from the oh-yeah?-take-that! dept.

The L.A. Times has an opinion piece by Frida Ghitis titled Weapons of Rage Are Fed With the Ammunition of Suffering. It’s a pretty good discussion of the emotional underpinnings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, focusing on how the current leadership is caught firmly in a seemingly unbreakable cycle of suffering and revenge. The one criticism I’d make is that it suffers itself from a selective historical myopia, managing to recall the mistreatment of Jews by Nazis in World War II, but leaving the events that made the Palestinians a nation of refugees shrouded in the mists of time. Still, it offers a fairly balanced view, something increasingly hard to find these days.

from the pesky-Bill-of-Rights dept.

The L.A. Times has the story of a federal judge’s dismissal of perjury charges against Osama Awadallah, a Jordanian college student, and the judge’s ruling that the FBI erred in holding numerous innocent people in jail (in Awadallah’s case, for nearly three months) as “material witnesses” in its 9/11 investigation. John Ashcroft, speaking at a press conference in Washington, criticized the ruling, saying, “I’m the Attorney General of the United States, for Christ’s sake. I’ll jail whomever I damn well want to. If Judge Scheindlin doesn’t watch herself, next time there’s a terrorist attack I’ll throw her ass in jail.”

from the invoking-God dept.

The Rabbi Eliezer Waldman has an editorial running in Arutz Sheva (a far-right Israeli news outlet) deploring, among other things, the scandalous way in which Israel’s current government has been pressured to abandon their righteous principles by dubya and Colin Powell, who are working, we are told, on behalf of the Saudi crown prince. Lots of talk about the 5-year-old girl murdered by a Palestinian terrorist in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Adora on Sunday, and an extended metaphor about how the Sharon government’s latest violence represents the “birth pangs of Israeli redemption.”

from the will-these-hands-ne’er-be-clean? dept.

The Scotsman, among others, has the story of Ariel Sharon’s apparently-final rejection of the U.N. investigation into the conduct of the Israeli military in Jenin. Given the bad light in which this puts him, one can only wonder at what worse outcome Sharon feared if the investigators were actually allowed into the camp.

from the rats.-no-AP-photos… dept.

hossman writes “I couldn’t believe this quote I saw on SFGate: “It’s not their right to know what kind of underwear

underwear they wore to a school dance … in public, in front of other (male) students waiting to get into the dance.”

from the more-heat-than-light dept.

A loyal lies.com reader, Shadowwalker, submitted the following story. I normally wouldn’t run something without a link, but in this case the story itself is interesting enough to serve as a nice break between my incessant Israeli-Palestinian postings. At least that’s what I decided. Follow the link below, or scroll down, to read the story itself, which, as near as I can tell, is a fictional account of nefarious goings on in the Douglas, Wyoming, police department, as reported by someone with truly atrocious spelling.
(more…)

from the us-vs.-them dept.

The Christian Science Monitor has a nice piece that looks at Israel’s return to isolationism in light of the world’s reaction to recent events. Note the “crawling back into the womb” metaphor offered by author Tom Segev - makes for an interesting juxtaposition with the earlier Arutz Sheva metaphor about Israel’s birth pangs.

from the Hi.-I’m-Big-Brother.-Do-you-need-help-with-anything? dept.

From the L.A. Times comes a story of the Once Famous boutique, where shoppers get to browse an eclectic selection of tony merchandise, while hidden cameras, microphones, and one-way mirrors are used to track their every comment and gesture. There’s a sign at the entrance that informs shoppers that they are actually market-research guinea pigs, but most don’t bother to read it. Kinda creepy.

from the second-chance dept.

Here’s a scary one: Theresa Wilson was a first-time, nonviolent drug offender. Basically, the 34-year-old mother of two tried to sell some prescription medication to an undercover police officer for $150 to pay an overdue electric bill. Her mandatory minimum sentence, under Alabama’s strict narcotics laws: life in prison. On Wednesday the state Supreme Court upheld an appeals court’s reversal of the original sentence as “grossly disproportionate.” She’s now a free woman. Um, could our friends in the legislative branch please stop playing “dicklier than thou”? These are people’s lives we’re talking about.

from the would-you-like-fraud-with-those-options? dept.

Another L.A. Times story is this extended feature on the fraudulent accounting practices used by all-but-washed-up dot.com Critical Path. Lots of detail on the sorts of jiggery pokery the company’s executives used to keep the stock price nice and high while they extracted their millions.

from the springtime-is-for-lovers dept.

