Posted 8/28/2009 06:58:00 PM by Douglas

This is by far the most fucked up story I've read in many, many years. When you hear stories about the boogie man and things that go bump in the night, you need to be scared of people like this.

In a rambling telephone interview from jail, Garrido told CNN affiliate KCRA of Sacramento he was relieved at being caught.

"I feel much better now," he said. "This is a process that needed to take place."

Kollar said Garrido's wife, Nancy, was with her husband when Dugard was abducted from the street in front of her house in South Lake Tahoe. Garrido was already a registered sex offender at the time.

Your wife helps you abduct an 11 year old girl you keep as a sex slave, and getting caught is a relief? Do we even have the psychological methodology in place to figure out what's wrong with these people? Sounds like he wanted to get caught:

A school spokesman identified the officers as Allison Jacobs and Lisa Campbell, and said the two became suspicious of "subtle behavior" Garrido exhibited.

They passed on the information to Garrido's parole officer, who requested that the 58-year-old man appear Wednesday at the parole office.

Garrido did just that, accompanied by his wife, Nancy, "and a female named Allissa," Kollar said.

The presence of "Allissa" and the two children surprised the parole officer, who had never seen them during visits to Garrido's house, Kollar said.

"Ultimately, Allissa was identified as Dugard," Kollar said.

You bring your abducted sex slave to your P.O.? Yeah, he was trying to get caught. But the kicker is this quote from the child-rapist:

But Garrido said he had "completely turned my life around" in the past several years. "You're going to find the most powerful story coming from the witness, from the victim," he said. "If you take this a step at a time, you're going to fall over backward and in the end you're going to find the most powerful, heartwarming story."

He added, "Wait 'til you hear the story of what took place at this house. You're going to be absolutely impressed. It's a disgusting thing that took place with me in the beginning, but I turned my life completely around."

Who knows what demons this guy was wrestling with, but he doesn't get them to resolve them at the cost of an innocent stranger, while fathering two children with her.

The London Times has a better background on the guy:

He was a registered sex offender who had kidnapped a woman from South Lake Tahoe in 1976, driven her to a warehouse in Reno, Nevada, and raped her. Garrido and his victim were found when a patrol officer called after seeing a car outside at 2.30am.

What a keeper. Well, at least he'll get health care where he's going to be locked up. I hope he gets raped more, though.

Posted 8/27/2009 07:27:00 PM by Douglas

I certainly can't say anything about Teddy that hasn't already been said, so I'll let those better at it than me eulogize the man. Let's start with The Agitator:

But I feel no compulsion to praise Kennedy’s life in politics. Kennedy was an elite, and not by virtue of any actual accomplishment (sorry, but we have 100 senators no matter who comes out on top on election night. Getting elected to political office in itself adds no value to society as a whole). Instead, Kennedy was an elite by birthright, by being born into the closest thing America has to royalty. He used his status and political power to procure advantages the rest of us don’t have, whether it was evading responsibility for his role in a young woman’s death, or hypocritically killing off a planned wind farm in Nantucket Sound because the renewable energy project would have sullied the view from the Kennedys’ Hyannis Port compound–to pick two examples that bookend his life in politics.

Newspaper editorialists like to eulogize politicians by exalting the sacrifice that comes with public service. I’ve never really believed that. A U.S. Senator’s life is hardly one of hardship. It’s hard for me to find anything particularly praiseworthy or sacrificial about an already-wealthy man adding to his wealth the enormous power that comes with spending 40+ years in the halls of the U.S. Senate. Kennedy played no small role in vastly growing the size, scope, and power of the federal government. In my book, that makes his career contribution to human freedom a net loss.

That pretty much sums it up. I don't feel much veneration for rich, privileged people that work their whole lives to help the down-trodden when they do it with other people's money. That's not compassion coming from a multi-millionaire. But you've got to go to the Telegraph for the real obit:

As senator for Massachusetts from 1962, Kennedy proved both hard-working and effective, with a consistent devotion to liberal causes. The old, the young, the unemployed, the disabled, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, women — all found in him an eager advocate. But not unborn children: unexpectedly for a Roman Catholic, Kennedy approved federal payments for abortions.

