TEN JACK TEN

Politically Stupid

Remember the “virtual fence” that was supposed to protect our border with Mexico? Turns out it’s a useless waste of money.

In May 2006, Bush heralded the “virtual fence” as “the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history” and as a linchpin for his immigration overhaul. A $20 million pilot program to safeguard a 28-mile stretch of rough, mesquite-dotted terrain that straddles a smuggling corridor south of Tucson was supposed to be operational in June but now is expected to be delayed until the end of the year, according to the officials at the Department of Homeland Security who are overseeing it.

Ground radar and cameras that were to identify illegal border crossers so that armed patrols could be dispatched to capture them have had trouble distinguishing people and vehicles from cows and bushes. The sensors are also confused by moisture, the officials said.

It seems that the government forgot that “virtual” means “pretending something is real when it isn’t.”  Either that, or they were counting on everyone else to forget that.

There Might Be No “I” In “Team,” But There’s One In “Stupid” 

If there’s one rule in college sports, it’s that everbody involved needs as much money as possible except for the people who actually play the sports.  Texas A&M football coach Dennis Franchione has found a new low in money-grubbing.

The Texas A&M athletic director said he didn’t know coach Dennis Franchione was providing inside information on the Aggies in a newsletter to boosters who paid $1,200 per year until two weeks ago. Franchione said he has stopped selling the newsletter. The money from the subscription fees helped finance the coach’s personal Web site.

About a dozen big-money boosters subscribed for the past three years to the e-mail newsletter, called “VIP Connection.” It offered Franchione’s candid assessments of players and specific injury information, details Franchione routinely declined to discuss publicly, citing program policy. Franchione made subscribers sign a confidentiality agreement and said he doesn’t believe any of the inside information was used for gambling, the San Antonio Express-News reported Friday after obtaining a copy of the newsletter through a “third-party source.”

“We asked them to sign something,” Franchione told the newspaper. “And for them not to do that. Most of these people are tremendously loyal Aggies.”

So, it was a totally appropriate program, but you made people sign promises not to exploit the information you were giving and wouldn’t tell your college administration about it? When something doesn’t even pass your own smell test, don’t pretend it’ll pass other people’s.

— 

Can’t a guy relax from the stress of a guilty plea on federal charges with a doobie?  Apparently not.

On the day of Vick’s guilty plea, U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson warned that he wouldn’t be amused by any additional trouble. Now, he’s incurred the ire of the judge who could sentence him to up to five years in prison in the dogfighting case. The disgraced Atlanta Falcons quarterback tested positive for marijuana earlier this month, a violation of the conditions of his release as he awaits sentencing in federal court on a dogfighting charge that already jeopardizes his freedom and career.

Because Vick violated the conditions of his release, Hudson could take that into consideration during sentencing, said Linda Malone, a criminal procedure expert and Marshall-Wythe Foundation professor of law at the College of William and Mary. “Every judge considers pretty seriously if they feel that the defendant has flaunted the conditions for release,” she said.

“It’s certainly not a smart thing to do.”

I’m sure it’s not a surprise that an internet search for “Michael Vick” and “marijuana” returns a lot of ‘hits.’

A Masterpiece of Stupid

In an empty room in Boston’s South End, track lights go on and off at five-second intervals. The lights illuminate nothing except the bare walls and floor. This is “Work 227: The Lights Going On and Off,” the brainstorm of a Scotsman named Martin Creed, who has explained it this way: “It’s like, if I can’t decide whether to have the lights on or off then I have them both on and off and I feel better about it.”

This “work” won a $30,000 art prize in London. It makes me realize how much art I’ve been producing independently and without proper recognition.  Why, just the other day, I produced “Work 487: A Disassembled Propane Grill.”  I generously donated this work to the City of Frisco last Friday, where it will be on display on city property until it’s covered up by other, newer, works of art.

Stupid for Legal Purposes

Good advice for any attorney facing disciplinary proceedings is “be more stupid.” Relentlessly self-promoting attorney Jack Thompson shows this principle in action:

Thompson has a pair of lawsuits underway against the Florida Bar in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. One of the cases, presided over by Judge Adalberto Jordan, has been the recipient of a flurry of motions by Thompson in recent weeks.

In a document filed with the court on September 19th, Thompson criticized the Bar for allegedly collaborating with Norm Kent, a criminal defense attorney from Fort Lauderdale. Thompson and Kent have a contentious legal history dating back nearly two decades.

Kent, who publishes the National Gay News website, was criticized by Thompson in last week’s court filing for “distribution of hardcore porn to anyone of any age.” Not content to make that alleged point in writing, Thompson attached several gay porn pictures to his motion with Judge Jordan. The pictures apparently do not come directly from the National Gay News site, but rather are contained on sites linked from NGN’s adult links section.

