May 11, 2008

Old Gaffers Kickin' Ass on the Wii

Technology permits the infirm to once again box and play tennis. I can say, without irony, that this is a mutherfuckin' triumph of our species.

(via Ze)

The Powerpuff Girls meet the Big Lebowski

The Powerpuff Girls - Big Lebowski Scene



Clown-car update: Michelle continues her older daughters' enslavement

Happy Mother's Day: Woman pregnant with 18th child

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — It's a happy Mother's Day for an Arkansas woman — she's pregnant with her 18th child.

Michelle Duggar, 41, is due on New Year's Day, and the latest addition will join seven sisters and 10 brothers. There are two sets of twins.

"We've had three in January, three in December. Those two months are a busy time for us," she said, laughing.

The Duggars' oldest child, Josh, is 20, and the youngest, Jennifer, is nine months old.

The fast-growing family lives in Tontitown in northwest Arkansas in a 7,000-square-foot home. All the children — whose names start with the letter J — are home-schooled.

Duggar has been been pregnant for more than 11 years of her life, and the family is in the process of filming another series for Discovery Health.

How I got kicked out of the Feminists' Men's Auxiliary: Links to Us: "Klown Kar Kapers," or, "Why I hate broads." | "I love my cigar, too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while." -- Groucho Marx

842 percent interest loan

Of course this should be illegal. It once was. Viva deregulation.

ChiTrib | Trapped by Web loan with the 842% interest rate

Rochelle Parker needed money for Christmas gifts and medicine, so she went online and found a Web site promising easy money. After a few key punches she was zapped a $300 loan, but one that charged an astonishing 842 percent annual interest.

The recently retired fingerprint technician for the Chicago Police Department had several other online loans that drained her financially and forced her to move in with her daughter. But getting another loan was so easy on the Internet.

People like Parker are falling through one of the newest trapdoors in the cash-strapped economy—online payday loans. Such loans typically were the province of payday loan storefronts that cater mostly to the working poor and low-middle-income workers, short on cash until payday. Now online loans are spreading to the middle class as a result of rising gasoline and food prices, tightening credit, the subprime mortgage fallout and the ease of home computer access to the Web.

Behind the food riots: a debate on how best to farm

The United States government has encouraged other countries to move small-holder farmers off the land and into wage-earning jobs, so they can buy cheap, imported food. Which now, of course, is no longer cheap. Who benefits from encouraging developing countries to switch to energy-, transport- and chemical-intensive farming methods and away from farming suited to the local climate, ecosystem, and culture? I think you know.

Behind the food riots: a debate on how best to farm

Around the world, governments are trying every play in their books to stave off food riots — sending troops to hand out food in slums, ordering sweeping wage increases, banning grain exports and suspending futures trading. The United States is promising millions in emergency food aid.

But many experts call these Band-Aid solutions, saying what's needed is a radical rethink of how the world gets its food.

However, they're deeply divided about which way to go.

Some would in effect reverse the fundamentals by investing massively in small farmers, instead of letting them sink in a free-trade world. That would be very different from what the U.S. has long been evangelizing — take uncompetitive food producers off the land and put them in new jobs with paychecks that would buy them cheap food, efficiently farmed....

The pain inflicted on Mexican farmers by NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, was supposed to be offset by cheap grains for consumers, said Jeff Faux of the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute. "But when the U.S. Congress realized the potential of ethanol, corn was diverted there and Mexico was left high and dry," Faux said. "The corn turned out to be not that cheap."

The campesino federation estimates 200,000 Mexicans a year have fled the countryside for the city or the United States since NAFTA was launched in 1994.

See also: Tudor Enclosures

Republicans removed over one million people from the voter rolls in Indiana

News From Underground: Over 1,000,000 voters purged in Indiana


I can only view this as the rich, white upper class taking away the most basic civic right from the poor and the black. This should be an enormous scandal, but no one talks about it.



In April 2008 when Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita announced the release of "record high" voter registration rolls, with 4.3 million voters set to vote in the Tuesday May 6 primary, he didn't mention that a whopping 1,134,427 voter registrations have been cancelled.


Now, the voter rolls are supposed to be tidied up prior to each election. Indiana's last general election was in Nov. 2006, and they have had a slew of special and general elections since then. So how have 1.1 million voters -- 26 percent of the current statewide list-- escaped the voter registration cleanup squad? Who are these million voters and where do they come from?


