Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Peanuts as political satire

Just change the following: 
Great Pumpkin to "Mr. Obama"
Halloween Night to "November 6"
Linus Van Pelt to "gullible leftist voter" or "Mainstream Media"(your choice)








Cartoon strip from my delightful Peanuts 2012 tear-off desk calendar (thanks, girls!). Order the 2013 calendar here
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Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Very sad news

Update: Barbara passed away this afternoon. May she rest in peace, and may God grant comfort to her grieving husband Tripp and twelve children. 


One of my favourite Catholic Mom-bloggers, Barbara Curtis from Mommy Life, has suffered a massive stroke and is not expected to survive. I pray the doctors are wrong. Updates here at Elizabeth Foss's blog. Pray, and donate to help her family if you can.

h/t Pundette

Michelle Obama weeps for the "schtruggles" of American families

Or not.



And let's not forget the Big 0, either.



h/t Mommy Life

Saturday, October 27, 2012

BOOYAH, Bean!

You gotta love him. Rowan Atkinson's speech for free speech. LSN
Speaking at a meeting at Westminster of the campaign group Reform Section 5, Atkinson placed the freedom to offend people as second only to the right to the means of “sustaining life itself.”



I love him cuz he makes me laugh



Heigh-ho. I hear the Democrats are working on a devastating attack ad showing Mitt bayoneting Big Bird…

Friday, October 26, 2012

A fate worse than JFK's

Daniel Greenfield. Words fail, except to say that he rocks. (Were he to see my posts, I hope he would not take amiss my constant comparisons with Mark Steyn. I mean it as the highest, highest praise.)
Obama will not be immortalized by a Communist with a rifle. Instead he is doomed to be mortal, his hair turning white and his musical tastes turning worse. Any day now he will admit to a fondness for Kenny G and after that there will be no saving him from the dread ravages of time.
[...]
Obama has gotten desperate. His fundraising emails walk the thin line between emotional blackmail and hysteria. Increasingly they read like Cousin Larry phoning for bail money from Tijuana.

I really don't expect anyone to watch this video, but if you do (and you last more than seven seconds)... doesn't it just take you right back to the 80's, to those times when you rode that elevator?




Thursday, October 25, 2012

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

I almost want to sue him myself.

Just to keep him writing this kind of comedy gold.

In the same spirit, I see that I’ve just been awarded the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. Under Ireland’s citizenship law, I’m an Irish national (through my father). Ireland is a member of the European Union. The EU has just been given the Nobel Peace Prize. QED. Come to think of it, my mother’s Belgian, so I’ve been awarded two Nobel Peace Prizes.
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Apparently it's United Nations Day

So it's a good day to fast and pray that the UN may soon be abolished, disbanded, disassembled and sold for scrap.

St. Anthony Mary Claret, pray for us.
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Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Afflicted with basic post-Vatican II ignorance?

Don't know the difference between an Antependium and a Sedilia? That makes two of us. How nice to find this site, Sancta Missa ("Holy Mass"), subtitled "Tutorial on the Extraordinary Form of the Mass".

I especially like the illustrated section "From Sacristy to Altar," which explains all about items used at Mass.  I'm going to enjoy learning more about my lost heritage.

Dear President 'Snippy and Sneering'...

The Marines still use bayonets. That is all.

  Unless you want more.

And of course, I'm holding my breath waiting for The Steyn's response.
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Sunday, October 21, 2012

The relativistic idolatry of "Peace"

Peace: I don't think that word means what you think it means.  Mybad.  Forgot to post the link. Andrew McCarthy at NRO. "Sharia and Freedom"

Religion as cosmetic reverence shorn of substantive content is a virtue only the postmodern, post-doctrinal West could love: its self-congratulatory elites having evolved beyond anything so quaint as doctrine and arrived at . . . nihilism. Ratzinger knew better. Doctrinal differences never lose their salience because it is doctrine that defines a believer. To airbrush our differences — even for the well-intentioned purpose of elevating “peace” as a transcendent value — is to deny the essence of who we are.
[...]

There is no common concept of God, and the mush that passes for this feel-good illusion cannot obscure that real faiths exist. They are different because they represent different claims about ultimate truth. One cannot apprehend what those claims are, and how the believer is apt to act on them, without studying doctrine and respecting the divergences between faiths. Substantive differences, civilizational chasms, and supremacist ambitions do not evaporate just because we wish to believe everyone wants “peace.”

