Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Taking A Mini-Vacation

Well folks, I'll be on a mini vacation. So, if there are any far-sighted editors from such publications like The New York Times or USA Today and are willing to throw large amounts of money for my dribble written works of art, I won't be around here until Wednesday night.

I won't have e-mail or the Internet where I'm going. I hope I won't get the shakes since I'm a news junkie. Like last time.

‘Tis NOT The Season

Do you know what burns my bacon? I’ve seen Christmas advertisements already and it’s not even September.

Really, are stores that desperate for the all mighty dollar that they keep pushing back the Christmas Season?

Whoever the marketing “genius” is who thought this up needs to have a Nutcracker in his Christmas balls.

Advertising for Christmas when it’s still summer time makes about as much sense to me as shaving Santa Claus’ beard off and putting him on Weight Watchers and changing his name to Don Knotts!

The Christmas Season should start on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. In fact, I will vote for any candidate who is willing to make it a federal law that companies aren’t allow to push their Christmas merchandise until Black Friday. The penalty is listening to bad Christmas songs while drinking curdled eggnog.

And let’s add something else to that federal law: People need to take down their Christmas decorations by New Year’s Day. Christmas lights are like dirty underwear: No one wants to see them on your front yard come St. Patrick’s Day. Yes, both are very festive and multi colored, but there is a time and place for everything.

We all know about supply and demand, but there can’t be that many people who really need to have that ceramic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer that poops chocolate while its nose blinks “The 12 Days Of Christmas” in Morse code when it’s 90 degrees outside. If so, these people need to see their doctor and ask if Paxil is right for them.

But I’m not a Scrooge. I love the winter holidays. I honestly love hearing the Christmas music playing nonstop on some radio stations and I love looking at the decorations. In fact, the gaudier the better.

I was even thinking of placing some very decorative mistletoe on my belt buckle when I’m invited to my friend’s house this December for his annual Christmas party. I’m sure his wife will get a kick out of it, but I may reconsider since my friend has a nice collection of hunting guns and a long sword on his living room wall.

After all, I don’t want my holly jollies shot off and slice into little pieces to be given out to Santa’s reindeer on Christmas Eve.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Stopping Men From Staring At Girls?

I can’t believe this actually happened. A 20-year-old Eastern Kentucky University girl was enjoying a Sunday trip at the mall when she was asked by a security guard to leave because older women were complaining that their husbands were checking out her short dress, according to The Richmond Register.

You know, this reminds me of the time that I visited my old high school, while new additions were being built onto it. I was given an impromptu tour by an old teacher and he showed me and my best friend, who was with me, one of the new classrooms.

The classroom had such a hideous color painted on its walls that my mind has prevented me from truly recall what the color was. I think it might have been a combination of black, purple and charcoal black, if it’s possible.

Anyway, I asked my tour guide why in the world would the school decide to use a color that made puke green warm and friendly. He told me with a straight face that studies showed that it would prevent young, male teens from checking out the girls and would help them concentrate on their studies.

I told him there wasn’t a color that would stop any teen guy from trying to look up a girl’s skirt or down her shirt. He basically agreed with me and I could tell that he thought the idea was stupid too.

Just like it’s stupid in making a security guard to escort a college girl out of a mall because a couple of husbands were enjoying the view. And it’s something that apparently women haven’t been able to figure out yet, at least these old biddies.

From Albert Einstein to the guy who can’t understand the complexities of “No shoes, No service,” all men enjoy looking at women, either clothed or nude. We can’t help it. We could be married to a tattoo-, STD-free Pamela Anderson who is 15 years younger and it wouldn’t stop us from looking at the young checkout girl at a food store who is handling our huge cucumbers and placing them in the grocery bag. And hey, we don’t care if it’s paper or plastic!

Each one of us has a man-pig inside who roars a primitive howl of approval if we even see so much as a hint of anything from an attractive woman. Maybe it’s a reproductive gene that helps us to mate with our species and help populate the planet.

