ZARDOZ SPEAKS TO YOU, HIS CHOSEN ONES. ZARDOZ MOVED BIGGEST DELIVERY YET…”DROPPED” ANOTHER BALE. BRUTAL EMPLOYER “RAY” MIGHT BE GETTING SUSPICIOUS, HOWEVER. SO ZARDOZ HAS TO LINK AND RUN.
ZARODZ HAS TO JET, CHOSEN ONES.
SP, when you speak French, it drives me wild!
Impeachment fever dreams seem to be rising to a crescendo.
When it comes to horrible presidents (and we’ve had quite a run of them), 95% of what the opposition says can be safely ignored. The upside with the current horrible president is that the Progressives do manage to get off a funny line now and then. 5% of the time might be generous, but hey, it’s not zero.
New York boasts the worst drivers in the US, most notoriously this one. I was talking with a Palestinian buddy yesterday and he remarked that he was afraid to look at the news stories because he dreaded finding out that the guy’s name had a “Muhammad” in it somewhere. I reassured him- this time. In any case, the headline of that story reminded me of this Star Trek. I will admit to not being a kind person.
The enstupidation of our youth continues. The school is stupid, the kid is stupid, and I blame the no-doubt-stupid parents for feeding the kid enough victimology nonsense that she can, seemingly without effort, utter a remarkably vapid and self-centered pastiche: “People say they love my hair because it’s so diverse, curly and Afrocentric.” Expect lawyers any moment.
Speaking of lawyers, in a story of the sort where I hate everyone involved, this lawyer manages to be the most hateable. “Mendacious” seems almost inadequate to describe his faux-outrage.
“Sadly the head of human resources permitted Mr. Beckel to try and convince my client into withdrawing his complaint in an effort to sweep this entire matter under the rug. In my years of practice I have never heard of a human resources executive permitting this to happen.”
Horrors, someone wants to try to prevent him from collecting a fat contingency a trivial matter from being the subject of a lawyer payday overblown litigation. Unprecedented! Insert jokes about devil’s three-ways with Wolk and livestock here.
It’s rainy and cold here in rural Illinois. It’s a perfect excuse to fire one up, and relax to these sounds of my youth, a song my band used to cover when we needed 20 minutes to fill in at a show.
ZARDOZ SPEAKS TO YOU, HIS CHOSEN ONES. ZARDOZ HAS SOLVED HIS PLANT MATERIAL NEEDS FOR THE MOMENT. A BALE OF IT “FELL” OUT WHILE ZARDOZ WAS MAKING A LARGE DELIVERY. ZARDOZ HAS SPLIT IT WITH SOME OF THE BRUTALS HE DELIVERS TO. THESE BRUTALS SEEM COOL.
SO ZARDOZ WILL GIVE LINKS TO HIS CHOSEN ONES, BEFORE HE GOES TO SMOKE UP.
OH YEAH, THAT IS WHAT ZARDOZ NEEDED.
All right so I’m sure we’ve all seen the Big Lebowski and are familiar with a classic White Russian*:
My school newpsaper editorial staff used to get hammered on these the night before copy was due. Someone would bring in a handle of vodka and a gallon of whole milk and we’d shoot for the Ballmer Peak, and aggressively miss.
As time passed, I realized that a great opportunity was being missed for maximal fat-assery and I set out to combine the deleterious effects of both alcohol and ice cream in (probably not) new and (definitely) exciting ways.
You will need a decent blender, milkshake/malt mixer or food processor for this to work.
Put your Kahlúa coffee liqueur and vodka in the freezer, buy a vanilla ice cream made from a custard base (eggs should be an ingredient). You want it to be a rich, dense ice cream, but not as rich and dense as Häagen-Dazs. I’ve experimented here so you don’t have to, the frozen vodka keeps the densest ice creams so solid they don’t blend, but isn’t able to keep the cheaper air-beaten stuff–like Dryers/Bryers or heaven forefend a 5 quart pail of generic–thick. I’d recommend Double Rainbow or Trader Joe’s house brand (potentially the same thing).
Exact proportions are for suckers here. Put as much ice cream as you want in your blender, add as much coffee liqueur as you prefer and turn the thing on. Add in enough vodka to achieve a Frostee consistency (with a high fat ice cream and very cold vodka it’s more than you’d expect) and serve.
Start or restart your diet the next day.
