Bent Corner

The Del.icio.us bookmarking site has gone under major overhaul. For one thing, they changed the spelling to plain old Delicious. It’s about time. If you’ve been reading this blog for any period of time, you know I am quite a stickler for spelling.

That of course is not true.  I am a terrible speller.  If anything, my lack of a spelling ability makes me extremely annoyed when companies attempt to be creative by dicking up the title of their website.  I don’t know who they were trying to impress by placing a couple periods where they didn’t belong, but I was not impressed.

I was not amused.

WTMJ-TV Channel 4 in Milwaukee is reporting that the Green Bay Packers offered Brett Favre $20 million paid out over the next 10 years to stay retired. Could they know something that the rest of us don’t? I think most people believed that the reason Brett Favre wanted to un-retire and come back and play quarterback in the NFL was because he still had the burning desire to compete.

What if he just needs the money?

It seems to me that if a guy just wants to play, offering him money to sit at home and watch Judge Judy would be a complete waste of time. With that said, the Green Bay Packers thought it was worth making the offer.

I would think with all of the commercial endorsements Brett Favre does, money wouldn’t be a problem. Unless of course being the pitchman for heartburn medication and blue jeans sold at Wal-Mart doesn’t pay a lot.

Report: Packers offer Favre $20 million to stay home (Milwaukee Journal Sentinal)

Evidently the McCain campaign is running an ad that compares Barack Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. I think this is below the belt. The McCain campaign  is way out of line comparing Obama to these two celebrities.

Neither Britney Spears or Paris Hilton voted with Republicans giving retro immunity to the telecoms for their part in illegal warrantless eavesdropping.  Neither Britney Spears or Paris Hilton stated that a woman’s mental health shouldn’t be a factor when considering exceptions to the ban on late-term abortions.  I also don’t think neither Britney Spears or Paris Hilton chose a hateful racist to be their spiritual adviser.

Not that I even know whether or not these two ladies have spiritual advisers.  I’m guessing they don’t.

Hopefully the McCain campaign comes to their senses and pulls the ad before it does any lasting damage to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

Evidently Washington Post columnist and ESPN PTI co-host Michael Wilbon hates wearing long paints in the summer time.  Knowing first hand just how hot it is right now in the Washington DC area, I really can’t blame him.  In fact, I’m wearing shorts right now too.

This reminds me of when I had my high school senior portrait taken.  I too was wearing a jacket and tie above the waist and OP corduroy shorts and Vans slip-on shoes below it.  Good times!

The Only Thing Michael Wilbon Hates More Than Sports Bloggers Is Pants (Mister Irrelevant)

Science fiction writer Orson Scott Card has his secret Mormon holy underpants in a bunch over the idea of allowing gay people to marry.  Marriage, that sacred holy union enjoyed by the likes of Britney Spears and Keven Federline and Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley.

Orson Scott Card does not like gay marriage and he chose to argue his views in the pages of the Mormon Times. How brave of him.

Here is some of what Orson Scott Card had to say:

These judges are making new law without any democratic process; in fact, their decisions are striking down laws enacted by majority vote.

No, that’s not what is happening.  Massachusetts and California Judges have ruled against laws that discriminate against gay people.  That is what judges are supposed to do.  They strike down laws that discriminate against people because of their race, sex, religion, or sexual orientation.  It doesn’t matter if a majority of voters agreed to deny rights to gay people.  There is a difference between a Democracy and mob rule.

Remember how rapidly gay marriage has become a requirement. When gay rights were being enforced by the courts back in the ’70s and ’80s, we were repeatedly told by all the proponents of gay rights that they would never attempt to legalize gay marriage.

It took about 15 minutes for that promise to be broken.

Who promised him that? It’s not that people want to legalize gay marriage. Those of us on the pro-gay marriage side just think that the government shouldn’t enact laws that make it illegal.  There is a difference.

