Do they realize they are bringing a chapter in American Psycho to life: Designers compare business cards. [via Fimoculous, who has a load of good links today]

Quick, double-check that its not April Fools Day: EverQuest and Grand Theft Auto are implicated in deaths in Arkansas and Tennessee.

The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas recently reported that a 36-year-old mother neglected her 3-year-old daughter while playing EverQuest for several hours, resulting in the child's death.

Also, an Associated Press report today states that two teenage stepbrothers, ages 16 and 13, from Newport, Tennessee, told police they were imitating Grand Theft Auto when they fired a .22-caliber rifle up to 25 times at vehicles along Interstate 40 on June 25 of this year.

Boy, there sure are lots of stories about law enforcement folks and sex recently: Policewoman suspended after a prisoner applied to have "sexual visits" from her. This seems wrong on a couple of fronts. 1st, she's a police officer, not a jail guard - so boning an inmate in her private time ought not affect her job performance. 2nd, would they suspend the warden if an inmate applied for 'sexual visits' from him? Seems to me you can't suspend somebody unless they actually do something wrong - simply being an object of sexual desire (we all know wardens are dead sexy) to an inmate doesn't seem to fit the category of 'wrong'.

There have been more and more stories about kids lemonade-type stands getting shut down this summer than I've ever heard before. I wonder if it has something to do with the poor financial health of local governments, or if its just the ever-expanding reach of the zero tolerance mentality.

In June, police in Naples, Fla., responded to a neighbor's complaint by closing the lemonade stand of a 6-year-old girl who didn't have a permit. After fielding indignant phone calls from around the country, embarrassed city officials waived the $35 permit fee and allowed her to reopen. The story won national attention.

Before she was shut down at her stand on Como Av. a block or two from the fairgrounds, Mikaela had been in business for four days, offering passersby an assortment of packaged lemonade, orange juice, water and pop. What the city did made her sad. And mad.

If cities feel they absolutely must enforce these permits onto kids, they need to create a whole separate class of permit - preferably, one thats free, and available from their websites. It ought to simply be an online form where you fill out your name, address and product for sale - submit it - and it kicks you out a printable permit. Kids would love getting something official looking, the cities would be able to track where these lemonade stands were going up at (there are health issues), and parents wouldn't have to shell out $50 or so for the permit or waste time at city hall filling out paper work.

From Drudge: There is said to be some fire to the smoke this Labor Day weekend over a report that Hillary Clinton has set a date to discuss a run for the presidency... Hillary and her advisers, including her husband the ex-president, her money-men and pollsters, will meet shortly after Labor Day -- September 6,- to discuss whether or not she should go for it!

I have long believed that if Hillary runs, Hillary will win. And I'm not talking about the Democrat nomination.

Please no. Men are having tupperware style parties for golf equipment. Thats just lame.

They say everybody has a twin - I think we just found Newman's (from Seinfeld): Postman Convicted for Keeping 61,000 Letters. Police discovered mounds of post that had accumulated over two-and-a-half-years filling the rooms and basement of the 36-year-old's house after locals complained about missing deliveries. The man resigned his job.

"He said he had too many letters to deliver on his round," said Bernd Lottes, spokesman for the court in the western town of Neuss. "He was hoping to deliver the other stuff when he had a bit of breathing space."

Funniest thing I've read all day [via Magnetbox]: "With iTunes I don't feel guilty when I download music -- Apple and the record labels handle the screw job for me!"

My band only gets 9 cents per song, but I looove the seamless design.

Great headline from MTV.com today: Jacko Goes Willy Wonka, Invites Outsiders To Tour Neverland. Of course, Jacko's invitation is nothing like Wonka's since its by invite only, and you still have to pony up $5,000 for the privledge of being invited.

"From the moment you enter the gates ... you will wish that this day could last forever," the invitation reads. "Be one of the privileged few who have ever personally experienced this extraordinary and magical oasis."

Interesting, I never would have thought 'privleged' was an accurate term to describe the scores of little boys he's had sleep with him. Vitimized is more the term I was thinking of.

So very true: Where the fuck are the human shields? I thought they went there to make sure this kinda crap didn't happen. Where are the granola eating turdburgers who went bravely to pre-war Iraq and placed their bodies in harm's way so that a stray incoming round would hit them, rather than the baby milk factory?

I guess they just up and left, when they all survived the war. They need to turn right around, get their collective asses back, because someone's blowing up the water pipes and people are going thirsty. The infrastructure of Iraq is being destroyed! It's killing the chilllllllldren! Hundreds of thousands of innocents are at risk! DOn't you CARE about the suffering of the Iraqi people rom indiscriminant bombing and ruthless attacks? Come back! You are needed!

Wesley Clark as the Democrat's savior may be going down the tubes before it ever gets off the ground if he keeps up with his Perot-like black helicopter stories. Today, he's claimed that the White House got him fired from CNN.

The White House actually back in February apparently tried to get me knocked off CNN and they wanted to do this because they were afraid that I would raise issues with their conduct of the war," Clark told Newsradio 620 KTAR. "Apparently they called CNN. I don't have all the proof on this because they didn't call me. I've only heard rumors about it."

This is not the type of story a serious presidential candidate just throws out there - with zero proof. Though, honestly, the likes of Atrios, Kos and OWillis will just eat this story up - and it'll probably end up helping Clark in left-wing circles.

This is something I never expected, Mike Tyson has signed with K-1 to fight in Japan. If you don't know, K-1 is a kickboxing organization that tends to be just this side of UFC and Pride style fighting. It'll be interesting to see if Tyson transforms himself into that style of fighter, or if K-1 simply promotes him as a regular boxer.

They aren't exactly a reliable source, but the World Tribune is reporting that the Bush Admin thinks they've found Iraq's WMDs - in Lebanon. Upon seeing the headline, I bought it because I've heard this theory before - but once I read the article, someone is lying (Bush admin or World Tribune). Here's the telling paragraph: U.S. intelligence first identified a stream of tractor-trailer trucks moving from Iraq to Syria to Lebanon in January 2003. The significance of this sighting did not register on the CIA at the time.

Maybe I give them too much credit, but I don't see how our intelligence agencies could have looked at a near-convoy of trucks leaving Iraq and ending up in Lebanon and not thought anything of it. That simply doesn't pass the smell test.

I don't care too much about the California recall at this point, but it seems to me that if Bustamante is being raked over the coals by the SF Gate, he doesn't stand a chance with mainstream democrats in Cali (despite his current 30% poll numbers).

Bustamante's budget plan seems oblivious to the trouble California businesses are in. We do not need higher taxes. California already has the second-highest maximum income tax rate in the nation and the eighth-highest maximum sales-tax rate. The top 10 percent of California earners pay 80 percent of the state's income tax. And Bustamante wants to increase that burden.

One of the worst ideas Bustamante proposed is taking his $8 billion tax increase directly to the voters if he can't get the state Legislature to pass it. While it is very unlikely voters would approve such a hefty tax increase, they shouldn't be asked to sift through budget decisions. That's what we elect the Legislature and the governor to do. Frankly, if Bustamante did put his plan on the ballot, it should be accompanied by an initiative to reduce the Legislature to a part-time body.

I may have to keep this story handy for when Taylor starts dating. An over-protective father in Germany has allegedly warned off his stepdaughter's new boyfriend with an electro-shocker. But instead of welcoming him to the family, the man allegedly prodded him with the device to show him exactly what he thought of his relationship with his 21-year-old stepdaughter.

How many autistic kids have to be smothered to death while their parents/friends try to 'cure' them before a judge finally starts throwing the book at somebody. I've probably heard half a dozen of these stories over the past 5-6 years, yet the punishment is never severe. Making an example out of somebody here would do two things - properly punish them for killing a child, and bring national attention to the scam that this ridiculous 'procedure' is.

UPDATE: The boy's death has been officially ruled a homicide. The 8-year-old autistic boy who died during a weekend prayer service suffocated after a church elder sat on his chest, police said Monday. The article also mentions they may have difficulty charging the man with a crime because it was a 'religious healing'.

What the hell - Kobe Bryant's accuser got her house broken into. Are there people out there with so much invested in Kobe that they resort to harassing the girl and breaking into her house? Is that what this is all about, are are these just attention-seekers?

