Let's all get up and dance to a song

From the USA Toady:

Pfizer finds no proof Viagra causes blindness
NEW YORK (AP) — Pfizer (PFE) said Tuesday a review has concluded that Viagra doesn't increase patients' risk of blindness but that it is still working with federal regulators to update the drug's label to reflect rare reports of vision loss.

Last month, the Food and Drug Administration said it had 38 reports of blindness caused by a condition called NAION, or non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, among users of Viagra.

I dunno anything about "ischemic neuropathy," but I knew obvious stuff like this years ago. Of course, back then we didn't have any fancy college-boy acronyms like NAION ... we just called it "Shaking hands with the boss."
Jeez, didn't anyone at Pfizer have a mother to warn them about this?

Yes if I know the truth. How 'bout you?

News Flash: Bono is a complete hypocrite? No shit...

So lemme see if I've got this straight: The self-important band U2's even more self-important singer Bono has been campaigning worldwide for years to pressure wealthy nations to forgive the debts of shoddily-run third world nations... but when someone takes his hat, the gloves are off? What a fucking assbag hypocrite.
Come on Bono, where's your solidarity with the downtrodden working man now?

Hey Bonobo, when Gambia takes the hundreds of millions of dollars YOU give them for food or education and spends it on fighter jets and presidential palaces, then we can talk. Until then put your damn pants back on and shut your fat mouth.

They stab it with their steely knives

Absolutely brilliant.

This is a much better response to the asshatted Supreme Court ruling on property rights than violent revolution or any of that type stuff. While it should help to focus some attention on the problem, it still doesn't completely stave off GTA: New London.

The icing on the cake is the originator of the project sharing a name with one of our best legal minds: Clarence Darrow. It's damn near karmic, even. If this project goes through, it's even more fitting that the Code Enforcement Officer in Weare is named "Meany."

I'm calling my travel agent tomorrow. I want to get a good room for the grand opening of this place.

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Update: More asshattedness, this time from the House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi. Several other bloggers put it best with "How hard is it to say 'I don't know?'"

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Update II: Editorial from the Pittsburgh Tribune Review.

Your words can crush things that are unseen

Looking over the front page here, I've gone off on a rather political bent. Therefore, in order to keep all my reader(sic) from going over to talk about boobies with the Aussies, I should make fun of some athletes or something.

Enter: Jeremy Roenick.

Holy crap, can you come up with a worse thing to say to hockey-deprived fans than "Don't watch. Don't come. We dont' want you." How about a little fucking gratitude for the people that have stood up for the game for over a fucking year while you selfish prigs sat on your asses and got nothing done? You've pissed and moaned about salary caps and how they'll ruin the league, when the blame belongs squarely on your own shoulders.

You want to know where the money that pays your salary really comes from Jeremy? It comes from TV. The TVs that fans watch, and loyally at that. The same fans you're now badgering into not watching. No fans watching means no money for your dumb ass.
The league was in a great position a year ago, with viewership starting to gain momentum. It even looked like the league had fully recovered from the short season a decade ago... but you threw it all away because you didn't want a salary cap. And now what are you signing? A shittier salary cap. Congratulations, you deserve it.

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Update: I'm pretty sure any virus problems were on my machine to begin with - click with impunity, my friends!
Those damn kids and their interwebs...

Our house was our castle and our keep

Just in case you thought you really owned all your posessions... Surprise!

God bless the people in New London that just lost land their families have occupied for decades. Maybe that shiny new hotel would give them a job in the gift shop. It might comfort them to know that even though they can't go home again... at least they could shop there.

The frightening thing is that it's not isolated to Connecticut. Before the ink was even dry on the Zimbabwean Supreme Court decision, Freeport Texas was already gassing up the bulldozers to demolish a seafood processing facility to make way for a private marina. How much more elitist can you get? Run blue-collar jobs out of town so that some fucking snowbird can park daddy's yacht a little closer to the hotel.
The biggest hypocracy comes a few paragraphs down where the city's director of financial development claims that the new hotel would bring 150 to 250 jobs... hey Brainiac: how many jobs are you running off by razing a couple of large food processing facilities? And furthermore, how much better is the pay in a food-packing plant compared with foodservice or housekeeping in a hotel?
The city council needs to take a hard look at changing the name of the town, because "Free" is the last thing you should be calling it.

