Overnight Open Thread (12-12-2012)

Lena Dunham Is Gonna Get $3.7 Million Dollars For This Crap

In case you've never heard of her Lena Dunham is the 26 year old Obama-loving creator of HBO's Girls - and pretty much the embodiment of everything Morons despise. It's like someone took the worst sockpuppet caricatures from all the comments and distilled them into one supremely annoying life form.

Here's just a sample from her Wikipedia entry:

Dunham was born in New York City. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter of "overtly sexualised pop art", and her mother, Laurie Simmons, is a photographer and designer who creates "disquieting domestic tableaux" with dolls. Dunham's father is Protestant, and according to Dunham, a Mayflower descendant; Dunham's mother is Jewish. She has a younger sister, Grace, who is a model and student at Brown University and who starred in Dunham's first film Tiny Furniture. As children, both Lena and Grace were babysat by photographers Sherri Zuckerman and Catherine McGann. Dunham attended Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, New York, where she met Tiny Furniture actress and Girls co-star Jemima Kirke. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2008, where she studied creative writing.

Recently she just got a $3.7 million dollar deal from Random House for a book of her musings on sex, travel, diet and pubic fat. And this deal was based on a 66 page outline consisting of instagram pics, her diet diary, and apparently a lot of 'nauseating and cloying precociousness'.

Well Gawker got a hold of the proposal and mocked it to shreds. When Dunham's lawyer threatened to sue them, they had to pull the proposal and edit her quotes into deliciously cruel fair-use versions. It's Gawker (I know I know) but this is some beautiful schadenfreudtastic blue-on-blue action.

Fully 13% of the proposal's pages are devoted to reproducing a diary Dunham kept of what she ate in 2010. And she intends to devote an as-yet-unwritten chapter to "a collection of emails that screw the pooch, jump the gun, and terrify men." Also, Dunham thinks she has the "beginnings of a FUPA (fat upper pussy area)" and wants to write about that, in her book of advice for women.

I'm pretty sure you could get 66 pages of better material by cherry-picking the better satire in the comments here during any two week period. But then we're not "rare literary talents" with all the right connections, credentials, necessary politically correct views, narcissism and lack of shame to pull this off with a straight face either.

Obama May Hide Any Fiscal Cliff Tax Hikes From the Public

Because whatever the law says the person who actually collects the taxes from each paycheck effectively determines the tax rate.

The White House has the power to temporarily protect taxpayers from middle-class tax hikes even as upper income rates rise if Congress does nothing and all of the Bush-era tax rates expire in January.
Experts and lawmakers alike agree that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has the power to adjust how much is withheld from paychecks for tax purposes - for all taxpayers or just for some.

And if you make over $250,000, your withholdings WILL go up:

...Experts believe Geithner could even go so far as to adjust withholding to reflect the White House's preferred policy - higher rates on the nation's top 2 percent of earners and lower rates on everyone else. In fact, Minarik said the president could even use withholding as leverage in negotiations with Republicans if it came to that, using the tables to argue he is protecting the paychecks of the middle class.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle acknowledge Geithner has this power, even if they hope to be productive enough to make it irrelevant.

And lest you think Obama's tax hikes are just for the rich it turns out that they've defined 'rich' down to anyone in the upper 20% i.e. making over $75,000 a year:

Affluent people are much more likely than low-income people to have health insurance, and now they will, in effect, help pay for coverage for many lower-income families. Among the most affluent fifth of households, those affected will see tax increases averaging $6,000 next year, economists estimate.

Now Everyone Can Be A Sniper

Or at least a very, very good shot by letting a computer decide when to actually fire the rifle.

TrackingPoint claims that their patent pending Intelligent Digital Tracking Scopes (tracking scopes) will allow an unskilled accurately hit long-range targets. How?

Initially, the view through a tracking scope is simply a magnified view of the target along an axis parallel to the rifle barrel. The shooter first "tags" a target by choosing a desired impact point on the target's surface. An electronic display adds a red dot that indicates the desired impact point, which remains fixed on the target as the direction of the rifle changes.

...Now the riflescope computer displaces the aiming cross-hairs so that they indicate the bullet's impact point as predicted by the firing solution. If the trigger is now squeezed, the rifle will not fire until the desired impact point and the predicted impact point are sufficiently close together. At 1000 yards (914 m), most shots should hit within the width of a single hand.

Do NOT Talk About the War Child Rape, Women Beating, Sodomy, or the Taliban

Lest your Afghan allies get all stabby and shooty.

The soon-to-be-released Army handbook is still being drafted, but a mainstream newspaper got a sneak preview and published an article that should infuriate the American taxpayers funding the never-ending war on terror. The manual is being created because someone with authority bought the theory that cultural insensitivity is driving insider attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. [...]

The draft leaked to the newspaper offers a list of "taboo conversation topics" that soldiers should avoid, including "making derogatory comments about the Taliban," "advocating women's rights," "any criticism of pedophilia," "directing any criticism towards Afghans," "mentioning homosexuality and homosexual conduct" or "anything related to Islam."

I'm torn on this - on one hand you do want to pass on info on cultural topics and actions to avoid in order to keep from offending Afghanis. On the other hand the very fact that our soldiers have to be so careful to avoid remarking on the barbaric, benighted practices of a backwards people or they might be killed makes me wonder why we're even there.

How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football

In 1905 football was also under the gun due to injuries and deaths and there was widespread talk of just banning the game. Roosevelt decided something needed to be done to save it.

On October 9, the president summoned some of the game's most powerful figures, including Walter Camp and John E. Owsley of Yale, Princeton's Arthur Hillebrand, and Harvard's William T. Reid for a closed-door meeting at the White House. "Football is on trial," he declared. Then he tasked the decision makers with changing the sport to keep it alive. After several heated rounds of meetings, in early 1906 the committee announced new rules: First downs now required 10 yards instead of five, what ultimately became a one-yard neutral zone between teams was mandated at the line of scrimmage, and yardage penalties for unsportsmanlike conduct were instituted. But the most impactful change-ironically, one that Camp himself vehemently opposed-was the introduction of the forward pass, a mainstay of modern football.

How Many People Are in Space Right Now?

Well www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com will give you the current number.

Urban Dictionary + Xmas = Santa Sex Acts

And here are a couple we can print:

• Santa's Chimney. A blissful urination or poop after a long night of raw, passionate sex, like the cleaning out of a chimney.
• Santasy. A sexual fantasy involving Santa Claus. Riding sleighs, North Poles, and the like.
• Mrs. Claus Vagina. When a woman has sex for so long that her vagina gets red and swollen like Mrs. Claus' face.

Teh Tweet!

Yahoo group. That is all.

Tonight's post brought to you by the coming new currency:

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posted by Maetenloch at 10:21 PM

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