TEN JACK TEN

 I will point out that it was “scrotum of,” not “scrotum off.”  Still scary.

A couple of months before the annual Red River Shootout between the Sooners and Longhorns, words were exchanged at Henry Hudson’s Pub between Allen Beckett, 53, and Brian Thomas. Witnesses said it was because Thomas was wearing a UT T-shirt. Neither Thomas or Beckett chose to comment, but the police report described what happened to the victim, including graphic details about his injuries that included a torn scrotal sack with partially exposed testicles.

Beckett’s attorney, Billy Bock, said his client’s actions were in self-defense. “Sure, he’s an OU fan. Not necessarily an overboard die-hard OU fan, but he certainly admits he said something in a joking fashion to the guy about his Texas T-shirt. The guy got offended. He said he was sorry,” said Bock. Bock said the apology apparently wasn’t enough for the Texas fan and the man then approached his client. He said his client then grabbed the man in self-defense.

LINK

I’d rather order the one thing I know I really like on a restaurant’s menu than try to be adventurous and end up disappointed.

SD cards have won the flash-memory market share war.

It’s not worth it to try to compute exactly how much time you’ll need on a parking meter and only pay for that amount of time. Parking tickets are a profit center for cities, so toss in another quarter, big shot.

I’m done buying Motorola cell phones.

A downtown area’s one-way streets confuse and frighten out-of-towners.

When I’m really concentrating, I ignore thirst and hunger. Actually, that’s the only time I ignore them.

A little consideration is too much to ask of most drivers.

Almost all cell phone games aren’t worth your time between the tiny screen and bad controls.

I wouldn’t like living in a small town and having everybody know my business.

George W. Bush makes a lot of bad personnel decisions.

Stupid, Meet Stupid

Crime may not pay, but it sure doesn’t cost a lot if you’re a rich young white female. Nicole Richie spends 82 minutes in jail for a DUI. That’s less punishment than the people who paid to see the “Bratz” movie got. Even more impressive, Lindsay Lohan turned two arrests for seven misdemeanor drunken-driving and cocaine charges into 1 day in jail, 10 days of community service, and (of course) rehab. Good for her there wasn’t enough cocaine left to constitute a felony-level amount.

First, there was an idea to do a “Dallas” movie based on the old TV show. Then, they cast John Travolta as J.R. Ewing. That was such a great idea, the film project fell apart. Now, they’re trying to do a “Dallas” comedy instead. But they kept Travolta. Keep him out of a fat suit, willya?

I know cops often do side jobs to supplement their incomes, but gay hooker probably isn’t one of the better options.

An informant told authorities that Gibbon was working as an escort and was to show up at 4 p.m. to meet a client in room 141. Gibbon, carrying a blue mini cooler, knocked on the door and was greeted by an undercover trooper posing as a client. Once inside the room, Gibbon discussed with the trooper sexual acts that would be performed for an amount of money, the criminal complaint says. Gibbon began to undress as he accepted $200 in marked money. A signal was given to surveillance teams, who entered the room and arrested Gibbon.

All I really want to know is: what was in the cooler?

Politically Stupid

Elvira Arellano came to the US illegally, got kicked out, came back in, had an illegitimate child who is now a citizen, got ordered to leave, and hid in a chuch and issued press statements about how unfair it all was, went to LA for a press conference, got deported. Now, she wants us to feel sorry for her, claiming from the floor of the Mexican Senate that the real crime was committed by the US when it let her come into the country so easily. Now she’s campaigning for the Mexican government to stand up for her right to leave Mexico:

“For me it is very important that our government take a strong stand to defend all of us who decide to migrate to another country,” she said.

Due to the absolute ridiculousness of this story, I have to point out the link is to USA Today, not The Onion.

