Well, so do I. So what?

I know: But Michael Jackson can actually make this happen, whereas I can't.

I don't think so. I think we're both in the same not-enough-money-for-a-50-foot-doppleganger-robot boat.

One of us is simply sane enough to realize that.

Michael Jackson is in discussions about creating a 50-foot robotic replica of himself to roam the Las Vegas desert, according to reports.

The pop legend is currently understood to be living in the city, as he considers making a comeback after 2004's turbulent child sex case.

It has now been claimed that his plans include an elaborate show in Vegas, which would feature the giant Jacko striding around the desert, firing laser beams.

...

Luckman Van Pier, his partner at the company behind the proposal, claims blueprints have been drawn up for the show and seen by the star.

Wow. He's even got blueprints.

"Michael's looked at the sketches and likes them," he told the New York Daily News.

On the subject of the robot, he continued: "It would be in the desert sands. Laser beams would shoot out of it so it would be the first thing people flying in would see."

Well, Vegas is forever trying to sell itself as a "family friendly" vacation destination. Nothing can be more reassuring to parents than to know there's a 50 foot Michael Jackson robot prowling around the city, plying their children with wine and pornography.

I've got to get Yaron from the Daily Lunch in touch with Jacko:

He could make a fortune doodling little robots for the fey freak. Could use it to cover the bandwidth for his new-ish site.

Thanks to Drew, who writes, "It's almost an old story, so I understand if you want to sit on it for a few days until it's officially old."

Hah. Yeah, I saw it on Hot Air. Figured everyone else did. Also figured the odds of this ever happening are about as good as Kramer ever building his apartment into "nothing but levels."

Snark: Tushar--

All the 10 foot Robots in the world are getting uneasy at the news.

Posted by: Ace at 12:39 PM | Comments (19)
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Since I swiped so much of Crichton's speeches, I'll throw in a link to a book he published late last year, Next. It's all about the brave new world of the commercialization of our very biology.

In a Charlie Rose interview (this and other interviews found here, either video or transcript form) he discusses how someone now owns the disease Hepatatis C. Owns it. They analyzed the genetic structure and then applied for a patent on the disease-- and got it. So now they own it, and if you want to do research on it, well, you have to license the disease from the patent-holder.

Now that's weird but he chalks that up to a mistake, a goofy ruling from the patent office, and one that will almost certainly be legislatively corrected (if it hasn't been already).

But this is very, very weird. How can this be legal?

MICHAEL CRICHTON: This is an old story, this is like the first story.

1980, a guy named John Moore; he is a construction worker on the Alaska pipeline. Gets sick. Big physical guy. Starts to lose weight, doesn`t feel good at all. Goes to his doctor, who is from the Seattle area. The doctor says you have a very rare form of leukemia, and the only place for you to get treated is UCLA.

He goes down to UCLA, sees the expert there. The guy says, yes, we`ll treat you. It`s - it`s an almost uniformly fatal illness. Has his spleen removed, has other treatments. Has chemotherapy, radiation. Survives.

A year later, he`s going back for testing. Everything is fine.

Everything is fine. One day, his doctor calls him up and says we need you to come back for further testing. Doesn`t say why. Doesn`t say - just, you know, something doesn`t quite look right. So, now he`s going back more
and more often. And this goes on for a period of years.

He`s concerned -- no one actually tells him that he`s still sick, but he`s worried about it. And each time he goes back, they take more tissue and more biopsies, and he has a few more forms to sign. A few more consents, a few more releases.

Finally, they`re getting pretty thick. Eventually, you know, he says to his doctor, you know, it`s difficult for me to come from Seattle. Can`t I do these tests up here? No, you have to come down here. Finally he says, "Are you doing some commercial thing with these tissues?" The doctor says absolutely not.

The guy turns around and discovers that UCLA has made a cell line of his cells, which have the characteristic of producing a very large quantity of anti-cancer agents.

It's quite true:

His physician, Dr. Golde, quickly realized the medical and commercial potential of Mr. Moore's cells. Repeated withdraw of "blood, blood serum, skin, bone marrow aspirate, and sperm" was performed on Mr. Moore. With his doctor's advice, part of his spleen was also removed.

In 1984, his doctor patented his cell line without Moore's permission. This patent was then sold to Sandoz Laboratories stocks currently worth about 5 million dollars.

Moore did challenge his doctor's appropriation of his cell line, and the California Court of Appeal noted the irony in the fact that Mr. Moore could not own his own tissue, and that the University of California and the biotech companies saw nothing wrong with having the exclusive control of Moore's spleen.