[...]
Sharia-compliant Islam is ascendant. In the Middle East, about 80 percent of Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan tell pollsters they desire to live under sharia strictures. Even in the Far East, in Indonesia, where the practice of Islam tends to be more moderate due to its syncretism with other traditions of worship, sharia is on the march — preferred by half the population . . . and rising. Throughout the West, including in the United States, governments are under pressure from their swelling, aggressive Muslim communities to accept and adopt sharia standards — legitimizing them in our law and our culture, even as their brute repression of speech degrades our capacity to assess the wages of conferring legitimacy.

"Peace" at the price of sharia? No thank you.
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My poor bleeding ears

To say nothing of the damage to my soul these last few decades. There are so many ways of suffering for the faith. Constant exposure to deplorable 70s pop-tune church songs shouldn't be one of them. Thank God for the Eucharist, that's all I can say. And for real music.




It's time once again for Awkward Family Photos

Rule 1 of Family Photo Etiquette: Never, ever dress alike. Especially when you've chosen fabric that looks like spilled chicken entrails.



Rule 2: Try not to be too artistic, or too metaphorical, or cryptic, or disembodied.




Rule 3: Just say NO to pregnancy portraits, especially those involving trees. Only upside of this one: they have clothes on.


Scratch that.



Rule 4: Check your trombone at the studio door. I say this with no ill will because (sit down for it) I played the trombone for 8 years  in the school band (I know! Can't you just picture it) --so trombones rule, but they are not--I repeat NOT--romantic in any way.



Rule 5: No mangled-looking appendages. ("The Claw is our Master. The Claw decides who will go and who will stay...")



Rule 6: Just.... NO.

Well, at least it's not beside a trailer....


Saturday, October 20, 2012

Little Dorrit would approve

"Him, with the cake!" Best line from the BBC's Little Dorrit. That and the button thing. You just don't know how many subtexts are in a work until you watch it with two of your (five) clever sisters.

However, this post is not about Dickens, but cake. We have four, count them, FOUR birthdays (and one wedding anniversary) in the Pinkerton household this month. If you can imagine, two of my daughters were born on my husband's birthday. That has made for some interesting dynamics over the years. To say nothing of many, many photos of Mr. P posing happily behind cakes adorned with pink frosting, and occasionally ballerinas. He is much to be commended, not only for surviving life with 8 women, but for sharing his birthday with two of them.

And so, in honour of husbands, birthdays and cake, something on which to feast your eyes. I made none of these.


Too lovely to frost! Nordic Ware's "Bavaria" bundt pan.




So elegant! Nordic Ware's "Heritage" Bundt Pan
Image from Amazon.com








So cute!



Altogether too cute: 
castle bundt cake with brown sugar for sand...


Yes! This too is a bundt cake, not a Gigerbead Hows (TM)



Most images courtesy of Nordic Ware. Made in America.

Autumn loveliness

Courtesy of Nordic Thoughts.





Bureaucracy comes from hell.


The Sultan rocks.

Large operations tend toward greater degrees of inefficiency due to the diffusion of responsibility and accountability. Large systems respond to inefficiency by creating more redundant structures which only increase the inefficiency.

Bureaucracies cope with all problems by adding new layers of paperwork without recognizing that paperwork is itself the problem. The world outside comes to be modeled through paper so that rather than interacting with problems, the system interacts with a paperwork model of the real world that is detached from the real world and requires ever increasing resource of paperwork handlers to maintain.
[...]
 The problems become institutionalized and unsolvable because the institutionalization of a problem creates a bureaucratic mandate for the survival of the institutions dedicated to solving the problem and the institutions dedicated to solving the problem seek to survive by not solving the problem.
(This is, incidentally, why we will never see an end to poverty, aboriginal issues, drug abuse, or any garden-variety disease for which we need perpetual 'awareness' campaigns.)

It's hard enough to endure this with everything that is touched by the government, but a thousand times more horrifying when one sees the church at various levels sink deeper into this mire. A certain Cardinal (I think his name was Ratzinger) said it best about 30 years ago: "The Church needs saints, not bureaucrats."
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Friday, October 19, 2012

I can't say this because I'm white.

