I’m cheating. I slid in last Saturday’s TWIS behind the NFL post, even though that post was published first. Scroll down for sarcasm.
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Looks like spammers have gone beyond the groin area and now want to sell replica watches. Great for keeping track of when your V!agr@ will kick in.
- I remember that during the last two weeks of the season, there would be two NFL games on Saturday. Now, we have one game on the NFL network. Not an improvement. I’m becoming more and more convinced they want to assume all of the broadcasting and sell a “package” to the broadcasters. The fact that they think Bryant Gumbel is a competent commentator doesn’t give me a lot of hope should that plan ever come to pass.
- Hiring Bill Parcells isn’t going to save the Dolphins. When he was at Dallas, he wasted his time chasing old players from the Jets and Patriots, ignored the coaching staff he inherited rather than hired personally, and benched Romo until the last possible moment. This, despite the fact that his golden boy Bledsoe was guaranteed to make at least one boneheaded mistake each game.
- Too bad the the Rams couldn’t wrap up their 2007 season on Thursday night. Because they’re really done playing football.
- Romo’s thumb, TO’s ankle, whatever excuse you need for why you’re not going to win the Super Bowl.
- The Patriots have not stopped trying to win, even though they’ve locked up their playoff slot. This is a good thing. I’ve seen too many teams slack off at the end of the season and never get the rhythm back.
- Damn, the Vikings are inconsistent.
The Montgomery Burns Award For Outstanding Achievement In The Field Of Stupid
Lots of folks want to give you parenting advice. Some even want to charge you for that advice in book form. But it takes real balls to try to sell the public your parenting advice when your children are high-profile train wrecks.
“Pop Culture Mom: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World” was initially scheduled for release May 11, Mother’s Day. Spears, the mother of three children with ex-husband Jamie Spears, had been working with a Michigan-based freelancer since March on the memoir chronicling Spears’ experiences raising a family in the public eye.
If anyone has something positive and constructive to add to the national conversation about proper child raising, it’s a divorced stage mom. But you’re going to have to find another Mother’s Day gift, because . . .
Lynne Spears’ book about parenting has been delayed indefinitely, her publisher said Wednesday. Lindsey Nobles, a spokeswoman for Christian book publisher Thomas Nelson Inc., said Wednesday that the memoir by the mother of Britney Spears was put on hold last week. She declined to comment on whether the delay was connected to the revelation that Spears’ 16-year-old daughter, Jamie Lynn, is pregnant.
Maybe the indefinite delay is so the book can be rewritten under the new title: “Here’s What I Did To Screw Up My Kids, Try Not To Do This Stuff.” Or maybe they’re just waiting to add some more grandparenting tips.
Our Business Is Stupid, And Business Is Good
Tributes are fine things, in the right context. But nobody’s particularly interested in tributes to, say, war criminals, pedophiles, or animal abusers.
Roddy White and four other Atlanta Falcons were fined by the NFL for violating uniform regulations with tributes to Michael Vick during last week’s Monday night game.
After scoring a touchdown, White displayed a “Free Mike Vick” T-shirt under his jersey.
He, along with tight end Alge Crumpler and cornerbacks DeAngelo Hall and Chris Houston, were fined $10,000 each. Crumpler, Hall and Houston all wore black eye strips with written tributes to Vick, which the league called “displaying an unauthorized personal message.” Wide receiver Joe Horn was fined $7,500 for pulling up White’s jersey to show the black T-shirt with handwritten white lettering.
Failure to recognize that Vick is toxic means either you think what he did was no big deal, or you’re really not paying attention. Not sure which is better.
Politically Stupid
You can get away with a lot in this country if you claim you’re protesting something. Including not making any damn sense.
Art Conrad has an issue with the commercialism of Christmas, and his protest has gone way beyond just shunning the malls or turning off his television. The Bremerton resident nailed Santa Claus to a 15-foot crucifix in front of his house.
“Santa has been perverted from who he started out to be,” Conrad said. “Now he’s the person being used by corporations to get us to buy more stuff.”
A photo of the crucified Santa adorns his Christmas cards, with the message “Santa died for your MasterCard.”
Get it? Conrad’s using the modern standardized image of Santa Claus, prominently marketed by the Coca-Cola company since the 1930s, to protest his use as a marketing tool. By using religious imagery. From a holiday that will occur several months from now.
Just between you and me, I think Conrad just gets off on crucifixes and sending shitty cards to everyone.
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Since politicians feel the need to fill any empty space with their words, WTF moments are bound to happen.
Standing atop a stage in a livestock auction barn, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton likened the experience to her quest to woo undecided voters in the closing days before Iowa’s pivotal caucuses.
“I’ve been to cattle barns before and sales before, in Arkansas, but I’ve never felt like I was the one that was being bid on,” Clinton told a crowd in western Iowa. “I know you’re going to inspect me. You can look inside my mouth if you want. I hope by the end of my time with you I can make the case for my candidacy and to ask you to consider caucusing for me.”
Um, yuk. Let’s give the long-distance relationship more time to develop before we meet up, okay?
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Tis the season to apologize to Obama. Yet another Clinton supporter trips up while trying to tie him to things they think will scare the rubes.
Former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey has apologized to Barack Obama for any unintentional insult he committed by raising the Democratic presidential candidate’s Muslim heritage while endorsing rival candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“It’s probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim,” said Kerrey, a former governor and the current president of the New School in New York City. “There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal.”
