A takeoff of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Modern Major General” by the student choir at Simon Fraser University.

xkcd does the lyrics.

Via George Takei.

Humorist Dave Barry gives us a month-by-month rundown of the year currently slinking like a yellow dog toward its well-deserved end.

The Good News: Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer did not successfully revive their loathsome political careers. The Bad News: New York City instead elected a Stalinist mayor, who is scheduled, it was recently reported, to be sworn in by Bill Clinton. To which news, Christopher Buckley responded: “Bill Clinton is swearing in De Blasio? On what, a stack of Playboys?”

October

… the federal government, in an unthinkable development that we cannot even think about, partially shuts down. The result is a catastrophe of near-sequester proportions. Within hours wolves are roaming the streets of major U.S. cities, and bacteria the size of mature salmon are openly cavorting in the nation’s water supply. In the Midwest, thousands of cows, no longer supervised by the Department of Agriculture, spontaneously explode. Yellowstone National Park — ALL of it — is stolen. In some areas gravity stops working altogether, forcing people to tie themselves to trees so they won’t float away. With the nation virtually defenseless, the Bermudan army invades the East Coast, within hours capturing Delaware and most of New Jersey.

By day 17, the situation has become so dire that Congress, resorting to desperate measures, decides to actually do something. It passes, and the president signs, a law raising the debt ceiling, thereby ensuring that the federal government can continue spending spectacular quantities of money that it does not have until the next major totally unforeseeable government financial crisis, scheduled for February 2014.

Things do not go nearly as smoothly with the rollout of Obamacare , which turns out to have a lot of problems despite being conceived of by super-smart people with extensive experience in the field of being former student council presidents.

More here.

Hat tip to Star Belsen.

Hat tip to Jacqueline Osterrieth.

Kelly MacLean offers a cynic’s description of the Whole Foods shopping experience.

Whole Foods’ clientele are all about mindfulness and compassion… until they get to the parking lot. Then it’s war. As I pull up this morning, I see a pregnant lady on the crosswalk holding a baby and groceries. This driver swerves around her and honks. As he speeds off I catch his bumper sticker which says ‘NAMASTE’. Poor lady didn’t even hear him approaching because he was driving a Prius. He crept up on her like a panther.

As the great, sliding glass doors part I am immediately smacked in the face by a wall of cool, moist air that smells of strawberries and orchids. I leave behind the concrete jungle and enter a cornucopia of organic bliss; the land of hemp milk and honey. Seriously, think about Heaven and then think about Whole Foods; they’re basically the same. …

I move on to the next isle and ask the nearest Whole Foods clerk for help. He’s wearing a visor inside and as if that weren’t douchey enough, it has one word on it in all caps. Yup, NAMASTE. I ask him where I can find whole wheat bread. He chuckles at me “Oh, we keep the poison in aisle 7.” Based solely on the attitudes of people sporting namaste paraphernalia today, I’d think it was Sanskrit for “go fuck yourself.” …

I grab a couple of loaves of poison, and head to checkout. The fact that I’m at Whole Foods on a Sunday finally sinks in when I join the end of the line…halfway down the dog food aisle. I suddenly realize that I’m dying to get out of this store. Maybe it’s the lonely feeling of being a carnivore in a sea of vegans, or the newfound knowledge that some people’s dogs eat better than I do, but mostly I think it’s the fact that Yani has been playing literally this entire time. Like sensory deprivation, listening to Yani seems harmless at first, enjoyable even. But two hours in, you’ll chew your own ear off to make it stop.

A thousand minutes later, I get to the cashier. She is 95 percent beautiful. “Have you brought your reusable bags?” Fuck. No, they are at home with their 2 dozen once-used friends. She rings up my meat, alcohol, gluten and a wrapper from the chocolate bar I ate in line, with thinly veiled alarm. She scans my ladies acidophilus, gives me a pitying frown and whispers, “Ya know, if you wanna get rid of your Candida, you should stop feeding it.” She rings me up for $313. I resist the urge to unwrap and swallow whole another $6 truffle in protest. Barely. Instead, I reach for my wallet, flash her a quiet smile and say, “Namaste.”

I used to shop at Whole Foods in Foster City and in Menlo Park.

I’d always marvel at how a loaf of bread, a bag of apples, and a piece of meat somehow mysteriously invariably added up to over $200 at the Whole Foods register, while at my next stop, Trader Joe’s, I’d have trouble racking up a total of a hundred dollars even with two cases of Two Buck Chuck in my shopping cart.

From Hugging the Horse via
Ratak Monodosico.

Hat tip to Ratak Monodosico.

Uhlan, when he was an adolescent, used to grow some extra fur in the wintertime. Here he is, in our backyard in Bluemont, Virginia with a piece of a groundhog which had mysteriously recently come to a bad end.

The Russian zoologist who bred our tazy recently was advertising a few pups from a new litter, and one of the European correspondents on the saluki discussion list asked: “What are Khazak tazys like? Are they similar in temperament to Persian tazys?”

These sighthounds bred from dogs recently imported from Central Asia are referred to in enthusiast circles as:”Country of Origin” dogs. COO dogs are particularly admired by connoisseurs because they are thought to fully retain their natural hunting instincts. Another way of putting it would be to say: they remain relatively feral. Consequently, training them and persuading them to refrain from anti-social behavior (or hellish crime) takes a certain amount of effort.

I was moved to respond to that European correspondent’s question by posting a link to the video below, which (on the basis of knowing Uhlan) I said “pretty accurately describes Kazakh tazys’ temperament and behavior.”

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Steve Bodio actually responded before I had even written and uploaded this post.

Brits do it so well.

Hat tip to Steve Bodio.