AP: “‘I don’t find anything funny about Adolf Hitler,’ said Jonathan Swain, Indiana campaign spokesman for Obama.”

Please consider this posted by commenter jbg. He directs the viewer to a YouTube video of the German version of “The Office,” which tried to pretend it wasn’t a ripoff until Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and the BBC threatened a lawsuit. But that’s not the part jbg liked. The part jbg liked is midway through this clip:

Via Ain’t It Cool News.

The top has played an important role in modern history. Without top hats, we wouldn’t have had the Civil War, World War II or Guns n’ Roses. Since the top hat’s impact on important human events is often overlooked and underestimated, here’s a collection of pictures of famous people wearing top hats:

Abraham Lincoln:

Madonna:

Fred Astaire:

Sienna Miller:

Gene Wilder:

Mark Twain:

Marilyn Manson:

Mary Kate Olsen:

Johnny Depp:

Pete Doherty:

Brigham Young:

Slash:

Stevie Nicks:

Britney Spears:

Winston Churchill:

And now, one wild card. An elusive picture showing both Abraham Lincoln AND Winston Churchill where NEITHER are wearing top hats. Could this insult to nature be why we lost the Korean War? I think it’s possible:

By the way, did you notice that Britney Spears and Winston Churchill are in almost the same pose in their top hat pictures? Seems intriguing, doesn’t it?

UPDATE: I’ve added a few more famous people to our top hat collection:

Bob Dylan:

Daniel Day Lewis:

Harpo Marx:

Leonardo DiCaprio:

Marlene Dietrich:

Michael Jackson:

Peter Boyle:

Gillian Anderson:

Tom Petty:

Click to big-ify

Joke #1: A Ferrari? We haven’t even passed the bar yet, who can afford a Ferrari?
Joke #2: This is Los Angeles, I thought all parking spots were reserved for a Ferrari.

What kind of car was actually parked there? Not a Ferrari.

Hillary Clinton, humorist:

Through it all, Mrs. Clinton has not retreated into a shell. She asks her aides about their children, spouses and partners. She tries to keep the mood upbeat on the campaign plane, such as recently joking about how Ohio is so diverse that it sometimes feels like five different states.

Man, I love that “Ohio is like five different states” joke, it kills me every time. Hillary Clinton’s like a modern day Lenny Bruce.

In honor of Ron Paul receiving over 60,000 votes in today’s Republican Florida Primary, here are a two celebratory pictures:

Ron Paul doesn’t believe in Evolution.

Ron Paul is Revolting.

The Ron Paul masses will be here in 3, 2, 1…

Ok, I’ve had enough.

It’s been going on for a long time and I haven’t said anything because I thought the problem would go away on its own, but it hasn’t. The problem has been growing for as long as I’ve been living in my current neighborhood and it’s time to take a stand; I’ve had enough of homeless people drinking martinis in my park!

It used to be that, oh, once in a while you’d see a homeless guy in the park with a snifter of brandy or a nice after dinner port, but these days our standards are slipping. It’s not a gentlemanly highball these homeless people are enjoying, no, it’s a no-good, trashy martini. Martinis are a gateway cocktail that could lead to all sorts of nightmare scenarios; I bet some have even moved on to dirty martinis! The shame.

It’s getting so you can’t walk through a park anymore without tripping over an oh-so-low-brow martini shaker set, or slipping on a pile of forgotten olives. Those olives go bad you know! It’s just plain unsanitary. I don’t even want to know where they’re leaving the toothpicks.

The time has come for men of honor to be counted, and I for one am standing up for the rights of those of who want to walk through our parks and find our homeless population enjoying a nice Courvoisier, or a good old slow gin fizz, not a freaking Martinis! Have we fallen so low?

And don’t even get me started on Apple-tinis!

Earlier we asked “what does God need with a starship?” Today we ask a slightly different question:

Again, if only I were a video editor, this could have actually looked decent.

A few months ago CrazyMonk wrote about Dennis Kucinich’s odd speech at an early Democratic forum in which he twirled around chanting “no strings attached.” It was weird.

Anyway, in rewatching an old episode of the Simpsons I noticed that maybe it wasn’t so weird after all. Dennis Kucinich claims that he has “no strings attached,” but as he’s whirling, whirling, whirling toward freedom, is he right? This short video focuses on whether Dennis Kucinich has, in fact, been taking his marching orders from the Simpsons’ writers all along:

Is Kucinich controlling Citizen Kang, or is Citizen Kang controlling Kucinich? Only further investigation can tell us the truth. I expect Lyndon Larouche and his followers to lead any such investigation.

Here’s the .wmv for when YouTube/Fox improperly DMCA me.

Guerillas seize gorillas.

Hyuck, hyuck.

Last night while half asleep I came up with (dreamed?) the idea for a wonderful and revolutionary new business — NetSox, it’s NetFlix for socks!

