Quick Hitts

Today is “Everybody Draw Mohamed Day,” a response to the evil imbeciles who insist their rights are being violated when anyone criticizes their idiotic superstitions, and who get upset, to the point of rioting, when anyone pictures their founding asshole.

I thought of doing something obscene, but this should be fun, not cruel, so I used my go-to photograph, taken by Mike Harling about ten years ago.  (I consider it current, because I still have the same shirt and still smoke that cigar.  (Punch Double Corona))  I came up with two versions and am not sure which one I like better.

It was fun creating his image in the smoke of evil, evil tobacco.  I’ll leave it to someone else to do his portrait in bacon.

I wasn’t quite comfortable with wearing the head of a violent, racist, misogynist pedophile, but it came out pretty well, and maybe of Mo had taken the time to enjoy a cigar once in a while he wouldn’t have been such an asshole.

This will be my avatar on forums for the next week or so.

If you haven’t drawn a picture of Mohamed yet, it’s not too late.  It doesn’t have to be great – some people have just done stick figures with a label.  Lack of Photoshop MoJo shouldn’t stop you from participating.

Leave a comment with a link to your picture of this vile creature.

For a (very incomplete) list of atrocities committed by Muslims and other mindless superstitious morons, check out the series Things Atheists Didn’t Do.

You should follow me on Twitter

The details of the NYC Wannabomber reads like a Pink Panther script.  He created a Rube Goldberg bomb that had no chance of working, then cleverly left the keys to his getaway vehicle in the bomb car.

Anyone reading this blog could have searched Google and in fifteen minutes collected dozens of different designs for bombs that would, you know, explode.  This clown spent five months training in a Pakistani terrorist camp. The US military needs to find the exact location of that camp and be very, very careful we never damage it.

The Underwear bomber was another Muslim who went to a terrorist training camp and then crafted a comically inept attack.  His sole accomplishment was giving himself second degree penis burns.

He tried to bring the plane down over Detroit, of all places.  In most places a plane crash would result in substantial loss of life on the ground.  If he had Googled Detroit Photos, which would have taken all of six seconds, he’d have known a plane could crash in the city without hitting a single person on the ground.

We have had a couple of successful terrorist attacks on US soil.  The Fort Hood Massacre, where, as usual, the Muslim aspect of the attack was played down, resulted in 13 deaths.  There have been a couple of instances of Muslims driving SUVs into crowds, resulting in a few deaths and lots of injuries.  But the most successful attack, measured by how well it terrorized people, was carried out by John Allen Muhammad, the DC sniper.

With nothing more than a rifle, a used car, and an accomplice, Muhammad was able to terrorize tens of millions of people who were afraid to go about their daily routines.  It was a simple, inexpensive operation, one that should be easy to replicate.  Imagine the effect of a half dozen such teams spread out across the US.  It would be devastating.  It wouldn’t take many resources, but it hasn’t happened.  That alone tells us that Al Qaeda doesn’t have the money or brains to do it.

You are literally more likely to be hit by lightening than to be killed by a terrorist in the US, and given their track record, that’s not going to change, ever.  If you still have any fear of these bumblers, it’s time to give it up.

While discussing crackpots on Facebook a friend posted a video of someone claiming to be a Psychophysiologist.

So I’ve decided to declare myself an expert by making up a silly but complicated name for my field of study.

I’m a Nicotianastogieologist, specializing in herfpalaver.

(Translation: I like smoking cigars with other talkative cigar smokers.)

What’s your field of expertise?

In February, acting on nothing more than a tip from an informant and the resulting eight-day-old search warrant, police raided a home in Missouri, shot both of the family’s dogs (cops love to shoot dogs), and roughed up the occupants.  They pointed guns at everyone, including a child, then arrested the man of the house.

After threatening the family with deadly force they charged the father with child endangerment.

No action has been taken against the vile thugs that committed this egregious crime.

This is not an anomaly.  This happens 100-150 times a day in the US.

Still think we’re not living in a police state?

It’s easy to feel superior reading stories of our ancestors buying worthless potions from snake oil salesmen.  But a stroll though the aisles of any warehouse style store proves that nothing much has changed.  Every other end cap features a small TV making a pitch for some magic pill or potion that’s long on hype and short on effectiveness.

I don’t keep close track of health woo, but it appears to run on fads just like pop music. A while ago Melatonin was the Britney Spears of their psudo-science.  Acai berries are now Lady Ga Ga.

The ingredients change but the claims remain the same.  On a recent trip through BJs Wholesale club I was subjected to videos claiming some secret combination of herbs and spices would:

• Melt away belly fat.  Nonsense.  You can burn fat, but you can’t target specific areas.
• Cleanse and flush your system.  I think this “works” by making people feel miserable for days.  When it’s over they feel great because they’ve stopped taking the crap that was making them feel lousy.  It would be cheaper, and just as effective, to go to the tool section, buy a hammer, and repeatedly whack yourself in the head with it.  When you were finished at least you’d have a hammer.
• Slow the aging process.  The only way to do that is by accelerating to near light speed, which is difficult to do with pomegranate juice.
• Run fast, jump high.  Oh, wait, that was sneakers, about a million years ago.

