Category Archives: Wonkette

Hot Air

Chicken Checkin’

One of our town’s most talented copywriters spends her time outside the corporate cubicle raising chickens. Jana Wilson lives with her family on a nice 20-acre spread nearby. She writes about Gallus gallus domesticus husbandry in her blog, The Armchair Homesteader.

Tons o’folks these days are growing the birds, mainly to be able to eat fresh eggs and even for the fresh meat to liven up their cacciatore. (Hey, wait a minute: Do peeps eat alla cacciatore around here?) Anyway, the City of Bloomington, for instance, allows residents to raise chicken flocks, although said flocks can’t number more than five birds and none may be roosters. Apparently, that crowing rooster next door might cause some little friction in the n’hood. That and chicken coops often stink.

The chickens-in-the-city trend got a huge jump start about five years ago when author Susan Orlean wrote about it in the pages of The New Yorker. “[R]ight now,” she wrote, “across the country and beyond, there’s a surging passion for raising the birds.”

Chicken

“A Surging Passion”

When my grandmother, Anna Lazzara, lived in Chi., she was quite put out because the city wouldn’t allow her to keep chickens in the backyard. But back in the 1930’s people could still turn fresh chickens into dinner that night by buying the birds live at the butcher shop. Anna would tell my mother, Sue, to go get a chicken on a given weekday, a chore Ma loathed. She’d have to squeeze the bird between her arm and her chest in order to prevent it from fleeing, the critter pecking and clawing at her all the way home. Then Anna would grab the chicken from my mother, wrap her two fists around its neck and yank. Within minutes, the chicken’d lie still and be ready for plucking, singeing, and washing.

Ma always said those weekly walks from the butcher shop produced in her a phobia of all birds.

Yesterday, Wilson wrote about the problem of newbie chicken-raisers who purchase a passel of chicks and soon discover that one of the purported hens is actually a guy. She writes:

You anticipate these adorable little chicks growing into egg-producing hens and the speed at which they grow is just amazing.  They’re growing more feathers every day, their little combs beginning to develop, their legs lengthening. It’s all very fun and exciting. Fun until the day when little Sue emits the strangest sound. It sounds like a strangled screech. Could it be… oh no, surely not. But yes, its a crow!

Oh dear, little Sue is really little Stan.

Remember, cities that allow residents to keep chickens usually frown on or outright ban the keeping of males. “And for good reason: they are quite noisy and don’t crow just at daybreak,” Wilson writes. “Trust me on this one… they can crow just about any time of the day or night.”

In any case, check out Jana’s blog. You’ll even learn what a Sicilian Buttercup is. (And, no, it’s not me.)

Après Ce, Le Déluge

It turns out those who’ve been wringing their hands over the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision, predicting that all manner of Christianists would start suing to get out of certain laws and responsibilities because their “sincerely-held beliefs” preclude them from doing so, really aren’t just being Chicken Littles. Any number of “sincere believers” have made moves to get out of things like not firing employees because they’re gay and other expressions of deep spirituality.

It would be hard to top this one, though: Pro-life activist attorneys in Florida have filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of a nurse who applied for a job with the Tampa Family Health Centers. The attorneys claim the medical center refused to consider her for employment because she is Christian.

How horrible, right? What’s this crazy land coming to?

Christians/Lion

Persecution?

Natch, the case isn’t that simple. The nurse made a point to tell the clinic’s HR director that her Christian beliefs forbid her from prescribing certain contraceptives, which just happens to be one of the primary tasks of the place. I suppose it’d be be rather like a newly graduated cartographer applying for a job at the local globe factory and saying he would not be able to draw maps on the co.’s product because he’s a member of the Flat Earth Society. The wags at Wonkette explain the impasse thusly:

Let’s play a game. It is sort of a choose-your-own-adventure make-believe game. Costumes optional.

