Video of the Day 12.06.06

The Iron Sheik has something to say about Michael Richards's use of the dreaded "N-word", in his typical incoherent fashion. Hat tip to Ron and Fez Show.

Discomfort Zones

There's been a lot of hay made in the news recently about certain ordinances recently passed in Farmers Branch, Texas, and similar laws recently put on hold by federal injunction in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. I love this new tactic in fighting illegal immigration. I liken it to the war on drugs.

See, attempts to stop the flow of drugs into the country have been fruitless at best, despite ever-increasing penalties for trafficking and unprecedented international policing efforts. But the simple fact is that as long as demand for drugs remain high, there are profits to be made for the suppliers that are worth risking the penalties, no matter how severe we make them, especially for lower-income people who can make the kind of money they have no chance to make legitimately. No, the only way to stop illegal drugs will be to make people no longer want to buy them--or at least not be willing to shell out the kind of money that keeps the trade profitable. That's pretty damned hard to do with addictive substances--almost to the point of futility.

But illegal immigration isn't an addiction, and these laws in Farmers Branch and Hazleton appear to be an effort to similarly attack an unwanted commodity from the demand side. Illegals want to come here because they can live better below the poverty line here than they can under average circumstances in their home countries. And employers enjoy having them here because they'll work for slave wages. And as long as those two conditions are true, all the fences, walls, border patrols, and armed dirigibles in the world won't stop people from coming here illegally. Instead, we need to make life more difficult for those who've broken our laws to enter this country. We need to make it more difficult for them to find places to live and work, and the only way to do this is to make it less profitable and more hazardous to business for landlords and other businesses to rent to and hire them. Once we decrease the tide of illegals, then it will become harder for the truly dangerous to hide themselves among them, and we can accomplish this through these laws for far less taxpayer cost than we can with more walls and guards.

And yet the ACLU (along with some other groups) still refuses to see the threat to national security posed by unchecked illegal immigration, saying among other things that these laws discriminate against Hispanics. Are laws increasing and establishing penalties for Americans assisting federal lawbreakers--whether they're from Central America, China, or the Middle East--more or less discriminatory than the other plans to build walls and mobilize forces exclusively along the Mexican border? The ACLU's apparently willful narrow-mindedness on this issue, and others pertaining to issues of national security, earns them a permanent link on my Enemies List.

Halloween

...is over, thank God. This is a holiday without much of an upside for me. My bad food habits run more towards chips than candy, for one thing. Sure, there's always the fact that a lot of women use the holiday as an excuse to get dressed up like hookers on the stroll, but the only Halloween party I was invited to this year was at the office, so that aspect would have been ruined by middle-aged women with midsections textured like trays of freshly baked cinnamon rolls. And that was before I got caught up in the opening series of the '06-'07 flu season. There's nothing more obnoxious than trying to get from couch or bed to the bathroom in complete darkness so as to avoid little hands pounding on my door to beg for candy. Actually, in my neighborhood, the most common costume is "thug teenager", and they don't trick-or-treat so much as shank-or-treat. But fortunately, my lights-out strategy worked, due in part, that there were more larger groups of kids going around to one another's homes, rather than simply going door to door. And with good reason--my neighborhood has a higher concentration of sex offenders than the Neverland Ranch. Bring on Thanksgiving--any holiday with customs focused on gluttony and football-watching is one that I'm solidly behind!

Attack Ads

I'm not a big fan of campaign commercials. I make my voting decisions through more-or-less independent research, not propaganda spewed out by candidates, parties, and (especially) special interest groups. But I've got to admit, some of the smear campaigns are just so damned entertaining to watch for their hyperbole, if nothing else. Take a look at this one, where Republican candidate Paul R. Nelson goes after incumbent Democrat Ron Kind for voting against funding body and vehicle armor for soldiers in Iraq (which is inexcusable), but for funding all sorts of odd sex studies (which is just friggin' funny).

