A very short Youtube went slightly viral the past couple days. It was of a very unenthusiastic girl playing the cowbill for the Boise State marching band during the Fiesta Bowl.
It was all fun and games until this tweet showed up….
I didn't think the video was very funny to begin with.
Researchers at King's College London in the United Kingdom have brought the elusive G-spot to the forefront with a study of more than 1,800 female twins. The study suggests that there is no genetic basis for the G-spot and that environmental or psychological factors may contribute to whether a woman believes that she has a G-spot. The new study is published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
I would take this with a grain of salt. Let's remember that:
Maybe all it means is that British female twins lack that particular erogenous zone.
Andrew Sullivan quotes at length from an anonymous reader who has very interesting thoughts on the Christmas underpants terrorist. You can read Sullivan's post here, but I will attempt to summarize.
It starts with the question: "Why didn't the terrorist just go to the airplane toilet and blow up the plane from there?"
And the suggested answer is that al Qaeda probably had a good idea the attack wouldn't necessarily result in carnage – i.e., they suspected that this naive young recent-convert-to-fundamentalist-Islam might get caught at airport screening or something like that. The goal of terrorism, one needs to remember, isn't necessarily to kill, but to create terror — something at which (arguably) the Christmas underpants terrorist was successful (gauging the reactions — or over-reactions — of some in the political sphere).
So that's probably why he wasn't trained to go to the airplane loo to detonate himself. Because that wasn't necessary in order for al Qaeda to spread fear. It was to be done in the open. If the bomb detonates, great (from an al Qaeda perspective). If it doesn't, you still get nationwide fear and over-reaction, something you wouldn't get if all that happened was that the Christmas underpants terrorist took a humiliating stroll from the airline toilet back to his seat with a failed bomb in his pants.
This is technically a timely post, since we are still in the 12 Days of Christmas. Today is in fact the 12th Day, because the star appeared above the manger on Christmas Eve and it took the three magi twelve days to follow it and arrive at the manger and who the hell cares?
Anyway, for "The Sing-Off" fans, here's Straight No Chaser doing their version of 12 Days of Christmas, live, although it's really a tribute to Toto's "Africa" (starting at the 2:00 mark or so):
The Darwin Awards are given every year to "those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it." In other words, the awards are given to those who are too stupid to live… literally.
The 2009 Darwin Award winners were announced, and they included a Greensboro (N.C.) woman:
(3 June 2009, North Carolina) Greensboro was innundated with four inches of pouring rain in two hours, stranding several cars on flooded roads. Rosanne T., 50, was not deterred. She hopped on her moped and drove to a convenience store where she "possibly had a beer," according to her mother, before deciding to blunder home through the storm. She phoned home to say, "My moped has two rubber wheels, Mom, I'll be fine."
North Carolina does not require a license to own a moped. Ms. T. had acquired hers two years previously after a DUI conviction.
The Highway Patrol had blocked off several roads that were inundated with water, including Rosanne's path home. But she rode right past the officer and the barriers, lost control of her vehicle, and fell into the swollen creek below. The officer retrieved rope from his vehicle and proceeded to haul her from the water.
He then interviewed the woman, probably inquiring about her motivation for speeding through a roadblock during a flash flood. When the officer returned to his patrol car to call for assistance, Rosanne took the opportunity to escape–by jumping back into the creek!
The officer attempted to rescue her again, but alas, it was too late.
The victim's mother speculated that her daughter's motivation for jumping into a flooded creek was to rescue her drowning moped. "She loved that thing."
The 2009 winners were from Belgium:
(26 September 2009, Belgium) The city of Dinant is the backdrop for this rare Double Darwin Award. Two bankrobbers attempting to make a sizeable withdrawal from an ATM died when they overestimated the quantity of dynamite needed for the explosion. The blast demolished the building the bank was housed in. Nobody else was in the building at the time of the attack.
Robber One was rushed to the hospital with severe head trauma; he died shortly after arrival. Investigators initially assumed that his accomplice had managed a getway, but the second bungler's body was excavated from the debris twelve hours later. Would-be Robbers One and Two weren't exactly impoverished–their getaway car was a BMW.
The other winner was this guy:
He phoned authorities when he got into trouble, but he wasn't able to tell them where he was, because he didn't know how to operate his GPS device, which he packed with him.
