TEN JACK TEN

Stupid, Meet Stupid

If you’ve pissed away all the good will you had as an actress with arrests for drunk driving and drug use, what’s your next step? You guessed it, you show your boobies. (NSFW).

At least Ms. Lohan’s knockers appear to be real. But so does her prematurely aged, overly freckled skin. Ew.

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But at least Lohan didn’t completely screw herself up with plastic surgery. Unlike the lady at the end of that link. I’d post a picture, but you can’t un-see it and I don’t want to be responsible for that. Proceed with caution, or at least morbid curiosity.

All The Stupid That’s Fit To Print

First the New York Times endorses McCain, then it tries to take him down a few weeks later by claiming he was sleeping with a female lobbyist. That would be some impressive Machiavellian maneuvering — crippling the Republicans by supporting a candidate until he wins the nomination, and then they destroy him at their leisure. Except they didn’t have any facts to back up their claims. CNN almost immediately undermines the story:

Dan Schnur, McCain’s communication director during his 2000 presidential bid, told CNN on Thursday that he was involved in most high-level situations and that such a problem almost certainly would have “landed on my desk.”

Schnur said that he was unaware of any “improper” relationship between the senator and Iseman and that he had never heard of any meeting with staffers and McCain about such a concern.

Schnur, a professor of political science at the University of California-Berkeley, has no connection to the McCain camp now. Schnur said he spoke on the record with a Times reporter in December and said he knew of no problems surrounding Iseman. He said he was surprised the paper gave no hint of his views.

As the NYT public editor put it:

. . . if a newspaper is going to suggest an improper sexual affair, whether editors think that is the central point or not, it owes readers more proof than The Times was able to provide.

I asked Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, if The Times could have done the story and left out the allegation about an affair. “That would not have reflected the essential truth of why the aides were alarmed,” she said.

But what the aides believed might not have been the real truth. And if you cannot provide readers with some independent evidence, I think it is wrong to report the suppositions or concerns of anonymous aides about whether the boss is getting into the wrong bed.

I wonder if McCain is still patting himself on the back for enhancing the influence of the press with his campaign finance reform legislation. Because after all, public opinion is far more likely to be influenced by random citizens buying a TV ad than a nationally-known newspaper.

Stupid.net

Garfield Minus Garfield

Politically Stupid

Michelle Obama apparently has big plans that you’d better not interfere with.

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

Or else what, Michelle? Maybe I’m too attached to my cynicism, but you sound like a super-villain from a ’70s comic book.

Stupid For Legal Purposes

Oakland, California decided to do a gun buyback, offering $250 per gun. Perhaps that was a bit high.

Did no one running the program think to look at the price of a new gun? In fact, the first two people in line at one of the three buyback locations were gun dealers with 60 firearms packed in the trunk of their car.

And then the funds ran out.

The “One Less Gun” buyback program attracted so many eager sellers that the money quickly ran out, but instead of closing up shop, the police handed out IOUs good for a future buyback. The Oakland police are now stuck with a bill for $170,000.

Who do you call to collect an IOU from the cops?

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People still aren’t figuring out that this is the age of surveillance. So there’s a good chance testing your theory that the prisoner in the wheelchair is faking will end up on the web.

The video shows Brian Sterner, 32, out of his wheelchair and on the floor while Deputy Charlotte Marshall Jones is booking him into the Hillsborough County Jail, the Web site reported.

“The best I could do is offer him our apologies,” [said] Chief Deputy Jose Docobo.

I think if you ask him, the best you can offer is a sizable cash settlement. We haven’t heard why Deputy Jones decided to dump this guy out of his chair, but maybe she thought that his being in a wheelchair didn’t match up with why he’d been arrested.

Records show Sterner was arrested on charges of fleeing and attempting to elude a law enforcement officer from an incident on Oct. 25.

Or maybe he was just a smartass. I’m no police expert, but he didn’t look particularly elusive or likely to flee after he was dumped on the floor. Good luck with that prosecution.

Last May, I spent over $800 on shelves from Ikea, and then spent another hundred or so buying the pieces they didn’t have in stock the first time. I eventually got all but one of the pieces: a stand to use for my consoles. It was the ironically-named “Lack” stand, which was available in stock with every finish but Beech, the color I had used for the shelves.

In the meantime, I was using a table I’d swiped from the kids room, but there were all kinds of wires and transformers showing and I knew My Lovely Wife hated all the clutter.

So I checked back. First weekly, then monthly, then bimonthly. Every time I asked for help from the Ikea employees, I was assured that the table was not permanently out of stock and was not discontinued. I just needed to keep checking back. The empty slot on Row 20 was there every time I came back, for more than half a year.

