Bent Corner

A rattlesnake rancher in the fine state of Texas that goes by the name of Bayou Bob has been placed under arrest for selling bottles of vodka that included a baby rattlesnake floating in each bottle. Though he remembered to give himself a dumb name, he forgot to get a state liquor license.

He claimed the concoction was an “ancient Asian elixir.”

He might be right. When I was young, dumb, and in the Air Force, the first time I went to Korea I had to drink a shot of something called SnakeJu. It came from a large bottle of Soju, a very potent Korean version of vodka that had a dead snake floating in it.

To be honest, I forgot all about this chapter in my life. Don’t get me wrong. I remember going to Korea. I was somehow able to block out the memory of drinking a shot of snakeju. Until now.

Link

This is a 1/18 scale diecast model of the car used by Mel Gibson’s character in the movies Mad Max and The Road Warrior. Its made by the Japanese company AutoArt.

The Mad Max Interceptor started out as an Australian 1973 XB GT Ford Falcon Coupe.

Like all diecast cars made by AutoArt, the car appears to be very detailed. In fact, it even has a 1/18 scale machete. From the looks of it, the machete appears to come out of it’s scabbard. I wonder if its sharp? Knowing AutoArt’s eye for detail, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Link (HobbyTalk)

• What does all the software I enjoy using and ATI video cards have in common? ATI video cards won’t work with Fake UNIX (Linux).

• Producers of the The Comic Book Haters podcast have announced the first annual Schooly Awards. Voting ends June 31 and people of Irish decent are discouraged from participating.

• Steve of Steve Likes to Curse has weighed in on the controversy surrounding the MySpace page of Deryk Schlessinger, son of conservative radio fake psychologist Laura Schlessinger. In case you haven’t heard, young Deryk is a soldier stationed in Afghanistan fighting the enemies of freedom. When he’s not doing that, he evidently is posting cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation on MySpace. Has any good ever come from MySpace? I hate MySpace. Make sure to checkout my MySpace page. It’s awesome!

• Marvel Comics is at it again. The cover of HEROES FOR HIRE #13 features three young women wearing tight revealing clothing with their hands chained above them on a stone pillar. There is some kind of tentacle creature feeling them up. Who’s calling the shots over at Marvel, Deryk Schlessinger?

• Some kind of massive outage hit XM Radio yesterday. I thought it was my radio. While driving home from work I was constantly losing the XM signal. I even stopped at one point to see if my antenna was still where it was supposed to be. It would have been nice if the good people of XM Radio could have perhaps made an announcement that they were having problems. It wasn’t like it was constantly down. Instead I had to learn about it later from reading the Internet. My opinion of XM Radio has really taken a dive lately.

• John Edwards currently running for third-place for the Democratic Presidential nomination is calling for mandatory military service. He said that we should have some level of mandatory service so that everybody in America and not just poor kids are serving this country. What a hypocritical prick. Edwards never served in the military. Who is he to call for mandatory military service?

I promise that I’m not going to permanently blog about the Don Imus “nappy-headed ho” controversy, but I tend to write about things that interest me. Sometimes I write about funny books. Sometimes I write about politics. Like I said, I blog about things that I find interesting.

Right now, I’m finding the Imus story interesting.

Yesterday’s New York Daily News ran a story about one of the ministers that was calling for Imus to be fired. The man’s name is Reverend DeForest Soaries and he hails from New Jersey. He claims to be one of the first to call for Imus to be fired. I’m not sure if this entitles him to print up t-shirts and trucker hats stating this fact, but I guess only time will tell.

He tells of being asked to act as a liaison between the Rutgers basketball team and Imus by Rutgers coach Vivian Stringer, a member of his flock. Not that I really understand why a liaison was needed. Soaries tells the New York Daily News of meeting with Imus in New York to discuss meeting with the team. As it turns out, the meeting took place minutes if not seconds after Imus found out he was fired from MSNBC.

“I became more of a pastor to him than the facilitator of the meeting,” he said.

“We didn’t even talk about what I was supposed to be there for. I needed to be with him spiritually. This was a man who’d just got big, bad news and he needed me to listen to him.

