RadioFreePirate

Ha. Be sure to click “Next Picture” to see all the ads.

Tomorrow is Talk Like a Pirate Day, so naturally we’re all a-twitter here. We only get two Pirate themed holidays a year, so we gotta make the best of ‘em.

In that spirit, here’s Browse Like a Pirate.

And then someone pointed out to me this weekend that there’s an evolutionary connection to pirates: “You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.”

The Raconteurs: “I’ve never heard of this band before, but our correspondent in Hoosierland sent me a link to their site, marveling at the old school design. It’s a wonderful throwback that takes me back to the good ol’ days of 8-bit computing, where the screens were 40 columns and you could have any color you wanted, as long as it was green. Neon, fluorescent, alien death ray green. Ah, good times, good times.”

The success of a business is determined by PROFITS not PROPHETS!

The practical, first requirement of good management is to make a profit for the enterprise so that those who made the capital available may be rewarded, and thus encouraged to provide more, through further savings, and so that the worth and dignity of profit as the source of progress and improvement may be simultaneously established.

–Super Valu Sales Service Department, Computing Margins & Mark-ups

Not long ago, on a road trip with my partner, I broached the subject of my nascent plans for our future.  To ensure our stability, I would turn our bank holdings into gold, protecting us from such events as a stock market crash or wave of avian flu. 

Partner was concerned on several counts, among them concern for my sanity, distress at my lack of trust in the economy, and the overwhelming concern that I would forget where I’d hidden the money.  I wasn’t convinced - would my blissful dreams of a gold stockpile in the attic (I picture it as kruggerands, despite not being entirely sure what those are) be so easily forgotten?

 then last night, in an attempt to learn the Irish accent for a production, we watched “Michael Collins,” a rather slow and one-sided movie about the revolutionary leader and nominal “Minister of Finance” in the early Irish Parliament.  This morning I looked up his entry on Wikipedia to see what Neil Jordan had left out (plenty) and came across this sidenote:

“Such was Collins’ reputation that even Lenin heard about his spectacular national loan, and sent a representative to Dublin to borrow some money from the Irish Republic to help fund the Russian Republic, offering some of the Russian Crown Jewels as collateral. (The jewels remained in a Dublin safe, forgotten by all sides, until the 1930s, when they were found by chance.)”

let us state for the record, my friend, that: YOU WERE RIGHT, I WAS WRONG.  If a struggling new republic can just forget about the crown jewels, I don’t have much hope for our nest egg.

 Perhaps some bills in a sock?

And you just don’t know who to ask.

DO AWAY with the workaday woes of shiatsu answerlessness. STRAIGHTEN UP and FLY RIGHT.

Visit the Zen Shiatsu Chicago Weblog.

Or the Zen Shiatsu Chicago Website.

The fact that I purchased the Venus Vibrance, despite the fact that I only shave when I play a character with a different aesthetic bent than my own, may owe something to the power of (cough, cough) design. The fact that it is quickly becoming a huge-selling item for Gillette may have something to do, instead, with the power of shame.”With the push of a button, turn on Soothing Vibrations ™ for a whole new shaving experience.  You’ll feel so pampered.”  I’ll say! A soak in the tub with the Vibrance, and you’ll feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor - but the experience has little to do with shaving.  The first powered razor for women is as pink as Barbie’s townhouse in Times Square, and nearly as function-free and condescendingly marketed.  Both its packaging and the website emphasize the simplicity of its battery operation (guess what? you unscrew the handle and pop out the battery), which gives an eloquent clue to the assumptions the designers have made about women.  And in the final analysis, does one really need a razor that is both battery powered AND designed to use when wet? 

When I came across this item at the store, I laughed out loud - imagining a crowd of men in suits around a conference table, trying not to chuckle as they promise the Vibrance will sell like hotcakes due to “discerning female buyers.”  In my neighborhood, I have two adult store options - neither of which are particularly welcoming to female clients, or for that matter particularly clean. While I wouldn’t say I’ve felt myself to be in personal danger, I wouldn’t go alone at night.  Add in the fact that many women would be as embarrassed to have their vibrator found by a visitor or child as they would be to be spotted at an adult store, and you begin to see the brilliance of this product and the “ball shape at the end of the razor (which) allows a stable, extended reach, even into the most difficult areas.”

I don’t mind so much that the product looks like a razor - much like a lipstick pipe, it gets you across state lines and avoids embarrassment at the airport.  But it seems a shame that a product like this can only be sold at K-Mart as a cosmetic tool.  I find myself longing for a time when feel-good products can be sold in the open, companies like Hitachi (producer of that grand-daddy of vibes, the Magic Wand) and Gillette can come clean, and I don’t have to worry about razor burn.  

BBC NEWS | Americas | Refugees taught how to eat American food: “This workshop on how to eat American food responsibly is part of an Illinois state-funded programme to improve the nutrition of refugees who are being re-settled in the land of plenty.

‘First we are most concerned about whether they will understand how to eat American food,’ says Shana Willis, with the non-profit refugee resettlement agency Heartland, one of the project co-ordinators.

‘They did not only not understand how to eat American food, but they went immediately to the junk food and it was then that we realised, this is going to have a much more important impact than we anticipated.’”

Killing the messenger : “Lebanese photojournalist, Layal Najib was killed by an Israeli strike on Sunday. She was only 23. This is just horrendous. Najib is yet another innocent victim of the Israeli collective punishment of Lebanon. Why did she have to perish at such a young age? “

Huitzilopochtli - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia — The Nahuas believed the world would end like the other previous four creations. Every fifty-two years, they feared the world would end. Under Tlacaelel, Aztecs believed that they could give strength to Huitzilopochtli with human blood and thereby postpone the end of the world, at least for another fifty-two years. Ironically, the Aztec empire fell at the end of this cycle.