Wow! What an opening salvo! But it continues:

“Senator,” began one interviewer, “you were expelled from Harvard for cheating, then you left a woman to drown in your car at Chappaquiddick. What makes you think you have what it takes to be President?” On the streets bumper stickers proclaimed: "No one drowned at Watergate”.

I'm more fond of the bumper stickers in Texas: "Ted Kennedy's car has killed more people than my gun!"

So Massachusetts has the task of finding the first non-Kennedy senator since the Eisenhower administration in 1953. In a country that defeated the world's strongest monarchy to establish a meritocracy, this alone can't be all bad.

Posted 8/25/2009 05:32:00 PM by Douglas

I'm not going to laugh at people getting swept into the sea and drowning, but seriously, this isn't Bill's fault.

Rangers at Acadia National Park insisted Monday that they had done all they could to warn visitors before beauty suddenly turned brutal, launching a hurricane-generated wave over a group of gawkers, dragging several into the roiling Atlantic and killing a 7-year-old girl.

The wave swept over 20 people, 11 of whom were taken to the hospital with injuries including broken bones from being slammed onto the rocks, officials said. Several people were tossed into the water, and all but three managed to pull themselves out.

Spectators eager to take in the views of dramatic surf began filling up Acadia, about 75 miles east of Augusta, the state capital, on Sunday morning, Chief Ranger Stuart West said. As the tide rose, generating even bigger waves, 10,000 people eventually parked along the road to view the waves spun off by Bill, West said.

What the hell? 10,000 people at Thunder Hole (my nickname in college, btw) and they're surprised when a hurricane sweeps them into the sea?

A little after noon, a huge wave crashed into the shore, sucking the visitors out to sea. The Coast Guard responded shortly afterward to a call from rangers and dispatched a boat and two aircraft.

The Coast Guard, eh? In Texas, we ignore the storm warnings at our own risk, so why do yankee Coast Guard have to risk their lives when yankees fall into the drink?

Posted 8/25/2009 05:24:00 PM by Douglas

The winning joke sucks, but I like some of the runners up:

"I'm sure wherever my dad is; he's looking down on us. He's not dead, just very condescending."

"Going to Starbucks for coffee is like going to prison for sex. You know you're going to get it, but it's going to be rough."

Ha!

Posted 8/24/2009 06:47:00 PM by Douglas

Shuttle launch tonight, and it sounds like they're trying to get some good PR out of this one:

When Discovery flies to the international space station this week, it will deliver a new treadmill named for a TV comedian and pick up a Buzz Lightyear toy.

Discovery and its crew of seven are scheduled to blast off early Tuesday, carrying about 17,000 pounds of supplies and equipment to the space station. It is the second station visit in as many months for NASA, making it harder to drum up excitement.

Sturckow and his crewmates agree lighthearted touches — like the treadmill named after Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, the Buzz Lightyear toy that's spent more than a year at the space station and Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte's trip — are good ways to publicize the more workaday events unfolding in orbit.

The treadmill, for the record, is officially known as the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill, which spells COLBERT.

It's still pretty lame that NASA had the contest to name the new module, then went ahead with the lame-ass name they were going to give it.

Posted 8/24/2009 06:42:00 PM by Douglas

Thank god the state of Texas, in all its infinite wisdom, is taking care of you. There's plenty of vaccine for the looming pig flu outbreak.

As Texas schoolchildren head back to class, state officials are urging commonsense precautions but say they are prepared for an outbreak of swine flu.

Gov. Rick Perry said Monday in San Antonio that the state has 2.5 million courses of anti-viral medication on hand and has requested 800,000 more.

I fully expect to be dead in a week or two.

Posted 8/24/2009 06:39:00 PM by Douglas

Blogger is sued for making comments about the trainwreck that was the Anna Nichole saga.

A second blogger being sued by the mother of the late Anna Nicole Smith is set to spend a weekend behind bars for failing to do what a local judge asked.

