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The Grossest Revelation of the Year

Check this out: 1 in 6 British iPhones have fecal matter on them, apparently because people do not wash their hands after taking care of business.

In related news, at least 16.6% of the British cannot drop a deuce without soiling their hands. WTF? Do y'all use BOTH sides of the toiler paper?

Does the Nobel Committee Think That a Good Speech is Better Than an Accomplishment?

What has Barack Obama done to deserve a Nobel Peace Prize?

• Increase troop levels in Afghanistan?
• Remove peacekeeping forces in Iraq?
• Talk about nuclear disarmament without actually making progress toward it?
• Promise to close a POW camp without actually doing it?
• Apologize for the U.S. being a bad country from 2001 to 2009?
• Wish for better relations between Israel and Palestine?
• Let Iran build The Bomb?
• Let North Korea test long-range missiles without consequence?
• Invite a policeman and the black professor he arrested to the White House for a beer?
• Help South America get an Olympiad?
• Kill (almost) a boatload of pirates?
• Mention Darfur a few times?
• Give good speeches?
• Bomb the moon?

• Not be George W. Bush?

Good grief, he hadn't even been president for two weeks when he got nominated. I know he talks a good talk about world peace, but so do most beauty pageant winners. That's not Nobel Prize caliber achievement. Giving Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize at this stage in his presidency is the peace equivalent of giving a scientist a Nobel Prize in Physics for declaring that he is going to invent a teleportation device.

My esteem for the Nobel Peace Prize is gone.

We'd Have to Convince the Jurors that What???

If you were completely aghast and confused about NBA player Marko Jaric wedding and bedding supermodel Adrian Lima, this story will confound you even more:

Jaric was accused of sexual assault earlier this month.

Prosecutors will not be taking the case, possibly because you can't possibly convince 12 ordinary people to decide, beyond any reasonable doubt, that someone that ugly, with someone as beautiful as Lima at home, would waste his time tapping any other ass.

Lift Mishap Leaves Skier Cold-Cocked

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0106091vail1.html

Ouch.

Google Defames Me

So I'm telling my brother-in-law about the Bill Plaschke and his funny video with Kevin Pang wherein they eat bowls of penises at a Chinese restaurant (currently mentioned and linked on the left in my quasiblog for the month), and I tell him that if he does a search for "plaschke" and "penis", he'll find it. So he googles it, but he's in the "images" google search mode. And he tells me the first photo on the results page is a picture of me. Slander!

Cyclists bring bikes to a demolition derby

Have you seen this photograph of the cycling race in Mexico that was interrupted by a car taking out a whole pack of riders? Unbelievable. The rider in green must feel like the luckiest guy in Mexico right about now. If you are wondering how this happened, Mexican authorities say the driver was drunk, and fell asleep behind the wheel.

A Woman Scorned

A New York woman named Chandra Myers has sued Sara Lee Bakeries and Bimbo Bakeries USA, for more than $8 million, alleging that they failed to withhold wages from her ex-husband pursuant to a wage garnishment order. The ex-husband, whom Myers has called a "deadbeat millionaire" in some rambling internet posts, says that $611 of his $1,600 monthly income goes to their daughter, and he has to support five other kids on what's left. Myers, however, allegedly has a $2,000 per month support order. If she can't get it out of the husband's $1,600 monthly income, she's reaching into the deep pockets of his employers. The cases are Myers v. Sara Lee Bakeries and Myers v. Bimbo Bakeries USA, Inc. Myers is represented by New York attorney Lawrence H. Bloom.

She also goes by the names or handles of Dr. Chandra Cromwell, RXLady4You, and Mama Proof. She's been known to lead crusades against her cable company. She's a jill of many trades, too. She sells mortgages, fixes credit, is some sort of doctor, represents hip-hop artists and lectures. She sounds like quite a success when she brags about her own income:

"I have been blessed with a wonderful career in the Pharmaceutical Industry and with a Ph. D in the field I have always earned a high six figure income. But I gotta tell you the money I am making as a Reseller for eGolf International is AMAZING !!!" [now available only with Google cache]

Why a woman making a "high six figure income" would want to try to squeeze $2,000 a month out of a man who is supporting five kids on $1,600 a month is a mystery to me, but she must think it is a noble cause, because she has an iPetition, man.

