TEN JACK TEN

The Sporting News’ preview of the University of Oklahoma’s 2007 football team. September can’t come fast enough, but look out for that Miami game in week 2.

LINK

Via Opinion Journal, recent developments in the exciting and dynamic field of voter fraud:

. . . the most interesting news came out of Seattle, where on Thursday local prosecutors indicted seven workers for Acorn, a union-backed activist group that last year registered more than 540,000 low-income and minority voters nationwide and deployed more than 4,000 get-out-the-vote workers. The Acorn defendants stand accused of submitting phony forms in what Secretary of State Sam Reed says is the “worst case of voter-registration fraud in the history” of the state.

The list of “voters” registered in Washington state included former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, New York Times columnists Frank Rich and Tom Friedman, actress Katie Holmes and nonexistent people with nonsensical names such as Stormi Bays and Fruto Boy. The addresses used for the fake names were local homeless shelters. Given that the state doesn’t require the showing of any identification before voting, it is entirely possible people could have illegally voted using those names.

Local officials refused to accept the registrations because they had been delivered after last year’s Oct. 7 registration deadline. Initially, Acorn officials demanded the registrations be accepted and threatened to sue King County (Seattle) officials if they were tossed out. But just after four Acorn registration workers were indicted in Kansas City, Mo., on similar charges of fraud, the group reversed its position and said the registrations should be rejected. But by then, local election workers had had a reason to carefully scrutinize the forms and uncovered the fraud. Of the 1,805 names submitted by Acorn, only nine have been confirmed as valid, and another 34 are still being investigated. The rest–over 97%–were fake.

LINK

XM’s alternative channels are a bit too fond of The Jam, XTC, and U2.

“The Departed” was overrated.

“Beerfest” was underrated.

Different liquors deliver a different intoxication experience. For example, beer does not equal rum, which does not equal vodka.

A plot recitation is not a movie review.

I’m running out of time to figure out what I want to do when I grow up.

Nobody appreciates the simple benefit of good health until they don’t have it anymore.

Windows Vista is not a compelling upgrade just yet.

I drive faster when I’m listening to the Pixies.

Deejays are missing the gene that would allow them to percieve the loathing of their fellow man.

It’s entirely possible that I’d built up too much expectation for a demo of less than a gig that took 6.5 hours to download from the PlayStation Network.  That kind of anticipation should pay off somehow.

But 6.5 hours and a gig on your hard drive don’t get you a hell of a lot of gameplay anymore.  Slide down a rope, chop some guys up, repeat.  Given how long this game’s been in the pipeline, I’d expected a high degree of polish and control.  But it really didn’t feel much smoother or more sophisticated than your typical last-gen button-mashing one-against-many fighter.  Hopefully, they held some things back for the full release.

This isn’t the first time a TV show has made the transition to the big screen, and this movie isn’t the most successful transition, although it works better than the X-Files. Enough of the tiredness that permeates the latter seasons has made its way into the film to drag it down.

This is not to say that the movie is bad, but that you might walk out of the theater wondering exactly why you had to pay for the experience. South Park at least gave you the feeling they were finally free of their limits in their film, while the Simpsons Movie would just as soon show you a 10-year old’s tallywacker and call it a day of adventure.

Mild spoilers after the break…

(more…)

Stupid, Meet Stupid

Lindsay Lohan gets busted for DUI again. Not the best way to celebrate getting out of rehab.

Lohan, who is already facing a drunken driving charge in Beverly Hills, was pulled over near the Santa Monica Police Department after authorities spotted her car chasing another vehicle, said Sgt. Shane Talbot. Authorities conducted a field sobriety test and then transported Lohan to the police department. The 21-year-old actress was booked on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol, driving on a suspended license and possession of cocaine, among other charges….

But this is just the generic version of the story. The details are what makes it great.

The GMC Denali they were in belonged to Dante, but he was sitting in the front passenger seat. Ronnie and Jakon were in the back seat. The assistant’s boyfriend was behind the wheel. The keys were in the ignition when the assistant’s boyfriend got out and continued the argument with his girlfriend. She then got in her car and left.

According to the group, Lindsay suddenly jumped in the driver’s seat of the Denali, started the engine and began driving — chasing the assistant’s car. Ronnie says he was so fearful, he jumped out of the vehicle as it accelerated. Just as he hit the ground, he says Lindsay ran over his foot and just kept going.

Dante and Jakon say Lindsay then hit Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. Dante says he tried to grab the wheel, prompting Lindsay to say, “If you touch me I’ll sue you.” Jakon says they pleaded with her to stop.

