Posted 5/25/2011 09:23:00 PM by Douglas

Hey, Mike Barnhart, do you really want to know why people hate IndyCar racing and most race fans would rather listen to NASCAR race on the radio than see an Indy Race in person? It's because of this bush league bullshit like this.

This year, Junqueira qualified 19th for the race in A.J. Foyt Racing's No. 41 car, but Foyt and Andretti Autosport owner Michael Andretti made a deal Monday that put Andretti Autosport driver Ryan Hunter-Reay into the car for Sunday's race.

Here's what happened. Hunter-Reay was sitting on the 33rd and final qualifying spot for the race with 3 minutes left to qualify this past Sunday, or Bump Day, as it's called. Marco Andretti went out and qualified, thus 'bumping' his teammate from the qualified drivers. I mean cars. Right, team owner Michael Andretti?

"I disagree with the idea that we are doing something to hurt the integrity of the Indy 500," he said in a statement. "We would never do that — ever. The rule is the fastest 33 cars make the race — not the 33 fastest drivers. And, that is what will be on track Sunday."

I wonder if he said that with a straight face. Your driver and his entire crew put together a car and everything that goes along with that. They don't make the cut. So you whip out your checkbook and buy a car from A.J. Foyt? What a load of crap. I hope A.J. got a lot of money, because they're both what's wrong with the entire event. It's bad enough they sold out their key sponsorship to some faggoty French T-shirt company.

Enjoy your slide, through the marbles, and into the wall of relevance, Indy.

Posted 5/21/2011 09:16:00 PM by Douglas

So I guess Jesus saw his shadow today, but nothing happened.

With no sign his forecast of Judgment Day arriving on Saturday has come true, the 89-year-old California evangelical broadcaster and former civil engineer behind the pronouncement seemed to have gone silent.

Family Radio, the Christian stations network headed by Harold Camping which had spread his message of an approaching doomsday, was on Saturday playing recorded church music and devotional messages unrelated to the apocalypse.

Camping previously made a failed prediction Jesus Christ would return to Earth in 1994.

Ooops. So how many mulligans does this guy get before people quit listening to him? Is there a better way to make use of this idiot's time? Sure there is.

After all, it might be if the Rev. Harold Camping is right. The 89-year-old California religious leader has pinpointed the human race's expiration date with mathematic exactitude: May 21, 2011.

In honor of that pronouncement, more than 200 people have signed up for tonight's "Rapture party" at the Fox and Hound English Pub and Grille on Westheimer, hosted by the Texas Free Thought Convention.

A table will be set up where people who expect to disappear in the Rapture can leave behind their possessions, such as car keys and bank account numbers.

"We'll make sure their stuff is in good hands," said Paul Mitchell, president of the Texas Free Thought Convention. "And if Camping is right and the Rapture does happen, we want to make sure we have a really good time beforehand, so we can say we partied like rock stars as the world came to an end."

Party down!

Posted 5/21/2011 01:34:00 PM by Douglas

Paula Deen is bat-shit crazy. That being said, I don't think her status as a gourmand could ever be impuned. Certainly not by this recipe:

Ingredients
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter
2 cans (14 1/2-ounces) English peas, drained

Directions
Melt the butter in small pot and add the peas. Cook over medium heat until peas are warm.

Whoa! Slow down there, Paula.

I still love Homer's definition of gourmand: Like a gormet, only fatter.

Posted 5/18/2011 10:28:00 PM by Douglas

Remember a few weeks ago when you saw that video from the National Geographic special about the couple that lives together and the dude is an adult baby? Sure you do, and it was weird and we all had a good laugh. Well, would you believe that the adult baby is on the government's tit, as well? He's been receiving SSI disability benefits for the past decade, and some people are none too pleased with that prospect.

Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican and the Senate’s top waste-watcher, asked the agency’s inspector general to look into 30-year-old Stanley T_____ and his roommate, Sandra D___, who acts as his “mother,” saying it’s not clear why they are collecting Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits instead of working.

“Given that Mr. T___ is able to determine what is appropriate attire and actions in public, drive himself to complete errands, design and custom-make baby furniture to support a 350-pound adult and run an Internet support group, it is possible that he has been improperly collecting disability benefits for a period of time,” Mr. Coburn wrote in a letter Monday to Inspector General Patrick P. O'Carroll Jr.

OK, it's weird, but why pick on this guy? How many people are mooching off SSI? Hell, Judge Judy wouldn't have a career if people weren't abusing the SSI program. But let's hear how he reacts to new found publicity:

“You wanna test how damn serious I am about leaving this world, screw with my check that pays for this apartment and food. Try it. See how serious I am. I don’t care,” the California man said. “I have no problem killing myself. Take away the last thing keeping me here, and see what happens. Next time you see me on the news, it will be me in a body bag.”

