Rachel Lucas Is A Bitch

I don't really mean that, of course. She seems like a lovely woman. Just coming off mean and persnickety to me lately.

What is it about cliches that so offend people? The reason certain phrases become trite and worn is because they are so useful, after all.
From Ms. Lucas' Guide to Online dating:

7. Do not title your headline, "Carpe Diem." Dude. That is the most hackneyed thing you could possibly say. We're OVER it. Great movie, nice concept, but Jesus H. Christ. Just do not say it.

Hey, WTF is wrong with 'Carpe Diem?' It has become part of the idiom. If this fine, feisty old slogan repels hyper-sophisticated professional snark-demons, single men should put it in their ad headline just for that protective effect.

8. Do not title your headline, "Nice Guy...With An Edge." The primary reason for that is, five billion other guys use the same headline. The secondary reason is because it is meaningless and also sounds really fuckin' silly.

But it's not meaningless, Rachel. It means 'I'm a terrified little boy and please don't hurt me.'

11. Much like #6, do yourself a huge favor and don't say that you "enjoy life." Because, again, NO SHIT. We are all going to go ahead and assume you do, in fact, enjoy life, even if you don't point out such. You may as well tell us that you are glad you can breathe and you don't want to die.

When a guy says he 'enjoys life,' he means, 'intense depressives and bitter divorcees need not respond to this ad.'

I don't know why her post rubbed me the wrong way, exactly. It just seemed unnecessarily critical of people who are just being real.

If a girl is looking for a prose-craftin' wizard to steal her heart away, she's going to date a string of phonies, and miss out on some really great guys.

She also wrote a guide for women.

Pretty much the same thing.
So glad I'm married.

Posted by: LauraW. at 08:55 AM | Comments (67)
Post contains 348 words, total size 2 kb.

Defandant has sure-fire plan for his acquittal: Threatening to kill all the jurors if they find him guilty.

Jurors today begin deliberating the fate of Richard Glawson, who yesterday, while chained and padlocked, threatened to murder them if they find him guilty of a 2001 multi-community crime rampage.

Or, at least thatÂ’s the plan.

In a case of defense deja vu sorely testing the patience of Suffolk Superior Court Judge Patrick F. Brady, Glawson has filed an emergency petition with the state Supreme Judicial Court, asking it to intervene on his behalf because Brady refuses to declare a mistrial or release any of the jurors, whose families Glawson said would also be killed unless he was exonerated.

“I’m not going to delay the trial further,” Brady tersely told Glawson, who in addition to being chained to the floor in a special chair, is now tended to by more than a dozen court and correction officers.

Apparently causing mistrials through his own courtroom misbehavior is his specialty:

After a then-unrestrained Glawson, 46, punched an elderly juror in his first trial, he got a mistrial last week, but only the stateÂ’s highest court forced BradyÂ’s hand.

The Massachusetts SJC. They'll probably force the judge to declare another mistrial.

This guy does not placate:

Jurist and defendant briefly locked horns over whether Glawson, who was put in a holding cell for part of yesterdayÂ’s trial, could be trusted to even stay in the courtroom.

Glawson said he could be trusted, but Brady shot back, “Why should I believe you?”

“I’m not going to give you a reason,” Glawson snapped.

Judges love that.

While that one is stupid-clever, this one is just stupid-stupid:

A Mission man arrested Saturday night after a routine traffic stop in Goliad told deputies that the cocaine found in his vehicle was a graduation present for his son in Houston.

"I have no idea what he was thinking," said Sgt. Danny Madrigal, investigator with the Goliad Sheriff's Department. "We've never had anybody saying, 'I'm taking this to give to my son. He's graduating.'"

However, Madrigal said, "The following day I spoke to him, and he told me it was for personal use."

Goliad County deputies Sgt. Gary Cowley and K9 Officer Martha Martinez pulled over Omar Cruz Garza, 35, for speeding within city limits.

He was also booked on one count of having the name "Omar Cruz Garza."

No, really:

The deputies suspected something was up when they saw items including a DVD player, a safe, power tools and camera inside the vehicle, Madrigal said, and searched the 2006 Dodge pickup.

"He just had a lot of things that you wouldn't normally carry if you were going to visit somebody," he said.

When deputies asked for Garza's license, he handed over a fictitious I.D., Madrigal said - likely because Garza is on parole until Friday.

"He probably thought he'd run into some troubles there with the parole board," Madrigal said. "But he had his name tattooed on his back, which was an indicator that he wasn't the guy he reported to be at first. We found another I.D. that turned out to be him."

