Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Hat tip to Jose Guardia.

When I was a kid, I used to imagine that digging a tunnel from my backyard in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania would take me to China, or maybe Australia. Good thing I never pursued the project. Now that I have a tool to identify where I’d be coming out, I see that I would have wound up all wet and far out to sea in the Indian Ocean.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

from Copyranter.

Here’s link to Wikipedia’s list of Number 1 singles by year to start you off.

My result was: Pee Wee Hunt’s 12th Street Rag. Could have been worse.

Dave Barry bids an unfond farewell to a year that was not much fun for most Americans.

It was the kind of year that made a person look back fondly on the gulf oil spill.

Granted, the oil spill was bad. But it did not result in a high-decibel, weeks-long national conversation about a bulge in a congressman’s underpants. Which is exactly what we had in the Festival of Sleaze that was 2011. Remember? There were days when you could not escape The Bulge. At dinnertime, parents of young children had to be constantly ready to hurl themselves in front of their TV screens, for fear that it would suddenly appear on the news in high definition. For a brief (Har!) period, The Bulge was more famous than Justin Bieber.

And when, at last, we were done with The Bulge, and we were able to turn our attention to the presidential election, and the important issues facing us, as a nation, in these troubled times, it turned out that the main issue, to judge by quantity of press coverage, was: groping.

So finally, repelled by the drainage ditch that our political system has become, we turned for escape to an institution that represents all that is pure and wholesome and decent in America today: college football.

That was when we started to have fond memories of the oil spill.

I’m not saying that the entire year was ruined by sleaze. It was also ruined by other bad things. This was a year in which journalism was pretty much completely replaced by tweeting. It was a year in which a significant earthquake struck Washington, yet failed to destroy a single federal agency. It was a year in which the nation was subjected to a seemingly endless barrage of highly publicized pronouncements from Charlie Sheen, a man who, where you have a central nervous system, has a Magic 8-Ball. This was a year in which the cast members of “Jersey Shore” went to Italy and then — in an inexcusable lapse of border security — were allowed to return.

But all of these developments, unfortunate as they were, would not by themselves have made 2011 truly awful. What made it truly awful was the economy, which, for what felt like the 17th straight year, continued to stagger around like a zombie on crack. Nothing seemed to help. President Obama, whose instinctive reaction to pretty much everything that happens, including sunrise, is to deliver a nationally televised address, delivered numerous nationally televised addresses on the economy, but somehow these did not do the trick. Neither did the approximately 37 million words emitted by the approximately 249 Republican-presidential-contender televised debates, out of which the single most memorable statement made was, quote: “Oops.”

As the year wore on, frustration finally boiled over in the form of the Occupy Various Random Spaces movement, wherein people who were sick and tired of a lot of stuff finally got off their butts and started working for meaningful change via direct action in the form of sitting around and forming multiple committees and drumming and not directly issuing any specific demands but definitely having a lot of strongly held views for and against a wide variety of things. Incredibly, even this did not bring about meaningful change. The economy remained wretched, especially unemployment, which got so bad that many Americans gave up even trying to work. Congress, for example. ...

Complete article.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Genus Pogona.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Hat tip to Tiomoid of Angle.

It’s vital that public schools teach Evolution. Otherwise, children might grow up unable to follow the plotline of this video.

Hat tip to Colossal Art & Design.

Kotaku:

One of the world’s largest and most respected humanitarian groups in the world is investigating whether the Geneva and Hague conventions should be applied to the fictional recreation of war in video games.

If they agree those standards should be applied, the International Committee of the Red Cross says they may ask developers to adhere to the rules themselves or “encourage” governments to adopt laws to regulate the video game industry.

The International Committee of the Red Cross is mandated under the Geneva Conventions to protect the victims of international and internal armed conflicts. That includes war wounded, prisoners, refugees, civilians, and other non-combatants. The question they debated this week is whether their mandate should be extended to the virtual victims of video game wars.

During this week’s 31st International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent in Geneva, Switzerland, members of the committee held a side event to discuss the influence video games have on public perception and action.

“While the Movement works vigorously to promote international humanitarian law worldwide, there is also an audience of approximately 600 million gamers who may be virtually violating IHL,” according to the event’s description. “Exactly how video games influence individuals is a hotly debated topic, but for the first time, Movement partners discussed our role and responsibility to take action against violations of IHL in video games. In a side event, participants were asked: ‘What should we do, and what is the most effective method?’

“While National Societies shared their experiences and opinions, there is clearly no simple answer. There is, however, an overall consensus and motivation to take action.”

The International Red Cross made this video to document war crimes against imaginary electronic entities (IEEs).

It makes perfect sense. If Geneva Convention protections can be extended on a completely non-reciprocal basis to terrorists and illegal combatants who routinely violate those conventions and all other laws and customs of war by a simple fiat and decree expressive of an international, entirely non-democratic and unrepresentative, consensus of self-appointed elite holier-than-thous, why shouldn’t entirely fictive and imaginary electronic entities not be entitled to receive the same kinds of rights and immunities from the same sources on the basis of similar reasoning and procedures?

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Via Steve Bodio.

Via Maggie Koerth-Baker.

Hat tip to Rafal Heydel-Mankoo.

Too sexy for Puritanical Australia & USA predicts the Sydney Morning Herald. Nonsense.

Background.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

From Buzz Feed: “30 Ways (some facetious) That the World Used to be Cooler.”

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

Hat tip to Ben Slotznick.

Hat tip to Ben Slotznick.

Dressing like a Preppy has been a successful marketing approach in men’s clothing for several decades, but offering to allow you to smell like a Preppy? (Those of us who once frequented locker rooms in the Yale gymnasium are shaking our heads at this one.)

Perhaps, this company has finally figured out how to compound the ultimate scent effective in the seduction of the opposite sex: the pure, distilled essential aroma of old money.

Hat tip to Tim of Angle.

Ivy Style

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The failed recovery is obviously our fault, not this administration’s. We all know that Barack Obama is a higher being, who could have delivered Hope and Change; who could have “ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth;” who could have made the rise of the oceans begin to slow and the earth begin to heal; if only we had been worthy of his magnificent leadership.

These considerations cause Frank Fleming to engage in some serious introspection.

Obama was elected on the promise of hope and change; he was going to make everything better by fixing the economy, ending all wars, and making every rainbow a double rainbow. As smart and capable as we all knew he was, he should have succeeded beyond our wildest imaginations. But instead, we’re even worse off than before — I don’t remember the last time I even saw a single rainbow. The only explanation is that somehow we’ve angered Obama and caused him to turn against us. It’s just that I’m not sure how.

Now, we could go to a town hall and ask Obama, “What have we done to make you want to destroy this country?” I think that is a horrible idea, though, as Obama will only glare at us and become even angrier. Obviously what we’ve done is extremely bad based on the way Obama is treating us, and it would only be worse if he knew we were ignorant of our exact slight against him.

We just need to accept the fact that we’re a bad country, and that’s why Obama is not following through on the hope and change he promised. So now what we need to do is try to figure out how to become a better country so Obama will like us and decide that he doesn’t need to destroy us. So I’ve done my best to study Obama and figure out some ideas to make us a country he considers worth saving.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Piv.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.