Category: [Idiots]

Product placement

I’ve seen a few people commenting on this:

…a tweet from the US Department of Homeland Security marking the occasion of Easter with a picture of whatisname on the cross and the text from Luke 23:46 with a crucifix above it. And there is indeed much that could be said about this, particularly the inappropriateness of a US government department ignoring the whole church & state separation thing to the fact that the current regime likely wouldn’t even let their putative saviour into the US to begin with, but it was cartoonist Tom Tomorrow who pointed out on Bluesky the most… interesting thing about it; namely, the way the crucifix above the text was placed right over the Lord’s crotch. And… yeah, there it be. I don’t really know what else to say about it.

Tumblr: still partying like it’s 2018

I’ve been maintaining a blog on Tumblr in some form or other since 2010 as a bit of a side thing. The current version is almost as old as this thing, cos Tumblr in their usual infinite wisdom decided the previous one must be destroyed for some reason or other. Accordingly, I haven’t posted anything to it myself, only reposts of other people’s stuff. Let other people take the risk.

And I thought Tumblr had started being a bit more reasonable about adult content; after the infamous (and not altogether effective) porn ban of late 2018, I thought it was making at least some progress by introducing “mature content” tags that users could apply themselves. Not the best solution, but better than outlawing the stuff entirely, which was what they tried in 2018…

Unfortunately, as I’ve seen tonight, Tumblr seems to have decided to go back to 2018 and start applying those tags themselves according to their own judgement… meaning that I’ve now got a bunch of stuff tagged as “potentially mature” and, as in 2018, at least a certain amount of that is actually bugger all of the sort… but I’m more bothered by the things they’ve flagged as definitely “mature”, cos they’ve apparently gone beyond what they did in 2018; back then they replaced the dirty dirty smut with a note that the post had contained dirty dirty smut but had now been hidden to protect everyone (including the blog owner), but now it looks like they’re not even doing that… not only do you have no option to request a review, the content is completely hidden now. Not even a sign that it was there at all. The odd thing is, those things are still visible in the mass post editor, but when I click on them from there, Tumblr just gives me the “not found” page.

So, not for the first time, I’m querying the whole point of me being on Tumblr; feels like a slightly pointless enterprise not just because I’ve got this thing now, but because the whole point of me making it a reblog-only thing was so I wouldn’t be affected again by Tumblr’s decisions about this stuff and, well, here I am affected anyway. I just liked the idea of having a corner of the Internet that people who actually know me in real life don’t know about (apart from one, I think). Mind you, no one who actually knows me in real life ever remarks to me about anything I post here, either, so I’ve kind of got that obscure corner anyway…

Loaves and fishes…?

Another book I spotted online. I don’t know what we can say about the diet of someone who may or may not have even existed in the first place, but, even if we assume that he did, Jesus’ diet didn’t make him, you know, live longer… unless, of course, you accept that he is still alive in heaven and/or has always existed as the second person of God, in which case(s) I don’t think his diet has had much to do with his longevity. And he certainly wouldn’t have been eating those tomatoes on the cover, given they didn’t make it to the middle east until the 1800s…

Possibly not

Found on Tumblr:

Jeane Dixon was a psychic who became notable for predicting the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1956, in that she predicted the Democrat candidate would win the 1960 election but be murdered in his first term. Which, of course, is what happened, except that at some point before that election Jeane changed her mind and said Richard Nixon would win. Whoops. Apparently several years later, when Nixon finally did become president, she further predicted Nixon would survive the Watergate scandal and stage a great comeback. Whoops again.

Dixon apparently had a ton of similarly unsuccessful forecasts; her Wiki entry notes that she was right about Robert Kennedy’s assassination (wish she could’ve warned us about his worthless son, THAT would’ve been useful), but also there’s no source given for that story so it could be about as believable as her prediction that world war 3 would kick off in 1958. I don’t know whose “rise” she was predicting in the above book, apparently published in 1975, but history suggests she was wrong there too, cos 1999 was not a notably peaceful year (but there was another Kennedy death). She went on to be one of Nancy Reagan’s astrologers in the 80s; I can only assume Nancy was unaware of Jeane’s track record…

The queen is deaf

Morrissey cancels Valencia concert after being left in ‘catatonic state’ by city noise

British singer Morrissey has cancelled a concert in Valencia after being left sleep-deprived during the city’s notoriously noisy Las Fallas festival.
A statement on his website said: “Having travelled for two days by road, Morrissey reached the hotel in Valencia late on Wednesday. Any form of sleep or rest throughout the night was impossible due to festival noise/loud techno singing/megaphone announcements.”
The statement went on to say that “this experience has left Morrissey in a catatonic state”, and that he would not be performing.
Morrissey is due to perform in two other Spanish cities, Zaragoza and Seville, on 14 and 16 March respectively.
His team insisted that the Valencia concert hadn’t been cancelled but that “circumstances made it impossible to perform”. The singer produced recordings of the noise to justify the decision. The cheapest tickets for tonight’s scheduled show at Valencia’s Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia cost €103 (£88).
In a later communique, Morrissey wrote that his hotel was an “indescribable hell. It will take me one year to recover. And that is an understatement.”