Teresa Stephens, accused in a civil lawsuit of defaming Smith's mother, was arrested Thursday in the Fort Worth area and is due in Harris County court Monday morning.

A judge will ask Stephens, whose blogging name is Butterfly according to the lawsuit, to show why she should not be found in contempt for failing to follow court orders to turn over her computer and to appear in court to explain why she didn't do so.

Wow.

Posted 8/24/2009 06:36:00 PM by Douglas

Mad Men, season three is in full swing of weird

Poor Margaret Elizabeth. It is going to rain on her wedding day. Roger's daughter doesn't want her father's young bride to show her unlined face. The fabulous former Mrs. Sterling tried to propose a compromise. Roger and June (ha!) could host their own table; she'll sit with the in-laws. Roger had the arrogance to suggest that he could find his ex a date if little Margaret was worried about an odd number of guests. Oh, he's a low-down dirty dog. Jane be damned.

After two episodes, I think the storyline is getting a bit crowded, but it's still the best thing on TV. And then there's this guide to pick up women like Don Draper:

Posted 8/23/2009 01:59:00 PM by Douglas

Man, that's a lot of Czars. I know Barry didn't invent the term, but I've always found it a bit telling that a representative democracy appoints a 'Czar.'

Posted 8/23/2009 01:54:00 PM by Douglas

If you get a fancy enough camera, you can get a Nobel prize for making a porno.

New Scientist brings you sex as you've never seen it before: the first video of a couple having sex in an MRI scanner (see video). Just released, it was made from a series of images captured during an experiment some years ago. The study aimed to prove that it was possible to image male and female genitals during sex and to help better understand human anatomy.

Really?!? Do you really want to 'better understand' something, or do you just want to take picts of people doin' it? The money quote: The video is "of interest to laypersons who have an interest in reproductive anatomy." Uh, isn't everyone? If you're not, why do you bother getting out of bed every day?

Posted 8/20/2009 05:56:00 PM by Douglas

Gotta give it to MSNBC. They got the story that racist gun-toting Obama haters are showing up at town hall meetings. But they had to get a real tight shot of one guy with a gun, because he was, in fact, black.

The whole “when will the angry white people take a pop at the brave black president” commentary went on for a couple of minutes. I’m pretty sure that more than a couple people walked away from the report honestly thinking that the anti-Obamacare protesters are a bunch of insane, racist would-be assassins.

You see, the guy carrying the guns was a well-dressed black man.

Pretty stupid, but even more embarrassing that MSNBC thought they could get away with it. A black man with a gun at the town-hall? Someone is going to get that on camera.

Posted 8/20/2009 05:27:00 PM by Douglas

From the king's foot to a block of metal in Paris. We still have a way to go when it comes to a measurement system that's worth a damn.

More than a century ago, a small metal cylinder was forged in London and sent to a leafy suburb of Paris. The cylinder was about the size of a salt shaker and made of an alloy of platinum and iridium, an advanced material at the time.

In Paris, scientists polished and weighed it carefully, until they determined that it was exactly one kilogram, around 2.2 pounds. Then, by international treaty, they declared it to be the international standard.

Yay, kilogram! But of course, this is a perfect system, right?

As it stands, the entire world's system of measurement hinges on the cylinder. If it is dropped, scratched or otherwise defaced, it would cause a global problem. "If somebody sneezed on that kilogram standard, all the weights in the world would be instantly wrong," says Richard Steiner, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Md.

Yeah, well no. The entire balance of power of the natural universe doesn't give a shit how big this metallic rock is. And there are copies.

For that reason, the official kilogram is kept locked inside a secured vault at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris. Scientists are so paranoid that they've only taken it out on three occasions: in 1889, 1946 and 1989. Each time, they've compared it to a set of copies. In 1889, the copies and the kilogram weighed the same, but by 1989, they had drifted apart. Based on the data, the kilogram appears to weigh slightly less than the copies.

Not surprising. No matter how good you take care of it, it's going to be off by a molecule or two, and when you're measuring it as precisely as these guys are, it adds up. But interesting that all the copies are increasing. That would imply that this one is decreasing. Any ideas why?