Documents filed in court are freely available to the public, which now includes online access. The judge did not appear impressed with this tactic and asked Thompson to state his reasons why he shouldn’t be sanctioned. A flurry of referrring-to-himself-in-the-third-person righteousness results.

Thompson may have more to say in his own defense as to his alleged contemptuous behavior, but at this juncture, with all respect, he does not apologize for nor regret what he has done… if this court desires to throw Thompson into jail for trying to sound the alarm in this dramatic fashion… then Thompson is prepared to go there.

To hold Thompson in contempt for alerting the federal court system to the criminal activity… is akin to arresting Paul Revere, in 1775, for “disturbing the peace” with his midnight ride…

Although, in this analogy, “the British are coming” would have a sublty different meaning.

— 

Smart citizens know better than to assault an officer of the law. But some people are just born bad.

When Morrisville police officer Chris Gill handed him a ticket, Kent Kauffman coughed. Next thing Kauffman knew, Gill was charging him with assault on a government official. Gill contends Kauffman intentionally coughed on him three times. According to Gill’s report, Kauffman looked into the officer’s eyes before “hacking” in his face, Morrisville spokeswoman Stacie Galloway said Wednesday.

Kauffman acknowledges that he coughed two or three times from the window of his Dodge minivan Tuesday but said it was toward Gill’s waist. “He says I coughed in his face,” Kauffman said. “But that would only work if he had a 4-foot-long face.” Kauffman said that Gill cuffed him and threw him into the side of the patrol car, and that he ended up on the ground.

Why wasn’t this menace shot in self-defense? Stop him before he coughs again!

When the used dryer you bought 9 years ago dies, it’s pretty much a no-brainer to replace it rather than try to repair it. And since you’re doing the dryer, you might as well replace the old washer, right? And since you’re buying new ones, why not buy quality ones?

It’s that kind of thinking that gets you to lay out two grand at Best Buy for those fancy-schmancy high efficiency washers that promise to save you on the electricity and water bills enough to pay for themselves if you use them for the next 37 years. Not only did Best Buy have a decent price for them relative to other stores, they’d deliver them and cart away the old ones for no extra cost. And as an added bonus, there’s the Reward Zone card.

Best Buy used to charge for the Reward Zone card (which I think is stupid), but now they give it to you in exchange for your info. For every pre-sales-tax dollar you spend at the stores, you get a point. For every $250 you spend, you get a $5 gift card. No big deal if you’re buying $30 DVD sets, but lay out $2k for appliances and there’s some actual value involved.

Looking forward to $40 to spend at Best Buy, I checked my RZ balance. The purchase isn’t there. The website lets you report sales that didn’t get counted for whatever reason, so I entered the transaction code from the receipt.

The website says my purchase was already posted to another account.

Today, I called Best Buy customer service and was told that someone named “Cameron Garcia” had claimed the sale. I’ve never heard of this person.

They say they’ll fix it, or at least refer it to the people who can fix it. I wonder if there’s some kind of scam going on, or if they’re just randomly assigning purchases to other customers.

UPDATE: Fixed in about 48 hours.  Not bad, Best Buy.

- A lead of 35 points with more than 7 minutes on the clock isn’t enough to motivate Fox to switch to a closer game.

- Tony Romo is obviously enjoying himself.

- There’s no shame in losing to the defending Super Bowl champs by 6 points. I hope this doesn’t send the Texans into a tailspin.

- Could it be that firing a head coach from a winning team can turn it into a losing team? San Diego says yes. Dallas says no.

- Unless something goes horribly wrong, the Cowboys will be 5-0 going into the Patriots game. Then we’ll see just how good they are.

- The college football fan in me loves to see Matt Leinart getting his ass handed to him in Arizona.

Cell phones are now ubiquitous. I’d already heard anecdotal stories of how people were disconnecting (or never establishing) land lines in favor of cell exclusivity. Three things this last week had me thinking about cell phones.

One: One of my co-workers asked me to take his mother’s cell phone to her, because she’d left it at his place.  We both lived in the same suburb well away from his place, so I agreed because it would be a pain for him to deliver it. When making the arrangements to meet at AJH’s football practice, I said, “you could give her my number if she has trouble finding me,” and caught myself because I’d automatically assumed she could call me despite what I was supposed to be taking her. 

Two: Returning after taking the boys to school on Friday morning, I saw a kid about 10 or 11 years old riding his bike to school with one hand on the handlebars and the other holding his cell phone up to his ear. Multitasking comes early these days.

Three: I stopped for a bathroom break at a truck stop on the way back home from Tulsa on Saturday morning.  Like most guys, I’m not particularly into restroom conversations, and it was odd and disturbing when a guy in one of the stalls kept speaking out loud. I finally figured out that this guy was having an animated cell phone conversation at the same time he was taking a dump. Technology is a magnifier for the worst tendencies of humanity.

