She links funny old posts by SobekPundit, John From WuzzaDem, and Dave at Garfield Ridge, and Protein Wisdom. (And me, too, but you've seen that one, probably.)

In a post about his childhood crushes, Garfield Ridge deep-references the old Saturday morning "action" series, Electra Woman and Dyna Girl, which was sort of a less gritty and realisic version of The Mighty Isis.

Wow. That's what I call a callback.

I can still remember the Electra Woman theme, I'm sad to say.

Good stuff.

Go to the top of the blog to see a picture of Tom Cruise in mid-karate-kick looking... not threatening at all. Unless you have a phobia about Muppets.

Posted by: Ace at 09:51 AM | Comments (9)
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Another reason to decriminalize pot.

Is there any way we can get Madonna off of Kaballa and on to weed?

GEORGE Michael's career has gone up in smoke because he would rather puff joints than record new songs, a former musician pal claimed yesterday.

I think they're confusing correlation with causation here. I imagine he's smoking pot because no one listens to his music anymore.

I mean, for crying out loud, he has to wait on hold to get Moby on the line. How the flighty have fallen.

Toby Bourke, who dueted with George on the 1997 single Waltz Away Dreaming, claimed: "Drugs have turned him into a stoned waster and made him depressed. Dope is his poison."

Toby, who says he watched George chain-smoke 20 super-strength skunk joints a day, added: "Dope destroyed his will to work. When you smoke as much as George has done you simply cease to function. Cannabis has wrecked his career. All that dope put paid to it."

George, 42, has not released an album since Patience in March 2004. And he has not done a world tour for 15 years, although one is said to be in the pipeline.

But Toby said: "I don't think you'll see much more work from him. He is basically lazy - and it is all the cannabis he's smoked that has made him like that."

Top Ten [Reposted] Signs That You, George Michael, Should Probably Just Give It Up

10. London tabloids keep referring to you as "The Artist Formerly Known as George Michael"

9. You begin wondering how the dickens Elton John manages to keep that youthful, slender figure of his

8. You pull the old "Do you know who I am?" trick to get a table at Nobu, but are heartbroken when the maitre d' incorrectly identifies you as his high-school driver's ed teacher, "Mr. Gurks"

7. You've sunk so low you're now taking Margaret Cho's phone-calls; you spend all night with her gabbing about Will & Grace and eating Haagen-Dasz

6. Your last record just went Triple Gypsum

5. You've begun saying all those things you once detested older singers for saying, like "the industry has changed" and "kids today don't know what good music is" and "when I move, I slice like a fucking hammer"

4. You now not only share a name with the host of George Michael's Sports Machine, you also share his urologist

3. April 18, 1986: you cashed in on your success to sign a multimillion-dollar deal with Sony Records;
April 18, 2006: you cashed in a frequent-buyer's card at Subway, getting that free three-cheese hoagie you've had your eye on

2. You just can't get arrested in Hollywood anymore, not even in a men's bathroom

...and the Number One Sign You Should Probably Just Give It Up...

1. You're actually excited to get a call from VH-1's Behind the Music, but your heart sinks when you find out they've just confused you with the guy from Tears for Fears

Posted by: Ace at 09:42 AM | Comments (19)
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For example, if it were not for people typing messages on the Internet, public opinion never might have reached the conclusion that the Star Wars prequels were "way ghey" but that Darth Maul's two-bladed lightsaber was "the ROXXOR."

Note the article uses the term "blogger" more loosely to include anyone expressing his opinion on-line. Or, as actual bloggers call them, "civilians."

Bloggers and internet pundits are exerting a "disproportionately large influence" on society, according to a report by a technology research company. Its study suggests that although "active" web users make up only a small proportion of Europe's online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends.

More than half of the internet users on the continent are passive and do not contribute to the web at all, while a further 23% only respond when prompted. But the remainder who do engage with the net - through messageboards, websites and blogs - are helping change the national conversation, say researchers.

"We're seeing this growing," said Julian Smith, an online advertising analyst with Jupiter Research and author of the report. "The strongest part of their influence is on the media: if something online suddenly becomes a story in the local press, then it matters."

I'm not sure whether to feel flattered or frightened.

You morons are setting the debate? Lord help us.

Posted by: Ace at 09:31 AM | Comments (22)
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That headline is second-rate. I really can't improve on NYPost columnist Andrea Peyser's hed:

Subway Jerk Off The Hook

A judge refused to impose a three-month jail sentence on the restauranteur who apparently mistook the R train as a porn-shop buddy booth, and so he's just on probation.

Dan Hoyt is a neat, finicky, remarkably small man with impressively large hands.

Ummm...

...

"I'm a changed man," Hoyt told me, unconvincingly, in the hallway of Manhattan Criminal Court, when I spotted him alongside much larger miscreants. With his painstakingly trimmed beard and ruddy skin, he looked more like a shifty public defender than a sexual deviant.

