Bastards Ad Infinitum

Caught the trailer for Inside Job last the other night before Centurion (basically The Dirty Dozen in second century Britain, and as awesome as that sounds). Looks like it shares a lot with an excellent Planet Money/This American Life/ProPublica collab from earlier this year, right down to the name, which bodes well. While it seems like ‘How did this go to hell so badly?’ vein has been mined pretty heavily as of late, there’s still plenty we don’t know about the bastards who broke the global economy and how they got away with it. If director Charles Ferguson’s debut effort, the Oscar-nominated No End in Sight, is any indication, expect this one to be enlightening, compelling, and utterly devoid of hope for any sort of justice or decency to be salvaged from it’s subject.

 

Department Of Slight Overreactions

The Vatican released a statement today updating some of it’s many, many, many rules, and calling the ordination of female priests a “grave crime” that should be punished in the same way as clergy sexual abuse. While advocates for ordaining women were naturally ruffled at the notion of being compared to the Catholic Church’s veritable legion of sexual predators, this may actually be  good news for their cause. After all, the policy towards ordaining women just essentially became ‘Official Disapproval Followed By Decades of Not Doing Shit.’

The Vatican also updated some of their rules regarding how they will deal with priests who sexually abuse children, basically codifying and making official the current de facto policy of ‘not doing shit with a gun to their heads.’

 

Best. Nuns. Ever.

Police in Uganda have uncovered a the best part of any convent’s garden – the acre of marijuana.

According to the BBC, two nuns and two porters at the convent have been questioned, with local media reporting that one of the nuns claims the illicit crop was used to treat the pigs and other animals raised at the convent. Which is pretty much the oldest scam in the book.

“Oh, wow, officer, I didn’t even realize that was pot. I just use it to treat my pig’s…porcine…glaucoma…and such.”

Sure it sounds like a good story when it’s coming out of your mouth, but that tired old line has never worked for anyone, short of divine intervention of some…

Oh, I see what you did there.

 

The Greatest Minds In All of Science

After the failure of their three best options for stopping the stream of oil into the Gulf of Mexico which also happen to sound like deviant sex acts – the top hat, the hot tap, and the junk shot – BP is officially out of ideas and just making shit up at this point.

The latest – a robot with a hacksaw attached to it will saw off a length of the pipe so BP can place a dome over it, a tactic those of you who have been paying attention will recognize as shit that didn’t work the first fucking time. And if that doesn’t work, BP also has a small army of little Dutch boys at the ready, and they are prepared to drown as many small children as they need to to avoid paying a monetary fine that will inevitably be whittled down to something like ten minutes worth of profits in the coming years.

Meanwhile, in even dumber news regarding the oil spill, one of the many cleanup options being considered by BP is a centrifuge designed by Kevin Costner while he was on the set of Waterworld, which promises to be to science what Waterworld was to cinema – the awesomest thing ever.

 

Wait, Someone Is Keeping Track of This Bullshit?

Wondering what the Library of Congress has been getting up to recently? The answer is as follows: Very Important Things! Like making sure everything everyone ever puts on Twitter will be archived for posterity, guaranteeing that the philosophical musings of Russian spambots and records of where you ate lunch yesterday will be forever preserved for the edification of future generations.

Next up to be archived in the hallowed halls of America’s most storied library, the notes you passed in 8th grade math class and every dirty limerick anyone has ever written on a bathroom wall.

 

Mad-Lib Time!

An earthquake struck (pretty much any place on the goddamn planet) today, killing (number) and leaving countless others without access to (basic supply or substance necessary to life) and trapped beneath tons of (synonym for rubble). Scientists attribute the quake to (fact about geology or thing God is angry with us for). Donations to victims can be sent to (url for website that is almost certainly a fraud).

Who is the planet furious at now? China, come on down!

 

Of Bowties and Badasses

Dear Justice John Paul Stevens,

Thank you very much for holding out for probably about eight more years than you actually wanted to be a Supreme Court Justice. Your refusal to retire, or for that matter die, during the Bush administration, a pair of options that so many of us considered without nearly as good reasons as you had during those dark times, is a beacon to us all.

