Thanks, morons...

...for giving me three straight months of increasing traffic, culminating in more than a thousand visits to my humble little crapblog this month. I don't think that's happened since the Moron-in-Chief linked a couple of my posts a few years back.

And thanks to everybody who's linked here recently, especially see-dubya, who drove a lot of traffic here from Michelle Malkin's blog, and doubleplusundead for including me so often in the Moronosphere roundup.

The jinx is dead!

Well, it took them ten innings and three lousy runs on sixteen hits, but the Angels finally won a game while I was in attendance! It must have been my 2002 playoffs t-shirt, which I wore today instead of my newer, non-frayed Angels shirt, which I wore the last few times. Yes, I'm crazy.

Aside from the game, which was great, we ate dinner here, where they have the best pastrami sammiches in Southern California. All in all, a good night.

(Previous jinx posts here and here. And, sort of, here.)

Hey, isn't today Caturday?

Swindler with a bindle

I think I'm in the wrong line of work. Instead of writing news articles about what the local city councils are up to and the such, I think I'll start scamming ultra-gullible people out of thousands of dollars. I mean, if this hobo could do it, how hard could it be?

Prosecutors say a former Souderton resident posed as a music mogul on an Internet dating site and swindled more than $100,000 from 13 women all around the country.

Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Ferman said Thursday that 50-year-old Paul Krueger is being held without bail in Atlantic County, New Jersey. He was apprehended at a casino. It's not known if he's retained an attorney.

[...]

Ferman says Krueger posed as a Grammy Award-nominated music producer but was actually homeless, his only possession a laptop computer. He told women he was starting a company to manufacture DVDs and CDs.

Sheesh. You'd think that with more than a hundred grand in ill-gotten gains, he could have found some decent accommodations. And maybe a few knick-knacks.

Souderton police investigated when a woman who invested $10,000 complained to federal authorities that he had stopped returning her phone calls.

Yeah, I can see how that might make a person a little suspicious. Eventually.

Way to keep a low profile, dumbass

I don't know a whole lot about being a fugitive from justice, but I'm pretty sure one hard and fast rule is that you're not supposed to call attention to yourself. This guy apparently didn't realize that:

Police responding to a tip about a naked man walking on a state highway in Lumberton [North Carolina] say he's connected to a three-week string of thefts involving more than $85,000 worth of property.

The Fayetteville Observer reported that police say Jonathan Michael Allen stole two vehicles, televisions, power tools and jewelry. The 31-year-old is charged with multiple counts of breaking and entering, larceny and burglary.

Allen was charged with multiple counts of breaking and entering, larceny and burglary.

Lumberton Police Lt. Johnny Barnes said Allen was stealing and selling the property to support a drug habit.

You mean to tell me that a dude they found wandering around a state highway completely starkers has a drug problem? No, you don't say.

In space, no one can hear you...uhhhhh...

When you think about missions to outer space, you think of the importance of complex computers, oxygen systems, rockets and the such. But there's another piece of equipment that's also really, really important:

Astronauts aboard the NASA space shuttle Discovery will be carrying an extra piece of cargo when they launch on Saturday -- a new toilet pump.

Crew members aboard the International Space Station have been fumbling with plastic bags since their zero-gravity toilet went made "a loud noise" and stopped working properly last week.

"We will be taking some spare parts up," NASA spokesman Allard Beutel said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

The three station crew members want the toilet working properly for obvious reasons -- but on Saturday they will be sharing facilities with seven space shuttle astronauts.

"You can imagine you are having guests over and your one and only bathroom is broken. Clearly this is something you want to have working," Beutel said.

Discovery will carry a pump and other spare parts for the toilet, which is still disposing of solid waste.

If you read the whole thing, you'll find out about how the toilets work and where the waste goes. Let's just say that the concept of a space walk just became a little less appealing to me.

Maid of dishonor

Uh-oh. Sounds like somebody's got some serious splainin' to do:

A nude maid is accused of really cleaning up at a Florida man's home. The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office said a 50-year-old man hired the maid from the Internet on Friday to clean his Tampa home.

Authorities said the woman arrived at the home in a one-piece, light colored dress. She took off the dress and cleaned the house for $100-per-hour. Sheriff's office spokeswoman Debbie Carter said the man told deputies he left the maid alone in the bedroom to clean.

When the man's wife came home from vacation, she discovered $40,000 in jewelry missing from their bedroom.

I wonder what she was more pissed about: the fact that forty grand worth of jewelery got swiped, or the fact that her husband took advantage of her absence to hire some nude tart to ogle while she jiggled around their home with a vacuum cleaner?

Strange love

They say people grieve in a lot of different ways. And not all of them are healthy. Case in point:

A Taiwan man grieving over the death of his girlfriend climbed inside a morgue freezer to be with her and was only pulled out alive half an hour later, media and an official said on Tuesday.

The 41-year-old man was discovered on Monday when workers detected an unusually high temperature in the freezer and realized the hatch was not securely fastened.

"A morgue manager opened the hatch, saw two people lying inside, felt scared enough to yell out and then even cried," the Liberty Times reported. "She didn't stabilize for a long time."

The man took a drug before entering the freezer to speed what appeared to be suicide attempt, local papers said. They said his girlfriend died on Friday from an overdose of sleeping pills.

Why is it that when something like this happens at the end of a certain overrated play about "star-crossed lovers," people think it's incredibly romantic, but when it happens in real life, it's just creepy and sad? Funny how that works.

Jail: it's no fun anymore

I figure being in jail has got to suck, but now, in the Cincinnati area, it's more repressive than ever. I mean, check out what these fascists are requiring of the visitors:

Officials say visitors to a southwest Ohio jail can't wear plunging necklines, Spandex or see-through garb. The Hamilton County jail said the new dress code also requires guests to wears shirts, shoes and underwear.

