Volume 12, Number 45, December 2, 2007

Greetings, and thanks for joining me for another week. Starting us off are a few news stories you may have missed. First, you can never look too good no matter what your age (or, It’s nice to have money). From London’s Daily Mail: across the pond in London, mothers can take their babies in for workouts, as several gyms recently reacted to warnings about childhood obesity by creating programs to shape up kids as young as 10 months (teaching galloping, "monkey jumps" and forward rolls), and early next year, one gym will begin accepting 4-month-olds. Puh-leez! What about warnings about ignorance or stupidity? Next thing you know, “they” will come out with something called Baby Bermbits or Baby Einstein thinking it’ll make a difference. Hah!

Next, there are fans and there are FANS! Joshua Vannoy, 18, filed a lawsuit against the Big Beaver Falls School District near Pittsburgh for the disruption to his high school years when he and his family were forced to move to another school district because Joshua was being too harshly picked on. His troubles stemmed from an incident a year earlier, just before a Denver-Pittsburgh playoff football game when Joshua chose to wear a Broncos jersey to class and was then forced by one teacher to sit on the floor and endure paper wads being thrown at him because he was, according to the teacher, a "stinking Denver fan." [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]

Finally, from Ananova, uh, oops! A Chinese man is suing for divorce after discovering that he is the father of only one of his twins. Liu Yuan of Nanjing city says he could see the difference between the babies the day they were born. "The baby that came out first was much bigger than the second, who was very weak and sickly," he said. Liu says he started to be suspicious when the smaller baby turned out to have a different blood type, along with the fact that it doesn't look like him. Liu had his own and the two babies' DNA tested - and discovered that he was the biological father of only the bigger twin. "My wife admitted that she'd had sex with her former boyfriend after we got married," he said (Maury, how’d you miss that one?). Doctors explain that it's quite rare, but is certainly possible, since a man's sperm can survive for 72 hours in a woman's body.

Stupid Pills time. The Kitsap Sun (WA) reported that a man in South Kitsap, Wash., had been working on his car, and needed to remove a wheel. One lug nut was too tight to budge, so he chose an unusual device to loosen it: a shotgun. The 00-buck from the round ricocheted, carrying with it chunks of metal from the wheel. The do-it-yourselfer was hospitalized with "severe but not life-threatening" injuries from his shins to his chin. The unidentified 66-year-old man "wasn't intoxicated," a sheriff's spokesman said, and didn't say why he resorted to a shotgun. "I don't think he was in any condition to say anything," the spokesman said. "The pain was so severe."

The real Weapons of Mass Destruction were found… sort of! From Yahoo News, a landscaping crew about to grind a tree stump discovered 30 World War II mortar shells buried on property once owned by the Navy. A worker hit and broke one of the shells, but it did not explode. The mortars could have done serious damage had they exploded, Sgt. Bobby Randolph of the Monroe County Sheriff's office said. As a precaution, about a dozen homes were evacuated and cars were cleared from the area while a bomb squad removed the explosives. Sheriff's spokeswoman Becky Herrin said authorities will contact naval officials to "see if they want to destroy them. If not, we will."

One of the reasons people feel so full of knowledge these days (and yet aren’t) is what is passed off as news. From a recent random couple of days, here are some of the big “news” stories presented (you can easily find the stories online if you want more details). (1) From the Edmonton Sun, six hockey players and two coaches were suspended following a brawl between two teams of eight-year-olds in Guelph last week that has stunned police. (2) Sports in America start with the national anthem. The Dolphins - Steelers game was an exception. Rushing to begin the nationally televised matchup following a 25- minute weather delay, the NFL chose to skip the anthem Monday night before Miami played Pittsburgh. The game started without any of the traditional pregame ceremonies, except the coin toss, and neither team was introduced on the public address system. (3) A Los Angeles company is bragging a new reality game show called "Who Wants to Marry a U.S. Citizen" that aims to create televised matrimony between legal citizens and immigrants who have temporary visas. The show's backers at Morusa Media hope to make a sort of love match between reality TV and a national obsession with immigration. (4) HYPERLINK "http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b88_1196526130&p=1" NBC reporter apologizes for calling President Bush a 'monkey'.... (5) HYPERLINK "http://www.insideedition.com/ourstories/inside_stories/story.aspx?storyid=1088" Julia Roberts Chases Paparazzi.... (6) HYPERLINK "http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSN0135521320071201?feedType=RSS&feedName=entertainmentNews&rpc=22&sp=true" No pepper spray found in Puerto Rico pageant case. (7) Imus Returns to Radio Tomorrow. (8) Huckabee HYPERLINK "http://www.arkansasleader.com/2007/11/editorialswhos-biggest-tax-raiser.html" Raised Arkansas Taxes More Than Bill Clinton!... etc.

Stephen King, in a Time magazine interview, summed it all up: Stephen King (regarding selection of the magazine’s Person of the Year: I was thinking, I think it should be Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. Yeah. You know, I just filmed a segment for Nightline, about [the movie version of his novella] The Mist, and one of the things I said to them was, you know, "You guys are just covering — what do they call it — the scream of the peacock, and you're missing the whole fox hunt." Like waterboarding [or] where all the money went that we poured into Iraq. It just seems to disappear. And yet you get this coverage of who's gonna get custody of Britney's kids? Whether or not Lindsay drank at her twenty-first birthday party, and all this other shit. You know, this morning, the two big stories on CNN are Kanye West's mother, who died, apparently, after having some plastic surgery. The other big thing that's going on is whether or not this cop [Drew Peterson] killed his... wife. And meanwhile, you've got Pakistan in the midst of a real crisis, where these people have nuclear weapons that we helped them develop. You've got a guy in charge, who's basically declared himself the military strongman and is being supported by the Bush administration, whose raison d'etre for going into Iraq was to spread democracy in the world. So you've got these things going on, which seem to me to be very substantive, that could affect all of us, and instead, you see a lot of this back-fence gossip. So I said something to the Nightline guy about waterboarding, and if the Bush administration didn't think it was torture, they ought to do some personal investigation. Someone in the Bush family should actually be waterboarded so they could report on it to George. I said, I didn't think he would do it, but I suggested Jenna be waterboarded and then she could talk about whether or not she thought it was torture. And then the guy from Nightline said, "Well, obviously you've not been watching World News Tonight with Charlie Gibson." But I do — I watch 'em all!

Finally, a few quotes selected to provoke some thought: (1) “Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.” Andre Gide. (2) “Actions lie louder than words.” Carolyn Wells. (3) “Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” Gertrude Stein. (4) “Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.” Nick Diamos. (5) “The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who don't have it.” George Bernard Shaw. So go think about them.

Later.