Overnight Open Thread (12-25-2013) - Lazy Christmas Evening Edition

Merry Christmas All. Leftovers are on the table and the port-a-potty is next to the garage. I'm claiming this here bottle of cheap champagne sparkling wine and going back into my cave to keep working on Plans and Projects. I'll check back in later to make sure we won't be losing our deposit.

No One Is Beyond the Reach of the Comedy Police

Not even Steve Martin.

The storm started Friday when he invited people to ask him grammar questions on Twitter.

Someone wrote, "Is this how you spell lasonia?" to which Martin replied: "It depends. Are you in an African-American neighborhood or at an Italian restaurant."

The Perpetually Offended Humor Monitors were not amused and Martin quickly tried to explain:

"I knew of the name Lasonia. I did not make it up, nor do I find it funny. So to me the answer was either Lasonia (with a capital), or Lasagna, depending on what you meant. That they sounded alike in this rare and particular context struck me as funny. That was the joke," he wrote on his website.

But it was too late - he was already condemned as a hateful thought-criminal and the internet mob was summoned based on misquotes from Salon and TMZ. On the other hand Steve does know a lot of people so with a bit of groveling he'll probably still be allowed to keep working.

Jimmy Being Jimmy

[Update: This quote seems to have come from comedian John Fugelsang instead of Carter. I still stand by my rant though based on prior offenses.]

And still casting out nasty slurs and insults inside a soft drawled voice. Having the government take money from people and then give it to other people isn't Christian charity - it's really theft and redistribution of income designed to make you feel all charitable and decent without having to lift a finger. But then Jimmy Carter has never been charitable to anyone who dares disagree with him.

Okay I Did Not Know This Factoid

Mannheim Steamroller I understand. A Mannheim Steamroller Christmas sounds exactly like what it is: an electro-classical New Age Christmas record made by an advertising jingle-writer from Nebraska. Strangely enough, Chip Davis, the founder of Mannheim Steamroller, was also the songwriter behind the completely fictitious country music star C.W. McCall and his 1975 #1 hit "Convoy," so that either proves my cultural dis-overlap/star-cluster theory or refutes it. Either way, the incongruity of a plains-state advertising executive writing both the theme to a Kris Kristofferson trucker movie and a proto-steampunk bleep-bloop Xmas album is somehow easier for me to understand and enjoy than of a shiksa Texas millennial contest-winner singing lewd gospel-voiced country-rock Christmas carols. If you told me that Kelly Clarkson was an invention of a Nebraskan jingle-writer I would be expected to smirk knowingly because that conforms to the blue-state counter-narrative of my own narrative of hipster superiority. But Kelly Clarkson is real.

Chris Matthews' Christmas Hate

Because politics and hate never take a holiday. What a sad way to go through life.

Most Americans view Christmas as a time to consider such lofty things as peace on earth and good will toward men.

Not MSNBC's Chris Matthews who actually devoted his entire Christmas Eve Hardball show to mercilessly attacking eleven conservatives with assistance from a panel of some of the most conservative-hating liberals in the nation.

Icelandic Highway Delayed Due to Impact on Endangered Elves

In case you thought the American EPA and its allies didn't have some trump cards up their sleeves.

Elf advocates have joined forces with environmentalists to urge the Icelandic Road and Coastal Commission and local authorities to abandon a highway project building a direct route from the tip of the Alftanes peninsula, where the president has a home, to the Reykjavik suburb of Gardabaer.

They fear disturbing elf habitat and claim the area is particularly important because it contains an elf church.

The project has been halted until the Supreme Court of Iceland rules on a case brought by a group known as Friends of Lava, who cite both the environmental and the cultural impact - including the impact on elves - of the road project. The group has regularly brought hundreds of people out to block the bulldozers.

Could Have Used a Gun

After first robbing the wife the man came back 12 hours later to rape her on video tape. The couple were forced to fight off the would-be rapist with fists, wasp spray, a baseball bat and eventually a knife - fatally wounding him.

An intruder who was stabbed to death after breaking into a gym owner's house had been planning to sexually assault his wife and video tape it, according to reports this week.

Ken Boonstra was stabbed to death by a 26-year-old woman while her husband attacked Boonstra in their Washington home.

Police have now revealed that Boonstra, 48, had a camera and tripod in his pocket when he broke into the couple's home.

The couple, who own a local branch of a gym, are not being identified because they are the victims of a crime. The wife's mother and the couple's 7-month-old daughter were both in the home at the time of the attack.

The Original Reviews of 10 Classic Christmas Movies

Some were seen as classics from day one while others barely got made.

Snoopy and his pals overcame a lot of troubles to make it to the small screen in 1965. Executives didn't like the slow pace of the show. They didn't want Linus to recite Bible verses. They hated that there was no laugh track. And they thought having the children be voiced by real children instead of adult voice actors was the worst idea in broadcast history.

Turns out they were wrong about all of it. It's been estimated that nearly 50 percent of households with televisions tuned in to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas that November, and they've been coming back ever since.

Being Right vs Being Happy - A Scientific Study

Intervention

The intervention was for the male to agree with his wife's every opinion and request without complaint. Even if he believed the female participant was wrong, the male was to bow and scrape.

Main outcome measure

We measured quality of life with a Likert score of 1 to 10 (10 being the best possible quality of life). Although our tool was unvalidated, it was thought to have face validity. It was justified on the grounds that brevity was essential, given that the intervention was administered in a potentially complex domestic environment.

And here were the results:

But the researchers believe that more study is needed.

Many people in the world live as couples, and we believe that it could be harmful for one partner to always have to agree with the other. However, more research is needed to see whether our results hold if it is the male who is always right.

The Complete Handel's Messiah

As performed by the Choir of King's College, Cambridge.

"When the River Meets the Sea"

Teh Tweet!

Le AoSHQ groupe de Yahoo. Ooh la la!

Tonight's post brought to you by some of my favorite things:

You know the world could use more whips and whipping.

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posted by Maetenloch at 10:17 PM

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