Until last week, when I checked back and there was no place on the shelf anymore. I’d have complained, but it’s pretty obvious that Ikea doesn’t trust its local employees with anything other than stocking the shelves with what they are given. So one last time:

Screw Ikea for not keeping their products in stock.
Screw Ikea for pretending the Beech-finished Lack table would ever come back in stock by maintaining an empty space for it on the shelf.
Screw Ikea for either keeping their employees too ignorant to help or instructing them to lie to customers like me.
Screw Ikea for discontinuing an item for months without telling anyone that it was discontinued.
Screw Ikea for wasting my time.

Oh, and one more:

Screw me for buying a bookshelf at Ikea to fill the space. Hey, it was Beech-finish and hid the wires.

The passage of time can soften my dislike of a particular band or song. This does not apply to Mister Mister.

It’s better to turn off attached USB devices when starting up a PC, they can interfere with the boot process.

Once iTunes adds the files in a folder to your library, it won’t look at any changes you make to those files that aren’t done in iTunes.

Once iTunes adds a folder to your library, you can’t remove it. The only solution is to move or rename the folder and delete the entries from iTunes.

Toshiba laptops won’t talk to iPods and other types of MP3 players. Toshiba doesn’t particularly care about fixing this problem.

Sometimes it’s more important that a report be filed on time than it is for the report be accurate.

I don’t like champagne.

By the sixth year of a president’s term, everybody’s pretty much tired of him.

Once an entree costs more than $12, my expectations become so high that I usually won’t enjoy it.

When ripping to MP3, a 192k bitrate is a good compromise between sound quality and file size.

The most sarcastic blog I’ve seen maybe ever: Stuff White People Like

Politically Stupid 

I’ve never had the experience of a politician making me all tingly, but if I had, you can bet I’d never talk about it on national TV.

During MSNBC’s live coverage of Tuesday’s presidential primary elections, after the speeches of Barack Obama and John McCain had aired, Chris Matthews expressed his latest over the top admiration for Obama’s speaking skills as the MSNBC anchor admitted that Obama’s speech created a “thrill” in his leg: “It’s part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama’s speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often.”

Are you sure it’s not a blood clot?  It might be a blood clot.  Or you could just be turning gay.  I hear that the adult-onset variety starts in the legs.

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Voter fraud is alive and well in NYC.

Unofficial primary results gave Obama no votes in nearly 80 districts, including Harlem’s 94th and other historically black areas - but many of those initial tallies proved to be wildly off the mark, the board said.

In some districts getting a recount, the senator from Illinois is even closer to defeating Hillary Clinton.

Initial results in the 94th, for example, showed a 141-0 sweep for Hillary Clinton, but the recount changed the tally to 261-136.

If you’re going to lie, make it a believable lie.  Bad lying insults everyone.

All The Stupid That’s Fit To Print

I can understand that celebrities can easily come to resent the fame they pursued so relentlessly.  It can’t be a good feeling to have people contantly waiting for you to do something careless so they can have something to sell.  But it seems like the threshold for condemnation is getting lower and lower.  Are we really entitled to micromanage other people’s lives?

Country singer Billy Ray Cyrus apologized on Wednesday for being filmed in the back seat of a car with his daughter Miley, who plays Hannah Montana in the hit Disney series, without wearing seat belts.

The apology was made through People magazine’s Web site after U.S. magazine Consumer Reports raised concerns over a scene in Montana’s hit 3-D movie “Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour.”

“We got caught up in the moment of filming, and we made a mistake and forgot to buckle our seatbelts,” Cyrus told People.

“Seatbelt safety is extremely important,” he added.

Consumer Reports said Cyrus and his 15-year-old daughter were filmed riding in a Range Rover on the way to rehearsal for the concert tour and neither was wearing a seat belt.

This was a perfect “mind your own damn business” moment, but I’m sure it was lost in the corporate shuffle.  Meanwhile, I wonder what Comsumer Reports has to say about other children’s entertainers for having unprotected sex and getting knocked up.

Stupid For Legal Purposes

If you’re going to sue, sue big. Let’s say some tech guys lose your laptop . . .

Campbell, who could not be reached Tuesday, filed a negligence lawsuit suit against [Best Buy] in Washington Superior Court on Nov. 16, seeking fair compensation for replacement of the $1,100 computer and extended warranty, plus expenses related to identity theft protection.

Best Buy spokeswoman Nissa French said in an e-mail that Campbell “was offered and collected $1,110.35″ as well as “a $500 gift card for her inconvenience.”