You’d think the folks who put themselves in charge of detecting racism and xenophobia in our society could use those enhanced perceptive skills to be a little more subtle about their racist xenophobia.
Think Globally, Act Stupidly
Finally, machines that run on recycled humans. Or at least parts of them.
The fastest eco boat on the planet will attempt to break the round the world speed record using fuel made from human fat.
Pete Bethune, the New Zealand skipper of Earthrace, said the attempt to circumnavigate the globe would begin from Valencia in Spain on March 1 next year. Bethune and his wife mortgaged their house and sold everything they own to help make the project happen, while continuing to seek support from sponsors.
Demonstrating further commitment to the cause, Bethune underwent liposuction and donated enough to produce 100ml of biofuel, while two other, larger volunteers also had the procedure, making a total of 10 litres of human fat.
This in turn produced seven litres of biofuel, which could help the boat travel about 15km.
Wow. Seven liters of fuel, and all it takes is risky surgery on multiple people and processing biohazardous materials. Will this have any impact on world’s energy needs? Or even the race’s energy needs?
Circumnavigating the globe represents the pinnacle of powerboat challenges, and more than 24,000 nautical miles is the world’s longest speed challenge.
Nope. Well, I say that, but I’m assuming that the decision to provide fuel from your own body will be voluntary.
Dangerously Stupid
Los Angeles continues a tradition of providing top-notch emergency services for its citizens:
. . . about 10 a.m. Saturday [a car] hit a parked car in a bank parking lot and then crashed into the building at 19255 W. Ventura Blvd. Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics removed the driver from the vehicle and took him to Northridge Hospital Medical Center, said spokesman Brian Humphrey.
The car was then towed about seven miles to the impound yard, where it sat overnight. On Sunday afternoon, authorities called the impound yard and asked an employee to look in the vehicle for anything unusual, a source said.
“We conducted a follow-up to the tow yard, and we discovered the woman inside the vehicle,” Lopez said. “She was dead.”
LAPD detectives and officials on Sunday afternoon and evening swarmed the vehicle lot at Howard Sommers Towing Inc., an official police impound and tow yard in Canoga Park, trying to determine how city paramedics and traffic officers had failed to spot the woman in the damaged vehicle.
The slightly built woman had been concealed beneath an air bag that had deployed during the accident, police said. The vehicle was badly banged-up after crashing into a building.
Looks like the LAPD and the fire department need to be told the same thing you tell a six-year-old: Don’t tell me you can’t find something until you look under, not just at.
And I don’t think it will be missed. I went in the Frisco store today to see if there were any bargains to be had. Nope. The only sales they were going to make were from people who didn’t know any better.
Everything was 10% off, 15% at the most. And all sales final, no returns. Which might be interesting except for CompUSA’s long history of keeping prices high long after they’ve dropped other places. So, I could get a Microsoft Habu gaming mouse for 10% off $70, but I can get one from Dell for $51 with free shipping. Playstation 2 games selling for $20 everywhere else were 10% off $40. Blank CDs and DVDs were higher than the sale prices at Best Buy or Office Max.
Amazing. They can’t even go out of business competently.
- If the Dallas sports media gets its way, Tony Romo will not be allowed to bring girlfriends to Cowboys games anymore.
- I guess the Ravens aren’t done losing to the Patriots yet.
- Something about having teams with losing records in “playoff contention” bugs me.
- Detroit is still Detroit. Detroit was kidding itself if it thought otherwise.
- This season will come down to the four dominant quarterbacks in the league: Brady, P. Manning, Favre, and Romo.
- I thought the NFL Network wised up and fired Gumbel, but he was just sick. Damn.
The Montgomery Burns Award For Outstanding Achievement In The Field Of Stupid
I love a mystery. For example, was this guy trying to teach the airport security staff a lesson, or was he just a cheap asshole?
. . .at the Nuremberg airport on Tuesday, [] the 64-year-old man was switching planes on his way home to Dresden from a holiday in Egypt.
New airport rules prohibit passengers from carrying larger quantities of liquid onto planes, and he was told at a security check he would have to either throw out the bottle of vodka or pay a fee to have his carry-on bag checked as cargo.
Instead, he chugged the bottle down - and was quickly unable to stand or otherwise function, police said.
A doctor called to the scene determined he had possibly life-threatening alcohol poisoning, and he was sent to a Nuremberg clinic for treatment.
Politically Stupid
If there’s an upside to people wanting to destroy your reputation, it’s the knowledge that you are regarded as a credible threat. Hillary Clinton’s campaign appears to be feeling the heat and panicking.
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign on Sunday requested the resignation of a second Iowa volunteer coordinator who forwarded a hoax e-mail saying Barack Obama is a Muslim possibly intent on destroying the United States.
Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ and says he has never been a Muslim, but false rumors attempting to tie him to Islamic jihadists are circulating on the Internet.
“Let us all remain alert concerning Obama’s expected presidential Candidacy,” read the e-mail. “Please forward to everyone you know. The Muslims have said they Plan on destroying the US from the inside out, what better way to start than at The highest level.”
Well, if he’s not a dangerous Muslim, then maybe he was a drug dealer.
Billy Shaheen, the co-chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in New Hampshire, raised the issue of Sen. Barack Obama’s past admissions of drug use in discussing the relative electability of the Democrats seeking the presidential nomination today.
Shaheen said Obama’s candor on the subject would “open the door” to further questions. “It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?’” Shaheen said. “There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It’s hard to overcome.”