Gun, wallet or cellphone?

This website is supposed to test how inherently racist you are.

Sure, Watch This on a Laptop

But not in an airport or on an airplane. Link.

If You Ever Wondered Why Them Call Them "Wakes,"

this story from Chile explains it. Feliberto Carrasco, an 81-year old man in the small Chilean village of Angol shocked his grieving relatives by waking up in his coffin at his own wake on Sunday. Way to go, Feliberto.

Bigfoot?

This is pretty cool. Is it a Sasquatch, or just a skinny black bear with a bad case of mange? I'm guessing bear. I wish the damn thing would have turned around. The Bigfoot Research Organization says it looks like a juvenile Sasquatch, but a spokeshole for the Pennsylvania Game Commission said there was "no question it is a bear with a severe case of mange."

Guy Richie: "Gulp."

Madonna and Guy Richie were recently photographed leaving a London hotel with a clear bag, inside which was a strap on sex toy. If you ask me, she looks like she's ready to enjoy it. His face shows at least slight trepidation.

Choking Chickens

In the land of China, the men use bottled water to choke their chickens.

There Is No Constitutional Right Of Privacy

Why do you have the right to use contraception, have non-commercial consensual sex of whatever kind you want with any consenting adult, obtain an abortion and the like? According to the federal courts, it is the "penumbra of privacy rights" one can infer from the other provisions in the Bill of Rights. In other words, you have the right to not have government poke its nose in your business as it pertains to your body.

I've always thought that this was a good policy, but completely intellectually dishonest from a Constitutional standpoint. The court wanted to give people complete sexual and reproductive freedom, so it made up this non-existent Constitutional right to make up for the contrary decisions, or lack of action, by the legislative branch of government. Deep down, however, the courts know there is no such right, and when sex and abortion are not factors in the analysis, privacy disappears from the Constitution.

Case in point: Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. Von Eschenbach. The opinion is 65 pages long, but this AP quote sums it up nicely:

Quote:

Terminally ill patients do not have a constitutional right to be treated with experimental drugs, even if they likely will be dead before the medicine is approved, a federal appeals court said Tuesday. The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned last year's decision by a smaller panel of the same court, which held that terminally ill patients may not be denied access to potentially lifesaving drugs. The full court disagreed, saying in an 8-2 ruling that it would not create a constitutional right for patients to assume "any level of risk" without regard to medical testing. "Terminally ill patients desperately need curative treatments," Judge Thomas B. Griffith wrote for the majority. But "their deaths can certainly be hastened by the use of a potentially toxic drug with no proven therapeutic benefit."

To paraphrase, you have a constitutional right to privacy over your body when it comes to sexual conduct or aborting an unborn child in your womb. You have no constitutional right to privacy when it comes to ingesting substances that you believe might cure your terminal illness. No, if the government hasn't approved that substance and regulated its sale, you need to just sit there and die. No privacy for you.

The two dissenting justices (who had cast the majority votes in the original 2-1 decision in Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. Von Eschenbach before the ruling was reviewed en banc) nailed the issue: Judge Judith W. Rogers called the ruling "startling" and observed that courts have established the right "to marry, to fornicate, to have children, to control the education and upbringing of children, to perform varied sexual acts in private, and to control one's own body even if it results in one's own death or the death of a fetus." However, in the majority's opinion, "the right to try to save one's life is left out in the cold despite its textual anchor in the right to life."

Outrageous!

And For 36 Hours, We Play Poker

I'm not going to buy the book, or whatever else he's selling, but I must admit I'm intrigued by the idea of the 4 hour workweek.