His body washed up on the beaches a few weeks later.
Rush thinks American health care is boffo, but a great graphic making the rounds lately (one originating from National Geographic) says otherwise. Give it a couple minutes of your time — it plots U.S. health care versus the health care of other nations.
Here's all you need to know:
Click on it to embiggen:
The first thing you'll notice is that Americans spend more — waaaaaay more — on health care than citizens of other countries. And we spend way more even though we don't use health care as much.
And what about the bang for the buck? We actually have a lower life expectancy than most other countries.
Best health care in the world, Rush? By what measurement?
Politico's Mike Calderone:
Fox's Brit Hume has taken some heat since advising Tiger Woods yesterday [Sunday] to embrace Christianity as a way to cope with his problems, while knocking another religion in the process.
"He's said to be a Buddhist," Hume said on Fox News Sunday. "I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. … Tiger, turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery."
On Monday night's "Factor," Bill O'Reilly asked Hume a good question: "Was that proselytizing?"
"I don't think so," Hume said, before reiterating his comments from Sunday that Woods should convert to Christianity.
It's that last phrase that gets me. Read it slowly.
Hume said he wasn't prosyletizing, and then repeated his belief that Woods should convert to Christianity.
Perhaps he doesn't know what the word "prosyletizing" means?
And Hume didn't stop there:
Hume said that given Woods problems, he "needs something that Christianity, especially, provides and gives and offers." That includes, he said, the chance for "redemption and forgiveness." Later in the segment, Hume said: "I think that Jesus Christ offers Tiger Woods something that Tiger Woods badly needs."
Calderone is right on the money here:
I don't think criticism was leveled at Hume over the past 24 hours or so simply for being a Christian, but more for what seemed like a jab at Buddhism. But apparently, Hume doesn't see pushing his own religion on air, while dismissing another, as proselytizing.
So how does Merriam-Webster define the word? Let's see: "to induce someone to convert to one's faith" or "to recruit someone to join one's party, institution, or cause."
How can Hume NOT be prosyletizing?
With the cold snap hitting most of the country, you're likely to hear that phrase. But if you want to know what it is really like to freeze to death, read here. It's horrifying. Not at all like the supposedly "pleasant" experience of drowning. An excerpt:
As you sink back into the snow, shaken, your heat begins to drain away at an alarming rate, your head alone accounting for 50 percent of the loss. The pain of the cold soon pierces your ears so sharply that you root about in the snow until you find your hat and mash it back onto your head.
But even that little activity has been exhausting. You know you should find your glove as well, and yet you're becoming too weary to feel any urgency. You decide to have a short rest before going on.
An hour passes. at one point, a stray thought says you should start being scared, but fear is a concept that floats somewhere beyond your immediate reach, like that numb hand lying naked in the snow. You've slid into the temperature range at which cold renders the enzymes in your brain less efficient. With every one-degree drop in body temperature below 95, your cerebral metabolic rate falls off by 3 to 5 percent. When your core temperature reaches 93, amnesia nibbles at your consciousness. You check your watch: 12:58. Maybe someone will come looking for you soon. Moments later, you check again. You can't keep the numbers in your head. You'll remember little of what happens next.
Your head drops back. The snow crunches softly in your ear. In the minus-35-degree air, your core temperature falls about one degree every 30 to 40 minutes, your body heat leaching out into the soft, enveloping snow. Apathy at 91 degrees. Stupor at 90.
You've now crossed the boundary into profound hypothermia. By the time your core temperature has fallen to 88 degrees, your body has abandoned the urge to warm itself by shivering. Your blood is thickening like crankcase oil in a cold engine. Your oxygen consumption, a measure of your metabolic rate, has fallen by more than a quarter. Your kidneys, however, work overtime to process the fluid overload that occurred when the blood vessels in your extremities constricted and squeezed fluids toward your center. You feel a powerful urge to urinate, the only thing you feel at all.
By 87 degrees you've lost the ability to recognize a familiar face, should one suddenly appear from the woods.
At 86 degrees, your heart, its electrical impulses hampered by chilled nerve tissues, becomes arrhythmic. It now pumps less than two-thirds the normal amount of blood. The lack of oxygen and the slowing metabolism of your brain, meanwhile, begin to trigger visual and auditory hallucinations.
