Category: News

Before Six Flags over Mid America, in Eureka, Missouri (a suburb, now, of St. Louis) opens, the firefighters and emergency workers have their day. It’s not like they get short lines to the roller coasters, though; Six Flags lets them use the Thunder River ride to practice rescuing people from flash floods and rapids. How cool is that?

Story, courtesy of the Suburban Journals (a wholly owned subsidiary of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch designed to make you think there’s real “competition” or that they contain “news”), here.

How convenient. French scientists have determined that the mosquitoes that carry West Nile are mutants. Just at the same time that X-Men 2: X-Men United is atop the box office again. Sure, these scientists claim this is based on scientific evidence and the announcement is designed to further the understanding of the West Nile epidemic.

Furthermore, the scientists explain their trademarking of the “MassKillto” super villain suitable for t-shirts was inadvertent, and that they meant to send the comic-book style graphic to the magazine Nature.

Listen, Garner, I love Heather.

The Opinion Journal yesterday included a column that explained that Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus. Or, as the article says, Democrats want to build (presumably Utopia) while Republicans want to defend civilization, whatever its flaws, from the alternatives.

This conforms to an idea I had while I was growing up, in the Reagan/Bush years, that the Republicans made good presidents, but Democrats made a good legislature. Republicans believe in law enforcement and strong militaries, which conform to what the executive branch does, whereas Democrats embrace the social freedoms in the bill of rights, or seemed to, and would provide a good body of legislators for a shambling and mostly gridlocked Congress. A balance of thought, a balance of focus, and the balance of power. What could be better?

But I am older and wiser now. I realize politics is sports for old fat men and women who cannot compete on the field and are afraid to try it in the honest business world (and I do mean honest, not the inbred business-lobbyist-executivocomplex). It’s not about making good laws, it’s about making a leaping reverse stuff law that says a lot but does whatever someone eventually interprets it to do. It’s about scoring votes and trash talking and excessive celebration after every small victory and one side winning and the other being humiliated. Since I have grown up, I have seen how they haven’t.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports (second item) that a man in a suburb of St. Louis became suicidal and armed himself with a sword. However, lacking a good instruction manual for killing oneself with a sword, this gentleman drew the attention of neighbors, friends, family members, or the local busybody. Said other, non-suicidal person called police, who arrived and shot the suicidal man when he brandished said sword at them.

No, they didn’t kill him. Now he’s going to prison for attempting to kill a police officer. That should fix him right up.

The San Fransisco Chronicle reports about an ambulance proceeding lawyer who’s suing Nabisco for selling Oreos which are not good for children. His goal, other than getting his name in the paper so he can be the Erin Brokovich of food lawsuits (man breasts probably included), is to keep tran fat out of the hands of children.

Listen, bub, here’s a lesson for you. When Milwaukee started getting decorated by the young graffitos in the local youth crime organizations who used brightly-colored, aerosol-propelled paint in their unauthorized, yet profoundly authentic, murals, Milwaukee banned the sale of spray paint to people under eighteen. You had to go to the counter and show some ID for your Krylon. No kidding. This meant, of course, that those young, impassioned artistes driven to speak out in the only subversive, non-violent fashion they could needed to hang out outside the local True Value waiting for someone they could bribe to come along, or they could improvise. And many did, which meant that most of the gangland glyphs were done in permanent marker. Now, Milwaukee had to make marker possession by minors into a felony….

What’s my point? Aside from using the blogomockracy to make fun of this frivolous lawsuit? I guess none. Of course, without sugary things that are bad for you to put into their mouths, we’ll return to the dark ages of eating Elmer’s Paste and papier-mache. Is that the bright future we want for our children? I think not. Let Them Eat Tran Fatty Cake!

Thank you, that is all.

Dick Gephardt has announced his daughter is a lesbian and will now serve as an important tool in his campaign to woo the homosexual vote, which apparently does not vote on issues but on symbolic gestures.

Next week, it is expected that Gephardt will announce that some of his best friends are black.

