Always Amusing

I love the smell of blazing dickheads in the morning...

The tragedy of NASA

And so the long awaited Augustine Commission report has been released, offering its vision for NASA's future.

And what did it recommend?

Eight piss-weak alternatives to keep NASA on a shoestring - two maintaining the current funding and six with a paltry $3 billion p.a. top-up.

To achieve what?

Bugger all really. Skip the moon. Forget landing on Mars in the next thirty years. Go visit an asteroid! Do a Mars flyby! Or go check out Phobos or Deimos and do some 'exciting science' there.

By when?

Oh, going back to the moon should be a goer by 2030...

Jazus H. Fucking Rice Crispies!

In the 1960s NASA got the moon and back in less than ten years from a standing start, and now a bunch of learned bean counters say it can't be done again in under twenty!

NASA has achieved some of the greatest events in all of human history. Getting off the Earth CAN be achieved. And getting off the third rock from the sun is both inevitable and a total human necessity.

The U.S. has the financial muscle to do this. The money exists.

The elephant in the room is - of course - the U.S. military. The U.S. Department of Defense gets more money each year than NASA has been granted in its full history of 50 years - over $500 billion. Every year.

To do what?

Stuff all! Piss off middle eastern countries and rattle the sacred sabers. A colossal fucking waste of money and resources with few tangible gains.

Just 5% of the Defence budget moved to NASA would put a permanent human presence on both the moon and Mars in just a few years, doing real science and expanding human boundaries in amazing ways. Our first steps to the stars.

Or, the preferred option of gun luvin' American paranoids, keep the status quo and keep on spending trillions of dollars, beating the crap out of carefully nurtured enemies.

Carl Sagan was right. A great civilization itching to snuff itself out of existence when on the verge breaking free.

Sigh.

Suit Blight

There are times when I would like to scrape together all the world-media-owning suits (Rupert Murdoch and similar pond scum), all the copyright lawyers, all the net ignorant politicians and all the other olde worlde corporate executives and related douchebags together in front of a very large stone wall and blast the living crap out of the lot of them with a few hundred thousand bazookas.

Oh how we'd cheer.

Bugger!

The Internet is GLOBAL. Get over it!

There is no excuse for this sort of endless copyright bullshit being drooled out by stuffwits still working to a 19th Century business model.

The above example is not very important in the scheme of things, but note that it is for a smegging 21 second promo! A mighty media empire will crumble and fall if a non-US citizen should be allowed to glimpse it! No money to be made here!

AaaaAAARGH!!!!

Sigh.

Morons.

Damn. I've run out of exclamation points.



Warm up the bazookas...

Shameless hussy mushroom cleans up her act

WARNING! ADULT CONTENT BELOW! WARNING!

It is sad sign of the end times that even Mother Nature can have her hand diverted by the evil designs of the Prince of Darkness, Satan.

And so it came to pass that I was recently disgusted to find this filthy image on a personal blog:



But the InterWeb is a place where families and children and the faithful of God do dwell! I really think the owner of this blog needs to make the WHOLE WORLD (all 50 states of it, from sea to shining sea) AN APOLOGY! To inflict this FILTH without warning is surely a public mischief of the highest order! Unsuspecting children who fall victim are surely going to witness the steady enduring flames of HELL!

I redisplay this disgraceful image here as a public service and offer a way of atonement for the perpetrator.

Switch your image, before too many more young minds are destroyed, with THIS VERSION:




There. The cleansing love of Godly pixelation hath rendered the foul pure.

Sin averted. :-)

Another Family Friendly service by Petros!

There is no such thing as...

1. The Easter Bunny. Thank God. (see left)
2. God, as we know Him. Thank Bunny.
3. Santa Claus. Ha. I figured that out when I was ten! No flies on me...
4. The Loch Ness Monster. Can't say the same for the Loch Ness Monster Tourist Industry.
5. Big Foot.
6. Yowies.
7. Yeti.
8. The Min Min lights.
9. Credible aliens from outer space. Oh, they are probably out there... They just aren't here.
10. A meaningful historical record in the bible. Old or New Testament.
11. Chi. (Hah?)
12. Chakras. (What? Are you kidding me?)
13. Energy from crystals (A.K.A. lumps of pretty rock).
14. Heaven.
15. Hell. (Do follow this link, and especially, play the audio recording of the real Hell about half way down the rather lengthy page. It's just great!)
16. Purgatory.
17. Limbo. How low can the Vatican go...
18. Intelligent thought in the Vatican.
19. Golden plates from which might be transcribed the Book of Mormon.
20. Catholic Saint makin' miracles.
21. Any other miracles.
22. Ghosts.
23. Spooks.
24. Apparitions.
25. Poltergeists. Just as well, since who ya gunna call?
26. Ectoplasm. Although it would be fun to play with.
27. Spirit photography.
28. Sin. (Oh, 'evil' sure exists, but 'sin' is just some shit thought up by evil holy men and attributed to a god for the calculated purpose of crowd control. It's worked for thousands of years...)
29. Miraculous appearances of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mandy Mary on pieces of toast, rocks, hotplate grease, tree bark, clouds or steaming dog turds.
30. A 6000 year old creation of absolutely everything, starring your friends and mine, Adam and Eve as the original human screwups. Therefore, no 'original' sin, therefore, no need for a Jesus death dive into a vat of boiling suet, or whatever it was he did, to (sort of) let the faithful off the hook. Thanks for calling, JC.

