Category: Nonsense

“10 famous people who could kill you with their bare hands”

Scoop, ... 6 comments.

When was this list written? 1990s? Julia Child has been dead more than 20 years.

Most of these people are so old they can’t wipe ass, let alone kick it. The rest are dead. You’d be more likely to get your ass kicked by Ariana Grande.

Chuck Norris is 85
Harrison Ford is 83
Samuel L Jackson is 77
Jessie Ventura is 74
Dolph Lundgren is 68
Daniel Day Lewis is 68
Ice-T is 67

Christopher Lee has been dead for 11 years, but he would be 103
Julia Child would be 113

—-

The only one on the list who might still deliver an ass-kicking is Jason Statham, and even he is nearly 60.

(Actually Dolph Lundgren looks like he can still do some damage.)

What should Americans call Danish pastries now?

Scoop, ... 31 comments.

When Bush the Younger was mad at France for whatever reason, we were supposed to call our favorite fast food side dish “Freedom Fries.” Now we seem to be headed to war with Denmark. So what should we call Danish pastries? Patriot Pastries?

Also, do we have to burn our Hans Christian Andersen books? And what will the tariff be on LEGOs, cans of butter cookies, and foul-tasting licorice? It’s gotta be, what, a million percent?

Whatever the reason, after we conquer them, I don’t think they’ll be putting blackberries and truffles on their hot dogs any more. It’s time they used mustard, as Jesus taught.

You know what I just realized? Denmark is one of the few countries in the world that still has a king, which means that after we kidnap their royal family and send them to Guantanamo, Trump can declare himself “acting king of Denmark.” I can see him making that permanent!

And then there’s Greenland, which must be conquered because it is harboring weapons of mass destruction. Well, one weapon. A club. But it’s a big club. And technically it is capable of mass destruction, as it can kill more than one seal.

These were Abraham Lincoln’s last words

Scoop, ... 3 comments.

Not sure why I became curious about this- maybe this thread.

One of the following represents the final words Honest Abe spoke to his Mary:

1. Suddenly I have a great headache. Man, that shit hurts.

2. As much as I dread death with so much left to accomplish, even death is more welcome than having to sit through the rest of this fucking play.

3. After all the work I did to save this union, and all I need to do to rebuild it, it’s now in the hands of that asshole, Johnson.

4. There is no city on earth I so much desire to see as Jerusalem.

5. She won’t think anything about it.

There doesn’t seems to be complete agreement on this. It is either 4 or 5. Number five seems more likely.

“10 Most Badass Last Words Ever Uttered”

Scoop, ... 3 comments.

There are some on the list I’ve never encountered before.

Karl Marx: “Go away! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!”

I dunno. He had only managed to fuck up half the world. Some deathbed words could have either fucked up the other half, or undone some of the damage.

Some better last words would have been:

“You know all that communist shit I wrote? I just did it to sell the books and get enough cash to buy all the cigars, booze and drugs I could possibly consume. So long, suckers!”

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Here are some others, both real and apocryphal, not in the article. As it often turns out, everything we believe is wrong. Not one of these is 100% legitimate, but some are close.

“Either this wallpaper goes or I do.”

(This is a shortened version of a Wilde quote which was certainly not uttered on his deathbed, and may not have been uttered at all.)

Some say that Wilde actually said “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go” to a visiting friend a few weeks before his death in Paris in 1854. Others say that the quote is completely fabricated.

“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”

(Legend.)

This one is attributed to Edmund Gwenn, or Edmund Kean or Edwin Booth. People obviously think it must have been some notable actor named Ed, but not Asner. It’s most likely that none of them ever said it.

“Thomas Jefferson survives.”

(This one may be a legitimate deathbed quote from John Adams, but it has been partially debunked and in any case did not represent his last words.)

They are the words supposedly uttered by John Adams as he was dying on America’s 50th birthday (July 4, 1826), the day when the second and third presidents both died. Historian Andrew Burstein, in “America’s Jubilee: How in 1826 a Generation Remembered Fifty Years of Independence,” examined the evidence and found: (1) that the quote had been embellished; (2) that it was actually said on the 3rd of July; (3) that it was actually Adams’s second-last utterance; and (4) that Jefferson was alive when Adams allegedly said it, but dead before Adams actually passed.

It is firmly established only that Adams said “Thomas Jefferson …” on the evening of the 3rd, but what followed was indistinct. His actual last words were uttered after midnight, when he asked a simple, pedestrian question, “Is it the 4th?” He would hang on in silence until the evening of the 4th, while Jefferson passed away about noontime.