You are about to graduate from Thing-Doing School and apply for a job as a professional Thing-Doer, as one does after attending Thing-Doing School. You inform your potential employer that you are interested in the Thing-Doing job but will be unable to perform Thing-Doing duties because of your religious beliefs. Your potential employer tells you, “LOL, that’s hilarious, but we are actually looking for a real Thing-Doer who is willing to perform Thing-Doing duties, because that is the job. Thanks but no thanks.”

For this, nurse Sara Hellwege and her handlers, the Alliance Defending Freedom, will be taking up time and space on the federal district court’s docket to right what they see as a horrible wrong — although the sane among us see it as pretty much a cheap stunt.

Thanks Justice Alito and the rest of the straight, male, white, Catholic majority of SCOTUS. (And don’t write to correct me that Clarence Thomas is not white; he’s whiter than an albino wearing a lab coat in a snowstorm.)

Stoned, Again

Speaking of regressive fundamentalist extremists, Al Jazeera tells the tale of The Islamic State‘s latest contribution to civilization. The erstwhile ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), fresh off its successful campaign to capture and control a significant swath of Iraq and bits of Syria, is now turning its attention to the behavior of women, AKA sluts.

The Izzy State is bringing back that fave from yesteryear, public stoning for women who dig sex. Acc’d’g to AJ’s report, members of the gang that scares even al Qaeda stoned a woman to death in the public square in the town of Tabaqa, in Syria, because she’d committed adultery.

R. Crumb

Flashback

An important corollary to the story is the fact that the man with whom she sullied all of Islam was charged with no crime at all because, well…, because he’s a man, you dope.

 

Thermonuclear Hot Air

Ka-Boom!

We’ve seen and heard tons of whacked-out statements from the deranged Far Right since this holy land elected its first Muslim, communist, abortionist president who was born in Kenya. They’ve spewed their crazed ideas about Obama himself and about god, guns, gays, and a gazillion other topics.

Let’s skim a quick list of such maniacal ejaculations:

  • “I think video games is a bigger problem than guns because video games affect people.” Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn)
  • “… [T]hey are absolutely essential to living the way god intended for us to live.” Rep. Tim Donnelly (R. Calif) on guns
  • “A holstered gun is not a deadly weapon…. But anything can be used as a deadly weapon. A credit card can be used to cut somebody’s throat.” State Rep. Dan Dumaine (R-New Hampshire)

Credit Card

Deadly Weapon

  • “President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.” Former presidential candidate Rick Santorum.
  • “… [A] total sham and a travesty…. We are not a democracy.” Plutocrat Donald Trump on the 2012 reelection of President Obama.
  • “All family and friends, even close family and friends, who I know to be Democrats are hereby dead to me. I vow never to speak to them again for the rest of my life, or have any communications with them. They are, in short, the enemies of liberty. They deserve nothing less than hatred and utter contempt.” Libertarian/Republican blogger Eric Dondero.

Then, of course, there are those cherished chestnuts gargled out by political self-immolators whose weird word combos were so alarming that even rank and file Republicans have conveyed to them the strong suggestion that they should seek other forms of employment:

  • “I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that god intended to happen.” Former Indiana senatorial candidate Richard Mourdock
  • “First of all, from what I understand from doctors [it] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Former Rep. Todd Akin (R. Missouri) on pregnancy resulting from rape.

And what list like this would be complete without at least one citation from the Empress of Whack, future former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn)?

  • Teachers, she once splurted, are trying to “normalize” homosexuality and “desensitize” our darling children to it. “[A] very effective way to do this with a bunch of second graders is take a picture of The Lion King, for instance, and a teacher might say, ‘Do you know that the music for this movie was written by a gay man?’ The message is: I’m better at what I do because I’m gay.”

Bachmann

Raving Royalty

What a trip down memory lane!

Just when you think you’ve heard it all, someone, somewhere, says something that makes even the above paranoiac ideations seem, well, tolerable.

