Steaming Turd

Some Iraqis protest wall dividing sectarian regions of Baghdad

Is this a misguided strategy on the part of US military commanders in Iraq? Are they misreading the best way to deal with sectarian violence in the area?

Or is this a stroke of genius designed to bring Sunnis and Shi’a together in common purpose, giving them a chance to see that peaceful protest works better than blowing people up?

Whoever decided to have Beyonce and Shakira do a song together had a halfway decent idea.

Whoever decided to make a video of it was a frickin’ genius.

I just watched Doctor Zhivago. For those who don’t know, it’s a movie based on the Russian novel vaguely about some guy named Doctor Zhivago who does random stuff throughout the political upheaval in early 20th-century Russia and eventually dies alone and unhappy.

Anyway, the movie was pretty much like the other Russian novels I’ve read. It was incredibly long, it had an aimlessly meandering plot that tries to follow the life of an average guy, and it ended abruptly and unfulfillingly. The only thing it was missing was the 150-page denouement of pointless philosophical blathering a la Anna Karenina.

The one thing I did get from the movie was that the Leninist soviet system was a government based entirely on sour grapes. Essentially, you take everything from the wealthy out of spite and envy, and you parcel it out in portions so small that nobody gets any real benefit from it.

I’m sure everyone’s heard the most incredibly annoying commercials on television EVAR. Those are, of course, the ads for the Head-On family of products. For those who don’t know, these are homeopathic formulas which are ostensibly used to cure a variety of ailments. The actual indications of these products are not mentioned in the commercials because there is no reputable scientific evidence to support homeopathic remedies working any better than a big fat placebo.

Nevertheless, the company that makes the product is apparently very confident in its effectiveness, as well as their advertising strategy of so very few words. When someone asked how Head-On and related products actually work, a company rep provided a five word response:

It works through the nerves.

QED.

Howard Stern (ironic warning about content)
Rush Limbaugh

Oh, and I’ll agree with them, too. We already know that he wrote plays (and some totally jacked up ones at that), so maybe we should be blaming the theatrical arts for what happened. Doesn’t make sense, does it, but the same logic applies. The truth is that if a person is going to flip out and kill a bunch of people, they’re gonna do it if left to their own devices. But they’ll express themselves through whatever interests them, whether they like video games, or theater and movies, or drugs, or whatever.

That kid was seriously just sick in the head, and it’s just unfortunate that there wasn’t a way to monitor his descent and stop him from falling too far.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,266460,00.html

Dear Mr. Shourds:

Grandstanding, armchair quarterbacking, and twenty-twenty hindsight serves nobody. Try blaming the lunatic gunman for what happened, instead of lashing out at reasonable people who took reasonable actions in unreasonable circumstances.

That is all.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Don Imus’s infamous comments showed profound ignorance and insensitivity. But I have to ask: If Al Sharpton happens to say anything racist and offensive to white people on his radio show, does that mean that he would lose his show as well?

That’s what just happened to my downstairs neighbor’s stove.

The smoke alarm in the hallway went off a little bit ago. A bunch of folks in the building who were home at the time went into the hallway to see what was going on. It turns out that my downstairs neighbor was fortunately home as well - though he was almost on his way out the door - when he heard what was sort of like a water gushing/hissing noise. He went into the kitchen to see FLAMES ERUPTING FROM AROUND THE SIDES OF THE STOVE BURNERS.

He called the fire department, although the crappy E911 that he connected to on his cell phone transferred him to City of Cleveland rather than Cleveland Heights, twice. The 911 operator had said not to use the fire extinguisher on it, which I can only assume is because it’s safer to have the gas burned off rather than accumulating. The fire department arrived, turned off the gas to his apartment, and put out the fire. All is good now, except it smells a little bit funky in my apartment and a good bit more funky in the apartment downstairs.

First story on the page.

Bonus points for explaining this post’s title reference and its relevance to the article (hint: it’s from Futurama).

No, really, it is!!