Also, is it just me, or do homosexual-friendly candidates often cough up gay daughters, but not gay sons? Is this because they’re playing on the current lesbianism-as-non-threatening-and-titilating-homosexuality cultural vibe, er, more?

Discuss.

Well, not exactly, but one young man in the Northwest R-1 school district, from which I matriculated, was busted for videotaping the girls locker room. Now, he’s going to get it.

Looks like possible punishment might fit what used to be called “hijinks.” A suspension and a slap on the juvenile wrist. Entire movie franchises were built on kids doing this sort of thing, albeit before x10 made it easy. (See also Meatballs (I-IV), Porky’s (I-III), and American Pie (I-III).) So spank the boy, send him to bed before dinner, and maybe raise him, but let’s not deny him the right to vote, lock him up, and brand him a sicko-for-life yet. Youthful “exuberance” is not a felony yet.

Maybe I am just a softy because Northwest Valley used to be Northwest High School, and I have fond memory of it. Just one, graduating.

Not quite. Apparently, the Supreme Court of the fine state of Utah has officially determined that dogs and cats are not equal in the eyes of the law.

How should animal rights activists reactivist to this news? A whole new separate-and-unequal controversy!

The AP wire is a–twit–ter after Ted Nugent apparently said, how delicately they put it:

the words “g—-” and “n—–” on live radio

Do you suspect the words are not goof and niggardly? Instead, I reckon, he might have used the words gook and nigger. (Let the insensitivity shine through! Brian J. typed the words without hyphens or cute, non alphanumeric cartoon-swearword characters.) I don’t know what he used, because the news accounts are very clipped, not offering much context but instead focusing on the act of using the prohibited words.

What we do have for context is this:

Rick Lewis and Michael Floorwax, morning talk show hosts on KRFX-FM, said that during an interview Monday, Nugent said one of the members of a group called the Funk Brothers years ago complimented his guitar playing by using a racist term for blacks.

Would that be these Funk Brothers? If so, a majority of them appear to be black. If one of them said Ted Nugent was his nigga, or something along those lines, odds lean toward a black man calling Ted Nugent the N-word. In which case, it wasn’t used in the sense of a racial slur. And Ted Nugent reporting the word use is a not a racial slur, either.

Sorry. I understand these “special” words have magickal significance to aggrieved covens of the afflicted, but they are just words. Perhaps Ted Nugent was using them to draw attention to the fact that they’re just collections of glyphs on the page or voiced velar stops, alveolar coronals and other articulations and not anything more. Actus reus without mens rea. As our society fundamentally shifts from criminal intent to strict liability template, it’s no longer necessary to mean harm with words, just speaking the words is the offense.

We’ll probably never know how Ted Nugent meant to use the words or how he really used the words. It’s not like the inflammatory news article presents the context or a transcript. Don’t bother going to the the Web site of the radio station 103.5 The Fox, or the dee jays with whom the Nuge was communicating, Lewis and Floorwax. Instead of information about this heinous crime, you’d just see the “sunken treasure chests” contest in which one woman with small breasts will win free breast augmentation! At least these holders of the moral high ground took the opportunity of this new-found celebrity to remove the photo of one of the morning show participants vomiting into a trash can after smelling rancid dog feces as part of some morning hijinks. Some marketing flack must have known the attention the Web site was about to receive. Any publicity is good publicity, especially when you’re enlightened defenders of feelings AND you don’t have puking interns on the Web site.

Ted Nugent’s Web site probably won’t glorify this “scandal” with a response. I cannot say I blame him. The whole thing smacks of a publicity stunt by a couple of drive-time losers with declining marketing share, deciding to pillory an outspoken conservative figure for fun and ratings.

Unfortunately, it will probably work.

And another thing, why does the AP article bear this line:

Nugent is past president of the National Rifle Association and is known for his outspokenness.

