Why India SUCKS at athletics

...well, not just Indians, but also Pakistanis and Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis and Nepalis and Bhutanese. And whoever the hell participates in the South Asian Games. In this particular case, the giant snafu was in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where I hope heads roll for this, but this gives you an idea of the amount South Asians care for athletics.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/events-tournaments/south-asian-games/South-Asian-Games-Marathon-ends-7-kms-short-of-official-distance/articleshow/5553100.cms

THEY CAN'T MEASURE THE DAMN DISTANCE REQUIRED FOR A MARATHON.

Oh, and the Indians were far better, check this out: they missed the entire closing ceremony because of a traffic jam.


At first it's funny, and then it's really, really sad. Don't give me this b.s. of "oh we're a poor nation, we're just developing, there aren't any funds." If you can't make it to the ceremony of the games where you won some 90 gold medals, you suck. That's it.

Iceland Air - my personal saga

So last week's little trans-Atlantic trip reminded me of a very different, but almost equally memorable trip that I made when I was a bit younger; the background is that I'm this young, broke student, and I'm trying to visit this lady-friend of mine back in England. The whole romantic affair was a waste of time, but the actual flight there turned out to be rather eventful. Here's an email I shot off after I got back, with some edits (the writing was horrendously tacky - I was a young and jilted lover who had just had a bad flight experience...)

With all the money I had made, the only airline I could afford was Iceland-air. Now if there's one thing I learned after this trip (and you should learn after reading this), it's never to fly Iceland-air. First of all, they buy all their 737s second-hand from Ryanair (which buys all their aircraft from the worn-out Ghana-air fleet, which in turn buys Kyrghyz-air rejects, which are basically the planes that the pilots of Air India have reduced to wrecks after 20 years of semi-drunk flying). So we get into this shell of a plane which looks like its just been in a demolition derby and spray painted by Andy Warhol off his meds. The insides are worse - bad karma all around. It looks (and smells) like the last trip involved horses, alcohol, frayed tempers and many, many upset stomachs. I say so to the old lady who sits to my left; she nods somewhat dreamily; I look to my right, and there's this cute thing (the one bright spot in the trip) that sits next to me, and we look at each other nervously as the plane shudders down the runway and eventually decides to heave itself into the air inches before we all get dumped into Chesapeake bay.

I look at the in-flight mag. Eidur Gudjohnssen is the first Icelander to play footie in England. You get good fish in Iceland. Icelandic water is clean. Icelanders bathe in open air pools and hot streams. Iceland has good fish. Icelandic water is healthy. Eidur Gudjohnssen has a wart on his left toe. Hm.

I turn talk to the babe, but the old woman on my left gets to me first; turns out she's on her way to meet her girl-friend. I make the mistake of looking at her quizzically, because she enthusiastically tells me that they indeed are dating. I also learn in quick succession, that
a. she was married,
b. her husband beat her every night,
c. she had kids (many),
d. her husband beat her every night,
e. her many kids had kids,
f. her husband beat her every night,
g. she eloped with her grandkid's governess.
Also jokingly, she adds that septuagenarian lesbians are, sadly, hard to come by. I laugh uneasily, and decide the only way to shut out the visual images that keep popping up in my head is to focus on the in-flight magazine (the TV closest to me was 12" across and a good 20 feet away, and they were showing Icelandic 70s pop). The two women on either side of me continue to have a spirited conversation about woman power.


Before long (I had time to read about Eidur Gudjohnssen's up-to-date love life twice over) we reach some stable altitude and wobble there. This is when Icelandic airhostesses appear with food. Each one of these ladies look like they can smother Hulk Hogan between their ample bicep and forearm fat pads. And they wear lipstick like it's been painted on by a 12" brush. As I quiver in fright as their body looms in front blocking all cabin light, they ask "VOT DO YOU VANT" in a decidedly you-better-tell-me-quick-you-dipshit-i-need-to-go-put-my-lipstick-on-again kind of
tone. So I ask for the pasta and get some glop that looks like its left over from the last ice age. Plus it has bits of what looks suspiciously like walrus meat, but I don't want to antagonize my friendly Icelandic airhostess. So I let Ms Hagar go bleach her bushy mustache and apply more green/orange eyeshadow, and I swallow the glop (carefully avoiding the meat - it has bristles on it that look just like walrus whiskers. I'm sure it was walrus meat). Fortunately they follow it up with alcohol (aqvavit - Iceland's national drink. Of course). I decide I need a stiff one, so does Etta (the pretty thing - we were close pals by then). So we down a couple, and then the ageing beast (the plane, not the airhostess) decides to do an all out death dance in the middle of the atlantic. Lights go out, alarms go off (REALLY loud sirens), and we all panic a bit. I decide to cash in, and turn towards Etta to comfort her, but glop + aqvavit was too much for her delicate tummy. She turns green, and before I can whip out the barf bag, she shoots out projectiles of half eaten walrus meat (though her nose too, I swear I saw it) all over a radius of six feet.

