Double Length Superspecial Interblag News of the Day

Not all politics, something for everybody this time.

So many interesting bits of weirdness around today, it's hard to get started, so I might as well hop into it.

Fuckwit College Editorials
Boy do we ever get a lot of these around here at IU, in our own paper, the Indiana Daily Student (or as it was always called in my undergraduate days, the Indiana Daily Stupid. Not the cleverest riposte, but incredibly accurate)

In this case, at the Daily Texan, we have a college age male actually trying to make the case that women wearing pants are evil, and that it would be best for all concerned for them to submit to his 'benevolent' domination.

Yeah...

Source: Feministe

Guitar Hero(ine)

While I can't agree with everything said in this article (like the claim that a guitar shaped like a woman's leg in fishnets is somehow an assault on the senses, a visceral attack), I have to admit, the skimpy outfits, heavy promotion of Axe bodyspray and its assorted floozies within the game, to the point that it interferes with gameplay.. that's not a good sign. Activision appears to think that, you know, they should toss away a good portion of the next-gen gaming market share, which includes women, families, and what you might term 'soft-core' or 'casual' games (I prefer soft-core myself just because a: it'll rile some oversensitive types up, and b: all consumer gaming is casual. Game testers and programmers do the non-casual gaming, and that's called WORK, boys and girls), in order to court the drunken frat boy market. It's worked before; look at the sports heavy initial lineup for the original Xbox.

But that doesn't mean it's a good idea in this day and age, when the Wii stalks the earth.

Source: TheCurvature.com

Apparently Rock Band, by the original creators of Guitar Hero, takes a much more balanced, and less commercially crass approach. You might want to stick with that one.

Source: Feministe

Crazy But (Mostly) Harmless Cult Alert:

So in Italy, it seems, for decades, a sort of loose cult of artisans crafted an incredibly elaborate series of cave/vault like churches underground, without permission from local authorities. They did this competently enough that the structures are sound, and due to their neglecting to pay taxes on it or inform the authorities or what not, they're now in possession of the government.

It really is amazing what nuts with time to spare can accomplish. The work they did is amazing. Yet the art itself is uninspired and tacky. It's like a children's playground for hackneyed neo-paganism.

Still worth a look-see.

Source: The Daily Mail

Torture in Lieu of Ticket:

As picked up by the excellent Digby, there is now a video floating around on Youtube of a cop torturing a man for refusing to sign a confession on a traffic ticket. You read that correctly.

I sort of expect that sort of behavior, really, but the idiot cop forgot he was on his dashboard camera the whole time. Needless to say, there's a major lawsuit forthcoming, and good on the taser victim for that. We now live in a country where if you fail to lick the boots of your traffic cop, they can torture you with high voltage. Bravo.

Source: Hullabaloo

Random Wikipedia Coolness of the Day
Birds that vocalize don't have a larynx, like we mammals, they have a syrinx. This structure lacks vocal cords but otherwise serves the same function, with a twist -- it's located farther down the throat, where the lungs branch off in the bronchial tubes. As a result, some birds can sing two sounds at once.

This is wicked cool.

Source: Wikipedia (duh)

Also, here's a Gobi fish that lives symbiotically with a shrimp. The shrimp is mostly blind, so it digs a burrow for both, and the fish acts as a lookout when they're above ground level. neat.

Source: Wikipedia

Finally, did you know that the Poinsettias you get at holiday time are produced using a deliberate infection by a little known category of bacteria called Phytoplasmas? See, without the infection, they produce a single stem, not the cute bushy arrangement full of flowers that people love. So they dose the plants with a disease to alter that. This is somewhat similar to the striped tulip thing the Dutch get mocked for. Apparently, striped tulips are now produced without the disease that originally caused so much adoration.

Sources: Wikipedia (Poinsettia: Cultivation), (Phytoplasma), (Tulip [Introduction to Western Europe])

Marilyn Manson, Perhaps Crazy After All:

Having most recently made the news for bottling his own brand of the highly overrated absinthe, Manson is now getting deeper embroiled in a lawsuit brought by his former bandmate (who operated under the equally cheerful name Madonna Wayne Gacy), for basically embezzling band funds.

To buy human remains. Lots of them.

Included in the list of alleged props: masks made from skin and the skeleton of a little Chinese girl.

Seriously.

Source: The Daily Mail

Science and Morality Watch:

A tragic story about a new baby that has a horrific degenerative disease that causes Alzheimer's like symptoms as young as five, and death before adulthood. It's your standard autosomal recessive genetic disorder, so both parents have to give you a faulty gene. There is a test to determine if you have the gene, it seems, and you're supposed to have the test done if your family has a history.

This woman didn't do what might be argued is due diligence and was unaware of a family member who had a child die of the same illness months before. Now she has a kid that will know nothing but a life of increasing suffering as his own cells die from a glut of cholesterol piling up like toilet paper in a clogged sewage line.

Why is it that people rush into breeding? Why can't they get a comprehensive DNA battery done before they do so? Why for that matter don't we test all fetuses in the womb, to see if we could spare them from, you know, this ghastly and unspeakable, untreatable hell? I know I'll get called a Eugenicist for saying that, but fuck. I'm not the one who is putting a child through five years of torture.

Source: The Daily Mail

Well, that's about it for the news today. Very little in the way of mainstream politics that caught my eye; the whole cell phone tracking scandal I already posted about, and the grind on the FISA bill and Congressional oversight continues apace.

Peace out, word to your mother.