One quarter-million of them come from just two northwestern Indiana counties: Lake and Porter. Lake County reports purging 137,164 voters and neighboring Porter County cancelled out 124,958 voters.


Lake County, the home of Gary, Indiana, has spawned the Jackson Five and a great old musical (The Music Man) and has been referred to as "the second most liberal county in America." Lake County also has one of the heaviest concentrations of African-American voters that you'll
find anywhere in the USA.

May 10, 2008

The Worst Videogame Box Art Part 4

The Worst Videogame Box Covers Part 4 from 1UP.com




I hate pointing out when things look gay -- but, yeah, this looks pretty gay. Not the unacceptable "gay as a synonym for bad" kind of gay. I mean that the men pictured here are having sex with each other. They're the gayest gays that ever gayed a gay. And that's all right. Totally acceptable. It's a lifestyle choice that should in no way impede them in their pursuit of careers in the fields of moustache-having and being-a-racial-stereotype. I'm just having trouble imagining a scenario in which this game went to press without anyone, at any point, raising his hand and saying, "You know, this looks a little gay." I therefore have to assume it was intentional, and that I have every right to be disappointed that Cowboy Kid is not actually a videogame about the adventures of a gay cowboy and his well-oiled Native American sidekick. Instead, it turned out to be an awesome multiplayer platforming game. What a rip-off.


Fun Fact: Cowboy Kid features bosses named "The Scorpion Master" and "Keith." Nobody knows this because they were all too homophobic to actually play Cowboy Kid.

Abhay on the appeal of epic comic crossovers

The Savage Critic(s): Abhay Briefly Considers Secret Invasion #2


Maybe there’s an analogy we can draw to the big crossover. A specific series can only cover so much geography—an issue of The Fantastic Four can talk about family, an issue of Captain America can talk about patriotism. But the daily lives of readers are rarely just one thing—life can often be a series of collisions between disparate elements, between balancing family and work, social responsibility and private needs, etc. People eat dinner with their families, then turn on TV and hear about crazy shit happening on the other side of the world. Everything collides together. Everything’s colliding faster and faster—try and follow the news anymore. One day, the Bush Administration’s corrupt, the next day they’re incompetent, the day after that, they’re back to corrupt—who can keep up? The same machine you’re reading this on, brings you pornography and music, you know? The pornography is sometimes about innocent schoolgirls who get caught cheating on their college geography exams, and have to pleasure their way out of trouble. Sometimes there are moustaches involved; sometimes there aren’t. Sometimes the performances stops in the middle for the two lovers to kick open a pi�ata, and inside of the pi�ata are sex toys, and then the porn stars resume their lovemaking on top of the lust-pi�ata. Sometimes a young pistelero arrives upon the scenes and says “Madre de Dios! You have destroyed my lust-pi�ata with your naughtiness. I shall teach you both a lesson.” And then he does, sexually, and it’s horrible, and you want to look away, and you want someday to forget what you see, forget what happens next. But it’s border justice, and you learn to live with that.


Usually there are tattoos.


I think a big crossover can speak to that sense that beyond our own limited human stories or what have you, we’re part of a larger social organism, in a way that I don’t know of or can think of any other mainstream comic that can. So: maybe that’s something…?

The crucifix-shaped MP3 player

TEO MP-301 brings Jesus and the MP3 together at long last - Engadget




Good lord. No, really. Good lord. The TEO MP-301 MP3 player from IceTech USA crams 1GB of media storage into -- as you can see -- a very Jesus-friendly form factor. The $49 player features a built-in microphone with voice recorder, mirrored front panel, and even a little speaker. According to reviews, the player has some serious interface issues and a weak screen, but if crucifixion is your thing, you can't go wrong with this necklace cross-cum-MP3 player. Or is that the other way around? Is this an MP3 player that's also a cross? Anyway, there you have it: the cross-shaped MP3 player, indeed.

May 09, 2008

Poor Mojo's Almanac(k)
Issue #381 - Thurs., May 8, 2008

This will be here for a while. News is below.

Spellcheck is for assholes.

Giant Squid: Ask the Giant Squid: Everyone Has Advice For The Monkey-Headed Lady

Dear Mr. Squid,

I's wondering if it's OK to be all dreamin' 'bout touchin' on a lady with a monkey head. Not a monkey lady, just a regular lady with a monkey head.