But they don't get any funnier...or more true...than this ad produced by David Zucker (of Airplane! and The Naked Gun fame) for the Republican party (hosted by YouTube, hat tip to The Outhouse Times-Picayune for the link.)

My Radio Debut

For all you Beast fans out there...if you've got an XM satellite radio or DirecTV, catch the replay of today's Ron and Fez show on High Voltage. About 45 minutes before the end, I'm on there for a moment discussing Frosted Mini Wheats with everyone's favorite cowbell-slingin' hosts.

Caveat Lector

I'm loving Showtime's new series Dexter, about a CSI tech who happens to be a part-time serial killer, and a sociopath with a conscience, enough so that when I spotted the credit for "Based on the novel....", I had to read it, and then the next one in the series. And suffice to say, I wasn't disappointed...the series thus far has paralleled the novel fairly well, with a few subplots thrown in for television, and the novel is as entertaining and, if anything, even funnier than the show, if dark humor is your thing. The novels are running in my "Recent Experiences" pane this week, with this word of caution: from what I can tell, season 1 of the show is going to parallel the first novel, and I can only assume that if it goes another season, they'll be using plot points from the second novel. Thus the title of the post--translated, "reader beware"--by finishing the novels, I've likely learned most of the series' plot twists for the next couple of years. That's fine with me--I always prefer to read the book before seeing it acted out--but if your tastes run the opposite way, you may want to hold off for a while.

World Series Time

Speaking as a Yankees fan, I can't tell you how happy I was to see the Cardinals finish off the dinged-up Mets last night to advance to the World Series. I'm looking forward to this one--it's not the Mets-Yankees Subway Series many were predicting, but with two Central Division teams squaring off, I think you can safely call this at least an "Amtrak Series".

Now that the season's almost over, it's time to see how I did with my predictions from the start of the season.

AL East: Yankees win, the Red Sox and Blue Jays are out of it by the time August ends. I'm 0 for 1.
AL Central: Some thought the Twins would contend for a wild card; the White Sox were in it till near the end, but I'm still 0 for 2.
AL West: Oakland's moneyball beats out Anaheim and leaves me 0 for 3.
AL Wild Card: No one saw Detroit coming this year...including me. 0 for 4.

NL East: The Mets win easily, the Phils are in it till the end, and the Braves are sub-.500; pretty much the oppositie of my prediction. 0 for 5.
NL Central: The Spirit of St. Louis takes 'em all the way to the Series. 1 for 6.
NL West: The Dodgers edge out the Padres, but Sanny Eggo takes the wild card. This one came down to tiebreakers, so I'm giving myself another hit here to go to 2 for 7.
NL Wild Card: It was the Padres and not the Mets, but I can't really give myself an extra credit for reversing the positions of a division champ and a wild card, leaving me at 2 for 8.

I'm not going to break down the actual playoffs against my predictions since I missed most of the teams that were going to be in, but I'm going to give myself a point for correctly identifying one of the World Series teams, for a final score of 3 for 9, a .333 batting average. If I was playing baseball instead of predicting finishes, I'd be in the running for a batting title, but the only title I can claim this year is that of Nostradumbass.

Go Tigers!

Worst Case Scenarios

The one thing about the extreme right and left is their insistence on attacking anything that comes from someone who doesn't share their world view. Sometimes you need to consider the worst-case scenarios coming from a course of action when the factual truth isn't clear.

Case in point: this article from Newsbusters (a site which I peruse daily, and generally agree with.) They're taking to task the coverage of Richard Branson's $3 billion dollar donation to global warming research, and by extension, the donation itself, citing doubts in the scientific community as the reason for the attack. But what's the harm here? If global warming is real, the worst-case scenario of doing nothing is fairly obvious--eventual human extinction, just like in that great rock-umentary The Day After Tomorrow. But what's the worst case scenario if manmade global warming turns out to be nothing? It's a private donation to a private foundation, so it's not costing a dime to anyone who isn't paying voluntarily. And who knows, maybe it'll help us develop some alternative fuels that can help us stop depending on paranoid dictators who hate us.

