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Category Archives: Stop Looking at Me Like That

World Historical Criminal Caught on Tape!

25 Apr
"I know you're in there. Come out or I will smoke you out!"

“I know you’re in there. Come out or I will smoke you out!”

If I could go back in time and kill anyone in the history of the world, it would be that psychopath Alexander Graham Bell.

I hate the phone. I hate the phone more than I hate gingivitis and that cramp you get sometimes in your calves. I hate the phone more than I hate the remake of The Taking of Pelham I, 2, 3 and that Tiffani Thiessen doesn’t get nearly enough face time on White Collar. I hate the phone more than Steve Jobs hated Google.

The first thing I do when I start a new job is find a place to hide the phone. Because I know that day is coming when I’ll be daydreaming about finding another job, or I’ll be in my happy place, which is made of bacon and caramel and shows 70s movies all day and is in Holborn in London, and I’ll be drifting off into an ethereal, bodiless existence, where I’m not me but that other me that I was supposed to be before they raised all the prices, and that fracking phone will ring, startling me back into reality.

And worse than the kidney-jiggling sound of the phone itself is the thought that on the other end . . . is a person. Who wants to talk. To me. About things. And I’ll be expected to respond. And then that person will respond. And then I will have to find a way to respond again without betraying that tone. That tone that says I’d rather be guillotined with a rusty blade than continue this exchange one more minute…

Out of thin air, a voice, importuning me to do something I have no desire to do. Like work.

I’ve been known to keep the phone on the floor, locked away in a filing cabinet, in a drawer, buried under books and papers. I refuse to have a phone in the house. I own a smart phone only so I can stream The IT Crowd while standing on line at Fries and Franks.

Oh for the days when primitive transportation delayed communication such that one could go years without having to speak to another human being! The silence. The isolation. The peace.

But no. Along comes Alexander Graham Bell and his infernal machine to kill the romance of long distances.

Well, someone has dug up a recording of this sadist. Listen for yourself. You can hear the malice in his voice, the villainy. This is what I imagine Satan would sound like after being pulled over for driving drunk and he doesn’t have his license and it’s a rented car.

I curse you, Bell! I curse you and your demonic voice box!

 
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Posted by on April 25, 2013 in SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP, Stop Looking at Me Like That, What Fresh Hell Is This

 

The Real Ring That Inspired Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the’

03 Apr
the-lord-of-the-rings-ring-of-mordor-11999

“This is the last time I ride this stupid Merry-Go-Round…Gonna vom….gonna vom…”

So you thought it was all just “made up,” eh? And after Lars told you it was much more complicated than that. For shame…

Britain’s National Trust and the Tolkien Society are putting the artifact on display Tuesday for fans of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” to decide for themselves whether this was Tolkien’s precious ring of power.

Found in a field near a historic Roman town in southern England in 1785, the gold ring is inscribed in Latin, “Senicianus live well in God,” and inset with an image of the goddess Venus. It is larger than average, weights 12 grams, and is believed to date from the 4th century.

The ring is believed to be linked to a curse tablet found separately at the site of a Roman temple dedicated to a god named Nodens in Gloucestershire, western England. The tablet says a man called Silvianus had lost a ring, and it asks Nodens to place a curse of ill health on Senicianus until he returned it to the temple.

An archaeologist who looked into the connection between the ring and the curse tablet asked Tolkien, who was an Anglo-Saxon professor at Oxford University, to work on the etymology of the name Nodens in 1929.

The writer also visited the temple several times, and some believe he would have been aware of the existence of the Roman ring before he started writing “The Hobbit.”

Details of the exhibition can be found here.

I expect to hear any day now that H.G. Wells’s time machine was based on an ancient Cuisinart that took people back to childhood with its evocation of homemade cookie dough.

 
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Posted by on April 3, 2013 in Stop Looking at Me Like That, Strange News, Told You

 

Superman Acknowledges Death of Print

23 Oct

Vogue

So Clark Kent has had it — had it! He’s tired of no one figuring out he’s Superman just because of the stupid glasses! Come on!

