Still the best

I first saw this maze game years ago, and it really is difficult and addictive. I was just reminded of it today, so I thought I'd share...

(for you weenies, I just tracked down a much easier full-screen version)

Various definitions of "dead"

A fun trifecta in my e-mail provider's entertainment news today:

For those keeping score, Britney is doing her level best to commit careericide, while Seinfeld is just painfully unfunny. Oddly enough, both are still very rich, as far as I know.

Seriously, have you seen the "Bee Movie TV Juniors" on NBC? How that dude manages to keep getting unfunnier is amazing, considering how high he set the bar in the '80s. I have actually preferred hearing Toby Keith call a truck a "big dog daddy" over and over the past few weeks, and I have previously ranked Toby Keith above Gargamel on my list of all-time villains.

Overheard in the newsroom

I'm a fan of those "overheard" blogs and columns.

Had to share this overheard snippet of 1 minute ago:

"... pigeons taste pretty good."

I don't think that tops a snippet from the same person a week or so ago:

"I've never got a speeding ticket, but I ran over someeone once."

Creep-you-out Friday

This one is more of a mental-image exercise. Following is the headline of a press release that a certain famous preacher's foundation just faxed us:

BILLY GRAHAM RAPID RESPONSE TEAM DEPLOYS TO CALIFORNIA

The splash graphic at billygraham.org further highlights the absurdity:

I'm not trying to make fun of the guy, mind you - hell doesn't sound like a place I'd like to go to - it's just that they probably could have picked better wording. Anything that makes me think of Billy Graham hoisting a fire hose is... well, it's creepy, isn't it?

In other faxed-in religious news, apparently Radio Disney edited the word "God" out of a commercial for the movie The Ten Commandments. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't God one of the main characters in that story? I mean, isn't that like trying to advertise "The King and I" without using the word "king"?

T-shirt tour, part 2

People often ask about my "Beware of perverts" shirt, which looks like this:

I really wasn't planning to play wardrobe docent, but oddly enough, an AP story today updates us on the long-running Japanese-train-groping phenomenon (that's groping on trains, not groping trains):

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Cell Phone Message Warns Train Gropers

By HIROKO TABUCHI, Associated Press

TOKYO (AP) -- Did you just grope me? Shall we head to the police? That's the message women are flashing on their cell phones with a popular program designed to ward off wandering hands in Japan's congested commuter trains.

"Anti-Groping Appli" by games developer Takahashi was released in late 2005, but has only recently climbed up popularity rankings, reaching No. 7 in this week's top-10 cell phone applications list compiled by Web-based publisher Spicy Soft Corp.

The application flashes increasingly threatening messages in bold print on the phone's screen to show to the offender: "Excuse me, did you just grope me?" "Groping is a crime," and finally, "Shall we head to the police?"

Users press an "Anger" icon in the program to progress to the next threat. A warning chime accompanies the messages.

The application, which can be downloaded for free on Web-enabled phones, is for women who want to scare away perverts with minimum hassle and without attracting attention, according to Takahashi's Web site.

"I first downloaded this as a joke," said Spicy Soft official Michika Izumi. "But I think it could be a lifesaver if I get groped."

Brought to you by the letter H

Alert reader Joanna B. sends us this... erm, nugget.

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PLANO, Texas—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Oct. 22, 2007—J. C. Penney Company, Inc. (NYSE:JCP) today announced that Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Myron E. (Mike) Ullman, III, is scheduled to have elective, laparoscopic surgery on Oct. 31 to improve certain physical comfort-related symptoms stemming from a medical condition he has had for more than 20 years.
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"Certain physical comfort-related symptoms"? Joanna suspects that the good folks of Plano are just too polite to say "hemorrhoids."

I'm inclined to concur, except that who on earth would wait 20 years to take care of that? It's the sort of problem you should nip in the... erm, never mind.

A question of when, not if.

As a way of doing penance for missing my first Creep-you-out Friday in months, I offer this Sunday night headline, courtesy of cnn.com:

Waffle House brawl lands Kid Rock in jail

How could the man surprise us less?

Snap.

I am frequently asked about my "finger-quotin' Margo" t-shirt, which looks like this:

I try to explain the awesomeness of the unnecessarily-nasty-sarcasm-incarnate that is Apartment 3G's Margo Magee (and mind you, I don't even read the strip - only the Comics Curmudgeon's take on it), but I can never get it just right.

Which is why I'm glad that yesterday featured a single perfect, no-comment-necessary illustrative panel:


Who wouldn't want her on a t-shirt?

Nobel = not that cool

Porkchop has dutifully reported the goings-on over at the Paradigm Reseach Group, and their crusade to end the "truth embargo" regarding aliens, before.

