Go Get 'Em!

Jason Beghe is rapidly climbing my hero list now that he's crusading against the "church" of Scientology:

"Will Smith is supposedly dabbling in Scientology. Let Will Smith know that his shit was fucking recorded. And tell him to look them in the eye and see if he believes it when they deny it."

Even worse, he says, is that behind the backs of celebrities, Scientology officials gossip about what transpires in those supposedly private sessions. "Everything's supposed to be confidential. But all they do is chat about it," he says.

And apparently Maverick almost slipped loose at one point...

The best part is this dude was deep into the whole thing:

His move to clear was so rapid, Beghe was told that diminutive Scientology leader David Miscavige considered him a “poster boy” for the religion.

“I was Miscavige’s favorite boy, so they were doing all kinds of things to keep me happy,” he says. “I moved up the Bridge faster than anyone in history. I went at it 24/7 for about a year. I went clear. Got to OT V. I was a trained auditor.” (OT stands for “operating thetan,” and the highest level in the church is said to be OT VIII.)

“I’m farther up the Bridge than Travolta, and he’s been in there a thousand years. He’s not a trained auditor.” To Beghe, some of the celebrities “seemed like dilettantes,” enjoying the perks but not really working hard at being Scientologists.

I still wonder what the "perks" actually are. Aside from "connections", or whatever...

Holy Cow

The Broom Game has to be one of the most (potentially) dangerous party past times I've seen in a while. Coworkers and I are working on death-defying variations, since our only spot to play it would be on a 3rd story stucco balcony. Here are a few others:

  1. My neighborhood (featuring a nice mix of ponds, streets, and prairie dog-infested open space)
  2. On a rowboat (sharks/piranhas/etc. for extra points)
  3. The grassy triangle in the crotch of a highway off-ramp.

Awesome.

Bullet the Blue Sky

Or... Y'know... A bulleted list of junk from the internets:

That is all.

Trsly

Andre points to Trsly.com, which may be a lot of fun. At the very least it should give me a place to put quick links to all the *boggle* I find on the intarwebs but choose not to post here. I'll need to see about hacking it into my WordPress theme, but in the mean time you can subscribe to my quotes with that wild feed reading technology. (Or not. The user-level feed link is actually busted at the moment, which sucks balls.)

Hit 'Em Again

Here's to having MLK Day off from work! Going for my walk/run today in 15 degree (F) temps wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting. Until my calf started cramping. That had nothing to do with the cold, though. It was ready to go from the activity earlier in the weekend.

Junk I've run across:

Hey, how are ya?

Some random crap: My mommy got me a 40" Sony LCD HDTV for Xmas. I was planning to get something in the 46" range later in 2008, but 40" turns out to be plenty big (plus, it's free, yo!). That mother of mine is pretty cool. Even if she does have a thundering herd of Great Danes at her house (including this one and this one, who will make you cry).

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Did you hear the Lakota have decided to secede from the US? I figure this is roughly equivalent to them going on strike. They're grabbing some attention and might get some sort fo concession from the US government, but in the end it will amount to nothing. Though, Brozo and I think it'd be fun if they started tolling traffic on I-90 and formed an army. How long do you think it would take for them to be labeled "terrorists" if they did that?

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Did you hear that monkeys are as good at mental mathematics as college kids?

"We had them do math on the fly," Cantlon said.

The task was to mentally add two sets of dots that were briefly flashed on a computer screen. The teams were asked to pick the correct answer from two choices on a different screen.

The humans were not allowed to count or verbalize as they worked, and they were told to answer as quickly as possible. Both monkeys and humans typically answered within 1 second.

And both groups fared about the same.

Great. Just great.

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Maybe they can help economists decide whether there's going to be a recession or not.

"A lot of the underlying resilience of the U.S. economy seems a bit unappreciated," says Citigroup economist Steven Wieting. "It's not clear that this is so large a burden that we can't muddle through this."

That's the best this guy could come up with? Muddle through?

Bah! I'll show you "clubby".

I hate the Apple Store. I have from the beginning. I guess some people like it (or did like it), but I'm not one of them. I like to be able to actually buy things in stores without having to enlist a fulltime escort. Nothing frustrated me more than needing a new iPod, walking into the store, seeing a table loaded with iPods packaged for Christmas joy... BEHIND a friggin' rope. I stood there frozen, staring at my just out of my reach goal, thinking "How... Do... I... Buy... One...?" until I got frustrated enough to walk out and buy the iPod online from home.

Conversely, I was fine with the expectation of having to talk to someone when I wanted to buy my iMac. That's a big purchase with options involved. I'm fine talking to someone about that. I shouldn't need to talk to someone to buy an iPod, though. At least not until my credit card is out.

