Life In The Monkey House

Tab Clearing…

by Tam May 15, 2012 View from the Porch

Certain words have consequences.Having dispatched a mouse with a CCI .22 shot shell in the last couple weeks, this was interesting.You can see the white guilt from 250 miles up.

Read the full article →

WHERE U AT? NJ? GET OUT!

by Tam May 15, 2012 View from the Porch

So the borough of Fort Lee in New Jersey has passed an ordinance criminalizing “texting while walking”.Explains their ortsgruppenleiter:There have been 23 pedestrian accidents since January, Fort Lee police chief told CBS New York. While most accidents were minor, three fatalities were reported.”They’re not alert and they’re not watching what they’re doing,”Which sounds like a [...]

Read the full article →

…and put this deck chair over there.

by Tam May 11, 2012 View from the Porch

I was going to make some comment about what a master stroke of electioneering it was for Obama to use his bully pulpit to get the GOP to pull its teeth out of his economic Achilles’ heel and go chasing off after the gay marriage issue, but then I realized it didn’t really take any [...]

Read the full article →

Heart of Weirdness.

by Tam May 10, 2012 View from the Porch

From Fort Wayne comes this intriguing bit of Hoosier shenanigans:Police in Fort Wayne arrested a man after they say he drove three blocks with four children strapped on the hood of his car.The maddeningly cryptic story leaves it unclear as to whether this was being done as a punishment or a reward or just, you [...]

Read the full article →

QotD: Eat The Goose, No More Eggs Edition

by Tam May 9, 2012 View from the Porch

Adaptive Curmudgeon on everybody’s favorite South American strongman:It looks to me like Chavez has beaten his country like a rented mule and his time is just about up.  His 13 year socialist reign has been, for want of a better word, “craptacular” for his people.  He trashed a nation in less time than most of [...]

Read the full article →

Problem with the paradigm.

by Tam May 8, 2012 View from the Porch

So another terror plot was allegedly uncovered, despite the War on Terror being more or less kinda sorta over. The president offered the vague reassurances that apparently come with the job description:U.S. President Barack Obama was told about the plot in April, and the attempt “underscores the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism here and [...]

Read the full article →

Primary sources…

by Tam May 7, 2012 View from the Porch

If you are a Hoosier going to vote in tomorrow’s primaries, Roomie has a link to a place where you can find out who will be on your ballot.While everybody is yammering about who gets the White House, the smart voter will be looking at elections that actually matter to them, and that they have [...]

Read the full article →

No nukes.

by Tam May 7, 2012 View from the Porch

So the Japanese powered down the last reactor in their country, and the whole grid is humming along without a single volt originated by splitting a uranium atom.Environmentalists are probably decorating their cupcakes over this; a major economy forswearing that icky nuclear energy and moving forward into a greener future of unicorns farting luminescent rainbows [...]

Read the full article →

___________s Suck!

by Tam May 7, 2012 View from the Porch

Apparently, the thing to do these days, especially if you’re a bald shooting instructor with a Brand Name®©™ and a goatee, is to release a YouTube video declaring that _______s Suck!By using “sucks” in the title, everyone will know that you’re hip and edgy. You’ll increase attention to your Brand Name®©™ as hundreds of owners [...]

Read the full article →

You’re putting the emPHASis on the wrong sylLABles.

by Tam May 4, 2012 View from the Porch

I lived in Chicago ’til I was nine, before moving to Atlanta. I spent the bulk of my life there before migrating to Knoxville, and thence up to Indy. Therefore, I have limited experience with accents.Obviously, there is a distinct Chicagoan accent, and then there are the various shades of Southern accent, with which I [...]

Read the full article →

Phrasing!

by Tam May 3, 2012 View from the Porch

The link at CNN said simply “Obama vows to ‘finish the job’”.With visions of the U.S. economy hemorrhaging gouts of blood as it crawls grimly forward on its hands and knees and Barry stepping up behind it, rolling up his shirtsleeve as he contemplatively hefts a framing hammer, I clicked the link.Turns out it was [...]

Read the full article →

More-or-Less-Instant Karma

by Tam May 2, 2012 View from the Porch

So, apparently there was this cat running loose, stinking up the streets of North Carolina. Despite a felony rap sheet full of crimes like kidnapping and multiple counts of the especially-icky-sounding “Indecent Liberty With A Child”, the penal system had given him nothing worse than some probation and a whole three month stretch in the [...]

