Enter here for your chance to win a pair of tickets to see Sugarland at Snowden Grove Amphitheater on August 13th, with special guests Little Big Town and Vonda Shepard.
We’re giving away a pair of tickets each week until the show. Each week is a different drawing and you can enter as many times as you like, as often as you like. Winners will be notified by email on the morning of each drawing.
Here are the dates for the weekly drawings:
Friday, July 30th
Friday, August 6th
Colton Harris-Moore was apprehended in the Bahamas yesterday.
(If you haven’t heard that name before, Google it.)
He’s lucky to be alive. Ever since he was reported to be armed, I thought he’d never see a courtroom.
His court appearance should be a media frenzy and I have a feeling Colton Harris-Moore will be a household name by the end of the week.
Steve Carrell and Stephen Colbert in the return of Even Stevphen:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Steve Carell | ||||
|
||||
15 Things you didn’t know about Office Space.
Weekly photo lineup contest from The Smoking Gun. Match the arrestee with his/her weapon of choice.
A Fatwa we can all get behind. Fatwa decrees vuvuzela haram above 100 decibels.
Cat steals women’s panties from neighbors’ clotheslines and brings them home. (Side note: I always get a little tickled when the BBC or any other UK news org uses the term “knickers.” Pip-pip cheerio!)
Facebook, you’re getting a bit ridiculous.
Update 7.8.10 7.33a:
And another…
It’s the Friday before a 3-day weekend. That mythic time when the clock moves at half speed, yet you can’t get any work done because the people you need to talk to are already on vacation.
So here’s some light reading.
Willie Nelson on heaven, hell, karma, racism, etc.
===
A man in Tipton County unearthed the jawbone of an extinct mammoth-like species while digging a swimming pool. (No word on whether or not a frozen Brendan Fraser was also found.)
The skeleton is from a trilophodon, which Google says looks like this:
===
Mel Gibson is still a racist. Tapes have surfaced of him dropping N-bombs, C-bombs, and all sorts of other bombs in arguments with his former girlfriend. Read the asterisk-filled account here.
===
“M. Night Shyamalan’s THE LAST AIRBENDER is a hate crime against film lovers.”
more updates to come…
(I should pause first and note that I came across this whole thing via Dan Savage. So, full hat tip to him. It’s worth checking out his post about it, which includes lots of good links and analysis.)
Okay folks, this is a little complicated, but it’s important.
Pediatric endocrinologist Maria New, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Florida International University, and her long-time collaborator, psychologist Heino F. L. Meyer-Bahlburg, of Columbia University, have been tracing evidence for the influence of prenatal androgens in sexual orientation. [source]
To sum up the science-y stuff: The doctors are offering pregnant mothers a steroid called dexamethasone in an attempt to prevent congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), which can cause the development of ambiguous genitalia in female fetuses. Later in life, CAH women also show less interest in playing with baby dolls, having children of their own, domesticity, and sexual activity with men in general.
Meyer-Bahlburg suggests that treatments with prenatal dexamethasone might cause these girls’ behavior to be closer to the expectation of heterosexual norms. [source]
Doctors Meyer-Bahlburg and New assume that “normal” behavior for women is bound to marital and child-rearing duties and that deviation from that is abnormal and should therefore be cured. Now that they’ve discovered the correlation with CAH and found a treatment for that, they think they can prevent “abnormal” female behavior prior to birth. In short, it’s
the first systematic medical effort attached to a “paradigm” of attempting in utero to reduce rates of homosexuality, bisexuality, and “low maternal interest.”
I’m reminded of those bumper stickers that say “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
If I need to explain any further why this whole thing is ludicrous, offensive, wrongheaded, backward, and… well, sexist… then I don’t think I’ll waste my time with you.
What’s worse is that this is an off-label use of dexamethasone and the women it’s being administered to are not enrolled in any sort of formal clinical trial, which would include ethics oversight.
Medicine — capital M — has long been a tool of oppressing women in the West. That is nothing new. But now the technology has arrived to shape sexual interest prior to birth. Needless to say, the procedure will be met with praise in some circles, perhaps even in respected medical communities.
Let’s hope the progressive medical community steps up and puts a stop to this.
…ly had his head up his ass when a Rolling Stone reporter was following him around. Why else would he speak so contemptuously about his bosses that he got himself fired before the article was even out in print?
Part of the reason, of course, is that the article was old news by the time I got the offending issue of Rolling Stone in the mail yesterday. It was posted online earlier this week and the controversy was in full swing by the time McChrystal showed up for his meeting with President Obama yesterday.
Reading it in print — on glossy new pages with subscription cards falling out everywhere — was a little surreal. It was reminder of the disconnect between long-form journalism and the 24-hour news cycle we have gotten accustomed to… But I’ll spare you the “gosh, the world moves awful fast these days” crap. I was reading it thinking this article ruined this guy’s career; Most of the stuff in it is now past tense. So — as my girlfriend asked when I was explaining the situation to her — what did he say that was so bad?
Let’s be honest. Most RS profiles are cool-porn. You get to read about another person doing cool things that you are unlikely to be doing yourself any time soon. Be the subject a drug-addled rockstar, a sex-addicted comedian, or in this case a “highly intelligent badass,” the writer’s goal is to bring you into the subject’s inner sanctum and show you how they live in a nonstop state of cool.
In this case, the writer showed a smart, tough, career military man without much patience for politicians — looking smugly at his bosses seems to be part of his shtick. Whatever the reason — caught up in the spotlight, resentment, ego, etc — you can’t bad-mouth your boss in Rolling Stone and expect no consequences.
There’s a reason for civilian chain of command and this kind of subordination is not only counterproductive, it’s potentially dangerous. Generals going rogue is how military juntas rise to power.
One final note…
Is it just me or does McChrystal sound like some hellish fast-food burger? Like some bizarro sci-fi future in which McDonald’s and Krystal have merged to compete against the Burger King’s White Castle empire?? Or is it just me?
Summer has begun, just don’t go outside. The whole map is red!!!
Enter here for your chance to win a pair of tickets to see Robert Plant at the Orpheum on July 13th!
We’re giving away a pair of tickets each week until the show. Each week is a different drawing and you can enter as many times as you like, as often as you like. Winners will be notified by email on the morning of each drawing.
Here are the dates for the weekly drawings:
Friday, June 18th
Friday, June 25th
Friday, July 2nd
Friday, July 9th
Yesterday I found myself reading Men’s Health. I’m not proud of it, but I was in a waiting room for a very, very long time. An article about members of the US World Cup team mentioned goalkeeper Tim Howard’s “home in Memphis, Tennessee.”*
Er, what?
How did I not know this?
Turns out our relative obliviousness to the world of soccer is precisely the reason:
SAM- How did you end up making your summer home in Memphis? […]
TIM HOWARD- That’s where my wife’s from, and we don’t get a chance to spend loads of time in the states, for me its usually just a few weeks. We get to have some peace and quiet. It could have been any number of places, but that’s just the place we settled and to be honest I love it there. [Soccer By Ives]
…and…
“It’s great. It’s quiet, it’s easy living, which is important,” he says. “[Not getting recognized] is always a good thing for me.” [CBS Sports]
Here’s hoping that the US team’s performance in the World Cup will gain gain him some well-deserved recognition stateside. Just not so much that it chases him out of Memphis.
(* You can find the passing Memphis reference here. You have to click the “Tips” tab.)
