short fat guy online

The fun begins…

When visiting this online store, some read it as “Pen Island” while others see something…a bit…different.  Click here to go to penisland.net.  (From Fark.)
    • A visit to the King Kong set.  Part 1.  (From AICN.)
    • An inch of snow causes North Carolina to declare a state of emergency.  “Oh my God!  The roads are almost not completely visible!” thus a thousand car accidents ensure.  ...And they have the nerve to call themselves “North”.  (From numerous sites, but I liked the picture on MSNBC.)
    • Some more Mac proselytizing.  Why the “security through obscurity” myth doesn’t come close to explaining why Mac and Linux PCs are secure from viruses.  (From the Baltimore Sun, via Mac Mischief.)

Blogging against Bush was less than a resounding success, yet here I go again.  A new PAC site, There is No Crisis.com, has begun, trying to get the point across that despite our President’s repeated assertions, there is no social security crisis.  The Republicans’ continued cries for the piratization—sorry, privatization—of social security is nothing more than another attempt to “starve the beast”, to get rid of those damned irritating social programs that spend money on the middle class instead of on wealthy Republicans the way God intended.
    There is no crisis.

    But then again, there were no WMD … and we all know how successful blogs were in getting that point across.

I was planning on another big long live-blogging session last night, as the Golden Globe Awards began.  I got a couple posts in, about E!’s pre-show coverage, before realizing that I really didn’t care about the outcome.  I watched the show, of course, and the displays of cleavage were nice as always; but I did not care who won or lost.  It doesn’t help, obviously, that I’ve only seen a couple of the movie nominees (Million Dollar Baby, but I have plans to see a few more soon).  I’m glad Jason Bateman won and that Lost won in the TV categories, I guess.  But no one title got up my enthusiasm.  The Hollywood Foreign Press parceled out awards to a wide swath of nominees, finding bits of excellence here and there but culminating in no big winner.  One movie had great supporting actors, another one had the best lead actors; one movie had the best direction, but a different movie was the overall best.  After a while it got to feel like they were giving out awards to whomever they felt like seeing on stage.
    There were a great many misguided people who said last year’s Academy Awards were the most boring since the same movie—Return of the King, of course—kept winning every award.  After last night’s Golden Globes, I have a feeling these people will really see what boring is next month, when the Oscars are forced to deal with a roster of well-done but uninspiring choices, with nothing to unite behind or root for.
    Next up in my monthly TV column: some called it a vegan call to arms, others a shockingly profanity-laced tirade.  The fallout from Paul McCartney’s Super Bowl halftime show.  Could this mean the end of live TV?

Wow, two entries in one day.  I’m coming back with a vengeance!  I couldn’t go back to sleep, however, without a word about the brain trust that is defending the schmoes arrested for the Abu Ghraib tortures.  This is defense attorney Guy Womack’s way of playing down those all too memorable photos of prisoner debasement:  “Don’t cheerleaders all over America make pyramids every day?  It’s not torture.”
    That is just so true.  And it’s similar to his “Robbery?  The ATM at my bank just gave me $20—does that make me a bank robber?” defense and his “So what if my client killed them.  They were going to die eventually”