Wow, he threw a little baby fit. Who saw that coming?

Posted 5/17/2011 10:16:00 PM by Douglas

It's not often, ok, ever, that I find myself agreeing with Ruth "the badger" Ginsburg as the lone stalwart of The Supremes, but dang if this isn't a head scratcher.

Ruling in a Kentucky case Monday, the justices said that officers who smell marijuana and loudly knock on the door may break in if they hear sounds that suggest the residents are scurrying to hide the drugs.

The Kentucky case began when police in Lexington sought to arrest a man who had sold crack cocaine to an informer. They followed the man to an apartment building, but lost contact with him. They smelled marijuana coming from one apartment. Though it turned out not to be the apartment of their suspect, they pounded on the door, called, "Police," and heard people moving inside.

At this, the officers announced they were coming in and broke down the door. Instead of the original suspect, they found Hollis King smoking marijuana and arrested him. They also found powder cocaine. King was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to 11 years in prison.

So knock down the wrong door, totally surprise someone doing something illegal, and because you did it unknowingly and, as Alito says, because the "exigency wasn't created," it's now legal. Here's the whole opinion. I'm glad Ginsburg quoted this part from a ruling in 1947:

"The right of officers to thrust themselves into a home is . . . a grave concern, not only to the individual but to a society which chooses to dwell in reasonable security and freedom from surveillance. When the right of privacy must reasonably yield to the right of search is,as a rule, to be decided by a judicial officer, not a policeman . . ."If the officers in this case were excused from the constitutional duty of presenting their evidence to a magistrate, it is difficult to think of [any] case in which [a warrant] should be required."

Thanks a lot, 1947. You gave them too many ideas.

Posted 5/17/2011 09:55:00 PM by Douglas

More on the Mississippi from Mr. Weather, Jeff Masters:

While I expect that the Old River Control Structure will indeed hold back the great flood of 2011, we also need to be concerned about the levees on either side of the structure. The levees near Old River Control Structure range from 71 – 74 feet high, and the flood is expected to crest at 65.5 feet on May 22. This is, in theory, plenty of levee to handle such a flood, but levees subjected to long periods of pressure can and do fail sometimes, and the Corps has to be super-careful to keep all the levees under constant surveillance and quickly move to repair sand boils or piping problems that might develop. Any failure of a levee on the west bank of the Mississippi could allow the river to jump its banks permanently and carve a new path to the Gulf of Mexico.

This is from Friday and the Morganza spillway has been open for three days now.

Posted 5/16/2011 11:39:00 PM by Douglas

For a line of credit increase, press one.

The United States reached its $14.3 trillion limit on federal borrowing Monday, leaving Congress 11 weeks to raise the threshold or risk a financial panic or another recession.

If it doesn't raise the limit, Congress would have to come up with $738 billion to make up for what it planned to borrow through the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. The options are drastic: Cut 40 percent of the budget through September, which might mean defaulting on payments to investors in government bonds; raise taxes immediately; or some combination of the two.

Wow, I never get tired of this story. Thankfully, it doesn't seem like I'll have to, since this happens just about every year. I finally made a tag for it! The details:

In 2010, Congress raised the limit to nearly $14.3 trillion from $12.4 trillion. Three decades ago, the national debt was $908 billion. But Washington spent more than it took in, and the debt rose steadily — surpassing $1 trillion in 1982, then $5 trillion in 1996. It reached $10 trillion in 2008 as the financial crisis and recession dried up tax revenue and as the government spent more on unemployment benefits and other programs.

Sleep tight, kids.

Labels: debt ceiling

Posted 5/14/2011 09:00:00 PM by Douglas

So it begins:

A steel, 10-ton floodgate was slowly raised Saturday for the first time in nearly four decades, unleashing a torrent of water from the Mississippi River, away from heavily populated areas downstream.

The water spit out slowly at first, then began gushing like a waterfall as it headed to swamp as much as 3,000 square miles of Cajun countryside known for small farms and fish camps. Some places could wind up under as much as 25 feet of water.

Opening the Morganza spillway diverts water away from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and the numerous oil refineries and chemical plants along the lower reaches of the Mississippi.

“We’re using every flood control tool we have in the system,” Army Corps of Engineers Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh said Saturday from the dry side of the spillway, before the bay was opened. The podium Walsh was standing at was expected to be under several feet of water Sunday.

Sit tight, kids we're still in act one of this play. . . .

Posted 5/14/2011 01:41:00 PM by Douglas

Here comes the flood.