Finally, Bush grows some balls and starts freezing the assets of Hamas. How that organization retains any credibility with anyone with half a brain is beyond me.

We are heading to the Ringling Bros. circus tonight. I'll try and post some pictures late tonight or tomorrow.

UPDATE: A few pictures from the circus are here. All in all, it was a pretty lame circus when compared to others I've been to.

Although there doesn't seem to be any progress in getting schools to change their policies, at least there are plenty of articles being written about the horror of zero-tolerance policies. In Palm Beach County last year, it was a felony charge of throwing a deadly missile for a 15-year-old carrying an egg in his pocket on Halloween, and trespassing charges against a 6-year-old for cutting across school property after hours. In Broward County, it was automatic expulsion for a student who found a knife in the seat of his school bus and tried to bring it to the driver's attention.

A recent report by a Washington, D.C.-based civil rights watchdog group goes even further, calling zero tolerance a miserable failure that has replaced the trip to the principal's office with even more frequent trips to jail, pushing a growing class of kids onto a one-way track toward juvenile hall. One of their major findings was that most of the indicents punished under ZT policies are not violence related.

An elementary school in Iowa is forcing kids to eat in total silence. The school did this because of 'problems' with too much talking and not enough eating."I don't like it," said Max Arnett, 10. "I don't know why, but for some reason I just have a lot of things to say at lunch. It's the only part of the day when I get to talk."

Heard a story on the radio today about a female prison guard who was fired after posing nude for "off-duty conduct unbecoming a correctional officer". Not suprisingly, she's suing the prison to get her job back. Amazingly, some of the photos can still be found at Burning Angel.

UPDATE: Now a male police officer is on the verge of getting in trouble for appearing on Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. Jeez, we need a little more Tyler Durden in this world: You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

Roosh managed to pull off his Flash Mob in DC - they had about 100 people converge on a Books-A-Million store. Follow the links for pictures of it all.

What looks to be the most explicitly violent movie I've ever seen - Ichi The Killer. Is this thing for real?

The planned lawsuit against the gay high school in NYC is now official. But according to some legal experts, separating students based on sexual orientation is legal. Steven Goldberg, a professor of education law at Arcadia University, said that a state government's obligation to provide a public education doesn't prohibit it from implementing group-specific education. "Because blacks are protected under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, to single black students out — even for their own benefit — is clearly unconstitutional," Goldberg said. On the other hand, Goldberg said, separating gay students can be legally justified in the same way that special-education classes, gifted classes and before-school prayer groups are justified. "Ironically, because [gays] don’t have equal protection under the Constitution, there's nothing wrong [with] segregating them legally, particularly if they're doing it voluntarily," Goldberg said.

If that is correct under existing law - you can segregate gays but not blacks - I'd expect that law will get changed as a result of this lawsuit.

Another unfunny attempt to poke fun at The Right. First, we had Steve Martin on WMDs, and now Paul Newman goes after Fox News.

Unreliable sources report that the Fox suit has inspired Paul Newman, the actor, to file a similar suit in federal court against the Department of Housing and Urban Development, commonly called HUD. Mr. Newman claims piracy of personality and copycat infringement.

Whats the point of these celebrity articles poking their noses into politics? Both tried to be funny, or at least ironic, and by my tastes - both failed miserably. The Fox News situation ought to be an easy set up for someone wanting to make fun of the, but Newman fails horribly. I thought Steve Martin's was bad, but Newman's is by far the worse written piece.

Do any of you find these two pieces funny, ironic or insightful? Should the NY Times be in the business of printing just about anything that a celeb writes to them?

This is just flat-out the most disturbing elevator story I've ever heard. Hitoshi Nikaidoh, 35, was stepping into a second-floor elevator at Christus St. Joseph Hospital Saturday morning when the doors suddenly closed, pinning his shoulders. His head was severed when the elevator car moved upward.

There was actually somebody in the elevator while this all happened, and they ended up being stuck in the elevator for 20 minutes with the severed head. I'm guessing she may need some therapy.

I'm home again after a weekend of golf back home in Hays. I played in a member-guest tournament with my Dad over the weekend in some of the worst golfing conditions I've seen in a few years. Hot as hell, and 40+mph winds both days on a course that has zero protection - its flat with very few trees. Postings will resume this evening.