UPDATE: Now there’s a fourth.  Driving back to work in downtown Dallas, I noticed the guy in front of me was not moving after the light turned green because he was talking on a cell phone.  Once he made his delayed start, he proceeded to turn right and head the wrong way on a one-way street.

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

Dan Rather must have been fuming all the time since his departure from CBS. They didn’t believe in him and his Bush National Guard documents story enough, and shoved him out the door. 

When you are a virtuous and noble person such as Mr. Rather, the only reasonable explanation for something bad happening to you is a conspiracy by shadowy and malevolent forces. As we all know, the best tool for combating shadowy and malevolent conspiratorial forces is a big-ass lawsuit.

In the suit, Rather alleges that he was forced to apologize for the Bush story as part of a conspiracy by top CBS management to ensure that no further damaging revelations about the president’s time in the Texas Air National Guard would become public. Rather also alleges that CBS hired a private investigator to re-report the original story — after Rather threatened to hire his own private eye to do the same thing — and that the investigator found the story to be accurate, only to have his findings suppressed by CBS as part of an effort to curry favor with the Bush White House. Finally, Rather alleges that CBS fired him over the story the day after Bush was reelected, despite his later claims that his departure was separate from the Bush story.

Rather may have a hard time with this case in court, since people who are suing other people in court actually have to prove their case instead of making a bunch of allegations and claims and challenging the other side to disprove them. One of the odd quirks of our system.

Stupid, Meet Stupid 

Whatever you think of when you think of pop singer Madonna (personally, I think “overcompensating has-been”), what you probably don’t think is “Judaism.”  She’s going to change that.

Madonna toasted the Jewish new year with Israeli President Shimon Peres and declared herself an “ambassador for Judaism,” local newspapers reported Sunday. The singer, who is not Jewish, arrived in Israel Wednesday on the eve of Jewish new year to attend a conference on Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism. Madonna, who was raised a Roman Catholic, has taken the Hebrew name Esther, and has been seen wearing a red thread on her wrist in a Jewish tradition to ward off the evil eye.

She’s not the only one on the “magic Jewishness” bandwagon.

Other celebrities who flew in for the Kabbalah conference included movie star Demi Moore and her husband, actor Ashton Kutcher, Rosie O’Donnell and fashion designer Donna Karan. The Haaretz daily quoted Kutcher as telling a group of Israeli businessmen and entertainers on Saturday that Kabbalah had answered fundamental questions in his life and made him a better actor.

I won’t even try to top that punchline.

—

Have you been to the most famousest bathroom ever?

… tourists are asking about a new destination in the Twin Cities, says Karen Evans, information specialist at the information counter at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. A common request is, “Excuse me, can you please tell me where the Larry Craig bathroom is?” Evans was just 15 minutes into her shift Friday afternoon and already had heard the request four times.

Jon and Sally Westby of Minneapolis were flying to Guatemala on Friday. “We had to just stop and check out the bathroom,” Sally said. “In fact, it’s Jon’s second time — he was here last week already.” “I checked it out,” Jon said. “It’s the second stall from the right.” 

All I can say is, how much for the t-shirt concession?  “My dad went to the second stall from the right in the bathroom just off the central food court at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, and all I got was this shirt.  Oh, wait, I got the better end of that deal. Never mind.”

Educated, But Stupid

The University of Central Florida spent $55 million on its new football stadium. And in a move that looks like money grubbing at its worst, installed zero water fountains.  The result…

A committee overseeing the University of Central Florida’s new on-campus stadium will be tackling concerns about a lack of water fountains at the facility after more than a dozen people suffered from heat exhaustion at the school’s first game Saturday. During the game, emergency crews passed out free cups of water while several people suffered heat exhaustion.

I wonder if the cost of emergency personnel handing out water to guests is covered by the incremental increase in overpriced bottled water sales.  Or maybe that comes out of a different budget, so nobody has to care.

— 

A 14-year old student started vomiting in class at 7:20 am.  The school called 911 at 8:45 am.  She was having a stroke that caused her to lose the use of her right hand and leg. Why the delay?

An assistant principal at Jamaica High School wrote the order just two weeks before ninth-grader Mariya Fatima suffered a stroke at the Queens school in April. The typed words on the school memo are as direct as they are stunning: “No Deans are permitted to call 911 for any reason.”

In February, Jamaica High School was placed on the city’s impact list of dangerous schools. Some staffers said they felt penalized for honestly reporting crime. They also said they felt pressured to drive down the stats. Seemingly to that end, Guy Venezia, the assistant principal for security, sent the one-line memo to the school’s deans on April 12, instructing them not to call 911.

