Evil mutant rises from the dead ...

… to threaten industry and prosperity. First, it was Waxman-Markey; then it was Boxer-Kerry; now it's Kerry-Lieberman; but it's all cap 'n' trade.



Left to right, Kerry, Obama, Lieberman. Al Gore is out of the frame.

If it passes, it will be the American economy that's the zombie. But the Chicago Carbon Exchange will be doing fine.

Not opposed to immigration ...

... opposed to crime. Illegal immigration is illegal. Even LOLcats can do tautologies. Sneaky cat is sneaky:



Illegal alien is illegal. It's not hard to understand. I'm old enough to remember when legal aliens were required to register at the Post Office annually.

Jan Brewer tells Obama that it's no laughing matter:



We are unwilling to enforce our own immigration laws. The Mexican government has much stricter immigration laws, which they enforce. J. Michael Waller in 2006: Mexico's Immigration Law: Let's Try It Here at Home.

Rich people, big houses, no smiles

Unhappy hipsters.

And their somewhat happier pets.

Related: Look at this hipster.

Chinese menu follies and bad tats

[Links in this post will make more sense if you have fonts installed for Chinese and Japanese. Arial Unicode MS would suffice.]

Those who are aware of all Internet traditions have seen this before. I have seen this before. But I don't think I've linked it. By way of Inside the Asylum and Boing Boing, here is May I take your order? This is the sort of thing that if you like, for instance, English As She Is Spoke [that's two links, and I challenge anyone to read either out loud and keep a straight face], you will like it a lot, and it may lead to LOL so intense that pain may result. Be warned. Also, language! NSFW because of language and likelihood of uncontrollable laughter. The comments go on for days, and many are illuminating (about issues of translation), or funny, or both.

Sidenote on the power of coincidence: the story referenced in the post below about CFL's was filed by the Times reporter from Foshan, China. The restaurant whose menu is the focus of "May I take your order?" is in Foshan, China. I can assure the reader that there is no conspiracy or aforethought going on here; but will the reader believe me?

A couple more of these: Engrish dot com. The clothing, especially. If American hipsters had a genuine sense of the absurd, we would see more of these T-shirts and jackets on the street. The Chinglish Files.

This, then, leads us on to Hanzi Smatter, in which we find many examples of bad tattoos. People who do not speak or read Chinese or Japanese do like to get bits of those languages tattooed on their bodies. They take it on faith that the tattoo artist is both knowledgeable and honest. That's a lot to take on faith. The NY Times wrote about Hanzi Smatter, in case you need more explanation than the subhead: "dedicated to the misuse of chinese characters in western culture." [Lower case in original.] Which sounds like they are promoting the misuse, etc. But that's not it, at all. At Hanzi Smatter is a link to a couple of the "flash" charts that tattooists use, the source of their knowledge of Asian script: Gibberish Asian Font Mystery Solved.

Related: When LOLCats don't quite satisfy; Look at this hipster.

Update: Language Log on another Chinese translation problem: how did the F-word get into so many menus and grocery stores? The Etiology and Elaboration of a Flagrant Mistranslation. Not safe for work, or some homes, either.

Look at this hipster

As a companion to Rock 'n' roll mockery, here is Look at this f-ing hipster. A collection of photos with humorous captions. The photos are funny; the captions give them the boost to LOL. Thanks to Althouse commenter mcg, who says "NSFW for language in large type." And I agree.

Gleanings

Beginning with the gruesome, moving on to the funny.

This seems to be a custody dispute. From Saudi Arabia: Toddler beheaded in supermarket. Arab News: Man Butchers 15-Month-Old Nephew in Jeddah Supermarket. Follow-up from Saudi Gazette: Dad Denies He was there at Son’s Beheading. (via)

Terri Irwin and Australia Zoo are in trouble with the tax authorities in Australia.

I knew I had seen FDR with a halo, or at least a nimbus, in old movie shorts. Lileks has found one of these, in which Jimmy Durante sings "Give a Man a Job." The post includes some commentary on the NRA (not the National Rifle Association, the other one.) (via)

If you have a copy of Love and Consequences by Margaret B. Jones, hang on to it. It's going to be a rare book. (via)

New supersonic business jet on the way. Shiny! (via)

Unusual instruments: I suppose this is a form of glass harmonica, but what a form! Michel Lauzière plays Mozart on wine bottles, on rollerblades. (via)

A new typographical term: keming. I have been having trouble with modem and modern for years. Though one can usually tell by context, with that pair. (via)

Photoshopped comics, not a new idea but very well done indeed: Rampant plagiarism. (via)

Continuing the discussion from comments at BitMaelstrom on smart TV shows, Jennifer Ouellette, of Cocktail Party Physics, mentions a bit of genuine erudition on, not "Buffy," but "Angel." Close enough. Also: the music of the spheres. And from the same post at Flares into Darkness, some photographs whose intensity makes them dreamlike: 20 beautiful HDR pictures. (HDR = high dynamic range.) There's a lot of griping in the comments about how unreal they look; I would have thought that was the point. It would be easy to slip into Thomas Kinkade or Velvet Elvis land with this effect, but it's just another tool in the toolbox. Here's a Flickr group for this technique. Also on photos with dreamlike intensity, take a look at this. The reds on left and right seem to *pop*!

