The March of Progress

Forced March: Selected Poems

Mullets on the Loose

FBI says mullet bandit holds up another bank:

The suspect is described as a white male, in his late 30's, about 6 feet tall, with a medium build, a scruffy appearance and dark hair cut in a mullet. He is wanted in connection with the two previous bank robberies...

Got Some Skin in the Game?

"Well, then, to carry out the principles of socialism do its believers advocate assassination and bloodshed?" "No great movement," Karl answered, "has ever been inaugurated Without Bloodshed."

- from a interview with Karl Marx, the Chicago Tribune, January 5 1879

News Digest from the Fake Crisis Management Center no. 2011\05C

Film examines global bee crisis

In the film, beekeeper Gunther Hauk calls the crisis, "More important even than global warming. We could call it Colony Collapse of the human being too.

Judged in degrees of fakeness, he might be right.

The Rather Distant Ago

When Britons used to still occasionally give birth...

REVIEW OF THE YEAR 1946

The Mullet - Know your Rights

Fight the power!

Aussie Rules player sent off for bad haircut

After the first point of his opening match, he'd have heard "Code violation, criminal mullet, warning Mr Agassi", with disqualification coming three points later.

Revenge of the Mullets

Mullet-wearing bank robber strikes again

His dark hair was cut in a mullet. He wore a dark Mariners baseball cap; large, dark sunglasses; a dark shirt; and light-colored pants. He also carried a large, dark book bag.

Take the Money and Run (Full Screen Edition)

Stiga Montreal Canadiens NHL Table Top Hockey Team Pack

News Digest from the Fake Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\05B

One can only guess how these things get counted: "US behind S.Korea, UK in broadband adoption, download speeds"

International Business Times:

Probably Google's new fibre optic project in Kansas city and the Missouri side which has promised to bring a 100X faster internet broadband connection will make US overcome its cyber crisis.

To me, the "crisis" elicits a so what, once you see what threy're talking about: an isolated part of Korea and the UK.

Nearly 8.4 million broadband users in New York found their average download speed to be 11.7 Mbps, crawling much behind Seoul and South Korea which has a speed of 35.8Mbps for 10 million residents.

SO why exactly is there a crisis? A lake of state ownership, of course!

Walter McCormick Jr, the USTelecoms chief executive, pointed to FCC data showing that 95 percent of Americans have access to fixed broadband, and 93 percent are happy with their service saying, "Clearly the private sector is doing its part -- broadband has been deployed to virtually every corner of America where a business case can be made for investment."

The Ever popular Canadian Bartender with Mullet Theme Continues

Bartender rocks mullet for charity

One Pitt Meadows bartender hopes his Tanner Glass-style mullet can raise at least $1000 for sick children. Cale Reining, 20, started growing his hair as a joke

It didn't draw the interest he hoped. Must be that anti-mullet sentiment.

Henpecking in the Near Distant Ago

Save the Headbangers

Leading scienticians say that anti-mullet sentiments have risen a staggering 437% in the past 5 years alone.

Yea, verily, the mop top of old must be rated.

What is it anyways? To say that the mullet is a hairstyle barely even scratches the surface of the issue. The mullet is a way of life, it is a state of mind, it is every person who wears it. Physically it is characterized by short hair on the top, front, and sides of the head, followed by a long drape of hair on the back, reaching at least to the middle of the spine. Typical accessories to the mullet include moustaches, scraggly beards and/or goatees, and sunglasses. Research on the mullet phenomena, at this stage, is still in its infancy. However it is suggested by many top laboratories that the mullet, as it slowly reaches maturity, begins to grow tentacles into the brain of the victim.

World's Slowest Fundraiser

Mullets for moolah: Canuck fan grows hair for kids' hospice

Cale Reining, 20, started growing his hair as a joke between co-workers at the Boston Pizza in Pitt Meadows last December, but his "Mullets With Meaning" campaign has now raised more than $400 for Canuck Place.

Fake Crisis Squared

Education system doesn't support NBN: Caelli

AUSTRALIA is not equipped to deal with the National Broadband Network due to past "dumbing down" of IT education and resulting lack of trained professionals, security expert Bill Caelli warns.

So, to have one crisis, they will have to equip themselves sufficiently first. And THAT'S a crisis.