The Army Corps of Engineers announced today that if it opens the Morganza Floodway north of Baton Rouge to reduce the height of Mississippi River floodwaters flowing south, the flow into the Atchafalaya River basin may be limited to only a fourth of the floodway's capacity.

Until today, corps officials have said 300,000 cubic feet per second of water, half the floodway's capacity, would flow down the Atchafalaya.

In its statement, the corps said the flow at Red River Landing had reached 1.45 million cubic feet per second at 7 a.m. today, and is projected to reach 1.5 million cubic feet per second this weekend.

The key will be whether that's enough to keep water flow levels above the Bonnet Carre Spillway to 1.5 million cubic feet per second. That spillway, when all 350 bays are opened, diverts 250,000 cubic feet per second of water into Lake Pontchartrain, which would allow only 1.25 million cubic feet per second to pass the Carrollton Gage in New Orleans.

Here's what I don't understand. Bonnet Carre is always first to open, dumping water into Pontchartrain. But if the whole system gets overwhelmed, isn't that just going to be MORE water in New Orleans? It's the Lake Pontchartrain levees that failed during Katrina. The Army's battle with gravity is going to get interesting this week.

Posted 5/11/2011 09:25:00 PM by Douglas

The record flooding on the upper Mississippi River is headed for the, wait for it, LOWER Mississippi River. Sounds pretty logical, right? Well duh, but here's why it's a big deal to people NOT just in the Atchafalaya Basin:

But the real threat posed by this historic, gathering flood may well lie several hundred miles to the south, where the Mississippi crosses the Louisiana border. There, as the Corps well knows but dare not discuss, this historic flood threatens to overwhelm one of the frailest defenses industrial humanity has offered to preserve its profits from the immutable processes of nature. This flood has the potential to be a mortal blow to the economy of the United States, and outside the Corp of Engineers virtually no one knows why.

Don't like $4 a gallon gas? Good, you won't have time to get used to it if the refineries between Baton Rouge and New Orleans are shut down because the course of the Mississippi changes course this weekend.

Well good luck with all that. For a good source of current events of as this unfolds, try this. And here's a great history of the problem, and 60 years of the Army Corps of Engineers trying to make water flow uphill.

Posted 5/11/2011 08:54:00 PM by Douglas

Great video of the new Boeing 747 take-off abort test. Let's just say a million pounds going 200 miles per hour don't exactly stop on a dime:

HOT FOOT!!!

Posted 5/08/2011 05:59:00 PM by Douglas

I've tried to avoid this one, but I'm afraid I have to weigh in on slut-walk. Check out the picture:

Why is it that in a "Slut Walk," the only nipple we see is on a fat, hairy dude? Sluts, where are your nipps? But I digress. Sluts, speak out:

Some women and men who protest dress in nothing more remarkable than jeans and T-shirts, while others wear provocative or revealing outfits to bring attention to "slut-shaming," or shaming women for being sexual, and the treatment of sexual assault victims.

Ok, sure the guy made a stupid comment. Is he advocating sexual abuse against women? No. But, there might be some situations women find themselves in that would increase their likelihood of being a victim, but we can't talk about that, because sluts have a right to live consequence-free lives, right?

Dave Chappelle had the best take on this, when he called a woman a slut because she was dressed like one. She became incensed, and he likened that to people becoming confused as if he were wearing a policeman's uniform. Is it fair to confuse the uniform for the person? Absolutely. You may not be a slut, but if you're wearing the uniform, you might as well be.

Posted 5/03/2011 06:39:00 PM by Douglas

Now that we've had a few days to settle down about the killing of Bin Laden, I think it's apt to trot out a great essay from George Orwell and his take on revenge. I love his angle here about the perception of the oppressed as he becomes the oppressor:

I concluded that he wasn't really enjoying it, and that he was merely--like a man in a brothel, or a boy smoking his first cigar, or a tourist traipsing round a picture gallery--TELLING himself that he was enjoying it, and behaving as he had planned to behave in the days he was helpless.

How perfect. "I know I'm supposed to enjoy this. . so why don't I?" I don't think the world was a better place with OBL in it, but his demise gives us very little to celebrate. In short, he won, and he was looking for this bullet for the last 15 years. The "war on terror" isn't any closer to being over, we're not any safer, and the draconian law that were enacted because of him will never, ever go away. So celebrate the revenge, morons, and think real hard about the times when you used to be able to get on an airplane without getting felt up.

Here's an amusing send up of a past not likely to return:

Posted 5/01/2011 10:14:00 PM by Douglas

Where to live to avoid natural disaster. Suck it, Dallas.

Posted 5/01/2011 10:12:00 PM by Douglas

Bin Laden is dead. Just as soon as they show his death certificate to Donald Trump.