I turn green now, and turn away (hey, there's only so much I can do ok? besides I had a girlfriend back then - or so I thought - and judging from this babe's pro-lesbian tilt, I could be heading for a big letdown). Meanwhile Ms Hagar comes around, yells in Icelandic to her minions (I could see a vein throb in her temple); they wipe up the mess hurriedly and squirt some airfreshner that smells like a horses backside pretty much in our faces. As I clear my throat to let out a whimper of protest I get the eye from the lady, so I swallow the rising bile and shut up. It suddenly dawns on me about how it all makes sense. The horseshit, the vomit and the bad karma; it all fitted in... Feeling enlightened, I fall into dreamless sleep for about 30 seconds when the bloody sirens go off again. We're landing this time.

We land in Iceland (its quite brown and barren) on a rutted landing strip, we all shuffle into a lounge as big as my uncle's bathroom. exactly 17 minutes later (I understand that this is the minimum time gap between 2 legs of a flight in the same carrier) we shuffle out of the lounge and back into our seats. They shuffle seats though, so this time I get empty seats on either side. They shuffle airhostesses too, so this time I get a brunette Ms Hagar. But I've had enough of all this shuffling, and my enlightened mood manages to linger on so I just squeeze my eyes shut and dream of anatomically inaccurate viking babes till we get to Heathrow...

Interpretive dancing at the Shakespeare Theater

So I reconnected with a long-lost cousin this past weekend (yes, yes, I know, all of us Indians are related and we only have two degrees of separation as opposed to six for white people). Anyways, she decided that we should go check out some interpretive dance show at the Shakespeare Theater. I'm always up for stuff like this, so I said yes. And then realized that I had double-booked my Saturday (again). I had a football (soccer) game to watch at the stadium. So I went with my buddy to watch my team - the absolutely hapless DC United get thrashed again - this time the most awesome play they managed was when Benny Olson was fouled hard, and as the ref was handing out a yellow card to the offending player, good old Benny decides to kick the ball in the players face, earning him an immediate (an absolutely well deserved) red card, which means automatic ejection. This got us all happy, but of course, with a man disadvantage, we got our asses handed to us. This manner of losing is seemingly constant in all United games.

So I'd been jumping up and down and yelling with the group for three hours, and I realized I had precious little time to get back to the theater, so I rushed back after chugging my ($7.50!!!) Harp. I made it in time, but not soon enough, so I found that while my cousin got herself awesome orchestra tickets, I was stuck in the nose-bleeds. Which was fine, or so I thought, because I could blend in with the riff-raff.

Turns out no one who goes to see interpretive dance on a Saturday night is riff-raff. The women are all dressed like ostriches that have dived into fruit bowls and then ran through a GAP store to pick up mannequins for dates. I mean, I showed up in my soccer jersey, all out of breath and sweaty and beery, and I was huffing and puffing and I ran into this foyer, and then I saw the people. As I was processing the sight of thousand-dollar outfits and swept back hair and cuff links, they caught wind of an admittedly semi-drunk yogi. Champagne flutes stopped mid-clink, gloved hands went to grasp throats, cowlicks went unswept-back, there was a collective gasp, and things generally came to a somewhat shuddering and unceremonious halt.

I made the best I could of the situation, gave a cheerful wave, pointed to my jersey, and said something about United sucking. My cousin, bless her heart, stepped up and ushered my to a corner and gave me the ticket she had bought for me. Most people went back to what they were doing, and so I kept a low profile, and went in to see the show (which started a good half hour late). There are a bunch of things that I would like to point out about the whole getup, now that I've had the time to think about it:

1. The seats have as much space as economy seats on a Southwest flight from DC to NYC. If you are anything more than waif-like, you better get used to your neighbors elbow in your groin and your knees blocking the bottom half of your vision.

2. They rise really steeply, so I hope you don't suffer from vertigo. If you do get waves of vertigo induced nausea, fortunately you can bite into your knee caps (they're right there, hovering below your chin), which helps.

3. Funny people show up for shows. The lady sitting in front of me was blind. I don't know maybe she was listening to the footfalls during the interpretive dance show. She sure looked like she was having a swell time. There was also this dude who was given to moderately loud flatulence. I mean, they weren't thunderous, but they were noticeable, especially because they kept coming in fits and starts (he must have been trying to hold it in). No, fortunately, no bite. Only bark.

4. The dance part of the show was a let-down. They made a big deal about how it was all "late-night" and "18 and above", and so I was expecting some serious avant-garde shit, you know, like naked women (yeah...). So when they announced the first piece and say that "people will be dancing in the flesh" (I'm not making that up), I was thinking "Oh god, please no naked fat men. Please, make them hot women." I wanted to see me some boobies.