Sheriff's spokesman Steve Barnett said the dress code has become a problem in recent years. He says the rules are in line with visitor dress codes at state prisons.

[...]

The new rules also require visitors to keep their pants on their waists, bellies covered and upper thighs concealed. Guards will send visitors home if they think the clothing is too revealing.

I wonder how they're going to check to make sure people are wearing underpants. That would seem to be a job that would be at turns very interesting and extremely repulsive.

Memorial Day

I know I have a few readers with friends and/or family in the military right now, but for any of you who know someone who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, I'd like to give my sincere thanks today. Both to them and to you.

Wanna see some bad crazy?

Most people who know me will tell you that I'm a night person. When I was in college, and in the years right afterward, for instance, I used to wait until around midnight to do my grocery shopping. The stores are virtually empty, except for employees stocking the shelves and a few other misfits like me, which cuts down on the annoyance factor that comes with shopping at peak hours.

I mention this because driving around at night got me into the habit of listening to Coast to Coast AM, which was Art Bell's show at the time. Now, if you're unfamiliar with the show, it's generally a talk/call-in show about the paranormal. UFOs, ghosts, psychics, and such phenomena, basically. Government/Illuminati conspiracies, too. It's like the X-Files, if Agent Mulder had a radio show.

While I'm not a big believer in any of that stuff, I've still seen some crazy shit in my day, so I like to think I have an open mind. But a lot of the people who call the show just spout the most insane stories you've ever heard. And the people who host the show let them tell these stories, sometimes, seemingly, lending them credence. I've often wondered whether or not they believe these people.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I was driving home from one of the local watering holes when I switched over from my mix CD to Coast to Coast, and heard a caller talking about a nefarious conspiracy involving mind control, rape, and people in the highest ranks of the U.S. government. Seeing as how this supposedly took place in the San Francisco Bay area, you may not be surprised to find out that it allegedly involves President Bush, as well as the Director of the FBI.

Read the whole thing for a glimpse into a truly unhinged mind. There's more here, which is where I found the link. The caller suggested that Google search.

I might add that the Coast to Coast host sounded pretty incredulous about the story the caller was peddling, though he said he'd look into it as a future show topic.

Update: I found the whackjob's website. Note the URL.

Fight for your right to underpants

We've all had a crappy job at one time or another, but I've never had one where they wouldn't let me wear underwear. Up until now, these guys couldn't say that:

Employees counting donations at a popular Hindu shrine in southern India will no longer have to take off their underpants at work after the local human rights commission intervened.

Police and temple authorities imposed the dress code at the Sabarimala hill shrine in Kerala five years ago after thefts were reported from the shrine's strongroom.

Employees in the vault, all of whom were men, were made to work topless wearing only a dhoti -- a cotton wrap worn around the waist -- with nothing underneath.

But they found it degrading, and their union complained to the Kerala State Human Rights Commission.

"The employees on duty are made to strip before an officer before leaving the office to ensure that they do not carry anything in their underwear," said Chavara Gopakumar, the union leader. "It is humiliating and an insult to human dignity."

The state's human rights commission agreed.

Authorities at the shrine, which is dedicated to Ayyappa, a south Indian deity, said on Friday they would end the practice and have begun looking into electronic surveillance systems.

While putting up security cameras may well be a little more expensive than the old "show me your junk before you go home" system, they'll certainly be less time-consuming. And considerably less awkward, I'd imagine.

Open sez me

So much of what I do around here is about ridiculing stupid people, and that's because I'm a mean bastard. And I'm okay with that. But once in a while, I see something somebody's done that's actually pretty cool, like this story about a locksmith who cracked a an old safe that had baffled a bunch of experts:

In 2 1/2 hours, Tom Gorham of Longview got the safe open by spinning the dial and feeling for grooves to get the combination, a technique called manipulation.

"You've got to have a lot of patience, and concentration doesn't hurt," Gorham said.

Gorham trekked to Astoria, a town about 40 miles west of Longview and 70 miles northwest of Portland, Ore., to try his luck with the 1-ton safe found during renovation at a cannery there. The cannery's owner, Floyd Holcomb, wanted it opened without damage.

Gorham and his wife, Kelly, also a locksmith, asked to try after watching a television report on unsuccessful attempts to open the safe. He said an expert from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had tried, as did another professional locksmith who gave up after 14 hours.

The only disappointing aspect of the story is the fact that they're not saying what they found inside the 159-year-old safe until the owner tells the cannery's board next month. I'm guessing gold coins, jewels, and a bunch of nineteenth century pornography. That's just how my mind works, people.

Flying off the handle

I can't say I'd like it if I found a dead insect floating in a bottle of water I'd been drinking from, either, but I'd like to think I wouldn't freak out about it like this guy did:

A man who claimed that he became depressed, anxious and phobic after finding a a dead fly in a bottle of water will no longer get the judgment he won against a bottling company, Canada's top court ruled Thursday.

Martin Mustapha will have to shell out thousands in court costs, instead of collecting the more than $345,000 he won in an Ontario court three years ago.

The Supreme Court of Canada agreed in a 9-0 judgment that Mustapha suffered real psychological harm, but Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin said his reaction was so "unusual or extreme" that bottling company Culligan of Canada Ltd., should not have to pay compensation.

McLachlin said the legal test for damages is whether a person of "ordinary fortitude" would suffer psychological harm. In Mustapha's case, she concluded, the reaction was so unique that Culligan could not reasonably have foreseen the consequences and should not be held liable.

