Excuse me, I'm off to sack Rome

OldAFSarge finds a fun site.  It clearly has an AI back end because there's no way I'm this good looking.

Oh, and how do we get to the bottom of who sacked Rome?  Better get a 1930s Gumshoe:

Yeah, I did The Queen Of The World as the Queen of the World.  And as a mermaid.  It's awesome.

Highly recommended.

Ten years ago, but this time funny

This always made me laugh.  You probably want to click through to the Czar of Muscovy's old post to see what kicked this off.  Oh, and it may be that in the picture my Lautrec is Toulouse ...

Originally posted 16 February 2011

Gettin' my Wookie Seurat on

The Czar of Muscovy describes me as a "non-boulevardier", which is true.  But it wasn't always.  These days, I'm more comfortable hanging out at the shooting range, but Back In The Day, I used to haunt the First Arrondissement, hanging out with Georgie Seurat and the crowd.  L'hotel La Sanguine was just down the street from the church of La Madeleine, which was cheek-by-jowl to the Place de la Concorde.

As you can imagine, the difficulty was my Wookie Suit.  Even though this was a particularly classy one - made of Carmague musk rat fur - some of the crowd thought it was too over the top.  Gaugain in particular, although he didn't like anything except for naked Polynesian girls.

But Georgie thought it was tres magnifique, and even snuck me into one of his paintings.  See if you can spot me - although I always thought he made my butt look too big.

Photoshop courtesy of #1 Son.  Did himself proud on this one. 

My first (and only) viral meme

Ten years ago today I posted what would become my only viral meme.  It was satirizing the ClimateGate shenanigans.

What happens when you run the Climate Models?

There's been a lot of analysis of the Hadley/CRU emails disclosed in the data leak. There's been less - but very interesting indeed - analysis of the source code disclosed in the leak.

That got me wondering: what happens when you run the code? I mean, the whole IPCC Thermageddon story is based on this code, right? Running the code might be interesting.

So I ran it. "Interesting"? Boy, Howdy.

The first thing that became obvious is that this is not at all a manual process. There is a lot of operator intervention, with the program asking you for all sorts of input. So much so, in fact, that it looks like a programmer at CRU took a shot at trying to automate the process:

I'm not interested in grants, and it looks like the editor of GRL has already been properly dealt with, so I selected the first option and forged ahead.

Unfortunately, the code looks to be very fragile, with poor error handling. I'm in the middle of stack dumps, but thought that these results so far were interesting enough to post. Here's the (admittedly limited) error report that I have so far.

Seems legit

Photobombing: X-Ray edition

Someone explain to this dude what ionizing radiation does to nerve cells ...

I smell photoshop ...

Damn sharks

Always have to be in the picture.  Selfish jerks.

University "Diversity" needs to get Photoshop lessons ...

Via #1 Son, we find this:

The University "Diversity" team is doing high fives (although where is the asian chick?  C'mon - we're looking for "Diversity" here).  But if you look closely, you'll find that the African American grad didn't seem to wash up after the weekly cross burning ...



No doubt your Captain will be shocked, shocked that "Diversity" organizations are staffed by idiots ...



Next thing you know,
Major Strasser the "Diversity" program will be shot ...



#1 Son seems to be resisting the Bulls**t fed to his generation.  I hope that this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship ...

Doh!

I've been posting on the breakdown of the new "hockey stick" paper, and I forgot the first thing from this blog that went viral on Mr. Gore's most excellent Information Superhighway:

I made it on the handy-dandy Clippy-o-matic.  Come to think of it, you could do another one:

Looks like the Climate Science Establishment have created a mock-o-matic!

TheOnesDay® No. 22

Epic photoshop is epic.  Rumbear has more.

Remember Alinksy's rules - mockery is an excellent tool, particularly when targeting someone as famously thin skinned as the current President. A weekly mocking of the First Ego is a healthy tonic for the Republic.  So go mock.

Saddle up

Monkeys riding border collies in a rodeo.  Your argument is invalid.

At first I thought that this was a photoshop but it's real.

Opus 5000

This is my 5,000th post.  As you well know, it's hard to get me to shut up.

For a while, I was tracking things like how many words I wrote a month.  The average was about 25,000, in around 120 posts each month.  If that still holds (and it sort of feels like it's in the ballpark), then I've probably written a little over a million words here.

Well, it seemed like a cunning plan at the time.

Look, Robin! The Bat signal!

Any gunnie web designers out there willing to do a bit of pro bono work on a secret (but insanely) cool project For The Cause?  Drop me an email: borepatch, gmail, you know the drill.

This is classified, burn-before-reading stuff, but has the potential to have a huge marketing release with very high Internet visibility.

Matter of fact, any Marketing/PR types, send me an email.  We want to make a splash, and while I have done a fair bit of marketing in my day, I'm not a real Marketeer - I only play one on TV.  With a face made for radio.

