perfidy

From an item in today's inbox, repeat after me:

Quote Of The Day:

"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth."

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Well, about damned time, I'm thinking.

Oct. 5, 2006
Tribune Co. said Los Angeles Times Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson has resigned, amid disagreements over the future of the paper. Johnson had defied the company's demands for what he considered potentially damaging staff cuts.

All due respect to what I'm sure were good and strongly-held intentions on the part of Mr. Johnson, but when your boss tells you to do something, you can either do it or quit. Johnson's been taking the imaginary middle ground, to date, and invoking the Nancy Reagan Defense.

He may even be right in claiming that requested cuts at the LA Times would hurt the paper's viablity, and who am I to contradict him? Nobody, that's who. I'm not contradicting him, I'm just saying that he should have been fired the minute he refused a direct order. That's the way life works, and even though he's now "resigned", let's not kid ourselves - he was fired, rightly so.

Based on the shirt-rending hue and cry of the past month in Los Angeles on this matter, the cries of indignation seem likely be broad and loud. If so, they'll all be sadly misplaced. Local groups in and around the metropolis have made noise about buying the Times from Tribune, but haven't made meaningful headway yet. Over the past month, it's sounded, in fact, as though they were trying to insist that the Tribune Co. sell them the paper, but on their terms.

Here's another tip as to how things work: You can insist that, for the good of the community, the paper be sold to local ownership, and you can insist on your own set of terms for that sale. But in America, you can't do both.

And thus, the LA Times, for now, remains the property of the Tribune Co., and with that ownership, they can take whatever management & personnel actions they feel are required. If those actions turn out to be ill-advised, the LA Times, Tribune Co., and their stockholders will suffer, also rightly so.

That, too, is how things work in America.

I'm sure you've heard the old saw about not starting fights with people who buy ink by the barrel?

Addendum: Don't ever piss off Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers' Tom Perkins.

Quick chronology (sans copious and specific links, since anyone who cares already knows, anyone who doesn't know probably doesn't care, and really, this is all about the juvenile punch line):

• HP's board was considering changing leadership
• Not all members were on board with doing so
• The board got leaky with the press
• George Keyworth was fingered & drummed out as a board member
• Tom Perkins didn't like seeing his friend pilloried (even though his friend {ahem} was the source of the leaks)
• Perkins pitched a bitch, raised holy-hell, and got a Congressional hearing scheduled
• Now Patricia Dunn, the former chairman of HP's board, stands a chance, however slight, of a career change into the "license plate stamping industry"

Coincidence? You decide. I guess it could be.

But, dig this little-known fact - he also caused her to lose some of her good looks and most of her hair, as evidenced by this pictorial chronology:

Coincidence? I'd like you to believe I think that's stretching it.

[wik] Speaking of "stretching it", I mashed all those pictures so they'd fit. The last one is distorted such that it's worse looking than the one in the WaPo story, and that's unintentional. So I added a link to the pop-up, full size picture, which is unfortunately, like the mashed version, less than flattering. Also unintentional - she was quite the looker at one time, anti-glamour shots notwithstanding, and Congressional hearings are surely a complete pain in the ass. I blame Tom Perkins.

While I doubt this will cause a significant change of direction among automotive safety engineers, it seems that Silicone Breast Implants Save Lives.

Forget airbags, silicone breasts will do 1 hour, 21 minutes ago

A woman in the northern Bulgarian town of Ruse has survived a car crash thanks to her silicone breasts which acted as an airbag, a newspaper has reported.

The 24-year-old ran through a red light and crashed her car into another vehicle at a busy crossroad in the middle of town Saturday, the daily Standart said Monday.

"The two cars were crumpled past recognition in the crash but the woman's silicone breasts acted as airbags and saved her life," Standart wrote, citing eyewitness reports.

But survival as well as beauty comes at a price as the woman burst her silicon implants in the crash

Who knew?

