Random News Stories

This story happenned in the town my sister lives in:

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I wonder what it would be like to be Raul Castro

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And Pit Bulls!

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Puppy Gun

Hollywood Babylon

Here's the latest movie trend:

In "The Break-Up," Vince Vaughn breaks up with Jennifer Aniston, who works in an art gallery.

In "My Super Ex-Girlfriend," Luke Wilson breaks up with Uma Thurman, a super-hero who, in her secret-identity, works in an art gallery.

In "The DaVinci Code," Tom Hanks chases clues left by a dead naked guy who works in an art gallery.

In "The Devil Wears Prada," Anne Hathaway's new lifestyle makes her friends angry, one of whom works in an art gallery.

In "You, Me and Dupree," Owen Wilson moves in with Matt Dillon and Kate Hudson, who works in an art gallery.

In "Clerks II," one of the Clerk Guys breaks up with his fiance, who works in an art gallery.

In "Mission: Impossible III," Tom Cruise, in-between secret missions, "marries" a woman who works in an art gallery.

In "Superman Returns," Lois Lane has a new boyfriend, who works in an art gallery.

In "Pirates of the Caribbean," Jonny Depp sword fights a fish-headed guy who works in an art gallery.

This is why Mel Gibson hates Jews.

I'm Hilarious

What do you call it when you overthrow the government using small raw vegetables cut into pieces?

Cru d'etat.

Or maybe..

Coupdité

I'm hilarious.

Reach for the stars, but keep your feet on the ground

This is a display rack in a small newsstand near where I work:



Note that the sign on the rack says "Innovation Station." The picture, from my cell phone camera, is of course blurry. You're probably wondering "What kind of amazing items to they have at the 'Innovation Station?'"

Just gum and candy.

"Gum and candy with lasers? Or tiny electronics?"

Just regular gum and candy.

"Does it at least make your teeth turn blue?"

Just gum an candy. Same as they've been making in the Necco Wafer factory for a hundred years.

"I guess the 'Innovation Station' is poorly named."

Workplace Danger

T.M.B. vs T.B.B.

The Manhattan Bridge got into a fight with the Brooklyn Bridge. They slapped each other with their cables. In the end, it came down to pylons. Captain America was the referee.

Breakfast rules

I don't believe in the whole "It's 12:01, so it's the next day." thing. It's the next day when you go to sleep and get back up again. If you're up all night then the next day begins when you go to Denny's for breakfast. The only exception is New Year's Eve.

Fish and Chips

I'm thinking I'm maybe going to have some fish and chips tomorrow. And maybe some peas.

Jerry's Trees

Jerry lived in a house
with a yard and a porch.

He used to live in England,
And called a flashlight a torch.

Down in the basement,
he discovered a leak.

He then caught a duck
And cut off it's beak.

He had a white fence,
and flowers and bees,

A garage and a truck
and seventy-two trees.

Matching Lifeguards

Tattooed Baby

with switchblade

Red "Gorilla"

And a half-shelled coconut in a flower pot.

And he's smoking.

Lungs

or, Maine and South Carolina

eye

two lists

it's a list of tv shows that take place at a tv station or radio station


it's a list of movies where they made two or three at once

two lists

dick van dyke show
mary tyler moore show
frazier
wkrp in cincinnatti
sports night
newsradio
lateline
larry sanders
it's garry shandling's show
pepper dennis
studio 60
30 rock



pirates

star wars

kill bill

back to the future

matrix

lord of the rings

My wrench is pastey, goddamn it...

1001 uses

When I get a sore throat, I enjoy some applesauce. It is also good with potato pancakes, but I like sour cream better. Sometimes you can find old-timey style chunky applesauce.

Here's the news story.

"Tell me what street, compares with Mott St."

Note: C18H21NO3

Hot

Sunny Egg Day!

Two Day Blog Break!

Woo hoo!

Two-Million Dollar Fish Taco

It's got a solid gold shell, wrapped around an anodized platinum halibut. And that's not lettuce, that's shredded $10,000 bills. Manufactured by Haliburton for secret state dinners. And it's actually 46 inches long.

Randomly Chosen Blog of the Week

Blockade Boy

Vampire-Ann-Margret at Home

How to keep your building from exploding

Yesterday we had photos of the building that blew up. It's looking like the guy who owned the building, and lived there, did it on purpose and got blown up with the building. Maybe intentionally, maybe not.