Former Congress member Patsy Schroeder is now president of the American Association of Publishers. But she can’t stop being a partisan Democrat when she has the chance. When a poll showed that self-described liberals reported reading more books per year than conservatives, she just had to say something dumb:

“The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: ‘No, don’t raise my taxes, no new taxes,’” [she] said in a recent interview. “It’s pretty hard to write a book saying, ‘No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes’ on every page.” She said liberals tend to be policy wonks who “can’t say anything in less than paragraphs. We really want the whole picture, want to peel the onion.”

That must be some onion, because the basis for her characterization of conservatives as essentially retarded is a poll (not a study, mind you) result stating:

Among those who had read at least one book, liberals typically read nine books in the year, with half reading more than that and half less. Conservatives typically read eight, moderates five.

I’d say the fact that you read Al Gore’s book and I didn’t shows that I’m the smart one.

Our Business Is Stupid, And Business Is Good

Japanese game company Atlus was forced to withdraw its arcade arm-wrestling simulator “Udedamashii” because it broke three people’s arms within a month of its release.

Players would choose a strength level from 10 characters, ranging from a maid to a professional wrestler, and face off with an artificial arm on the other side of the table. A 25-year-old South Korean man broke his right arm while playing the game in Osaka, while a 19-year-old Frenchman and 24-year-old Japanese man also suffered arm fractures, the company said.

I hope it wasn’t the maid that broke their arms, although I’d say the average maid could probably take down the average nerd without too much effort.

Stupid In Print

The FBI asked Seattle’s local media to run photos of two ferry passengers wanted for questioning due to odd behavior. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer declined to run the photos because they felt the unnamed individuals privacy was more important than helping the FBI. Okay. Pompous and and wrong-headed, but okay. Then, they decided to celebrate their lack of cooperation with the national-security establishment with an online haiku contest. That, they apologize for.

The girl’s fine, but the show’s dead. After one low-rated hour on the air, Fox pulls the trigger and puts it out of its misery.

I could already see the show was only going to have one dimension: “real” journalists resent bimbo. I probably liked it for all the wrong reasons, since it made the actual news staff of the Tyler, Texas TV station look like overblown, self-important twits.

I suppose the only way to get canceled faster would be to never have been on the air in the first place. Maybe Fox should experiment with canceling shows while they’re on and just switch over to a Simpsons or Family Guy rerun in progress. Imagine the excitement as the “play” button is hit on two programs at once, while in a box on the corner of the screen, a studio exec has his hand on the switch, ready to flip over if the ratings dip below the “death line.”

LINK

At some point, looking for traffic before crossing the street not only became optional, it became uncool.

The only thing ethanol is good for is making corn farmers rich.

Comments are a bit much to ask of my readers (as wonderful as they are).

Most boxing matches disappoint me and go the distance.

Compared to ultimate fighting, boxing is dull.

I’m much happier if I avoid fantasy football.

Daylight savings time really messes with children’s schedules.

Firefox caches web pages, including the one that had the blog post that you worked on for hours and stupidly deleted half of.

It’s worth the money to keep an extra tank of propane around for the grill.

People tend to take their own experience and viewpoint and universalize it to the rest of humanity.

Boy 3 (4 years old) and I are working a puzzle on the floor.

“Can we go see George Washington?”

“No, son, he’s not around anymore.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s dead.”

“Is he coming back to life?”

“No, son, when you’re dead that’s pretty much the end of it.”

“Who killed him?”

“Nobody killed him, son. He just got sick.”

“Did he put a toy in his mouth?”

The Montgomery Burns Award For Outstanding Achievement In The Field Of Stupid

The Washington Post illustrates why newspaper circulation numbers keep shrinking by publishing a 987-word article in which staff writer Monica Hesse ruminates at length about the name “Fred” (as in Fred Thompson).

Say it out loud. Do it. Fred. Fred. In the South, Fray-ud.

Fur-red-duh.

It has the tonal quality of something being dropped on the floor, something heavy and damp-ish.

Waterlogged paper towel.

Fred.

