This was one great contest. When the call went out, you guys responded in droves, proving once again that you are, hands down, the best bunch of commenters anywhere on the Internet. Thanks a bunch to each confused, unwashed one of you.

Before we start, let's give some credit where credit's due. The original idea came from a post by Levy over at The Daily Gut, so let's acknowledge him.

For anyone who missed them the first time, the two Seagal threads are here and here.

The contest was judged according to standards that made no pretense of either fairness or balance. I disqualified myself, but beyond that the winners were chosen with regard to nothing more than my own capricious whims. I tried to do a top ten, but such was the quality of so many entries that I had to settle for a top thirty-seven or so. And even that number left out a lot of funny stuff.

But enough talking. Let's meet the winners. more...

Posted by: AndrewR at 08:14 AM | Comments (67)
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If you can take the drooling imbecility, yes, she gets completely naked. (I took one for the team to make sure of this.)

She practices what she preaches -- no fur.

Is it worth it? Errrmmm... well, you can't skip ahead, so start playing it, go read something else, and come back. If you're really desperate.

Thanks to Beta Male Prometheus, who finds all this stuff he just can't blog.

Posted by: Ace at 10:42 PM | Comments (123)
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The NYT claimed that 51% of all women were now single. To get to that figure, they had to include 15 year old girls as "women."

And then they portrayed this dubious datum as unambiguously good news. Even the Columbia Journalism Review can see through the silliness:

It had a tone of exuberance that spun the numbers as an unambiguously positive piece of progress for women. A quote from William H. Frey of the Brookings Institute captured the mood of it. The shift away from marriage, Frey said, represents "a clear tipping point, reflecting the culmination of post-1960 trends associated with greater independence and more flexible lifestyles for women."

But America is not a monolith. As much as we would like to persist in thinking that we are a classless and race-blind society, the Times, of all papers -- having run groundbreaking series on both race and class -- should realize that a phenomenon that might bode well for middle-class white women might be absolutely disastrous for poor black women.

Apparently, though, we are the only ones to see it like this. Because apart from a tossed-off paragraph that reminds us that, buried within these statistics, seventy percent of African-American women are single, there is nothing to indicate how the epidemic of single parentage in the black community contributes to this statistic. We imagine -- though aren't told -- that many of these women are raising children alone and being dragged deeper into poverty because of their unmarried status.

Instead the rest of the article is completely about those middle class white women who insist they have chosen to be without ball and chain. We meet Emily Zuzik, a 32-year-old musician and model who lives in the East Village of Manhattan, and Linda Barth, a 56-year-old magazine editor in Houston. We hear about how happy Sheila Jamison, who also lives in the East Village and works for a media company, is and about how Shelley Fidler, a public policy adviser at a law firm, has "sworn off marriage."

As far as we can tell, not only was there no socio-economic diversity among those interviewed for the piece, there was also no racial diversity. These other women, ignored entirely by the Times, might have told a story quite different than Shelley Fidler, who said, "The benefits [of singledom] were completely unforeseen for me. The free time, the amount of time I get to spend with friends, the time I have alone, which I value tremendously, the flexibility in terms of work, travel and cultural events."

Well, of course. Look, the New York Times likes to write endlessly about black women, but it's not writing for them.

Posted by: Ace at 05:18 PM | Comments (73)
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Spizzock in the Hizzle.

Posted by: Ace at 04:14 PM | Comments (15)
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An article by him with a lot of the same jokes.

Posted by: Ace at 04:02 PM | Comments (30)
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A Weather Channel idiot calls for the de-certification of anyone who doesn't promote the "global warming" hype as absolutely, unquestionably true.

This will come as a surprise to those of us who never even suspected that vapid weather-models like Sam Champion had any sort of "certification" at all, except, perhaps, for having "cutting-edge cheekbones."

Melanie Morgan notes the woman's expertise seems to be based on her "earning a bachelor's degree in Near Eastern religions and history from Juniata College. "

Well, that seems egalitarian, doesn't it? We are all Climate Experts of a sort. We can all tell, after all, when it's "cold as shit" and we all know "it's not the heat, it's the humidity."

Doesn't all this "wacky weather" prove global warming?

Well, no, not really. We've always had "wacky weather." It happens. Freak storms may be freak but they're not unprecedented.

The whole "global warming" claim -- the alarmist strong-form of the silly theory -- is that we know, with 100% confidence, that not only is the world getting warmer, but that this additional warmth is not a good thing as some drooling imbeciles may stupidly assume, but a very, very bad thing indeed, because weather patterns will be changed to create "more extreme weather."

More extreme weather. Not just somewhat warmer weather, and certainly not somewhat warmer weather featuring less extreme weather due to temperature amelioration by warm air warming cold areas why cooler air cools warm areas. If global warming resulted in the latter -- a greate range of temperate areas right in the human comfort zone and a right in the happy medium for agriculture -- global warming wouldn't be a calamity, it would be an outright boon.

It's silly to start claiming that one season's weather proves anything either way.

But so long as we're going to stake the claim of "more EXXXTREME weather" on a single season, let's consider this season's EXXXTREME weather.

Not a single hurricane. Some penny-ante tropical storms that just couldn't gather up the necessary cold-air-swirling-with-hot-air prerequisites to go fully cyclical.

The weather in the usually-cold Northeast is unseasonably warm -- and pleasant as you could possibly hope for.

On the other hand, it snowed in Malibu. Is this horrible? Well, I'm sure Malibu doesn't like it. But it's an example of an amelioriation of weather effects, a mixing of cold and warm, so that cold areas get a little warmer and warm areas get a little cooler. Again, I'm sure those in Southern California aren't happy the endless summer ended, but if a few weeks of cold weather in SoCal means a few months of tame winter in the Northeast, I'd say that's a bargain I'm willing to make.

