Is 'endilden' a verb yet?

Let us pause now and think back on all the good times we've had with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"Are parts of the car on fire? Sure. Would we like them not to be? Of course. Have I gone insane from three decades of snorting military-grade rubber cement? Quite possibly. Do we need everything to be perfect for us to go out on the road? Well, that's absurd," says Donald Rumsfeld.

"That's very true," says me. "We cannot make the perfect the enemy of the terrible."

The bridge up ahead is either out or doesn't exist. But if we waited for everything to be perfect before we did stuff well then we'd never get anythin done! Forward, onward, downward, Donald Rumsfeld!

Indeed.

There's a bright shiny new law banning bestiality!

The man who inspired the creation of this earthly commandment is Kenneth Pinyan, a Boeing engineer, who, according to a King County Examiner's report, died on July 2, 2005, due "to acute peritonitis [that resulted from the] perforation of the sigmoid colon during anal intercourse with a horse."

...

The absence of a law banning bestiality was never more apparent than it was on the day James Michael Tait—the man who, according to the Enumclaw Police Department, filmed the exact moment that the horse's monstrous penis fatally ruptured Pinyan's colon—stood before a judge last November. The prosecutor's office wanted to charge Tait with animal abuse, but the police found no evidence of abused animals on the many videotapes they collected from his home. As there was no law against humanely fucking a horse, the prosecutors could only charge Tait with trespassing.

...

The state wanted to punish this man for horse fucking but because there was no law against it at the time the horse fucking occurred, the state could only charge him with a crime as boring as drunken driving, serving booze to minors, a failed attempt to turn a trick.

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The measure, which is to be heard in the House Criminal Justice & Corrections Committee on February 23, will make bestiality a Class C felony, punishable by a maximum of five years in a state prison or a $10,000 fine, or both. It is a law that points an angry finger directly at James Tait: It bans not just bestiality, but "videotap[ing] a person engaged in a sexual act or sexual contact with an animal" (including a horse) "either alive or dead."

...

Indeed, reading the law that was drafted by Senator Roach is very much like reading hardcore porn. Here is the last paragraph of the bill: "'Sexual contact' means any contact, however slight, between the sex organ or anus of a person and the sex organ, mouth, or anus of any animal, or any intrusion, however slight, of any part of the body of the person into the sex organ or anus of an animal, for the purpose of sexual gratification or arousal of the person. Evidence of emission of semen is not required to prove sexual contact."

My tax dollars at work.

I tell people I'm from Iowa City. I don't like to admit that I grew up in Council Bluffs. If you'd spent much time there, you'd understand why.

Gobble, gobble.

Well, who'd have thunk it? There really are a bunch of hysterical religious wastes of semen who were up in arms to protest against the secularisation of Valentine's Day.

I swear, it's impossible to cook up an idea so completely stupid that some God-felching nutbug out there hasn't already had it, taken it completely to heart, and gone running pell-mell straight into the lands of self-parody.

Well, let's try another one: Jesus really WAS a fish! Literally! For real! Really!

Do we have any takers for this?

Blogue.

'I went hunting with Dick and all I got was SHOT IN THE FUCKING FACE'.

Think about that.

Now a lot of people got themselves all worked up into a lather a few months ago over evil secular society's attempts to take the Christ out of Christmas. Who can forget the shocking night in early December when a snarling pack of lesbinazis tore the Baby Jesus bodily into pieces at the behest of the ACLU and the International Chinese Communist Conspiracy? Or those dreadful days when saying 'Merry Christmas' at the Mall could get you karate-chopped right in the throat by godless necrophiliacs brainwashed by objectively pro-Saddam liberal university professors? Well, I'm sorry to say that the idiotarians are at it again, launching a cowardly and shameful attack on that most sacred of holidays, Valentine's Day. It's time to remember the reason for the season.

And that reason is a giant holy wooden dildo.

There are a lot of misconceptions about Valentine's Day out there. Many would have you believe that it relates to a poorly-documented Christian, Saint Valentine, who was shot through the heart with an arrow by a giant fat flying baby. This is simply ridiculous. Giant fat flying babies, as any fool knows, are indiginous only to Australia; the first specimens didn't reach Europe until the 19th Century. This story was invented by the greeting card industry in Victorian times. England was so disgusted by the thought of its frumpy monarch engaging in intercourse that genitals were declared illegal, and all mating had to be carried out by post. The twee imagery of cherubs inflicting sucking chest wounds on lovers was hurriedly introduced to avoid a total collapse in the Valentine's Day card market when all previous cards were thus banned, filled as they were with the ancient and hallowed imagery handed down from time immemorial: giant holy wooden dildos.