***
At 85 degrees, those freezing to death, in a strange, anguished paroxysm, often rip off their clothes. This phenomenon, known as paradoxical undressing, is common enough that urban hypothermia victims are sometimes initially diagnosed as victims of sexual assault. Though researchers are uncertain of the cause, the most logical explanation is that shortly before loss of consciousness, the constricted blood vessels near the body's surface suddenly dilate and produce a sensation of extreme heat against the skin.
All you know is that you're burning. You claw off your shell and pile sweater and fling them away.
But then, in a final moment of clarity, you realize there's no stove, no cabin, no friends. You're lying alone in the bitter cold, naked from the waist up. You grasp your terrible misunderstanding, a whole series of misunderstandings, like a dream ratcheting into wrongness. You've shed your clothes, your car, your oil-heated house in town. Without this ingenious technology you're simply a delicate, tropical organism whose range is restricted to a narrow sunlit band that girds the earth at the equator.
And you've now ventured way beyond it.
Brrrrrrr…..
This ABC promotional shot for the last season of "Lost" apparently contains some clues. (For example, why is Claire there, but not Desmond?)
Click to embiggen to full size:
Uh-oh. NOW we've done it.
The Tea Party movement is going to show all us libruls that they are here and they mean it, if by "it" we're talking about their general opposition to government, Obama, and America (but not the flag and country music). I guess….
That's right, on January 20 of this year, Tea Partiers everywhere will… well, nobody's quite sure. "Strike" presumably means they won't show up for work, en masse. That's a good thing, because now all of us socialist librels can talk openly about them at work without offending them.
No, but seriously… it's not clear how the strike will work. From the strike's website (yes, it has a website already), this is the most information I can glean relating to what is going to happen on January 20:
On January 20, 2009 tea party groups around the country will work together to direct massive attention to the businesses, in a legal manner, that are the largest supporters of the most liberal members of Congress as well as those that support extreme liberal media outlets that have gone after the citizens represented in the movement. I will not be more specific than that as to the action.
The idea is to focus attention on the supply lines of the far left agenda of taxing everything that moves and cradle to the grave control of our lives.
Going after businesses? So it sounds like a boycott, which means that they probably should have called it a "boycott", rather than a "strike". It's not clear who their targets are. Are they not going to watch Rachel Maddow and MSNBC (like tea parties do already???)
Also, "going after businesses" kind of has that long hair, socialist, hippie protest vibe to it. Just sayin'.
One gets the sense that maybe the Tea Party organizers are making it up as they go along.
Anyway, somehow the nation will crumble to its knees on January 20, as Tea Partiers take back their country, wresting this great land from the hands of the plurality of voters who voted for change. Obama will voluntarily relinquish the White House, Democrats will resign in shame, and Ronald Reagan will be re-animated using… well, something really cool I can tell you that. Mark your calendars.
Pictured above: The American Bald Eagle, with arrows in its talons, uses a shield to crush the laurel leaves (which symbolize peace and socialism and communism and marxism and the kind of tax-and-spend islamic muslimism that Hitler had)
P.S., But seriously, someone could get hurt on January 20… and rhetoric like this feeds the flames….
UPDATE: CNN took up the story and discovered something:
CNN reached out to a number of national Tea Party organizations. While some were aware of the planned strike and some not informed, none said they were going to actively take part in the event.
I guess the lockdown at the Newark Airport (due to terrorist fears) this past weekend wasn't a total bust:
This unproduced musical intrigues me —
Okay. That's cool. And the original concept album recording will include King, Mellencamp, Sheryl Crow, Kris Kristofferson, Elvis Costello, and…. boxing legend Joe Frazier?
I'm going to keep an eye on this one…..
So, last March, three American evangelical Christians went to Uganda and gave a series of lectures on homosexuality (its evils, how it can be "cured", etc). Presented as "experts" on homosexuality, they talked to thousands of Ugandans, including teachers, policemen, and politicians.
And then they left Uganda, pleased with their work.
And a month after they left, Uganda started the political process of criminalizing homosexuality, which was to banned under (in some cases) penalty of death.
The New York Times has a good story today about how those three evangelicals are distancing themselves from the fruits of their labor.
