humour
illconsidered | November 8, 2011For those of you who have not seen this at Deltoid yet, below is the hilarious "Denial Tango" from the Aussie group Men With Day Jobs.
Very clever and well articulated! I think it applies well to quite a few folks around these parts...
aardvarchaeology | October 7, 2011
So yeah, Kickstarter now offers you the opportunity to back a card game set in a Lovecraftian girl school.
Via Kenneth Hite.
aardvarchaeology | October 2, 2011Friday was quite a day for me: wake up at 5 after a restless night, travel by air, give test lecture, get praised beyond belief, eat excellent mutton & cabbage, do very friendly interview, become optimistic, meet up with local skeptical buddy, return home. Then a metal gig headlined by Graveyard, whose stellar new album Hisingen Blues is a must for all Zeppelin fans, preceded by Top Hawk with a basso singer and Horisont as fine openers, the latter with a particularly impressive drummer and an 80s-style high-tenor singer. (All three bands also had technically brilliant lead guitarists who…
illconsidered | September 23, 2011Hat tip to Chris S on the last AWOGWN thread for posting the link, here is the video of David Mitchell shredding the "prove it first, then we'll stop the pollution" argument embedded below:
I have argued many times that the "let's do nothing til we're sure" people have it backwards because we are in fact doing something: altering the atmospheric chemistry. Do nothing til we're sure would entail an immediate cesation of all long-lived GHG emissions.
aardvarchaeology | September 19, 2011
Bamse magazine is one of Sweden's most beloved childrens' publications, with a readership mainly about age 10. Its title character's name does mean "The Big One". But still, I must say that I was as surprised as Bamse himself and the squirrel when I saw what that troll is doing with such glee to the cow on the cover. Also, I wonder if those are silicone udders.
aardvarchaeology | August 27, 2011
I'm a single dad now for two weeks while my wife's in China shooting interviews for a documentary series.
Aard's been getting a lot of comment spam lately, and the filter isn't working properly, so I've turned on comment moderation.
After digging in that cave I did four hours of metal detecting at the Lilla Härnevi hoard site because it has been ploughed and harrowed since April when we were there in force. Only one semi-worthwhile metal find: one of those fyrk coins of Queen Christina's. Also two pieces of knapped imported flint, and Magdalena found a grindstone. No hoard bits.
I bought…
illconsidered | June 27, 2011Non-lord Christopher Monkton is out and about again after laying low for a while, calling people nazis, using his Pink Portcullis coat of arms, etc.
Greenman has a short video on that, though I must say I found more interesting the clips and content on James Delingpole. I must say he does not come out looking too good in that!
Seriously though, it is a perfect analogy no wonder he faltered and stuttered like he just woke up from one of those dreams where you are naked in a crowd only to find it was no dream. I actually felt embarrased for him!
Think he mistook this cartoon as a "How To"…
aardvarchaeology | June 13, 2011
Fecal sample submission window.
Dan, be cake. Because the Danish-Belgian Cake Company says so.
"Busen" means "breasts" in German and "the naughty one" in Swedish.
No appointment needed. Come whenever you lie fallow.
"Shroff" means "tariff" in Engrish. Maybe.
Porular blog Aardvarchaeology a rad.
aardvarchaeology | June 9, 2011
"Lie Fallow" means "in your spare time, without a prior appointment" in Engrish.
Everybody loves Engrish, the surreal dialect of English found on signs, in menus, on clothing etc. in the Far East. Much of it seems to stem from blind over-use of dictionaries, where the non-Anglophone user picks one of the possible translations of a term at random. Here are a few examples I've caught recently at restaurants.
The breakfast menu at our hotel in Hecheng had some fine variations on rice porridge and its condiments.
illconsidered | April 29, 2011Barak Obama has finally released his long form birth certificate. Will it satisfy the Birthers?