I doubt, though, any statement made yet or in the future about the evils of President Barack Osama Adolf Joseph Al Capone Norman Bates Obama can ever, ever, ever top a recent “revelation” by the deep thinkers at a website entitled We Will Not Be Disarmed.

The WWNBD scribblers claim to have intercepted a report from the Russian spy agency GRU that the Prez had planned a nuclear attack on the city of Charleston, South Carolina, in order to create “chaos” in the US.

Why would he do this? WWNBD doesn’t say. Maybe he’s suffering a mid-life crisis. Who knows?

Obama

“Nuke ‘Em!”

Anyway, a US military jet was to drop a ground-penetrating nuclear device that would, it was hoped, trigger an earthquake underneath the historic southern city. That was the plan until four key generals bravely stood up to the gay, Nazi, fascist, jihadist usurper of presidential power. The generals, WWNBD claims the Russkie spook report reports, directed the pilot of the jet to drop the bomb in the ocean off the coast of S.C., where is exploded harmlessly.

Natch, Barack Osama bin Laden pitched a fit when his orders were disobeyed and fired the generals on trumped-up charges of gambling, alcoholism, and other vices. This despite the fact that the four, acc’d’g to the putative GRU paper, were among the finest human beings this or any other planet has ever been home to.

The Imam-in-Chief will not be deterred, WWNBD concludes, citing a Ron Paul interview with tinfoil hat wearer Alex Jones this month that a declaration of martial law is just around the corner.

Phew.

And I thought I was delusional because I truly believe the Chicago Cubs might win a World Series in my lifetime.

[h/t to Wonkette]

Your Daily Hot Air

He’s a Furriner

How weird, weird, weird is it that some of those same Birthers and fellow trash can sniffers who turned purple when a brown man was elected Prez — because, after all, BHO couldn’t possibly be a real American — are now pretty cool with Ted Cruz?

That is, with the Tex. Sen. potentially being the CEO of the US Inc. Cruz, who certainly is not shooting down rumors that he’s f’nta run for the Oval O. come 2016, was born in — drum roll, please — Canada.

Cruz

Hoser

Which, last I checked, is not part of the United States. Although, being predominantly white, maybe it is at that.

Donald Trump and some doorknob polisher named Lord Christopher Monckton, both of whom transformed themselves into dicks (in the 1940s, savvy-dame-snafu sense of slang as diminutive for detective, ironically) to hunt down proof of Barack Obama’s real place of birth in Kenya or Abortiastan, are big, big, big on a Great White North Presidency. Emphasis on the word…, aw, you know.

h/t to Wonkette for pointing this all out. Ironically, I had no idea Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz wasn’t born in this holy land. Then again, I studiously avoid reading anything at all about the gun-loving, gay-marriage-hating North American moose.

I get the sense that constitutional experts think Cruz being born north of the 49th Parallel should be no impediment to his presidential ambitions. Apparently, as long as his Mom was a US citizen and had lived in the Greatest Nation This Earth Has Ever Seen for 10 years prior to his emergence, he’s cool to be the Boss.

Bullwinkle J. Moose

Eligible

Which, fascinatingly enough, should have shut all those Birthers the hell up even if Barack Obama was born in the Kremlin or Mau-Mau-ia. His Mom, after all, was a Kansan, which I know for a fact is in Murrica.

Ah, none of it matters anyhow; Hillary Clinton is a lock to be the next White House target of Right Wingnut Nation.

Anybody care to risk a C-note on that proposition?

Harvest Moon

Speaking of Canadians.

Your Daily Hot Air

Ghoulish Giving

NPR stations around this holy land probably do this, too, but I’m only familiar with the act as committed by Bloomington’s own WFIU.

That is, the really creepy begging on-air for you, the listener with a foot in the grave, to write the public radio station into your will.

