The Intelligence Estimate

Fox News has lost it's freakin' mind. Here are the top three stories on Fox News as of 11:54 a.m. :

Cops: Man Paints Goats, Leaves Porn to Harass NY Neighbor
Report: The Wiggles' Lead Singer May Quit Due to Illness
Britney Spears, Out With Paris Hilton, Flashes Nether Region

I never thought I'd live to see the day when Britney Spears' snatch would take precedence over the War on Christmas, War on Terror and War on Common Sense that rages over at Fox News. The Democrats run the House and the Senate so I find it VERY hard to believe that there isn't some preemptive bitching that could be done about them driving us all toward a catastrophic end and a premature rapture.

Although I will give them credit for getting the terms "Goat," "Wiggles," and Britney Spear's "Nether Regions" altogether on a "news" site.

Labels: Britney Spears, Fox News, Goats, Naughty, News, Paris Hilton, Wiggles

I love dumb headlines. Crave them. Seek them like Paris Hilton seeks attention. So imagine my joy when I stumbled up on this: "Death Row Man Glad to be Home." Really? Glad to be home? You don't miss the friendly confines of an Pakistani prison? (In a related note, do all of their prisoners convert to Christianity the way ours convert to Islam?)

Unfortunately the BBC story isn't very illustrative. So I looked up the same story on CNN. Here's the skinny as I understand it. The accused, Mirza Tahir Hussain, travelled to Pakistan to visit relatives. On the day he arrived he was picked up by a cab. (In Arab countries are all the cab drivers guys with unpronounceably foreign names like Jim and Huey?) The cab driver attempted to sexually assault Mr. Hussain and in the ensuing struggle the cab driver kinda got sorta a little bit dead.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I say let he among us who has not thought of killing a cab driver cast the first stone. (I'm no scholar of Islamic law, but if Sunday school has taught me nothing (and I'm almost certain it hasn't) it's that stoning people is the most common way of settling disputes in the middle east. That and preemptive military strikes. ) By killing his assailant Mr. Hussain was living the dream of every conventioneer who's ever paid $50 to be driven across the street only to find out that the Chili's has been closed down for the minor health code violation of finding a finger in the deep frier. (The number two way of settling disputes in the Middle East.)

When the altercation was over Hussain climbed into the front of the cab and drove himself and the dead cabbie to the police station. Just to get the full effect he drove at ludicrous speeds and took the most circuitous route imaginable. When he arrived at the police station he was so furious with the driver's service that he only tipped himself 4%.

He was promptly arrested. The Pakistani police must have been so thrilled that the means, motive and opportunity walked right into the station and left a car full of evidence waiting for them out in the parking lot. This saved them all the time they would have wasted doing all that messy police work themselves.

Hussain was sentenced to death. His sentence was later commuted to life in prison. And then, in a bizarre loophole of Pakistani law, he was set free with time served. It seems that Hussain had, at that point, already been in jail for over 14 years and the Pakistani law defines a life sentence as 14 years. It's never fully explained why life is only 14 years, but I suspect it has something to do with living between the nuclear armed Indians and the Taliban.

Upon his landing back in Britain, Hussain said, "My thoughts remain with all the prisoners I have left behind." Apparently he'd made a lot of "friends" on the inside. And that, in the end, is the bitter irony. He went to jail because he was trying to avoid being sodomized. But perhaps that is REALLY the way the Islamic punishment is meted out: one shower at a time.

Labels: BBC News, Cab Driver, CNN, Mirza Tahir Hussain, Pakistan

I had originally conceived of a blog post about this, but it is really it's own research project. More on this later, I promise you!

