Category Archives: Humor

Tortoise Ranching In The Old West

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A brief history:

Back in the old West a lot of the toughest codgers tried tortoise ranching, but it died out because it took years to drive the herds up to Kansas City or Chicago. On a good day they might cover a mile and a half, but most days they could only drive them about a mile because a herd has to graze. There was no use bringing skinny turtles to market. In frontier towns along the drive it was a always big week when the boys brought a herd through, and people would grab their kids out of the streets in case there was a stampede as the torts got a whiff of the salad bar at the Golden Corral and Saloon.

A lot of people don’t realize it, but Westerners learned to say little and talk slowly so they didn’t run out of things to say during the big tortoise drives. Now that’s part of our Western culture. But then came the barbed wire fences, and the last of the free-grazing tortoise drives stopped because the tortoises didn’t give a s**t about the barbed wire, but the cowboys would have to carry their beer coolers and lawn chairs the long way round and try to catch back up to the stock, and that was just too much work for the world’s laziest f**king ranchers.

The only ones left are the ones who run mixed herds of cattle and tortoises, like Cliven Bundy’s family. If the BLM wins, an historic and traditional American way of life will come to a final, bitter end, and this nation will close a fascinating chapter of its history.

I did not know that.

President Romney’s Lawlessness

The Democrats and the media bash him for it:

Schumer’s colleague, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, described the Romney administration’s behavior as “the nuclear option.” “This abuse of executive discretion is beyond the pale,” Reid fumed. “I’m a lawyer, I know.” (For more information on the American system of government please take a look at Ezra Klein’s comprehensive explanatory primer, “Our Constitution in Exile: Why Everything President Romney Does Is Illegal,” over at VoxProg. Alternatively, consult Greg Sargent’s excellent Washington Post column, “Article I: A Love Story,” published January 20th, 2013.)

Others went further. “It’s. The. Law,” animated Democratic spokesman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz told reporters at a hastily assembled press conference in Miami, barking out each monosyllable and pounding her fist on her desk. “The terrorist, anarchist, hostage-taking neo-confederates in the Republican Party tried for years to delay this in the legislature and now, simply because they have a Senate they dislike, they are trying to do so with the executive branch. It’s a disgrace to the memory of our Founding Persons and it will not stand.”

Wasserman-Shultz’s claim of impropriety is a strong one, and it echoes Democratic complaints from last June, when President Romney delayed the income tax by two years to allow compliance deadlines to be met and to make sure that he was standing up for the middle class. George Washington University law professor and frequent critic of executive power, Jonathan Turley, broke through tears to tell National Review Online that the development was “merely the latest in an endless series of corruptions, and another devastating step on the road to monarchy.” “D’you know what?” Turley added, his voice cracking. “I’m thinking of moving to Cyprus.”

Despite the criticism, Republican strategists remained sanguine. “What you’re seeing here is the Democratic Party reaping the whirlwind,” a GOP operative explained on condition of anonymity. “This is the train that the last guy set in motion — and he was cheered on by politicians and journalists alike. Can they really complain now our guy has the reins? I think not.”

Those damned Republicans, who don’t give a damn about the law or the Constitution.

Eco-Warriors Frozen In Global Warming

Mark Steyn’s take on the intrepid explorers:

…you’d have to have a heart as cold and unmovable as Commonwealth Bay ice not to be howling with laughter at the exquisite symbolic perfection of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition ‘stuck in our own experiment’, as they put it. I confess I was hoping it might all drag on a bit longer and the cultists of the ecopalypse would find themselves drawing straws as to which of their number would be first on the roasting spit. On Douglas Mawson’s original voyage, he and his surviving comrade wound up having to eat their dogs. I’m not sure there were any on this expedition, so they’d probably have to make do with the Guardian reporters. Forced to wait a year to be rescued, Sir Douglas later recalled, ‘Several of my toes commenced to blacken and fester near the tips.’ Now there’s a man who’s serious about reducing his footprint.

But alas, eating one’s shipmates and watching one’s extremities drop off one by one is not a part of today’s high-end eco-doom tourism. Instead, the ice-locked warmists uploaded chipper selfies to YouTube, as well as a self-composed New Year singalong of such hearty un-self-awareness that it enraged even such party-line climate alarmists as Andrew Revkin, the plonkingly earnest enviro-blogger of the New York Times. A mere six weeks ago, pumping out the usual boosterism, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that, had Captain Scott picked his team as carefully as Professor Chris Turney, he would have survived. Sadly, we’ll never know — although I’ll bet Captain Oates would have been doing his ‘I am going out. I may be some time’ line about eight bars into that New Year number.

Unlike Scott, Amundsen and Mawson, Professor Turney took his wife and kids along for the ride. And his scientists were outnumbered by wealthy tourists paying top dollar for the privilege of cruising the end of the world. In today’s niche-market travel industry, the Antarctic is a veritable Club Dread for upscale ecopalyptics: think globally, cruise icily. The year before the Akademik Shokalskiy set sail, as part of Al Gore’s ‘Living On Thin Ice’ campaign (please, no tittering; it’s so puerile; every professor of climatology knows that the thickest ice ever is a clear sign of thin ice, because as the oceans warm, glaciers break off the Himalayas and are carried by El Ninja down the Gore Stream past the Cape of Good Horn where they merge into the melting ice sheet, named after the awareness-raising rapper Ice Sheet…

There’s more.

V8

So, it wasn’t just me:

I found the stuff revolting, because it was like drinking cold tomato soup.

…It had great brand awareness when I was growing up, thanks to the constant barrage of ads featuring people who had, for some reason, forgotten to avail themselves of a V8, and remonstrated themselves by slamming their palms into their foreheads.

Not even this made me want some.

Me, neither.

Happy New Year

And good riddance to 2013. Let’s hope that it won’t have turned out to be an average year — worse than the one before, better than the coming one.

One good thing about it, though. It’s the year that defiance of the State became cool.

[Update a while later, watching a rerun of the Rose Parade]

That was the year that was — Dave Barry summarizes the suckitude of the past twelve months. We laugh so we don’t cry.

Stuck In The Non-Existent Ice

As I noted on Twitter yesterday, you’d have to have a heart of stone to not laugh out loud at this.

Also:

As a commenter there notes, irony, like revenge, is a dish best served cold. Very cold.