Million Dollar Oops

LA MARQUE, Texas - A man blamed a low-flying pelican and a dropped cell phone for his veering his million-dollar sports car off a road and into a salt marsh near Galveston. The Lufkin, Texas, man told of driving his luxury, French-built Bugatti Veyron when the bird distracted him. The motorist dropped his cell phone, reached to pick it up and veered off the road and into the salt marsh. The car was half-submerged in the brine about 20 feet from the road when police arrived.
**I do not own an expensive car, but if I did, nothing and I mean NOTHING could distract me from the experience of driving my $1 million Bugatti Veyron. Let’s be honest – this whole story sounds like bullshit. “Hey look, a pelican – oops my cell phone…SCREEEECH…SPLASH!!” Let’s summarize: Cell phone – about $100 Bugatti Veyron – THE FASTEST AND MOST EXPENSIVE PRODUCTION MOTOR CAR EVER BUILT BY MAN. Dude, pull over and get your cell phone later. Dumb ass.

TAMPA, Fla. - Florida police say a man arrested for repeatedly calling 911 looking for sex claimed it was the only number he could dial after running out of cell phone minutes. Tampa police said 29-year-old Joshua Basso made sexual comments to the 911 dispatcher and asked if he could come to her house. Investigators say she hung up, but he called back four more times. Basso reportedly told officers that he didn't think he would get in trouble for calling 911.
**Hey, that’s really using the old bean there, Josh. Calling 911 asking for sex? What could possibly go wrong? Tampa Police released this transcript:
Operator: Tampa 911. What is your emergency?
Basso: Hey baby, it’s Josh. What are you wearing?
Operator: Excuse me, sir?
Basso: Are you wearing that pink thong I got you for Valentine’s Day?
Operator: Sir, this number is reserved for emergencies.
Basso: But I am having an emergency…in my pants, baby!! Yeah!!
Operator: Sir, if you do not have an emergency, I will have to disconnect.
Basso: Don’t disconnect baby. Can you still do that little trick with your tongue…
Operator: (click)

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin rubbed shoulders with rappers and was hailed with "respect" in a television show Friday that could help boost his flagging ratings. Putin, wearing a turtleneck sweater and jacket, went on stage to present awards to participants in "Battle for Respect," a hip-hop music contest run by Muz TV, a Russian rival to MTV. A presenter told the audience of about 100 young rappers in a makeshift television studio in an abandoned Moscow factory building that he wanted "smiles to stay on your faces throughout the evening." Putin's carefully orchestrated image also include bare-chested photos on fishing trips in Siberia, appearances with rare animals such as Siberian tigers, leopards and beluga whales and encounters with fringe social groups like bikers.
**I am not sure which is more bizarre – the fact that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin attended an awards show for Russian rappers, or that Russia even has a rap scene at all. With his turtleneck and jacket, Putin apparently has much to learn about hip hop clothing. Of course, the addition of a huge gold medallion and a jewel-encrusted crunk cup might have made all the difference. I think my favorite part of Putin’s appearance is the fact that he was speaking in front of 100 people in an abandoned Moscow factory building.
(Putin to himself): “Man, who booked me in this shithole? I’m going to kill Morty when I see him.”

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A plant that converts cow dung into energy for homes opened in the Netherlands Friday. Manure from cows at a nearby dairy farm will be fermented along with grass and food industry residues, and the biogas released during the process will be used as fuel for the thermal plant's gas turbines. The heat generated will be distributed to around 1,100 homes in the area around Leeuwarden in the north of the Netherlands, the plant's operator Essent said in a statement.
**GOOD NEWS: You are on the cutting edge of the biofuel revolution.
BAD NEWS: You live next to a plant which ferments cow manure and rotting food industry waste. Good luck selling that house.

Taking Care of Business - In Second Life

London, England (CNN) -- As travel budgets are squeezed in the recession, companies are increasingly seeking innovative ways of bringing employees together for conferences and meetings remotely. Virtual community Second Life is seeking to tap into that market by creating a new tool that allows businesses to have virtual meetings on their own computer networks.
The company's Enterprise tool will let employees' avatars -- animated alter egos -- meet in virtual worlds from the privacy of a company's own network, rather than the public networks used in standard Second Life.
**I am officially in mourning today. Who died? Face-to-face interaction between two human beings. If you are not familiar with Second Life from Linden Labs, it is essentially an online community of user generated computer people (called avatars) who explore and live in a huge computer generated world which includes homes, nightclubs and other spots for avatars to congregate. That was all fun enough until someone, presumably a marketing person, decided to blur the line between Second Life and Real Life.