Labels: Explosions, Oregon, Paul Linnman, Whales

I was at a concert last night and I got a phone call from a number I didn't recognize. Under normal circumstances this wouldn't bother me, but I missed work a month or so ago because I read the schedule wrong. They tried to call me from work, but I ignored the call because I didn't recognize the number. So now every time I get a call on my cell from a number I don't know I immediately start to think I've missed work and that I'm going to be fired. You see, being fired is one of the few things I'm good at. So good in fact that I did it from two consecutive jobs in totally different fields for...well...for much the same reasons. Work Force Development called it gross negligence, I called it raging against the machine!

Anyway, I say all of that to say this, I let the call go into voice mail and then I left to go listen to it immediately. Turns out it was a satisfied, yet concerned reader. A reader who wishes to remain nameless so for our purposes we'll call her Bertha. Why Bertha? Why not? How about for no other reason than it's a good, all-purpose comedy powerhouse? The workhorse of the humor names: BERTHA!

Bertha called me because she had recently been the subject of one of my blog entries and she was worried about the adverse effect it might have on her relationship. She wanted me to consider taking the post down.

The phone call started out like this,"I just read your blog and I laughed my ass off!" Good opener. No, GREAT opener. For those of you taking note at home (as I assume everyone does), appealing to my vanity is always a good option. However there are pitfalls. Tell me I'm funny and you will have my trust. Tell me I'm handsome and you have my suspicions. Bottom line, don't spread it on too thick. I'm vain, not stupid.

But Bertha (I laugh just thinking about that name!) played it just right. She then went on to say that she worried that the blog entry might damage her relationship with the person I wrote about. This was also a stellar move because it pre-supposes 2 important conceits: 1) my little web site is highly trafficked enough that the other half of her relationship would eventually fall prey to my clever marketing and rapier wit, and 2) I have the power, using nothing more than my intellect and my wordsmithery (if it ain't a word it should be!), to do permanent harm to her relationship. This appeals to the budding megalomaniac in me.

Then Bertha (if you're not on the floor laughing at that name by now you have no soul!) went in for the kill and asked me to take down the blog post. Now, I worked at a newspaper, so I know what it's like to be edited by people who don't know or appreciate your work. Given half a chance I would tell the editor to go to hell and not bring any sunscreen. (Oddly enough THAT wasn't one of the jobs I was fired from.) But Bertha played me like a friendless 14 year old plays World of Warcraft. I had no choice but to succumb to her pleas. And frankly, if she's that good on ME who she's only known for a few months, I don't know why she's worried about her other relationships.

Labels: Betha, Comedy, Concert

As some of you may remember, I am keeping track of all the movies I see in a year. (158 at last count) Well, yesterday my friend Tyler and I did something we've been talking about for over a year: we watched all three Lord of The Rings movies in ONE sitting. Eleven hours of hobbits, heroism and leg cramps.

This isn't the first time done something like this. The night before Tim Burton released his Planet of the Apes remake my friend Mike and I rented all five original Planet of the Apes movies and watched them in one sitting. A feat we were able to accomplish because Mike's wife was out of town and my girlfriend at the time was busy working...at least that's what she said. Whatever. If she didn't want to participate in MONKEY MADNESS (Yes, that's actually what we called it!) that was her loss. Come to think of it we didn't have any women on board for the Hobbitfest either. (YES we called it that! We'd already committed to watching all three Rings movies, I don't think we sink any lower on the food chain by having a snappy title!)

That's not entirely true. Tyler's girlfriend was there for a portion of the Two Towers. She stayed just long enough to point out that the eye of Sauron looked a lot like a vagina and then she left. That totally ruined the end of the movie where Frodo stands on the end of that long phallic rock outcropping and drops the ring into the lava below causing the lava to rise and spray violently out of mount doom and ending the reign of the evil vagina. It's a weird mixture of Ansel Adams and Larry Flynt.

By the way, I think all of the unpleasantness of middle earth could have been avoided if they had just called Mount Doom something a little more inviting like Mount Sweetie or Kitty Cat Mountain or Candy Colored Rainbow of Mountainy Goodness. Problem solved.

Hmmmm...upon closer inspection I think I'm starting to see why women don't go in for these shenanigans.