Similar things are happening in Chicago and San Diego as well.

From the original article:

City Manager Richard Brown said he expects more lawsuits, but believes the land fight is over and doesn't expect a showdown when bulldozers arrive in the neighborhood. Landowners in the lawsuit, however, pledged to continue their fight.
"It's a little shocking to believe you can lose your home in this country," said Von Winkle, who said he would battle beyond the lawsuits and fight the bulldozers if necessary. "I won't be going anywhere."

How many people want to take bets on another "Roby Ridge" breaking out? It might not happen in New London, but it's only a matter of time before someone puts their foot down and asserts their inalienable right to life liberty and pursuit of property.
Don't get me wrong, I certainly don't want to see people getting hurt. I do, however, put a lot of stock in the "Four Boxes" philosophy of dealing with the government, and it looks like the first three have failed these people. Most folks can't really look at things in the long term when an overzealous alderman is staring at their home over the top of a bulldozer blade. Paitence tends to evaporate pretty fast in that sort of situation...

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Update: I just stumbled onto the Eminent Domain Watch site while reading up on the proposed Lost Liberty Hotel. Not surprisingly, I'm not the only Texan who's pissed about the prospect of city governments becoming claimjumpers. (I always liked that word... I so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence.)
Rep. Frank Corte Jr. (R-San Antonio) is proposing a constitutional amendment to limit the instances in which eminent domain can be used, and will ask Gov. Perry to add it to the special session so that it may appear on the november ballot. It might not happen in time to help the shrimp facility in Freeport, but it should keep another one of these landgrabs from happening again. More details here.

Find my nest of salt, everything's my fault

And the hits just keep on coming!

Billy Yates has a great post about Sen Turban's weasel impression this week. Go get yourself hip to the lingo all the cool kids will be sportin' at recess on monday.

(Tipoff courtesy of Michelle Malkin)

All in all is all we are

I've held off commenting on Dick Turban and his dumbass "G'itmo is a Gulag" comments until now because he's just trolling for publicity. His stupid remarks were no different than a troll on a message board or chatroom that says something outrageous to draw attention to themselves, and I try pretty hard not to encourage those types... sometimes I even succeed.

But senator Turban's halfassed "apology" yesterday has really gotten me pissed off. True, it's just the next link in a long chain of slimy non-apologies from the left that blame the offended for being insulted... but Durbin's pseudo-apology was an odious new low. The meat of his rapid backpedaling was this weaselly comment:

"I'm sorry if anything that I said caused any offense or pain to those who have such bitter memories of the Holocaust, the greatest moral tragedy of our time," he said, adding, "I'm also sorry if anything I said in any way cast a negative light on our fine men and women in the military."

"You know, because I wasn't sure if comparing enemy combatants (who continue to avow their desire to kill as many Americans as possible) sitting around eating rice pilaf in their air-conditioned cells to entire cities of people being rounded up and packed like human cattle into rail cars then thrown in ovens or gassed to death just because of their religious faith would really offend anyone's sensibilities."

"I'll also admit that I have absolutely no idea if comparing the men and women of America's armed forces to the mad regime of Pol Pot, who killed over 1/3 of his country's population during his reign of terror, would be casting them in a negative light... but if it did, then I guess I'm sorry or something."

Fuck you very much, Dick Turban. The good people serving our country at Guantanamo Bay have sacrificed far too much to put up with name calling by the likes of you. And fuck the DNC friends of yours you rode in on. You know the ones I'm talking about... the ones who were howling long and loud on the senate floor for over a week because Trent Lott said something nice at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party.
Senator Lott was forced to step down as majority leader because of all the negative press and calls for his resignation he recieved from the democrats for the insensitivity of his remarks. I think America's Jewish, Cambodian, and former Soviet state communities might have something to say about the insensitivity of Senator Turban's comments.

Oh hey, whaddya know... They do. Well some of them, anyway. You wouldn't know that by the mainstream media coverage, of course.

Just One Minute and Michelle Malkin both have extensive coverage of this. And without all the colorful language I'm so fond of using, either!

Gotta have more chips than a grab bag full of Doritos

Apparently Saddam has the munchies...

His agents hooked people's genitals up to car batteries, and we're the ones running a fucking gulag? Don't even try to spin that shit.