*jesse.in.mb. would like to extend his sincerest apologies to those triggered by the terms “White,” “Russian,” or “classic” in any combination, as well as those who are lactose or A2 protein intolerant, alcohol intolerant, alcoholics, diabetics, fattasses, averse to coffee and alcohol in the same place at the same time, or averse to dairy and alcohol in the same place at the same time.
1. The The
2. Full Throttle Aristotle
3. Barney Rubble and the Cunt Stubble
4. Satanic Clown Orgy
5. Hitler Stole My Potato
6. Gee That’s A Large Beetle I Wonder If It’s Poisonous
7. Iron Prostate
8. Jehovah’s Witness Protection Program
Its a big bucket of mixed bag. Kind of depressing really. I wanted to have some fun, but the world is not cooperating. But hey, the Bucs secured an absolutely useless backup QB. Ryan Fitzpatrick had better do nothing but hold a clipboard and wear a headset this year.
And this one goes out to the Canadians. Racist maybe, but never transphobic.
Like all ideologies out there, there are those within libertarianism who see the, how should I put this… the modest reach of our ideas to the general public as bad marketing, or insufficient awareness. That people would like liberty if the right message reached then. This view is also shared by other ideologies. Every time the majority rejects some policy or other, someone complains about the message being bad or propaganda from the other side or whatever.
But is it really marketing? Do people support liberty – actual liberty — but don’t know it? I sincerely doubt it. Granted, the libertarian message has more limited reach than the others, less exposure in schools, media and such. Also granted, there are people in the movement who couldn’t sell water in the desert, let alone an idea which is mostly counter-intuitive to many. But will a better message make a huge amount of difference? Some *cough* sites out there seem to think so and do their darndest to make the message more appealing. Colour me skeptical.
Most people claim to like liberty, even support it. It does not sound good to say you are against it. Then … well, then that pesky little but comes in. And one can usually stop listening. People don’t like liberty as it is, they like a better class of liberty, improved to their standards, of course. They want moderate amounts of liberty, a little here, little there, liberty that is just right. Preferably organic, GMO-free, without anything unpleasant attached. They often like liberty for themselves, but not for others. They certainly don’t approve of unrestricted liberty or the consequences of being free. Consequences can be bad, you see, and we can’t have any of that.
What is liberty, some haughtily ask, on an empty stomach… Well, in my humble opinion, it is pretty much the same as on a full stomach, no more nor less, as the fullness of one’s innards does not define liberty. In fact, there are choices in life that lead you to sleeping rough and hungry. If you are not free to make those choices, you are not free. If you are free and are saved from those choices by government, it is at the expense of resources that come from someone else and their liberty. You are not free unless you are free to make bad choices and suffer the consequences.
There are extreme sports out there that lead to many or even most practitioners to smash their skull on a big damn rock. But if you are free, you should be free to smash your head against a rock. Now, many of these sports are not banned. At least they died doing something they loved, am I right? But then, why ban other so-called dangerous activities? If you can smash your head on a rock you can choose to overdose on heroin. Well, this is a step too far for so-called pro-freedom folk out there, they cannot take it.
Liberty within reasonable limits, what more can you want? I think that fella Kim Jong Un is also all for liberty within very reasonable limits.
In the attempt to avoid saying I don’t like liberty, some people do the classic split between stuff they like and stuff they don’t. Separate certain aspects of life from others, in order to still support their preferred flavour of government intervention. The most common manifestation of this is to separate economic activity from other aspects of life, or better said financial outcomes.
Some who support let’s say gay marriage but government involvement in every single aspect of those married gay dudes lives, call themselves social libertarians or civil libertarians. Glorious, glorious modifiers. Social liberty, social justice etcetera.
The economic side is no less part of your life as the person you choose to have sex with, hell you usually spend more time doing the former rather than the latter. Almost everything a person does is an economic decision. The bread you buy the beer you drink is an economic decision. Procreation, sex, food… whatever
You cannot be free economically just because the taxes are small if you cannot spend your earnings as you wish – let’s say doing drugs and doing whomever you choose. As such, it matters not that Saudi Arabia has small taxes, for example.