Labels: Lord of the Rings, Movie Madness, Movies, Naughty, Planet of the Apes, Tyler, Vagina

"That reminds me of the time my cousin got bit by my pirhana."

Not words you hear at YOUR work place? That's because you don't work with Mr. James Smith! What made this story even better was that it came on the heels of my friend Ryan telling a story about cutting his hand peeling potatoes and my story about cutting my finger while making a cross section of a potato for a botany class. So you can see how pirhanas spring immediately to mind.

The long and the short of the story are pretty simple. When James was a kid his cousin asked if the fish would bite him. James thought that was a stupid question so he answered with a sarcastic, "No, they won't bite you." The rest is fish food.

Now, that story in and of itself is amusing, but it also follows a pattern for James life.

About three years ago he was in a drive through wildlife park in Sandusky, Ohio with his cousins. At the park they give you buckets of carrots to feed to the animals. (Although I like to think of James just carrying buckets of food with him wherever he goes. A bucket of carrots, 5 gallons of mashed potatoes, a 55 gallon drum of ribs, a palette of hot sauce...and if you've ever seen him eat it doesn't sound that far fetched.)

Now there was a brilliant wildebeest who was stalking the car the whole time. The wildebeest, we'll call him Louis, had his one carrot but he could not be sated. Louis kept after the car. "More carrots, " he pleaded. This made James angry and he refused to feed the "Greedy mofo." (I attempted to explain to him that the wildebeest was not greedy, just smart...and an animal, but James persisted in believing that it was a personal attack.) So Louis stalked the car like a ninja and when the moment was right he stole the entire bucket of carrots. James needed to be physically restrained from chasing Louis. No one, including James, is quite sure what he was going to do with Louis if he caught him but you can rest assured that nature would be taught a lesson.

Just like that damned dolphin who had the audacity to splash him when James was 11. After the show James went up to the pool and slapped the top of the water to call the dolphin over to him just like the trainers do when they feed the dolphins. So the dolphin is expecting to be fed. He surfaces by James unaware of the animal rage coursing through the man tapping the water. James punched the dolphin.

Labels: Animals, Blue Man Group, James Smith, Work

I went to Fox News to read a story about an Al Queda warning about an attack in Yemen and before I even read a word of it I clicked on a banner headline about Britney Spears filing for divorce.

Labels: Al Queda, Fox News, Hollywood, Marriage

According to an article in gay.com "scientists" at Oregon State University at working to turn gay sheep straight.

I'm gonna give that sentence a moment or two to sink in. Gay sheep, turned straight. University of Oregon. Research. Working. "Scientists." Ok? Let's continue.

Gay sheep. Before you begin any serious discussion about gay sheep (if there can in fact BE a serious conversation about the sexual preference of domesticated animals) you must first ask yourself, "How do you know the sheep are gay?" If I was forced to guess I would have to say that perhaps the gay sheep spend an unhealthy amount of time in a fraternity, but that is hardly scientific. Who had the unenviable job of sorting through the herd of sheep and determining which of the rams like to be rammed? Presumably lonely, socially awkward farm kids. In which case, didn't the sheep really just have gay thrust upon him...so to speak?

But in order for the issue to move any farther I suppose we need to conceed the point that gay sheep do exist and that that is where fabulous sweaters come from. Ok, point taken. But then the question becomes, how does one make a gay sheep straight? I'll let the gay.com article handle that explanation.

"According to the animal rights group PETA, Oregon Health and Science University experimenter Charles Roselli is medicating sheep to prevent the actions of hormones in their fetal brains. Roselli is also dissecting the brains of "male-oriented" (homosexual) rams in order to find the hormonal mechanisms behind homosexual tendencies . Once found, he hopes to change them."