And then out walked these three girls (so far so good) dressed in gowns (positive development - they're easy to take off), and they executed some writhing moves on stage. I was starting to get a little impatient, but then they stared disrobing. I think everyone sat up a little straighter (riff-raff or hoity-toity, we're all the same), and then the robes came off to reveal....

...
...
...

SKIN COLORED TIGHTS.

SKIN. COLORED. TIGHTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There was a palpable sense of dismay that swept through the seats. I mean, what the fuck. You've GOT to be kidding me. Come ON Shakespeare. If you're making me pay to see some bullshit interpretive dance, and then you get me all tingly and excited by telling me there are going to be naked people, then GIVE ME NAKED PEOPLE!!!! I am not here to see some bullshit dance moves by people who weren't good enough to make it into a real dance troupe to some bullshit music mixed by some jock who was too unhip to mix at the local club. You know what I interpreted it as? Fully clothed people who had forgotten their latest dose of phenobarbital. You know, I really like artsy stuff. I do. But I want people to be honest. If its going to be people in tights, tell me its going to be people in tights. Also, if it's going to be interpretive, don't make us do ALL the interpreting, OK? Give us a hint here or there. Some skinny dude prancing around the stage in his pajamas is exactly that - a skinny dude prancing around the stage in his pajamas. The people were obviously in great shape and had decent talent and training, why not put them to better use?

5. The stuff in between the pieces was pretty good. Awesome poetry, very funny (and really sexually charged. The lady next to me kept going "Oh boy. Ooh boy. OOOH boy." until I wanted to hit her. But she was huge and already had an elbow right by my testicles, so I desisted.)

So overall, it was an eventful evening. Worth doing. Just dress up a bit. The ostriches are few and far between (there was some hyperbole up there I'll admit), and they generally make giant fools of themselves. You're there for the art, not to show off your Blahniks. Oh and also, if someone tells you their dancers are going to dance in the flesh, ask for a conditional refund.

The new movie about Darwin - nope, you can't see it

Why, oh why, oh WWWHHHHHYYYYY are we like this????

The Darwin movie (which has been getting pretty good reviews, and from what I gather is more about the man than making the case for a lack of a god/gods), is apparently "too controversial" for audiences in our blessed country of the United States of Am-oh-we-don't-want-to-piss-off-Jesus-and-his-devout-non-evolution-believing-followers-erica. So THEY AREN'T EVEN DISTRIBUTING IT.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THONK, THONK, THONK.... (sound of yogi's head slowly hitting wall)

Here is the clip. It gives me the goosebumps. I'd love to have seen it. Except of course, I can't now because of how the assholes that quail in fright at the thought of Jesus' army picking up their knives and guns and capping their asses for screening a movie that chronicles the life of a dude, who, you know, changed how we think about life. Idiots. And cowards.

Women: cock-blockers of the first order

Yeah, I know, I know, you all already know this. Men and women think differently. Men come from Venus, and women come from Mars or some such b.s. Well, you're wrong.

Men come from Hey-let's-give-this-guy-a-chance, and women come from Hey-let's-crush-this-dude's-balls. Let me explain.

When men are at a bar (or some equivalent social locale) and start up a conversation with a bunch of women and one of the men takes a fancy for one of the women and starts talking to her and it's obvious that she's into him too, do you know what we men do?

We let them be.

With the one and only exception of obviously foreseeable irreversible physical harm that might occur (after multiple beers, everyone can make mistakes, and it is the duty of the group to ensure that their friend lives another day - this has happened to me and I'm glad for it), we let them go their own way. Whatever happens happens. They both are ADULTS, they can reach their own decisions. Our best wishes are with the guy, and we let him make the best he can out of the evening.

When WOMEN are at a bar (or some equivalent social locale) and start up a conversation with a bunch of men and one of the men takes a fancy for one of the women and starts talking to her and it's obvious that she's into him too, do you know what the women do?

They decide all of a sudden, oh no, we can't allow our dear friend (who've we've been bitching about all this while because she's wearing old 06 Blahniks and has the wrong shade of eyeshadow) to make her own mind up about the dude she's having a fun time with. Oh no, we can't. We've been drinking our martinis all night and making catty comments at all the other girls who look like they're having a great time. Oh, we know we're going home alone tonight and crying ourselves to sleep after eating that half tub of icecream and feeding the cats, pretending that we really are too good for the trash out there in the city while knowing full well that we're going to hit 35 and then realize that we're running out of time to churn out babies and then decide that that shlub from high school who admitted that he jerked off to our graduation photos all through college and still lives in his mom's basement while earning 10 bucks an hour at the local florist and who's only upwardly mobile posession is his hairline, all of a sudden seems to be a stable and sensitive guy, and that as a result of having gotten hitched to this winner in the future, we're going to end up living the rest of our lives wanting to shoot ourselves in the face to lessen the pain of a pointless wasted life.

