J.K. Rowling finishes last Harry Potter book.

Posted by: Ace at 08:01 AM | Comments (22)
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Extra Special Bonus Silly Link! Content warning for this one -- seriously, it's a link to an on-line sex-toy seller.

The sex toy in question is a blue-skinned, triple breasted alein "Area 51 Love Doll," featuring, the box says, "Three Out of This World Love Holes!"

Captain Kirk just wrote to say, "They weren't really 'out of this world,' to be perfectly honest."

Thanks to Casey.

A spoof of Gawker style celebrity sighting submissions, submitted by someone's mom in Spokane.

7:11 p.m. AMC Theatres. My husband and I were there to see Miss Potter, which, I should tell you, was just wonderful. I worry about that Zellweger girl, though, after that awful marriage to that country musician whose father was not Tug McGraw. I think she falls in love too easily, that's what I think. Do you think she does drugs? I don't, but I was just wondering. Also, is she fat or skinny now? She was normal in the movie, but kind of fat-normal. Anyway, she reminds me of my daughter. Well, as we were going in, I saw Paul Stephenson, my daughter's ex-boyfriend from high school, with his wife and new baby, and they were coming out of The Pursuit of Happyness. I hear he's working at an investment firm downtown! He's so handsome.

- - - -

9:45 a.m. At the Starbucks next to Barnes & Noble. Hey, that guy from that movie they're filming downtown is drinking coffee here right now. I can't remember who he is. He seems like a jackass. I don't know why, that's just what I think. Oh, wait, it's not that guy. It's just the kid who works at Blockbuster. I knew he looked familiar. Anyway, he takes cream and sugar in his coffee, if you want to know.

He is kind of a jackass.

Celebutante/professional dirty whore Paris Hilton says the n-word. At 2:45 in the video.

Usually I might object to someone being exiled to the Phantom Zone e for a lapse of the tongue.

Not this time.

Of course, it won't happen. She's bulletproof. I have no idea why, but she is.

Posted by: Ace at 07:48 AM | Comments (25)
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Okay, last time I read this moron he was whining that 24 was too gosh-darn anti-terrorist for his tastes.

So now this whiny jagoff rips into the Sarah Silverman show for being too "shallow."

Ah, spoofing a main character's shallowness. Certainly that's never worked in comedy before. Oh, except for, off the top of my head, that nice Jewish boy Jerry Steingold or whatever his name was. He seemed to have some degree of success with it. Wonder what happened to him?

He doesn't seem to realize why this is funny:

Sarah has been slacking on her couch in Valley Village, trying to find some awesome TV to pass the day with when she clicks onto a 36-hour leukemia telethon: Remember, these are children that are DYING. "Dying like a fox," our Sarah scoffs.

I added in the emphasis, because I've heard her tell similar jokes, and I figure that's how she delivers it.

This idiot calls this Silverman showing off her "attitude." He seems to really believe that Silverman has an "attitude" of superiority over children stricken by cancer, and that she really imagines they've got a really good scam going here.

Um... Do I really need to explain this? She's doing a schtick which might be called "ironic sophomoric," where the joke is that she's imitating a cynical know-it-all sort (such as Slate's Troy Patterson) who thinks she sees what's really going on, but in fact is just retarded. See, she's showing how smart she is, but the actual Silverman knows this is a pretty fucking stupid remark. So do most of us.

Most of us are in on the joke. Most of us, except for amateur webzine Slate's TV critic Troy Patterson.

The whole review is like this -- he thinks Silverman is really being pretty darn serious when she says plainly absurd things. And he doesn't seem to get that one of the biggest areas of comedy is lampooning stupidity, shallowness, and selfishness. Even the stupidity, shallowness, and selfishness of a main character closely patterned on the actual star, and actually having the star's real name. Like, what was that guy's name again? Jerry Steinhof, or whatever. Show ran a couple of seasons; I've forgotten what it's called.

Which is all to say that The Sarah Silverman Program isn't about anything but its own supposed daring and the hyperbolic smugness of its star. When Larry David makes himself look like a non-PC jerk on Curb Your Enthusiasm, there's a richness that springs from his sense of wonder at the subtle discomfort and anxieties surrounding social taboos. Silverman is so intent on delivering attitude that she doesn't care whether the jokes have any weight. "I can't even imagine what it would be like to be homeless," the Sarah character says to a neighborhood bum at one point, her delivery whiny and slack. "High school is the closest thing I can imagine to that. Y'know, 'cause it's cliquey." Read that again. What's the target? It only hammers away at Sarah's own famous self-absorption, which is more like self-immersion. You can't accuse Sarah Silverman of being annoying: That's her whole shtick.

The joke doesn't have any weight? I'm sorry, are we judging comedy according to its weightiness now? When did that memo come down?

And as for the "target" of the joke-- well, idiot, the target is Silverman herself, spoofing her (wildly exaggerated) character of being so out of it and priviliged that she imagines the big problem with homelessness is the fact that it's "clique-y."

Good God, I feel like I'm explaining French kissing to an alien with no mouth.

This joke doesn't sound especially funny, and it's just sort of Silverman's standard throw-away schtick, but whether it's funny or not depends on her delivery, and decidely not whether the "target" of the joke has a "weight" (such as, I'm guessing, a joke about Bush, Cheney, Halliburton, Blackwater, etc., would).

Is this guy completely, utterly useless?

Again: I don't expect much from this show. Comics I like too often have shows that suck. Even though I was a huge fan of Steinfarb, I found his show utterly unwatchable the first two seasons (and did not start watching again until everyone kept quoting "The Bet" episode to me). Norm MacDonald bombed on his show; Dennis Miller bombed on his talk show. Time and time again comics I really dig utterly disappoint me, so I'm not really psyched to watch the Sarah Silverman show.

At least-- I wasn't. If this subretard is that offended by it, though, damnit, she might just have a hit on her hands.

Troy-- a sneering, condescending, superior attitude is what you have.

What Silverman has is a schtick. Something quite different.

And also, talent.

(And also, as she says, "hairy Jew-arms." But it takes talent to pull those off.)

Bonus! The only joke this buffoon liked was one that explicitly reinforced his liberal politics. The joke is actually halfway decent (if, um, kind of old and done a thousand times already), but I am amused again that this guy seems to watch entertainment not for its intrinsic worth but simply for the number of times per minute it flatters his liberal sensibilities.

He must be quite the Margarat Cho fan.

Is that really what Slate is looking for in TV critics? Jackasses who can't evaluate anything artistically but simply make the rather basic evaluation if something skews left or right?

"Dumb" Humor Vs. Dumb Critics: It never fails to astonish me that liberal critics are so idiotic that they believe a show is smart and witty if it features (supposedly) smart and witty characters, but dumb if it features dumb characters. According to this submoronic calculation, Murphy Brown was brilliant because the characters had jobs in the elite media and dropped (strained) references to Charlie Rose and, I don't know, Zbigniew Brzezinski, whereas Beavis and Butt-head was stupid.

Um, au contraire. Beavis and Butt-head was briliantly written, and Mike Judge is a genius; Murphy Brown was low-middlebrow reference-pornography.

Critics fell over themselves to call Dumb and Dumber stupid, despite the fact that it was a very clever and very funny movie. (Also written by geniuses.)

Critics only cottoned to Mike Judge when he made Office Space, which featured average to above-average intelligence characters, and the same for the Farelly Brothers, with Something About Mary.

But -- especially in the case of Dumb and Dumber and SAM -- the same basic style of humor and similar jokes were working in both movies. Same guys behind them. But the only thing the moronic critics saw was that Dumb and Dumber featured dumb characters, so it was beneath critics' elevated sensibilities, and Something About Mary had an orthopedic surgeon in the title role, so, gee, that must be something worth praising.

How idiotic.

If TV is a vast wasteland, talk about TV or movie criticism. That's the absolute abyss.

Posted by: Ace at 07:10 PM | Comments (67)
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Sobek Pundit runs down the cases Mary Beth Buchanan has prosecuted and finds there aren't a lot of drug posecutions, contra Boo Radley.

