Solar plexus! Bursting out from the hit Comedy Central show, THE COLBERT REPORT–it’s STEPHEN COLBERT’S TEK JANSEN! In this stunning continuation of Stephen Colbert’s critically acclaimed, yet unpublished prose novel, everyone’s favorite sci-fi hero must stand against the enemies of freedom no matter what dark planet they crawl from! Each issue features two stories: A main serialized story written by John Layman and Tom Peyer with art by Scott Chantler & an independent backup story written by Jim Massey with art by Robbi Rodriguez.
Flight of the Conchords can be uneven, but, as someone who studied French in high school, I absolutely loved “Foux Da Fa Fa”:
While “Foux Da Fa Fa” sounds like a stereotypical 1960s French pop song, “A Kiss is Not A Contract” clearly borrows quite explicitly from the old-school video for Serge Gainsbourg’s Ballade de Melody Nelson (about 45 seconds in):
(Edit: The original YouTube video for Serge Gainsbourg’s Ballade de Melody Nelson that I embedded is no longer available, and other versions, like this one, aren’t embeddable — by those of us who lack Serge’s certain je ne sais quoi, at least.)
When I first listened to “Foux Da Fa Fa,” I missed a few of the lyrics, so I looked them up. Unfortunately, HBO does not provide the French lyrics with accents. Of course, they’re not really in correct French to start with, either. As a public service, I’ve added the accents, fixed a few spelling and grammar errors, and provided a rough English translation:
Foux da Fa Fa(with English translation)
Je voudrais une un croissant (I would like a crescent roll)
Je suis enchanté (I am enchanted/delighted [to meet you])
Où est le la bibliotheque? (Where is the library?)
Voilà mon passeport (Here/there is my passport)
Ah, Gérard Depardieu (Ah, Gerard Depardieu [a famous French actor]) Un Une baguette, ah ha ha, oh oh oh oh (a loaf of French bread)
Ba Ba ba-ba Bow! (Ba ba ba-ba bow [gibberish])
Foux da fa fa (Foux da fa fa [no, it doesn't mean anything])
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah
Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah
Et maintenant le voyage à la supermarché! (And now the trip to the supermarket!)
Le pamplemousse (Grapefruit)
Ananas (Pineapple)
Jus d’orange (Orange juice)
Boeuf (Beef) Soup Soupe du jour (Soup of the day)
Le camembert (Camembert [cheese]) Jacque Jacques Cousteau (Jacques Cousteau [the undersea explorer])
Baguette (Loaf of French bread)
Mais oui (But yes/of course)
Bonjour (Hello/good day)
Bonjour
Bonjour
Bonjour, monsieur (Good day, sir)
Bonjour mon petit bureau de change (Hello, my little foreign exchange)
Ça va? (OK?)
Ça va. (OK)
Ça va? (OK?)
Ça va. (OK)
Voilà – le la conversation a la au parc. (Look, conversation at the park)
Où est le livre? (Where is the book?)
À la bibliotheque (At the library)
Et le la musique dance danse? (And the dance music?) Et le À la discotheque. (At the disco/nightclub) Et le À la discotheque. (At the disco/nightclub)
C’est ci, baby! (This is it, baby!)
Un, deux, trois, quatre (One, two, three, four)
Ba ba ba-ba bow!
Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah
Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah
Où est le la piscine? (Where is the pool?)
Pardon moi? (Excuse me?)
Où est le la piscine? (Where is the pool?)
…Uh…
Splish splash
…Uh…
Eh…
Je ne comprends pas. (I don’t understand.)
Parlez-vous le français? (Do you speak French?)
Eh?
Eh? Parlez-vous le français? (Do you speak French?)
Uh ….No.
Hmmm.
Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah
Ba ba ba-ba bow!
“Foux Da Fa Fa” won’t be on the new Flight of the Conchords EP, The Distant Future, but “Robots” obviously will.
This week’s episode of Flight of the Conchords was fairly weak, but Murray’s first music video, “Leggie Blonde,” more than made up for the rest of the episode.
