- Homer Simpson would be very proud of Kerry Silverman. The Kansas City native and student at University of Missouri has created "Pub Corn," alcohol-flavored popcorn that you know the patriarch of the Simpson family would love if he actually existed and wasn’t a cartoon character. Silverman, a business management major, was inspired to create his alcohol-flavored snack food after seeing some teens sneaking alcohol into movie theaters. He went to work on finding a way to infuse popcorn with the flavor of alcohol, without success initially. "I soaked the kernels in whiskey," Kerry Silverman said. "That didn't work. I tried injecting it with a syringe. I poked my finger a lot, but it didn't work.” Undeterred by his failures (as is any great inventor), Silverman then moved on to non-alcoholic coatings that taste like beer, piña colada and Irish Cream. A plant in Kansas City, Mo. administers the coatings and Silverman’s products have found a devoted following, especially amongst pregnant women and truck drivers. Why these groups? Because they're looking for the taste of alcohol, but can't drink the real stuff. According to Silverman, he’s been contacted by producers for Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres and Martha Stewart, all of whom would like to have Silverman on their shows. Oprah herself made a request for tequila-flavored popcorn, a flavor Silverman says he is testing. As a quick aside, if you’ve seen Oprah’s bloated physique lately, she needs to steer clear of both snack foods and alcohol, but I digress. It turns out that Kerry Silverman is quite the entrepreneur, having started a total of three business, including an online study group Web site that is used by almost 100 colleges around the country. Now what will be interesting to see is whether Pub Corn a regional, short-term phenomenon or if this could catch on nationwide. I’m thinking more to the latter, although I don’t think it’s the second coming of Planter’s cheese balls or anything…….
- Darn freaking right, U.S. Navy. You’d better release those pirates you detained off the coast of Puntland, a small region including the horn of Africa, a few weeks ago. All told, the idiots in our navy captured 16 suspected pirates and held them on a ship for the last few weeks. This week, nine of those pirates were released and I’m just going to go ahead and assume that the other seven will be released any day now. The first nine were let go because the Navy did not have enough evidence to hand them over to Kenya for prosecution in court, in accordance with a recent agreement between the United States and Kenya. After capturing the pirates and continuing their attempt to hold down my favorite scourges of the high seas, the U.S. Navy handed them off to the Puntland coast guard. All of this came about because some panicky captain of the Indian-flagged ship Premdivya broadcast a distress call to all ships in the area that it had come under attack by a small boat. As always, you need to lay off the pirates and quit blaming them every time something happens, even an act of piracy. When you overreact, you end up with something like the Navy spotting a small boat meeting the description given by the Premdivya and detaining the occupants. Whatever happened to the days of respecting and fearing pirates as they looted, pillaged, plundered and make wenches walk the plank? Keep fighting the good fight, pirates. Don’t let The Man hold you down……..
- Dude, this season of Lost is seriously bumming me out. It’s so erratic and at times awful that I’m losing a little bit of interest. The show has a nasty habit of ignoring one of the two main groups of people in the show, those being the Oceanic 6 (now back on the island) and those who didn’t make it off the island last season. Tonight’s episode was one of those troubled shows, zeroing in entirely on those who remained on the island until literally the last 30 seconds of the show. It picked up on the scene from last week when John Locke disappeared down a well into the interior of the island to find a way off of it - so he could convince the Oceanic 6 to come back. Except this episode the focus was on Sawyer, Juliette, Miles, Daniel and Sun, the crew who has been hurtling through time this season as the island leapt along the space-time continuum to various years of the past century. After Locke disappeared down the well as a light flash hit and a time travel incident hit the island, Sawyer and Co. were left looking at a patch of dirt where the well used to be. They’d traverled through time again, this time to 1974, it turns out. Sawyer decides that the best course of action is to return to the beach where the Oceanic 815 survivors had their camp. Along the way, the group encounters Daniel, who stayed behind with Charlotte rather than continue on to the well with Locke because Charlotte was very ill due to continued exposure to the time travel incidents on the island. A distraught Daniel tells Juliette that when the last flash hit, Charlotte simply disappeared. She’s gone but everyone else remains and continues on the way to the beach before