Tanya Hadden, a 33-year-old high school science teacher, has apparently lit out for Canada with Richard Pena, one of her freshman students, after suspicions were raised about a possible “improper relationship” between her and the boy. I feel a movie of the week coming on.

from the help!-he’s-feeling-our-pain-again! dept.

Ex-Commander-in-Chief Bubba is apparently getting tired of the $250,000-a-pop public speaking grind, and is exploring the possibility of hosting a daytime talk show. Word is he has being doing meetings with NBC, and is asking for $50 million a year. Note the leading choice in the poll at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution site linked above for the person we’d most like to see as his guest: a certain big-haired former intern.

from the finally,-some-REAL-news dept.

Justin Timberlake has reportedly said that Britney Spears, the famous “no sex before marriage” sex goddess, is in fact not a virgin. I don’t know about you, but personally, this just blows my whole image of her. Say it ain’t so, Joe.

from the all-Britney,-all-the-time dept.

The New York Post is running a photo that they claim shows Britney Spears smoking a cigarette on the balcony of her hotel in Australia. (See, along with saying she wouldn’t have sex before marriage, she’s also been quoted as saying she wouldn’t smoke.) I dunno; it’s not a very clear picture. But I think I’ve found my new poll question.

from the corporate-rights-trampled-again,-darnit dept.

The California Supreme Court has ruled that a business making public statements must comply with truth-in-advertising laws if those statements are commercial in nature. This represents a higher standard than that used for evaluating statements made by non-commercial entities, who are presumed to have a First Amendment right to free speech (though they can still get in trouble for libel or slander). The case involves allegedly false claims Nike made about factory conditions in the firm’s southeast Asia operation; a lower court had thrown out an activist’s false-advertising suit, saying Nike’s press releases weren’t an ad, and so weren’t subject to truth-in-advertising laws. Now the state Supreme Court has disagreed, saying that the statements had a significant commercial impact. The ruling means the original suit can go forward again, though Nike, with support from the ACLU, says it is planning to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, these days at least, seems likely to be friendlier to the idea that a corporation should be allowed to lie in pursuit of profit.

from the science-lesson-over,-for-now dept.

The 33-year-old high school science teacher who ran off with her 15-year-old student was apprehended at a Las Vegas hotel yesterday. Now the teacher is in custody and the boy is back home with his parents. The article includes a nice summary of earlier, similar cases.

from the backing-away-from-the-m-word dept.

The L.A. Times has a story today titled Massacre at Jenin Doubted. It focuses on whether or not Israeli soldiers committed an indiscriminate massacre of civilians in Jenin, concluding, on the basis of interviews with investigators from groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, that they probably didn’t. Instead, it seems likely that the civilian deaths (22 of which have been documented so far by Human Rights Watch, along with an additional 30 Palestinian and 23 Israeli deaths) were side effects of the Israelis’ overwhelming-force approach to rooting out Palestinian combatants in the camp. Still unclear, according to the story, is the extent to which Israeli soldiers committed various other war crimes, such as using civilians as human shields and blocking access of emergency medical personnel to the dying.

from the love-makes-the-world-go-’round dept.

Providing another example of her extraordinarily bad judgement, soon-to-be-ex teacher Tanya Hadden gave a jailhouse interview to the L.A. Times yesterday. In the course of the interview she “scoffed” at news reports that she and Richard Pena, the 15-year-old with whom she ran off to Vegas, had been having sex, though she apparently stopped short of giving a denial more explicit than “that’s so not what this is.” Interesting stuff, in a depressing sort of way.

from the how-blessed-are-those-who-cannot-read dept.

Again from the L.A. Times comes a story about the Rev. William R. Grimbol, author of the latest work in the “Idiot’s Guide” series: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Life of Christ. It joins such other venerable crossover titles as The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Enhancing Self-Esteem and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Raising Your IQ.

from the NOW-how-much-would-you-pay? dept.

Got this one in an email spam. Have I mentioned how much I hate spam? I do. Anyway, here it is: Learn to Detect Deceit in Everyday Life - if you’re lucky, you’ll learn to detect it before you send them your $34.95.

from the say-cheesecake dept.

I started off thinking it was funny, in a startling kind of way, but as I went through the images, looking at the way they’d married a particular memorable dubya expression with a particular model’s body, I found it even funnier, if disturbing. I didn’t RFLMAO, but I did LOL. The images actually come from a different site, as per the original creators’ overlaid URL.

from the devil-in-the-details dept.