A little promo runs every day on Morning Edition. Some somber-ish music plays in the background as the announcer tells us we can make “an investment in WFIU’s future” and leave behind a valuable legacy. The financial support page on WFIU’s website expands on the concept. It tells us that these are “Gifts that cost you nothing during your lifetime,” as if the station’s doing us a big favor. The page also gives us options for giving cash, stocks, real estate, or other personal property. It even shows us how to make that very last donation by signing over our life insurance or retirement plan benefits.

Undertaker

“But First, Let’s Sign Those Papers.”

I know the ad is directed to us all in general, but I can’t help thinking about the poor souls who are pushing 85 or 90 and maybe have an electrical system that’s about to short out.

The station is saying, sans all the prettified verbiage, “Hey, when you’re dead, can we have your money?”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, public broadcasting needs our support. The Loved One and I pitch a c-note over to WFIU every year, natch. And, yeah, the Republicans every once in a while threaten to cut off federal funding for NPR because, as we’re all well aware, public radio endorses forced sterilizations and compulsory abortions and works feverishly behind the scenes to convert all white children into homosexuals. Nevertheless, we continue to listen and want to help pay for Will Murphy‘s fleet of Maseratis.

(And, BTW, every time the Republicans threaten to cut off funds, public  radio and TV fundraising phones jump off the hook.)

Anyway, I dig that public broadcasting fundraisers must be creative. I mean Garrison Keillor’s not gonna pay himself for his valuable time. Still, this legacy business is really unseemly.

Look, my brother has made himself a nice, tidy pile over his lifetime and, don’t get me wrong, I’ve put the touch on him once or twice, or was it half a dozen times? — no matter — the point is, even I wouldn’t have the cagliones to say to him, “Hey, Joey baby, I was just thinking, wouldja mind filling out a nice round figure for me in your last will and testament and, oh yeah, I think I’d look awfully good behind the wheel of that Chrysler 300 of yours.”

I don’t want to get all Bob Greene-y on you here, but I don’t think this kind of ghoulishness would have flown even twenty years ago.

Greene

Yes, That Bob Greene

[Big Mike Note: While I was googling pix for this post, I discovered that there’s a whole genre of erotica surrounding sexy babes and hearses. I have absolutely nothing to say that would make this addendum any funnier or snarkier. I just want you to know about it.]

I Am Love The Walrus

As you know, without Wonkette, I would be blissfully unaware of every important development in this crazy, mixed up world. And, (h/t to Doktor Zoom of Wonkette) here’s what’s important to the lunatics employed by the thankfully dead Andrew Breitbart’s network of interwebs agit-prop sites: this holy land’s advertising industry and Hollywood are in cahoots to foist bestiality upon us.

Yup. As evidence, John Nolte of Big Hollywood last year cited a weird little commercial for Skittles in which a couple of hot tomatoes talk about their sizzling love for walruses who gobble the multi-colored candies.

Indeed, nothing like pix of chix making out with walruses to entice Murricans to try animal sex.

OTOH: I have to wonder if bestiality really is on the rise. What else, after all could explain the existence of Breitbart bloggers better than the coupling of Homo Sapiens sapiens and Pan troglodytes?

Chimpanzee

Hey, Baby, How ‘Bout It?

I Am In Love With A Sheep

Redux on this vid; I’m fairly certain I’ve run it before, but it’s always worth a reprise. This is the single funniest wordless double-take in the history of film. And it’s proof that Gene Wilder was a comic genius. Go ahead, laugh out loud, even if you are at work.

Your Daily Hot Air

Why You, I Oughtta….

Do not ask me why this fascinates me, but it does. I learned last night that one Morton Horowitz, a gas station operator in Los Angeles in the 1940s, developed the idea of the self-service gas pump and had them installed at his 18 locations.

Not only that, Horowitz’ stations also featured pretty dames, often on roller skates — he called them “Change Girls,” whose duty was, natch, to bring customers their change.

