Firecrotch ?

boyfriend with gasoline and setting him on fire while he was in bed.

The woman, Cynthia Covington, 39, was also burned in the Saturday incident, Fulton County police Cpl. Gary Syblis said.

Bobby Thompson, 50, returned from work to the south Fulton County home the couple shared around 6:30 a.m. and went to bed, police said. For unknown reasons, Covington threw gasoline on him and lit it, Syblis said. Thompson was burned in the crotch, face and arms.

CNN ledes the story as "Woman allegedly sets boyfriend's groin on fire," as that seems to have been the specific target of the attack. The video link is on CNN's home page.

The boyfriend is in stable condition. The woman is in critical condition -- she burned herself much worse than him.

Thanks to jeb.

Posted by: Ace at 10:25 AM | Comments (35)
Post contains 147 words, total size 1 kb.

Four times the legal limit (in many states) of .08.

A 2-month-old girl is expected to be OK despite having a blood-alcohol content that was more than four times the legal limit for adults who drive.

OK? Really? A 2-month-old exposed to what is often a lethal dose of alcohol and it will be "OK"? No brain damage at all? No stunting of brain or body growth?

The baby girl and her mother were dropped off at Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs early Sunday morning by the mother's boyfriend. The man took off and now the Colorado Springs Police Department is searching for him.

The infant was brought in with blood-alcohol level of 0.364, investigators said.
Click here to find out more.

...

The baby's mother is the focus of the criminal investigation. But police said it's been difficult to figure out exactly what happened because the mother is telling conflicting stories.

Oh, well, that would seem to clear her. If she's telling "conflicting stories," who can say what happened?

As Kathleen Carroll of the AP would say -- hey, a lot of crazy shit is going down, why sweat the details?

An emergency room doctor was previously "in shock" that a seventeen-month-old survived a .195 BAC level.

"Not to be comatose at that stage, they maybe would've had to have a tolerance," said Dr. Kerry Broderick with Denver Health.

So imagine what's going on with this poor kid.

Posted by: Ace at 09:01 AM | Comments (115)
Post contains 261 words, total size 2 kb.

This is a link to Flopping Aces, quoting the Times and responding to it, so you can click with a clear conscience.

The international editor of the A.P., John Daniszewski, said in a statement Tuesday that the military’s questioning of the original sourcing on the article was “frankly ludicrous and hints at a certain level of desperation to dispute or suppress the facts of the incident in question.”

Mr. Daniszewski added that A.P. was nonetheless re-reporting the incident, and the agency had sent its reporters back to the Hurriyah neighborhood of Baghdad, where they found several additional witnesses who not only corroborated the original report, but gave exhaustive details of a day of bedlam, for a second article that hit the wires Tuesday afternoon.

The Times does not mention the phantom police captain Jamil Hussein -- at all. It gives the reader no heads-up about a key source who might very well be lying even about his occupation, nor does it mention that the AP seems on very shaky ground here. They've interviewed new (unnamed) witnesses, but can produce no proof Hussein is who he says he is -- and the Iraq Ministry of the Interior says he's not on the payroll.

Check this out, for example:

For bloggers who believe that the media has been drawing false pictures of mayhem in Iraq, the insistence of the American military and Iraqi officials that the burning incident appeared to be a mere rumor was proof that their suspicions were correct.

No, the proof -- or at least strong evidence -- bloggers were correct on this was the fact that Jamil Hussein, AP's star source for its stringer-written story, is not actually a police captain as they claimed.

The Times fails to mention this.

They do seem to attack AP's dare-not-question-us attitude, slightly, but there's no question with whom their loyalties lay. Check out how bloggers are described:

Then there was The Associated Press itself, which by Friday had come to view the continued scrutiny of its article as evidence that everyone — the military, the blogosphere, even other media outlets tracking the back-and-forth — was either agenda-driven, insolent, or both, but not legitimately curious.

...

And so questions lingered and the blogs raged on.

Raged? Do we "rage" more than, say, Paul Krugman? Not a subtle attempt to portray media critics as unhinged cranks, even as they bury the evidence that those unhinged cranks may be right.

The executive editor of The Associated Press, Kathleen Carroll, in a meeting in her office Friday afternoon, explained that the agency had already done all it could to respond to the uncertainties by vigorously re-reporting the article, and suggested that to engage these questions — to continue to write about them — merely fueled a mad blog rabble that would never be satisfied.

"A mad blog rabble"? Now they're going all the way, huh?

And we can be satisfied, very easily -- with one paystub in the name of "Captain Jamil Hussein" from the Iraqi MOI.

He should have dozens and dozens of them. And yet the AP cannot produce one. Why is that?