The New Zealand Herald is running a detailed story on events in Jenin, and whether the Israeli Defense Forces there were guilty of war crimes. Based largely on the report issued by Human Rights Watch, the story focuses on the evolution of IDF tactics over the course of the operation. There is also an interesting quote from Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst for ABC News, who says, essentially, that this is just how urban warfare works. Not mentioned explicitly, but underlying all this, is the Sharon government’s assertion that it actually should be praised for the restraint it showed in Jenin, that it was their concern for Palestinian civilians that prevented them from doing what they very well could have done, which was to just shell and bomb the entire camp, with its 14,000 civilian inhabitants, from a distance. Like we Americans did to Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki in World War II, for example, or to North Vietnam in the early 1970s.

from the anti-gravitas-presidency dept.

This past weekend the White House Correspondents Association held its annual dinner bash, at which Presidents are encouraged to drink and act silly in front of their Fourth Estate adversaries. Say what you will about dubya, he’s never been one to back away from a challenge like that. Anyway, Reuters has some details of the edgy hilarity that ensued, including a slide show during which dubya displayed a photograph of Dick Cheney peeing on the door to the Oval Office. That’s my dubya.

from the guilty-pleasures dept.

With my lies.com posting obsession temporarily hijacked by an obsession of another sort, I appealed to the folks in the Ishar mud for a suitable item to post today, and this is what they came up with: Celebrity Prank Calls. Enjoy.

from the myth-in-the-making dept.

Abu Jamous is a master burglar with a string of successful heists. He’s also a Palestinian, one who has been accused of working with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah group to help Palestinians elude Israeli security. Captured once, he escaped as he was being brought to court. A special police unit formed to recapture him eventually succeeded, but now he has escaped again, this time from a fortified police bus where he was secured with handcuffs and leg restraints, accompanied by two other security vehicles and guarded by 10 elite prison guards. Wow.

from the another-narrow-squeak dept.

Thomas H. Kimbell Jr. is a free man today, four years after he was convicted of the brutal murder of a woman and her three children. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had previously ruled that his original trial judge erred in not allowing the defense to present testimony raising doubts about his guilt. As a result, Kimbell had been convicted despite the fact that there were no eyewitnesses and no physical evidence linking him to the crime. After a two week retrial, Kimbell was found not guilty. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, this represents the 101st time that a person has been exonerated and released from death row since the death penalty was re-instituted in this country in 1973.

from the can-we-bomb-him-anyway? dept.

Robert Scheer’s column today calls NYT columnist William Safire to task on the latter’s wholehearted embrace of the Mohammed-Atta-met-with-Iraqis story, first floated by the Czech government and widely cited by the Bush Administration as justification for taking the War on Terra to Iraq. Except that it turns out pretty much everyone now agrees that the meeting never took place, and the FBI and CIA, despite plenty of effort, have basically concluded that there simply isn’t any evidence linking Saddam Hussein with the 9/11 attacks. I like Scheer’s closing thought: “Bush’s foreign policy is based on a fairy tale, the persistent if childish hope that all of our problems can be solved by one solid blow to the latest Evil Empire, now found in Baghdad. Someone needs to read the president a better bedtime story.”

from the seldom-heard-voices dept.

From the Jordon Times (as reprinted from the Web-hostile login-required Chicago Times web site) comes Omar Karmi’s explanation of the post-1948 Palestinian experience, and of the national yearning for the right of return that is the result. It’s a calm, measured, succinct statement of the Palestinian position - which makes it amazing that it appeared in a U.S. newspaper. I’m sure Congress will act quickly to condemn the heresy.

from the maybe-if-we-ignore-her-she’ll-just-go-away dept.

Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was released after 19 months of house arrest by the country’s ruling junta yesterday, and was reportedly mobbed by supporters during her first day of freedom. Interestingly (well, at least to someone raised outside the realm of state-controlled media), Myanmar’s government-controlled newspapers studiously ignored any mention of the event, as Malaysia’s The Star Online reports.

from the see-if-you-can-follow-this dept.