The real crux of this problem is that it's impossible to tell what has changed over the past 120 years. The copies may have grown heavier over time by absorbing air molecules. But it's equally possible that the kilogram is getting lighter. Periodic washings, for example, may have removed microscopic quantities of metal from its surface.

Periodic washing??? In NPR letting summer interns write copy? (oh wait, that's just an art history major). They've only taken it out of it's triple bell housing three times in 120 years. I find it hard to believe that during one of those outings Jean-Michelle would take it down to the car wash.

Posted 8/19/2009 05:23:00 PM by Douglas

Keeping with their staunch march to obscurity, this time it's Newsweek. While thumbing through this week's dead-tree edition, I anxiously turn to check out the cover story: are there really aliens? I couldn't wait. So imagine my disappointment when I get to the back of the magazine (they always bury the lede) and find that this piece of hard-hitting journalism is in list form. Great! They're now bringing annoying formats previously reserved for their short attention span internet addicted readers to print form! That should save the industry!

But if you keep clicking through this fun, fact-filled frolic into journalistic frivolity, you come up on this little jewel, I mean turd. Literally.

Deep down, Americans have always known that wiping their rears with dry paper is ineffective; a classic survey showed that half of TP users spend their days with "fecal contamination"—anything from "wasp-colored" stains to "frank massive feces"—in their underpants.

Super! We're not wiping our asses correctly. Thanks Newsweek! I think I'm going to renew my subscription for this priceless information right now!

Labels: dumb internet lists

Posted 8/17/2009 08:54:00 PM by Douglas

Sure, we've all been there. You have a toddler that's also a Navy SEAL. Where are you going to find riot gear, tasers, bullet proof strollers and bomb blankets designed with your toddler in mind? Right here.

I thought it was a real site (I found it when searching "Bomb Blanket" for a work project, but that's another story). Then I got to the comments on the "baby taser" and started laughing my ass off. Also, don't miss out the product testing video on the main page. Real fake, but real funny.

Posted 8/17/2009 08:43:00 PM by Douglas

The Telegraph nails another fascinating obituary.

Hugh Millais, who has died aged 79, wafted genially through life – sailing around the Caribbean in his own yacht as a calypso singer; starting an ambitious house building scheme in Spain; and appearing in two of Robert Altman's films – without ever having to suffer the indignity of full-time employment.

I like his recipe for a great life:

Hugh Millais summed up his recipe for life: "75 years, 0 hours of labour, 40,000 bottles of wine, a pinch of Song, Women (to taste). Sozzle gently over a low lifestyle, leave to marinade slowly, bring to fruition. Garnish the whole thing wildly in the telling."

Top that, workin' suckers.

Labels: Telegraph Obits

Posted 8/16/2009 06:17:00 PM by Douglas

Cosmo has been trying to figure out "what men want" for over 40 years, but it really is this simple. Masturbating in peace is such a close second to gettin' some. So very close. Thanks, long-time reader!

But for a real critique of women's magazines, I have to defer to a woman, because no one can point out how insipid they are quite like Ms. Althouse. Yeah, the "125 Sex Moves" really made me laugh. Sounds like about 123 too many!

Posted 8/13/2009 08:47:00 PM by Douglas

America is out of sugar.

The food producers, which also include Kraft and General Mills, gave the warning in a letter to the Obama administration. They claim that unless import quotas are increased there could be a severe shortage of sugar used in chocolate bars, breakfast cereal, cookies, chewing gum and thousands of other products.

US sugar prices are trading near 30-year highs on growing concerns about global supplies.

So why the panic? Maybe if all the corn in the country wasn't being wasted in ethanol production, your Hershey bar wouldn't be in such trouble. Besides, relaxing standards on inporting food? What's the worst that could happen?

Posted 8/13/2009 08:40:00 PM by Douglas

Rarely do genius inventors know the potential of their progress. It usually takes someone with a different perspective to apply their creation in a way they had never imagined. Such was not the case with Les Paul.

Mr. Paul, whose original name was Lester William Polsfuss, was born on June 9, 1915, in Waukesha, Wis. His childhood piano teacher wrote to his mother, “Your boy, Lester, will never learn music.”

