Wow, I thought this was a British version of The Onion, for a minute.

Tesco condemned for selling pole dancing toy | the Daily Mail
(via Joe)

Crooks and Liars » Countdown Special Comment: Death of Habeas Corpus: “Your words are lies, Sir.”

This managed to scare me more than any claim of nuculur terrurist threat that I can recall.

Sometimes the headlines on the front of cnn.com will have some dumb entertainment headlines–Paris Hilton engaged or George Clooney stubs toe or whatnot–but I cut ‘em some slack because they say they’re entertainment news as well, so.

But there’s really no excuse for this being their top feature story:

With all the crap that’s been going on recently, is a slow news day even possible? Lookit all the subarticles there, it’s like they called Madonna Day at CNN’s web office.

Two SpinnWebe things: first, I started a guest run of Scribs that will go to the end of the month, on the theme “getting ready for halloween“.

The other one’s more significant for me: I got together a standard header for all my active (and sorta active) sites and put it at the top of all of them. This is part of the reason why I haven’t been getting SpinnWebe together–I wanted to have this standard thing first, so when I make page templates I can make it a standard for all new pages. right now it’s just some cross-linking and a shill for my Dreamhost referral, but I wanna get it Ajaxxed up so it’ll show last updates on request, and whatever else I feel like throwing in.

Back in May 2005, The Living Comic had something nice to say about Scribs. The guy writing it, Occultatio (fun aside: try to figure out how you’d pronounce that), said he’s been a lurker on my site for years. It got my interest, I liked the way he wrote and what he wrote about, so I checked up on his blog occasionally.

But he hasn’t updated since November 2005, so it makes me wonder, did something happen to him? He appeared to make a big deal out of updating three times a week or giving copious apologies when he didn’t, but since then, nothing. Now his blog is slowly being corrupted, Reboot-virus-like, by comment spam and php include errors.

He might be fine and moved on to better things; he might be dead behind some new drywall in a Georgia basement, I don’t know. I just think about this occasionally…if I suddenly died, my friends would know, but there’d be a couple websites that were no longer being updated, and some collection of people who’d wonder why, and they’d never know what happened to me. There’s a weird feeling here for me, and I have a hard time putting it into words. I kinda want to say it’s about the immediacy of the Internet–or maybe its illusion of information permanence–but I think it’s independent of medium. It’s probably the same weirdness as if someone sent you a letter shortly before they died, and you receive it the day after their funeral.

Well, at least Foley didn’t raise the page’s taxes like a cut-and-run Democrat, am I right people?

Aircraft crashes into New York building - CNN.com

Well, good, all kinds of conspiracy nuts get their workout this week. The Foley scandal, conservative wingnuts have said that Democrats set it up to discredit Republicans before the election. Now with this, liberal wingnuts can say that Republicans set up a plane to fly into a building to make people remember 9/11 more vividly and paint Democrats as weenies.

he’s an…an…an ath…an athi…oh Jesus he’p me I can’t even say it!
Republican Party of Texas: “…So Help Me God.”

Sam linked me what may be about the most obtuse geek joke ever. This is a geek joke so geek, I had to fight my way into it.

So, in a moment of self-hate, I decided to go look up some statistics, and yeah. Alexa puts xkcd somewhere around 9,000, and Scribs somewhere around 900,000. I had figured that people look at the art and decide it’s no good, but the popularity of xkcd makes me think this isn’t true. We both have relatively simple sites, he’s been doing it for less time than I have, even.
What am I missing? I guess it’s marketing, I haven’t really gotten Scribs out there a whole lot, but I’m not sure what he’s done that I haven’t.

This morning, there’s a pair of guys on the radio before Laura Ingram comes on (grumble mutter mumble, I just saw a clip of her on the teevee saying that the popularity of the show 24 is a national referendum for torture), and they’re laughing about something Ted Turner said in a talk somewhere. Im paraphrasing, but it was something like:

One of the things that the President said that really bothered me…after the 9/11 attacks, he said, “You’re either with us, or against us.” And I thought, I haven’t even made up my mind yet, I want to read some things, learn more about what happened…

They they go on making fun of him, saying “oh, he hadn’t decided yet whether he was for America or for the terrorists.” Various “what’s he smoking” jokes, what the hell is wrong with him, etc. Ending with “you know, in a Time of War, this should be considered treason.”

But christ, what’s wrong with that? I mean the extremism was even inherent in their jokes and they didn’t realize it. After I got over the shock of the attacks, my first reaction was not Welp I better get out there and support my President, my reaction was Why? Why did this even happen? And if a guy wants to research the issue and determine whether it was his goverment’s fuckupery that led to this point, what’s wrong with that?

But here’s the kicker: ten minutes later they had a story about an old guy who drove his car into a construction area and got into an accident, because he was following his car’s GPS instructions rather than the “construction ahead” signs. It was a Mercedes, and either the guy was German or they just joked that he was because of the car.

“So the guy just followed what his GPS told him.”

“Well, Germans, you know…they like to follow directions.”

“Ha ha, yeah, Germans really got themselves in trouble by following directions, I’m talking world history here, you know?”

The irony just about knocked me over. It was one of the few times I had the urge to call into a radio show.

That title’s all I got. I can’t really think of any way to make this funny. Award winning art teacher takes kids on field trip to art museum, kid sees rendered naughty bits, teacher loses job of 28 years.

TheDenverChannel.com - Education - Art Teacher Loses Job After Kids See Nude Sculpture

Of course, it’s Texas, so.

When Bush was caught saying “shit” on tape, Michael Medved was talking about the growing permissiveness of our culture, and how all crude language has become more acceptable, and he could think of no examples where a word in normal usage became less acceptable. I thought about it for a while and thought of one: “ejaculate”. And if the concept ever comes up again, I’ll have to remember this story about a teacher getting fired for letting a student see a statue.

Used to like Ben Stein. This instantly drained all that outta me.
The American Spectator - Hypocrisy, Democrat Style

We have a Republican man in Congress who sent e-mails to teenage boys asking them what they were wearing, and an entire party, the Democrats, whose primary constituency, besides the teachers’ unions, is homosexual men and lesbian women. I hope it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that a big part of male homosexual behavior is interest in young boys. (Take a look at anyone renting Endless Summer next time you are at the video store.)

Here’s a fun drinking game: each time Ben Stein says something in this article that makes you want to punch him in the face, actually go and do it.