History of the World, by Wikipedia

For a reason that isn't interesting enough to describe, I was looking at the wikipedia page for today. On the "today in history" part, it seemed a bit skewed toward recent developments. For example, between the dawn of time and 500 AD, nothing of note happened on this day. From 501AD to 1000 AD, there is but one entry:

514 - Pope Hormisdas assumes the papacy of the Roman Catholic Church.

From 1001 AD until the rise of the United States, there were just four events of note:

1304 - Wars of Scottish Independence: King Edward I of England takes the last rebel stronghold of the war.
1402 - Ottoman-Timurid Wars: Battle of Ankara - Timur defeats forces of the Ottoman Empire sultan Bayezid I.
1712 - The Riot Act takes effect in Great Britain.
1738 - French explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de la Vérendrye reaches the western shore of Lake Michigan.

From the last twenty years, it lists such "historic" events as

• "Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's show opens at Washington, D.C.'s Project for the Arts after the Smithsonian Institution's Corcoran Gallery cancels it.
• Haiti asks the US to send observers to monitor its upcoming elections.
• A cargo plane crashes in a suburb of Georgia, killing 40 people.
• Health workers from certain aid groups leave Afghanistan.
• Some Olympic officials get indicted.
• A discotheque fire kills 25 people in Peru.
• A newsman reveals who had claimed that Downing Street had "sexed up" the "Dodgy Dossier".
• People got hurt by a couple of bombs, and
• A coal mine explosion killed two dozen workers.

If you didn't know wikipedia better, you'd think that the world didn't become interesting until I was old enough to drink beer without a fake ID.

Allison Stokke, the Reluctant Minor Celebrity

We were sitting around the other day talking about stupid news stories, and the topic of Allison Stokke came up. Ms. Stokke is a cute young athlete in Orange County who is an above-average pole vaulter, and for reasons I can't quite explain (news stories talk about how she is "extremely attractive", but she looks like any run of the mill cute OC teenager to me), seems destined to become the Anna Kournikova of women's pole vaulting, a young adult female athlete known for her good looks and her fourth place finishes. A google search for her name in quotes yields 817,000 hits; she has unofficial fan clubs; and she keeps getting wikipedia entries that someone keeps deleting. It seems she and her dad, Al Stokke, don't like the attention she's getting. Of course, the more time they spend telling the media how much she hates the attention, the more attention she gets. But that's not even the strangest part of the tale.

Someone pointed out that they read a story (and I don't know what to credit, since the story is all over the place) about how her dad is a criminal defense lawyer, and he's the same guy who won an acquittal last year for David Park, a police officer who had been accused of ejaculating on a motorist during an early-morning traffic stop in Laguna Beach. After DNA testing confirmed the mess was his, the cop admitted to putting it there, but Al Stokke argued that Park wasn’t responsible—the alleged victim, who was on her way home from work as a dancer at a local cabaret, “got what she wanted. She’s an overtly sexual person.” While that may all very well be true, I find it at least moderately ironic that someone who would use a sleazy defense like that could claim to be all that offended about people googling and ogling his adult daughter. Once you've used the "she's an overtly sexual person" defense, you forever forfeit your right to take the moral high ground when it comes to bitching about someone attracting excessive attention from the opposite sex.

Fortunately, of course, I'm not that kind of lawyer. So if anyone ever puts up an unofficial fansite devoted to one of my daughters, I still have the right to find out who and where he is and beat the living shit out of him.

What Do You Call a One-Armed Doctor With No Legs?

Dr. Lim, of course.

Wallet Test

Using a hidden camera and a wallet with some junk in it, some crew decided to test the honesty of strangers. The good news: more people are honest than opportunistic dishonest. The bad news: if you dislike racial stereotypes, you are going to hate what they did with the results.

Flash Your Amtrak Today

Today is the 27th Annual Mooning of Amtrak in the OC. And with the new weekend service of Metrolink in the area, it is the First Annual Mooning of Metrolink. For the uninitiated, this is when it is perfectly acceptable for normal, mature people to gather along train tracks in Orange County and expose their buttocks to passing strangers. I'll be too busy playing with my kids at a local amusement park to participate, but it sounds fun enough.

