Read all about it With all the jubilation over the rescued Utah boy scout, his bizarre behavior and actions during the rescue are being gloseed over. His mother says: He had two thoughts going through his head all the time... Toby [his father] always told him that 'If you get lost, stay on the trail.' So he stayed on the trail. We've also told him don't talk to strangers ... when an ATV or horse came by he got off the trail ... when they left, he got back on the trail. Lost for four days, desperately in need of help, he doesn't have the sense to reach out to the rescuers he encounters on the trail. Worse, he is consciously hiding from them, having been taught not to talk to strangers. That he doesn't have enough sense to distinguish between a rescuer who is looking for him in the wilderness and a stranger who will snatch him from the streets of Provo forever, at 11 years old, is totally perplexing. Rewind a few years to another triumphant return, that of Elizabeth Smart. Her reticence to flee her kidnappers, even where it appears she had opportunity to do so, was ascribed to Stockholm Syndrome. Maybe it's whacko Utah kid syndrome... there must be some sort of brainwashing, or Mormon lock-step groupthink, that made these kids completely incapable of dealing with grave circumstances. Neither child showed one scintilla of common sense during their ordeals, which were horrifying. God rest her blessed soul...5 year-old Samantha Runion spoke clearly to her friend "go get my nana!" when grabbed by the monster would kill her; that clear instruction (which her friend followed) resulted in the capture of the vile creature. She kicked, screamed, and fought to the end. Perhaps it's my bias, but to have two kids from Utah who simply melted into their truly dire predicaments with nary a peep is more than coincidence.

Read all about it Or between a vote for Bush and Gag me with a Gore-bee. How can you possibly expect those yet-to-be-identified Martians could discern the difference between pro and amateur photography? The funniest business travel stories I have are all my interactions with retarded Floridians. Funny now, that is; not funny at 12 a.m. when trying to get a rental car and sleep before an 8 a.m. meeting, which is 5 a.m. on the California clock. It was those trips that made me fully understand the voting "controversy" and why they felt so justified in defending their inability to distinguish one hole from another (that's another post entirely...squeal little piggie, squeal!). Whenever I went to the hotel, the car rental counter, or the airline counter, it was always the same... "Last name please." My name is one of those Irish deals with an O and an apostrophe; the next letter is a D, as in "O'Dxxx" 10 times out of 11; "O- whut?" I spell it. "We dont' have no D's... here. D whut?" I spell it again. "Is it D somthin, or O somthin'? " I always asked said counter person, "Did I land in Jacksonville, Florida or is this Mobile, Alabama? Juss checkin'..." Therefore my MWB friends, it's no surprise the example of the retarded Martian photo lab employee who cannot tell the difference between a pro photog and an amateur is, frankly, no shock.

Read all about it Every single one of these guys is hot hot hot, but more in the way a cast iron skillet on a hot stove is hot; all on the surface but eew! Don't wanna touch it! As good as all these guys look on the surface, they all have that certain je ne sais quoi... that I'm-a-slimy-gay-pornstar look.

Read all about it This story was written to talk about how eBay had to end the auctions of Live 8 tickets--given away originally for free--due to hoax bids of up to 10 million pounds. What it's really about is a man, Bob Geldof, who's family has been totally destroyed by family courts. Courts where the government all the cards and you are but a recipient of the slap of its heavy hand, should it so decide... But he is more than willing to keep a strong government presence in the lives of everyone else, as long as that big government is run liberally, as he has so decided. What a fool you are Geldof, what a fool you are.