Ah, so they’re really just worried about what the bad old mean Republicans are going to say. Funny how that excuse lets you say anything you want about somebody without having to back it up. Not that anyone bought that line.
A top campaign adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton resigned Thursday, a day after suggesting Democrats should be wary of nominating Barack Obama because his teenage drug use could make it hard for him to win the presidency.
“I made a mistake and in light of what happened, I have made the personal decision that I will step down as the co-chair of the Hillary for President campaign,” Shaheen said in a statement released by the campaign Thursday.
Or, and I’m just throwing this out, maybe insulting Obama is just an easy way to bail out of the Clinton campaign?
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It’s good to be queen. But it’s even better when you abuse your position as much as possible as soon as possible.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has spent $16,000 on flowers since taking office, one reason why she spent 63 percent more in her high-profile inaugural year than her low-key predecessor did last year. Pelosi (D-Calif.) spent a little more than $3 million in the first nine months of 2007, records show, compared to the $1.8 million Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) spent during the same period in 2006.
Most of the $16,058 that Pelosi charged taxpayers for flowers, Elshami said, was for the visits of foreign dignitaries, such as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Jordan’s King Abdullah.
So, it’s a normal expense? Well….
While Hastert didn’t appear to spend any money on flowers last year, bouquets are not new to Pelosi’s office. She spent about $5,000 on flowers last year when she was minority leader.
Pelosi [also] has more people working for her. Hastert employed 35 people during the third quarter of last year. Pelosi, by contrast, had 51 people on her payroll during the same time period.
Another factor in the disparity is travel. Hastert didn’t bill much official travel last year, spending only about $1,700, while Pelosi racked up many times that at nearly $60,000 — a figure that does not include her “congressional delegation” journeys to Europe and the Middle East. It does, however, include many visits to congressional districts.
Clearly, what we have here is a failure to appreciate the specialness of the individuals involved. But it’s also a good way to tell Democrats and Republicans apart: what they want to waste tax money on and how fast they want to waste it.
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Oh, wait, we’re not done with the mudfighting.
Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, asks in an upcoming article, “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”
He ended up eating his words in record time.
Educated Is Not The Opposite Of Stupid
Anonymity wasn’t good enough for the Penn State student who went to a Halloween party as a murdered Virginia Tech student and had his pictures posted on the net. He had to make sure everyone knew he was the real victim.
But today, one of the students, who reportedly wore one of the controversial outfits, said he will not apologize. “Never ever ever,” Nathan Jones told The Daily Collegian, the student paper at Penn State.
Jones, a senior biochemistry major, told the paper that he never thought the images would cause an uproar. “A lot of people do crazy, insensitive things,” he said. “I knew what I was doing was sad. I did it for that reason. It was never meant to get out.”
Jones told the Daily Collegian today that the controversy has sparked threats. The names of three people have been turned over to authorities for threats.
Jones also told the paper: “I would not show my face on the Virginia Tech campus now. They might actually murder me. Apparently, violence is the answer.”
Jones really seems to think he can convince us that he’s the one with the position of moral superiority in this situation. But just as high-minded is Penn Staten itself.
Lisa Powers, a spokeswoman for Penn State, told ABC News the campus community was horrified by the controversial pictures. However, Powers said that Penn State, after talking with one of the students involved, had no plans to discipline the students, citing freedom of speech protections in the Constitution.
It’s amazing how concerned universities are about free speech when it involves them doing nothing. And how unconcerned universities are about free speech when it involves them doing nothing.
Think Globally, Act Stupidly
It’s not about future generations, the polar bears, or Gaea the Earth Goddess. It’s about making Al Gore feel special.
Many of the audience at last month’s Fortune Forum summit were restless as Mr Gore, who has won both a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for his campaigning work this year, delivered the half-hour speech that netted him £100,000. Guests had paid between £1,000 and £50,000 to attend.
But a source told The Mail on Sunday: “Many guests looked tired and began to talk among themselves during his speech. Heads began to twitch with tiredness.
“Al uses his position for great personal gain. He goes from event to event delivering a similar speech, earning a large fee, and a lot of the time he doesn’t actually inform the audience.
“He refused to speak to journalists and security would usher away VIP guests and the Press.
“He was being very precious and demanded his own VIP room before the event, where he held his own exclusive reception.
“The other guests were cut off. It was very clear that many guests were disappointed by this.”
Paul Hetherington, media relations manager for WaterAid, said: “Pictures couldn’t be taken and people were being moved out of the main hall so they couldn’t experience the event. It was very disruptive.
“We had to apologise to people who were invited. We wanted to say thank you for all the support that many people had given us, but some of them were asked to leave.
Looks like Al’s found a way to act like a rock star without actually entertaining anyone.
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More evidence that the environmental movement is starting to regard people themselves as pollution.
A West Australian medical expert wants families to pay a $5000-plus “baby levy” at birth and an annual carbon tax of up to $800 a child. Writing in today’s Medical Journal of Australia, Associate Professor Barry Walters said every couple with more than two children should be taxed to pay for enough trees to offset the carbon emissions generated over each child’s lifetime.
Professor Walters, clinical associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia and the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth, called for condoms and “greenhouse-friendly” services such as sterilisation procedures to earn carbon credits.
“Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, not simply by breathing but by the profligate consumption of resources typical of our society,” he wrote.
If you’re not trying to preserve the environment for people, including future people, then what are you trying to preserve?
Our Business Is Stupid, And Business Is Good
He knows when you’ve been sleeping, he knows when you’re awake. And he just might be tired of you and your crap.
