Pardon my freedom

The Daily Show points out that the Dept of Homeland Security’s website has this useful piece of advice: if you are on fire, don’t run.

If you’re looking for parodies of the site, see this, this, and especially this. But to fully appreciate them, you must first experience the hilarious graphics and duct-and-cover advice on offer at the government site. For example, here we see how a simple door can block the blast, firestorm and radiation of a nuclear blast.

Speaking of stuff that’s already most of the way to being a satire of itself, there is a restaurant in NC that has renamed French Fries “freedom fries.” Insubordinate.net suggests some other changes: “Freedom kissing”, “Pardon my freedom.”

The Serbian prime minister threatens to sponsor a breakaway Serb province in Kosovo if the west doesn’t let Serbia’s troops return to “protect Serbs’ rights.” Well, it’s worked so well in the past.

The sharia courts in Nigeria are getting creative. A thief has been sentenced to “cross-amputation”: right hand and left leg.

Sexism rears its ugly head in the Russian space program, which during the current crisis will not be sending any more woman cosmonauts up.

8 foot ceiling. Fireworks. What could go wrong?

After arresting the Palestinian professor in Florida, the Justice Dept is now going after academics elsewhere, including accusing a lecturer at Birbeck College in London, producing this gulp-inspiring headline in the Telegraph: “Don Denies Terror Claims.”

In more random censorship news, Russian authorities shut down a newspaper for running a parody of Putin’s growing personality cult, and Spain orders a Basque paper closed for supporting independence (it appeared anyway today under a different name).

Creepy religious item of the day (only $20).