I should begin by explaining to the uninitiated that users of Second Life generate their own avatars and make them look however they want. So, if I want my avatar to have a human torso, a goat head and zebra legs – there’s an app for that. You get the picture. Of course, users may also generate avatars which resemble regular human beings in every way. With that in mind last year, a Real Life clothing store chain became what I believe was the first corporate entity to open a business in Second Life. The store sold clothing through a computer generated retail outlet, not for users but for their avatars. And here’s the clincher – users pay Real Life money. Ok, how disconcerting is it that I am wearing a $40 pair of jeans while my avatar is rolling in some $300 designer threads I could never afford in real life?

But wait, there’s more. In 2008, a British couple (or I should say their avatars) met in Second Life and struck up a romance online. The couple subsequently met and married both in Real Life and in Second Life. Some time later, the wife suspected hubby was involved in some extracurricular activities so she had a girlfriend make an avatar and go into Second Life to see what hubby was up to. Sure enough, hubby’s avatar was knocking virtual boots with another female avatar in Second Life. The couple eventually divorced in Real Life.

This is all crazy and ridiculous enough, but this new development of conducting business meetings in Second Life is just too weird for me. I thought the purpose of Second Life was to provide an escape from one’s Real Life. According to Second Life developers, 14 companies currently use the environment to hold online meetings and brainstorming sessions – including IBM and the US Military.

Maybe I am just at that age where new technology coming out seems really superfluous and stupid to me. Ok, I understand the advantage of saving travel time and budget by meeting in Second Life. I get it. I understand the novelty of it, but I just can’t help thinking I would be distracted in the meeting by Todd from Accounting, who happens to be half iguana-half werewolf.

There is a file sharing capability which is pretty useful, and avatars are able to collaborate in real time on projects in Second Life. So, I suppose there are some legitimate possibilities to conduct business in Second Life, but it’s still a really freaky thing to do.

Fort Hood shooter insane, not extremist

I feel kind of bad for American Muslims. They routinely take a beating from the press and public and this latest incident at Fort Hood with Maj Nidal Malik Hasan couldn’t have come at a worse time. It was only a few weeks ago that Jordanian immigrant Hosan Smadi was arrested in Dallas after an FBI sting operation in which he attempted to detonate an explosive in the garage of Fountain Place downtown.

I have no doubt that 99.99% of American Muslims have nothing to do with these kinds of attacks, and I am fairly sure they are just as outraged as non-Muslims. Condemnation of these events by Muslim leaders is nothing new, and clerics across the nation were quick to distance themselves from the deadly assault by Maj Hasan. Muslims have a real PR problem on their hands.

In true American reactionary style, the news media and paranoid bloggers were quick to conclude that Maj Hasan’s attack on soldiers at Fort Hood was a terrorist act. First of all, Maj Hasan was born and raised right here in the US. The fact that he happens to be Muslim is an unfortunate coincidence. Let’s honest, if Hasan were Methodist or Jewish, would we be so quick to draw conclusions about his motives? Did this terrible tragedy occur because Maj Nidal Malik Hasan is Muslim? No. This happened because Maj Nidal Malik Hasan is patently insane.

Consider his line of work. Maj Hasan is a psychiatrist who specializes in dealing with soldiers suffering from psychiatric disorders related to their combat service overseas. So, he sits in an office all day every day listening to one soldier after another tell him the grisly details of their tours in the Middle East and the unspeakable things which occur in the heat of battle. That’s enough to push anyone over the edge. After seeing firsthand the psychological damage inflicted by military service, Maj Hasan was understandably upset over the news that he was about to be deployed to Iraq. I suppose his fear might have been that he would end up on the other side of the desk talking to a mental health professional himself.

I understand the anxiety a soldier must feel about being deployed to a war zone. It must be terrifying. What I do not understand is how a person goes from, “I’m scared about being deployed” to “I’m going to shoot up my base and kill my comrades.” No, Maj Nidal Malik Hasan did not go jihadi – he went old-fashioned postal.

My only beef with the Muslim community is their lack of initiative in trying to prevent attacks like these. Sure, Muslim leaders publicly condemn these events and pray for the families of the victims, but are they doing anything within their own congregation to try and identify those who might be prone to doing this kind of thing? I don’t even know if that is possible, but I think they could at least do something. Condemning an act in the media is one thing, but actually doing something about it is another.

Major Nidal Malik Hasan is an insane sociopathic killer, not a Muslim extremist. Let’s not jump to conclusions here.