Instead of doing laundry, you’d select the style of socks you’d like to wear next week from a well designed and easily navigable website (NetSox.com). The website would provide pictures and user-generated reviews of every known brand, style and color of sock known to man for the user to choose from. The most popular sock designs might require some diligent queuing!

And in just a few days, your selected socks would show up in the mail in a handy red mailer, clean and ready to wear.

After a day’s use, you’d put the now dirty socks back into the return mailer and send them off to NetSox, at no charge, to clean them and then put them back into circulation. You can keep the socks for as long or as short as you’d like all for a single low monthly rate!

You’ll never need to buy another pair of socks again!

Who has venture capital?

It’s really difficult to understand the sheer awfulness of this idea. It’s an idea that clearly made it directly from someone’s idle and ill-conceived conjecture into an actual marketplace product too quickly for anyone to ring the alarm bells. It’s a combination so foul that I’ve been unable to remove it’s stink from my mouth for the past hour.

The idea is, of course, clam beer. It, of course, contains shellfish:

I went to my local non-Simpsons themed 7-Eleven in a vain attempt to buy the sold-out buzz cola. This store didn’t have what I wanted, but what it DID have was Chelada, a combination of Budweiser beer and Clamato clam juice:

“Budweiser beer with natural flavor AND certified color.” The first person to adequately explain to me what “certified” color is gets a free clam beer in the mail. Plus, the thing is huge! Check it out, a pint. But be careful:

No agite! Do not shake! I guess if you’re drinking clam beer, you really want to make sure you get a full blast of clam in every gulp. I mean, it would hardly do to buy a big old clam beer and have had all the clam component settle to the bottom… your first gulp would just be beer with no clammy goodness. How sad. What also seems kind of sad, is that apparently the Mexican community in America is a big fan of clam juice… check out the bilingual description:

“Enjoy the best of two worlds: a refreshing Budweiser and the unique flavor of Clamato. Drink a Red One!” I hope the phrase “Drink a Red One” really catches on. I’m going to start throwing it around at parties. Anyway, I spent nearly three dollars on the thing, so I had to try it. I poured myself a glass:

It’s very unsettling to look at. It’s bright red. It looks like a carbonated Hawaiian Punch or like some awful homemade grapefruit soda. But no, it’s so much worse. While it looks like the kind of sickly sweet carbonated juice that would be marketed to children, it still SMELLS like clam juice. Children don’t like clam juice. Hell, nobody likes clam juice. I just don’t understand this product. And yet, when the time came, look how happy I was to give it a shot:

And, then, of course, came the inevitable result.

Totally, completely, unbearably gross. It tastes exactly like you would think the combination of clam juice and beer would taste as soon as it even comes within vapor range of your mouth. Getting one throatful down was a challenge and it was all I was willing to manage. The rest of it quickly went down the drain with the garbage disposal churning at full blast lest some not fully pureed chunk of clam linger in my home any longer than was absolutely necessary to take these pictures.

Oh god, what an awful experience.

PS. there’s also apparently a Bud Light version and another blogger had pretty much the same experience with it as I had with the non-Light variety.

Am I the only one who can’t help going through this thought process every time I see the License to Wed poster?

I think the designer was intentionally going for the reproductive system silhouette. I like the idea of Mandy Moore being an ovary, while either John Krasinski, or possibly the headboard, is a Fallopian Tube.

UPDATE: Shockingly I’m not the only one who noticed this.

The Daily Mail ran a story a few days ago about a 2 year-old named Georgia Brown with an IQ of 152.

Setting aside the questionable choice of publishing the child’s name, picture and IQ in a national newspaper, the Daily Mail also made the point that her IQ “puts her in the same intellectual league, proportionate to her age, as physicist Stephen Hawking.” The idea of comparing children to adults based on IQ tests is somewhat ridiculous, but not as ridiculous as the chart that the Daily Mail attached to the story:

I guess they gave him some leeway on “count,” “use,” and “explain” (with the aid of a computer?) but the rest of it is just awful.

Does anybody really think that a 2 year-old is smarter than Stephen Hawking because she can “dance ballet” or “sing”?

Twenty years have passed, a whole new generation of operatives has taken the reins, and yet we’re still putting politicians in flak jackets and army helmets?

When will the American political establishment learn?

Originals: Lieberman in Iraq, Dukakis on a tank.

The IMDB trivia page for A Few Good Men had an interesting tidbit which I hadn’t heard before:

Ed O’Neill shot scenes for the movie as a marine giving courtroom testimony. These scenes were cut from the movie, however, when test audiences began to laugh when he came on screen. This laughter was influenced due to his being involved in one of the highest rated sitcoms at the time, “Married… with Children”, in which he played a slovenly unloving patriarch of a lower middle class family.

Slovenly? Tough. Anyway, I hadn’t heard this story before, so I went online and found a few pictures from the deleted scenes of Al Bundy starring in A Few Good Men:

And, I even found one picture where Ed O’Neil got a little bit of help from a Married With Children castmate!

For an unrelated piece of oddness, here’s a video of the big scene from the film done using the Half-Life game engine.