And finally, the fake-but-accurate salutation. The New York Times suggests here that things are just so batshit crazy in Iraq anyway, what does it matter if the AP is falsely reporting enemy propaganda or not?

Whatever the agenda of the bloggers most interested in debunking the article, it somehow seems important to figure out why this incident — in the face of all the killings in Iraq — remains in such dispute.

The suggestion that there has to be some larger reason to have a concern about accurately-reported news is a strange one to be coming from the New York Times.

Or, perhaps, not so strange at all.

And more on AP's questionable reporter at Flopping Aces.

Posted by: Ace at 08:47 AM | Comments (15)
Post contains 665 words, total size 4 kb.

I don't know if this was truly a "test run" or it was simply an act of provocateurism to re-win Muslims the precious civil liberty to act weird on airplanes without repercussion.

Maybe their weird actions were just misconstrued. It doesn't matter. If they are allowed to get away with this, it would mean that no Muslim acting strangely -- including bona fide hijackers and terrorists -- could ever be questioned or tossed off an airline again. The Muslim Grievance lobby is pressing for the strange proposition that the people we must most closely watch for terrorism must not be watched at all -- or else it's "Islamophobia."

Whether a true test run or not, the outcome is the same -- they are probing airline security to see exactly what will and won't draw attention, and trying to push the boundaries of what they can do on an airplane. Whatever their motives, they are objectively aiding the terrorists.

Good piece, and I'm glad someone said it:

The facts pretty much speak for themselves.

An airline gate agent told the Minneapolis Police Department that six Muslim men began praying very loudly and repeatedly shouting “Allah” as passengers began boarding Flight 300 bound for Phoenix Nov. 20. The six imams refused to sit on their assigned seats, moving around the cabin and arranging themselves in a pattern reminiscent of the Sept. 11, 2001 hijackings. Three asked flight attendants for heavy seat belt extenders, but then didn’t use them to buckle up. Witnesses overheard them talking about al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden.

Such obviously suspicious behavior was deliberately intended to trigger a response from the airline. The motivation became apparent Nov. 28 when members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations held a “pray in” at the U.S. Airways ticket counter at Reagan National Airport to protest the imams’ well-deserved removal from the flight, charging that their civil rights had somehow been violated. CAIR spokeswoman Rabia Ahmed complained that Muslims “have to walk around on eggshells in public” to avoid being “misconstrued as suspicious.”

And Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Falls Church-based Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, called the incident “a gross example of blatant Islamophobia and the violation of the civil rights of Muslim passengers,” characterizing the legitimate concerns of the flight crew and other passengers as “irrational fears.”

That’s obviously bunk and it needs to be debunked right now. The six imams were hardly “walking on eggshells” and their behavior was certainly not “misconstrued” by anybody familiar with what occurred Sept. 11.

...

At a rally in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington a few years back, Bray — a self-proclaimed champion of civil rights — reportedly told protesters, “Let’s all go into jihad, and throw stones at the face of the Jews.” Or maybe we “misconstrued” that, too.

Airlines have the right — and the duty — to protect their passengers. The security protocols established as a direct result of Sept. 11 inconvenience and sometimes even humiliate everybody who flies. If you don’t want to submit to the indignity, stay off airplanes.

And the only way to counter ideological jihad is to speak the truth: U.S. Airways did the right thing by removing these six provocateurs from the plane.

Again, I don't know about the "deliberately intended to provoke a reaction" or the "test run" stuff. I doubt that, at least in the way it seems to read.

But the fact is -- pushing for the right of perfectly innocent Muslims to act strangely and in a coordinated fashion on airplanes, without any check whatsoever, grants the same right to terrorist Muslims. If we're going to profile based on "behavior," then it's the behavior we have to look at. We can't tell the innocent from the vicious through a chemical test. We can only make best guesses based on patterns of behavior.

There is a price that falls on Muslims due to 9/11 -- suspicion, "humiliation," etc. One can sympathize with a Muslim who doesn't like being treated suspiciously just because of his religion.

However, if we don't watch Muslims a little more carefully than we did before 9/11, then we're going to have a price paid -- in human life, and perhaps in the hundreds or even thousands again.

I'm afraid I have trouble comprehending the mindset that says it is preferrable that hundreds die than that a single Musilm suffer so much as the humiliation of an arched eyebrow at an airport security check.

Posted by: Ace at 08:24 AM | Comments (37)
Post contains 767 words, total size 5 kb.

Although I appreciate the candor he offered to the UN, I'm not sure it matters a damn. One thing I never got was Bolton-mania -- if one accepts, as a starting point, that the UN is a fundamentally corrupt and anti-American organization and the best one can hope to get out of it is benign neglect of the world's troubles, what does it really matter that John Bolton, and his moustache, are there cajoling it?