Mustapha insisted that he had been treated unfairly and said finding the dead fly in an unopened bottle of water in 2001 devastated him. He became obsessed with thoughts of dead flies, could not sleep and was constantly on edge — to the point that his business and even his sex life suffered.

Damn, that's one fragile dude. I hate to think what would have happened to him if anything like this had happened to him. He'd lose his friggin' mind. Moreso, I mean.

Maybe now he'll start having nightmares about the Canadian Supreme Court.

It never rains in Southern California

Man, we had some wild weather today including hailstorms in some areas (like at my brother's office), snow in the mountains, and tornadoes out in Riverside County. We just had thunderstorms here, but they had predicted that we could get nickel and dime-sized hail. And all this after record high temperatures for this time of year (up around 100 degrees) just last week!

By the way, if you click on the link at the top of this post, you can watch videos of the hail tornadoes, and flash floods from around the area today. Some crazy shit.

Man's freedom bogarted

I think an incident like this might just be the perfect combination of stupidity and drug use:

A New Zealand man had a novel idea when he found himself in a queue at a service station counter with no money, could he pay with marijuana instead?

Unfortunately he didn't get a chance to discover whether the attendant would accept his offer, as the person behind him in the queue was a police officer, the Dominion Post newspaper reported.

The man's attempt to buy two packets of M&Ms and a packet of potato chips to satisfy his "munchies" was caught short when he was arrested.

He must have been hungry, as he failed to notice the police patrol car sitting on the station forecourt being filled with petrol, the paper reported.

I don't think he missed the patrol car because he was hungry. I think it was probably more because he was really high.

Look what we found!

Oh, man, this could have been tragic:

Three children picking up trash along a river in Hudson [Wisconsin] for community service work found much more than garbage. Charlie Thompson, 11, Maddie Roth, 10, and Demetri Roth, 8, came across a hand grenade, picked it up and headed home to show off their discovery.

On their way back Monday, they ran into a neighbor, who immediately called 911. Hudson police cordoned off the block, then determined the grenade wasn't a danger, even though it still had the firing pin inserted. Sgt. Eric Atkinson says the grenade was rusted and contained no powder.

They're lucky they didn't blow themselves to bits. But, honestly, what kid that age wouldn't pick something like that up? I know I would have. After all, kids are stupid.

Say what?

I don't speak German, so if I was (or were—I'm not getting paid to write this, so I don't really care if it's grammatically correct) taking a trip to, say, Vienna, I'd probably want to take a German-English dictionary or phrasebook. I don't think I'd want to take this one with me, though:

A free guide to be distributed around Vienna to soccer fans visiting for Euro 2008 will advise them how to order Austrian cuisine, flirt with local women, and find their way to the stadium in the thick local dialect.

Essential phrases such as "Ham Se an Kaiserschmoan mit Zwetschknroesta?," "Do you have a sliced sugared pancake with plum compote?" or "Fia mi bitte no a Soizguakn," "another gherkin for me please," are listed with English and German translations.

Those are "essential phrases" in Austria? I had no idea that pickles and pancakes played such a big part in their day-to-day lives. I figured they were all about waltzes, little cans full of barely edible sausage, and bodybuilding. That, and getting confused with Australia.

For an initial approach to a member of the opposite sex, the book suggests: "Servas, fesche Katz," literally "greetings, hot kitten" but translated as "Hello princess."

Is it just me, or does that sound like the kind of thing that could lead to a guy getting a drink thrown in his face?

Total Nerd Update: I have no excuse for why I didn't immediately think of this:



"My nipples explode with delight."

Into the woods

Spontaneity is important for some people when it comes to romantic relationships, and it can lead to wonderful things. But it can also lead to big trouble:

An airline pilot was found hiding behind a shed wearing only flip-flops and a wristwatch as a nighttime romp in the woods with a flight attendant ended with both under arrest, police said.

Jeffrey Paul Bradford, 24, and Adrianna Grace Connor, 24, both employees of Pinnacle Airlines Inc., were at a diner on the outskirts of Harrisburg on Sunday night before they apparently decided to walk into the woods, police said.

"They told the officer they wanted to go do it in the woods, essentially," said Lower Swatara Township police Sgt. Richard Brandt. "That's the best answer they had."

The two somehow became separated, and people who live in the neighborhood summoned police around 9:30 p.m., saying they had seen a naked man and an intoxicated woman.

It might not have been that big a deal that they got separated from each other. I think the real problem is that the guy somehow seems to have become separated from his clothes.

A helicopter with heat-seeking equipment was called in, and Bradford was discovered hiding behind a shed shortly before midnight.

Bradford, of Pittsburgh, was charged with indecent exposure, public drunkenness and other offenses. Connor, of Belleville, Mich., was charged with theft from a motor vehicle, public drunkenness and other offenses; police said she took a flashlight from a neighbor's vehicle.

Wait, you mean the both of them were were trashed when it happened? Who would have guessed that alcohol played a part in something like that?

Big trouble

Like most boys, I got in plenty of trouble when I was young, but I never did anything like this. Good thing, too because my parents would have probably murdered me.

An Arkansas preteen faces a drunken driving charge after he and a friend drank his parents' beer, "got liquored up" and crashed his stepfather's pickup truck, the Johnson County sheriff said.

Sheriff Jimmy Dorney said the 12-year-old boy and his 10-year-old friend drove off in the truck May 4 to find a girl they met at a rodeo. The boys made it about 10 miles before the 12-year-old lost control of the truck.

Dorney said the truck hit and jumped over a guardrail, sending it careening 50 feet down a steep hill into a forest.

Clark James, 46, who lives down the road from the crash site, said he answered the boys' banging at his front door with shotgun in hand about 2:30 a.m.