Dante says they were going 100 MPH. They say Lindsay caught up with the assistant and began doing circles on PCH, around the assistant’s car.

They say at one point, Lindsay boasted, “I can’t get in trouble. I’m a celebrity. I can do whatever the f**k I want.”

The now former assistant finally lost Lindsay on PCH. Dante says Lindsay thought the assistant was going to her mother’s house in Santa Monica so Lindsay went there. It just so happened that the assistant’s mother was pulling into the driveway as Lindsay arrived.

Dante says the mother panicked at Lindsay’s crazy driving, and backed out of the driveway in fear — not knowing who was behind the wheel. The guys say Lindsay then began to chase her at speeds of up to 80 MPH through Santa Monica, blowing multiple red lights.

Dante realized the mother was driving to the police station and warned Lindsay if she didn’t stop she’d get in hot water. He says Lindsay responded, “I’m a celebrity. I’m not going to get in trouble.”

The two cars stopped in a parking lot near the cop shop. When police arrived, Dante says it seemed as if Lindsay told officers, “I wasn’t driving. The black kid was driving.”

Dante and Jakon say they saw Lindsay flunk the field sobriety test. They say when she tried touching her nose, she almost fell over.

Barry Bonds loses battle of wits with Bob Costas. I guess the drugs don’t enhance the performance of your conversational skills.

A day after Barry Bonds called him a “little midget man who knows (nothing) about baseball,” broadcaster Bob Costas said he wasn’t upset with the San Francisco Giants slugger and responded with a jab of his own. “As anyone can plainly see, I’m 5-6 1/2 and a strapping 150, and unlike some people, I came by all of it naturally,” Costas said Thursday in a telephone interview.

Told before Thursday’s series finale that Costas claimed he came by his physique naturally, Bonds responded, “How do you know?” before going on to say he didn’t care.

Stupid.net

CNN examines the long history of falling on your ass on camera. One of the dumbest things a person can say in this modern age is: “Don’t put this on YouTube.”

Get a quote on your soul’s market value.

High quality Belgian chocolate anuses. I’m not kidding. They take PayPal.

Real life crime or Scooby-Doo plot? You decide.

Politically Stupid

Union hires homeless to picket for them, pays them $1 above minimum wage. Does protesting have any meaning anymore?

At the protest site, union organizers ask for identification and a Social Security card from those who want to picket. The picketers are divided into groups of about 30, and some are sent on to other sites. They are often accompanied by an eight-foot-tall inflatable rat brought in by pickup.

On a recent Thursday morning, one group was sent to 1100 13th St. NW, another group to the corner of 21st and M streets. Typically, two or three union members are on hand to oversee each group. Armed with clipboards, they check off the names of picketers when they arrive and leave to ensure that they work their full two to four hours.

One day, a group picketed from 9 to 11 a.m. in the 600 block of Indiana Avenue NW. After an hour lunch break, the picketers headed to the 900 block of Capitol Street NW from noon to 2 p.m.

Their placards have the name of the targeted firm taped at the top; when the picketers move on to another company, the name is changed.

The most magnificant irony is at the end:

A few months ago, after a day’s picketing across from the National Geographic Society at 17th and M streets NW, Strange went inside and filled out a job application. He now loads trucks for National Geographic’s warehouse at night. He still pickets during the day. Strange also recently moved into his own one-bedroom apartment near the Brookland Metro station. “Every day I turn that key to my apartment, I feel great. I owe that to the picketing,” he said.

John Kerry denies that anyone really got hurt when the Communists took over in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia after the US refused to be further involved. I thought a “genocide” was always a “bloodbath,” not the other way around.

“We heard that argument over and over again about the bloodbath that would engulf the entire Southeast Asia, and it didn’t happen,” Kerry said.

Stupid for Legal Purposes

An Oregon prosecutor is seeking to put two 7th-graders in juvenile detention as sex offenders for slapping girls on the bum. Illustrating the point yet again: zero tolerance means zero thinking.

The two boys tore down the hall of Patton Middle School after lunch, swatting the bottoms of girls as they ran — what some kids later said was a common form of greeting. But bottom-slapping is against policy in McMinnville Public Schools. So a teacher’s aide sent the gawky seventh-graders to the office, where the vice principal and a police officer stationed at the school soon interrogated them. After hours of interviews with students the day of the February incident, the officer read the boys their Miranda rights and hauled them off in handcuffs to juvenile jail, where they spent the next five days. Now, [they] face the prospect of 10 years in juvenile detention and a lifetime on the sex offender registry in a case that poses a fundamental question: When is horseplay a crime?