Well if he’s going to need that much time to get over this attack of the vapours, that doesn’t bode well for those other two Spanish shows, does it? As the article notes, he’s booked 21 shows to promote this new album of his and he’s already cancelled five and postponed a sixth, which I’m sure will be properly called off in due course. Never change, Steven Patrick…

Well done Angus, etc.

Via the estimable Terry Sedgwick on FB:

So that’s two weirdly unsurprising things happened in local politics this week: the Coalition reunited again and Sussan Ley got the arse as Liberal leader. And this apparently leaves the Coalition with a potentially complicated parting gift:

[Ley] intends to resign in coming weeks, sparking a by-election in her massive western New South Wales electorate.
It could be a very interesting and complicated election.
Having served a few weeks longer than Alexander Downer did in 1994-95, and a couple of weeks less than Brendan Nelson after the defeat of the Howard government in 2007, Ley’s leadership is the second-shortest of any federal Liberal leader.
But her tenure as the member for Farrer is the second-longest in the seat’s history.
The seat was held by former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer, a National, until his retirement in 2001.

This could be a headache on two fronts, one being the resurgence of One Nation who are going to want the seat, and the other being the Coalition’s own rules… under which, the sitting member in a Coalition-held seat isn’t challenged by the other side at election time, if the sitting member is Liberals then the Nationals don’t put up a candidate, and vice versa. But when there’s a by-election and there is no sitting member, it’s fair game for both sides… and given they’ve both only just patched up their differences, they probably don’t need this sort of potential tension. Ley has been saying things about clearing the way for Angus Taylor by not sticking around to undermine him, but I feel this is more like leaving a big steaming shit on his doorstep out of spite…

As for Angus Taylor himself…

…THIS is still what he’s best known for all these years, i.e. providing Australia with one of the great social media self-owns. But what has he done otherwise that was actually, you know, useful instead of just inadvertently comedic? I mean, he lost to Sussan Ley at the Liberal leadership contest after the last election; he was clearly considered so piss-poor that the Libs would rather vote for a woman of all things. Today Malcolm Turnbull was calling him the best-qualified idiot the party had ever met. I can’t believe the party couldn’t find a better option; obviously Sussan’s time was up (and I’m kind of impressed they let a woman run them for so long anyway), but was no one else available? This dickhead is the best they can do? How does Dave Shittleproud feel? Eh, whatever. As long as people (especially Labor) keep using that gift of a Facebook fuck-up against him while he’s there, cos that’s what matters most of all…

Who rules over you, etc

“THEIR head of state”? Oh Albo. What an interesting phrase, and an unfortunate one too. I can see those words being repeated throught racist and antisemitic propaganda of the sort spread by The Noticer (and, as the article notes, further spread by certain far-right characters in our so-called government), questioning whether Australian Jews place their loyalties with Israel ahead of Australia… cos if I, er, noticed the potential implications of that choice of words, I’ve no doubt the cunt behind that “news” site did so too. Not exactly what our Jewish friends need right now.

Insert Carl McCoy here

On a lighter note, Threads (which I still check out most days) has turned particularly silly in the last few hours…

So, the weather in the US has been quite foul lately, even for this time of year, and someone somewhere was inspired to develop the idea that the US “government” has engineered the weather to stop the Biblical Leviathan from awaking and to drive it back into its frozen slumber. This is FUCKING MAGNIFICENT, especially cos no one seems to know how it started nor whether (nearly wrote that as “weather” HO HO) the people who started it  mean it or not. A lot of people do seem to be invoking it sarcastically as a meme, but the funnier and sadder responses come from people not getting the joke (if it is one), e.g.:

Well, in spite of my own education (Matraville Primary 1980-86, Sydney Boys High School 1987-92, University of NSW 1993-97, and two TAFE courses 2001-03), I’ve never seen satellite imagery off the tip of Argentina/Chile before because there’s never been any reason why I SHOULD have done. I generally don’t NEED satellite imagery of anywhere, let alone the arse of South America, my interests and activities generally don’t require that sort of thing. I imagine MOST people are in a similar position to me, in that they don’t take a regular active interest in this sort of thing, but when someone shows them a cool picture like this they’ll say “oh, that’s a cool picture”, they’ll acknowledge it positively despite that… and then some prat comes up and screams at them for not being more interested in science.

Then there’s Paula here:

Here’s something else she seems to be serious about:

I think I’ll pass on that offer, thanks. At least some people are retaining their senses of irony:

And this is hard to argue with too:

As a respite from the horrors, this whole Leviathan thing certainly has been one. And, as a final note, this is also hard to argue with: