This is from an email written by my buddy Wess, who lives in LA — but don’t let that fool you, this sort of thing doesn’t happen to people in LA every day…

I walked into Sherman Oaks’ Fashion Square yesterday to buy a new watch battery. As I entered the center part of the mall, a man with a headset stopped me and told me to move away from where he was. I had no idea who this guy was and what was going on so I looked at him puzzled and asked, “What?”

He pointed to a spot maybe fifteen feet away and said, “That’s where you should be.”

Now completely confused, I told him, “I’m just here to buy a new watch battery.”

“I don’t care about your motivation, the extras are not part of this shot.”

After staring at him for a second, I looked around and suddenly realized there were five cameras and heavy equipment all around us. The floor was taped up, dozens of people were mulling about, and ten feet away was Felicity Huffman. A big sign read “Desperate Housewives.” I had walked into a TV shooting.

I chuckled and told the man I was just shopping and wasn’t part of the production. I thought he’d be mad.

Instead, he seemed amused and said, “I liked what you were doing. It was very believable.” He turned to a man and said, “Do we have room for this guy in the next scene?”

The guy looked down at his clipboard and shook his head. “We need less extras, not more.”

The first man looked back at me and said,” Sorry. But I liked what you were doing.”

It’s good to know that when I’m shopping I have the look of someone who is shopping.

I can’t seem to turn on the TV without hearing “This is the most important election of our lives” and “If you think you’ll know who the next president is on the morning of November 3rd, you’ll be in for a suprise.” I’m inclined to agree, but it begs the question: what’s the big issue everyone will be fixated on starting Tuesday night? Lots of things will probably go wrong, but we’re a nation with a short attention span, so what’s the One Big Thing that will grab the attention of everyone and their lawyers?

• Computer Voting Fraud ?
• Computer Crashes with no paper backup ?
• Colorado’s EC Vote Proposition ?
• Voters turned away from crowded polls ?
• Counting of provisional ballots ?
• Counting of absentee ballots ?
• Counting of ballots from soldiers over seas ?
• Osama being captured on Monday ?
• Hanging Chads ?
• Alien Invasion ?

…sound off folks, nows your chance to prove you can predict the future.

Dan Savage and David Schmader have put together a nice little bit that’s both timely, and accurate: 2004’s Scariest Halloween Costumes. My personal favorite is “Lyndie England” (thanks for the link T).

Sometimes on my commute home, I find the remnents of a newspaper on the train seat next to me, and I skim it. Usually nothing catches my eye, but in the handfull of pages of today’s San Francisco Chronicle, there were two items that caught my eye.

First up was a front page story about Jon Stewart, his impact on youth voters, his Crossfire appearance, and his acknowledgement that he plans on voting for Kerry. In particular: that his fan based doesn’t really care who he plans on voting for; and what really draws them in is “Stewart’s indictment of the system”

Second, was Jon Carroll’s own indictment of the system. Or more specifically, his opinions of the debates, the things the candidates lied about, the things we let them lie about because we’re too scared to admit the truth, and things he wishes he would have heard.

Props to my buddy mark for pointing to this piece, which documents that conservatives don’t choose to be the way they are, it’s genetic. Normally, I’d brush this off as a “Net Kooks” rant, but they do cite some respectible research. The conclusion’s drawn in the reason.com article should defintiely be questioned, but there is some scientific merit to the discussion.

This article also contains the “Quote of the Week” as far as I’m concerned…

Whether it be an unfortunate evolutionary holdover or a mental disease transmitted by our parents—the science is apparently still up in the air—academic researchers have surely amassed enough evidence of psychopathology that conservatism can listed in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Reasonable people, such as the distinguished academic researchers cited here, will no doubt agree that until effective treatments can be developed, we should reconsider whether sufferers of conservatism, like other mental defectives, should be allowed freely to exercise the franchise.

Well, one of the stories that was lost in the server crash was about the Ad Graveyard. Which is pretty cool, so I figured I’d post it again.

Wei-Hwa Huang has put together a few histograms showing the frequency of various words and phrases as used by the major players in the first debate. I’m not convinced that these graphs can be used for scientific analysis anymore then tea-leaves can, but it still provides some mild entertainment and head sctraching. Notable things to look for: “poland”, “at the wrong place”, “at the wrong time”, “made a mistake”, “United States”, “United Nations” and “respect”

Another great link from the Interesting People mailing list: Katheryn Harrington is a 52 year old teacher from Florida who flies on a regular basis. On her last trip, she was stoped by TSA employees, handcuffed, and charged with carrying a concealed weapon: her leather bookmark. (They claimed it resembled a sap) The charges have been droped, but she still faces up to $10,000 in civil fines.

Here’s the part everyone should read and think about fully:

According to the TSA’s official prohibited items list, anyone who brings any banned item to a screening checkpoint, even accidentally, may be criminally or civilly prosecuted. Even items that are not specifically listed, but could be considered dangerous, are illegal.

