In a world where Santa is Scarface

Nothing exceeds like excess You should know that Rudolph

Because he's evil

Wherein Ronnie Van Zant's "The Needle and the Spoon"




Alternate quote, almost went with this from Trainspotting

People think it's all about misery and desperation and death and all that shite, which is not to be ignored. But what they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn't do it. After all, we're not fucking stupid. At least, we're not that fucking stupid. Take the best orgasm you ever had, multiply it by a thousand and you're still nowhere near it. When you're on junk you have only one worry: scoring. When you're off it you are suddenly obliged to worry about all sorts of other shite. Got no money: can't get pissed. Got money: drinking too much. Can't get a bird: no chance of a ride. Got a bird: too much hassle. You have to worry about bills, about food, about some football team that never fucking wins, about human relationships and all the things that really don't matter when you've got a sincere and truthful junk habit.

'Twas the night before a midnight dreary

Wherein while the idea was interesting the ten minute execution fell short


A slightly inelegant literary mashup

'Twas the night before a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

The children were nestled all snug in their beds, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. `'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door –

While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads; Only this, and nothing more.'

And mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Had just settled down for a long winter's nap, Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter, And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain

Trilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.

Away to the window I flew like a flash, Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash, here I opened wide the door; - Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

When, what to my wondering eyes should appear, But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer, With a little old driver, so lively and quick, I knew in a moment it must be Lenore!

Merely this and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,

When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky, Let me see then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore –

Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; - 'Tis the wind and nothing more!'

As I drew in my head, and was turning around, Down the chimney the Raven came with a bound

Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door - Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, His eyes -- how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!

His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry! And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself

Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!' Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

A wink of his eye and a twist of his head, Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;

`Doubtless,' said I, `what it utters is its only stock and store,

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.

And laying his finger aside of his nose, And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;

`Wretch,' I cried, `thy God hath lent thee - by these angels he has sent thee Respite - respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle, `Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!

And away they all flew like the down of a thistle. Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!'

But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight, "Happy Christmas to all, and to all Nevermore."

Edgard Clement Clarke Poe

And that reminds me of this thing I read

Wherein slightly related one of the older students at The Child's ballet school has such a need to void the contents of her stomach before a performance that puke buckets are placed on each side of the stage


Slate asks Can You Be Scared Enough To Pee Your Pants? Simple answer is yes and Brian Palmer does provide a reason. However, for a more colorful explanation, let me direct you towards Neal Stephenson's Reamde:

No one could look at Peter, who had become a nearly unbearable sight on grounds of posture alone: shoulders drawn together, body trembling, back of neck brilliant red. Sokolov was favorably impressed by the fact that he had not yet shit his pants. Men always made crude jokes about people pissing their pants with fear, but in Sokolov's experience shitting the pants was more common if it was a straighforward matter of extreme emotional distress. Pants pissing was completely unproductive and suggested a total breakdown of elemental control. Pants shitting, on the other hand, voided the bowels and thereby made blood available to the brain and the large muscle groups that otherwise would have gone to the lower-priority activity of digestion. Sokolov could have forgiven Peter for shitting his pants, but if pissed his pants, then it really would have been necessary to get rid of him.

A neatly folder cardboard box is the last refuge of a recyclist

Wherein Snowclones

• Samuel Johnson: patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
• Isaac Asimov: Violence is the refuge of the incompetent
• Oscar Wilde: Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative
• Oscar Wilde: Ambition is the last refuge of the failure
• Oscar Wilde: Hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do
• Oscar Wilde: I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
• Natalie Clifford Barney: Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual
• Tony Wilson: Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented
• Kim Stanley Robinson in Red Mars (1992): Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation
• Thomas Sowell: Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument
• Joe Klein: Issues are the last refuge of a scoundrel
• The Illustrated magazine of art, Volume 3: We have said that these convents are the the last refuge of Greek art
• New Scientist Dec18-25, 19975: Wetlands are the last refuge of that most persecuted creature, urban man
• Romantic Europe and the ghost of Italy, Joseph Luzzi: Corinne responds that art is the last refuge of a nation despoiled by foreigners of its arms and government
• George Russell: the story of an American composer, Duncan Heining: In some ways, the avant-garde is the last refuge of the untalented