Myself, I blame Hans Blix. The guy's been in Iraq for years now and he can't even find Saddam a fucking Snak Pack? Hussein should be greatful he didn't end up in G'itmo... he'd be in a world of pain if he had to subsist on lemon grilled chicken and rice pilaf.

--Update--

Saddam's ravenous hunger for that zesty isosceles goodness has forced Coalition troops to start producing Doritos locally, since the butcher of Baghdad can't be bothered to wait for FedEx to deliver daily shipments. To avoid copyright issues, they're going with their own home label.

Image courtesy (i.e. blatantly ripped off) of Che*Mart, a damned funny site in its own right.

Scrappleface also weighs in on this bizarre story here.

I've seen the future, and it will be...

BATMAN!

By the great omnipotent Osmonds, Batman Begins was fucking incredible! The director, Chris Nolan, essentially took Joel Schumacher and his plasticine Bat-Nipples out behind the woodshed and beat the snot out of him with a mattock handle. Seriously, if there is such a thing as the perfect Batman movie - this is it. It is the Omega-Batflick.

Usually, I could nitpick a geek film like this apart despite all it's qualities (and believe me, I've done it before) but there will be no such thing happening today. The only thing I could even possibly complain about would be Cillian Murphy's impression of Jeffrey Combs. Even then, I've got no gripes because that's the way the character should be played. Jeffrey Combs nailed the part for the animated series, and out of either respect or fear (either one is plausible for him) Murphy is made to look like a Jeffrey Combs clone for the movie.

So in lieu of complaints, I'll offer this smart-assed comment sure to completely ruin the movie for you if you read it before you go to the theater... Highlight away if you're brave.
I think it would have been a nice homage if the scene in which Lucius Fox (played by Morgan Freeman) and Bruce Wayne are taking the tumbler on a test-drive had ended with Fox asking "You want I should drive you to the sto, Massa Wayne?"

Yes, I'm well aware I'm an ass. Thank you for your consideration.

Jock-a-mo fee-no ai na-né

In all the excitement over yesterday's media-gasm, today will certainly be overlooked. Sad really, when the "press" has all this free time now that they're not trailing Billie Jean around picking up little pieces of his face...

For those of you that left your dayrunners behind at Margarita Monday last night, I'll clue you in. June 14 is Flag Day. No, it's apparently not a major enough holiday to garnish a 3-day weekend, and used car sales, but it's an important one to me.
When I was a little Stewling, I used to give official-type people all kinds of shit for forgetting Flag Day. It would really torque me off when the flag that we had fought and died for was ignored because towels weren't 35% off. You see, Flag Day is supposed to be a Day that we set aside to honor the symbol of our nation, but since the calendar doesn't get fiddled with to give us a day off, Chester McFatass can't be bothered to pay attention.

Feel free to scroll right past this long-winded anecdote of mine. Essentially, it's the younger, more marketable version of me cracking wise and one-upping the ruling class. (If it were in a sitcom, I'd probably be played by an Asian guy and have a black girlfriend.)

I remember one year right around the time political correctness was coming into vogue, there would be special announcements for all sorts of bizarre shit at my school. Haitian Pride Day. Differently Abled Persons Awareness Day. Winter Carnival. Gay Wombat Day... you get the idea. (OK, I made that one up... we didn't have any Haitians in my school.) Anyway, Flag Day rolls around and there's nary a peep out of the office denizens. This, I decided, would not stand.
So retrieved my Union Jack from home at the first opportunity (thank you open campus policy!) and ran it up the flagpole. For a good 4 hours, nobody noticed or said a thing about our onetime foe's colors flying proudly over a government institution... until. (there's always an "until" in these sorts of stories.)
School lets out, and I'm hanging around out front waiting to see if anyone at all has their wits about them, when a Vietnam vet bus driver comes up the sidewalk fuming. I quietly follow him to the office, wishing I had popcorn for the show. One "WHAT THE HELL DO YOU COMMIES THINK YOU'RE DOING IN HERE FLYING THAT DAMN FLAG?!?!" later, and a very embarrased principal comes out and takes down my Union Jack. She's trying to apologize to Sgt. Slaughter, but he's not having any of it and I begin to fear for my colorful banner, so I step up and say "excuse me, but may I have my flag back now?"
They both turn and look at me like I just announced I was offering free circumcisions. Trying not to let a shit-eating grin creep onto my face, I explained that while every other day under the sun and some fake ones (like that Haitian scam) got special attention, Flag Day had been completely ignored, so I wanted to call a little attention to it.
The principal was pissed at first and wasn't about to give me my flag back. She said something about a district policy regarding pranks, and how she couldn't condone them... until I offered to trade her the school's flag for mine. I pulled the school's neatly folded US flag from my backpack to show her, and saw her face fall. The bus driver was pretty impressed (and so was I actually, it's not easy to fold a US flag by yourself) and he backed me up. "Aw, give the kid his flag. He's right."
For the rest of my school career, I was that guy's hero. Occasionally, I'd see him around town, and he'd always say how impressed he was about "that time with the flags." I wouldn't be surprised if I'm some sort of urban legend at the local VFW by now.