Still, with all of this, you know what they do? They execute the classic cock-block. They lead their bewildered friend away, "Oh honey, it's for your own good...." leaving yogi (equally bewildered) wondering what the heck just happened. Listen, if I looked like a rapist, fine. If I was smashed and acting creepy, fine. If I was sober and taking advantage of a clearly drunk woman, that's kosher too. But if she is obviously having a great time and we are in the MIDDLE OF EXCHANGING PHONE NUMBERS, LET. HER. BE.

Listen, you stupid dumbasses. I don't know what your problem is. Let your ADULT friend make her own decisions. She's smart and can handle herself, which is why yogi liked her in the first place. If she needs your help or if she needs to extricate herself from an awkward situation, she'll let you fucking know. Or, god forbid, she might actually take care of herself.

Creepy guys in bar restrooms

The only reason I don't have a pic is because the only thing creepier than the creepy guy in the men's room is taking a photo of the creepy guy in the men's room.

Well, long story short, there are some bars in DC that have dudes parked in the men's room. I don't know why they do this, maybe to ensure there's no drugs or gay sex in the bathrooms, but whatever the reason is, you're having a good time in a crowded bar, you have a bunch of beer, and eventually it's time to empty a kidney. So you walk down to the men's room (focusing on walking dead straight, chest all puffed out, gazing ever-so-casually at the rest of the bar with the supreme confidence of the leader of a pride of lions gazing at his harem), and then just as you relax and get ready to do what you have to do, you smack right into the dude.

He's there, right by the door, looking at you, paper towel at the ready and a steady gaze through you and beyond, a good 500 yards behind your skull. He has little set of things right by the sink too. Cigarettes, breath mints, gum, q-tips. And condoms. And that's just what you could see - I'm sure you could buy car insurance and walking canes from him too, as long as you paid the right price. And as long as he could watch you urinate in a bar. You edge by him, do your thing somewhat self-consciously, remember to flush, and wash your hands thoroughly, all under his undecipherably blank gaze. He then gives you the paper towel, and then waves his hand in front of the damn machine until it spits out some more, tears it out, and goes back to standby mode. You then feel obliged to throw a dollar or so in his tip tray and get the hell out. It's downright creepy.

And it's also bullshittical.

1. There are enough people up there, and I'd like to clear my head for a few seconds. I'd like to do it without some brother looking right at me.
2. I can bloody well wave my hand at a machine to make it spit out some paper at me. I do not need your help.
3. I am never going to take those individual half-unwrapped sticks of gum that have been marinating in aerosolized shit and/or piss for the last few hours.
4. I appreciate your concern and your sense of entrepreneurship with the condom sales, but could you take it outside, please?
4a. btw do you have a lady partner hawking lipstick and tampons in the women's room? I'd like to know.
5. Very smart move, keeping just the two bucks in the collection tray. Just enough to let people know that that what it's there for, yet not enough that people will think you've earned enough money for waving your hand every once in a while and hawking some knick-knacks.

Bar owners, you have to stop this shit. It's stupid and pisses people off. ESPECIALLY if you have a rest room the size of a coffin. The dude was literally looking over my shoulders last night.

Jeez.

Bethesda is one snooty town

So I'm at this bar called the Harp and Fiddle, which is a pretty decent place, if you like pretend-Irish bars in the US. I'm with a friend that I hadn't been with in six months or so, and so there's a bunch of catching up to do. So here we are, on a Wednesday, at happy hour, chatting about our miserable lives and generally having a good time when a little old lady walks up to us and says:

"Could you two please lower your voices? My husband is playing, and both your voices really carry." and she has this look on her face (the "could-you-kids-please-shut-the-fuck-up-eh? please? ok? thanks." THAT look)

Both of us are dumbfounded because we don't know what she's talking about. I mean, both Kim and I are from Baltimore, where sure, there might be the occasional fight and gunshot wounds and drug dealing, but NO ONE has come up to us and told us to shut up. EVER. So we stare at her, and then we see she's walking back to the other side of the bar, where sure enough, there's a wizened old man playing on a lute or something. We had thought it was bar music, and we we had to talk over it to hear each other. Turns out it was this septuagenarian with a replacement hip cranking out civil war era tunes on his venerable instrument, much to the delight of his wife. I mean, she had her eyes closed and was swaying to the music in the kind of unchained rapture that I will attribute to menopause and a lack of sex for a couple decades. And of course a giant pineapple up the ass.

I mean. What the fuck.

Last time I checked, we weren't at the Carnegie.
We're at a bar.
At a fucking Wednesday happy hour.