Unlike you, with your Internet skillz.  Let's show those fascitsts gun grabbers what good old American know-how can do!

UPDATE 10 January 2012 19:50: Thanks to the League of Superheros who responded!  Looks like our subversive army is fully staffed.

Epic Photoshop

... is epic:

Awesome - it's a photoshop of a photoshop.  Recursion FTW!

Via ScottH in a comment that led me to Epic Win.

Epic Troll

... is epic:

Well done, anonymous troll!

Via #1 Son.

#OccupyFOBBorepatch

I've been away for two weeks, and the birdfeeder is empty.  Probably has been for a week now, based on how fast the birds clear it out.  It's causing an unexpected protest.

Didn't see that coming.

Elizabeth Warren is as dumb as a rock

OK, Godwin says that maybe this is a little over the top, but c'mon - hyperbole is a long established and respected (OK, long established, at least) form of satire.

Quite frankly, the satires write themselves.  And what is it about Democratic women politicians from Massachusetts, anyway?

Oh, and I only did this because all the Cool Kids are.  So there.

UPDATE: Sean Sorrentino beards the Lion in his den.  Heh.

A helpful reminder when you're packing in your waistband

Finger off the trigger until you're lined up on target.  Boy, howdy.

Packin' and Stylin'

Dennis from Dragon Leather Works has an interesting idea - what if you could have a holster that would work rigged inside your belt (for those times when you want to be all covert) as well as outside your belt (say, for when you're at a Texas Barbecue)?  Obviously, the Barbecue bit means that you're showing off the pretty thing.

So he made one thats pretty:

And he sent one to me to try out.  It's said to be here now, so you'll hear about it in a while - I'm quite excited to have a holster that won't suck.

Dennis calls it the "Quantum" - you can't know where it will be.  Hmmm, said I: that sort of insanely fun  geekiness calls for some retro Photoshop The Gimp love:

That's the simple one.  But you know me - why stop at simple when you can get all complex:

After all, it's for a Barbecue, right?  People will know it's time to stop hitting the Shiner Bock when they can't figure it out.  And so, how about a poll?

Which logo for the Dragon Leather Works Quantum holster?

• Simple is always best.
• Bring the complex one, and the Shiner Bock!
• Why not both, where people could order the one they want?
• Why not both, where people could order the one they want? (I'll pay to get the stamp made)

View Results
Create a Blog Poll

Just a clarification: by "I'll pay" I actually mean "You'll pay".  ;-)

H-S Precision rifles are best for the job

Especially if the job involves shooting mothers holding babies.

There's been quite a kerfuffle in the Blogosphere lately.  It seems that the guys manning the H.S. Precision booth at the NRA booth were Sad Lonely Pandas.  It seems that folks remember their insane marketing FAIL, even without being punched out thrown out of the booth.

Well, says I - didn't you do a Photoshop on this very subject, lo those many moons ago?  Why, yes I did.  Almost won Sebastian's contest with it, too (thanks to everyone who voted!).  And so, in the hopes that Google's voodoo ranking algorithms smile on me, this post is offered up to a (hopefully) grateful Internet.  If you find this post from doing a Google search for "H. S. Precision" or some such, you need to read up on the sort of folks they like to hang out with:

So. After receiving these unlawful, UnConstitutional orders, Lon Horiuchi did not man up and inform his superiors that he categorically refused to follow those orders. He didn't even keep quiet while refusing to obey them.

No. Lon Horiuchi not only accepted those orders, but he followed them to the letter by firing twice upon adult males who were armed, but not posing any imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to Agent Horiuchi or any other third party.

During the firing of these two shots, Lon Horiuchi managed to quite neatly shoot Vicki Weaver (neither an adult male nor observed with a weapon) in the face -- while she was holding her baby daughter in her arms -- killing the 42-year-old mother graveyard dead.

Thankfully, he managed to miss the baby.

 And while I don't typically link-whore, anyone out there who has a hankering to link to this post will help nudge the Google voodoo algorithms towards enshrining their moment of infamy near the top of the search results.

Note to the H. S. Precision marketing department: if you want to reply, send a statement in an email or leave a comment.  I will post your email text unedited.  But before you deny that this happened, remember that the Internet is forever.

It's quiet. Too quiet.

Even for a library.  Coyote posts a picture of an abandoned library in Detroit - part of what's increasingly an abandoned city.

It's creepy.  Looking at the pictures, I felt that something was missing - that I'd seen something very nearly like this before.  The creepiness came from an unsatisfied feeling of anticipation.  With a little help from Photoshop The Gimp, I fixed it.

It's OK to use your Outdoor Voice in this library.

Those of you who've been living in a cave for the last 3 years can get the zombie story here.