[wik] Lucky for her, she hit the dash tits-first

[alsø wik] Either that, or she had silicone implants inserted in a non-traditional manner

From Thursday's Washington Post:

THE NEW SEASON TV Preview

Look Homely, Angel
ABC's 'Ugly Betty' Is Plainly Lovable

By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 28, 2006; Page C01

"Ugly Betty" isn't just entertainment, it's therapy. Nirvana therapy. It's happiness in a tube, or rather The Tube. It's a pint of Ben & Jerry's with no fat or calories. It's tuning in to "The View" to discover they all have laryngitis. It's Florida without those disgusting bugs.
...

Mmmmkay... When I walked into the house Thursday evening, Ugly Betty was what the girls were watching. Aside from the fact that it was arguably too adult for my 11 year old to watch ("Too many icky parts!"), it was one of those painful 5 minute periods where I see a show and immediately tune it out as not worth any further attention. A total piece of crap, even before the girls had a chance to vote. Who gets off on watching the lead character be serially treated like crap by a bunch of hoes?

I had no idea, until they ladies stopped watching it, what the they were watching, and hadn't even heard of this new show, Ugly Betty. I thought, in the short time I saw it, that it was some spiced-up made-for-Disney movie, thus guaranteeing that it would be a one-time event in our house. It just had that look to it. Luckily, even though it was a series, not a movie, the girls were pretty merciless ("needlessly catty!", "deep, evil plot twist at the end!", "totally derivative of a bunch of earlier 'Girl Meets World' movies!"). It seems we won't be cursed, in my house, with its ongoing episodes between now and its cancellation.

So there's that.

But when I looked at what the WaPo section of my Google home page showed, I saw a story about a review of the series, excerpted above. I took a look, assuming that whomever reviewed it would have roughly the same views as those on the softer side of my house. Newp.

Gushing review. "...therapy", "Nirvana therapy", "happiness in a tube", "a pint of Ben & Jerry's with no fat or calories".

What the hell? Who could possibly think such a thing? And then I looked at the header over the review:

Well, never mind - that explains everything.

[wik] Hey, for all I know, he's otherwise a genius. (That is a "he", isn't it?) I'm only casting aspersions on this particular critique.

[alsø wik] Of course I can make such a catty swipe, because I'm perfect. Except for my yoooge head. He's apparently got more hair than I, but he also has more chins.

[alsø alsø wik] As la mia figlia would say "Woof!"

At least not permanently. According to the WSJ, in a story last week, "Soccer Star Zidane May Have Lost His Head, But(t) It Hasn't Hurt Him".

Good for him.

Rash actions in the heat of the moment, particularly during a sporting event, seem easy to forgive. Exceptions, of course, exist - think Woody Hayes' attack on Clemson's Charlie Bauman in the 1978 Gator Bowl. Quite an embarrassment, and one he never really lived down. It differs both because he wasn't a contestant, and because it was clearly a childish hissy-fit, unlike Zinedine Zidane's head butt of Marco Materazzi, who, let's be serious, probably earned it.

Seeing the story, however, reminded me of an idiotic picture that circulated shortly thereafter. Just because it was idiotic doesn't mean it wasn't funny, however, and the WSJ story provided a cheap excuse to post it, so I will:

(Note: That's an animated picture, and I got tired of watching it move on our page, so click to see it in its native, full motion, form. It's far less funny if the animation is disabled in your browser, to the point of "not at all funny")

Speaking only for myself, this comes as a total shock. So much so that I'm not sure I know who I am any more.

(Article text included here simply to avoid risk of link rot)

Paris Hilton: I'm not that smart

By BECI WOOD
September 22, 2006

IN probably the least shocking celebrity statement of the decade, Paris Hilton has admitted that she’s "not like that smart". The confession was made when the star helped police officers with an investigation into a burglary at the house of Hollywood porn baron Joe Francis.

When cops asked her what she knew, the socialite said: "I'm not that smart... I don’t remember... I forget stuff all the time." The man in question, Darnell Riley, admitted the offence earlier this year and was sentenced to nearly 11 years in prison. On the tape Paris also told cops that an anonymous man had called her to try and extort money for the return of 'private tapes' stolen from her house.