"I opened the door and the first thing (the 12-year-old) said to me was, 'I'm drunk and I had a wreck,'" James said. "I looked at him and I thought 'You're kind of young to be out drinking. And you sure shouldn't be driving.'"

Neither boy was seriously injured in the crash.

County prosecutor Bruce Wilson said that he will charge the 12-year-old boy with drunken driving and several other misdemeanor charges in district and juvenile court in Johnson County.

Wilson said the 12-year-old could face a variety of sanctions ranging from probation, to court-mandated community service and alcohol rehabilitation, to commitment to the state Department of Human Services Division of Youth Services.

I take it that's the fancy title for juvie, which is where it sounds like he belongs. Hell, it might just be the only place where he's safe from his stepfather, who's got to be really really pissed.

A rhetorical question

How come the spiders what live outside my house always spin their webs right at the damn level of my face? I'm really sick of going "AAAAAAH! Pppfffftttt! Get it off!" every time I go out for a smoke.

I love a parade...

...but this one sounds incredibly stupid;

The veggies your mom implored you to eat are getting their own celebration in New York City: The Veggie Pride Parade.

Rain or shine, the parade is expected to wend its way through Manhattan's old meatpacking district on Sunday before ending at Washington Square Park.

Along the route, costumed bride and groom Penelo Pea Pod and Chris P. Carrot will exchange veggie vows and ask observers to "Give Peas a Chance" and "Go Vegetarian!"

I'm gonna go ahead and guess that something this lame probably drove people to eat a hell of a lot of steak, unless they're fans of really lame puns. Then again, that's assuming anybody showed up to watch.

By the way, click on the link to find out which super-awesome, not-at-all-ridiculous country inspired this event.

Aw, screw it. It was France.

Bad taste

So, I went out to get a few drinks with some friends last night, and while I was sitting at the bar, some goateed, shaved-headed douche sidled up next to me and ordered a few drinks. He was wearing a black t-shirt with a bunch of writing on it, which I suddenly recognized as...the prayer they say at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Ugh.

I wonder what he wears when he's buying crystal meth.

Fascinating news: man rides bike to work

Boy, it must be a slow news day if some guy parking his truck can make headlines:

Brian LaFave couldn't care less how high gasoline prices climb these days — he's parked his pickup truck and is refusing to buy gas for a month, possibly longer.

"The goal is to not use one drop of gas for 31 days," LaFave said, calling it his personal stand against the oil companies.

Now LaFave, 31, is riding his bicycle or walking everywhere he goes. He won't even let friends pick him up unless they already planned on being in the neighborhood.

"If they're not going out of their way, I can take the ride," he said. "But if they're going out of their way, then ... I'm still consuming gasoline so it kind of defeats the purpose."

LaFave started the effort May 11. He bikes to his third-shift job at Aldrich Chemical in Sheboygan Falls, a 9-mile commute.

[...]

LaFave fills out a chart each day listing how many miles he bikes, the destination and the gas price that day, among other things. He plans to compute his savings and donate that amount to a charity that provides food to children in Africa.

"I think just with the gas prices being so high, everybody complains about it but no one ever really does anything about it," LaFave said. "People continue to drive nonstop and not think about it, but I just wanted to take a stand and say, `I'm not gonna pay this much money for gas.'"

Quick, somebody get him a medal.

Look, it's nice to see somebody putting their money where their mouth is, but is this really worthy of a wire story? Really? There was nothing else interesting going on in the world?

World's worst tourist attraction

I enjoy visiting museums as much as the next guy, but I don't think I'll be heading out to see this one:

Sigurdur Hjartarson is missing a human penis. But he's not worried: four men have promised to donate theirs to him when they die.

Hjartarson is founder and owner of the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which offers visitors from around the world a close-up look at the long and the short of the male reproductive organ.

His collection, which began in 1974 with a single bull's penis that looked something like a riding crop, now boasts 261 preserved members from 90 species.

The largest, from a sperm whale, is 70 kg (154 lb) and 1.7 meters (5.58 ft) long. The smallest, a hamster penis bone, is just 2 mm and must be viewed through a magnifying glass.

One species conspicuous by its absence is homo sapiens, but that may soon be rectified since a German, an American, an Icelander and a Briton have promised to donate their organs after death, according to certificates on display.

The American, 52-year-old Stan Underwood, supplied a written description of his penis -- which he purportedly nick-named "Elmo" -- for display alongside a life-size plastic mould of the member as well as his pledge to donate it.

Hjartarson said the Icelandic donor, a 93-year-old from nearby Akureyri, was a womanizer in his youth who thought having his penis in the collection might bring him eternal fame.

But vanity may make him rethink the offer.

"He has mentioned lately that his penis is shrinking as he gets older and he is worried it might not make a proper exhibit," Hjartarson said.

Uh, does that really happen? Boy, getting old really sucks.

The specimens, most of which were donated by fishermen, hunters and biologists, are kept in glass jars of formaldehyde or dried and mounted on the wall, creating an atmosphere that is part science lab, part trophy room.

Hjartarson has paid for only one -- an elephant penis nearly 1 meter long that hangs, stuffed and mounted on a wooden board, in the museum's "foreign section."

He said he began collecting penises 24 years ago, when working as a school administrator, with little notion he would one day be running a museum devoted to the subject.

"It was just a hobby," he said, adding that the collection was relegated to his office until the inception of the museum.

How the hell do you get started collecting something like that? Get bored with your stamp collection?

Anyway, if you read the whole thing, you'll find out that the majority of the museum's visitors are women, which isn't very surprising if you think about it. I mean, how many guys do you know who would enjoy visiting a building packed to the rafters with severed dicks?