Under news

• The Crikey health blog: marathon running is the last refuge of the scoundrel
• Mile High Report: But a Hail Mary pass is the last refuge of the desperate for a reason
• Sebastian Shakespeare: Twitter is the last refuge of the green-ink brigade
• Andrew Scharf: Dr. Johnson once quipped, “Nationalism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”.
• DrRck, in the comments: Boxing, though, is not the last refuge of an MMA fighter, any more than MMA is the last refuge of a boxer.
• Bruce Jackson (?): "Uncertainty is the last refuge of economists who can’t explain what is going on."
• Joe Nocera quoting Paul Kasriel: (“Uncertainty,” Kasriel told me, “is the last refuge of economists who can’t explain what is going on.”)
• Lydia Miljan: "I know saying that is the last refuge of the meek."
• Adam Gartrell quoting Robert Jeremenko: Harmonisation is the last refuge of scoundrels
• Jim Carroll: [box sets and deluxe editions] are the last refuge of the record label scoundrels
• Paul Ryan: Fear and demagoguery are the last refuge of an intellectually bankrupt party
• Robert Bryce: "Green jobs" are the last refuge of the subsidy seekers.

Zombie target practice

Wherein found here

A scene from The Wire

Wherein I've never seen The Wire though I hear it's good

Because Gandalf has spent the last 30 years wandering Middle Earth stoned out of his gourd

Wherein let me check the Silmarillion for the appropriate synonym for bogart

No yen or Kongbucks!

Wherein a few examples of the new economy from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash

Hyperinflation

Y.T. bargaining with the metacops

"Tell you what," the second one says. "You pay us a trillion bucks and
we'll take you to a Hoosegow. Then you can bargain with them."

"Half a trillion," Y.T. says.

"Seven hundred and fifty billion," the MetaCop says. "Final. Shit, you're wearing cuffs, you can't be bargaining with us."

Y.T. unzips a pocket on the thigh of her coverall, pulls out the card with her clean hand, runs it through a slot on the back of the front seat, puts it back in her pocket.

U.S. government office regulations

5) Cash pool donations, as with all monetary transactions within the
U.S. Government, must use official U.S. currency - no yen or Kongbucks!

Naturally, this will lead to a bulk problem if people try to use the donation bucket as a dumping ground for bundles of old billion- and trillion-dollar bills. The Buildings and Grounds people are worried about waste-disposal problems and the potential fire hazard that may ensue iflarge piles of billions and trillions begin to mount up. Therefore, a key feature of the new regulation is that the donation bucket must be emptied every day - more often if an excessive build-up situation is seen to develop.

In this vein, the B & G people would also like me to point out that many of you who have excess U.S. currency to get rid of have been trying to kill two birds with one stone by using old billions as bathroom tissue.

While creative, this approach has two drawbacks:
1) It clogs the plumbing, and
2) It constitutes defacement of U.S. currency, which is a federal crime.

DON'T DO IT.

That's a lot of Meeses

"There's money in the storage compartment in front of you," Ng says.
Y.T. opens the glove compartment, as anyone else would call it, and finds a thick bundle of worn-out, dirty, trillion-dollar bills. Ed Meeses.

"Jeez, couldn't you get any Gippers? This is kind of bulky."

"This is more the kind of thing that a Kourier would pay with."

"Because we're all pond scum, right?"

"No comment."

"What is this, a quadrillion dollars?"

"One-and-a-half quadrillion. Inflation, you know."

Solyndra Green is Obama

Wherein literally minutes were spent on this flexing all my mad grafx skilz

First sentences by Neal Stephenson

Wherein it is acknowledged that ranking and or judging books by a single sentence is a wholly stupid enterprise and thus these are arranged chronologically

But the Cobweb sentence would be my favorite.

The Big U, 1984

The Go Big Red Fan was John Wesley Fenrick's, and when ventilating his System it throbbed and crept along the floor with a rhythmic chunka-chunka-chunk.

Zodiac, 1988

Roscommon came and laid waste to the garden an hour after dawn, about the time I usually get out of bed and he usually passes out on the shoulder of some freeway.

Snow Crash, 1992

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory.