A U.S. District Judge in New York has issued an injunction requiring Penthouse magazine to stop distributing its June issue, and to refrain from posting on its web site a series of images allegedly showing tennis player Anna Kournikova topless. The injunction comes in the wake of a suit filed Monday not by Kournikova (who denies the pictures are of her), but by 28-year-old Judith Soltesz-Benetton, daughter-in-law of fashion designer Luciano Benetton, who says the pictures are of her. The part that has me wondering is Soltesz-Benetton’s motivation: I can see her being upset that photos snapped of her flashing her rack on Spring break in Florida (or something; I’m not clear on the circumstances) had found their way into the magazine, but wouldn’t it maybe have been better, at least from the icky-publicity standpoint, just to keep quiet about the whole thing?

from the no,-seriously dept.

I think you just have to read the story, over at Yahoo News, courtesy Reuters Oddly Enough: Count Dracula Stirs Row with His ‘Kingdom’ in Germany. Then you can go visit the Count’s web site, at www.prince-dracula.com. As befits his ultimate-evil nature, his site uses frames, hard-to-read navigational links, and the following warning: “This site is optimized for browsers with Internet Explorer 5.0 or better and screen resolution of at least 800 x 600. Best results are achieved with Internet Explorer 5.5+ and 1024 x 768 screen resolution.” Oooh, very evil.

from the um,-okay dept.

Lucy Spelman, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoo in Washington, has rejected a reporter’s request for the medical records of a recently deceased giraffe, Ryma, saying that to release the records would violate the dead animal’s right to privacy. Legal experts want to know what she’s been smoking, though it seems likely, given the circumstances, that she’d view that information as private, too.

from the anyone-else-want-in-on-this? dept.

Apparently deciding that all this free publicity was too good to pass up, tennis player and famed email-virus bait Anna Kournikova has now filed her own lawsuit against Penthouse magazine, a few hours after the magazine publicly apologized for running topless photos of Judith Soltesz-Benetton and mistakenly identifying them as being of Kournikova. As reported here yesterday, Soltesz-Benetton had previously sued, and obtained an injunction blocking further distribution of the photos. Tune in tomorrow for the class action suit on behalf of the magazine’s readers.

from the money-equals-speech dept.

Now that a suitable interval has passed during which politicians were able to bask in the glory of their righteous vote to limit soft-money contributions, the political machine has shifted into gear to dismantle campaign-finance reform. Arguing that they have a constitutional right to buy politicians, the Republican National Committee filed a federal suit yesterday seeking to overturn key provisions of the recently enacted measure. Not to be outdone, Democrats crossed the aisle to join a state-court lawsuit in California that is aimed at overturning state- and local-campaign fundraising limits in the same law.

from the I-(heart)-headlines dept.

I’m linking to this one only because I liked the headline: Oil rig evacuated after collision with ship. It joins such previous memorable stories as, “Fire hydrant appears out of nowhere and collides with drunk’s car” and “World Trade Center collapses after smashing into hijacked jets.”

from the good-Jews,-bad-Arabs dept.

A nice example of the sort of whip-up-the-anger-on-both-sides rhetoric that flourishes in times like these is Victor Davis Hanson’s piece in the National Review Online, On Hating Israel. Those poor, plucky Israelis, perched on the edge of destruction at the hands of those vicious, anti-Semitic, uncivilized Arabs, just trying to find a few yards of ground to call their own after the unique horrors they suffered at the hands of those vicious, anti-Semitic, uncivilized Europeans during the Holocaust. I mean, really; why can’t the rest of the world just understand and sympathize with the suffering of the Jewish people?

from the not-to-be-viewed-at-mealtime dept.

From the extremely odd people at stinkfactor.com comes The Tabasco Challenge, in which a fine example of American manhood attempts to drink an entire bottle of Tabasco sauce and then not throw up for 30 minutes.

from the make-$$$-working-from-home dept.

From Janus comes a pointer to the latest feature over at The Brunching Shuttlecocks: The Back Page, a send up of all those silly classifieds you find in the back pages of throwaway weekly newspapers.

from the taggers-take-note dept.

The L.A. Times has a story about Richard Ankrom, an artist who spent two years planning and installing an unauthorized work of art (consisting of the word “North”, the symbol for the 5 freeway, and an arrow) on a freeway sign above the northbound Harbor Freeway near downtown L.A. The best part? After nine months, authorities still hadn’t realized the addition was unauthorized. After reading the story, I remembered using that offramp, and being grateful to Caltrans (I thought) for the well-thought-out sign; it’s a tricky offramp, and Ankrom’s addition really helps.

from the white-collar-crime dept.