trouble finds them. Shots ring out in the jungle and off in the distance, Sawyer sees two men with guns attacking a woman and placing a bag over her head. When the men, dressed like Others, see Sawyer they hesitate before opening fire on him. Juliette and Sawyer return fire and kill the men, rescuing the woman but finding her companion - a man in a Dharma jumpsuit - is dead, apparently at the hands of the two Others. The woman, Amy, takes Sawyer and his group back toward the barracks - or New Otherton, as Sawyer tends to call it. In 1974, the Dharma Initiative still inhabited the barracks. At the sonic fence used to protect the barracks from the island’s many dangers, Juliet insists that Amy turn off the fence so they can pass safely through. Amy tricks the group by pretending to turn the fence off, then walking through it safely by using ear plugs. When Sawyer and Co. follow, the fence takes them down and renders them unconscious. The group wakes up to find themselves at the barracks, with Horace Goodspeed, whose corpse and tattered jumpsuit we’ve seen before on the show, questioning Sawyer about his group and how they came to the island. Sawyer crafted a lie about being the captain of a salvage ship that wrecked nearby and washed the crew up onto the island. Sawyer also called himself Jim LaFleur, with both lies believed by Horace. Horace informed Sawyer that he and his group would be placed on the submarine leaving the island the next morning, the same sub we know was blown up back when the show was operating in the present day and not three decades ago. As Sawyer explains all of this to the rest of his group, a siren goes off in the barracks and all of them are herded inside as none other than Richard Alpert strolls into camp with a torch. Horace goes out to meet with Alpert, who is clearly pissed that two of his Others were just killed. Sawyer realizes he can diffuse the situation, which could ruin the truce that the Dharma people and the Others had struck. Sawyer tells Richard who he really is and confirms his claims by listing things he saw in the past during time travel flashes on the island, things like the H-bomb the Others found and buried and Locke’s appearance in their camp in 1954, claiming to be their leader. Richard believes him but insists that the deaths of two of his men demand justice. A deal is struck that the Others get to have the body of Paul, Amy’s husband who was killed in the earlier attack. With that matter settled, Horace agrees to allow Sawyer and his group to remain on the island for two more weeks, until the next submarine comes in. One person who doesn’t want those two weeks is Juliette, who has been trying to get off the island for more than three years. Yet in a conversation on the dock, Sawyer talks her into staying for two more weeks. An immediate flash forward reveals that those two weeks turn into the three years, with Sawyer and Juliette are together as a couple, living together in the barracks and in love. Sawyer, still going by the name LaFleur, is the head of security, and he’s called out of bed in the middle of the night because Horace is out near the Flame, a Dharma station on the island, setting off explosives and blowing up trees. Sawyer rounds up Miles, who clearly never left the island either, and they don Dharma jumpsuits before going out to retrieve Horace. They find him drunk and passed out, out acting like a fool while his wife Amy (who he apparently married after the death of Paul three years prior) is having their baby. Amy makes a successful delivery thanks to help from Juliette, who had refrained from practicing any medicine in the past three years living in the barracks because of the pregnant women who had all died during her work trying to help care for the Others when she originally came to the island. Juliette delivers the baby and everyone comes through fine, but Horace misses it because he was out blowing things up after he and Amy had a fight over an old necklace of Paul’s she’d kept since his death. Once all of the drama is resolved and Horace is told what he missed, Sawyer goes home and goes to bed. A phone call from Jin wakes him up and sends him rushing across the island. Jin is told to “keep them there.” By “them,” Sawyer means Jack, Kate and Hurley, who Sun found two episodes ago after they successfully made it back to the island. Sawyer rushes out to meet the group and when he and Kate lock eyes, all his words about loving Juliette and being over Kate are thrown into question, and that’s where things end. The year is now 1977, so we’ll have to see how that factors in. It was made clear all episode that the time travel flashes are done and as Daniel said, “Where we are is where we’re staying.” Everyone is apparently stuck in 1977…..except for Locke, who is back on the island but seemingly in 2009 along with the others from Ajira 316 that the Oceanic 6 were on as they tried to return to the island. But the freaking idiots running the show neglected Locke all episode, we also have no idea what became of Ben Linus, in the infirmary with Locke and the Ajira survivors and also of Sun and Sayid, who we haven’t heard from since Ajira 316 went down. Another subpar episode and another reason this season is really beginning to piss me off………