Interface, 1994

William Anthony Cozzano's office was a scandal.

The Diamond Age, 1995

The bells of St. Mark's were ringing changes up on the mountain when Bud skated over to the mod parlor to upgrade his skull gun.

Cobweb, 1996

Clyde Banks was standing in line, in the early stages of hypothermia, when he first saw his future wife, Desiree Dhont, wrestle.

Prologue from Cryptonomicon, 1999

Two tires fly. Two wail.

A bamboo grove, all chopped down

From it, warring songs.

...is the best that Corporal Bobby Shaftoe can do on short notice--he's standing on the running board, gripping his Springfield with one hand and the rearview mirror with the other, so counting the syllables on his fingers is out of the question.

1st chapter from Cryptonomicon, 1999

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored.

In the beginning...was the command line, 1999

About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information-processing machines for use in the home.

Quicksilver, 2003

Enoch rounds the corner just as the executioner raises the noose above the woman's head.

The Confusion, 2004

He was not merely awakened, but detonated out of an uncommonly long and repetitive dream.

The System of the World, 2004

"Men half your age and double your weight have been slain on these wastes by Extremity of Cold," said the Earl of LostWithiel, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and Rider of the Forest and Chase of Dartmoor, to one of his two fellow-travelers.

Anathem, 2008

Do your neighbors burn one another alive?

Reamde, 2011

...to be added September 20, when Amazon delivers it. I read that if you do THE FACEBOOK, excerpts from the first chapter are available at The Neal Stephenson's THE FACEBOOK page. But by not doing THE FACEBOOK this isn't available to me. On THE TWITTER I requested help in accessing the first sentence and received no help. Based on this small, but completely accurate, sample size, I conclude that participating in social media is both annoying and pointless.

Abandonment issues

Wherein after sacred crows I pretty much ran out of ideas

• Abandon your sacred cows

• Abandon your scared cows

• Abandon your saccharin cows

• Abandon your sacred crows

• Abandon your sacred dhows

• abandon your family *
  

• abandon your long-term investment goals *
  

• abandon your good standards and common sense *
  

• abandon your previous style missteps *
  

• abandon your tea-party colleagues *
  

• abandon your regimen *
  

• abandon your pets *
  

• abandon your goal *
  

• abandon your Ministers and your Synods *
  

• Abandon your apprentice *
  

• abandon your comfort zone *

• abandon your poor Eugenia *
  

• Abandon your pomp, your banquets, and your costly entertainments *

• abandon your whaling *

• abandon your march toward freedom and free markets *
  

• Abandon your claim to any additional water *

• abandon your person to his lascivious embraces *

• abandon your scheme of marriage *

• Abandon your grief *

• Abandon ship

• Abandon hope all ye who enter here

Amy Winehouse -- 32 months

Wherein she could sing



Amy's first appearance on Nevermind the Buzzcocks aired on March 8, 2004. She's cute, funny, and personable. American comedian Rich Hall is one of her team mates and makes a few jokes about heroin addicts. Specifically about heroin addicts having nice hair.

Her next appearance aired November 16, 2006. Just 32 months later and Amy Winehouse is a big-haired, tatted up whack job. Thanks Rich.


Never Mind The Buzzcocks S14E10 (Part 1)



Never Mind The Buzzcocks S14E10 (Part 2) /


Never Mind The Buzzcocks S14E10 (Part 3)



Amy Winehouse on Never Mind The Buzzcocks S19E04 ~ Part 1


Amy Winehouse on Never Mind The Buzzcocks S19E04 ~ Part 2


Amy Winehouse on Never Mind The Buzzcocks S19E04 ~ Part 3

Body parts as band names

Wherein a short list


Heart

Elbow

Big Head Todd

Fishbone

Soft Cell

Lothar and the Hand People

Nine Inch Nails

The Violent Femurs

CoccStyx

Barbara Mandible

Toni Basal ganglia

The Replacement Hips

Iggy Hypophysis

The Nasal Brothers

The Rolling Kidney Stones

Wu Tang Clavicle

Emerson, Lake, and Palm

Gladiolus Knight and the Pips

Hall and Throats

Ulna and Oates

Cochlea Twins

The Ramonspubis

Vas Deferens Halen