Police thwart criminal mastermind

Thank God, the good people of Manhattan can sleep soundly now that this monster is once again off the streets:

Jose Andujar, 43, was arrested Friday in Times Square for selling the Obama condoms, and police said it was his third arrest for unlicensed peddling in the past year, the New York Post reported Tuesday.

A State Supreme Court justice previously ruled Andujar does not need a vending license to sell the condoms, and his products are protected under his First Amendment right to free speech.

However, police said Andujar will continue to be subject to arrest pending the outcome of the city's appeal.

Far be it from me to tell New York's Finest how to do their jobs (which is a clear signal that I'm about to do just that thing) but I can't help thinking that their time, manpower, and money might be better spent chasing down, oh, say, murderers and rapists instead of repeatedly arresting a dude selling novelty condoms.

Memorial Day

Since it's Friday night...

...and that is the time typically reserved for cheesecake, here's a photo of singer/sometimes crazy person Mariah Carey:

She looks comfortable for someone who has apparently been sucked into a dimension void of matter.

Are you a better ad exec than a fifth grader?

Um, in this case, apparently not...

A health board in Washington state has reversed itself and voted against endorsing a colon cancer awareness campaign that uses billboards saying, "What's up your butt?"

The Tri-City Herald reports that Wednesday's vote by the Benton Franklin Health District in Kennewick, Wash., was in response to complaints the ads are in poor taste.

They've since decided to go with the somewhat more tasteful slogan "A Sphincter Says 'What'?"

Trust me, I forgot to carry the cubit

Hey, to be fair, math can be kind of tricky:

The evangelical Christian broadcaster whose much-ballyhooed Judgment Day prophecy went conspicuously unfulfilled on Saturday has a simple explanation for what went wrong -- he miscalculated.

Instead of the world physically coming to an end on May 21 with a great, cataclysmic earthquake, as he had predicted, Harold Camping, 89, said he now believes his forecast is playing out "spiritually," with the actual apocalypse set to occur five months later, on October 21.

Camping, who launched a doomsday countdown in which some followers spent their life's savings in anticipation of being swept into heaven, issued his correction during an appearance on his "Open Forum" radio show from Oakland, California.

Now, I've always been an agnostic, I'm not a much of a gambler, and I'm certainly not a lawyer, but do any of these people who gambled all their money on the Rapture happening based on this guy's apparently faulty Biblical calculations get to sue him because of their losses?

Also, let this be a lesson to you: Never trust anyone from Oakland. Al Davis should have proved that a long time ago.

I don't know much about the car rental business...

...but I'm pretty sure that a jittery guy who's just been in a car wreck probably isn't your ideal customer:

Police in Washington state said an allegedly inebriated driver destroyed a vehicle he had rented after totaling his own vehicle while under the influence.

David Britt, 21, was hospitalized Tuesday after slamming his Chevy Tahoe into a parked pickup truck while being pursued by Spokane Valley police officers who said they saw him fly through an intersection at an estimated 70 mph shortly after midnight.

He told police the Chevy was a rental he had been driving since he had wrecked his own pickup while driving under the influence of cocaine.

The high-speed chase ended with the Tahoe crashing through a power pole and an iron fence before striking a parked truck at the Whimsical Pig apartments.

Well, at least his drug-fueled antics resulted in him colliding with something at an amusingly-named building. If it was something like, say, an orphanage named after a local war hero, that would have been a real bummer.

I can't believe it's not Acapulco Gold

If 1980s comedies told me anything about babysitting, it was that it was a profession fraught with wacky misunderstandings. Well, it looks like nothing much has changed since then:

A Pennsylvania woman will stand trial on charges she fed marijuana-laced margarine to a 12-year-old girl she was baby-sitting, as well as two other children at her home.

The 12-year-old's mother called Upper Burrell Township police after discovering the drugs in a tub of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter in 22-year-old Stevie Hickey's freezer. The woman tells police Hickey spread the substance on two pieces of toast that Hickey gave to the girl.

Police say Hickey told the girl it was "parsley butter" but later acknowledged to police that it was marijuana.

Well, I guess we can all breathe a sigh of relief, seeing as how she didn't serve the tot some "salted butter," with great big rocks of "salt" that she'd stashed in her freezer.

Since it's Friday night...

