Pop Culture Cuisinart

Talk about giving 110%, Aaron Rowand of the Phillies broke his nose last night making a game saving catch while crashing into the wall. Video available here.

Now that's hardcore.

about American Idol? The next person that tells me how shocked they are that Chris Daughtrey was voted off on Wednesday will get a size 10 in the posterior. Actually I must give my girlfriend Kelli some credit. While telling me how shocked she was, she suggested that Chris should hook up with a band looking for a lead singer like Fuel. Well apparently Fuel agrees, because they have offered Chris a job. You called it, Kel.

I still find American Idol to be only slightly more pleasant than jock itch, but hey, I gotta give credit where it's due.

Former Cubs reliever and current ESPN announcer Rick Sutcliffe was attending the Padres-Brewers game last night with comedian Bill Murray and was invited to do a guest appearence with the Padres TV crew. This proved to be a bad idea because Sutcliffe was absolutely three sheets to the wind. The impressive thing about this is the game was only in the 3rd inning. That's some drinking! The audio may take a minute to load so be patient.

Thank God Suzy Kolber wasn't around to be kissed.

A Catholic school teacher in Wisconsin was fired for having in vitro fertilization. While the procedure is opposed by Catholic teaching this seems like an overreaction to a person who just wanted to have children. Of course overreactions are common in the fundamentalist right wing world view. This is why our government won't fund programs that talk about abortions, ok the morning after pill, encourage abstinence only sex ed, or fund stem cell research.

Religion makes for poor public policy.

made in the US. With the assistance of AT&T, Verizon , and Bellsouth, the NSA has been actively gathering phone record information about American citizens. If it wasn't for the fact that nothing the modern Republican gestapo does surprises me anymore, I'd be horrified.

Oh, here's another fun one, remember the Justice Department investigation into the legality of the NSA wiretapping? It has been stopped, because the NSA refused to give the DOJ security clearence to look look at what they've collected. Well that's certainly one way to stop an inquiry. This provides and interesting counterpoint to that favorite conservative argument "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about the government collecting your info." Well if this program is truly legal then they shouldn't worry about letting the Department of Justice taking a look at the data they've gathered,
without warrents!

Well except for Ricky Williams, er, wait I mean actual marine mammal dolphins are smart. A recent study indicates that dolphins use definitive whistles to identify each other, and can recognize them even when synthasized by humans. This makes dolphins the only other species to have a form of vocaliztion akin to language.

Dolphins are also recognized as one of the few other species on the planet that have sex for pleasure, including some instances of homosexual sex. Quick somebody monitor the coast off Fire Island!

Dolphin's talking and [censored]

A group of about a dozen elementary school students were accused of sexually assaulting an 8 year old girl. Now I know that kids can be cruel and little boys definitely have a pack mentality when taunting someone. But SEXUAL ASSAULT? I dunno if biology has changed that much in the last two decades(an evolutionary leap, perhaps) but my equipment didn't work well enough at the age of 6 to sexually assault anyone. (Not that I'd have known how anyway.) Inappropriate behavior sure, but to term it sexual assault seems a misnomer.

It's up at Yahoo. Now you can see if you want to sit through 2 hours of this latest M. Night Shayamalan opus to find out what the undoubtedly cliche twist ending will be. Maybe the Lady in the water is really a dude. Yeah, that's it, the shemale in the water.