Give Me a Break category archive

and from television commercials at the gas pump, good Lord protect us.

I used to know a fellow who cashed in $40,000 of his retirement to pay for his daughter’s wedding. Sorry, but disposable cameras on every table at $15.00 a pop is hardly a “tradition.”

One hopes that this presages a return to sanity in the wedding biz.

“A lot of people are not doing the huge affairs they were in years past,” Coleman says. “And if they are having a normal traditional wedding, they are trying to find out ways to save as much money as possible.”

Kristin Mihok, owner of All About Weddings in Townsend, also has seen a sharp decline in wedding budgets in recent months. Where her brides had been spending between $20,000 and $30,000 before 2008, they are now spending between $8,000 and $20,000.

But one doubts it.

From the Toimes:

Two weeks ago I bumped into a friend whom I hadn’t seen in months, and we tried to strike up a conversation. But since we follow each other on Twitter, are friends on Facebook and blog-stalk one another, the usually enjoyable conversation quickly turned awkward. Every major update to our lives, after all, had already been published online.

Oh, yeah.

Join Twitter and see Afghanistan.

Their poisonous bigotry knows no limits. Guess some folks are not happy unless they hate.

Via Jack, who also points out this one.

Will it become the new TMZ?

And who cares?

These people live in another world:

Portfolio ran an anonymous piece today by a self-described TARP wife lamenting how far she’s fallen both socially and monetarily. . . . What’s always astonishing about these Wall Street “look how much worse my life is” pieces is that they’re written with the belief that people, besides their friends at the country club, will have any sympathy for them whatsoever.

Newt Gingrich is babbling about the Founding Fathers on Marconi’s Magic Box.

Too bad he didn’t think about the Founders–about their ideals, about their dreams, or about the Constitution which they crafted–from 2001 through 2008.

On the Media reports on Texas’s persistent attempts to pass off creationism as something other than the fable it is. From the website:

For two decades, critics have argued that the Texas Board of Education’s science standards have allowed creationism to creep into public schools and textbooks. Last week the board changed the language, creating the latest arena in the clash between creationists and the scientific community. Both sides explain why the subtle language change may greatly affect how evolution is taught in Texas and the rest of the country.

Listen here

or follow the link to listen to the segment or read the transcript.
.

Honest to Pete:

A fifth-grade teacher at Leasure Elementary School used a student’s serrated knife Wednesday to cut a vanilla cake with white frosting that the girl brought to share with classmates.

After handing out the slices, the teacher promptly turned the girl in for bringing a “deadly weapon” to school, her parents said.

This is right up there with strip-searching a girl for possibly having a legal, non-addictive prescription drug.

If you follow the link and read the story, you’ll see that the school has already had second thoughts and is looking for some way out without conceding that the whole damn policy is bull-headed, stupid, and irresponsible.

And why, you might ask but probably didn’t, is the whole damn policy bull-headed, stupid, and irresponsible?

Because it takes no account of intent or behavior. A child who empties out a backpack to use on a campling trip and forgets to remove the camping jack knife when returning to school on Monday is treated with the same severity as the child with a seven-inch switchblade and blood in his or her eye.

But it is easier, I suppose, to make and enforce blanket policies than it is to think.

Guess school is no place for thinking anyway.

Afterthought:

Oh, yeah, and the News-Journal’s headline is an insult to the child and her family. It reminds me or when my brother (he was about five) nearly died from an electrical short in a transformer at a light pole in the front yard. All the volts were going down a guy wire to ground. He was frozen to the wire screaming and my father broke into a dead run and ripped him free.

All the local paper could think of for a headline was “Billy —- Learns about Eletricity.”

Addendum:

No charges. Apparently the school district figured out that she is not a menace to the public peace.

Furrfu.

El Reg:

A German evangelical pastor who’s recreated biblical scenes from Playmobil figures has been given until 6 April to pull his website, or face the wrath of the company’s lawyers.

According to the Telegraph, 38-year-old Markus Bomhard’s principal sin was to adapt the figures . . . .

Playmobil said in a statement yesterday: “For private purposes – by collectors and fans – we are very tolerant of this so-called ‘customising’.”

However, the company described Bomhard’s creative adaptations as a “massive manipulation of the figures, for example reshaping their arms with a hairdryer or candle to nail them to a cross”.

I congratulate the pastor on his creativity.

Playmobile needs to get a life. They make toys, for heaven’s sake, not some bleedin’ plastic Mona Lisas.

Somewhere, right now, some three-year old is doing far worse to Playmobile figures.

(See the pastor’s website here while you still can.)