How much does this lady sue for?  $54 million.  What had she already received before suing?  A refund and a sizable gift card.  Why does this silly crap keep happening?  Judges allow atorneys to get away with this sort of grandstanding without any sanctions.  Best Buy should cancel that gift card.

Dangerously Stupid

“Hey, Bob, why don’t you tell the new guy about that time a dominatrix saved your life?’

[Retired college professor Robert Benjamin’s] life was saved last Friday by a dominatrix at the Nutcracker Suite on East 33rd Street, who was assigned to check on him after her colleague left him with a dog collar around his neck and a leather mask over his face, suspended a few inches off the floor.

She realized his foot was turning blue because one of his high heels had slipped off.

“I don’t want to go to the clubs anymore,” Benjamin said.

Thanks to the Nutcracker Suite on East 33rd for instituting professional dominatrixing policies. Free advertising is now your reward.

A Stupid Way To Go

Every once in a while, a group of people does something so inexplicable, I can only wonder what led them to this particular place and time. 

According to police, two cars had lined up for a race on the smooth and relatively flat and straight stretch of highway. They spun their wheels, kicking up smoke, then sped off, Copeland said.

The crowd then moved into the road to watch the cars drive away.

Yes, they were standing on a highway, in a cloud of smoke.

The white sedan hit people standing on the side of Route 210 around 3:40 a.m., Prince George’s County Police Cpl. Clinton Copeland said.

“There were just bodies everywhere; it was horrible,” said Crystal Gaines, 27, whose father was among the dead.  Gaines said she grabbed her child but could not help her father, William Gaines Sr., 61.

Yes, the spectators were there to see an illegal car race at 3:40 am, and yes, this crowd included children young enough to be the child of a 27-year-old.  I clearly do not understand the thought processes of a significant portion of the population.

Via the NYT:  NBC gives up on the idea of jamming all of its new shows into a two-month window called the “new fall season.”  Since there are so many other entertainment options that don’t lock themselves into this rigid format, it was bound to happen.  The idea of a “new season” every year is a holdover from the days when the big networks were the only option for viewers, and those days are long gone.

My personal experience of the last few years was to pick the one or two that seemed the most interesting, and figure that any of the others would come out on DVD if they were any good.  As a result, I’ve got season one of “Heroes” on my shelf that I haven’t watched yet because I picked “The Nine” or something equally weak to try first.  Better to space the shows out and not force the audience to commit before the shows have aired. 

NBC is also trying to integrate the shows more with advertisers, an idea that’s come full circle from the early days of the medium.  They brag about using a Ford in the Knight Rider remake (and by the way, NBC, thanks for putting a lesbian one-night stand and a threesome sleeping it off in the first 15 minutes of the show, parents LOVE explaining that crap). They also point out that advertisers can let them know when their ideas stink:

The lineup also may receive early input from advertisers who are given an earlier look at it. That may help both parties, Mr. Graboff said. He cited as a cautionary tale the network’s experience with “Kidnapped,” a show from a season ago.

“That’s a perfect example,” Mr. Graboff said. “The pilot cost $7 million to produce. We put it on sale to advertisers in May, and they ran for the hills. If we had been able to sit down and have a two-way conversation about them and we told they we had a show about a 13-year-old boy who is kidnapped for the entire season, they would have told us, ‘Good for you, but we’re not putting our clients in it.’ ”

Some ideas are suitable for TV shows, some are suitable for movies.  Kidnappings are pretty much a movie idea, it’s too much to ask for the audience to have a character in jepoardy for that long.  Never mind the unmarketability of abusive behavior towards children.

HD-DVD is dead, killed by the movie studios and Best Buy and Blockbuster and Netflix and Wal-Mart.  The last one is kind of surprising, since they were selling the heck out of HD-DVD players last Christmas.  At least most of the folks who bought stand-alone players will be able to use them as overpriced DVD players in the future, unlike those who ended up with Betamax videotape players and nothing to play on them.  And unlike those who bought the HD-DVD add-on player for their Xbox 360s.  Those are just useless now, except for playing the handful of releases already out.

Not that there wasn’t enough screwing to go around.  Early Blu-ray players can’t support the additional features being added into the specification by Sony, and can’t be upgraded.  They’ll still play the movies, but you might not be able to see the picture-in-picture of Micheal Bay offering commentary on why he thought one of the Transformers should be urinating oil in this scene.  Big loss there.

The idea of a format war for high definition movies was ridiculous anyway, neither format offered the leap in quality and accessibility that DVD offered over VHS.  What you got with the HD formats was greater picture detail and enhanced color fidelity.  There was also the prospect of uncompressed surround-sound, but the amount of people with the amp and speaker hardware to take advantage of that is only a fraction of the number of folks with HD sets.  That barely made up for what you lost in portability.  I know I’m a gadget freak, but a quick mental inventory gives me 12 things in my house that can play DVDs (including game consoles and PCs), along with 2 parked in the driveway, versus one that can play Blu-ray disks.  DVDs aren’t going anywhere; Blu-ray is for enthusiasts and perfectionists.

