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That’s no fail! That’s Leslie.

Honestly, I figured it was just a matter of time before violence broke out at one of the health care town hall meetings, but I didn’t realize it would be so stuperb.

The story comes from the Kansas City Star, but to avoid having the AP go apeshit on me for pasting its text here, I’ll paraphrase:

The Scene

A St Louis health care town hall meeting, organized by the Tea Part Coalition.

The Incident

A lot of he says, she says, but the end result is that a fight breaks out and a conservative man, Kenneth Gladney, is injured. He says the Service Employees International Union started the fight; they say he did.

The Aftermath: Hilarity Ensues

The unfortunate Mr Gladney, in addition to being beaten up, is also recently unemployed and has lost his health care coverage. Therefore, he will accept donations from the general public to help cover his medical costs.

(Insert joke here)

From Wired:

Let the robot holocaust commence: robots think we taste like bacon.

Researchers at NEC System technologies and Mie University have designed the cute little guy to the right: a metal man gastronomist, “an electromechanical sommelier”, capable of identifying wines, cheeses, meats and hors d’oeuvres. Upon being given a sample, he will speak up in a childlike voice and identify what he has just been fed. The idea is that wineries can tell if a wine is authentic without even opening the bottle, amongst other more obscure uses…like “tell me what this strange grayish lump at the back of my freezer is/was.”

But when some smart aleck reporter placed his hand in the robot’s omnivorous clanking jaw, he was identified as bacon. A cameraman then tried and was identified as prosciutto.

Absolutely horrifying. Like cows, once robots taste blood, their hunger for human flesh can never be satiated.

( I’m pretty sure it would identify my husband as prosciutto, too.)

So, great. I guess it’s a race to see whether we’re destroyed by zombies or by our own creations. This reminds me of the cartoons where the cartoon cat drools, imagining its prey as a walking steak.

After my husband got this book for his new Kindle2, I couldn’t resist:

It’s apparently the new trend in foreign relations: chucking shoes at world leaders when you don’t like what they stand for.

It happened to President Bush, and now it’s happened to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao while he spoke in Cambridge.

The sole protestor, a 27 year-old man, was promptly arrested.   Unlike his Iraqi counterpart, though, he’ll just have to appear in front of a magistrate in England, rather than being maimed and tortured in an undisclosed location in Iraq.

What’s funny about this story - I mean, in addition to the general silliness of having a shoe thrown at one’s head - is the Chinese spin on the matter. After the government was done purging message boards of comments about the matter, the boards were left with messages like this:

“The uncompromising Iraqi people threw a shoe at Bush which is a brave act by a suppressed nation,” said one comment on the tiexue.net bulletin board. “But the ugly Englishman threw a shoe at Wen, which was only a barbaric trick.”

In addition to the hilarity of such a simplistic, nationalist comparison, I giggle at the notion of a ‘barbaric trick’.  It might be just a difficulty with the translation, but ‘trick’ seems much too casual a word to put together with ‘barbaric’ and the combination tickles the wordie in me.