Boo Radley objects that this listing doesn't examine the plea-bargained cases, which is a fair point, but neither has Boo Radley offered to tally up all the plea bargain drug cases to prove his point, either. He basically says, here's a link, there's a few of them there, do your own math. And, of course, plea bargains take a relatively low level of a prosecutor's time; jury trials take up much more time. So if we're just assessing how many hours are devoted to drug cases and how many are devoted to "important" cases, I'm not sure that simply noting there have been a great number of caught-dead-to-rights, so-there's-really-no-reason-for-the-defendant-to-insist-on-a-trial plea bargains really advances this argument all that much.

One point I'd like to make is that libertarians have not yet succeeded in convincing the public to legalize pot and other drugs through normal political, legislative channels.

Having failed in this endeavor, they seek victory by goading prosecutors and judges to simply not prosecute or punish drug offenders. They seem to have this idea that, even though drugs remain illegal, prosecutors and judges ought to act as if the libertarian position on drugs has carried the day and sort of treat drug laws like antiquated vestiges from the eighteenth century, like laws against adultery and sodomy, and treat them as no longer binding law.

Well -- no. They remain the law of the land and it's just juvenile for the pot-crazed hopheads to keep insisting, over and over, that while as a nation we've agreed to keep the prohibition on narcotics in effect, our jurisprudential betters ought to save us from our stupidity and de facto repeal all these laws.

Instapundit used to do this on occasion -- oh dear Lord, another big federal effort to stamp out Ecstacy, don't we have a war to fight? As if there's a list of crimes we should and shouldn''t be taking seriously anymore that we all agree on.

Actually, we do have such a thing; it's called the US Criminal Code, plus the various criminal codes of the 50 states. And we tend to take most of the crimes on those lists seriously, with a few exceptions.

If the glue-huffing amyl-nitrate crackies want to take drug laws off those lists, well, have at it.

But it's just annoying for these guys to continue whining every three weeks that even though they've (as of yet) lost the political battle we should just pretend they won, because, you know, it's kinda hard to pursue a legislative agenda when you're all amped up on crystal meth and sweat is pouring out of your eyeballs from the nine tabs of acid you just dropped while injecting distilled gila-monster venom directly into your testicles. Real buzzkill, you know?

Who the fuck took my mallomars? I swear to God I'm going to dose the bastard who took my goddamned mallomars.

Oh -- and? The constant reefer madness jokes? Are, in fact, jokes. (Mostly. As Jack M. says -- "I went to college." As most of us did, and yeah, we can't help shake the memory that most of the guys really into this thing called "libertarianism" tended to be the same guys who really liked their weed.)

But either way: lighten up, fellers. You're always selling yourselves as the hip, cool alternative to judgmental, dour conservatism; you could try acting like it once in a while.

And Yes... I know the name is "Radly Balko." Or something like that. I didn't know the exact name or spelling so I went with Boo Radley.

Just joking. Don't freak out and tell me you've never once been a major character in a beloved Southern Gothic novel before.

Okay... That was unncessary. Balko keeps saying he doesn't smoke pot, which is a perfectly justified statement, given that the implication made is that he's personally invested in getting the drug laws repealed. A lot of pro-legalization guys don't do drugs; Penn Gilette is fond of bragging he's never had a puff of a cigarette, a gulp of coffee, or a sip of alcohol in his life.

I guess what was coming out there was my general annoyance with many (not all, of course) libertarians who are very big on this hipper-than-thou, shock-the-straights sort of juvenile attitude. I've just come to regard libertarians as the Madonnas of the right, always showing off their gold-lame torpedo bra and hanging upside down from crosses while feigning fellatio on a prop MX missile reading "RAND CORP." on its side.

Not really something to do with Balko. Just more an annoyance with libertarians generally. We get -- you're really super-cool and shit. You don't have to tell us so every three minutes.

Again-- that really has nothing to do with Balko. Just a standing peeve that saw an opportunity to pet itself and jumped at the opportunity.

Posted by: Ace at 04:10 PM | Comments (80)
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Commenters have been saying they should be locked up just on the basis of this "too bad, we Punk'd the whole city" non-apology.