Yeah, doesn't that happen to everyone?

His interest in gadgets came early. At the age of 10 he devised a harmonica holder from a coat hanger. Soon afterward he made his first amplified guitar by opening the back of a Sears acoustic model and inserting, behind the strings, the pickup from a dismantled Victrola. With the record player on, the acoustic guitar became an electric one. Later, he built his own pickup from ham radio earphone parts and assembled a recording machine using a Cadillac flywheel and the belt from a dentist’s drill.

And the music world was never the same. But he wasn't done:

In 1940 or 1941 — the exact date is unknown — , Mr. Paul made his guitar breakthrough. Seeking to create electronically sustained notes on the guitar, he attached strings and two pickups to a wooden board with a guitar neck. “The log,” as he called it, if not the first solid-body electric guitar, became the most influential one.

“You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be sounding,” Mr. Paul once said.

The odd-looking instrument drew derision when he first played it in public, so he hid the works inside a conventional-looking guitar. But the log was a conceptual turning point. With no acoustic resonance of its own, it was designed to generate an electronic signal that could be amplified and processed — the beginning of a sonic transformation of the world’s music.

Then he invented the 8-track recording, had his elbow wired into a position that would let him play. Read the whole thing, but the last time brings it all home:

“Honestly, I never strove to be an Edison,” he said in a 1991 interview in The New York Times. “The only reason I invented these things was because I didn’t have them and neither did anyone else. I had no choice, really.”

They don't make 'em like this anymore.

Posted 8/13/2009 08:26:00 PM by Douglas

In a polite society, we build prisons for monsters like this. I'm not one to advocate prison rape, but I hope he gets some payback in the shower for the next 120 years.

The FBI found John Jackey Worman with more than 1 million images and 11,000 videos of child pornography when they arrested him in suburban Philadelphia in 2007. Worman made girls in his care perform sex acts for school lunch money.

But at least he's remorseful:

Worman has told prison doctors he feels no remorse for sexually "anointing" his female victims.

"I am totally at peace with everything I have done," he said, according to U.S. District Judge Lawrence F. Stengel, who sentenced him to 120 years in prison.

So how was he finally caught, if he had some much help finding victims?

A teenager who had been abused for several years ultimately tipped off authorities, after watching an episode of "Law & Order" about child sexual abuse. She only then realized it had been wrong, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Rotella said.

Law & Order. Is there anything it can't do?

Posted 8/13/2009 06:50:00 PM by Douglas

Do you feel small yet? Watch the video. Also, remember that NASA gets 0.07¢ out of ever one of your tax dollars. And let's not forget what kept the Hubble in orbit from 2002 to 2009.

"Extensive" analysis, indeed.

Posted 8/13/2009 06:33:00 PM by Douglas

RIP: John Hughes. This time from Molly Ringwald.

Most everyone knows that John retreated from Hollywood and became a sort of J.D. Salinger for Generation X. But really, sometime before then, he had retreated from us and from the kinds of movies that he had made with us. I still believe that the Hughes films of which both Michael and I were a part (specifically “Sixteen Candles” and “The Breakfast Club”) were the most deeply personal expressions of John’s. In retrospect, I feel that we were sort of avatars for him, acting out the different parts of his life — improving upon it, perhaps. In those movies, he always got the last word. He always got the girl.

None of the films that he made subsequently had the same kind of personal feeling to me. They were funny, yes, wildly successful, to be sure, but I recognized very little of the John I knew in them, of his youthful, urgent, unmistakable vulnerability. It was like his heart had closed, or at least was no longer open for public view. A darker spin can be gleaned from the words John put into the mouth of Allison in “The Breakfast Club”: “When you grow up ... your heart dies.”

I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. Though it does seem sadly poignant that physically, at least, John’s heart really did die.

Wow. Who knows what happened to him after the 80s, and why he stopped writing. I'm sure it'll come out in a few weeks. But to every teenager in the 80s, the man was a god. We can forgive him for Flubber. A man's gotta eat, after all.

