Irony

"Crap, the jack is under all these tires!"

NPR – Cheaper than Death from above

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting receives around $400 million from the federal government. Of that, about 75% is used to fund public television and the rest goes to NPR. According to the Washington Examiner, they get about $90 million a year from the federal government.

Recent debate in the House of Representatives is looking at cutting this expense as a means of deficit reduction (after all, aren’t there better ways to spend taxpayer’s money than on radio programming for people in rural Kanas? - "The object of this bill is to get NPR out of the taxpayer's pocket," said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. "It is time for us to be good stewards and save the money of the American taxpayer.")

http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/congress/2011/03/house-votes-cut-npr-funding

Now, I can’t really comment on that but two days ago, John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the house, started bashing the Obama administration over the establishment of a “no fly zone” above Libya.

He asked what the ultimate goal is in enforcing UN resolution 1973 and what the cost would be.

Well Boehner, we here at The Orange Folder Chronicles get what a dumb shit you are so here’s a little help answering the second part of your question (I can’t figure out the first part either so you’ll need to continue with your polite questions to President Obama on that one).

“Now wait a minute, you know math is hard”

I have no idea what it costs to fly a sortie in an F-15 and definitely don’t know about flying one in an F-16 so lets just stick to the cost of firing cruise missiles, which I figure is like the grownups version of a bottle rocket fight.

According to “The Guardian” (assuming you can trust limeys, which I think we can since they have such cute girls) the American’s have fired 168 missiles so far:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/25/raf-role-libya-no-fly-modest

Elisabeth Hurley, a trustworthy Brit

Kate Middleton, another cute chick from “Tealandia”

Also, according the US Navy (we know we can trust them, they never lie) each one of these costs $569,000, which compared to a bottle rocket is probably pretty reasonable since you get a much cooler explosion.

http://www.navy.mil/navydata/fact_display.asp?cid=2200&tid=1300&ct=2

It’s shaped like that for a reason

So mister Boehner, using my $2 Chinese calculator I get about $95,592,000 just for the missiles. Add to that the fuel for the sub (I think uranium is slightly higher than the $3.54 a gallon regular gas my Ford Ranger uses), the cost of paying all those sailors, the donuts you had in your office while writing your latest silly rant and so on. I think we can safely say that this little action cost a tad more than a years worth of stinking liberal biased radio programs. Does that help you out Mr. Speaker?

“So you say your Republican congress is making a lot of noise?” “Sell it, it’s a lemon!”

If you're gonna build something, make it interesting

Daily suggestion on how to have a kickass day

Tip #27 - How to have a kick ass day

"Find money walking across the parking lot of Wal-Mart"

It’s a pomegranate world whether you want it or not

Whenever I manage to find something I like, I generally stick with it and don’t feel much obligation to change. Change is only good if it’s better.

I can't begain to tell you how many of my favorite things have been discontinued just to make way for something "new and improved".

For example, I grew up in a simpler time when juice came in flavors like orange, apple or grape. There was no need for exotic stuff or weird blends.

Anything fruit flavored was based off these simple flavors and it never got more unusual than maybe raspberry or cherry.

In the 80s however, something seems to have gone awry. Someone discovered that they had these large weird green berries in the land of goofy animals and suddenly everyone on the planet was trying to figure out what they could stick kiwis in that had never had it before.

So who was the first guy to think "That looks like a fuzzy green testitcle, let's try it out" anyway?

Kiwi wasn’t really good enough by itself so you had to mix it with something else, usually bananas. I never have liked bananas so I never really like the weird mixtures of kiwi either. Kiwis are OK by themselves but to be honest, it’s just not as good as orange, apple, grape, cherry and the oh so exotic raspberry.

Apparently enough people like having kiwis mixed with other crap though that it was deemed a success. I’ve got no real beef with that except once kiwis became “de riguer” the entire product development staff at every large food conglomerate suddenly seems to have realized that they have to keep concocting weird ass tropical fruit flavors or there is really no justification for their jobs.

So, starting in the 90s legions of people with no real purpose in life started concocting all sorts of bizarre and clearly inferior mixtures of whatever oddball fruits and flowers they could find on the internet. It became like the great race to the south pole and eventually jumped the shark.

Mangos, dragonberrry, quince or whatever oddity you could find a native eating began to infiltrate the food isle. Weird flowers and spices are starting to appear. Pomegranates and some nasty tasting thing called Acai berry have risen to the top lately as the Lindsey Lohans of weirdo fruit of the day.

To be honest, pomegranates suck as food. You have to pick at them, they are full of seeds and the flavor is mediocre at best. It’s sorta like trying to unwind the rubber bands on a golf ball core just to find out there’s nothing more interesting inside than a rubber ball (of course, I’m sure golf balls aren’t made that way anymore. There’s something new and exciting now like Nike balls made out of titanium hair wound around a balled up core of Tiger Wood’s tramp’s phone numbers or something)

Gratuitus photo of Racheal Uchitel nearly naked

Problem is, there is only so much shelf space on a rack so to make room for all these weird flavors, something’s gotta go. Well, have you noticed lately how you can hardly ever find plain old orange soda or grape gum down at your local zippy mart? To hell with that, we need something new and fashionable like pomegranate mango.

I’ve had this habit of drinking wine coolers instead of soda since the 80s. They taste good and aren’t as sweet as soda and I just like em. That’s about to end though as now the only tolerable flavor left is something called “Seagrams Exotic Berry” (raspberry flavored) and even that’s getting hard to find.

