Kara Jean

NYT, Social Q’s, 24 May 2013:

Our group of close friends has spent the last few years attending one another’s weddings. We all give gifts to the newlyweds, except for one couple who hasn’t given gifts to anyone. Now the nongivers are getting married. Some of us do not want to gift them at all, whereas others think a more modest than normal gift is in order. What do you think? - Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

It sounds to me like these non-givers are completely missing the point of getting married, which is to receive household items and cash. They may be misguided, believing that marriages are about celebrating a couple committing their lives to each other, or they may be malevolent, dooming their friends’ unions to sure destruction by depriving them of tea towels, the literal fabric that holds marriages together.

Or, it may be that the cost of attending several weddings in a short time period makes it financially difficult for this couple to buy a gift on top of funding their attendance, but I don’t see how a little electricity, or dinner or diapers, is more important than the sterling silver Crate & Barrel salt shakers you’ve all earned by falling in love with another human being and declaring it publicly.

Healthy friendships are built on well orchestrated passive aggressive punishments tailored specially for the people you care about most. Whatever you decide to do, make sure that everyone does it in a way that your friends will sort of notice but that you can all sort of deny doing later, that way you can all quietly judge-and-jury each other for the rest of your incredibly fulfilled lives.

shattered - Lucky & Wild (Namco - arcade - 1992)

requested by thats-beautiful-dad

Take a look at this impressive, heavily loaded Bloody Mary, served at O'Davey's Irish Pub & Restaurant in Fond du Lac. (Also known as Davey's.)

This ultimate hangover cure is topped with an extensive beer chaser consisting of pop corn, bacon, peanuts, beans, sausage, pretzel, sliders, a pickle and (this is Wisconsin after all) a cracker and cheese curd. Plus a Brewers flag.

Wildest Bloody Mary you've ever seen creating buzz for Wisconsin [Gitte Laasby/Journal Sentinel]

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

sluttyoliveoil: onlylolgifs: Macaroni being made

From Gabe Wyner come photos of a menu in Arcos de la Frontera, whose English version is full of the delightful consequences of someone's earnest reliance on a bilingual dictionary. For example:

In the Spanish version of the menu, that one of course is Calamares en su tinta.

Lexicographical parentheses come up again in the various dishes characterized as Revuelto de X, where revuelto here means "scrambled", and (I think) refers to scrambled eggs with various other ingredients, but has been translated as "In a mess (Untidy)":

Another poetic fragment involves several dishes characterized as "Attacked" of this and that, resulting from the fact that saltear can mean "rob, assault" as well as "sauté":

A more subtle misconnection is the translation of guarnición as "garrison" rather than "garnish":

The full English and Spanish versions of this menu page are here and here.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess what you'd get if you ordered "Iberian Secret" or "Iberian Pen (Feather)" from the "Meets" section:

notablegamebox:

Shamus was a knife-throwing robot who liked to dress like Doctor Who. Released in 1982 by Synapse Software for the Atari 800 and Commodore 64. Artwork by Tim Boxell.

There are many wonderful ways to voice your dissent on political issues of the day. You could, for example, put a bumper sticker on your car, which is highly effective. Or you could write a sternly worded letter to the powers that be. Or wave signs. Or put on a funny-looking hat with teabags hanging from it. But you know what is ALL KINDS OF FUCKED UP? Shooting yourself in the head on the altar at Notre Dame (the actual Notre Dame, not that college in the middle of Nowhere, Indiana) because of THE GAYS. That, friends, is ALL KINDS OF FUCKED UP. Unless you’re Madame La le Bigot, in which case, it is a “spectacular” and peachy way to wake up your fellow countrymen to the imminent threat of les gays.

French National Front leader Marine le Pen has saluted the acts of a far-right activist who shot himself dead at Notre Dame. The man had earlier called on his blog for “spectacular action” to protect France’s identity. [...]

The suicide was hailed as a political gesture by Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Front. “All respect to Dominique Venner whose final, eminently political act was to try to wake up the people of France,” Le Pen said on Twitter, signing her initials to indicate that she had written the entry personally.

Le Pen’s far-right party, running primarily on an anti-immigration platform but which also opposes French government efforts to legalize gay marriage, is the third-most popular in the country.

