sigma7: Sims (NFL)
( Sep. 28th, 2007 12:05 pm)
This wins my vote for "lede of the year":

Ever wonder what the Seahawks' locker room tastes like after a big game?

Apparently, Jones Soda Co. thinks Seattle NFL fans want to know. The company started taking online pre-orders Thursday for a five-pack of sodas with flavors it says reflect the hard work of professional football players.

Clare Bowles, a spokeswoman for the Seattle-based company, said the four literally named flavors -- Dirt, Sports Cream, Perspiration and Natural Field Turf -- are "pretty lifelike."

"Perspiration Soda is kind of salty tasting," she said, with a slightly higher sodium content than the average soda, with a smooth, "stinky football sock" finish.

A sip of Sports Cream Soda conjures up the experience of rubbing ointment into an aching muscle, while Natural Field Turf Soda is like "playing tackle football, and you get tackled really hard, you're down on the ground and you get a little bit of the grass in your teeth," Bowles said.

The only sweet soda of the bunch, Sweet Victory, has a berry flavor.
GQ editor confirms he spiked story about Clinton team feuds: Ben Smith reports Hillary Clinton's aides told GQ: Kill the piece, or lose access to Bill Clinton, who is to appear on the magazine's December cover. "I can tell you that yes, we did kill a Hillary piece. We kill pieces all the time for a variety of reasons," says GQ editor Jim Nelson.

Proof that the Kansas State Collegian is not the stupidest Collegian in the country -- or even the region -- has emerged: The editor of CSU's Rocky Mountain Collegian newspaper said he's prepared to fight for his job this week in the face of criticism for an editorial published Friday that featured a prominent profanity.... The Collegian editorial page ran a four-word editorial in large type that said, "Taser this. F-- Bush," with the profanity spelled out.... A memo from Collegian newsroom manager Jeremy Trujillo on Friday said the paper lost $30,000 in advertising in the hours following the editorial’s publication and said the pay of student staffers would be cut 10 percent to offset the loss.

Wow. It's idiotic and infantile actions like this that jeopardize the freedoms of those with legitimate viewpoints and stances instead of just shock value (connecting the Tazering of Mr. Rowdypants asking not-a-candidate John Kerry a question to the current commander-in-chief is tenuous at best). I'm not against ever using that language, but you've got to earn it. Bozo the Wonder Editor did not. Suffer. This isn't a First Amendment issue, this is a competency issue; I'm not sure the editor should be allowed to use Adobe Indesign, much less run a real, if student, newspaper.

But the real mind-blowing assertion of the day goes to the president of Iran, Mr. I-Would-Have-To-Cut-and-Paste-His-Name-Anyhow: "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like you do in your country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who told you that we have this."

Which poses several possibilities:

1) There's nothing sexually attractive in Iran, so nobody's really attracted to anything.
2) They've all been killed already.
3) This explains the right's burning desire to invade -- this is the magical heterosexual promised land, where everyone gets turned straight and musical theatre is appropriately enjoyed on its own merits and not at all ironically.
4) The census form that asks "Are you a homosexual? If so, please check box 5E and report to your nearest execution center at earliest convenience" may have skewed the results....
Okay, I didn't think I hallucinated this, but upon rediscovering it, I can understand why people might think I did....

Fan death is an urban legend that originated in South Korea, but has since spread to other countries in the Far East. The belief is that an electric fan, if left running overnight in a closed room, can result in the death (by suffocation, poisoning, or hypothermia) of those inside. This belief also extends to air conditioners and the fans in cars. When the air conditioner or fan is on in a car, some people are apt to leave their car windows open a crack to avoid "fan death." Fans manufactured and sold in Korea are equipped with a timer switch that turns them off after a set number of minutes, which users are frequently urged to set when going to sleep with a fan on.
Yes, the rich are different than the rest of us.

A private fire crew dispatched by a national insurance company that caters to wealthy clients is guarding 22 high-end homes threatened by the Castle Rock Fire, a blaze that has forced the evacuation of hundreds of million-dollar homes west of Ketchum.

The crew will protect only homes insured by AIG Private Client Group, an insurance company that offers "loss-prevention services" to its wealthiest customers. A truck and two-man crew sent by AIG from Montana arrived in Ketchum about 2 p.m. Wednesday to start dousing properties with Phos-Chek, the same fire retardant dropped from U.S. Forest Service aircraft.