Make mine Well Done, please

New York (CNN) -- Two people have died and 28 people have fallen ill with matching strains of E. coli after an outbreak in ground beef, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Sixteen of those people are in hospitals and three have developed kidney failure as a result of the contamination, the CDC said late Monday. The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced last week that Fairbank Farms in Ashville, New York, was recalling more than half a million pounds of fresh ground beef products that may be contaminated with a strain of E. coli, a potentially deadly species of bacteria. The products subject to recall were sent to retailers including Trader Joe's, Price Chopper, Lancaster and Wild Harvest, Shaw's, BJ's, Ford Brothers, and Giant Food Stores. The exact products affected are listed on the USDA's Web site.
**In the ten months that I have been posting to this blog, I have noticed a few themes which appear over and over again in the news. Like food safety, for example.

It began on January 15 with an announcement by the Kellogg Co. that consumers should avoid eating their peanut butter crackers because of possible salmonella contamination. The scandal became a HUGE story as the death toll mounted and the sordid tale of Peanut Corporation of America came to light. A couple weeks later came sound bite nirvana with the quote from Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, who asked the age-old question, “What’s more sacred than peanut butter?” Indeed, Senator.

February 23 saw the recall of the Simply Potatoes line of pre-processed potato products (designed for lazy people who cannot cut their own potatoes) due to contamination from listeria monocytogenes, which cause flu-like symptoms. In March, Union International Food Company recalled its Uncle Chen line of Asian-inspired spices citing salmonella contamination.

Now, half a million pounds of ground beef have been recalled that have been contaminated with E. coli. Two people have died and 28 people have been sickened by the tainted meat. Where does E. coli come from? Well, I am no epidemiologist, but I’m pretty sure it comes from poo. Let me just say from the beginning that if you are purchasing and consuming a line of meat products called “Price Chopper,” you should probably expect some explosive diarrhea from time to time. By the way, Giant Food Stores was also ground zero for the Uncle Chen Chinese spice thing, so if you have a Giant Food Store near you, I would consider another grocery store.

I am carnivore. Few things please me more than a juicy steak that has just the right amount of tasty pink goodness right in the middle. I don’t ask for rare steaks or burgers in restaurants anymore because I started getting that look of horror from the waiters. It was as if I was taking my life in my hands. Cheeseburger Russian roulette. That being said, I do understand the desire of some people to forego meat in favor of veggies. Over the years, I have wrapped myself tightly in a blanket of denial about where meat comes from. A steak is just a steak. It was never a cow who was confined to a small pen and force fed while it stood in its own filth. It was never an animal who lined up with other animals to go into a processing plant and be jabbed in the forehead with a pneumatic metal rod that pierced its skull and killed it instantly. It’s a steak, not a cow. I turn the same blind eye toward pork, chicken and seafood. I try to clear my mind of all those things before I sit down to a Sunday chicken dinner.

Like it or not, human beings are at the top of the food chain, and I think that entitles us to kill and eat whatever we want. Of course, that also entitles us to occasional bloody diarrhea and possible death. I don’t know that being vegetarian is any safer than eating meat anyway. Don’t forget that veggies have had their fair share of PR problems in recent years. Lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, peppers, cilantro, potatoes and peanuts have all been linked to food borne illness. So, what is a hungry apex predator to do? I don’t know. Grow your own food, I guess, or eat processed food and roll the dice.

Americans are hapless victims of our own prosperity. Consider the fact that, if I want a steak, a simple trip to the neighborhood market is all it takes. If I had to find a cow, kill it and somehow try to shear a steak from its quivering carcass, I would be screwed. I wouldn’t even know where to look. Yet, that is how most of the world gets their meat. Decades of economic stability have lulled us into complacence about the darker side of our food supply. I am sure that a closer examination of the dark side must be traumatic, though. My father, who worked at a meat processing plant in college, is 68 years old and will not eat hot dogs to this day. He doesn’t talk about it either. I think he is having some kind of wiener-related PTSD, like he was a chopper pilot in Vietnam. I’m not sure what all the fuss is about – I think hot dogs are darn tasty. I just don’t care to know how they are made, or what they are made of. It’s just a hot dog (enter blanket of denial).

I am not going to rehash my rant about the FDA and the USDA in this post. It is sufficient to say that the whole food processing industry and the government agencies which regulate it are in dire need of an extreme makeover. The United States is one of the most affluent countries on earth. Our citizens deserve a safe, reliable food supply so that we can continue our reign as the fattest people on the planet. (Note: The State Fair of Texas recently concluded its annual three-week run which, this year, saw the introduction of Fried Butter. Yes folks, we’ve found a way to make butter more unhealthy.)