Criminals are a cowardly, retarded lot.

Thanks to dri and Sinistar.

By the way: I'm botching html worse than usual today. I'm on like two hours sleep.

I fixed the html of the "Great Moments in Crime" post to properly bold, rather than cut off, the punchline to the second story.

Posted by: Ace at 08:34 AM | Comments (10)
Post contains 583 words, total size 4 kb.

How funny would it be to dub dialogue from the Boogie Nights trailer into scenes from the Star Wars trilogy?

Pretty funny as it turns out.

Thanks to Ian at Hot Air.

Posted by: Ace at 06:03 AM | Comments (6)
Post contains 44 words, total size 1 kb.

So says Linda Chavez, at least of all of you who oppose the new open-borders bill.

And if you thought that the Christian-Newsome murders weren't being covered because the victims were white and the perpetrators black, CNN says you're a Nazi too. A lot of people have weighed in on this, but apparently the only people CNN can find to suggest a media double-standard are avowed White Supremacists with blogs with such names as "Arayan Awakening."

That has got to be one of the most despicable hit-pieces I've ever seen.

The media is claiming its brand-new "objective standard" on reporting about such stories is whether the crime in question is a "hate crime" or not. Listen how many times CNN claims the Christian/Newsome butcheries were "not hate crimes" as a defense against their non-reportage of this outrage.

I'm sorry, I hate to break this to CNN, but the Duke Not-A-Rape suspects were never charged with hate crimes, either. And yet CNN trots this little fact out as if this triviality, and no other reason, explains the disparate coverage.

To be honest, I've thought about this some, and while I think it is all but undeniable the media loves them some Whites/Straights Abusing Minorities/Gays stories (and never the opposite), I don't think the non-coverage of the Christian/Newsome rape/slaughter/mutilation is explainable by that.

Given the fact that the media does in fact cover Pretty Missing Blondes and Dead Blonde Playmates pretty damn thoroughly (often, um, a bit more than thorooughly), I think it's safe to say that the media is most interested in crime -- only interested, pretty much -- when there are whites involved in it, either as victims (preferrably missing) or as suspects.

True enough, there are other factors here (Christian and Newsome are obviously white); the media tends to embargo crime stories as a general rule because so many of them involve black perpetrators, and twenty years of whining from black lobbying groups has convinced them that reporting on crime is inherently "racist" as too many black faces are showed in a negative light.

It's a mix of things. It's a PC code of reluctance to identify the culprits in heinous crimes as blacks. It's the ratings thing, as most Americans are white, and so more closely identify with stories with white victims (again, preferably female, blonde, attractive, and missing). And of course it's the eternal hunt for, as Tom Wolfe called it, the Great White Suspect.

However you come down on this -- whether the media should have reported this crime more, or whether, frankly, given the scandalous rates of violent crime among blacks, this is in fact a case of dog bites man and, sadly, not really newsworthy at all, just as the media says -- CNN's hatchet-job branding of its critics as Nazis is a new low for the network.

Godwin's Law, assholes.

Google it.

Posted by: Ace at 06:36 PM | Comments (83)
Post contains 491 words, total size 3 kb.

This essay by Pat Dollard (excerpted at LGF) gives me a bit of hope that smart, tough negotiations and strong, smart diplomacy may yet have a chance.

Thanks to Mike.

Shock: Eurorg Rates US Near The Bottom of "Most Peaceful Nations:" says we're just barely ahead of Russia and Iran (and Iraq!) in terms of peacefulness.

And barely ahead even of the Jews.

The Jews, for crying out loud. The ones who "start all the wars."

I'm starting my own organization to rate nations in terms of "Complete and Total Faggiosity." I'll be sending my results to AP mucho pronto, which is the new official American way to say "rapido."

Posted by: Ace at 05:58 PM | Comments (38)
Post contains 132 words, total size 2 kb.

As in, "You know, it's that guy. That guy. That guy from that movie where he did that thing to Bruce Willis."

Good stuff, although a lot of these guys are pretty famous by now and have left "that guy" status.

#7: PETER STORMARE

You Might Know Him From...

The Big Lebowski, Prison Break, Bad Boys II, Minority Report, Armageddon, and instilling an intense fear of wood-chippers in you in Fargo.

Special Moves

Believing in nothing, severing pinkie toes, and just generally giving off the impression that heÂ’s committed a couple of sex crimes lately.

Is a Poor Man's...