"We're not going out there to fight the fire," said Dorothy Sarna, vice president and national director of risk-management services and loss prevention for the New York-based company. "We're out there to protect our clients."
Not directly ST related, but certainly some asshaberdashery afoot here. (Edit: see the comments for some really intriguing discussion. It's taken my mind in some pretty interesting directions. Or maybe that's just the Unisom talking. Still, I like it when I get to process more information like this; much more interesting than just parroting.) Remember the donations 6A was offering during the beginning of the permanent account sale?

EFF is the world’s leading advocate of freedom of speech on the web; RAINN is the United States' largest anti-sexual assault organization; Creative Commons is the global organization pioneering alternate licenses to traditional copyright in order to allow sharing, remixing and reusing content; and Witness works to use video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations.

If you decide to buy a permanent account during the first 36 hours of the sale, $25 of your purchase will shared with these organizations. Or, if you prefer, you'll have the option to earmark the donation from your purchase for only one of these groups. So you're in control of how much we donate and which organizations will benefit.


[livejournal.com profile] oulangi followed the money: All but one of these organizations has deep ties to Joi Ito, the President & CEO of Neoteny venture Capital group. You know, the people who put up the money to buy 6A. YOU people in other words. If you want to use us, your LJ customer base to raise money for your pet causes, fine. But at the VERY LEAST you should have acknowledges these links, instead of painting this as altruism on your parts. It's shady.

EFF - An organization that MAY well "advocate free speech on the web" (something 6A doesn't, but another argument, another time) BUT EFF has also been involved in court cases that have benefited Joi Ito's business/person. [1] [2]
RAINN - Real charity, needed work. Also awesome window dressing to lend this "charity drive" credibility?
Creative Commons - Which Joi Ito helped found, and sits on the board. [1]
WITNESS - which Joi Ito is on the board. [1]


I'm sorry, I didn't wake up today wanting to kick 6A in the teeth relentlessly. But damned if they didn't ask for it on this one. Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] indigoskynet for the pointer.

And for frivolty's sake.... How will I get suspended from LJ? )
From the Series-of-Evil-Tubes files: Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney traveled along the Interstate 35 corridor near the site of next month's straw poll Thursday, promoting his call to try to keep pornography away from children.

...But Romney showed some unfamiliarity with the Internet when he discussed the problem of sexual predators and children.

"YouTube is a website that allows kids to network with one another and make friends and contact each other," Romney explained. "YouTube looked to see if they had any convicted sex offenders on their web site. They had 29,000."

Actually, YouTube is the popular site that allows Internet users to upload and watch a variety of videos. The web site, which is owned by search-engine behemoth Google, also was a co-sponsor of the Democratic presidential debate held on Monday night.
I knew one day or another they'd run out of cool and ominous-sounding nicknames for drugs. I did not expect that day to come so soon.

A cheap, highly addictive drug known as "cheese heroin" has killed 21 teenagers in the Dallas area over the past two years, and authorities say they are hoping they can stop the fad before it spreads across the nation.

It's yet another Monty Python sketch come to life.
Sorry for the blogspam, but this just keeps getting better and better.

A segment of animated footage promoting the 2012 Olympic Games has been removed from the organisers' website after fears it could trigger epileptic fits.

Though you could say that about the stationary logo, too.

Edit: Emphasising that it was not the logo itself which was the focus of worries, she said: "This concerns a short piece of animation which we used as part of the logo launch event and not the actual logo." I'm not sure I believe them. The logo is alive. The logo wants us all dead.
[livejournal.com profile] cleolinda's linkspam on Strikethrough 2007, chock-ful of information. The most disturbing aspects of the recent unwinding of the affair from this perspective:

-- that 6A was hesitant to act until its advertising was threatened
-- 6A allowed itself to essentially side with exterior interests rather than the LJ "community"
-- when 6A went after LJs/comms it deleted/suspended them instantly, in contradiction of the procedure set out in its own TOS
-- 6A's silence on the matter is, at the moment, deafening
-- today's it's incest; as at least one other user pointed out, the rationale given ("it's illegal") can cover plenty of other interests -- gay marriage, anyone?
-- ...have you seen what else WfI stands for? (Don't go to the site: malware/spyware and IP tracking ensues.)

