This is … er … a lede:
Here’s a horrifying little story to kick off your weekend: A 16-year-old girl in Japan recently had a tumor surgically removed from her ovary — and when her doctors split it open, they found a tiny brain growing inside.
Or, you know, as the headline from Science of Us explained, “Doctors Found a Tiny Second Brain Growing Inside This Woman’s Tumor”.
Believe it or not, this one doesn’t actually go downhill from here. Adam pulls it out; it gets better―if, you know, better is a word used here to mean mildly less creepy.
Okay, that’s not fair. Considerably less creepy.
What? This is Star Wars we’re talking about, here.
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Image note: Kids ― Detail of Bug Martini by Adam Huber, 14 December 2015.
For the puns on the buns this one’s got no good runs for the big guns rockin’ in a title really idle for the teevee something something oh Jesus God why are you letting me carry on like this?
There isn’t a frame in this one that isn’t … well … okay, Uncle Sam Bug kicking bug-ass isn’t exactly creepy, but as we’re fond of saying around here, it all goes downhill from there.
Don’t blame Adam; make him famous.
The fourth panel is worth a Nerd Bug that doesn’t know how to keep his damn mouth shut, too. Really. All that and a bag o’shivers, too.
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Huber, Adam. “Have Buns – Will Travel”. Bug Martini. 24 August 2015.
Something about implications goes here.
When I was young, a distant relative explained why her three year-old daughter didn’t like Sesame Street―clowns frightened the child. It was the first time I’d ever heard of such a thing, but in later years a joke would emerge; it turns out the young lady was hardly alone in her fear of clowns.
This is not quite the same thing.
Still, though, Zach Weiner’s latest is actually kind of frightening.
Well, you know. If you stop and think about it.
How ’bout this? Don’t think about it.
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Weiner, Zach. “Pix”. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. 13 July 2015.
“It’s not often you see a wall full of glowing predators.”
Start your day the creepy way.
Sounds good. It rhymes. It’s not quite eight-thirty in the morning, and the coffee hasn’t kicked in, so silly rhymes work. Still, though, creepy is as creepy does, and it probably isn’t fair to call it creepy just because it’s a creeping, crawling, burrowing, predatory bit of nature that just happens to glow with a bioluminescence that allows us to see the internal organs lighting up.
Can we call that creepy? You know, without maligning nature? Then again, maybe we can blame Aaron Pomerantz of Tambopata Research Center. Really, what part of the idea of “a wall full of glowing predators” isn’t creepy?
Or maybe Gwen Pearson isn’t helping anything by her comparison:
The greenish worms are the larval form of a click beetle, and their glow seems to have one function: attracting prey. The larvae are more like a Tremors graboid than a Star Wars saarlac: hiding out in little tunnels with just their glowing head sticking out, their jaws are spread wide open. When a hapless insect is attracted to the light and blunders into their lair, the jaws snap shut. The glow seems to function only to attract prey, not for protection. In fact, once disturbed, the lights go out. Pomerantz said “they just sort of shut off once we pulled them out.”
To the one, trivia can be fun.
To the other, it is occasionally a bit unsettling that, well, right. I mean, somebody had to write it down.
Consider it this way: Todd Van Luling’s HuffPo article about “5 Plot Holes You Never Noticed In ‘Star Wars'” is, in its own way, kind of fascinating. Sure, it’s pedantically snobby, and presumes Star Wars viewers are complete morons, but it is not an endeavor without merit. The amount of work it takes to fill the column inches trying to make this sort of stuff sound intellectual complicated should not be understated.
Or perhaps that isn’t fair; those of us who have had the whole thirty-seven years to watch and dream about these films until we’re sick of them are accustomed to this sort of trivial addiction. You know, like that one kid we all knew who collected everything Star Wars, and then used his collection to pay for college. Oh, wait, actually that was kind of smart. Never mind.
But for the youngest generation, who arrived after the prequel trilogy, this stuff might be news. After all, they weren’t there to hear everyone grumbling about the lack of continuity between the two episode blocs as they walked back to their cars after the show.
Then again, in this economy, with a jobless recovery, who can blame a guy for taking what work he can get?
Again, that is probably unfair. But articles like these always recall a curious episode from over a decade ago, before CNN Headline News became the HLN monstrosity you find playing on the flatscreens in a bourgeois McDonald’s. Late autumn, 2003 or so. There’s a war on. The phrase, “I died a little inside”, had not yet risen to fashionable heights. Or maybe it had. A new young reporter gets his first big shot on the air, and he’s stuck doing a report on which sweaters will look best on your small dog during the Christmas season. Which, in turn, is enough to inspire a recollection of the old Wayne Cotter joke about masturbating a fish.α
We should probably take it easy on Van Luling. To the one, it’s a job. To the other, yeah, it’s also just a bit creepy. Flip a coin.
Our apologies, though, Mr. Van Luling. And, honestly? If you can explain to me why anyone in the Universe would wear their hair like Leia’s, that would be a piece of trivia worth more than a Claven on a barstool.β
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α What, you want trivia? Find that joke. It’s sublime.
β It’s called mixing metaphors, an exercise that, as this example shows, should be undertaken with great caution, and only under extremely necessary circumstances. Otherwise it ends up looking like that.
Van Luling, Todd. “5 Plot Holes You Never Noticed In ‘Star Wars'”. The Huffington Post. 21 October 2014.
Rep. Steve King (R-IA4) is confused … or else he’s just a dirty old man.
“When you’re in the private sector … with God-given rights that our founding fathers defined in the Declaration, you should be able to make your own decisions on what you do in that private business,” King told the Des Moines TV station WHO. The Arizona legislation sought to give business owners the right to refuse service to customers on the basis of the owners’ religious freedom.
“Although it’s clear in the civil rights section of the code that you can’t discriminate against people based upon—and I’m not sure I have the list right—race, creed, religion, color of skin,” King said, “there’s nothing mentioned in there on self-professed behavior, and that’s what they’re trying to protect: special rights for self-professed behavior.”
King explained that he doesn’t “know whether it’s a choice or not” but that homosexuality exists on “some type of continuum or curve”—although he doesn’t “know what that curve actually looks like” ….
…. “The one thing that I reference when I say ‘self-professed’ is how do you know who to discriminate against. They have to tell you,” King said. “And are they then setting up a case? Is this about bringing a grievance, or is it actually about a service that they’d like to have?”
Sexual orientation does not warrant constitutional protection because it cannot be “independently verified” and can be “willfully changed,” King contended. The Iowa lawmaker linked his opposition to LGBT anti-discrimination laws with his long-running suspicions of hate crime legislation, which he described as “punishing people for what you think went on in their head at the time they perpetuated a crime.”
(Ashtari)
Where to start? Okay, how about with verification, since that one’s pretty straightforward:
(1) Watch gay pornography.
(2) Can you tell the difference?
(3) Just how should we verify gayness?
I mean, come on. It’s long been a joke that the party of “small government” wants to forcibly insert itself into people’s bedrooms. After all, it’s not the size of the pen, but how it is used to legislate.
This Is 