Liberals, can we riot now???

I love this picture!

The annoying headlines of the NYT

Ever check out the homepage of the New York Times and try to figure out what the stories are about? Well, you'd never know by looking at the headlines. You see, NYT readers are sophisticated enough that they don't need to know exactly what the stories are about... the mere impression will suffice.

Check out today's list of "most e-mailed stories":

1. Findings: And Behind Door No. 1, a Fatal Flaw
2. A Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity
3. Vanished: A Pueblo Mystery
4. Well: Keeping Priorities Straight, Even at the End
5. In a New Generation of College Students, Many Opt for the Life Examined
6. Asian Inflation Begins to Sting U.S. Shoppers
7. Growing Pains for a Deep-Sea Home Built of Subway Cars
8. Equestrians’ Deaths Spread Unease in Sport
9. There’s Gas in Those Hills
10. Young Obama Backers Twist Parents’ Arms

Of those 10, the only ones that make any friggin sense at all are numbers 6 and 8. I especially love the number 1 headline. What is this about door no. 1? What is "Findings"? And what's this about some kind of underwater subway car house? ARRRRRRGH. JUST TELL ME WHAT THE FUCKING STORY IS ABOUT BEFORE I STAB SOMEBODY IN THE FACE!!!!

Graphic design hell

Ever wonder exactly why foreign soccer logos tend to look so much cooler than American sports team designs? Take for instance, Gretna F.C., a small Scottish soccer club:


This design isn't necessarily "pretty" or cutting edge in any way. But it is just so tough and intimidating and cool looking. I'd be proud to be fan of that team.

Now compare that to the Atlanta Thrashers, an NHL hockey team:

It's cartoonish and corporate! It looks like it was designed without any input from fans and is about as generic a team logo as you could ever come up with. I'm sure there's some graphic designer who puts this on his resume ever day, but I can't help but prefer Gretna's logo, even if it's not cutting edge in any way. I wonder how many other sports fans would agree with me.

Why David Brooks makes me want to puke

I really hate when liberals claim they like David Brooks, on the grounds that he's a "thinking man's conservative." He's truly no different than any of the other reactionaries in the media who relentlessly bash any kind of class-based change in America.

Today's column on the days leading up to the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. is a good example. He constantly equates angry, violent poor people with the angry, violent racists in power as if there is some moral equivalence between battered, dispossessed people standing up for their rights and the reactionary, fascists elements of society that formed a bulwark against change.

Around him in the front were the sanitation workers, with their concrete demands. But in the back of the crowd there were more radical and anarchic elements.

The looting and the rioting began almost immediately. King was whisked away. Hundreds were bloodied. One was killed. The authorities were driven both by the desire to restore order and by their own racist demons.

That march was a pivot. In both the white and black communities, the forces of order and reform vied with the forces of hatred and anarchy. The latter grabbed the upper hand.

Might doesn't make right, but when people have no other recourse, of course they're going to be violent if it means overthrowing an oppressor. To say otherwise is to take the side of the club-wielding fascists who were fighting against those changes. Not everyone was equally wrong!

World's Best Dad

I would like to nominate Keith Macdonald for that honor/honour.

Pretty much everywhere, it's gonna be hot

Watch this short clip. And then repeat numerous times. It only gets funnier.

Throw McCain under the train

According to this two week-old story about John McCain on the campaign trail, the old coot "travels Amtrak like everyone else."

"Nice to see you, nice to see you," McCain said to workers and passengers who greeted him on the 8 a.m. high-speed Acela Express train.

So while he's enjoying the convenience and service of inter-city train travel, he's also the one who nearly killed funding for improving the system and has positioned himself as a political enemy of Amtrak.

But Hutchison and pro-Amtrak Democrats Max Cleland of Georgia and John Kerry of Massachusetts had to settle for supporting roles Tuesday as McCain offered an unflattering history lesson about Amtrak, which runs two routes that cross Arizona. (Link)

Here's more on McCain's history of being anti-rail. Maybe next time Amtrak employees (or riders, for that matter) see him on the Acela they should remind him where he is.

Polar bear is a publicity-addicted psycho

You've gotta love the British tabloids. They're even trashier than American ones. But what they do excel at, really, is at turning absurd news items into dry humor. Exhibit A is the Daily Mail's rehashing of a story about a "psychotic" polar bear at the Berlin Zoo.

I especially enjoyed the useful graphic and cutline:

Then and now: Left, Knut as a cuddly baby before his adoring fans, and right, as a grown-up 'publicity-addicted psycho'

Comcast promises to play nice

The world's worst corporation, Comcast, promised it would stop throttling BitTorrent. It complains that 50% of the world's web traffic is tied up in torrents. Maybe so, but since when do ISPs have the right to play traffic cop?

Deep fried craziness

As nutty as Georgia can be sometimes, it often seems like Tennessee, the current home state of my parents in law, also has its share of wide-eyed psychobillies.

Check out this wikipedia page for "Low Tax Looper," one of the most bizarre political characters I've ever heard of.

Charleston and Savannah

Di and I went on vacation last week (it was her school's spring break), so we decided to take another of our famed road trips -- this time through the good ol' cities of Savannah and Charleston.

