This is the year 2111! Much has happened since the Zecronian triumphs of 2100-2105. The Crasstalk Nations have inflicted upon the Aquamaranian Zecronians great defeats, in open battle, alien-to-manchild. Our pre-destructive offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the Kuiper Belt and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war (by which we mean the ever glorious cheese biscuit bomb) and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory! Don’t blame me! I voted for Kodos! That is why we must fight! That is why we must win! Continue reading →
In honor of Prince Philip’s upcoming 90th birthday, The Independent has compiled a list of ninety gaffes made by Queen Elizabeth II’s husband. Casual racism or clever witticisms? I’ll let you decide.
Men! Man your battle-stations! Women! Woman your battle-stations! Children! Shouldn’t you be in school? Oh, it’s the weekend? FINE! Child your battle-stations! Little Birds, an alien threat is upon us. They wish to destroy our entire way of life. They wish to destroy the squirrels. They wish to destroy the hippopotamuses. They wish to destroy our supermarkets and our bodegas. They wish to destroy our LensCrafters. They wish to destroy our embassies. They wish to destroy Disneyland. They wish to destroy Disney World. They have issued a press release stating that the do not wish to destroy Disney California Adventure because they think that one’s kind of fun. Rubes! Rubes we say! Philistines! Philistines we shriek! They even, and we’re struggling to say this. It’s like all of the air has been Dyson’d out of our bodies, but, we’re going to try. Birds, they wish to destroy…
Little birds, while researching today’s article, we came across some shocking news. Barbie™, everyone’s favorite doll, was, at one time, an SS Hauptsturmführer known as The Butcher of Lyon. She tortured men, women, and children (we assume this is why Kelly™ always looks like she’s afraid of something despite living the glamorous life of a plastic doll in Los Angeles) through electroshock and forcing them to have sex with dogs. That’s right. Everyone’s favorite Special Education Teacher/Paratrooper/Pet Stylist is a murderer who was put on trial for her war crimes today in 1987. We assume she was declared innocent (though, clearly, she wasn’t) as she became President of the United States in 2000, stealing Hilary Clinton’s glory after a previous failed attempt in 1992. Perhaps her crimes were still in the memories of our nation’s peoples. Perhaps that’s why she lost to the nation’s First Black President™, Billiam Clinton.
Oh my god. We really can’t believe that we’re standing up here, talking to all of you people. We’ve worked so hard and we’ve failed so much so that, we’re sorry for tearing up. We really are! It’s just, we’re so happy right now. We mean, obviously we have to thank the Academy for rewarding us with this great achievement that all of the other nominees deserved just as much. Go you! Go you! We’re all winners, even if we’re the ones with the statue. Oh! We’re just a little hot up here (fans selves). This is just so exciting! We came from a small town without the support of anyone but screw you all now! Screw you all! We made it and you’re watching us on television right now! We made it! We made it. (softer) We made it. And it’s all because we believed. We believed in our writers. We believed in our producers. We believed in the little people that make this all happen and, of course, we believed in God because He’s the one that gave us all this talent and He’s the one that’s opened up the doors so that we could share it, not only with everyone in this room, but with everyone in the world. (raises trophy above head) We did it! Continue reading →
One of the more interesting wikileaked cables to come out in the few weeks is a cable from 2008 detailing prisoner files from the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center. In the document released last week it names the courier who we tracked to find Osama, and his working location, namely Pesahwar and Abbottabad. Continue reading →
Good morning little birds! Oh dear, oh me, oh my! You’re all covered in residue from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. And on Earth Day too! We’ve got to get you cleaned up, but we’re all out of Dawn™ or whatever detergent is the one that has those commercials of workers cleaning ducks. Covered in black gold on Earth Day! Oh dear, oh me, oh my! Let’s get clean with Joseph:
There! All clean! You’re no longer an endangered species! We’ve saved you! But because you’re all such individuals, maybe you are endangered. We know for sure that LaZiguezon is endangered. That Canadian weather, man! We don’t think we could handle it and we live in Southwest Ontario*! Anyways, it’s Life, Death and Violence™, America’s number one source for environmental journalism** and jokes about The French™. Oh, the French™! And on this day, the anniversary of the greatest environmental tragedy ever perpetuated on the world by those smarmy English®, we bring you people and events that matter to their sworn enemies for all time, no matter what any treaty says! That’s right, we’re talking about The French™ so surrender your seriousness and grab a baguette, we’ve gotta get going or we’ll miss the last bus to Giverny! France shuts down on Good Friday (they’re good Catholics, well, the France we romanticize is), so we’re going to talk about what happened yesterday! OMGSHUTUPLETSGO
LA VIE!