“He didn’t cry, but I could see he was in pain. He tried to joke, but it was a mask for that pain. He seemed hurt by what had happened to him.

“He felt somewhat betrayed by certain people. He didn’t name anybody, but he thought certain people could have given him more time.

“He thinks he should have been given the chance to meet the team first, that if those people could see he was truly repentant, then CBS and MSNBC would see it that way, too.

“I had words of consolation for him, even though I was one of those asking for him to be fired.”

I’m glad that Reverend Soaries could console and act as a paster to Imus. The last time I checked, that is what our holy men are supposed to do. They aren’t supposed to demand that people be fired from their jobs. They are supposed to act as spiritual counselors.

They are supposed to be advocates for forgiveness. At least the Christian ones. Forgiveness is what the Christian faith is based on. It’s what Jesus preached about. It’s what he commanded us to do to each other. To forgive. Something not a lot of the reverends involved in the Imus controversy have been doing.

Forgiveness means that you don’t demand somebody to be fired.

Shouldn’t Reverend Soaries have kept silent about ministering to Imus? Doesn’t he have some sort of ethical obligation to keep quiet about consoling Imus?

I’m sure Reverend DeForest Soaries did nothing wrong by speaking to the New York Daily News about the meeting. I can tell by looking at his photo that Reverend DeForest Soaries is a very honorable man. Did you notice the way he sits with his chin resting in the palm of his hand? He looks to be very thoughtful and insightful. Plus, I see from his photo that he fancies shirts with French cuffs. Nothing speaks integrity more then fancy French shirts.

Imus on the other hand wears cowboy clothes.

From the April 4 edition of MSNBC’s Imus in the Morning:

IMUS: So, I watched the basketball game last night between — a little bit of Rutgers and Tennessee, the women’s final.

ROSENBERG: Yeah, Tennessee won last night — seventh championship for [Tennessee coach] Pat Summitt, I-Man. They beat Rutgers by 13 points.

IMUS: That’s some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos and –

McGUIRK: Some hard-core hos.

IMUS: That’s some nappy-headed hos there. I’m gonna tell you that now, man, that’s some — woo. And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know, so, like — kinda like — I don’t know.

McGUIRK: A Spike Lee thing.

IMUS: Yeah.

McGUIRK: The Jigaboos vs. the Wannabes — that movie that he had.

IMUS: Yeah, it was a tough –

McCORD: Do The Right Thing.

McGUIRK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

IMUS: I don’t know if I’d have wanted to beat Rutgers or not, but they did, right?

ROSENBERG: It was a tough watch. The more I look at Rutgers, they look exactly like the Toronto Raptors.

IMUS: Well, I guess, yeah.

RUFFINO: Only tougher.

McGUIRK: The [Memphis] Grizzlies would be more appropriate.

I hate how rich assholes like Charles Simonyi are able to use their money to put them somewhere the rest of us can only dream of going. In this case, the International Space Station (ISS). Something our taxes pay for. NASA shows that $25.6 billion of tax dollars went into funding the ISS from 1994 to 2005.

I have to believe that all that tax money went into the station for something other then creating an exotic vacation spot for rich pricks like Charles Simonyi.

I understand that the rich are able to get much better medical care then everyone else. I accept the fact that they get much better representation from our elected officials then the rest of us. They also enjoy a criminal legal system that the rest of us aren’t subjected to. They also don’t send their children to fight and die in Iraq or Afghanistan.

What I cannot accept is that they also get to turn space and the ISS into their personal playground.

The fact that he paid off the Russians for this privilege doesn’t dilute my anger over this. Maybe anger is too strong a word. Then again, maybe it’s not.

I’m old enough to remember when NASA used to be cool. I remember when they went to the Moon in rockets designed with slide rules and lots of paper and pencils. Now they go no further then Earth’s orbit in shuttles designed in the 1970’s. They build and fund a space station so ultra rich assholes like Charles Simonyi have somewhere different to go.

He even has a blog. I wish it was on Blogger so I could flag it as inappropriate.

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.

• 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?