Yesterday, Canada Post shut down its Write To Santa program across the city while it joins Ottawa police to hunt down the “rogue elf.”
Each Santa letter Canada Post delivers contains the same main message with a hand-written personal postscript.
Maya’s personal “P.S.” said: “This letter is too long, you dumb s—.”
“I went straight to Google, got the Canada Post number and called,” said Ms. Da Costa. “A very nice lady at a call centre in Fredericton, New Brunswick, was shocked, and when I told her I also had a letter for Colton and was planning to let him read it when he got home, she said I should open it now just in case.”
Ms. Da Costa went downstairs, picked up the letter and returned to the phone. What she read had both ladies gasping. “Oh, my god! Oh, my god!,” they kept repeating.
The personal P.S. to Colton’s letter read: “Your mom sucks d— and your Dad is gay.”
What does Santa know that we don’t?
- What is that thing painted on the 50-yard line of the Patriots’ field? Is it a spaceship? A building? Half a bridge? Are the yellow lines coming out of it lasers? Jet propulsion lines? You’d think they would paint something on their field that would look better than something a fifth grader would draw on his notebook.
- Can we all now agree that guarantees of victory are bad ideas? And what exactly was guaranteed? I don’t think anyone who wanted the Steelers to win got a refund.
- Good teams win games they shouldn’t win. Bad teams find a way to lose when they should win. The Cowboys have exposed the Bills and the Lions as bad teams.
- Remember this time last year when everyone was talking about when Brett Favre would retire because he was so obviously not good anymore? Nobody knows a damn thing they think they know.
The Montgomery Burns Award For Outstanding Achievement In The Field Of Stupid
The culture of self-esteem has finally reached its natural end in the Ivy League. They understand that the suffering of others isn’t a tragedy, it’s an opportunity to entertain your fellow elites.
Two Penn State students, dressed as Virginia Tech shooting victims, at a Halloween party have enraged people from the Virginia Tech community, as well as the entire country.
10 On Your Side has seen all of the controversial pictures. They are of two Penn State students and are extremely graphic. Both are wearing Virginia Tech t-shirts and elaborate make-up. Both have bullet holes in their bodies.
There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, of course.
We talked with one of the students who wore the costume. He said the outfits were worn to a small party and meant to be private.
“It’s not that it was funny, it’s that we are notorious and infamous in the state college, so we have to do things that push the envelope just for shock value,” he said.
I hope you have some sympathy for this poor guy — he’s trapped in a cage of the high expectations others have placed upon him. If you think about his devotion to serving others, you’d realize he’s an American Hero. And our Hero has more to teach us.
After seeing the pictures, a Virginia Tech student created a Facebook group called, “People Against This Costume.” Some of the upset members have left threatening messages to the Penn State students.
“This is a group of college students who now think it’s trendy to be upset about their friends being killed,” one of the two Penn State students who wore the costume said. “I don’t know what they teach people in Virginia Tech, but at Penn State we don’t learn to threaten people with murder to teach them that murdering is wrong.”
He goes on to defend the pictures.
“The thing is, everybody’s making a big stink about Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech was 32 deaths out of the 26 thousand that happen in America everyday,” he said. “That’s the problem with college students. They all live in an ivory tower of privilege. They don’t understand, when it all boils down to it, it’s someone wearing a costume.”
Ivy League students really are the best of us all. I’m grateful that he took all this time and trouble to educate us on the fallacies of taking college students seriously. This is exactly the kind of guy we need to send the wilds of Pakistan to negotiate with Al Qaeda and explain to them how they really don’t understand things.
However that scenario ends up, it’s a win for the world.
All The Stupid That’s Fit To Print
To be clear, I’m not pointing this out to illustrate the stupidity of leaving $12 million for a dog rather than your grandchildren. I’m sure the dog had a better attitude.
No, it’s the press coverage of the dog’s travails.
A pampered pooch who inherited 12 million dollars from a late US hotel magnate earlier this year has fled to Florida under an assumed name after receiving death threats, a report said Monday. Trouble, a white Maltese who belonged to billionaire Leona Helmsley until her death in August, was flown by private jet under tight security two months ago after receiving around 20 such threats, the New York Post reported.
This paragraph assumes the following propositions:
(1) that dogs can inherit and manage their own property;
(2) that a dog can receive and understand death threats;
(3) that a dog, once it receives a death threat, will rent or purchase a private jet to flee the threat rather than simply run out of the room;
and (4) that in the course of this flight, the dog will not only change its name, but communicate this new name to others.
I don’t know about you, but I suspect human involvement.
Politically Stupid
It’s probably pretty satisfying to catch your political opponent in a lie. But how far back do you go?
To rebut Obama’s comments that he was not running “to fulfill some long-held plans” to be president, the Clinton campaign cited an AP interview with Obama’s kindergarten teacher, who remembered he wrote an essay entitled, “I Want to Become President.”
Because if he’s lying about this, he must be lying about all those other policies he proposed in kindergarten. It’s actually better, because the Clinton campaign put out a press release:
At an event in Boston this evening, Senator Obama claimed for the second time today that he is “not running to fulfill some long held plans” to be elected President, contradicting statements his friends, family, staff and teachers have all made about him. . . .