Last week’s episode was stronger — especially for any Bowie fans out there. I love Jemaine’s imitation of “1972 David Bowie from the Ziggy Stardust tour”:
Warriors of the French Foreign Legion looks at the infamous “army of cutthroats and thieves,” where new recruits leave behind their pasts and take on a new name and a new identity.
Within the Légion étrangère, one unit stands out as even more elite, the second paratrooper regiment. Here’s what happened to the first:
The 1st Régiment Étranger Parachutiste (1st REP) was established in 1955 during the Algerian War and disbanded in April 1961 as the entire regiment rose against the French government of Charles de Gaulle (Algiers Putsch), in protest against moves to negotiate an end to the Algerian War.
The nightlife in Japan is surreal and — to a westerner — bewildering. The Great Happiness Space — how Japanese is that title? — is a documentary from 2006 that explores host bars, where androgynous young men with big peroxide hair entertain young women. Get ready for some culture shock.
Come back to it later if you don’t have time now. You definitely want to get to the first “plot twist” about a half-hour in.
I have been watching and enjoying Human Weapon on the History Channel, but two things have bothered me.
First, they pretend that after training for a few weeks, our hosts will be able to compete against a master of that particular style. The masters are clearly toying with them, sparring lightly, but the show doesn’t admit that obvious fact.
Second, while Jason Chambers is a well-trained martial artists, his football-player co-host, Bill Duff, is a meat-head. Here’s what a Canadian judoka training in Japan had to say:
Training was going really well for a long time. I felt strong, techniques were clicking, and all in all things were excellent.
Then last Wednesday people filming a show for the History Channel came to Tokai to do a show on judo.
After a four and a half hour practice, after I had cooled down and stretched, I was asked by Agemizu sensei to have a little match with one of the History Channel guys, a six foot 5 or so, 230+ lb man.
Now, knowing well that this guy was a beginner, it wouldn’t look good if I slammed this guy, so I took it easy and was just moving around, going in for techniques half-heartedly, and just kind of messing around. No one told me that this guy was going to fight me like his life depended on it.
So, long story short, after being at Tokai for well, almost a year now, and training with World Champions and the like, for the first time since my shoulder surgery, something in my shoulder popped when this oaf jerked my arm back with both his arms with all his might.
I acted like nothing happened, and got up and moved around some more with him, and at that point he started sticking his bald sweaty head in my face while pushing me straight back, and then he grabbed my leg, and I just hopped away, thinking he’d let go, but instead he football tackled me from behind.
Weird California describes itself as “Your Travel Guide to California’s Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets,” and as such it lists the sites of a number of utopian communes, including the Rancho Santa Fe location of the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide of 1997.
You may recall that the cultists were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants and brand new black-and-white Nike tennis shoes, with purple shrouds over their dead bodies. There were two details I didn’t know though. First, their track uniforms included patches saying “Heaven’s Gate Away Team”. (That seems darkly comical.) Second, they each had their passports and $5.75 in hand.
In an animated feature that has both human and animal characters, usually the humans are the bad guys because they either a) kill and eat the cute animals or b) pollute the animals’ environment and despoil the earth or c) both a and b. This is the story of an animal who wants to be human, or at least live like a human being. In other words, human is good! And the film explains what the essential difference between the human and the animal is: humans make, animals take. Rats take other people’s food, humans invent new foods. Thus, cuisine is a symbol of what gives human beings whatever dignity they may have. Remy, the cute animal protagonist, is a rat who wants to be a chef. Throughout the movie, stealing food (even to feed hungry friends!) is treated as the one thing he must not do, or he will lose his hard-won human dignity. We repeatedly hear the motto, “Anyone can cook” (ie., even a rat). At the end, we realize that what this means is not that everyone can be a great cook (sorry, not everyone is great) but that greatness can come from anywhere.
Science fiction at one time was despised as vulgar and “populist” by university English departments. Today, it is just another cultural artifact to be deconstructed, along with cartoons and People magazine articles. Yet one could argue that science fiction has had a greater impact on the way we all live than any other literary genre of the 20th century.