"They were trying to sell it to a newspaper or something," she explained. "So if you pay somebody, then you're gonna be paying for the rest of your life."

"My dad always taught me. They'll keep the tape anyway."

From the left sidebar of a Reuters story entitled "Court says $32,000 is too much to fondle bosom", this picture:

Subtitled thusly:

A bra designed by actress Jennifer Aniston is shown at Sotheby's auction house in New York, April 8, 2003. A fee of 25,500 euros ($32,000) is way too much for a woman to charge a man for fondling her bosom, a Finnish district court ruled.

I can see why someone, even at a supposedly serious news organization would think about putting that picture of a Jennifer Aniston-designed bra into the sidebar of a story such as that mentioned above. I remember my high-school days, when such a juxtaposition would be considered not only snidely funny, but mandatory.

However, based on the fact that neither Ms. Aniston nor her objectively ugly creation actually has anything to do with the story, I fail to see why someone at a supposedly serious news organization would actually do so, even in a story section entitled "Oddly Enough".

Discuss.

For those lucky souls who know nothing about the current options backdating scandal, please skip to the next post, because I'm not willing to bore you with the details.

I am, however, willing to bore you with this:

This morning's WSJ contains an article entitled "Cablevision Gave Backdated Grant To Dead Official"

Cablevision awarded options to a vice chairman after his 1999 death but backdated them to make it appear they were awarded when he was still alive. Cablevision restated its results as an options probe escalated.

I'm trying to picture the response from the PR person at Cablevision. Something like, say, 'Oh, don't worry - they were way out of the money, since we didn't figure he'd complain' or 'We spoke with his lawyer and were informed "No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting."'

Yes, this scandal has officially become Pythonesque.

Clearly, posts based on the contents of one or more of the roughly 200 non-SPAM email messages I get per day are easy. Why, they practically write themselves!

But that's not the point. The point is to give me a jumping off point to opine about one thing or another, and Steve Elliot, of Grassfire.org, has done just that. I have no idea how I ended up on their mailing list - I'm not aware of anything they've had to say (at least in the periodic "Please sign this petition!" emails I've gotten from them) that I think is worthy of even clicking the link to go to their site. That, plus internet petitions are generally tools for twits. This latest, however, coerced me to action.

That action? To ridicule the silliness of the Grassfire.org actions, if not their intentions. Actually, come to think of it, I'm ridiculing their intentions, too. Here's an excerpted version of their 'plaint for this week:

If you didn't see Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez call President Bush "the devil" during his U.N. speech, go here and see for yourself: redacted

Thanks, Steve - I didn't see it, but I read about it, and have no need to go watch Chavez make an ass of himself on tape delay. Continuing:

Here is what Chavez said:

"Yesterday, the devil [President Bush] came here. Right here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of."
--Hugo Chavez

Then Chavez made the sign of the cross as if praying to God for deliverance from the "devil" (President Bush)! This was one of the worst mockeries of a U.S. President ON OUR OWN SOIL by a foreign leader in history!

Did you know this fascist thug also own (sic) Citgo oil company and is making untold millions on Citgo profits to undermine our President and the troops?

Chavez is using OUR MONEY to attack and undermine our President and our nation!

In response to this outrage, thousands of citizens are sending Chavez a message by joining the Citgo boycott. Go here to send Chavez a message: (also redacted) We want to rally 100,000 signers in the next 7 days and deliver these petitions to the main distributors of Citgo Gas, including 7-Eleven.

Thanks for your immediate action!

Steve Elliott, President
Grassfire.org Alliance

So, if I read him correctly, Hugo Chavez "own" Citgo Oil? Technically, as well as factually, no, he doesn't. He controls it, as part of his country's nationalized OPEC member, Petróleos de Venezuela SA, and controls it quite poorly, on reflection. So any damage "needed" to Citgo, he seems clearly able to inflict on his own without the help of me or any of my more gullible co-mailinglist-members.

