Cheapness Studies

Apparently, day-of-week matters when you’re buying certain things. If you must buy things, and many of us do, then read the article to know when.

Dinner Out

When to Buy: Tuesday.

Why: Most restaurants do not receive food deliveries over the weekend. "Sunday is the garbage-can day of the week," says Kate Krader, senior editor at Food & Wine magazine. "No doubt, they're cleaning out their fridges. Tuesdays, they're starting fresh." Dining out on that day offers the best odds you'll get a meal worth paying for, no matter your price point.

Gas

When to Buy: Thursday, before 10 a.m.

Why: The price of oil isn't the only factor influencing costs at your local pump. Consumer usage plays a role, too — and weekend demand is high, prices usually swing upward on Thursdays as travelers fuel up to head out the following day. By hitting the pump before 10 a.m. (when many station owners change their prices), you'll beat the rush and the price jump.

Jealous?

I'm in southern Ohio!!!! For 2 weeks!!!! Suckas!!!!

A Good Band Name...

Inflatable Giant Monkey Scrotum

Multiple Sushi Sclerosis

You probably didn’t know this, but Seattle has the highest rate of Multiple Sclerosis in America. It’s about 3 times the rate of southern states and the reasons are somewhat of a medical mystery.

Anyway, I’m eating at my favorite sushi restaurant ($1 rolls at lunch, pretty decent quality) and I go into the men’s room. On the wall is a public service poster that reads:

“The Pacific Northwest has the highest incidence of MS in the nation. If you experience symptoms, get diagnosed!”

Then there’s a beautiful montage image of Mount Rainer, a waterfall, and some of Seattle’s lush evergreen forests with text asking intriguing questions:

“Is it in the air?
“In the water?”
“In the trees?”

To which someone scrawled in ballpoint pen: “Is it in the sushi?”

Still Dead, Still the Man

Kurt Vonnegut: AV Club remembers the man

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.


Related.

Bottled Up Inside

Eloquent informed anti-endorsement of bottled water called Bottled Water Is Still A Scam. And it is.

A little ironic, but Google Ads attached these 2 ads...

Bottled Water Delivery
Get Delivery of Fresh Spring Water- Poland Spring, Arrowhead & More.
Delivery.Arrowheadwater.com

Private Label Water
Custom Labels for any occasion! 5 case minimum order (120 bottles)
www.collingwoodwater.com

China Takes the Lead

Another distressing trend, the US is losing its leadership in a field where it's traditionally led the world: misinformed backwoods hijinx. Chinese peasants have inadvertently been eating fossils.

Villagers in central China spent decades digging up bones they believed belonged to flying dragons and using them in traditional medicines. These were dinosaur fossils, which were boiled with other ingredients and fed to children to treat dizziness and leg cramps.

So we have rural folks with some wildly misinformed beliefs; a distrust of doctors with their fancy doctorin'; and a willingness to put anything whatsoever in their mouths.

This is China, but could've just as easily been Georgia. Let’s bring the pride back home.

Fourth of July!

Happy Birthday, Jesus!

An Editorial: Scooter

With this pardon business, Bush is simply not respecting the system.

The system has been carefully designed to help all of us feel better; to help the public get some closure. The system provides that for every outrageous screw-up, exactly one sacrificial lamb (or scapegoat) be tossed to the wolves. Sad as it is, Scooter Libby is that lamb.

Much like when villagers tossed virgins into the volcano, this act appeases the gods and spares the village. When a scandal breaks, a jittery public gets angry--but after the sacrifice, they can rest easy knowing that the guilty scapegoat is safely fired/ in jail/ in rehab and that no more stupendously stupid screw-ups like the one that just happened, will ever happen again. Everyone wins.

Past examples:

Mike Brown. The FEMA guy who single-handedly destroyed New Orleans. He was a bad apple.


Whatshername from the Abu Ghraib scandal. She single-handedly tortured every Iraqi detainee in US custody. She was a very bad apple.