Florida convict prosecuted for jerkin’ the gherkin in his cell.

Sherman said jurors determined that a prison cell, which is owned and operated by the government, is neither public nor private but is a “limited access public place.'’ He also said that none of the jurors had a problem with the sex act, per se. The case drew snickers in the courtroom, especially during jury selection, when prospective jurors were quizzed about their own habits. Defense attorney Kathleen McHugh faced 17 prospective jurors and asked point-blank who among them had never done that particular sex act.

No hands went up.

Massachusetts teen breaks into farm, humps sheep, gets arrested. Hey, buy your own sheep!

According to a police report, the farm’s barn had been the target of at least a dozen break-ins between August 2006 and June 2007, prompting the property owner to install surveillance cameras. Between 3 and 4 a.m. on June 27, according to police, the camera captured and filmed a person identified as Roger Henderson II.

Whoever Roger Henderson the first is, I’m pretty sure he’s figured out there is such a thing as bad publicity.

90-year old man arrested for exposing himself to a police officer. His name: Leonard Dickman.

Our Business Is Stupid, And Business Is Good

Microsoft’s entertainment (i.e. Xbox) division loses almost $2 billion. More than half of it is a charge for fixing the obviously flawed Xbox 360’s they’ve been selling for the last year and a half. But hey, if you don’t have to make a profit, anything is possible.

Dangerously Stupid

I wish I knew the back story for this one.

Syracuse police say Michelle Rendino, 20, left four young girls alone in a car Wednesday evening while she went off with a man in a wheelchair who spent more than an hour taking nude photos of her in the woods.

When officers responded to an emergency call, they found the children — a 6-year-old, two 4-year-olds and a 3-year-old — crying in the car. AP says the oldest child told them that “Aunt Michelle” was in the woods taking “nasty pictures.”

Jonah Goldberg: 

Liberals used to be the ones who argued that sending U.S. troops abroad was a small price to pay to stop genocide; now they argue that genocide is a small price to pay to bring U.S. troops home.

An online course about the psychology and history of the slot machine. The cited sources may be more interesting than the online paper itself.

LINK

Stupid, Meet Stupid

John Lovitz beats the crap out of Andy Dick. I’m actually surprised it doesn’t happen more often.

It was fight night at an L.A. comedy club last week when Jon Lovitz roughed up Andy Dick over the murder of their “Saturday Night Live” colleague, Phil Hartman.

Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada, who witnessed the assault, said, “Jon picked Andy up by the head and smashed him into the bar four or five times, and blood started pouring out of his nose.” Lovitz told Page Six, “All the comedians are glad I did it because this guy is a [bleep]hole.”

Lovitz and Dick have been at loggerheads since a 1997 Christmas party at Hartman’s house, five months before his troubled wife Brynn flipped out, fatally shooting Hartman, then killing herself. “Andy was doing cocaine, and he gave Brynn some after she had been sober for 10 years. Phil was furious about it - and then five months later he’s dead,” said Lovitz, adding that when he filled in on Hartman’s “Newsradio” sitcom, “I told Andy, ‘I wouldn’t be here now if you hadn’t given Brynn that cocaine.’ ”

Last year, Lovitz related, a drunken Dick strolled up to his table at Ago in West Hollywood, rudely downed his guests’ peach liqueur drinks, and “looked at me and said, ‘I put the “Phil Hartman hex” on you - you’re the next one to die.’

Unfunny comedian Jamie Kennedy dies a miserable death hosting Activision’s E3 conference. High? Stupid? You decide. It’s pretty obvious Tony Hawk thought he was a moron. The only laughs and applause from the audience come when Kennedy gets slammed by the other guys on stage.

Our Business Is Stupid, And Business Is Good

Faith Hill before and after being photoshopped for a magazine cover.

Sony manages to piss off everyone by claiming a price drop isn’t a price drop and a stock clearance isn’t a stock clearance. Not only does the left hand not know what the right hand’s doing, I think a foot has issued a press release.

EA and Jostens are setting up a program that lets players on Madden 08 unlock the ability to buy their own “Super Bowl” ring by winning in the game. Finally, there’s a level below “mathlete.”

New football videogame lets you play as O.J. Simpson, taunt murder victims.

The company, which has come under fire in the past for offensive content in its games, is now testing the taste barrier with its latest sports video game, All-Pro Football 2K8, which features O.J. Simpson, unquestionably America’s most infamous athlete.