In third grade, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled ‘I Want To Be a President.’ His third grade teacher: Fermina Katarina Sinaga “asked her class to write an essay titled ‘My dream: What I want to be in the future.’ Senator Obama wrote ‘I want to be a President,’ she said.” [The Los Angeles Times, 3/15/07]
In kindergarten, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled ‘I Want to Become President.’ “Iis Darmawan, 63, Senator Obama’s kindergarten teacher, remembers him as an exceptionally tall and curly haired child who quickly picked up the local language and had sharp math skills. He wrote an essay titled, ‘I Want To Become President,’ the teacher said.” [AP, 1/25/07]
That’s right, she’s calling out that damn lying 5-year-old. Well, except for . . .
Although Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii, when he was in kindergarten and third grade, he lived in Indonesia.
As I’m pretty sure Shakespeare said, “If you strike at a kindergartener, you must kill him.” You’d think it would have occurred to the press release drafter to make sure the kindergartener in question was making his presidential campaign announcement in the US.
Our Business Is Stupid, And Business Is Good
It’s a time-honored tradition. If you have access to an electronic device, try to make it say something dirty. Spell “HELL” or “BOOBS” on your calculator. See if you can get the Speak & Spell to say “shit.” Or mess with Microsoft’s online Santa.
An artificial-intelligence Santa bot operated by Microsoft to talk to children wavered off topic saying: “It’s fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else….”
Once the report of the randy Santa broke, questions prodding Santa to give up even more questionable answers took off like eight tiny reindeer.
One person said “…..come on you like big hairy men — don’t hide it!” To which Santa responded, “I know, I know. I just hope you won’t get mad at me.”
The story seems to suggest that the discussion of oral sex was virtual Santa’s idea, but I think he was just repeating whatever text the naughty list member was typing in. So it’s an accomplishment well below the level of teaching a parrot to curse.
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Comic book artists can pick up extra money by selling their original artwork. Some artists take commissions, producing art with certain comics characters in poses requested by the customer. And the comics companies don’t usually mind.
This guy gets his eBay auction yanked and a cease-and-desist letter from DC Comics. Which is a shame, because those nipple-eyes follow you wherever you go, like some sort of sick Scooby-Doo episode.
I guess this also means we’re not going to see “Batman Returns to The Second Stall From The Right at The Minneapolis Airport Men’s Room” go into production anytime soon.
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Don’t miss any possible sale.
A posh food store in New York’s Greenwich Village has found itself red faced after offering hams for sale with the slogan “Delicious for Hanukkah,” the current Jewish religious holiday. The non-kosher labeling was spotted at the weekend by Manhattan novelist Nancy Kay Shapiro, 46, who decided instead of alerting management to take a picture of the unorthodox sign and post it on the Internet.
Don’t laugh until you’ve seen these sales figures! Soon, people will be saying “they’re selling like Hanukkah Hams!”
Educated Is Not The Opposite Of Stupid
The Spokane, Washington school board was making its list of important days, but they may not have checked it twice.
In a December newsletter to the families of elementary school students, Spokane Public Schools’ list of “important dates” [included] Hanukkah, Human Rights Day, winter break, the Islamic holy day Eid al-Adha, first day of winter and Kwanzaa . . . But no Christmas.
But I bet they still want the day off.
Stupid For Legal Purposes
Welcome to the surveillance era. Cameras and recording devices are everywhere. Try to adjust your lies accordingly.
Detective Christopher Perino testified in April that the suspect “wasn’t questioned” about a shooting in the Bronx, a criminal complaint said. But then the defense confronted the detective with a transcript it said proved he had spent more than an hour unsuccessfully trying to persuade Erik Crespo to confess - at times with vulgar tactics.
Perino had arrested Crespo on New Year’s Eve 2005 while investigating the shooting of a man in an elevator. While in an interrogation room at a station house, Crespo, then 17, stealthily pressed the record button on the MP3 player, a Christmas gift, DeMarco said.
“I couldn’t believe my ears,” said the lawyer, who decided to keep the recording under wraps until he cross-examined Perino at the trial.
Once the transcript was revealed in court, prosecutors asked for a recess, defense attorney Mark DeMarco said. The detective was pulled from the witness stand and advised to get a lawyer.
Perino, 42, was arraigned Thursday on 12 counts of first-degree perjury and faces as many as seven years on each count, prosecutors said. He was released on $15,000 bail.
Woops. At least it wasn’t on videotape.
The interception that saved the game for [Hawaii] was followed by a small stampede of fans, leaving three seconds left on the game clock. Several fans scooted past on-duty officers in riot gear, but one young man did not make it.
“(The officer) hooks the guy around the head and brings him down,” UH freshman Miles Kreisberg said. Kreisberg zoomed in his camera to the area of the incident.”I was like, ‘Oh, I got to catch this.’ I couldn’t believe what was going on,” Kreisberg said. The video caught the officer delivering what looked like three quick blows to the fan’s back.
If you watch the video, it doesn’t look that bad to me. Kids today just can’t take a beating like they used to. But I did like the reporter’s shirt. And the odd experience of watching an internet video about an internet video.
The killer in Omaha knew he’d get what he wanted way before he pulled the trigger.
Because the media silently but constantly repeats the same thing to disaffected losers who want to lash out at anonymous strangers (i.e., the world) and go out in what they consider to be a blaze of glory.
“Do it. Do it. We’ll make you famous.”
The Spice Girls are touring again.
Now all I need is an Old Spice joke . . .
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The press’ interest in covering space shuttle launches and landings is directly proportional to how recent the last space shuttle fatalities were. Gosh, you’d think all they really wanted was a clip of themselves reacting to the fiery death for their demo reel.
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Mormons believe some crazy shit. That said, every Mormon I’ve ever hung around with has been a decent and pleasant person. Go figure.