Of course the left is going ga-ga for them, as these cutting edge guerilla pranksters showed just how uptight and paranoid we are about this whole "terrorism" scam.

Like this asshole:

A follow up to yesterday's "Aqua Teen Hunger Force LED art shuts down Boston" coverage - Two of the artists who put magnetic lights up as part of an ad campaign were arrested, based on the city's current "post 9-11" stance it's likely they will each get the death penalty, or perhaps worse.

CNN sent me an email and I talked to them briefly - a few blinky magnetic signs aren't "hoax devices" and unfortunately what was demonstrated is best summed up by a MAKE reader "...anyone can cripple a city with little or no expense. Real bomb not even needed. All that's necessary is pathetic paranoia."

Hmmm... pathetic paranoia, you say?

Where have I heard that before?

I'm so glad the fascist Muslim jihadis and the "progressive" left are now working off the same talking-points dispatches. Should save them a bundle on printing costs.

Overcharged: As much as I'd like them to do 30 or 60 days in jail for the small-bore crimes they did commit, I'm as skeptical as the judge they were arraigned before about the prosecutor's overcharging:

The two men smiled broadly throughout much of the brief proceeding as Assistant Attorney General John Grossman described the battery-powered characters as "bomb-like devices." The men, Peter Berdovsky, 27, and Sean Stevens, 28, face charges of placing a hoax device in a way that causes panic and disorderly conduct.

...

Judge Paul K. Leary seemed skeptical of the state's case, telling Grossman that the law requires that people must intend to create a panic to be charged with placing hoax devices.

You can't prove intent from resut. Yes, the result was to cause a "panic" (though I'm not sure it was a panic), but it is doubtful in the extreme that was their intent. Even if they had some resin-clogged notion about that -- "Wouldn't it be great if people just wigged out when they saw these?" -- it could never be proven.

Nonetheless, it seems pretty incontrovertible they committed a raft of minor crimes -- trespass, disorderly conduct, whatever other penny-ante stuff you can get them on -- and that, being guilty of those crimes, they should pay a penalty for them.

Sure, prosecutors have discretion in cases. Most of the time such things won't be prosecuted. But that's the point of discretion. You may not be prosecuted for setting off fireworks without a permit, but if you accidentally shoot them into a crowd a blind a child, trust me, you'e going to be charged.

You can't overcharge for crimes that a criminal didn't intend, but, should havoc ensue because of his crimes, you sure can charge and prosecute for the crimes he definitely did commit.

Posted by: Ace at 01:16 PM | Comments (301)
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I'm sure that if they do double into the vicinity of 48,000, Andrew Sullivan will suddenly support it, right? After all, he claims he's always had the specific target of 50,000 new troops in mind -- or is going to quibble over 2000?

Apparently the larger number is closer to the real one, at least according to this story. Bush's "21,500" is the number of pure combat forces, whereas the larger figure -- up to 48,000 -- includes the support troops that of course must be deployed to support primary warfighters.

The howls from the left will be, well, screechy and girlish as usual. Bush lied!

Well, I prefer to look at it as underpromise, overdeliver.

President Bush and his new military chiefs have been saying for nearly a month that they would "surge" an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq, in a last, grand push to quell the violence in Baghdad and in Anbar Province. But a new study by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says the real troop increase could be as high as 48,000 -- more than double the number the President initially said.

That's because the combat units that President Bush wants to send into hostile areas need to be backed up by support troops, "including personnel to staff headquarters, serve as military police, and provide communications, contracting, engineering, intelligence, medical, and other services," the CBO notes:

Over the past few years , DoD's practice has been to deploy a total of about 9,500 personnel per combat brigade to the Iraq theater, including about 4,000 combat troops and about 5,500 supporting troops.

DoD has not yet indicated which support units will be deployed along with the added combat forces, or how many additional troops will be involved. Army and DoD officials have indicated that it will be both possible and desirable to deploy fewer additional support units than historical practice would indicate. CBO expects that, even if the additional brigades required fewer support units than historical practice suggests, those units would still represent a significant additional number of military personnel.

The article notes that the cost of the surge will likewise be higher than currently estimated by most. But then, if these guys beat Al Qaeda, well, you have to look at the massive savings from that too.