I'm also not American. So I'll let Perry Drake say it.
Obama is not the first "black" man elected president, no matter how many people think so. I'm "black," and I can tell you: "black" in this context is more than the color of my skin. It's a shared experience, a purely American experience -- if you will -- which stretches back to when the first Africans were brought in shackles to our shores in the mid-1600s.
Nothing in Obama's background speaks of the American experience. It's not difficult to understand why. Obama is the son of a white woman with jungle fever and a commie Kenyan. He was raised in circumstances that almost all Americans -- let alone blacks -- would find foreign.
Obama is best described as an "African in America." (And no, I'm not a birther, despite the earlier "Nairobi" joke.) The difference between Obama's actual identity and an actual "black" person's is no small distinction. It explains how he could hold such an outdated view of the violence plaguing black communities across the nation. It explains why you never see him campaigning in black communities or dropping by for photo ops. (Well, that and because he knows that 95 percent of "those people" are going to vote for him anyway.)
It's also explains why Obama's first instincts are always to blame America first and profusely apologize for past American actions. 

h/t Deborah Gyapong
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Thursday, October 18, 2012

"The professors hated them. But the kids had fun."

The professors, of course, were ultra-liberal. You know, the kind that are all into peace and justice and tolerance, and not hating anyone.

One of those tolerant liberals wrote of homeschoolers:
"The husbands and wives in these families feel themselves to be under a religious compulsion to have large families, a homebound and submissive wife and mother who is responsible for the schooling of the children, and only one breadwinner."
He says that like it's a bad thing!

Then there's this (I warn you, it's NOT satire):
Dana Goldstein, writing in Slate, urged her fellow progressives to resist the temptation to homeschool, arguing that the practice is “fundamentally illiberal” and asking incredulously: “Could such a go-it-alone ideology ever be truly progressive?” She went on to argue that the children of high-achieving parents amount to public goods because of peer effects — poor students do better when mixed with better-off peers — meaning that “when college-educated parents pull their kids out of public schools, whether for private school or homeschooling, they make it harder for less-advantaged children to thrive.” She does not extend that analysis to its logical conclusion: that conscientious, educated liberals should enroll their children in the very worst public schools they can find in order to maximize the public good.

Money quote: "A political class that does not trust people with a Big Gulp is not going to trust them with the minds of children." True.  Read the rest, and enjoy!  Truly brillaint. 

Homeschoolers, the last radicals  by Kevin D. Williamson at NRO

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Reason #3040595854837366 to homeschool

The Steyn:
Yet somehow a bureaucrat in the Department of Agriculture wound up with a monopoly on what your kids eat.


If only we could opt out of Big Government and its attendant demonic bureacracies as easily.

Ten examples of Catholic-speak that should be banned

Only ten? Not remotely. But as Fr. Alexander Lucie-Smith points out, this is his list. You are welcome to make up your own. 
9) Ongoing. This is a great favourite, especially when nothing is in fact going on. “Our investigations are ongoing” translates as: “We are doing nothing about it at present, except fob you off with words.”
6) Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Just ban it. Now. Never let these words be mentioned together again. Ever.
3) Share.

The Curt Jester adds to the fun.

2) Faith Community 

This could well turn into an ongoing continuing series. 
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Tuesday, October 16, 2012

I heart Rebecca Taylor

Because she is smart and funny. And because she speaks the truth about the human condition. (Disclosure: my crop-researcher hubby has done some work with GMOs, so I take the hysteria --rampant even in Catholic circles-- with a grain of salt.)
As a former California girl, I am aware that my state of origin is full of contradictions like women who are on the Pill eating nothing but organically grown produce.
heh. 
Californians are not the only one who seem conflicted about genetic engineering. There are many people who would support cloning for stem cells but would not eat meat from a cow cloned with the same technique. I have always said that if I was forced to choose between implanting myself with stem cells from my dead embryonic clone or drinking milk from a cloned cow, I would ask, "Do you have any Oreos?"
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Monday, October 15, 2012

Oh, what an icky web we weave


...when we mess with God's plan as to how babies ought to be conceived.