And he’s tired of having a desk next to the bathrooms!

“I wasn’t going to test the waters. I was just going to do a cannonball in the Super-verse,” says new Superman writer Scott Lobdell, who began his run on the book alongside his Red Hood and the Outlaws artist Kenneth Rocafort last month with a special zero issue.

DC’s “The New 52″ relaunch a year ago changed a good bit of Superman’s status quo, such as the fact that Clark and Lois weren’t married anymore. He’s moved on, of course — Superman and Wonder Woman recently shared a kiss in the pages of Justice League.

However, his still-strong feelings for Lois, combined with Daily Planet editor in chief Perry White getting on his case for not enough scoops on the Superman beat and his boss’ boss Morgan Edge also giving him a hard time, leads to a Jerry Maguire-type moment where he quits in front of the whole staff and rails on how journalism has given way to entertainment — in a not-so-mild-mannered fashion. (The Daily Planet has also been moving more toward the real world, too, with the newspaper becoming part of the multimedia corporation Galaxy Broadcasting.)

“This is really what happens when a 27-year-old guy is behind a desk and he has to take instruction from a larger conglomerate with concerns that aren’t really his own,” Lobdell explains.

“Superman is arguably the most powerful person on the planet, but how long can he sit at his desk with someone breathing down his neck and treating him like the least important person in the world?”

Oh how I can relate.

Seems Clark is going to start his own version of either the Huffington Post or Drudge, depending on your politics.

And his.

UPDATE: A writer over at the Daily Beast calls Clark Kent a crap reporter with a conflict of interest:

As comic-book heroes evolve, it’s becoming clear that crimefighters aren’t fit for journalism. Peter Parker was fired from The Daily Bugle for digitally altering one of his photographs to stop a bad guy. Ninja Turtles ally April O’Neil was booted from her job as a TV reporter for getting tangled up in sewer adventures. And investigative reporter Tintin is always gallivanting around the world, but rarely files a story. An editor’s going to notice that eventually.

So this modern and hip Superman’s fight isn’t really against the decline of journalism—it’s a classic conflict of interest. How do you objectively cover the ultimate reality and superhero star when you actually are that superhero?

 

 
1 Comment

Posted by on October 23, 2012 in Bruce Wayne Is NOT the Batman, Stop Looking at Me Like That

 

Attention, Screwballs: Area 51 Secrets to Be Revealed September 22!

05 Sep

And when I say “screwballs,” I don’t mean that in a derogatory manner. I’m using it in its literal sense: “a whimsical, eccentric, or crazy person: see zany.” And who doesn’t love a zany, so long as his ankle bracelet is activated and appropriate adult supervision is at hand and all the steak knives have been safely secured?

Be that as it may, the truth will finally come out about the military-industrial complex’s massive cover-up of the only verifiably rumored alien landing within the continental United States after that one Orson Welles lied about.

And the Easter Bunny will be there, too! Yes—Glenn!

Please note that this lecture is being sponsored by the National Atomic Testing Museum. So now we know what the long-term aftereffects are of even low-level exposure to radiation.

I know, I know: I’m an anti-alien-invasion-conspiracy bigot. And I expect my comeuppance once our robot overlords get those re-education camps up and running (assuming we don’t end up in the Beryllium mines).

No doubt some of you are shaking your multiple heads and asking how I can continue to doubt when someone like Ret. Air Force Col. Robert Friend, former director of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book from 1958 to 1963, is a believer? You’ve just answered your own question.

Far be it from me to deny you a close encounter of the loony kind. By all means, enjoy your lecture and come back here and let us know what we missed. But beware! Something strange is happening in the vicinity of — Grover’s Mill!

 
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Posted by on September 5, 2012 in I'm with Stupid, Infinite Human Capacity for Stupidity, Stop Looking at Me Like That

 

Three Powerful Arguments for Women as Pastors and Elders

02 Sep

Don’t look at me like that. I’m not the one making the arguments. 