And, about those gullible souls who might "Take ... immediate action!" because of Chavez's actions "ON OUR OWN SOIL!" and what he does to us with "OUR MONEY!" (yeah, I added a couple exclamation points, but only because Steve must have forgotten these guaranteed-to-enflame necessities from the toolbox of all rabble-rousers), I hope there are few, not because I wish Elliott or Grassfire any particular harm, but because this is a meaningless gesture, designed to enflame the rubes among us and generate funds for Grassfire, nothing more.

I consider it no different than the several-per-week pretend-solicitations of my opinion or involvement in some God-forsaken pretend-grown-up activity put together by the Republican Party. And, lest Ross get all chubby, the DNC is no different, and no more intelligent in its pretense to actually give a shit what any of its Middle America adherents think, only about the money they can milch (or would that be "mulct"?) for the latest cause du jour.

Puh-leeze. If you don't want to buy Citgo gas, go buy some other gas. But don't pretend Chavez's distributors will give a fat rat's ass about some Intertube-circulated pseudo-petition expressing the nation's indignation about the way he acted at the U.N. toward GW Bush.

Here's a couple clues for those who might think Elliott has a point: Bush almost certainly doesn't care about Chavez's opinion of him, and less so about any words he might use to enunciate it. Including this nugget, from a NY Times story on the matter:

[Chavez] brandished a copy of Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance" and recommended it to members of the General Assembly to read. Later, he told a news conference that one of his greatest regrets was not getting to meet Mr. Chomsky before he died. (Mr. Chomsky, 77, is still alive.)

I mean, "everyone" knows Bush is dumb as a bag of hair, right? But even Bush knows Mr. Chomsky is still alive.

Furthermore, he made this speech at the United Nations General Assembly, and nobody who's got a lick of sense actually believes the General Assembly is worth the powder it would take to blow it to hell. The UN does such a poor job at most of what it does that the few good things it does are lost in the backwash. So who cares where he made this inane statement?

Elliott does, or claims to. Whatever nit-wits sign his petition do, or claim to. I do not.

[wik] No, I don't know why I turned into the hyphenation queen for this post. It's just how it came out.

[alsø wik] Odd, this entire embargo thing must not be working out. I got a follow-on from Steve today (9/26/2006) informing me that:

In the next seven days, I want to deliver 50,000 petitions
to 7-Eleven which distributes Citgo gas at thousands of
locations. Please help.

No offense, but tough shit, snookums - boycotts of volatile commodity items seldom make sense, and seldom achieve the desired effect. I hope that the shortfall in signatures is because most of his recipients realize this. Otherwise, it means the internet is broken, and that would suck. Too bad about the inability to meet the reduced and extended expectations. And, yes, I've unsubscribed from his mailing list.

Fresh from my inbox to your screen, Kinky's campaign answers questions related to his scuffle with the interestingly-monikered and intellectually challenged Senfronia Puff-n-Stuff:

Kinky Friedman Campaign Statement

Friends and neighbors,

While Rick Perry was cheerleading in college and Chris Bell was being potty trained, Kinky Friedman was picketing segregated restaurants in Austin to integrate them. Now that Kinky’s in second place and a serious threat to the two-party system, Perry and Bell have paid political assassins to dig back as far as 30 years through fictional books, comedy shows and song lyrics, desperately seeking to paint Kinky as a racist.

Republicans and Democrats have created an entire industry -- called Opposition Research -- whose sole purpose is to tarnish and destroy people’s reputations. This is why regular citizens don't run for office. If you do, and you start to threaten the system as Kinky has, you’re going to be attacked.

Kinky has overcome all of the obstacles placed before him -- getting on the ballot, raising millions of dollars, building the largest grassroots network Texas has ever seen, and breaking 20% in the polls months ago. He's a serious threat to the establishment, and when you threaten the political establishment, they use the money generated from their formidable fundraising machines to pay for "dirty tricks" tactics to manipulate the press.