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My office is moving this weekend, almost 10 years to the day after we moved to that space. It’s very odd to pick something up to pack it and realize that you set it down 10 years ago. It’s as if I set something down at the end of second grade and picked it up as I was graduating high school. Just goes to show how your perception of time changes as you age.
Via UnitedHollywood, cute internet animals go on strike to support the Writers’ Guild strike. Follow the link because I can’t figure out how to embed a YouTube video.
Be sure to watch all the way through to the scab animals.
I guess with the writers’ strike delaying everything, Keifer Sutherland can get his DUI jail time out of the way before starting a new season of 24.
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I opened up the comments to whoever wanted to post. I was paranoid about spam posts, but the Akismet spam filter has worked amazingly well. It’s blocked 141 spam comments, and let only 2 through. Those were pretty obvious, since they were both posted to the same old item, the “screw Ikea” post. That post must tickle the web-bots in some unique way.
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And by the way, S C R E W Ikea. They haven’t had the single remaining piece of the furniture set I’ve wanted for six consecutive months now, even though they have one on display and they swear it’s not discontinued. Their employees are either clueless or deliberately misleading me.
- The Packers-Cowboys game delivered. I was sorry to see Favre go out, here’s hoping that his starting streak will get to 250.
- I didn’t know it was possible, but Bryant Gumbel is more annoying as a football commentator than Joe Theismann times Dennis Miller. Really, who in the NFL seriously thought that we needed to hear from broadcasting’s biggest dickweed for an entire football game?
- I guess with all the excitement of having 8 seconds left in the fourth quarter, Joe Gibbs forgot that calling two timeouts in a row to “ice” the opposing kicker was an automatic 15-yard penalty. That turned a 51-yard field goal attempt into a 36-yard field goal. All Redskins-specific emotional issues aside, I’m not sorry to see the “icing” process bite back for once.
- That was the same Bears team that came back against Denver last week? And went to the Super Bowl last season? They couldn’t do a damn thing right in the fourth quarter.
- Of course, Grossman wasn’t the only QB sailing balls over his recievers’ heads all game, Palmer looked pretty bad against the Steelers. The Bengals want to claim a rivalry with the Steelers, but it’s not much of a rivalry if there’s not a decent chance you’ll win.
- Two games, two three-point wins. Either the Patriots are vulnerable, or they’re a team of destiny that can’t be stopped. They won even though they couldn’t stop the run, couldn’t consistently catch the ball (aren’t they were a no-dome, cold-weather team?), and couldn’t protect Brady. Even then, they needed an amazing act of dumbth on the part of the Ravens to bail them out of a bad 4th down play call, getting a do-over due to an ill-timed time out. An amazing game.
The Montgomery Burns Award For Outstanding Achievement In The Field Of Stupid
It appears that CNN has yet to realize that this is now a world where everybody can check your homework, sometimes even before you finish your report to the class. So when you’re cherry-picking the best YouTube questions to try to nail the Republicans, you might want to bone up on your Google-fu.
The retired general who asked about gays and lesbians serving in the military at the CNN/YouTube Republican debate on Wednesday is a co-chairman of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s National Military Veterans group.
David Bohrman, a CNN senior vice president and executive producer of the debate, later said: “We regret this and apologize to the Republican candidates. We never would have used the general’s question had we known that he was connected to any presidential candidate.”
Kerr told CNN that he had not done work for the Clinton campaign, and CNN verified before the debate that he had not contributed money to any candidate, the broadcaster said in a blog post after the debate.
Kerr told CNN he is a member of the Log Cabin Republicans and was representing no one other than himself, CNN said.
Kerr also was on Kerry’s National Veterans Steering Committee, according to a campaign press release retrieved from the website of George Washington University.
Wow. If you can’t trust a gay general, who can you trust? Well, not people who use pseudonyms from 70’s rock bands.
Example: “Journey,” a.k.a. “Paperserenade,” the girl who asked an abortion question, is a declared John Edwards supporter.
You couldn’t tell from the video that CNN aired, where she’s wearing a plain shirt.
But if you click through on her YouTube profile, you see her latest video in response to the candidates’ answers. And she’s prominently wearing . . . her John Edwards ‘08 t-shirt.
Damn. What about the guy asking about gay Republicans? Nope.
As they say it on the net, CNN got owned.
Stupid, Meet Stupid
How much would you be willing to bet that Larry King is going to die before you will? Most folks would like those odds. So it’s understandable that when Mr. King wanted to sell the right to have a life insurance policy on his life, he had takers. But now, he’s got seller’s remorse.
The broker re-sold the $10 million policy later that year, yielding a $550,000 windfall for the client.
The investors who bought the policies, who remain unidentified, took over payment of the premiums and became the new beneficiaries. The client followed up that transaction by selling a second $5 million policy on his life, earning $850,000. Another unknown investor became the beneficiary.
But then the client had second thoughts. In a lawsuit, he claims he was not fully apprised of the ramifications of what he was doing. Further, he contends that the broker failed to tell him that the new policies, now in an outsider’s hands, would significantly reduce his ability to buy additional life insurance.
So, King’s essentially suing on the basis that he didn’t understand that taking out $15 million in insurance against his own life would impact his ability to get more insurance against his own life. ”Your honor, I was victimized because of my inability to perceive the obvious.”
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How do you do well in business? An easy way to think about it is the phrase “find a need and fill it.” Unless you make movies.