And all this time, I thought the penis was a semen delivery system. Scientists now think that men's penises are shaped the way they are to remove the semen of rival lovers from women's vaginas. Tests led a team of US researchers, headed by Professor Gordon Gallup, to conclude that the penis acts as a "semen displacement device" and its shape has evolved in part to displace another man's semen.

Is/Was it real common for people to have sex with a girl while another man's semen was still inside of her? That seems to be a necessary situation for this theory to be true - otherwise, how do you go about removing semen that is gone or dried up or absorbed?

At least there is an alternative view in the article: "The research might very well be accurate, but I'm not convinced that just because the penis does something like this it was necessarily designed to have that effect." Dr Colm O'Mahony, chairman of the UK Association for Genito-Urinary Medicine, said the theory seemed flawed. "If the man continues to thrust after ejaculation he would simply be scooping out his own semen.

Is it really so difficult to find your toilet in the middle of the night that you need a motion sensitive nightlight mounted to the seat to guide you in?

Despite what she says, Arianna Huffington's record of not paying much in taxes despite being very weatlhy is going to ruin her campaign in California. She cannot reasonably rail against businesses and individual "fat cats" who fail to shoulder a fair share of taxes, when she lives in a 7 million dollar house and has paid no individual state income tax and just $771 in federal taxes during the last two years.

In an interview Wednesday, Huffington said there was no inconsistency between her campaign message and income tax record. She characterized her deductions as "very conservative" and said that any comparison between her and those whom she has criticized would be unfair. "There isn't any loophole here. There isn't any dodging here," she said. "This is basically putting your income against your expenses."

Right Arianna. When its your taxes, you aren't using loopholes - its everybody else thats abusing the tax system.

Kevin Smith is going to be making a prequel to Fletch. FLETCH was announced what seems like many moons ago but had reached a stand still because Smith was fighting for friend Jason Lee to star. Miramax head Harvey Weinstein didn't feel Lee was a big enough star to carry such a film and the dispute was never resolved...until now. Smith released a shortlist of candidates he's looking at for the role of Fletch which include Ben Affleck (surprise), Will Smith, Brad Pitt, Adam Sandler and Jimmy Fallon. The model for FLETCH WON is said to be the Steven Soderbergh adaptation of Elmore Leonard's OUT OF SIGHT.

Depending on who gets the lead role from that list, it might have a chance at being very funny - Ben Affleck would be horrible.

Maureen Dowd talks a bit about weblogs in her latest column. Her focus is on how politicians have begun to 'overrun' the traditional little guy blogs. I think thats over-stating the influence of politicians blogs, most of which are forced journals - and likely temporary - that simply attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the medium during the campaign. Once the campaign is over, you'll see the politicians blogs go away.

How Dowd ends her column was a shock to me though: Even former candidates are weighing in. Gary Hart, who began his blog in March, doesn't bother to read other digital diarists. "If you're James Joyce," he said slyly, "you don't read other authors." Now there's a man with a future in blogging.

More like a past in blogging. Gary Hart hasn't updated his 'blog' since July 20th. In all of June and July, he had 6 posting. Six. I hate to break it to Ms. Dowd, but 6 postings over 70+ days does not a blog make - its an online editorial column.

New way to cool athletes down. The new device works like this: The palm of the hand, a natural radiator point, is placed over a water-cooled steel plate inside a vacuum chamber. The suction then draws the warm blood from the body's core out to the palm, where the plate cools it. The cooler blood then recirculates to the body's core.

I need one of these bad boys for after I mow the lawn.

Daniel Pipes is going to get a recess appointment to the U.S. Institute of Peace because his nomination is stalled in the Senate (aren't they all?). Pipes isn't the most politically correct guy out there (which is a large reason he's opposed by many), but I think he'll be very valuable to the Institute.

Looks to me like PKWare and WinZip are coding themselves right out of business. PK added some security to their ZIP format, and WinZip followed with their own security - but now the ZIP files created by one format aren't compatible with the other. Both programs use the basic .zip file extension to designate both secure and standard files. The upshot? People who receive a file with .zip now won't know until they try to open it whether it's one of three types: a secure file accessible only through PKWare's software; a secure file accessible only through WinZip; or a standard Zip file that can be accessed by any compression utility.