(En ce qui entre parenthèses est absolument vide de sens)
Michel Rolle: 1652: That hair! So French™! A mathematician, which explains the adult onset acne*** (or is that supposed to be scruff?), he developed Rolle’s Theorem which states that “a differentiable function which attains equal values at two distinct points must have a point somewhere between them where the first derivative (the slope of the tangent line to the graph of the function) is zero” or f'(c)=0. He also hated calculus, which isn’t surprising since Wikipedia says he deserves to be credited with the invention of Gaussian elimination which stems from Newton’s notes and Newton invented calculus. J’accuse Rolle! J’accuse! The French™! Always at war with The English®! There is no known portrait of Rolle. Newton slashed them all****.
1774: Jean Baptiste-Biot: Watch out everyone! Rocks can fall from the sky at any moment! Not only that, they’ve been sent this way by aliens! Three run homer for the Orion Warriors! And The French™! They believed him! Meteorites are now considered scientific fact as opposed to sports history, which, really is a shame, because the Warriors went all the way that year for the first time in a lightyear*****.
Jean-Baptiste, and how could he not be French with that smug face, also participated in the world’s very first hot air balloon ride! Is anyone shocked by the fact that the French conquered hot air? Anyways, he rode with some gay guy named Lussac. They talked about physics, if you know what we mean.
He also studied polarization which gave us LCD televisions and camera filters. Bow to your French master. He lived in Paris, he died in Paris. He knew how fucking magnets worked.
1972: Gwendal Peizerat: Listen Gwendy, ice dancing is not a sport. No matter how many medals you win (silver at Nagano, gold at Salt Lake), no matter how much the Olympics tries to legitimize it, ice dancing is not a sport. Couldn’t you have been a figure skater like your cousin****** Jean? He never amounted to anything, but at least he had some athleticism!
All you have is jazz and a pretty face, Fabio. You’re from Bron for chrissakes. You couldn’t do something more befitting of the Brawny paper towel guy? Oh, you don’t know who that is, Fabio? Of course you don’t. Get back to your theatrics, pretty boy. I’m sure the high school quarterback is really as interested in you as you want him to be. We’re sure he is.
Anyways, we’re sure that after your “career” is over you can sell fake butter and be on romance novel covers. Oh wait, that job’s already taken by actor slash model Fabio! Dance away Gellert Grindelwald. Dance into the sunset and do your French thing. We don’t care.
LA MORT!
(La mort est tout sauf féminin, à moins, bien sûr, il est le résultat d’une cession)
1142: Pierre Abélard: Peter was a sexxxy theologian who is famous for sexxxing sexxxy French nun*******Héloïse. With all those accents and umlauts, how couldn’t he find her attractive? They met at the Notre Dame (the Parisian one) and it was love at first sight. She with her deep knowledge of classical letters in Greek, Latin and, oh!, HEBREW and him with his ability to spout theology and philosophy to thousands at once! Oh! Le petit mort! How couldn’t they be together? But, oh, it wasn’t to last. After one particular petit mort, Héloïse’s womb grew and grew until out popped a baby boy named Astrolabe (who would later become the inspiration for the Japenese AstroBoy********)
To appease her uncle, they married secretly, so as not to harm Peter’s Important Man Career™. The uncle, j’accuse!, announced the marriage publicly and after Pierre sent Héloïse to a convent, Fulbert, the uncle, castrated him! He castrated him! Why? Because he thought Pierre wanted to be rid of Héloïse who was then forced to become a nun and write letters saying how sad she was because all she ever wanted to do was be a can can dancer at the Moulin Rouge which hadn’t even been built yet which is probably why Fulbert was always so confused by his niece. She spouted crazy talk. Witch? Maybe that’s why she was forced to be a nun. She was a witch*********.
1699: Jean Racine: He wrote plays at the same time as Moliere and was considered one of the Big Three. Unlike Moliere, he wrote tragedies. He drank too much and died of liver cancer. Obviously, the following video is all that needs to be said of Jean:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hXzKnVgMdU
LE VIOLENCE!
(Dans lequel je suis pas par des traducteurs)
1809: Battle of Eckmühl: Oh, it’s on. It’s on like Donkey Kong! BANG! POW! SHOOT EM UP! Napoleon took control of the horribly named “Campaign of 1809” after having to, oh my god le grande mort, retreat eleven days earlier after a surprise attack when the war began. However, Napoleon didn’t know that the French garrison of Ratibone had fallen to the Austrians and inadvertently gave the remaining Austrian calvalry (since he killed about a third of Austria’s army) a route to escape. Damn Austrians. Why can’t you just let The French™ have what’s theirs!? Oh, because it’s not? Oh, well, that seems fair. You go on with your bad selves. Bee tee dubs, Napoleon the Short (ohmahgawdguyzthatssowittyandoriginal) showed up and rotated the entire French army with his mere presence. Now, that’s a leader!
