Mrs was out on a girl's weekend this past weekend, so I finally got around to watching the Stones' "Rock And Roll Circus" show. It was a thing the Stones filmed in 68, with performances from Jethro Tull (lip synced, but with Sabbath's Tony Iommi on guitar), Taj Mahal, The Who, Marianne Faithful, "Dirty Mac" (John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Mitch Mitchell) and The Stones. Dirty Mac did "Yer Blues" and then did a blues jam with a bewildered concert violinist sawing away while Yoko Ono screamed and howled next to him - it was surreal. There was a bunch of circus stuff, too.

Nearly all of it was at least pretty good. But, The Who's bit was the best:

What a monster band.

It's much better on a big screen with lots of volume, and no audio sync problems, but this will have to do.

Now that Mad Men is back (and almost gone... final ep is waiting on my DVR!), I know why I always thought Romney was a con-man.

Imagine a Portuguese speaker on the late 1800s attempting to write a Portuguese to English phrasebook, while not knowing any English but possessing both a Portuguese to French dictionary and a French to English dictionary.

It actually happened. And here's the result.

ex.

My uncle what will to treat her beship in a great sumptuousness, he was go Avignon for to buy what one should not find there, and he had leave me the charge to provide all things. I have excellent business, as you see, and i know some thing more than to eat my soup, since i know do prepare it. I did learn that it must give to the first to second and to the third service, by dishes that want to join, and yet some thing more; because we does pretend make a feast at four services without to account the dessert.

It sounds like what you'd expect by putting text through a mechanical translator a couple of times. Because that's basically what it is.

h/t

I wonder what kind of access Newsmax Inc is expecting to receive for their $1,000,000+ donation to the Clinton Foundation ?

Fox News too.

Gotta say I prefer when this Dave and Gillian do Neil:

You've probably heard the phrase "The greatest thing since sliced bread". And maybe you've wondered just WTF is so remarkable about sliced bread, and how there could possibly be a time before sliced bread. Did people in some long passed time just take turns biting off a communal loaf?

Well, there actually was a time before sliced bread - packaged, pre-sliced bread, that is - and it wasn't all that long ago.

The first loaf of commercially produced, pre-sliced bread was sold in Missouri in 1928. And it was sliced and packaged using a machine invented by Otto Frederick Rohwedder, a jeweler, watchmaker, ophthalmologist and inventor.

Wonder Bread was created in 1930. And by 1933, sliced bread was outselling unsliced bread.

Rohwedder's machine in now in the Smithsonian.

“I get blamed for selfies,” Sasson told me with a chuckle. “They do it just to get a rise out of me or something.”

Says the poor guy who invented the digital camera.

A group of vultures is called a wake, committee, venue, kettle, or volt. The term kettle refers to vultures in flight, while committee, volt, and venue refer to vultures resting in trees. Wake is reserved for a group of vultures that are feeding

Source: Vulture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

She also became part of a growing crisis in Europe, where a surging number of young people from non-Muslim homes are flocking to the Middle East to heed the call of violent jihad. It is happening, terror experts say, as converts emerge as some of the most dangerous and fanatical adherents to radical Islam — a fact driven home this week by Elton Simpson, a 30-year-old American convert who joined one other man in opening fire on a Garland, Tex., contest for cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

The Washington Post

It's a phenomenon as old as humanity (so, nearly as old as the phrase "as old as humanity"): those people who are the most un-critical and zealous about a cause - any cause, really - are often those who have just taken up the cause. They're full of energy and enthusiasm. They want to spread the word. This new thing is changing their lives and want to devote themselves to it completely. They haven't yet figured out that elation is always temporary, and that they'll eventually be back to dealing with all the same crap that they were trying to get away from in the first place. And until they do, smart recruiters will make the most of the converts' enthusiasm.

Anyway, "the zealotry of the newly-converted" is a phrase I've always admired. If you don't already have a copy of it in your head, get one! You might be surprised how often you'll get good use out of it.

Techdirt tells us about how the FBI spent years trying to decipher the lyrics to "Louie Louie" to determine if they were pornographic. And then they realized that the US Copyright office must have the lyrics already.