Near as I can tell, one of a few things is going to happen.
1. People will start using the more secure versions - and incompatibilites will bring the usage of ZIP files to a halt.
2. Everyone will ignore the security components because of the incompatibilities, and PK and WinZip will have spent alot of time and money developing stuff that people can't/won't use.
3.Microsoft will jump into the game even further (XP has compression utilities) and simply make a 3rd party compression utility unnecessary.

I think 3 is the most likely, and this compatibility war is probably just the open door that Microsoft needed to get into this market without being labeled monopolistic again.

Probably the most stupid statement I'll read all day: Arianna Huffington: Everyone knows that the majority of Californians are upset with Davis because he' s too conservative.

How far to the left on the wacko-scale is Arianna? I've never paid much attention to her, but thought she was a former conservative who's morphed into a 'progressive' and I assumed she was somewhat centrist - but now I'm not so sure.

If you live in the D.C. area, Roosh is organizing a Flash Mob for no later than August 24th. Send him an email (addy is on the linked page) if you are interested.

How and why the Iraq army was crushed by the US military.

"Professional soldiers can't fight without orders and inspiration from their leaders," he said. "But we had clowns for leaders. This is our tragedy." Faik said soldiers used to hear Hussein say in speeches: "Saddam is Iraq and Iraq is Saddam." So in the end, he said, "when the time came to fight for this guy who sends us unprepared to fight a superior American military, no one was willing to die for Saddam."

The whole article is pretty interesting, and details one soldier's disdain at his life now that he can no longer be a soldier.

Paul Krugman is in a bad spot. As a highly political guy, he has to dabble in a whole bunch of dirty areas - throwing around smears and smirks at those he disagree's with. Thats pretty par for the course when it comes to political commentary. The problem for Krugman is that as an economist, he's dealing with numbers. Numbers that many times, don't differ depending on what your political alignment is. So, as he continues to make mathematical errors (here's the previous one I mentioned) - all of which bolster his position - he gets made a fool of when they get pointed out. Here's the latest:

When is the "newspaper of record" going to run a correction of Paul Krugman's egregious mathematical error in which he claimed, in his August 1 column, that growth in real per capita California state spending from $1,950 in 1990 to $2,211 in 2003 was "only 10%," when anyone with a pocket calculator can tell that it is really 13.4 percent? And when will it correct Krugman's flatly deceptive claim that this growth "was simply a matter of keeping up with the population and inflation," when calculations of real per capita growth, by definition, already take those factors into account?

Random House has released a 6 minute audio preview of Chuck Palahniuk's latest book - Diary. I'm not sure if the audio preview is simply a spoken version of the excerpt available on the official site as I haven't listened to it just yet.

UPDATE: Just had a listen, and the audio excerpt is the same (doesn't start at the same point, but still the same) as whats available in text on the official site.

The 1st chink in the armour of the NAACP? Or just an angry cast-off? Probably the latter. I don't expect the NAACP to go away or to become less powerful anytime in the near future - regardless of how bad this story turns out to be for them. They have already been relegated to a very minor national role thru their own doing.

"There was a time when the NAACP was truly viewed as being non-partisan," he said. "They have become a totally ideological vehicle. They have gone from being the grandfather of the civil rights revolution to a political operation and a wing of the Democratic Party."

Not many folks would dispute that statement. I suppose it happens to every group that achieves at least some form of success with their original mission (NOW comes to mind also) - whereby after achieving at least a portion of their main goals, they lose focus and drift off into oblivion as they begin to pick at smaller and less significant 'gains' until they over-reach and become entirely irrelevant. Both NOW and the NAACP are somewhere down that path - how far is arguable, but they definately don't have the importance or the purpose that their founders had.

Attitudes like this from NAACP members don't help: Our strength is in the pack," said Mississippi Democratic Rep. Tom Wallace. "I don't think it's healthy for a bunch of us to go out individually. We need to ride with what the group stands for."

Nevermind that you don't agree with the group - get the hell back in line.