Oddly enough, one of the best current Blu-ray player options is a PS3.  For $400 at the low end, it’s competitive in price with stand-alone players and it can be easily updated via WiFi or ethernet.  If you use HDMI, it will also upscale DVDs.  It’s not perfect, HD cables and the bluetooth media remote are extra.  And because the remote uses bluetooth, you can’t use your IR universal remote with it unless you buy a third-party dongle.

From the Dallas Morning News, the story of CompUSA’s failure:

. . . as stores are liquidating and the company is shutting down – most employees’ last day is Friday – several analysts, longtime shoppers and one of the company’s founders all say Dallas-based CompUSA could have done a lot better over the years.

A series of mistakes killed the company, they said. CompUSA once ruled the emerging niche of computing but couldn’t keep up in a changing world wrought by its own products.

In a recent eulogy, Credit Suisse analysts boiled it down to three issues:

•CompUSA needed more stores with higher volumes. But it couldn’t grow because Best Buy and others were adding brands and expanding their categories, reducing customers’ reasons to visit CompUSA.

•Acquisitions diverted attention.

•Money-saving cuts were the last straw.

What the article didn’t mention was that CompUSA never really committed to any one business and ended up doing everything halfway.  They sold hardware, but they really wanted to push software training.  The hardware they sold was easily available online for less from companies like Newegg.  (It was at CompUSA I saw the $100 HDMI cable).  They sold DVDs, but the selection wasn’t very deep and never discounted. 

They sold games, but they didn’t keep the inventory well maintained and were slow to discount.  They would consistently find themselves with a bunch of outdated games that had dropped to lower prices in other stores, but were held out as “closeout” bargains at a higher price point. 

They ended up being the “emergency store” I’d go to when I couldn’t find a copy of Pokemon at Target or Best Buy around Chiristmas, because I knew nobody shopped there.

Now I’m hearing that the Plano store will reopen under the management of the same folks who run Tiger Direct.  This will be interesting, this is a store that’s less than 2 miles from a Fry’s and a Best Buy, and about 5 miles from the only Micro Center in the Metroplex.

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Courtesy of SFGate.com, how the 2008 tax rebates are going to be paid.

Under HR5140, the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, most working people will get $600 if they are single or $1,200 if they file a joint return, assuming they paid at least that much in federal income tax in 2007.

To help people who earn little or nothing - and might be more likely to spend their rebates - Congress said that anyone who had at least $3,000 in income from a job, self-employment, Social Security and/or certain veterans benefits would get a flat rebate of $300 if single or $600 if married filing jointly, even if they don’t owe income tax.

If your 2007 federal tax liability is between $300 and $600 (single) or $600 and $1,200 (married), your rebate will be equal to whatever you paid in tax.

Anyone who gets a rebate of any size will get an additional $300 for each child eligible for the child tax credit in 2008. To qualify, the child must be younger than 17 on Dec. 31, 2008. 

The rebates - including the $300 rebate for kids - start to shrink when your adjusted gross income hits $75,000 (single) or $150,000 (married). Adjusted gross income includes income from all sources, but before most deductions and exemptions have been subtracted.

The rebate is reduced by $50 for every $1,000 you earn above the income limit. It disappears at some point which varies depending on your family size.

Singles with more than $87,000 in gross income and couples with more than $174,000 get no rebate if they have no children.

Looks like a good motivation to get those 2007 taxes filed instead of taking an extension to file until August.

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

Where does education fall on the list of priorities for American universities?  We already know it falls somewhere below sports, fundraising, faculty pay and retention, loan processing, landscaping, logo merchandise sales, real estate transactions, tuition and fee collections, meal service, fraternitiy/sorority supervision, and physical plant maintenance.  But now we have to move it down another notch to make room for expanding the students’ sexual horizons.  Duke shows the way:

. . . a variety of university organizations paid for a performance of the Sex Workers Art Show at the campus’ Reynolds Theater. The Art Show received a total of $3,500 and high-level official sanctioning from the university, according to Kenneth Larrey, president of the Duke Students for an Ethical Duke,

The performers did not just take their clothes off – and the actual nudity part of the show was rather tame. But mere nudity could hardly compare with a show that began with the Art Show’s founder and announcer, Annie Oakley, imploring the audience to stand up and shout “I take it up the butt!” Some other highlights, or lowlights if you prefer, included:

- A transvestite, naked except for some strategically placed tape, with the words “F___ Bush” painted on his chest, kneeled on all fours and lit a sparkler protruding out of his rectum with “America the Beautiful” playing.

