- Do you ever get the feeling that your state legislature (or even Congress) is just jerking with you when they discuss, debate and dissect some of the most inane and moronic bills known to man in the quest to figure out which Boy Scout troop to recognize for its latest merit badge project, settle on an official state jazz song or determine the merit of banning spitting over your left shoulder on Thursdays after 7 p.m. when crossing a north-south street? Pay attention to politics long enough and you’re bound to get that feeling, a feeling residents of Maine should be experiencing right about now as their legislature debates a bill that would make the whoopie pie the state of Maine's official dessert. This essential bill is moving for a vote in the full legislature, but could not make it there without one vital alteration. Instead of labeling the whoopie pie that state’s official dessert, the bill would now designate the whoopie pie as the state's official treat. Great, because official state treat sounds like an important designation to make. That’s an important label, whereas official state dessert just sounds ridiculous. Big ups to the committee that suggested that key tweak to the bill Monday before passing it along for a vote by the full legislature. Now, a cynic might ask the question as to why it makes a damn bit of difference whether the whoopie pie is recognized at all. The answer, of course, is a small group of whiny d-bags who support a particular cause and feel like everyone needs to be made aware of it even if it’s just another unhealthy dessert option for Americans already coping with too many such options at the restaurant or supermarket. In this case, supporters wish to have the whoopie pie recognized because of the many thousands that are sold across the state each week. "I think this little whoppie pie bill is an economic development bill, that's what it is," said employee Carol Ford of Cranberry Island Kitchen. "It's a small one. It's not like the national stimulus. It's small, but for Maine, whoopie pies are a little economic engine. And for Maine we need all the little economic engines we can get." Oh, so you think people are going to eat more whoopie pies because the idiot politicians are the statehouse in Portland whom they rip on a daily basis for being liars, cheats and worthless drains on the political system pass a bill telling them that the pies are now officially recognized by the state as its official dessert/treat? Seems like sound logic to mean. Just know that passing this bill is tantamount to launching a Scud in the whoopie pie war, with the Pennsylvania Dutch Visitors Bureau's website claiming the product was invented in that state in the 1960s. The best part of the debate is that, in the end, everyone’s time is wasted and nothing of value will have been accomplished. Score one for politics…………
- This is certainly a new twist on trying to stamp out riots taking place in your country. Simply demand the execution of those deemed responsible for them and see if the people are as willing to turn out en masse next time to demand changes in how their country is run. Now, those comments could be directed at most any nation in the Middle East right now, but if you guessed Iran on the location of this story, you are correct. Seems that some lawmakers in Iran have called for the execution of two opposition leaders who supported Monday's rallies in Tehran on account of sedition, an offense punishable by death. These over-reactive lawmakers want to see opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi be tried for sedition and put to death, which I suppose is their way of saying, “You have a valid point and every reason to rise up, but we’re in charge and in Iran, disagreeing with the government is the quickest way to get yourself before a firing squad or into the hangman’s noose.” The scene in Tehran truly was chilling, with state TV broadcasting a bizarre march of some 50 conservative MPs through parliament's main hall on Tuesday, chanting "Death to Mousavi, death to Karroubi." The reaction was nothing if not predictable after the two opposition leaders called Monday's rallies in Tehran and elsewhere to show solidarity with recent Arab uprisings against authoritarian governments. No government is more authoritarian and dictatorial than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime in Iran, so protests are needed there more than anywhere else. Of course, there is also a lower tolerance for dissent in Iran than just about anywhere else, thus Iran looking to off those responsible and warning foreign powers against getting involved.
"We think that the shared desire of all the nations in the region is for the oppressive countries not to meddle - especially in the face of the violations and encroachment of the Zionist regime - and to cut off dependence from the U.S. and the Zionist regimes and their supporters,” said Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ramin Mehmanparast. That didn’t stop U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from saying Tuesday that her country “very clearly and directly” supports the protesters. Iran has seen its share of protests during Ahmadinejad’s rule, with large-scale uprising last occurring after the disputed presidential election in 2009. The impetus this time was the wave of protest sweeping the region, from Egypt to Yemen to Tunisia. What’s especially great about the lawmakers’ quest to prosecute and execute Mousavi and Karroubi is that Iranian security forces prevented them from joining the rallies by surrounding their homes in the city. Personally, I would argue that the government should be thrilled that these rallies, unlike the last round of uprising in Iran, didn’t come in response to an (allegedly) rigged election. But hey, maybe that’s just me seeking the sunny side of every situation…………