Life Sized Transformers?...Girl Repellant

From iReport.com:
This year for our Halloween display, we built two Transformers for our front yard. One is Optimus Prime, 17ft tall and the other is Bumblebee, 12ft tall. We live in Cleveland, ohio and there are always a ton of people coming over taking pictures and asking about how they were made. They are made from wood and foam and it took 6 months to build Optimus and 2 months to build Bumblebee. This is a display you won't want to miss!
**You know who isn’t coming over to see your Transformers? GIRLS!! You guys are never, ever ,ever ,ever ,ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever getting laid…ever.

(CNN) -- Smartphone cameras are pretty basic. Often they won't zoom. They don't have aperture settings. Usually there's no flash. But thanks to a growing slate of photography apps, simple mobile-phone photos can be transformed into interesting pieces of art. They're the new Polaroids -- far from high-end but offering a sort of irreverent charm.
ShakeItPhoto: $0.99, iPhone
Miss the days when you could "shake it like a Polaroid picture?" Well they're back with the ShakeItPhoto app for the iPhone. On ShakeIt, the photos you snap appear to slide onto the screen of your camera without having been developed. Then -- just like in the days of Polaroid -- you shake your phone to develop the images. Bonus: The apps color scheme gives a nice '70s tint to your photos.
**Stop for a moment and consider how difficult it is to create a digital photo. First, there must be a fully functional camera encased entirely within your cell phone. Then, the camera must convert an analog image into a mind-bendingly large series of “1”s and “0”s that a computer can understand. Lastly, the computer sends that HUGE code to the ShakeIt photo application so that it can be made to look like a crappy, yellowing Polaroid photo from the 1970’s. As a person who grew up in the 70’s, I can tell you that Polaroid photos were shitty back then, and they’re particularly shitty now. Why would a developer go to the effort of turning a modern technological marvel into an artificial, contrived version of something crappy from 30 years ago? We have this unbelievable technology that is changing everything about photography and media…and this is what we’re doing with it?!? That’s like having Optimus Prime transform from a gigantic, futuristic robot warrior into a beat-up 1977 Pinto (see how I worked that last story back in?).

Zebras at the Marah Land Zoo

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Gaza City zookeepers have found a creative way of drawing crowds to their dilapidated zoo — by painting their donkeys. The Marah Land Zoo's only two zebras died of hunger earlier this year when they were neglected during the Israel-Hamas war. The popular animals were too expensive to replace, so the keepers decided to design a pair of donkeys with black and white patterns instead. Aside from the two 'zebras,' the zoo also flaunts an aging tigress, two monkeys, and a selection of birds, rabbits and cats.
**Decades of armed conflict in the Gaza Strip have, no doubt, taken their toll on the municipal services available to local residents. Considering the zoo’s only two zebras perished due to malnutrition, I would have thought that would give zookeepers pause to consider whether Gaza is an appropriate venue for a zoo at all. I assume that at some point a regular zoo becomes a “petting zoo.” It sounds like this one is well on its way with a menagerie of birds, rabbits and house cats. In 2010, the zoo will unveil its latest exhibition- a poodle and a goldfish. So, rather than replace the fallen zebras or abandon the exhibit altogether, zoo officials hired a French painter to literally paint a pair of donkeys with black and white stripes. WHAT?!? Look, 30 seconds on the internet would let any student in Gaza know that actual zebras look nothing like the “zebras” in their zoo. I guess I can appreciate zoo officials wanting to give school children the experience of zebras, but they woefully underestimated the sophistication of kids today, and turned this whole thing into an embarrassing farce.

A Southern California sperm bank has taken to matching its donors to the celebrities they most resemble, putting an actual image to a process that previously had prospective parents sort through an often confusing jumble of printed characteristics, from ethnicity to eye color. The matching of sperm donors to famous people is far from an exact science. Instead of using sophisticated face-recognition gear, Brown and a panel at the Cryobank simply put pictures of their existing roster of sperm donors up on a big screen while they vigorously debate who the person most looks like.
**I have said this time and time again – just because we can doesn’t mean we should. I am old enough to remember the miracle of IV fertilization (we called them “test tube babies” back then). This is a technically sophisticated, highly scientific process that is an achievement of modern medicine. So, how do the staff at the sperm bank decide whose donor sperm are most likely to produce a baby resembling a celebrity? DNA profiling? Facial recognition? No, friends – the staff sit around and debate among themselves who the donor most resembles while looking at a picture of the actual donor himself. Yes, this is about as far from an exact science as anything I can possibly think of. Your chances of getting a baby who looks like Brad Pitt would probably be better if you chose some sperm out of a hat (metaphorically speaking, of course).