A couple of weeks ago, I came back from out of town. I had been visiting my twin nieces. One is Italian, so she would have been very excited by the World Cup final, but she's only one year old so is not a huge soccer fan yet.

I get home, and there's a note on my door. The landlord had to change my locks. (even though I had given him a spare key, which he lost). There had been a gas leak! Not exactly in our building, I believe they had been doing some road work in front. They fixed whatever was wrong, but in the process, they of course had to shut off the gas for the building.

In order to turn the gas back on for the building, the gas company has to check every single apartment. I guess they have to make sure that no one came home while it was off, tried to turn on the stove, but it wouldn't come on because the gas is off, but they forget and leave it turned on, and then when the gas for the building comes back on, the gas on the stove comes on and the building explodes again. Or maybe the gas can get backed up and pop the cylinders loose...When the guy came to check my apartment later (they weren't able to check it when I wasn't there and they changed the locks, why I don't know...) anyway, when they checked my apartment the gas company guy pulled out my stove and had some liquid he sprayed around like a CSI dude...

So I guess it's going to be a while before the folks who live on the block on 62nd St. with the blown-up building will only have cold water in their showers for a while...

Now with Actual Journalism!

As you've seen in the big huge media, here and here, a building blew up in New York City Monday morning.

And Clinky was there! Not at the time of the explosion, of course, but severa hours later. Look!
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OK just a second, we have to scroll down to see the pictures in extra wideness!
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Almost there! It's gonna be good!
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Just an inch or two more (we have to get by that junk on the right. That's why I don't have a lot of links...
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The other media was there too:



More about gas leaks tomorrow!

Vampire-Ann-Margret

Amelie Wins Wimbledon

This one is for J-A.

Spider-Man is like Ann-Margret

Spider-man is unlike most of the super-heroes because his name is spelled with a hyphen. Superman, Batman, Aquaman, Sandman; all one word with no hyphen. Spider-man has a hyphen.

Ann-Margret also has a hyphen. She was born Ann-Margret Olsson, in Sweden. She was friends with Elvis. She is in the movie "The Break-up." Also with a hyphen.

Invention of the day

You can use it to write a letter. And fight Plaque.

Insert "Theme from Ironside" Here

There's nothing to see here. We're just trying something out.



I'm thinking of an album cover from 1974.

Yo-Ho! There's a new Pirate Movie!

I'm sorry to ruin it for you, but Captain Jack Sparrow ends up frozen in a block of carbonite. And Orlando Bloom has his hand cut off and it turns out his father is actually Captain Stubing.

No-Knock Warrants, Pussies, and Illegal Drugs

The Supreme Court recently upheld the legality of "No-Knock" brand search warrants. The police, when executing a search warrant, do not now necessarily need to knock. No more polite chit-chat, and "Yes, ma'am, we do have a warrant, so if you excuse us, we'll be searching your home now." Just bust down the door and commence to trashing the place.

Now, first, a word or two about warrants in general, and, as promised, pussies. By pussies, I mean those chicken-shits, who as Ben Franklin said "...would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety," and thus, "deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Now, I'm a huge fan of warrants, in general. They are the essential fulcrum between Liberty and Safety. They allow us to achieve a balance between the anarchy of complete freedom and the tyranny necessary for complete safety. They are the answer to the pussies who think that the only way we can fight terrorists is to give up our freedom. Because I'm glad to have the police search whoever they want, as long as they have a warrant. And all they need to do to get a warrant is convince a judge they have probable cause. Not iron-clad evidence of a crime, just a reasonable expectation that there's going to be something there. And judges tend to be old white men. So, contrary to what conservative talk-radio hosts would have us believe, they're not going to be crazy liberal hippies who only want us to burn flags and get gay-married. Judges want to fight crime and evil and terrorists as much as anyone. Only a huge fan of fascism would have a problem with warrants.

OK then, so on to our ostensible main topic, "No-Knock" warrants. In theory, they make sense. There are times that giving a probable criminal the courtesy of a knock and some chit-chat would give him enough time to destroy the evidence. But they are also very problematic. There have been cases where old women in the wrong apartment, listed wrongly on the warrant, get accidentally killed. Worse, there was a case where the surprised occupant of a house killed a police officer. In that case, it was proved that the killer may not have been very surprised, and he was found guilty of murder, and he sits on death row. But imagine the following. A dude sits in his house. An upstanding, law-abiding citizen. He is, like all freedom lovers, a Second Amendment enthusiasts. He sits, ready to defend his home, his property, and his family with a duly-licensed handgun. Meanwhile, a clerk at the courthouse has mistakenly typed a seven instead of a two on a no-knock warrant. Armed police officers, without knocking, burst into the house. The wrong house. It's dark, and our citizen, half-asleep, sees only armed men invading his bedroom. He shoots and kills a policeman. Is it murder or self-defense? Is it possible that no-knock warrants add an extra element of unpredictability to the job of the police? Their job is dangerous enough. Are no-knock warrants worth the risk?