Read the full article →

They finally got their fangs into their bête noire.

by Tam May 1, 2012 View from the Porch

The headline story, as well as the BREAKING NEWS banner across the top of the page at CNN.com this morning read:Rupert Murdoch not fit to run business, UK lawmakers ruleI hope CNN’s web guy had some Kleenex at his desk to use after he finished typing that in. I wonder how you pronounce “Mouch” in [...]

Read the full article →

Tab Clearing…

by Tam April 30, 2012 View from the Porch

“Worse Than SOPA” passes the House on a party-line vote, with the “Small Government GOP” backing the legislation that is opposed by a pretty broad spectrum of people. Barry O is making veto noises, which is more than his predecessor would have done. And I can’t believe I just typed that last sentence.So Iran is [...]

Read the full article →

Oceania still at war with Eastasia.

by Tam April 30, 2012 View from the Porch

Despite the end of the “War on Terror”, I still have friends in Afghanistan, I still got Porn-O-Scanned at the airport, and little kids still get scared by the monsters in Scooby Doo reruns.Leon Panetta (who, in some kind of bizarre game of political checkers, inexplicably wound up as my Secretary of Defense,) came out [...]

Read the full article →

The impossibility of parody.

by Tam April 27, 2012 View from the Porch

Two years ago, Brian J. Noggle joked about starting an Urban Chicken Rescue Organization, to take care of the little egg factories that had been purchased by well-meaning yuppies who discovered that anything much more maintenance-intensive than a Pug or a Prius didn’t fit well with their lifestyle, no matter how many eggs it laid.Today, [...]

Read the full article →

QotD: Chariots of the Gods Edition

by Tam April 26, 2012 View from the Porch

Seen in a list at Adaptive Curmudgeon’s place:38. The world will not end. It’s a calendar carved on a rock by people who didn’t have enough technology to make an electric toaster…get real.Heh.

Read the full article →

You keep using that word…

by Tam April 25, 2012 View from the Porch

Here’s an interesting sociology project!The following paragraphs were fished from the spam filter here at VFTP Command Central by our elite team of sewer commandos. They obviously originated in China, and I am betting that they were carefully written in Chinese with the aid of some translation software. “Self-Reliance Day” is obviously meant to be [...]

Read the full article →

Overheard in Roomie’s Bedroom:

by Tam April 25, 2012 View from the Porch

The TeeWee has come on with the morning news…Me: “Did you hear that? Somebody kidnapped a four-year-old out of a St. Louis hospital, and he was next on the list for a heart transplant. Part of the BOLO was that he was wearing a drug-injecting medical backpack with only 24 hours worth of heart dope [...]

Read the full article →

…and then you wake up in a bathtub full of ice…

by Tam April 24, 2012 View from the Porch

I sometimes jokingly refer to my local gun store as “Death Camp Guns & Gear” because it’s practically across the street from the Amtrak repair yard in Beech Grove that the Reynold’s Wrap yarmulke crowd insist is a secret FEMA extermination camp, based on a video that went viral amongst the conspiranoiacs on the internet [...]

Read the full article →

3000 Miles to Roseholme

by Tam April 21, 2012 View from the Porch

Driving down to Knoxville, I went via Nashville. Despite being almost exactly a hundred miles longer, it had the important advantage of the highway being intact the whole way there, a feature not shared by I-75 South.I had planned on coming home via I-75, but Shannon showed up in the gunsmithing shack yesterday morning with [...]

Read the full article →

…and, like clockwork:

by Tam April 19, 2012 View from the Porch

Oh, CNN, we can always count on you for the stupid!Seriously, have you people looked at the sales numbers of First-Person Shooters? If these things turned people into killers, you would need hip waders to keep the hemoglobin out of your hightops while perambulating the streets of America .Plus, this meme is tired. Really, really [...]

Read the full article →

Brace for the stupid, gamers.

by Tam April 19, 2012 View from the Porch

The headline article at CNN.com readsAnders Behring Breivik, who admits killing 77 people in Norway last summer, used a video game as training for his shooting spree, he testified Thursday at his trial for homicide and terrorism. He played the game “Modern Warfare 2″ for practice, he said. Breivik, who boasts of being an ultranationalist [...]

Read the full article →

Sexism isn’t cute, even with floral trim.

by Tam April 19, 2012 View from the Porch

Writes one Kiri Blakely:As the prostitute scandal continues to rock the Secret Service, one thought has been running around my brain like a mouthy schoolgirl: Why aren’t there more (or any?!) female Secret Service agents? The reason there should be more is simple: Women don’t get into trouble the way men do.Well, Ms. Blakeley, as [...]

