ABC Calls New Bush Film One "Only Fans Could Love"
Yes, that is an actual screenshot from ABC's news website this morning.
Someone over there has a sense of humor. Following last night's press
conference and the lukewarm reception ABC gave it, this is just a clear
example of the press being silly. And I like it.
First candidates in 2005 "Dumbasses of the Year Award" announced
Last week, Barry Billcliff and his buddy Timothy Crebase were on top of the world. Or, at least, they were on every morning TV news show talking about how they found a cache of money while digging around in Crebase's backyard. This morning they are under arrest for theft following allegations that they found the money on a jobsite and simply kept it for themselves.
Good going fellows, welcome to an elite club of people too stupid to stay off television after allegedly committing a crime. You are in good company. Possible other additions in the coming days will be the fiance of the missing jogger (you know you are thinking he did it, aren't you)?
CNN out of ideas
Someone once told me that the lamest shit you can do on TV news is read the newspaper to people. I have seen our local lameass newspeople do this on occasion. Yes, it was lame. It means, "we have no reporters or producers with enough sense to just go out and interview someone about their brand of toilet paper, so here's some shit we saw this morning while eating the doughnuts." Think of the dumbest thing you have seen a reporter do on TV. Now, walk ten paces south from that. That is reading the newspaper on TV.
So, imagine my shock and horror yesterday afternoon when I stumbled across CNN at about 4pm and saw two anchors reading from fucking blogs. What could possibly make this display of absolute incompetence complete? How about the fact that they were taking shots of the blogs in question from a camera, not from any sort of video output of the computer.
CNN, seriously, is that the best you can do? Please hire me. I feel that, from my home and doing little or nothing, I could easily live up to the grand standard for live broadcast journalism that you have set forth in the early years of the Twenty-First Century.
Back to the lameass local ABC affiliate out of Asheville, they actually fucked up a few days ago and did an entire newspiece about a sex offender while a graphic of Billy Graham was up. This is typical. They are also owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, go figure. More about that station later.
Report says kids in poor countries more likely to die: Poor countries reply - "No shit!"
The report in question was issued by the World Bank, known for its great track record over the years of helping those countries into crippling debts while plundering the nations for their material wealth. The end result is leaving the nation ruined and unable to support any sort of localized economy.
So, um, no shit. Poor people die miserable. Imagine that. Wow. I never would have guessed. Are you people taking notes? They've been killing South Park's Kenny for years to make this point.
Insert stupid Beatles reference here
I write that headline today, because so many blogs and newspapers and morning radio and TV news shows will undoubtedly use the same stupid reference this morning. It is stupid to me because this is America, not Britain. It's the double-oughts of the twenty-first century, not the sixties of the twentieth. And, to be quite honest, have you ever seen a tax collector wandering around this country? I haven't.
I was going to write a longer piece on a couple of stories on CNN this evening (14 April), but it would be too heady and serious. They can wait. Theses bits are better. Shorter. Funnier. More closer to honest nihilism, whatever the hell that means.
The difference between good parenting and bad
"What did we miss as a community? What did we miss as parents?" asks the coach of a fifteen year-old who was killed by the opposing team's pitcher following a "Pony League" game Wednesday night. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe the part you missed was the little lecture about not getting a baseball bat out of your bag and clubbing other people "in the knees, then the head." Just a guess.
Dumb and dumber
More evidence that this country is headed to hell and probably deserves the ride: Following a pharmacist's refusal last week to fill a prescription for the "morning after pill," citing moral objections to the pill as a form of abortion, Congress Leaps Into Action(!) with ALPhA, the "Access to Legal Pharmaceuticals Act."
First off, why don't we pass a "Stop Making Laws that Can Easily Be Transliterated Into Useless Acronyms Act" and call it, well, call it nothing because that would violate the letter of the law. Damn, there's a pile of funny jokes there. I should stop now. But I won't. This new law would insure that no pharmacist can refuse to fill a prescription for valid and legal medication unless another pharmacist is on hand who will fill the said prescription. I am not a big fan of this law, for any number of reasons.
Second, this is exactly the kind of law that the Right-Minded Wing of America uses to justify its Culture of Asinine Behavior and assail the Left with. Not because it is a stupid law, but because it deals with morality and religious beliefs and other things that the Right finds sacred as long as the Right can get political capital out of it from the even-further Right that form its base. My thinking is that if your pharmacist doesn't fill your prescription, then find one who will and try to get people to not go to the first pharmacist. He obviously wants to be either a priest or politician anyway, from his behavior, so let him close up the pharmacy and go into a line of work where telling people how to live is appropriate and expected.
Otherwise, pharmacists of the world, just fill the fucking bottles up, mmmk?
Coming soon on Law and Order: Trial by Jury
Jurors return a guilty verdict not because of the facts they heard in the case, but because they found a written confession in a pair of pants entered into evidence. This just screams "Put me on TV! Let Bebe Neuwirth get all worked up over this! Let's see more of that weird and vaguely Arabic judge again, 'cause he was way cool in that one episode!"
Yes, I watch Law and Order. I like the theme song and that "Doink! Doink!" sound.
Reach out and touch me!
The faith is spreading boys and girls, and now you can get your hands on one of the new Talking Jesus dolls available from "Messengers of Faith," itself a subsidiary of some Teddy Bear company or another. I wish that, as a child, someone had taken me aside and told me that I could just design teddy bears as a living. I think I would have stopped reading and maybe even stopped going to school right then and there.
