Adding insult to injury.

Wait a minute. Michael Phelps set an Olympic record for number of medals by a single athlete AND he's toking up? No apologies necessary, bro.

OK, aside from the obvious apologize for your lost sponsorship dollars, I'm thinking how in the hell do you do all that in the pool and still drag that unfiltered weed down your lungs?

The other swimmers are probably really rethinking their training regimen right about now. I mean, you can't exactly call marijuana performance enhancing, can you?

To all buggered bastards out there...

We get it. You're depressed. Just don't be such a selfish bastard and let the wife and kids make their own decisions.

Who knows how many more stories like these we will hear in the times to come, and how many we didn't hear about before media saturation and the internet echo chamber.

The short track to street cred. Or not.

I like Joe Strummer as much as the next person, but...

No, let me rephrase that. I revere Joe Strummer, but...

I would never buy this Faux Strummer guitar for nearly $1000:



Seriously. For a grand you can get a manufactured Telecaster that simulates Joe Strummer's 1975 Tele. Forget the fact that his Tele looked that way from relentless repaintings and actual road wear -- now you can buy it prefab. But the best bit (if by best you are thinking nearly throw up in your mouth) is the verbiage written to sell this distressed guitar:

All his life, he vigorously championed individuality, self-expression and change-tenets often reflected in the constantly altered look of his favorite instrument-his Telecaster (currently on display in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland), an otherwise standard '60s-era model with all the original parts and specifications.

So in tribute to his individuality, self-expression, and change, we're going to offer a cookie cutter replica so you can all be individuals (yes, we're all individuals...).

Seriously.

Have another bag of pills, fool.

You do have to hand it to right-wing blowhards like Rush Limbaugh. He not only gets behind his microphone and tells his vast listening lemmings that his four words for Obama are, "I hope he fails," but then he tries to explain what he means.

Apparently, he claims the government is trying to take over "as much of the private sector as possible," and that really it's those plans that he hopes fail, so therefore he hopes Obama fails.

Now that explanation may work for the comatose reactionaries who listen to his show on a regular basis, but for those of us whose memories aren't shorter than a goldfish, we recognize all of Limbaugh's complaints -- from the auto industry to the banking sector -- to be programs instigated by the Bush administration.

These drastic measures of course were made necessary by the last thirty years of Republican and Democratic free market foolishness (sure the Repubs bear the brunt of the blame, but the Dems -- esp. the Clinton wing -- share in it quite a bit). Rabid de-regulation (thanks, Phil Gramm) created a whirlpool in which a small group of greedy sociopaths could cook books and line their own pockets while creating phony profits based on selling not even paper but the idea of paper to one another.

For all the idiots out there who actually consider Ayn Rand a philosopher and not some third-rate literary hack (I'm talking to you, Alan Greenspan), it bears repeating: unfettered capitalism does not work. Not surprisingly, when people look to maximize their own personal profits, they tend not to give a shit about the long-term stability of their company or the social implications of their own recklessness.

By the way, ever talk to a Randian, or "Objectivist" as they like to be called? It's like talking to a 9/11 truther or a JFK conspiracy theorist. Reality is no obstacle.

Conundrum.

It's bad enough the IDF shelled the UN compound in Gaza, but now we find out that Israel has admitted to using white phosphorous shells, in violation of international law. I guess they figured they wouldn't be caught. Or maybe they just don't care. After all, it's not like the UN -- the very body that gave birth to the state of Israel -- has ever been respected all that much by Israeli governments.

From terrorists and rogue states, you expect such behavior. Is this the company then that Israel wants to keep?

"The time has come to set aside childish things..."

At that point in the speech, G.W. Bush put down his Nintendo DS and looked sheepishly about...

New semester.

I'm teaching in a basement classroom that must have been a storage room at some point. Low ceilings, floors with lumps beneath the carpet (seriously, it's as if they simply rolled some carpet out over a bare dirt floor and said done with it -- I nearly tripped waltzing around the classroom), and some bizarre paneling like it was someone's mid-70's basement rec-room redo.

However, the absolute best thing about the room is that when I stand at the podium with built in computer console, my ass hits the blackboard. My back is quite literally against the wall in this class. So I need to watch my use of chalk, lest I end up powdering all my clothes. Additionally, the podium is placed so that, unless I contort my body and lean further into my little corner, I'm blocking about a fifth of the screen when I use the LCD projector.

I suppose I shouldn't complain, since I do have a computer and LCD projector, but I have almost no room to roam at the front of the classroom, and I like to roam. I like to move from side to side in front of the rows. In this class, I have about ten feet to move across. That's three, four paces, then I'm up against either my immobile podium or the extra student desk they crammed into the front of the room.

Does anyone take classroom design into account when they're counting on how many tuition paying students they can cram into a space?