Martha Stewart did something bad with stocks or something. Bad apple.

These people went to jail and/or got fired...proving that the system works!

Scooter Libby is the designated scapegoat in this case, and as such, is expected to perform some very well-defined scapegoat duties:

1) Take the blame.
2) Frown, a lot. Practice his Mr. Frowney sad faces in the mirror.
3) Do a little min. security time: edit his memoirs / perfect his tennis swing
4) Learn a very important lesson about not doing whatever bad thing it was he did. Frown to show how deeply learned the lesson was.

With this early pardon, the entire system breaks down. Nobody is paying for this awesomely corrupt screw-up, whatever it was. The virgin has escaped the volcano and the public desperately needs some closure.

Bush should just say a hobo leaked that CIA agent's identitiy and be done with it.

Gypsies

Growing up in America, I had no idea they even existed. My grandparents would use them as a threat if we kids misbehaved. They said bad children were bought by traveling gypsies and whisked away in their caravans. In the movies, they told fortunes and could put curses on those who wronged them. That was just Hollywood, but as a child we were still careful not to shove just any old woman around -- in case she was a gypsy.

Before I went to Europe I thought gypsies were pure fiction, just imaginary boogymen used to scare children, like werewolves or mormons. But over there, they’re very real; call themselves Romani, and are actually a long persecuted minority. The more you know…

Who Were the Gypsies?

From the article:

A Romani woman, according to traditional mores, must not walk in front of a man who is seated. Romani women have managed to turn this fear of defilement into power. A Romani woman who is wronged can toss her skirt over a man's head (or sometimes her underwear or even just expose her genitals). Skirt tossing defiles the recipient, making him an immediate outcast. He must make peace with the skirt tosser before he can reenter the group. Defilement from skirt tossing is permanent; the only way to remove it is to pretend it never happened. The skirt tosser does just that once peace is made.

That's a creative form of punishment -- it'd make a great episode of Law & Order for sweeps week.

ET Phones in a Hit

A real life astronomer says that other astronomers might be stupid, dead stupid, for beaming tightly focused radio transmissions to nearby stars:

Bad Idea

The fact is, and this should have been obvious to all, that we do not know what any extraterrestrials might be like - and hoping that they might be friendly, evolved enough to be wise and beyond violence, is an assumption upon which we could be betting our entire existence.

Give me $50,000 or I abort my baby!

Wow...this website is...uh, rather bold:

http://helpmybabylive.com/

It comes down to this. If we can't raise the $50,000 in the next 3 months, we'll have to choose abortion. We don't like it, and we don't like the nature of our appeal, but it is what it is. We're asking you to donate money to us using the link to your left. Anything you can give would be appreciated.

A new nadir for American culture, or the wave of the future? Begging for money use to be so passé and street corner; but now it’s gotten all high-tech and tres chic -- this fall, begging is the new black.

I actually think this helpmybabylive.com website is a good thing, it’ll help get a lot of stupid money out of circulation. Money that might’ve otherwise bought a snowmobile or jetski and gotten someone hurt. Hats off to you, anonymous pregnant couple!

So that's why I've put together my own plea...

It comes down to this. I’ve got a lot of viable sperm, but I can’t raise them all without your help. I don’t like it, but I have to ask the Internet to give me $5 each. Otherwise, I’ll be forced to flush them down the toilet -- even though I respect life and stuff. I’m dead serious about this threat. Especially since Desperate Housewives is almost on. Please hurry!

(link via MetaFilter)

Nation of Retards

Wonkette provides some thoughtful context and analysis to Newsweek’s polling data.

Nation of Retards

How dumb are Americans? A fifth of you think most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Iraq, which makes sense as 41% of you think the September 11, 2001, attacks were an Iraqi military operation. An elite 11% were able to identify the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

If you’ve wondered who could possibly approve of Dick Cheney, it is likely the same 10% who believe the American or British empires predate the Roman Empire, or the 8% who chose “sports utility vehicles” as the one thing that definitely does not contribute to global warming.