Two Funny Things

If someone found this out by scanning the entire thing without a leaked hint from anyone, he's either a genius or an idiot, and I'm not sure which, but I was tipped off about this awesome trailer from Mel Gibson's next big movie, Apocalypto. Here's the deal, watch it once and try to spot the anomaly. If you miss it (you will), run it again to the screaming monkey scene, then hit pause and go back a frame at a time.

And I'm posting this link too late, as the guy has met his goal, but behold the power of the blogosphere: a guy seeks, for certain private personal reasons, to build a website that gets 2,000,000 hits. In almost no time, he's there. You go, boy!

Busted!

Some seller on eBay is selling "an authentic Korey Stringer jersey! Korey Stringer, football player for the Minnesota Vikings, actually WORE this jersey during the 1999-2000 season!" In fact, it's so authentic, it actually has the shoulder patch, with Stringer's number on it, that the Vikings began wearing after his death to honor him.

Say.....wait a second!

Anyhow, if you are stupid, and you have money to waste, the auction ends in 3 days.

Fear My Predictions

So, after we have virtually no earthquake activity for years, I start getting paranoid about earthquakes, and the next thing you know, we have two strong temblors and a tsunami warning in one week.

You've been warned: if I tell you I'm worried about asteroid strikes, you should run for the underground caves.

Michel's Foresight, or, Psychic Bullshit

Psychics are all bullshit. I was at the Tustin Chili Cookoff last Sunday when I happened past a pychic reading booth that offered to tell your future for $10. It occurred to me that if they were right, those readings would be worth a lot more than $10, but that if they were bullshit, that was a pretty sorry way to blow ten bucks.

Late psychic Jeanne Dixon was world-famous because she guessed about so many future events that she sometimes came close to be right on a few. Dixon is best known for "predicting" Kennedy's assassination by saying that the 1960 election would be won by a Democrat who would die in office, though not necessarily in his first term. (In fulfilling that one, Kennedy became the 6th straight president, elected in a year divisible by 20, to die in office -- there were thousands of amateur "psychics" who also predicted it.) Dixon also predicted that the Soviets would beat America to the moon; that World War III would begin in 1958; that Nixon would be president in 1960 (a neat hedging of the Kennedy prediction); that a "new holocaust" would occur in the 1980s; that Rome would again become the world's foremost center of culture, learning, and religion before the turn of the century; that cancer would be cured in 1967; that a Middle Eastern child born on February 5, 1962** would unite all warring creeds into one faith; and that there would be peace on earth by the year 2000.

She wasn't really all that close on those.

A bit less than a month ago, I posted about three things I felt certain would happen soon:

1.  A verdict that day in the Alejandro Avila trial; it happened that day.
2.  An earthquake (no set date); one (the strongest since 2002) struck yesterday.
3.  Another freeway shooting that week; (it happened that Wednesday).

It doesn't prove that I'm psychic, but it beats the tabloids' last few lists of prognostications, and it's much more precise than Dixon's garbage. Maybe I should go into the future-reading business.

As I told the people who went on my witness run over the weekend, I'm also pretty certain that the Michael Jackson verdict will come in today, if it ever does. Give people a weekend to think about it and they usually come to a conclusion on Monday (like the Avila jury). That's not foresight, however, it's just conventional wisdom. If I'm predicting the outcome, I'll call it: guilty on the alcohol charge, hung or not guilty on molesting this kid, with a bunch of them saying that they suspect that he has molested other little kids; but if they come back with "not guilty" across the board, I think we'll hear a bunch of starstruck and stupid jurors saying that the prosecution showed "no evidence" of his guilt whatsoever.