I guess I was wrong last week when I said that bureaucrats don’t like making tough decisions.

- The Cowboys and Packers appear to be for real this year.

- The Colts still have trouble with late-game focus when they lead too much at the half.

- The Falcons are understandably dead in the water.

- NBC thinks I will want to watch their pre-game and halftime shows more if they make a point of prominently featuring smug liberal prick K. Olberman. NBC thinks wrong.

- Chevy’s still not done playing that damn Mellencamp song.

- After the cheap move of calling a timeout with as little time left as possble, Denver made the kicker miss the second attempt and ended up winning in overtime.  This is BS.  The NFL should impose a 5-yard penalty for the opposing side for calling a timeout on a field goal attempt with less than 20 seconds on the play clock.

Anybody can sue anyone for any reason, whether it stands up in court is an entirely different issue. As a result, the publicity given to lawsuit filings is usually unjustified.

Spammers are of the belief that the presence of a middle initial will somehow fool me into opening their mail.

Budget shipping from Amazon.com shows up sooner than you think it will. Budget shipping from Buy.com shows up later than you think it will.

The erectile dysfunction drug industry is keeping the NFL and XM Radio on the air.

“My Name Is Earl” has beaten out “24″ as the best show on TV right now.

If you wipe the rubber blade after every stroke when you clean your windshield at the gas station, the results will be much better.

You know you’re getting older when the women on the covers of Town & Country look more interesting than the girls on the covers of Cosmopolitan.

Jennifer Garner’s relationship with Ben Affleck has tainted her in my eyes.

DirecTV takes away your ability to order pay-per-view movies if you leave the phone line unplugged.

Bagged salads go bad really quickly.

In case you cared, but didn’t care enough to cough up $30 for the PPV, the OU/US game will be replayed by Fox Sports Southwest on Monday, Sep. 17, at 11am.

RJH had the early game. The first half was ugly, with four offensive series ending with three fumbles and the half. In the second half, the team had its first score of the year with a touchdown, but missed the extra point. That was the difference, and they lost 7-6. Another TD was called back on a penalty, so this was at least a loss with dignity.

Did the boy help? Maybe. On several plays, his feet didn’t budge as he stayed on the corner. On others, he didn’t decide to get involved until the traffic was already past. We talked about the difference between waiting for the play to come to you rather than you going to the play. He was in the middle of it when the other side fumbled. He didn’t cause it or recover it, but he was there and the coaches were praising him. Something to build on.

AJH had the late game. No shade, 1pm in the Texas sun. Things went bad, ending up with a 24-0 loss to the two-time league champions. We had an angry dad yelling at the coach at halftime for not playing his kid enough, threatening to pull him out at the end of the season. The kid played more in the second half, but didn’t really make a difference. Careful what you wish for, especially when the wish takes the form of a screaming fit.

AJH had a couple of tackles on defense, but twisted his ankle with about a minute left in the first half. He only played one series in the second half. There was no swelling or discoloration, but he complained & limped a lot and it was sensitive to touch. We had a talk about toughness.

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

It starts with a letter that wasn’t really a letter.

The letter, which appeared to ask parents to renounce their U.S. citizenship, prompted phone calls to the school from several irate recipients. Bidwell Junior High School administrators said a letter sent home with students in an eighth-grade class Tuesday was a good idea for a history lesson, with bad execution. Principal Joanne Parsley said teacher Mike Brooks never intended to have parents sign the letters, or forward them on to President Bush, to whom they are addressed. “It was a well-intended lesson that didn’t shake out too well,” she said, adding that Brooks would not be subject to disciplinary action.

The question that should be popping up in your mind is “what the heck was exactly in that letter?” When the excuse has this big a lead over a quote, it must be a beauty.

. . . the teacher said his U.S. History class is studying the Declaration of Independence, and he decided to write a letter putting the document into modern language. His intention, he said, was to send it home for parents to review, and possibly discuss with their children.

He concluded the letter with “After careful consideration of the facts of our current situation, I have decided to announce to everyone that I am no longer a citizen of the United States, but a free and independent member of the global community.”

Ah. Just teaching children by asking people not actually participating in the class to sign something, nothing to see here.

Chico resident Michael Hill said he was told by his daughter, Kaytlen Hill, 13, that the assignment was to have parents sign the letter and return it to class Wednesday. “The lesson being taught in class was that the U.S. kidnaps innocent people and takes them to Cuba, where they are kept indefinitely and tortured,” Hill said he learned through his daughter.

When Hill asked her if Brooks mentioned Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the U.S. imprisons terrorist suspects, he said his daughter replied “yes.” He said his daughter broke into tears when she talked about Brooks mentioning illegal wiretaps and other surveillance directed against innocent people.