...and I usually post pictures of sexy ladies during that part of the week, here's a photo of actress Alison Brie:

I can't help but think she's lying on that piece of furniture upside-down and backwards, but I'm somehow okay with that.

Persistence (kind of) pays off

I guess that the good news here for most of us is that you don't have to be particularly skilled or talented to be a World Record holder:

A retired prison guard ate his 25,000th Big Mac on Tuesday, 39 years to the day after eating his first ... nine.

Don Gorske was honored after reaching the meaty milestone during a ceremony at a McDonald's in his hometown of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Surely McDonald's most loyal customer, Guinness World Records recognized Gorske's feat three years and 2,000 Big Macs ago, and the 57-year-old says he has no desire to stop.

"I plan on eating Big Macs until I die," he said. "I have no intentions of changing. It's still my favorite food. Nothing has changed in 39 years. I look forward to it every day."

The sign beneath the golden arches Tuesday read "Congrats Don Gorske 25000 Big Macs."

I think they left out a few words (specifically "On Not Dying After Eating") from the middle of their sign.

That's actually not fair, since he's described later in the article as "trim" and having low cholesterol, and he's apparently pretty healthy, which is pretty amazing, considering...

He's only gone eight days since [May, 1972!] without a Big Mac, and most days he eats two. Among the reasons he skipped a day was to grant his mother a dying wish. His last Big Mac-less day was Thanksgiving 2000, when he forgot to stock up and the store was closed for the holiday.

The man hasn't gone a day without a Big Mac in nine and a half years. Hell, I haven't even eaten breakfast every day in that time span.

Germans are fun!

You read that right. In spite of their Twentieth Century reputation for being, er, somewhat joyless, we've managed to turn the Krauts into the Las Vegas of Europe:

One in three university students in the German capital would consider sex work as a means to finance their education, a study from the Berlin Studies Center said on Wednesday.

The figure in Berlin, where prostitution is legal, was higher than students surveyed in Paris (29.2 percent) and in Kiev (18.5 percent), the three cities the report looked at.

The study found some 4 percent of the 3,200 Berlin students surveyed said they had already done some form of sex work, which includes prostitution, erotic dancing and Internet shows.

A Nation of whores isn't necessarily something to aspire toward, but it's probably something that Germany's neighbors can be a little more comfortable with.

Expected things found in expected thing

Hey, some town found out what was going on back in 1961!

Officials in a Louisiana city said they opened a time capsule from 1961 and found newspapers, photographs and items celebrating the city's 1961 centennial.

So, when I have a bunch of newspapers from 1961, I'm a hoarder, but when they bury those same newspapers, it's somehow better?

Small town to be overrun by tourists

Actually, maybe not so much:

Tourism officials have made a point of displaying the hundreds of pencil sharpeners collected by an Ohio minister who died last summer.

The Rev. Paul Johnson had kept his collection in a small shed he called his museum, outside his home in Carbon Hill in southeast Ohio. A new home for his more than 3,400 sharpeners was dedicated Friday inside a regional welcome center.

I understand that you do what you have to do in order to attract tourist dollars to your sleepy burg, but I don't really see this pumping a hell of a lotof money into the local economy. I blame the mechanical pencil industry.

DAMN YOU, PENTEL!!!

Since it's Friday night...

...and I'm running out of hot chicks to feature here, what the hell, how about Megan Fox?

I actually picked this photo because it didn't show any of her stupid, ugly tattoos.

It's the thought that counts

As far as publicity goes, this will surely get some attention, but I think the message might get kind of lost:

A Japanese lingerie maker Wednesday unveiled a bra that carries messages of encouragement from overseas as the country struggles to recover from a devastating quake and tsunami that struck exactly two months ago.

The white, bustier-style garment and matching skirt by Triumph are covered with messages from 36 different countries received in the aftermath of the disaster, each accompanied by a tiny flag of the nation that sent it.

Yeah, the thing is, though, the actual words of support from around the world would probably get a little more attention if you put them on teevee commercials or billboards instead of all over lingerie on an attractive model.

Subtext?

Okay, so there's a case in Wisconsin where a former school bus driver named Delton Gorges was recently sentenced to seven years in prison for sexually molesting an underage boy. The judge who sentenced him, Philip Kirk, made some rather, um, interesting remarks...

"I think you were born gayer than a sweet-smelling jockstrap," Kirk said.

Okay, that's not exactly what I would say while questioning some other dude's sexuality, but...