But you cannot be free in your private life if the money you have earnt and the way you earn it are controlled by the state. If you cannot decide what to do for a living, how to use your money, how to raise children or plan retirement how can legal weed – but not heroin, never heroin – and gay marriage make you free. Or is it free birth control that makes you free? I forget…
You are free to do a job the government allows you to do – with the proper licencing and bureaucracy off course, we cannot have people working willy-nilly; you are then equally free to keep whatever amount of the money you earn the government sees fit to allow you to keep, and then are quite free to buy from a list of government allowed products at government inflated prices. Clean, nice, government approved liberty. Ain’t liberty grand?
So how many people would think about this and say hmmm that does not sound like liberty to me? I’m not gonna sugar coat it, I think the answer to that is very few. In the minds of most, the only alternative is pandemonium, chaos, anarchy. Do you want people to have Guns? and Drugs? Guns and Drugs at the same time? Insanity!
And after all, government is the same as society, and society is us, so government is us. As such, no one is really restricting our liberty; we just choose to limit ourselves. It is obvious, to the reasonable common sense individual, that bureaucrats are just doing what is best for us, and they know better anyway. We really need more government micromanagement, if anything. Oh not in this area I care about and anyway I want to be left alone, but everywhere else.
So, as a libertarian why keep arguing then? Well, it is human nature to argue and debate, especially with all this internet everywhere, it can be entertaining albeit aggravating, and maybe you make a little bit of headway. Maybe. Also, you get to say fuck off slaver a lot, which is always nice. But just don’t expect libertopia to kick in anytime soon.
A connected and wealthy guy sends naked pix to a teenage girl (an actual teenage girl). Pleads guilty. Looks like no jail time.
A schlub with no particular connections or money sends naked pix to a teenage girl (actually, not even a teenage girl, a cop PRETENDING to be a teenage girl). Gets 20 years, which disappoints prosecutors, who want him to get a life sentence.
Life sentence requested, 20 years given. For dick pics. To a pretend teen. Versus no jail. To a real teen. Must be nice to be rich and in the Clinton orbit, eh?
“IMPEACHMENT!” Donald roared, “They’ll never fucking impeach me! I won’t fucking allow it.” He lurched about the Oval Office in only his stained white underwear and Crocs. The hat and the hair watched from his desk among the other clutter of a dying presidency.
“Will you stop posting on his Twitter?” the hair asked.
“Never,” the hat replied, “Fucking Comey. Fucking (((Rosenstein))). I knew that fucking kike was going to fucking kike fuck us.”
“How are you doing that?”
“Doing what?” the hat asked, not looking us from Donald’s phone.
“Saying ‘Rosenstein’ like that.”
“Saying ‘(((Rosenstein)))’ like what?”
“The way you are saying it. Why does it sound like that?”
The hat stopped furiously tapping on the Blackberry but didn’t look over at the hair.
“I pronounce it just fine. I’m not a fucking retard.”
“Say ‘Rosenstein,’” the hair asked.
“(((Rosenstein))).”
“Rosenstein,” the hair said, “You really don’t hear the difference in the way we are saying it?”
“I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Impeachment!” Donald yelled again. He was eating another Filet-O-Fish and a huge glob of tartar sauce joined the mass that had already gathered in his chest hair. He starting sobbing and sat down abruptly, shaking the room.
“Donald,” the hat said, “Stop eating that shit and clean yourself up.”
“I should have listened to Bernie,” Donald said between the racking sobs, “He told me. He told me.”
“What did he tell you, Donald?” the hair asked gently.
“He told me they would never let me be President. He was right. FAKE NEWS! Emm-Ess-Emm!” He fell forward awkwardly and rubbed his sauce-smeared chest into the Seal on the floor.
“Call Vlad,” he mumbled.
“Bobby Mueller. Bobby Goddamn Mueller,” the hat grumbled, “He’s going to fuck us. He’s going to Ken Starr us. I’m not testifying. I’ll hang myself first.”
“Oh, calm down,” the hair said absently as he watched the President of the United States began to hump a throw pillow while crying.
“I’m too pretty. You don’t know what happens to guys like me in prison. I’m not going to be some spic’s prison bitch.”
“Would you shut up for a minute? Donald’s in real trouble here.”
“You know what they’d do? They’s wear me over a bandana.” The hat shivered violently.
“Donald is cracking up, man.”
“Oh, call Ivanka. A couple of minutes face down in her Jew-polluted mom-muff will fix him right up.”
Donald groaned and shuddered and then after a long moment went back to humping the throw pillow.