And, of course, our sub-topic of illegal drugs. We quickly mentioned above the idea of "time to destroy evidence." We forgot to mention that the only type of crime that this really applies to is drug crime. Other evidence, either you're smart enough to get rid of it on the way home, or you're not smart enough to immediately destroy it when you hear a knock at the door. You can't flush or burn a gun. "No-knock" warrants are useful, really, only for drug crime. And they're dangerous, for both citizens and police. I don't think that they're entirely indefensible, but they tend to settle a little too much toward the fascist end of the scale for me. And if it weren't for the prohibition of drugs we wouldn't need them at all. So we can add that to the rise of organized crime, gangs, prison overcrowding and general wasting of law-enforcement resources on the list of things we get from the "War on Drugs."

Note: I don't use illegal drugs, never have, and I think it's stupid to keep a loaded gun in the house; you're more likely to shoot a family member than a burglar. But freedom is the right to be stupid, and I support that right for everybody. All drugs should be legal, and you should be able to own as many guns as you want.

Geek Test

Here's what I heard, that in the next Spider-man movie, he's going to fight the Sandman. But they didn't say which Sandman, the new one:



or the Golden Age Sandman:



Even better would be the Jack Kirby Sandman from the 70s. Keep those cards and letters coming!

Shiny Happy People

They drive by night

Driving home on the Fourth of July, we first drove down the Palisades Parkway from Bear Mountain. And there must have been at least a dozen cars pulled over to the side of the road. Broken down? I don't know. There seemed to be a high proportion of SUVs.

I'm sure they must have had good reasons for parking along side the highway, but I couldn't help but think "You stupid, stupid, morons."

Did I mention that I had lost my voice? So I couldn't scream at other drivers like I usually do.

But even better, we happen to be heading out of the Mid-Town Tunnel at the same time as the fabulous Macy's fireworks are going off. And people are pulled over to the side of the Long Island Expressway to watch. Lots of cars. The Long Island Expressway was lined with cars for miles, double-parked in some places. Traffic was moving good, though.

And finally, if you live in New York City, even in the boroughs, for instance Queens, you may not drive. But here's a suggestion: You should know how to get to your house by car. You may need to take a taxi home one night, and you'll need to give the driver directions. And it can be a little tricky in some places, what with the one-way streets and what not.

Required Reading

Aside from Clinky The Boy Robot, the other website you should read every single day is I Am Not Any Oprah!

However, recent evidence suggests that he may, in fact, be an Oprah...



"And I'm wearing adult diapers!"

Tomorrow is the 4th of July!

We should have kept this as our flag. That would be cool. Then we wouldn't have to worry about the flag burning amendment. No one would burn a flag with a snake on it.

Heh Heh...

I like typos. The internet is a two edged sword. The fast pace means that a lot of typos get through. But it's malleable. So typos are easily corrected. But in a lot of cases, for whatever reason, errors go uncorrected. For instance:

Read the second paragraph of this article.

You'd think they'd correct this. Because the guy couldn't have had the operation as described...

Finally! Why I Like Flag Burning!

Most of the arguments against the flag-burning amendment have already been made. A brief recap:

There's not exactly a rash of flag burnings right now.
Actual freedom is more important than the symbol of freedom.
Nice speech doesn't need protecting, only abhorrent speech.
It's impractical. (What constitutes a flag? What if it only has 12 stripes? What about bunting?)
Haven't we got more pressing problems?
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
It's stupid.

OK. There are a plethora of reasons that an amendment prohibiting the desecration of the flag is the idiotic last gasp of an ineffectual, incompetent administration looking for a way to distract us from their lack of accomplishment.

But none of the reasons above explain why this is, at its core, such an ill-conceived anti-American idea.

What is the Constitution? The Constitution doesn't have any laws in it. There's nothing in the Constitution that says you can't murder somebody. There's nothing in the Constitution that says you can't beat someone up, burn their house or steal their blue suede shoes. The Constitution is a framework. It is a set of guidelines for how to make the laws. It explains how we elect people, and those people make whatever laws they see fit, within limits. Those limits are mostly found in the first ten amendments, your friend the Bill of Rights.