Gone are lemon-lime, orange, lemonade etc. They’ve been replaced with weird stuff like “Calypso cooler” (this is bright blue colored) and “Jamaica me Happy” or “Fuzzy Navel”. Ad men suck alright. I have to confess that drinking wine coolers is a bit “frue-frie” at best but it’s downright intolerable to be drinking something that tastes weird and has a name only Richard Simmons could appreciate.

However, this is what broke the back of this old camel. I went to loot out the kids Halloween candy and boosted a Tootsie pop. The wrapper looked a bit off to me so I looked a little closer and saw this:

Come on people, - You know this isn't right!

Before YouTube there was the Xerox machine

The other day while I was sorting out and tossing old papers, I realized that I’m old enough to remember some stuff that has gone the way of the Cold War.

For example, I can still recall the putrid smell of purple mimeograph fluid (and the uncontrollable urge to sniff a fresh copy even though it smelled like puke).

Most of all, I remember what it was like to fuck off at work before email and the internet. Back when office correspondence came to you in a brown reusable envelope with a red string closure, nearly everyone below the rank of area manager had some sort of “copier joke” tacked to the wall in their work area.

These were usually tattered sheets that had been copied over and over so many times they were barely readable, covered in defects and spots like an octogenarian’s DNA.

At one point they were ubiquitous. You could travel from one business to another one on the other side of the country and there’d be the same blurry page taped to the side of a filing cabinet. I remember wondering who could have drawn the originals and exactly how old were they? Copiers date back to the late 1950s but the mimeograph was invented back in the 1870s.

While digging through my old papers, I ran across a small stash of these. Most of the ones I had inadvertently saved were just simple text with jokes like “Stress is the body’s reaction to resisting the natural urge to kick the shit out of someone who desperately deserves it” or compilations of made up corporate sounding acronyms that spelled out variations of the word “shit”.

There were two of these though that were universal. No matter whether you were in a government office or a warehouse you’d see these two taped up in all their yellowed glory to some cubicle.

The first of these was Snoopy’s work week. He starts out dancing on Sunday and progresses miserably through the week, slowly improving towards the weekend. Girls always had this one.

The only one of these more common than the “Snoopy at work” was “Never give up”. Say those words to anyone who remembers the first brick cell phone and this is what comes to mind:

He must have really liked that car

Here’s a vintage photo of unknown origin of a guy who went to extraordinary steps to save his car from a flood. I’m assuming the car did not run or he would have just driven it someplace safe.



I hope all that water didn’t loosen up the soil and cause the tree to fall over from all the weight hanging off one side of it . It would be a real bitch to do all that and come back and find your flooded car with a huge tree on top of it. Note the house on the right is completely flooded out.

South Africa’s contribution to a more irritating world

So last night I decided to go down to “Plaza de Largartos” in El Paso to see “the grito” or the traditional cry of independence of Mexico. It was being held in El Paso this year instead of Juarez because Reyes Ferris, the mayor of Juarez (who wisely lives in El Paso) decided that it was too insecure to host the bicentennial Independence Day celebration of Mexico from Spain in Mexico and the whole thing was moved across the border into the US.

After driving around for an hour around the area cordoned off by the El Paso police (who unlike the various Mexican police are doing their jobs instead of shooting at each other) I finally parked and started walking toward the celebrations.

I knew from 4 blocks away it was going to be unpleasant. The sound wafting around the buildings was familiar and I knew immediately that the 2010 World Cup has forever changed the world into a less enjoyable place. That irritating bleat of vuvuzelas was growing louder as I got closer. Seems some enterprising soul had gathered up all the leftover red white and green horns unsold after Mexico got knocked out of the World Cup and remarketed them as holiday noisemakers.


The typical vuvuzela owner is a kid about 3-4 feet tall or 5-6 feet tall at the end of his horn, which puts the damn thing right at ear level. After about 30 minutes of being deafened by every third passing kid, I knew it was time to leave and went to Taco Tote to watch the whole thing on TV. Definitely the right decision since they weren’t selling beer downtown and the national fireworks in D. F. were stunning.

Today is the 200th year of independence of Mexico from Spain, which our local narcos celebrated by adding some red to this green and white taxi on Ave. De Technologico.

"Viva Mexico!"

1950s Fiat dealer in Vermont - Make that California

Here's a cool shot I ran across of a Fiat dealer in Vermont in the late 1950s (Note- A reader of this blog I pretty much trust states that this dealer was in California, not Vermont). The blue car in the front is a Autobiachi based off the Fiat 500. Even nicer is the Fiat Jolly in the showroom. Originally sold with wicker seats and a canvas "surrey" top these car are highly desireable today and a mint example can fetch north of $60,000 at auction.

Not bad for a Fiat 500 with roof chopped off!

"I'll take the 2 fer deal!"

Islamic gay bar at ground zero?

So it seems in the furor that has erupted over the building of “something by Muslims” near the site of ground zero in New York , conservative blogger Greg Gutfeld has come up with his own novel response to this.

He has proposed the building of a "islamic freindly" gay bar next door. I guess the logic behind this is that Muslims find homosexuality to be an affront against Islam and would be equally offended as he is to building “a mosque” next to the former site of the World Trade Center.

Here’s his entire proposal, including the part about not serving alcohol in his bar since Muslims “don’t drink”: http://www.dailygut.com/?i=4696

However, I can’t get over some conservatives proposing opening a gay bar. This has got to be a first or at least the first time they’ve been willing to admit they consider gays more “American” or “normal” than Muslims.

I suppose there’s a master ranking of “hated people” tacked up on the walnut panelling in some smoke filled backroom of the RNC national headquarters up in the Hamptons or something.

I’m curious though, what does a conservative gay bar look like anyway?

Do you open the door and walk into a tiny room full of coats?