Re-cue "You Sexy Thang" here.
D’AURES TRUCS SYMPA QUI S’EST PASSÉ AUJOUD’HUI!
(Certains cela n’a rien à voir avec le français)
753: OMG NEW AND IMPROVED! Twins found Rome™! Rome™ conquers France sometime later.
33: OMG BETRAYAL! Judas betrays his buddy for some silver. The French™ go cuckoo for the buddy sometime later.
1519: OMG SHINY! French neighbor’s Spanish son Hernan lands in Veracruz and begins slaughtering everyone due to his gold-lust. The Aztec™ never saw it coming until sometime later.
1898: OMG WAR! The United States (patent pending), with land purchased sometime before by The French™, declare that they’re at war with Spain! The Spanish find out sometime later
1910: OMG A COMET! It flies over France and the rest of the world, too, we guess, but mainly France.
1910: OMG SAD! Comedian Mark Twain, born under a comet, on land originally owned by The French™ sometime before the Louisiana Purchase, dies under the same comet that flies over France and, we guess, Connecticut, but mainly France.
1952: OMG SECRETARIES! It’s Secretaries Day! Canadian fellow David Rakoff has a story about how when he was an assistant at a publishing company, he and all the other assistants would take the day off so as not to be confused as secretaries. These shenanigans would obviously go over well with the class obsessed French.
1994: OMG ASTRONOMY! How many Poles does it take to find an extrasolar planet? Just one! Aleksander Wolszczan! Poland is near France (sort of, not really) and we know that the aliens on extrasolar planets are just goo goo for French cinema. We just know it!
You know what? Fuck The French™. We always liked American boys better. See you on Tuesday, birds, for more historical accuracy. We’re outta here (until Photo Phriday. Stop by that!)!
*Southwest Ontario is what we call Detroit. Mainly because of Tim Horton’s and hockey.
**Life, Death and Violence is not and has never been America’s number one source for environmental journalism.
***People who study mathematics are no more likely to get adult onset acne than people who study, say, business.
****Mr. Newton is not responsible for the absence of any portrait of Mr. Rolle.
*****We are aware a lightyear is a measure of distance, not a measure of time.
******We have no proof that Mr. Peizerat has a figure skating cousin named Jean.
*******Héloïse did not become a nun until after the culmination of her affair with Pierre. This obviously diminishes how sexxxy they were together.
********Mr. Astrolabe is not the inspiration for AstroBoy.
*********Ms. Héloïse was not a witch. She was a very nice person by all accounts who found herself in a bad situation.
Good morning my little birds and Happy Tuesday! You know, we’ve been feeling like this thing has been going in the wrong direction. More crass than sass, if you get the gist, so on today’s program, we’re going back to basics. Now, that’s a very broad statement, so we must ask ourselves, what do we mean by that? We don’t want to rehash past glories and we certainly don’t want to offend anyone with our blatant inaccuracies, poor judgments and crude jokes (this is, after all, the column that once quipped ‘Remember that group of anti-Nazi protesters whose members were arrested last week, The White Rose? Yeah, they were executed.’), but, honestly, we think there’s too much hot boy. It’s distracting! That’s not to say that we are discontinuing the Life, Death and Violence Crush Object™, but we will be taking a break from the male models for a hot second and going back to that boy we all know and love. That’s right, birds, he’s back:
Tax man got you down? Of course he does, man. Of course he does. You work so hard for that dough and then it all goes away, man. It all goes away and if it doesn’t? Then bam! Straight to Alcatraz. Al Capone killed 937259023475 people, and what is he arrested for? T-A-X-E-S. So file those forms today or request that extension lest you end up the Birdman of Crasscatraz. Damned Big Brother. Like a monkey on our backs, and that’s an actual monkey, not a pinko Commie pre-human version Chim-PAN-zee*, man. You got a problem, man? Then you better take it up with the muscle and today’s Life, Death and Violence Crush Object™ Tobias Sørensen.
Wanna Try?
From WCRS Detroit and Public Snark International, it’s Life, Death and Violence, brought to you by pencils. Pencils: damn they’re sharp! Don’t use a pencil on those forms, though. The IRS doesn’t accept pencil. Pen only. Black or Blue. What an awful day to be sponsored by pencils really. If only the IRS did tax forms by ScanTron!
Today on our program: Inconveniences. Happy Least Favorite Day in America™ everybody!
LIFE!
