Too Stupid for Words category archive

Don’t care, although, every day this week, my local rag has devoted an entire half page, with lots of white space that could have included, you know, sentences and paragraphs, to previews of the World Cup.

I’m not one to follow a sports event just because it’s eventing.

Guess I’d just as soon see them waste the space on soccer (Association Football, that is) as on NASCAR. Either way the paper soaks up spilled coffee.

Apparently, not everyone shares my apathy.

Some seem to think that Soccer is a librul plot.

Read more »

But, being the Wall Street Journal, it denies it in the same breath.

It is generally not a good idea to threaten elected officials. Tea bagger armchair revolutionaries are starting to realize this:

A Michigan man and his son are facing federal charges for allegedly threatening the life of congressman Bart Stupak over the Democrat’s recent support of the health care reform bill. In a letter addressed to “Stupak family” and mailed to the politician’s former residence, Russell Hesch, 73, allegedly threatened to paint a local bridge with the blood of Stupak and his family members, according to the below FBI affidavit.

A. Parents.

Becomes shark bait.

It’s just as reprehensible as if it had been said by David Duke.

You tax dollars at work:

Authorities have charged five teenagers in a sexting case at Franklin County High School.

Commonwealth’s Attorney Cliff Hapgood says the charges include felony counts of using cell phones to possess and transmit pornography involving minors.

Hapgood says a female student took pictures of herself with a male student’s cell phone in a bathroom at the high school. The male student then sent pictures to other students.

More stupid at the link.

One hopes the parents have heard of this case.

Read more »

Blag Hag has the details.

It is truly quite stupid for grown-ups to pretend that sex doesn’t exist.

I know. Your parents didn’t have sex and neither did mine. They were different.

But everyone else’s parents did.

Boy shoots loaded school bus:

The unidentified 14-year-old was arrested Thursday morning. Police spokesman Don Gotthardt said investigators are trying to determine whether the teen intended to shoot the bus. He said the working theory is that the boy had been shooting at birds.

This happened in the Bailey’s Crossroads area in Northern Virginia, a densely populated old suburb. A .22 calibre bullet, if I remember my readings in Boys Life accurately, can carry at least a mile.

Newsweek recently ran a review of a play.

The reviewer didn’t like the play. For all I know, it was a lousy play. But the reviewer went a step into fantasy land in claiming that

While it’s OK for straight actors to play gay (as Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger did in Brokeback Mountain), it’s rare for someone to pull off the trick in reverse.

This has caused a lot of ferment.

What elevates this into the “Too Stupid for Words” category is that gay actors have been playing straight roles convincingly for years. (The same can’t be said in reverse because, until recently, about the time of La cage aux folles, teh gay was unmentionable and officially did not exist in filmdom.)

Anyone ever hear of Rock Hudson, just to pull a name out of a hat?

No wonder Newsweek is going belly up. It apparently has no competent editors.

Details here.

Clearly, knowledge must lean left.

Don’t dry and drive in Chicago.

But prosecutor Mike Mermel said there’s a big difference between polishing nails and other forms of distracted driving.

“It is not the same as biting a sandwich … it’s a voluntary disablement,” he said. “She might as well have been in the back seat making a sandwich.”

A Lake County jury of eight women and four men apparently agreed. After deliberating 3 1/2 hours Thursday, they found that Hunt, 49, of Morris was criminally reckless in the crash near Lake Zurich that killed 56-year-old Anita Zaffke on May 2, 2009.

Assurances of privacy be damned:

Screener Rolando Negrin’s private body parts were observed by his Transportation Security Administration colleagues conducting training on the airport’s full-body imaging machines.

Months of joking culminated on Tuesday night, when Negrin attacked co-worker Hugo Osorno in an employee parking lot, according to an arrest report.

Via Unqualified Offerings.

. . . would be better than this. Emily Hill at the Guardian theorizes that weird celebrity behavior can be traced to weird celebrity diets:

(Naomi–ed.) Campbell is a strong, powerful woman. Bread or no bread, she’d still be breathtaking. But she’s not the only celebrity engaging in increasingly crazed regimes. Cheryl Cole eats according to her blood-type – it’s called the Eat Right 4 Your Type diet — which can only lead one to the conclusion that the pop princess’s gullibility cells are as active as her thyroid. Actress Kirsten Dunst apparently follows a diet that consists 70% alkaline foods and 30% acid. Jennifer Aniston allegedly downed a glass of freshly squeezed lemon juice first thing every morning but has now embarked on a new baby food diet. Liz Hurley famously lived on a bowl of cabbage soup a day. Hollywood starlet Megan Fox guzzles a cider vinegar cocktail, while popstar Fergie does it in shots.

I’ve just been reading Janusz Bardach’s Man is Wolf to Man, and am considering becoming a diet guru myself – proposing the gulag diet (1 x head of salted herring, 12 x hours of sawing down trees. No water. 500g of bread at the end of it = red-carpet-ready bone visibility guaranteed within one week).

Shorter version of the column I read today and wish I hadn’t wasted my time:

I have to figure out some way to call Obama “far left” so I can scare some more people.

Bring back banishment as a punishment.

By God, if it was good enough for the ancient barbarians, it is good enough for us.

All joking aside, this is wankery.

You know, of course, what wanking refers to.

It makes one feel good in the short term, but really doesn’t accomplish anything nor does it leave a legacy.

Words fail me.

Why else would Arizona be afraid of a H. G. Welles science fiction story?

Not just in the news. Are the news:

For anyone who is dizzied by all the Twitter jargon, here’s the gist: ABC’s Twitter feed issued a false report of Elena Kagan’s nomination (to the Supreme Court–ed.), attributing it to ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper. Tapper, always the trenchant fact-checker, pointed out that he said no such thing. But by this point, the falsehood had spread rapidly among Twitterers hungry for news but lax about double-checking.

The website Mediaite reported that the mistake was the result of an ABC staffer misunderstanding a “drill” that the news team was conducting, in preparation for coverage of real breaking news. The drill story was reported over an internal loudspeaker, prefaced by, “DRILL DRILL DRILL FOR DRILL PURPOSES THIS IS NOT TRUE,” a spokesperson told Mediaite. ABC’s designated Twitterer missed that first part, and the mistake was off and running on the Internet. (The original tweet has since been deleted.)

Via Bart Blog.

Because, as Atrios points out, most of us who live in cities and suburbs aren’t allowed to keep chickens.

Video via TPM.

Addendum:

With apologies to Joann Worley, another chicken joke.

Dumb and Dumber meets ignorant. Ignorant of history, ignorant of political theory, ignorant of America. Oh, never mind. It’s all about the Scary Black Man anyway.

Must be Fox News viewers (warning: language):

Teabaggers via the Booman Tribune.

Jon Stewart via TPM.