As the years have gone by, however, the focus of the strip has changed, and now a majority of the strips are about Norman's father, Ralph, rather than Norman. Since they share a surname, though, I suppose the distinction is irrelevant.
Today, then, Ralph's wife reminds him that he's on a diet as he sits there eating aerosol cheese, and he cheekily tells her that he's saving all kinds of calories by not eating it on crackers.
Well, crackers are made of nothing but carbs. Easy Cheese, according to WIkipedia, is made of "milk, water, whey protein concentrate, canola oil, milk protein concentrate, sodium citrate, sodium phosphate, calcium phosphate, lactic acid, sorbic acid, sodium alginate, apocarotenal, annatto, cheese culture, and enzymes." Pretty sure none of those are carbs, anyway. And since carbs are what make you fat--
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NO the Fungus does not recommend attempting to subsist on pasteurized process cheese food. But if your choice is A) carbs and B) Easy Cheese, pick the latter.
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Human remains should never be incinerated for any purpose other than cremation. That is to say, if you're going to burn human remains, the fire that you use to do it should have no other purpose. Blood, snot, pus--that's okay to burn as fuel. Arms, legs, pancreases, ABORTED BABIES, no: you build a special fire for that and you don't also generate electricity or heat your house with it.
Matt Walsh gets it 100% correct:
I don’t have any long tirade for you. I just need you to understand what’s happening here in your one nation under God. We are incinerating slaughtered babies so that we can charge our iPhones and power our televisions.I'm going to Godwin myself by invoking the Nazi death camps. The effing NAZIS didn't even do something this heinous, for Christ's sake! They cremated many of the Jews they murdered, but at least they didn't use the bodies as fuel for generating electricity.
If we displace a few caribou to build a pipeline, or disadvantage a couple of dolphins to drill for oil, the public outrage cannot be contained. The cries of injustice and eco-treason can be heard across the land. But using the corpses of dead kids like firewood? Well, that’s just a practical cost-saving measure, now isn’t it?
God help us. And God help the sick, perverted, psychopaths who can’t recognize this for the atrocity that it is. We kill these human beings, can’t we at least treat their bodies with dignity?
"God help us"? We'll be lucky if God helps us. This is more like "a hail of fire and brimstone" territory, for crying out loud.
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Speaking of fascism--both modern and historic--Borepatch tells us a little about how fascism was cool in the 1930s:
Cole Porter's original lyrics are deucedly hard to find in any recording: You're the top! You're the great Houdini! You're the top! You are Mussolini!The article that Borepatch links to, he says, "[T]races you through the entire history of Marxism, and socialism, and fascism."
He says, prior to that quote,
This is a very, very interesting article, which includes the five critical facts about fascism. The two most important (in my opinion) are fascism was a movement whose roots are in the left, and fascism was intellectually sophisticated. Those two are enough to explain 90% of the hatred that socialists hold for it. It's a hatred that you only see between brothers.Emphasis his.
Very good reading.
And we then go to the "modern" variety by linking Matt Walsh again, and a discussion of how leftists in Michigan are highly upset that the Supreme Court has decided that it's constitutional for the citizens of a state to have a say in how they are goverened. The SC didn't rule on the constitutionality of Affirmative Action itself, only whether or not a referendum could bar the use of AA in college admissions. "Predictably," Walsh says, "a mob of left-wingers immediately took to the internet to advocate for racial tolerance by saying a bunch of racist things about Clarence Thomas."
He goes on to say,
In the mind of Liberal Whitey, not only should we have a paternalistic mechanism in place to treat minorities like children who need special treatment, but we should even disallow the citizens of individual states from getting to decide for themselves whether their education system will be based on racial quotas and institutionalized discrimination.Because the leftists are always right and anyone who disagrees with them is always wrong, about everything, regardless of circumstance.
Walsh goes on to explain what is wrong with AA. As always, a worthwhile read, but if you've paid any attention to conservative/libertarian politics for the past twenty years it's stuff you already know.
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Now let's get away from the totalitarianist nonsense and talk about things that are more entertaining and less enraging.
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JayG comments on an $80 million prescription drug heist. That's a sizable number, but if you think about what RX drugs cost in the US it's really not as big as all that. You could probably carry $80 million of that snake antivenin (which costs $100 a dose in Mexico where it's made, but some $4,000 per dose here) in a heavy-duty pickup truck, or maybe a small box truck. Ditto for the high-dollar chemotherapy drugs; you could probably just fit $80 million worth of some of those into my Cherokee. (Something costing $20,000 per dose? Easy. That's 4,000 doses, but since you mix it with saline, an actual vial of the stuff from the factory is probably no bigger than your thumb.)
Now, if you wanted to steal $80,000,000 worth of ibuprofen or something, you'd need a fleet of semis to do it. Chances are this is more like the Firefly episode, where Dr. Tam tells Mal etc how they could make tons of money by heisting RX drugs from a hospital, and the thieves made off with the most expensive (street price) drugs in the place.
Either way, it's more of a reflection on how insane drug prices in the US are than anything else.
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Borepatch reminds us not to be so dismissive of the receptionist of a major corporation.
A good receptionist (or secretary) is worth his weight in gold. In iridium-plated gold.
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And then back to JayG for motorcycling stuff. 'Tis the season, and speaking as someone who's itching to ride his bike (and can't because vehicle insurance does not grow on trees, though I'll soon be insured again) it could not have come soon enough.
But he mentions these "polarizing arguments" and I have to comment on them:
* American vs. Metric.In order: don't care; wear a helmet if you want to live, but it's your brain; ride what you like; full gear is better for you but you have to make up your own mind about what sort of risk you want to take; and I don't know what the hell that means and likely wouldn't care if I did. Then he brings up "loud pipes save lives vs. loud pipes lose rights".
* Lid vs. no lid.
* Cruiser vs. sportbike.
* Full gear vs.jacket and boots.
* Squids vs. tourers.
I think loud pipes are stupid.
It has nothing to do with saving lives or "losing rights"; open pipes are dumb because you then have to wear earplugs lest you lose your hearing. If you have to wear earplugs your machine needs a fucking muffler.
The noise from your machine will be loudest behind you because that's the direction your pipes are pointing. If you want people in front of you to hear you coming, you've got to point them forward. I don't know how many times I've seen a bike before I heard it, even though the bike had open exhaust; it sure is loud after it passes by, but I barely hear anything before that. Because nearly all the sound is being projected behind the bike.
Then a commentor jumps in:
As one of the ambulance drivers whose sirens are routinely ignored, I'm going to have to say that "loud pipes save lives" is most likely a myth. One thing we're taught is that at highway speed (~60 mph) we have to get within about 12 feet of a car before our sirens are audible.It's not about saving lives; it's about being obnoxious and feeling like a rebel.
Same sort of shit as with the stupid-loud stereos some morons love. There's no real purpose to it, and you have to wear earplugs to protect your hearing while you're annoying everyone in a quarter-mile radius with your utterly pointless noise.
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I want to hang a set of these on the key rack in the front hall. It's Lucy's keys from Fairy Tail, her set of Zodiac keys that let her do her magic. Each one summons a different stellar spirit. That's pretty f-ing cool.