..: schmeeve / a blog :..

Treachery

QotD:

This dude should really just come out of the closet. He's full blown gay and this vagina based treachery isn't fooling me for one second.

Crack is Whack!

After learning just last month that Osama longed to give Whitney Houston his meat kebab, it should come as no surprise that Whitney no longer wants to be Mrs. Bobby Brown.

My bet's on irreconcilable crack differences.

During rehab last year she used the power of prayer to overcome the evils of drugs.

This time we're all praying for you, Whitney.

El Reg Breaking News

Why do you sometimes shiver when you wee?

Al Gore, Liar

SFGate:

The large number of dairy cow deaths have overwhelmed the rendering plants that normally dispose of the carcases.

"If you don't bury them, you have to deal with the stench and flies," said John Ferreira of the Cotta & Ferreira Dairy in Stockton.

The state Department of Food and Agriculture has issued a waiver in eight counties allowing animal carcases to be disposed of in landfills.

Steve Lyle, a spokesman for the department said his agency believes thousands of head of livestock have died, but he could not provide a specific number.

Mmmmm... rendering plants.

CNN

Waking up this morning, hungover and stricken with that "OMFG! what did I do last night?" fear, I popped on CNN to distract me from searching my liquor-soaked brain for evidence of something which will require me to leave the state and change my name.

Anyway, it's official -- CNN is now 100% relevance-free. So some woman got cold feet two days before her wedding and bolted on trip through Nevada and New Mexico. They've been on this shit for two days now, apparently killing time until the Pope has a fucking bowel movement or something.

The "kidnapping" story existed for only a few hours this morning, and here like 16 hours later it's the lead story on CNN.com and they've got 2 fucking videos, including her 911 call and a "how the case unfolded" dissection. They've got "experts" talking about "wedding stress."

Unfuckingbelievable. Are we this stupid? Is CNN this fucking contemptuous?

Why I Fear Bananas

Link:

If you happen to come across giant spiders in your kitchen every now and then, you might want to pay attention to this one. A British chef bitten by the world's deadliest arachnid was saved after snapping a photo of it with his camera phone.

According to a story in the Times Online, Matthew Stevens was bitten twice on the hand by a Brazilian Wandering Spider as he cleaned behind the freezer of his pub. The creature, not generally associated with life in England, is believed to have arrived as a stowaway in a box of bananas.

USS San Francisco

Had no idea we had a nuclear submarine named after our city, that is, until it ran aground today 350 miles off the coast of Guam. Charming.

And the USS San Francisco is a "Los Angeles-class" sub. Makes a lot of fucking sense to me.

Interesting bit of trivia about subs: last bastion of all-male personal in the military, cuz of the close quarters and all, and you can not wear deodorant of any kind as it interferes with the CO2 filters. I'm sure there's a lovely bouquet once you pop the top on a recently surfaced sub. *shudder*

Fox "bored" with Tsunami

Salon:

Whereas rival CNN has torn up its regular programming and dispatched an army of staffers to the ravaged region, Fox News appears to be going through the motions on the colossal story. Rather than breaking news, Fox feeds off partisan sparks. And it's hard to get angry about a natural disaster because empathy does not lend itself to outrage -- although that hasn't stopped the high-priced talking heads at Fox from trying to turn the tsunami into a contentious issue.

If the Republican National Committee doesn't have an angle on the story, then neither, apparently, does Fox News. And the last time we checked, there were no GOP talking points on natural disasters of biblical proportions. The best Fox News could do in terms of political spin was to bolster claims by the Department of Defense that the Bush administration was not slow to react to the crisis. Fox also routinely referred to the White House's "initial" aid package as being worth $35 million, not the more accurate and paltry sum of $15 million. At one point during the Dec. 31 telecast, a picture of George Bush appeared in the upper left-hand corner of the Fox News screen with the words "Stop the Bush Bashing," according to News Hounds, a Fox News watchdog site.

[...]

Mostly, though, the coverage has been nasty. Fox News host John Gibson bemoaned the fact that U.S. relief -- getting water, food and shelter to millions of destitute people -- might be part of an insurance scam to simply pay for the cost of rebuilding a resort community. "This is the travel industry, major big hotel companies," he said last week. "How is it that United States taxpayers are going to be convinced you have to build hotels in Phuket?" He worried aloud that "Thailand, Indonesia, India, the countries that got hit [will] say, 'We need dough and we need buckets of it to fix all this so Swedes can go on vacation in Phuket again.'"

O'Reilly blamed the "liberal press, which hates Bush" for criticizing his early response to the disaster, noting the initial $15 million pledge gave "secularists" an opening to go after Bush. (Secularists?) Belittling a Democratic strategist on his show, O'Reilly bellowed, "Nothing in your liberal world is going to be good enough. You guys -- you've got to get off your contempt, your hatred." Yet the only ones surrounding the tsunami coverage with hatred were the team at Fox News, which apparently feels naked without it.

O'Reilly also mocked Germany for only donating $27 million: "They're America's biggest critics, France, Germany. And they're just pounding us day in and day out. And they -- and when it comes down to crunch time, they don't have anything to give." Germany has since upped its pledge to nearly $700 million, dwarfing the U.S.'s aid package.

Meanwhile, Hannity decided that the wake of the killer tsunami was the perfect time to attack the United Nations: "The U.N. has proven themselves incapable, not trustworthy enough, to handle this or any other humanitarian effort." Hannity dismissed the suggestion of his guest, Bill Orme of the U.N. Development Program, that, "This is a time to concentrate on the victims of this troubled disaster and what we can do together to help them out first."