This isn't just a far-right tactic, either...check out this article from Newsweek accusing Republicans of overstating the threat of Iran developing nuclear weapons. The worst case scenario of assuming that Iran really is close to developing nuclear weapons? We gain some intelligence on an unfriendly power that's probably harboring, funding, and/or training terrorists, and maybe take some steps to slow them down. The worst case scenario? A hostile power with a nuclear weapon, followed by the end of life as we know it, just like on that reality show Jericho.

Cursed

I love to play fantasy football, and each year it seems like I end up with more teams than the year previous. I limit myself to one league per year with an entry fee and prizes, and give that team most of my attention--this year, the fee and prizes were higher than ever. So you can imagine how psyched I was when I drew the number one pick--there was no question who I was going to take: last year's MVP, Shaun Alexander of the Seahawks. I couldn't lose with him, right?

Not even a week after the draft, I picked up my copy of Madden 07...and went to my league's message board and left a post with an expletive title, because there was my #1 pick on the box's cover.

Let's look at past Madden cover boys (excluding the big man himself) and their fates (all years listed are release years, not "model years"--the 1999 cover boys were for Madden 2000, and so on):

1999 - Barry Sanders: Shared the cover with Madden, and avoided the curse...by retiring before the season started.
1999 - Dorsey Levens: Alternate cover; his '99 season was pretty good, but he was pretty much done after that.
2000 - Eddie George: Yeah, anyone remember him? Didn't think so. He did OK in 2000 but pretty much dropped off the planet due to injuries. Too bad--he dodged the Heisman Curse, only to fall victim to the dreaded Madden curse.
2001 - Daunte Culpepper: Suffered his first knee injury during the '01 season; missed the last third of the year.
2002 - Marshall Faulk: He claims he's coming back, but he suffered what thus far has proven to be a career-shortening ankle injury during this season.
2003 - Michale Vick: Broke his leg in the preseason; missed most of the regular season.
2004 - Ray Lewis: The only defensive player on the box appears to have missed most of the curse. He missed the last game of the season due to injury, and failed to get any interceptions, but other than that, he had an average season for him.
2005 - Donovan McNabb: Hernia. T.O. Your humble blogger laffs and laffs.

Coincidence or spooky curse? It was revealed earlier this week and confirmed today that after three disappointing weeks, Alexander will miss a month or more with a broken bone in his foot. Man, I wish I'd gone with LaDanian Tomlinson.

Friday Videos

She ain't big, she's a whole lotta woman!

And, in honor of tonight's Law and Order season premiere...

What Would Willie Smoke

Talk about a "dog bites man" story....Willie Nelson got arrested with pot. I don't know about the 'shrooms, but can we just go ahead and decriminalize marijuana already? There has to be a more constructive use of cops' time than chasing after old men smoking a little reefer...especially in Louisiana.

End of an Era

I love the time of year when Sundays are essentially wasted days, spent on the couch watching the NFL, drinking beer and eating junk food. It's very different this year, and from my perspective most of the changes are positive. I don't have the expensive Sunday Ticket package, though I do get NFL Network, so from my perspective, the extra nationally televised games are a very good thing. I'm going to get to see a few extra Giants games this year that I wouldn't get to see otherwise, and other than when Joe Buck does play by play for games from a remote location, his addition to the Fox pregame show doesn't bother me as much as it does Mike over at the Outhouse Times-Picayune.

But something was missing from my football experience this Sunday. After the Jags-Cowboys game ended, I flipped to ESPN, as I have every football Sunday for almost two thirds of my life, to catch the highlights of the eight or so games I didn't get on NFL Primetime. But it was nowhere to be found...and as I found out yesterday when I went searching for its next airing on good old Google, it's gone for good. Now I understand how some of the younger set felt when they heard the Crocodile Hunter had died. I didn't watch it last night, and probably won't watch much of it in the future--it doesn't matter what they call it; if it's not on Sunday nights and not hosted by Chris Berman, it ain't Prime Time.