From Fox News:

Authorities say a 16-year-old girl who died after losing control of her car had been texting on her cell phone moments before the accident.

Seems like it would be a perfect story for warning teens and drivers in general not to do something stupid like sending text messages while driving, right?  Well, when you read further into the story:

Authorities say Preuss had been driving drunk and was speeding.

If this is how far the media have to look to find a case where the use of a cell phone contributed to a car crash, I'm not going to get too upset at all the yahoos I see driving around New Jersey with their cell phones plastered to their ears.

According to the DNA tests, the carcass that was turned in allegedly as Bigfoot is, well, I'm not sure what it is.  From the story:

One of the two samples of DNA said to prove the existence of the Bigfoot came from a human and the other was 96 percent from an opossum, according to Curt Nelson, a scientist at the University of Minnesota who performed the DNA analysis.

Human AND opossum?  From the same carcass?

Does this make it more like Pigman, or ManBearPig?

Here's the linkline from Fox News:

Wife Accuses James Bond Actor George Lazenby of Death Threat, Offering Toddlers Alcohol

Whoa.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I recalled that George Lazenby wasn't just married to some nobody.  And sure enough:

It's getting ugly between former James Bond actor George Lazenby and his soon-to-be ex-wife, former pro tennis ace Pamela Shriver.

Shriver does tennis broadcasts for ESPN, and won multiple grand slam titles with Martina Navratilova.  I think she made it to a grand slam singles final (or maybe two) in her career as well.  She's probably in the Tennis Hall of Fame.  And it's just "Wife accuses James Bond Actor ..."?  I would have thought it would pack more punch and attract more readers to name both famous members of the pair.  I mean, I think Shriver is also part of the whole Shriver / Kennedy universe, and STILL she doesn't even get mentioned in the headline?  I suppose this is just another indication of how much of a niche sport tennis, and women's tennis, have become, though I would suspect that Lazenby's role as Bond in one movie would put him about on the same level of celebrity obscurity as a multiple grand slam doubles winner.

Skimming through the "Muse Arts" page at Bloomberg this morning, I came across what I thought was going to be a story about a Coney Island attraction where people could line up and pay $1 to be waterboarded for fun.  Here's the link text:

Waterboarding for a Buck Adds Twist to Coney Island Thrills: Jeremy Gerard

It turns out you can't actually get waterboarded for a buck to add a twist to your Coney Island thrills, as we'll see:

Aug. 12 (Bloomberg) -- I wasn't prepared to be devastated by the lurching, blindfolded figure in an orange jumpsuit, gasping for air as a hooded man in black poured water down his mouth.

"Waterboard Thrill Ride," Steve Powers's installation, is disturbing in a way that journalistic accounts of torture can only approximate.  It left me wrecked.

True, I wasn't there by accident (unlike, say, nameless others further south in the lovely seaside resort of Guantanamo Bay).  I'd actually come to see a man being tortured.

Let's get this out of the way first.  It's a good thing the "nameless others" remain nameless, because my guess is none of the clowns down there enjoying the warm weather, free Korans, and three meals a day are there by accident.  Go ahead, Mr. Gerard, name ONE of them who is.  I won't hold my breath.

Now, it still seems from the setup that there is at least going to be a real person being waterboarded, and maybe even a dollar-paying customer who gets to experience it first hand!  Um, no:

I watched the two figures, motionless dummies until I inserted a dollar bill into a slot next to the bars.  That's when the water flowed and the prone body lurched.

Motionless dummies?  There are no real people?  That's right:

The figures in the "Waterboard Thrill Ride" aren't alive.  They're "crummy animatronic robots," Powers told me in a telephone interview, and any doubt about the point of his show is dispensed with by the cartoon on the gray storefront.  A sinister blue man is getting ready to pour water on SpongeBob SquarePants, who is saying "It doesn't GITMO better!" a reference to the practice of waterboarding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.  SpongeBob is grinning like it's, you know, a day at the beach.

Again, let's deal with this first - "the practice of waterboarding prisoners"?  Using the word "practice" kind of makes it sound like it goes on all the time.  But does it?  Did it?  Well, according to ABC News [updated to add link], only 3 of the scumbags at Gitmo were waterboarded.  Not much of a practice, but at least a technique to try to get necessary information out of some pretty bad dudes.

