The Bull in Full

April 1 Round-up

My day started off with the clock-radio playing NPR, with Frank Deford talking about lawsuits against teams like the Detroit Lions for defaming the good names of actual lions by being so bad.  I then managed to drop a decent one on my co-workers with a fake techie e-mail (for those who care, I said I was giving up and installing the new version of Exchange for Solaris.  It's kind of an inside joke...)  The News and Observer got into the act with a sports blog entry about how the Chapel Hill police were regulating the sale of light blue paint in order to prevent fans from defacing too much (and yes, I had to try to be the smart ass in the comments). 

Gary Kueber over at Endangered Durham goes for the comedy-at-the-extremes approach and takes on some of his favorite punching bags, including NIS, the Human Services parking lot, DOT, and a few new ones, including electronic billboards.  (And also ribs some fellow bloggers.)

Google's offering this year is, to my eye, highly disappointing compared to past efforts (particularly the sublime Google Romance) and features a supposed new artificial intelligence, which appears to be some kind of split parody between the Terminator franchise and bad personal websites.  

That's all I've found so far.  Anyone else find anything good?

Update: A couple more.  A new product to make your Kindle smell like a real book, and I totally walked right into this.

Just some pictures for the day

I may be the last to see these photos, but they popped up on DailyKos, and I couldn't stop laughing at them, and had to share them:

Two more below the fold.

Best. Political. Cartoon. Ever.

Okay, so maybe not best EVER, but this is so succinct yet forceful, not to mention right on the money (so to speak), I had to link to it:

That wasn't the kind of "emergency" we had in mind...

When I used to live at 911 Iredell St., I would occasionally make jokes (mostly pre-2001) about the number, saying something like, "dial 911 for your emergency LOVE" or some such thing.

I didn't think that somewhere in the world, someone might actually try that.

My sister, Kathryn, is currently working in Kampala, Uganda.  She passed this too me, saying that surely my blog had a place for this.  I'm inclined to agree.

SOME 900 Kampala women call the Uganda Police emergency lines every night begging the officers for sex.

Shocking reporters at a usually drab police weekly press conference, Kampala Extra Police Spokesman Simeo Nsubuga said the information room was flooded with unwanted calls from lonely women.

"We warn desperate women who call our officers at night using police patrol lines asking them to make love.  They call the toll free line everyday saying they are feeling so cold in bed and need some assistance from police," Mr Nsubuga told the bemused journalists.

I'm not sure I have anything I can add after that.

ATHF The Movie

I was unaware until this week that Aqua Teen Hunger Force had a full-length movie coming out.  I heard about it earlier this week, but whether I see this movie or not, it has already brightened my day by inspiring this review at the Washington Post.

ATHF recently gained notoriety when the Great Boston Flashing Light Scare (parodied mercelessly and hilariously in this video) scared the willies out of hundreds of thousands of idiot chowderheads across New England.  I had encountered it years ago, staying over at my parents house for holidays or to take care of their dog.  Cartoon Network has a few funny things on during the day, but it's the late night lineup where the good stuff comes out, from Space Ghost Coast to Coast to all sorts of weird Anime stuff (Cowboy Beebop was great when it was on), to ATHF. 

What's so funny about the above review is that it highlights something that I couldn't quite get my brain around, which is how ATHF would come across when not encountered safely in its late-night slot on Cartoon Network, where if you've bothered to tune in, you've already run the risk of hitting Space Ghost or SeaQuest, or some other weird, off-color cartoon.  In that context, if you've just been watching a bad Hanna-Barbara hero running a talk show with his enemies as the musicians and crew, or what looks like a kid's cartoon about a submarine but where they're talking about STDs, a talking Happy Meal living in South Jersey really isn't that odd.

On the other hand, if you're sitting in a movie theater expecting some model of normalcy, and it starts with a milkshake watching TV, well, you get something like this:

I am not  making this up. I couldn't make this up. My imagination isn't powerful enough.

I just saw a movie in which a pack of french fries, a wad of ground beef and a milkshake save the world -- or at least, New Jersey -- from a psychotic giant exercise machine built 70,000 years ago by aliens.

Yup, that just about sums it up...

Overheard at the cafe

I have to relay this conversation.  Background: Broad St. Cafe sits within a long outfielder's throw from my alma mater, the North Carolina School of Science and Math, a.k.a. NCSSM, a.k.a., by its grads, S&M.  The source of lots of jokes, of course, and some confusion, as in this exchange below the fold: