Bloggish

NJ Gov'na Jon Corzine has given it up. All of it. That's balls, people.

We're finally winning the war! Or, well, the British are winning the war for us! Or, well, the honey badgers that the British troops are being blamed for bringing to Iraq are winning the war! (Just ignore the evidence that the badgers existed in the area well before the invasion.)

This surge of Badger troops is seriously freaking out the population around Basra, who think the British forces have unleashed a plague of man-eating monsters ('head-and-body length ranges from 60 to 102 cm') into the area. Residents claim to never have seen anything so ferocious and hideous before-- one witness saying he watched a badger ('head-and-body length ranges from 60 to 102 cm') shred apart a cow. One woman reports she was attacked by one describing it thusly: "It is the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey."

Because of their relation to the wolverine, I imagine the Iraqi version of Red Dawn will have a group of paramilitary high-schoolers who are fighting the good fight and call themselves the RATELS, starring the Iraqi versions of Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, and C. Thomas Howell. If they ask nice they might even get Lea Thompson to reprise her role.

Prince Charles visits members of the British armed service.

Former Surgeon Gen. Dick Carmona testified in Congress yesterday about the various ways the Bush administration tried to influence his reports and stance on policies.

Stem cells? nope.
Contraceptives? nope.
Global warming? nope.
Secondhand smoke? nope.
Global health? nope.
Prison health? nope.

Even when invited to the Special Olympics he was told not to go, partly because the Kennedys were involved and partly because he was told: ‘Why would you want to help those people?’
He was also instructed to use "glowing references" to the administration and to use President Bush's name at least 3 times per page.

Testifying with him about political v. medical showdowns were former surgeon generals David Satcher and everyone's favorite beardo C. Everett Koop-- both of which agreed Carmona faced the most political interference of any previous general.

Still no word from Joycelyn "Me-Time" Elders on her political woes.

Nirvana's Nevermind is almost 16 years old now, which makes you feel old, right? Now seems to be a good time to check up on our favorite, forever street-cred'd, naked, dollar-fishing baby--- his name's Spencer Eldin and though he just turned 16, he looks like he's still stuck in 1991. Spencer may have grown up and started wearing clothes, but he's still willing to fish for money. He even got himself onto some other unknown band's album cover.

Which makes you wonder what happened to all those other kids of the early 90s rock scene: the Blind Melon Bee Girl? All those kids in the Soul Asylum Runaway Train video?

Speaking of children of 90's rock, maybe it's about time we checked up on Frances Bean, the love child of Kurt and Courtney (who should marry Spencer and form a covers band). She's 15 now and looks shockingly like a small, showered, female version of her dad. She even seems more mature and put-together than her mother. But her father's looks are just about all she's going to get, according to wikipedia:
'Frances is set to inherit "a sweater, a guitar, and the lyrics to '[Smells Like] Teen Spirit'' from her father's possessions. Many other possessions will be sold in an upcoming auction held by Courtney Love."

Shittiest mom ever.

This site visually maps Wikipedia's tangle of related internal links. It's really great.

WikiMindMap via Lifehacker

This is really taking viral marketing to the next level. Click the above logo to go to the website of all the corporations that have partnered with The Simpsons to hype the upcoming release of The Simpsons Movie.

To their credit, each of these companies has done an amazing job of making the hype feel like highly personalized excitement for Homer and the gang. I confess, I did a fist pump when I saw that there would be an entire channel dedicated to The Simpsons on my JetBlue flight to Chicago last weekend; and I admit, I did shed a tear when I saw photos of the Kwik-E-Mart of Los Angeles. I never thought I'd see the day. But is this going too far? A website devoted strictly to the commercials?

More ads that get us hard after the jump...

The best new show on TV features, yes, a man who eats animal feces. His name is Bear Grylls and his show Man vs. Wild is on the Discovery Channel pretty much all the time. DSC is trying to one-up a Steve Irwin-less Animal Planet with Grylls (his friends call him Beary -- har har) who, in each episode, is dropped into some new-fangled extreme wilderness condition with nothing but a pocket knife, a flint, and (you guessed it) a camera crew, and is forced to survive in order that we be entertained.

So far I have watched Bear eat a lamb's eyeball that he cooked in a lava-heated mud pool, catch some kind of Icelandic pigeon, snap its head off with his hands, and then peel away its skin and feathers before remarking on "all the dark meat" and eat it, and slide down a glacier on his ass while jabbing a broken ski pole into the ice to slow down his precarious descent. Not in that particular order.

Anyway, here is a video of Bear catching and eating a live snake. Thank god this show exists.

A red-tailed hawk hangs out near Grand Army Plaza. [via Gothamist]

Way back in the day, presidential candidate and sex machine Fred Thompson made a name for himself working as an investigative counsel for the Senate Watergate investigation committee.

One big problem: Fred was "dumb as hell." At least according to Richard Nixon. Recent reports based around Nixon archival tapes indicate that Fred Thompson was just like one of the moronic hired goons seen in the movies; he was willing, but not quite able. [Examples include Lex Luthor's friends or Be-Bop and Rocksteady from the Ninja Turtles.]

Those tapes show Thompson had a behind-the-scenes role very different from his public image three decades ago. He comes across as a partisan willing to cooperate with the Nixon White House to discredit the committee's star witness.

It was Thompson who tipped off the White House that the Senate committee knew about the tapes. They eventually cinched Nixon's downfall in the scandal resulting from the break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington and the subsequent White House cover-up.

Meanwhile, the New York Times is finally reporting what we've said multiple times: Fred Thompson's wife is hot. [They're also yelling aloud to many other crappy newspapers: "We want your readers!!!"]

Thompson's secret role in Watergate [Chicago Tribune]

Will Her Face Determine His Fortune? [New York Times]