Has he really changed?

I asked Hoyt an aching question. One that no amount of public humiliation or court-ordered therapy seems to have wrested from his mind: Did your victim secretly want it?

"She may hate me. She may like me and want to go home with me," Hoyt said, to my amazement.

"It's her call." Right.

In fairness, it never hurts to "put it out there" and see what happens.

Until recently, Dan Hoyt was most famous for owning a Village restaurant, Quintessence, in which food is served raw - or is this a metaphor for his life?

Then last year, he got caught masturbating, like a garden-variety pervert, on the R train. In the daytime. He was caught doing it before, in 1994. This time, he chose the wrong woman to give a show. His victim, Thao Nguyen, snapped Hoyt's picture on her camera phone, mid-performance, and posted it on the Internet.

He pleaded guilty to public lewdness, a misdemeanor, in February. In passing sentence, Judge Alexander Jeong noted Hoyt's complete lack of remorse. Hoyt told New York magazine that his victim "would probably want to go out with me."

Hoyt's lawyer, Michael Bachner, insisted that therapy is removing these kinds of thoughts from Hoyt's mind.

Again, I understand where this cat is coming from. I have a whole desk full of restraining orders against me from women whom I pretty damn sure "wanted it."

Ah, the game of romance. A batted eye, a secret smile, a criminal complaint and court-mandated therapy. Women have such odd and indirect manners of letting you know they're interested.

...

Hoyt said nothing during the proceeding. But before court, he continued to paint himself as the victim of vigilante justice, a drum he's long beaten.

"It's actually illegal to take pictures in the subway," he said of his victim's actions.

She violated his privacy, see?

Don't I know it, brother. Don't I know it.

...

Meanwhile, Nguyen, 23, stood outside the courthouse, along with a half-dozen protesters, some of whom have been flashed themselves. They wielded signs that read, "Wash Your Hands Before You Serve Food," and "No Dan, I Wouldn't Date You."

"It doesn't seem like he's learned his lesson," Nguyen said.

It's so obvious she's still trying to get his attention. And so the tango of desire continues.

Related: Shock study shows that men are more satisfied with sex than women.

I, or anyone I've ever dated, could have told them that for free.

Posted by: Ace at 09:22 AM | Comments (16)
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The goofy technopussy finally has discovered a tax he doesn't like: the "war tax."

The anti-war GO star doesn't believe the [Iraq war] is legal, and tells MTV the war is costing Americans $2,379 (GBP1,359) each. He fumes, "A lot of times, when you think of government policies, it seems very abstract and sort of arbitrary, until all of a sudden it's tax time, and you realise that your tax dollars are actually funding what the government does."

This just occurred to him. Before tax time, he imagined the government was being funded by love.

"Apart from that it's the biggest foreign policy disaster in the United States and that thousands of American soldiers are being killed and maimed, the fact that it's coming out of everyone's pocket really just adds insult to injury." Moby suggests that Americans should let the government how they feel by writing 'Not For Iraq' when they pay their taxes.

That ought to do it.

Moby is busy in the studio working on his newest single, a 12" disco remix of last year's largely-ignored dance track, Splitting Atoms... With My Mind.

Last time we bothered to listen to Moby he was declaring that he would do "everything in his power" to make his children gay. Seriously; I'm not making that up.

Posted by: Ace at 09:09 AM | Comments (22)
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Watchers of the show have already seen this, but it was new to me.

Lindsay appears about halfway through this VIDEO CLIP, doing a stint as the new White House Press Secretary, snotty 16 year-old babysitter Brittany Doyle.

Her funny response to Norah O'Donnell's inquiry as to whether the President will replace Donald Rumsfeld:

"The President won't change his opinion about someone because people say bad stuff about him. I mean, if someone said Norah O'Donnell is a slut, I would still be your friend. It's not my business if you're super-slutty."

Hee.

Posted by: LauraW. at 09:02 AM | Comments (10)
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Not sure what the hell to make out of this:

The Pentagon's fringe science arm wants to keep track of potential enemies-of-the-state in every way imaginable: not just by sight, or by sound, or by their e-mail; but by their smell, as well.

Darpa's "Unique Signature Detection Project (formerly known as the Odortype Detection program)" aims to sniff out genetic markers in "human emanations (urine, sweat, etc.)" that "can be used to identify and distinguish specific high-level-of-interest individuals within groups of enemy troops."

"Recent experimental results" show that chemical compounds in a mouse's "urinary" scent produces an "odortype" that's unique to each individual rodent, Darpa observes in its original solicitation for the project. "Although experimental data for humans is far less quantitative," the agency is hoping that a similarly "genetically determined," "exploitable chemosignal" can be found in people, too.

Is anyone buying this?

...