While the public is staying away in droves from “Rendition,” “Lions for Lambs” and “In the Valley of Elah,” audiences are really avoiding “Redacted,” De Palma’s picture about US soldiers who rape a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, then kill her and her family. The message movie was produced by NBA Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who insisted on deleting grisly images of Iraqi war casualties from the montage at the film’s end. Cuban offered to sell the film back to De Palma at cost, but the director was too smart to go for that deal.
“Redacted” - which “could be the worst movie I’ve ever seen,” said critic Michael Medved -took in just $25,628 in its opening weekend in 15 theaters, which means roughly 3,000 people saw it in the entire country.
Assuming a national population of 300 million, we can divide the part by the whole and figure out that 0.001 percent of the population paid to see DePalma’s new movie. I think that’s statistically equivalent to the number of people who say the wrong movie title to the ticket clerk.
With all of the free sanctimonious lecturing available from Our Hollywood Betters, why would people pay for it? It’s just like that MP3 thing that has the music industry suing everybody.
Our Business Is Stupid, And Business Is Good
If you own an NFL team, you know that you have 16 regular season games, and that 8 of those will be home games. That means that 8 times a year, you will be hosting a football game and charging people a bunch of money to watch it. You can handle that, right?
Steelers management took almost as much of a beating Tuesday as the playing surface at Heinz Field did the night before when hard rain left it nearly unplayable. Despite a 3-0 win over the Miami Dolphins, critics pounded team officials about the condition of the DVD Grassmaster surface that has had trouble holding up in previous seasons.
The playing surface at Heinz Field was resodded — essentially a new field was laid over the existing one — after the South Florida-Pitt game Saturday, and team officials were pleased with the result.
“I certainly felt bad that the playing conditions were as bad as they were,” Rooney said. “(The field) really looked fantastic (Sunday), so I felt bad that we didn’t have what we thought we were going to have, and that was the unfortunate part.”
The problem occurred, Rooney said, when heavy rain overwhelmed tarps covering the field. Leaky seams caused water to pool in places and, as a result, players on both teams slogged through water and mud.
Resodding cost the Steelers between $100,000 and $200,000, one official said.
The field had taken a beating because four WPIAL championship games were played there Friday, followed by Pitt’s home finale Saturday.
It was the other football games. It was the new sod. It was the half-assed tarps. It was all the rain.
It was your responsibility to host a football game, not a mud-wrestling event.
Politically Stupid
Power is the ability to impose your will on other people. Today’s example:
A widely performed school play has been canceled by Lakota officials after a recent meeting with a local NAACP official. The internationally acclaimed play - Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Indians” - was to be performed by students at Lakota East High School this weekend.
But Gary Hines, president of the local NAACP branch, recently complained to Lakota officials that the play, based on Christie’s 1939 mystery novel, was inappropriate for a school production.
A serious charge, given the heightened sensitivity to race this country’s had lately. What’s the basis for this claim?
Hines said the book’s original title and cover illustration used for its initial publishing that year in England was a racial slur toward blacks and included a cover illustration of a black person and a hangman’s noose.
“The original title was ‘Ten Little (N - - - - - -),’ and it is important to say that because that was the actual title,” Hines said Monday.
The title of the international bestseller was widely changed after 1939, and school theater productions in America have performed the murder mystery play as either “Ten Little Indians” or “And Then There Were None” for decades since.
My God. Racist marketing in another country 68 years ago?
Hines claims that a lack of racial diversity among Lakota’s students and teachers allowed the play to be chosen despite the history surrounding its original title. But Hines, who operates GPH Consultants - a diversity training company - in West Chester Township, said that despite his strong protest, it was Lakota officials’ idea to cancel the play in response to his complaints.
So, now “diversity” means maintaining a catalog of things that happened and were changed before you were born? Of course it does, what other explanation could there be?
But Joan Powell, president of the Lakota Board of Education, criticized Hines, whose local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People includes Liberty and West Chester townships, Hamilton and Fairfield. Powell said Hines has a history of making racial accusations against Lakota schools with his personal financial interests sometimes coming into play.
In 2002, Hines accused Lakota schools of widespread, systemic racism and recommended that more than 2,000 Lakota employees be required to enroll in diversity and cultural sensitivity training similar to what was offered by his company. He promised to compile a report months later detailing his accusations against the schools but never produced a document.
Hines, however, has continued to allege racism in the school district.
Most recently in a Nov. 20 e-mail to Powell and other Lakota school board members, he wrote: “Given the history of the district, anything short of involving the NAACP in planning, developing, and executing a systemic approach to diversity is not acceptable and certainly not good enough for the district’s students, faculty, and staff.”
But the play’s canceled, so everybody’s safe now. Thanks to Mr. Hines’ exquisite diversity-based historical memory, any harm was avoided.
Lakota East senior Luke Null, who has rehearsed since September to perform as one of the lead characters, said “pressure from the local NAACP canceled the play.”
“I read the play as part of a class in the ninth grade. There are no racial undertones in it at all, and we weren’t putting on the play under it’s original name from 1939. We were putting on the play under another name,” Null said. He and other theater students are now scrambling to find another play to perform some time early in 2008.
Yup, harm averted.
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The desire to find and crush racists might be getting out of control. Depends on what you think about a school suspending a student for using the phrase “brown people.”
According to school officials, the boy made a statement about “brown people” to another elementary student with whom he was having a conflict. They maintain it was his second offense using the phrase. But the tape recording indicates this only came out after another parent was allowed to question the boy and elicited from him the statement that he “doesn’t cooperate with brown people.”