"I think that if anyone believes that in the last 10 years or 15 years all of a sudden you developed an interest in homosexuality and young boys, then I must have looked ravishing in my prom dress this year," Kirk said.

Alright, he's being ironic there, seeing as how he probably didn't wear a prom dress. And even if he did, he probably didn't look "ravishing." Probably.

Kirk talked about how difficult life was for gays in Wisconsin in the 1940s and 1950s when "no one knew there was a closet to come out of."

Okay, I think I'm going to stop here while I'm ahead.

Next time, try buying a flashy car

The Lord (and anybody who is a personal acquaintance) knows that I'm not good with the ladies, but even I don't see this being a winning strategy for picking up women:

A suburban Chicago man thought he had the perfect chick magnet in his pet alligator. Authorities only saw a dangerous animal.

A charge of possession of a dangerous animal has been filed against 43-year-old Dewayne Yarbrough of Ford Heights, who claims he kept the four-foot alligator to impress women.

Seriously, "You wanna go back to my place and have a look at my alligator?" seems like one of the worst pickup lines you could ever possibly use.

Since it's Friday night...

...and I didn't do much posting last week, I guess I owe you something extra. So, here are a couple of twins in bikinis:

I have no idea who they are, but it doesn't really matter, does it? It's not like any of us is getting their phone numbers or anything.

They might want to put up a sign or something

There are just so many things wrong going on here that I'm really not sure where to start...

A mayor in Germany helped rescue a man who became trapped in a women's prison after mistaking it for a shortcut to a nearby park, police in the northern city of Hildesheim said on Wednesday.

[...]

The man told police he was strolling through town and did not immediately notice he had walked into a prison. By the time it dawned on him where he was, the gate to the jail had already closed, locking him inside.

Okay, first of all, either this guy needs to be considerably more aware of his surroundings (seriously, is he Mr. Magoo or something?) or the authorities need to label their prisons a lot better. I understand that the Germans may not be comfortable with lots of barbed wire and guard towers, but people really should be able to figure out when they're walking into a prison. At least make it look kind of prison-y.

And that brings me to another point, which is that you should not be able to just casually stroll into a fucking prison. One would think that there would be guards at the gate asking people who could potentially be smuggling contraband items into the facility for some identification. Also, if you can just wander in mistakenly without any guards noticing, what's to keep you from wandering out on purpose?

Finally, why did the mayor have to get this guy out after he was mistakenly locked in? Couldn't he have approached some sort of prison official and said, "Say, I'm not a woman and I seem to have been mistakenly locked in your correctional facility for women"?

I'm beginning to suspect that this is not the best-supervised (or staffed) prison in the world.

Hey, that's great!

I've never achieved a world record, but on the other hand, I can bitch about politics without fear of my neighbors ratting me out to the authorities:

A Cuban cigar roller said he is submitting his 230-foot cigar to Guinness World Records for recognition as the world's longest cigar.

Jose Castelar Cairo, 67, who uses the name Cueto for his cigar rolling, said he began rolling the massive Habano -- a cigar containing 100 percent Cuban tobacco -- April 25 using tobacco from his own farm in San Juan y Martinez and completed the project Tuesday, the Cuban News Agency reported Wednesday.

I'm not sure what the guy got as a prize, but I'm fairly certain that it wasn't a shiny new car.

Green thumb grannies

Every once in a while, you hear about an old woman who goes back to college. This isn't quite as inspirational, although they were engaging in college student behavior:

Aleen Lam, 72, and Virginia Chan Pon, 65, were arrested Friday after neighbors called police to report a burglary, said San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe.

When officers arrived, they found the door had been kicked in and nobody was home.

Through the broken door, police could see marijuana growing inside the house, Wagstaffe said.

Police obtained a search warrant and found 800 marijuana plants, $3,000 in cash and an electrical bypass that allowed the women to tap into a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. power line to steal electricity, Wagstaffe said.

"This has not happened in the 34 years that I've been here," he said in describing the operation and the suspects' ages.

Well, with the Baby Boomers hitting their golden years, you might want to get used to it.

(You know, because there will be more cases of glaucoma.)

So...

...I've haven't been doing any blogging here for a few days. Did anything interesting happen while I was gone?

Oh, right...



I understand that the song was originally part of a larger satire of jingoism, but I don't really care. It's come to be something that Morons like me want to hear when something AWESOME happens.