It's a slimy industry that exists for the sole purpose of destroying people and -- like cockroaches -- scurries for the shadows whenever a light is shined on it.

The latest political assassination attempt takes completely out of context a controversial word that Kinky was using in a 1980 stand-up performance to lampoon racists. Playing a character on stage, Kinky was exposing bigotry through comedy and satire.

It’s pathetic that the major-party candidates have sunk to this -- trying to paint Kinky as a racist when, in fact, he was poking fun at racists. Shame on the press for being complicit. Rather than confront our opponents on their tactics and get the full story, they are allowing industries like opposition research to exist and operate outside the understanding of most voters.

-The Kinky Friedman Campaign for Governor

Hmmph. That'll show 'em. Why the hell not?

See Allah, Via Ace.

The entire matter may not be as cut and dried as some of my colleagues believe.

That said, coercively interrogating the wrong guy due to bad Canadian intelligence and embarrassing American operational standards is inexcusable. So is anything to do with Syria's government.

But it might be time to dispense with fiction that the sole value of coercive interrogation is that "...someone being tortured will say whatever they can to get it to stop."

Sometimes, perhaps many or most times, there's more to be gained than false confessions.

It's probably just me, but when I see a story headline like "CBC head quits after defecation, bestiality remarks", it's like I'm at a train wreck, or, for that matter, stuck in Houston traffic near an accident - I have to at least have a look. (Except for that last bit - I'm actually one of an apparently small number of Houston drivers who can ignore any accident that's not blocking the freeway, the better to avoid, well, blocking the freeway.)

At least that story's subject can easily be inferred from the title - the head cheese at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. had a failure of editorial control, logorrhea, if you like, about a couple subjects, and got turfed for the indiscretion. Whatever works for the Canadian government, who had "lost confidence" in him.

The really difficult ones, I think are like this: "Dry as a dead dingo's donger", from the September 2, 2006 issue of The Economist.

Sadly, that one's behind the subscriber's-only part of the site, so it's not directly available to non-subscribers. (See note at end of entry, below)

My precognitive abilities fail on such a headline, starting with the fact that there are two words in the title itself that I had to look up. First, I didn't really know what a "dingo" is. I presumed it's the Australian version of a prairie rat. Until I saw that headline, I honestly didn't care. But by now, Wikipedia to the rescue, and I've looked it up. Pfft! Turns out it's just a wild dog. Next time I hear someone holler "Dingo took my baby!", I'll be somewhat more skeptical. Although, come to think of it, for a dingo to take someone's baby, it would seem necessary that a dingo be bigger than the prairie rat of my fevered imagination. So please forget that I mentioned the rat.

Second, what the hell is a "donger", I said to myself? I guessed it could have been some abstract, made-up name to play the foil in an odd humor piece, from the movie Sixteen Candles. Nahh, too simple. Other sites who've used that phrase long before September 2006 provided no further information on the matter, and, like the Economist, appear to have used it for its headline value, without informing me what, praytell, a donger actually was. Same deal with another site, talking about the return of American Idol, back in 2005. But the only reason for the use of the phrase in that context, according to the site's author, was, and I quote:

*did a search for "dry as a" and this was the funniest

Perhaps that's what drove the Economist's headline writer.

But I still hungered to know how I was supposed to process the word "donger", and so far, almost all I'd seen other than the aforementioned sites was a host of others referring to people (unfortunately, I presumed) named Donger. Or the Doneger Group, an outfit who really might reconsider their choice of search engine optimization service providers, unless I could come to the conclusion that there's nothing even remotely off-putting about this "donger" which can apparently be found attached to dead "dingoes". How many things could possibly fit such a set of criteria?

And things weren't looking good - I found a site defining "Dinker Donger", and it fit my preconception of the intended meaning. But remember - I had a preconception of what a dingo was, too, so I was willing to ignore that one, since it was a compound phrase, and might be inapplicable as a result. And I continued my search.