The man was identified by police as 78-year-old Dominique Venner, a historian known for his far-right publications. A note on Venner’s blog, dated May 21st, had strongly criticized a law to allow same-sex marriage that was passed by the Socialist government last week.

Um, we are a little bit at a loss and don’t understand why Monsieur Venner felt the need to kill himself instead of just spewing incoherent hate slogans outside a court house or something, like our bigots do here in America. Sure, that hasn’t really stemmed the tide of states legalizing marry-whomever-the-hell-you-love marriage, but at least they feel they’ve made their point — even if it’s a really stupid one — and no one has to die, and also the priests don’t have to wipe your skull bits from the sacristy.

[DW]

andoperator: Casio CZ-101

For someone who spends the day sitting at a computer with NPR playing in the background, Yr Doktor Zoom doesn’t actually use many NPR stories as the starting point for his Wonkets. Today, an exception: We heard this thing on the radio t’other day and knew we would have to write about it, because A) Watergate and B) Video game (video game stories have been good to us), not to mention C) “Timothy Leary shows up with drugs and you get in a fistfight with Nixon.” Wonkers of all ages, regardless of whether you even like video games, with their gratuitous violence and furries, you owe it to yourself to try “Watergate: The Videogame,” which can be played online free for nothing, requires no downloading, and if you get stuck some goofballs have even made a walkthrough already. (A “walkthrough” is a thing for videogames that helps you differentiate your ass from a hole in the ground, for example “Carl Bernstein” was Bob Woodward’s “walkthrough.”)

The game is the creation of one Samuel Kim, who explains that he put it together in about six months after breaking up with a girlfriend:

I holed up in my apartment with a laptop, a dog-eared copy of All the President’s Men, and three books about game programming. Half a year later, I emerged from my hermitage with the completed game and a severe vitamin D deficiency.

The design of the game is ambitiously primitive, your basic point-and click stuff where you have to go from one static location to another; not a lot of “pew-pew-pew!” here. You are Bob Woodward, a rookie reporter at the Washington Post, and Editor Ben Bradlee calls you into his office with an assignment: find out what’s up with this break-in at the Watergate Hotel, and why a Miami prosecutor, Martin Dardis, is investigating the suspiciously large checks recently deposited into one of the burglars’ Florida bank account? The plot starts out more or less paralleling All The President’s Men, but immediately starts getting weird, like when Ben Bradlee gives you “an Elvin Broadsword” (we assume that’s misspelling as trolling). Or the aforementioned Timothy Leary vignette. Or the bit where you have to dig up the skeleton of Nixon’s little dog, Checkers.

Samuel Kim has loaded Watergate: The Videogame with a frothy mix of political and media in-jokes that makes us suspect he may be a closet Wonkettarian (or he should be). For instance, there’s this bit when you pick up a vital clue in the men’s room (click picture to embiggen):

Yes, kids, this is almost certainly the first Charles Krauthammer joke in a video game. We are in a kind of sick twisted love with Samuel Kim, we think.

You don’t really have to know anything about Watergate to enjoy this nonsense, and you don’t have to be any good at gaming, either, except maybe (spoiler alert) in the final Oval Office showdown with Richard Nixon, where you have to be pretty good to beat him in a fistfight or he puts you in the paper shredder. We never managed to beat him, but we hear that if you do, your finishing move is to decapitate him with the First Amendment. The game can easily be finished in under an hour. If you “die,” you are immediately restored to the previous decision point, so be sure you take the time to make some obvious bad choices like turning down the Watergate assignment or digging up the wrong grave so that you can be attacked by G. Gordon Liddy. All thumbs up, four stars, and winner of Best Video Game Based on A Good Book By A Guy Who’s Shat On His Own Reputation Ever Since. We’re hoping Kim does a sequel based on the Watergate hearings, where you get to be committee aide Hillary Rodham in a Lara Croft Womb Raider onesie, or Sam Ervin wielding the Gavel Of Maximum Carnage.

[WBUR / Motherboard / Watergate: The Videogame]

Not gonna lie. We’re big fans of the whole digital revolution thingy, because it means you give us monies to read our blog. Also, too, porn on the internet is so much easier to get than having to steal our dad’s copy of Hustler from between the mattress and the boxspring. We are not in love with all of the digital enterprising though no we are not! Self- or quasi-self published ebooks can often be a blight upon humanity and dear god now they’ve given us a sexytime book about Michele Bachmann and we think we want to die.