So, is the teacher in trouble? Of course not.

[Principal Joanne] Parsley said she doesn’t believe Brooks has any political agenda to advance.

If you’ll excuse me, I have to go sell some magic beans to a school principal in Chico, California.

Our Business Is Stupid, And Business Is Good

GameStop takes a stand for the gaming rights of the dumb.

[Store manager Brandon] Scott says he’s been suspended by GameStop in the wake of his unconventional “games for grades” policy at an Oak Cliff store. On his own, Scott decided to stop selling video games to any school-age customer unless an adult would vouch for the student’s good grades.

Educated, Yet Stupid

The Navy’s football team gets a display of New Jersey class from Rutgers fans:

Navy’s Reggie Campbell took the kickoff and ran full speed ahead up the middle with all the force his 168-pound body could generate. Campbell, almost always the smallest and fastest man on the field, hit a wall of XXXL-sized scarlet jerseys and was slammed to the ground at the bottom of the pile. He got up slowly, limping off. This gutsy kid, a slotback who already spent three quarters being chased and tackled by gangs of defensive linemen and linebackers, all weighing at least 100 pounds more than him, was then given a dose of Rutgers’ student section class.

‘’You got f—ed up. You got f—ed up. You got f–ed-up,” they chanted.

Navy was booed and peppered with “You suck!” chants when they stepped on the field for both halves. Toward the end of the second half, Rutgers students in the new bleacher section began to serenade the adjacent section of Navy fans and uniformed Midshipmen.

‘’F— you, Navy. F—you, Navy. F— you, Navy.”

Remind me to enjoy it when your football program sinks back into obscurity, Rutgers jerks.

Zero tolerance = zero thinking.

Under a new school rule, students at Hobbton High School [in North Carolina] are not allowed to wear items with flags, from any country, including the United States. The new rule stems from a controversy over students wearing shirts bearing flags of other countries.

The superintendent of schools in Sampson County calls the situation unfortunate, but says educators didn’t want to be forced to pick and choose which flags should be permissible.

They reversed the policy almost immediately after it was publicized, but it’s amazing to see the contortions a bureaucrat will go through just to avoid making a real decision or judgment call.

Politically Stupid

You’ve just been released on bond pending sentencing for a crime you were convicted of more than ten years ago. What now? If you’re Norman Hsu, you get on a train to Denver and flip out.

Hsu, 56, on the run for the second time from a 1992 grand theft conviction in San Mateo County, was arrested Thursday after the paramedics took him to a hospital from the train station in Grand Junction, Colo. Hsu boarded the train in Emeryville about 7 a.m. Wednesday, Amtrak said, two hours before he was to have appeared in a Redwood City courtroom in connection with his grand theft conviction. He had touched down earlier that morning on a charter jet flight to Oakland, his lawyer told prosecutors. Amtrak said he boarded the Zephyr with a ticket for Denver.

Alberto Dee, 21, who boarded the train in Truckee, said Hsu “freaked out” when Amtrak personnel approached, and was roaming a train car “without shoes and no shirt. … I thought he had a suitcase full of crack or meth.”

After waiting until the fishy Mr. Hsu was re-captured, the Clinton campaign is now giving back $850,000 to donors who donated through him. Which will be a nice benefit to those folks, since most of it was likely not their money to begin with. But Clinton really wants the money back.

The campaign is refunding $850,000 to these donors, viewing the money as tainted. Yet the campaign is also risking another public relations mess by saying that it would take back the money if it clearly came from the donor’s bank account, not from Mr. Hsu or another source. The risk is that Mrs. Clinton will appear to want more cash no matter whether it was once colored by a disgraced donor.

The campaign will try to get most of the donors to give the money back right after the refunds, said a senior Democratic strategist who advises Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. “That’s the plan,” the strategist said.

Another smooth move from the lady who refused to give Paula Jones any “go away” money until the damage was already done.

Stupid in Print

The New York Times publishes a full-page ad from MoveOn calling the US’s commanding general in Iraq a traitor.

“General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” reads the full-page ad, which cost the liberal group MoveOn.org approximately $65,000 and ran in section A of today’s New York Times.

And gives them a very nice discount on the standard page rate to do it. Something tells me the MoveOn bunch wasn’t supposed to talk up the “friend rate.”

… while I don’t claim to understand the intricacies of New York Times advertising sales, their own rate card (PDF) seems rather specific that Advocacy ads, which the MoveOn.org ad most clearly was, are sold at $167,157 for a full-page, full-price nationwide ad.

Stupid.net

Via Dubious Quality, via CNN, from Mental Floss, a list of failed food products. My favorite was toaster bacon.

