Give Me a Break category archive

Will Bunch, discussing CNN’s stupid coverage of the Zimmerman trial,* drafts the obituary for cable TV. A nugget:

TThat’s the real tragedy of cable TV. Almost every good idea for a channel that anyone has come up with — a channel that shows trials, or a channel that shows music videos, or a “learning” channel, or ( heaven forbid) a history channel — has been ruined by that free-market thing of everyone chasing the Powerball jackpot of ratings, which apparently involves a program about ice road truckers. (Who knew?) Or maybe a poop cruise. But that’s the thing — we used to think that news was above all this. Why were we so naive?

I can remember when I watched CourtTV fairly regularly; I particularly enjoyed “Forensic Files,” which was a relief from the fantasy science fiction world of CSI.

That was before it changed its name to TruTV and became yet another cesspool of “reality shows.”

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*It’s stupid because there’s no story until the verdict is delivered, and that’s not the story that matters.

The story that matters is that George Zimmerman thought it was okay to stalk and kill a kid because he didn’t like the kid’s skin color and that he’s not alone in thinking like that.

A local police dispatcher is in trouble with the public after a Facebook post related to a recent police action (emphasis added).

Mike McKenna, a former Norfolk police officer and a national representative of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, said Camarillo called him about the post.

“She didn’t think anybody would see it,” he said. She said she believed “it was a private communication between her and Busby, or so she thought.”

Private.

Internet.

Facebook.

Yeah.

Right.

Developer.

Yeah.

Right.

I remember walking past one of his businesses–a second-floor massage parlor above an X-rated theatre* on Market between 21st and 22nd–on my daily commute and seeing a fellow in a wheelchair leaving the place with a big smile on his face (I’ve always wondered how he got down the stairs, which were on the outside of building).

More power to the guy in the wheelchair, but really, developer?

The antics of “developers” too often cause me to develop hives.

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*As I recall, the movie that was playing was The Immoral Majority. For some reason, that name stuck with me.

Everyone seems to be going gaga over this story–everyone, at least, who hasn’t been paying attention for the past decade.

This is old news.

How many persons know that the movie, Animal House, was based on Dartmouth College, an institution laden with tradition?

The twits on twitter celebrate the tradition.

North Carolina Republican state Rep. Tim Moore says that women can protect themselves from a new law that makes baring female breasts illegal by simply applying duct tape to their nipples.

On Wednesday, the (North Carolina–ed.) state House Judiciary Committee C approved House Bill 34, which makes it a Class H felony to purposefully expose “private parts” for the “purpose of arousing or gratifying sexual desire.”

The bill expands the state’s definition of “private parts” to include a woman’s “nipple, or any portion of the areola.”

Republican state Rep. Rayne Brown told lawmakers that she was co-sponsoring the bill because activists had held a topless women’s rights rally in Asheville last summer, where as many as a dozen women bared their breasts.

It would be a Republican.

They are notoriously afeared of lady parts.

I rather doubt that women at a women’s rights rally are particularly interested in “arousing or gratifiying sexual desire,” but the skeevy Republican preoccupation with sex–oh, never mind, it’s just skeevy.

Facebook in the agony column.

When I go to a restaurant, I often eschew the entrees to make a meal from appetizers.

This indicates why:

Via PoliticalProf.

Offered without comment; I stand silent before the chutzpah.

THE “Bachelor’s Package” at the Penthouse Club, in Port Richmond, includes an invitation onstage and doting attention from the dancers.

But for one Montgomery County man, it also came with internal bleeding, according to a lawsuit filed in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court last week.

Patrick Gallagher, of Lansdale, claims that a dancer slid down a stripper pole and landed on him with such force that she ruptured his bladder.

The San Jose Mercury-News has a long story about Facebook’s latest attempt to get into your pants, or at least into the dressing room while you are trying them on:

The giant social network said it’s working with a market analytics firm, Datalogix, to measure how often users see a product advertised on Facebook and then purchase that product later in a retail store. Datalogix says it uses information from customer loyalty programs and other sources to track purchases by more than 100 million households at more than 1,200 retailers in the offline, brick-and-mortar world.

If you poke, friend, like, or tag anything or anyone on the Faceborg, read it to find out just zucked you are.

It’s never gonna let you go.

Or “Why I have given up on movies.”

What is it about whack jobs and God?

Emphasis added.

“I feel like it was all God’s plan,” he told conservative talk show host Sean Hannity in Zimmerman’s first interview since the shooting.

Toward the end of the hourlong interview, however, Zimmerman backtracked on that statement.