- A bare-breasted stripper sang a lewd song about Saint Bridget of Ireland, with lyrics mocking the act of ascension as she climbed to the top of a stripper’s pole.

- A stripper, in the guise of a U.S. flag-draped Lady Justice, emptied coins out of her scales, pulled dollar bills out of her clothes as she removed them, and yanked a string of dollar bills out of her posterior as the sound system played Dolly Parton’s version of “God Bless the U.S.A.” She ended her act by saluting and holding up her middle finger to the crowd. The announcer referred to it as her “Infamous Patriot Act.” Her most private area was kept covered by a small American flag.

- A porn actress read a series of prose-poems. In one, entitled “Spit,” she described how another actress spit into her eye and then licked it out. Another, called “Staph,” was about an infection on her genitals.

- A dominatrix donned a large, “strap-on” male sex organ, and pretended to masturbate while the crowd was urged to shout “faster, faster,” in Chinese. 

Because if there’s one segment of the population that needs to be coaxed into discovering sex, it’s college students.  I would like to know how often that guy with the sparklers gets burned by sparks, though.  Did they have some sort of anal-involvement requirement to be part of the touring company?

Politically Stupid 

Let’s start with a riddle:  When is a pimp not a pimp? 

Last week, MSNBC suspended David Shuster for saying, “Doesn’t it seem as if Chelsea [Clinton] is sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?” A search through MSNBC’s archives quickly uncovered a glaring double standard: Last September, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann accused President Bush of “pimping General David Petraeus.” It’s the same analogy — these days, the word “pimping” is slang, meaning to use in an unseemly way. Olbermann wasn’t reprimanded, but Shuster was suspended for two weeks and forced to apologize.

Answer: When he’s a flaming liberal.  Hey, I didn’t say it was a funny riddle.

Our Business Is Stupid, and Business Is Good 

Waterboarding: If it’s good enough to get intelligence out of terrorists, surely it’s good enough to motivate employees.

Former Prosper, Inc employee Chad Hudgens alleges he was waterboarded last spring and is suing the firm and his former manager for unspecified damages. Hudgens alleges that the waterboarding damaged him physically and emotionally and that the company’s human resources department ignored his immediate complaint.

Utah-based Prosper, Inc. provides “executive-level coaching for individuals,” which includes ”the education and hands-on experiences they need to achieve their personal and professional goals.”

The suit describes Joshua Christopherson, a Prosper, Inc. manager, as a supervisor who routinely punished employees by drawing fake mustaches on them, removing their chairs and slamming a paddle down on their desks. On May 29, 2007, Christoperson asked for volunteers for an unspecified ”new motivational exercise,” which plaintiff Chad Hudgens volunteered for to prove his loyalty, according to the suit. 

Christopherson then marched his subordinates up a hill near the office, told Hudgens to lay with his head facing downhill and ordered other employees to hold him down, according to the suit.  Christopherson then “slowly poured a gallon of water over Hudgens’ mouth and nostrils, thereby making it impossible for Hudgens for breath (sic) for a sustained period of time.”

If you blindly trust a guy that draws fake moustaches on his employees, you kind of have it coming.  Perhaps that’s part of the “education” they provide.

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File under: “Oh geez, they’re serious?” 

Arrested Development’s Will Arnett has been asked to get out of the car — the KITT car that is. The actor, who had already recorded all his lines as the voice of the Ford Mustang for NBC’s two-hour sequel Knight Rider, was asked by GMC to back out. As the voice of GMC’s ads, the car company didn’t want Arnett associated with a Ford . . .

I might like Will Arnett’s work, but I’m not sure I’d recognize his voice.  Nor would I buy a Ford or a GMC based on a voiceover.  They had their chance to sell me cars, and it’s long gone.  Here’s hoping the GMC gig pays enough to offset Arnett’s loss.

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Next time you’re in China, be sure to pick up some “Super Osama bin Laden Kulfa Balls.”

Come for the jihad, stay for the flavor.

Educated Is Not The Opposite Of Stupid

What’s more important, public health and safety, or making sure gay guys don’t have their feelings hurt?  San Jose State University tells us the answer.

By law, people who want to give blood must be screened for a variety of potential risk factors. For instance, people aren’t allowed to donate within a year of getting a tattoo. The rise of AIDS in the 1980s prompted the FDA to prohibit donations from men who had sex with men any time after 1977. These days, groups such as the American Red Cross say that lifetime prohibition is excessive, since modern blood testing will catch any diseases contracted more than three weeks before the donation.