Today, as their faxed release attests, they're dogging on a certain newly-minted peacenik laureate. "Say huh?," you ask? Viddy thou well an excerpt from their "Open letter to Albert Gore, Jr.":

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The multiplicity of solutions to the global warming crisis you offer will require an unprecedented modification in collective worldview never before seen in human affairs within any time frame, let alone the one or two decades suggested. In short, you need all the help you can get - help that includes powerful, non-fear-based components.

With all due respect for global warming's potency as a change agent, that and nothing else comes close to the formal disclosure of the presence of non-human, intelligent beings for getting the human race's attention. It will and properly should be the most profound event in human history. If you wish for the human race to see itself as a singular species shepherd to its one and only home planet, helping to end the truth embargo will significantly improve that prospect.

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In case you didn't have the patience to read all that, it boils down to this: "Forget your Nobel and Oscar. If you really want people to believe in global warming, tell them about the space aliens the government is hiding."

Well played, PRG. Well played.

Oh! I Love My Body

Our latest fax from Xlibris says:

"Give your little tykes a head start from their fellow preschoolers with Jeannette Gray's charming picture book Oh! I Love My Body. Beautifully illustrated, this is a wonderful and colorful book where young children will learn to identify the parts of their body through picture, song, and repetition. It shows happy outdoor scenes - including cute animals - where kids talk about and name various parts of their bodies."

Creep-you-out Friday

See a whole collection of creepy old ads at Weirdomatic.

Rash of school violence?

So that's what those bumps are!

Here's today's first e-mail:
"Dear Ms. Rosenberry, We are syndicating an exclusive feature story that could be of great interest to The Gazette readers, especially parents and students, and could be a great addition to any coverage you are doing on the recent rash of school violence. This article gives readers the chance to 'sit in' on a unique crash course on how to survive a school shooting massacre taught by elite commandos.

"SYNOPSIS:Six months after the US suffered its worst ever campus shooting with 33 killed and 23 injured at Virginia Tech, America is again reeling from a school shooting in Cleveland, Ohio on October 10th and the arrest the very next day of a 14 year-old who was planning a Columbine-like school massacre in Plymouth, Pennsylvania.Parents around the country are looking for ways to better protect their children, but the answer may come not from the school-yard, but the battlefield."

Riiiiiiiight. The Web site's "massacre timeline" lists 12 events in the last 30 years. Does 4 events a decade a rash make?
Here's the link provided for the course.

Here's the instructor:






Chief instructor of the survive a shooting massacre course, Walter Philbrick, is a 30 year veteran instructor to elite police units around the world and CEO of the security firm International Protective Services.
Photo by Ron Laytner, Edit International

Dinger's first game

Dear Porkchop,
Yesterday I heard a mean, ugly man saying bad things about Dinger, the Rockies mascot, on TV. I think Dinger's cool. Please tell everybody I'm right.
-Virginia

Dear Virginia,
Funny you should mention that, because I've been doing some research on that very subject. Please feel free to print this story out and hang it on your refrigerator, or set it to music and sing it at school - whatever you need to do to spread the word.

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Dinger’s first game
By Porkchop McGillicutty

The sun shone down on the mile-high city that fateful day in a late-sixties autumn, finding two young men – we’ll call them Joe and Edgar, because they need names –engaged in some mid-day catch.

“Pop-up!” Joe shouted, and Edgar scrambled, squinting against the sun to pluck the stitched sphere from the heavens.

“Grounder,” Edgar replied – and it was then that the problem ensued.

Joe failed to keep his glove down and his eye on the ball, and so the grounder rolled across Blake Street into the front door of the neighborhood watering hole. It rolled through the bar and into the back office, where the owner – we’ll call him Ted – kept his collection of fine cigars. It rolled through the open door of Ted’s big humidor, finally settling in a dark corner.

“Forget it,” said Joe from the lot, and Edgar agreed. They had to get to the Broncos game anyway.

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When the time came, in the wee hours of a frigid morning in a mid-nineties winter, the long-forgotten baseball rolled back out of the humidor, propelled by the movement of the life form within. Violently pitching back and forth, it began to split along its seams, the leather cover groaning in its last futile effort to hold back the colossal force.

Finally, suddenly, a purple triceratops sprang forth, fully formed, improbably standing on two feet, some seven feet tall.

He shook his great scaly head, and surveyed his surroundings. Where am I, he wondered, and what am I doing here? I should be on the plains or in the marshes, king of all I survey, and yet here I am in a tiny room.

No answers presented themselves in the office, so he lunged headlong through the door, breaking it off at the hinges. Barely slowing, he powered through the front door and onto Blake Street. It was deserted.

Across the street, the beast saw a great brick building, with banners touting the heroes of the realm.

It is they, he thought, who have consigned me to this hellish existence. I shall wait for them in their castle, and confront them when they arrive. They shall die the cowards’ death they deserve. He began to scale the walls.