No kidding! I think it would be more relevant, considering that he was on the phone with a rock and roll music station, apparently discussing rock and roll music, to mention:

• Nugent is a former member of the Damn Yankees, who charted with the song “High Enough”, which sounds like a Rave song, but given Nugent’s eternally anti-drug stance is not about drug usage.
• Nugent’s solo career was built on musical hits designed composed to celebrate the human condition, particularly Procreative Drills, featuring several colloquial representations of male and female genitalia in the titles.
• Nugent is the founder of Ted Nugent Kamp for Kids, an organization designed to train kids in safe hunting.
• Nugent is the founder of Hunters for the Hungry an organization dedicated to providing meat harvested in hunts to homeless shelters.

Oh, but no. Nugent is the past president of the National Rifle Association.

I guess the point is a free-association of racial slurs, and those who would use them to denigrate (author insensitivity alert!) other races, with the National Rifle Association, whose stance on the Second Amendment runs counter to that of the author of the piece, the Associated Press in general, and “enlightened” people everywhere. The sooner those louts are tarred with the same pot of pitch, the better to round them up and pelt them with animal entrials–no, wait, they might like that.

And let’s not let the facts step in front of an onrushing good Nexis-Lexis search phrase. Nugent’s own biography does not list him as a former president, but he does sit on the board of directors at the NRA.

A Brazilian police station turned out a confessed drug dealer because they think he made the whole thing up for the free prison time.

Perhaps he should emigrate to America. Although conditions might not be described as cush, the United States doesn’t turn prisoners away.

Our motto: Over 1.4 Million Currently Being Served!

Richard Roeper’s got a point in today’s Chicago Sun-Times. Laci Peterson is the latest member of the pantheon of people who were anonymous while alive, but became national celebrities after murder, eligible for emotional deconstruction upon which to project something of our own lives and losses so that we can all together regrieve.

Shouldn’t we just get the heck over it? It just depends upon what the meaning of closure is.

The Washington Post reports that the Department of the Treasury will no longer sell paper United States Savings bonds. Instead, all bonds will be maintained through electronic accounts. Wow, this is so much a bad idea that I can briefly foam at the keyboard in the scant minutes I have to refuel the Doc-U-Matic “Mr. Digestion” Portable Energy System (MDPES).

It’s undemocratic. People without computers or accounts can no longer just walk into a bank and buy a bond. The official explanation is that a large portion, as a percentage, of investment dollars that pour like a broken dam into the nation’s coffers are done electronically. And by very large funds and corporations, no doubt. It’s a bad symbolic move to suddenly make the common stock in America preferred, with only big investors or little investors with computer accounts eligible to participate.

In the story about USA Interactive’s acquisition of LendingTree.com, the author or someone misadvertently casts it thus:

The LemonTree deal is the biggest financial services website acquisition, apart from online stockbroking deals, since the height of the boom.

LemonTree?

(Thanks to /. for the link.)

One of the commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission is named Swindle?

In his column on CNet, Declan McCullagh says it with a straight face, his accompanying photo depicting his normal look of concern that indicates he fully agrees with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner vision of the future, starting about 2007.

Me, on the other hand, I cannot. Orson Swindle! Orson Swindle! Haw haw!

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Jim Stingl tried out the new mask chic that SARS is spreading in Asia.

I don’t know what havoc the police thought this 94-year-old jogger was seeking, but they got right to the bottom of it. Turns out she had not garrotted the night orderly with a jump rope, flailed the nursing supervisor with an un-Velcroed one pound ankle weight, and choked the nursing home warden by feeding him his enterprise’s own Ensure in her Buy-It-Now for freedom and the start of a new crime spree.

Nope, she was just jogging.

But you can never be too careful.

To alleviate any confusion, and to put our municipal authorities at ease, I shall remain in the recliner. Thank you, that is all.

After a climber gets pinned under a boulder for five days, he cuts his own arm off with a pocket knife, puts on a tourniquet, rappels to the floor of a canyon, and walks up to his rescuers.

Most of us men would like to think we could do the same thing, but I am not so good with setting anchors and rappelling. Of course, this sort of thing keeps me off of mountains in the first place.