Since it's Friday night...

...and I'm nearly ready to head out to the local watering hole, how's about I post a picture of BSG's Grace Park from two angles?

Double your pleasure! (Gum not included, but you can click for bigger.)

Jim Morrison was right

"Keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel," indeed:

Police say a Buffalo-area tow truck driver was juggling two cell phones — texting on one and talking on another — when he slammed into a car and crashed into a swimming pool. Niagara County sheriff's deputies say 25-year-old Nicholas Sparks of Burt admitted he was texting and talking when his flatbed truck hit the car Wednesday morning in Lockport.

The truck then crashed through a fence and sideswiped a house before rolling front-end first into an in-ground pool.

He may as well have had a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. He injured a 68-year-old woman and her 8-year-old niece in the crash. Hopefully, he'll be stripped of his driver's license, though I'm not confident of that, seeing as how often actual drunk drivers get back out on the road.

What East Coast bias?

ESPNews started the top of the hour by noting that the Dodgers (who lost in fifteen innings to the Cardinals) and the Yankees (who beat the Rays) were tied for the best record in Major League Baseball. They then put up a graphic which showed that the Angels were just behind both teams, and, after that, showed highlights from...the Red Sox beating the pathetic Oakland A's.

Fuck you, ESPN.

Update: They mentioned the players the fucking Pirates traded away today before mentioning that the Halos got their sixtieth win at fourteen minutes in. We need a West Coast version of this network. One which reports on teams outside of the Bristol, Connecticut area.

Navigation FAIL

It's not like I'm all that great with directions or anything, but I'd like to think I could do better than this:

Two Swedes expecting the golden beaches of the Italian island of Capri got a shock when tourist officials told them they were 650 km (400 miles) off course in the northern town of Carpi, after mistyping the name in their GPS.

"It's hard to understand how they managed it. I mean, Capri is an island," said Giovanni Medici, a spokesman for Carpi regional government, told Reuters Tuesday. "It's the first time something like this has happened."

The middle-aged couple, who were not identified, only discovered their error when they asked staff in the local tourist office Saturday how to drive to the island's famous "Blue Grotto."

That's right. Not only were they 400 miles or so away from where they were supposed to be, not only did they fail to realize that they'd made a spelling mistake on their GPS device that sent them to the wrong place once they got there, they also failed to realize that they were on the mainland, and not on an island.

I've taken a wrong turn or two in my day, but that's fucking ridiculous. Stupid Scandis.

You try to be nice...

And look where it gets you:

Madison police said a panhandler accepted $1 from a good Samaritan, then grabbed the rest of the donor's cash and punched him in the face. Police said the panhandler approached a 50-year-old man Monday evening and asked for 40 cents. Authorities said the man pulled out $14 and handed $1 to the man. The man allegedly grabbed the entire wad of cash and walked away.

The donor followed him and demanded his money back. Police said the panhandler responded by punching him.

This is why, number one, you don't give money to panhandlers. Number two, you don't show them all of the money you've got, even if you're giving them sixty whole cents more than they're asking for.

Besides, you know they'll just invest it in risky mortgage derivatives. Oh, wait...that's Congress.

Criminal Masterminds tripped up by getting trashed, apparently

I've never stolen a bunch of liquor, but I'm pretty sure this is the wrong way to do it:

After stealing about $1,154 in liquor, two burglars decided to celebrate and got so drunk they fell asleep instead of escaping, police in Swansea, Wales, said.

Burglars Keith Cullen and Paul Wiggins stacked up the stolen booze outside the store and then went in to have a drink. Police found them asleep in the store the next morning, The Sun newspaper reported.

See, you're supposed to plan your liquor heist (or any heist, for that matter) in a way in which you end up in some kind of hideout. That hideout could be your residence or a cabin in the woods or some other place, but it really, really shouldn't be the place you've stolen stuff from.

I'm just saying is all.

Simultaneously the most arousing and disturbing thing ever

Content Warning: The following is NSFW unless your boss happens to be Larry Flynt:



That's actually (and I'm not kidding, here) a commercial for a chain of Canadian convenience stores. Yeah, really.

(h/t)

Since it's Friday night...

...and blah, blah, blah, so here's a picture of Sarah Chalke from Scrubs looking hot:

Going to the hospital was never this much fun! Okay, it's never fun, but you get the idea. (Click for bigger.)

This is where a lesser man would make a joke about plowing

I know we're not supposed to judge other cultures for their traditions, but...actually, in this instance, I'm not gonna criticize them:

Farmers in an eastern Indian state have asked their unmarried daughters to plow parched fields naked in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain, officials said on Thursday.

Witnesses said the naked girls in Bihar state plowed the fields and chanted ancient hymns after sunset to invoke the gods. They said elderly village women helped the girls drag the plows.

Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and criticize the elderly women helping out thing a little bit, but still...pretty neat.

Bad cop, no Big Mac

I have the utmost respect for police officers and the job that they do, but that job also, unfortunately, attracts some high-strung, power-tripping jerks who think that a badge and a gun give them an excuse to act like assholes. Case in point:

A Denver police officer has been charged with felony menacing for allegedly brandishing his gun at a McDonald's restaurant after getting tired of waiting for his food. Derrick Curtis [Saunders, 29] also [faces] charges of prohibited use of a weapon, reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct.