Moving on, the upshot of the piece is that you can pay a dollar and watch two "crummy animatronic robots" in a fake waterboarding scene.

Let's remember that waterboarding, while not something I want to have done on me, and not something I would try with my kids, is basically a way to scare the crap out of really bad guys in order to break them down and get information out of them.  They aren't really being drowned.

I think Mr. Gerard and I would have different answers to the question, "Which is worse, waterboarding illegal enemy combatant terrorists who may have critical information that would help save innocent lives, or setting up a fake waterboarding session in order to make a few bucks and add a thrill to tourists' Coney Island experience?"

Seems like a perfect product placement for a "Seinfeld" / "Cheers" crossover episode.  The "Seinfeld" reference is perhaps obvious.  The "Cheers" reference less so.  From the story:

German police women are to be issued with bullet-resistant bras to give them complete undercover protection.

From a news story on a proposal in Great Britain to do away with the notion that there are correct and incorrect spellings of words:

Playwright George Bernard Shaw was fond of pointing out that the word "ghoti" could just as well be pronounced "fish" if you followed common pronunciation: 'gh' as in "tough," 'o' as in "women" and 'ti' as in "nation."

The proposal does not seem to be getting any traction, but it's an amusing article all the same.  It seems to me that it would make teaching children to read and write all that much more difficult if you throw out the idea that there are right and wrong ways to spell a word.  But I would get tremendous satisfaction if one of my kids were clever enough to come with a spelling like Shaw's for fish and tried to get it past a teacher.

From Fox News:

ARCHES NATIONAL PARK, Utah —  One of the largest and most photographed stone arches in Arches National Park in the U.S. has collapsed.

Wall Arch fell sometime late Monday or early Tuesday, though no one has reported seeing it collapse, said Paul Henderson, the park's chief of interpretation.

Chief of interpretation?  I'm not sure exactly what the job title means, but there you have it.  The story has before and after photos as well, and unfortunately I have not figured out how to add images to the blog, so I did not paste them in.  Here are the image links in case that is helpful:  Before.  And after.

Sometimes if you can't find a way to laugh, you just want to scream:
 
    * 'World's Greatest Dad' Pleads Guilty to Child Sex Abuse

====================================================

From Seinfeld's "The English Patient" -

[The New York Hospital]

Izzy is in a hospital bed, as Jerry stands beside it.

JERRY: Again, Mr Mandelbaum, this back specialist is supposed to be the best.
So if there's anything else I can do, please don't hesitate to, uh, try and
find my number.

Jerry turns to walk out.

IZZY: Uh, oh, wait.

Izzy rummages on his bedside table and picks up a t-shirt. He holds it up to
his chest so Jerry can read what's written on it. 'World's Greatest DAD!'

IZZY: How 'bout that, huh? The World's Greatest Dad. My son made it for me.

JERRY: (humouring him) That's very nice.

IZZY: The best in the world. (pointing to himself) Which means I'm better
than just number one.

JERRY: Well, I don't know how official any of these rankings really are.

The folks at Maclean's can't seem to make up their minds whether life in the Great White North is better in every conceivable way than here in the U.S.:

Once a month, Henry Tenby jumps in his car — just after the morning rush hour and with a tank close to empty — and makes a 45-minute drive from his Vancouver home to Blaine, Wash. After zipping across the border using his recently acquired Nexus pass, he fills up with cheaper American gas and stops off at a packaging store, Hagens of Blaine, where the aviation buff and Internet entrepreneur picks up the computer parts and memorabilia he routinely buys online from the U.S. and has shipped there under his name. The cross-border shopping ritual saves him anywhere from $50 to hundreds of dollars a trip — at the very least, the equivalent of a nice dinner out, he says. This month, he plans to buy a piece of new computer hardware in the U.S. for about $200. Buying the part in Canada would cost $320, he estimates. As for Canadian retailers charging more than their American counterparts: "I think they're just being greedy and gouging Canadians," he says. "I don't like it."