- Never knew parents in Texas were so overly sensitive. Yeah, I’ve heard that everything is bigger in the Lone Star State, I just didn’t know that meant parents there were bigger babies than anywhere else. Look, just because a school librarian recommends “The Boy Book” to a 13-year-old girl and that happens to be a book with racy chapter titles and content is no reason to get your knickers in a bunch. Sure, the book calls women's breasts "boy magnets” and suggests that, "No matter how puny your frontal equipment, don't wear the kind with giant pads inside. If a guy squeezes them, he'll wonder why they feel like Nerf balls instead of boobs.” Who doesn’t want their kid reading such informative, insightful literature and more to the point, who doesn’t want their school’s librarian recommending that sort of book? One fortunate Keller Independent School District student got her hands on a copy of "The Boy Book" from her middle school library. By reading it, she got helpful hints line those in Chapter Three, which talks about drinking. Not every child at Fossil Hill Middle School is fortunate enough to get this sort of literary reference from the librarian, so I don’t know why this girl is complaining, but complaining this ungrateful brat is. “There's stuff kids my age don't need to know yet,” said the student, whose family did not want to be identified. Au contraire, kid. Did you not see Chapter Six, all about the "serious boyfriend." Did you not see helpful hints about relationships such as, “You can see a future if the two of you are getting horizontal on a regular basis. You borrow his T-shirts.” See, fashion tips AND relationship advice, two-for-one shopping right there. Don’t subscribe to your school’s arcane, square PDA rules like prohibiting boys and girls for hugging for more than two seconds. Thankfully, the school district appears to be standing behind the librarian and the book, meeting with the mother of the offended girl and saying that “the district relies on reviews from quality national journals written by certified librarians,” and the book was recommended. Gotta admit, I expected more from you, Texas parents…….
- I have a new group of people to hate: people who hate on Barbie. No, I’m not a Barbie fan, never owned one or played with one or as far as I can remember, held one in my hands for even a second. However, what pisses me off is idiots with nothing better to do than attack a piece of plastic shaped like a miniature woman because she’s not exactly anatomically realistic. Yes, I’m looking right at you, femi-Nazis. You and like-minded idiots have spent years whining that Barbie dolls give girls unrealistic images on how they should look and that if Barbie’s proportions were played out in real life, she’d be like 9 feet fall with a 50-inch rack and 25-inch waist or something ridiculous like that. Right, because everyone looks at a plastic doll and judges how they should look by that. I don’t remember ever looking at a He-Man action figure or G.I. Joe and thinking, “Boy, I need to be ripped and bulked up like those guys, I have to look like them.” Yet there are still morons out there like West Virginia lawmaker Jeff Eldridge, a Democratic Delegate who proposed a bill Tuesday in Charleston, W. Va. to ban sales of Barbie and others like her. His imbecilic proposal states that such toys influence girls to place too much importance on physical beauty, at the expense of their intellectual and emotional development. "Basically, I introduced legislation because the Barbie doll, I think, gives emphasis on if you're beautiful, you don't have to be smart," Eldridge said. Allow me to respond, if you don’t mind and even if you do. First, you tool, Barbie is a FREAKING DOLL. She has no intelligence at all because she’s an inanimate object. In no way does she influence girls’ beliefs on intelligence versus appearance because she has no intelligence. Besides, I’m sure that at some point, Mattel has slammed Barbie into a doctor’s outfit or scientist’s coat, which would seem to send a message to girls playing with Barbie dolls that intelligence is important. Second, I hope this measure is merely symbolic and you don’t expect it to pass, because the only way a product should be banned in any state is if the product is illicit or unalterably harmful to users. You can’t just go dropping bans on toys you don’t like, because where do you draw the line? Violent video games? Sporting equipment because it encourages kids to value athletic achievement over education? Quit grandstanding on meaningless issues and try to focus on topics that matter and have some relevancy to the world in which you live. Allow Barbie to celebrate her 50th birthday on March 9 without any further harassment. She’s not a role model, she’s not a life planning advisor and if you’re too dumb or lazy to raise your child in a way to know that, then you deserve what you get…….
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