Blizza Blizza

Just learn how to dance and you’ll have them all over you.

Not sure those are the kind of ladies I’d want to meet, though. (Click for full-size image.)

(via Dave Barry)

It’s time for Mike Rowe to go on a road trip to Romania. Key quote:

The carcasses are rotting amid heat of 38C, just metres from a main road.

That’s 100 degrees Fahrenheit for you non-metric types.

And for the record, “Huge Meat Pile” would be a great name for a death metal band.

The FBI has raided the Alaska home of Senator Ted Stevens in connection with an investigation into allegations that an oil company paid for a remodeling job.

The article is not forthcoming on the details of the remodeling job, but our sources tell us that Senator Stevens may have upgraded his home to include a series of tubes.

A 20-year-old babysitter in Granite City, Illinois, has been charged with pimping after sharing in the $140 a 12-year-old girl in her care was paid for sex the babysitter arranged for the girl to have with a 48-year-old man.

Has Illinois reinstated the death penalty yet?

I was en route to Holgu??n, Cuba yesterday with a planeload of passengers, in cruise at 17,000 feet, when a giant lightning bolt materialized out of nowhere about 10 feet off the nose and our plane flew right through it. The bolt hit about two feet from my face on my side of the nose.

I had just enough time before it happened to think, “Wow, we’re about to get hit by lightning. Cool!” and my first reaction after it happened was, “Huh. That wasn’t nearly as loud as I was expecting it to be.”

The strike took out both our communications radios and caused a fan somewhere in the avionics stack behind me to shed a fan blade, which made a horrible grinding sound for the next five minutes as the fan blade slowly tore itself apart. Eventually, the noise went away and was replaced by the whine of an un-loaded electric motor.

We were able to re-establish communications with ATC about 10 minutes later using the voice capabilities of our ACARS unit and diverted back to Miami, where we had an uneventful landing. Photos here, thanks to the captain, whose camera phone is far better than mine. (I had meant to take my digital camera along on the flight but forgot it as I was running out the door on my way to work yesterday.)

Two hours later, we had a new plane and finally got the passengers to Holgu??n five hours late. On the way back, we were very nearly struck twice more by lightning, prompting me to look at the captain and wonder aloud, “What sort of trouble are we gonna be in if we bring back a second plane with lightning damage in one day?”

I’m really glad I have two days off now. I also kind of want to go work for the Hurricane Hunters now.

Eric Sarkkinen, you win the prize for not only “hitting on children” (in the sexual sense, not the beating-them-up sense) but for doing it while drinking and driving and with that amazing look on your face.

Who wants to bet Eric has a MySpace (“A Place for Child Molesters”) profile?

I know that a rocket doesn’t have a throttle in a purely technical sense, but neither do turbine engines, so there.

It’s nice to see that NASA is finally catching up to the FAA. Am I the only one who is shocked that this wasn’t already a rule, at least for critical phases of flight like launch and re-entry/landing?

I’m getting very tired of people — largely ignorant citizens interviewed on TV or radio, or idiots posting in online forums, but also some members of the so-called media — claiming that Michael Vick should be considered innocent until proven guilty.

He is being treated as innocent until proven guilty. That’s why he’s not in jail right now.

Whether Nike and Reebok choose to suspend endorsement deals and pull his merchandise from their store shelves, or whether the commissioner of the NFL chooses to tell Vick to stay the hell away from a league that is already fighting for its public image due to many other off-field incidents of a similar nature has nothing whatsoever to do with the American legal doctrine of “innocent until proven guilty”.

The same argument was put forth several months ago when Adam “Pacman” Jones of the Tennessee Titans was suspended from the NFL for the 2007-8 season for his involvement with several high-profile off-field incidents, and the same counter applies now as it did then: what happens between the NFL and its players, or between Major League Baseball and its players, or between the NBA and its players (or referees) is entirely independent of the legal system unless contracts are broken and the injured party brings the case to court.

Pete Rose was banned for life from all aspects of Major League Baseball — and deservedly so — for betting on the game (a sin which Rose himself has confessed) and, in particular, betting on games in which he was directly involved as a manager (though not against the team he managed, Rose maintains). Rose has never been convicted of any crime, nor found liable in any civil suit, with regards to this heinous breach of professional ethics. But what he did was, indeed, heinously unethical, and Major League Baseball is perfectly free to hand down a punishment of its choosing without Rose being put on trial in front of a judge and jury.