I'm not an RPer, and I don't discuss gloriously illegal things on my LJ because, well, I'm not an idiot. (Imbecile? Maybe. Depends on the day.) So this doesn't affect me on its most basic level. But it is eroding my f-list and my f-list's enthusiasm for LJ, and that's pissing me off.

I've backed up my LJ and am worried -- the community is my sole reason for posting here on LJ; lose it, and there's really no reason to stay. The sad thing is I was seriously considering opting for a permanent account, and I don't think that's going to happen now. [livejournal.com profile] warren_ellis is gone, now, and I wouldn't blame anyone else for leaving.

Jesus, how idiotic do you have to be to take such a simple idea like "Pedophiles are bad!" and somehow screw that up in the implementation?
As per usual, [livejournal.com profile] warren_ellis shows us the way:

For what it’s worth: Warriors For Innocence come off a little weird, to say the least. Mind you, so does Andrew Vachss. But LiveJournal’s response bears more study. Their sloppy, blanket response indicates that they simply don’t have a process in place to differentiate between nonce-news and people writing about furry widdle brother and sister unicorns who love each other very much.

The outcome, therefore, has been pure comedy, with comments that read very much like “I love spending all day reading about forced underage incestuous sex with squirrel fisting on top, but of course I’m not interested in that in real life — that’d make me a pervert!”

LiveJournal is part of Six Apart, which has in times past proved itself to be, shall we say, socially backwards. They’re not good at dealing with people. The questions of importance are less about the somewhat gung-ho and poorly informed Warriors For Innocence, and more about the panicked spasm LiveJournal had, that appears to have had very little thought put into it.

All that said: if you listed “rape” as an interest on your LiveJournal user profile, you must have known that someday someone was coming to see you about that.
sigma7: Sims (dammit)
( May. 30th, 2007 11:28 am)
US citizens who apply for a job will need prior approval from Department of Homeland Security under the terms immigration bill passed by the Senate this week.

Has anyone who's been charting post-9/11 America tracked the point where we crossed "hysteria" and entered "comedy"?
They're calling it Strikethrough 2007. From [livejournal.com profile] liz_marcs: If you've seen certain users, RPG journals, or fanfic groups suddenly getting suspended out of the blue, this post should explain everything. There's also a GreatestJournal organizing for LJ refugees and a reminder to back up your LJ. (Some are reporting getting suspended for icons. Oh, this should be fun.)

[livejournal.com profile] warren_ellis: Lia’s got a small collection of related links here. Personally? I have an eleven year old daughter. I’m with Warriors For Innocence on this. Of course, almost as bad a name as "Perverted Justice," who views LJ as, and I'm not making this up, an "aggressive corporate sex offender" (and some see PJ's hand in all of this, too).

My worries: that, as [livejournal.com profile] liz_marcs notes, the first whiff of this came in April, thus insuring actual "predators" had ample time to cover their tracks. And, of course, that by willfully glossing over the fact-fiction line, LJ/SixApart hurls itself quite willingly down the slippery slope, and I know some of you are going to get caught in it, one way or another. Me? I guess I'm just kinda glad my LJ's not that interesting.
A couple of dozen Gig Harbor High School students are demonstrating outside the school today to protest the use of a surveillance camera to catch two girls kissing.

One student reporting the demonstration for the school paper, Amber Critchley, says they are saying the school shouldn't have interfered and that sexual orientation shouldn't matter.

Principal Greg Schellenberg says the protest is a disruption but classes are continuing.

...He says the school does not target gay and lesbian students.


Oh, no chilling effects here at all. Idiots.

In other news, rest in peace, Herbert Kornfeld. The H-Dog lives on.
sigma7: Sims (gonnasuck)
( Apr. 29th, 2007 05:41 pm)
Two people died and at least two others were wounded Sunday in a shooting at a shopping mall in Kansas City, Missouri, a Fire Department official said.

Good God. Enough already. Here's hoping the f-list and all its acquaintances are OK.

...Janet Coleman said she saw "a young man with a sawed-off shotgun" in the parking lot being chased by police.

"I could just see a blunt-sized gun bigger than, like a regular .44," she said, adding that she gained her expertise in weapons from watching "a lot of crime TV."


