Bent Corner

My elected representative Roscoe Bartlett has found something else to waste his time on. Evidently he believes that the already existing penalties for cockfighting and dogfighting are somehow not tough enough. Once again he is introducing a law that does nothing to benefit the people of his district. Unless he somehow believes that we are a bunch of blood thirsty cockfighting and dogfighting aficionados. That only tougher federal laws will reign in our desire to witness cock on cock or dog on dog combat.

He recently got a federal law passed that forbids home owner associations from banning the display of the American flag. Something that is already against the law here in Maryland.

Years ago he got a law passed that banned the sale of adult magazines on military bases. Both state-side and overseas. Because of Roscoe Bartlett, 20 year old kids in the military stationed in South Korea cannot buy the same nudie magazines sold in any 7-11 or Sheetz. This from a man that refused to serve in the military.

It’s not like we have a problem with cockfighting or dogfighting here in western Maryland. I’ve never heard of either activities taking place anywhere near here. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not an advocate of animal cruelty. I don’t have much patience for people that abuse animals. I just don’t see a big cockfighting or dogfighting problem here in western Maryland.

I would prefer it if Roscoe Bartlett concentrated on issues that actually pertained to the people he is representing.

Link

Not only did Sanjaya not get the boot last night on American Idol, he wasn’t even in the bottom three. I’m not saying that Chris Sligh didn’t deserve to be let go after butchering a Police song. I don’t like people that foul up a Police song.

I dislike Sanjaya more.

If this craziness continues, this may anger God. He’s probably looking down and shaking his head at America’s stupidity. Not that he doesn’t do that a lot anyway. When he looks down and sees Sanjaya prancing around on stage with his hair in a pony-hawk forgetting words to songs, it’s got to irritate him. Especially when he knows that Sanjaya is remaining on the show only because people are voting for him to remain.

It’s not a good idea to make God mad.

Who knows what voting for Sanjaya will make God do. He very well may flood the Earth. He promised to never do that again, but that was before he heard Sanjaya sing. He may turn our rivers to blood. He may blanket the country in locusts. They are kind of like grasshoppers, but different. I think he also did something with frogs, but I don’t remember all the details.

Remember, we all used to have only one language until the good people of Babylon came up with the idea of building a really big tower. Unfortunately, they forgot to fill out the proper paperwork and get all of the permits from God. That made God mad. Next thing you know, we had different languages. Even that one in Africa where people cluck. If you ask me, they got the short end of the stick.

Compounding the problem is that I have to believe God was rooting for Chris Sligh. He was a student for several years at Christian fundamentalist Bob Jones University. Not only does America vote to keep Sanjaya, it causes the guy he was rooting for to get kicked off. If you think about it, it’s a lot worse then building a humongous tower without asking for permission first.

Don’t blame me if you wake up tomorrow morning to find that nobody understands you any longer because you speak cluck.

The joke has gone on long enough. American Idol is supposed to be a singing competition. At the bare minimum, the contestants should be able to sing.

Sanjaya Malakar is not a good singer. That’s precisely why he feels the need to resort to dressing up as a freak. That’s why he feels the need to do ridiculous things to his hair each and every week. Each week it’s worse then the last. He simply has to go home tonight. He has run out of shtick. There is nothing more he can do that will out Sanjaya last night’s appearance. He has backed himself to the cliff and there is no where else to go but down.

I honestly don’t know what more he could do to look even more freakish.

Last night’s actual singing was even worse. Not only did it sound rotten, he actually forgot the words. He is now at the point where he is mocking the very people that call in and vote for him every week. Can you imagine how real singers feel when they see this buffoon on TV? Singers that take their art seriously?

Singers that if they were going to be singing live on national TV in front of 30 million people might actually learn the words to the song they were singing. Sanjaya spent more time doing his ridiculous ponytail Mohawk then preparing to sing.

What an ass.

Anna Nicole Smith’s autopsy report was released today. You can own your very own personal copy of her autopsy report by downloading the PDF file.

It seems Anna had quite a few pharmaceutical substances in her body. Oddly enough what was not found in her body (or her hotel room) was Trimspa, the over-the-counter diet supplement she was a paid spokesperson for. I guess the only thing Anna was taking from Trimspa was a paycheck.

There were a lot of people buying and taking Trimspa because they were led to believe that it helped Anna Nichole Smith lose a ton of weight. According to her toxicology report, she wasn’t taking Trimspa. She was taking chloral hydrate, Valium, Klonopin, and Ativan. She was also taking human growth hormone.

No Trimspa.

