Archive for the 'April Fool' Category

Keep your PC away from my deep fryer!

Here’s a post (with photos!) that claims to show how you can operate a PC while the main components are immersed in cooking oil. Supposedly, the heat given off by the PC would heat the oil enough to make french fries.

There were four things I liked about this entry:

1) It was a clever way to spread the prank, by including the two things that computer geeks love most: computers and fried foods. I’m surprised that they didn’t claim that Ron Paul had thought up the idea while watching an episode of South Park.

2) If you read the comments, you’ll see that several people actually went through the trouble of debunking the prank by looking up the cooking temperature for french fries and comparing it to the heat generated by a PC, and by pointing out anomalies in the photos.

3) Despite the fact that the prank had already been debunked, a commenter claimed that he had once seen the feat accomplished.

4) This story gives me a perfect excuse to use some of my favorite Ronald McDonald photos:

A bit too obvious for an April Fool’s prank, but fun nonetheless.

I’m not going to Mars without my cat

I logged onto Google to see if they were running an April Fool’s Day prank, and I found a link to something called Virgle:

For thousands of years,
the human race has spread out across the Earth, scaling mountains and plying the oceans, planting crops and building highways, raising skyscrapers and atmospheric CO2 levels, and observing, with tremendous and unflagging enthusiasm, the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply across our world’s every last nook, cranny and subdivision.

An invitation.
Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.
The question is, do you want to join us?

Ever yearned to journey to the stars? You can learn how to become a Virgle Pioneer, test your Pioneering potential, or join the Mission Control community that will help develop the 100 Year Plan we’ve outlined here.

Nice try, guys. But honestly, I can’t wait to take the “be a Mars colonist” quiz to find out what kinds of questions they’ve dreamed up.

UPDATE:

This is evil: the last question on the Mars Pioneer Quiz is a request for prospective astronauts to send in a 30 second video of themselves, explaining why they want to live on Mars. This has the potential to cause a lot of embarrassment to someone who doesn’t get the joke.

Apparently, every April 1 Hasbro rolls out a spoof of their Dungeons and Dragons franchise. This year it was My Little Pony: The Roleplaying Game. The write-up even includes a cute version of a D&D monster known as a Beholder. Never mind how I know what a Beholder is. I know, OK?

(via Cinerati)

French strikers pursue Chirac

French President Jacques Chirac will rescind a new law that had inspired a general strike in France. Using its typical anti-labor spin, the New York Times reports that the law was “intended to make hiring more flexible.” In reality, of course, the law was intended to make firing more flexible, which is why labor unions were protesting it.

If you read this blog on April Fool’s day, you know that I picked three stories from the right-wing Townhall website and pretended to agree with them. Now that Chirac has caved in, I can announce that all three examples of wingnuttery have been debunked. I knew the stories were BS, but I hadn’t expected them all to be proven false so quickly.

Let’s start with Pat Buchanan’s anti-Labor screed. Buchanan pronounced the death of the European labor movement (calling the movement “European Socialism”), citing the French strike as an example. With the vicory of the strikers, and the recent election results in Italy, I think it’s safe to say that Buchanan was about as wrong as he could be.

I didn’t even have to wait for a news story to debunk Doug Giles’ contention that Hollywood is anti-male. His contention that machismo is derided in Hollywood movies, and that Hollywood is too “politically correct” to portray women and minorities in a bad light was ridiculous on its face. So I just debunked the notion in the original April Fool’s piece.

And just two days after Bob Novak wrote that the Abramoff scandal wouldn’t hurt Tom Delay, the Texas congressman retired from politics. As it turns out, having two senior aides indicted in the Abramoff scandal will hurt your political viability.

Don’t expect any corrections, either from Townhall or from any of their columnists.

Mark From Ireland takes on Cheney. To get the joke, first click Reclusive Leftist, then click here.

**********

Lighthouse Patriot has some lighter fare.

**********

Slashdot takes on Cute Overload.

Cute Overload retaliates.

(via My Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy)

Ann Althouse engages in hilarious, yet non-partisan, self-parody.

Alert reader Squashed of Bricolage Fantasy points us to this story.

Also, former feminist Violent Socks finds Jesus at Reclusive Leftist.

And Hugh Hewitt pretends that he’s a frothing madman.

All the Hollywood heroes are pansies

I never noticed until Doug Giles pointed it out, but Hollywood is training the boys in our culture to be a bunch of feminized pacifists. Here’s Doug in part 5 of his indispensable series on raising boys:

The clear message that comes from popular culture is that masculinity sucks, and femininity is fabulous—even for men. Men who would be men are getting pounded in pop culture more than Scott Phillips’ drum skins during a gig, and everyone is expected to be cool with it.

GodDAMN, that Doug Giles is hip! I still have no clue who Scott Phillips is. And I only switched from saying “groovy” to saying “cool” last year.

Read the rest of this entry »

Did DeLay overreach?

There’s really no reason to bother with a trial for Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tx). Friends of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff have told Bob Novak that Abramoff is busily implicating everyone in the Republican party except DeLay.

So what if Abramoff himself said that DeLay is lying?

“Everybody is lying,” Abramoff told a former colleague. There are e-mails and records that will implicate others, he said. He was noticeably caustic about House Majority Leader Tom DeLay…”Those S.O.B.s,” Abramoff said last week about DeLay and his staffers, according to his luncheon companion. “DeLay knew everything. He knew all the details.”

If Abramoff’s friends told Novak that DeLay is innocent, that’s good enough for me.