Freaky Fashion Friday

As befitting All Hallows Eve and the sad departure of Blah Blah Blog here is some Freaky Fashion in hommage:

I got dust in my eye

Living as an ex pat is both enlightening and infuriating, is also...wait, that's three things......

Anyway, from afar, the American 'Collective', or the guvmint you people put in, scares the hell out of people. Then, there is the country I grew up in; as I had forsaken the people in charge of the 'collective' long ago.
To me, this is what you do when you can.

ESA's Jules Verne

The European Space Agency built a robotic spacecraft to dock with the ISS. Once unloaded it was sent back home in a controlled reentry. Below is a very nice picture of it as it breaks up in the atmosphere on reentry. Courtesy APOD

The bright side of the economic meltdown

On the upside, now that people will be more broke than usual I bet all the crying over caged chicken eggs will die down. As little as anyone cares about PETA, they will care less now.
Good times, good times.

pretty pathetic

Well, we've got Western governments handing our money over to their banker pals because we won't even whimper.
Now, to add to the further collapse of what is right(whatever that means), they are using a mediator for the Somali pirates. One well placed missile and the tanks and pirates are in Davey Jones Locker and whoever owned the ship gets insurance. Why is this so hard to understand?
Or, even better, hey arms dealers and other miscreants that use the shipping lanes near the east coast of Africa, why not hire some nation(any one come to mind comrade?), to escort you. Cheapskate wussies.

A parable for our times

"Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to the
villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each. The villagers seeing
that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest, and started
catching them.

The man bought thousands at $10 and as supply started to diminish, the
villagers stopped their effort. He further announced that he would now
buy at $20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started
catching monkeys again.

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to
their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys
became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone
catch one!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 ! However, since
he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy
on his behalf.

In the man's absence, the assistant told the villagers 'Look at all
these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell
them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell
them to him for $50 each.'

The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all the monkeys
for $35 each. Then they never saw the man nor his assistant again. They had
the monkeys, and the man had their money.



Now you have a better understanding of how the stock market and the
government work."

Hadal Snailfish

British and Japanese researchers have released a vid of these fish that live almost 5 miles underwater. Footage after the deepest sighting below.

Is very very cool stuff; however in 1960 Jacques Piccard and David Walsh of the US Navy took a bathyscaph 35,600 feet down in the Marianas Trench.
Here's what Mr Piccard was quoted as saying, “…. And as we were settling this final fathom, I saw a wonderful thing. Lying on the bottom just beneath us was some type of flatfish, resembling a sole, about 1 foot long and 6 inches across. Even as I saw him, his two round eyes on top of his head spied us - a monster of steel - invading his silent realm. Eyes? Why should he have eyes? Merely to see phosphorescence? The floodlight that bathed him was the first real light ever to enter this hadal realm. Here, in an instant, was the answer that biologists had asked for the decades. Could life exist in the greatest depths of the ocean? It could! And not only that, here apparently, was a true, bony teleost fish, not a primitive ray or elasmobranch. Yes, a highly evolved vertebrate, in time’s arrow very close to man himself. Slowly, extremely slowly, this flatfish swam away. Moving along the bottom, partly in the ooze and partly in the water, he disappeared into his night. Slowly too - perhaps everything is slow at the bottom of the sea - Walsh and I shook hands.”

Best bass player in the world

I am bass. I love bass. When I decided the sporting life wasn't for me I wanted to do music. Like the old Western Swingers holler...'that's right m'boy...HIT BOTTOM!', I like bottom.
John Entwistle, what a bass player. Bob 'BJ' Jorin built his own! Gimme bass! The thing is, Matt Freeman is the bestest bass player I have ever heard. Will see him
on 4 November...weeeeeee!

Banks warn of Christmas credit squeeze

Ya think?

The Taxman

Now my advice for those who die, (Taxman!)
Declare the pennies on your eyes, (Taxman!)
‘Cos I’m the Taxman,
Yeah, I’m the Taxman.

Friedrich Schiller has been sent a notice of some overdue taxes. He has been dead over 200 years.

Dumbing down of civilisation

Look around. It ain't like it used to be. Myself, I think it's a whole Tri--lateral Commission plot, but there you go.
Anyway, in today's 'txt' driven world, some things need to be put in terms everyone understands, so there is no confusion.
Here's an example:

(1) Just one God

(2) Put nothin' before God

(3) Watch yer mouth

(4) Git yourself to Sunday meetin'

(5) Honor yer Ma & Pa

(6) No killin'

(7) No foolin' around with another fellow's gal

(8) Don't take what ain't yers

(9) No tellin' tales or gossipin'

(10) Don't be hankerin' for yer buddy's stuff

There, how hard is that?