. . . the makers of Reddi-wip® were unable to meld their keen understanding of human laziness with one of processed meat. They figured, if you’re cooking breakfast in the morning and you’ve got a hankering for bacon, why dirty up a pan you’ll only have to clean later?

The solution: foil-wrapped Reddi-Bacon you could pop into your toaster for piping-hot pork in minutes. It seemed perfect for the busy 1970’s household, and what’s more, the stuff actually tasted pretty good. Too bad the absorbent pad intended to soak up the dripping grease tended to leak, creating not only a fire hazard, but also a messy (if not totally ruined) toaster.

It’s not often anymore that I’m immediately taken with a song, but I ran across Canadian band The Weakerthans’ song “Plea From A Cat Named Virtue” on XM Channel 52. I’ve listened to it several times and each time I made out a few more of the clever lyrics. It’s what your cat would say to you after a breakup. Listen & let me know what you think.

The Weakerthans’ website.

Direct link to the song from their website (192k MP3).

Former US Senator Alan Cranston tells a tale of Nazis and copyright:

While I was doing my foreign correspondence work, I read Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the book he wrote while he was in prison before he became the dictator, outlining his plans for Germany and the terrible things he intended to do in the world. There was no English language version of it. When I quit journalism and came back to try to get involved in activities in the United States, one day in Macy’s bookstore in New York I saw a display of Mein Kampf, an English language version, which I’d never seen before, which hadn’t existed. I went over to look at it out of curiosity and as I picked it up, I knew it wasn’t the real book. It was much thinner than the long book that I had read, which is about 350,000 words. So I bought it to see how come. And delving into it I found that it was a condensed version, and some of the things that would most upset Americans just weren’t there as they were in the version I had read, the original, in German.

So I talked to an editor friend of mine in New York, a Hearst editor named Amster Spiro, and suggested that I write and we publish an anti-Nazi version of Mein Kampf that would be the real book and would awaken Americans to the peril Hitler posed for us and the rest of the world. So we did that. I spent eight days [compiling] my version of Mein Kampf from the English language version that I now had, the original German language version, and another copy that had just appeared. A book was then selling for around three dollars normal price. Hitler was getting forty cents royalty for each copy that somebody bought that wasn’t [even] the real thing.

We proceeded to print in tabloid the version that I wrote, with a very lurid red cover showing Hitler carving up the world, and we sold it for ten cents on newsstands. It created quite a stir. Some Nazis went around knocking down newsstands that displayed it in St. Louis and the German part of New York and elsewhere in the country. We sold half a million copies in ten days and were immediately sued by Hitler’s agents on the grounds we had violated his copyright, which we had done. We had the theory that [though] he had copyrighted Mein Kampf in Austria, he had destroyed Austria with his army, so we said he destroyed his copyright at the same time. Well, that didn’t stand up in court, and a Connecticut judge ruled in Hitler’s favor. No damages were assessed, but we had to stop selling the book. We got what was called an injunction. But we did wake up a lot of Americans to the Nazi threat.

LINK

Youth football season is dominating my life. (Sorry about the abbreviations, but I’m a Google-phobe.)

Last year, Boy 1 (JAH) wanted to play football.  I tried to talk him out of it, but he was serious and I respected that.  He never complained about practicing in the worst of August’s Texas heat, and gained a lot of confidence over the course of the season. I had to admit it was a positive experience for an 8-year-old.

This year, Boy 2 (RJH) wanted in on the action. Now we’re juggling six practices a week and spending most of Saturday at games. It’s good but exhausting and a bit unfair to Boy 3, who doesn’t have anything to do at a two-hour practice session. Throwing some ripped SpongeBobs onto the PSP helps, but he’s legitimately entitled to complain about being bored.

RJH is 7, the earliest age the local league plays tackle football. Watching the teams shows a big difference between 7 and 9.  The 7s have to be taught to hit and not shy away from being hit. It makes sense, since people’s natural instincts tell them not to seek out physical conflict. There’s also several kids on the team who don’t necessarily want to be there, but their parents have insisted. (I can see why, football can be a de-wimpifier) RJH does want to be there, but he bobs along through practice like a cork in the stream, happy to be present, but not particularly focused on the big picture. In contrast, the 9s are serious and take pride in their play.

Last Saturday was the first game for both boys.  On a hot September Saturday, AJH’s team plowed through the other team and won 32-0.  AJH played the entire game as an offensive lineman and had a few series on defence, including an impressive sack.

RJH’s team lost 24-0. Ouch. RJH is not particularly worked up about it, and I think he should be. The other team’s running backs breezed past him several times, and he sort of slapped at them on the way past. I don’t think he’s taking it personally, but the coach is.  We’ll see if it sinks in by the end of the season.