(Yes, there is a climate connection. Check the links!)
illconsidered | April 18, 2011How much wrongness can you pack into one short paragraph? This is from Rep. SHEILA BUTT (R-Columbia) in Tennessee, spoken in favor of a bill to "teach the controversy" in science class:
At the risk of drawing this out, which I hate to do, but I do know, as Rep. Dunn has mentioned, that I was taught things in science class in high school which have turned out not to be true. I remember so many of us when we were seniors in high school, we gave up AquaNet hairspray. You remember why we did that? Because it was causing global warming! That aerosol in those cans was causing global warming. Since…
aardvarchaeology | March 27, 2011
I was reminded of this timely song when discussing an odd 7th century burial at Norsborg with my friend Dr. Ing-Marie Back Danielsson. The buried individual has been murdered, which triggered the association.
illconsidered | March 17, 2011I am off traveling again so the posting will be quiet for a while and the comments unattended for a couple of days. So be nice and don't forget three or more links lands you in the "unapproved" queue.
Before I go, I thought I would share the YouTube below that came to my attention via a "friend" request. I am a big fan of Climate Crocks and a couple of other climate YouTubers but this is quite different. It is thin on science but very energetic, young and slick, I can't help but think it is a very good approach because after all, we are in a PR battle not a scientifc one.
What do people…
aardvarchaeology | March 1, 2011
Jack Chick is an insane Christian cartoonist. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an atheist horror writer who wrote about people being driven insane. In Fred Van Lente and Steve Ellis's brilliant 2000 tract, Chick and Lovecraft are made one.
Thanks to Kalle Bäcklander for the tip-off.
illconsidered | January 13, 2011Over on the history of CO2 thread, that old chestnut of an issue has been raised, namely that there's this one paper in one journal, notorious for publishing anti-science papers on climate (a field well outside its focus), that has shown wild flucuations in CO2 to levels well above today's in times as recent as 60 years ago. Therefore....Not the IPCC.
The paper is by Ernst G Beck and the journal is Energy and Environment, 2009 (sorry, all my primary links are stale...anyone?)
Here is the graph, supposedly showing global CO2 levels:
This picture is at-a-glance completely implausible.
To…
illconsidered | January 5, 2011Check out an hilarious post from Denial Depot where he applies a keen sense of climate skepticism to the movie Jaws. Here is his synopsis, to whet your appetite:
A group of so-called government funded "experts" whip up alarmist fears of a killer shark off the coast of Amity, a sea side town. Their goal is to destroy the local tourist industry, send Amity back to the dark ages and thus achieve their underlying socialist agenda of wealth redistribution. The heroes of this tale are the local major and business leaders who lead a successful audit of the alarmist claims and by doing so manage to…
aardvarchaeology | January 1, 2011
I seem to be on a poetry roll here, kids.
When I was 14, Citadel Miniatures put out a small run of a novelty pewter miniature named Sanity Claws: a tentacled menacing monstrosity for the festive season. And now Norm Sherman of the Drabblecast, whom I do not hesitate to call a genius and an Elder God, has written a Lovecraftian poem on the same theme (in all likelihood quite independently of that 1986 pewter giggle-shudder item). Hear Norm perform the poem on the Drabblecast's Christmas Special!
'Twas the Night
By Norm Sherman
'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the edifice…
aardvarchaeology | December 25, 2010When I turned 25 my friend Sanna gave me a little poetry anthology that I have since treasured. Kathryn & Ross Petras's Very Bad Poetry (1997) is a lovely read. One of the versifiers most voluminously represented there is W.T. McGonagall (1830-1902). After quoting his words, "The most startling incident in my life was the time I discovered myself to be a poet", the Petrases comment, "Many people in his native Dundee, Scotland, apparently disagreed with his discovery."
Here is McGonagall's "The Death of Lord and Lady Dalhousie".
Alas! Lord and Lady Dalhousie are dead, and buried at last,…
illconsidered | November 29, 2010Consensus is a dirty word when it comes to climate change experts, but put in just about any other context, expert consensus is what we all would want. This Marc Roberts cartoon casts that issue in the best light:
Just imagine getting medical assistance from Lord Cristopher Monckton... Oh look! We don't have to imagine.
I began to think that Viscount Monckton might be a formidable opponent during the debate. Then he told me that he has discovered a new drug that is a complete cure for two-thirds of known diseases - and that he expects it to go into clinical trials soon. I asked him…