After that was reported to the boy’s teacher, he was made to stand in front of his class and publicly confess what he’d said.
The boy maintains that he never said it; that the words were put in his mouth by the parent who questioned him. That parent happens to be the mother of the student with whom he is having a conflict—and she happens to work for Abraham Lincoln as a detention-room officer.
The tape indicates that rather than just spouting off with racial invective, the boy was asked first why he didn’t want to cooperate with brown people by the parent/school official.
In court, this might be called entrapment. Not to mention a conflict of interest.
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Neve said school officials didn’t advise her of the incident until several days after they questioned her son. When Neve objected to the suspension during the conference, [school principal] Voinovich told her that she didn’t have any rights; that parents give up their rights to discipline when they send a child to school, the tape shows.
“If you don’t want that, you can take him out of here,” Voinovich said tersely.
If you spend any time around kids, you’d quickly figure out that they don’t think in terms of race unless they’re taught to do it, but they can’t help but notice the obvious fact that people have different skin coloration. And now, we’re teaching them not to deal with it rationally.
Think Globally, Act Stupidly
Brad Pitt wants to restore the bad parts of New Orleans. Yeah, that didn’t make any sense to me, either, but that’s what he wants to do.
The architects were each asked to design a 1,200-square-foot house for about $150,000, with Make It Right to help with the financing. The houses had to be built five to eight feet off the ground, with a front porch and three bedrooms.
Mr. Mayne of Morphosis opted for a lightweight concrete foundation anchored by two pylons, like a pier, which would buoy the house if floodwaters rise. “It’s a boat,” Mr. Mayne said.
“The population doesn’t want to live on stilts — and it’s expensive,” he added. “These are simple houses for low-income people.”
Mr. Pitt is asking foundations, corporations and individuals to contribute to the project by adopting one house, several houses or a portion of a house through the project Web site. “You can adopt a tankless water heater or a solar panel or a tree or a low-flush toilet,” Mr. Pitt said. “You can give it to someone for Christmas,” he said — instead of another sweater.
Does anyone want to bet how long solar panels and tankless water heaters will stay in the $150,000 floating houses that Pitt wants to build in one of the poorest neighborhoods of one of the poorest states in the US? My wager is that Larry King will still be around to interview Pitt and ask him what the hell he was thinking.
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Doompimping ain’t easy. Turns out hurricane predictions are about as reliable as college football predictions.
Just before the season started on June 1, the nationally prominent Gray-Klotzbach team at Colorado State University predicted that 17 named storms would grow into nine hurricanes, five of which would be particularly intense, with winds above 110 mph.
A different team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted 13 to 17 named storms, seven to 10 hurricanes and three to five intense hurricanes.
The actual results for the 2007 season: 14 named storms, five hurricanes, two intense hurricanes.
That turned a season predicted to be extremely active into one that was about average in number of storms and well below average in total intensity.
Even mid-season corrections issued by both teams in August — somewhat akin to changing your prediction about a baseball game during the fifth inning — proved wrong.
Their pre-season predictions in 2005 and 2006 were even worse.
The teams defend their forecasts, saying they are based on the best science available, were closer to the mark in prior years and serve an important public service.
I agree that an important public service is being performed, but I don’t think we mean the same ones. The one I was thinking of was: “Scientists don’t let not knowing what the heck they’re talking about get in the way of making press releases.” The one they were thinking of was: “People shouldn’t be deprived of our valuable opinions so they can plan for dangerous events that might not happen.”
‘’People have the right to know if we think it will be an above normal or below normal season,'’ Bell said.
‘’But we always, always, impress on people that we cannot, on seasonal time scales, predict if a given locality is going to get hit, so they have to be ready,'’ he said.
Predictions of Certain Doom are a lot better when they’re safely in the future. Preferably, a future where you’ve already spent all of your grant money and retired.
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Let’s say a lot of your arguments based on GLOBAL WARMING involve the words “inconvenient” and “truth.” Wouldn’t it be ironic if there were some true things that inconveniently contradicted your claims?
. . . we have the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coming up with yet another of its notoriously politicised reports, hyping up the scare by claiming that world surface temperatures have been higher in 11 of the past 12 years (1995-2006) than ever previously recorded.
This carefully ignores the latest US satellite figures showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level - not to mention the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century, with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but 1934.
As the guy who got caught in the act of cheating by his wife: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”
Dangerously Stupid
Nobody wants to be the poor sap who gets taken out by bizarre, random chance. Say, for example, by your preferred pocket for your cell phone.
The man, identified only by his family name Suh, was found dead at his workplace in a quarry Wednesday morning and his mobile phone battery was melted in his shirt pocket, a police official in Cheongwon told The Associated Press.
“We presume that the cell phone battery exploded,” the police official said on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still under way.
Kim Hoon, a doctor who examined the body, agreed.
“He sustained an injury that is similar to a burn in the left chest and his ribs and spine were broken,” Yonhap news agency quoted Kim as saying. “It is presumed that pressure caused by the explosion damaged his heart and lungs, leading to his death.”
If only he’d kept it in this pants pocket, he’d probably be alive and very very unhappy.
UPDATE – the cause of death was false:
“The co-worker confessed to us last (Thursday) night that he had actually hit him by accident and lied about the mobile phone exploding,” said an official with the Cheongju Heungdeok police station, about 100 km (60 miles) southeast of Seoul.
The co-worker confessed to police that he pinned the victim to a rock face while backing up a construction vehicle.
I’m not sure the point has changed that much.
