Ducks up, geese down!

This is crazy but true:

From Morning Edition on NPR:

This is the morning that kids were invited to the White House for the Easter egg roll. The roll for Laura Bush includes reading a children’s book. It’s called, “Duck for President.” The first lady will read the story of a duck who takes over the farm, then runs for governor, and then runs for the White House. He wins after a recount, but Duck gives it all up to go back to the farm. The duck concludes, “Running a country is no fun at all.”

According to the book’s publisher, “President Duck,” who didn’t realize being president would require a lot of “very hard work,” ends up with “a very bad headache” before passing his duties off to his Vice President.

Sometimes, the jokes write themselves.

Indeed they do. Another line from the book I heard on a different news program:

"The duck gave speeches that nobody could understand, except for other ducks."

Word.

Watch this

(via)

Brew a pot of coffee, Martha, it's going to be a long haul

Here is my new, sinister plan to make the Bellman the number one blog on planet earth! Just keep posting and posting, and wait for the others to die off:

The number of new blogs isn’t the only thing that’s slowing down. The company reports that they’ve noticed a slowing in daily posting volume as well. Technorati was tracking about 1.5 million blog posts per day in March of this year, compared with 1.3 million posts per day from just a year ago.

Bachelor cooking 201

Three words: boil in bag.

Another post about Grindhouse

I'm with DR. I give it an unqualified WOOT.

Some further notes:

-- Megan and I had seen Jungle Julia billboards around town for awhile. I was perplexed by the ad campaign, partly because I couldn't make out from the billboard what station they were advertising. "What a poorly designed advertisement," I thought. Now, of course, it makes sense. I never saw the one pictured here, or I might have caught on since she's dressed like The Bride (or, of course, Bruce Lee). The one in my hood had her in rollerskates.

-- Speaking of rollerskates, it was cool to see Punky, who actually worked at the Chili Parlor, playing "Punky," a bartender at the Chili Parlor. Apparently Tarantino told a joke about Punky getting drunk and falling out of his truck when he appeared on one of the late nite shows. (I also have some good drunk-Punky stories, but unlike Mr. Tarantino, I have the good taste not to broadcast them. Unless you ask very nicely.)

-- Watching Grindhouse was a lot like seeing any old film at the Alamo Drafthouse. As I have seen both directors at the Drafthouse several times, I don't think it's a coincidence. Austin kicks ass.

-- What are we to make of this?

-- Lastly, from Wikiped,

The Canadian release of Grindhouse also featured a faux trailer for a film titled Hobo With A Shotgun. The trailer is the winner of Robert Rodriguez's SXSW Grindhouse Trailers contest and was created by Dartmouth, Nova Scotia filmmakers Jason Eisener, John Davies, and Rob Cotterill. Outside of the Canadian release, the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, TX also features Hobo With A Shotgun in screenings of Grindhouse.

The trailer was funny. Hopefully it will get included on the DVD release, so those not fortunate enough to live in Austin or Canada can see it.

Did I mention that Austin kicks ass? I guess Canada's okay, too.

The morale of the fleet continues to rise

On the classic Battlestar Galactica the Viper's stick has three buttons labelled "thrust", "fire", and "IM". Two questions:

1. What does "IM" stand for?
   
2. Doesn't forcing a pilot to stop thrusting in order to fire seem like a really serious design flaw?

Woot!

You know what I'm talking about.

Notes:

• Robert Rodriguez received screen credit as his own chef.
  
• On the whole, I'd say that I'm anti-pustule.
  
• Even though I've liked all of his films, for some reason I'm always skeptical when Tarantino releases a new one. What's up with that? Lots of people must have similar reactions because Grindhouse didn't do well at the boxoffice.
  
• Planet Terror isn't getting much love in the reviews, but I thought it was hilarious.
  
• The character of Zoe was played by a stuntwoman named Zoe. That's pretty dang awesome.

Goodbye, James

This post is really just to test this cool ImgRed.com service, which you can read about here. But click on the image for the rest of the very funny comic. Also check out this comic.



Using ImgRed, you can also easily display a thumbnail:. It seems that the thumbnail attempt is just generating an error. I'm going to let it stew for awhile and try again.

