"As far as I'm concerned, Thanksgiving dinner is gravy, and everything else is a condiment. Make a deep well in the mashed potatoes, elbow everybody out of the way, and fill that fucker up. Gravy." - Paul Tatara

In response to ex-President Bush's claim that waterboarding of suspects helped thwart terror attacks and saved British lives, this quote from the Times...These stories about waterboarding thwarting attacks - I’ve never seen anything to substantiate these claims. They are to be treated with great scepticism. This is the way our enemies behave. It’s ( Read more... )

A.A. Gill goes to town in The Sunday Times today:We all suffer from literary guilt, some great unread classic. For many it’s Proust or Tolstoy or Joyce. For me, I blushingly admit, it’s Follett. I keep meaning to read him. Every time I am in an airport I think maybe a flight to Sydney is the time to open up to Ken, but then inevitably I get seduced ( Read more... )

Hugo Rifkind in today's Times:Do they have any idea, the Iranian regime? Do they grasp, at all, why the world is so frightened of them? Tehran, please, listen. It's not because you pose a lurking threat to our beloved US-dominated, Zionist hegemony. I know you like to think that, but genuinely, it isn't. It's because you're lunatics. Proper, bomb- ( Read more... )

"We have a market of people who are not interested in music, they are interested in grazing. Of course they use tuners on those programmes - those f***ing idiots couldn't sing their way out of a wet paper bag."-Mark St. John, owner of Mobile Lane Studios, on the use of Auto-Tune by X-Factor and other "talent show" television programmes, as quoted ( Read more... )

Thanks to kazmat for reminding me that today is the 120th anniversary of the birth of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. And in his honor...HP birthday to you,
HP birthday to you,
HP birthday, dear planet adrift in a mind-blasting sea of squamous noisome eldritch horrors,
HP birthday to you!
*cough*

*flee*

My sister's cat Lucifer was diagnosed with stomach cancer last month; he's been growing steadily weaker and less interested in life (even in especially Lucifer-y things, like food) ever since, and she finally had him put to sleep this morning.

My Mum wrote yesterday:...I remember the lovely naughty cat with attitude and that's all gone. He's just ( Read more... )

Taxi and lorry drivers in Japan are being affected by unusual disruption from US military bases - baby babble that jams their radios.

Officials in Tokyo said that US-bought baby monitors used by parents on bases were emitting signals that interfered with other nearby transmissions.

The Times’ “Celebrity Watch” (CW) column addresses actor James Van Der Beek's remark about his wedding:“We look upon this wedding as a sacred union of our souls. The wedding rings are round - to symbolise circuitry with no beginning and no end.” And also, presumably, to kind of trap the rings on to their fingers. If CW is being brutally practical.

"The Guinness Book of World Records gives the 'official' record number of children for a woman as sixty-nine, produced by an eighteenth-century Russian peasant. In twenty-seven pregnancies between 1725 and 1745, she had sixteen pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets."-Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True