Though being a Cubs fan probably helped to prepare you for a decade of senseless disappointment and near-constant sorrow, staying on the Court until you are damned near 90 so that your replacement by an arch conservative will not drastically unbalance the bench and the nation for a generation to come is conduct above and beyond the call of duty, and your nation owes you a debt of gratitude.

Now you go enjoy the fuck out of your retirement, good sir. God knows you’ve earned it.

 

Pac-Moon

Saturn’s moon Mimas has long been beloved by nerds the world over for having a crater that makes it look almost unsettlingly like the Death Star. Granted, it has also been feared because of this, just because you never know, but mostly feelings on Mimas range from indifference to downright adoration.

It was only this week that we learned that Mimas is even dorkier than anyone suspected, harboring cosmic homages to not just one, but two nerd legends. While the Death Star dominates the outward terrain of Mimas, it’s real nerd cred lies just below the surface. When NASA’s Cassini spacecraft turned it’s thermal imaging capabilities on Mimas, it revealed the following photograph:

That’s right – the heat distribution on Mimas–courtesy of it’s vast underground shoggoth empire–renders thermal images of the moon the spitting image of our own hero, Pac-Man. This fact is not only awesome but scientifically relevant, explaining at long last why the peculiar, angular orbit of Mimas keeps it so far from Saturn’s other moons: Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde.

 

Gleaming The Cube

We’ve seen robots that can solve Rubik’s cubes before, so frankly, it’s going to take something pretty special in that realm to impress us.

Like one made of Legos that looks like a futuristic torture device of some kind and solves a random cube in under 11 seconds while also inducing seizures with it’s garish display of flashing lights.

Yeah, that would probably do it.

 

Gamecrush Delivers Sexy Fantasy Women To Legion of Shut-Ins

New startup Gamecrush is bucking the stereotype of video-gamers as reclusive CHUDs who dwell in the Underdark of their parents basements, wholly incapable of engaging a human female in conversation.

Instead, Gamecrush is betting that gamers are a bunch of reclusive CHUDs who dwell in the Underdark of their parents basements and will pay through the nose for the opportunity to engage a woman in conversation, as long as that conversation takes place while playing video games online and includes the word “pwned” at some point.

Members of Gamecrush fall into two categories, both of which manage to somehow make the very concept of paid sex chat even less dignified – Players, the men who pay for the privilege of engaging in private chat sessions with Playdates, women who are paid by Gamecrush to chat up legions of lonely FPS fans during rounds of play.

Meant only for totally mature individuals over the age of 18, chat sessions can be set to Flirty or Dirty, though exactly how one would get dirtier in these sessions than during an average round of Modern Warfare 2 stretches the imagination to a point where the senses reel and the mind begs for mercy.

Update: The link is not broken, the site is just down due to massive public response to the first Beta offering. In related news, we are all fucking doomed.

 

Shields Up

It’s a commonly accepted tenet of both warfare and gamesmanship that the best defense is a good offense.

This is wrong.

As anyone with any basis in the underlying concepts of space-age warfare can tell you, the best defense is a force field.

But combining defense, like a force field, with offense, like a tank, as the British military is doing right now? Well, that’s just some diabolically clever shit right there.

But will it be a match for the battleship mounted, weapons-grade laser being developed by Boeing right now? Only time will tell.

Well, time and the inevitable Mech War of 2019.

 

Of Course He Did This He Is Joe Biden!

Ah, all the ludicrous shouting, the relentless, ugly hue and cry over health care is behind us. Now, all that’s left is a sober, dignified signing ceremony making a momentous, if imperfect, health care reform bill law. Wait a minute, is that an open mic? NO! Get Biden away… NO GET JOE BIDEN AWAY FROM THAT OPEN MIC RIGHT NOW! NOW NOW NOW!

Ahhh, hell. Too late. Well, it beats the hell out of shouting “Baby Killer!” on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and then making a fundraising video because you’re kind of famous for being a dick now.