By the way -- the CBO's lowball estimate for the total number of troops, assuming below-the-usual minimum of support troops accompanying warfighters, is still 35,000.

Thanks to JackStraw.

Posted by: Ace at 01:01 PM | Comments (25)
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Soy, Part II. Except this actually comes from a real peer-reviewed science journal.

Who are these parents slathering their young boys with lavender, by the way?

Lavender and tea tree oils found in some shampoos, soaps and lotions can temporarily leave boys with enlarged breasts in rare cases, apparently by disrupting their hormonal balance, a preliminary study suggests.

While advising parents to consider the possible risk, several hormone experts emphasized that the problem appears to happen infrequently and clears up when the oils are no longer used. None of those interviewed called for a ban on sales.

The study reported on the condition, gynecomastia, in three boys ages 4, 7 and 10. They all went back to normal when they stopped using skin lotions, hair gel, shampoo or soap with the natural oils.

...

The findings were being reported Thursday in the
New England Journal of Medicine. The federally funded study came out of the University of Colorado and the environmental health branch of the
National Institutes of Health. The findings were first released last year at a science meeting.

The three boys were brought to their doctors with overdeveloped breasts that looked like those of girls in early puberty. They were sore in one case. For each boy, doctors could tie the problem only to their use over several months of the natural-oil products.

The researchers suspected that the oils might be upsetting the boys' hormonal balance. So they did a series of laboratory tests to check how these oils work within human cells. The oils appeared to mimic estrogen and block the male hormone androgen.

...

Marijuana and soy products also have been linked to gynecomastia.

Yeah, but is it the pot or the Double-Stuff Hydroxes that follow?

Dr. Clifford Bloch, a hormone specialist in Greenwood Village, Colo., who treated the three boys, recommended that parents "be cautious" with such products, especially for prolonged use. "I would not give these products to my children," he said in an interview.

Now the big question: Are these oils safe for girls?

Bloch said he also suspects the oil played a role in a handful of young girls he saw for a similar condition, including a 17-month-old whose parents were washing her bottles with a lavender-scented soap.

So, no.

But I have a feeling a lot of guys are going to be giving their wives Lavender Extravaganza gift-baskets this Vagina Day.

Thanks to Warden.

Posted by: Ace at 12:28 PM | Comments (19)
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I think everyone kind of likes Richter, and so we keep hoping he'll have some success. I liked his old show a lot, partly because it introduced me to Paget Brewster...

...who's kind of like a comic-oriented Sean Young without all that bugfuck-insane baggage. She played his boss/ex-lover. Uh-huh. Hollywood is a fantasy factory after all.

Anyway, Conan O'Brien will be producing. Richter plays a CPA mistaken for a private eye, which is kind of a hack premise, but what isn't?

Thanks to yls.

Sarah Silverman's Show... starts tonight, at 10:30 I think, on Comedy Central.

I'm not expecting much. I get hopes up for, say, the Norm MacDonald show, then it turns out to be just a dumb sitcom with an occasional dose of watered-down Norm.

And Sarah Silverman, I think, has lamented the fact that every show she's on bombs.

Who knows though. Maybe she'll figure out a way to be funny in scripted show.

Thanks to someone.

Since I'm pimping shows, I'll mention the Sandler-produced sitcom Rules of Engagement -- starring Patrick "Puddy" Warburton and David "Finch" Spade -- will be debuting February 12th fifth, or Monday, I think. I hear it's funny.

Posted by: Ace at 12:06 PM | Comments (27)
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No, not that one.

The other one. The one involving a bunch of these guys:

Good DAY, sir!

Thanks to Wuzzadem for that pic, who has a fresh report on Joe "Mr. Clean" Biden.

Posted by: Ace at 11:57 AM | Comments (4)
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Baseball Crank. Who was, just as an aside, one of the first bloggers to link me. I think.

It's long, so you morons won't read it, but you can skim the bullet points.

(Of course, I haven't read it, either. But then again, I don't really need to be sold on him.)

Posted by: Ace at 11:51 AM | Comments (9)
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