Posted 8/12/2009 06:52:00 PM by Douglas

Smooth move, Barry. When selling your health care plan, maybe you shouldn't have compared the government option to the post office.

He countered a distortion of a rule that would require Medicare to pay for end-of-life care counseling, and compared the relationship between a public option and private insurers with that of the Post Office, and private shippers FedEx, and UPS. “‘UPS and FedEx are doing just fine,’ Mr. Obama joked. ‘It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.’”

Wait a sec, isn't the option you're pushing, the post office option, and not the FedEx/UPS option?

What a sad epilogue (and I think it will be) to a failed program when the president exemplifies the problem with his own analogy as to how the private sector can do anything better than the government.

Posted 8/12/2009 06:46:00 PM by Douglas

And now from the bureau of pulling things out of our butts, let's here it for "this is the worst time for hurricanes in 1,000 years."

Atlantic hurricanes have developed more frequently during the last decade than at any point in at least 1,000 years, a new analysis of historical storm activity suggests.

The new study, being published Thursday in Nature, attempts to reconstruct Atlantic hurricane activity back to the year A.D. 500. In doing so the authors found one era, a medieval period around A.D. 1000, when storm activity matched or exceeded recent hurricane seasons that included storms such as Katrina and Rita.

What does the NHC think about this?

“The paper comes to very erroneous conclusions because of using improper data and illogical techniques,” said Chris Landsea, science and operations officer at the National Hurricane Center.

In his criticism, Landsea notes that the paper begins by saying that Atlantic tropical activity has “reached anomalous levels over the past decade.”

“This isn't a small quibble,” he said. “It's the difference between a massive trend with doubling in the last 100 years, versus no trend.”

Don't confuse them with facts. They have converging models, and they got published. None of the hot-heads that are going to cite this study in order to justify CO₂ based global warming are going to read past the executive summary, anyway.

Labels: global warming

Posted 8/12/2009 05:37:00 PM by Douglas

You should never beat your red-headed stepchild. Turns out, they feel more pain, anyway, so technically, you don't have to beat 'em as hard!

A growing body of research shows that people with red hair need larger doses of anesthesia and often are resistant to local pain blockers like Novocaine. As a result, redheads tend to be particularly nervous about dental procedures and are twice as likely to avoid going to the dentist as people with other hair colors, according to new research published in The Journal of the American Dental Association.

Researchers believe redheads are more sensitive to pain because of a mutation in a gene that affects hair color. In people with brown, black and blond hair, the gene, for the melanocortin-1 receptor, produces melanin. But a mutation in the MC1R gene results in the production of a substance called pheomelanin that results in red hair and fair skin.

Interesting. I wonder if there's any research done on if any pain is felt by redheads when they play you dirty and fuck your brother? If only I had got my grant application in on time.

Posted 8/11/2009 07:46:00 PM by Douglas

Interesting take on our culture of free, but little perspective, other than a pithy political cartoon (which, isn't funny) about how that related to health care.

But where does this pervasive "culture of free" come from? No one thinks that the government owes you a car, do they? Ok, bad example. But still, isn't this the perpetuation of the government program run awry? People don't need to take care of themselves, because the government is always going to be there to pick up the pieces. Get a bad mortgage you can't pay? Here comes uncle sucker. Need health care? Here comes uncle sucker. Can't afford a new car, take care of your kids, feed yourself, or wipe your own ass? Don't worry about it. Here comes the government, and they're here to help, and save you from yourself.

Well I can afford newspapers, CDs, automobiles, and for the time being, health care. So how 'bout instead of trying to figure out how to get the government to take care of all your daily needs, we try the opposite and make sure that people taking care of them selves is the norm, not the exception.

Posted 8/09/2009 09:45:00 PM by Douglas

Sunset, Mission Beach, San Diego.

Posted 8/08/2009 11:56:00 PM by Douglas

We survived the Californian Odyssey. Eleven days in the golden state, driving up the Pacific Coast Highway from San Diego to San Francisco, and we didn't get knifed or swallowed by an earthquake. Pictures, such that they are, will soon follow. After I wash four metric tons of laundry.