Alana S. Newman at MercatorNet:
But the increased scarcity of the fertile female body, combined with IVF technology that allows for egg harvesting and surrogacy, creates conflict between generations of women. Older women with more power and resources put their interests ahead of younger women’s and make up for their past mistakes or misfortunes by risking the health and well-being of their successors.
[...]
If heterosexual couples can use sperm donors to create children who are separated from their biological fathers, so the logic goes, then lesbians should be able to do the same thing...  And if lesbians use sperm donors to create fatherless children, then it’s only equal and fair for gay men to be able to use egg donors and surrogates to create motherless children too.
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Flannery, as usual, has proven prophetic

Even when she's only making up titles.



You can't have free speech if it makes some people really, really mad.

The very right that laid the foundation for Western civilization is increasingly viewed as a nuisance, if not a threat. Whether speech is deemed imflammatory or hateful or discriminatory or simply false, society is denying speech rights in the name of tolerance, enforcing mutual respect through categorical censorship.

Coercing people into 'respecting' one another: good luck with that. 
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Saturday, October 13, 2012

Aggiornamento: that word doesn't mean what you think it means.

Pope Benedict explains Vatican II:
This constantly updated vitality, this 'aggiornamento', does not mean breaking with tradition; rather, it is an expression of that tradition's ongoing vitality. It does not mean reducing the faith, debasing it to the fashion of the times using the yardstick of what we like and what appeals to public opinion. Quite the contrary, just as the Council Fathers did, we must mould the 'today' in which we live to the measure of Christianity. We must bring the 'today' of our times into line with the 'today' of God.
Funny how some people still think Vatican II is all about, "Baptize contraception, abortion, homosexual activity and women's ordination! Doesn't  God know it's _____?" (fill in any year, starting with 1963).
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The Rolling (Gall)Stones

Heh. Funny piece at NRO by Lee Habeeb about the Stones' upcoming tour geared for seniors.

“This tour is different from others we’ve done,” the band’s promoter explained.
How different? For openers, the Steel Wheelchairs tour will not be playing big stadiums, but smaller arenas and theaters. “Half our fans are dead, and the other half are on Medicare,” the Stones’ business manager explained. “They can’t fill up stadiums they way they used to. Heck, they can’t make it up the stairs the way they used to.”
[...]
Here are a few of those reworked hits, with the old titles first, followed by the new ones:
“When the Whip Comes Down” / “When the Hip Goes Down”
“Brown Sugar” / “Brown Splenda”
“Start Me Up” / “Help Me Up”
“Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday” / “Hello, Blueplate Thursday
“(Hey, hey you) Get Off of My Cloud” / “(Hey, you kids) Get Out of My Yard”
“The Girl with the Faraway Eyes” / “The Girl with the Hairs on Her Chin”
“Midnight Rambler” / “Early Bird Scrambler”
“She’s So Cold” / “She’s So Old”
“Honky Tonk Women” / “Bingo Parlor Women”
“Waitin’ on a Friend” / “Waitin’ on the End”

So glad to see satire is not dead, even though the Stones nearly are.

Seriously, dude, time to give up the guy-liner.

...and the hair dye.
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Time for more Doug Savage

This one goes out to my daughters (at least the ones who are fans of Thor), but I don't know why, since they don't make hurtful comments. Or any comments. Or even read our blog.

More fun at Savage Chickens. 

Friday, October 12, 2012

Beautiful.

Both the icon and the story. From News.va English 




Yesterday evening, to celebrate the opening of the Year of Faith, a torchlight procession organized by the Catholic Action group with thousands of people participating from every continent and state of life in the Church took place here in Rome. The procession ended in St Peter’s Square, and, as had his predecessor, the Blessed John XXIII on the same night exactly a half-century earlier, Pope Benedict XVI appeared at his window in the Apostolic Palace to greet the faithful. “Today, as 50 years ago,” said Pope Benedict, “we can be happy, because we carry the joy of the gospel, with us.” Evoking the extraordinary and prophetic gentleness and familiarity of Blessed John XXIII, Pope Benedict said, “50 years ago, at this very window, the good Pope John appeared and spoke to us with unforgettable words, words full of poetry, goodness, the words of the heart.”
Pope Benedict concluded his remarks by making his own the request of ‘Good Pope John’: “Go home to your children, and hug them tenderly. Tell them, ‘this tenderness is from the Pope.’