Getting a TUI

Sure, the Ace of Spades Lifestyle™ is a lot of fun, but there are certain places where you just shouldn't practice it. Like at school, for instance. Especially if you're there to teach a class:

A substitute teacher suspected of being drunk in a suburban Dallas middle school class was too intoxicated to complete a sobriety test and was arrested, authorities said.

Thomas Brownlee, 56, was in a classroom Tuesday with students and another staff member for about 20 minutes, Richardson school district spokesman Tim Clark said. Another teacher suspected Brownlee was drunk and told a police officer at Parkhill Junior High.

A Dallas police report states that Brownlee "had slurred speech, breath smelling of an alcoholic beverage and bloodshot eyes."

The officer stopped issuing a sobriety test out of concern for Brownlee's safety, according to the report. Brownlee was charged with public intoxication.

Damn. You've got to be really, really trashed to have the police stop your sobriety test for fear that you're going to keel over and injure yourself.

Whatever happened to the friendly skies?

If this turns out to be true, I've got a feeling that several people are going to be losing their jobs:

A New York man who says he was denied a seat on a five-hour JetBlue flight and was instead told to "hang out" in the plane's bathroom has sued the airline for $2 million, saying he suffered "extreme humiliation."

When Gokhan Mutlu arrived to check in for a JetBlue flight from San Diego to New York in February he was told the flight was full, according to the lawsuit filed in New York State Supreme Court.

But Mutlu was allowed to board after a JetBlue flight attendant agreed to give up her seat and travel in an airline employee "jump seat." It was not clear in the lawsuit whether the flight attendant was working.

However 90 minutes into the flight, the pilot told Mutlu the flight attendant was uncomfortable and he would have to give up his seat and "hang out" in the bathroom for the remainder of the flight, the lawsuit said.

The pilot "became angry at (Mutlu's) reluctance" and said Mutlu "should be grateful for being onboard," the lawsuit said. When Mutlu volunteered to sit in the "jump seat," he was told it was reserved for airline personnel.

Well, in that case, the pilot probably should have told the flight attendant to suck it up and sit there.

I guess somewhere along the line, somebody repealed the old rule about the customer always being right, huh?

What could possibly go wrong?

I know next to nothing about local politics in Oklahoma, but I'm pretty sure that this is a really bad idea:

A 19-year-old freshman at the University of Oklahoma was elected mayor Tuesday of Muskogee, a city of 38,000 in the northeastern part of the state.

With all precincts reporting, John Tyler Hammons won with 70 percent of the vote over former Mayor Hershel Ray McBride, said Muskogee County Election Board Secretary Bill Bull.

"The public placing their trust in me is the greatest, humbling and most awesome experience I've ever had in my life," said Hammons, who is from Muskogee but attends the university in Norman.

The two candidates squared off in a runoff election for the nonpartisan post after neither secured 50 percent of the vote in a six-person election April 1.

Hammons, who will be sworn in next week, said he plans to continue his college education but expects to transfer to a school closer to Muskogee.

"Being elected does not change my desire to continue my education," he said. "We will schedule our time in an appropriate fashion so that I can be mayor and stay in school."

Now, this Hammons may very well be very mature and a great guy, but I remember what I was like as a 19-year-old college freshman, and I wasn't fit to run my three man dorm room, much less a city of thousands.

I just hope there aren't any city council meetings scheduled during final exams. Too much pressure, man.

I guess his Aston Martin was in the shop

It sounds like this oh so suave guy may have had a few too many Martinis, shaken, not stirred. Or maybe just a bunch of malt liquor. Either way, it sound like he was plenty drunk:

Police say a tuxedo-clad western New York man was drunk when he took a riding lawn mower out for an early morning spin.

Chautauqua County Sheriff Joseph Gerace said deputies got a report of an intoxicated person at a home in Irving around 1 a.m. Monday. When they arrived, the man was spotted riding away on his mower.

Deputies who stopped the Irving resident charged him with felony driving while intoxicated and aggravated unlicensed operation.

Huh. I didn't know you needed to have a license to operate a riding mower. But riding around on an open vehicle with whirling blades on it while soused is certainly a bad idea.

A story that's sure to impress the ladies

My brother went down to Orange County to pick up his friend from a medical office and take him to dinner. His buddy, it seems, suffered a "sports" injury and had to get an MRI. What happened, you might ask? Well, he blew out his knee playing...ping pong. Actually, he wasn't even playing ping pong. He was retrieving the ball from the concrete floor somewhere near the table when he slipped on a puddle of water, resulting in his injury.

My brother assures me that we're laughing with his pal, rather than at him. Aside from the excruciating pain, he apparently thinks it's pretty damn funny, too.

Art is dead

I really don't understand why this guy's photo shoots are even news anymore. We get it, already:

The man behind the camera had three requests for his subjects: no sunglasses, no smiling, and no underwear.

The latest work by New York photographer Spencer Tunick gathered 1,840 people, baring it all in Austria's Happel Stadium on Sunday.

"Stay very still. Don't move," the Austria Press Agency quoted Tunick as telling the crowd as he went to work.

[...]

The stadium will host seven of the Euro 2008 soccer championship matches being staged by Austria and Switzerland, including the June 29 final.

Tunick has made a name for himself with his works featuring hundreds of naked people at unusual venues. He described Sunday's shooting on his Web site as combining "the spirit of sports, the grand sweeping waves of stadium architecture and the abstract relation of the human form to modern structures."

I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on that. Your pictures actually combine the "spirit" of conning a big crowd of doughy people who are (probably) liberal dupes into getting nude in public places in the name of doing something "transgressive," with your ability to con the media into giving you free publicity, again, because you're a "transgressive" "artist." But you're not. You're a huckster, no matter what kind of high-minded rhetoric you try to use to pass off your big group naked pictures.

