Category: In the News (page 1 of 3)

I’ve become a fan of the elephant dung drinking… urine drinking… bug eating survival guy on Mav vs Wild. Thanks to a tip from Jake, there is specific, corroborated evidence that he’s pretty much faked all the coolest parts of the show. Once I fix my tivo (dead drive), I’ll still probably watch the show, looking for the wires, life jackets and trick photography.

(oh, the can’t say glacier comment… he pronounces it glossy-a)

Unless you live under a rock and hate baseball, you’re aware that our defensively fantastic first baseman, Doug Menquevich Doug Mienkievicz Dougie Baseball was traded to the Boston Redsox. The strange thing was, the Sox were actually here in town for a three game series, and doug basically traded dugouts before the game and put on a new uniform. Crazy.

In light of this news I’d like to announce a silent auction for a Large Twins Doug Mientkiewicz T-Shirt. It’s slightly used – only worn twice, but in great condition.

Update: The Tribune on Doug’s departure – Quiet comes to ‘loudest locker’.

If you watched the Twins game last night, you know about “The Hit”. Not a base hit or a home run, but the full speed linebacker hurt that Hunter laid down on the White Sox catcher on a tag up run home. They will be playing that highlight for years to come. It takes a lot to get ESPN to talk about the small market Twins, but that hit got front page.

Apparently the Sox fans weren’t too happy about the play. I can’t imagine why? Torii only went about 3 feet out of his way and then, Schpladow! No big deal.

When Hunter went to the on-deck circle to bat in top of the ninth, fans showered him with taunts and heckling. One fan took it too far, allegedly threatening Hunter’s life, and sparked a brief heated exchange before the fan was escorted away by security.

“When I heard ‘I’ll kill you,’ I lost it,” Hunter said. “Don’t talk about it in front of these kids. … Somebody should have gotten him out of there a long time ago.

“The guy was reaching over … I was hoping he’d come on the field so I could whup his ass. I can’t go in the stands, but if you come on the field, that’s a free ass whupping. That’s stupid, I’ve got a bat in my hands.”

“The University of Wisconsin-Madison students say in their lawsuit that Madison taverns that agreed to eliminate weekend drink specials committed felony violations and that the victims of price fixing are entitled to triple damages under antitrust law.” (Madison Capital-Times)

Keep fighting the good fight Madison.

Ok, NASA now has two, 384 pound robot rovers on Mars. They’re cruising about, “performing experiments” to reportedly look for signs of water and martians.

Yeah right. Think about it. A room full of MIT geniuses with a billion dollars at their disposal – what are they going to build? Exactly.

This is all a giant cover up for a geeked out long distance robot war. Just like the trip to the moon was just to build hype for the Star Wars and Star Trec movies to air in the ’70’s.

I’ll be taking bets on which robot wins. Odds are 3 to 1 in favor of Opportunity. Spirit has been having technical difficulties; whereas, Opportunity has had only one problem, a “heater” that keeps turning on unnecessarily. My sources tell me that this is in fact a flame thrower that the uber’s are testing out, prepping for battle.

If you want to watch any of the super bowl ads again, you can stream them at iFilm.

The TiVo came in handy during the halftime show. A “shocking surprise” was promised during Super Bowl halftime show, you can say that again. Just as Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake wrapped up Timberlake’s hit song Rock Your Body with the lyric “Gonna have you naked by the end of this song,” Justin ripped away the cloth covering Janet’s right breast. I hit the TiVo instant replay button to be sure it just happened. Yup, it did, and it was planned and approved by CBS.

‘ve got the TiVo set to record all the xtreme happenings at the ESPN Winter X Games VIII in Aspen. The snowcross and hillcross events this year are not surprisingly flooded with Minnesotans – 21 of 56 qualified riders are in fact from here. There are 5 snowboarders from the land of 10,000 lakes that qualified as well. One of the Hillcross riders is a friend of mine, and I hope he kicks some ass. They have practice today, and qualifying tomorrow. The quarter-finals and finals are on Wednesday.

For the first time in 4 years the snowcross event, which is now complete, wasn’t won by Blair Morgan. Morgan has won every race he’s entered in this year, so this is a bit surprising to see Michael Island win – actually his first pro win. The shot below is of Morgan, racing in the quarter finals last night, note he’s actually racing here, it’s not a jumping contest. Balls.

Update: My bud made it to the semi-finals, and should have made the finals but he got clipped. His fate was explained in this article as follows:

“In the final quarterfinal race, Chad Bauerly started off strong, but Chris Burandt clipped him and the two were knocked off course. Burandt was bucked off his sled and neither rider advanced to semis. “

It hard to believe that here in The State of Hockey we had only one player on our professional team (Go Wild!) that was local, now we have none.