Love,
Someone You Don't Know Who At All

Fiction: I, Panderer
I was part of a crew that sold sex gadgets and erotic lubricants. Our clients were stores like Adult World and Lusty Life Book Shop. Jack Tanner, the sales manager, was a functioning alcoholic and also a sadist. "I'm a practicing sadist," he would often say, apropos of nothing in particular.
Poetry: Invalid Geometry
I told you to meet me
On the other side of town
Where nobody knew us.
But you had to come here
Flaunting it for all to see.
Rants: The Flood (A Poor Mojo's Monstrously Bad Sex Rant Contest Notable Entry)
After two months of dating and putting up with Mari, my patience was wearing thin. Her being a virgin had not sounded so bad at first. I could break her, I thought. But of course, things usually never sound as bad until you're actually in the situation. I tried so many damn times to just "accidentally" slip myself within her. Several make-out sessions would lead to oral play and so many times I thought that this was it. I'm going to be SO IN! She wouldn't be able to hold back like me and she would give in to letting me be in her holiest of holies.

Teens suspected of making a bong out of a child's skull

3 accused of using Humble corpse's head to smoke pot | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle



The Kingwood teenager's story of decapitating a corpse and using the head to smoke marijuana was so outlandish that at first Houston Police Department senior police officer Jim Adkins did not believe it.


. . .


Houston police believe the teens disturbed the grave of an 11-year-old boy who died in 1921.


The child was buried at an unmarked cemetery believed to be reserved for black veterans and their families, Adkins said.


Under the law, a person can be charged with abuse of a corpse simply by vandalizing, damaging or treating a gravesite offensively — even if the human remains buried there are not touched, Adkins said.

Congress votes to bail out homeowners, Bush threatens veto

Defying Bush, House Passes Broad Housing Bill - New York Times



WASHINGTON — House Democrats defied a veto threat from President Bush on Thursday as they approved a broad housing bill that would provide up to $300 billion in federally insured loans to refinance the mortgages of debt-strapped homeowners.


The measure passed by 266 to 154, more than a dozen “yes” votes short of the two-thirds needed to override a veto. Thirty-nine Republicans broke with their party’s leadership to vote for the measure, whose main backer has been Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads the Financial Services Committee.


Similar legislation has been working its way through the Senate, which has a much narrower Democratic majority and where the legislation’s supporters have even less chance to muster a veto-proof majority.


The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Mr. Frank’s bill would generate about 500,000 refinanced mortgages over the next five years at a cost to taxpayers of roughly $2.7 billion.

Bald Eagle gets bionic beak

Disfigured bald eagle to get a bionic beak - Science- msnbc.com





ST. MARIES, Idaho - She has been named Beauty, though this eagle is anything but. Part of Beauty's beak was shot off several years ago, leaving her with a stump that is useless for hunting food. A team of volunteers is working to attach an artificial beak to the disfigured bird, in an effort to keep her alive.


"For Beauty it's like using only one chopstick to eat. It can't be done" said biologist Jane Fink Cantwell, who operates a raptor recovery center in this Idaho Panhandle town. "She has trouble drinking. She can't preen her feathers. That's all about to change."


Cantwell has spent the past two years assembling a team to design and build an artificial beak. They plan to attach it to Beauty next month. With the beak, the 7-year-old bald eagle could live to the age of 50, although not in the wild.

Dog found wearing collar of fishhooks

15 Fish Hooks Surround Dog's Neck - News Story - WPXI Pittsburgh




BULLSKIN TOWNSHIP, Pa. -- A cruel collar forced a dog to undergo surgery. The mixed breed border collie was found wearing a collar full of fishhooks; and one of the hooks created a hole in the dog's neck.


Humane officers at the SPCA in North Union told Channel 11 this was an unusual case of animal cruelty and they have no idea who is responsible or why someone would do something so terrible.


The dog is recovering from surgery to remove a fish hook from his neck -- one of 15 that someone had attached to the inside of his collar.

The distribution of blondes in Europe

214 - The Blonde Map of Europe -- Strange Maps





This map, indicating the varying degrees of ‘blondness’ in Europe, shows how fair hair gets rarer further away from this core area – towards the south, as one intuitively might presume, but also towards the east, west and even towards the north.