Am I jealous just because every time I try to get people to take their clothes off in public, my parole officer gets a call? Probably. But you're still a douche.

Michelle-lanche Update: Welcome Michelle Malkin readers! Thanks for stopping by. Please take a look around and feel free to leave comments.

I was away from the computer for most of the day, so I didn't notice the huge spike in traffic until well after midnight Monday night/Tuesday morning. Otherwise, I would have put this update up much earlier.

And thanks, of course, to see-dubya for linking!

Eight isn't nearly enough

Seeing as how I'm a pretty classy guy, I'll forgo the rather obvious anatomical joke that could be made here:

It's a happy Mother's Day for an Arkansas woman — she's pregnant with her 18th child.

Michelle Duggar, 41, is due on New Year's Day, and the latest addition will join seven sisters and 10 brothers. There are two sets of twins.

"We've had three in January, three in December. Those two months are a busy time for us," she said, laughing.

The Duggars' oldest child, Josh, is 20, and the youngest, Jennifer, is nine months old.

The fast-growing family lives in Tontitown in northwest Arkansas in a 7,000-square-foot home. All the children — whose names start with the letter J — are home-schooled.

I knew a family whose four sons' names all began with the same letter, and I thought that was insufferable. Sheesh.

Duggar said she's six weeks along and the pregnancy is going well. She and her husband, Jim Bob Duggar, said they'll keep having children as long as God wills it.

Uh, yeah, you see, the thing is that with this one, you'll be able to field a couple of baseball teams. Are you looking for enough for a tournament or something? Enough, already.

On the other hand, these people must make hardcore enviro-weenies' heads explode, so there is that.

"We should totally make a bong out of a..."

Smoking dope can lead to some really bad ideas. Fortunately, it also often leads to inertia, so that those bad ideas are forgotten while the people who had them sit around, snacking and watching television. It's a pretty good system, actually. But unfortunately, sometimes, the system breaks down:

Authorities in Texas have filed corpse-abuse charges against two men who allegedly removed a skull from a grave and used it as a bong.

The Harris County District Attorney's Office confirmed on Thursday that misdemeanor abuse of corpse charges have been filed in the case.

One of the men allegedly told police they dug up a grave in an abandoned cemetery in the woods, removed a head from a body and smoked marijuana using the skull as a bong.

I'm fairly certain that the conversation that led up to this really heinous crime began with words to the effect of, "Hey, brah, you know what would be really killer?"

And then they went and dug up a corpse. So they could smoke weed. Out of its skull.

Man, I guess there really wasn't anything good on teevee that day.

Dude

Most people, were they to run over your pet, would feel the need to apologize profusely. Most decent people, anyway:

The driver of a 1997 Honda Civic that struck and killed a dog near Cloquet is suing the dog's owners for damage done to his vehicle. Jeffery Ely was driving on the night of Jan. 4 when Fester, a miniature pinscher, squeezed past owner Nikki Munthe as she was letting in her other dog and ran out onto the road. Ely's car struck Fester, killing the 13-pound dog instantly.

Now Ely is suing the Munthes for about $1,100 for damage to his car, time he had to take off from his two jobs to get the car repaired, and court fees.

Pieces of the bumper were propelled into the radiator when it hit the dog, Ely said, necessitating a replacement. Ely maintains he didn't have problems driving until after the accident and that the radiator issues were not pre-existing.

Ely said he feels sorry for the Munthes' loss but, as a dog owner himself, feels that they must be responsible for their pets' actions.

"I have complete compassion for them," Ely said. "I know how it feels. I love dogs. But once you get them, they are your responsibility."

Something tells me he has a very different idea of what compassion means than the rest of us. That something would be the assholish lawsuit. Yeah.

A picture's worth a thousand words...or a couple years in the pokey

I've always hated those guys who think it's funny to jump in front of your camera when you're trying to take a picture. It turns out that the joke was on this douche:

Police had no trouble tracking down a suspect in the robbery of three women at a Bucks County convenience store, because the women had taken the man's picture a short time earlier at a bar.

The suspect, Andre Smith, struck up a conversation with a group women at a bachelorette party at the Bensalem Township taproom early Sunday morning, said the township's public safety director, Fred Harran. The women were taking photos of each other when Smith jumped in front of the camera, Harran said.

Smith later was ejected from the bar for allegedly harassing customers.

When two women in the group left the bar to go to a nearby convenience store, Smith robbed them of their pocketbooks, Harran said. The women recognized Smith — who apparently didn't recognize them — and gave investigators a copy of their photo, Harran said.

The cops were able to track his dumb ass down later the same day. Unfortunately, jackassery isn't against the law, so he's just being charged with theft and robbery.

Well, that was awful

So, Andy and I headed out to beautiful Dodger Stadium this afternoon to catch the final game in the series against the Mets. I've got to say, that was the worst, most one-sided game I've been to. I love heading out to the ballpark to catch a game, eat some hot dogs (and Dodger Dogs are the best), and drink overpriced beer, but it's a little more fun when the team you're pulling for isn't getting beaten like a red-headed stepchild.

Anyway, I guess it looks like the jinx is still in effect. If this keeps up, I think I may have a lucrative career ahead of me where wealthy baseball team owners pay me not to show up at their home games.

EPIC FAIL

And here I thought the whole "shooting yourself in the foot" thing was just a metaphor:

The police chief who shot himself in the ankle was waving a loaded pistol and being careless, according to two students who were attending his class to qualify for a concealed-weapons permit. "We were told the gun is the chief's personal sidearm, but it looked to me like he didn't know anything about the gun," Lewis Walker said.