Of course, this being Fox News, it's not surprising that partisan pundits bungled the facts. Hannity blasted U.N. emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland for having "the unmitigated gall and audacity to lecture North America and America and the world about being stingy." Egeland did no such thing. And Fox-friendly pundit Ann Coulter accused former President Bill Clinton of attacking Bush in public for being too slow to respond to the disaster, which is patently false.

Leave it to Fox News to make the tsunami story about Clinton. And leave it to Fox to grow bored with the biggest natural disaster news story in nearly half a century.

Look, I'm not saying CNN is great, and its no big secret that Fox is the media wing of the GOP. Nor is it shocking their coverage of the biggest natural disaster in memory was turned into a despicable partisan hackfest.

But when it comes to TV news in the US, CNN's one of last places where even basic lip-service is paid to journalistic ethics AND it has at least enough viewership to have a pulse. Sure, they get it wrong -- a lot -- but CNN has a semi-reputable foundation and 20 year history which they seem unwilling to throw away. And that should be encouraged. I suppose.

Tsunami Kills 23K

Yesterday, a 9.0 earthquake in the Bay of Bengal triggered massive tsunamis killing more than 23,000 from Indonesia to Somalia to India and Bangladesh. A massive tragedy impacting some of the most impoverished places in the world. Just awful.

The ICRC has set up an aid website. Donate.

The local news here in Atlanta saw this story so important it ran it 15 minutes into the broadcast, the last story before weather. The lead story being after Christmas sales, of course. God our media sucks.

Rome

Is this what we've come to just to make people act civilized?

ATLANTA (AP) -- Airlines have offered more legroom, televisions and even martinis on flights to draw customers in a highly competitive market. In the latest unusual effort, Delta's low-fare carrier, Song, will give free tickets to passengers who are nice to one another.

Help another passenger carry a bag, stay upbeat during a difficult situation or assist a flight attendant and you could earn one of 5,000 roundtrip tickets Song will give away in June for redemption between September and November.

Earth to Dan

Why is Dan Savage writing articles for Salon about Howard Stern and his battles with the FCC?

His sex "advice" columns are often entertaining, but he never goes more than a paragraph or two without some self-aggrandizing stroking. Here, he aludes to being the "Gay Howard Stern," actually considers himself big enough to be "next on the list" (while denying doing it), and then plugs his own website all by the end of the 2nd paragraph. Nauseating.

Dan: stick to the weenies, poo-eating, and boybutt. Don't try to legitimize yourself, and I think I hear the phone... yep, it's the Rikki show again...

Karl Rove Re-election Plan On Track: Saddam Captured Alive

Seriously, is anyone really surprised by this?

Bush verbally masturbated for 45 minutes declaring "a dark era is over." The streets of Bagdad erupt in jubilation. "Operation Red Dawn!" Natch, CNN's sucking up the spin like a wet sponge. Lordy.

OK, so am I the only one who thinks we've had ol' Saddam all along and he'd been shoved in some dank dark hole until the Bushies deemed it most "newsworthy?"

The unibomber-look is a nice touch, though.

Now, about that pesky democracy thing...

Fucking PG&E

Think utility corruption ended with Enron and Dynergy? Oh, it SOOO did not.

It's bad enough we're already paying inflated energy prices from the 2000 crisis that left California with rolling blackouts and led to the eventual bankruptcy of PG&E. Not my fault (try Enron), but I sure am paying for it.

But now it looks like PG&E will get away with screwing Californians out of an additional $9.3B in inflated energy prices through 2012. In the meantime, they'll pocket and extra $326M by raising natural gas rates. Now, it's not like PG&E was a nice, generous utility before the crisis. Known for it's unparalleled greediness and poor management, it had the gaul to pay out mondo bonus packages to management days before it filed for bankruptcy. It made Erin Brockovich famous thanks to poisoning her entire town, and it was even involved in a cover-up following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, almost 100 years ago.

I feel dirty.

Rootin'-Tootin' Round Up

Several other rousin' bits or things pissing me off today (mostly the latter):

• Amazing Hubble photos of Mars [kickapoo.stsci.edu]
• They can't go home again [Salon.com]
  Poisonous politics in Texas. And seriously, if you've ever voted for Tom DeLay, send me an email. I want to meet you. You've danced with the devil.
• EPA Eases Pollution Rule at Power Plants [yahoo.com]
  "Jane, Tommy, Mommy's only 29 but she's dying of cancer so the CEO of FirstEnergy can buy another S600. Send my regards to George W. Bush."
• We're loosing the war in Afghanistan, too [Salon.com]
• The Aladdin on the Vegas strip will be turned into a Planet Hollywood themed resort [yahoo.com]
  Ugh. This SOOO won't work.

Bourbon and Mosquitos

Damn. A Jim Beam distillery in Kentucky burned up to the ground, taking with it more than 1M gallons of bourbon.

Meanwhile, a mosquito that entered my downstairs window on Friday night, then involved me in a viscous cat-and-mouse game throughout the weekend, met her end last night. After landing on the wall over the couch, poised to strike, I spotted the fucker and smashed her bloodsucking ass against the wall. Hard. The bastard got 4 good bites off of me on Friday night as I slept. Throughout the weekend, I spent many an hour stalking like Predator, constantly being teased as she would pass in front of me only to disappear -- somewhere, anywhere, watching me like a delicious platter of veins. I vowed, obsessed, and stayed up all Saturday night refusing to sleep until my seek and destroy mission was complete. Last night, I slept like a baby... bite free. And today I bought some 100% DEET Off! repellant. Sure, I'll probably grow an extra cancerous testicle, but at least I'll be mosquito-bite free.

Bottom line: I suppose I won't be saluting my West Nile virus with Jim Beam...