Welcome Home

In honor of Veteran’s Day, Mental Floss has put together a compilation of videos of dogs welcoming home soldiers who’ve been deployed. Geez, if these videos don’t melt your hard heart, you’re made of stone.

Now, as a counter-point, the video below shows every cat in America welcoming home its owner.

[Props=Balloon Juice]

Ambiguous No More

College Humor has resolved all of those ambiguous movie endings for you. I actually like this version of No Country for Old Men better.

And another similar one from a while back was “If All Movies had Cellphones.”

I Believe That’s Called . . . A Beauty Pageant

Princess Jesus Boobies, aka former beauty queen Carrie Prejean, has published her book, “Still Standing,” which is destined for a permanent place beside Sarah Palin’s forthcoming “Going Rogue” on the ghostwritten-booklike-artifacts-by-former-beauty-queens-turned-rightwing-darlings bookshelf.

The book is chock-a-block full of SHOCKING REVELATIONS and SCANDALOUS DETAILS, including the fact that homophobia actually means fear of men, as well as this salacious tidbit about how Donald Trump treats beauty contestants like, well, beauty contestants:

Prejean also reveals that Trump personally inspected each of the contestants, lining them up on stage and asking them which other contestants were “hot.” After he made his way through all the girls, he motioned the ones he liked to one side, leaving the “discards” on the other side: “It became clear that the point of the whole exercise was for him to divide the room between girls he personally found attractive and those he did not.”

Carrie, Carrie, Carrie, I know this may be difficult to comprehend, but the activity in which you were engaged is called a BEAUTY CONTEST, and its only goal is to ruthlessly herd its vacuously smiling participants into various demeaning subsegments, including the flawlessly attractive category, the ridiculously attractive category, the quite-fetchingly-attractive-but-has-small-breasts category, the stunningly-attractive-but-is-a-bit-too-’ethnic’ category, and, finally, the still-more-attractive-than-99.9%-of-the-population-even-though-she’s-the-ugliest-one-on-that-particular-stage category. It has no other function.

Of course, you seem to believe you were ‘censored’ because you were asked a question during a beauty pageant the express purpose of which was to judge your answer and — wait for it — you were judged on your answer. You then proceeded to wrap yourself in a martyr’s cloak stitched from equal parts Old Glory and the robes of Jesus. Carrie, you lost a beauty contest; you’re not Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. You lost because you gave an incoherent, anti-gay response to a question in an industry entirely dominated by gay men. Nothing more. When your book is banned and burned, and you are thrown in prison, then you can claim censorship. Until then, just smile and wave.

(And, Carrie, please note that I got through this entire post without once mentioning your sex tape. You’re welcome.)

Life After Aerosmith

As soon as I heard that Steven Tyler may have quit Aerosmith, I thought of this clip from This is Spinal Tap, wherein Marti DeBergi asks the boys the million dollar question: “If you could not play rock and roll, what would you do?”

Nigel Tufnel gives the best answer:

Nigel: I suppose I could work in a shop of some kind or do free lance selling of some sort of product.
Marti: A salesman?
Nigel: A salesman. Maybe in a haberdasher or maybe like a chapeau shop or somefing. Like, “What size do you wear, sir?” (And then you answer me.)
Marti: Uh, seven and a quarter
Nigel: “I think we have that.” Something like that I could do.
Marti: Do you think you’d be happy doing that?
Nigel: “No, we’re all out. Do you wear black?” See that sort of thing I think I could probably muster up.
Marti: Do you think you could be happy doing that?
Nigel: I don’t know. What are the hours?

Famous Authors Narrate the Funny Pages

Here is Dilbert, by Charles Dickens:
There was much to be done in the halls of Business in expectation of a visit from Mister Catchclaw, the enterprising Vice President of the Corporation. The clerk Dilbert was requested to turn out spread-sheet upon spread-sheet until, his eyes scarcely able to focus on his computing screen, he requested to his supervisor, Mister Lapwroth, that he be allowed to return home to care for his round companion Dogbert. “Home!” exclaimed Lapwroth, “Home is for those who work smarter, not harder!”

From McSweeney’s. The rest are here.

The Movie Title Compilation

Videogum has it. You want it. Why not go there?

“I Love You, Mr. Star Wars,” the movie title compilation
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Weird Kid Types Grammatically Coherent YouTube Comment

Daily Fortnight has the details

In addition to the cringe-worthy syntactical accuracy of his writing, Callaghan appeared guilty of using multi-syllabic words such as ‘indoctrination’, ‘retrospective’ and ‘decriminalization’ to get his points across, and left thousands of readers bewildered when he made accurate use of a character known as the ‘question mark’ at the end of his concluding sentence.

Dredging Allegiance

By now you may have seen the video of Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) hilariously messing up the Pledge of Allegiance while trying to shove it in the faces of ‘liberals’ at the Grand Teabag Ball yesterday, but here it is again. Could there be a more telling slip than being so focused on ‘under God’ that you skip right over ‘indivisible’? Of course, that just set the stage for John Boehner (there to represent all orange Americans) to mix up the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution.

Two fun facts about the Pledge of Allegiance that Rep. Todd Akin did not mention during his speech:
1. It was written by a socialist, Francis Bellamy
2. The original salute for the Pledge was not the hand over heart that we use today. The original salute looked like this:

This version of the salute was officially dropped in 1942, for obvious reasons.

Oh the Ironic Irony

U2 fans are outraged — outraged, I tell ya — because the band has constructed a metal wall around the site of their free concert in Berlin to commemorate . . . wait for it . . . the 20th anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Now, when I say ‘the bank has constructed’ I don’t actually mean the members of U2 built the wall. It’s not as though Bono was out all night at the Brandenburg Gate, “Edge, be a luv an’ pass me that spanner before I land in ‘ospital wif me wee bollocks in a sling!”

Frankly, I don’t understand the controversy. U2 has always been adept at separating itself from its fans when it comes to live performances, whether it be on a barge, in the snow, on a rooftop, on another rooftop, on a horsedrawn carriage, or in the horrible city of Las Vegas.

In searching through most of the U2 vids on YouTube (‘U2 on YouTube,’ is that confusing?), I did come across this gem, Improv Everywhere’s spoof of U2’s rooftop fetish. Funny stuff, but maybe the hoax would have lasted longer than one song if the band hadn’t sucked so bad.

Here’s What Ohio Looks Like These Days

More scenes of the carnage here, courtesy of Erin O’Brien.

A couple of years ago, I did a bike tour through Ohio with my sister and brother. It was called GOBA, the Great Ohio Bike Adventure, and it’s a great ride. We rode through a lot of small towns in the southwestern part of the state — Xenia, Hillsboro, Circleville — and in every town there was the same sense of eerie stillness, as though the entire downtown had simply picked up and bolted. Down the length of Main, boarded up shops lined both sides of the street, and the only businesses left downtown were a pizza shop or two, a couple of bars, a VFW, maybe a hair stylist or a second hand store. Meanwhile, the drug store stood empty, the hardware store was empty, the shoe store and the grocery were long gone, along with the ghost of whatever independent department store had once supplied the townspeople with appliances and winter coats. It was like the setting for a horror movie. Then you’d ride out of town and just outside the town limits you’d come upon the strip mall with its inevitable Wal-Mart, its Best Buy, its CVS, its wretched chain restaurants (Bob Evans, Applebees), all surrounded by endless black parking lots.

When the hell did this entire country turn into Pottersville?