** In case you're wondering, Bin Laden was born in 1957.

[UPDATE] The following quote is closer to what I initially thought the jury would be thinking, but I was mildly, and pleasantly, surprised to hear it after the across-the-board acquittals: "I feel that Michael Jackson probably has molested boys," juror Raymond Hultman said. "I cannot believe that ... this man could sleep in the same bedroom for 365 straight days and not do something more than just watch television and eat popcorn. I mean, that doesn't make sense to me. But that doesn't make him guilty of the charges that were presented in this case and that's where we had to make our decision." That comment saved my faith in this jury.

He's done it, but they didn't prove he did it this time.

I can respect that finding.

As for me, I think he did it, including this time, but that this time, he was set up. Not that entrapment by the child is a defense. Someone who is seduced by a child is still a child molester. As to whether I believe that beyond a reasonable doubt, I am not certain, but probably not.

I would find him liable in a civil trial, and I would award the boy a dollar.

I Hope This Turns Out To Be a Hoax

The headline in the UK Telegraph was bad enough:

"Sisters pregnant at 12, 14 and 16. So what does their mother do? She blames the school."

But then I read the rest of the story.

The three sisters live in Derby with their twice-divorced mother, Julie Atkins, who does not work, and receives annual welfare benefits of £31,000. You would think that being able to stay at home and raise her children, she would have time to teach her daughters about the realities of life, and, hopefully, inspire them to keep their legs together for a few more years, but no. She has deferred completely to the educational system. "I blame the schools. Sex education for young girls should be better. More and more kids are getting pregnant younger and younger and sex education needs to start a lot earlier. If I could turn the clock back I would definitely prefer them to not have children as their education is so important. They've all ruined their lives because they are all too young to have children."

You might wonder if this woman was just ambushed by a bad set of circumstances that all occurred before she knew what was happening. You might wonder, but it isn't true. The 16-year-old had already had two miscarriages and an abortion. Maybe it's just me, but I believe that, after your oldest teenage daughter gets pregnant three times, you need to stop worrying about whether the schools are going to parent your children and start doing it yourself.

The 12-year-old, Jemma Williams, was the first to become pregnant, giving birth to her son T-Jay in February. "T-Jay." That's what happens when you let a child start making up names. Mom had no idea she was pregnant until she was seven months along. "I only found out when I took her to buy a new bra and as she was being measured I saw her huge bump," said the mother. I can understand not knowing when the child is three months along, four months along, but at seven months, with a "huge bump," if you aren't noticing something is wrong, you must be stupid, stupid, stupid.

And she doesn't even have the excuse that she was a single working mom. She's a sit-at-home-on-your-ass welfare mom. The least a sit-at-home-on-your-ass welfare mom can do to earn her £31,000 per year is pay attention to their children.

Jemma's now raising the child herself in her mother's house. The father, who was 14 at the time, has a new girlfriend now. Sadly, mom didn't warn Jemma that 14-year-old boys might not stick around and help raise the baby. Bad mom.

The 14-year-old, Jade Williams, said she had been determined not to do the same, "after seeing all the dirty nappies and her sister enduring sleepless nights." (The story, however, says the girls got pregnant within three months of each other, so maybe that apparent inconsistency means the story is untrue.) But she became pregnant after a one-night stand, giving birth to a daughter in December. She thought it wouldn't happen to her. And the schools didn't explain things, and neither did mom.

One mother earlier, the 16-year-old, Natasha Williams, gave birth to Amani. Amani's father, who is 38, comes see the child from time to time, but "he's Asian and still lives with his parents, so they don't know about me or Amani." Natasha doesn't worry, though. She doesn't really want to be "anything but a full-time mum," she said. And Britain is the place to do it. The Centre for Policy Studies reports that in Great Britain, a married couple's average weekly salary leaves them just £1 per week better off than single mothers who never worked and had no contact with the father of their children.

The three-generation family now lives rent-free in a three-bedroom house, which they claim is too cramped. Mrs. Atkins continues to hope for more from the public trough. "Hopefully we may be able to get a bigger house, but who knows?"