We love you too, Papa.

h/t Robin on FB

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Priceless piece from Fr. Raymond J. de Souza


On damsels and handsome princes. (National Post)

One observes first that the damsels are not in distress. They are doing just fine, with good jobs, an active circle of friends, participation in health clubs, book clubs, even a dynamic parish life. They are not lounging on the couch, playing video games and waiting for the phone to ring.
Perhaps many of them feel like Snow White, waiting for their prince to show up while stuck with the seven dwarfs, men of arrested development content to hang out with their “bros.” An increasing number of young women hear the depressing compliment from their boyfriends that they are “just like one of the guys.” The dream of every girl: to be an eighth dwarf.
[...]
Every woman wants to find somebody who puts her wishes ahead of his own interests. Westley does so in an extreme and endearing fashion. In time, Buttercup learns that love demands the same of her, to sacrifice for the good of the beloved. She, like Westley before her, rises to the occasion. The measure of love, and its only real evidence, is the willingness to sacrifice my good for the one I love.

Pretty awesome stuff from a 'celibate male', what? (Hint: it's the Catholicism and his ministry to young people that makes him so smart.)
h/t Cecilia on Facebook
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Knish: Sultan of Swing(ers)

Daniel Greenfield rocks. (And I'm still not convinced he wasn't separated at birth from Mark Steyn; memo to self: find out if DG has ginger hair.)
Sexual freedom fits this model as well as any other of the causes. Like all the other fake freedoms, it has come to mean the freedom to have power over others, to dictate their values, denounce their views and compel them to pay allegiance to the new system. These fake freedoms do not mean the ability to individually do what one could not do before, but the power to have the system compel others to do what you want them to do.
It is a perversion in the purest sense, all the more so because it begins with the whine of entitlement, "Why can't I just be accepted for who I am?" and ends with the roar of power, "Now you will do what I say.

As The Shea puts it, "Tolerance is not enough. You. MUST. Approve."

To wit (NRO):

Some gay activists are one step away from claiming that if someone disagrees with them, they shouldn’t be allowed to work anywhere. The original Hollywood blacklist never went that far, but you won’t see any movies made about the current intolerance of supporters of traditional marriage.
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Thursday, October 11, 2012

David Letterman: prophet or Freudian slipper?

His first question to Obama the evening after the terrorist attack in Benghazi:

"How much do you weigh these days?"

Apparently, not much.

Breitbart:

With middle class incomes deflating, four Americans recently assassinated by al-Qaeda, poverty and gas prices increasing, and the debt already saddling our children and grandchildren with mortgage-sized debt, Americans aren’t likely to be any more enamored than the media with Obama's non-stop "smallness."

SUN's Ezra weighs in (sorry) too. 

The debates revealed Obama as a lightweight. But they also revealed that for four years, the mainstream media has covered up that fact.


Well, maybe not all the media. This photographer seems to have caught the gist.

Bad optics? He looks tiny even in relation to the prompters-- 
which is another unfortunate metaphor all on its own.
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It's probably because I love traditional fairy tales...

... and legends, and early 20th century art, and old photos, and old architecture, and simple rustic design, and crafty craftsmanship (things you knit or weave or carve or sculpt) and well, as it turns out, nearly all things Nordic (is that a Tolkien thing, maybe?)... that these are two of my new favourite blogs (same blogger). I go there to chill (no pun intended), but they make me feel all warm and fuzzy and human inside. Just what I need at the end of most days.

A Polar Bear's Tale (she has retired this blog, but left it up, so one can peruse the archives, which are filled with beauty)





And her newer blog, Nordic Thoughts, which is just as lovely.





Both paintings by Anna Ancher (1859-1935): LOVE!

I want a print of this one



So cute!
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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Why I blog about U.S. politics


Even though I don't pretend to know a whole lot. Because what transpires south of the 49th parallel totally matters to us Canucks.



The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Best. Moderator. Ever.) on "The Better President for Canada." Featured on the in-studio panel: the perennially delightful Theo Caldwell, whom I still miss from that other show that's no longer on SUN TV.

Worth the 35 minutes (watch while you do the dishes or something). There were even some LOL moments. The self-delusion of the Left knows no bounds. Example: Obama would be a better president because, abortion.

Best line: (Theo) "Sorry, was I interrupting you, Sheila?" (She was the only woman--a Liberal--on the panel and she was constantly interrupting the other gentlemen, who were indeed gentlemen, because they never interrupted anyone.)
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It's been too long since I've visited Savage Chickens

Ha ha. One of five in his Olympic series.


