Times Squared

Wow. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this picture on Gawker.

Evidently Lara Spencer and Chris Jacobs, the two idiots making hand gestures and looking like assholes, did a promo in Times Square yesterday with Jon Gosselin (on the left) and Levi Johnston (sandwiched in between Gosselin and Spencer) for their TV gossip show, The Insider.

I'll bet you didn't know how much Levi and Jon have in common.

They both are haunted by women who want to keep their gonads in a trophy case. Sarah Palin, I'm sure, would love to emasculate Levi, and Kate, Jon's soon to be ex, has been castrating him ever so slowly over the last few years.

Levi has a child he didn't expect and Jon has that times 8.

Although those guys are about 15 years apart in calendar years, really they're both 11-year-olds on a maturity scale.

Some day when Levi's legal, maybe he and Jon will go out and have a beer together.

Betting on Bette

When I saw this headline "Midler Urges Bombers to Pay for Cleaning of Major Deegan" I thought it couldn't possibly be Bette Midler. Why would Bette Midler give a rat's ass about the filthy highway in the Bronx? And no, for those of you out of the area, the Major Deegan is not a person at this juncture but a thoroughfare. Wasn't she born in Hawaii? And didn't she sing to naked gay men in Manhattan in the Continental Baths? So what's this with the Bronx?

Or is this just a way to humiliate the World Champion New York Yankees into reaching into their wallets (where they keep their millions of dollars) to get the garbage off the road many fans use to get to Yankee Stadium so they can pay lots of bucks for the privilege?

Turns out Ms. Midler actually started the New York Restoration project and she pays cleaning crews to come twice a week instead of the standard once to clean a stretch of the Major Deegan, but she thinks the Yankees should pay to clean up a two mile stretch of road that's right in front of their bazillion dollar stadium.

What would it cost them? $25,000 a year? That's chump change for the team.

Bette is right. You guys don't even have to do it yourselves! You can pay someone to clean it for you!

Let's go, Yankees!

Reefer Madness

Remember Diane Schuler? That's her pictured above with her husband.

Funny we mentioned her today in a post when opining how Long Island may just be the most awful place in the western world.

In any event, she was drunk and stoned and drove the wrong way on the Taconic Parkway last summer, killing herself, her daughter, her nieces and some total strangers.

Well, the total strangers' families are suing her estate and some evidence seems to have been discovered that reveals Diane was in fact a big fat pothead.

Personally, I think everyone might have survived if she'd just been stoned. I believe it was the quart of vodka she drank with the doobie that turned her into a directionally challenged driver.

Her best friend and sister-in-law told police: "Diane smoked marijuana on a regular basis. She usually would smoke at night after the kids would go to bed."

I hate reporters. Are her best friend and sister-in-law one and the same person or two different people? I have no idea.

Police say the information they uncovered tends to support a new theory: that Diane was not a regular drinker and not an alcoholic, because she had trouble handling the 10 shots of vodka she downed during her deadly drive.

Say what? Don't most semi-normal people have trouble handling 10 shots of vodka in like five minutes?

The probe also showed that Diane was so disoriented, when her brother phoned her just before the crash, she kept calling him "Danny" instead of "Warren."

Metropolitan Home Demolished

The latest in the seemingly endless list of magazines that is ceasing publication is Metropolitan Home.

Now seriously, who reads this magazine? People who live in houses that look like this one on the cover? I sincerely doubt it. And not only that, does this residence even look as if it's in a metropolitan area? Not to me.

People who live in homes like these are not going to buy this magazine unless their place is featured in an issue. And in this economic climate do you, Joe Average, want to see what the uber-rich are calling home these days?

So we've solved the mystery of why this magazine will no longer be published.

I keep wondering what will actually be the last paper and ink magazine to close its pages.

Any guesses?

Death Camp for Dogs

The woman pictured above is Sharon McDonough and she lives on Long Island. Authorities found the remains of 20 animals in her backyard. Evidently a lot of pets in the neighborhood have gone missing and it seems they may have ended up in Ms. McDonough's clutches.

"It was a concentration camp for the animals," the suspect's son, Douglas McDonough, said. "My sisters and me, we got the end of it, too."

Douglas is the one who tipped off the authorities about his mother but I don't know what he means about he and his sisters. Did their mother also cage and torture her children?