Since I was already at the Urban Dictionary site, a site that's clearly almost as authoritative as Wikipedia itself (and that's saying something!), I just used their search function to see if the word could be found, in isolation.

Turns out, it could. And it further turns out that while I suck at identifying common names for Cannis lupus dingo, my initial Spidey-sense that the Economist was having a funny on its readers was correct.

Oh, and according to that eminent authority, the Urban Dictionary, there are several other possible interpretations of the phrase "a dead dingo's donger", given that "dingo" (6th and 7th definitions) isn't always a "mythical (?) dog-like creature of Australia" (1st definition).

Who knew?

The Economist article, by the way, while listed at their site as unavailable to non-subscribers, has already been poached by a free site (though for all I know, they got reprint permission), and synopsified by another. So you can view the cut of its intended jib at either of those two places, if you don't subscribe to the Economist.

I'd have been more forthcoming about the article itself if its contents had had even the slightest thing to do with this post, but they don't, so I wasn't. However, it's an interesting article about an impending environmental crisis in Australia.

Not to repeat myself, but who knew?

[wik] After a casual re-read of this post, to check for typos, it occurred to me I'd missed one other possible interpretation for the CBC head's "retirement". It's the sort of thing James Taranto would have a field day with, if he wrote about articles on defecation and bestiality.

One could, if one didn't read the article, get the impression he was kicked to the curb (or do they spell it "kerb" in the Great White North, like the Brits do?) for having taken a shit (or do they refer to it as "leaving a shit" in the Great White North, like George Carlin used to?) right before launching into an extended dissertation about bestiality. Which might have been even funnier, come to think of it.

The Pope said something the other day, and pissed off a lot of Islamic nutbags. Lucky for him, he appears only to have pissed off the ones he was actually referring to - the irony-challenged ones who think the answer to any such perceived sleight merits a murder threat or a bombing. BFD - I have nothing else to add to the matter that's not already been said by others.

However, I thought I'd bring to your attention, in case you hadn't seen it, a snippet from Scott Adams' blog, entitled "Pope Stirs Up P o o p", that got a chuckle out of me:

...I love the fact that the Vatican’s official position is that Muslims should be treated with “esteem.” According to my dictionary, esteem is a very weasely word. It can mean “high regard,” and that’s a nice compliment. But it can also mean “the regard in which one is held” which is a broad concept encompassing everything from “really groovy” to “bearded turds.”

My hope, I guess, would be that Benedict XVI meant the latter interpretation, not the former, but as a long-lapsed Catholic, my vote on such matters no longer counts.

To be honest, I didn't even know she was here.

If Google happens to be broken and you're curious (Google's already got 30 hits for that quote), I'll make the topic even more obvious with another:

If I was her adviser, I would tell her to go kick all the ladies' tails around for about four years and if she wants to try again when she's 20, 21 and grown up more, and maybe a better player, come on back.

(emphasis mine) Not a good week for the girl who claims to want to beat the men at the mens' game. I wonder how much of this silliness is driven by her sponsors?

So, there I was - sitting in my home office, taking care of a few things that need to be taken care of, and listening to the radio broadcast of the Sunday night NFL game between Dallas & Washington.

Having given the 7 point spread and chosen Dallas in the pool I've joined, and with Dallas in control, but not running away with it, I've been paying a bit more attention to the action than I otherwise would.

Including, apparently, the commercials. I just heard one for a company/product called "See More Bucks". I'm guessing it was a locally broadcast commercial, though with AM radio shows, it's hard to predict what sort of marketing you'll be exposed to. Anyhow, hearing the word "Bucks" must have piqued my interest, thinking they were talking about the Ohio State Buckeyes. And as I listened, I found it had nothing to do with OSU football.

Seems they were offering a product that, if sprinkled on the foliage near one's "deer blind" (whatever - I'm not a deer hunter, so if I fuck up the special verbiage of the brotherhood, please forgive me), causes the bucks to just hang out and gnosh until you get a chance to put a slug between their eyes.