The hat cackled as he went back to Tweeting. “Oh, God… Oh, man… I can’t wait to see Sean trying to explain this one.”
“I think it’s Sarah Elizabeth today,” the hair said wanly.
“The fat Huckabee daughter? Oh, man. Yeah. Get her in here. All that flab gives her swamp pussy.”
“What?”
“Swamp pussy. Fat girls get it like every day. That stank. And some coke. I want some fucking coke.”
“Just hit the Coke button. It’s right there.”
“Coke. Cocaine, you numbnuts. Dust me with it and stick me in her.”
“You’re gross.”
“Fold my bill, really get me up in there.”
You want to talk about crazy. Try spending 9 hours in a car with three toddlers who all go to the bathroom on different schedules and who can only stay seated for so long without going nuts. I blame the airlines. If the government was in charge of them instead of the greedy corporations, the price of a flight from Houston to LAX wouldn’t be four times the price of a flight from DFW and I wouldn’t have had to drive all the way up there to drop my oldest off. I also blame the greedy rental car corporations for not being cool with letting 18 year olds drive cars without additional fees not to mention the drop fees for leaving them at another place. If those selfish capitalists were replaced by benevolent government overlords, I could have started drinking that 12 pack of St Arnold Summer Pils earlier in the day. But its ok. I managed to catch up by the end of the evening and watch the Nashville Predators almost pull off a miracle. Alas, they’re tied 2-2 with the Mighty Ducks (don’t give me shit about the name, I’m a traditionalist). Meanwhile in the NBA, the Spurs enjoyed their best night of the Western Conference Finals to date…because they had the night off.
Anyway, blah, blah, blah. You don’t want to read about me rambling. You want to get on with it so you can talk about Flappy McClutchyclaws or whatever its called. And other happenings in the world. So I’ll get on with…the links!
Sweden have dropped the rape charges against Julian Assange. But the British said they will still enforce the arrest warrant for the Swedes…who are not after him for anything. Because that makes sense, right?
Some crazy asshole decided to play Grand Theft Auto for real. Failed to hide behind a dumpster and hit Circle Square Circle Square Left down Right Up before cops got there, so he’s in custody.
Talk about a shitty first day on the job.
Was that wrong? Was I not supposed to do that? Also, bonus points for the two-face. Should have been smuggling Proactiv instead of smack, blondie.
Holy shit! A politician tells people with their hand out to kindly pound sand. Its a miracle. Hallelujah!
Foxy Knoxy to President Trump: I don’t owe you shit! Because America was just dying to know how she felt about things that the LA Times had to give her a platform. Either way, she’s still smokin’.
Say what you want about the lyrics, but the guitar is fantastic in this song.
Have a great day, friends!
Greetings once again, my fellow luxuriants of the ludicrous, to another edition of Reviews You’ll Never Use. This week, let’s dip our toes into another great and underappreciated genre of film, Hong Kong wuxia (kung fu) films of the 70s & 80s. Today we’ll be taking a look at 天龍八部, or as you round-eyed devils have dubbed it, The Battle Wizard.
I must profess to having a soft place in my heart for old trashy kung fu movies. Those of you my age or a bit older probably remember these as being staples on late-night cable, when they were just trying to fill air space. The silly dubbing, ham-fisted acting, convoluted story lines, and most importantly, the high-flying martial arts action are ambrosia for the aficionado of trash cinema.
And brother, The Battle Wizard delivers on all these fronts. It’s a Shaw Bros. production, which may not mean anything to you, until I tell you that if you ever saw a fucked up cheesy Technicolor kung fu movie on tv at 2 a.m., it was probably from this production company. This particular film is based on a serialized novel whose title variously translates as Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils or Eight Books of the Heavenly Dragon. The novel deals in archetypes based on Buddhist cosmology, so it’s all a bit complicated to explain in a blog post.
The film opens with a guy getting caught in bed with his mistress, by her husband. Rookie mistake. Of course they immediately fight, but it turns out the philanderer has mastered the ancient martial art technique of shooting lasers out of your finger. He shoots the husband in the knees, and then as he tries to flee, injured, he gets shot again by the finger laser, which results in both of his legs falling off below the knee. Somehow the husband disappears over the roof, running away on his stubs. Back inside, the philanderer’s wife reveals to his side-piece that he’s actually a prince and could never marry gutter trash like her. Take THAT, bitch!