A customized video clip on the Game Trailers Web site shows Simpson game highlights as his team, “The Assassins,” moves down the field. Toward the end of the clip, Simpson scores a touchdown, prompting a large hooded mascot (above) above the scoreboard to make stabbing motions with a large knife.

Stupid.net

An innovation in iPod security.

An open letter to Subway re: cheese.

A condolence card for the death of your Xbox 360.

Politically Stupid

The Senate wants to double the $25 million bounty on Osama bin Laden. Why not throw in a pony and a gift card for Target, too? That’ll break down anyone’s resistance.

The International Association of Fire Fighters is questioning Rudy Giuliani’s 9/11 leadership, claiming he made the 9/11 toll worse. However, hindsight makes the fire department look bad, too.

Rather than reinforce the life-saving potential of rooftop rescues, the police department’s daring helicopter operation in 1993 had the opposite effect. After the garage bombing, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the World Trade Center, and the fire department made a deliberate decision not to plan for future helicopter rescues, officials with the two agencies say.

The agencies rejected recommendations from police pilots that an area of the north tower’s roof be kept clear for helicopter landings. . . . And mostly for security reasons, the Port Authority kept the two sets of heavy metal doors leading to the building’s only roof exit tightly locked–as they would be on the morning of Sept. 11.

Part of the explanation for this decision in the wake of the 1993 blast was an intense feud then raging between the city’s fire and police departments over who had control at emergencies. The fire department, which has no helicopters of its own, dismissed the 1993 rooftop rescue as grandstanding. Fire commanders said the mission was dangerous and unnecessary. And they said any future evacuations should be carried out by fire personnel from the ground.

And just to put icing on the cake:

New York’s fire code requires rooftop access in case of emergency. But because the Port Authority is a public agency, it is exempt. The Journal reports that the fire department “went along with the authority’s policy of keeping the trade center roof exits locked.”

Iranian students make a game about rescuing Iranian nuclear experts from the forces of the Great Satan. Because the “stoning the adultress” genre is played out?

In Rescue the Nuke Scientist, players take control of an Iranian security force carrying out a mission code-named “The Special Operation”. Penetrate the U.S. troops’ fortified locations, kill U.S. and Israeli troops, and seize their laptops to win the game.

“We tried to promote the idea of defense, sacrifice and martyrdom in this game,” one of the students told reporters. “This is our defense against the enemy’s cultural onslaught.”

Educated, Yet Stupid

Pittsburgh Public Shools stop referring to themselves as “public” schools. Because it’s easier to change the label than the product.

By dropping “public” from its name, Randall Taylor said, the district might be able to avoid the negative attitude often associated with public schools.

* * *

Also, the district last night announced plans to upgrade its parent hotline into a “customer service center,” another initiative aimed at boosting the district’s image.

Graduates from Richmond’s Binford Middle School get a certificate with a picture of Karl Marx. Turns out it wasn’t a communist plot, it was just a case of someone not knowing what the heck they were doing.

Richmond schools spokeswoman Felicia Cosby called last night to explain: “She really thought she was capturing clip art representing Frederick Douglass. She did a search to pull up Frederick Douglass and this is what came up . . . with the beard and the hair.” Hold on. Wait a minute. One was a German philosopher, the other an African-American slave who became a leading abolitionist.

Dangerously Stupid

Parents’ obsession with online game results in severe malnutrition and child neglect charges. Too bad the popularity of bottled water has made the introduction of birth control drugs into the water supply impractical.

The couple faces a potential 12 year prison sentence each. “They had food; they just chose not to give it to their kids because they were too busy playing video games,” said the prosecutor to the Reno Gazette-Journal.

China executes the government official responsible for food and drug safety. The US is more civilized. We send our corrupt former government officials on book tours and speaking engagements.

California’s highway department shuts down a highway due to driver behavior.

Drivers inconvenienced by a road-widening project subjected construction workers to so much abuse—including death threats, BB gun shootings, even a flying burrito—that the state revoked a rush- hour window and shut down the highway altogether.

Now drivers who relied on California Highway 138 are being forced to take a detour that costs them at least a half-hour a day and businesses along the road are suffering.

Five days on a cruise ship is enough time to convince your brain that the natural state of the world is a gentle, side-to-side motion. Leaving the ship for land does not change this assumption right away.

Anywhere where there are tourists, Mexican vendors will offer the following items for sale: cheap silver jewelry; poorly-tooled leather goods; overpriced and allegedly Cuban cigars; t-shirts with filthy jokes on them; carved marble suitable for any respectable trailer home; gaudy sombreros; cheap trinkets made with beads, clay, paper-mache, wood, scrap metal, or all of the above; and peasant-style clothing.