I'm sorry I had to raise my voice to be heard above the cacophony that your geriatric spouse was cranking out, ok? But the next time you want to experience auditory orgasmic bliss in silence, tell your hubby to play Wagner in bed.

And the next time, if there is one, that you tell me to shut up, I WILL punch you in the face. Or well, maybe kick your fucking cane out from under you.

Bush Co. Cover up of the Dasht-e Leili massacre

I had only read snippets of this massacre previously, but now this video really really brought it home for me.

Watch the video, it is chilling.



Dostum is an Afghani Pol Pot. And we not only befriended the guy, we called him our ally, made him a minister, allowed him to kill thousands in our name, and still continued to support him AND HELPED COVER UP THE MASS MURDER HE ORCHESTRATED.

It makes me sick.

And you want us to "move forward?"

Hiking on the Appalachian Trail

I think this will go viral as a new idiom:

"Hey Joe, where's that report you were supposed to submit today?"
"Er... I went hiking on the Appalachian trail..."

Or even better:
"What the fuck Joe, where's that report you were supposed to submit today? Did you go hiking on the fucking Appalachian trail???"

Of course, for those of you who don't know what's happening, I am of course referring to Mark Sanford's sad saga. Poor republicans. For being the party of moral values, they sure are finding it real hard to keep the snake in their pants. Bloody hypocrites. So yeah Sanford? You can go to hell. Oh one more thing: awful penmanship. Those letters make me want to puke.

And finally, apologies for those who thought this was about, you know, the Appalachian trail. Here is a post from a while back that may help.

I hate primary school band concerts

First of all, more work = less blogging. Man, this bullshit is beginning to get me down a bit. It's nice and pretty outside, and I was hoping to get some free time because the last few weeks have been brutal at work. No luck.

That being said, I did get to see my nieces' gym video and band concert video. You know what, I think music teachers need to be a little less tolerant with young beginners. If the little kid doesn't know a C from a F within a couple months, cut him/her from the team. Don't make them do solos at the end of the year. This might be news to you, but not everyone has the ability, nor even wants to be, the next Chris Botti. So why put them, us, and indeed, yourself through all this torture, I don't get. Trust me, we'll ALL be glad if they didn't lay their dainty little fingers on an instrument ever again.

I got to see a bunch of kids play instruments half as big as their bodies and managing to sound like the terminal wing of an asthma clinic having sex with an unwilling horse. My niece was great (honest), and so were a couple kids, but that was about it. They could have just had a nice quartet and been done with it. But no, being cut from a team makes you a psycho killer or a misfit in society for life apparently, so we had forty fucking seven solos, most of which SUCKED BALLS.

There was the kid who tried to play the trombone, and had clearly not figured out the relationship between slide and pitch. There were the drums duo who managed to be out of sync for EVERY SECOND of their (mercifully) short piece. There was the piano duo that, not satisfied with sucking while playing solo, played together, with one girl handling the low notes with her left hand and the other handling the highs with her right. Disaster.

But none was worse than the self-important little kid who came out and played two lines from the the Titanic song over and over AND OVER. 6 FREAKING TIMES. And all the while, her mom (from where the self-importance gene was clearly passed down) sat down in the front row and played conductor while managing to both beam with pride and be in a trance from the apparently captivating cacophony. This was the only piece when I both wanted to puncture my eardrums AND stab my eyeballs to lessen the pain of the experience.

So, music teachers, for everyone's sakes, when a kid sucks, cut them from the group, ok? Please. Thanks.

wholly unnecessary alliteration

If you have read this blog enough, you already know by now that the ubiquity of little word plays in today's world of advertising pisses me off, and no word play pisses me off more than the cheapest of all word plays, alliteration.

Merriam-Webster has this definition. Alliteration: The repetition of usually initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words or syllables (as wild and woolly, threatening throngs) —called also head rhyme initial rhyme

So when I saw this label on a box of Crumblettes (which by itself pisses me off; it's a crumble, and just because it's small by American standards doesn't mean you can add the "ette" suffix), you can imagine, my head just about exploded.

I mean, WHAT THE FUCK!!?!?!?? WHOLLY WHOLESOME WHOLLICIOUSNESS??????? I WILL TEAR YOU A NEW ASSWHOLE YOU ASSWHOLE!!!!!

Fuck the American capitalist system

So I got told by this financial advisor dude the other day that my credit score tanks. I thought, "Hm, that's funny". You see, Pushupyogi has lived quite a simple life. Not exactly frugal, but not stupid. No student loans, no car loans (thank you pushupsister), a credit card that gets paid of every month...