Speaking of photos, the Library of Congress has uploaded a large collection of images to Flickr. Two sets so far, 1930s-40s in Color, and News in the 1910s. From the LoC blog: My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven.

Gruesome, or funny? More on the funny side, I think: LOLTHULU: Cthulhu Fhtagn Cheezburger.

How did the Amazon reviews for Tuscan Whole Milk, one-gallon size, become a repository of gloriously absurd short fiction, and some poetry even? I have no idea. But I laughed and laughed. Look at the customer images too. (via)

Simply irresistable

Nice office, Al! Thanks to XWL of Immodest Proposals for the lol macro. It looks better over there, and there's a link to the Tim Blair post that inspired it, so do click on through.

Historical origin of LOLcats

Ape Lad reveals the hitherto little-known beginnings of the burgeoning LOLcats phenomenon.

Not many people know this, but my great grandfather Aloysius "Gorilla" Koford, was also a cartoonist (see the video evidence here). From 1912-1913 he produced a comic strip which was featured in 17 newspapers, including the Philadephia Star-Democrat, the Tampa Telegraph, and the Santa Fe Good-Newser. The strip was entitled "the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats" and featured the exploits of one Meowlin Q. Kitteh (a sort of cat hobo-raconteur) and his young hapless kitten friend, Pip. The strip did not last long due to a run-in my great-grandfather had with none other than William Randolph Hearst.
See, the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats was syndicated by one of Hearst's competitors, so “Big Willy” (as Hearst was known in his day) used the bully pulpit of his media empire to hound and mock the efforts of my great-grandfather. Hearst scribes insinuated Aloysius was an actual trained gorilla and purported to have evidence in the form of banana shipping statements.…

The archive includes proof of the epochal antiquity of the Cthulhu cult,

showing that Lovecraft was, indeed, more of a chronicler than a fabulist.

Thanks to BoingBoing.

Numa numa!

After watching the CNN YouTube Democratic candidates debate, I need something sweet to get the bitter taste of all that ambitious foolishness out of my mouth. So: Dragostea Din Tei!

Darn, I love this song! I love it even better in the original Romanian. Because I don't understand Romanian.

Here's the original Romanian language video. Way cool airplane! (Link may not last, Warner is on a campaign to keep you from appreciating their products. I have had to change two of these links in the last couple of days.)

A live performance at the Star Academy. This includes a dancing dinosaur, a "zero-g" spaceman, and plenty of bouncy audience members who join in the dance.

Another live performance by Buffy, with Spike on drums, and Willow dancing in the red-and-black striped top. [That link doesn't work any more, try this. Not as good video quality, but the same live performance.] Oh, no, sorry, that's not Buffy, it's Paula Mitrache. Another by Paula Mitrache and her group Haiducii [Outlaws], with lyrics in Romanian and English in the sidebar.

Here it is in English. Kind of loses a little of the mystery. Update: Now that I have found the transcriptions and translation of the original lyrics, I see that this is a completely different song, to the same tune. The original has much more depth and poignancy.

A couple of versions using World of Warcraft characters: In this one, a character does the Macarena; this one has a lot of babes in bikinis, with swords.

Wikipedia has a an article on the song that seems pretty thorough, with some interesting ideas for possible variant translations of the title. The repeated "nu ma, nu ma" seems to mean, "don't want, don't want." So is the song related to LOLcats in some way? Were LOLcats involved in this? No wonder it's so popular.

When LOLCats don't quite satisfy

Then u can has something a little deeper. Philolsophers!


One more, to carry on with the critters theme:


Lest this get completely out of hand, I'll just link to a couple more that I think are highlights, and, y'know, relatively comprehensible: the gestalt-shifting lolduckrabbit, and the Athenian philosophers with their invisible basketballs.

Thanks to Ann Althouse, who has interesting comments, Jeremy Bentham in the cupboard (or Auto-Icon, if you must), and links to "No soap, radio." Definitely worthwhile if you enjoy jokes like

"How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"
"Fish."

LOL!