Trick or treat

As happens every year, the festivities of Halloween have brought out the religious nutjobs.  The story:

Spanish bishops warn against ‘anti-Christian’ Halloween

Father Joan Maria Canals, the director of committee on Liturgy, said the emphasis had shifted from worshipping the saints to celebrating death.

“Children dress as witches, vampires, ghosts, corpses and skeletons and parents favour this type of festivities focusing on elements of death.” He said.

Instead families should use the holiday to visit the graves of loved ones in a “festival that encourages life and not death”, he said.

Yeah, if you want to celebrate life rather than death, making a bee line to the nearest graveyard is the best way to do it.  And, of course, you won’t find anything as ghoulish as someone resurrecting from the dead in the Christian Bible.

Video killed the video store

Alright,  I’ve come to accept that I will not be able to get a copy of The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) before Halloween.  It’s a great movie: well acted with beautiful sets and  thoroughly entertaining.  But not one damn video store in town has it.  I know video stores are on the way out.  And I know that changes in technology and economics are the primary factors.  But another important factor is that the selection at pretty much every video store sucks.  Most of the available movies appear to have been made since the early 1980s.  Classic old movies are hard to find.  In fact, the “classics” section of the video store no longer exists.  So do people actually buy the crap they have available?

No.  They don’t.

I went to Barnes and Noble tonight making another attempt to find The Bride of Frankenstein.  Of course, they didn’t have it.  Not much of a call for it, the video clerk told me.  I walked over to a large collection of videos, pulled one out, and brought it to him.  So there isn’t much of a call for The Bride of Frankenstein, but there is a call for The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave?  (The disc was marked at $4.99).  That’s all the guy needed to hear.

He walked back over to the rows and rows of DVDs and conceded that he had sold only 40 of them in the last year.  He was clearly embarrassed by many of the titles which included the 1973 Blaxploitation movie Coffy starring Pam Grier.  The clerk admitted that on the rare occasion he actually sold one of these DVDs, the purchaser was generally buying it for the kitsch value.

As a last-ditch effort, I went to Best Buy.  No Bride of Frankenstein.  But there was a prominent display of Bollywood movies.  Also available was Cheech Marin’s 1987 cinematic triumph Born in East L.A.  Like The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave, it could be had for $4.99.

So I’ll buy The Bride of Frankenstein online.  I might even be able to download it if I looked around a bit.  But there is little doubt that in a few years I’ll be able to very quickly download virtually any movie ever made.  And I won’t have to trek across town, going from one depressing video store to another, each one’s movie collection more pathetic and pitiful than the last.  And then the video store can assume it’s rightful place in the dustbin of history.

Driver’s Ed

Target acquired

Hey, parents, here’s a great new way for you to stalk your kids.  It’s a GPS device call the “Little Buddy Child Tracker“.  Finally, you’re no longer limited to stunting your child’s intellectual and emotional growth by harrassing them via text messages over their cell phone.  (Every kid needs a cell phone).

Now you can pinpoint their goddamn co-ordinates on the planet’s surface, you personality disordered freaks.

Clear cut case

Some stupid fuck ran over his goddamn kid with his lawnmower and then sued the company that made the lawnmower.  While this never should have made it to trial, at least the outcome was just:

The John Deere company and a local distributor are not liable for a 2006 riding lawn mower accident that cost a Springfield toddler her leg, a Lane County jury decided after 10 days of testimony and eight hours of deliberation.

In three 9-to-3 votes, the panel rejected arguments by attorneys seeking more than $11 million in damages on behalf of Isabelle Norton, now 6.

The divided decisions held that Deere had not created and sold a defective and unreasonably dangerous product, and that neither Deere nor the Ramsey-Waite Co. were negligent in the way they marketed and sold the machine.

They and their witnesses arg-ued throughout the trial that there was no way to “child-proof” a machine as powerful as a riding mower. They emphasized that Isabelle’s parents had not heeded a sign affixed to the mower warning operators not to give children rides on the machine and that her father had disregarded its warnings not to mow in reverse or when children were around.

You mean they actually had a “Don’t Mow Down Your Goddamn Children With This Mower, You Dumbass” warning on the thing?  For fuck’s sake!

Make this subhuman piece of shit pay the legal bills for the innocent John Deere Company and the local dealership he blamed for his own fucking stupidity.

[T]he accident occurred after Kurt Norton went outside to mow his backyard despite no other adult being home to supervise five children ages 9 and younger that he left inside the house watching television.

Christ!  Five fucking children and the oldest was goddamn nine?!  Put the fuck in prison!

The Naked Truth

I see, hear, and read about a lot of stupid shit in my day to day life, but this one sounds like it’s from the fucking Bizarro world.

Man Charged After Making Coffee Naked

A Springfield, Virginia man is facing an indecent exposure charge after a passerby spotted the man naked in his kitchen and reported it to police.

Eric Williamson, 29, is a commercial diver who grew up in Hawaii and rents home with several co-workers. Williamson told FOX 5′s Will Thomas his roommates were not home and he walked into the kitchen to make coffee about 5:30 a.m. Monday.

“Yes, I wasn’t wearing any clothes but I was alone, in my own home and just got out of bed. It was dark and I had no idea anyone was outside looking in at me,” Williamson said.

The complaint came from an unidentified woman who was walking with a 7-year-old boy. A Fairfax County Police spokesman said officers arrested Williamson for indecent exposure because they believe he wanted to be seen naked by the public.