This was never meant to be a techie forum, this is a bitch session that happens to offer some techie advice... FREE! Whenever I adjusted the volume in my Windows Volume Control, it made this obnoxious beep. It made this beep even if the sound on Volume Control was muted, and even when my sound schemes were set to "No Sounds" ... I destroyed my computer, literally, by disabling something that referred to "Volume" but was really to manage the storage volume... you know, the hard drive? OOPS. I forget if it was a deleted registry entry or a disabled service (gobbledeygook, I know), but regardless, it said "Volume" and I got rid of it after hours of trying to eliminate whatever was causing that really annoying and really LOUD beep, and my computer choked up its left lung and died. Thank you jesus for my obsessive habit of backing up my PC; rebuilt and restored data within 2 hours, no headaches, but the BEEP was back! I started feel like the beep was a little chucky doll I could not kill... I finally found some uber obscure reference to the beep posted a forum over 2 years ago, and it turns out it is a Non Plug-n-Play device driver and I won't go on. Here's a link to the forum if you need help getting rid of Chucky Beep...                                         >Go to Forum< You gotta love geeks; they talk about this stuff for fun, and the rest of us get to have the answers by default. And I love what the poster on the forum says: "The MS tech support flunky who said it was a motherboard problem should be boiled in oil for such a blatant lie." And whoever built this "feature" in the first place deserves an equally horrid fate. Why is disabling this beep buried three layers deep in system configurations and who would ever want it in the first place? Does NO SOUNDS mean NO SOUNDS EXCEPT THE LOUD AND OBNOXIOUS BEEP WHEN YOU AJDUST THE VOLUME to Microsoft bitheads? Apple whackjobs need not post comments, we won't go to your grasseating ways no matter what you say.

Read all about it I don't often excerpt the articles but I'm thinking some CNN editor is going to peel his lips off the crack pipe and remove the lead in to this story... ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) -- Mountaineers who ascend North America's loftiest peak are often brought down to earth by "virus-laden poo" left behind by previous climbers, a medical report says.
Another reason not to go anywhere; forget the grand canyon. Forget Indonesia. Just stay the f home.

Read all about it Yahoo and Google are both racing to provide password protected content to users as long as they're a subscriber (for now, right?). These sights start with the nice Consumer Reports magazine online, but soon to include sites such as Lexus Nexus. Lexus Nexus is a ginormous databank with highly confidential data on every single person born in a hospital in the 2nd and 1st worlds. If you think I'm kidding, read this: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7913667/

Read all about it I have been unable to finish my earnest effort to convince you the Patriot Act should not be accepted blindly in its entirety. In the interim, Marla asks you to ponder which period in antiquity this prehistoric freakshow came from and should be sent back to. Thank god he's no genius...

