Bent Corner

This is just too funny:

Wal-Mart has placed banner ads on the Pirate Bay, one of the largest sites indexing pirated music and movies via BitTorrent technology and leading tormentor of the Motion Picture Assn. of America.

I guess it makes sense. Sort of. Go to Pirate Bay and search for BitTorrent of The Simpsons or The Sopranos and you might just see a banner ad for either one of these TV shows on DVD at Wal-Mart.

Link

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I was watching CNN this morning when I learned that there is yet again another fire raging forth in Malibu. So far, four mansions have been destroyed, including the home of Suzanne Somers.

Because of the Santa Ana winds and the geographical location of the hills surrounding Malibu, mansions along the beach in Malibu are constantly burning down. It’s not the first time a celebrity’s home was destroyed in Malibu and it wont be the last. I think it’s dumb to build a mansion someplace where so many of them have burned to the ground, but what do I know? It’s not like I was smart enough to invent the Thighmaster.

Watching CNN switch gears to the topic of sending more troops to Iraq made me realize that there is a parallel between the two stories. What does Bush sending more troops to Iraq have to do with Suzanne Somers and her home burning down?

Sending more troops to Iraq at this point would be like Suzanne Somers going out tomorrow and buying fire insurance .

For both, it’s too late. The time to send more troops to Iraq would have been at the time of the invasion. Before anarchy and chaos and upheaval were allowed to take root in Iraq. Before the looting and before the sectarian violence.

Now it’s simply too late.

If Suzanne Somers were ever going to buy fire insurance for her Malibu mansion, the time would have been before the fire destroyed her home. For her to now say that she is thinking of buying fire insurance would be ridiculous.

For George Bush to say now he is thinking of sending more troops to Iraq is equally ridiculous. Now it’s simply too late.

It turns out that my bout of ill health over the weekend wasn’t food poisoning. Sheri started to feel sick yesterday and she is now going through the very same thing I was going through on Saturday. Since she didn’t eat any Popeyes chicken, that means I wasn’t suffering from food poisoning. Which is good to know I guess. I would hate to think that I couldn’t eat Popeyes chicken anymore. Granted, I never had it before Friday, but it was mighty fine fried chicken. The coleslaw was especially good. It was much better then the coleslaw at KFC.

I do feel bad that I gave my stomach flu to Sheri. At least she has the comfort of knowing that she was right and I was wrong. She didn’t believe I had food poisoning.

Today is the first day I can drink hot coffee. My esophagus or whatever it’s called was so tore up and tender from puking that I couldn’t drink anything hot. How pathetically sad is that? My ancestors went out west in covered wagons and I couldn’t drink hot coffee.

Though I have no iron clad proof that Popeyes poisoned me, I now that I don’t normally spend Saturdays being so violently ill. How does one prove food poisoning?

Friday night for the first (and last) time in my life, I had a chicken dinner from Popeyes. A couple pieces a chicken, a biscuit, a little tub of coleslaw, and a little tub of mashed potatoes. It actually tasted pretty good. It was a lot like KFC, but not nearly as greasy.

Not only did I spend yesterday puking my guts out, I had a fever of 102 for most of the day. With the fever, I had the accompanying body ache. I took a shower and almost blacked out. I was really feeling rough. That’s putting it lightly. I felt as though I was going to die.

Sheri thinks I just had the flu. I don’t agree. When I get the regular flu, I don’t throw up. I get extremely congested. That didn’t happen this time. My problem was focused squarely on my stomach. I once watched a segment on 20-20 about food poisoning. A doctor being interviewed talking about how there really wasn’t such a thing as the stomach flu. When people had what is commonly referred to as the stomach flu, it was simply bad food. I really think that is what I had.

I feel a lot better today. I was able to eat this morning and I don’t have a fever anymore. I’ve also changed my mind about dying.

UPDATE: It turns out that it wasn’t food poisoning. My apologies to Popeyes.

Here’s a letter I wrote that was published in the local newspaper, the Herald-Mail.  It was in response to a letter written by someone who was calling for all Muslims to denounce terrorism.  For some reason, it struck a nerve with me.  Here is my letter:

I wanted to weigh in with an opinion on the recent letter written by Jack Myers where he called upon Muslims everywhere to denounce suicide terror attacks. Why stop at only calling on Muslims to denounce terrorism? Should be ask all religious people to denounce terrorism?