It falls in the “Sick and Wrong” category that R. Kelly, a fellow pedophile to Michael Jackson, penned a song on Wacko Jacko’s upcoming album. The name of the song, One More Chance.

I know you all feel guilty for stopping in for a Super Size Fries or munching on the occasional fast food crabby patty now and again, but the situation is probably much worse than a few Atkins violations or busting over your Jenny Craig points max for the day. For example, a woman found half a worm in her baked potato at Wendys – I’m sure you can figure out where the other half went.

God help you if you love Burger King. The 100 sampled by msnbc rang up a whopping 241 total critical violations. Health inspectors cited a Virginia Burger King for 14 separate critical violations, including employees not washing their hands, uncovered food in the fridge, grime and debris found on this ice chute, and on the drink machine at the drive-thru widow. And lets not talk about the whole pissing on the food story where 19 people were fired for doing just that – at one Burger King.

This stuff just came up in the past few weeks, I didn’t even try to dig up old violations. One last thing, a google news search for the word restaurant returns 7 results for people shot in fast food joints, one was for a paintball raid, but still, if the food wont kill you, the employees will.

I’m off to McDonalds for lunch.

Tonight the Twins will try to prove to New York that game 1 wasn’t a fluke, and that bling-bling salaries doesn’t always mean playoff wins. Speaking of Winnesota, here is some more good reasons to cheer on the local teams:

• Kevin Garnet signed a deal to stay with the wolves until he gets a senior citizen discount at home games.
• The Gophers Football team is in the top 20.
• Local football teams SCSU and St. Johns here in St. Cloud are ranked nationally in their divisions.
• The Gophers hockey team is going for it’s record third national championship in a row.
• The Wild are coming off a playoff year, and will fare well if they sign a few more of last years heroes.
• The Vikings are 4 and 0 on the season and on a 7 game winning streak if you go back to 2002. Oh, and the Packers are 2-2.
• The WNBA Lynx made it to the playoffs with their best season yet – ok that’s pushing it.

All that said, it’s going to take a bit of luck to beat the Yanks on their home field again, and the Vikes are playing with a backup quarterback and have had a mostly fluff schedule as of yet. So I’m not counting my eggs, just hopping for the best.

I had a kick ass time at the Twins game last night where they (hopefully) assured their position in the playoffs by sweeping the White Sox in the three game series. Jones hit two dingers, one of which was 436 feet. Not bad for a guy who had only 12 on the year.

The Twins magic number* is now 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 and they have a cake schedule from here on out.

*It appears that The Magic Number Guy’s website is down for bandwidth reasons. He’s got his index.html page set to zero K, but the rest of his site is still there. Price of fame.

“Our customers have indicated it would be preferable to have a real knife,” Northwest spokeswoman Mary Stanik said.”

Since Sept. 11, all passengers, first-class or coach, have been provided a plastic knife. Now Hijackers would be wise (sic) to foot the bill for a first class ticket because they are now being provided a stainless steel knife (along with the stainless fork and spoon). No need to smuggle box cutters if you fly first class.

Read the rest of the article at the Houston Chronicle.

If you read weblogs you no doubt have come across the a-listers bitching about how Google is broke because weblogs are oft near the top hits for searches.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m searching for something on Google, I rarely have to go past the top 10 hits. If I do go past, I don’t spend hours spouting about how Google sucks and start writing volumes on how the internet is not what it used to be (starting… .now).

So listen up, just refine the search by entering -weblog into your search arguments if you don’t like weblogs skewing the results. Problem solved. It’s not Google that’s busted, its all the useless content that we bloggers are spreading across the web.

What’s worse, is Kottke listed all the searches that Google inaccurately points to his site, even further confusing Google. Still worse yet is the fact that all the Kottke minions (myself included) will link to that post, and Google will think he’s an even more of an expert on the items he listed. In effect he just made his own Google bomb and exploited and damaged the vary thing he’s complaining about.

Remember, everything that is in the public domain runs the risk of being abused, wheather it’s the homeless man pissing in the drinking fountain in the park, or some hose-head blogger who talks about Farva all day long and consequently Google thinks he’s an expert on the subject (well, I am, chicken fucker). If you really want to help the issue and like me you spend all day pretending you’re the foremost site on a given subject rather than actually being one, just block Google-bots from crawling your site and suggest others to do the same.

Does anyone else see the irony in my complaining about other people complaining? I just didn’t have any content for a few days and thought I’d make something up.