I won't even bother talking about the Midwest. The Midewst always has severe winters and always will. I suppose it's because all that warm air travels north along the oceans (and thus the coasts), only allowing cold arctic air to surge its way across the inland areas. But what do I know. Same thing seems to happen in Eurasia; Western Europe and Japan are temperate, Russia is cold, Siberia is permafrost.

So if we're going to take a single season as "proof" of global warming -- fine. And let's just note that as far as this single-season goes, we have not had more "EXXXTREME" weather, but in fact extremely mild weather.

I'm supposed to be scared that in mid-January Boston I can walk outside with just a sweater and be reasonably comfortable?

I have no link -- perhaps one of you can help -- but some climate scientists say the historical record directly refutes the claims of the strong-form, EXXXTREME weather, we're-all-gonna-die alarmists. That, in fact, periods of rising global temperatures are periods of mild, nicely-distributed weather, whereas it's during periods of falling temperatures that air and ocean-water circulates less and in fact leads to cold areas becoming colder while warm areas become unbearably hot.

Again, I know nothing about this -- almost as little as "Dr." Heidi Cullen, Climate Exxxpert -- but it does seem to me that if the air and water have higher kinetic energy (i.e., are warmer), that would suggest they would have a greater tendency to move and circulate about, creating less severe weather everywhere.

Makes sense. May not be true, but then, I'm not sure how that off-the-cuff theory is any less viable than "warmer air inevitably leads to global weather calamities."

I think all of this crap is just will stabs in the dark, but, look, if you want to go by the "wacky 2007 winter," I say let us have more of these wacky winters.

Global Warming May End The Oceanic Conveyer Belt Cycling Warm Water To The North and Cold Water To The Tropics! Well, sure. Or, you know, it might speed the conveyer belt up, as the fundamental impulse of water is still to flow from warm to cool and cool to warm.

Horrors! Enormous Uninhabitable Areas Will Become Quite Habitable! Due to what I will now begin calling the "Miracle of Global Warming."

The report notes that some areas -- like Alaska and Siberia -- will become fairly pleasant, rising in temperature by 10 degrees C.

But other areas, the report warns ominously, will become uninhabitable.

Now, study claims the entire globe's temperature will rise by FOUR degrees C -- so obviously Alaska and Siberia, according to the report, will get much warmer than the rest of the globe, due to oceanic and atmospheric warming.

That means that other places will get cooler. After all, we need to balace out the ten degree increase in the arctic areas with smaller increases in other areas; the whole deal has to balance out to 4 degrees of increased temperature world-wide.

So which places will become barely warmer, or even a little cooler?

Places like, say, the tropics?

Are the tropics going to become less hospitable to human life by losing a couple of degrees of temperature? Or more hospitable?

Posted by: Ace at 02:40 PM | Comments (116)
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"Lost his temper."

Grabbing a scalpel, he sliced off the penis in front of shocked nursing staff, and then placed it on the operating table where he chopped it into small pieces before storming out of the operating theatre at Bucharest hospital.

I guess so.

Well, that's all very common. But then the story gets strange:

A Romanian court has now awarded Radonescu £20,000 costs – to pay for the operation to rebuild his ruined penis using tissue from his arm – as well as 100,000 pounds in damages.

The medical costs will be paid by the hospital's insurer, but doctors' unions have criticised the decision that the money for the damages has to be paid by the doctor.

They say the move sets a dangerous precedent and that Professor Ciomu, a urologist and lecturer in anatomy, has already been punished enough after having his medical licence suspended.

Yes, we wouldn't want to create such a precedent. Then we'd be on a "slippery slope" of penaling doctors for amputating and mutilating other body parts in a snit.

Posted by: Ace at 01:44 PM | Comments (54)
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No, really. Even the part about balls is sorta true.

Chemicals known to change the sexual characteristics of fish and other animals have been found in West Virginia tributaries of the Potomac River, which runs through Washington, D.C. and surrounding areas, the U.S. Geological Survey said on Wednesday.

An investigation into fish that had both male and female characteristics turned up a range of chemicals including pesticides, flame retardants, and personal-care products, the USGS said.

The Potomac is fed by rivers and streams in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia.

"We analyzed samples of 30 smallmouth bass from six sites, including male and female fish without intersex and male fish with intersex," said Douglas Chambers, a USGS scientist who led the study.

"All samples contained detectable levels of at least one known endocrine-disrupting compound, including samples from fish without intersex."

Endocrine disrupters affect the animals' hormone systems. They can cause birth defects and sexual abnormalities called intersex in species ranging from frogs to alligators and perhaps humans as well.

Thanks to RobG.

Posted by: Ace at 01:42 PM | Comments (19)
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"Scholars" are debating whether or not the letter is an abomination to Islam.

The controversy stems from a Saudi businessman hoping to trademark the word "Explorer." The man lampoons the mullahs in remarks actually printed by the Arabic media, wondering whether or not the the plus sign is also to be banned, "to prevent filthy Christian conspiracies from infiltrating our thoughts, our beliefs, and our feelings."

No, seriously. He said that. Good on him.

Posted by: Ace at 01:38 PM | Comments (32)
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I guess it's something.

Barely something, but something.

FWIW, I thought both were fairly funny and good-natured about an inherently uncomfortable situation. O'Reilly especially since, after all, he was the one being lampooned.

Posted by: Ace at 01:32 PM | Comments (14)
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