Long Island, New York is a very strange place. It was home to the woman who drove drunk the wrong way on the Taconic Parkway this summer. It's home to the teenagers who randomly beat an Ecuadorian immigrant to death a year ago. It's also where Margery Tannenbaum lives. You might remember her as posting a sexual ad on Craig's List listing the phone number of the 9-year-old her daughter had an argument with.

Waxing the Body Thetan

Word comes from CrazyLand, of which Tom Cruise is the President, that he offered to beat up disobedient Scientologists. Whether or not that is true, what I find even more disturbing is that this picture of the Cruises was snapped in New York where they appeared at a fund-raiser benefiting the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project.

This is something Cruise co-founded in 2002. It's a 30-day program, based on Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's principles, offering free treatment to cops, firefighter and paramedics who believe they developed breathing difficulties and other ailments after working at Ground Zero.

Wait a minute. Does that mean that all the horrible lung ailments were figments of the workers' imaginations?

The detoxification purports to "flush" poisons from the body's fat stores using an intensive regimen of jogging, oil ingestion, sauna, and high doses of vitamins, particularly niacin.

Does it work? Some think it does, even some who aren't Scientologists. I'm all for sick rescue workers feeling better, but I'm immediately skeptical of anything to do with Tom Cruise and his sci-fi religion.

Laying off the booze and drugs, drinking a lot of water, exercising and taking vitamins would probably make anyone feel like a champ, even suppressive persons.

Rap Up

Word to the wise: Don't carry a toy gun and aim it at plainclothes cops. 'Cause if you do, and you subsequently get shot in the face, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Take Marcus Bonner. Please. Directly to prison.

This incident happened in the Bronx, New York this weekend. Marcus threatened a group of teens with a gun. Some undercover police saw the incident and chased after Marcus and another suspect. Marcus pretended he was surrendering, but reached for his pretend piece and one of the detectives shot him in the cheek.

"Rev had a BB gun and he pulled it. And they shot him. Rev was bleeding out of his mouth," said Jessica Rivera calling Marcus by his nickname. "Damn, they tried to take his head off."

There goes Rev's career. Oh, he wants to be a rapper, but it's hard to rap without a mouth.

Let this be a lesson to you, boys and girls.

Precious?

You may have heard about the movie Precious about an obese black teenager who has been repeatedly raped by her father and given birth to two of his children. There's a lot of Oscar buzz surrounding it. I'm sure it's incredibly moving, but frankly I don't think I have the wherewithal to sit through something that depressing.

Although the movie is reportedly based on a novel I was immediately reminded of it when I heard about the sentencing yesterday in Queens, New York of one Brigitte Harris. Harris was convicted of "Bobbitting" her father and then suffocating him two years ago.

She claimed that she didn't want to kill him, just cut off his Johnson so he couldn't return to Liberia with his granddaughters. He'd been abusing her since the age of 3 and she is now 55.

Brigitte was sentenced to 5 to 15 years, the maximum she could get after being convicted of second degree manslaughter. The jury really didn't want to convict her after hearing of the abuse she'd been subjected to. The judge was annoyed with the jury and chided them for being sympathetic.

Blue Meanies

So there I was, watching the World Series on television, when I was subjected to the trailer for Avatar, James Cameron's new movie.

Holy Mother of God.

I cannot think of any reason to see this movie unless one was getting paid for it.

What's wrong with James Cameron? Does he really think he's King of the World because of that Titanic crapfest?

I remember reading once that the whole idea for Terminator came from a nightmare he had. Well, I can't imagine what was going on in his brain that might have germinated the idea for Avatar. Did he do a mind meld with M. Night Shyamalan?

On no planet would this movie be a good idea. The graphics were better in Star Wars circa 1977.

If you missed the trailer and want to see it, I've posted a link. You may be tempted to pour Drano in your eyes but please don't. Just resolve you won't see this cinematic abortion.

http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXF2nH4Z9sc

Baby Found With Dust Bunnies

This baby, whose name is Shannon Dedrick, was reported missing by her mother five days ago; however, she was found in a box under her babysitter's bed today. She wasn't crying and she appeared to have been cared for.

As if that isn't strange enough, it appears that the baby's mother gave the child to the babysitter.

This is what goes on in Florida when you let people out of their double wides.