Now I've watched a lot of Star Trek, but that does not mean I should get quoted when we discover a new planet. Bad reporter. Bad editor. Bad CNN weekend staff. No cookies.
Every once in a while, when I fear for my sanity, someone reassures me that I could be much, much worse:

A part-time Boston University student who hosts a popular video game review show on an MTV Web site allegedly sent an e-mail threatening to kill an ex-girlfriend and recreate the Virginia Tech bloodshed at her school, according to a Boston police report obtained by the Herald.

"(I)'m gonna (expletive) bring a gun to your school and kill you and K (another female student) and everybody you love. It's gonna be VT all over again," 20-year-old Andrew Rosenblum allegedly wrote in an e-mail to the victim just hours after 32 people were gunned at Virginia Tech.

"Seriously I'm just that demented," Rosenblum wrote, according to a BPD report. He ended the message with a threat to commit homicide and suicide: "killing people can change people's lives forever. (T)he best is in the end when I pull the trigger on myself, too."


Okay, this time we can blame MTV.

Extra points to the Herald for dropping a mention of the guy's height (5'5") into the story for absolutely no reason.
Virginia Tech student newspaper liveblogging the shootings, occasionally hiding:

Madison Van Duyne said she and her classmates in a media writing class were on "lockdown" in their classrooms. They were huddled in the middle of the classroom, writing stories about the shootings and posting them online.

That's gotta be worth an award or two.

Bonus: Yep, despite the fact that he's a known liar, infamous for threatening fellow attorneys and judges and is on the cusp of (one would hope) losing his license to practice law in Florida, Jack Thompson managed to weasel his way onto Fox News to spew his own particular brand of hate and lies.

That's right, Thompson is trying to link the worst shooting in U.S. history, the one that occurred earlier today at Virginia Tech, to video games.

What I love about this is that just about everything he says on live television is blatantly not true, like blaming video games on the Red Lake High School shooting.

It saddens me that filth like Jack can get on national television to gloat and revel in the deaths of so many and try to put it off as education.
Friday: Authorities say a 6-year-old boy who collapsed on a Harrison County school bus died from an abscess where two teeth had been removed from his lower jaw.

Coroner Gary Hargrove says Alexander "Alex" Callender went into shock from the infection and his body shut down. Callender collapsed on the bus after leaving Lizana Elementary School Thursday.


Saturday: The death of a Prince George's County boy this week from an infection that started with an abscessed tooth has spurred lawmakers to demand better dental care for poor children and has prompted a deluge of calls to local dentists for advice and appointments.

Deamonte Driver, a 12-year-old homeless child, died Sunday in a District hospital after an infection from a molar spread to his brain.


Seriously, what the hell, America? When did we become the lesser-developed country? How is this at all acceptable?

(And sorry to be so depressing today. I'm not even bringing up BSG until tomorrow.)
The 850-pound woman in Texas who decided to have gastric bypass surgery? Died last night of a massive heart attack, almost two weeks after the surgery. Turns out the risks are much greater for people whose body mass index is over 60, and hers was 137.5....
A 15-year-old girl who had the hiccups for more than five weeks finally got relief.

After trying countless remedies and attracting national media attention, Jennifer Mee said her hiccups suddenly stopped around 5 p.m. Wednesday.

No one is certain exactly why she was able to breathe freely again. This week, she has been to an infectious disease specialist, a neurologist, a chiropractor, a hypnotist and an acupuncturist. She also tried a patented device that is designed to stop hiccups.


She lasted a month longer than I would've without stepping in front of a bus. Kudos.
It's not surprising that the earth doesn't move for Warren Chisum, and maybe it's not surprising that he blames a Jewish conspiracy for it.

Still, it's enough to set the world a-spinning that the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, the most powerful committee in the House, distributed to legislators a memo pitching crazed wingers who believe the earth stands still -- doesn't spin on its axis or revolve around the Sun -- that Copernicus was part of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the Old Testament. That would be the same Old Testament that was written by the folks Chisum's friends say are conspiring to undermine it.


But in bigger news, Britney Spears shaved her head and Anna Nicole Smith has been embalmed. I'm beginning to firmly believe that this world deserves whatever it's got coming.
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