“The first 10,000 fans will receive a grisly demise,” he thought, with a grim chuckle he couldn’t explain, as he nestled down to sleep beneath the center-field bleachers.

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Had the triceratops awakened just a bit earlier on that brisk evening the following spring, he might just have carried out his wishes.

As it happens, he arose from his slumber in the bottom of the 14^th inning. The Mets had scored a run to retake the lead, but the beast could hardly be aware of that. All he knew was that the heroes had returned to their home, and that he had to act quickly in order to exact his revenge. He stretched out deliberately, going once more over the plan he had dreamt of for months.

He would start in the sections around him, eating every man, woman and child in his way; then he would work his way around the castle clockwise, stopping at the pentagonal altar on the opposite side. As he drew from its power, the rest of the revelers would flee into the night, screaming in terror and telling the rest of the land about the fearsome creature living on Blake Street.

Surely, the townsfolk would soon enough be lining up to pay him tribute.

With a violent glint in his reptilian eye, Dinger lumbered up the concrete stairs and into the artificial light.

And then…

And then…

Not everyone remembers the exact moment when the essential goodness of his favorite baseball team won him over, turned him forever into an irrational creature whose well-being hangs on their fortunes. Perhaps it was a story his grandpa told him, or his first bite of cotton candy at the park that would become his second home.

For Dinger, it was instant he reached the mezzanine and heard the crack of the bat, and the orgiastic cheering of the fans. Dante Bichette had turned on a fastball and driven it deep to left field, plating three runs, winning the game.

From each soul in the sellout crowd witnessing that opening game came such love that it overwhelmed the purple behemoth. It turned his skin to plush, and covered it with festive polka dots. Quite without planning it, Dinger began hugging every child he saw, as he does to this day.

History tells us that Dinger hatched from an egg found during a Rockies game at old Mile High. It’s a good enough story, since the truth was witnessed by no one.

But still, for accuracy's sake, thank goodness for omniscient narrators.

Thank goodness for Dante Bichette.

And thank goodness for Rockies baseball.

Fight the urge.

Our friends at Passive-Aggressive Notes have compiled a sort of do-not-lick greatest hits. Just, you know, in case you can't keep your tongue to yourself.

Self-negating headline

Jackie Chan's son wants his own identity

Booga alert

Hot off the fax machine:

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Hood Boogas
The Movie

There are many types of women in this world. Some are beautiful ladies who eventually turn out to be great wives and mothers, and others are what we like to call "Hood Boogas." Executive Producer Rockiem Joiner of Da Noe Doe Network and Director/Producer Frazier Prince of the Prince Henry Entertainment Group join forces to bring us a Rap-u-mentary about a group of ghetto fabulous divas wanted for crimes of atrocious behavior. The search for these self-preservation specialists lands Brooklyn based BMS Agents (Baby Mama Surveillance Squad) in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains where they discover the culprits working their heinous magic on unsuspecting local folks.

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Be warned: the press release goes on to tell us the film "certainly deserves an HB-13 rating for Baby MaMa's strongly cautioned."

"Don't fall prey to those 'Hood Boogas' around the way," the release warns. "Check this movie out before it's too late."

Creep-you-out Friday

Yeah, it's Thursday. I'm not gonna be here tomorrow, though, so...
Porkchop purists, click over to rainbowpuke or something, and come back tomorrow. Those who want to read about a sherry enema immediately, read on (and thank God there aren't photos):

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Charges dismissed in sherry enema death

By Erwin Seba Thu Oct 4, 9:33 AM ET

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Charges have been dropped against a Texas woman who was accused of giving her husband a sherry enema that killed him, the prosecutor in the case said on Wednesday.

Tammy Jean Warner had been scheduled to face trial for negligent homicide in the May 2004 death of Michael Warner, 58, but Brazoria County District Attorney Jeri Yenne said the charges were dismissed a month ago for lack of evidence.

The dead man had had "a severe alcohol issue" and it was not clear his wife had committed a crime, Yenne said in a telephone interview.

"Let's say I have lung cancer and I continue to smoke. If you provide cigarettes to me, is that negligent homicide?" Yenne said.

"I really wrestled with the consent issue and negligence issue. I didn't think it rose to the level of negligent homicide."

At the time of Warner's indictment in 2005, police told the Houston Chronicle the woman had given her husband two large bottles of sherry, which raised his blood alcohol level to 0.47 percent, or nearly six times the level considered legally drunk in Texas.

Warner admitted administering the enema but denied she caused the death of her husband, who was a machine-shop operator. The incident occurred at their home in Lake Jackson, near Houston.

She told the newspaper her husband was addicted to enemas and often used alcohol in that manner. Police said Warner had a throat ailment that left him unable to drink the sherry.

Warner could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.

Yenne said a charge that Warner had burned her husband's will a month before his death was also dropped.

"We were never able to verify there was a signed, executed document," she said.

Coolest thing ever?

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