Mr. Topp and the Big Bad Blog

The morning coffee is actually dealing with real news this morning. The world is clearly a strange, strange place. You can tell, because Facebook is causing security breaches in the UK.

Also, the situation in Iran has taken another twist, as Iran’s biggest group of clerics have declared that the recent election was illegitimate, and have come out against the crackdown on protests.

(by Red Nose Studio)

Now onto Sarah Palin …

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we have no idea if this is “real” news, or the more normal type of insane goings on which normally make their way into your morning coffees. The problem appears to be that it is both these things.

As a result, the morning coffee suggests that you try the following steps, to understand Sarah Palin and her abrupt retirement:

1. Skim over her official announcement, which was self-authored, and try not to remain slack-jawed at the level of illiteracy present.
2. Read the following quote from Ned Sublette (as quoted in boingboing):

[W]hat Roland Barthes would have called the pleasure of this text has to be savored in full to draw out its pure nuttiness. It’s hard to know what to appreciate more: the all-caps prepositions; the sentence fragments that begin the fifth and sixth paragraphs, the run-on sentences, the frequent exclamation points!, the quotation from her parents’ refrigerator magnet, the basketball analogy, the proposed logic of quitting so as not to be a quitter, or the grammatically incorrect final sentence framing the misattributed punchline, which was actually said not by General Douglas MacArthur but by General Oliver P. Smith. I especially like the capital O of “Outside” in “Outside special interests,” which reminds us that the world consists of two parts: Alaska, and Outside.
But what I most enjoy is the authenticity of this text; there can be no question that Governor You Betcha wrote it herself {wink}.

3. Read Ms. Palin’s official announcement again.
4. Read this article from Wonkette and this one from the Anchorage Daily News.
5. Focus on these paragraphs in the latter article:

[Palin's lawyer,] Van Flein wrote that his letter “is to provide notice to Ms. Moore, and those who re-publish this defamation, such as Huffington Post, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post, that the Palins will not allow them to propagate defamatory material without answering to this in a court of law.”

The New York Times and Washington Post haven’t written anything about this, but Van Flein said he believed they were asking questions. “What I’ve been informed is that they’ve been interviewing people in Wasilla about this, and have tried to interview the governor’s parents about it,” Van Flein said.

6. Realise that Palin is threatening to sue the New York Times and Washington Post for interviewing people regarding her resignation.
7. Gain a new understanding of just how insane Sarah Palin must be.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Happy birthday, United States of America! I bought you some links!

	Paleontologists visit the Creation Museum.
The Washington Post presents the damning statistics behind Iran’s election numbers.
	Best headline of the week: Wrestling midgets killed by fake hookers
The best Transformers 2 review yet! Transformers interpreted as an avant garde art film.
	In 1971, this woman had her plane break apart at an altitude of over 3,000 m. She survived the fall and hiked through the forest to find help.
Kurt Vonnegut worked for Sports Illustrated for a day.
	Is this disturbing? Educational? A bit of both?
You want pockets in your trousers? Not at my airport!

The article below was this morning’s morning coffee, which failed to be published due to technical difficulties. Please accept it as an after-work coffee instead.

We begin this morning with a quick glance at serious news.

In Iran, British embassy staff have been arrested, as the authorities continue to blame Britain and the United States for voter anger at rigged election results.

In Honduras, President Manuel Zelaya has been exiled to Costa Rica in a military coup. Venezuela is threatening military intervention.

(Photo by Mike Mawson)

Will art critics be replaced with pigeons? A recent study from Japan has shown that pigeons can be train to discern “good” art from “bad”.

Crop circles in the UK are apparently not made by visiting aliens or teenagers with too much time on their hands. Instead, they are indicative of the existence of 6,000-year-old tombs, which interfere with plant growth on the surface.