The Man Who Loves His Car - Way Too Much and Too Often

So you've met the bow f*cker and the dolphin f*cker - well here's the car f*cker:

A father is stunned as his son confesses that he's in an intimate relationship - "sexually and emotionally" - with a car!

Nathaniel, 27, says the relationship with his 1998 Chevy Monte Carlo named Chase has been going on for five years. The bizarre attraction to cars started during puberty, he says.

He tells his father that he gets his sex fix by "rubbing up against it," adding, "it involves masturbating as well."

A 1998 Chevy Monte Carlo - that's the hawt piece of motor action he wants to settle down with? Well I guess love - even screwed up, freaky, diagnosable love - really is blind.

At this point I'm guessing his dad is just thankful that his son's automotive-lover is a female one. Oh wait.

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Energy Secretary Steven Chu said he thinks the US should be paying the same per gallon as Europeans do. At the time he said that gas in Europe was about $8 per gallon.

Well, it's Halftime In America for gas prices baby!

Average retail gasoline prices in California have risen 18.8 cents per gallon in the past week, averaging $4.01/g yesterday. This compares with the national average that has increased 4.5 cents per gallon in the last week to $3.51/g, according to gasoline price website CaliforniaGasPrices.com.

And it's coming to the rest of the country soon.

The price of unleaded gasoline in the U.S. will likely hit a nationwide average of $4 by this summer, said Dan Dicker, oil trader and author of “Oil’s Endless Bid.” The last time prices topped $4 was 2008 and Dicker said there’s a one in three chance that gas could reach $5 a gallon.

If gas prices do head to those lofty levels, that could put a crimp in the economic recovery as consumers will likely cut down on spending if they have to pay more to fill up their cars.

Just last month, higher gas prices were to blame for an uptick in inflation. And itÂ’s not just consumers who will suffer. Companies facing higher shipping costs may reel in their hiring plans, slowing job growth and putting a crimp into the overall economic recovery.

“This price juggernaut has taken on a life of its own since the Iran/Israeli threat flinging began and [the] boycott/sanctions war continues to ratchet upwards, and it’s been made worse by the big run in stocks since the start of the year,” said Dicker.

Of course Democrats and their stenographers in the media will argue that none of this is Obama's fault. It's all Iran's fault, they say. Now technically, yes, instability caused by Iran is too blame for much of the recent hikes but there were also reasons beyond George W. Bush's control and yet we know he got all the blame back in 2008.

As an aside, Iran's cut in supply and the subsequent hike in crude futures demonstrates the exact opposite of what people who oppose taking action on Iran will claim. One of their big arguments is an attack on Iran will lead to spike in oil prices. Well....Iran just showed it can do that anytime it wants. Imagine how a nuclear armed Iran will be able to control oil prices by simply issuing a nasty press release attacking the Saudis. It's not an either/or proposition. Iran will mess with oil markets, the question is will they have a nuke when they do it.

When the spike really hits and Republicans claim we need more domestic supply the Democrats will say what they always say, "It will take a decade to get more supply online, we need conservation and unicorn power!", remind them if they had listened to us 10 years ago, we'd have more supply coming online right...about...now.

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If you've got something.

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Sources say. more...

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I'm so racist it never even occurred to me that "chink" was a slur against the Chinese!

The ESPN editor fired Sunday for using "chink in the armor" in a headline about Knicks phenom Jeremy Lin said the racial slur never crossed his mind - and he was devastated when he realized his mistake.

"This had nothing to do with me being cute or punny," Anthony Federico told the Daily News.

"I'm so sorry that I offended people. I'm so sorry if I offended Jeremy."

The headline - "Chink in the Armor: Jeremy Lin's 9 Turnovers Cost Knicks in Streak-stopping Loss to Hornets" - appeared on ESPN's mobile website at 2:30 a.m. on Saturday and was removed by 3:05 a.m.

Yeah, I don't believe that. "Chink in the armor" doesn't really make a great deal of sense here. When I think armor I think defense. Lin's errors were committed on offense. Seems an odd expression in that context.

Generally I would say that this is no victory for "us," but rather yet another scalp for the headhunting cannibals of political correctness, but here the writer wasn't speaking on his own time, and didn't appear to just "slip up."

In addition, there have been so many "ha ha, a Chinaman is good at basketball, isn't that funny" jokes -- far more of them made privately than have made it on to the airwaves or website headlines -- that it's just impossible to imagine this guy never heard a one of them, and therefore had no idea what the problem was.

He used his employer to make a cruddy joke, and exposed them to embarrassment.

For what? I don't know if he's a "racist" but it seems like he has very poor judgment.

He's also one of those guys who's pretty sure he's super-clever and funny but in fact is a perfect dunce. A dangerous combination -- arrgoance and incompetence. Imagine if we had that kind of a combination in the White House!

If you can't trust the guy -- if you have to babysit him and clear every single thing he writes before allowing it to be published -- he's a lot more trouble than he could possibly be worth.

Representative Judy Chu: The "C-Word" Is Appalling and Just Like the N-word. Now comes the best part of any PC offense story-- people pushing it to score points and advance a particular agenda.

Correction: ESPN, not Sports Illustrated, ran the headline.

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From Newsmax.

Open thread. more...

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Follow 'The Daily DOOM' on Twitter: @AoSHQDOOM.

Today's DOOM is going to be short and sweet, my malenky droogs. I had some pain in the gulliver so had to sleep. I was not awakened when I gave orders for wakening.