Mexico hasn’t changed in years and isn’t changing anytime soon.

Cruise lines probably break even on the fares and make their profit on alcohol sales, casino gambling, and photos.

The limits on duty-free alcohol shopping (capped at 1 liter for Texas residents) make it barely worth the time you’ll spend picking it up on your way off the ship.

I still don’t understand Craps.

A cabin with a window isn’t significantly more desirable than a cabin without one.

The majority of teenage girls have an incredibly vacant expression on their face most of the time.

Eating anything in Mexico is a bad idea.

I’ll probably do a cruise again.

Swayed by the price cut, the prospect of reduced funtionality in future versions, and the fact that I had more money than sense at that moment, I bought PS3 from Circuit City yesterday.  Even better, they didn’t pull my internet order within 24 minutes so I got a gift card.  Woohoo.

Impressions follow.

- It’s a polarizing industrial design, just like the PS2 (which I found particularly ugly). This time, I thought the PS3 was gorgeous in shiny black and chrome, while My Lovely Wife thought it looked silly.  With the PS3 in its place next to the Xbox 360, there’s no mistaking that two very different design philosphies were are work.

- It’s a nice PS2, assuming you get one with the PS2’s chipset rather than the 80gig version with only software backwards compatibility. You can have infinite memory cards on the hard drive, there’s progressive scan support and nice upscaling. It’s as good as PS2 games are ever going to look.  Too bad the image is off-center and doesn’t quite reach the screen edges of my Sony HD set. And can’t be adjusted.

- Sony put nothing in the box they didn’t have to. You get: the PS3, the manuals, the power cord, a Sixaxis controller, a short USB cable, an ethernet cable, and a composite video cable. No demo disk, no HD cables of any kind, no optical cable, no PS2 memory card adaptor. And no demos or videos on the hard drive, either.

- Sony still hasn’t worked all the kinks out of it. It took forever to get it to talk to my WiFi router (which may have been a non-PS3 issue, I suspect an old wireless bridge was interfering). But while I was figuring that out, I couldn’t upgrade the 1.3 firmware. And it wanted that firmware update before it would play nice. The manual directs users to go to Sony’s Playstation website for updates so they can install them from a memory stick or other device. However, while the Playstation website has a menu tab for PS3 system updates, but nothing’s there. Also, the controllers constantly need to be re-synced after starting and quitting a PS2 game.

- Giving the Sixaxis controller non-removable batteries and requiring it to be connected to a live USB port to charge is stupid.

- The remote-play media functionality with the PSP is impressive, but I don’t know why I’d want to use it instead of slapping my movies and music on the PSP’s memory stick. If they could let me play a PS2 game remotely, that would be impressive, but there aren’t enough buttons on the PSP for that.

- The XMB interface is either elegantly spare or cold and uninviting. I’m leaning towards the latter.

- The PS3’s web browser is worse than the Wii’s. Less clear, less functional, worse fonts, worse navigation.

- The sound setup makes you choose between the A/V cables OR the optical toslink. Why not both? I can’t be the only one who has consoles hooked up to both the TV and the surround-sound amp.

- The Playstation store is not well stocked for a platform more than six months post-launch. There’s only a handful of exclusive downloadable games, and only a couple of handfuls of downloadable PS1 games. Nintendo’s releasing 3 downloadable games a week for the Wii, every Monday. MS has a bunch of downlodable games for Xbox Live Arcade, and releases something almost every Wednesday. Sony has no dedicated release day and isn’t publicising what’s in the channel.  It looks like their attention span ran out after the initial batch of stuff.

- Clearly I bought this because I’m a gadget freak with faith in Sony’s ability to deliver in the future. There are only four PS3-exclusive titles I’m even a little interested in right now, and one of those is the poorly reviewed Full Auto 2. Here’s looking forward to the fall.

FM modulators are worthless, particularly in the Metroplex.

Live Aid didn’t fix Africa.

Live Earth won’t fix the Earth.

Nobody seems to be sure what Live 8 was for, but it didn’t fix anything, either.

Rock concerts are a discredited mechanism for fixing societal problems.

Harrison Ford is no longer a credible action star. See Firewall.

Bruce Willis just keeps on ticking. See Live Free or Die Hard. No, really, see it, it’s good.

Even if we assume the proposition that there’s no such thing as a stupid question, there’s plenty of questions that will make the person asking them appear to be stupid.

I like to make up my own definitions for slang terms. For example, a “tool” is someone whose high opinion of himself is unjustified by any particular skill, knowledge, or expertise.

Al Gore is a tool.