jay leno is so bad.

it's been months since i posted anything here. i'll admit, it's been a combination of laziness, disinterest, and overall ennui.

but when i heard the reports that NBC was thinking of booting conan and/or giving leno the tonight show back, i had to spring into action. and thus, i finally joined the evil world of twitter.

please follow me and retweet and whatever else the kids do at http://twitter.com/lenoissobad

no. no. no. no.

argh. nightmares. enough said. part of me doesn't even want to post a picture because it's so disturbing. eeeesh.

unfortunate tattoos.

i saw this story about hayden panettiere's misspelled tattoo. and it made me think of the tragedy of bad body art.

this has become an especially touchy subject in my dating life. i seem to have a talent for picking guys who pick the dumbest tattoos ever. unfortunately i have no pictures, but it's probably better that way.

exhibit A - i slept with a guy who i've known for almost my whole life. except it wasn't until he was naked that i realized he had a tramp stamp. i kid you not. a male tramp stamp. does it matter what the tattoo was of? no. it was a male tramp stamp.

exhibit B - a guy i dated earlier this year who had two fish on his arm. now, fish can be cool, but they usually aren't. i learned this when another guy, pablo, showed us his. "it's a guppy," was my best friend's reaction. that about sums it up.

well, this guy's fish weren't guppies. they were opposite each other in a way that he explained "was supposed to symbolize the yin-yang." it went even a layer further because this guy also happened to be a pisces. first off, white people should never get anything chinese on them. i don't care if that sounds racist. they shouldn't. i have this fantasy in my head where all the chinese character tattoos actually say something drastically different than what we think they do. "peace" really means "tampon" and "serenity" really means "kick me." it's my wish for the world.

but secondly, i'm a little skeeved by the whole astrological sign thing. i mean, i think there's some credence to it. i certainly exhibit every characteristic a leo is supposed to. but, i happened to meet this guy on eharmony. and for those of you familiar with the system, i swear one of his "can't stands" was superstitious. what a douchebag.

exhibit C - same guy! i know, tragic. he explained this one to me too. his grandparents ran an apple farm. and so on his shoulder, he had a tattoo of an apple in a crate with their farm name on it. now, i'm not cold-hearted, i think that's sweet. but here's the rub:

the crate only had one apple in it. which means it was either a monster apple or midget crate.

has anyone else had bad luck with dating bad tattoos? if so, i'd love to hear them.

15th ave coffee & tea (& wine & beer)

NPR reports on a new starbucks in non-starbucks clothing. is it smart branding, or insidious corporatism? you decide.

the vatican says something not stupid.

carla bruni need not get upset this time.

the vatican newspaper has called oscar wilde a "lucid analyst of the modern world."

indeed he was. he poked fun at marriage, gender roles, and societal norms. i wonder what the vatican liked best?

* A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.

* Genius is born--not paid.

* I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.

* The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

*Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

* It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

* Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

* I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

* The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.

* There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

* There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

* Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.

orly taitz

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The Born Identity
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i first heard about this woman via the daily show [ because jon stewart is, after all, the most trusted man in america ]. but then i read this article in oc weekly. [ obviously the crazies are concentrated in orange county ]. then the washington post's secular corner ran this.

when is the truth not good enough for us anymore?? i'm reminded of a bit lewis black did, and i'm scouring the internet trying to find it. basically, he talks about how you can't look at a piece of footage [ in this case, it was whether george bush was told about bin laden ] and say that it didn't happen. he then relates it to cat suicide. [ natch ].

but seriously, when did facts and evidence become not good enough? has photoshop made us overly cynical, even when we shouldn't be? do we just want to be upset, to be upset? someone please enlighten me.

best excerpts of the oc weekly piece:

The problem is most of the above facts aren’t true.

For starters, the Pakistan “travel ban” is a complete fabrication based on zero evidence and completely contradicted by State Department records and a 1981 New York Times article. The full transcript from Obama’s grandmother shows that she never said he was born in Kenya—in fact, she repeatedly said he was born in Hawaii. The law allowing foreign-born children to obtain Hawaiian COLBs didn’t exist until 20 years after Obama was born, while Obama’s published COLB says his birth information was recorded four days after his birth in 1961. And those “forensic experts” who say Obama’s document is phony? There have only been three of them: Two haven’t published their real names or any verifiable credentials (one went by the moniker “TechDude”), and the other merely said that she can’t make a determination of a document’s authenticity based solely on a JPEG.

***

“It’s just fascinating,” says Bob Haggard, a frequent poster on Politijab’s Orly Taitz forum. “She runs around the country doing things that amount to absolutely nothing. She tells her followers that she ‘files’ all sorts of documents, but she never files anything. She drops stuff off.”