The Supreme Court of California, however, ruled that the doctor was at fault for failing to inform Moore and getting false consent from him. However, the court denied Moore on the issue of conversion, where Moore claimed the UC and the doctor benefited from his property. The court noted that it was detrimental to research if property status was granted to cells and body parts of the patients. The court also awarded Moore a small amount of money.

Here's the patent.

Well, the only part that doesn't seem proven is the bit about the repeated extraction of tissue after he'd been cured, solely for the purpose of mining his body for valuable cells. But definitely this was all going on without informing him.

Posted by: Ace at 12:18 PM | Comments (14)
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The NYT and AP dutifully rehash old allegations. It's just not fair that Giuliani beats the Dems in the polls.

I'll link this pro-McCain blog for the digest.

And because I wanted to link this picture:

Subtle, Palmetto State McCaniacs. Very subtle. I am not reminded even for an instant that Giuliani bunked with a couple of gay guys after his ex-wife had him booted from Gracie Mansion.

That said, I'd run a similar picture of McCain who is, you know, almost certainly a homo.

Giuliani's Wife Will Sit In On Cabinet Meetings, If She Wants: Some people are bothered by this.

I'm not. It's called "pandering," and it's a time-honored method of appealing to voters (say, married women) who might not want to vote for you.

Pretty harmless pandering. Does anyone think Giuliani is so pussy-whipped he'll let his wife become a co-president like Hillary! ?

I don't. After all, he's a queer.

Posted by: Ace at 12:04 PM | Comments (22)
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Justine Levine at Patterico states what he does and doesn't believe about "global warming, and links to a terrific Crichton speech on the subject. It's old, yeah, but awesome. I've linked one of these before; one was new to me.

Some of his links are here, and pretty much the only way to punctuate these is with his final "That just happened!" clip from Talledega Nights.

Links and some excerpts under the fold. more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:27 AM | Comments (60)
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Posted by: Ace at 10:50 AM | Comments (29)
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The trespasser was a woman. And she broke in and masturbated in front of fraternity brothers for half an hour.

BumperStickerist notes,

I'm surprised a Lacrosse game didn't break out.

Damnit, I was trying to think of a joke along those lines. Nice.

Anyway:

Police have been unable to locate a woman who entered the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity house without permission on Thursday and began to masturbate on a couch.

While fraternity members were eating in the dining room, a woman entered the house's living room, took off her clothes and started masturbating, said LSA junior Dan Nye, the president of the Washtenaw Avenue fraternity.

No one saw the woman enter the house or knew how she got in. Nye said she could have entered through the front door, which was left propped open while it was being repaired.

Fraternity members asked the woman to leave the house, but she refused and continued masturbating for about half an hour, Nye said.

That's about how long I'd give her, I guess.

...

She walked out of the front door wearing only a thigh-length black coat after a fraternity member called the police, Nye said. When police arrived minutes later, the woman had already left.

According to a police report, the woman was between 20 and 30 years old, had short brown hair and appeared to be under the influence of drugs.

"Obviously, she was very disturbed," Nye said. "It was not how a normal person would respond to people."

But in a better world than this...

...

Fraternity members said they will throw out two couches in the living room because of the incident, Nye said

Two couches? Nice. I'm going to start rating women according to the number of couches I'll have to discard after thinking of them.

Salma Hayek? There's a four-coucher right there. Used to be a five-coucher, but time catches up with all of us.

How ugly do you have to be to show up wearing only a short jacket, begin masturbating all over a frat house, and yet still get asked to leave?

Supposedly this is a picture of the woman (Light Content Warning: Contains text-ads for porn-sites at the top) not sure if it is, but it matches the description in the article.

I'm not sure that's ugly enough to warrant this disturbing lack of gallantry. And these guys demanded she leave? What's become of our youth?

No, seriously, the woman was obviously disturbed, and I think these guys did the right thing.

After a half hour of watching her, of course. But that's still pretty heroic.

Thanks to Ken.

Posted by: Ace at 10:48 AM | Comments (54)
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Elliot Stein is a great fat lunatic who got into an internet feud with Cathy Seipp and her daughter. That in itself is understandable -- people feud on the internet -- but what turned him into a new internet verb ("to stein," meaning "to behave in such a way that Deborah Frisch says, 'Oh, that's just over the line'") was his choice to continue the feud by spoofing Cathy Seipp's final hours before death.

Just hours before her death, "Cathy Seipp" suddenly seemed to undo decades of hard work with an oddly written letter posted on the Web site, www. cathyseipp.com. In what came off as more bizarre rant than heartfelt apology, her supposed "very last blog entry" called her years of journalism a "shoddy," "despicable" and "irresponsible" career as a "fourth-rate hack." Her political stance? All a mistake...