At the company’s 18th annual shareholder meeting in Seattle on Wednesday, the chief executive (of Starbucks–ed.) told shareholders he aims to knock down the “myth” that Starbucks coffee costs $4 a cup. Schultz also insisted the company is well aware of the impact that lost jobs and foreclosures are having on its customers. Listen to analysis of McDonald’s and Starbucks’ performance during the recession.

“We’ve become the poster child for excess. … We are going to dispel this myth about a $4 cup of coffee,” Schultz said near the end of his 70-minute presentation to shareholders. In fact, he added, most of the company’s beverages retail for less than $4.

How about the truth that it attains mediocrity as a standard?

This trial went on for months. In the world of Pennsylvania politics, it is a Big Deal. And now

A juror deliberating corruption charges against former Sen. Vincent Fumo discussed the case on the Facebook and Twitter social networking Web sites and even promised a “big announcement” today, the defense said in an emergency motion it filed.

Sunday’s filing raises the specter of a potential mistrial in the nearly five-month-long trial, whose jury was set to start its sixth day of deliberations today.

Technology can be a wonderful thing.

It does not cure stupid.

Aside: Atrios is following the verdicts.

Addendum:

Mithras has the latest on the Twitter motion.

Please make the lies go away:

For the past couple of days, FOX News and Lou Dobbs have been bleating nonstop about President Obama’s ‘broken’ campaign promise to ban all earmarks.

Only one problem — he never made any such promise. That was John McCain, as Keith Olbermann pointed out last night on Wednesday..

As you’ll see in this video, during the campaign President Obama actually said that while he supported earmark reform, he believed a line-by-line review would show that some earmarks were for good programs and some were for bad programs.

Via Atrios, who documents that the MSM has fallen for this one too.

I see that bumper sticker from time to time, usually attached to a beat-up vehicle driven by an old white guy.

My first thought is always, “Drop the stupid S. O. B. down at 56th and Market for a week. If he survives, see if he’s singing the same tune when the week’s over.”

Politeness does not spring from the muzzle of a gun. Bullets spring from the muzzle of a gun.

Field Negro has more.

John Cole (emphasis added):

Seriously- the welfare queens on Wall Street keep asking what Obama can do to “regain the confidence of Wall Street” (and I really can not describe how angry those statements make me- Obama needs to have you regain confidence in him? You were the rocket scientists who caused this mess.)

Saturday morning in the hotel at the “complimentary breakfast” (sorry–I can’t compliment the breakfast. The only bagels were raisin bagels–I was compelled to inform the Front Desk Clerk that bagels come in plain, egg, garlic, onion, sesame, and many other varieties, but that “raisin bagels” and “cinnamon raisin bagels” are not bagels, they are cookies), the Saturday Today Show was on. (I didn’t even know there was a Saturday Today Show. I am network teevee illiterate.)

As we watched the news about the unemployment rate, the eight of us who happened to be in that room came to a conclusion:

Wall Street Bankers would look good in orange jumpsuits picking up litter along the road.

I really can’t improve on what John Cole said.

What Leonard Pitts said.

Read more »

One of the great American historians of the mid-twentieth century, Richard Hofstadter, wrote a wonderful book, which documented the United States’s love-hate relationship with learning and inquiry.

It was true then. It is true now.

Notice to Oklahoma: Legislation does not change facts. You see, facts have this one uncomfortable property.

Facts are.

Via CC.

It’s a dog; it’s not a symbol.

Citibank falls for the Nigerian scam. Yes, it actually tried to wire the money to the scammers. It only got off because the transfer didn’t go through due to a typo.

Definitely bonus-worthy.

. . . Over time, Amos and his cohorts created a series of official-looking documents that instructed Citibank to wire the sum of $27 million from the National Bank of Ethiopia to a series of puportedly legitimate bank accounts. These accounts were actually controlled by the thieves, who presumably intended to empty them immediately once all 24 of the specified wire transactions had been completed. The exact amount of money intended for each account is not given, but I’m assuming the group settled on an amount of cash that, while sizable, could be moved from Point A to Point B without arousing too much suspicion.

The scheme fell apart when the target banks could not process the transactions. At that point, either Citibank or the target bank attempted to contact the Bank of Ethiopia, which could not verify the transactions as valid. A warrant for Mr. Amos was issued; the man was arrested last month when he attempted to enter the US. The FBI, Citibank, and Ethiopia are obviously pleased with having caught the theft-in-progress, the ringleader is now in jail, and Citibank returned the complete amount of money that had been transferred from the National Bank of Ethiopia.

Via GNC.