Tuesday, October 9, 2012

The theology of Yesterday


No, it's not really about the Beatles at all. My latest article at The Record.
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"I am an unhyphenated American who happens to be black"

It's only the Left (ie. Dems) who talk non-stop about "post-racial" America, but will never actually get there. (And frankly, don't want to.)

Lloyd Marcus:
If I were a part of the brain-dead racist herd of African-Americans who voted for Obama solely because he is black and celebrated him winning the presidency, I would feel pretty betrayed and embarrassed by Obama’s debate performance.

[...] I am a black Conservative because I have witnessed, in my own family, the devastatingly negative effects of the tired old Democrat rhetoric articulated by their slick black empty-suit president. A large segment of my family is prematurely dead after spending their entire lives on government welfare – AIDs, drug abuse, alcoholism, serial out-of-wedlock births and prison. They had free food, housing and heath-care. Their lives should have been wonderful. Right? Wrong. They suffered hopeless, dreamless and wasted lives. Why? Because the Good Book says, “An idle mind is the Devil’s workshop.”

Never mind white, black, red, yellow, pink, or chartreuse: the world needs more fellows like this (I include ladies, of course) who can THINK.

Related: Obama: Disaster For Black Americans.
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Monday, October 8, 2012

Harrison Bergeron, call your office

Heh. 

BCF: Lunch lady slammed for food that is "too good." 

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Happy Thanksgiving

Whether or not you're Canadian. And remember to be especially thankful for the Christian victory at the Battle of Lepanto, and anniversary of which was yesterday, Oct. 7.

David Warren: 
Were it not for Lepanto, it is doubtful that Canadians would be celebrating Thanksgiving this weekend; for the unambiguously Christian conceptions of life & liberty, that were carried to our shores, might not have survived in Europe.

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Saturday, October 6, 2012

Boo.

That's my one-word review of "The Woman in Black", and I left the exclamation point off intentionally. Do yourself a favor and watch the 1989 adaptation instead. Now that's a scary movie! The new WIB is all fog and creaking doors and dark hallways, so naturally, you're expecting every moment to have a cattle prod of horror shoved into your ribs (accompanied by jarring violin music, of course). In the old WIB ghosts don't wait for rainy days or darkened rooms. They'll come for you no matter what the weather or where you are.
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Now playing: Mark "OscarHammer" Steyn's poetic take on last Wednesday's debate.






That oughtta be put to a melody. I can already see the hit musical....



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Friday, October 5, 2012

Mitt Romney, alpha male--who knew?

Mark Steyn, that's who.
Ten minutes in, he jumped right on Big Bird, and then he took off – and never looked back, while the other fellow, whose name escapes me, never got out of the gate. It takes a certain panache to clobber not just your opponent but also the moderator.
I can already see the billing for the next debate: Killer Mormon v. Listless Sourpuss

Meanwhile, at American Spectator
Reason magazine's Matt Welch: "That wasn't a debate so much as Mitt Romney just took Obama for a cross country drive strapped to the roof of his car."
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TGIFWTA: Beards of Wonder

 Goodbye to the lovely warm weather we enjoyed all through September. The temps have been dropping, and the cold wind has been blowing. Among other harsh realities (the unpacking of the boots, scarves and mittens), we are faced--literally--in the Pinkerton household with Mr. P's annual Growing of the Beard. 

But this has the potential to change everything: the Beard Hat.

Mr. P. grows a beard every winter not to be cool, but for precisely the opposite reason. He walks (a goodly jaunt) to work, and the beard keeps his face and neck warm. But aesthetically (and in other ways too) it doesn't really work for me.

This, despite my love for the Avett Brothers and their Beards of Wonder...

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Maybe it was motivated by an earnest desire to share the sizzling crispy tastiness


We are truly beyond satire: in a world where synagogues and churches are bombed or torched; Jews, Christians and assorted diplomats are murdered; flags are burned, beheadings are routinely called for; riots du jour; girls and women barbarically injured or killed (by their menfolk and sometimes even their mommies!) in 'honour' violence (or just for fun, as in FGM); Free Speech having its throat slit before getting thrown under the bus...  by Americans!

...Cops in Canada are calling bacon a hate crime. (Cuz, like, a pile of bacon on the sidewalk is morally equivalent to killing an ambassador and stuff.)







Is it a hate crime if he wanders into the wrong neighbourhood?
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