News

Just for fun, let’s take a look at what has happened the last few times I’ve taken a vacation.

• Late August, 2005: I go to Europe to celebrate my girlfriend’s birthday. Katrina wipes out New Orleans.
• October, 2007: I go to Hawaii to get married. My good friend, mentor, and business partner dies of a heart attack.
• October, 2008: I go to Savannah, GA to celebrate my one-year wedding anniversary. The stock market crashes.

As far as I can remember, I didn’t take any sort of vacation at all in 2006. You should probably thank me.

I simply cannot have been the only one who watched the vice-presidential debate tonight and thought that Palin’s answers were eerily similar to this famous speech. I mean, really? Really? Nucular? Poliferation? Infastructure? Here’s a random quote I grabbed from the transcript:

John McCain, in referring to the fundamental of our economy being strong, he was talking to and he was talking about the American workforce. And the American workforce is the greatest in this world, with the ingenuity and the work ethic that is just entrenched in our workforce. That’s a positive. That’s encouragement. And that’s what John McCain meant.

It’s a shame that Biden didn’t win this debate on the merits of his arguments, because in general they were pretty good. He won it simply because his opponent failed to speak in logical, complete sentences. Here’s another good one:

I’m not one to attribute every man — activity of man to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man’s activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet.

Am I alone in asking, “WTF?”

• Stocks skidded Monday, with the Dow slumping nearly 778 points, in the biggest single-day point loss ever, after the House rejected the government’s $700 billion bank bailout plan.
• The Yankees will sit out the postseason for the first time in 15 years.
• Vanderbilt is in first place in the SEC East.

Time to start stock-piling water, kids.

Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports criticizes IOC President Rogge:

Jacques Rogge is so bought, so compromised, the president of the IOC doesn’t have the courage to criticize China for telling a decade of lies to land itself these Olympic Games.

All the promises made to get these Games — on Tibet, Darfur, pollution, worker safety, freedom of expression, dissident rights — turned out to be phony, perhaps as phony as the Chinese gymnasts’ birthdates Rogge was way too slow to investigate. …

Rogge’s ripping of Usain Bolt’s supposed showboating in two of the most electrifying gold-medal performances of these Games has to be one of the most ill-timed and gutless acts in the modern history of the Olympics.

Mrs. Greenburg said in an interview that the delay was doubly unpleasant for her Maine coon cat, Sammy, who howled through the entire experience in a pet carrier in the back seat.

The comments on these amazing photos of the Large Hadron Collider are almost as awesome as the machine.

There was a story this morning about gay marriage on LA’s 89.3 KPCC. I was infinitely more offended by the fact that reporter Kelly Wilkinson pronounced the word “rural” as “rurl” and the word “unfamiliar” as “unfermiliar” than I was about any part of the gay rights argument.

A seal has been caught on camera trying to have sex with a penguin.

“I would never had done any of this if I thought there would have been an accident.” — Jim Abernethy, Scuba Adventures

Right. Of course. You’re just dumping bloody fish chunks into the ocean and then letting people swim with really aggressive sharks. What could possibly go wrong?

One of the all-time best stand-up comedians, Richard Jeni (official page, currently down), apparently committed suicide this weekend. My girlfriend and I read about his death on Perez last night as we were getting ready to watch Rome. Just the night before, while celebrating a friend’s birthday at the Dresden, a few of us were talking about his hysterical HBO special, A Big Steaming Pile Of Me, how difficult stand-up is, and how few real geniuses there are in the field.
I still have that show on the TiVo in the guest room. It will be that much harder to delete it now.

You have to get out of bed pretty early to pull one over on the local coroner in Los Angeles.

Southern California kicker Mario Danelo was drunk when he plunged over a cliff to his death, but the cause of his death was “undetermined,” according to a coroner’s report released Monday.

He’s a football player in excellent physical health. He got really, really drunk. He climbed a large wall and fell over 100′. I don’t see the mystery here. Tragedy? Yes. Mystery? No.

A call about a possible weapon at a middle school prompted police to put armed officers on rooftops, close nearby streets and lock down the school. All over a giant burrito.

The drama ended two hours later when the suspicious item was identified as a 30-inch burrito filled with steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa and jalapenos and wrapped inside tin foil and a white T-shirt.

link via bill

PETA Ups Anti-KFC Campaign With Buckets o’ Blood
A label on the bucket says “Just for you, KFC’s suppliers cram thousands of chickens into filthy sheds, sear baby chicks’ beaks off with a hot wire, slam the birds into crates (breaking their wings and legs), slice their throats open and scald them to death while they’re still conscious. Enjoy.”

The buckets are reminiscent of the “Unhappy Meals” PETA began distributing in 2000 as part of a public relations assault against McDonald’s. The boxes, similar to the Happy Meals that McDonald’s serves to children, contained a stuffed doll that looked like Ronald McDonald holding a bloody butcher’s knife.

Your homework project:
Compare and contrast the information contained in the article quoted below with Keats’ assertion (poetic, true, but an assertion nonetheless) that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

NBC is planning to make a movie about Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the rescued American POW, even if it doesn’t get her permission. Can the network do that? Doesn’t NBC need to buy the movie rights to her life?

Yes, it can, and, no, it doesn’t - so long as NBC sticks to the facts.