So I make a few calls, and find out that there's a debt collection agency is still awaiting payments from me. Images of Vinny with his cheap (but thick) gold bracelet and his baseball bat fill my brain immediately, but I push these away, and try to figure out how the hell this happened. More calls later I find that it's because of unpaid electricity bills from a house that I lived in more than a year ago. Even more calls confirm that I had a bill, but I had already paid it. But there was some miscommunication - and remember I NEVER got an email/snail mail from these guys, and so I was cruising along, except that the collection agency had this file open AND NEVER TOLD ME. So my credit rating gets screwed for a grand total of 80 bucks owed (actually 80 bucks NOT owed), and I find this out just by chance.

And then when I ask how this little thing could have made such a big difference, I get told by my advisor that it was because I "didn't have enough of a credit history." He then suggested that I go get a second credit card, and then maybe have a little bit of a balance on it, to get a good credit score.

I mean, WHAT. THE. FUCK. So what he was telling me is that I needed a second credit card that I didn't really need, and then I should go ahead and run up a debt on that card, essentially borrowing money that I couldn't/wouldn't repay at the end of the month, AND THIS WOULD HELP MY CREDIT SCORE???

No wonder we're so screwed. you people have a system that's just plain messed up. Sorry, but that's the truth. it's just fucked up.

Fox "News" is a lying, news-altering piece of garbage

Now, we all knew that Fox is entertainment. I mean, come on. Fair? Balanced? (Oh, apparently, these days they are fair, balanced AND accurate. Which is like me pretending to be a yogi and a pushup maniac). You've seen Bill O'Reilly and that idiot Sean Hannity with his shit-eating grin. They are hate mongers, and they reap their millions by creating straw men on the left and then knocking them down, and providing their audience with a bunch of vitriol and bone-headed opinion.

But that's the point - all that is opinion. As much as I hate BillO and his pompous ass, as much as I want to pull out Hannity's teeth with a pair of pliers (All their acolytes - Dick Morris and Ann Coulter and Bernie Goldberg and all the other wankers deserve to have pineapples shoved up their asses too), as much as I want to do all that, well, they are opinion makers. Their opinion might be a busload of bullshit, but its their opinion.

But when Fox actually crops and edits video to fit their news story (which usually is a critique of the admin), not only is it 1. Easy to detect and call them out on it, because the facts are open to all to see, but 2. It is worse than the usual chicanery and sophistry and deception; it's just flat out lying. Not that I expect any better from these assholes, but still.

Here's an example of what I mean, from mediamatters.org. Boy, we really do owe these guys for keeping tabs.

throwing hats into the ring, uh, rink...

So I was watching the Capitals beat the Penguins today in the playoffs, and Ovechkin (who is the big star in DC, if you didn't know) scored a hat trick, three goals in one game. And then the cap shower started. See, I get it, OK? Hat trick. So lets throw our hats onto the ice. Cute.

but this was ridiculous on multiple counts.

1. It holds up play for a while, and we get to sit with our thumbs up our asses as the crew cleans up.
2. Where were all these fans when the Capitals were the Crapitals? Huh? Huhh??? NOW y'all want to be fans when the tea is winning... we know fair weather fans when we see them. Fair weather fans thrown their stupid new hats onto the ice at the uh, drop of a hat...
3. Do you know how much those hats cost??? I hope that someone collected all those caps and put them in a giant trash can so people could fish them back out. Otherwise, that's a solid 25 bucks that you just threw away. In addition to the $60 tickets and $40 beer.

Here's a little embed to show you what happens, from an old game. It's just a little shot at the end. But this was NOTHING compared to today - there were a couple hundred hats on the ice...

Teh stoopid. From a jackass Canadian

Did you hear about this?

Apparently, the kid wanted to commit suicide. So what did he do? FLY A PLANE FROM CANADA INTO U.S. AIRSPACE, HOPING TO GET SHOT DOWN BY F-16 FIGHTERS.

WHAT. THE. AAAAAAAAAAFRRRHVGHJKSDFBHJAKBDHIABVHJBVASDAVUDKCVBAYHBSAASDAHFJAJLKJHGHGHGHGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

no, wait.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHRJKLGHURGKBYHEVRBHRKEBHYUIERKVBUIBRVSDHFUVLKBHDFJHJKLHGGHGGHGHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11

I mean, all he had to - AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh Jesus. Please.

I have to get offline and hit my head on my tiled bathroom wall. No seriously. I'm done.

Teh stoopid. From a scientific company

I was waiting at a metro station when I saw this ad from a scientific company that claimed great results, quick speed and awesome accuracy from one of their new products. OK, first of all, a smiley face from western blot bands on a clock face is incredibly gay, but notice something else?



Look where the "55" is. Nowhere close. I mean, WTF!?!?!? I mean, if you are a multibillion dollar scientific company, the LEAST you can do is get the damn face of a clock right. What are you, dumber than a first grader?

Dhani is one giant muay thai fraud.

Have you seen this show? It's called Dhani tackles the globe on the Travel Channel, where this ex-footballer dude goes around the world and does manly things. Mostly getting beat in wrestling matches and banging local prostitutes.