Bart Ulm, another student seeking certification to carry a concealed weapon, said he was surprised Chief Dave Hansen was using a loaded gun to show how it worked.

"Right then, I was very leery, because there's no need to have live ammo in a gun in the class. But I figured he's the chief, so he must know what he's doing," Ulm told the Standard-Examiner of Ogden.

Looks like you were wrong there, Bart.

Hansen held the Glock 40 under a table to disassemble it when a bullet fired, Walker said.

The chief cried, "I'm hit," and fell over. Students who were screaming "Officer down!" were urged to call 911.

The gun went off in a conference room Saturday at Riverdale police headquarters.

Hansen was taken to McKay-Dee Hospital in Ogden for surgery and released Monday, Lt. James Ebert said.

Wow! Who knew you could make a full recovery from a brain transplant in only two days?

Holidays in hell

I've gone to some pretty crappy places on vacation in the past. I think we all have. What I don't get is why someone would intentionally visit a place like this:

A Rio de Janeiro tour company could be in trouble for giving tourists too intimate a view of life in the city's notorious slums, including photo opportunities with drug gang leaders.

The Brazilian city's tourism chief said on Monday that the company, Private Tours, could be stripped of its license after a report in Sunday's Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper that it had set up meetings between traffickers and tourists.

The paper sent a reporter disguised as a foreign tourist on the 4-hour, $55 tour of Rocinha, the city's largest slum, that included visits to the "bocas de fumo" where traffickers sell drugs to Rio residents.

It said the traffickers told the tourists stories about their time in prison, described the life of a Rio drug dealer, and would then pose for pictures with their guns -- as long as their faces were not photographed.

Rio tourism chief Rubem Medina said the firm could lose its license if the story was accurate.

"It's not necessary to do this kind of tour in Rio; there are a lot of wonderful attractions," he told Reuters.

Well, while I don't really get the appeal of a tour like that, there's obviously a demand for it, and if they're safe, I don't see why the tour companies shouldn't be allowed to continue offering them.

As for me, if I wanted to take a tour like that, parts of Los Angeles are right there! Actually, back in high school, Andy had a couple of exchange students from Japan, and the first place they said they wanted to visit was...Compton. We took them to an amusement park, instead.

He fought the law (and guess who won?)

It's been my experience that people who enjoy riding motorcycles fall into two categories: Ordinary people who enjoy the thrill of the open road, and idiots who fancy themselves badass rebels. This guy falls into the latter category. Well, at least he did, for a few minutes, anyway.

A Long Island man who flipped his finger at a police cruiser and then popped a wheelie on his motorcycle is recovering from injuries after crashing.

Suffolk County Police said Frank Patti, 26, of West Islip, rode by the police car at a service station in Copiague at 7:30 p.m. Sunday. Police say Patti made an obscene gesture to two officers in the car, popped a wheelie and then sped away.

Police gave chase.

When the motorcycle turned into a parking lot it crashed into a police car that had joined the chase.

Yeah, see, when you're running from the cops, you generally don't want to do that. I mean, you've got to figure that it's much easier for them to arrest you while you're lying on the ground, all unconscious-like.

Beerly departed

Man, if this guy ends up dying in some kind of alcohol-related accident, that funeral is gonna be awkward:

Bill Bramanti will love Pabst Blue Ribbon eternally, and he's got the custom-made beer-can casket to prove it.

"I actually fit, because I got in here," said Bramanti of South Chicago Heights.

The 67-year-old Glenwood village administrator doesn't plan on needing it anytime soon, though.

He threw a party Saturday for friends and filled his silver coffin — designed in Pabst's colors of red, white and blue — with ice and his favorite brew.

"Why put such a great novelty piece up on a shelf in storage when you could use it only the way Bill Bramanti would use it?" said Bramanti's daughter, Cathy Bramanti, 42.

Uh, maybe because it's pretty damn creepy to drink beer out of a friend's coffin. That's why.

That, and novelty coffins are kind of tacky.

Damn

I'm a relatively young guy, but I figure, hey, it's never too early to do something to help out your...uhhh...internal plumbing. And so, when I heard a week or so ago that there was a certain simple activity which was good for that, I breathed a sigh of relief.

Unfortunately, it looks like that was bullshit:

Recent reporting you may have read on the health effects of masturbation is wrong. I don't mean morally; I mean journalistically. PlanetOut reported on Monday that "BBC News reported on Wednesday" that masturbating frequently may reduce a man's risk of prostate cancer. Masturbating may or may not affect one's cancer risk, but the only BBC report I can find on the subject is dated July 16, 2003—and it contains statistics that are identical to those cited by PlanetOut. (For what it's worth, that day was indeed a Wednesday, according to this online tool.)

Moreover, the Australian organization named by both news outlets, the Cancer Council Victoria, does not appear to have any recent press release on masturbation or ejaculation, though it does have one dating to July 2003. (A phone call to the Cancer Council, placed at 4:27 a.m. local time, went unanswered.) A search of PubMed.gov, a database of published medical studies, turned up only one study about ejaculation (and one letter to an editor) coauthored by Graham Giles, the researcher quoted by PlanetOut.

A staff member at the Advocate who claimed to have written the PlanetOut.com story (the publications share an owner and some of their content) double-checked her source at a reporter's request and confirmed that the BBC report on which she had based her article dated from 2003.

In a brief news report, FoxNews.com appears to have perpetuated the error, citing PlanetOut as its source and further stating: "Researchers told the BBC last week that the prostate produces one of the fluids involved in ejaculation and that frequent masturbation appears to flush out carcinogens." No such report could be found on BBC.co.uk.

So, I guess I can totally go back to not doing that, huh? Because I was only doing it for my health. For real. Yeah, totally.