The biggest show on Russian TV is a remake of…

Turn on the sitcom that is the hottest television show in Russia, and it all seems so familiar. Moored to his living room couch is a shoe salesman who is more interested in watching sports than conjugal relations. His wife has shocking hair and an even more shocking mouth. A couple of ne’er-do-well teenagers round out this bawdy, bickering bunch.

In fact, the show is an authorized copy of the American sitcom “Married With Children,” with a Russian cast and dialogue but scripts that hew closely to those of the original. This knockoff is such a sensation, especially among younger viewers, that its actors have become household names, and advertisements for its new season are plastered around Moscow. 

Follow the link for pics.  The wife looks amazingly like Katey Sagal.

LINK

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

Journalist Piers Morgan thought George Bush was a dumbass for falling off of a Segway:

The ex-newspaper editor, now a columnist for The Mail on Sunday’s Live magazine, took great delight in making fun of President Bush for falling off a Segway - the two-wheeled, motorised, gyroscopically balanced scooter that, its makers promise, will never fall over. His paper, the Daily Mirror, ran the headline in 2003: “You’d have to be an idiot to fall off, wouldn’t you Mr President.” It added: “If anyone can make a pig’s ear of riding a sophisticated, self-balancing machine like this, Dubya can.”

In a grand triumph of cosmic justice, Morgan falls off a Segway and breaks three ribs.

Our Business Is Stupid, and Business Is Good

Fixing aircraft in Nepal:

Officials at Nepal’s state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said Tuesday. Nepal Airlines, which has two Boeing aircraft, has had to suspend some services in recent weeks due the problem.

The goats were sacrificed in front of the troublesome aircraft Sunday at Nepal’s only international airport in Kathmandu in accordance with Hindu traditions, an official said. “The snag in the plane has now been fixed and the aircraft has resumed its flights,” said Raju K.C., a senior airline official, without explaining what the problem had been.

“Oh yeah, you’re looking at a two, three goat job here.”

When you buy a house for $2.6 million at a foreclosure auction, you might want to have a look inside to see if it’s full of feces. No quotes. Too disgusting.

A lot of modern PC software wants to be activiated before it will run, and publisher 2K made the game Bioshock particularly difficult to install. So when a user asks whether his brother can play the copy already installed on the PC using his own XP account, the 2K rep responds:

2k Tech JT writes:
The other way to view this, is one USER has purchased the game. Not the whole family. So why should your brother play for free?

And that’s the way to get the public to support PC gaming.

Microsoft has a space for its Xbox Live users to post a motto for others to see (mine’s “Not in the face!”). Because people are morons, they filter the mottos for objectionable words. However, MS’s definition of “objectionable” includes the words “Unix” and “Linux.” It’s called synergy.

Politically Stupid

John Edwards wants to make you go to the doctor:

“[His plan] requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care,” he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. “If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK.”

He stopped short of letting us know what the consequenses would be for disobedience.

Stupid In Print

The New York Times lectures us about the Constitution:

It is an eminently good thing that the anti-suicide measure would require medical specialists to keep track of veterans found to be high risks for suicide. But that’s to care for them as human beings, under that other constitutional right — to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But that phrase doesn’t appear in the Constitution, it’s in the Declaration of Independence. Which doesn’t establish any rights.

Think Globally, Act Stupidly

Japanese McDonald’s will give you a half price hamburger if you promise to fight global warming.

The Japanese unit of the US burger giant Tuesday offered a Big Mac for 150 yen (1.3 dollars), about half the normal price, to anyone demonstrating a commitment to preventing climate change. People were asked to check up to 39 boxes on a form they could download from the environment ministry’s website, each listing a way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions blamed for global warming. The 39 measures range from cutting air conditioning use to reducing shower time by one minute to simply wiping water off the bottom of a kettle to save energy when heating it on a stove. Customers can print the forms or show them on their cell phones.

Look what you made me do. All I wanted was a cheap hamburger, and you made me lie to get it.

Thanks to liberal guilt, we now have concepts such as “carbon offsets,” where people who consume lots of energy can make themselves feel better by paying someone else to not consume energy. Kind of like going on a diet and paying someone else not to eat.

Whenever [leader of the UK Conservative Party, David Cameron] takes a flight to some foreign destination, Cameron donates to a carbon-offsetting company that encourages people in the developing world to ditch modern methods of farming in favour of using their more eco-friendly manpower to plough the land. So Cameron can fly around the world with a guilt-free conscience on the basis that, thousands of miles away, Indian villagers, bent over double, are working by hand rather than using machines that emit carbon.