Anyways, these three dolls (Jesus, Mary and Moses - 'cause who else do you need, really? Do you want your child to get his or her own talking Judas doll? Picture that.), are about twenty-five dollars a pop and were, get this, created by a Jewish guy! Why? Well, he says, "Religion is universal...and faith is for everyone."
That translates pretty loosely into, "This is going to make me a fortune."
Symbol of a growing something
The Eighties, folks, are on the way back. It's more than just Jesus dolls and hair metal reunions, though. It's summer movies and television shows. It's icons of the past pushing the wave of the future. It's the way in which the President just smiles at goddamn near everything. And, ultimately, it's the way in which there will be a new Pope in the next month or so.
John Paul II was widely credited two weeks ago with destroying Communism in Eastern Europe. Where this came from is anyone's guess. I suppose that somewhere down the line, Nixon started it with that trip to China. Or maybe it was Ford and Kissinger in Indonesia, right before those pesky Timorese were taught a twenty-year lesson. Conventional wisdom tells us that Reagan single-handedly tore down the Berlin Wall, but now we learn it was a Polish Catholic who began chipping away at the edifice. Who knows? History is nowhere near that simple, but the way it is explained to the public is. In fact, the easier the explanation can be - no matter how odd or stupefying to anyone who might know better - the easier it is to allow the dissonance out of one's head.
Culture geniuses may tell us that we "digest culture in twenty-year cycles," but all that really means is that no one is willing to take chances on anything new, which leads the most cynical observers to state, unequivocally, that there is nothing new under the sun. Most days it feels that way. This year it feels particularly bad.
Ah, well, I've lost my point here entirely.
Woody Allen has written almost fifty films - and I haven't seen any of them
How's that for a non-sequiter headline? Well, that's all you can expect when a storm arrives 24 hours late, and there's probably not enough time to finish a real update to this page before the electricity or the internet goes out. In fact, the only reason any updates will be seen is because I will be compulsively hitting "save" every few moments.
The other thing I should be compulsively hitting are my sources, who are still keeping me in the dark in regards to certain news items. Of particular interest is the recent release of a study, done by our very own UNC apparently, that states that teens who take chastity pledges are six times more likely to allow a partner access to the backdoor. These teens are also four times more likely to engage in oral sex and, perhaps as a result of all the good sex-education they are obviously getting from both their public schools and Baptist parents, are less likely to get tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
Yea, that whole abstinence thing is working out pretty goddamn well, isn't it?
Speaking of working out pretty well
Crossing
sports with fasion shoots is another area where a lot of progress
is being made. Witness Venus
Williams and wonder. Wonder what, I do not know. (note: original link
went to Sports Illustrated and is dead - this is some blog link that has
all the original SI pics. Why you would want to click on
that and see them is beyond me.)
I mean, honestly. The Williams sisters play tennis better than they look. And that other girl, with the blond hair, she plays hot better than she played tennis. Let's keep that straight, ok?
Apparently, they have different "lifestyles"
Bathroom Grafitti that is not as interesting as it sounds. No phone numbers to call, sorry. The rules, per se, prohibit posting the fun stuff. So, I'll take it. If you've got the balls to take a camera into the bathroom and risk being seen taking pictures of dirty messages, let me know and I'll gladly show up and find out just how dirty a public restroom can get. Yea, baby!
What a year, so far!
What a year we've had so far, folks. I've been neglecting this site for reasons of simply being exhausted. That, and it just lost its charm, you know. That charm of finding out that people really are dumber than all holy fuck and having to write about it.
But, with the passing of the Pope, it seems that a time of quiet reflection is in order. Now that the moment is over we can continue with some more annoying bits of news.
Florida woman finally dead, world can move on
Only the death of the Pope could have removed the "Schiavo case" from the headlines, it seems. This annoying and persistent "news story" surfaced again a few weeks ago as the husband and the family went at it. Bonus points can only be assigned to the family, for quickly causing the media to run out of ways to say "Terri Schiavo's family has run out of options," which seemed to be a headline every other day. When that wasn't the headline, it was: "Terri Schiavo's family heads to another court."
All of this was before Congress attempted to pass some silly Federal version of Terri's Law to keep her alive. I don't really know which part of this whole circus made me the saddest. No one looked good during the affair. And no one looked good afterwards, either, since there were still issues about burial and on and on and on. Fucking people. Why not just follow Hunter Thompson's lead and make it known how you want to go?
But, the idiocy doesn't even end there. Some people, apparently, can not deal with someone choosing suicide as an option. They couldn't do it when Cobain went out and they can't do it now that Thompson's out. That's right, kids, the conspiracy nuts are all ready at it. Hunter S. Thompson was murdered, says some reliable sources.
So, the short version is that Thompson had found "hard evidence" of the conspiracy to destroy the World Trade Center and his son was acting strangely and his wife gave inconsistent accounts of what she heard on the phone and there was this odd little man, always standing just beside the county coroner and a video tape of the elite hit squad sent in after HST....
Do we just not have any dignity left in this country? Or is it something else wrong with the water?
And now, for something completely stupid
Sorry for the bummer, here's news to cheer you up. You have read all about people who stand in line for ages to be "the first" to see a movie when it premieres, right? And you know that of all movie franchises, Star Wars is one that always brings out one of those crowds, often in full uniform? Well, it turns out that they really aren't that bright after all, um, assuming you thought they were in the first place. I wonder what it sounds like when Darth Vader cries like a little girl?
Obligatory Playa Hatin'!
Asheville's Social Pleasure and Aid Club!
The
Orange Peel: Fuck 'Em
Local playa
hatin' - Fuck
the Orange Peel: Part Two
found weirdness:
The Cat With Hands.
and
something funny.