So it’s not enoough that you have to surrender your knitting needles and nail clippers — you can be criminally charged for bringing any item, listed or otherwise, into an airport if someone in the TSA happens to be having a bad day and decides it might be dangerous.

There are certain things in this world that I just assume are illegal without anyone ever explicitly telling me so. Apparently I assume too much, because last week, if you worked in a California morturary and had sex with corpses you weren’t breaking any laws. But not this week — this week it’s a felony.

Props to my buddy Wess for pointing me to this AZCentral story about Phoenix Arizona having no pictures whatsoever of C.J. Dyer — the city’s 15th mayor (for 5 months in 1899). So, doing what few cities in the country would do, they hung a picture of Seinfeld’s Michael Richards in it’s place.

It just goes to show, you can’t get too many second opinions. Jim Malone was diagnosed HIV+ and then later told it was all a mistake. What makes this really disturbing is that after his initial diagnosis, he began treatment at a VA Hospital which conducted their own test and confirmed he was negative, but: “It appears he was never informed of the negative result” — that was 8 years ago.

Maybe now, people will start taking the the issues of TSA “secret lists” seriously: Ted Kennedy (the senator) has repeatedly been delayed in getting on flights because T. Kennedy (the suspected terrorist) has a similar name. The only reason he was ever able to get on the planes is because Airline supervisors recognized him, and the only reason he was ultimately able to get off the list was because Tom Ridge stepped in and personally took care of the matter. As Kennedy puts it: “How are [ordinary citizens] going to be able to get to be treated fairly and not have their rights abused?”

Amazingly, Kennedy is not the only congressman to have this problem.

Proving once again that I get all of my news from the Daily Show, I’d like to point out the following “blog” (god I hate that word): SpinSanity…

Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan are young writers who edit Spinsanity, the nation’s leading watchdog of manipulative political rhetoric. Since founding the site in 2001, their award-winning analysis has been cited in scores of national and international media outlets, including CNN, Fox News Channel, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and they have appeared on numerous radio and television shows. In 2002, they were featured in a regular column on Salon, and they can currently be found every Thursday on the commentary page of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

On one hand I’m a firm believer in the oncept of “earning citizenship” — but this isn’t what I had in mind: “Gana la Verde” is a spanish langauge game show modeled after Fear Factor, in which contests compete for a Green Card … except they don’t raelly. What they compete for is the promise of a team of Lawyers to work hard at getting them a Green Card for one year. As you can expect many Immigration Lawyers and Rights Activists are a little displeased. What I want to know, is how you justify giving someone a prize of “good intentions” — especially given that by going on this show, illegal immigrants draw attention to themselves.
(Thanks to Back In Black for brining this to my attention)

I love stories like this. After years of complaints from the Feds about violence in TV and Movies, they are asking Hollywood for help in the imagination department, to try and anticipate unusual terrorist attacks.

Anybody who says John Edwards is “way out of the mainstream” obviously hasn’t run into him and his wife at a Wendy’s on their aniversary.

I admit it, I get all of my news from the Daily Show, which is where I heard about the “Marshmallow Terrorist“.

It’s a good thing we have Federal Marshals performing random warrant checks on people entering the country, otherwise we never would have caught this vicious, vile, 32-year-old Wyoming woman who never paid a year-old $50 fine from Yellowstone. And it’s a good thing they carry leg shackles so they could keep her from escaping when they dragged her off her cruise ship at 6:30 AM (in her nightgown) … not to mention during the 9 hours they kept her locked up.

Oh wait, she paid the fine? the same day she got the citation?

Oops. Our bad.

Umm. I guess we should probably take those shackles off now.

Some people read an article like this and think: “Stupid birds.” Other people think: “There goes mankind, messing up the environment and indirectly killing off a species”.

I read it and thought: “This is fucking hilarious!” …

Pelicans Mistaking Asphalt for Lakes

(Which kind of person are you?)

I heard about this the other day, but haven’t really had a chance to look into it untill now. Citizens United (“America’s premier conservative research organization”) has filed a complaint with the FEC claiming that TV Ads for Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 should not be allowed to air durring the month of August, becuase they make reference to President Bush, and thus: “qualify as ‘electioneering communications’” (which are not allowed to be paid for with corporate money one month prior to a Primary).

The AP and the Boston Globe both have decent stories on the complaint, which point out some interesting questions about the multitudes of issues involved: Moore’s First Amendment rights; Preventing foreign and corporate influence in the election process; and the power of the FEC to (potentially) prevent a company from marketting its completely legal product.

As usually, when controversy follows Moore, he seems to have the last word: Thanks for the free press. Again.

“…the Illinois legislature adjourned earlier this week without extending the Aug. 30 deadline for presidential candidates to be certified by the state elections board and qualify for the Nov. 2 ballot. …
The relatively late dates of this year’s Republican Party convention, running Aug. 30 to Sept. 2, mean that Bush will not be the official nominee until after the deadline … As a result Illinois, is the only state where Bush could be left off the ballot. ”
Update: whoops, yeah the source URL would have been a good thing to post. (This is why you shouldn’t post in a rush.)