The trip was great. We stayed in nice places in both cities and really relaxed. We saw a bunch of great stuff: mansions, art galleries, Paula Deen's restaurant, a man with two hooks for hands, some of the best karaoke singers ever, some of the worst karaoke singers ever, enough fried chicken to kill a man, mint juleps, she-crab soup, a pirate, a slave market, a rooftop bar, cobblestone streets and most of the South Carolina countryside (on the drive home we took the straightest route back to Atlanta, which meant 80 straight miles of two-lane roads).

My brother (who turned 28 yesterday) gave me a tiny Flip camera for Christmas, which we made full use of. Here's some video. The first scenes are in Savannah, but the rest of it is us visiting the Aiken-Rhett House in Charleston and then wandering the streets.

For the undecided voters

Here's a little help decided whether you want to vote for either Barack "Barry Hussein" Obama or Hillary "Angry school librarian" Clinton.

Um, no he wasn't.

For the last few years now you've seen the occasional commercial pop up with some dead celebrity endorsing it. (I believe Fred Astaire, for example, was in a Dirt Devil vacuum commercial). That's bad enough. Even worse is twisting someone's legacy into the opposite of what his life actually was.

Case in Point: These fine t-shirts proclaiming "Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican."

The Worst Hotel in the World

I love tripadvisor, I really do. The site gives you reviews mostly of hotels and resorts from everyday travelers who might or might not be sane human beings. (Usually, they're reasonable but sometimes you end up taking some of the reviewers with a grain of salt.)

Well anyway, Mrs. T-L and I are taking our first real vacation together in a while next week. We are gonna be spending a few days in Savannah, Charleston and at Hunting Island State Park (where we're gonna do some camping). I think we're staying in some really nice places.

Well at least we're not staying in what I think might be the official World's Worst Hotel, the President Inn in Washington, D.C. Here are a few excerpts from the traveler reviews:

• More Like The President Crack Den
• upon my departure I noticed small red bumps all over my body
• It was so bad, that I actually want to see the building getting bulldozed.
• I have backpacked around the world, ranging from South America to Asia and this was by far the worst place ever.
• he receptionists are nice, but at night time they are protected behind bullet proof glass (while you're left to fend for yourself).
• The lobby entrance has thick bullet resistant plexiglass surrounding the reception area.
• a variety of interesting stains of unknown origin thoroughout the room
• There is razor wire around the property. It is across from a run-down liquor store and next to four railroad tracks.

Great science fair pictures

This collection of great science fair pictures is hilarious. Kind of cruel, but also kind of endearing, I suppose.

Why Star Wars is purely fantasy

I do admit to occasionally liking science fiction. It's fun to transport our current world to some foreign universe full of interplanetary empires and alliances. Here's a sci-fi writer's explanation for why we shouldn't hold our breath if we expect humans to colonize other planets. Good, geeky stuff!

Awful NY Times trend story of the week

Pointing out the hopelessly bourgeois/sloppily "researched" trend stories of the NY Times would really be regular feature of this blog if I weren't such a lazy lima bean. Anywho, check out this trend story on how rich DINKs are discovering that their high-design lifestyles conflict with their delayed acceptance of babymaking.

Life is hard for the rich when they have to give up things like sharp-edged custom coffee tables!

When the twins became mobile, the couple realized that they would need to create a designated play space in their prewar Park Avenue apartment. Still, the room they sacrificed — the formal dining room — was tough.

Heavily armed Floridiots

Ahhh, Florida. The State Where Everyone Gets a Second Chance.

Well, not any more. There will be no second chances if you find yourselves lined up in the laser sight of a .499 caliber Alexander Arms Beowulf Elephant Gun. Apparently a sheriff department in the Orlando area is stocking up.

Some choice excerpts from this Only in Florida story:

Essentially an assault rifle on steroids, the $800 weapon has "the power to kill anything that walks, swims or crawls!" according to a 2003 product review by gunblast.com. "Everyone who shot the gun was grinning like an idiot, and muttering phrases like, 'I gotta get me one of these.'"

and

In the 1960s, an elephant escaped from a circus in Winter Park. It rampaged along Cady Way into Winter Park Pines, leaving large mementos of its presence along the street, until it was subdued and recaptured.

and last but not least

Orange County's toughest neighborhoods may not have elephants, but the deputies who work there are getting a shipment of 25-shot machine pistols.

"Matching firepower," said sheriff's spokesman Capt. Mark Strobridge, when asked why.

"Our tactical squads that are getting the weapons are dealing with the worst of the worst and those types of neighborhoods," Strobridge said of the new semiautomatic, .45-caliber Heckler & Koch machine pistols. "They're more accurate than their [regular] pistols, and they can stand back further from the bad guys."

Hot bitches!

Check out Deadspin's "coverage" of the Westminster Dog Show. Yes, the freaks from "Best in Show" actually exist.

My favorite emu band

Some hick town in Georgia that no one's ever heard of now finds itself on the veritable internet freak show map: Appling, Ga., we love you!

Emu gets lost in road.

Tucker said Thursday that a man from Wilkes County said he was coming to see if the emu was his, but he had not arrived. "We're hopeful," she said. "Emus are a difficult animal. After four more days, we will put him up for adoption."

No one knows who owns the emu. Emu gets put up for adoption.... Emu ends up on trailer park Thanksgiving table?