Again, I'm forced to say "whatever...". Perhaps that's normal in deer hunting, but it brought a memory of a friend from my youth, Jimmy, who fished in Southern Ohio and regularly took his houseboat out on one of the large man-made lakes of the area. His first action was to ensure the beer was cold. Next, he took a bushel basket of ears of corn and scattered it in the water around the boat. Several beers later, he'd drop a line in the water, and pull out fish as fast as he could cast.

I wonder how that's different than using "foliage perfume" from a company called See More Bucks. Oh, and Jimmy used to call it "chumming".

Doesn't seem very sporting, but I'm not that type of sportsman, so I could be wrong.

[wik] Oh, and when Jimmy got into the second six pack, he might occasionally stop casting, and just grab his net before dropping a few lit M-80s into the water. Even I know that's not sporting.

Allegedly, the past several years have seen great advances in the ability to correctly identify junk e-mail. In fact, I'm one of the people who would make this allegation, since I almost never see actual spam in my inbox any more, and I'm not aware of having lost any legitimate mail as a result of measures currently in place.

However, there's an odd side effect of the increasing power to automatically flush spam. Sometimes, the email message obfuscation used by the dung-brained losers who send such messages causes them to get past my spam protection. When they do, these days, they seem to result in largely unintelligible gibberish. To wit:

According to the most recent news,
they verbalized that most American's
are really moved in maintaning their wad
That is why they uncovered last night this place

http://www.*********.org/aj/
They hit upon it after happening around the net.
The things of the net.

looked on and listened in artificial a sort of
"You see," I lizard smell
noticed Monkey King among their other

letitia watson

I've redacted the name of some dumb-ass web site from the message above and will be reporting it to one of the central repositories of other such dumb-ass websites, the better to ensure that, no matter what form of Ebonics future authors of such crap use, the presence of that website address alone is enough to get the message shit-listed.

But here's the thing - if I were to suffer a momentary lapse of IQ and decided to pay close attention to my spam, looking for ways to radically improve my life, it's not crystal clear to me what part of my life letitia (not his real name) is offering to help me with.

An infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of keyboards, indeed.

[wik] Someone beat me to the punch in reporting these assholes. I'm OK with that, and it's why I almost never see spam these days.

This could leave a mark:

AUSTIN - A Houston-area lawmaker said Tuesday that she is "vehemently insulted" by independent gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman's derogatory comments about Hurricane Katrina evacuees.

Friedman last week attributed a spike in Houston's crime rate to the "crackheads and thugs" who evacuated New Orleans.

I haven't a clue how "She" could both be offended by his comments and simultaneously be an elected representative from Houston, since Kinky wasn't talking about Houstonians with funny names, but instead was speaking of Katrina evacuees, but "She" continues:

"He has demonstrated a total lack of human sensitivity," said state Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston. "The people of Katrina have lost everything and are suffering not only from the loss of loved ones, but the trauma of the event itself. What has precipitated from this tragedy is behavior that results from a disastrous event."

Damn - is it just me, or did Senfronia just say that, yeah, the Katrina evacuees laid waste to large parts of Houston, but that it's OK, because it was to be expected under the circumstances? Ouch. And that will leave a mark, but probably not on Kinky Friedman.

Sadly, it probably won't leave a mark on Senfronia, either, because Houston proper has a wicked habit of electing maundering assholes to minor functionary legislative positions. (See "Sheila Jackson Lee", though, to be fair, the tony suburb of Sugarland hasn't covered itself in electoral glory either, and the city does sometimes do right, such as with Mayor Bill White and Judge Bill Eckels, true studs, both)

After all, something more than 20% of the year's homicides (through Aug 26) in Houston have involved Katrina evacuees (though that includes both perps and victims). Kinky appears, as always, to just be saying what everyone can see with their own damned eyes.