See how you get?

The three who make the arguments are Ben Witherington III, New Testament scholar, Methodist, author of Jesus the Seer, which I haven’t read but looks really cool; Greg Boyd, open theism evangelical (for lack of a better identifier), senior pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, and author of The Jesus Legend, an excellent history of oral tradition in the Bible; and N.T. Wright, Anglican, former bishop of Durham, author of the magisterial Christian Origins and the Question of God trilogy and at least two more books since I started typing this.

Watch, listen, cogitate:

Now the traditional arguments against women in pastoral/leadership roles include:

Read the rest of this entry »

 
5 Comments

Posted by on September 2, 2012 in Is My Complaining Interfering with Your Crying?, Ow OW! My Head!, Stop Looking at Me Like That, What Are You One of Those Pointyheads?

 

Addicted to the Internet? Blame Your Caveman Ancestors Who Just Couldn’t Put Down that Mouse.

01 Sep

Og checks the Weather Channel before planning the next bore hunt. (And no, that’s not a typo.)

Internet addiction is no laughing matter. (Although I do find an addiction to tooth whitening mildly amusing.)  Incessant online shopping can soon empty a child’s college fund. Checking one’s Facebook page every thirty seconds to see if you’ve been friended by the Sultan of Brunei during your mother’s funeral is just rude. Reading your Twitter feed to find out the results of your colonoscopy is just weird. And yet people do this stuff. Right?

Although the world wide web has been around for less than a generation, Dr Christian Montag from the University of Bonn, said they had found a gene in people who could not drag themselves away. Most were women.

Dr Montag said that, biologically speaking, internet addiction had the same genetic cause as smoking addiction.

He said: “Internet addiction is not a figment of our imagination. Researchers and therapists are increasingly closing in on it.”

Describing the impact of the genetic variant on those who had it, he said: “Within the group of subjects exhibiting problematic internet behaviour this variant occurs more frequently, in particular, in women.

“The sex-specific genetic finding may result from a specific subgroup of internet dependency, such as the use of social networks or such.”

Oh, sure. Like men don’t sit on their laptops day and night. (OK, not literally sit on, because that would invalidate the warranty.) As far as I’m concerned, this is yet another example of sexism in medical research. Look up the origins of the word hysteria. Or ineffable. (I can never remember that one. I always think it has something to do with crossing the boundaries of consanguinity.)

I for one am outraged and am organizing a boycott. I don’t know of what. And I’m not even 100% sure why. But I do know that I would never have gotten all worked up if I hadn’t been surfing the Internet. Again.

 
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Posted by on September 1, 2012 in I Read It on the InterWeb, Stop Looking at Me Like That, Your Tax Dollars at Work

 

Man Bursts into Flames While Sitting at Home. And No, He Wasn’t Watching ‘The Playboy Club.’

25 Sep

There’s no reason why only characters in great English novels should spontaneously combust. Now the Irish can make a claim of their own:

A man who burned to death in his home died as a result of spontaneous combustion, an Irish coroner has ruled.

West Galway coroner Dr Ciaran McLoughlin said it was the first time in 25 years of investigating deaths that he had recorded such a verdict.

Michael Faherty, 76, died at his home in Galway on 22 December 2010.

Deaths attributed by some to “spontaneous combustion” occur when a living human body is burned without an apparent external source of ignition.

Typically police or fire investigators find burned corpses but no burned furniture.

An inquest in Galway on Thursday heard how investigators had been baffled as to the cause of Mr Faherty’s death at his home at Clareview Park, Ballybane.

Perhaps the gentleman was engaged in particularly incendiary thoughts, or his pact with the devil was simply past its due-by date. Maybe he’d been snacking on an inordinate number of pistachios, which are famous for their combustible nature.

Or maybe everyone is just making it all up, which is my default position on most controversies.

 

 
1 Comment

Posted by on September 25, 2011 in I Am Not Cleaning That Up, Stop Looking at Me Like That, That Looks Nothing Like Me

 
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