Darpa's smell detector is part of a larger, $15 million-per-year effort to develop "novel sensors" for U.S. troop operating in "urban settings." The goal of the Urban Vision program is "to enable the warfighter to 'see' movers within a building using a variety of fused multi-spectral techniques." The "Enemy Dismount Intrusion Detection program," on the other hand, "will develop a chemical sensor that is capable of providing an advanced warning of the presence of enemy troops or combatants by detecting the chemical emissions... that are common to all humans."

That sounds a little more realistic, I guess, but also a lot less useful. I can't imagine that such a system would be much more effective than, you know, listening.

I wonder if a less ambitious version of the system could just sniff out the chemcials produced when a human is fearful, stressed, or ready to attack -- whatever scents are produced along with adrenaline. That could be useful in airports and military checkpoints and even just randomly sniffing out potential threats.

Of course, usually people behave in a jumpy or worrisome manner when they're nervous or planning to attack, so the human eyes are probably just as good at such a task already as a scent detector would ever be. But then, we carefully instruct our airport security personnel and even cops to studiously ignore any such signs -- hey, such vague signals might just be subconscious racial profiling! -- so maybe a scientifically-determined flashing red light is necessary.

Posted by: Ace at 08:55 AM | Comments (11)
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Is there anything David Hasselhoff can't do?

Hasselhoff believes [Baywatch] is providing feisty female role models to women in the Middle East. He enthuses, "They're sitting there oppressed. They can't vote, can't do anything! "Then they go, 'This is the world! Why can't I go out there.' They pull back their burkas and they've got blonde hair."

I'm not sure how many Persian women have blonde hair, nor why golden locks should necessarily be a sign of courage or confidence.

Of course, fighting tyranny isn't new to David Hasselhoff. Remember, it was a pop song of his that brought down the Berlin wall.

Posted by: Ace at 08:43 AM | Comments (12)
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I'm sure this is somehow Bush's fault. He was governor of neighboring Texas, after all.

Considered felons by the government, these migrants fear detention, rape and robbery. Police and soldiers hunt them down at railroads, bus stations and fleabag hotels. Sometimes they are deported; more often officers simply take their money.

While migrants in the United States have held huge demonstrations in recent weeks, the hundreds of thousands of undocumented Central Americans in Mexico suffer mostly in silence.

But of course they do. As Hollywood taught, reality has followed: the only politically acceptable villain in the world is Caucasian, male, straight, and preferably American. (Jews-- extra bonus points!)

Mexican brutality against Central Americans? Hey, whatever happens in Tijuana, stays in Tijuana. A brown-on-brown crime is not a crime, or at least not one making a fuss about.

And though Mexico demands humane treatment for its citizens who migrate to the U.S., regardless of their legal status, Mexico provides few protections for migrants on its own soil. The issue simply isn't on the country's political agenda, perhaps because migrants make up only 0.5 percent of the population, or about 500,000 people — compared with 12 percent in the United States.

The level of brutality Central American migrants face in Mexico was apparent Monday, when police conducting a raid for undocumented migrants near a rail yard outside Mexico City shot to death a local man, apparently because his dark skin and work clothes made officers think he was a migrant.

By the way: this is an AP article. Just pointing out the incongruous.

Virginia Sanchez, who lives near the railroad tracks that carry Central Americans north to the U.S. border, said such shootings in Tultitlan are common.

"At night, you hear the gunshots, and it's the judiciales (state police) chasing the migrants," she said. "It's not fair to kill these people. It's not fair in the United States and it's not fair here."

Undocumented Central American migrants complain much more about how they are treated by Mexican officials than about authorities on the U.S. side of the border, where migrants may resent being caught but often praise the professionalism of the agents scouring the desert for their trail.

Mexico should drink itself a nice tall cool glass of shut your f'n' piehole juice.

This is nice:

...

Maria Elena Gonzalez, who lives near the tracks, said female migrants often complain about abusive police.

"They force them to strip, supposedly to search them, but the purpose is to sexually abuse them," she said.

Others said they had seen migrants beaten to death by police, their bodies left near the railway tracks to make it look as if they had fallen from a train.

So, there you have it. You have people waving Mexican flags and demanding US voting rights who silently (or more than silently) support a Mexican government that treats migrants as opportunities for robbery, rape, and even murder.

Thanks to Steve.

Posted by: Ace at 05:59 PM | Comments (27)
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This was the Iranian frigate Sahand, destroyed eighteen years ago today by the United States Navy in Operation Praying Mantis, a battle that decisively established the superiority of the Navy in the Persian Gulf. We have been at war, to varying degrees of overtness and intensity, with Iran for a long time now, as Mark Steyn reminded us.

This is merely today's reminder.

(Picture borrowed from here)

Posted by: Harry Callahan at 04:53 PM | Comments (53)
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