Muslims believe in the God of Abraham, along with people of the Jewish and the Christian faith. Should everyone that worships the God of Abraham also denounce terrorism? There are over a billion peace loving people in the world that practice Islam. Only a small percentage of that number recognizes or endorses terrorism as a legitimate method of achieving objectives. It is ridiculous and insulting to lump all Muslims in with the terrorists. The reality is that an overwhelming majority of Muslims don’t condone terrorism or even know a terrorist.

Asking Muslims to denounce terrorism is like asking Catholics to denounce pedophilia. Of course the vast majority of Catholics do not condone or endorse pedophilia. Similarly, the vast majority of Muslims do not condone or endorse terrorism. Don’t allow the actions of a small few lead you to make erroneous judgments about a majority.

I don’t know if we will ever win this war on terror.  How do you win a war against a technique?  I do know that we will not win it by insulting a billion Muslims that don’t support terrorism.  It’s giving credibility to the idiotic notion that all Muslims are blood thirsty terrorists that only have children so they can strap bombs on them and turn them into suicide bombers.

It’s like asking Christians to denounce rattlesnake handling.

The ironic thing about my letter to the paper was the title they gave my letter.  It’s as though the editor didn’t even read what I wrote.

He entitled it, “All should denounce terrorism“.

Really?  Was I saying that everyone should denounce terrorism?  That’s not even close to the point I was making.

Yesterday I posted something about how Wal-Mart is changing the way they schedule their employee’s work schedules. Why is Wal-Mart doing this? Is it really to save money on labor as they are claiming?

No. The reason they’re doing this is to purge their employment rolls of single mothers. An internal Wal-Mart memo leaked last year reveals that approximately half of Wal-Mart employees’ children are either uninsured or rely on state-subsidized programs for health care.

States are finally getting fed up with picking up this tab.

Here in Maryland, lawmakers recently enacted a law aimed squarely at Wal-Mart that would have dealt with this problem. That is until a federal judge stepped in and stopped it from taking effect:

A federal judge in July struck down the so-called Wal-Mart bill, aka the Fair Share bill, passed at the beginning of 2006 over Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.’s veto. The law would have required large employers in Maryland (Wal-Mart was the only company the law would have applied to) to spend at least 8 percent of its payroll on employee health care or contribute the difference to a state health fund.

One sure fire way to decrease the amount of Wal-Mart employee children that are either uninsured or receiving health insurance from state-subsidized health care programs is to simply get rid of those employees. Employees with the children without health insurance. They cannot just simply fire these employees. No, that would be illegal. Instead, they create a work environment that is all but impossible for single mothers to exist in. Such as forcing them to work “flexible” shifts.

It’s only a matter of time before Wal-Mart is forced to finally trickle down some of it’s massive profits to it’s workers so their workers can provide health care for their children.

Wal-Mart announced today that December sales at stores open at least one year would rise 1.6% instead of the 1% gain it had initially expected. They also announced that they will soon be moving all of their 1.3 million employees over to a new “flexible” scheduling system.

It will force employees to be flexible with what hours they work.

This means that a single woman working for Wal-Mart who must rely on daycare to watch her children will have a much harder time making those arraignments. They will be forced to find daycare providers that are just as flexible as Wal-Mart is forcing them to be.

This will not only adversely effect single mothers. It will throw a monkey wrench into any working family.

Wal-Mart claims to be making this change to it’s scheduling system to cut labor costs. Something I wouldn’t think would be necessary when you consider how much profit Wal-Mart makes. Whatever happened to the trickle down theory? Wal-Mart rakes in massive profits yet still comes up with new ways of paying less money to the American worker.

That’s not the way it is supposed to work. Sales are up. Higher then they expected. They still find a new way of cutting pay to American workers.

Wal-Mart moving employees to new schedule system [Yahoo!]

The trailer for the second animated Hellboy movie.

This is real classy on the part of CNN. I wonder how many times before the 2008 Presidential elections they and the rest of the mainstream corporate media will make gaffs like this. My guess is take the amount of times they played the Howard Dean yell in Iowa and multiply that by 100.

Barack Obama scares the mainstream corporate media. The enthusiasm, charisma, and excitement this man naturally generates is remarkable. People naturally gravitate towards him. In other words, he is the complete opposite of the mainstream corporate media’s favorite for the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.

I wonder how long it will be until the mainstream corporate media starts referring to Sen. Barack Obama using his middle name.

(photo stolen from Daily Kos)