So, in summary: it’s not weblogs that are ruining Google, it’s people complaining about how weblogs are runing Google. That is actually ruining Google more. Incidentally, the best place to find out what’s ruining Google, is of course Google.

A group of would be Cuban migrants used a 1951 Chevrolet pick-up truck equipped with oil barrels as flotation devices and a propellor connected to the drive shaft to make a break for the United States. They were at sea 31 hours when they were picked up, over half way to the US. Read the rest here.

The American government has released photos of the now deceased sons of Saddam, Uday (top) and Qusay (bottom). From these before (left) and after (right) photos it’s easy to tell that they were brothers. Qusay is obviously in a body bag whereas Uday is gruesomely exposed. There can be no doubt about the authenticity of these photos. Iraqis will sleep well tonight – well, once all celebratory the shooting into the air calms down.
Read more

I didn’t want to say anything about the trade the Timberwolves were making until it was official – didn’t want to jinx it. It went through. Hell yeah!

We now have a starting 5 that all average double digits with some power off the bench – Wally Z, Troy Hudson, Kendall Gill, Rod Strickland, Ervin Johnson. When you look at their roster one third of the players don’t even have numbers yet. I’m glad they’ve made drastic and expensive changes to surround the big ticket with some worthy players because if we can’t sign Garnett next year, we will never, ever be a good basketball team.

I went to the Twins game last night with a few friends. Good to see the boys well out of their skid with a convincing 4 game sweep over the A’s and now following that up with a win last night over Seattle. I’d just like to mention that Hunter has a cannon for an arm.

Everyone has been on the lookout for Nemo, so I’m assuming there is some type of reward for whoever finds him. Well my roommate is harboring him, and I have no problem turning him in. Well, as long as there’s a reward that is – any reward… I’m talking 25 cents. (his little blue friend is hiding under the rock if you’re looking for her too).

Realizing I’d just posted 3 geek posts in a row, I knew I had to scramble fast for some good, funny content. I bring you:

New Neighbor Tested With Beer – from The Onion

“Iwanski, 52, who administers beer tests to all new male arrivals to Maple Bluff Road, invited Lundback over to share a six-pack of Heineken”

“We’re a pretty tight unit, so how a new neighbor responds to an offer of beer goes a long way toward deciding whether he’ll become a regular at Sunday-football get-togethers.”

Read the rest here.

This is a test to live by. (to those of you who already read the onion, sorry but I couldn’t come up with a damn thing today)

Landmark Theaters and Microsoft today announced that they are equipping 177 screens in all 53 Landmark Theaters across the United States with digital cinema playback systems based on Microsoft Windows Media 9 Series.

Movie goers can now expect films that have really crappy digitized playback, quit half way through, and frequently suggest popcorn and ju-ju-bee enhancements – in the middle of movie. Another new enhancement that again will be displayed while the movie is playing, is a suggestion window that urges you to upgrade to Movie Theater Pro™.

Theater patrons can also expect popup previews for unrelated films that come on at unexpected points in the movie. These suggested movies will require you to go to a newer, more expensive theater to watch.

Of course, any or all of these new features will be accompanied by a frequent occurrence where the entire theater screen will go entirely blue blue; asking you to put down your popcorn, hit the reset button on the front stage and start the movie from the beginning.

I am by no means a military expert, but I believe I’ve shown my competent grasp of the subject in previous posts. The only weakness that our coalition forces have shown, at least that I’ve seen, is our susceptibility to the evil blue on blue tactics used by the fratricide forces. They seem to be especially effective against the British.

I think it’s abundantly clear we need to dethrone the cunning Fratricide Regime, whoever the heck they are.

With all the speculation on whether or not Saddam is barely alive, in good health, or sending us these videos from the grave, it’s only a matter of time before some macromedia wizard generates a “Make Your Own Saddam Video” website with a meme worthy following.

I was enraged with Bush regarding an obvious oversight in planning the “Showdown with Saddam”. If there has ever been a more obvious time to bring in The A-Team, I’ve never seen it.

You laugh, but the Iraqi army is a perfect adversary for the A-Team. If you watched the timeless 80’s sitcom you no doubt remember the hundreds of criminals that would shoot aimlessly at the A-Team. Not surprisingly, none were ever able to actually hit anything. Similarly, the Iraqi anti-aircraft weapons continuously shoot at plane’s over Bagdad, and just as the A-Team’s adversaries, can’t hit shit (I’m not even going to touch the SCUDS).

I was actually formulating a letter to the President to inform him of this military mistake, when I was informed that he had in fact deployed Optimus Prime (no joke) in their stead.

Bravo Mr. Bush, bravo.

Update: Ok, this is just getting out of hand. Saddam Better watch out.