Friends were horrified. They quickly realized that the letter was the work of an infamous character known as "Troll Dolls" who'd positioned himself as the blogger's archenemy and bought the domain name www.cathyseipp.com years earlier (Seipp's real Web site is www.cathyseipp.net). Troll Dolls is really Eliot Stein, a 54-year-old former online talk-show host and stand-up comedian who had taught Maia in a journalism class for a brief period in 2004, and who blamed Maia and Seipp for his departure from the school after only five weeks...

"He's a genuinely weird dude [who wrote] a rambling, odd, mean, totally cruel series of posts... designed to trick well-wishers, as Cathy lay dying, into reading a torrent of rage and bitterness against her," Rob Long, an L.A. television writer and longtime friend of Seipp's, wrote in an e-mail. "Just immensely cruel. It was easy to ignore when she was alive, but as she died it became intolerable - thousands and thousands of people wanted to reach out to Cathy and her family in the days surrounding her death, and this guy tricked, perverted and deeply hurt them. And for what? A years-old grudge?"

He says:

“I’ve got an incredible sense of humor,” Stein said. “I’m an expert at Photoshop.”

The first is obvious. The second is debatable.

Were he an expert at Photoshop, he might have added something big in the background to create the illusion of slenderizing him. Like, I don't know, the Duchy of Luxembourg.

Well now comes the inevitable, quite necessary Elliot Smith parody blog.

I've been feeling pretty low today, so I did something to cheer myself up. I heard the ice cream man coming up the street, and it's like 90 degrees today, so I thought, "what an opportunity!"

I put on my underwear, grabbed $400 in cash, and went outside. There were at least twenty kids gathering on the hot sidewalk, eagerly waiting to cool off with some refreshing ice cream treats. So, when the truck pulled up, I pushed my way to the front of the line and bought every single item the guy had, then paid the guy two hundred-fifty dollars if he'd promise to not sell ice cream to any of the kids in my neighborhood from now on; only to me. Then I slapped the two nearest kids in the face and told them all to get fucked, and then went inside and took a nap. I feel better now.

Now that's the work of an incredible sense of humor.

Amy Alkon may or may not have something to do with this.

Thanks to PaulM.

BTW, CathySeipp.com was apparently pulled down by Smith's internet service provider on cybersquatting grounds. I'm almost certain I read this on Patterico, but I can't seem to find the post even after looking three times.

Posted by: Ace at 10:12 AM | Comments (20)
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First I thought this was a fakey internet thing, then I realized it was too professional looking to be fake.

Awesome. Reagan is "the ultimate buzzkill."

Opens on 4.20 (huh, huh, huh).

I don't know. I guess this is disrespectful. But in some ways, it's the ultimate tribute.

Posted by: Ace at 09:50 AM | Comments (34)
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Dire news. But I suppose it was inevitable. And, I suppose, also necessary. They'll have to be beaten at some point.

Shi'ite militiamen, who melted away from Baghdad when U.S. and Iraqi troops began their security crackdown seven weeks ago, are rolling back into the city with fresh Iranian training, Iraqi and other officials said.

It is not clear whether the radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is in control of the newly trained group, which some Iraqis describe as a "secret army" trained and equipped by Iran.

U.S. forces are concerned that, despite Shi'ite leaders' assurances that they have pulled their fighters off the streets, uncooperative militias will return and seek to destabilize efforts to secure the city.

Videotapes and other evidence of Iranian propaganda have been found on people recently detained in Sadr City, said a member of one of the multiple Iraqi and U.S. security forces trying to return security to Baghdad.

...

A new element appears to be entering the territory: an extreme Mahdi Army splinter group that broke off from Sheik al-Sadr, went to Iran for training and started to return, said one Iraqi with intimate knowledge of the group.

"This is a special group, used for special operations, not controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr. This is a secret army," said the Iraqi, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals. "They work for Iranian intelligence. They have good weapons, good salary."

The group's objectives are not clear, but the Iraqi said he thought the goal was to exacerbate simmering strife between Sunnis and Shi'ites.

The daily number of sectarian executions is creeping up again in some neighborhoods of Baghdad, despite an enormous coordinated security effort by U.S. and Iraqi forces that has reduced incidents of violence.

Thanks to amish.

122 Dead In Blast: The carnage continues.

Posted by: Ace at 09:36 AM | Comments (15)
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Kermit does Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt." It's so sad to see a frog shoot smack.

Via Ann Althouse, who's defending the public's choice of Sanjaya as American Idol, partly because it will help reduce homophobia.

Whoops: Allah already had it. Should have figured. I guess I'll make it up to him by stealing his other Kermit video. Kermit embeds in Iraq:

It's not easy being a mean green killing machine.

Posted by: Ace at 09:30 AM | Comments (19)
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