(Inconvenient, but fun, and hey, at least it doesn’t last forever)
1894: Nikita Khrushchev: Led to rapid baldness due to the stress of his jealousy over his predecessor’s magnanimous mustache, the lovable fat man of the Soviet Union caused many an inconvenience for the glorious post-war American government, not to mention his people (and several dogs), whom he shot into space on rockets made out of string and bubble gum, hurtling to the stars, hurtling to their deaths. He also banned Doctor Zhivago, regretted banning it, forced the author to decline his Nobel Prize and let his people become the most detestable group of people known to man: Tourists.
After being charged for war crimes over the mistreatment of his cordwainery, Khrushchev was removed from office and given a pension where he grew depressed, wrote a memoir, smuggled it to the West, drank some vodka and died of a heart attack while wondering if it was stiflingly hot in Africa. Speaking of stifling heat:
A Swedish Tourist Tours the Fields of Russia
DEATH!
(Inconvenient AND Permanent)
1865: Abraham Lincoln: What an inconvenient time to die, man. At the theater? With your best hag? By the hands of a failed actor? Gee, whiz. America’s First Gay President had to deal with other inconveniences though, including but not limited to: That inconvenient Civil War (right when cotton and tobacco prices were dropping!), those bleeding hearts inconveniently fighting over his suspension of habeas corpus (damned human rights), and Mary Todd’s insanity (listen lady, it aint gonna happen!)!
All highly inconvenient, but, Abe gone done fixed e’rything and then to be inconveniently shot? By a failed actor? At the theater? Oh, wait, already said that. His stovepipe hat, though? Very convenient, IFYOUKNOWWHATWEMEAN**
We’re pretty sure he revolutionized armor though, and even if that’s a blatant lie***, it’s just an excuse for this:
Union Soldier Circa 1864
VIOLENCE!
(Never ever inconvenient, except for those who die, in which case it’s a little inconvenient)
1912: The Titanic sinks. Lots of (famous!) people die. How inconvenient. The real tragedy, however, will not occur for another 85 years.
Gagworthy
OTHER NEAT STUFF THAT HAPPENED!
1635: Tobias’ ancestors defeat the Romans in the 30 year war.
1755: SamJo pubs the English Dict.
1817: Some guys with French sounding names found the American School for the Deaf in, ugh, Connecticut, but fail to solve the core problem: How will they hear the television ads?
1896: Olympics are over. Hope you’re in good enough shape four years from now!
1923: Insulin is released to the public, but the real question is, will the deaf hear Wilford Brimley telling them they need insulin?
1947: Jackie Robinson becomes the first black baseball players after joining the Brooklyn Dodgers. Bed-Stuy Do or Die.
1983: TOKYODISNEY!
2002: Plane crash
2011: There was a suicide bombing in Indonesia today.****
That’s it for today, folks! See you on Tuesday! And remember, Swedish men are never inconvenient.
*We are aware chimpanzees are apes, not monkeys.
**Sex Toy Storage
***It was a lie
****UPDATE: Insensitive comments were made, removed. Sorry.
Michel Rolle: 1652: That hair! So French™! A mathematician, which explains the adult onset acne*** (or is that supposed to be scruff?), he developed Rolle’s Theorem which states that “a differentiable function which attains equal values at two distinct points must have a point somewhere between them where the first derivative (the slope of the tangent line to the graph of the function) is zero” or f'(c)=0. He also hated calculus, which isn’t surprising since Wikipedia says he deserves to be credited with the invention of Gaussian elimination which stems from Newton’s notes and Newton invented calculus. J’accuse Rolle! J’accuse! The French™! Always at war with The English®! There is no known portrait of Rolle. Newton slashed them all****.
1774: Jean Baptiste-Biot: Watch out everyone! Rocks can fall from the sky at any moment! Not only that, they’ve been sent this way by aliens! Three run homer for the Orion Warriors! And The French™! They believed him! Meteorites are now considered scientific fact as opposed to sports history, which, really is a shame, because the Warriors went all the way that year for the first time in a lightyear*****.
LIFE!
1894: Nikita Khrushchev: Led to rapid baldness due to the stress of his jealousy over his predecessor’s magnanimous mustache, the lovable fat man of the Soviet Union caused many an inconvenience for the glorious post-war American government, not to mention his people (and several dogs), whom he shot into space on rockets made out of string and bubble gum, hurtling to the stars, hurtling to their deaths. He also banned Doctor Zhivago, regretted banning it, forced the author to decline his Nobel Prize and let his people become the most detestable group of people known to man: Tourists.
1865: Abraham Lincoln: What an inconvenient time to die, man. At the theater? With your best hag? By the hands of a failed actor? Gee, whiz. America’s First Gay President had to deal with other inconveniences though, including but not limited to: That inconvenient Civil War (right when cotton and tobacco prices were dropping!), those bleeding hearts inconveniently fighting over his suspension of habeas corpus (damned human rights), and Mary Todd’s insanity (listen lady, it aint gonna happen!)!