I find this nonsense more amusing than upsetting, figuring that a fool as his money were lucky to get together in the first place.  The law on supplements tells the FDA to ignore these clowns as long as their packaging contains a disclaimer buried somewhere in the tiny print saying that the claims aren’t verified.  So the FDA ignores these blatant charlatans to go after dangerous stuff like walnuts.

Yep, walnuts.

The FDA notified Diamond Walnuts they’ve classified their nuts {insert your own juvenile testicular joke here*} as a drug.  Diamond made a few true statements about the health benefits of walnuts on their website (not on their packaging), which got the FDAs undies in a bunch.  Among them:

“Studies indicate that the omega-3 fatty acids found in walnuts may help lower cholesterol; protect against heart disease, stroke and some cancers; ease arthritis and other inflammatory diseases; and even fight depression and other mental illnesses.”

“The omega-3s found in fish oil are thought to be responsible for the significantly lower incidence of breast cancer in Japanese women as compared to women in the United States.”

Note the careful working – studies indicate, may help, are thought to be . . . unlike bold claims on the modern day snake oil.  Even without the careful weasel wording the statements are true.

But the FDA says those true statements transforms walnuts from tasty snack into a drug.  I feel I need to repeat that, because it’s so ridiculous and stupid you might think I was joking the first time.

So if you want to sell ridiculous crap like this on a web site that doesn’t contain a single true statement, you have nothing to worry about.  But if you want to talk about the real benefits of your real healthy food, you better watch your nuts.

*I figured I’d save you the trouble.

Hat Tip

It’s Sunday night.  I’m tired and bored and sitting in a hotel room and I think, “Hey, I’ll watch an episode of “Justified.”

First I went to Hulu.  There service is cool enough to put up with watching their commercials even though they tend to air extremely stupid ones (like Capital One) for extremely evil companies (like Capital One).  Since the show contains naughty language I’m prompted to log in, because, hey, no one under age would ever lie about that when creating an account.  I enter the generic username/password I use for unimportant sites, and it fails.  I’m too tired/annoyed to deal with that, so I google “justified” and go directly to FXs site.

I pick an episode to watch and am informed I’ll have to download a viewer.  Great.  So I do.  And it doesn’t work.  I’m using a Windows 7 laptop that’s less than a week old and their damn movie viewer doesn’t work.  They take me to a page that wants me to do diagnostics.

Screw that.  I’m beat and tired and have episodes of Bullshit and Dr. Who handy.  I’ll just watch those instead.  Sorry, FX, I tired to play by your rules, but you made it so damn obnoxious I gave up.  I’m going back on the road next week, and I’ll grab a few episodes from bittorent.  Don’t bitch about that – you brought it on yourselves.

Driving a U-Haul moving van is like getting a piggyback ride from Michael Moore. It’s bumpy, noisily, uncomfortable, pulls to the left, is difficult to maneuver, and has huge blind spots on both sides.

I just spent the past two days piloting one of these POS so I feel qualified to offer the following advice.

Forget the “when you assume” cliche  When you see a U-Haul vehicle on the road you should assume the following:

• The driver is at least annoyed, possibly agitated, and probably outright pissed because his vehicle is very uncomfortable and there’s something wrong with it. (It’s a U-Haul, so something is broken.)
• The driver is not familiar with the area, so he’s trying to find his way, either with a GPS that’s hard to hear above the truck’s rattling or maps that are blowing around the cab.
• The driver’s experience controlling big cumbersome vehicles can be measured in hours.
• And this is the most important assumption: The Driver, no matter how careful he is, can’t see you. The blind spots on these things are enormous, and they’re not helped by lose mirrors that flap in the wind.

I was schlepping boxes from Rhode Island to Connecticut over roads I’d never traveled. My first adventure happened a few minutes after picking up the beast. A motorcycle cut in front of me, and when I tried to slam the brakes I discovered the brake pedal, which is located considerably higher than it should be, is designed to catch your foot on the way up. I was able to stop a foot away from his back tire. Another second and the EMTs would have sent his remains home in a Tupperware bowl.

Adventure #2 happened after I had picked up a friend and we headed out for the long drive to get the boxes that needed schlepping. We were driving up an on-ramp where the road merged. I asked if the road to my right was clear. He checked and said yes, then, about five seconds later yelled “Watch Out!” I swerved to the left and an idiot zoomed by on my right. I missed him by inches.  Despite our double-checking we didn’t see him, and the idiot compounded the problem by deciding that passing a huge clumsy truck on the right with inches and moments to spare was a really good idea.

On the trip back it happened again, with a different idiot, who missed disaster by millimeters. If I hadn’t pulled to the right milliseconds after hearing my friend yell there would be one less idiot in the world, instantly converted to hamburger embedded in scrap metal. He would have deserved his closed coffin.

The moral of the story: For your safety and his, stay far, far away from any U-Haul moving van. And pity the poor guy driving it. He is not having a good day. That’s not an assumption, that’s a fact.