Lazy Cat on Treadmill

In Short: Silly CEO, It's Free!

That silly rabbit, News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch (Fox News?), was talking about how he plans to be paid for all digital content. For those of you new to the internet, digital content is generally free and news digital content is ubiquitously free, so he's having some 2 girls 1 cup wet dream that he's going to change the paradigm of the interwebs.

"Quality journalism is not cheap," he said.

My immediate thought was: Okay, so how much is your kind of journalism then?

Glenn Beck: Choose Research, not Gossip

Indie band Gossip

This morning, in a throw away to a break, Glenn spouted the little gem that the origin of the word gossip comes from kings needing to know what the people were thinking, and so sent their minions to pubs and taverns with the instructions to "go sip" here or there. And that turned into "gossip."

Right. And back then most weddings happened in June because people bathed once a year in May...

Anyone who has been on the internet more than five minutes should know that research into historical or etymological claims is a necessity. And when you have a paid research staff, foolish errors like this make you look silly.

From Word Detective, just for Glenn:

The appeal of such stories is said to be that they "make sense," but the actual origin of "gossip" makes just as much sense even if it takes a bit longer to explain. In Old English, a "godsibb" was a godmother or godfather, a person's sponsor at baptism, from "god" plus "sib," meaning "relative" (related to our modern "sibling"). Eventually "godsib" acquired the broader meaning of "close friend" of either sex, although most often a woman. Since close friends share intimate secrets and news, "gossip" (as it was spelled by the 15th century) came to mean "one who indulges in idle chatter or rumors," and the modern sense of labeling someone a "gossip" was born. The use of "gossip" to mean the rumors themselves is more recent, appearing in the 19th century.

An ounce of prevention...

And here's Gossip's "Heavy Cross"

Kidd Video: What the Hell Was I Thinking?

I used to watch a show called Kidd Video on Saturday mornings in the early/mid 80's. It was about a teenie California band that was opted by Master Blaster, leader of Flipside, through a mirror during one of their rehearsals. He pulled them through, Zod-style, into a cartoon world. Sorry, no token black in this one.



What the fuck was I thinking? For fuck's sake!

Then again, Dungeons & Dragons was also my bread & butter:



But that I can respect. Right?

Van Mural Wednesday: Flowers, Peppers, and Poison

This week's Van Mural Wednesday shows that either someone loves the nature, or is celebrating the three ingredients that keep him high:



And as promised Monday or something, here's the joy brought to me by my friend Brent (Twitter - we're still working on the website thing.)



Image from Picture Is Unrelated.

In Short: Bill Clinton Brings the Beef

How fucking amazing was it that the whole fucking world is pissing up Kim Jong Il's communist ceremonial robe about the American reporters sentenced to years of hard labor and Bill Clinton shows up to the party, a walking monument to American cajones, probably jokes with Kim, punches him in the arm, passes on a Lewinsky cigar, watches a porno, and North Korea lets the journalists go.

The right barely had time to fart afoul of the visit before the release happened. They're already back with their families!

Screw that talk about W. Bubba got some swagger and he ain't afraid to use it.

Brazil Talks Pee Pee

Today Mrs. Shambles sent me this link from CBS in which, well:

New TV ads are encouraging Brazilians to save water - by urinating in the shower.

Brazilian environmental group SOS Mata Atlantica says the campaign, running on several television stations, uses humor to persuade people to reduce flushes.

The group says if a household avoids one flush a day, it can save up to 4,380 liters (1,157 gallons) of water annually.

SOS spokeswoman Adriana Kfouri said Tuesday that the ad is "a way to be playful about a serious subject."

The spot features cartoon drawings of people from all walks of life - a trapeze artist, a basketball player, even an alien - urinating in the shower.

Narrated by children's voices, the ad ends with: "Pee in the shower! Save the Atlantic rainforest!"

Sure. Fine. I can pee in the shower and start saving myself some water money to save up for the toilet with the Pee/Poo buttons. But what made this postworthy was not the story about peeing in the shower, though it did make me giggle.

It was this unfortunate juxtaposition:



So, so wrong. Next up: a public service announcement that amateur golden shower porn actually take place outdoors or in the bathtub to save the water that would be used to clean up that stank.

New Site: Picture is Unrelated

I got a new picture for an idea for Van Mural Wednesdays (Which will appear on Wedensday) and in that discovered a site as wasteful and time-consuming as FailBlog.org.

It's called Picture is Unrelated.



Mindfuck FTW! So much wrong with this that I ask your opinions, dear readers.

Also visit Ask A Urinal for more LOLs.

Project Censored - Ignored Stories

As much as I love commenting on political commentary and opining on opinion, there are some that dedicate themselves to exposing things that are in plain sight, even if just for a moment. This is where Project Censored comes in, presenting "the news that didn't make the news." Check out their site. In the meantime, check out some clips from the most recent newsletter:

American School Segregation

For example, current research indicates that public schools in the United States are more segregated today than they have been in more than four decades. According to a new Civil Rights report, published at the University of California, Los Angeles, schools in the US are 44 percent non-white, and minorities are rapidly emerging as the majority of public school students in the US. Latinos and blacks, the two largest minority groups, attend schools more segregated today than during the civil rights movement forty years ago. Millions of non-white students are locked into “dropout factory” high schools, where huge percentages do not graduate. The most severe segregation in public schools occurs in the Western states, including California—not in the South, as many people believe. Most non-white schools are segregated by poverty as well as race. Schools in low-income communities remain highly unequal in terms of funding, qualified teachers, and curriculum.

1 Million Dead Civilians in Iraq - Confirmed

Other taboo stories include civilian death rates in Iraq and questions on 9/11. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and a professional survey company in Great Britain, Opinion Research Business (ORB) report that the United States is directly responsible for over one million Iraqi deaths since our invasion six and half years ago. In a January 2008 report, ORB reported that, “survey work confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003…. We now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000.” A 2006 Johns Hopkins study confirmed that US aerial bombing in civilian neighborhoods caused over a third of these deaths and that over half the deaths are directly attributable to US forces. Iraqi civilian death levels in the summer of 2009 likely now exceed 1.2 million.

9/11 Called Back Into Question

Former Brigham Young University physics professor Dr. Steven E. Jones and some 700 scientific professionals in the fields of architecture, engineering, and physics have now concluded that the official explanation for the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings is implausible according to laws of physics. Especially troubling is the collapse of WTC 7, a forty-seven-story building that was not hit by planes, yet dropped in its own “footprint” in 6.6 seconds in the same manner as a controlled demolition. To support this theory, Jones and eight other scientists conducted chemical research on the dust from the World Trade centers. Their research results were published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal Open Chemical Physics Journal, Volume 2, 2009. The authors write, “We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.” Thermite is a pyrotechnic composition of a metal powder and a metal oxide, which produces an aluminothermic reaction known as a thermite reaction and is used in controlled demolitions of buildings.