- Billy Ray Cyrus, owner of the greatest mullet of all-time, is also one of the most ungrateful jerks ever to grace a stage or screen. He should appreciate the fact that he rode his marvelous mullet and a complete lack of talent into a lengthy career in entertainment and that the good Lord then blessed him with a child star daughter whose success he could gravy train to keep that career going, but instead Cyrus is biting the hand that feeds. In a new GQ interview, he slams Hannah Montana, the Disney series that made his daughter Miley a star. "It destroyed my family," says Cyrus, who split from wife Tish last year and admits he no longer speaks with his 18-year-old daughter. "I'll tell you right now -- the damn show destroyed my family ... it's all sad." Wait…..so you’re blaming the show that kept you relevant and gave your musically clueless daughter a chance to shine for breaking up your family? How long do you think you all would have lasted if that show never came along, your 15 minutes of fame ended and your daughter was just an ordinary kid and part of a family left to deal with a has-been dad who was known primarily for “Achy Breaky Heart,” the single worst song in a genre (country) full of them. But let’s humor my man Billy Ray and see where he’s going with this. "Season four, it was a disaster," he said of the show’s final season. "I was going to work every single day knowing that my family had fallen apart, but yet I had to sit in front of that camera. I look back and I go, How did I ever make it through that? I must be a better actor than I thought." No, no you are not. Your acting is and has always been subpar. Asked next if he wished the show had never happen, the über-ungrateful Cyrus added, "I hate to say it, but yes, I do. Yeah. I'd take it back in a second. For my family to be here and just be everybody okay, safe and sound and happy and normal, would have been fantastic. Heck, yeah. I'd erase it all in a second if I could." Trust me, the rest of us wholly support that idea. Just because you and your daughter don’t talk and your wife ditched you isn’t a reason to lash out at a television show. The most hilarious part of the interview is Cyrus likening himself to Jesus when speaking about how he often became a scapegoat whenever Miley did something dumb and it went public. “Well, I took it, because I'm her daddy, and that's what daddies do. 'Okay, nail me to the cross, I'll take it,’" he explained. Oh, okay. So you’re like Jesus being nailed to a cross because people blame you for your kid coming off the rails, I get it. It makes no sense and it’s an asinine comparison, but I get it. The piece de resistance for the interview, however, was Cyrus attempting to put his daughter in the same category as Kurt Cobain, Anna Nicole Smith and Michael Jackson. "That's why I'm concerned about Miley," he said. Alluding to Cobain, he adds, "I think that his world was just spinning so fast and he had so many people around him that didn't help him." Right, except he had put out some of the greatest music of his era, turned out an all-time great album and had talent along with serious mental issues. But other than that, he’s exactly like your daughter and so is a one-gloved freak who sang falsetto and a surgically enhanced Playboy bunny whose sole “talent” was her ample chest……….
- For once, politicians might just have some valuable insight into professional sports. Sure, lawmakers have long been in the business of interjecting themselves into the sporting world, largely because they never had the game to make it as an athlete and this is the next best thing, but typically those forays into athletics have been pointless and wasted everyone’s time. But now, New Jersey Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg and Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin have a great idea for Major League Baseball and commissioner Bud Selig and Co. would do well to listen. The two Democratic senators are urging MLB, along with baseball’s players union, to ban smokeless tobacco, such as chew and dip. In letters made public Tuesday, the senators said (rightly) that the product endangers players' health and "sends a dangerous message" to young fans. The core message of the letters was for Selig and Michael Weiner, the head of the union, to include a ban in the next collective bargaining agreement they will negotiate after the current one expires in December. Right now, smokeless tobacco is banned in the minor leagues but not in the majors and it is a regular sight for a player to stride to the plate or be caught on camera in the dugout with a ginormous wad of chew in their cheek or carrying a tin of dip in a back pocket. Oh, and don’t forget the ever-disgusting spit bottles into which chewing tobacco users spit their revolting refuse once they’re doing with it. Safe to say that young, impressionable baseball fans aren’t the only ones who would be better off and much happier not having to see these nauseating sights when they tune in for or attend a game…………
- Google, you might just do some good in this world yet. Users of your and other search engines are routinely slammed by results generated by content farms, the sources of those of spam-tastic Web pages engineered to show up high in search results. Contents farms are now going under the microscope at the Web giant, which said in a post on its official blog that users of its Chrome Web browser are invited take part in a test of an extension that will let them block certain sites from their search results. By adding the extension, users will be able to set up a "personal blocklist." From that point on, they will see no content from that site in Google searches done while using Chrome. To ensure that the list of blocked sites is not lost, the app also sends Google a list of all the sites users have blocked. "We will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results," Google principal engineer Matt Cutts wrote in the post. The extension represents, for once, a corporation actually listening to and responding to the complaints of its customers. In the post, Cutts describes content farm results as sites with "shallow or low-quality content" and he’s right, but search engine users have been saying as much for a long time. But maybe we should cut Google some slack…..maybe. After all, Cutts said in a post last month that Google was busy adjusting its algorithms to try to minimize those offensive sites and promised that more changes are on the way. "We hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content" he wrote. "The fact is that we're not perfect, and combined with users' skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better." So who are these faceless content farms that are spamming up everyone’s search results? Demand Media's eHow, AOL Seed and Yahoo's Associated Content are typically the first names mentioned any time the issue of content farms comes up. These crap factories of content work by paying writers small wages to create posts on topics that have been identified as frequently-searched. Content farms them optimize the posts to show up high in search results and use that positioning to sell ads. Now, you can tackle the problem thanks to your pals at Google and you can do so whether you speak English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish or Turkish. Good times………
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