Everybody's got different names but they're all sort of related. I really can't be bothered listing everyone's name and what they have to do with each other. You'll have to take my word on it. Let us just say that the baby's father is the babysitter's stepbrother.

The babysitter, whose name is Susan Baker, once had a stepson who mysteriously disappeared in North Carolina 22 years ago. She and her husband did some jail time for that, but the boy's body was never found.

And apparently Ms. Baker, with the missing and presumed dead stepson, wrote a letter to the Governor (I'm amazed she can actually write) asking for custody of little Shannon because her parents did drugs in front of her, and so on and so forth. I guess somehow she decided she was Mom of the Year.

I'm hoping the authorities get the kid away from these people, out of their town and preferably out of their state.

When Too Much is Just That

I think the NY Times wants us to feel sorry for this woman.

Her name is Leslie Williams and she and her husband bought an apartment in Manhattan a couple of years ago for over $2 million and then proceeded to pour beaucoup bucks (half a milion bucks) into a renovation. They moved in a few days before Christmas 2007 and two weeks later her husband moved out. Their marriage and the renovation were over as far as he was concerned.

Well, as fate would have it neither one of them could afford the place on their own, so it's been sold for just about its asking price of $2.6 million.

It's hard to tell from the tone of the article whether Ms. Williams thinks the most tragic event was losing the apartment or her marriage.

It's really hard for me to work up a whole lot of sympathy for people like her. There are people who can't make the mortgages on their basic hovels for instance.

I certainly wish her well, but please, NY Times, can you at least try to get your priorities in order?

Winning is Fun

The Archbishop Blows a Gasket

Did you know the Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, has a blog? I didn't either, but I found out today because he is really, really pissed off at The New York Times and Maureen Dowd in particular.

It was her op-ed piece of October 25th that got his blood boiling in which Maureen opined that nuns are now, have always been and always will be, second class citizens.

The Archbishop called her editorial "the most combustible," "intemperate and scurrilous" "diatribe".

I disagree, Your Holy Rollership. I think all the points that Ms. Dowd makes regarding the hypocrisy and misogyny rampant in the Catholic church are right on the money. Nuns ministering to homosexuals is outrageous by papal standards?

Ms. Dowd opines that The church can be flexible, except with women. Absolutely true in my book and that may be its undoing.

Union Jack Off

Where's my machine gun?

Okay, let me just start out by saying I think it was really nice of the Philadelphia Transport Workers not to go on strike until after the World Series. Oh, wait. Governor Ed Rendell ordered them not to. Never mind.

Local 234 went on strike this morning at 3 a.m. after negotiations broke down. Does that mean broke down like their lousy buses?

So basically anyone who uses SEPTA to commute is screwed.

The dispute is over the same old things: wages and benefits. The union wants an 18% pay increase. Are they fucking kidding? SEPTA bus, subway, and trolley operators earn from $14.54 to $24.24 an hour, reaching the top rate after four years. Mechanics earn $14.40 to $27.59 an hour.

Wisconsin 911

Mary Strey wanna-be

You probably should call the police if you see someone driving drunk, perhaps even if the drunk driver is you.

Mary Strey from Wisconsin called the police the other night to report a drunken driver. When the dispatcher asked if she was behind the vehicle Mary said, "I am them."

Mary said she'd been drinking all night long, but she took the dispatcher's advice, pulled over and turned on her flashers. She was cited for driving drunk. Her blood alcohol level was double the legal limit. Her first court appearance is scheduled for December 10th. Kinda makes me wish I was in Wisconsin so I could attend.

Don't Take the A-Train

I'm wondering when we're going to see our first swine flu death. Oh no, I don't mean from the virus itself but from the ensuing mob mentality.

According to an eyewitness, a woman coughed on a subway train in New York City yesterday morning and didn't cover her mouth. She was reprimanded by another female passenger and a yelling match escalated until the cougher spit on the other woman. The phlegm's recipient then grabbed the ill-mannered cougher by the hair and threw her down on the subway floor.

Basically that's the end of this story, but how long will it be before people who cough and don't cover their mouths are beaten to death by their fellow citizens? Sneezing might get you stomped before long.

Because nobody wants to get the swine flu! And if we have to kill you to prevent you from spreading your germs, that's just the way it's going to have to be.