Lexicographic Smackdown

Having spend a number of years in/around Boston, I can testify that it becomes increasingly believable that the Irish may have invented the world. Perhaps this tendency isn't only a Beantown phenomenon, as illustrated by this NYTimes article about tracing a large portion of the modern slang dictionary to the Irish Gaelic tongue. The book, for which the article is basically an advertisement, is actually called How the Irish Invented Slang.

Like I said, though, it's kind of easy to fall for these types of hypotheses (for whatever reason). Luckily, the intarwebs are full of differing opinions on just about any subject you could imagine. In this case, the counterpoint is solid:

In January 2005, I challenged Cassidy to present all of his evidence. I told him that I’m the descendant of three strains of Irish, four strains of empiricist, and the son of a bluster-catcher, and I said he was going to have to do better than trot out the same-old “they’re all against me!� argument of every perpetual motion inventor.

To date, what he’s provided as evidence is flimsy and fouled by scholarly incompetence.

Just fair warning, if you're at all like me and tend to fall for the various romantic myths of the various Celtic peoples. Besides, everyone knows the Scots invented everything! ;^)

Here's tae us Wha's like us Damn few, And they're a' deid Mair's the pity!

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Track o' the Post: Erin Go Bragh from Dick Gaughan's Handful of Earth. (Dick Gaughan, it's worth noting, is a Scot and something of an internet geek. Nice!)

Oh, Internets, how I love thee!

Some tidbits that make me happy:

  • Have you found He-Man? I'm not really sure why they've labeled this guy He-Man. He's much more like a Chippendales dancer with his Swayze mullet, velvet choker, and perv 'stache.
  • You know who makes me happier than He-Man? German Techno Viking, that's who! He makes me giggle with the boundless joy of a little girl.
  • Then there's Tiffany Sutton (no known relation, thanks). Brozo pointed her out to me a while ago when her story first broke. Now she's been to court and "attempted to show her remorse". (I'm guessing she didn't do so well, if that's how they wrote it up in the paper...) I've bolded some awesomeness for you:
    • In one incident, she and the victim, 46-year-old Robert McDaniel, were high on drugs and drunk when he agreed to be tied up during sex, a police report states.

      McDaniel told police he became scared and asked Sutton to untie him when she attacked him with a knife. Instead, she sliced his leg, punctured his arm, shoulder and back, and cut his neck and stomach, court records show. When he escaped, she chased him with a pickax.

    • So you're telling me there were multiple incidents? Did the others involve excavation tools?

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Track o' the Post: Moaner from Boucoup Fish by my favorite techno wizards, Underworld (FYI: This is the first time Amazon didn't have the MP3 download for the track I originally wanted to use: "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor" by the Arctic Monkeys, which I still think is the more appropriate/amusing choice.)

Effective Clownery

Once, when I was small and living in the winter home of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, I thought I'd like to be a clown. Nowadays I mostly subscribe to the "clowns are creepy" philosophy, though. But when I come across a story like this, it warms the cockles, to be sure:

Clowns KKKick KKK ass!

"White Power!" the Nazis shouted, "White Flour?" the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt "White Flour".

"White Power!" the Nazis angrily shouted once more, "White flowers?" the clowns cheers and threw white flowers in the air and danced about merrily.

Awesome! And this happened in Knoxville, TN -- my old neck of the woods.

You should be stronger than me.

Well, Amy Winehouse is finally going to rehab ("No, no, no!"). Mad props to WWTDD for summing up the story perfectly:

Winehouse, who collapsed last week after taking a cocktail of heroin, ecstasy, cocaine and the horse tranquillizer ketamine, is now thought to be wait did that fucking say "heroin, ecstasy, cocaine and the horse tranquillizer ketamine"?  HOLY SHIT!

...

This story about a porn star called Mia Rose being banned from World of Warcraft for... um... being a porn star is hilarious. Where's the logic in that? Wouldn't you want people to think hot sluts played your game?

...

David Allen should be announcing the winner of his tattoo giveaway today. Of course I entered, but I'm really rooting for his mom.

Kay You En Tee

They way I imagine this happening

Scene: A junior exec from KM Communications is trying to bond with his teenage sons over a "meal" from Wendy's, since he's never learned to cook and hasn't introduced his girlfriend to the boys yet out of fear that they would tell his ex-wife about her.

Dad: Hey! I've been put in charge of picking the call letters for some new TV stations. You guys wanna pick some out?

Boys: *whisper-giggle-whisper* Yeah, Dad, that'd be really cool. How about these...

Now the question is: Are there any other offensive call letters out there?

Rules of the game:

  1. 4 letters (no numbers)
  2. First letter must be K or W

Personally, I don't come up with much. WUSS and WIMP is about as good as I get.