The autopsy report said that at the time of her death, she had a serious blood infection “caused from an abscess that had developed on her buttock as a result of so many injections”. Also noted on the autopsy report were things I never knew were even looked at by a coroner. For example, the report stated, “The vagina is normally wrinkled and contains no foreign material”. Normally wrinkled? No foreign material?

It also stated, “The anus is unremarkable”. It sounds like her actual asshole received a really bad job performance review. The kind you get and you just know you aren’t getting a raise.

I never realized that a coroner looks at your anus.

It almost makes me want to die in a massive explosion. I don’t want a coroner or anyone else rating or grading my anus. Maybe that’s only something they do for celebrities. I can only hope.

I thought something was wrong with my blog. I noticed that load times seemed to have slowed down slightly. I thought it might have been because of a few of the WordPress plugins I was using. I tried deactivating some of them to see if that helped. It didn’t.

I then read a story on Digg. It pointed to a post on the StatCounter blog about “another” website counter service that was putting malware junk on people’s machines. They wouldn’t come out and actually say which service was doing this, but it was fairly obvious they were referring to Site Meter.

I decided to clean out my browser’s cookies and test Site Meter. I use Firefox, so I went Tools>Options>Privacy and selected Show Cookies. I then selected Delete All Cookies. I selected Close to save what I had just done and then reloaded my blog in Firefox.

I should have had NO cookies. Instead, my browser immediately had four (4) new Specificclick spyware cookies. Just by simply reloading my blog.

Needless to say, I won’t be using Site Meter any longer.

• Attorney General Alberto Gonzales lied. I’m so shocked. Last week he said he was not closely involved in the firing of U.S. attorneys. Email messages released last night show that he approved the firings.
• There is going to be a third TV series. I’ll be honest. I didn’t even know there was a second.
• A Wal-Mart in nearby West Virginia had a health scare. Evidently someone plugged up a toilet at Wal-Mart causing an “an overflow of sewage”. That’s not what caused the health scare. This was West Virgina after all. It’s going to take more than the scent of raw sewage to rile people up. The problem was that the Wal-Mart associates (employees) tried to clean up the mess with some kind of bleach and chlorine mixture that resulted in noxious fumes. The store had to be evacuated and 7 people taken to the hospital.
• State lawmakers from the hillbilly western part of Maryland are angry over the fact that delegates from other parts of the state are constantly trying to ban bear hunting. They have come up with a stupid way of dealing with it. They call it the Maryland Share the Bear Law. They want to capture bears in western Maryland and release them in other parts of the state. More populated parts of the state.
• Speaking of bears, if saving a baby polar bear that has been abandoned by it’s mother is wrong, I don’t want to be right. Animal activists want to kill the bear. Have they seen the cute pictures of it chewing on a soccer ball?

Well, they did it. The Democrats in the House agreed to give Bush $124 BILLION, but they put restrictions on it:

The $124 billion House legislation would pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year but would require that combat troops come home from Iraq before September 2008 — or earlier if the Iraqi government did not meet certain requirements. Democrats said it was time to heed the mandate of their election sweep last November, which gave them control of Congress.

Bush and the other neo-cons need to learn that the American people will not sit still for a never ending occupation of Iraq. The neo-cons first tried to base American troops permanently in Saudi Arabia. We all saw how that worked out. They now want to make Iraq a permanent base of occupation to facilitate control over the Middle East.

To the neo-cons, it’s not about not leaving Iraq until “the job is done”. Whatever that means. It’s about staying in Iraq forever. It’s about having a permanent presence in the Middle East.

I doubt Bush would have invaded Iraq if it meant American forces would one day have to actually leave.