Does anybody care to parse this Steve Martin article about WMDs in Iraq? I've got to be reading it incorrectly. After reading it twice, it appears that he's writing it as if he were GW Bush, but I'm still not positive. And even if that were the case, the article is neither funny nor informative - it has no apparent point.

Why is MC Hammer reading scripture at Patrick Dennehy's wake? You can't just go and throw that tidbit into a news story without explaining why he's involved. Is MC Hammer now a minister? Did Dennehy have all his CDs? Does he have a connection to Baylor U? Somebody fill me in here.

UPDATE: OK, MC Hammer is indeed a minister and he preached at a San Jose church that Dennehy attended when he was back home from school.

So, now that there are some serious candidates for CA governor, I gotta believe that increases the chances that Grey Davis actually gets recalled. But, whats the chance that if his poll numbers are looking horrible two weeks prior to the recall election - and Schwarzenegger's (Republican) are looking good - that Davis simply resigns his post thereby turning power over to the Democrat Lt Governor and effectively 'cancelling' the recall election?

Thats cheeseball politics, but given what we saw from the Dems in the New Jersey and Minnesota Senate races last year - I think this kind of strategy would be pretty high up on their list.

Al Sharpton doesn't like the media coverage (or lack thereof) that he's getting as he tries to run for president - and he blames it on racist news reporters. Not a huge shocker there. Sharpton has pretty much claimed racism everytime he's been disagreed with over the years.

Remember Mike Hawash? He just pled guilty to aiding the Taliban and is going to testify against all his pals that he attempted to travel to Afghanistan with after Sept 11, 2001. From the 'Free Mike' site: Mike is being targeted because he is a Muslim. The Justice Department has organized a smear campaign to portray him as a radical. Sounds like the Justice Department was accurate.

UPDATE: Hah! The Free Mick Hawash site has been updated with this statement: Aug 6: Mike pled guilty today to one count of his three-count indictment. He admitted attempting to enter Afghanistan with members of the "Portland 6".

Nice spin - except its not a crime to 'enter Afghanistan'. Here's what Hawash actually pled to: to join a group of individuals who planned to travel from Portland, Oregon, to Afghanistan to assist the Taliban in fighting against the armed forces of the United States of America.

No suprise here - a slew of organizations are going to sue NYC to stop the opening of the Harvey Milk 'Gay Highschool'. Public funding should not be used to segregate kids," said state Sen. Ruben Diaz (D-Bronx). Diaz, president of the New York Hispanic Clergy Association, said the association was working with New York State Conservative Party Chairman Mike Long on the lawsuit.

I hope the lawsuit prevails (but I doubt it will) because I can't see how we go back to separate but equal - even if its voluntarily separate. Hell, here in Wichita, we still have to bus kids around to have properly integrated schools. If given the chance, what do you think those kids would choose - spending 90 minutes on a bus every day, or going to a school that was less integrated?

I hope that this lawsuit goes after the City using the Equal Protection clause of the 14th amendment. Giving gays a choice in schools that doesn't exist for other 'classes' of kids seems a blatent violation.

And didn't the Supreme Court just decide that there is a compelling state interest in promoting diversity? Yet NYC wants to make their schools less diverse. Or, is only some kinds of diversity protected by the constitution. Somehow I doubt it.

Also troubling is Mayor Bloomberg's rationale for having the separate school for gays: "It lets them get an education without having to worry. It solves a discipline problem."

So any group of kids that gets picked on can have their own school? I doubt it. And what of the gay kids that decide they don't want to go to the special school? How long till some anti-gay school administrator decides that even having a few gays at his school is still causing discipline problems - and tries to get the gay kids transferred? How would that not be acceptable? Its for the safety of the gay kid after all. What an utterly horrible idea.

The AFL-CIO ought to be ashamed of itself. In supporting Grey Davis (which is fine by me), they had this to say: "We are united against the recall of Gov. Davis and urge all potential Democratic candidates to stay off the recall ballot and join with us in support of the governor," said a three-paragraph letter sent to Democrats in Congress and the state Legislature, as well as statewide elected officials. "United we will defeat this ultraconservative coup attempt."