Patrick McKinnion of Yes to Democracy puts it a different way: “There’s a certain amount of fascination with unbridled insanity, and that’s what you’re seeing with the birthers: a level of hatred that borders, if not absolutely pole-vaults, into insanity.”

hump day

my friend, a violence and injury prevention specialist (whatever that means), shared this link.

according to a new study, suicides are most likely to occur on wednesdays. while those interviewed for the story cautiously offered work stress, at its height in the middle of the week, as a possible reason, here are my guesses:

there's nothing good on tv on wednesdays. consider the law and order franchise. monday is the classic law and order, a good way to start the week. tuesday is SVU, so it only gets better. but then on wednesday, you're stuck with criminal intent. shoot me.

no one goes out on wednesdays. thursdays everyone is raring for happy hour. friday everyone's like wooo, let's start the weekend! but wednesday? no one wants to do shit on wednesday. except maybe hang themselves.

wednesday is the worst day for sushi. a lot of restaurants get their shipments on thursday, in preparation for the weekend rush. this means that by wednesday, you're getting all the leftover week-old fish. if THAT doesn't kill you, you might just off yourself.

wednesday is commonly referred to as "hump day." but if you're not getting humped, you just feel like shit.

the way wednesday is spelled makes no fucking sense. and if you try to make sense of it, you'll just go batshit crazy, and potentially leap from a building.

more theories? post them in comments.

the recession claims more victims

in one of the saddest states of the economy i've seen yet, the los angeles times reports that more and more people are leaving the bodies of their dead in the custody of the state because they can't afford to collect the remains.

i can't imagine what it must be like not only to have to deal with the death of someone, but to then be burdened with the guilt of not being able to honor them with a ceremony, burial, or even an urn.

it's kind of a sick, sad reason that i wish six feet under was still on the air. the show dealt several times with bodies going unclaimed, but never for a monetary reason. there was a memorable episode when david tried to upsell a family on a casket. i don't think funeral homes are inherently evil [ not all anyway ], but in a bit of macabre irony, they, too, are just trying to ride out the economic tide.

someone more thoughtful than i... go make a show about this.

palin's resignation speech: the good version.

vanity fair takes a stab at making sarah palin sound cohesive. nice try, guys. notice not a single thing was stetted.

utah kiss-ins

we're all god's children. until we're not.

A police report said they sat down for a kiss and were approached by a pair of church security guards, who asked them to leave because their behavior was "unwanted."

garage rape

this actually happened.

horrible, cute irony.

in china, a mother red panda rejected its two cubs. a dog was brought in as a surrogate, and immediately took to the cubs. problem was, she then rejected her own pup. oh boy. maybe the red panda mother will come around and nurse the dog.

NYT banners

i remarked on my facebook* today how dismayed i was by a scientology.org banner on the new york times's website. but that damned gawker beat me to it.

it also brings up this shingles ad which is prominently displayed today, and that is just completely nasty. whatever happened to escapism during hard times? sheesh.

i will say in my defense, however: i am on west coast time. check mate.

* also, note: i'm not sure what compelled me to link to my facebook. maybe because i have a vanity URL now. but i don't want to be your friend. i mean, really. yes, even you.

malcolm gladwell and the moral hazard myth

as debate over national health care rolls on in congress, i am reminded of one of the most poignant and memorable articles i have ever read. it was published in a 2005 issue of the new yorker but is still [ if not more ] relevant today.

i thought about bullet-pointing the striking parts of the article for those who don't wish to read it, but i truly feel it would be doing gladwell [ and the uninsured ] a huge disservice. if you don't believe in "socialized medicine" and don't think we need reform, you need to take a look. and even if you do, some of the facets you learn in this article are too critical to pass up.

** if you're curious as to what prompted this entry, it was the drudge report's cover story labeled "TAX THEM!" with this picture:

my parents joined facebook.

no. no. thankfully not MY parents. but some people's parents. you know who they are. but just in case you don't, look here and be afraid.

samantha bee/jon stewart covering the palin resignation

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Craziest Catch
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Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Joke of the Day

the geniuses at the daily show did it again. the craziest thing is a coworker of mine actually said he was so sorry that jon stewart was in repeats the week palin did this. do you think she knew? i'm glad she didn't get away with it. enjoy.

brooke shields's endorsement of LATISSE

advertising has done its share of creating problems in order to sell "solutions." in 1921, listerine advertisers invented the word "halitosis" to make bad breath sound more like a condition to be treated.

i guess it shouldn't surprise anyone anymore. but just as i thought it couldn't get any more ridiculous than "restless leg syndrome," along comes another miracle drug to make all your problems go away.

except this time, your problems are... your eyelashes?

A new FDA-approved drug called latisse is marketing itself as a solution for "eyelash hypotrichosis" -- "another name for having inadequate or not enough eyelashes."

REALLY?!?! we're in a global recession and there's a market for people with wimpy eyelashes who can't just buy a tube of mascara like the rest of us?

best of all, they've solicited brooke shields as their spokesperson. wait, why? is she a well-known case of eyelash hypotrichosis? i always thought she had a pretty successful modeling/acting career... featuring her eyelashes the whole way along.

weird.

i can't find the spot online, but you can watch brooke's video diary on the latisse website. this is the richest part:

Brooke is Ready for Her Closeup
HER VIDEO DIARY CHRONICLES THE LASH JOURNEY

She's one of the world's most recognizable faces — a legendary model and actress who's paved the way and continues to set trends. Her film, TV and Broadway roles have earned her critical acclaim and legions of fans, but it's her personal commitment to important causes that makes her real beauty.

i'm glad those important causes now include eyelash health. pffft.

flushing the toilet

seems like a no-brainer, no? i work on a floor with only about 5 women on it. and yet, somehow the thought of flushing the toilet AND MAKING SURE IT ALL GOES DOWN has escaped us. gross.

racist camera

via buzzfeed, a camera that is helpful to everyone but most of the people on the planet. haha.

welcome to sugar booger

this is my repository for all things sweet and snotty. things i find that amuse me, or which i can totally turn my nose down on. now, i realize there are plenty of blogs out there that show cool gadgets or videos or websites or what have you. but i hope to bring together some diverse interests... music, politics, video, pop culture, writing, and other general awesomeness. let's see if it works.