Clams got tongues?

Post by Corinne Comeau.

Yep. (FF to about 1:50)

That's it. I've GOT to try this. I'm going to go bring some whelks home and take some pics. Right now.



UPDATE:

Apparently this is a whole Internet Thing.


So, let's find out of whelks got tongues too.



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Freaky!

It's paper. Paper head-slinkies.

From an artistic culture that's just got too much damn time on its collective hands.



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Oh China, you crazy nut!

It's a popcorn canon.

Yes, it's because they're weird.



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Must be autumn

Even though it's 25-28 degrees every day, which when I was growing up was 'summer,' it must be autumn in Italian.


This mushroom sprang up in the pot with the hibiscus today.



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What to do with your spare goat

Remember my "Italians are all nuts" post a few weeks ago? About the bagpipe festival in Molise and the giant Italian bagpipes made out of a whole sheep?


Here's a guy who took the family business to California, where I guess there are more goats than sheep.

(H/T to Cracked and as always, a big "Hi John!" to our long-time bloggie friend Six-Bells-John in California, you mad, piping Traddie, you!)




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A new New Liturgical Movement

I don't see why liturgy can't involve more marching bands.

h/t to Fr. Derek.



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Breaking: Leftist coup being staged...

...in Milwaukee.

Yep.

The world has finally completed it's journey to the Dark Side of the Weird.

Arabs are demonstrating in the streets for freedom and democracy (if the MSM is to be believed...so, you know...) and the hard left in the US, in the person of Wisconsin's public employees union, the state Democrats and the President, are attempting to overturn by force a democratically elected government.

...the President of the United States’ re-election campaign is involved in coordinating the protests in Wisconsin and are organizing similar protests in other States.

Um, my American chorus can correct me if I'm mistaken, but aren't there Big Rules about the President mixing it up in the outcome of state elections? Aren't they supposed to keep their noses out of it? Or at least try to be discreet about interfering in state politics...



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Did everyone else know about this already?

Activists from Pygmy communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo want the United Nations to set up a tribunal to try government and rebel fighters accused of slaughtering and eating Pygmies during fighting in the north-east of the country.

That Pygmies have "activists"?

Is the world weird, or what?



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Just for laffs

So, did everyone else already know that the "Bueller-Bueller" guy in Ferris Bueller's Day Off was actually an important American conservative political writer?

He was a speechwriter for Nixon and Ford (those are US presidents of the 60s and 70s, for the too-young-to-remember-Star-Wars crowd). Was as an adjunct professor on the political and social content of mass culture at American University in Washington. Writes for the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the New York Magazine.

Then he became an actor, comedian, and game show host (?!).

"I've said to my wife repeatedly, I just want on my gravestone, 'He loved dogs' and 'Bueller, Bueller.'” - Ben Stein


Apparently, this speech was ad-libbed from his own economics lectures.

Turns out real life is weirder than fiction.

Am I the only one

who is still fairly freaked out by the words "Governor" and "Schwarzenegger" going together?

Is this an age-related thing? Do you have to be an old person to remember that Ahnold hasn't always been a politician?


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Something new every day

The President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, came to visit the pope this week.

Just discovered he is a devoted fan of English hard rock, listing Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin as his favorite bands.


and don't forget, he grew up in the Soviet Union.

A world of weird

They're

Lutheran Benedictines.

Is the world weirder than anyone could imagine?

Why yes. Yes it is.

When I saw this

Narnia (Swedish band), a Swedish Christian melodic metal band

on a Wikipedia disambiguation page, well,


how could I possibly resist such temptation?

No, it's OK. You don't actually have to listen to it.

Too weird? Not in Toronto!

I saw a guy on the train the other day doing a cube. He struck me as someone I wouldn't really want to meet. Had an odd, pastey look about him. Like he spent too much time in basements examining wriggly things under dim lights.

But it wasn't the strangest thing seen recently on Rome transit.

I have it on good authority that someone, who looked mentally competent, was seen on a bus reading L'Osservatore Romano.

You know, I used to respect Yoyo Ma

There must be something wrong with my brain

The first thing to pop into my head when I saw the following headlines at NOR,

Transsexual attacks priest during Mass in Italy
Brazilian stripped naked in front of the altar

was, "Ooo! Did anyone get pictures?"

thinking Protestant brain weird is

A chaplain to the Queen has called for Catholic concessions to balance proposed changes to the Act of Settlement, including the end of "sectarian schools".

Rev Alastair Symington, minister at Troon Old Parish Church in Ayrshire, said the reforms in aid of the Catholic Church were welcome but that they needed to make a "quid quo pro".

[...]

Rev Symington wrote: "I trust ... the Roman Catholic Church will drop its request that children of any such future royal union must be baptised into the Roman part of the Catholic Church and raised in equally sectarian separate schools."

Err...

the "Roman part of the Catholic Church"...?

Sorry what?

Can anyone figure out what this woman is blithering about?

My mind was thrown back to 1990, coming round from the anaesthetic after having my abortion, and that overwhelming sense of failure, failure as a human being and failure as an artist. If only I had known then that I would have my drawings hanging up in the Tate; not giant dominant works of art, but delicate, spindly line drawings that are so recognisably mine.

This morning, my friend emailed me, saying: "I met a 58-year-old woman who was very happy, really genuinely deep-rootedly happy, and I said to her: 'Why?' And she said, 'Because I have never had an abortion, that's why I can live without having children'. She said she had tried to have kids but had never got pregnant."

I emailed him back, saying: "My Dad said I must never have another abortion, because after three you start going mad. I've had two and I'm borderline. As it is, no one has ever wanted to have a child with me.

"Makes me feel cynical when I think about making love, and I sometimes have to ask: what is love? I would have been so much happier had I not had the abortions, but I truly believe that I would have been so much unhappier if I had had the children."

"failure as an artist"?

It reminds me of something.

Ah. Yes.

It reminds me of a Mass I went to on Sunday night at St. Peter's. There was some Cardinal celebrating. It was all in Italian (and it was the NO) so I didn't trouble myself much over trying to understand his homily. But I certainly recognised the style. He liked very much the sound of his own voice booming out of the speakers and bouncing off all the marble of that enormous place. He liked to start soft...softysoftysofty...then would suddenly and dramatically start booming his main point...followed by softysoftysofty...Boombooombooommmm BOOOMMM...

And he went on in this vein for a good fifteen minutes, while I struggled with the urge to start shouting. ("Can we go now?" "No." "What if I were to start shouting, could we go then?")

I thought, 'No, I don't really need to understand the words. I know perfectly well what he is saying.'

He was saying the same thing this strange woman is saying about the aftermath of having murdered her children:

Mememememememememememememememememememememememememememememememememememememememememememe...

Ah, Celebrity Culture

Are we supposed to recognise these people?...

oh, wait. One of them used to be on Buffy right?

So, this is what passes for moral life in that other world eh? It's weird in the Matrix isn't it?

"I pledge to use less botttled water."

Errr...

Huh?

le Gilet Jaune

Man, and I thought the Romans were nutty.

A new Froggy word I think I'm going to adopt: "beaufitude"