Pancake City

“Sex Offender Wins Lottery Jackpot” (link)

“Poll: Obama leads McCain among people who don’t have pets” (link)
Obama has an iguana problem!

Can anyone seriously argue that the TSA hasn’t become completely corrupted with power?

FOX News Porn.  So that’s why so many people watch FOX News.

Anti-NSFW: Garfield Minus Garfield (thanks, Kate) . This is the only way to enjoy Garfield.

Stuff I’ve read, watched, or listened to that’s good enough to recommend.

Yeasayer / “2080″ (music): Yeasayer is a difficult band to describe, which is a good thing. I can’t imagine anyone agreeing with this, but “2080″ reminds me of music that would play in a movie about an optimistic, post-apocalyptic future.

The whole album has an aura of oddly familiar strangeness. It’s like the music skipped a few stages of evolution, so it’s difficult to see where it came from, but it’s still recognizable enough to enjoy.

How about this: (World Music)^2 ? I give up. Great band, regardless.

Heroes (TV): I avoided watching the show until recently because the premise–ordinary people discover latent superpowers and try to avert a world disaster–sounded bland. The execution is excellent though. The show’s strength is its constant diet of new surprises and resolutions. It’s almost like the anti-Lost–something significant is revealed in every episode, to the point that I don’t see how they maintain the pace for more than a few seasons.

The Real All-Americans (book): I’m not a huge sports fan, but I found Sally Jenkins’ book on how Native Americans were integral to the development of collegiate football fascinating. I’m surprised I never heard of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an experiment in assimilating Native Americans by a well-meaning but perhaps misguided army officer, or knew that it was the source for a lot of what we now consider basic parts of football, like the forward pass,
reverses, and training dummies.

The book also brought light to some names I only heard in passing, like Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner. It’s worth checking out from the library or buying for anyone with an interest in sports history.

I feel sorry for the toilet seat. It’s always the comparison point for grossness.

Every few months there’s a story on how Everyday Object X has more bacteria than a toilet seat. “Average keyboard has more bacteria than a toilet seat.” “Calling Dr. Gross–mobile phone has more bacteria than a toilet seat.” “Why don’t you have your baby lick a toilet? Pacifiers have more bacteria than gas station commode.”

If there are so many objects more disgusting than a toilet seat, maybe it’s time to back off the insults to our porcelain friend. It’s doing something right. It is beating our cell phones in the clean contest, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t poop on my cell phone.

What would I use as a substitute? A far question to ask. If I were a scientist releasing a meaningless study because my company’s PR department wants to generate publicity from a media machine that hungers for attention-grabbing stories that require almost no research or effort to report, I’d….well, actually, I’d kill myself, because my life would be a hollow shell, empty of a long-forgotten dream to do something meaningful.

Or…I would use an object that no one would suspect harbors bacteria, and give people two things to fret about. “Office keyboards have more bacteria than corn!” What? Corn has bacteria?

Hey, lazy reporters!

Need evidence to support the conclusion you had before you started writing your political horse race piece? Visit Google Trends. It tracks search engine traffic and news references for popular words and phrases.

Google Trends is flexible enough to accommodate a wide-variety of pre-conceived ideas. Isn’t it a shame how people care more about celebrities than politicians? Just search for “Paris Hilton, Hillary Clinton.” Oops! Hillary got more news references. Better revise the search: “Paris Hilton, Senator Brownback.” There we go!

Hey, how does a goat fare against the three main Democratic presidential candidates? Hoo hoo hoo! Politics is silly.

Google Trends is also useful when planning the news cycle during the slow summer months. Should we go with Summer of the Shark, or Summer of the Monkey? Let’s check with America first.

I hate to criticize the media for not being assumptive. In the race to report news, media outlets often gloss over details, report hearsay as fact, and broadcast unverified information rather than take the time to analyze it first.

But how do you allegedly drive a car through a street festival and injure 43 people? The only doubt is whether to call it a street festival or an open market. (I suggest using The Clown Rule).

If you missed the story, I’m referring to an incident that happened last Sunday in SE D.C. No one died, so the article was already off the front page of The Washington Post by Monday night. How many people do you have to maim nowadays to get some staying power? I find it a small miracle that no one died, but there’s little information on what people did during and after the situation to avoid casualties.

The story resurfaced briefly today. The police department stated that the driver was a single Mom, high on crack, with her 7-year-old daughter in the back seat. This item got almost as much attention as the original incident. As it should. It’s bad enough to get hit by a car, but who wants to get run over by a stereotype? That’s no way to die.

FOX News sent over a camera crew after this development. Their latest report states that when the car finally crashed, a group of Mexicans popped out of the trunk and started singing La Cucaracha (”La Cucaracha” is Spanish for “We don’t actually sing this song. It sucks.”). They released a correction soon after the initial report. They meant to say allegedly.

INTERNET NEWS ROX. (1)

(1) Source: Wikipedia

At least for 2006.

“O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened”

The follow-up interview: “If I did it, and happened to videotape it, here’s what the videotape would look like.”

Bear attack victim loved nature, hated bears, dad says
Okay, I added the “hated bears” part.

This was on the front page of Yahoo. I think they’re testing the waters for Summer of the Bear.

Will Super Bowl XL live up to its name?

***

The deep questions are always the hardest to answer.

Will Super Bowl 143 live up to it’s name? Gee, I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine anything surpassing the drama of Super Bowl 117. And don’t get me started on the razzle dazzle in Superbowl 126: Part 2.

Here’s a real question: Will Superbowl Best Mutha-Fucking Superbowl Ever Live Up To Its Name? That would be something I’d be genuinely curious about. But Superbowl what–35? 40? Not much of a name to live up to.

On the cover of a “special” edition of Newsweek:

AMERICA’S HOTTEST COLLEGES!

“Woo hoo! Show your tits, Princeton!”

“It’s Colleges Gone Wild. [cue island music] You won’t believe what these colleges will do to get your tuition money.”

I know the war in Iraq, Social Security, and the national debt are important and all that. But let’s talk about the real today: WHERE ARE THE SHARK ATTACKS?

We started off with two wonderful ones, right after each other. I ran out and bought a can of Wite-Out for my “Summer of the Shark 2001″ shirt.

Then…nothing. It’s been almost a whole week without a shark attack. What gives? I don’t care if there haven’t been any real shark attacks. Can’t Wolf Blitzer strap on a dorsal fin and bite someone? And what is Tom Brokaw doing nowadays? I’ll tell you what he should be doing: biting people in the ocean. Throw your former comrades a bone, Brokie.

Media, this is the people speaking: WE WANT MORE SHARK ATTACKS!

Keep em coming, media! BOW DOWN TO THE POWER OF THE SHARK!!!

Summer of the Shark is back!

- A picture caption on Page 1 Wednesday incorrectly identified a man on a bicycle as the reputed mob boss Joey “the Clown” Lombardo. In fact, the man’s name is Stanley Swieton and he has no ties to organized crime. A story explaining the mistake is on Page 1 of today’s Metro section.

(from the Chicago Tribune)

Stanley’s name has the connotation of a man who would be very agitated about the mistake.