My wife and I enjoy the rights and privileges afforded to us because we are married. She is my legal next of kin and I am her’s. If I am ever in a life threatening accident and decisions have to be made concerning my care and treatment, not only will my wife be allowed to remain at my side, she will be allowed to make those decisions. The reason for this is because she and I are married.

This is only one of the many rights and privileges bestowed on married couples. Gay people in committed relationships love the person they are with just as much as I love my wife.  Why should my wife and I get rights and privileges that committed gay couples don’t?  I hate the fact that we deny this basic right to gay couples.

It’s embarrassing.

And for the record, if I am ever in a situation where my wife has to make a decision about my medical care, I want her to keep me alive any way that medical science allows. Not only do I want to be hooked up to machines, I want them to invent new machines just to keep me going. I want to live!

The choice is her’s though.  She is my wife.  She has earned the right to unplug me.

ABC has a TV showed called Extreme Makeover where they take the home of a supposed deserving family and remodel it.  By that I mean that they totally demolish the old house and build something totally new.  They do this with the aid of thousands of volunteers and they do it in only a week.  No expense is spared.  No corner is cut.  Nothing is too lavish when it comes to the remodeled home.

It appears that simple greed got to one of the beneficiaries of these extremely made over homes.  From the AP (via Yahoo!):

After the Harper family used the two-story home as collateral for a $450,000 loan, it’s set to go to auction on the steps of the Clayton County Courthouse Aug. 5. The couple did not return phone calls Monday, but told WSB-TV they received the loan for a construction business that failed.

I wonder how the Harper family qualified for the makeover. They normally select families with extreme sob stories. Families where mom is dying of cancer and the six kids all have allergies to plastic.  I also wonder how long it took them to turn around and take out a loan against the home.

I guess I should feel sorry for these people, but I simply don’t.  Not even a little bit.  I do feel sorry for the thousands of volunteers that put in the hours of hard work building these people a mini-mansion.

I bet that wont happen again.

This is only one of the photos from the flickr photoset “…the life of vader“.  I’ve never been very good at interpreting art. That goes double for dork art.  Not that I’m even sure this is art.

People from the anti-choice group Face the Truth came to Hagerstown yesterday and terrorized people with giant scary abortion photos. Hagerstown is only one stop on their 15 city terror tour.  Who knows, maybe they will make a stop in your city too.

My biggest problem with groups like this is that they take photos from a medical procedure and blow them up to 100 times the actual size to make them look like something they are not. They then wave these giant posters in your face and demand (demand!) you look at them.

It doesn’t matter who you are.
It doesn’t matter how old you are.
It doesn’t matter how young you are.

They will force you to look at their ghastly pictures.

It’s as though their right to make you look at ginned up photos is more important than your right not to see the photos.

Some members of Face the Truth even dragged their young children to the event and made them hold signs denouncing a woman’s right to choose.

The members of Face the Truth and other similar anti-choice groups want you to think that a fetus is the same thing as a human baby.  The reality is that the two are not the same. Just because a gigantic posterized photo of a fetus might look like a human baby doesn’t make it an actual human baby. Have you ever seen a pig fetus? They too kind of look like a human baby. The same thing applies to a monkey fetus. They look remarkably similar to a human fetus.

That doesn’t mean they are human, even if they look like they are human.  Looks can be deceiving.

I don’t know what Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu has been doing during the off-season, but he needs to stop doing it.  Though I commend him for finally getting a haircut, he has really let himself go.

It looks as though the FCC isn’t waiting around for Congress to pass specific net neutrality laws.  From everyone’s favorite supermarket tabloid The Wallstreet Journal:

The Federal Communications Commission will rule that the cable giant violated federal policy by deliberately preventing some customers from sharing videos online via file-sharing services like BitTorrent, agency officials said. The company has acknowledged it slowed some traffic, but said it was necessary to prevent a few heavy users from overburdening its network.

I didn’t even know there was such a thing as violating federal policy.  I thought something was either a federal law or it wasn’t.  I do think it is a case of fraud when you sell someone something called unlimited broadband Internet and then proceed to limit it.