Why the hell do you have a job, Monica? Why the hell does your editor have a job? Do you justify this level of inanity because it’s the Sunday edition and the newsprint’s just there to protect the Best Buy circular? The Post could fire its staff writers, turn the paper over to random bloggers, and see no change in the level of professionalism.

Our Business Is Stupid, And Business Is Good

Nobody gets away with it forever. Especially when the shipping costs 300 times more than the price.

A small South Carolina parts supplier collected about $20.5 million over six years from the Pentagon for fraudulent shipping costs, including $998,798 for sending two 19-cent washers to an Army base in Texas, U.S. officials said. The company also billed and was paid $455,009 to ship three machine screws costing $1.31 each to Marines in Habbaniyah, Iraq, and $293,451 to ship an 89-cent split washer to Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Pentagon records show.

The owners of C&D Distributors in Lexington, South Carolina — twin sisters — exploited a flaw in an automated Defense Department purchasing system: bills for shipping to combat areas or U.S. bases that were labeled “priority'’ were usually paid automatically, said Cynthia Stroot, a Pentagon investigator. The price the military paid for each item shipped rarely reached $100 and totaled just $68,000 over the six years in contrast to the $20.5 million paid for shipping, she said.

Have you ever rented a storage space and felt a little empty because it wasn’t enough of a political statement? Manhattan Mini Storage fixes that problem with their latest billboard ad. (follow the link for a picture)

The ad causing controversy depicts a coat hanger and takes a stance on abortion, along with the slogan: “Your closet space is shrinking as fast as her right to choose.”

It’s the Supreme Court coloring book! Somehow, I don’t think Spongebob and Dora are in any danger of losing market share. I also don’t think the ABA did a very good job of matching up the age group that’s interesting in coloring with the age group that’s aware that there is such a thing as government. But it does come with its own crayons.

Politically Stupid

French news service AFP wants to embarrass US forces in Iraq:

An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City.

Except the bullets are shiny and still in their casings, i.e., unfired.

Newark, New Jersey has a high-minded policy towards illegal immigrants:

. . . like a growing number of municipalities across the nation, Newark is an official illegal immigrant “Sanctuary City” in which police cannot ask a suspect about immigration status. In fact, New Jersey passed legislation in 2006 that bars law enforcement agencies throughout the Garden State from asking about immigration status.

Unfortunately,

Had authorities in Newark New Jersey contacted federal immigration officials after illegal alien Jose Carranza’s first felony indictment last year he would have been deported and therefore prevented from murdering three innocent youngsters in a schoolyard this month. Instead Carranza was released on bail, despite being charged with raping a 5-year-old girl and aggravated assault and weapons violations.

Presidential candidate B. Obama opens mouth, inserts foot:

“We’ve got to get the job done there,” he said of Afghanistan. “And that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.”

There’s a lot of assumptions going on in this brief statement: (1) we don’t have enough troops in Afghanistan, a claim nobody else is making; (2) we aren’t getting “the job” done there, whatever “the job” is; (3) current national policy involves killing civilians in air-raids; and (4) we are executing this policy so well, it’s causing enormous pressure of an unspecified nature, assumed to be bad. None of these assumptions can be substantiated. Have you been skipping security briefings, Barry?

Governor Schwarzenneger ignores how he made his money, promises to appeal a federal court’s invalidation of a California law banning sales of “violent” videogames to minors. Despite the fact that no state has ever managed to create a videogame ban that can survive a First Amendment challenge.

Stupid.net

The internet is not as anonymous as you think. Turns out Wikipedia edits can be traced back to their IP addresses:

. . . somebody from a computer traced to Democrat HQ edited a page on conservative American radio host Rush Limbaugh, calling him “idiotic,” “ridiculous” and labelling his 20 million listeners as “legally retarded.”

They’re doing it at Electronic Arts, too. Which is why it’s foolish to trust Wikipedia.

Uwe Boll has made a bunch of bad movies based on video games. When Wired panned his latest one, he called them to complain:

Uwe Boll: Hello.

Wired News: Hello, this is Chris Kohler.

