This may be NSFW, for dirty words and especially if you follow the link to the South Park video. Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza have been outed about a comedian trade secret joke called The Aristocrats. They’ve been collecting video of different commedians telling this “joke” in preparation to show it at the Edinburgh Festival.

For the uninitiated, “The Aristocrats” is not quite a joke, more a format, like when jazzers would feel free to free-form between the beginning and end of “Stardust”. You start by describing a family in a meeting with a showbiz agent, asking if they can perform their act. You then describe whatever mixture of [ naughty, naughty things ] and the family dog as enters the bad parts of your head. Once you’ve surprised yourself with some of the images (a contemporary variant might be to toss in some Abu Ghraib references), you have the family tell the impresario that their act is called “The Aristocrats” — and you’re home.

Apparently they asked Matt Parker and Trey Stone to make a version that made it out to the internet.

The wife was having a long bad day…as a matter of fact so was I, so I stopped at Pei Wei on the way home for some “take away”. It’s raining for the second day in a row — yesterday the rain gauge read 1 1/2” and when I left this morning it said 1 1/4” — and the weather reports have been clear that we were in prime flood conditions…with a warning that ended before 6pm. I left Pei Wei around 6:20pm and broke several major traffic laws maneuvering around large bodies of water that were previously not on any maps. By the time I got home, this was the scene on the street in front of my house:

and here’s a really crappy video of the gushing sewer grates in front of the apartment complex across the street. (squint and it looks better.)

The rain gauge was at 4 1/4” when I dumped it out about an hour ago.

(No, it’s not about sports.)

Thanks to the slow (non-existant) summer TV season — which some idiots want to abandon in favor of year-round TV — we’ve been watching TV box sets at Casa Rollerfeet. I had some reservations about purchasing TV box sets, mainly around the re-watchability factor. Last night and tonight I quelled those fears and saw two of the best things to ever happen on TV.

Monday at lunch I slipped into CostCo with a coupon for a portable DVD player and, of course, felt the need to cruise the DVD aisle for a new purchase. Simpsons Season Three was available with a coupon on the back for $10 off Simpsons Season Four (released on 6/15, btw). I bought it without concern for what shows were in Season Three and I’m not the type to have that kind of thing memorized. We popped the disc in last night and much to my pleasure, the first episode of Season Three is my favorite Simpsons episode of all time, Stark Raving Dad — the one where “Michael Jackson” comes home with Homer from the mental hospital and writes a song for Lisa. I almost cried at the end.

Tonight we watched Sports Night, episodes 1 through 6. I seriously don’t know how Aaron Sorkin didn’t get an Emmy or ten for episode 6. I was actually crying at the end…again…and I bet I’ll cry the next time I watch it. If you didn’t watch it the first time around, do yourself a huge favor and buy/rent it now. “It’s about sports. The same way Charlie’s Angels was about law enforcement.”

Perhaps we’ll have a chance to argue ketchup as a vegetable and welfare queens some other time, but I can put Reagan the Administration aside to give some respect to a guy who seems to have had a genuine love for our country.

Make it through about 10 levels of Castle and it starts to be really fun. Save up from killing peasants to buy a church (like all good monarchs do!), and you can convert the enemy to be archers and other evil defenses.

Today’s reason: the lies have to come from the top.

Two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with most of the nation’s air traffic still grounded, a small jet landed at Tampa International Airport, picked up three young Saudi men and left.

…

For nearly three years, White House, aviation and law enforcement officials have insisted the flight never took place and have denied published reports and widespread Internet speculation about its purpose.

I don’t neccesarily buy the speculation that the cover-up of this flight impacted the government’s ability to get full information about the 9/11 hijackers from Saudi nationals. I do believe that W and his well-connected family and cronies realized the possibility of shame they would bear once the nation started connecting the dots between the terrorists and America’s best oil buddies, and they have tried their hardest to not show that connection was so tight they could pull strings to get these men out while the rest of the nation was locked down tight.

The Saudis asked the Tampa Police Department to escort the flight, but the department handed off the assignment to Dan Grossi, a former member of the force… Grossi recruited Manuel Perez, a retired FBI agent, to accompany him. Both described the flight to Unger as somewhat surreal.

…Grossi declined to talk about the experience.

“I’m over it,” he said in a telephone interview. “The White House, the FAA and the FBI all said the flight didn’t happen. Those are three agencies that are way over my head, and that’s why I’m done talking about it.”

Namely me.

So I’m sitting on the couch watching Stern give the NBA championship to a good and faithful servant – sorry, I was watching the Lakers/Pistons playoffs, and hear a car roar down the street and knock over my trash can about 10 at night. I’m suprisingly un-upset, since I wasn’t asleep at the time, so I head out to pick up the trash and set the can up. Wasn’t so bad; the car had only tipped the can over; most of the trash was still in it, and the other can wasn’t knocked over at all. Plus, I got to meet another neighbor who’d had his cans tipped, too.

Everything’s picked up, I’m back on the couch for the 4th quarter, life is good.

Same car comes back, this time destroys one of the trash cans and completely scatters the trash in the other, and somehow I’d be the one in jail if I’d rolled down his windows with my shotgun.

Ashcroft was before Congress yesterday

Listening to the commentary this morning on my drive in, I was furious. A) He failed to make the simple and crucial point that even if his interpretation of the letter of the law did give the president the ability to completely ignore federal and international law, that TORTURE IS COMPLETELY WRONG AND UNAMERICAN.
and B) That the memo was either an exercise in exploring all options, or the work of a staffer who had crossed the line and been dismissed or reprimanded.

But for the first time this morning, I was sincerely contemplating voting for Kerry, or more likely casting another protest vote for Nader.

BTW – that he was verging on “contempt of congress” I actually kind of liked, but that misses the simple point that he did not clearly and unequivocably make the point that letter of the law be damned, TORTURE IS STRAIGHT UP, UNDENIABLY UN-AMERICAN.

Yep, that’s right. Here’s the family tree that shows it.

I think jank will get more from Gentoo is Rice… then anyone else, but I like to think of it as surrealist geek jokes so it makes me laugh.

“Oh please, for the love of jebus, tell me you don’t think that is an actual valid CFLAGS setting. You undesrtand that -march implies -mcpu right? I sure as hell hope so.”

LOL! Wait…is this the modern form of racism? Laughing at another person’s speech because you find it unintelligible?