I don't know that it does. I liked his tough manner, but what does it matter, ultimately? Doesn't change how a single country will vote.

Anyway, the Democrats, determined to make the UN the arbiter of US foreign policy, tanked the nomination by filibuster.

Isn't odd how solicitious they are of the opinions of 3/4ths of France, and yet so scornful of the opinion of 1/2 of their fellow Americans?

Posted by: Ace at 08:09 AM | Comments (30)
Post contains 163 words, total size 1 kb.

One size really fits all. Some might have fewer, or, alas, more applications per can, however.

December 4, 2006 Researchers at the German Institute for Condom Consultancy plan to launch a spray-on condom – the Institute is currently conducting tests on a spray can into which the man inserts his penis which is then sprayed with latex from nozzles on all sides. The plan is to make the product ready for use in about five seconds and offer a more effective contraceptive that fits better than standard one-size fits all condoms and hence does not slip. Pre-market trials are underway to demonstrate the new latex condom is evenly spread when sprayed and to optimise the vulcanization process.

"Vulcanization" and "penis inserted into a tube" really ought not be in the same product description.

The company is seeking Condom Testers with a penis length from 9 to 12 cm and 15 to 20 cm.

Apparently no further testing is required for men with penises from 13 cm to 14 cm, so I guess we now know the penis lengths of the men who actually work for the German Institute for Condom Consultancy.

Posted by: Ace at 08:04 AM | Comments (27)
Post contains 201 words, total size 1 kb.

A few weeks ago I posted a story about a guy being arrested for having sex with a deer. A dead deer. A deer carcass. A dearly-departed deer. The charge was for having sex with an animal.

His lawyer argued that an animal carcass was not an "animal" and therefore he could not be prosecuted under the law.

And how did the judge rule?

Victory!

He writes:

...defining animal to include carcasses would lead to absurd results. At what point of decompose [sic] would the carcass cease being an animal? Would picked-over skeletal remains still meet the definition?

Um, I don't find that all that absurd, personally. Your mileage may differ.

As Billy Crystal noted in The Princess Bride (198 , "There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead."

Cute, but I'm not sure how he sees the legal system all but unravelling if the definition of "animal" is taken to include "dead animal."

Thanks to yls.

Posted by: Ace at 08:00 AM | Comments (29)
Post contains 183 words, total size 1 kb.

Since you're talking about it anyway, here's a devoted thread.

How 'bout dem Cowboys. Hmph.

Posted by: LauraW. at 05:54 PM | Comments (81)
Post contains 19 words, total size 1 kb.

My brother's friends built one a while back and we had a great afternoon watching them launch all manner of vegetables into the neighbor's back yard and the street beyond.

That was a hand-held shoulder-harness jobber, with the projectiles propelled by sparking some aerosol hairspray in the chamber.

You wouldn't want to have this one strapped to your hip.
Includes videos. Video 6 shows a 20-ounce bottle of soda punching a hole through a sheet of 3/4" plywood.

Now that's some good, pointless fun (from Drew Curtis' FARK).

And just for the halibut, a cute trunk monkey commercial.
Lots more trunk monkey videos here.

If the guy who came up with that concept isn't a millionaire, there is no justice.

SPUD CANNON UPDATE: Interesting site tip in the comments from Purple Avenger. The page chronicles all sorts of stories about when things go wrong with spud guns.
An excerpt from one testimonial:

Not having hairspray available, I decided to go with the next best thing - Acetylene. I grabbed the torch and without igniting it gave a healthy snort into the combustion chamber. Then another. And another. Then I became concerned about the fuel mix and threw a couple of pumps of Oxygen in there as well. I had the tube aimed at the open door of the shop balanced across the I-beams of our frame-calibrating machine. Not wanting to get too close to the cannon I lit a book of matches and tossed them at the open hole that now had Acetylene/Oxygen fumes leaking from it.

Ever hear a noise so loud it just registers as a loud squeal in your ears? I was thrown 10 feet back, the lid from the can of pigment flew back with enough force to leave a football-sized dent in my toolbox, and my glasses wound up on the roof of the paint-booth. The ball of tape was nowhere to be found, and dust continued to fall from the rafters for 5 minutes.

Posted by: LauraW. at 03:01 PM | Comments (31)
Post contains 340 words, total size 2 kb.

In case you didn't see it over at Hot Air yet.

This is an American Man.

Posted by: LauraW. at 09:36 PM | Comments (33)
Post contains 22 words, total size 1 kb.