“I see that you have made 3 spelling errors.”

(Somewhat legitimate – with caveats.)

Just before his execution in 1790, French aristocrat Marquis de Favras supposedly read his death warrant and said something very similar to the quote above, but these precise words actually come from a play by Victor Hugo (“Marion de Lorme”), written in 1828 and performed in 1831. That doesn’t mean the quotation is totally debunked. Four years before Hugo’s play was performed, Louis Marie Prudhomme wrote a book called “Histoire impartiale des révolutions de France depuis la mort de Louis XV,” in which he noted, “Favras then quietly corrects the spelling and punctuation errors made by the clerk in his statement.” It is therefore likely that Hugo was inspired to write his line by what he had read in Prudhomme’s book. In time, Hugo’s scripted line was assumed to represent the actual words of Favras.

“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”

(Possibly legitimate. These seem to have been among the speaker’s last words.)

These were allegedly the last words of Major General John Sedgwick, a Union Army commander, before he was shot and killed by a Confederate sniper in 1864. Some say Sedgwick’s actual quote was “Why are you dodging like this? They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” It would be a great, highly cinematic story if he had been shot just as he finished that sentence, but that’s probably not how it happened. Others say that while the words are often portrayed as if they were his absolute last statement, this is unlikely to be true.

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Related Topic: What were Abe Lincoln’s last words?

Lux Pascal in Miss Carbón

Scoop, ... 8 comments.

This is a semi-biographical drama from Argentina, marketed in English and available on Netflix as “Queen of Coal”

A transgender woman lands her dream job of working in a carbon mine, but after having the sex-change surgery must face a superstition that bans female workers from entering the underground galleries.

I guess this story is more or less true, or at least based on real events. But she dreams of working in a coal mine? Talking about setting your bar low. As I recall, many of my ancestors dreamt of getting out of the coal mines. They dreamt of being farmers and seeing the sun. That wasn’t much of a dream either, but it beat the shit out of a coal mine.

The story I’m about to tell you is literally true, with no exaggeration.

Back when I was a young man starting out with The Southland Corporation, I took the company’s battery of personality tests to see if I was fit to make the move into middle management. I reported dutifully for my score analysis but was losing interest as the personnel man seemed to be droning on about my obvious plusses and minuses. Then one thing caught my attention. I had scored quite high in a characteristic called “femininity.”

(There’s some subtle test craftsmanship, eh? Let’s hope that the testing company has used the last thirty years to come up with a better name for that characteristic.)

Of course I wondered what was so feminine about me. I thought I was what society generally considered to be an average guy. I read the sports pages first, then the front page.

I asked the personnel guy which questions had affected that particular characteristic. He should know about manliness, I figured, even though his name was Milton, because nobody would ever call him Milton, or even Milt. Nobody dared to call him anything but Colonel Eddy, or just plain Colonel. I mean the guy had actually been a damned colonel. You can’t get any more macho than a fuckin’ colonel, assuming that the rank wasn’t earned in the British army. His wasn’t. He was a full Marine bird. That’s even more macho than a general. In peacetime, generals have to kiss the asses of senators and higher-ranking generals, and have to attend cocktail parties and play political games to get where they want to go in their sophisticated career paths, but a Marine colonel is a real two-fisted guy. He would be a general except that he says exactly what’s on his mind, and damn the consequences if any lily-livered civilian doesn’t like what he has to say.

So Colonel Eddy showed me some of my answers to the forced choices.

Would you rather go hunting or read a book?

There was the damning evidence inscribed forever in Number 2 pencil. I had answered “read a book,” thereby condemning my psychological profile to a lifetime of limp-wristedness. Jesus, I thought, maybe I should start using the ladies’ room.

Then the personnel maven came to the single most heavily weighted question, the one which had officially set off the wimp alarm, casting my official score irretrievably out of the Uncle Scoopy side of the ledger and into the Auntie Scoopy column.

Would you rather be a coal miner or a florist?

Holy shit, what had I done? I had admitted right there in black and white that I wanted to be a florist. Apparently, this is a choice made so infrequently by real men that the burly, close-cropped ex-colonel could not help but ask me, “What could conceivably have prompted you to make that choice?” I got off what I thought was one of the best lines of my life.

“Well, Colonel”, I replied, “I don’t give a fuck about flowers, but I never heard of anyone dying of Pink Lung.”

I guess that was manly enough, because I got the management job, and a lifetime career in the fast-paced, macho, damn-the-torpedoes world of Slurpee sales.

————

Lux Pascal has a very famous sibling, actor Pedro Pascal.


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