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Click the screenshot to see it at full size.

The undeserved court victory of Ammon Bundy and his thugs has been parodied in a Craiglist ad with the headline 3br – 1600ft² – Malheur Wildlife Refuge for Rent – $0/month, no deposit!

The Bundys, a.k.a. yet another case of white people getting away with crazy shit.

I think the ad will get taken down soon, so I’m reproducing its for posterity:

Quaint, stone cottage in beautiful, country setting! 3 bed, 1 bath (3 if you count 2 latrines dug out by our last tenants) with spacious patio and breathtaking views!

Comes fully furnished with some chairs and maps, and over 4,000 sacred Native-American artifacts! No deposit necessary so don’t worry about the artifacts (our last tenants didn’t)!

Tenants recently moved – Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is AVAILABLE NOW!

Call FBI to schedule viewing! If no one is there for the open house you can probably just stay.

Rent is $0/month!
No deposit!

All races welcome to apply! But can only guarantee safety for you-know-which-one (wink-wink).

cats – ok
dogs – ok
standoffs w/ FBI – you’re an adult

 

If you’d like some amusing background noise to help you finish off the final hours of the Friday workday, you might want to play this 3.5 hour ad featuring Andy Daly reading all insults directed toward Laphroaig single malt whiskey from its #OpinionsWelcome campaign on Twitter. I’m amazed it even got green-lighted:

For more on how the ad got made, there’s a story about it on AdWeek.

Laphroaig isn’t for everyone. If all your preference is for Glenlivet, Laphroaig is on the other end of the whisky flavor map, which is probably why a number of people liken it to tasting like “a burning hospital”:

Click the flavor map to see it at full size.

Pete Burns in the mid-1980s.

Another artist who provided the soundtrack from my wonderfully misspent youth is no longer with us: Pete Burns, lead vocalist of the ’80s synthpop band Dead or Alive, died at age 57 from a cardiac arrest on Sunday.

He’s probably best known for Dead or Alive’s biggest hit, You Spin Me Round (Like a Record), from the album Youthquake, which was released in 1985…

…and covered to great effect in the opening sequence of Adam Sandler’s 1998 film, The Wedding Singer:

Dead or Alive tunes found their way onto many a mixtape that got played in the Deathmoble — my car of that era, a Volvo 245 DL station wagon, named after the car in Animal House — like the one pictured below:

This isn’t my car from the ’80s, but it could be its stunt double.

Again, not my car’s interior, but very, very close.

I’ll close this Pete Burns tribute with another favorite from Youthquake — In Too Deep. Requiescat in pace, Pete, and thanks for all the tunes.

For those of you who think that Jell-O brand gelatin doesn’t taste overly sugary and artificial enough, Jolly Rancher has you covered.

For the curious, here’s a review of Jolly Rancher gelatin on the Food Junk blog.

My second-last text was “Landed in Tampa!”. What was yours?

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Alice Cooper (or the person or people on his social media team) recently posted the photo above to the Alice Cooper Facebook page. I would’ve loved to witness that meeting.

Yours Truly, stopping to admire the West Virginia scenery while moving to Tampa
(and yes, I still own that jacket).
Click the photo to see all this America at full size.

In the midst of a bitter, divisive, and surreal election season, the Toronto-based creative agency The Garden Collective have come up with an idea that feels like a breath of fresh air: a campaign for Canadians to tell America how great it is.

The idea behind the Let’s Tell America It’s Great campaign is simple: America could use some cheering up right now, so why not rally Canadians, the people who make up America’s neighbour (note the Canadian spelling) and largest and most trustworthy trading partner, to send it some love?

They created this video and told their fellow Canucks to do the same:

In their campaign, they also us to to post tweets with the #tellamericaitsgreat hashtag. Here’s a sampling:

Your declaration of independence is one of the most beautiful documents ever written. #tellamericaitsgreat

— SmallLady (@SmallLady0) October 15, 2016

Gatsby, Huck Finn, Moby Dick, Scarlet Letter, Grapes of Wrath, Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye… got literature down #tellamericaitsgreat

— Michel Vaillancourt (@MichelV69) October 18, 2016

Your arts & culture, your optimism & hope, your diversity & ideals – all brilliant. Plus you have @FLOTUS #TellAmericaItsGreat

— Sarah Bessey (@sarahbessey) October 16, 2016

Your national parks and trails are amazing. Yellowstone! Appalachian trail! Incredible. #tellamericaitsgreat

— christina andrecyk (@cmandrecyk) October 14, 2016

The 1st to arrive to help Canadians after the Halifax Explosion in 1912? A train load of nurses & doctors from Boston #TellAmericaItsGreat

— Lee (@leecaper) October 19, 2016

This is fantastic! LOVE so many American poets, story tellers, radio, podcasts, cities, musicals, scholars, economists #tellamericaitsgreat https://t.co/HxheQExjzL

— kelly erin foley (@foley_kelly) October 14, 2016

A society always ready to pull together, a kaleidoscope of talents. As Tutu said: “you are such a wonderful people.” #tellamericaitsgreat

— Laure Paquette (@lpaquett) October 13, 2016

#TellAmericaItsGreat New York, Chicago, Washington, Seattle, Orlando, Pheonix…and everyone in between!

— Jeff Minten (@JeffMinten) October 19, 2016

Speaking as a Canadian who was born in the Philippines and now living in the U.S., here are the reasons why I think America’s great:

• Star Wars and Star Trek!
• Creating not just the industries in which I’ve worked — computers, telecommunications, software, the internet, e-commerce, RFID, the internet of things — but also the job that I do: technology evangelism. And let’s not forget giants, from the originals like IBM, Unisys, and Honeywell, to Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and Oracle, to the scrappy startup cultures of Route 128 and Silicon Valley.
• Only in America could both the piano accordion (everywhere else, they used button accordions) and Weird Al rise to greatness.
• The Avengers and the Justice League!
• My home country couldn’t have been liberated without the Americans.
• Bourbon. ’Nuff said.
• Barbecue.
• America’s contributions to music, which include jazz, country, gospel, bluegrass, rock, hip-hop, house, and Ween.
• Spaceships, as both big government projects and scrappy private efforts.
• The “can do” attitude that underlies America’s official philosophy — “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — as well as the unofficial one — “Hold my beer. I’ve got this.”

Let’s not forget this American ideal:

And finally, what I love most about America: Anitra.