Michele Bachmann was the muse for a new romance novel called Fires of Siberia, to be published June 1, about a fiery presidential candidate who tries to bone up on her foreign policy credentials only to get stuck in the wilderness with a sexy stranger. “Inspired by the life of Tea Party leader and Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, Fires of Siberia is an old-fashioned bodice ripper romance that brings the heat for the 2013 summer beach reading season,” touts publisher Badlands Unlimited.

The only place that this would be “summer beach reading” is if one were summering in hell. Would you like a brief explanation of the plot, courtesy of the press release? Of course you would not, but we don’t care!

Presidential candidate Danielle Powers, full of firebrand pluck and red state sex appeal, has the country in a tizzy. But on an international tour to beef up her foreign policy experience, disaster ensues—her plane explodes over Siberia. Miraculously, Danielle survives, along with one other passenger—a mysterious stranger named Steadman Bass. Trapped in a wilderness of snow and ice, the two begin a journey that pushes Danielle to the brink. There she must confront her deepest self and choose between civilization and a wild, primitive ecstasy.

Oh dear god make it stop. While we have often fantasized that Bachmann end up stranded in Siberia, those fantasies have never included her doing the sex with anyone, and especially not someone with the improbable name of Steadman Bass. “Steadman Bass” sounds like the made-up name of a sideman in a blues band, rather than the made-up name of someone who will make the beast with two backs with the most terrifying person we can imagine. Can this get worse OF COURSE IT CAN because here is an excerpt from the actual book:

They shook hands, and Danielle felt the hot vitality of his blood. His hand was surging with warmth. His fingers were weathered like a workman’s, but his touch betrayed a grace and kindness his face otherwise kept guarded. She wanted to stay fastened to him, so essential was the heat.

In case it is not amply clear, were yr Wonkette stranded in Siberia with Michele Bachmann we would forgo body heat and crawl across the tundra and die rather than have sex with Michele Bachmann because sweet Jesus no.

Wonkipinos, please consider giving a little bit extra to Wonkette this month because the Editrix is going to need it to pay our sure-to-be-considerable therapy bills we incur from thinking about sexy Michele Bachmann.

[The Atlantic]

ultrace:

In addition to being a historic symbol of the Cold War, The Berlin Wall is an arcade game, released by Kaneko (a company probably most well known—dubiously—for the Gals Panic series) in 1991. The game itself is fairly mediocre, best described as the what would happen if Bubble Bobble and Lode Runner had a child, but didn’t give it any prenatal care. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the mother smoked and drank during the pregnancy, but the game successfully manages to merge the gameplay elements of both those games while capturing the charm and addictiveness of neither.

An interesting aspect of the game—the one I’ve chosen to actually show here—is that the background for each stage is a photo, presumably taken in or near the Berlin Wall at the time the game was made. The title screen credits these photos to Kyodo Photo Service, a Japanese news company. Since the game has you digging pits and dropping cutesy monsters into them, the backdrop of the Berlin Wall coming down near the end of the Cold War is a surreal choice of imagery and a stark reminder of an event that many gamers today are too young to understand the significance of.

hanswan: Keita Takahashi (高橋 慶太) Born 1975, known for his quirky, innovative videogames Katamari Damacy and Nobi Nobi Boy, Takahashi was invited to create a new playground at Woodthorpe Grange in Nottingham, Britain. “I hope that whole families will be able to play in the park together. It would be great if people’s pet dogs can also play with the equipment. What gives me the most joy is seeing people having fun. [Playgrounds and video games] are both fun things. They actually aren’t that different.” Says Takahashi. That is what I particularity like about Keita Takahashi. If your aim is to see people having fun, why limit yourself to a single branch?

From Simon King:

I am pleased to announce that the English section of this year's Blizzard Challenge listening test is now live. Please help us out by taking part, and encouraging your colleagues, students, friends, contacts, etc. to take part too. It's your chance to hear a range of speech synthesisers, including some really good ones. Please circulate this message widely - for example, on mailing lists, forums and using social media - we need to reach as many people as possible in the coming month or so.

In order to participate, sign up here and follow the instructions.