The consecutive bands (coloured in such a way as to approximately represent the ‘average’ hair colour in each area) surrounding the core blonde area in Scandinavia in most cases don’t correspond with national boundaries, but could be taken to represent certain degrees of ethnic variation, often with a possible historical explanation.

Cow's milk may increase the risk of diabetes

Cow's milk may increase the risk of diabetes - health - 09 May 2008 - New Scientist



Does drinking infant formula made of cow's milk increase the risk of developing type 1 diabetes?


In 1993, a Finnish study found that consuming dairy products early on correlated with diabetes risk. One explanation is that beta-lactoglobulin, a protein in cow's, but not human, milk prompts babies to make antibodies that also attack glycodelin, a protein vital for training the immune system. The mistuned immune system then mistakenly destroys insulin-producing pancreatic cells, leading to type 1 diabetes.


“The mistuned immune system mistakenly destroys insulin-producing cells”


Now Marcia Goldfarb of the company Anatek-EP in Portland, Maine, has found that five children with type 1 diabetes, who were fed cow's-milk formula, all have antibodies to beta-lactoglobulin

Pink for Boys, Blue for Girls

Feministing



In Western culture, the practice of assigning pink to an individual gender began in the 1920s. From then until the 1940s, pink was considered appropriate for boys because it was the more masculine and decided color while blue was considered appropriate for girls because it was the more delicate and dainty color. Since the 1940s, the societal norm apparently inverted so that pink became appropriate for girls and blue appropriate for boys, a practice that has continued into the 21st century. (Emphasis mine)

Has Hezbollah already won?

Rational Grounds: Hezbollah Takes West Beirut



That's because Hezbollah and its allies have basically won. Hezbollah outguns and by most accounts outnumbers the Lebanese Army, and it demonstrably dominates the other partisan militias as well. There's likely going to be a period of reassessment, some more declarations from all sides, and then we'll see. The government has pretty much two options. Give in and resign, or fight back.


So far, there really hasn't been that much fighting. The last statistic I saw was eleven dead. As a colleague in my office said, "If I unleashed the amount of firepower we've seen in the past couple days I would kill more people than that by accident."


That indicates that all the sides are still not quite ready to declare open war. The Lebanese Army has not engaged the militias - they're glorified hall monitors at the moment. Jumblatt's PSP (the Druze militia/party, and rumored to be one of the most heavily armed pro-government groups, along with the Christian Lebanese Forces) has fought an orderly retreat and evacuation, rather than standing and fighting. Tariq Jedideh, the Sunni stronghold right near the Hezbollah controlled southern suburbs, is still under Sunni militia control and basically untouched. And the Christian areas are also untouched, despite long standing deep divisions between pro- and anti-government parties.


Hezbollah has played this very wisely. They've spent the last two years laying the groundwork for this - establishing communication networks, expanding into new areas, growing their forces. In December 2006 they began a sit-in around downtown, and from there they've been able to cut many of the major roads linking the East and West over the past couple days. Even in their recent moves, they've positioned themselves and then dared the government to move them. If the government sends in the army against them, they can then say they're defending themselves.

Lebanon on verge of civil war

Informed Comment: Beirut Ramping Up


Joan Cole has reports from the ground. Apparently the Lebanese government has attacked the Hezbollah political party. There are also violent clashes between Sunni and Shiite groups.



WHAT LED TO THE PRESENT CRISIS:


In the beginning of the week, the Lebanese government removed the head of security from the airport, a government employee who was a supporter of the opposition was sacked, and Hezbollah controlled surveillance cameras were removed from the airport. The impact of the decision has been explosive, yesterday Nasrallah explained in his speech that the decision should be revoked and that anyone tampering with their surveillance system was essentially acting for the benefit of Israel.

NYPD sued for not investigating African-American missing persons

Feministing



In 2003, 21 year-old Ramona Moore - a student at Hunter College in New York - told her mother she was going to Burger King down the street and would be right back. She never came home.


Moore was held in a basement a few blocks away where she was raped and tortured for four days before her captors beat her to death. The police, who Moore's mother begged for help, did nothing to find her.


Sean Gardiner at The Village Voice has a huge piece not only on the police's mishandling of Moore's disappearance - but also how it has sparked a historic racial bias case against the city.