Well anyway, I watched a show for a bit, and in this one, this guy goes to Thailand to fight Muay Thai. Muay Thai, for those you who don't know, is a pretty brutal form of martial arts; skinny thai kids beat the crap out of each other, especially with the trademark (and pretty devastating) knee kicks to the ribs and elbows to the face.

Exhibit A (with apologies for the bad music):



Now, here's the promo for what Dhani did:



I bet you're thinking: Hey, not too bad, the guy is getting trained and is breaking a sweat. Hm, maybe I'll watch him in a real fight...

IN REALITY, what happens is that Dhani lands in Bangkok, shops around for some bikini briefs and fake handbags, watches some fish fight in a tank, and promptly hits the red light district, where he is mobbed by multiple prostitutes, some of who are clearly she-males. He rebuffs their advances (at least to the extent we know of), has a drink with a couple of really ugly ones that professed their undying love to him (I swear one ACTUALLY said "me love you long time"), and plays football with a baby elephant. No, I am not kidding. All this while being a typical American tourist and remarking about how crazy/crowded/polluted the city was to his tuk-tuk driver, who clearly didn't understand a damn thing he said.

In the meanwhile, he does do a few crunches and practice kicks. Mostly what you see on the promo clip. He then gets oiled up, gets taught a few prayers (which he faithfully recreates in the ring), and then gets to fight with THE MOST OUT OF SHAPE THAI DUDE I HAVE SEEN IN MY LIFE.

I mean, this guy, I wish I had a clip to show you. It looked like they went out to the bars (in the red light district for all you know), picked up the fattest, most out of shape drunk dude, slapped on a ceremonial head gear on his head and a few Bahts into his hand, and ushered him in the ring to fight Dhani (who is quite a fit brute, actually).

That the guy lasted two rounds itself was a miracle. I mean, the guy was passing out on his feet BEFORE they even started exchanging punches. It sucked balls. I think there were a few half-hearted punches and kicks, and then Dhani kicked him in the gut and it was all over. I mean, I don't think he knocked him out. I think the dude just wanted to go back to the bar with his new found wealth and drink some more, so at the first hint of contact with his flabby beer belly - which was really sizable, he toppled over and passed out (somewhat unconvincingly) in the ring.

And then as the guy gets carried away so he can drink away his ignominy, Dhani talks to the camera about how he felt good that he learned something from Thailand, and how he was proud that he won. Yeah, you know what dude, I was walking to work today and I stepped on an earthworm. He tried fighting back, he did, that crafty worm. But I showed him who was boss. I won. I feel proud. Plus I didn't wear a helmet like you did, you wuss.

Fight a real man.

And for God's sake, learn to bargain when you're buying a pack of colored briefs.

Jackass.

Another small dog. And this one's perpetually horny...

Oh Jesus, why do you torment me so? You all know I've had run ins with small dogs. To say that I do not find small dogs cute would be like saying Rush Limbaugh may perhaps have slightly conservative views. I hate everything about them. Hate. I have spent substantial amounts of time dreaming of ways to kill them. (I think I finally settled on feeding them into a blender. It seemed reasonably convenient, and might have worked, except that I realized I'd have to do a lot of cleaning up between dogs...)

Anyway, so when another of these dogs landed up in my house, I was not pleased. At all. Its bad enough that the thing yips and tries to grab food off of my plate and tries to lick my face with its filthy tongue, but then this happened last night when I was trying to watch TV.



See that look on the dumb mutt's face? What does it say? Well, low IQ obviously. Extraordinary ugliness, of course. But you see guilt? Just a wee bit? Well, I do. You want to know why? Because this was what was happening 30 seconds before.



That flurry of activity is the stupid dog trying to impregnate the hapless cushion. A sound kick to the behind stopped the mad pelvic thrusting, but now I'm wondering what other articles around my house have been propositioned by the damn dog.

Man, I got to go bleach my room...

Destroyed in Seconds - rapidfire thoughts (mostly those of annoyance)

I'm sure you've seen this show on Discovery, where things of various sizes, shapes, and colors, and usually traveling at some speed get obliterated. Or just broken up less spectacularly. The few transient but mostly deep thoughts that flashed through my mind immediately, I present to you in list form:

5. There is no end to the stupidity of people who try stunts. I just saw a guy who tried to jump a steamboat on an ATV. The guy had a 30 foot ramp, and was going at about 40 mph. He needed 80 feet and 70mph to clear the boat. He clipped the top and got tossed a good 70 feet (so he *did* clear the boat, but the landing left much to be desired...). Not to be cowed down by epic failure, he went at it again, this time presumably consulting someone who had passed high school physics. To be safe, they had the boat safely tucked under the ramp, so all he really had to do was stick the landing. For some reason, three-quarters of the way, after having crossed the boat, but still in mid-air, our resident hero decides to let go of his footrests and the handlebars. Gravity is not kind to stupidity. I forget exactly what he broke, but he isn't riding anything again.