UB: Yes, hi, hi. Yeah, now we can do this but whatever we say in the interview, you have to, you cannot censor, right?

WN: Of course not. I have no…

UB: And whatever I say, you have to print it how it is, and correct the spelling.

WN: And correct the spelling? Yeah. Well, there’s no spelling on the phone. So, it’s okay.

PETA makes a video game.

“Colonel Sanders and his minions have kidnapped Pamela Anderson for revealing to the world that KFC’s secret recipe is cruelty to chickens.” So begins PETA’s trippy Super Chick Sisters, a web-based Flash platformer that pushes allegations of mistreated chickens as you play.

Think Globally, Act Stupidly

NASA’s list of the hottest years ever, often cited as evidence of global warming, turns out to be wrong. Rocket scientists keep showing us their presumption of superior competence is likely unfounded.

In the United States, the calendar year 1998 ranked as the hottest of them all – until someone checked the math. After a Toronto skeptic tipped NASA this month to one flaw in its climate calculations, the U.S. agency ordered a full data review. Days later, it put out a revised list of all-time hottest years. The Dust Bowl year of 1934 now ranks as hottest ever in the U.S. – not 1998.

Turns out the NASA guys didn’t do the post-1999 math right, making it one of the few identifiable examples of a Y2K error.

Dangerously Stupid

Guy crashes $400,000 Lamborghini hours after buying it. Shouldn’t they make you take a class on driving overpowered sports cars or something? Or is the real money in selling these morons replacement cars?

Drop that baby or I’ll shoot! Or something like that. In Houston, security guards tasered a father who was trying to take his newborn out of the hospital without permission.

The April 13 episode began when William Lewis, 30, said he and his wife felt mistreated by staff at the Woman’s Hospital of Texas so they decided to leave. Hospital employees told him doctors would not allow it, but Lewis picked up the baby and strode to a bank of elevators. The elevators would not move because wristband sensors on each baby shut off the elevators if anyone takes an infant without permission.

David Boling, an off-duty Houston police officer working security at the hospital, and another security guard can be seen on the surveillance video arriving at the elevators and trying to talk with Lewis. Lewis appears agitated as he walks around the elevators holding his daughter in his right arm.

Within 40 seconds of arriving, Boling is holding the Taser. He walks around Lewis and whispers to the other guard, who moves to Lewis’ right side. About a minute later, Boling can be seen casually standing near Lewis, not looking in his direction, when he suddenly raises the Taser and fires it at Lewis, who was still holding his daughter.

Next weekend, old friend (emphasis on “friend,” not “old”) Bill Rollins runs an Ironman race (2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, 26.2 mile run) for charity. In Bill’s words:

I am raising money and awareness for the Fisher House Foundation, a non-profit organization that helps the families of injured American military men and women. Fisher House builds homes on the grounds of major military and VA medical centers. The use of these homes is available free of charge to the families of injured service members. It allows them to be close to their loved ones during hospitalization for a combat injury or other unexpected illness. Fisher House also works with airlines to provide round trip tickets to these families to get them to the medical centers.

Follow the link to Bill’s homepage if you’re inclined to help him out and donate in support of his worthy cause.

If you have satellite TV service, chances are you have access to BBC America. I’d been ignoring it until Fox’s “Hell’s Kitchen” raised my interest in chef Gordon Ramsay. Ramsay’s doing another show for Fox this fall called “Kitchen Nightmares,” which he’d previously done for the BBC (titled “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares” for DVR searchers). I looked it up and it’s pretty interesting.

Ramsay comes in to rehabilitate a failing restaurant (most seem to be about 100,000 pounds in debt), taking a week to shape up the staff, the menu, the kitchen, and the general attitude of the place. After watching a few, his game plan seems to be (1) beat down the owner (usually also the head chef) until they’re willing to accept change, (2) identify the employees that can handle responsibility and get them on-task, (3) fix the menu, usually by paring down the number of dishes and focusing on simpler and less artsy dishes, while using local produce to lower costs and enhance freshness, and (4) give the restaurant a relaunch.