What the fuck?!  First off, what in holy hell is a woman doing with a little kid in tow walking around on somebody else’s property at 5:30 in the fucking morning?  I believe the legal term for that is trespassing.  As far as wanting to be seen naked by the public, yeah, being in your own kitchen at 5:30 in the morning is tantamount to holding a goddamn press conference in the buff.  Jesus H. Christ!

Williamson is meeting with a lawyer to fight the charge and may attempt to seek damages from Fairfax County Police.

Sue the perverted, peeping Tom woman trespasser while you’re at it, Mr. Williamson.

Deal with the Devil

So, corporate America, how goes the Faustian bargain?  You remember, the so-called “bailouts” that you asked for from the government the taxpayers after you ran your companies into the dirt?  Well, corporate welfare queens, it looks like your new federal overlords have decided to bring your pay a little more in line with what you’re actually worth.  Kenneth Feinberg, the Treasury Department’s special master for compensation, also known as the “pay czar,” is cutting salaries at bailed out corporations by an average of 90%.

Steven Ratter, the Treasury Department auto industry adviser, reminds us of some of the problems with the corporations that were bailed out, in this particular case, General Motors:

From my first day at Treasury, PowerPoint decks would arrive from GM (we quickly concluded that no decision seemed to be made at GM without one) requesting approvals. We were appalled by the absence of sound analysis provided to justify these expenditures.

The cultural deficiencies were equally stunning. At GM’s Renaissance Center headquarters, the top brass were sequestered on the uppermost floor, behind locked and guarded glass doors. Executives housed on that floor had elevator cards that allowed them to descend to their private garage without stopping at any of the intervening floors (no mixing with the drones).

[I]f ever a board of directors needed shuffling, it was GM’s, which had been utterly docile in the face of mounting evidence of looming disaster.

Free markets are supposed to be places where efficiency, hard work, and innovation are rewarded and inefficiency, sloth, and incompetence are punished.  For much of modern corporate America, the opposite has been the case.  If you’re a liberal, it’s fun to see The Man finally getting what he deserves.  If you’re a conservative, the bailout fallout is a cautionary tale about the wages of corporate incompetence and the danger of putting yourself in the hands of the government.

Flagging intelligence

A few days back it was the asshat bus authority supervisor who suspended the bus driver for wearing a non-regulation pink tie in support of breast cancer awareness.  Now it’s this:

Firefighter suspended for refusing to peel American flag sticker from locker

Chester, Pa., firefighter James Krapf wants to know what’s wrong with Old Glory. The 11-year veteran was suspended without pay Thursday after he refused to peel a sticker of the American flag from his locker.

Fire Commissioner James Johnson, who served in the Marine Corps, vows the symbolism of the decal is not the issue.

“We wear the American flag on our uniform…it’s flying outside that station,” he said. “It is not about the American flag or patriotism.”

Jesus Fucking Christ!  Alright, folks, do I even need to tell you how this one ends?  Fire Commissioner and utterly clueless asshole James Johnson orders a firefighter to take the American flag off his locker and suspends said firefighter when he respectfully refuses.  Wait for it…wait for it…

Union and fire officials reinstate firefighter and allow sticker to stay put

Well, of course they reinstated the firefighter and allowed the sticker of the American goddamn flag to stay put.  And how did our clueless bureaucrat attempt to extricate his head from his ass?

“There was never an intent to desecrate the American flag,” said Fire Commissioner James Johnson during a press conference.

No, there was never an intent to desecrate the American flag.  We just decided to criminalize putting it on your locker, insist that you scrape it off, suspend you when you declined, wait about 10 seconds for the news media (including the DrudgeReport) to report the story, wonder what all those people outside the firehouse holding signs saying “The Flag Is Not Offensive” are doing, and then do what anybody with an IQ above 50 would have done.

Administrators, quit making goddamn asses of yourselves!  Quit enforcing so literally rules that were never intended to prevent the kind of behavior your subordinates are engaging in.  Christ!

Drugs, not hugs

So, British taxpayers, how is your government spending your money?  Study touts treating heroin addicts with heroin:

If treating heroin addicts by giving them heroin seems counterintuitive, having the government fund that addiction to the tune of more than $22,000 per patient per year comes across as downright radical.

Well, no, I wouldn’t use the terms “counterintuitive” and “radical”.  “Fucking nuts” and “a goddamn outrage” would seem to fit better.  That’s right, Brits, these drug addicts get their fix on your dime.  The article continues:

The use of street heroin was reduced by three quarters and the crimes committed trying to get drugs were cut by two-thirds, the study found.

You mean one-quarter of these druggies still got some stuff off the street despite getting $22,000 a year of taxpayer money blown on them?!  And a third still commited crimes to get drugs?!  Jesus!

The treatment is relatively expensive, about $22,000 per patient, per year. But in Britain many are coming to terms with the fact that keeping a person in prison can cost three times that.

Who says you have to keep them in prison?  Legalize the stuff.  Then it won’t cost the British taxpayers anything.

Take me to your leader

Immigrants Not Amused by “Illegal Alien” Halloween Costume, reads the headline.  Man, this must be pretty bad.  I wonder what this costume looks like.  Does it play to our base fears about The Other?  Does it depict some negative racial stereotype about Hispanics perhaps?  Are our black brethren made the target of racist humor?  Is there anti-Semitism?  What kind of bigoted, close-minded people would wear something like…this:

Give me a fuckin’ break!  You mean there are real live people who are offended by this?  Or who pretend to be offended by this because it forwards their agenda?  Jesus!