The moral of my story (bet you thought I didn't have one, did you?) is this: Take some pride in your country, America. You don't have to agree with everything we've done, but be proud of how far we've come. Because if you don't stand up for the flag, it might not be around to stand up for you.

Enjoy your Flag Day, everyone.

Just to tell you once again: Who's Bad!

A: The whole fucking lot of them.

Man, it's nice to see OJ's jury can still get work, right folks? Seriously though, it's fucking pathetic to think that even when they have multiple witnesses claiming that Mike was a regular Brian Flanagan with the Jesus Juice, Pauly, Tia and the rest of the 12 angry men can't equate that to "guilty of providing alcohol to minors." Never mind that the defense couldn't be bothered to even dispute the charges.

But enough with the scholarly analysis, let's get to the part where I make fun of the stupidity! Huzzah!

As soon as I heard a verdict would be read at 4:30, I set my alarm for 5 so I wouldn't have to sit through all the waiting to discover whatever bizarre fucking excuse / pajama ensemble that Billie Jean would be wearing to court, yet not be too late to hear the media pathetically trying to fill the empty space with "coverage." I timed it almost perfectly, of course. I had the radio on while waiting (because really, video games come before freakshows any day of the week) and I didn't have to wait 5 minutes before I heard the line of the day from the ABC announcer guy:

"Now folks, when they go into the courtroom there won't be any picture feed, you'll just hear the audio over your radios."

Thanks for the warning, Dr. Marconi. I was starting to get worried there...

On and on and on and on and on

1 week, 2 months... what's the difference?

Still, just because I said I'd take them this week, don't expect any photos until August. I've got a streak to keep going here.

Slow-motion weekdays stare me down

I'm starting to think I made a tactical error in joining the cell-phone armada.

You see, in the beginning I wanted nothing to do with cellphones and their ilk, but was forced into it by the circumstances of my situation. So I begrudgingly bought the John Heffron model that just makes calls and lets me talk to people.
That was in the fall. (or "autumn" for all you arteests / English)

Now with spring fully sprung, and summer barreling towards us, I'm starting to see a bunch of really weird shit going on around town. Shit that the world totally needs to be made aware of.

For example:

• A short gentlemen of Arabic descent with a shaved head and the top 3 or 4 buttons on his shirt undone. Seriously, if this guy's shirt was any color other than white, he'd be a 60s Batman villian. Or Captain Ahab.
  
  
• One of the Joker's henchman-mobiles. (speaking of batman...) Only this one has 23" rims with chrome spinners. How did I know they were 23" rims you ask? Simple, because he has a bigass orange 23" painted on his side windows. My new misson this week is to drive around town and find this guy so I can get a picture.
  

There's other stuff equally weird that's not going anywhere that I'll have to get pictures of as well... then we can all make fun of them together!

Been waiting and now you're sinking slow

Hey you guys. Is it just me, or am I missing something on the whole Deep Throat media glut? I don't remember ANY of this stuff from back in the day. Granted, I wasn't alive for the hubbub the first time around, but I did see the movie. I guess it just didn't cover all the little details people have been sifting through with a fine-toothed comb for 30 years... really strange when you consider that that's all they're talking about now, and there's been no mention of all the various people having sex.
Come to think of it, practically all I remember from the film is a bunch of fucking. I guess I was getting popcorn during the scenes with all the political stuff...