There’s also “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares Revisited,” where he goes back a few years later to see how they’re doing. Based on what I’ve seen, old habits are hard to completely eliminate.

The show goes a long way towards showing why Ramsay should be taken seriously as a chef and restraunteur. I’m hoping the high-conflict previews Fox has been showing of the American version don’t mean that they’ve changed the focus of the show.

What it’s like to be a child star on Hamas TV.

Saraa wants to be a doctor. If she can’t, the young star of Hamas television’s best-known children’s show said, she’d be proud to become a martyr. Saraa says little Jewish girls should be forced from their homes in Israel so that Palestinians can return to their land.

Saraa is the sweet face of “Tomorrow’s Pioneers,” a weekly, hour-long Hamas television children’s show best known for bringing the world a militant Mickey Mouse look-alike and then having him killed off by an Israeli interrogator.

When I put gas in the car this morning, the pay-at-the-pump system asked me to put in my zip code to verify my credit card. But I typed the zip in wrong; I saw that I’d transposed the third and fourth digits as I finished.

It authorized the purchase anyway.

That’s either really dumb or really clever. Either the system doesn’t actually verify that the zip entered corresponds to the card, or it’s so sophisticated that it understands that numbers might get transposed, especially since I often pay with that card at that gas station. I drove to work wondering which alternative it was.

Via Powerline, the story of Elvis Presley’s visit with Richard Nixon.

Elvis’s letter had prompted internal deliberations over the wisdom of a presidential meeting. Dwight Chapin’s memo to Bob Haldeman summarizing Elvis’s request is a bit clueless. The second page of the memo has Chapin’s earnest advice and Haldeman’s somewhat more astute response. Chapin writes: “[I]f the President wants to meet some bright young people outside of the Government, Presley might be a perfect one to start with.” Haldeman responds: “You must be kidding.”

Peter Bagge on “The Right to Own A Bazooka.” I’d quote but it’s a 4-page comic.

Google is an amazing thing.

Last afternoon, my cell phone rang.  I gave my typical greeting “this is Rick,” and the caller hung up.  I consider that quite rude.

This morning, I wondered who it was that was that couldn’t even manage simple politeness.  So, I Googled the phone number.

And let it be known, now and for as long as I pay my server bills, that some jerk at Owens Country Sausage called me and hung up without admitting that they were sloppily dialing the phone with no concern about who they were actually calling and were therefore in the wrong and should have at least acknowledged that fact.

Shame on you, Owens Country Sausage jerk at 972-235-7181.

A South Carolina newspaper editor discusses why John Edwards is a phony:

“Isn’t he a nice man?” said our copy editor (the fan). I agreed. Then came the revelation: “Unlike John Edwards,” observed the administrative assistant. What’s that? It seems that when she alone had met then-Sen. Edwards at the reception desk, she had been struck by the way he utterly ignored the folks in our customer service department and others who had hoped for a handshake or a word from the Great Man. He had saved all his amiability, all his professionally entertaining energy and talent, for the folks upstairs who would have a say in the paper’s endorsement.

The shortest increment of conversational time is the “Harvard Interval.” This is the amount of time it takes a person who graduated from, attended, or otherwise interacted with Harvard University to work that fact into a conversation.

Being a parent means worrying about your kids for the rest of your life.

Power, at its essence, is the ability to impose your will on other people.

Human beings crave power, and will not willingly abandon a source of power.

The guy that was perfectly willing to drive 65 in front of you will want to drive 80 next to you or behind you.

We live in a culture that tells us we are failures if we are not rich and/or famous.

I should avoid the Black Bean Chili Omelette at IHOP.

Content that would get a game rated “M” would only get a movie rated “PG-13.”

The worst part of the iPod experience is dealing with iTunes.

“Dogma” was the beginning of the end of my Kevin Smith fanhood.