Senator Barack Obama will be campaigning in my hometown today.  Actually, there's probably a little bit of a dispute on that point, as he will be appearing at Concord High School's gymnasium, which I think is technically not located in the City of Elkhart.  The Concord school system is separate from the Elkhart school system, and I don't think all of the land in the Concord area has been annexed into the city.  In any event, the news stories are indicating that Sen. Obama is in Elkhart, so we'll all go along with that characterization for now.

As for the appearance itself, Sen. Obama will be at McCuen Gymnasium.  In talking to my father, I understand the gym hold about 1,000 people.  This would be a nice little rally in a town of about 45,000.

But Sen. Obama could have had a rally in an even bigger venue in Elkhart.  North Side Gym holds approximately 7,000 people.  This gym was built in 1954 and I believe it was one of the largest gyms in the state for high school basketball for a long time.  The gym is actually located at one of the junior high schools (now called middle schools) in town, and both of the Elkhart high schools play their home basketball games there.  As a young kid in the 1970s, I remember going to games on Friday and Saturday nights and the gym would be full.  For sectional and regional games when the state basketball tourney started, the gym would be overflowing, and I can remember sitting in cramped corner bleachers in the upper level for many games, feeling like the whole gym would collapse under the stomping feet of the crowd.

Things have changed over the years with high school hoops in Indiana.  It's now been over 10 years since a single team was crowned THE state champs at the end of the tournament.  Now there are four class champions, depending on the size of the schools.  There will never be another Milan Miracle, upon which the movie "Hoosiers" was loosely based.

And the crowds at Elkhart high school games are not what they used to be.  I went to some of the games when I still lived in town after law school.  North Side Gym was nowhere near full.  A lot of the bleachers in the upper level weren't even rolled out for use.

I'm a little surprised that Sen. Obama apparently could not muster enough excitement in his campaign appearance to at least match the crowds at North Side Gym that I remember.  I'm sure his campaign staff would not want to have him speak in a quarter full gym in a small town in Indiana.  It wouldn't make for very good pictures.  So the smaller venue at the newer school out in the suburbs will probably be just fine.  It will be full with a cheering crowd, like it was when Sean Kemp played for Concord almost 20 years ago.  I wonder if Kemp's name will come up in today's events?  He's probably the most famous athlete to have attended the Concord schools.  If someone on the campaign staff did their homework, it may not be a bad reference to make, at least to try to connect with local celebrity and former glory.

... both the apparent boom in the lowland gorilla population is in some way thanks to warmer global climate, while at the same time the alleged decline in polar bear population (or floe ice, or whatever is the claim) is also in some attributable to the same thing?

It kind of stands to reason that a warmer climate may lead to a decrease in the population / habitat for one species, while it may lead to increases somewhere else.  Let's get the Diane Fossey / Jane Goodall chimp champs to slug it out with the Knut Knights and enjoy the fireworks!

I hope the news out of China this morning, about an apparent attack by Muslim terrorists that killed 16 police officers in far western China, does not turn out to be an even worse harbinger of what we may see in the next few weeks with the Peiping Olympics.  The smoggy, brown, polluted air, locust infestation, and raging algae blooms seemed like enough unpleasantness without the far worse spectacle of reliving the Munich Games.

I see at the Maclean's site they have a story comparing/contrasting Canada and the U.S.  Turns out they think life in Canada is a much better deal than here in the States.  Here's the summary:

The numbers are in. Compared to the U.S., we work less, live longer, enjoy better health and have more sex. And get this: now we're wealthier too.

Is this some kind of viral attempt to get people to move from the good ol' U S of A to Canada?  Maybe to make it an attractive destination for supporters of whichever candidate loses the fall presidential election?  Maybe a look at the immigration numbers will show that rather than trying to get to the U.S., all those poor third worlders are merely using our country as a convenient jumping off point to sneak over the 49th parallel into Canada for a Molson Canadian and a Tim Horton's, eh?

Turns out that for all the hype of the lead-in, the end of the piece reveals a slightly different "truth" than the starting point:

Be it sports, health care, business or wealth, Americans are still competing to be the best. And it's true that the best in the U.S. is the best you'll find on the planet. But when you look at the medians and the averages, their accomplishment pales. As the hard numbers in this report show, Americans have shorter lives, poorer health, less sex, more divorces, and more violent crime. Which may mean that perhaps America isn't the greatest nation on earth. After all, you can't judge a nation by the best it produces, you have to judge it by the success of the average Joe. And the average Joe in Canada is having a way better time.