The details of this carbon-offsetting scheme are disturbing. Cameron offsets his flights by donating to Climate Care. The latest wheeze of this carbon-offsetting company is to provide “treadle pumps” to poor rural families in India so that they can get water on to their land without having to use polluting diesel power. Made from bamboo, plastic and steel, the treadle pumps work like “step machines in a gym,” according to some reports, where poor family members step on the pedals for hours in order to draw up groundwater which is used to irrigate farmland. These pumps were abolished in British prisons a century ago. It seems that what was considered an unacceptable form of punishment for British criminals in the past is looked upon as a positive eco-alternative to machinery for Indian peasants today.

Yup, no guilt to be had here.

Are boring movies good or bad for the environment? Leonardo DiCaprio helps us find out:

His environmental documentary, “The 11th Hour,” has been a total bust at the box office. After 18 days in release, the film has grossed only $417,913 from ticket sales. By comparison, Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim’s similar but far more engaging “An Inconvenient Truth” had already made $3.5 million by its 18th day of release. . . . at Cannes, when the film by Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen was shown to journalists, nearly the entire room fell asleep.

Stupid For Legal Purposes

Shady fundraiser Norman Hsu skips out on $2 million bail. As noted by the Wall Street Journal:

All of this is very reminiscent of the 1996 Clinton fundraising scandal. A total of 120 witnesses either fled the country, pleaded the Fifth Amendment or otherwise were unavailable for questioning.

You’d think the judge would know better than to grant bail to a guy who avoided a warrant for more than 10 years. Especially when you know this:

On Monday, Mr. Hsu was ordered to forfeit his passport to the court, but he told court officials that he was unable to find it at the time. Mr. Brosnahan said that one of his assistants even went to Mr. Hsu’s apartment in New York City one day and spent 90 minutes searching for the passport. Mr. Brosnahan said he was hoping Mr. Hsu would turn it over today.

Hsu has made a fool of His Honor, who believed that a known flight risk “couldn’t find” his passport and let him walk out of the courthouse anyway.

I’ve heard of “hanging judges,” but not “spanking judges.”

The Mobile Press-Register is reporting [Circuit Judge Herman] Thomas is accused of periodically removing prisoners from Mobile County Metro Jail and spanking them in a room at the courthouse. According to the Press-Register, once inside the room, the judge would ask the men to drop their pants and prepare to be spanked with what was described as a wooden paddle. Judge Thomas told the Press Register that he did not have any comment on the allegations. Sources also say that between six to 12 men have shared their accounts with investigators. Thomas is preparing for an October 29th judicial ethics trial in Montgomery that could remove him from the bench permanently.

This does not appear to be part of the sentencing process, it just looks like he had jail prosoners brought to a room to drop their pants and get spanked. At least in high school you’d get time off detention for taking the swats.

Florida has a huge gap in its laws. Apparently, threatening people with frogs is perfectly legal!

A Cape Coral father called police Saturday after his son was scaring his sisters with a frog. It’s not clear from the report, taken by officer A.D. Fleming, how old the boy is. “According to (the boy), he was arguing because his father was pushing him out of his sisters’ room when he had the frog,” Fleming reported. “(The father) insisted I arrest his son. I advised him that the boy had not committed any crime, and therefore could not be arrested.”

Cheetos have always been dangerously cheezy, and now they’re just plain dangerous.

A Des Moines man was charged with domestic assault Sunday after throwing a bag of Cheetos at his father. Twenty-two-year-old Patrick Hamman was arrested after the bag of cheesy chips hit his father, Michael Hamman, in the face. Police said the bag hit his father’s glasses, causing a cut to the bridge of his nose. The police report said — quote— “Michael’s T-shirt was also covered in Cheeto dust.”

Dangerously Stupid

The Air Force accidentally loaded five nuclear warhead-equipped cruise missiles on a B-52 bomber and sent it out for a flight from a North Dakota base. They figured it out when the B-52 landed in a Louisiana base. Are nukes really that easy to “check out” and tool around the country with?

A roundabout confession is still a confession. Or did the author/killer think he was being clever?

Fishermen dragged Janiszewski’s corpse — stripped to a shirt and underwear — from the muddy banks of the Oder River in southwestern Poland on December 10, 2000. His body showed signs of starvation and torture. His hands were bound behind his back and tied to a noose around his neck. Police quickly identified the victim as Janiszewski, who had disappeared four weeks earlier. But they struggled to dig up clues and dropped the case after six months.

Five years later, a tip led them to Bala’s 2003 novel, “Amok,” an alcohol- and sex-fueled tale narrated by a man named Chris, who stabs a woman after binding her hands behind her back and then running the rope to a noose around her neck. The similarities aroused investigators’ suspicions, although the parallels were not part of their case to the panel of judges. Experts said the narrator-killer in his book bears a psychological resemblance to Bala, who acknowledged using the name “Chris” when abroad and online.

“And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for that meddling novel I wrote about my crime.”