The history of Valentine's Day can be traced all the way back to Pharaohnic Egypt. The name Valentine is in fact a Latinised form of the Egyptian name hieroglyphically rendered as Cat Eye Man-peeing-in-cup, a common term for the great god Osiris in his aspect as a man with a giant wooden dildo for a head. The holiday began as a ritual celebration of the love of Osiris and his wife Isis, one of the greatest myths of any civilisation.

Osiris was king of Egypt, married to his lovely sister Isis. His brother-god Set, the notorious homosexual, grew jealous of Osiris's power and grooming, and set in motion an elaborate scheme to get himself a piece of ass. He fashioned a beautiful sarcophagus from 36 rare and fragrant woods, and offered to give it to whomever it fit best. (This would later inspire the story of Cinderella.) As this didn't seem remotely suspicious to anyone, crowds came from all over Egypt to try it out. At last Osiris himself lay down in the sarcophagus. It fit him perfectly...so warm and tight...And suddenly Set slammed the lid and sealed Osiris inside, and then, cackling madly, cast him adrift in the Nile. (This is why it is traditional, on Valentine's Day, to woo a new love by locking them in a wooden chest until they pass out and become pliable and easy.) But Isis would not abandon her beloved husband: she tracked the sarcophagus through 24 countries until she found it lodged within the trunk of an acacia tree. (This would later inspire the film Titanic.) But before she could release Osiris from this woody prison, Set emerged from hiding. Having been thwarted in his attempts to drill a glory hole into the sarcophagus, he declared that, if he couldn't have Osiris, nobody could. (This is why most Valentine's Day cards contain anthrax.) He chopped the sarcophagus, and Osiris within, into 13 pieces and cast them to the ends of the Earth. Isis travelled far and wide, recovering all the pieces except one, which was eaten by a fish. (This is why chocolate-covered trout are often given on Valentine's Day.) Isis then embalmed her husband's remains using 42 herbs and spices, and through her mystic arts restored him to life wrapped tightly in constricting, immobilising bandages as the very first mummy. (This is how bondage was invented.) The missing piece she replaced with a giant holy wooden dildo. Fortunately the missing piece was his head, so he was still able to father a child, hawk-headed Horus, god of light, who went on to avenge his father and have a successful career as a goalie in the NHL.

This is the true meaning of Valentine's Day. And this is why we must prod our loved ones with giant wooden dildoes until we all get splinters and pass out on the lawn. For Osiris.

Here's a link to an Atrios post linking to a New York Times article about Bush-appointed public affairs gremlins trying to tell NASA what is and isn't science and what they can and can't study. Read, as they say, the whole thing; I won't quote any of it, as it'll only make me angry, and you won't like me when I'm angry. (If I get too steamed up my guts may in fact explode out in a chunky bio-geyser from my hernia repair incision. And nobody wants that. Well...There are some freaky, freaky perverts out there in the big wide world, so maybe someone does want that. Whoever they are, they're sick and bad and wrong and bad and wrong and wrong, and probably an intern at the Discovery Institute.)

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE! (07/02/06): The Bush-appointed busybody telling NASA scientists to keep a lid on all this science shit so as not to contradict the Party line dropped out of college before graduating to take a Bush campaign job. Which is to say: the administration appoints completely unqualified unskilled political lackeys to force ideological purity on real live practicing scientists. Our tax dollars at work...

As my parents used to tell me when I was 5 or 6, the groundhog is indeed an American interpolation into the ancient art of weather forecasting: ancient Germans, just like my parents, used the hedgehog instead.

The Roman legions, during the conquest of the northern country, supposedly brought this tradition to the Teutons, or Germans, who picked it up and concluded that if the sun made an appearance on Candlemas Day, an animal, the hedgehog, would cast a shadow, thus predicting six more weeks of bad weather, which they interpolated as the length of the "Second Winter."

According to Wikipedia, Hedgehog Day was celebrated in ancient times by the Romans. Let us keep this noble tradition alive.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE! Here is a video clip of a hedgehog running around with a cardboard tube over its face. It is the cutest thing in the history of stuff. I'm frankly surprised that Jesus-freak crackpot scientist Michael Behe hasn't tried to claim that hedgehogs are simply too cute to have evolved through the random processes of natural selection alone.