ACLU Gonzo Ad in NYT

The ACLU took out an ad on the Times' web site today, the basic conceit of which is that Habeas Corpus is a little cartoon dude who doesn't look too happy. The little guy's been kidnapped and you're looking at the side of a milk carton showing some basic info about his last known whereabouts. Here's a pic from the ACLU site (habeas.gif):



The incitement is to a letter-writing campaign to congress urging our -persons to get on that shit and start looking for Habeas Corpus. The cuteness doesn't stop there, though. The site also refers to Habeas Corpus as "Habeas," as though he were a little tike. On the playground they probably called him Habe for short or teased him occasionally by calling him "Habe-ASS." A quiet little green kid, a little troubled, but generally well-behaved and likeable. That is, before he was kidnapped and molested by some pervy old guy whose web cache, as it would later be shown, includes lots of Google Images searches for "Constitutional Rights Nude," and "Due Process Naked."

Find Habeas

Red Dawn and Contemporary Military Strategy

VS



The Choice Is Clear

A previous post (the most recent one, actually) indicated the importance of remembering Red Dawn, going so far as to point to an article on cognitive neuroscience to help elucidate the memory processes and help readers get over the biological determinism of forgetting.

You see, Red Dawn posits the now-defunct Soviet Union as the greatest threat to the security of the American Midwest. Events of the late-nineteenth and early twenty-first century (the collapse of the Soviet Union, 9/11) have done a great deal to mitigate the possibility of a foreign invasion that can only be stopped by the efforts of a handful of high schoolers.

In the contemporary scheme of international violence, one rarely considers a conventional war on American soil as a remote possibility. Continued nuclear proliferation and the emergence of highly skilled, motivated, and funded terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda have greatly diminished focus on old-style military conflict. However, Red Dawn was prescient in one crucial manner; the use of teenage boys armed with automatic weapons--once an empowering masculine fantasy--has since been fully realized several times on foreign soil.

Despite taking Red Dawn's advice on the military capabilities of high-school aged young Midwestern boys, current and past administrations have made the strategic error of failing to recognize their key military use: in a defensive, conventional war against an invading power. If we are to believe the performances of Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen (as we undoubtedly should), it is important to acknowledge that groups like their Wolverines are best suited to defend their hometowns against the robotic machinations of conformist Commies. The current endeavors in Iraq and Afghanistan greatly overestimate the ability of paramilitary teens to preemptively strike countries hostile to U.S. interests.

It is not too late to correct this error, however. Highly trained militias can recruit and train young children in the ways of firearms and explosives to fight the real war we have on our hands: a defensive war on terrorism, whose principle targets have typically been airports and landmarks of great symbolic significance to the U.S. Deploying our corn-fed, bright-eyed teenage dudes (especially the varsity athletes) in these locations will help prevent another attack from what currently poses our greatest national-security threat.

Meanwhile, as Point of No Return clearly shows, hot babes pulled off death row to become assassins are fucking great at urban warfare. Ship em out in droves.

Red Dawn Trailer

I Forget What You Forgot

It's on the tip of my tongue.

It is the dawn of World War III. In midwestern America, a group of teenagers band together to defend their town, and their country, from invading Soviet forces. What was the name of that movie? It has a young Charlie Sheen, Patrick Swayze? What was it?!?!?!

Ever struggle to recall really important information, those crucial tidbits that just might one day save your life?

Scanning the latest news tagged "Cognitive Neuroscience" led me to this article on why we sometimes forget things or details but, you know, they're on the tip of our tongues.



Basically, the article indicates that memory travels via electrical impulses from the brain to the tongue, where the information is normally transmitted via muscular contractions (known as elocution). Sometimes, oral buildup occurs, however, insulating the tip of the tongue from the electronic impulses, resulting in the memory shifting endlessly back in forth between tongue and brain. This scientific explanation has since been dumbed down for the public and appears now in colloquial English as "having [something] on the tip of [one's] tongue."

Okay just kidding. The REAL scientific explanation is that your brain stores a whole bunch of memories next to each other according to their characteristics. Sometimes competing memories with similar characteristics interfere with retrieval of the desired memory. So, if your brain were in charge of finding a stapler on your desk the way you are, it would sometimes pick up associated objects like a packet of staples (go in the stapler), or some pieces of paper (get stapled), or a paper clip (functions like a stapler). Thankfully our brains aren't in charge of those tasks, just finding memories.

Listen Up, Brains:

≠ ≠

Here's the practical upshot. If you find yourself in a situation where you forget someone's name, or a REALLY important detail of something, just start quoting the study titled "Tip of the Tongue and Retrieval-Induced Forgetting." It's sure to a) impress whoever your talking to, and b) make them forget what you forgot.

