Parvascintilla

thoughtsfromthesuburbs:

Thank goodness for Urban Dictionary #GameOfThrones

Norway, those cross-country skiing gold medalists, also seems to be home to at least one criminal mastermind. When a ten-year-old was caught on a joyride with his parents’ car, he had two rather brilliant excuses.

He later told another snowplough operator that he was a dwarf and had wound up in the ditch when making a hasty U-turn to go home for his driving licence.

That’s an impressive attempt at deception, particularly for a child.

“Elena Kagan revealed at the Aspen Ideas Festival that she recently joined her colleague Antonin Scalia on a friendly hunting trip—and even shot a deer… Scalia was not impressed: “She ended up killing a white-tailed doe,” he has noted, “which she could have done in my driveway.”

-Slate, July 2, 2013

In an interview with NPR, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said that he had recently gone waterfowl hunting after meeting with his new clerks. That afternoon on the Chesapeake Bay, he shot 15 snow geese from a canoe in just under an hour. This had to be a record, he bragged. His fellow Justice, Antonin Scalia, was nonplussed. “Psh. I could bag twice as many geese,” he noted, “just parking my car in downtown DC.”

- – -

Chief Justice John Roberts told BBC News that he had once spent a week on a friend’s small farm. While there, the area farms were plagued by a pair of coyotes which were massacring any chickens they could get a hold of. Justice Roberts and his host were fed up and stayed up all night and killed the interlopers. Justice Robert had shot one on the run, a near-impossible shot with a rifle.

Justice Scalia, noting first his deep respect for the Chief Justice, scoffed and said that the story is “more dubious than the meat in the Justice Department cafeteria’s hot dogs.”

- – -

Speaking with Anderson Cooper, Justice Sonia Sotomayor revealed that she had once killed a capybara while on a trip in Paraguay. Tagging along on a friend’s hunt, she shot the animal on a riverbank with a compound bow. She motioned to the pelt hanging framed on the wall behind her in her chambers.

Walking by and peeking into her open door, Justice Scalia laughed. “A capybara? Please, those are just glorified rats,” he said, making air quotation marks with his hands. “A child could ‘hunt’ an ‘animal’ that big in any major US subway system.”

- – -

In a Parade Magazine feature, Justice Samuel A. Alito said that while it was a startling moment, it wasn’t the worst scare he received in his life. That, he said, would be the time he had fought and killed an elk with his pocket knife. On a hike through Yellowstone National Park, an elk had surprised him and his family and Alito sprang into a fit of startled violence. The Justice charged and wrestled the elk to the ground, finally dispatching it with his pocket knife.

Across the table, Justice Scalia didn’t seem very interested. He chuckled and said “Look, if an elk is startled, you can basically kill them with a hardcover book, like my 1998 classic, A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law.”

- – -

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy talked on The View about the only time he had gone hunting. He had sat hunched in a tree stand for hours, exposed to the elements through a raging snow squall. His patience was rewarded when he spotted and shot a five-point buck. But the trail out was too treacherous in the storm, so Justice Kennedy had to field-dress the kill and fend off scavenging vultures and wolves for four hours until the storm passed. Only then could he drag his prize out of the woods.

Justice Scalia rolled his eyes, saying, “Anyone could sit through a snowstorm with the fancy Gortex get-up he has. And a five-point buck is really just a house cat with overgrown ears.”

- – -

Speaking with the New York Times, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suddenly grew very quiet. “Yes, I have broken one significant law,” she said, “in a momentary crisis of my faith in my law career. To clear my head and find myself, I took a rather unique cruise into international waters.”

Justice Ginsberg composed herself. “I hunted a young man, a human being, through the maze-like holds of a giant decommissioned oil tanker while wealthy gamblers bet on the outcome. Our cat-and-mouse chase ended on the wet deck. He had already shot me in the arm and so I had abandoned my rifle. But luckily, I suppose, I got the drop on him in the moonlight and I finished him off with my British Service Model Colt .455 caliber.”

“That trip…hunting the deadliest prey is one of my great regrets,” she said, “and remedying that moral transgression is what has motivated me to improve the lives of my fellow Americans throughout my career.”

The stunned crowd fell silent. The only sound came from Justice Scalia: “In the 1950s an extralegal human hunting party was about as daring as someone today sending a tweet to a celebrity they have never met.” The gathered law students gasped as Ginsberg ripped off her lapel microphone and slugged Scalia.

Before passing out, Scalia quipped, “of course she could pop me with a cheap shot. At my age, too much cayenne has the same effect.”

[Image via Wikimedia Commons]

The post Justice Scalia Yawns appeared first on The Toast.

Kevin Tong will sell two really great new prints today. His poster for Beyond Good and Evil is a 12″ x 36″ screenprint, has an edition of 200, and will cost $40. “The Eagle Has Landed” is a 12″ x 36″ screenprint, has an edition of 100, and will cost $50. These go up today (Thursday, August 29th) at a random time. Visit TragicSunshine.com.

Marvel Age Annual #1-West Coast Avengers by Steve Engleheart, Milgrom/Sinnott

You’re god damn right we are.

Temple Run 2 is a simple endless runner-style game, where you’re fleeing monsters and avoiding obstacles in the jungle, after snatching a golden idol of some sort. Come to think of it, your character is kind of a jerk in this game. Anyhow, while running, you collect coins which can be traded for various things. The game has long made it possible to unlock additional characters, using those coins:

Unlock a football player, for some reason.

“Unlocking” seems alright. But this is problematic:

“Buy”?!

Oh. This…this does not seem right.

According to Django Unchained, that’s a shockingly low price.