Ahhhh, well, there you have it. Find out and change it. Uh-huh. There couldn't be more straight forward a scientific practice than that. Find it and change it. Perfectly clear. In fairness he's not saying that he WILL change it, only that he HOPES to change it. This seems to fall under the Bush Administration's Office of Faith-Based Science.

And what possible good could come from this tax-supported science, you ask? "According to the grant applications, the experimenters plan to extrapolate the test results to humans -- with the insidious implication that homosexuality in people can be 'cured.'"

For those of you who are keeping score of the science initiatives the Bush Administration will fund that's a NO on curing diseases with stem cell research and a YES to curing homosexuality.

Labels: Anger, Gay, Gay.com, News, Politics, President Bush, Religion, Science, Weird News

Yesterday I was reading a random blog about a 50th anniversary party. The author made reference to the couple renewing their wedding vowels. I thought this was odd but I figured to was just a typo and read on. Then it happened again...three more times: wedding vowels. By now I figure they mean to call them wedding vowels. But this poses the obvious questions, "Which ones ARE the wedding vowels?" Do you include the letter Y? How do you decide if this is one of the times? Seems pretty important, there's a marriage of 50 years on the line! This is something Strunk and White are not equipped to handle.

EPILOGUE
The blog about wedding vowels has been edited since I read it yesterday. Turns out the author posted it late at night under the influence of sinus medication. Still, why can't Y make up it's mind? Get off the fence. You're a vowel or you're not.

Labels: Comedy, Vowels, Weird News

Headline from New Zealand Herald, National News: Most Inmates Do Nothing In Jail.

Contradicting headline from Gay.com: Philly Mulls More Condoms in Prison.

Clearly these clever convicts are finding SOMETHING (or someONE) to do.

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According to the Science Daily, researcher Roger Angel at the University of Arizona has come up with a solution to global warming and I for one am shocked. Mostly because I didn't know there was any actual academics going on at the University of Arizona. The University of Arizona is routinely ranked in Playboy's list of top party schools, and I think Angel's proposed solution to global warming is evidence of that. He's suggesting that we place what is essentially a giant parasol over the world to protect it from the harmful effects of the sun. I'm guessing this replaces his original theory of replacing the ozone with SPF 15 sunscreen. And even that built off of his earlier "stay inside" research.

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Discovery Channel News: Lifespan Longer in Low Body-Temp Mice.

Question: Why are we trying to prolong the life of mice anyway? Am I the only one who remembers the good old days when all we did to mice was give them cancer?

Labels: Cancer, Comedy, Gay, News, News Round Up

The Chicago Transit Authority is renovating the Brown Line and that means building new stations. Mine is currently closed and I am taking the next one over. This has caused me to venture into new, more commercial areas of my new neighborhood instead of the strictly residential path I took to my old station.

On my old path I walked past stately mansions, quaint bungalows and the kind of aggressively friendly people the make the neighborhood watch entirely unnecessary. My new path is decidedly more urban and a lot more fun from a "stuff to blog about" point of view.

I passed an H and R Block office that had a neon sign in the window advertising their "bookeeping" services. I know this is wrong because bookkeeping is the only word in the English language to feature three consecutive sets of double letters. (If you ever win money with that information, I want half!) My wife suggested to me that they actually have a boo-keeping service. I'm not entirely sure what that is, but I imagine the demand for it drops off sharply after Halloween.

There is an antique mover that I pass everyday. I know what they mean, but I prefer to think that when they go off to a job a bunch of mummies pile out of the building and trot to the truck. I don't know why but the thought of them moving a pull-out couch to the top of a two flat amuses me.

I also pass a rather large and remarkable well-lit liquor store. The other day when I was walking to the train I noticed that, on the counter right next to the cash register, they had condoms. The implication being that in order to use one you have to apply the other. I'm sure if you ask nicely the kindly old Arab gentleman behind the counter will even show you how to put on the condom using a thin bottle of pinot grigio. Just be careful popping the cork.

Labels: Alcohol, Chicago, CTA, Moving, Taxes