The classic opera, "Siegfried And Roy", written by Honus "Willie" Wagner. The scene in which Roy is mauled by a Valkyrie wearing the traditional tiger-striped breastplate has been satirized so many times few people have ever seen the original.

The Total Perspective Vortex, Version 1.0. Click Here.

So, if someone were to assassinate a major-party nominee prior to the election (and he/she wasn't the sitting President), what happens?

Does the VP nominee automatically get the Presidential nomination, or does it go to whoever got the second-most delegates? If there's no formal policy in place for the party, who decides?

Would the election be delayed, and would any debate over if it should be become a transparently facile set of arguments where supporters of the sitting President decree any such change would be "an unprecedented assault on the rule of law and a shameless attempt to exploit a tragedy for partisan gain" and supporters of the challenger's party claim that "it is necessary to preserve democracy and give the people the chance to make a fair choice for their leader"?

(OK, that last question is rhetorical. Like, duh. Of course it would. And if it happened two elections in a row, with the parties' roles reversed, the exact same people who made one argument would make the other and squeal "FALSE EQUIVALENCY!!!" at the top of their partisan lungs if anyone tried to point out the hypocrisy. But that's another thread.)

So, Bic has released pens "for her", as using manly he-man pens is clearly too much for weak, delicate, womenfolk. They're well-reviewed, too... just read the link! (PS: That was sarcasm. As are all of the reviews.)

Perhaps the issue is the spin. Instead of appealing to outdated 1950s stereotypes, they should modernize their marketing. You know. "Wymmyn! Liberate yourselves from the phallocentric pen design imposed on you by the patriarchy!" The ink would be 100% organic, harvested non-fatally from squids who[1] are kept in free-range ocean pens, and of course it wouldn't be plastic. You'd need to make the body of the pen from fair-trade, sustainable, wood harvested by unionized workers drawn from an ethnically and culturally diverse pool of applicants. It would cost 39.99, of course, but that's a small price to pay to undermine the capitalist oligarchical hegemony.

[1]Or is it "squids WHICH are kept"?

Skeumorph.

It is awesome to learn there's a word for a concept you have always known (the concept), but that you didn't know there was a word for. It's even more awesome to find out there's still words I can learn.

So, some guy who wants to take the Bar exam is described as "exhibiting an 'almost total lack of credibility and trustworthiness' as well as 'a continuing ability and willingness to engage in unlawful behaviour.'" I can see their point. He hardly needs to take the Bar, he's already qualified to be a lawyer.

Everyone ought to know what Rule 34 is by now, and, if you don't, don't try to find out. Trust me. You'll be happier.

So, having seen everything from Transformers to Totoro R34'd (and by "seen", I mean, "accidentally encountered and then ran screaming for the eye bleach", not "deliberately sought out"), I thought I'd seen it all. Then I read this. Romney/Ryan slashfic. (The main article is mostly SFW, but there's links to things that, presumably, are NSFW. I didn't follow them to check.)

Let's just say one excerpt includes "pony play", and I don't mean "Then Mitt showed off his favorite, a mint in box G1 Minty. 'I had to outsource 5,000 workers to afford to buy this', he chuckled."

How inaccurate and ridiculous does your book on how Thomas "I Wrote My Own Bible, Cutting Out The Stupid Bits" Jefferson was actually a mainstream Christian have to be for the Discovery Institute to disown it? Pretty darn.

Some of Jefferson's choicer comments on the issue of religion, and if America was intended to be a "a Christian nation".

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government."

"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."

"Priests...dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the duperies on which they live."

It's interesting that some people see a need to justify their politics not on making an argument that we'd all be healthier, happier, better off, etc, if they were followed, based on objective observations of reality, but on trying to prove that someone else who lived and died centuries ago believed something, and that's all we need.

A good idea is not good because of who said it, but because it can be shown to be good. Jefferson's ideas are worth following not because they were said by Jefferson, but because they have consistently shown themselves to be correct in the real world. Jefferson also held many ideas now shown to be incorrect -- from accepting slavery to believing there were mammoths lurking in the unexplored Americas. His good ideas are not invalidated because he also had bad ideas, and his bad ideas are not validated because he also had good ideas. Each idea has to be judged on its own merits as an idea, and not judged based on who said it or what other ideas they had.

(Hitler thought smoking was unhealthy. Therefore, smoking is healthy.)

Off to.