When one looks at the great technological revolutions that have shaped our lives over the past 50 years, more often than not one finds that the men and women behind them were avid consumers of what used to be considered no more than adolescent trash. As Arthur C. Clarke put it: “Almost every good scientist I know has read science fiction.” And the greatest writer who produced them was Robert Anson Heinlein, born in Butler, Mo., 100 years ago this month.
After the apocalypse, you won’t have the luxury of hitting REI for propane to cook that fillet of zombie. You’ll have to make do with what’s available. There’s only one stove that efficiently burns any liquid fuel, from butane to biodiesel, without requiring extra parts: the Brunton Vapor. Twist the top of the burner cap (with the flame off) to tweak its variable air intake; this alters the oxygen-to-fuel ratio to ensure a hot blue flame. Oh, it’s also useful for pre-Armageddon camping. Vapor $149, www.brunton.com
I was mildly upset to find that Amazon did not carry the Vapor, at least not yet, and I was shocked that they didn’t carry the Gerber Flik either, since they carry so many other Gerber knives and multi-tools. (It turns out the Flik isn’t available until Fall 2007.)
While researching Gerber though, I found their ad archive, and I must heartily recommend it for some deep, manly laughs.
I just came across an amusing term, Potterdammerung, for the end of the Harry Potter phenomenon.
For those who don’t follow German opera based on Norse mythology, the Götterdämmerung was the Twilight of the Gods — and the last of Wagner’s four Ring-saga operas:
The title is a translation into German of the Old Norse phrase Ragnarök, which in Norse mythology refers to a prophesied war of the gods which brings about the end of the world. However, as with the rest of the Ring, Wagner’s account of this apocalypse diverges significantly from his Old Norse sources.
The term Götterdämmerung is occasionally used in English, referring to a disastrous conclusion of events.
The US Discovery Channel is to ensure a survival show is “100% transparent” in future after conceding parts could have misled viewers, according to reports.
Man vs Wild — called Born Survivor on Channel 4 in the UK — saw Bear Grylls supposedly abandoned in the wild.
But a consultant said Grylls stayed in a motel and had scenes set up for him.
“Isolated elements” were not “natural to the environment”, Discovery said in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter, and promised greater clarity in future.
“For health and safety concerns, the crew and host received some survival assistance while in the field,” the channel told the publication.
“Moving forward, the programme will be 100% transparent, and all elements of the filming will be explained upfront to our viewers.”
Discovery also promised that any repeats of the series would be “edited appropriately”.
Some specifics:
The issue of scenes being manipulated was raised by Mark Weinert, a US survival consultant.
He told the UK’s Sunday Times that Grylls spent nights in a motel in Hawaii when he was claiming to be stranded on a desert island.
Mr Weinert also alleged that a raft was put together by team members before being taken apart so Grylls could be filmed building it.
Ouch. This is not how to handle the situation:
Channel 4 said the programme never specifically claimed Grylls was coping “unaided”.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Bruce: Scott Alexander made the point that everyone texting all the time is at least practicing basic literacy. And everyone who uses social media instead of television video news is reading, like reading the papers fifty years ago. Kurt Vonnegut used to say that if you walked into a house and saw his books or Tolkein’s, it didn’t mean they were reading the stuff. It was just furniture for a certain sort of person. But some were reading.
Bob Sykes: For some time now, Russia has imposed a total blockade on the Ukrainian Black Sea ports.
Lucklucky: Since when did Afghanistan not initiate the conflict? Or Iran? Actually there are several times the US would have been justified to answer Iran’s aggression and did not.
Phil B: “It started giving more money to the Follow Through models that had not done well.” Or, as it is known in the trade, reinforcing failure. Had those funds been spent on schools and pupils that did well, then how much better would they have succeeded? Compare and contrast the results of spending $50,000 per pupil in an inner city school and $20,000 per pupil in a less “diverse” neighbourhood. But failure must not only be reinforced but rewarded with more cash.
Isegoria: Asking Grok about that claim was eye opening: The frequently repeated claim that the US “initiated 81% of 248 armed conflicts from 1945 to 2001” originates in a Chinese Society for Human Rights Studies report (circulated around 2022 amid US-China tensions). It is not based on transparent methodology matching UCDP, Correlates of War (COW), or similar standards, treats “initiated” expansively (including indirect involvement, proxies, or interventions in existing conflicts), and is widely regarded...