The limits on the power of government found in the Bill of Rights are what make us a free country. When the government can make any laws it wants, that's tyranny. To change the Bill of Rights would be to fundamentally alter the freedom that makes us the greatest country in the world.

Again, the Constitution does not have any laws in it. So you can't just amend the Constitution to add a law that bans flag-burning. The reason that Congress can't just pass a law banning flag burning is because it's prohibited by the First Amendment. So if you want to ban flag burning, you have to eliminate the First Amendment. You might replace it with another (small "f") first amendment, but either "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech" or not.

So, in order to keep some idiot with a match and a $3 piece of cloth from hurting someone's feelings, we're going to replace the bedrock of our freedom with a hunk of painted styrofoam.

Any Senator or Representative who voted for this amendment should resign in shame.

God Bless America. (This also, technically, would not be allowed by the First Amendment, but I'm not going to be a dick about it.)

Maybe not the dumbest slogan ever, but close...

You can't really read it in my camera-phone picture but, in the ad on the back of the #75 bus, the slogan for "Sublet.com" is "Rent direct from owners." Which really means exactly the opposite of subletting. Which is when you rent from someone who is not the owner.

Don't be a dumbass

I sometimes help people with their computers. Here's what I've learned: People are stupid. People do insanely stupid things. Here are some of the things you shouldn't do:

First of all, e-mail is everywhere. Naked pictures are everywhere. Whenever you send an e-mail, assume that everyone in the world will read it. When you're writing an e-mail, imagine your mom reading it. Imagine your boss reading it. Because the second you let yourself think that an e-mail is in any way private, they will. If you let someone take naked pictures of you, assume they are going directly to the internet. The person taking the pictures may not intend for it to happen. But he'll forget to erase them, or he'll lose his laptop, or maybe he is actually a douchebag. Either way, if you're comfortable with your students seeing you naked, that's great. I endorse it. But if not, don't let him take pictures. And if he does, don't just erase them. Take the disk. Format it. Burn it. Or you'll end up on some fat sweaty pervert's giant hard drive full of porn.

Moving on; if you're stupid enough to look at porn at work, especially if you sit in a cube, there is a direct non-inverse relationship between the disgustingness of the porn you're looking at and the chances that your boss will walk up behind you. "Porn time" should be "Me time" and reserved for the privacy of your own home.

If you absolutely need to check your e-mail or update your blog on a computer that you don't own, make sure you say "Never" when it asks if you want to save your password, and be sure to Quit the browser program when you're done. (By the way, an excellent place to check your e-mail: The Apple Store.) And if you happen to stumble on to someone's "Blogger" password, a fun way to use it without the person realizing it's been compromised is to log onto other random blogs and leave the most horrific comments possible.

No matter how much a picture is obscured,some dude from CSI can unscramble it and have you stalked and arrested.

And of course, save early and often.

River House Update

C_____ just said "Snatch."

Woo Hoo! It's A Photo Gallery!

Glow-in-the-dark miniature golf, in New Roc City. They also have the slowest go-karts I've ever seen.




White suburban punks of Newburyport, MA. This is why my friends R______ and G______ live in fear.

On It!

"On it!" is the slogan of Con-Ed, the electric company in New York City. I've talked before about how the "Blogger" spell checker didn't recognize the word "blog." Apparently, it also doesn't recognize the word "on." It's a preposition.

Super-Science

Here's the thing. Sometimes a little knowledge ruins it for you. Like if you're fixing someone's laptop and you see the wrong pictures. But that's not what this is about (see previous/next entry). I'm talking about those crime tv shows, where they use science to solve crimes. I know a little about science, but I don't read the journals enough to call Bulls(clap)Hit! on the DNA stuff, or the ballistics stuff. But I do know a little bit more about digital photos, and I can't stand it when they take the blurry reflection of someone's eyeball off of a six-month-old store security video and blow it up into the small print on a car-rental contract. ("Look! If you blow up the reflection of that eyeball you can read the rider on that contract that doesn't allow a second driver! He must be lying!")

In the mostly obscured picture below, could you somehow extrapolate a full-on picture of whoever is behind the blurry closed eyes and have him (or her) stalked and arrested? I don't think so. But you never know...

Holiday Schedule

I've been sick. And I've been driving around. And they've shut off the gas in my apartment. But here's a flurry of new entries. Unless you don't read backwards. In which case, that was a flurry of entries. Eat a peach.