Ragtag Giggagon

A scientist uploaded a photo of his wicker chair's pattern to Stanford University's Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy and claimed it was an atom. What happened next will likely cause the deaths of many billions. Paleoanthopologists had been conducting research into the age of a piece of anal bone that is thought to be an early modern human, the oldest fossil of its kind. The rectal area was found at a site in South Africa where there were other skeletal remains - thousands of them avian, and hundreds of them elephantine or mammoth-like. But there was only one piece of human remains - now known as the "Leakey Gickerbone". A mad scientist decided to prank the Stanford-based professors in the course of his research into world domination. Using the pretext of a discussion on a forum at Stanford's online encyclopedia, he uploaded a close-up shot of the seat of his wicker chair, alongside a paper claiming it to be a photo of an atom taken under ultra-high magnification,...

“We’re living in a time today where journalism is occurring in an environment of extraordinary threat. As official sources of information for the American citizen, the American voter, begin to dry up, confidential sources, people in government who know the reality of what’s going on, particularly when the actions of government start to go out of bounds, are critical now. This is America. When something goes wrong, don’t we want somebody to stand up and say something about it?” ~Edward Snowden, pre-Trump Trump has called Edward Snowden a traitor. Snowden once said: “Every decision I have made, I can defend.” I'm really confused. I know the president's only allegedly RAPED a few CHILDREN, or got babies to piss on his head or something, but you know the way they got Al Capone for tax evasion instead of -bootlegging, -murder, -extortion, etc? There are a lot of grey areas in the hypocrisy of this Trump chap and his team.  There's the standard politics that's par for the co...

Jamie Zakian's Ashby Holler, available at Amazon , features the intrigues and political machinations of a transport company that is a front for a criminal enterprise. In more than one sense, Ashby Holler's a lot like Game of Thrones transplanted to an American subculture. It seems at times as subtle, sex-filled and brutal. The equivalents of earning of stripes, gang-hazing, and rising up through the mob are here, just tweaked with a wonderful originality that has evaded this reviewer in the past. I have yet to see Sons of Anarchy, for instance, and if there are similar ideas in other entertainments, they've passed me by. Sasha Ashby is one of the younger members of this family-owned business, keen to become Sergeant-at-Arms. If she's to enforce order within this group, however, she has to overcome prejudice against those who know she got a severe facial beating a few years previously from one of the other employees/gang members. This bunch parties like the Irish, with d...

"I wouldn't leave the White House. Obama always leaves the White House."~Trump, pre-election, on one of the many occasions he criticised Barack Obama for taking too many vacations. How about Trump walks around the golf course instead of forcing the Secret Service to spend $60,000 on golf carts?   At Mar-o-lingo (or whatever it's called), the Secret Service has spent more than $34,100 on golf carts, according to CBS. That's many times more than what the Secret Service refused to pay for Colombian prostitutes under Obama. They should refuse to pay for golf-carts at resorts owned by Donald Trump, given that he's  1. the owner of the resorts at which he vacations. 2. has a reputation for refusing to pay for services he's already received.  It's like a karmic tax. Like the rest of us, Trump's getting very fat. He needs to do one of two things to lose some weight:  1. Start walking around these golf courses so that the Secret Service doesn't have to...

“I hope [the demonstrating Nazis] get the ham salad kicked out of them by a bunch of drag queens. Coz you know what a drag queen still is? A six foot four black man.” -Tina Fey on SNL The joke here has been parsed as offensive to people of colour because it plays into the notion that black men are a threat. But what if I suggested that that joke is offensive because it conflates the struggles of the transgender and the African-American communities? Can I say “struggles”? Are African-Americans more homophobic than society more broadly?  You hear it in the rap.  They tend to be more church- or mosque-going, as a group.  Many of them may regard homosexuality as a sin.  Some have spoken out of their distaste about such conflations, that the fight for marriage equality should not be equated with the civil rights fight of African Americans. And here’s Tina, implying that many tall black men dress up as women, or that the majority of drag queens are tall black men. Do the ...

So apparently they have just discovered some of the highest concentrations of volcanos in the world in Antarctica: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/12/scientists-discover-91-volcanos-antarctica It (sort of) explains how it's possible that the Ancients could have charted the region in mysterious maps on which Renaissance-era cartographers based some of their own very accurate maps of a snowless, iceless Earth-bottom. These maps are known to be reasonably accurate when modern scientists have actually checked where all the land is under the snow. These maps' existences have also been embraced by theorists who hold the view that the ancients travelled around the world before an Ice Age that wiped out civilisations - or perhaps one world civilisation that was more highly advanced than we give credit for. (Graham Hancock is one such writer.) In pop culture, they're what the original Alien Vs Predator plot hung on, but it crops up far less in DaVinciCode or Indiana Jones...

"I got a call from the head of the Boy Scouts saying it was the greatest speech that was ever made to them, and they were very thankful." - Trump The head of the Boy Scouts said he apologised for the political, partisan themes of the speech and that no phonecall took place. Sneaky Trump has now weeded out another treasonous body of pinko liberals! On North Korea, Trump recently said: "Things will happen to them like they never thought possible." Trump is going to use his secret plan to defeat ISIS on the North Koreans instead. (It's a suborbital genital-removing death-ray.) That. is. all.

Poetry Collection: For Those Left Behind by Seán Maguire, available at Amazon US and Amazon UK Seán's biography: Seán Maguire was born and raised in the north of Ireland. Seán lived through over thirty years of political conflict, euphemistically referred to as, ‘The Troubles’. During three decades of horrendous violence over 3,600 people were killed and over 50,000 were injured. It was a terrible time to be a child or a teenager, playing sports and street games often just yards from gun battles and riots. Seán had a brother murdered during the conflict along with several school friends and various acquaintances. The poems in this collection hold up a mirror to the human suffering experienced by everyone in the North of Ireland. Despite the bombings and shootings people went about normal everyday life. This violent landscape provides the backdrop to the melancholy, and expressive imagery evident in Seán’s poems. Seán has been writing poetry, song lyrics, short stories and non-fict...