At San Jose State, it was an employee’s complaint last year that prompted Kassing’s office to investigate whether the rule made blood drives discriminatory. They decided it did, since gay men were being treated differently than other groups of people with similar risk factors.

“What San Jose State has done is to take an institutional position based on principles, based on values,” said Larry Carr, the university’s associate vice president for public affairs.

Congratulations on your new way to congratulate yourselves.

Dangerously Stupid

Whether it’s customer service workers or just some kid who wants to date your daughter, nothing says “I’m not kidding” like a shotgun. 

A DishNetwork repairman made the service call of his life Jan. 26, when a 62-year-old Vista, California man met him at his truck with a loaded shotgun and told him to fix his TV and internet service or die.

Gary Thomson was angry that the repairman was late for the service appointment set for between noon and five p.m., according to Vista Sheriff Sgt. Art Wager, and got out his Winchester 12-gauge to make his point. 

I hope this guy asks for a jury trial. And that most of the jury just tried to have cable installed or their refrigerator repaired.

A Stupid Way To Go

Heath Ledger’s death is a shame, and all the more a shame because it appears to be the result of reckless incaution amplified by physicians willing to hand out prescription drugs to a famous patient without setting a lot of limits. Here’s a list of the drugs found in his system:

oxycodone [OxyContin, notorious painkiller]

hydrocodone [Vicodin, opiate painkiller and anti-cough]

diazepam [Valium, a sedative]

temazepam [Restoril, a sleep aid]

alprazolam [Xanax, anti-anxiety]

doxylamine [Unisom, a sleep aid]

Not an illegal drug in the bunch. Or at least they were likely to have been individually acquired through arguably legal means.

I keep waiting for someone to report that Heath Ledger said something about killing himself if he heard one more damn Brokeback Mountain joke, but I guess that’s not going to happen.

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Is anybody buying the crying Hillary act?

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If you were flipping the channels any time around the Super Bowl, you might have run across the Puppy Bowl IV on Animal Planet.  If you didn’t, it was basically a bunch of puppies playing with each other in a play area made up to look like a football stadium.  Occasionally, some guy in a referee’s suit would “substitute” a puppy. 

My immediate thought was that this would be something to watch while really, really drunk.

- My usual response to any sports event involving them is “Fuck New York.”  But I’ve got to admit the Giants completely earned this one. They were the hardest hitting SOBs on the field, and they did it for four weeks in a row.  They shut down, in a row, three of the most potent offenses the NFL had to offer: the Cowboys, the Packers, and finally the Patriots.  And every game, they pressured the QB, disrupted screens, drew holds, and smothered the primary receiver.  The Giants defense won the playoffs, even though Manning is getting the credit. 

- I’m not convinced that Manning was the MVP, but by definition they do have to give it to a single person. Which means the QB gets the credit unless somebody else really steps up.

- Why did the Patriots game plan fall apart so completely?  And why the heck was Brady treating Welker like the team’s star receiver?  Even if Moss was covered, at least give him a chance every once in a while to make a play.  Could it have been that the Giants were letting Welker (who rarely advanced the ball after the catch) get open so Brady would toss it to him on the check off?  If that was deliberate, amazing.

- I don’t blame Belichick for stalking off with one second left on the clock.  The man just took as big a professional blow as someone can take, and it was all the worse for the high expectations created by going into the game undefeated.  He was obviously miserable in the mandatory post-game interview.

- Hey, those Iron Man and Wanted trailers looked pretty good.  The ads were weaker than usual this year, with a bit more creepy than I expect, what with the heart leaping out of the woman’s body, the badger in the car, the ugly girl with the cashews, the jumper-cable nipple-clips, the singing firefly buying it on-camera, and the mere presence of James Carville.  Loved the giant pigeons, though.

Okay, I’m being lazy. In my very weak defense, I had a trial at the beginning of the month and then got sick. And then spent 30 hours playing Mass Effect. So anyway, here’s a month’s summary of stupid.

Stupid, Meet Stupid

Jamie Spears isn’t done humiliating herself.

Pregnant Jamie Lynn Spears has been dumped by boyfriend Casey Aldridge because he doubts he is the father, it has been claimed.

“He wants a paternity test,” Britney told the Spears family friend, according to In Touch Weekly. “Casey doesn’t want to be with her until he’s sure that he’s the father.”

Rumours have swirled that Jamie Lynn is in fact pregnant by an older TV producer.

There we go. Now it’s stupid and creepy.