4. What about the poor cameraman? This one was about a BASE jumper who floats into a 300ft waterfall and gets his ass savaged by 12,000 gallons of water a minute. You should've heard the guy doing the voice-over talk about the jackass. BASE jumping legend, daredevil, all that stuff. But I kept thinking: what about the other dude who also jumped with this guy? In my opinion, he's the real hero. I mean, you've got a damn camera strapped to your helmet so you look like a jackass, and you've to keep looking at the jumper to make sure that all of it (success or painful failure) gets captured. And you still have to make the damn jump! And yet, the other dude gets all the glory. That's just wrong. Well, to be fair, the dude probably *did* make some money by selling tape to Destroyed in Seconds...

3. I thought Discovery was supposed to be about, you know, DISCOVERY. We've got environmental issues we can talk about, scientific inventions, docmentaries about the Earth and Space, so much other cool stuff. Why the hell are you reducing yourself to playing tape of things getting blown up and boob jobs? (Not all is bad - Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs are truly enjoyable) Still, I feel it's been watered down recently. I guess talking about environmental problems gets you labeled as a dirty hippie channel...

2. Ron Pitts, you have one lousy agent. I feel bad for this guy, have you seen him? To be fair, it's not like he's a superstar; I think he had a below-average football career for a few years and they sent him packing. Point is, you see him only twice during the show; at the start where he says "Welcome to Destroyed in Seconds, where you see stuff getting destroyed in seconds" or some crap like that, and then winds down the show with "This has been Destroyed in Seconds, see you next time." That sucks balls. I mean, that's as bad as Pamela Anderson and Debbe Dunning on Home Improvement ("What time is it? Tool Time!!!"), except that Stills, unlike Ms. Anderson, got those boobs by benching 350 and then stopping 5 years back...

1. Why do we love watching things getting destroyed? I don't get it, I really don't. For 30 minutes, no matter what, we're all reduced to grunting and puntuating explosions on TV with "Aw Jeez" or "What the F**K!!??" or "did you SEE THAT?!?!" even though we're all alone in front of the TV. Well, being male and drinking beer exacerbates this, but being male and drinking beer exacerbates a lot of things, so that might not be a factor. So why do we find something so inane, so vacuous, so breathtakingly POINTLESS, entertaining? Does this say something about our race? About society? About today's media and how it has conditioned us?

I don't know. You tell me.

More evidence of humans overcrowding this planet

First, there was this. And then there was this.

And so I really got thinking about how much we are going to be SO TOTALLY SCREWED. I mean, what I see in the future is no just just some minor inconvenience here and there, it's going to be one giant clusterfuck.

1. As far as the nuclear submarine incidents go (this was the second "this" just above if you were too lazy to click on it), it really isn't getting as much coverage as it should. Two NUCLEAR POWERED SUBMARINES with NUCLEAR WARHEADS HAD A FENDER BENDER in the Atlantic. I mean, first of all, how ridiculous is it that two giant behemoths can't see each other? I mean, we are spending billions of dollars trying to build missile shield systems that can shoot stuff out of the sky, and you can't see a 500 FOOT LONG 15,000 TONNE behemoth in front of your face??? Dude.

1a. What the hell were the subs doing that close anyway? Don't they have specific routes for their training exercises?
1b. Why the hell couldn't they see each other?
1c. Were they carrying payload? In which case, WHAT THE FUCK!!???!?!?? I mean, even without the payload, these are NUCLEAR POWERED craft. Sorry I'm shouting so much, but if there was a breach, we are talking of a massive, massive, unforgivable disaster.

On the other hand, and I KNOW this is my testosterone talking, but man, that HMS Vanguard is one sexy beast of a machine... Phew, it's giving me goosebumps.



2. The other sign that perhaps we're getting too numerous (technologically advanced for our own good) is the satellite collision that happened this past week - the first "this" above.. All that debris around the planet is going to kick our collective asses in the near future. I can promise you that.

Here's a cartoon of the simulation of the existing debris in space around the Earth (from the NS article)



Yep, all that junk is damn dangerous, irrespective of whether it starts coming down ("Ms. Smith, we regret to inform you that as your son was decapitated by an ancient soviet-era spy satellite during his soccer game today. He did however score a goal in the first half."), or whether it stays up ("Dear investors, we regret to inform you that the 3 billion dollar communications satellite that we successfully launched last year crashed into a 2 billion dollar communications satellite that was launched the year before, and is completely destroyed. However, not all the news is bad - the other satellite belonged to our competitors. Get the champagne, Charles.").

He who invents the first space poop-scoop will inherit the world.