But surely you women can understand this biological need in men to stare at other women. Sure, we have beautiful wives or girlfriends, but to put it in terms that you can understand, you have a great pair of shoes at home. But you have an irresistible need to look at nearly 50 identical ones at 20 different stores and buying at least three pair and bringing them home. Sadly, most of us men don’t have that luxury of bringing home a new girl from the mall. It’s simply not fair to us men and it’s actually quite sexist I think.

But if you don’t want your husbands or boyfriends from checking out the new models, then you need to leave them at home. We don’t have that much self-control. In fact, you women are lucky we don’t whip it out and urinate on a mannequin at J. Crew!

If you want your guys to stop looking at these young, tender college students, who may or may not have appeared on “Girls Gone Wild,” then put blinders on them. Actually, that won’t work, so just gouge their eyes out. On second thought, that still won’t stop a man from fantasizing about looking at a beautiful woman.

Sorry ladies, but you’ll just have to lobotomize your man the next time you want him to take you to the mall.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

No More North Pole?
Run For Your Lives!

This burns my bacon and it has nothing to do with someone driving a huge SUV.

At the end of June, it was reported that scientists believe that the ice caps on the North Pole will melt away by this September, according to National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., as reported by CNN.

But this week The Times of India ran a story about a professor from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey saying that Santa Claus will have to trade in his famous red, warm coat for some Speedos by 2013. Huh?

Hopefully, this will show many how imprecise predicting the end of the world is, or at least the top of it.

Now there are many causes to the North Pole losing ice, everything from natural cow gas to gasoline-run SUVs. No one, despite what a certain former vice president has said, can point a finger to any one thing and say, “Ah ha, that’s it right there. That’s causing the Earth to heat up faster than a high school boy looking at his first stripper.”

Sure, I’ve never been a big fan of the man-made global warming theory. But that makes people foolishly believe that I’m all about dumping my trash in park streams and making a yellow stream in the ocean.

I’m all about common sense. I’m all for alternative, reliable (and I can’t stress that word enough) sources of energy. I think as Americans we have to kick the oil habit. If anything, we shouldn’t have foreign countries holding us by our collective globes every time we want a little oil and having them squeeze a little harder just to price gouge us to death.

I’m also for drilling for oil, whether it’s off our coasts or in Alaska. If the fish and caribou don’t like it, then they’ll have to suck it up and deal with it. And that goes for PETA and Greenpeace too. I don’t think Americans should suffer any more just because a few people don’t want to inconvenience some mating caribou. And even if we drill for oil and we have only a million barrels to show for it in five to 10 years, well, that’s just a million less that Saudi Arabia can’t use to make us into their oil whores.

Listen folks, we had scientists back in the 1970s who were claiming that by the 1990s all of America would be in the middle of an ice age and guess what? The 1990s came and went and there was no ice age. So it’s a little hard to get all excited over about global warming with that type of track record.

(To read my other editorials and columns about global warming, please click here.)

Thursday, August 7, 2008

No Mercy For Killers

Do you know what burns my bacon? Death row inmates who complain that the method of their execution is cruel and unusual.

Take Richard Cooey for example. Old Richie was sentenced to death for raping and murdering two women in 1986. He’s supposed to get a lethal injection, without the lollypop, on Oct. 14.

However, Cooey is 267 pounds soaking wet in meat gravy and he claims that the lethal injection process would make it hard to find his veins because of his fatness. He also claims that he’s taking a drug for migraine headaches and that could affect the lethal injection process.

Let that sink in for a second. He’s worried that his headache medication would affect the lethal injection. I figure the lethal injection would be more effective in ridding his migraine headaches than his medication.

Now, anyone who rapes two women and murders them deserves to die right away. There should be no appeals for monsters like them, such as Vince Weiguang Li, who allegedly cut off a man’s head he was sitting next to on a Canadian bus and started to eat the hacked off pieces of his former passenger.

Tell me, how can you rehabilitate Li who allegedly lopped of a man’s head and started snacking on? The answer is you can’t. What are you going to do, roll up a newspaper and smack him on the nose every time he reaches out to someone during dinner time?