She lives, for free, off the labor of her fellow citizens, and she has the nerve to complain that it's not good enough. Maybe she's right. Maybe she and her babies and their babies will get more from the hard working people who support them. Maybe it isn't her. Maybe we're the ones who are stupid, stupid, stupid.*

* A legal fiction literary reference.

Borrowed, Blue, Old and New

Old and busted:

Elegant Bride magazine
Bride's magazine
Modern Bride magazine
New England Bride magazine
Today's Bride magazine
American Bride magazine
etc., etc., etc.

Net hotness:

Southern California Divorce magazine, with such wonderful articles as "secrets for dealing with a difficult ex." There's an online version, too. It's been around for ten years, but I'd never seen it until tonight. Luckily, I don't need it.

Call Me Michel

I think we will get a verdict today in the Samantha Runnion murder trial. I predict that convicted child rapist and murdered Alejandro Avila will get death.

As long as I'm pretending to be Michel Nostradamus (sans quatrains), I've had an irrational fear of earthquakes for the past few days. The last time that happened, it was only a few hours before Northridge shook uncontrollably for a few minutes and Los Angeles freeways, parking garages and apartments started collapsing all over.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure someone is going to be shot on the freeway again this week.

Got Milk?

Proving that you can sell just about anything on the Internet, I offer you the Human Milk Banking Association. New mothers with sucklings who want more than their dry teets have to offer can now purchase real human milk from the privacy of their own high speed Internet connection.

Screaming Lemon

I know it's no Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese, but I wonder what I could get on eBay for this screaming lemon that I just picked from my screaming lemon tree? Maybe I could get Golden Palace to pay $28,000 for it if I claimed that it was better than Johnny Chan's orange.

Alien Scanner

This picture below shows a price tag scanner used at Epcot. But the more I look at it, the more I see the mounted head of an alien with some sort of lifeline plugged into the back of its skull.

On the other hand, maybe I should stop eating those mushrooms that grow naturally in the hills behind my house.

Walkers and Bussers

I'm sure these two stories from Yahoo's Most Popular page last week were unrelated. On the other hand, it wouldn't have killed Rosa Parks to eschew that bus and hoof it once in a while.

21st Century Renaissance Man

Looking at this rolling advertisement, I can understand how a reasonably sane person might call the number (I cropped the last digit, since he's not paying me for the bandwidth) if they are looking for someone to provide mobile cleaning & detail, a power wash or lawn care. But seriously, who in their right mind would look at this trailer and think: "We should call this guy about mortgage financing"? Or, God help us, a new health plan?

Public Service Announcement #2

Rich (the Daily Column) posted this link that provides an unexpected twist to the usual "Don't Drink and Drive" preaching. It is, of course, graphic. It is also extremely powerful. I intend to save it and show it to my kids when they (or their boyfriends) get driver's licenses.

The Scariest Steven King Yet

Author Stephen King is not nearly as scary as child abuse expert Stephen John King. The latter, who lectured police and prosecutors on protecting children involved in child pornography, was jailed last month, and will remain locked up for seven years after being convicted of "systematic sexual abuse" of three girls, including 1 count for having sex with a girl under 13 years, 10 counts of indecent assault, 6 charges of indecency with a child and 4 counts of taking indecent photographs of a child.

He did protest too much, methinks.

You know, I've heard that you can't tell a child molester by looking at him, but this fellow looks facially guilty. Creepy. Like a gremlin. Guys like this are doubly wicked, because they make it so that normal guys like me don't want to speak out too strongly against pedophiles and the like, lest people suspect that we, like King, are molestors ourselves.

Bidding on Roo Nuts

You can buy almost anything on eBay. Do you need a kangaroo scrotum? Thanks to eBay, there's no need to drive all the way to the kangaroo scrotum store. Now, you can just peruse one of forty or more auctions and make your selection. There are always a bunch with buy-it-now prices of $9.99, but if you lay out more than five bucks, you are paying too high a price -- not as high as the price paid by the kangaroo, of course, but still too high.