Today’s a good day to learn about apples.

The key thing to understand about apple varieties is that apples do not come true from seed…If that seed grows into a tree, its apples will not resemble its parents’. Often they will be sour little green things, because qualities like bigness, redness, and sweetness require very unusual alignments of genes that may not recur by chance…

If you like the apples made by a particular tree, and you want to make more trees just like it, you have to clone it: Snip off a shoot from the original tree, graft it onto a living rootstock, and let it grow. This is how apple varieties come into existence. Every McIntosh is a graft of the original tree that John McIntosh discovered on his Ontario farm in 1811, or a graft of a graft. Every Granny Smith stems from the chance seedling spotted by Maria Ann Smith in her Australian compost pile in the mid-1800s.

I did not know that.

Recently, I stumbled across this product:

Frankly, that just seems like cheating. Even The Secret would sound good with James Earl Jones reading it.¹ Crafty as this may be, however, the creators of this work are really missing out on another opportunity. With just a bit of repackaging, an existing product could appeal to a whole new group, thereby generating plenty of additional revenue:

They could even jazz things up, by splicing in some Star Wars bits:

• For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten child, and they ruled the galaxy as father and son.

Now that’s a Bible with true crossover appeal!

Footnotes:

1. Apparently, the only person willing to read Rhonda Byrne’s execrable self-“help” book was little-known narrator Rhonda Byrne. ↩

Perfect Laughter just put three new art prints up for sale. They’re all 16″ x 20″ screenprints, have small editions, and cost $30-$40 each. Visit their Etsy Shop.

While shopping at a fancy Australian chocolate shop, I stumbled upon this brochure:

That is some high-maintenance chocolate.

It taught me a great deal.

• The ideal temperature for storing chocolate is 15 – 20 degrees Celsius, which means now you gotta do math.

• You may think “It’s not that hot out”, but please, never leave your chocolates in a parked car. Your dog, sure, but not your chocolates, and definitely not your dog and your chocolates together, alone.

• The name for that kinda-gross white powder that chocolate gets is “chocolate shock”. It’s ok to eat though.

• Hey, be careful where you keep those chocolates. Cocoa butter in chocolate absorbs odors readily, so be sure to store them away from garlic, spices, and perfumed soap.

• Note the number in the upper right of the brochure’s cover. Purchasing chocolates requires extensive education, and not one but at least three informational brochures.

Frankly, I don’t think I’m ready for that kind of commitment.

Previously: The Over It Pie

Ann Friedman is relieved to report that at least she's never had a sex dream about Gerard Butler.

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See more posts by Ann Friedman

160 comments

natgeofound:

People swim and swing from ring to ring in the Russian River in California, August 1938.
Photograph by B. Anthony Stewart, National Geographic

D: Russian River. Same as it ever was.
J: I have to reblob that.

Who needs one?

tastefullyoffensive:

Star Wars Yoga 

[youwillnotbelieve]

Zoltron will sell a poster for the Napa Valley music festival, Bottlerock, today. It’s 18″ x 24″ and comes in a number of different colorways. It goes up today (Friday, May 17th) at 10am Pacific Time. Visit Zoltron.com.

Tom Cruise is perhaps most famous for his role as Ron Kovic in “The Making of ’Born on the Fourth of July’”. Throughout his 30 year career, however, Cruise has also played several Jacks. Let’s look!

A List of the Jacks of Tom Cruise:

Jack

Film: Legend [Link]
Year: 1985
Trivia: The sound of the unicorns at play is actually a recording of humpback whales!
Note: Filmed with a (then-quite-large) $30 million dollar budget, “Legend” grossed only around $15 million, making it quite a flop. Cruise’s first true blockbuster “Top Gun” was released just one month later.

Jack Reacher

Film: Jack Reacher [Link]
Year: 2012
Trivia: The character in the book series is described as being 6 feet 5 inches tall. Tom Cruise is 5 feet 7 inches tall.
Note: The rather-ridiculous character name purportedly originates from author Lee Child’s own lofty height. While struggling with the first book, Child and his wife were at the grocery store when an elderly woman kindly asked Mr. Child if he could reach a product on the top shelf for her. Child’s wife mused that if he couldn’t finish his book, he could always get a job as a professional reacher.¹

Jack Harper

Film: Oblivion [Link]
Year: 2013
Trivia: Writer/Director Joseph Kosinski is not related to “The Office” star John Krasinski.
Note: With this film, Tom Cruise has actually played a Jack in two consecutive films.

Stay tuned for Cruise’s next Jack ____er role.

This completes our tour of the Jacks of Tom Cruise. I hope you have enjoyed this list. For a similar list, please see A Man for All Seasons, featuring Nicholas Cage.

Footnotes:

1. Not a real occupation.²↩

2. Unless you count “Basketball Player”.↩

I hadn’t stopped by Paper Crave in awhile, but I sure got a great tip from them here. Andrew Althouse’s “The World At Night” is a 24″ x 36″ glow in the dark screenprint, has an edition of 50, and costs $50. Get info at UnderConsideration.com, then buy from ShopRealMart.com.

fantagraphics:

Pin-up of the Rock Steady Crew by Wilfred Santiago for Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree.

captosta:

Wooden Bookshelves
made of modular elements.
All the modules are designed to rotate around a central
axis providing support for the books. The bottom part
can be used as an hanging device.
Multiple shelves can be endlessly combined to customize
your space.

FUSILLO

Inspired.

I wonder if I could reverse engineer this and avoid spending $500 on it.

Industrial medicine
House medicine
Heavy Metal medicine
Bluegrass medicine
’90s medicine
Medicine