Similarly, Pacman Jones and Michael Vick may not be criminally or civilly liable for the transgressions of which they stand formally accused, but for them to be associated with such riffraff reflects poorly on the National Football League and the sport of football in general.

The NFL has no legal mandate to convene a jury and hold a trial in order to punish a player. If you hang out with thugs and your thug friends get you into trouble, and your conduct reflects poorly on your employer — keep in mind that playing a game once a week for five months is the employment for which these men are paid millions upon millions of dollars each year — you should not be the least bit surprised if your employer disciplines you accordingly.

No one put up a fuss when Lisa Nowak was fired from NASA for conduct grossly unbecoming to a scientist, astronaut, and naval officer. Disgraced NBA referee Tim Donaghy resigned before the allegations of match-fixing surfaced, but would anyone honestly argue that, had Donaghy not resigned, he should not have been fired until found guilty in a court of law? I don’t see a whole lot of people feeling sorry for Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, or Paris Hilton (although I don’t see a lot of Hollywood types blackballing them either). So why is Michael Vick any different?

You do not have the right to a job in the United States (with California being the singular exception to the general rule of at-will employment), and you should not be the least bit surprised that your conduct outside of work, so disgraceful that you make national headlines for days on end, gets you fired — or at least suspended — from your job. And thank goodness that job is not “lawyer”.

Someone with actual journalism experience should feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here, but I’m fairly certain one of the major tenets of journalism is that headlines should be, well, factual. Apparently nobody told the anonymous AP hack covering the Cessna 310 crash in Sanford, Florida, about that. Observe:

NTSB: NASCAR plane crash due to broken control cables

This seems fairly straightforward and unambiguous, stating that the National Transportation Safety Board has found that Dr. Bruce Kennedy and Michael Klemm crashed because of broken cables in the flight controls of the Cessna 310 they were flying from Daytona Beach to Orlando.

Except that’s not at all what the NTSB has said. Again, observe, from the second paragraph of the aforementioned article:

It wasn’t known whether the cables broke before or during the crash, though, and the cause of the July 10 crash in suburban Sanford remained unclear, according to a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board.

So what you’re saying is that the NTSB has actually stated that they have no idea exactly what caused the crash at this point in time. Which is sort of, you know, the exact opposite of what the headline said.

Then again, the mass media seems to think airplanes stay in the air by magic anyway, so I guess expecting them to know how to write headlines that treat aviation with any semblance of reason is pretty silly.

The Detroit Free Press:

Harrington beats Garcia in playoff

The Lions are just hapless and unlucky enough that such a headline might make sense — and perfectly demonstrate the inability of the Fords and Matt Millen to run a football franchise — were it only late December.

“Hey, Darren, you know what would be really fun?”
“What, Dave?”
“If we cut the roof and doors off a crappy car and then drove it as fast as we can over a jump into a lake.”
“Wow, yeah, that sounds like a great idea! You get the car, and I’ll build the jump out at my parents’ abandoned quarry!”
“Oh, hey, Darren?”
“Yes, Dave?”
“Do you think it matters that neither you nor I knows how to swim?”
“No, probably not. We’ll just magically float to the shore after the car sinks.”
“Oh yeah. That should work fine.”

Except it didn’t work fine. These two Greeley, Colorado geniuses went through with their plan, which went off without a hitch except for that last little detail. David Griego, 18, drowned after the car landed in the lake because, well, he couldn’t swim. Neither could any of the bystanders who were out there to observe this stunt. Your Darwin Award will be on its way shortly.

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

Man, if only they had had Explosives Camp when I was in high school. That would have been amazing.

I would gladly pay a grand now for a week of blowing stuff up, by the way. UMR has a great marketing opportunity on its hands.

In celebration of our freedom, independence, and democracy, I spent the morning in…Cuba.

I am spending the evening watching the neighbours light off all manner of illegal explosives over the pond in the apartment complex. Yay for Independence Day!

On a much more serious note, thank you to all the servicemen and women who have kept this country independent. Your sacrifices are greatly appreciated.