From the New York Times, via Yahoo News, comes a nice write-up of the various ways Enron made money from us stupid Californians during the state’s electricity crisis last year. Includes some cool quotes from the various “smoking gun” memos that have come out lately. As someone who got to experience the rolling blackouts firsthand, I’m glad to know I did my part to help enrich dubya’s buddies at the now-defunct energy-trading firm.

from the disproportionate-application dept.

There’s an editorial in today’s Washington Post that makes some good points in favor of going beyond Maryland’s newly announced temporary moratorium on executions, and just going right to abolishing the death penalty altogether. An interesting statistic it mentions is that although 80% of murder victims in Maryland are non-white, 9 of the 13 people currently on death row in the state are black, and all but one of them was convicted of killing a white person. Advocates of state-sponsored killing are encouraged to offer their defense of such practices via the site’s comment system.

from the screw-this.-let’s-go-somewhere-else. dept.

Three elderly British vacationers, who left for a French resort last Saturday and hadn’t been heard from by their friends and family since, turned up none the worse for wear today, after an increasingly frantic manhunt in France, Spain, and Britain failed to locate any sign of them. It turns out they didn’t like the stairs that led to their originally booked accommodations, and ended up staying in a different town, nearby, without bothering to tell anyone. This has “lighthearted romantic comedy” written all over it, don’t you think? With quick cuts back and forth between the stressed-out relatives and their pleasantly vacationing elders, and with any number of homey messages at the end. I’m seeing Meg Ryan as the daughter of one of the missing, and Colin Firth or Hugh Grant as the son of another, with them initially worried sick and blaming each other, but with wedding bells by the final reel. Ron Howard will direct.

from the motorboat,-motorboat,-go-so-fast dept.

From Reuters comes the story of 39-year-old Hiromasa Ando, who began his professional powerboat racing career as a woman, but who was diagnosed with a gender identity disorder and underwent surgery to make him a man last December. Ando, who was competing for the first time as a man, came in fifth out of six.

from the okay;-maybe-NOW-I’ll-watch-it dept.

Dan Quayle has apparently joined the ranks of those who love The Osbournes, the MTV reality show that focuses on the wacky home life of Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne. The poor-spelling veep from the elder Bush’s presidency praised the show during remarks to the National Press Club yesterday, then explained afterwards, “In a weird way, Ozzy is a great anti-drug promotion. Look at him and how fried his brains are from taking drugs all those years and everyone will say, ‘I don’t want to be like that.’ Which I can totally relate to; I can’t tell you how many wealthy, academically indifferent white kids have contacted me over the years to thank me for saving them from pursuing a career in politics.”

from the one-last-book dept.

Historian Stephen Ambrose, a celebrity both for his popular accounts of such subjects as World War II and the Lewis and Clark expedition and for the plagiarism charges that surfaced in recent years, is dying of lung cancer. Now he is racing against time to complete his most personal book yet, A Love Song to America. The L.A. Times has the story.

from the be-afraid.-be-very-afraid. dept.

Famous O.J. Simpson houseguest Kato Kaelin is reportedly working on his own TV show called Houseguest. “It’s a show where I go across America, I knock on doors of the unsuspecting and invite myself in to spend a weekend with the family,” says Kaelin. Right. Then a former-athelete friend of his shows up in a ski mask and cuts everyone’s throat.

from the give-me-a-hug,-you-large-turban-you dept.

So, I hang out in this MUD all day, and people post the interesting URLs they come across, many of which wind up as stories here. Lately, Janus has been posting lots of weird lists from mcsweeneys.net, including this one: Names of Squash That Also Make Good Terms of Endearment. It’s cool, in a Pokey-esque kind of way; a reminder that the world is a big, wacky place, containing lots of people who think differently than I do. At least, that’s what I take from it.

from the enough-for-everyone dept.

John Balzar has an op-ed piece in today’s L.A. Times that talks about how dumb we were to buy into the energy-deregulation scam. His main point: the bad guys appealed to our greed (as with any con, pretty much), and we fell for it.

from the nuclear-secrets dept.

Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician who is serving an 18-year prison term for treason because he gave photos of an Israeli nuclear reactor to the Times of London in 1986, made a rare court appearance today to request that he be allowed to speak with his British lawyers, and that sealed documents from his case be revealed to the public. The part that intrigues me is the mention of the Israeli government’s policy of “nuclear ambiguity,” under which it doesn’t confirm what everybody in the world knows already: that it both possesses nuclear weapons and is crazy enough to use them.

from the passing-the-baton dept.

