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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.”