- Not a good week for presidents worldwide. Our own president W. is still a moron, Mauritania’s president was ousted from office and jailed and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is facing intense pressure to either resign or be impeached. On Monday, one of Pakistan’s four provincial assemblies passed a non-binding resolution calling for Musharraf to resign, with the resolution passing by a whopping 321-25 margin. Its language calls the president an incompetent leader whose policies have “brought Pakistan to the brink of a critical political and economic impasse.” Oh, how appropriate those words would be for certain other presidents in the world (cough, W., cough, President of the United States, cough). But I digress….the resolution also alleges that Musharraf’s policies have “plunged Pakistan into the worst power shortage in its history.” His opponents are giving him the option of resigning or calling for a vote of confidence in Pakistan’s national parliament. Musharraf does have the option of ignoring those calls for him to quit or call for the vote, although the groundswell of opposition against him is so strong that he needs to do something - anything - to quiet it or his country is going to disintegrate before his eyes….
- This is what I call putting your MIT education to good use. Three students from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology were planning to give a presentation at the Defcon computer hackers’ conference in Las Vegas Sunday, but a federal judge issued a last-minute temporary restraining order blocking the students from making their presentation. The topic of their talk was to be security flaws in the automated fare system used by Boston’s subway. Apparently telling a conference auditorium full of hackers how to score free fares on the subway system of a city that almost none of them live in is a big problem. Sure, the instant you share that information with a conference hall full of hackers you might as well broadcast it on national television and post it online at every major website, but so what? If these smart kids have found a way to beat the system, it’s not their problem, it’s the problem of the transit authority in Boston. Maybe once the flaws are made public, they’ll be motivated and able to fix those flaws. Why keep people from sharing information that would obviously be beneficial to those receiving it. I’m pretty certain that when the parents of those three students sent their kids off to MIT, this is what they hoped for; that their kids would find a way to help people rip off Boston’s subway system. So back off, federal judge in Massachusetts, no one likes someone with a stick up their ass and no sense of humor…..
- NFL players are not generally known for being candidates for Mensa. That’s not to say that all or even most of them are dumb, because there are quite a few intelligent guys in the league. However, it doesn’t help make the case for their intelligence when you have dudes sustaining serious lacerations on their feet during practice because they were dumb enough to do sprints with teammates while not wearing any shoes. The genius in question is Braylon Edwards, whom the Cleveland Browns will now be without for their next two preseason games because he was running sprints barefoot and fellow wide receiver Donte Stallworth inadvertently stepped on Edwards’ foot with his sharp spikes. The resulting laceration required stitches and it will knock Edwards out of commission for a couple of weeks. Nothing like suffering an injury because you can't’ keep your shoes on. Maybe I’m just overly cautious, but if I’m around 100 or so guys in cleats and many of whom weigh 200-300 pounds, I’m not exposing my bare feet. Too many bad things can happen if you do, things like huge gashes that sideline you when you’re supposed to be preparing for the season. Take this one as a life lesson and stop being Shoeless Braylon, it’ll be better for everyone, B., I promise……..
- If you were in northern Mexico or the southern portion of the state of Texas Sunday and thought you felt the Earth shift on its axis, don’t be worried. That was just Manuel Uribe, formerly the world’s most obese human being but now slim and svelte at 700 pounds, out for a little day trip. Uribe left his home for the first time in five months (still more often than pale, pasty, never-kissed-a-girl Star Wars dorks in their Darth Vader costumes) with the aid of a forklift and platform truck, making a trip to a local lake where he snacked on fruit and fish and relaxed. On a side note, if you need a forklift and flatbed truck to leave your home, maybe you shouldn’t be eating at all or at most, once a day. To make matters more comical, Uribe was transported while in his specially designed bed and never left the bed during the trip. I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again: people that FAT are really, really depressing. If you let yourself go to the point where you weigh more than 300 pounds (assuming your not 7 feet tall), that’s just sad. You’re basically saying to everyone that you’ve given up on life to the point that you weigh as much as three of four normal people combined and don’t care about the ugly, jiggly rolls of fat all over your body. For your own sake and the sake of anyone who has to look at you, trim it down and at least give yourself a fighting chance to see your feet every now and then…..
- It seems appropriate on the heels of that last story to mention that recent scientific developments have brought us a step closer to being able to make three-dimensional objects invisible. While making a ginormous pile of fatty flab like Manuel Uribe invisible seems like a Herculean task times a thousand, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have demonstrated for the first time that they are able to cloak 3-D objects using artificially engineered materials that reflect light around objects. Previously, scientists have only been able to cloak two-dimensional objects, so this is a big advance. The findings will be published in two scientific journals I’m sure you all already subscribe to, Nature and Science. As for cloaking 700-pound fatties like Uribe….look for articles on that in the Journal of Impossible Things That Will Never Happen and expect that journal to be published right around never, give or take a week or two.….
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