Mom's Bad Breath

This bizarre ad dates to 1940. Graphically innovative concidering modern graphic novels that use photos, retouched photos, and comic strip speech bubbles and formats.

Halitosis! Consumption be done about it?!?

That Hemorrhoid you Feel Bothering you is your Brain

European discomfort grows about bin Laden killing

So what?

"It's likely that bin Laden sought his own destiny," Zapatero told parliament on Wednesday after Gaspar Llamazares, deputy from the small leftist party Izquierda Unida, questioned his congratulating Obama.

Zapatero said "any democrat" would have preferred bin Laden stood trial, but that he understood how the operation ended in the way it did for "one of history's bloodiest criminals."

Islamist militants set off bombs simultaneously in four packed commuter trains in Madrid in March 2004, killing 191 people and wounding more than 2,000, in attacks they said were inspired but not ordered by al Qaeda.

In Germany a senior member of parliament from Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union, Siegfried Kauder, criticized her statement on Monday which said she was "glad that killing bin Laden was successful".

"I wouldn't have used those words. That is a vengeful way of thinking that one shouldn't have. That's mediaeval," he said.

It sounds like they want to give him posthumus citizenship and a Nobel Prize.

Contrary to what their self-regard is telling them, sometimes, ones' opnions simply don't matter in the real world.

Europa 1920, Europa 2010

Still Chasing the same straw men - that is, anything that reminds them of figures of authority as they think they understood them to be: military figures, business, and faith. A whole century of evidence, and they’re repeating the same infantile rants: make me free, feed me too, but give us authoritarian order, so long as it’s the type that suits my views.

The Dreaded Google Street View now Confounding German Car Buyers

Oh, how very ironical. Volkswagen will be putting the dreaded privacy impuning Google Street View into Audi dash boards.

Forbes:

When Germany pushed back hard on Google Street View, Google complied with its conditions — blurring people’s faces and even going so far as to allow privacy-sensitive Germans to have their houses blurred out. (Not everyone in Germany was on board with the visual censorship, and some of those blurred houses wound up getting egged by pro-Googlers. Ironically, opting out made them even more visible.) But eventually Google got fed up with the restrictions, and abandoned Street View in Germany.

Talk about your Fahrvergnügen.

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\05A

NAB: Spectrum Crisis is "Science Fiction"

Dslreports reports:

In this case, many seem to indirectly and incorrectly believe that free over-the-air broadcasting is the enemy of mobile broadband. NAB isn't the first to suggest the FCC's spectrum crisis is a stage show -- an insider who worked with the FCC recently...

Creepy Number Station Stuff: the Eternal Cubans

She Brings Home the Bacon, and Fries it up Too

There are heroes in the fields of battle. There are heroes in medicine.

Here's my heroine of the kitchen: Jo's the rock-star of recipes.

A Damned Good Read

Page for page, Ian McEwan’s The Innocents is as gripping as anything you’ll find. Set in Berlin during the Cold War, its story revolves around a murder so vivid in its description that I had to shut the book and steel myself to continue. The infamous American spy tunnel figures prominently in the tale as well.

Despite the usual European treatment of Americans as passive and two dimensional, as if they’re simply furniture, the story is an excellent one.

Today in History

4 May 1971

East Berlin Chief Quits

Walter Ulbricht, the Stalin of East Germany and Architect of the Berlin Wall resigned Monday as head of the Communist party because of age. He is 77. In east Berlin, antoher headliner, Erich Honecker, 58, was named to succeed Ulbricht as first secretary. Ulbricht is the senior Communist party leader in the Soviet Bloc.

Just a Thought

Germans generally need to thank the former Ossies for preserving German decency, values, and culture while the Wessie were turning their lives into one plotless, never ending Russ Meyer film.

The Bitter Flower of Youth

It doesn't take much looking to dispose of any regrets one has about one's age.

And it Fell without a Shot

It's not a special day. Celebrate it every day.
Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\05A

Internet Addiction: A Public Health Crisis?

The CRISIS has been found!!!

A large portion of studies on internet addiction come from countries like Taiwan, China and South Korea, which have some of the highest broadband use in the world.

The South Korean government has declared Internet addiction a "public health crisis,"...

Further Atmospherics from the Near Distant Ago

A joyride through post-Wende, pre-unification DDR