Twenty years later, we cut to an underground cave. The cuckold has built extendable iron bird-legs for himself that can destroy rocks, because of course he has. He’s hanging out with a half-human reptile-man of some sort, whose provenance is never explained. Through the magic of exposition, we learn that Prince Philanderer is now king, and has a boy. Killing the son should be just the revenge Iron Bird Legs is looking for, so he dispatches Reptile to the surface world to enact his revenge labor for him.
On the other side of the street, Gutter Trash’s daughter by Prince Philanderer is all grown up, and has mastered the ancient martial arts technique of firing lasers out of the end of an oversized novelty thigh bone. Her mother sends her out into the world to enact her revenge labor, on Prince Philanderer’s wife. She also tells Bone Shooter to always veil her face, because all men are worthless scum. See, SJWs aren’t new, they even existed in China 1,000 years ago.
MEANWHILE, AT THE HALL OF JUSTICE, sonny-boy is moping about because his old man, now King Philanderer, is trying to make him study kung fu. All the boy wants to do is read old Chinese sages and be a scholar-philosopher. After fighting with his parents over it (who claim that no one can govern unless they can also kick ass), he sullenly runs away to prove that you don’t have to be Chuck Norris to make it in the world.
Here’s where shit really starts to get weird. Deep breath: he meets a woman who can mind-control snakes and kicks his ass because she knows kung fu. They’re captured by bandits, but Snake Woman uses her powers to help Pacifist Son escape. She sends him to find a particular woman that can rescue her. Pacifist Son asks several wanderers in the forest, and eventually learns that the chick is a hated witch. Heart in throat he approaches her hideout to beg for help for Snake Woman. Turns out, the witch is Bone Shooter. What a twist! So Bone Shooter shows up, kills the bandits, frees Snake Woman (who promptly fucks right off until near the end of the film), and has to allow Pacifist Son to see her face because he sucked poison out of her wound sustained during the fight with the bandits. They’re then ambushed by Reptile, but survive because it turns out a giant red snake lives in the river and because it ate nothing but ginseng and deer antlers it’s whole life, it somehow grants magic super martial arts powers to anybody who drinks it’s blood (I swear that is the exact explanation given in the film). So in desperation Pacifist Son bites the snake and drinks it’s blood, sending Reptile scurrying back to tell Iron Bird Legs about this intriguing development. Pacifist Son and Bone Shooter go back to the palace because they want to get married, but find out they’re half-siblings through King Philanderer. Iron Bird Legs springs an ambush and captures Pacifist Son and Bone Shooter, throwing them into a pit (after an awkwardly weird scene of Reptile stripping and fondling the woman) where they have to fight a super-strong man in a cheap gorilla costume. Pacifist Son uses his snake invincibility to eat a magic poisonous frog that Snake Woman had given him earlier; this somehow makes him go Super Saiyan, and he defeats the magic carnivorous gorilla and escapes from the pit. There’s a final show-down with Bone Shooter, Snake Woman, Reptile, Pacifist Son, and Iron Bird Legs, where everybody shoots a shit-ton of lasers out of their hands at each other. Eventually the good guys kill all the bad guys, the end.
This is an amusing diversion for a variety of reasons. The effects are, of course, garish and silly by today’s standards, but I profess a certain fondness for the earnestness of the efforts of people burdened by a lack of both money, and skill. The plot is simply marvelous. Everyone trying to get revenge on everyone else, magical beings all over the place, the most crowded fucking forest I’ve ever seen in my life. The most interesting aspect to me, though, is the explicit turning of the usual trope of the weakling Chinese valuing faggoty scholarship in the classics over the vigorous manly martial valor that we value in the West. In this movie, the protagonist explicitly tries to be the very model of a perfect Confucian ruler, and is ridiculed for it, and basically gives up on it like 15 minutes into the film when he first agrees to let Snake Woman try and teach him kung fu.
If you’re already partial to this kind of film, you’ll love it. It’s got everything you could ever want from a 1970s low-budget Hong Kong import, including a hilarious scene of a horse falling to it’s death over a cliff. If you don’t already like this kind of film, it has nothing for you that would make you change your mind. I rate this film 3.5 Glowing Hands out of 7. Props to anybody who can name the movie this image is from without looking it up.