Bob Sykes: One is reminded that of the 250, or so, armed conflicts since 1945, 80% were started by the US, and almost always against countries at peace with us and our allies. Recent examples are Panama, Haiti (too numerous to count), Granada (a UK commonwealth member), Serbia, Somalia (still active after 34 years), Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq (twice), Syria, Yemen, Iran, Venezuela, Lebanon (by proxy), and Ukraine. The coup of 2014 that installed the current neonazi junta was our doing.
Isegoria: From The Screwtape Letters (Letter 27), by C.S. Lewis: And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.
David Foster: CS Lewis said (quoting very loosely) that if you want to destroy and infantry unit, you cut it off from its adjacent units…if you want to destroy a generation, you cut it off from its adjacent generations.
McChuck: A mild fever for a day or two after an inoculation is nothing. It’s a normal response to your body fighting an infection — which is the entire point of the inoculation. The strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots after the mRNA Covid shots are of real concern — but of course they can’t possibly study those, because they “don’t exist”.
Ozornik: It’s funny to read it against this: “The CDC advised her to take her temperature”, posted here on October 14th, 2026 Both Marburg and Ebola are not airborn and require direct bodily contact to spread. Methinks the author of the book might be either one of the lowest form of human existence – a journalist, or might have monetary interest in scaremongering oblivious sheeple. Oh, wait.
Phileas Frogg: People who intend to sit atop hierarchies should acquire the skills for getting and remaining on top of hierarchies. The great delusion of modern education is that they’ll somehow accomplish this by being good at math or engineering. I didn’t realize until I was in my mid-20′s that networking is an art, a specific skillset that needs deliberate cultivation. The best part is that when you tell most people they don’t believe you and just keep on hammering on about...
PM: Phileas Frogg says: “The first country to fully re-embrace rule by warriors is going to be hellacious to deal with for a few years.” Which puts me very much in mind of the Russian Federation’s ongoing initiative to load their bureaucracy with returning veterans of the SMO.
Bruce: Characters in 19th Century novels are constantly “overworking” and then taking off a summer or an entire year from their jobs. Getting ‘tired and emotional’? or other euphemisms for ‘publicly drunk’? Lot of overdrinking at work in 19th century culture.
Phileas Frogg: The side with better PPP is always more militarily dangerous than the side with better GDP. We’re going to learn that hard lesson very soon, but what do you expect? We’re ruled by bankers and merchants, while Russia and China are ruled by spies and engineers. The first country to fully re-embrace rule by warriors is going to be hellacious to deal with for a few years.
Bob Sykes: The novels of Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy, truly excellent as stories, also provide detailed descriptions of life in Britain during the 19th Century. Austin for the gentry, Dickens for the urban poor, and Hardy for the rural working class. Also, A.J.P. Taylor’s history of WWI has an analysis of the economic conditions in the run up to the War, and he concludes that working class was materially better off under wartime rationing than during the peace in the early 1900’s. The...
Jim: Traditionalists think that education should prioritize acquiring knowledge, that it should focus on ‘hard’ subjects like science, mathematics, and foreign languages, and that it should take place in a highly structured environment, where students’ time and behavior are tightly regulated. Progressives think that education should prioritize acquiring skills, that it should embrace ‘soft’ subjects beyond the supposed academic core, and that students should be given wide freedom in which to develop...
Steve Sailer: Characters in 19th Century novels are constantly “overworking” ; and then taking off a summer or an entire year from their jobs. That doesn’t happen that much anymore. It’s a little hard to grasp what that was about.
Dan Kurt: “Hely Hutchinson Almond, headmaster of Loretto School, who described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second…’” A late professor of modern history told me that the German military from the reforms in the early 19th century until its defeat in WW2 tried to select its officers under the chief criterion of one’s Character.
Bruce: “Does it ever occur to you that maybe all these idiots are lying?” — Ed Real, whom I trust on education stuff, maybe about someone else.
The nightlife in Japan is surreal and — to a westerner — bewildering. 
Lester Hunt is amazed by 
A recent Wired 
While researching 