But you gotta admit, it would be fun

Indeed.

(via)

I ain't tryin to round up drama

Here at the big bad grad union we've just finished up a semester long effort to modify the constitution (yawn) and raise dues (yikes!). In the end, we collected votes from 620 members and, naturally, they decided by an overwhelming margin to approve both changes. I don't think this news will mean much to anybody who isn't involved in the day to day affairs of a grad union, but let's just say that I'm extremely pleased and very tired.

We've also been working on this.

What we chat about: Living longer than Keith Richards

(Note to self: Spend less time chatting and more time blogging working.)


Oddly, the prospect of Keith turning 100 came up independently and virtually simultaneously in two separate chats. Regarding this:

"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father," [Keith] Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.

"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared," he said. "... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."

Reader poll

Grindhouse: Worth seeing this weekend?

For the foodies in the house

Yum.

Morgellons Disease update

Via PR Leap ("Over 2400 companies use PR Leap to get free press release distribution!"), this little gem just came in:

Retired Elementary School Teacher Locked Up in the Nut House For Having Morgellons Disease

Marlene Gregor is a gentle, kind woman who has suffered from a disease called Morgellons, tells here story of how her family felt it best for her to have onsite psychiatric care because she was complaining of “bugs biting and scratching me”. The truth is, she did have bugs under her skin, along with lesions all over her body with multi-colored fibers protruding from them. She also suffered depression, ‘brain fog’ and deep bone pains that no doctor could diagnose.

This horrifying and fascinating disease affects thousand of people in the United States and globally with major concentration of victims in California, Texas, Florida and Oregon. However, many physicians do not recognize Morgellons as a disease and are diagnosing the victim as Delusions of Parasitosis.

Whenever she would see a doctor, and she saw many, they would tell her “it is all in your head”. Marlene knew differently. She began to take a “clustered silver” product that drove the bugs out of her body. She could actually see them exiting. Her depression began to fade along with her brain fog. Her energy returned. And just when she thought she was over the hump, her husband and daughter had her committed, by court order, to the psychiatric ward of their local hospital.

While in the hospital, she convinced her neighbor to smuggle treatment into the hospital where she continued to heal. Marlene spent 4 weeks in the hospital and when she was finally released, nearly all of her Morgellons symptoms were gone. Marlene believes that it will take time to rebuild the trust that was broken between her and her husband. For the moment, Marlene is functioning well without the horrible symptoms of Morgellons consuming all of her time and attention. Marlene plans to produce a video telling her story to the world so that that it will bring hope to those who continue to suffer from this dreadful disease.

Her story and the video will be the second featured on www.MorgellonsHope.com, a site dedicated to supporting Morgellons sufferers, and their friends and families. Jeff Sohler, the site’s founder states, “Morgellons really is the first Internet disease. We felt the best place to support sufferers and bring more awareness to the disease is through this medium. Eventually this awareness will spill out to other areas, and the disease will get the research funding it needs. Of equal importance, its sufferers will be taken seriously and stories like Marlene’s will become a thing of the past.”

MorgellonsHope.com is an on-line Community dedicated to supporting sufferers of Morgellons Disease. The site features the Latest News, Articles, Pictures, Videos, Blogs, Case Studies, a Forum, GeoMap, Product Information, links to just about everything Morgellons on the

Yeah, it does just trail off at the end like that. The only alterations I made were the bolding on some of the more ludicrous sentences.

Mostly B-Z list blogs will be affected

Earlier today, I read all about how A list blogs really need links from D- list blogs (via which was via) so in the spirit of community I beg you to follow this link to Mathew Yglesias' blog. Alternately, you could just follow this link and go directly to Alanis Morissette's performance of "My Humps".

"wildlife" s/b "rat"

While walking to work this morning, I noticed^[1] the following written on the side of a Waste Management garbage truck:

Our landfills provide 17,000 acres of wildlife habitat

A casual look at the company's website suggests that my snarky reaction may be unwarranted. Then again, it'd be pretty easy to fool me.

----------
1 Due to the uncommonly aromatic smell.

This is not a democracy, it's a cheerocracy

Flip-Flopper.