An employee at the Aurora restaurant told investigators that two Denver police officers were waiting for their food at the drive-through window May 21 when one grew impatient and pulled his gun.

He's been suspended from his law enforcement duties, the article goes on to say. That's all well and good, but why isn't he in jail for pulling a gun on innocent people?

Now, she belongs to the ages

Gidget (not the surfer chick), an advertising icon, has passed away:

Her bug eyes and sweet face captured the hearts of millions of fast food enthusisats [sic].

But more than 10 years after her face first graced a "Yo Quiero Taco Bell" ad, marketing's top chihuahua has died at 15 from a stroke.

Since these things tend to happen in threes, and Billy Mays just died, the ShamWow guy had better watch his ass.

"Disgusting" would be more appropriate

I don't think "special" is the word you're looking for:

"I'm out for bragging rights," she said of entering the online contest. "It must mean I'm really special."

I'll leave it to you to click on the link to find out what kind of contest she entered.

Puzzling headline of the day

From Reuters: And WHY did they let him out?

Um, maybe because otherwise he would have died?

German police had to rescue a 20-year-old man from a train station suitcase locker after he shut himself in for fun and began to suffocate.

Yeah, sure, the guy sounds like a drunken idiot, and I don't know a lot about German law enforcement, but I'd guess that they're probably obligated to save the lives of innocent (if stupid) civilians when they get a call like that.

Since it's Friday night...

...and I really can't be bothered to come up with anything "funny," how about a picture of Charisma Carpenter looking hot as hell?

Oooooh...shiny.

Headline of the day

Hunt called off for drug lord's hippo:

Colombia has called off the hunt to kill a drug lord's escaped hippo and will instead try to relocate the beast after its mate was shot dead by order of the government, sparking outrage from animal rights groups.

The late Pablo Escobar apparently made enough money by exporting blow to musicians, New York City yuppie douches, and Robin Williams back in the eighties that he could afford his own zoo, from which two hippos escaped back in 2006. They've been living in the wild ever since. Well, except for the one who recently got gunned down. He's not really living anywhere anymore.

Worth a read

There's a good interview with one of my favorite writers, P.J. O'Rourke, here. An excerpt:

Most of the people who have grabbed hold of climate change and greenhouse gases, pollution, oil dependency—they have another motive, and their motive is to attain the appearance of virtue without having actually done anything virtuous. Or if they’re in politics, the whole point of politics is to achieve prestige and power without merit. These are just nice opinions to have. They’re utterly meaningless. It’s just a way for people to be pious jerks. This going on and on about how terrible a carbon-based economy is, these people are full of crap. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Their motives are not necessarily good just because they say they are being good. It’s peace, love, and understanding. To which I can just say, “Shut up.” Human liberty, rule of law, and free markets fix this stuff.

Read the whole thing. His last line about his motto is priceless.

(Via the Headlines at Moron HQ.)

Holy smokes!

You would think a bank might have some kind of software that would catch an error of this magnitude:

Josh Muszynski of Manchester said he was expecting to see a couple hundred dollars in his account, but instead he was faced with a negative balance far exceeding the national debt -- $23,148,855,308,184,500, WMUR-TV, Manchester, N.H., reported Wednesday.

"If it were to be true that someone actually compromised that money and got that money, they could do some severe damage with that amount of money," he said.

Muszynski said the amount appeared as a charge for a cigarette purchase at a Mobil gas station.

And I thought cigarette taxes were too high here in California...

Parents of the year

Sure, the smell of the smoke was a giveaway, but you know what else was a sign that these people were high? The fact that they ordered chicken at Arby's:

Police have arrested a couple allegedly caught smoking marijuana while waiting in the drive-through line at an Arby's restaurant with their 1-year-old in the back seat. A restaurant employee noticed the aroma late Friday and called 911, then had the couple wait for their order of chicken as police sped to the scene.

Officer Brian Silcox said he smelled marijuana while approaching the car. He said both a 27-year-old man and 25-year-old woman told officers Chatman had been smoking a cigar.

Police also said a loaded handgun was found in the car.

Thankfully, the child was distracted from the gun and the weed by several playthings, which included several broken whiskey bottles, a couple of rusty knives, and a few empty dry cleaning bags.

Rubbed the wrong way

I know that we're not supposed to judge other cultures and their peculiarities, but this is just stupid:

A family in Saudi Arabia has filed a lawsuit alleging theft and harassment on the part of a malevolent genie.

Officials with the Islamic Shariah court said the family alleges a genie has been leaving them threatening voice mail messages, stealing their cell phones and throwing rocks at them outside their home, CNN reported Monday.

"We have to verify the truthfulness of this case despite the difficulty of doing so," court head Sheik Amr al-Salmi, told the al-Watan newspaper. "What makes this case and complaint more interesting is that it wasn't filed by just one person. Every member of the family is part of this case."

Um, there's actually no difficulty here because genies (malevolent or not) don't exist. And every member of the family is either crazy or a liar.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to the woods to hunt for Bigfoot.

Since it's Friday night...

...and I can't be bothered to look for any funny news stories, here's a picture of Gillian Anderson, looking like a sexy Victorian strumpet:

Scully!!! Daaaaaamn!!!