The Patriot Act is, as the name suggests, a measure which patriotic citizens should adore and whose only opponents can be the unpatriotic, the communists, and the socialists. Anyone who disagrees with the Act is just some fruit-looped, Birkenstocked, Greenpeace employed whackjob and there is no in-between... “with us or against us,” right? Yet I’ve been in-between, and until today, I pah-pahed the vociferous concerns of those who oppose the Act and discounted its scope and by virtue of silence endorsed its existence. I believed the Act would only present a problem to someone who already presented a problem, and that common citizens would not be within its reach. So yah, I might not agree with it in theory, but I didn’t worry about what new permissions its sprawling 800 pages gave the government, the FBI, the CIA. Guffaw, who’s it really going to impact; some long-bearded future terrorists living in San Diego? Who cares about their civil rights? I don’t have to worry about the books I check out of the library, for Christ’s sake. And so I am quite sad to have been edified, to have been lifted out of my comfortable Patriot Act fog to learn that indeed, normal, everyday citizens like us have already suffered the consequences of the civil liberties the Act stole away so loudly (it was not quietly at all). So many of us were so earnest and pure in our desires to ensure there was never, ever, another 9/11 ever, never, ever again that we’d have agreed to the passage of a law that adopted a mandatory Nazi solute to police or the construction of a Reichstag at Ground Zero. And so we got our Reichstag, and it is the Patriot Act. I truly hate to echo along with the idiot U of Colorado professor who called the 9/11 victims “Little Eichmanns." Nazi references are used so flippantly these days that using it as an analogy at all just makes people (rightfully) dismiss you as though you are a Holocaust-denying moron. But allow me to draw this parallel just for a second, before you hit the back button on your browser and go Googling or checking email. The Reichstag had been the seat of German politics as its Parliament for decades prior to its rise as the face and symbol of Nazi power. On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag was set on fire by arson; the fire was set in multiple places and an explosion followed which completely destroyed the building. A very likely mentally ill Communist party member from Holland was found behind the building during the blaze. Hitler used the fire to rouse anti-Communist sympathies. As Chancellor of Germany, he convinced the president to sign something called the Reichstag Fire Decree which effectively erased the human rights provisions of the Weimar Constitution written after World War I. He further convinced the president to activate the Enabling Act which enabled the government to pass laws by decree rather than by democratic process. I do not find it much of a stretch between how Hitler came to have so much power over Germany so quickly in those early days by virtue of the Reichstag fire and how we may have granted the FBI, the CIA, and Homeland Security (another innocuous-sounding but potentially malevolent government behemoth) powers that may endanger democracy in the long term by virtue of 9/11. I have often accused liberals of never thinking of the past or the future; Ann Coulter sums it up quite nicely with “For liberals, history began yesterday.” Yet it seems that Conservatives may be thinking in the same way, and with similar short-sightedness. Today, the US government and civil liberties will not vaporize with the Patriot Act--erode, but not vaporize. What about 100 years from now? Where will our liberties be if 800 pages more are added to this Act, and opponents are mocked by conservatives who firmly believe that we are not “safe” without it? How will Freedom of Speech, Freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, Freedom of the Press survive 1600, 2000, 2500 pages of “Patriot” Acts? I believe that they would not survive and I believe it is possible. Our tax code that would circle this planet 29 times if it were printed out in its entirety. That’s proof enough that bloated bureaucrats are more than capable of quickly writing a ton of laws in a short amount of time--the tax code is only about 100 years old. Conservatives are more than willing to point the Nazi finger when it suits them; the Nazis took away everyone’s guns before they rounded them up and murdered them, by Golly. Well now we find the conservatives are taking away our civil liberties and then rounding us up, by golly. I rarely admit I’m wrong; I rarely change my mind. But I never stop pursuing truth, logic, and liberty the way I believe it is defined not only by the US Constitution, but by the ideal we represent. We fall short of this ideal since we are human beings, and human beings can’t perfectly implement any social or democratic system; we’re too subject to those things that make us human—greed, passion, desires, jealousy—to make anything work perfectly. But as long as your eye is on the ideal, you can stay as close as humanly possible to the goal. If you turn away from the ideal as long as you think you have mitigating circumstances, anything goes. Such is the Patriot Act; an anything goes law created in shadow of the extraordinary events of 9/11, our mitigating circumstances. It has allowed the conservatives to let history begin on September 11, 2001. It allows us to think someone is insane at the suggestion that Bush has waylaid power and human rights like Hitler in 1933. But just as the Reichstag Fire Decree snowballed into the full blown Third Reich, the Patriot Act and its add-ons enables our government an excessive amount of power which will be the death of our Ideal; the United States, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. Part II to follow tomorrow

-Why do people exit elevators, escalators, stairwells, planes--and all other places where human throughput is critical--stop 4 millimeters over the threshold while everyone behind them piles up while they gaze around like a stoner waking up from a long sleep? -When will restaurants realize those cool lights they hang low over the tables are a visual obstacle worthy of my darkest sunglasses? -Why do women with a huge belly wear pants that stop below the belly button and tops that start at the rib cage, subjecting the rest of us to a dollop of blubber only a 3 month old baby should have? -How is it we can create freeways where people can drive 80 miles an hour safely (don't tell me it's not) but we can't figure out a way to control traffic and speed in parking lots without large concrete obstacles that do not slow down SUVs at all and damage everyone else's car outright?