Got a wife and kids, I'm Barnaby Jack ...

© DAVID LEBON/TRANSTOCK/CORBIS (CARS); © ROLF BRUDERER/CORBIS.

The day is not far off when the manipulation of medical devices will be done routinely by punching keys on a smartphone, putting an individual’s internal organs in the hands of every hacker, online scammer, and digital vandal on Earth.

... so I must ask you to all step right on back:

Look Out—He’s Got a Phone!

Those words aren’t yet a cliché on TV crime dramas, but security experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before smartphones become the smart person’s murder weapon of choice.

By Charles C. Mann

... The IOActive researcher, a man named Barnaby Jack, was so worried about the implications of his work that he intentionally obscured many of the details in his presentation. As a further precaution, he asked the attendees not to take any pictures—a tough request in a crowd full of smartphones and laptops ... Let’s face it: Barnaby Jack is a man who is quite literally looking for trouble ...

Also from Fanity Vair: Person's Time of the Year (Spoiler Alarm: it's just after 2100 hours - do you know where the large hand on the small arms of your night watch is?).

Evangelical operative Ralph Reed with an iguana.  

In "Blues Cruise", New York's Joe Hagan takes in the Caribbean sun aboard the m.s. Nieuw Amsterdam, a Holland America cruiser chockablock with scarlet-faced, golf-condo donors to National Review and the magazine's Deep Thinkers (e.g., the scenery-chewing, parody-disarming Kevin "Dow 36,000" Hassett) of record, the better to assay the bottomless sense of wounded entitlement of an American demographic that, thanks to the conveyor belt of actuarial eclipse, that most efficient in its implacability among Nature’s instruments of moral hygiene since the Acme wheelchair and the greased gangplank to rocket down it sharkward, will bless us with its gibbering moral inversions for only several geologic milliseconds more:

That night, Cal Thomas, a USA Today columnist and Fox News contributor, was the host of my table of eight. At an earlier panel, he’d suggested that his audience “starve the beast” of government by refusing to pay income taxes; but now his stage fire had waned, and he looked bored, peering around our table with half-lids, his hound-dog face propped in his hand. I sat next to a retired surgeon from California named Duane, who heralded the Dinesh D’Souza film 2016: Obama’s America as the definitive truth regarding Obama’s anti-Colonialist background, which now portended America’s inevitable slide into socialism. Thomas liked the movie b -ut dismissed its impact on the election, saying it had preached to the converted and had “sourcing problems” besides. But Duane, who has thick glasses and a closely shorn flat-top, was undeterred, insisting it was relevant. “I disagree!” he spat.

This was a phenomenon that was common on the cruise—the conservative pundits and columnists from the National Review attempting to gently disinter their followers from unhelpful conservative propaganda. For people who believe in the truth of works likeDreams From My Real Father, a conspiracy-­theory documentary that argues that Obama’s real father was a communist propagandist who turned Obama into a socialist Manchurian Candidate, this could be difficult work.

As Thomas downed the rest of his drink, Duane said the only way out of the current quagmire is a “revolution,” citing the famous Thomas Jefferson line about watering the tree of liberty with blood from “time to time.”

What kind of revolution did he have in mind?

Duane’s eyes crinkled into a big smile. “You ever heard of guns?”

His wife sat up: “How do you like the veal?”

“It’s awful,” Duane growled, poking at it. “I can’t hardly chew it.”

Cf. the essay from 2007 by Johann Hari, whether in situ or as blogged by James Wolcott at VF, on the 2006 post-electionNR boat bash, aka The Muslims Are Coming Cruise.

From the scroll sequence "He-Gassen" (The Fart War), by an unknown artist from the Edo period (1700-1900) in Japan

From a blurb by historian Andrew Roberts for A Jew Among Romans: The Life and Legacy of Flavius Josephus by the veteran Chicago-born Oscar-winning English screenwriter (Darling, Two for the Road, Far From the Madding Crowd,The Glittering Prizes, Eyes Wide Shut, &c.), novelist, classicist and reviewer Frederic Raphael:

" ... Raphael tells us something insightful on every page, about Edward Gibbon, the Wandering Jew, Stalin’s Jewish executioner, Arthur Koestler, the battle of Masada, Pharisees, Hellenists, Tsarist pogroms, Judas Iscariot, Zionism and the ancient laws on farting.” 

Pompeii, Mother of All YouTube Commenters: from an ancient Pompeian graffito:

"I'm amazed, O wall, that you have not fallen in ruins, you who support the tediousness of so many writers."

AROUND THE WORLD/A-ROUND THE WOR-LD ... sorry, but Daft Punk does nothing for us whatever - in fact, it makes us wish we could "cease to be" and thus become "ex-parrots", as your telly skecth-comedians - "Flying" something-or-other, I believe - would put it. 

The One Type of Music That All Parrots Everywhere Despise:

... Biologists studying African grey parrots found that they all enjoyed rock and folk music and "danced" along by bobbing their heads. One preferred soothing "middle of the road" music, while another enjoyed pop. But when exposed to electronic dance music, they were left "distressed." ...