Read the full article →

Portland Tea Party.

by Tam April 18, 2012 View from the Porch

Apparently only TSA screeners are allowed to look at nekkid folks at the airport, because when an Oregon man attempted to give the entire crowd waiting in line the same view that the blue-gloved security minions had in the Porn-O-Scan booth, he got arrested for disorderly conduct and indecent exposure, rather than being given an [...]

Read the full article →

Our long dark night is over.

by Tam April 16, 2012 View from the Porch

Barack Obama makes Falklands gaffe by calling Malvinas the Maldives’Nukyular’; it’s pronounced ‘nukyular’.I wonder if he can see the Falklands from his front porch in Hyde Park?.

Read the full article →

The needle on the record of history keeps skipping.

by Tam April 16, 2012 View from the Porch

Chris Ex Machina offers thoughts on Argentina’s renewed bluster on the Islas Malvinas Falkland Islands.The Argentines have probably noticed that the Brits no longer have the long-range Vulcan bombers that hit the islands in the Black Buck raids or the Victor tankers that refueled them on the way. Similarly, all but one of the HMS [...]

Read the full article →

Tab Clearing…

by Tam April 15, 2012 View from the Porch

A very insightful and much-needed reminder that everyone is not Just Exactly Like Me. That’s part of the reason I make myself watch one or two MSNBC talk shows on weekend mornings as well as reading web stuff from SoCons and foreign policy hawks.The downside of being a firearms hobbyist is that firearms are a [...]

Read the full article →

QotD: Wipe That Smile Off Your Face Edition.

by Tam April 14, 2012 View from the Porch

In a you-need-to-go-read-it überpost, Kevin sighsI don’t think “our best days are still ahead of us.” I’m in very good company. I’m aware that Cassandras have been proclaiming the downfall of civilizations since time immemorial, but as Billy Beck once observed, “Sometimes they’re right.”Kevin doesn’t seem very sanguine about the near-term future, and neither am [...]

Read the full article →

The meme that wouldn’t die.

by Tam April 12, 2012 View from the Porch

All over the TeeWee and internet, people are still talking about Zimmerman “disobeying” the 911 operator. Zimmerman did not “disobey a 911 operator”, even if such a thing were possible.The 911 operator asked Zimmerman if he was following Martin. Zimmerman replied in the affirmative. The 911 operator said, and I quote: “We don’t need you [...]

Read the full article →

Stop me if you’ve heard this one…

by Tam April 10, 2012 View from the Porch

The chairwoman of the Democrat National Committee has come out and accused Republicans of being unpatriotic scoundrels, putting politics before country and talking down the economy in hopes of spurring their election chances:Republicans looking to defeat President Barack Obama in November’s general election are rooting for the American economy to fail, the chairwoman of the [...]

Read the full article →

Things I Don’t Get, #355,401

by Tam April 10, 2012 View from the Porch

Remember at the end of Python’s Holy Grail, when the cops show up and arrest Arthur and a bunch of his knights, and one of the bobbies yanks a guy’s shield away with a brusque “‘Ere, that’s an offensive weapon, that is”? Remember that?Well, Canada’s got some sweeping body armor ban coming down the pike, [...]

Read the full article →

But I don’t care about the kind with racquets, either.

by Tam April 7, 2012 View from the Porch

Unc asks, apparently in regard to the Masters’ kerfuffle:I’m guessing most women (as in an overwhelming percentage of) don’t care about golf one way or the other.I don’t personally know anybody, setter or pointer, who gives much of a damn about pasture pool one way or another.They could spice it up by incorporating some of [...]

Read the full article →

It’s not about the Benjamins.

by Tam April 6, 2012 View from the Porch

Humans are not rational animals. Oh, sure, we pay a lot of lip service to logic and reason, but we’re suckers for ceremony and symbolism. Ultimately, it’s about all about feelings.Every time gas jumps ten cents, somebody trades in their perfectly functional Accord and goes thirty long into hock on a Prius that, even were [...]

Read the full article →

QotD: Probulation Edition

by Tam April 5, 2012 View from the Porch

Because it’s my blog and I can have as many Quotes of the Day as I want:If they can’t keep a cell phone out of a septuagenarian’s high-security prison cell, they can’t keep anything out of anywhere.Point this out to your seatmate on your next flight if they’re one of those drooling nitwits constantly opening [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries