_

Not a statement, just too funny not to share.
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_AIEE! Fear the mopple monster!

Lucy is just a few months shy of being two years old, and every chance she gets, she leaps onto my lap, rips up my shirt, presses my neck back with her foot, and helps herself to a drink. If I’m standing therefore have no lap, she pinwheels down to the horizontal position and demands my nipple. Loudly.

Lucy thinks nipples are called mopples.

Lucy never adopted a favorite blanket. Nor has she singled out one of her stuffed animals for special love. Lucy’s comfort object is my mopples. When we go someplace new and she’s feeling insecure, she snakes her hand down my shirt and grabs.

But it doesn’t stop here. Lucy and I went to see her cousin Katy perform the role of Real Rabbit Number Two in a play. Lucy, energized by the show, reached her hand down my shirt and bellowed "FUNNY MOPPLES! FUNNY MOPPLES!"

It’s hard not to take that personally. Does she mean my mopples are comic? Or is she referring to their appearance or texture? I’m afraid to ask. And yet, she tells me that they’re funny every day now.

Funny how? Funny like a clown? My nipples amuse you? They make you laugh? I'm here to suckle 'n amuse you?

There's plenty more, and it's every bit as cringeworthy. Thank God I was raised Before Internet; who knows what I'd be trying to live down...
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_Tastes like fried crickets, worms and grasshoppers

A Thai mother and her daughter stop to buy fried crickets, worms and grasshoppers at one of 31 supermarket outlets of the Insects Inter chain at Bangkok's Central Plaza Shopping Mall on May 24, 2002. The Insects Inter stand is part of Thailand's first insect fast food chain, a network launched in March that has already made more money than its creator expected.

I guess they're still working out the kinks in their economic projections for bug eating.

Update: Fark chimes in (scooped 'em)
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_LCD screens taste like fish
Maybe. All color LCD screens are made with fish goo in the red, green and blue filters for each dot. The main link points to a year-old article (via Google's cache) about the rapid advances in a new, simpler, brighter, faster, cheaper and prettier display technology that also uses less power: organic light emitting diodes--OLEDs. A year later, OLED tech is muscling its way into the marketplace. Expect to see it first in cell-phones and maybe a future Game Boy (which desperately needs a better screen).

(The original article is here. I used Google to highlight the fish-goo parts.)
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_Alright, there ought to be something in here to piss you off today...
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_In Memoriam: New York City, 9/11/01
Tom Shales calls this "the most moving, unnerving and unflinching film yet made about the terrorist assault on America, ...also one of the most moving, unnerving and unflinching films made about anything." OK, I'll watch it, but that's not why I'm putting it here.

I'm reading this piece and hit the line "harrowing account of what had begun as a particularly beautiful late-summer day," and I'm thinking "but, it's not late in the summer?!"

Oh, right. No matter how much 9/11 feels like "now," it is not "now."
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_"My favorite thing in the world is a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich."
The joys of the humble PB&J. I too appreciate them, though perhaps not as fully since that dark day my sister told me that there is only one reason they make crunchy peanut butter: to keep you from noticing when you crunch a bug.

The horror! The horror!
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_"rape and carnality compounded many times over by utter indifference to human life"
The reaction of Berlin at the close of World War II as it sinks into the shrieking chaos it unleashed on the rest of the world:

The "strange mixture of suppressed hysteria and fatalism" evident in Berlin at Christmas 1944 gave way by April to "febrile exhaustion, terrible foreboding and despair," and later that same month "a sense of nightmare unreality pervaded the city as it awaited its doom." Berliners "now referred to their city as the 'Reichsscheiterhaufen' -- the 'Reich's funeral pyre.'"

In Berlin, as the Red Army drew near, young German soldiers became "desperate to lose their virginity" and found willing companions in German girls who "preferred to give themselves to almost any German boy first than to a drunken and probably violent Soviet soldier." As Beevor puts it, "the aphrodisiac effect of mortal danger is hardly an unknown historical phenomenon," a point underscored by the goings-on in the Reich Chancellery, where, an eyewitness reported, "an erotic fever seemed to have taken possession of everybody" and SS officers were "locked in lascivious embraces" with girls they had lured off the street. It was "the apocalypse of totalitarian corruption," Beevor writes, "with the concrete submarine of the Reich Chancellery underworld providing an Existentialist theater set for hell."

And it was all just a prelude to what was bearing down on them, the systemic rape of a hundred thousand women triggering an epidemic of suicide that would claim 10,000 lives.
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_Teacher displays porn during exam
Look, if you're a math teacher administering an exam to 16 year old school kids and you decide to surf some nudie sites to kill the time, make sure your PC isn't hooked up to the large screen display, m'kay?
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_How to defeat biometric authentication
Facial recognition, iris scanners, and several different types of fingerprint scanners, all designed to protect PCs from unauthorized use, and all easily defeated using exotic equipment like, say, inkjet printers or scotch tape or pencil lead.

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_The five most rascist Warner Brothers cartoons of all time
Well, let's not forget our own race issues. Here's a description of one of the cartoons that only rates the middle of the pack:

St. Pete rings this angel on a phone, and the guy - huge lips, lower jaw dangling open uncontrollably, eye lids drooping lazily into his eyes-keeps mistaking the phone for the horn he is attempting to play. The phone rings, the angel-mouth still hanging open-turns slowly, looks at the phone, turns slowly back, looks at his horn, and keeps playing. This happens a couple of more times before he finally picks it up, and in yet another slow, lazy, stupid voice (higher pitched than Nicodemus' even), he answers: "Yowza..? (Unintelligible) Right now..?"

This loser gets up and begins walking like an angel with a purpose, but within a few steps has already forgotten what St. Pete ordered him to do. He slows down, mouth STILL agape, and scratches his head.

This scene alone was enough to warrant a Top 5 slot for Pastures, but then we see the same dopey angel on Earth, in Harlem, set up in the street with a sign reading "PAIR-O-DICE NEEDS YOU." Underneath this headline are the perks: travel, good food, clean livin', music, and-perhaps this joke was included because Freleng thought everyone missed it the first time around in Sunday?-watermelon. Hey, that's funny enough, but then the angel tries to read the sign out loud, and can't, stuttering stupidly as he tries to pronounce each word.

Zoinks. I'll be over here, away from those people, ok?
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_Who's ugly now?
Making the observation, in the most inflammatory way possible, that Americans are really falling behind Europeans in unleashing orgies of anti-Semitism in the aftermath of 9/11. It is written to inflame, it does wander off into blah blah gun control blah blah Godwin, but the core truth is sound: Europe has been the scene of flare-ups of post 9/11 ethnic violence, not America, the nation that suffered the blow and was widely considered the home of the insular and petulant "ugly American."
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