Eastern European Bruce Willis

Thank to The Warden.

Oh, wait. I mean: Warden. Like when MC Hammer dropped the MC and became instead "The Guy Who Used To Be MC Hammer."

More "That Guys" And "That Chicks:" Sadly, not many pictures here, so you'll just have to see if you remember who the hell they're talking about.

Jane Adams should have gotten more work. They could have teamed her with Judy Greer in the ultimate cute-but-unhinged-neurotic chick flick. I would have seen it like eight million times, so right there, you're talking eighty million dollars in box office.

Thanks to PattyAnn, who got it from a comment at Garfield-Ridge.

Posted by: Ace at 03:06 PM | Comments (52)
Post contains 226 words, total size 2 kb.

"Don't hate the playah--
hate the JEWS."

After all, the Democrats refuse the repeal the, quote unquote, "Secret Evidence Act."

Pic via Reason's Dave Wiegel.

Although, to be honest, I'm not sure why Reason is snarking about her nascent candidacy. Is the problem that she's not insane enough?

Posted by: Ace at 02:53 PM | Comments (38)
Post contains 76 words, total size 1 kb.

State agencies. Is there anything they can't do?

New Jersey's health department is escalating the battle against the bulge by starting an Office of Nutrition and Fitness to better coordinate programs aimed at preventing obesity.

New Jersey may be the first state to create such a government body.

...

Fred M. Jacobs, commissioner of the state Department of Health and Senior Services... says he wants to tackle the obesity problem through education, support groups and encouraging physical activity, rather than by banning particular foods. One goal is to "de-normalize" the massive portions served in restaurants.

...

He is mulling the idea of having schools notify parents, via report cards, of children with weight problems.

Eh, health is good, obesity is bad, and kids should stop swilling all that soda.

Still... Governor Corzine was last seen lecturing us on the need to wear seat-belts to insure safe driving, after driving at unsafe speeds without wearing a seat-belt.

And now he's crusading against... fatness.

His next crusade will be against shaggy-looking facial hair.

I have to say I'm less inclined to take his advice on that matter than I would be to, say, take that of Allison "Stokes" Stokke.*

* I assume she's called Stokes. How could you be a jock with the last name "Stokke" and not be called "Stokes"? It just doesn't seem possible.

Posted by: Ace at 02:43 PM | Comments (30)
Post contains 238 words, total size 2 kb.

Apparently the dispute concerned whether transubstantiation literally converts a wafer into Christ's flesh, or merely does so metaphorically or spiritually.

Oh, wait, that wasn't the dispute at all.

The family of a Van Nuys man who has been arrested at a Phoenix airport in connection with the deaths of an Anaheim Hills father and daughter, the beating of a mother and a house fire last week say they are "very sad" about what is happening.

Iftekhar Murtaza, 22, was carrying a one-way ticket to Bangladesh...

"It has been a situation under pressure for my family," said Ishtiak Murtaza, 37, the brother of Iftekhar Murtaza this morning.

Iftekhar Murtaza is identified in court papers as the ex-boyfriend of Shayona Dhanak, the 18-year-old daughter of one of the two murder victims....

If you're having trouble following that, Shanoya survived the attack, her father and sister did not.

"I strongly believe that he has no part in it," Ishtiak Murtaza said at the family's convenience store in Van Nuys.

..

Martinez noted that "based on the brutality of the crime, we believe there was more than one suspect involved."

The victims were stabbed, strangled and burned, according to the documents. The Dhanaks' Anaheim Hills home was set on fire.

...

The motive for the crime appears to be a dispute over religion.

"Information developed revealed the suspect was upset with Shayona's parents and sister for discontinuing the relationship due to different religious backgrounds, Hindu and Muslim," the papers said.

The Dhanaks were reported by friends and neighbors to be devout members of the strict Swaminarayan branch of Hinduism. Murtaza is Muslim.

I blame this on the strict Swainarayan branch of Hinduism, myself. Clearly the family had no legitimate reasons to force the break-up, resulting, ironically enough, in their being savagely murdered by the very man they didn't wish their daughter to date.

Why, it's like a Greek tragedy of completely-unforseable consequences.

Thanks to the Bruce Dickenson.

Posted by: Ace at 02:31 PM | Comments (12)
Post contains 347 words, total size 2 kb.

The trick actually has nothing to do with the cards. Pay attention. I didn't, and now I feel stupider than usual.

Posted by: Ace at 02:14 PM | Comments (29)
Post contains 27 words, total size 1 kb.