Am I the only one that finds this strange?

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That’s no fail! That’s Leslie.

MSNBC.com reports that a man driving a motorized Laz-E-Boy was charged with a DWI after crashing into a parked car. He drank “eight or nine” beers and then headed home in his souped-up recliner, which police said was “powered by a converted lawnmower and had a stereo and cup holders.”

We slouch closer and closer to the dystopias described in Idiocracy and Wall-E.  All this guy needs is a toilet and maybe a retractable roof feature, and he’ll never have to use those weird fleshy appendages attaches to his pelvis again.

In addition to an aging, widening population and the increasing popularity of giant televisions, analysts believe that the recession itself is partly responsible for the rise in recliner sales (emphasis mine):

Sales of reclining chairs are getting a lift from the growing popularity of high-tech TVs, home theater equipment and video games, as well as an aging population that is less active. Even the recession, which forced many Americans to cancel vacation plans, seemed to have help sales of the comfy lounge chairs.

I realize that Americans are vacationing at home rather than Disneyland these days, but part of me giggles at the idea that some Americans might be celebrating their unemployment by treating themselves to a Laz-E Boy.

A Saudi woman filed for divorce after discovering by chance that her husband gave her name “Guantanamo” on his mobile phone, reports newspaper al-Watan.

The newspaper said the woman, aged 30 and living in the city of Jeddah, saw this after her husband left the phone at home.

The furious wife filed for divorce, arguing that by assigning such a nickname, the husband saw her as a tyrannical person and she could no longer continue to live with him after 17 years of marriage.

I don’t know; she sounds pretty reasonable to me!

Also, I’m not a math expert or anything, but 30 years old minus 17 years of marriage equals holy shit!

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)

Hearing this just made my heart sink. It’s a horrible mischaracterization of what happened to Matthew Shepard, who was selected, tortured, left for dead, and yes, robbed, because he was gay.

Congresswoman Foxx was arguing against a hate crime bill when she went off the deep end. Sure, the bill bears Matthew’s name, so evidently she wanted to clarify her thoughts on the case itself, but what in the hell was she thinking? How does this explanation even help her case? What does it have to do with hate crime legislation? Was she hoping to prove that crimes against gays just don’t happen, thus negating the need for a hate crime law?

I’m not hugely in favor of hate crime laws, but this seems like just about the weakest argument one could make against it - not to mention that it’s horribly ignorant and hurtful.

I read that Matthew Shepard’s mom was present when Congresswoman Foxx made these remarks. I can only imagine how much that hurt her to hear them.

On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.

What?!

This is really unfortunate wording. It implies that in order to determine whether Obama is popular, we have to throw out African American opinions to find out what real public opinion is.

In fact, I’m having a hard time finding a way to interpret this that isn’t troubling.

Sure, I’m willing to accept that a large percentage of African Americans support the President (and people can debate the reasons for this on their own time; I don’t care to address this). But how does that make him “seem” more popular than he “actually” is? This boggles me.

The gays and the marriage.

So this group made this commercial.  It looked like a remake of the made-for-tv movie The Langoliers, and it sounded like a whole mess o’ crazy. See for yourself:

I’m sorry, what? Legalizing gay marriage results in my rights being taken away exactly how?  Like, my right to criticize people for being gay somehow disappears once a law is made? No way! My right to be a bigot can’t be infringed upon by the likes of a godless “law”. The government can’t make me like those people.

I understand that people have religious reasons for opposing gay marriage. Seriously, I do. I think that any religious institution that opposes gay marriage ought not perform gay marriage ceremonies.  I just don’t get this ad.

Also, I love how the people are coming together “in love” for the express purpose of restricting the actions of others.

Also, I love how the male actors in the commercial appear to be in the closet themselves.

Let’s see…what’s next.  Oh, yes:

Asians need to stop with all the funny-sounding names.

So, Texas is embroiled in a big debate over whether to require photo id in order to vote. I don’t have strong feelings about this issue (though I tend to want to err on the side that allows the most democratic participation to occur). I do, however, wonder a lot about this (emphasis mine):

A North Texas legislator during House testimony on voter identification legislation said Asian-descent voters should adopt names that are “easier for Americans to deal with.”

The comments caused the Texas Democratic Party on Wednesday to demand an apology from state Rep. Betty Brown, R-Terrell. But a spokesman for Brown said her comments were only an attempt to overcome problems with identifying Asian names for voting purposes.

The exchange occurred late Tuesday as the House Elections Committee heard testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Ko told the committee that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have problems voting and other forms of identification because they may have a legal transliterated name and then a common English name that is used on their driver’s license on school registrations.

Brown suggested that Asian-Americans should find a way to make their names more accessible.

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.

Later, Brown said that her comment wasn’t intended to be racially insensitive; it’s just that Asian names are so hard to pronounce and ambiguously spelled, making ID verification difficult.

Check it out yourself. It gets good after about the 3-minute mark.

And finally, on the crazy front: for a mere $220 per night, you can spend the night in Saddam Hussein’s bed.

]]> http://stuperb.com/?feed=rss2&p=814 http://stuperb.com/?p=811 http://stuperb.com/?p=811#comments Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:50:58 +0000 stuperb http://stuperb.com/?p=811

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.