(What? Nothing since Jan. 14th? Crikey!)

Keith, dude....this one goes out to you, just because you reminded us that we actually DO have an audience, and that somebody cares...

Citizens! This is your brain on langwidge:



I bet you dni'dt konw taht if you wirte smeohting wtih all the lerttes fckued up epcext for the vrey frsit and lsat oens of ecah wrod, i'ts slitl pssiolbe for a ntavie raeedr to cmorphend wh'tas been wirtetn. It truns out taht wehn we raed smehotnig in an aplhbaectial lnagauge, we olny need to look at its "fmraweork", and not i'ts "cenrte".

I d'not eaxtcly konw waht the riamfciatonis of tihs are for lnagauge-lreaners and thier tacehers.... I maen, it knid of fcuks up the wohle piont of sepllnig lsesons, d'eonst it? Tihs is bad: i'ts waht I do for a lviing. Nor do I konw how tihs cmoopnent of lnaugage cognitoin afefcts poelpe who lvie in a dffirenet cnoopcetaul pradagim, epsceailly dsylxeics and tohse lreaners of Egnilsh as a Sceocnd Lnaguage wohse ntavie lngaugage epmolys iedogarphs, scuh as in Cnheise.

Do you tihnk tihs olny hpapens wtih Egnilsh and its (vrey) fkuced up seplling ssytem, or is tihs a mroe uinvreasl pehonemonn? Id' be itnresested in waht ya'll tihnk.


The Turning of the Worms

Forget Creationism... I have proof that Evolution is true!

Check it out :

http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/01/14/trauma.pill.ap/index.html

See, we haven't evolved to become the most advanced species on the planet because we've learned that aggression and greed and terror are bad and should be avoided at all cost... quite the contrary.

Our greatest claim to fame is that we've invented, all by ourselves, a drug that lets us forget about all the senseless pain, misery and death we cause each other.

Now that's progress, baby!

- g-spot -

The Star-Strangled Hammer

What most Americans don't know is that their favourite violent nationalist tune, um, anthem, was orginally a drinking song about fucking and drinking

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Anacreon_in_Heaven )

and that the war which Francis Scott Key was celebrating (the War of 1812) was, if you read Canadian history, a victory which was partially won by the British LETTING a loosely-disciplined American militia invade Fort York five minutes before they blew up their own magazine to send the Yankee invaders back over Lake Ontario in a shower of orange sparks. Oh sorry...it was a DRAW, like Vietnam...if you read American history books.

The point is that three countries have defeated the U.S. in history: Canada, Cuba and Vietnam. In each case, the weaker country let the Yankees in and allowed them to kill themselves with badly-designed military operational planning. Iraq is probably going to be the same. History repeats, as Satayana pointed out....

Anyhow, in commemoration of American military ingenuity, we here at Brainpeelings have decided to offer up a more modernised version of the militiamen's drinking song, with words that Rosanne Barr will actually be able to remember before the first pitch at SkyDome in Toronto in the springtime:

O say can you see, while the I-raqis fight,
How so badly you failed at the prison-house reaming?
Whose young men and old farts, thro' the perilous night,
O'er their orange jail suits, were so fearfully peeing?
And the agents all there, vi-olent and unfair,
Gave proof thro' the night that your flag was still there.
O say, does that rug-headed asset still crave
An end to Wal-Mart from the depths of his cave?

Sometime, look up some old oil paintings of the "White" House before 1813; you'll notice that it used to be the Pink House. That's because American Militiamen decided to burn Niagara On The Lake in their retreat south; the British/Canadian forces repaid the favour by going to Washington and having a torch party the next year; the only thing that saved the city was an unexpected downpour. However, history has left its mark on D.C. to remind us: the only colour of paint in sufficient quantities to repaint the presidential palace was (you guessed it), white; hence, "The White House".

Yesterday, largely unreported, two suicide bombers in cops' uniforms made it into the heart of the "Green Zone" and blew themselves up in the Interior Ministry, killing twenty-eight in the process.

It's not in the news today. Surprise, surprise....

In what colour(s) do you think history is going to repaint the Green Zone? Crimson? The world's most powerful military can't hold a four-square-mile patch of land in a country they've been kicking the shit out of for fifteen years. Maybe call it The Black Zone. History probably will.

The Turning of the Worms.