Agent 99
Agent was hired to babysit Agent Maxwell Smart. She had his back at all times. Would you believe, when told to sing “99 bottles of beer on the wall,” Agent Maxwell Smart forgot the lyrics? KAOS was scared of Agent 99. They were not worried about Agent Maxwell Smart. Agent 99 was a former fashion model, and the daughter of a spy. Would you believe, Agent 99 did not have a real name? Agent Maxwell Smart was a bachelor until he married Agent 99. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. Trivia is from the IMDB. One trivia item is fake.
Stone Mountain Oktoberfest
It was pride sunday, and PG had little desire to go downtown. A check of the innertubes turned up an Okterberfest event in Stone Mountain. This is the downtown part of the city, which the merchants like to call the village. It is not the park, or else PG and Uzi would not be interested.
The parking was in an open field, with the white tents across the street. The polka band was rolling out, or whatever those guys do. There could not have been more than twenty tents in the arts market. It was like the back alley surplus of the Duluth Fall Festival. The team was through in a few minutes. The sausages at the German restaurant did not have any appeal.
Fortunately, the town graveyard was nearby. There was a section of anonymous Confederate graves. Many of the other tombs had markers indicating that a CSA veteran was nearby.
A truck was going through the graveyard, with a man speaking on a loudspeaker. A trailer, full of people, was being pulled by the truck. PG said if he had known about that, he could have gone. Uzi said that there would have been a charge for the tour. PG would not have paid.
After a few cheerful minutes wandering amongst the dead, it was dinner time. There was a Piccadilly cafeteria on the way home. The health department gave them a 90 on the last inspection. No employees were in the restroom when PG washed his hands.
The Other Deadly Sins
PG was working on pictures. The phone rang. It was his friend “P”. Someone was using a loud machine to paint his fence, and “P” thought his dryer was broken. After hearing the story, PG asked “Is this what we have come to? It is pride sunday, we should be downtown, but instead we are talking on the phone about your dryer”.
“P” made a very good point. In his proud opinion, pride is just one of the seven deadly sins. The other six are feeling neglected. PG then looked up a blog post about things that come in seven. There, above seven holy virtues, seven goddesses, and seven dwarfs, were the seven deadly sins … envy, lust, gluttony, greed, pride, sloth, wrath.
Gay pride has devolved into a celebration of consumerism. It could just as easily honor gluttony, greed, or envy. Politically correct haters would love to cultivate wrath. Lust is an ongoing parade, with or without corporate maintenance.
Which leaves us with sloth, better known these days as slack. As any subgenius knows, slack is the most prized of these sins. Taking the train downtown does not further the pursuit of slack. Pictures were taken at the 2012 parade. They look very much like what you would see today. UPDATE
PG went to the Stone Mountain Oktoberfest on Pride Sunday. The polka band was loud and proud.
Science and Technology Knowledge Quiz
“Do you know more about science and technology than the average American?” Mephitic scholars at the Pew Research Center want to know. They have a 13 question test for your amusement.
The first 4 are true false. All radioactivity is man-made. ~ Electrons are smaller than atoms. ~ Lasers work by focusing sound waves. ~ The continents on which we live have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move in the future. 5 is multiple choice. The first 9 are easy.
The first one where PG had to think was 10. Which is an example of a chemical reaction? Water boiling ~ Sugar dissolving ~ Nails rusting. The demographics were gender, age, and amount of education. It did not take long to complete the test.
PG got 13 of 13 correct. “You scored better than 93% of the public and the same as 7%.” If you have too much free time, you can see a report.
The survey was conducted over the phone, using randomly generated phone numbers. Half the calls were on land lines, and half were on cell phones. In land lines, the interviewer asked for the youngest person, over 18, in the house. In cell phone interviews, the person answering the phone was interviewed. Quotas were used for gender, age, and education groups.
25 Things About Georgia
These daze, there is more media than messages. People need things to write about. One popular theme, at least in itp/otp, is lists about life in Georgia. A web facility that should know better, thought catalog, recently put out 25 Things You Need To Know About Georgia.
25TYNTKAG was written by Jeremy Populus Jones. He seems to be the CEO of something called GAFollowers. (@GAFollowers on twitter) From the fine print: “GAFollowers was created on a “strength in numbers” foundation, finding a creative way to use free online social networking sites to strengthen the “bond” between people in Georgia to help better form this state. … GAFollowers is one of the largest twitter accounts in the state of Georgia that spans nearly every corner of the region.”
These lists about Georgia life usally have a few common comments. There is the heat, the bugs, the traffic, the multiple Peachtrees, and southern accents. They seldom mention the shameless corruption, religious mental illness, rampant obesity, or racial pandemonium. Lets take a look at 25TYNTKAG. Mr. Jones will be in blue, and Chamblee54 in green. The photographs today are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”.
1. The weather here is just as inconsistent as your ex-girlfriend. Not really. It gets cold in January, hot in July. Your ex-girlfriend is staying out of this.