All The Stupid That’s Fit To Print

With a little effort, a little stupid can be turned into a much bigger stupid. Start with a gaffe by a talking head:

Golf Channel anchor Kelly Tilghman made a failed, flippant reference in a live broadcast about possibly stopping Tiger Woods’ dominance. In an unscripted exchange, Tilghman said foes might “lynch him in a back alley.” The statement’s racist connotations have dominated news coverage in the sport for two weeks and drawn the attention of civil-rights activists. Tilghman was suspended for two weeks.

Tiger Woods, consistently a class act, accepted Tilghman’s apology and said he thought she meant no harm. But someone else had a contribution.

Dave Seanor, Golfweek magazine’s editor and vice president, was fired Friday, two days after he defended the publication’s use a hangman’s noose illustration on its Jan. 19 cover.

The move came a matter of hours after top officials from the PGA Tour and PGA of America denounced the publication’s decision to use the image as the focal point of its follow-up stories on a racially tinged comment made Jan. 4 by a Golf Channel broadcaster.

The magazine’s artwork sparked a two-day firestorm that coincided with the PGA Merchandise Show this week in Orlando, where the Golfweek cover was the hottest topic on the expo floor. Writers at the magazine who had nothing to do with the cover artwork were fielding scathing e-mails from readers demanding that they resign, and some were canceling their subscriptions.

So, at the end of the day, the announcer who made the stupid remark keeps her job and the editor trying to exploit her winds up unemployed. How often does the right outcome occur?

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Wizard, the comics magazine, wears out its internet welcome.

While we’re talking Wizard, do you receive a Wizard Email Newsletter? Find it hard to get them to stop sending it to you? Well, it’s been a running joke at Wizard over the inability to de-subscribe. Stephen Shamus was heard to say that it was a waste of time removing people from the database, when that time could be spent adding new people. Basically, if you fill in a Wizard survey at a convention, buy an item from the store, subscribe, sign up on the message boards, that’s it. For life.

One side effect is that not too long ago the company email address for Wizard employees changed from “wizarduniverse.com” to “wizardent.com.” The reason was that most major e-mail servers classified anything coming from “wizarduniverse.com” as spam . . .

Finally, some consequences for spamming.

Politically Stupid

Life as a former president must be hard. Especially when you have to show up at events you don’t want to attend, but your wife wanted you to go.

But at least your hard work is paying off, right?

Roughly 6 in 10 South Carolina Democratic primary voters said Bill Clinton’s campaigning was important in how they ultimately decided to vote, and of those voters, 48 percent went for Barack Obama while only 37 percent went for Hillary Clinton.

Damn. All that finger-wagging for nothing.

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Hillary was working hard on her own behalf, too.

In the Democratic debate, earlier this week in South Carolina, Clinton called out Obama for taking part, while he was an Illinois state senator, in a land deal with the man she described as a “slum landlord.”

Although Obama has severed ties with the businessman, Rezko’s trial, on charges of attempted extortion and money laundering, starts next month, just as the primary season heats up.

Wow, this guy sounds like bad news. What does he look like?

Ah. The crook in the middle.

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The British government fixes the terrorism problem by renaming Islamic terrorist activity to something nicer.

. . . henceforth, any terrorism perpetrated by persons of an Islamic persuasion will be designated “anti-Islamic activity” Britain’s home secretary, Jacqui Smith, unveiled the new brand name in a speech a few days ago. “There is nothing Islamic about the wish to terrorize, nothing Islamic about plotting murder, pain and grief,” she told her audience. “Indeed, if anything, these actions are anti-Islamic.”

So . . . when Islamic terrorists kill and dismember people in the name of their religion, you’re going to combat that by telling them that, no, they don’t get it, they’re actually hurting their religion. Have we got a timeframe on how long this brilliant plan is going to take? As Mark Steyn put it:

Killing thousands of people in Manhattan skyscrapers in the name of Islam does, among a certain narrow-minded type of person, give Islam a bad name, and thus could be said to be “anti-Islamic” — in the same way that the Luftwaffe raining down death and destruction on Londoners during the Blitz was an “anti-German activity.”

People never seem to lose faith in the idea that changing the label will somehow change the substance. Perhaps it has something to do with the prevalence of marketing in the Western world.

Stupid.net

“MILF Magnet,” the comic book.

Stupid For Legal Purposes

Use a bladder, go to jail.

City police say it appears the mother, 45-year-old Tammy Jones, stabbed her son because he urinated on her while she slept in her bed.

21-year-old Michael Anthony Carson, nicknamed Pooh Bear, is charged with aggravated assault and battery. Police arrested him at his mother’s home on Wednesday.

City police say Jones stabbed her son six times with a butcher knife. He suffered wounds to his shoulder, calf, and chest. Witnesses in the house heard Jones say “why did you pee on me Pooh Bear?” A few moments later, the witness heard the son say “Mama you done stabbed me.”