“I do wish there was something, anything I could have done that wouldn’t have put me in a position where I would have had to take a life,” he said. “I do want to tell everyone I’m sorry that this happened. I hate to think that because of this incident, because of my actions, it has polarized, divided America. I’m truly sorry.”

Perhaps he could have started by not stalking the innocent black kid.

I think I shall be ill.

Afterthought:

Note the linguistic passive voice framing which implies that somehow Zimmerman had nothing whatsoever to do with actually pulling the damn trigger.

Sounds like a corporate press release.

Zimmerman’s tale of what happened doesn’t pass the WTF! test.

AfterAfterthought:

Chauncey Devega finds the lesson of the interview:

Unfortunately, for many people who live in a society where political ideology and racial attitudes form a type of Gordian knot, they see justice for Trayvon Martin through a lens which views all people of color, and young blacks in particular, as perpetual suspects whose lives, citizenship, and safety are contingent and not absolute.

(snip)

This is the source of their love for Zimmerman, and sincere rage at his arrest and prosecution. If anything, the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman should have just been a minor inconvenience for all involved–except of course the victim, his family, and community. He is just a black anyway, so what’s the big deal? They die everyday in America and no one cares either way.

The internet is awash in porn. If you don’t find it, it will find you.

In most towns of any size, you can’t travel more than a few miles in any direction without passing “adult novelty” stores or their less classy cousins (which for some reason always have yellow windows).

Old people (like me) do it in bathtubs on television during Wheel of Fortune.

Even Publishers Clearing House markets “marital how-to” videos, or, as I like to describe them, porn for people who are against porn.

And now some bozo writes a series of racy novels (which I am sure are not in the same class as A Man with a Maid, which has been in and out of print for over a century and read mostly by not-women) that many women seem to like, thereby causing (mostly not-women) pundit heads to explode all over the place.

Women sometimes like to read about it too.

Oh, the horror.

Addendum, the Next Morning:

Oh, my.

. . . where those in authority circle the wagons to protect their own because it’s the “humane” thing to do.

A snippet from Karen Heller’s column today:

How many young boys ago was 2001?

(snip)

Investigators uncovered e-mails, which were reported Monday, by Spanier and now-suspended athletic director Timothy Curley and former vice president Gary Schultz suggesting that the “humane” treatment of Sandusky was to not inform law enforcement.

It’s the ultimate corruption of the rich and powerful: exempting themselves from standards of society, because, well, they can. After all, he wears nice suits; he looks good in meetings; he brings us good press; he’sjust . . . well . . . pukka sahib, eh, what.

(And if you this is only the condition at football factories, read the financial pages for Pete’s sake.)

Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes to Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson in the last scene of Sherlock Holmes Faces Death:

There’s new spirit abroad in the land.

The old days of grab and greed are on their way out.

We’re beginning to think of what we owe the other fellow, not just of what we’re compelled to give him.

Time’s coming, Watson, when we shan’t be able to fill our bellies in comfort while other folk go hungry or sleep in warm beds while others shiver in the cold, when we shan’t be able to kneel and thank God for blessings before our shining altars while men anywhere are kneeling under either physical or spiritual subjection.

That certainly worked out well.

When the Revel mega-casino opens in May, many dealers, beverage servers and other customer service workers will be young, attractive and sexy.

And a casino policy will probably keep it that way.

Applicants are being told they will only have jobs for as little as four years at a time, after which they will have to re-apply. That means competing with younger, fresher faces — a requirement that has never been made before in the 33-year history of casino gambling in Atlantic City.

If this isn’t an attempt to write discrimination on the basis of age and looks into the bargain, I’m a penguin. This is a throwback to how airlines hired stewardesses, back when they were called “stewardesses.”

Looks like Christmas is winning, at least in Colorado.

From 2005 to 2009, the menorah was displayed in December on the back of the Lake House. But the Evergreen Park & Recreation District decided that the symbol cannot be put up this year.

Some members of Evergreen’s Jewish community aren’t ready to end the debate because a large tree, adjacent to the community’s popular hub, remains adorned with Christmas lights.

The colored lights on a tree are not considered by the governing bodies to be religiously affiliated.

Despite all the hoo-ha about the “commercialization of Christmas,” only a fool or a liar can claim with a straight face that Christmas trees aren’t “religiously affiliated.”

When that claim is used to justify disrespect to another religion, it sort of rules out “fool.”

Was it in Matthew or Luke that Jesus said, “Be nasty to your neighbors”?

Furrfu.

I wonder what sort of data these will collect:

British company Captive Media thinks it has developed a product that fills a gap in the market – a urinal mounted, urine-controlled games console for men.

It calls it the first “hands-free” video gaming console of its kind.