Pimp My Crab!

Niche products get taken to silly extremes, with this Ectotherm Hermit Crab Bling Kit:

Pimp my crab

Make your hermit crab’s shell sparkle! The new Hermit Crab Bling Kit comes with plenty of bling to accessorize 2 shells. Decorating has never been so much fun! The non-toxic kit contains google eyes, rhinestones, glitter poms, assorted gemstones, and a glitter glue pen. Let your imagination run wild and give your hermit crab the snazziest shell on the block.

I can’t imagine the brainstorming session in the marketing department that came up with this one. What were they on?

Too Posh to Protest? Then Pay A Servant To Do It For You.

Why didn’t I think of this?

Damn, I could’ve made a bundle from full-diaried woolly liberals ( “Sorry, darling, my facial’s been booked for simply weeks“) during the antiwar protests:

German website offers rent-a-protester service
Can’t be arsed waving a banner? Click here
By Lester Haines
Published Wednesday 24th January 2007 11:46 GMT

You know how it is: you feel very strongly that the government really ought to address the issue of rampant unemployment among immigrant Romanian single mothers in the Frankfurt sausage-making industry, but can’t actually be bothered to get up off the sofa and hit the streets in protest. Fear not, for help is at hand in the shape of Erento.com, where agitators are renting out their services to worthy causes.

For example, as the BBC explains, “next to a black and white posed picture, Melanie lists her details from her jeans size to her shoe size and tells potential protest organisers that she is willing to be deployed up to 100km around Berlin”. Six hours of Melanie giving forth will set you back €145.

An Erento.com spokesman was “unable to say how many demonstrators had been booked since the service was launched earlier this month, but that there had certainly been demand”.

Indeed, German media has reported that a Munich march “hired protesters because its own adherents were too old to stand for hours waving banners”.

More….

Presumably that 145 euro includes a portion for the legal and medical costs incurred when the protester gets their head kicked in by baton-wielding riot police?

Hey, Rachel Moran! Ever Heard of Rehab?

Spoilt Brat

Tampa Bay’s very own spoiltbratblogger Rachel Moran once again amply demonstrates her qualifications for a spell with the nice people at the local ‘residential spa’.

As Lindsay at Majikthise very helpfully points out Moran is writing about the homeless again and, as the lady herself once saw fit to grace us with her exalted presence and we continue to take a proprietary interest, I popped over to take a look.

I do wish I hadn’t.

hey, rick baker! ever heard of a SHELTER?!

Hooooray, guess what I did tonight? Kicked it with a homeless dude, of course, ’cause, you know, you made such a point of it.

I walked out of the Garden, where Sam The Pickles was playing the deep drum-n-bass, makin’, like, two pretty girls shake their ass for fun, before I hit the Brandy’s Liquor Lounge for the real Bon Jovi throwdown, courtesy of The Movie.

What is it with this woman? She seems to think she’s lliving in some kind of picaresque novel with herself as the heroine. She’s sleazing round bars in a provincial backwater, thinks getting drunk and/or high, tooling around in her Mercedes (‘Benz’. Oh dear.) on her Daddy’s money and talking drunken bollocks with her fellow trainee middle-aged lushes isn’t just another dull and tawdry story of a life lived in quiet desperation. Nope, she’s got to justify it to herself as some kind of transgressive, edgy, art experience, just because she’s blogging about it.

That could work in theory: ‘Mary Sue as Patrick Bateman’ hasn’t been tried in blogging yet so far as I know, so at least she’d have novelty value. But even taking it purely as a writing exercise it doesn’t work, not with Moran’s writing it. She’s just so damned incoherent.

I had trouble finding excerpts to feature, because for the life of me I cannot see any point where the whole rambling story hangs together. So one chunk’s as good as any other:

The Snoop Dogg look-alike was out of earshot or had given up by this time. I don’t know. I don’t care.

“What’s your name?” said the guy in the other Benz, in front of the cop.

“Mercedes,” I said and drove away, safely, slowly, thinking about you, and a cop kickin’ it by my car for no reason, and a homeless man that is perfectly sufficient asking you to hand him things.

I got a lot of flack when someone handed me things, so I stopped doing it.

My, oh my, what a difference a year makes.

Your challenge – buy something off a homeless person at an exorbitant rate. Don’t let the transaction take longer than it needs to.

Now pretend you go out and see police at every corner. I know you weren’t there, because the street was empty, except for the Snoop Dogg look-alike who sold me a stoge at a dollar (a 400% markup). Pretend also that you could handle the same transaction as smoothly.

And now tell me I wanna beat people up.

Uh?

I’ve really tried, but I can’t for the life of me find where that particular moral can be drawn from this story. All I can conclude is that Rachel Moran thinks the fact that she didn’t beat a homeless guy up on this particular occasion proves that she doesn’t want to beat people up. This from a former law student? It’s a good job she never graduated, she’d’ve been a liability to the profession.

The one thing that does come across from the post is that Rachel Moran thinks this is an adequate riposte to her critics and they should shut up and butt out.

Butt out? Oh no. She obviously wants attention, so she shouldn’t complain when she gets it.

Downing St Corruption: It’s Not Just Blair, It’s Brown Too

Oooh. Looks like Inspector Knacker may bag more than one major Labour politician. A major corruption and patronage storm is brewing around Gordon Brown, who has been anointed by the faithful to take over as Prime Minister when Tony Blair finally goes or is arrested (whichever comes soonest).

The story in brief: Brown is accused of being complicit in what may be fraudulent activity concerning an allegedly non-political ‘educational’ charity, the Smith Institute.

The institute is fimanced and run by Brown supporters, staffed by his and his wife’s personal friends, and holds closed meetings at No.11 Downing St.. the Chancellor’s office, which the Chancellor himself attends. These meetings are where prominent buinesspeople are dictating government economic policy to Brown and channeling fcharitable funds to the Smith Institute, Brown’s private slush fund, for the privilege of doing so – all the while claiming charitable status and the tax perks that go with it.

As Guido Fawkes puts it, it smells. More than that, it reeks. he has put together a timeline of posts that give the whole backstory, and a stinking mess of secret dealings, jobs for the boys, general self-interestedness and cynicism it is.

Cash for Policy.

Sith attempt to cover-up use of No. 11.

Mrs Brown recruits Konrad as the Sith apprentice.

The back story to the Sith’s Konrad.

The public charity which refuses to talk to the public.

Cameron : Brown is the dark side. [Sith Death Star graphic]

more….

BBC2’s Newsnight also did a an expose last night which can be viewed here.

Just because the major media is keeping schtum on this one for the moment doesn’t mean it won’t develop into a yet another major New Labour corruption story. I can’t wait. Brown is the architect of New Labour’s disastrous neoliberal economic policies and he’s as big a warmonger and liar as Blair.

Perhaps we’ll be rid of them both in one godalmighty, gigantic scandal and dramafest. That would be sweet.

It’s not enough for me that they’re gone: I want to see them go with piles of burning coals heaped upon their heads, never to be able to show their faces in public again, preferably to end their days chronically ill, on means-tested benefits, gibbering madly in one of their own privatised hellholes of a homeless hostel.

Or do you think I’m being too soft?

Thought For The Day

‘Politics, as I never tire of saying, is for social and emotional misfits, handicapped folk, those with a grudge. The purpose of politics is to help them overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power.’

— Auberon Waugh, “The Power Urge”, The Spectator, 15 December, 1982