Why I hate kids these days

Those who are busy texting during a history lesson from someone who was there are destined to be a bunch of assholes:

Officials at an Oregon high school said they are banning cellphones and iPods after rude behavior during a speaking engagement by a Holocaust survivor.

Scappoose High School administrators said the electronic devices are now banned for the school's 700 students after Alter Wiener, 84, was repeatedly interrupted during a January assembly by students text messaging and talking on their phones, KGW-TV, Portland, Ore., reported Wednesday.

"This is the first time I had to deflect from the presentation and say, please show me some respect," said Wiener, who survived stints in five different Nazi labor and concentration camps while his entire family was slain. "It's an insult to me."

There. Are. No. Words.

You could be hearing a stirring story about one man's survival in the face of unspeakable evil, and you'd rather be typing "OMG did U see wut Taylor is wearing 2day LOL?"

I weep for the future.

What a fun vacation!

Here's a headline from Reuters:

Theme park highlights challenges facing dwarfs

Granted, this is from China, but over here, our theme parks tend to highlight stuff like, oh, I don't know, fun. For the kids, usually.

(Nothing against dwarf theme park employees or anything, but I thought it was mainly about the kids. And the kids having fun. And the parents taking pictures of the kids on a carousel that didn't involve "challenges" for the park's employees.)

That's entertainment

Like everyone else, I get bored sometimes. When that happens, I check to see if there's anything good on teevee. Failing that, I put on a DVD or search for some internet por—um, entertaining Youtube videos. This, on the other hand, would not have occurred to me:

A man who has been charged with making a naked dash through a Tennessee supermarket told police he was "bored and didn't have anything else to do."

And, um, now you're in jail where the entertainment options are virtually limitless.

Since it's Friday night...

...and you're accustomed to seeing a photo of an attractive woman, here's model/actress Gabrielle Union:

If I was a lesser man, I'd make a joke involving her last name and my swimsuit area.

Any title I could come up with would be pretty crass

I've never been incarcerated before, but movies and teevee have shown me that it's not a pleasant place. And not just for the inmates, either. It's pretty harsh for the guards, too. Especially in Swedish prisons:

The warden of a Swedish jail said a prisoner received an official warning for voicing his discontent toward his situation via flatulence.

Anders Eriksson, warden of the Kirseberg prison in Malmo, said guards filed numerous complaints against the 21-year-old prisoner, who was not named, alleging "a series of concerted attacks" in the form of the prisoner's constant wind-breaking, Britain's The Daily Telegraph reported Thursday.

While I'm sure that having someone constantly farting in your presence is rather unpleasant, it doesn't really seem as bad as having to deal with riots or having a prisoner stab you with an improvised knife.

Okay, I officially take back the "Especially in Swedish prisons" thing that I said before.

What a horrible guy

Does anybody see what's wrong with this picture?

Nineteen-year-old Ilenia Moretti had asked her father Rodolfo for 5,000 euros ($6,756) for a trip to America before using the money to hire a hitman to kill him, apparently with her mother's consent, a police statement said.

The teen-ager, from the small town of Luzzara near the northern Italian city of Milan, told authorities she could no longer bear her despotic father's ways.

"She said she wanted to bring to an end years of intimidation suffered by both daughter and mother," an investigator said in the statement.

That's right. He was such a rotten, "despotic" father that when she asked him for nearly seven thousand bucks to go on a vacation in a foreign country, he gave it to her. The bastard!

Fortunately for him, the hitman had second thoughts and went to the cops to confess.

Daily Double!

"I'll take 'Places People Don't Normally Break Into' for $1000, Alex."

"This is a facility surrounded by barbed wire and full of criminals."

"What is jail?"

"It was not intended to cause offence and we apologise if it has"

Intentional or not, but, yeah, but when a company issues a statement like that, you know that some mistakes were made.

And, yeah, people were offended.

Since it's Friday night...

...and since this is the part of Sprockets where we post a picture of an attractive woman, here's a picture of Angie Everhart at sundown:

Looks like you might be a little chilly. Wanna snuggle? No? Well, can I at least get you a towel? Oh, well, this restraining order seems to be in order...

Good news!

If you're looking to buy what's probably the most popular URL in the world, there's still time for you to search for a few million bucks that you may have left sitting around in your couch cushions.

This is why God invented bedrooms

And showers. And hastily-cleared dining room tables. And basically anywhere other than carbon monoxide-filled garages as ideal settings for sex:

"A man and a woman retreated to their Volkswagen to have sex... Most likely the lovers turned on the engine to get warm," Interfax reported, citing a source in the Moscow police force. During a moment of "intimate closeness," the pair, in southern Moscow, inhaled the gas and died, the source added.

Well, at least they died doing what they loved. Inhaling noxious fumes.

What are the odds?

When you're impersonating a cop, who's the last kind of person you want to pull over?

An Arizona man accused admonishing motorists of traffic laws while posing as a police officer apparently picked the wrong driver to pull over.