Allan Grant Photo

[Allan Grant Photo]

So the fact that several entire generations have grown up not even knowing that at one time you drove into a gas station, ran over a bell tripper, and waited for a gas jockey to come out to fill your tank, check your oil and water, and even wash your windshield is attributable to some anonymous LA small businessman.

Only he wasn’t totally anonymous. He was, in fact, the son of one Samuel Horwitz*, born March 11, 1895, in Manhattan. Sam Horwitz became better known as Shemp Howard.

Yes, the Stooge. Weird, huh?

Shemp Howard

Happy Father’s Day, Shemp!

* The family name is cited as either Horowitz or Horwitz in different sources

[h/t to Mental Floss and the site’s Amazing Fact Generator, which got the dope from Find A Grave.]

Genetics

My soulmates at Wonkette tell us that a couple of Republican Congressbeings’ sons have proven recently on social media that the asshole doesn’t fall far from the tree.

The spawn of House members Jeff Flake (Ari.) and Joe Heck (Nev.) have waxed poetic about homosexuals, dark-skinned folk, and Mexicans on the likes of Twitter and Facebook.

From Wonkette

Heck’s kid posits that god has a plan for population reduction that incorporates gays, because “[F]aggots can’t have babies.” He also feels that the New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez is not as fast at getting rid of the ball as he is at “hop[ping] the border.” Oh, and that Barack Obama must be good at spear-chucking and rock-skipping because those are “the sports they do in his home country.”

Quite the little philosopher, eh?

The fruit of Flake’s loins firmly believes that the thief or thieves who stole his dirt bike (from a church parking lot, no less) are “faggots.” The kid also uses the terms “nigga” and “nigger” fairly regularly in his Facebook posts.

Flake/Heck

Flake & Heck

Flake’s boy, BTW, also is an aficionado of the online game, Fun Run, wherein his screen name is “NiggerKiller.”

Talk about fun!

Both Congressbeings have apologized for the sins of their progeny (oddly enough, they won’t apologize for their own legislative sins which are far more injurious than their kids’ sticks-and-stones misdeeds.) And both members of this holy land’s premier lawmaking bodies insist their sons are swell eggs who’ll grow up to be pillars of society.

To which I can only reply, Point of order, Mr. Chairman…!

I’m Bugged At My Ol’ Man

The Pencil Today:

HotAirLogoFinal Monday

THE QUOTE

“People are always looking for the single magic bullet that will totally change everything. There is no single magic bullet.” — Temple Grandin

Grandin

FIRE WITH FIRE

From Rich Abdill in Wonkette:

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Sure, and Apache helicopters don’t kill people but we cannot have those either.”

He also points out the fallacy of the argument that good people with guns can defend themselves against crazies with guns:

“It sounds like a great argument, until you realize that the good people with guns are awful at defending society from bad people with guns. Mother Jones put together a big, terrible list of all the mass-murders of the last 30 years, and not a single one ends with, ‘And then a person with a concealed weapon killed the shooter before the shooter could inflict anymore damage.’ None. Zero.”

Concealed Weapon

I Got Somethin’ For Ya Right Here, Psycho!

Charlie Pierce in Esquire magazine’s politics blog quotes a Tweet from X-tian loon, the Rev. Bryan Fischer: “Shooters attack an elementary school in CT — another ‘gun-free zone.’ Makes children sitting ducks.”

Pierce answers in the only possible rational way: “Go fuck yourself, pal. Sometimes I dearly wish I believed more strongly in a hell.”

Fischer

Rev. Bryan Fischer, Security & Education Expert

Naturally, the babbling idiot of the US Congress, Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), has plenty to say. He referred to the Sandy Hook principal on — what else? — Fox News Sunday: “I wish to god she had an M-4 in her office locked up so when she heard gunfire she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands but she takes him out, takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids.”

To borrow a quote from a very articulate man, Go fuck yourself, pal.