• The person that created the anti-Clinton “Vote Different” YouTube ad styled after the old Apple 1984 ad has been identified. He used to work for the company that does Internet work for the Obama campaign. He wrote a post over at at The Huffington Post explaining his motivation for the ad. Big shocker, he is an Obama supporter. Who would have thought that? He also explains that he made the ad without his employer’s knowledge. In fact he was fired for making the ad.
• Elizabeth Edwards once again has cancer. It’s incurable, but it’s treatable. I’m not sure I understand that, but I usually don’t understand medical things until I see it in an episode of House. Her husband John Edwards will continue his campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination. You would think with his wife facing such a serious medical problem, he would want to focus on her instead of his pursuit for third place.
• Once again, that longed haired hippy Sanjaya Malakar escaped getting kicked off American Idol. When will he finally get voted off the show? Do I have to pick up the phone and actually vote for someone? Someone who’s name is not Sanjaya? His singing was so bad this week that he actually made a retarded girl cry. If this keeps up, I will begin to doubt the musical integrity of the show. I do not like Sanjaya Malakar.
• Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy has weighed in on the topic of gay marriage. He says that he and Jesus are against it. That’s ironic, because many gay people in committed relationships think the Colts suck.
• Apple launched their newest product today. It’s something called Apple TV. Oddly enough, they chose not to put a pretentious lowercase “i” in front of the name. Apple claims that it will enable you to put audio and video content from your iTunes library to your widescreen hi-def TV. It will allow you to watch movies, TV shows, podcasts, and porn pictures from your computer. It uses wireless to sync up to 6 computers to your TV. It costs $299. If you have a video iPod, you can simply buy a patch cable from Apple for less then $20 that allows you to basically do the same thing.
• The SCI FI Channel has increased its episode order for the fourth season of Battlestar Galactica to 22 up from the original 13. If you ever wanted to realize just how much the last ten plus years of Star Trek sucked, watch an episode of Battlestar Galactica.
• Sean Hannity first challenges the mayor of Salt Lake City to a debate on Iraq and impeachment, then chickens out. Hannity being the douche that he is then blamed the mayor as being the one to back out.
• Speaking of Sean Hannity, has anyone ever seen Hannity and Nathen Lane at the same time? Those two look so much alike that I’m starting to think they might be the same person. Look here to see a comparison.
• A study shows that 75% of all Blogspot blogs are spam blogs. That’s a shame because many of them are very good.

• The chief muckety muck at computer security company Kaspersky claimed that Microsoft Vista’s User Account Control (UAC), is so annoying that most users will simply turn it off. He said that without UAC, Vista will be less secure than Windows XP SP2. I don’t know. I think most Windows users are used to dealing with annoying things so they might just leave it on.
• This is probably the best anti-war sign I’ve seen. Not that I have seen all that many of them.
• I’ve discovered the blog of another person here in Hagerstown. I’ve added a link to her blog to my blogroll. Check out Trapper Jen MD.
• Who would have thought Carol Burnett wouldn’t understand the concept of parody? This is just kind of sad.
• Speaking of sad, yesterday was the fourth anniversary of the Iraq invasion. Though I refuse to put one of those stupid magnetic yellow ribbons on my car, I support the troops. I support them so much that I want them to come home. Now.
• Last week, Procter & Gamble Co. won a jury award of $19.25 million in a civil lawsuit filed against four former Amway distributors that started a rumor that P&C were run by Satanists. Amway is the company that make a line of overpriced household cleaning products. People sell Amway products in their homes to friends, family, and coworkers. I remember as a kid being told in church that P&G was run by devil worshipers. This is funny.
• Here is a link to a website that always seems to have a direct link to the current Borders store coupon. If there is one. It’s easier to go to this site then the actual Borders website.
• President Bush says nobody in his administration did anything wrong in firing federal prosecutors. To prove it, he will allow Congress to question Karl Rove and Harriet Miers. As long as it’s in private and off the record. Also, neither Rove or Miers will be sworn under oath to ensure that they aren’t lying.
• Dick Cheney’s feeble body broke down again today forcing him to return to the hospital. Did he go to Walter Reed? No, he went to George Washington University Hospital.

Longtime comic book retailer and columnist Brian Hibbs touched upon Wizard’s recent smarmy Captain America #25 eBay activity in his most recent Tilting at Windmills column on Newsarama. Brian writes:

Finally, I think there’s some very real concern about Wizard magazine having advance knowledge of this event (and, as a print magazine, clearly they had to have that information weeks ago), and it either accidentally, or very much on purpose leaking to their sales arm, and their affiliated retail stores, giving them a clear market advantage.

Brian was able to sum up very nicely what Wizard did and why it’s so scummy. He goes on to add:

Wizard is not doing anything, that I am aware of, that is illegal. The comics aftermarket isn’t a regulated one. However, I believe it is deeply unethical to report on news and prices while at the same time selling items that can capitalize on that news and those prices.

He’s right that Wizard doesn’t seem to have done anything actually outright illegal. It’s not like Wizard did anything unethical or illegal with anything having to do with Wall Street.

What Wizard did was Insider eBaying. They used information someone at Marvel told them because they are the de facto Forth Estate of the funny book world and made some serious PayPal money from it. Scrooge McDuck would be so proud.

Wizard needs to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. Does it want to be the pinnacle of comic book journalism or does it want to sell $4 comic books for $50 on eBay the day they come? I honestly don’t see how they can do both. Not if they want people to respect what they do or what they represent. The more this type of crap goes on, the less they seem like a credible magazine and more like the typical fleamarket vendor. Only without the grotesque body oder.

Then again, if they were looking for respect they would have hired Augie De Blieck as Editor-in-Chief and not the guy that ran FMH into the ground. Not that FMH didn’t deserve to be run into the ground.