A Maricopa County jury on Tuesday found 62-year-old David Word guilty of impersonating a lawman for pulling over an off-duty police officer. Sentencing is set for May 5.

I don't know much about Arizona's courts, but I'm pretty sure there's very little danger that fake jurors will show up for that.

Since it's Friday night...

...yeah, let's just get to the picture of a beautiful woman. This week, it's Roselyn Sanchez:

Well, howdy, cowgirl!

Dude, just take shorter showers

Like most people, I'm not a big fan of paying bills, but this is ridiculous:

Police in Florida said a man who was angry about the size of his water bills found a way to stop the bills entirely -- he blew up his mobile home.

Investigators quoted witnesses as saying Johnny Dossey, 43, coated his Fort Lauderdale mobile home in gasoline Wednesday and the residence exploded only moments after he ignited the flames, the Miami Herald reported Thursday.

And just how much was he on the hook for? Thousands of dollars? Click on the link and check out the second-to-last paragraph for the answer.

Next time, try a bank

Since the economy sucks and most places accept debit or check cards anyway these days, this story doesn't exactly surprise me:

Riverside County authorities say a woman with a gun robbed 11 customers at a market and got away with $6.

Seriously, I don't usually have more than a buck or two in my wallet these days, mostly because it's more convenient to just swipe my bank card than to stop by an ATM and get cash.

Oh, and also, sticking up customers in a Riverside County convenience store isn't exactly a good strategy if you're looking for the big bucks. Seriously, just ask them for whatever meth they happen to have in their pockets and go for the resale route. You'll make a lot more than six bucks that way.

Banana Hammocks

That was just a slang term for a certain kind of dudes' underpants, until now...

Australian underwear company AussieBum has been monkeying around and the result is a range of men's underwear made with bananas.

The new eco-friendly banana range of undies incorporates 27 percent banana fiber, 64 percent cotton and 9 percent lycra, AussieBum's Lloyd Jones said on Friday.

Okay, even if I was all about saving Mother Gaia, I'm not going to be wearing underpants made of banana peels. Comedy potential or otherwise.

Unusual headline of the day

Woman charged in breast milk assault on jailer

There really doesn't seem to be much more to it than that. A woman who was being booked into jail squirted a deputy in the face with breast milk.

Although this is technically a crime, like spitting on someone, I'm sure that there are lots of dudes in Japan who would pay good money for something like that. I'm just saying, is all.

Oh, and there are probably lots of Japanese dudes who would pay you to spit on them, too.

Go Bears!

Congratulations to the Cal men's basketball team, who won my Alma Mater's first conference title since 1960 with their win over Stanfurd today. Now, it's on to the Pac-10 tournament, and then, March Madness.

Since it's Friday night...

...and Doctor Zhivago was just on one of my movie channels, here's a classic photo of Julie Christie hogging the covers...

Quit hogging the covers. No, seriously.

And, here's a musical interlude.

Life imitates slapstick comedy

Headline of the day, from our cousins across The Pond:

Man in gorilla suit helps nab suspect

There's no word as to whether or not rubber chickens or silly walks were also involved.

Something personal

I haven't mentioned it here before, but my Grandpa is in the hospital. He's 98, and he's got pneumonia. My Uncle and Aunt live nearby, and he seems to be doing better over the last few days. We've had a couple of scares, though, since he was admitted.

Thankfully (and I've knocked on A LOT of wood) my Uncle said that yesterday, he may have "turned the corner," and is getting better.

I don't tend to talk about personal stuff here, preferring to link to stories about idiots who have screwed up their lives through criminality and/or stupidity, but I'd like to ask the few people who visit this place on any sort of a regular basis to think of my Grandpa in your hopes and prayers for a while. I've mentioned this already at The Hostages, which is a den of scum and villainy until someone needs some help, at which point it becomes a (dysfunctional, yes) family, and I've received a lot of support. The people there who trade the vilest, most profane jokes with me over there have actually offered their kindest wishes, over and over.

Anyway, if you're stopping here for whatever reason (and if my Sitemeter is any indication, you're here for a photo of Jennifer Love Hewitt that I put up back in November) please spare a happy thought for my Grandpa.

Well, at least they aren't currently emitting carbon

Russia is doing its part to fight global warming by curbing a hundred or so modern tanks. Quite literally, it seems, by abandoning them along the side of a highway:

Video clips from the E1.ru website that were rebroadcast on Russian television showed local people clambering over some of the unguarded T-80 tanks that were parked in long rows in Kamishlovsk, about 100 km from the Ural city of Yekaterinburg.

[...]

Russia is currently streamlining its massive military, with some commanders recently quoted in the Russian media as saying they only require half of the country's 20,000 tanks.

Some people have criticized the "Cash For Clunkers" program (and I'll let you Google those people, seeing as how I'm too lazy to find the links) for a number of reasons, but, um, that didn't really involve vehicles with treads and high explosive shells, so I guess this is a little different.