LAWRENCE, Kan. - Police in the Kansas college town of Lawrence say they have arrested a 21-year-old man who stole an ambulance to get home after a night of drinking. Lawrence Police Sgt. Susan Hadl says the ambulance crew parked it early Sunday while responding to a medical emergency in an area filled with bars and specialty shops. Hadl says the man was intoxicated and believed he had no other way home. He led police on a brief, low-speed chase. The man was arrested on charges of theft of the ambulance as well as driving under the influence.
**In my years of heavy drinking, I did some pretty stupid things, but I never did this. I guess my question is how wasted do you have to be to think this is a good idea? I wonder if he had the lights and sirens going…

PITTSBURGH - A suburban Pittsburgh man slept soundly as his home caught on fire and partially collapsed. It wasn't until firefighters did a walk-through of the home more than two hours later that he woke up. Firefighters were initially unable to search for victims because part of the roof collapsed. After controlling the fire, firefighters walked through and found the man in a bedroom. Reubi says it appeared the man had no idea what was going on.
**Man, I haven’t slept like that in years.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - "D'oh!" doesn't even start to cover it. Marge Simpson -- the blue beehived matriarch of America's most loved dysfunctional family - is Playboy magazine's November cover, the magazine said on Friday. Simpson, tastefully concealing her assets behind a signature Playboy Bunny chair, is the first cartoon character ever to front the glossy adult magazine, joining the ranks of sex symbols like Marilyn Monroe and Cindy Crawford. Playboy said the cover and a three-page picture spread inside was a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the "The Simpsons" and part of a plan to appeal to a younger generation of readers. Scott Flanders, the recently-hired chief executive of Playboy Enterprises, told the Chicago Sun-Times in an interview that the Marge Simpson cover and centerfold was "somewhat tongue-in-cheek."
**I have been a huge fan of The Simpsons since they premiered in 1989, and it is no secret that the (presumably male) animators have endowed Marge with huge boobs and a nearly perfect body – all that despite Homer’s ghastly form. Over the years, the show has consistently shown as much of Marge’s nude body as they can get away with on network television. Still, it is more than a little weird that men all over America will be getting hard-ons over a cartoon. Sure, Marge’s body is stellar, but I must again reinforce the fact that MARGE SIMPSON IS A CARTOON!! With Marge’s trademark blue hair, you’ve got to wonder if the carpet matches the drapes…interesting. Strangely, Marge Simpson is hardly the first cartoon female to be drawn with exaggerated female features. Saucy cartoon portrayals go back to the very first animated characters to hit the screen – Betty Boop, for example. More recent examples include Jessica Rabbit, Ariel the Little Mermaid, Lois Griffin from Family Guy and Amy Wong from Futurama (another Matt Groening creation). That’s the difference between men and women – men cannot distinguish a real woman from a cartoon as far as their unit is concerned. I think men are just as likely to get wood from a Marge Simpson centerfold as they are from an actual woman. Sad, but that’s biology for you…predictable as always.

Mandela, Mother Teresa, Dalai Lama...Obama?

From most reports, America’s love affair with Barack Obama is beginning to lose its luster. I remember clearly around January of this year – Obama was the golden boy. The answer to all of America’s problems and the fruition of the dreams of many African Americans. In nine short months, Obama and America have gone from staying up all night talking on the phone to barely being able to sit in the same room together. Ah, fickle Americans..will we ever be happy?

Today, Barack Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. From a news conference in the Rose Garden, Obama said, “I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership.” I wondered how many other American leaders had won the prize. As always, I turned to the internet for real answers. Among them are Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger, Martin Luther King Jr., Woodrow Wilson, and Teddy Roosevelt. So, Obama is definitely in good American company.

In his signature self-deprecating style, Obama downplayed the announcement, saying he felt as though he did not belong in the company of past winners. True, when you look at the list of previous winners, his name doesn’t really jump out. I mean we’re talking about people who have changed the world forever – Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Mother Teresa. I just don’t know that Obama fits that bill from an international standpoint.

Curiously, nominations for the prize had to be postmarked by February 1 -- only 12 days after Obama took office. The committee sent out its solicitation for nominations last September -- two months before Obama was elected president. "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," the committee said. "His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population," it said. Man, this committee is gushing over Obama like teenage girls at a Beatles concert. Americans are keeping a distinctly cooler tone given Obama’s plummeting approval ratings lately.

It will also be interesting to see what Obama does with his Nobel Peace Prize cash. Oh yes, $1.4 million USD, baby! I think Obama should do it in traditional American style – he should buy a Bentley and use the Nobel Peace Prize as a hood ornament. That’s how Lil’ Wayne would roll, and that’s good enough for me.