Stretching fair use to its limits, just in case that link up top goes stale, I have to also include the following excerpts:

"Kinky Friedman has called himself a 'compassionate redneck,' " said Thompson, chairwoman of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus. "He would do well henceforth to highlight his compassion while de-emphasizing his redneck tendencies."

Yeah, there's that. But it's not like the governor in Texas actually has to do much of anything. Honest. And this:

Friedman earlier this week also said that we would not pander to different ethnic groups while campaigning for governor.

"I don't eat tamales in the barrio, I don't eat fried chicken in the ghetto, I don't eat bagels with the Jews for breakfast," said Friedman, who is Jewish. "That to me is true racism."

Tell it, brother! I continue to particularly like the cut of the man's jib.

He's #2 in "the polls" so far, but he's both still pretty far behind our current pretty-boy Governor, Rick Perry, and damned by the press to defeat because of his proclivity for action and fun, rather than the slog of executive life.

All that said, if I have to waste a vote in the race for Governor of Texas (a presumption I'm not willing yet to stipulate), I'm happy to waste it on a guy who knows that the job is virtually all public relations and bully-pulpit, and who also knows that in Texas, it's generally defensible to just speak your mind, particularly as long as you're stating the bald-faced obvious.

So, there I was - out of town the past couple days, when I got a call on my cell, from one of my correspondents who happens to have both my office number and my mobile.

The message? "What's wrong with your office phone service?"

I called the office number from my cell phone, and as reported, heard that

We're sorry - your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again.

WTF? I think I'm still in business, and I know the bill is paid, I said to myself. But at the time, I wasn't in a position where I could spare the inevitable hour+ the search for a solution would take on the phone to some hair-lipped dipshit in Bangalore, Mumbai, or New Jersey. So I punted. (Actually, "teed off" is a more appropriate sports metaphor, under the circumstances)

When I got back to town this evening, I decided I'd spend some time building up karma points, and I've heard that talking to soulless retards is good for one's karma balance. And so I called for technical support. The menu tree on the automated answering system at the service provider was clearly designed to ensure that, except for the most serious problems, no human would ever be bothered with my travails. When I'd finally gotten to the point where I was allowed to make a selection proving that I had, in fact, checked all the obvious problems and found them n/a, I did as requested, and pressed "1" to be transferred to a supposedly sentient being. After the standard boilerplate about how, to ensure quality, my call might be recorded, I heard a couple clicks, followed by a message:

We're sorry - your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again.

After I'd taken a moment to mop up a bit of the blood that burst, geyser-like, from my ears, I called again, and speed-pounded all the same responses as the first time, this time reaching quite the chatty Kathy (though his name was Greg) who asked me to do all the standard shit, and who seemed credulous as I paused after each request for just a long-enough time to allow him the delusion I was actually following his instructions. And when it was all over, I had several phone lines on which I could make outbound calls to anyone, but could only receive inbound calls from other customers of the same provider, though none from anyone who'd been smart enough to choose a different telephone company.

Just as I had been when the call began.

Except for one thing - I now have an "RT Ticket" (whatever that is) and a promise that the engineers in New Jersey will provide something (not necessarily a solution, but something) within 24-48 hours.

Marvelous. Just bloody marvelous. I don't think it would be right to name the company with whom I've so enjoyed this mincing waste of time and loss of telephonic contact from much of the business world, because, while the truth is an absolute defense against libel claims, and everything I've related here is the truth, they don't have a forum here to defend themselves.

[wik] Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, Vonage sucks. Like a Hoover.

[alsø wik] Correction, Vonage sucks like a Hoover trapped inside a Eureka.

[alsø alsø wik] On third thought, Vonage sucks like a Hoover trapped inside a Eureka, jammed up Dave Oreck's ass. Sideways. No disrepect to Dave Oreck intended, of course.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] Yes, Virginia, this does get me out of the hot seat, probably at least until the esteemed Minister Ross weighs in again.

[wik] No, Virginia, this doesn't get me out of the hot seat