Don’t bring a knife to a pissing match. Wait, no, it’s the other way around.

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Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you don’t have to buy the next round.

The trouble began Tuesday when Dalaia and O’Hare tried to cash Virgilio Cintron’s check at a store in Hell’s Kitchen on their own, police said. The man at the counter told them that Cintron had to be present to cash the check, so they went back to his apartment, which one of the suspects shared with the dead man.

Cintron was apparently undressed when he died, sometime within the previous 24 hours. Police said Dalaia and O’Hare proceeded to dress him in a faded T-shirt, pants they could only get up part way, and a pair of Velcro sneakers. They threw a coat over his waist to conceal what the pants couldn’t cover, police said.

They then put him on the office chair and wheeled the corpse over to the check-cashing store.

The men left Cintron’s body outside, went inside and tried to cash his check, authorities said. The store’s clerk, who knew Cintron, asked the men where he was, and O’Hare told the clerk they would go and get him.

At about the same time, Rapp spotted the men and confronted them as they were trying to haul the body into the store. He said that even after he identified himself as a police officer, O’Hare told him, “I have to get my friend in here. I have to cash his check.”

He ordered the men to back away from the victim. They feigned surprise when paramedics declared him dead, Rapp said.

“When they said, ‘Your friend is dead,’ they said, ‘Oh my God, he’s gone?‘”

It was hard to tell because he really used to enjoy being dressed by other people and wheeled around the city with a jacket over his noogies.

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Cheating on your wife is not illegal. Oddly enough, lying under oath about cheating on your wife is illegal. Even if you’re the mayor of Detroit.

Kilpatrick and Christine Beatty testified last summer in a police whistle-blower lawsuit and denied any sexual or romantic ties in 2002 and 2003. But the [Detroit] Free Press said it examined about 14,000 text messages on Beatty’s city-issued pager from those years and found many examples of such ties.

Kilpatrick is married, and Beatty was married at the time.

“I’m madly in love with you,” Kilpatrick wrote on Oct. 3, 2002.

“I hope you feel that way for a long time,” Beatty replied. “In case you haven’t noticed, I am madly in love with you, too!”

On Oct. 16, 2002, Kilpatrick wrote Beatty: “I’ve been dreaming all day about having you all to myself for 3 days. Relaxing, laughing, talking, sleeping and making love.”

Of course, if you’re going to lie about boinking your assistant, you might as well go all the way and act righteous and offended.

In his testimony last summer, at one point Kilpatrick expressed anger about claims of an affair between him and Beatty.

“I think it was pretty demoralizing to her—you have to know her—but it’s demoralizing to me as well,” the mayor said. “My mother is a congresswoman. There have always been strong women around me. My aunt is a state legislator. I think it’s absurd to assert that every woman that works with a man is a whore.

“I think it’s disrespectful not just to Christine Beatty but to women who do a professional job that they do every single day. And it’s also disrespectful to their families as well.”

You know what’s really disrespectful to Beatty’s family? Porking her behind their backs. And this story comes with a side order of irony: the lying didn’t work.

The trial in question arose from a lawsuit filed by two police officers who alleged they were fired for investigating claims that the mayor used his security unit to cover up extramarital affairs.

The lawsuit ended with the jury awarding $6.5 million to the two officers. The payout eventually grew to more than $8.5 million.

A Stupid Way to Go

Hey, it’s Christmas, let’s get high and drunk at the zoo and screw with the animals!

Paul Dhaliwal, one of the two surviving victims, told the father of the teenager killed in the Christmas Day attack that while the three climbed the 3-foot-tall railing and tried to get the tiger’s attention, they never threw or dangled anything into the pen, according to a search warrant affidavit filed in court.

“When they got down they heard a noise in the bushes, and the tiger was jumping out of the bushes,” according to the father’s account. Police found a partial shoe print that matched Dhaliwal’s on the 3-foot-tall metal railing, the court documents said.

Dhaliwal, 19, was severely injured when the 250-pound Siberian tiger named Tatiana clawed its way up the wall of its enclosure, leapt out and mauled him. His brother, Kulbir, 24, was also injured, and their friend, 17-year-old Carlos Sousa Jr., was killed.

All three victims had marijuana in their systems, and Paul Dhaliwal’s blood alcohol level was 0.16, twice the legal limit for driving, according to the affidavit.

Kulbir Dhaliwal told police the three had smoked pot and each had “a couple shots of vodka” before leaving San Jose for the zoo, the affidavit said.

Looks like I owe these guys an apology, they were drunk and high before they went to the zoo.