While Li’s alleged atrocities did not happen on U.S. soil, it wouldn’t take much to imagine what would happen to him if it did: Found guilty by insanity and pumped full of drugs for the rest of his life in a rubber room. But that’s still not good enough.

Why should tax dollars keep killers alive? After all, there are murderers who have been either sentenced to life in prison or they clog up the court systems with appeals to save their worthless hides from Old Needle. And I’m not talking about people who claim to be innocent. I’m talking about Cooey and the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world who have human hearts in their freezer next to the Breyers’ Chocolate Chip Mint Ice Cream. (Hey, even cannibals must enjoy a sweet frozen treat every once in awhile.)

The only way these animals should be left alive is to study them and discover some unknown gene that makes them into monsters and try to either reverse their murderous nature or find ways of screening people and treating them before they turns into killers.

But if this medical study won’t be done, then executing them is the only answer. There is no rehabilitation for people like Cooey, Dahmer or even Li if he is guilty of his savage acts. And having tax payers keeping murderers alive should not be an option either.

And I don’t want to hear the heart-bleeding old saying, “If you kill them, then you are just as guilty of they are.” B.S. That is a weak argument because killers murder innocent people. These animals aren’t innocent by a long shot.

And there is another argument to capital punishment: It doesn’t deter crime. It might not deter all murderers, but it makes damn sure that there are no repeat offenders.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

NY Times Attacks McCain
For Defending Himself

I want to say this burns my bacon, but to be honest, it explodes it.

The New York Times’ editorial board wrote an opinion piece about Barack Obama accusing John McCain and President Bush of using or planning on using racial scare tactics. But while many would think that they would go after Obama, they instead attack John McCain for firing back at Obama’s false accusations.

First, they claim that McCain’s attack ad of comparing Obama with drunken celebrity Britney Spears was a “racially tinged attack” on the Illinois senator. How they make this great leap of illogic, The New York Times makes a weak case for it.

While there has been no real evidence that McCain has or will use race against Obama, The New York Times decides to paint him guilty of racial attacks anyway by associating the Arizona senator with a few dirty Republicans who allegedly used a racial attack on black Senator candidate Harold Ford in Tennessee in 2006. The ads against Ford “juxtaposed” him with white women, according to The New York Times.

However, the only ad that I could find that’s against Ford isn’t a racial attack at all and it’s still a weak comparison with McCain’s ad, because if you’re going to sleazily compare a presidential candidate with an airhead celebrity, who better than Britney Spears? It seems like a good case of The New York Times seeing things that aren’t there.

Is John McCain's political ad a racial attack against Obama? The New York Times seems to think so.


And instead of attacking Obama for his obvious and false racial assault on not only McCain but President Bush, The New York Times goes after McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis when he defensively said, “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck.”

Now, it’s interesting that The New York Times doesn’t have a problem with, “You know, he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name, you know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills,” but they’re having kittens over what Davis said.

Because according to The New York Times, Davis’ statement conjures up a “loaded racial image” of Robert Shapiro during the famous O.J. Simpson murder case when he said, “Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.”

The Joker deals from the bottom of the deck. Is he a criminally insane racist?

But isn’t that what Obama did? He blatantly played that card and it was from the bottom of the deck because it was a low thing to do to accuse our nation’s president and another politician of using racial scare tactics and don’t offer any solid proof.

The New York Times not only kicked John McCain when he was down after being falsely accused of being a racist by his political opponent, but they stomped on him for trying to defend himself from Obama’s baseless attacks.

It’s bad enough that they turn a blind eye against Obama’s despicable statements, but they also made a feeble argument that McCain will use racial attacks simply because he is guilty by association because of what fellow Republicans allegedly did in Tennessee.

This sadly certainly gives credence to what many McCain supporters have been saying about Obama: He’s a Teflon candidate that the media simply loves too much to be objective with.

But more importantly, The New York Times just destroyed its own credibility when they attacked a victim and not the attacker.