2. We call all interstates in Georgia, “The Highway”. Most people use the number.
3. Only in Atlanta is everything named “Peachtree” without a single tree with peaches around. Peachtree is all over OTP.
4. Terio and Honey Boo Boo were born and raised here. You couldn’t do this without google. Terio is a chubby kid who dances. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
5. “Knuck if you Buck” is the song we will always get hype to no matter the age. Yuck.
6. White girls wear Nike shorts with big t-shirts covering their shorts. (How many can you spot?) Maybe there was a sale on big t-shirts at Walmart.
7. Zaxbys is what you eat. The TC comments said this is not accurate. They mentioned a certain spelling challenged company, that specializes in overpriced chicken sandwiches. At least the son of Mr. Zaxby doesn’t run off potential customers with his big mouth.
8. We call it a “rag” not a “washcloth”. Do people up north say a woman is on the washcloth?
9. Going outside at anytime during the summer instantly guarantees a minimum a 7 bug bites. This is mostly true. Who is counting?
10. In Georgia when someone ask, “Where you from?”, people usually reply with a county not a city. In Atlanta, when you say “Where are you from?” it is almost always somewhere outside of Georgia.
11. The speed limit is 65 mph but if you’re not going at least 80 mph you’ll be ran off the road. This is also true on surface roads. In hilly Atlanta, there are few places to pass on two lane roads.
12. In Georgia it’s not a shopping cart, it’s a buggy. Do people really say shopping cart? At Kroger it is a bascart. The stores have a bascart corral.
13. We get more inches of pollen in a week than inches of snow in a full year. Pollen season hits in early spring. It is rough for many people. The rest of the year gets relatively little pollen. There is a good ice/snow storm every ten years or so. This one is probably true.
14. You say Georgia, we say Jawja. Others say George-ah. To untrained ears they sound the same.
15. Sweet tea is our water. Very few people wash cars with sweet tea.
16. The night has been a success if you ended up at Waffle House. This is especially true if you are scattered, smothered, and covered.
17. In Georgia it’s necessary to look at the weather before picking out an outfit. Items this are a reason not to number lists. Just think of what you have to say, write it down, and hope it is not copyrighted.
18. We pray that we get snow during the winters. The people who pray for winter storms are merchants. They have an inventory of batteries, milk, ice, and eggs to sell.
19. We are the creators of, “Turn Up”. You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.
20. Here in Georgia white girls can twerk. No Miley Cyrus. Ditto reaction to number 17. What was PG thinking of when he decided to do this post?
21. You will usually be 30 minutes away from just about every destination that you’re heading to. 22. There’s a Waffle House in walking distance of every Waffle House. These two have been combined, for obvious reasons. Do people proofread these lists before sending them out?
23. Any dark soda is simply called “Coke”. Many say Cocola, without the second syllable.
24. We pronounce it “Atlanna”. Whatever. Sometimes the second t is audible, sometimes not. It definitely is not the ATL, except to radio shouters.
25. Braves, Falcons & UGA are the teams we really care about. Tech fans may disagree. Ditto taxpayers, who don’t care is Rankin Blank gets a new stadium.
Riding The Hog
There is a web entity called the bitchy waiter. Yes, that might be redundant. This presumably male person has a blog, a twitter account (@bitchywaiter,) and a facebook page (Bitchy Waiter.) (The spell check suggestion for bitchywaiter is birdwatcher.) BW got his fifteen minutes recently. He wrote a *viral post* about an alleged celebrity, who took up a table playing chess, while non-celebrities waited.
Today this waste of bandwidth is sponsoring a facebook contest. “Can you write a caption for this photo? The caption with the most “likes” by midnight EST tonight will win a Bitchy Waiter Bitch Proud bracelet.” The picture is embedded with this post, along with other pictures of people, dogs, and a mannequin. The pictures were taken at a neighborhood festival that charges admission.
PG’s entry was “This little piggy went to market.” He clicked “like”, which, while considered tacky, is not technically against the rules. Some say that a hog, big enough for a man to ride, is not a little piggy.
Another possibility is that the man is wrestling with the porker. This picture was taken at an opportune moment, when the human was on top, and seems to be winning. It is a bit of folk wisdom… You should never wrestle with a pig, You will just get dirty, and the hog will enjoy it. Porky does seem to be having a good time. Maybe the rider always leaves a good tip.
Two-Sentence Horror Stories
The real estate agent got a surprise when he showed the closet to a prospective buyer. Inside was the skeletal remains of last years hide and seek champion.
Brad Majors was upset when the car got back from the garage. He knewe that the odor, caused by the rotting meat loaf in the back seat, would never completely go away.
The pale faced man came out of the basement, and said “what are you doing to my home?” At that point the wreckers ball distributed the contents of his head across the front yard.
Photographs today are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”. A contest for Two-Sentence Horror Stories is not going to end well.