Oh, hell, who am I kidding?

Imagine if he worked from home

Sure, we all likes us some porn, but nowhere nearly as much as this guy, who I'm going to guess has some kind of compulsive behavior problem:

A Japanese civil servant was demoted for logging more than 780,000 hits on pornographic Web sites on his office computer over nine months, an official said Friday.

The man, a Kinokawa city government employee in western Japan, visited porn sites from June 2007 to February 2008, city official Tomiko Waki said. The man's name was withheld.

City officials said the number of hits discovered on his computer's internal log was so high in part because one click on certain types of pornographic sites registers multiple hits.

Despite his frequent porn viewing, none of his colleagues noticed his activities, which he apparently conducted throughout the workday.

"Each desk is set apart from each other," Waki said, adding that the man logged 170,000 hits on porn sites in July alone.

I think it's probably a very, very good thing that his co-workers didn't know what he was up to because the desks are set apart from each other, if you know what I mean.

(Via Dave in Texas over at Moron Central, who notes that the dude was merely demoted, not fired. Huh. That city must have the wold's most tolerant human resources department.)

Related: I had this video embedded here, but it loaded automatically every time I clicked back here, so you can just go watch it at the link.

Shouldn't she have seen this coming?

I'll admit that I don't know a whole lot about gypsies, and what I do know mostly comes from old horror movies. That said, isn't some kind of curse more traditional?

A fugitive wanted for allegedly killing a Sunset Boulevard fortune teller as part of a bitter feud between two Gypsy families has turned himself over to police in Phoenix, Los Angeles police said today.

Frank Shano Siganoff, 24, is charged with throwing a burning Molotov cocktail into Rose Marco's Hollywood storefront last September, setting her ablaze and leaving her with injuries that caused her death six days later, detectives said.

After the LAPD last week made public allegations that Siganoff had set the blaze, Deputy Chief Charlie Beck said, the fugitive gave himself up.

"We are on the way to Arizona to interview him and bring him back," Beck said.

The feud began over a broken engagement, police said. Within days of a marriage plan being announced over Easter 2005, relatives of Marco called off the wedding.

The other family demanded that the Marco clan pay $5,000 because of the show of "disrespect" in canceling the wedding, and warned that the life of a Marco relative would be in danger if the money was not forthcoming, police said.

Well, I guess that prediction turned out to be accurate.

Damn, I'm going to hell for making a joke there, aren't I? Or at least getting cursed. I mean, more so than already.

(By the way, I stole the title for this post from the e-mail subject line of a certain blogger who wishes to remain unnamed, who also hepped me to the story. He knows who he is, and I love/hate him for being funnier than I am. And for being more successful. Damnit.)

Don't mess with mom

Like everyone else, I've had fights with my mom. But I've never had one like this:

If anyone was wondering where French avant-garde novelist Michel Houellebecq got his talent for character assassination, the answer is clear: his mother.

In his seminal 1998 novel "Les particules elementaires," known in English as "Atomised," Houellebecq vented a lifetime of anger against his mother by portraying her as an egocentric, sexually promiscuous hippie who neglected her children.

Now it's pay-back time.

Lucie Ceccaldi, 83, has returned to France from her home in the Indian Ocean island of Reunion to publish a book of her own, "The Innocent One," in which she heaps insults on her son.

"My son can go and get screwed by whomever he wants, he can write another book, I don't give a toss," she says in one excerpt, widely published in French media on Wednesday.

"But if he has the misfortune of sticking my name on anything again he'll get my walking stick in his face and that'll knock his teeth out," she says in what newspapers described as a typical sample.

They really sound like some charming people.

He has always been very open about his grievances against his mother, who he says lost interest in him shortly after he was born in 1958 and left him in the care of his grandmother when he was a small boy.

Mother and son have been estranged since 1991, when a row over the Gulf War was the last in a long list of arguments.

"I knew I would never see my mother again and I was trembling with joy ... I really felt that I was experiencing a great moment -- full of light, liberating, peaceful," he has said of that final showdown.

In one subsequent interview with French arts magazine Les Inrockuptibles, he said his mother was dead.

Well, I guess he was mistaken.

"Michel and I can start talking again when he goes out in public with his 'Atomised' in hand and says 'I'm a liar, I'm an impostor, I've been a parasite, I've never done anything with my life except hurt those around me. And I'm sorry,'" she writes.

Houellebecq has given no public response.

Ceccaldi's account of his childhood does not contradict his version of events, but the interpretation is very different.

According to her book, she viewed him as a hindrance to her travel plans and active love life when he was a baby and later left him with his paternal grandmother for his own good.

Well, then, I guess he really has no reason to be upset with her. I mean, if my mom decided I was a burden and ditched me to go globetrotting and screwing around...uh...well, yeah, I guess I might be just a tad resentful, too

Getting greedy

I've never tried to pass a bad check, but I'd imagine that if you're trying to do so, you might want to try something a bit more...plausible than what this guy did:

Charles Ray Fuller must have been planning one big record company. The 21-year-old North Texas man was arrested last week for trying to cash a $360 billion check, saying he wanted to start a record business. Tellers at the Fort Worth bank were immediately suspicious — perhaps the 10 zeros on a personal check tipped them off.

Fuller, of suburban Crowley, was arrested on a forgery charge. He was released after posting $3,750 bail.

Fuller said his girlfriend's mother gave him the check to start a record business. But bank employees who contacted the account's owner said the woman told them she did not give him permission to take or cash the check.

I'm going to go ahead and guess that she probably didn't have hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank, either.

Oh, and in case you were wondering how he came up with such a bright idea, when he was arrested, the cops found weed in his pocket.