RED DAWN. Don't you forget it. Ever.

Jeremy

A: Jeremy. Where is he?
B: Jeremy? Paris. He's...
A: In Paris? With his parents? Please, tell me: Is he wearing fleece?
B: He'd better be, and burning reams of kerosene. It's ten degrees. That Paris breeze makes a scary scene.--His parents leave for CDG from the Carribean at three fifteen. He's getting married, see.
A: Jeremy's as very keen on Cheryl Lee as he's ever been.
B: I don't care to see him marry a Lee. I wish he'd married me when we were thirty three. I don't think I can bear the grief.
A: Really? Jeremy would've married ye?
B: Verily. He'd stare at me no matter where I'd be.
A: I fail to see how that'd mean he'd marry ye.
B: Listen carefully and bear with me.
A: I can't. This is wearing me......out.

History of Bees

A quick scan of the major obituary columns has not yielded any satisfactory coverage of the recent demise of bees. For this reason, Water and Vegetables provides the internet's only comprehensive biographical timeline.

Millions of Years Ago: Join up with birds in one of the greatest alliances the world has ever known.
1825: Begin hosting spelling competitions in antebellum Kentucky
1957: Drunk three-way with African and German hotties they will later regret.
1979: Land lucrative cereal endorsement deal
1980s: Beeswax ownership increases dramatically among American youth, who subsequently encourage one another to "Mind your own!"
1987: Form a basketball franchise in Charlotte, NC (not very good at basketball)
1998: Collaborate with Wu-Tang Clan's RZA
2001: Friend incarcerated for gun assault, begin appearing on rappers' albums shouting "Free Pimp C"
2007: Suddenly die to the shock and chagrin of millions (thousands?) of bears worldwide.



At least they still have the Olympics to look forward to.

Release the Bees

Why are the bees leaving?

-Too Busy
-Killer bees killing bees
-Hilary Swank not yet called upon to investigate
-Stuffy WASP culture
-Actually bad at spelling, embarrassed
-All New Songs!


NYT

I Was Trolling for Animals; Instead I Rolled up on Moby

The idea was simple, a joke about vlogging my dolphin, so I trucked over to YouTube for some cute videos of dolphins for a vlog. Instead, I wound up with a video of cute literal dolphins being actually flogged. [Warning this video is both graphic and HEAVY.]



Soundtrack by Moby. Narration by Joaquin Phoenix. Jokes about "flogging the dolphin" will never be the same. :'(

Blog Eat Blog

People in nineteenth-century Ireland ate a lot of potatoes. That is, unless they lived in Ireland between 1845 and 1849 during the Reign of Phytophthora. Look it up.

As you can probably imagine, the poor, starving Irish family, backs bent from days tending the potato fields subsisted on potato soup, mashed potatoes, whole baked potatoes, boiled potatoes, steamed potatoes, French-fried potatoes, potato chips, scalloped, diced, or sliced and fried potatoes, hash browns, dumplings, Rösti or potato pancakes, potato gumbo, potato pizza, potato tooth paste.

Had the Irish been aware of a leafy vegetable heavy in vitamins known as broccoli, the story might have been different.

It's a blog-eat-blog world out there, and even if you're Irish, you're probably not a potato farmer. So what's my point? You were lucky enough to stumble upon the broccoli of the blogosphere—a latest step in blogolution. Attribute it to a divine maker or natural selection if you like, but any way you cook it, you just landed on the purest, most evolved form of blogging.

If it would've worked for the Irish in real life, it can work for you on the Internet.

You can try to resist. But, once you go broc, you never go back.

Just Add Water

Centuries ago, before blogriculture became systematized, before bloggers were using growth hormones on their products, before chemical additives and pesticides, a man simply hoed his own blog and, at the end of the day, returned to his family to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

Those were simpler times, when a man could see exactly where his blogs were coming from. Sun, soil, and water. That was all it took back then, and although those homegrown blogs lacked the waxy shine of today's industrial produce, they tasted of the grit and earth from whence they came.

Nowadays, an entire daily allotment of blogs can be produced, shipped, and consumed in a matter of minutes. But at what price? Entire families blog in front of the television, setting their blogs on carefully designed disposable trays. The modern blogstyle —- certainly convenient —- nevertheless lacks the rustic charm of the old days.

That's where Water and Vegetables comes to the rescue. Our posts are one hundred percent shade-grown in their natural blogospheres, without the use of pesticides or additives. We pride ourselves on giving strict attention to fair labor practices, and each of our bloggers receives a decent living wage.

Water and Vegetables, the organic blog you can trust.