A-a-a-nd, former Reagan Secretary of Education, GHW Bush Drug Czar, self-appointed plaster saint, and degenerate gambler Bill Bennett wants an armed person patrolling the halls of every school.

Bennett

Bennett: “Do You Have Any Idea How Good I Am?”

Cool idea, huh? So, next time a psycho barges into a school, he pops the armed guy and then goes ahead and wipes out a few dozen kids and teachers.

You know what to do with yourself, Bill.

I’m gonna stop now. I’m getting depressed.

GOD THE EDUCATOR

Oh, by the way, the god who’s so enraged because we don’t allow public school kids to sing hosannas to him in the classroom that he sent an armed psychotic in to wipe a few dozen of them out? He’s hot for another reason these days, again having to do with public schools.

NPR reports that some Texas kid and her old man are suing a local San Antonio school district for forcing her to wear a radio frequency ID badge. See, these badges help school administrators keep track of students to make sure they’re not wandering off campus to do what teenagers like to do other than study mitosis.

The kid, who’s 15, told her daddy-0 that she was going to refuse to wear the ID tag when it was given her at the start of the school year because the Bible has something to say about it. “Daddy, I’m not going to do this,” she said. “Dad, That’s exactly what it talks about about in the Book of Revelation that you were teaching us about taking the mark of the beast. This is the exact same thing.”

Mark of the Beast

Not Only In Our Schools

The mark of the beast, in case you didn’t know (and I wish I didn’t), is mentioned in Revelation 13:15-18. It has to do with some evil being who comes down and pretends to be the Christ but is really the Anti-Christ and will somehow mark all people for some fercockter reason and then all hell will break loose. Or something. Look, I tried to figure it all out but it’s in the Bible, see, and if you want to get your head screwed completely around, try reading half a page of that thing.

Anyway, loads of folks believe in this stuff and are constantly on the lookout for the beast-mark. And this Texas kid, apparently, has put her finger on it and now she and daddy-o are making a federal case about it.

The local San Antonio school district told her she has to wear the ID badge and she responded by saying Whoa, Nilly, you’re violating my freedom of religion.

Now the whole affair is being played out this morning before the Federal district court in S.A.

Funny thing is, the school district has told the kid she can wear a badge without the radio frequency chip in it but she told them where they could stick that idea. She says she’ll only wear her old school ID from last year, which the Bible apparently approves of, although I was unable to find a reference therein for it.

The kicker is the kid and her old man are members of John Hagee‘s Cornerstone Church, headquartered in San Ant.

Hagee

Hagee

Hagee, you may recall, got presidential candidate John McCain in hot water back in 2008, after JM accepted the preacher’s endorsement. Hagee, it was learned, had written that the Catholic church is “a godless theology of hate”  and a “great whore.” He’d also stated that the goal of Islam was to “kill Christians and Jews.” He has stated that it was the Jews who were responsible for the Holocaust — and believe me, his “reasoning” behind this makes the Bible read like a kindergarten primer. He has stated that Hitler himself was an apostate Jew and that the Jews run the Federal Reserve System.

A-a-and the good Rev. Hagee is four-square in favor of a US preemptive strike on Iran using nuclear weapons. A real sweetheart, no?

Nuclear Explosion

Now Who’s The Boss, Iran?

All that said, Hagee calls himself a “Christian Zionist” and works tirelessly with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to support radical pro-Israel legislation.

Weird, huh?

You wanna know how weird? Pick up Matt Taibbi’s book, “The Great Derangement.” He goes undercover in Hagee’s church to find out who peoples his flock. Trust me, you’ll be torn between laughing out loud and wanting to slash your wrists.

In any case, this fellow, god, seems fixated on the goings on in our schools. Funny, no? You’d think he’d fix it so students would learn more and teachers wouldn’t burn out so quickly and legislators wouldn’t be so eager to cut education funding. Seems as though god’s priorities in education are about as screwed up as ours.

SCHOOL DAYS

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