Hmmm.  Medians and averages can certainly be interesting comparisons on this kind of thing.  But raw numbers might also be interesting.  My guess is that in terms of sheer numbers, a nation of 300 million has a lot more people who are experiencing a standard of living that is equal to and in many ways better than the standard of living of comparable Canadians among their approximately 33 million population.  Twain's observation on statistics, damn statistics, and lies still holds.

Jay Mariotti's latest column in the Chicago Sun Times takes the position that the Bears "blew" their chance to get Brett Favre in a trade with the Packers.  I don't know whether this is a sincere opinion by Mariotti, taking the entirely cold-blooded view that once a guy is on your team, everything that comes before if forgotten, or if it is merely a contrarian position meant to tweak Bears fans who do not want to see Favre, ever, wearing a Bears uniform.

I understand that it's antiquated to think of players as "our guys" and "their guys."  But as we are often reminded by sports columnists, we're called fans because it is a shortened version of fanatics.  We are not entirely rational in our views when it comes to our sports teams.  So Brett Favre is the enemy.  He played for the enemy his entire career.  He should never be considered as someone to simply bring over in a trade because he would be better than the guys you currently have at the position.  Heck, I still have a problem with Jim McMahon going to play for the Packers long after he'd been traded from the Bears.  The Punky QB was our guy.  That may be the only Super Bowl win I will ever experience as a Bears fan, and McMahon was a key part of it.  Seeing him in a Packers uniform made me ill.

So am I happy with Grossman, Orton and the rest?  No, I think they are underwhelming and could lead the team to another middling to poor season.  But I would rather watch them take their shots and be able to root for them and the team, together, than face the conflict of having Favre at quarterback and wanting to see the team do well and win, while also wanting Favre to get his clock cleaned on every play.  As a fan that's just not tolerable.

A while back, I posted some comments on "Extreme Home Makeover," the ABC television program where a family has their current home completely demolished and replaced with their "dream" home, which I understand to be a mortgage-free deal.  My kids usually enjoy the show, and we often have it on after dinner on Sunday nights.  My earlier comments raised the question of what happens to these families and their new homes when the television crew and the community have gone on with their lives.  My fear is that the families who are often chosen as the recipients of these wondrous gifts are going to find themselves unable to maintain the properties in the long run, and the homes will either fall slowly into disrepair or be sold to someone who can maintain them.

Tonight I saw a quick post at the Galley Slaves blog which pointed me toward this story:

LAKE CITY, Ga. -- More than 1,800 people showed up to help ABC's "Extreme Makeover" team demolish a family's decrepit home and replace it with a sparkling, four-bedroom mini-mansion in 2005.

Three years later, the reality TV show's most ambitious project at the time has become the latest victim of the foreclosure crisis.

Apparently the family used their home as collateral for a $450,000 loan to start a construction business.  The business failed, and now they are facing possible foreclosure on the property.  Even more disheartening information from the story:

Materials and labor were donated for the home, which would have cost about $450,000 to build. Beazer Homes' employees and company partners also raised $250,000 in contributions for the family, including scholarships for the couple's three children and a home maintenance fund.

So even with the free home and a quarter of a million dollars for education costs and home maintenance, this family still is on the verge of losing their home.  The story goes on to note that ABC advises the families it selects to work with financial planners to make sure they make sound financial decisions.  Whether the family in this case consulted a financial planner is not clear.  The mayor of the town where the house was built, who was also one of the volunteers who helped build the house, is quoted in the story as saying the family squandered what they were given.  It's hard to see how that is not the case.

It makes for sometimes heart-rending television to learn the backgrounds of the "Extreme Home Makeover" families, and it is wonderful that so many people in communities across the country are willing to put in so much hard work to try to help them.  Hopefully the families truly are being helped in the long run and are not simply enjoying a temporary respite from the very difficult struggles that made them the subject of the television show in the first place.