Coup attempt. Here's the definition of coup: (Politics), a sudden, decisive exercise of power whereby the existing government is subverted without the consent of the people; an unexpected measure of state, more or less violent; a stroke of policy ... a sudden and decisive change of government illegally or by force

Over-reaching with either the terms you use or the comparisons you make does nothing to bolster your position. You quickly start to sound like the boy who cried wolf, and sooner or later - everyone will catch on.

Lots of golf news today. A grand jury has indictedJohn Daly's wife and father-in-law for money laundering in connection with an illegal drug and gambling operation. So far, the feds are saying John himself didn't know what was going on - but honestly I doubt that. John has had a gambling problem for years and has battled off and on with drugs & alcohol. I hope for Daly's sake that he truly is ignorant of what his wife was doing.

Um, it ain't television that made Tiger Woods the NY Yankees of golf - it was winning. The obligation to show every shot in every tournament he enters, no matter how he plays, is obvious. Woods is the most popular advertising pitch man in the world.

Oh, its obvious all right, but being a pitch man has little to do with it. Its, again, about winning. Tiger's finishes this year: 1, 5, 1, 1, 11, 15, 4, 20, 13, 1, 4, 2. How exactly are the networks supposed to go about covering a golf tournament without including a heavy dose of Tiger. He's either winning or close to winning every single event he enters. Oh, and about half of the events that he didn't win this year - he was the defending champion from last year. He's unavoidable because he's so dominant.

This is just wrong. Man jailed for killing guinea pig he thought was a spy. Police arrested Zavala in September 2001 after a neighbour reported he had hit the guinea pig with a screwdriver and had cut it open and ripped out its teeth.

After dissecting the animal, he called relatives and said, "The good news is guinea bleeds. The bad news is guinea's dead," Connors told jurors during the trial.

Zavala told the neighbour he thought the pet's teeth were bar-coded and that there was a camera in the animal's head.

My daughter's guinea pig doesn't like me very much - he tries to bite me all the time.

After being criticized by nearly everyone for raising taxes, tolls, and banning smoking Mayor Bloomberg finally does something right - something that ought to be adopted everywhere. Rape suspects will be indicted using their DNA profile even when their identity is not known, to get around the statute of limitations on charging people with a crime.

To effectively eliminate the statute of limitations in aging cases, New York will become the first city in the nation to make rape indictments based solely on a DNA profile, before a suspect is even identified, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Monday.

If an an individual is eventually arrested and linked to the crime by DNA evidence, the suspect will go on trial, regardless of how much time has elapsed, Bloomberg said. Under state law, indictments cannot be made in crimes more than 10 years old.

Vernon Robinson is a black Republican trying to win the GOP nomination to run for Congress. There's a little story about his campaign on Fox News that contained quite a nugget of a quote:

"Vernon Robinson is a provocative Republican. Some people may even say that he is a bomb-thrower," said Jack Fleer, a political science professor at Wake Forest University. "He takes positions that are not appealing to large numbers of African-Americans, which might help him appeal to whites, but might also be a problem in terms of whites saying, 'Are you serious?'" Fleer said.

I'm not sure who Fleer was attempting to denigrate with that remark, but I think he covered everyone. White people don't take a black man seriously unless he's a shill for 'black issues'? Is that the point of his statement? How dare that black man have an individual thought! Get back and toe that liberal line or nobody will believe you!

The World Bank is doing its best to end up on the same pile as the United Nations - they are denying loans to Iraq because their current government isn't elected:

In a statement worthy of the French diplomat he apparently aspires to become, World Bank President James Wolfensohn concluded his meeting with the Iraqi Governing Council with the disdainful remark that "a constitution and an elected government would constitute a recognized government, but what do we do in the meantime?"

Whoaaa there, Daddy Warbucks! Hold the sauterne and the foie gras!

I don't recall that Saddam's regime was elected. Or that it governed by a constitution. Yet that terror-state was recognized as legitimate by the world's diplomats and international bankers. Every slithering, interest-bearing one of them.

And now Iraq's interim Governing Council doesn't deserve the level of recognition accorded Saddam Hussein?

This is a double standard of such a disgraceful magnitude that the only appropriate adjective is "European."