Thursday, October 4, 2012

Our Wacky World—10/4/2012

I'm trying not to bore you with politics this election cycle, but MItt Romney's freefall-at-terminal-velocity of a campaign (by all accounts he did a better job of lying at last night's debate and Obama let him get away with it) is a continuing source of high comedy. Here's how Fox News is handling it:
"Stylistically, the O'Reilly quartet may be on to something new. We've had mainstream journalism, alternative journalism, conservative journalism. This appears to be vaudeville journalism. "
CNN

"'Grassy-knoll' statistics". Remember when Karl Rove said he had the "real numbers?" Heh.
"When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem."
Gawker

Apparently Mr. Romney never saw Goldfinger. Some people think he was joking. How can you tell? The man is a $17 bill.
The most important issue
"So how did Romney choose this non-epidemic of a non-illness as an issue? ...he says...he would 'provide local physicians with protection from lawsuits to ensure that they can treat the disease with the aggressive antibiotics that are required.' Two weeks ago Romney spoke with Michael Farris about Lyme. Farris is, among other things, a creationist who founded Patrick Henry College [Purcellville, VA], and who says that his wife and all seven of their children suffer from 'chronic' Lyme disease. The Washington Post has reported that Farris’s wife has received treatment from Dr. Joseph Jemsek. Dr. Jemsek moved his practice to Washington after being disciplined by the North Carolina Medical Board for treating patients with long-term antibiotics."
New Yorker

You'll be glad to know that Virginia Governor Bob McDonell is on-board with Romney on this critical issue. Meanwhile:
"A Virginia man allegedly killed himself and his family earlier this week in part because he was upset by the thought of President Barack Obama being re-elected."
Raw Story


Enough politics—the rest of the world is still full of wackiness:
"But come on, nobody’s going to fall for the old canned air routine, right? Wrong, 'Chen Guangbiao: Nice Guy' air cans were flying off the shelves from the first day they were introduced, and they sold out in a matter of days."
Oddity Central

"A German liquor company called G-Spirits is promising customers that “every drop” of its line of alcoholic beverages has been poured on the naked breasts of a certified model"
NY Daily News

"Retired New Jersey locksmith Daniel Ferraris, 69, is hawking what he calls a 'firemen’s key ring' — and what a terrorist might call a dream come true. The set consists of five keys that would allow control of virtually any elevator in the city, could knock out power to municipal buildings and skyscrapers, darken city streets, open subway gates and some firehouse doors and provide full access to 1 World Trade Center and other construction sites."
NY Post


Here's an old story that just won't go away; anxiety disorder and OCD run amuck:
Anatomy FAIL (click)
"Several times a day, Barbara Lewis slips off her organic cotton slippers and relaxes on her tidy twin-sized bed. She slides a mask onto her face and turns on a steady stream of oxygen from a nearby tank. 'I have cast iron tanks — not aluminum,' she’s careful to point out. For entertainment, she stuffs a book inside a cellophane bag. (Plastic is strictly forbidden in her small apartment.) 'It blocks out the volatile organic compounds from the ink,' she offers as an explanation for the bag covering her book. It’s a tedious exercise Lewis repeats daily in her ongoing battle to lead a 'clean' life — convinced that nearly everything in the modern world is making her sick."
WFAA

"Workers had picked the highly unstable ordnance off the conveyor lines and stored them in a bucket of water in the basement. The munitions that they did not spot had been first plunged into conditioning tanks with the live clams, passed through steam cookers, and then raked across an industrial shucker that violently shakes the cooked meat from the shells. From there, the ordnance was picked up by Perry Butler, hidden in containers of empty clamshells, who passed them through a grinder that pulverised the shells into gravel before selling the fill on to various downstate residents. That none of the munitions exploded at any point was nothing short of miraculous."
Science Punk

“Fong also told Ho that it's ‘very bad’ for Amber Village to book ‘gay parties’ and that big groups of ‘gay partyers’ are especially bad for feng shui.”
NY Daily News


Here's a really excellent article:
"A pedophile...is someone adept not just at preying on children but at confusing, deceiving, and charming the adults responsible for those children—which is something to keep in mind in the case of the scandal at Penn State and the conviction, earlier this year, of the former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky on child-molestation charges."
New Yorker

"This is a clear conflict of interest. The worse the platform performs, the more advertisers need to use Sponsored Stories. In a way, it means that Facebook is broken, on purpose, in order to extract more money from users. In the case of Sponsored Stories, it has meant raking in nearly $1M a day."
Observer

"Gary Rossington, the only original member left in the band, told CNN that Lynyrd Skynyrd will stop using the Confederate flag as a stage decoration because it could be misconstrued as racist."
No shit. (Salon)