Moore's mother Elle Carmichael is bringing forward a a civil-rights lawsuit claiming that the NYPD has a "practice of not making a prompt investigation of missing-persons claims of African-Americans, while making a prompt investigation for white individuals."


Not exactly shocking news, of course, but the case would be the first of its kind.

FreakAngels Interlude

May 08, 2008

Cup of Brown Joy

Warren Ellis -- Cup Of Brown Joy



Lecturer Sues School Claiming Anti-Intellectual Students Created Hostile Working Environment

Post-Modernist Prof Sues School Claiming Students asking too many Subversive Questions - Don't Tase Me, Bro!



Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional expose, which she promises will "name names."


The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.


Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. "My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful," she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. "They'd argue with your ideas." This caused "subversiveness," a principle English professors usually favor.


Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."



This can't be the whole story. My gut tells me that she was hitting these kids with material that was too advanced and foreign for them and they flipped out. I belive that being a student requires you to keep an open mind but to also be critical of the ideas you are presented with.


Some students can be so thickheaded and belligerent that they ruin a class. I remember some from freshmen comp that refused--more or less--to acknowledge that symbolism even existed as a literary idea. They adopted a sort of Howard Stern-ian attack mode whenever subtext was mentioned.


This article is woefully incomplete and actively hostile to the teacher. I'd be curious to hear more from her side.

Omodaka and the dance of awesome

Kyoteizinc: Chiptune disco video ::: Pink Tentacle



Michigan Supreme Court tells all gay people to leave the state

Mich. high court says gay partners can't get health benefits



A same-sex marriage ban prevents governments and universities in Michigan from providing health insurance to the partners of gay workers, the state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.


The 5-2 decision affects up to 20 universities, community colleges, school districts and governments in Michigan with policies covering at least 375 gay couples.


Gay rights advocates said the ruling was devastating but were confident that public-sector employers have successfully rewritten or will revise their benefit plans so same-sex partners can keep getting health care.


The ban, a constitutional amendment approved in November 2004, says the union between a man and woman is the only agreement recognized as a marriage "or similar union for any purpose."

Massive police brutality caught on tape in Philly

Feministing



Top 5 Mistakes of Hillary's Campaign

Talking Points Memo | What a Pennhead



Clinton picked people for her team primarily for their loyalty to her, instead of their mastery of the game.


That became abundantly clear in a strategy session last year, according to two people who were there. As aides looked over the campaign calendar, chief strategist Mark Penn confidently predicted that an early win in California would put her over the top because she would pick up all the state's 370 delegates.


It sounded smart, but as every high school civics student now knows, Penn was wrong: Democrats, unlike the Republicans, apportion their delegates according to vote totals, rather than allowing any state to award them winner-take-all.


Sitting nearby, veteran Democratic insider Harold M. Ickes, who had helped write those rules, was horrified -- and let Penn know it. "How can it possibly be," Ickes asked, "that the much vaunted chief strategist doesn't understand proportional allocation?"


And yet the strategy remained the same, with the campaign making its bet on big-state victories. Even now, it can seem as if they don't get it. Both Bill and Hillary have noted plaintively that if Democrats had the same winner-take-all rules as Republicans, she'd be the nominee.

Al Qaeda endorses McCain, approves of his plans to bomb Iran

Informed Comment: Zawahiri endorses McCain Plan to Bomb Iran;
McCain seeks Endorsement of Catholic-Haters;
8 Percent of Pakistanis Back McCain



Well, it turns out that al-Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri has declared that he is actually on McCain's side in wanting to destroy Iran. Al-Zawahiri is hurt that McCain keeps confusing hyper-Sunni al-Qaeda with radical Shiism: "Ayman al-Zawahiri said al-Qaeda wants to see the destruction of Iran - a Shiite nation battling the terrorists . . . "The dispute between America and Iran is a genuine struggle, and the possibility of the US striking Iran is real," al-Zawahiri said. . ." Al-Zawahiri hopes that the US struggle with Iran will destroy the latter and weaken the former, putting al-Qaeda in a position to administer the coup de grace.

404 Error: Your Candidate Cannot Be Found

American Samizdat: Rebel Scum Since 2001



Amazing photos from the Chilean eruption

Fotos Tormenta


Click through to see them.