The Pursuit Of Truth
There is a podcast called The Fact of the Matter. It is about a man who likes to separate fact from fiction. “The pursuit of truth properly considered shouldn’t stop short of insanity.” After an hour or so plumbing the digital depths, PG began to appreciate the truth of that comment. Does anyone have a recipe that uses a can of worms?
The show is about a photograph from the Crimean War, The valley of the shadow of death. It was taken by Roger Fenton April 23, 1855, near a place called Balaclava. Today, this is in Ukraine. Balaclava was the site of a nasty battle, in a bloody, pointless war. Today, a Balaclava is a colorful ski mask. It is the fashion statement of Pussy Riot.
PG cannot understand why this picture is a big deal. The Library of Congress has a collection of the Fenton Crimean War Photographs. This Fenton pictures were one of the first collections in the LOC that PG worked with. The picture of a road, with cannonballs, did not catch his eye.
The more historic pictures PG edits, the better he gets. One thing he learned was to download the high resolution .tif pictures. When he did the Fenton pictures before, he used the lower quality .jpg images. When he paused the podcast, and went to the LOC to see “Shadow of Death”, he decided to download a few old favorites. These are the pictures that go with this post.
The podcast is a detective story. It seems that there are two versions of the photograph. One has the cannonballs in the road, the other doesn’t. Were the cannonballs tossed on the road to make the picture more dramatic, or were they removed? They could have been removed to clear the road for wagon traffic, or to recylcle the balls. In 1855, people picked up used cannonballs and fired them again.
A very good question is why anyone should care? A man named Errol Morris cares. The link is to a very long article at the New York Times about the picture. Mr. Morris went to Ukraine to investigate the pictures. It is possible that his pursuit of truth did not stop at the boundary of insanity.
So the podcast mentions this famous picture, with a second shot that casts doubts. PG went to the LOC, and found the famous picture right away. The second shot proved elusive. PG viewed all 263 pictures in the Fenton collection in a slide show, and could not find the second picture. PG began to think that maybe the second picture was the fake. The New York Times article by Errol Morris has a copy of the second picture. The possibility remains that the second picture is a fabrication.
The podcast says that the location of some rocks changes in the two pictures. In the picture without the cannonballs on the road, the rocks are higher up on a hill, than they are in the famous picture. To Mr. Morris, this is evidence that the famous picture is a fake. PG has examined the two images, and includes them here. Perhaps this search for truth will be called off before the onset of dementia.
Controversies about famous images is not new. The shot of the flag going up over Iwo Jima has long been suspected of being posed. Just today on facebook, there was a link to a feature, The Kissing Sailor, or “The Selective Blindness of Rape Culture”. The idea is that the nurse did not want the sailor to kiss her on VJ day. This is a repost. Pictures are from The Library of Congress
Sammy And Gnarlene
Sammy Snoutfair was given to pussyvans over his wonder-wench, Gnarlene. The latest set him to lunting crack, over the tortured realization that Gnarlene was a California widow. Sammy did not own the key to Gnarlene’s heart, just a weekend lease. He would groak as she ate a roadkill souffle’, and jirble a drink of the rankest rotgut. After dinner, Sammy tried to get Gnarlene into bed, and succeeded. He soon failed ignominiously in his manly duties.
The hot water heater was broken when Sammy chose to clean up. The curglaff when he jumped in the bathtub made him question, once again, his excuse for living. Soon Sammy remembered the good times, at the bar, playing team trivia. Sammy’s talents as a spermolger won his teammates, the men who say ni, pitcher after pitcher of beer. Since the bar was in the back of a pizza parlor, with a penchant for home made cheese, Sammy could add tyromancy to his talents. Sammy was so beef witted that he thought getting to cut the cheese was an honor.
The men who say ni lost at team trivia the night that Sammy learned the truth about Gnarlene. They became a crew of queerplungers, and all were duly rescued. The lake next to the pizza parlor was not very deep, and only the most beef witted would drown in it.
The same could be said about those concerned about their well being of the men who say ni. The people who rescued them were the Englishable gentry of the village. They were all as queer as a showroom of crochet bathtubs. The men who say ni were not without sex appeal, to a certain category of degenerate. It makes you proud to be British.
After the bout of queerplunging, Sammy was taken in by Armistead. When they tried to get into Armistead’s attic dwelling, the lock on the door refused the charms of the key. This residentialism was not unexpected by Armistead, who made an impecunious living as a bookwright. It paid better than being a soda squirt, even if the bennies were slow.
Sammy was also a burglar, and was able to install himself in Armistead’s attic dwelling. This was a good thing. There was a text message for Sammy when he checked his I phone. Careless Gnarlene was with squirrel, and saying that the baby belonged to Sammy. Zafty Armistead eagerly took responsibility for the pregnancy, and started to call abortion clinics. Sodomizing Sammy would have to wait for Gnarlene’s honor to be restored.
The vocabulary for this story was supplied by Death and Taxes. The enabling post was 18 obsolete words, which never should have gone out of style. Pictures are from Gwinnett County.
8 comments