There is such a thing as childhood innocence.

I hope the innocence of the cute little girl at the top of this piece survived that Easter Bunny...

A Petros 1K Short Story: Fred's Day

And it came to pass that the Reverend Pastor Fred Waldron Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, died and went unto his heavenly reward.

Verily, Fred had prayed and worked hard his whole life.

“I’ve done it all, Lord. I’ve cursed and rebuked all the faggots, and the harlots, and the fag enablers, and the filth, and all the scum that infested your sacred world, Lord. And now I’m comin’ home to ye!”, Fred prayed quietly, as he ascended the golden stairway to the place of judgement.

At the top of the stair, the Lord God Almighty rested on his magnificent throne surrounded by the multitudes of angels and all the Saints.

The Lord shifted gently in his seat, causing the flowing golden chains attached to his nipple rings, to clank gently. The sequin studded thong adorning God’s Holy Nether Bits spangled brightly in Fred’s face, and lo, Fred could not avoid noticing how little it withheld from his imagination.

“Well, big boy”, God intoned, “You’ve no idea how much we have all been looking forward to this…!”

100 Years Dead and Counting

Here she is! Australia's very own first Saint-to-be, Mary MacKillop now celebrating the completion of her first 100 years banging about in Purgatory. Praise the Lord!

Now this Saint has been a long time coming. Having to scrape up 100% guaranteed genuine post-death miracles just ain't easy. But if you are a zealous member of one of the world's greatest dying religions, you can make it happen! Even in Australia! The local Mary MacWorshippers have been at it day and night for a century, and now it is looking like all their valuable, important, hard work is about to pay off. Its a Miracle! They have got their miracles! The dead Sister finally whipped out a couple of magical cures and saved the day.

And so, it has come to pass, EVEN AS WE SPEAK, that a bunch of creaky old farts in red dresses over in Italy are slowly, carefully, importantly, crossing the last 'i's and dotting the last 't's to approve her elevation to the blessed state of Sainthood.

Any day now.

By next year at least, fer sure.

And then Pope Scary the 103rd will bestow on her the Sacred Gong, or something, and Australia will have its first saint, and there will be much rejoicing across the Catholic bits of the land.

Except for Sister Mary. She's dead, and really couldn't give a toss.

40th Anniversary - Apollo 11!

Congratulations of course, to Neil, Buzz and Michael, this being the 40th Anniversary of the first landing on the moon.

Raspberries and a cactus up the anus, to all the conspiracy fruitcakes that reckon it never happened. They are endlessly tedious and collectively have a negative brain cell count. The day Buzz punched one in the face (the jerk sprang out at Buzz and called him a liar, a thief and a cheat) was a great day for Truth, Justice, and the American Way! :-)

I do have a 40 year old grudge with Neil though.

He was so hyped up after landing that he insisted on skipping a three hour rest break scheduled for before the moonwalk. NASA caved and he and Buzz went out early. And I missed seeing the whole thing, as I was stuck in a compulsory school exam. My school refused to reschedule the exam just because of a little something happening on the Moon... It was all over before I got home. I couldn't see anything at school, as my school didn't have any televisions...

"Next time for sure!" I thought.

Nope. Al Bean buggered the Apollo 12 video camera by pointing it at the sun just after he and Pete Conrad started their moonwalk.

"Next time for sure!" I thought.

Nope. Apollo 13 never landed, but that's another story.

"Next time for sure!" I thought.

AMAZING! FINALLY! Live TV from the moon with Apollo 14! Wee...!

You too can be great writer in the comfort of your own home...

I have learned (thanks to Phil Plait) about a really neat website where you can submit short stories. Others may read and rate your stories and you can of course read and rate others. The site is called Ficly, and its really well done. The neat thing is that a single story can be no more than 1024 characters long, so you really have to be economical in your story telling. You can also write prequels and sequels to your own or other's stories.

I have submitted two stories so far.

The most recent, starring everyone's favourite fundie bigot, Fred Phelps is called Fred's Day and was up for about a minute before someone read and rated it. Wee.

If you like writing at all, give it a go...

Sri Lanka mystic reveals an answer to our problems

The Sri Lankan government has arrested a popular astrologer who predicted that the country's president would be ejected from office.

It's hard to pick the greater moron - the astrologer or the government genius who ordered the arrest. Probably the astrologer. He should have known better than to point the bone at a powerful figure in a country well mired in poverty and superstitious crap.

Still...

...it does give one an idea...

Ahem. I shall call forth my previously well shaded psychic astrological powers once endowed upon me by the venerated Gnostrell Earth Goddess of Foon, and confidently predict that out present Nanny Prime Minister Kevin '07 Rudd will be STABBED TO DEATH by every single member of the present Labor Caucus on or before the next Ides of March.

I mean, how much can they (or us) put up with? I am a long time Labor voter, but I am a little tired of all the self serving knee-jerk Mrs Grundy puritan crap oozing from this guy. He really would be better placed running for a spot in the U.S. Congress. They like that sort of thing there.

So, to get the crystal ball rolling, here's a little 100% guaranteed death spell:


... and by the magic of magick, we can sit back and watch Kevvie's inevitable doom unfold.

Aaaaaah.

Now to use my awesome skills on a Lotto ticket...