Scheduled to appear in the Metropolitan Opera’s final event of the season, in what had been billed as the final performance of his career, Luciano Pavoratti called in sick Saturday, so a 33-year-old Sicilian named Salvatore Licitra sang the role of Mario Cavaradossi from Puccini’s Tosca in his place - and brought down the house. Who says stuff like that only happens in the movies?

from the nice-kitty.-nice,-BIG-kitty. dept.

A twenty-one-year-old zookeeper had her arm bitten off by a 350-pound male lion at Tampa’s Busch Gardens yesterday, leaving the woman in serious condition, with doctors unsure of whether the severed limb could be reattached. Scary story, with mental visuals conveniently available via my recollection of that gruesome scene in the Nastassja Kinski/Malcom McDowell remake of Cat People.

from the not-sure-if-he-has-a-position-on-Pokey,-though dept.

Pope John Paul, speaking in his weekly address in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, focused on the Internet, giving his blessing to the net after previously having warned that it was a cesspool of moral decay. “We shouldn’t be afraid to put to sea in the vast ocean of information,” the pontiff said. “This new medium makes it possible for us to reach many more people with the word of God. I myself have been in communication via email with the widow of the former finance minister of Nigeria, and understand that the Church will soon be receiving a generous donation in return for its help in transferring a large sum of money out of the country.”

from the user-confessions dept.

Another in a continuing series of lies.com user submissions. Truth value: unknown. Spelling: pretty good, actually. Anonymous Coward writes “I had the 2 most bestest friends in the whole entire world. Then after a couple of months I started to realize that they were getting closer, and closer. I was like the third wheel. I always felt leftout, and stuff. So I started to talk about them behind their backs, and when they confronted me about the stuff I was telling people, I denied it. I lied to their face. The guilt is inside me eating me away. Eventually I told them the truthand that I was sorry. But that didn’t help. They hate me and it’s my fault. But they knew that they were leaving me out. I’m only 16, I should have a best friend, but now I don’t. I have a boyfriend, but I need a girl to talk to. It sucks.”

from the will-freak-for-food dept.

Rita Wilson, the Rancho Bernardo High School vice principal who made lies.com headlines by lifting dance-goers’ skirts (in full view of onlookers) to make sure they weren’t wearing thong underwear, has begun speaking out to the media, saying her career has been destroyed because of the public’s misconceptions about her panty-checking stunt. It’s really a must-read interview; proof again of that old adage: better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt.

from the billion,-schmillion,-whatever dept.

Speaking to the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank in Shanghai on Saturday, Japanese finance minister Masajuro Shiokawa caused hearts to race when he announced that Japan would be making a $500 billion contribution to a regional poverty fund. Except that when the prepared text of the speech was distributed, the actual number turned out to be $50 million. Oh, well.

from the user-confessions dept.

a_stupid_box writes “I’m considering dating a friend of mine, and in so doing, talk with her quite often about rather revealing subjects. One of the thingers that keeps coming up is honesty. Now I’m a VERY honest person — in fact, as far as I know, I’m the most honest person I know. I make an EFFORT not to lie, even about small things, and have been doing so since I was 16. I can honestly say I don’t lie. When I told my friend this, she seemed a little reluctant to believe it (though she does now), and I was totally floored. Has lying become so commonplace in our society? I used to lie like a damned rug, and I expected it of others. Is the only reason I’m suprised by her doubt because I’ve STOPPED lying myself? Scary to think of all the B.S. people could be telling me on a daily basis, and the only reason I believe them is because I expect them to believe me because I actually tell the truth…”

from the watching-grass-grow…-faster dept.

ZDNet has a story on Condensed Baseball, a pay-per-view net service that lets you watch selected major league baseball games on your computer, but with a difference: every pitch that doesn’t result in a play has been edited out. Which sounds weird to me. Is that really watching baseball? Anyway, good buddy Bundar says there isn’t enough sports on lies.com, so here you go.

from the strange-bedfellows dept.

How did I go so long without hearing about Christians for Cannabis?

from the who-says-I-don’t-cover-sports? dept.

Frank Ramaesiri, a St. Louis jewelry salesman who likes to bring his camcorder to the beach and stroll around in Bermuda shorts and dress socks taping all the young flesh,