This certainly feels DOOM-y to me: marriage has become a luxury good. Charles Murray's book Coming Apart tries to underscore that trend with data and extensive cultural observation. This trend portends a lot of things, few of them good. Single mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor and thus dependent on the welfare state, for one. For another, the whole concept of "fatherhood" is disappearing from a huge swathe of American life. Men are becoming marginalized and devalued, yet at the same time are faulted for being reluctant to enter into an institution -- marriage -- that is so grotesquely weighted against them in terms of risk versus reward. There is cold comfort to be had here, though: no civilization in the history of the world has survived without the nuclear family as the basic building-block. We will revert back to the mean, sooner or later.

The case for dying broke.

In what is sure to come as a shock to absolutely no one, the Greek debt situation is worse than expected. And since everyone expected it to be catastrophically horrible, that tells you all you need to know.

Something's gotta give.

His Majesty's wicked predecessor is to blame for all the ills befalling the kingdom. His Majesty only wishes his long-suffering people to remember that -- the present King wishes only good things for his long-suffering people.

Risk-aversion, monoculture, and the decay of higher education.

A warning from Britain: the illusion of permanency.

Mr. Weston spoke of how Tony Blair and his British Labor Party set out to destroy traditional Britain by encouraging mass immigration to ensure a majority that would vote for the Welfare State in perpetuity. Millions of people from around the world were invited to move to Britain. Pamphlets were distributed in Pakistan, for example, urging locals to move to England and go on welfare. And both of these actions were facilitated and were, fed, in part, by post-colonial British guilt. Today, although a native British citizen cannot marry more than one spouse, the United Kingdom pays welfare costs for immigrants with up to four wives and their children.

$6 trillion worth of fake US bonds seized in Italy. The real ones won't be worth much more than the fakes before long.

If the goal is simply to increase the number of graduate students, this is probably a good idea. Otherwise...not so much.

The shrinking labor-force participation numbers are starting to get wider attention. The government will continue to fudge the numbers to make the unemployment rate look better than it is, but at some point the cheating gets too obvious to miss. more...

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Newt Fanciers Throughout History

Back when Newt Gingrich was enjoying his first burst of popularity (then second, now third?) Mark Steyn made a comment about the rise of the 'Newt-fanciers". Well as soon as I heard the term I could only think of a single name: Gussie Fink-Nottle, the famed newt fancier of PG Wodehouse's Wooster and Jeeves stories.

And it turns out that the Anchoress had the very same thoughts. And needless to say that sent me on a jag of re-reading Wodehouse's stories and books. The Anchoress recommends starting out of order with The Code of the Woosters, but I still think it's better to begin with Right Ho, Jeeves.

Bertie Wooster is of course the intellectually negligible London gentleman bachelor whose gentleman's personal gentleman, Jeeves, is continually getting him out of scrapes and unwanted engagements. And along with them comes a whole collection of wonderful characters including Fink-Nottle the hapless newt fancier, Sir Roderick Spode the wannabe dictator, the fearsome Aunt Agatha, along with <shudder> The Bassett woman to whom Bertie ends up engaged several times.

True confession: I own the complete DVD collection of the BBC Jeeves and Wooster series with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry and whenever I start feeling down about the state of the world (more frequent these days) I throw a random disc into the player and within ten minutes I'm feeling much, much better.

And whenever I read the stories and books I always hear them with Laurie's and Fry's  voices. For stories that are getting close to a hundred years old - other than a few slang terms that have fallen out of  favor - the prose seem remarkably modern. I think Wodehouse purposely had Bertie speak in a super-casual imprecise slangy way to show how unserious and lighthearted he was - but a century later It turns out that we all speak Bertie-style now.

It's hard to find Wodehouse quotes short enough to give you the full flavor but here are a couple to whet the old A.

In Society circles, I believe, my Aunt Agatha has a fairly fruity reputation as a hostess. But then, I take it she doesn't ballyrag her other guests the way she does me. I don't think I can remember a single meal with her since I was a kid of tender years at which she didn't turn the conversation sooner or later to the subject of my frightfulness. Today, she started in on me with the fish.

"Bertie," she said - in part and chattily - "it is young men like you who make the person with the future of the race at heart despair!"

"What-ho!" I said.

"Cursed with too much money, you fritter away in selfish idleness a life which might have been made useful, helpful, and profitable. You do nothing but waste your time on frivolous pleasures. You are simply an anti-social animal, a drone --" She fixed me with a glittering eye. "Bertie, you must marry!"

As a rule, you see, I'm not lugged into family rows. On the occasions when Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps [...] the clan has a tendency to ignore me. It's one of the advantages I get from being a bachelor -- and, according to my nearest and dearest, practically a half-witted bachelor at that. "It's no good trying to get Bertie to take the slightest interest" is more or less the slogan, and I'm bound to say I'm all for it. A quiet life is what I like.

"Beginning with a critique of my own limbs, which she said, justly enough, were nothing to write home about, this girl went on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating asparagus with such acerbity that by the time she had finished the best you could say of Bertram was that, so far as was known, he had never actually committed murder or set fire to an orphan asylum."

'There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, "Do trousers matter?"'
'The mood will pass, sir.'

And if you're not into the whole reading and ciphering this, here are some video clips:

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Hola morans and moranettes! Below the fold is a selection of soon to be released movie trailers worthy of a smart military blog. Embrace them as you would embrace your own children. more...

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It seems our President is in need of a new catch phrase for his 2012 reelection campaign.

Advisers say a fresh slogan to replace the winning "Change we can believe in" mantra of 2008, is unlikely to appear before Obama knows who his Republican opponent will be and starts big campaign travel swings, likely in the spring or summer.

His campaign posters now say simply, "Obama 2012."

But Obama's surrogates have roadtested some slogans in recent months, including "Winning The Future," which the White House used to promote its budget, and "Greater Together," which the campaign has used to brand its youth outreach effort.

I'm sure the Moron Horde can help him out.

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