Related: I just watched Mike Judge’s Idiocracy; at times it was so stupid and also not-stupid. It’s already getting a cult following on DVD like his Office Space did.

Here’s a litmus test. If this clip makes you laugh, then you should rent the film ASAP. If it’s just weird to you, then you definitely shouldn’t, cause you'll really hate the movie.




It’s almost a dystopian science fiction film, in a way. In the future, people have been dumbed-down so much that the top TV show is called "Ow, My Balls” which only shows a guy hurting his balls. The clips of this show-within-a-movie can be enjoyed on two levels. First as cutting cultural commentary, revealing the poisonous anti-elitism in our society. And also on the level of it being funny watching a guy kicked in the balls.

The 300 / Novelty Parking

#1 Ordering movies at the library...the Seattle library has a great electronic reservation system, but you have to wait your turn. Placed an order in for the violent CGI spectacle "The 300" and got this message: "There are 338 active holds ahead of you". So it took less men to actually fight the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C....than are ahead of me in line.

Seems oddly ironic, like how it cost more money to make "Titanic" than it took to make the Titanic.

#2 Been mildly irked by these kinds of novelty parking signs lately:


I've been driving around for days looking for a place to park and whenever there's an open spot I don't qualify for it. Really need more hobbies and/or ethnicities, otherwise I'll keep getting these novelty parking tickets.

Anyway, coming into work today I notice one: "Parking for GodSmack Fans Only". Which seems odd, the people who buy these signs are more typically the "World's Best Grandpa" type and less typically into moshing with GodSmack. Searching for a deeper meaning, what this sign really says is, the owner of this house has tragically lost all taste in music.

Basically it's a Handicapped Parking Sign.

Bong Hits 4 Jesus – Update

The case of the Bong Hits 4 Jesus banner has just been ruled on…

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Supreme Court ruled against a former high school student Monday in the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner case -- a split decision that limits students' free speech rights.

Joseph Frederick was 18 when he unveiled the 14-foot paper sign on a public sidewalk outside his Juneau, Alaska, high school in 2002.

Principal Deborah Morse confiscated it and suspended Frederick. He sued, taking his case all the way to the nation's highest court.

The justices ruled 6-3 that Frederick's free speech rights were not violated by his suspension over what the majority's written opinion called a "sophomoric" banner.

The Supreme Court is wrong, wrong, wrong here. Whether the banner was “sophomoric” or the deepest E=MC-squared Shakespeare NPR shit, the First Amendment protects it. Or is supposed to. If high school students aren’t allowed to say sophomoric things, then how can they say anything at all? We might as well just cauterize their mouths. Which maybe isn't bad idea anyway.

In an ironic twist, the student in this legal case is supported by conservative Christian groups who rightfully fear that the ruling will have a chilling effect on speech – in their case religious expression in schools, such as speech that opposes homosexuality or abortion.

In a second ironic twist, the lead prosecutor against free student speech is none other than Kenneth Starr – famous for investigating Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky years. Back then, Starr was all about saying dirty, dirty things in public. Now he’s all “think of the children” and still a sexually frustrated pervert.

It's indicative of our upside down times, that the highest court in the land is enmeshed in debate that somehow gets Monica Lewinsky; conservative Christians and Alaskan stoners; on the same side. It's the case of the strange bedfellows.

In this court case, free speech is like a plucky Rocky boxing Apollo Creed. He takes punch after punch, getting bloodied and staggering, but refuses to give it up. The final bell rings and Rocky comes out swinging like a man possessed and that's when an asteroid strikes the boxing ring, instantly vaporizing everyone for miles around -- that’s how thoroughly free speech did not win today.


Related: Even Judge Judy has more sense than the Supreme Court