What a way to start off your kid’s school day:

A daycare in a North York elementary school was under lockdown this morning after a bizarre incident in which a man was found dangling from a tree and impaled by a metal stake.

A parent dropping off a child at Roywood Public School - in the York Mills Rd. and Victoria Park Ave. area - called 911 after spotting the man hanging from a small tree at the back of the school around 7:30 a.m., Toronto Police say.

When emergency crews arrived on the scene, they found the man, believed to be in his 40s, impaled through his “rectal area” by one of the metal posts that were supporting the young tree at its base. [Read more]

What a pain in the ass.

What a pandering jackass:

A Senate candidate has legally changed his name to Pro-Life and will appear on the ballot that way this year, state election officials say.

As Marvin Pro-Life Richardson, the organic strawberry farmer from Letha, 30 miles northwest of Boise, was denied the use of his middle name when he ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2006 because the state’s policy bars the use of slogans on the ballot.

Now, though, officials in the Idaho secretary of state’s office say they have no choice because Pro-Life is his full and only name. He says he will run for the highest state office on the ballot every two years for the rest of his life, advocating murder charges for doctors who perform abortions and for women who obtain the procedure.

“I think it’s just and I think it’s proper to have Pro-Life on the ballot,” he told the Idaho Press-Tribune of Nampa. “If I save one baby’s life, it’s worth it.”

[Link]

Maybe I should move to Idaho, run for Senate and change my middle name to “Fetus-Squisher”, just to balance things out. Motto will be, “If I can grind just one baby’s brains to butter, it’s worth it.”

I just read this article about the deathbed affidavit by Walter Haut, who was the army public relations liaison at the Roswell Air Force base in 1947 when the so-called “Roswell Incident” occurred. After initially releasing that the army had recovered a strange craft, he issued a statement to the press that it was the wreckage of a weather balloon and that no strange alien ship had crash-landed in the desert. There was no UFO and no bodies either. It was just a weather balloon and some dumb hick farmer’s imagination.

Walter died last year, but before kicking the bucket, he made a sworn affidavit to be released after he passed away. In it, he states that the weather balloon explanation was indeed a cover story and that a strange craft was recovered as well as alien corpses. There was not one, but two crashes; the second having much more debris and bodies.

He described a meeting with the base commander and other high-ranking officers where they puzzled over pieces of strange material from the craft. He told of being taken to “Building 94″—one of the base’s hangers, where he was shown a metallic, egg-shaped craft about twelve to fifteen feet long and six feet wide with no windows, landing gears or features whatsoever. He saw two child-like bodies about four feet tall with oddly large heads, lying on the floor, covered with a tarp.

You can read a copy of the full affidavit here.

…something to ponder over your morning oatmeal.

It’s a very rare occasion that I watch televised news. It’s outdated, frustrating and a more often than not a waste of my time. In my line of work, we like to say that print is dead. The thirty to sixty minute TV news show format needs to have a steak pounded through it’s heart.

Chances are, by the time something airs on television, I’ve already read it to death online. I’ve no patience to wait through an news hour for that 1-3 minute bit that I’m interested in, when I can get the same (and usually more and many different versions of) information from my computer. I can even watch televised news online, neatly chopped up by some diligent YouTube user into bite-sized, relevant segments without all the bullshit buildups, the “stay tuned” and “when we come back” crap that sucks you into watching the whole damn thing, even though you could care less about what Paris Hilton is eating in prison.
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Recently, I read about a Santa Fe, NM. cathedral’s Ash Wednesday mass being disrupted, mid-way by loudly blaring sexually explicit profanity coming from CD players surreptiously hidden under the pews. Horrified parishioners evacuated and in came the over-reactive police sent in the bomb squad. Hilarity. By far, it is the coolest idea of the week. Why don’t more people do this?

“The CD players, duct-taped to the bottoms of the pews, were set to turn on in the middle of noon Mass on Wednesday at the Roman Catholic Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi.”

“The recordings, made on store-bought blank discs, featured people using foul language and “pornographic messages,” Johnson said. He would not elaborate because of the ongoing investigation.”

“Church staff members took the CD players to the basement and called police, who sent the bomb squad, Johnson said.”
“The bomb squad blew up two players outside and kept the third one to test for fingerprints or DNA and trace its components, he said.”

The fact that police feel the need to detonate everything is a bit absurd and considering the cost of doing this, really questionable. Those assholes just can’t take a joke, I guess.

I know it’s only Tuesday, but I think that nothing’s come close to (or will surpass) making my week than this article about a man, afflicted with an anal fistula, who for one reason or another, flagged the attention of some U.S. Immigration officials and earned himself a cavity search.

Some exciting excerpts:

“Arriving on holiday in New York in August last year, the unnamed 48-year-old was interrogated and searched by immigration officers… The rectal examination discovered a device called a seton, which doctors in the UK had inserted into the fistula to help control long-term infection.”

“The man had an anal fistula, which is a painful channel that can develop deep into the anus, caused by infection or digestive conditions such as Crohn’s disease.”

“US immigration officials insisted the sufferer of an anal infection remove a small piece of medical thread which was being used by doctors to treat the condition. The man required treatment under general anaesthetic as a result.”

“…After one baffled immigration officer pulled “very hard” on the seton, the patient was given the choice by the baffled immigration officers of either getting on the next plane home, or submitting himself to a procedure to have it removed.”

Fortunately, the whole fiasco caused no extra damage to the guy’s ass, although they did have to knock him out to remove the seton. Awesome.

You know someone’s got their head up their ass when they demand you hand over a photo ID to get some pancakes. You’ve got your head shoved even farther up your own ass if you actually hand your driver’s license off just because you need some shitty breakfast.

I’ve never been to an IHOP and never plan on it. I do enjoy the occasional pancake, but asking me to hand over my identification to some minimum wage tool of a security guard will generate a clear directive to go fuck yourself with a rusty, sharp object. I noticed that in the article linked above there’s a quote that the IHOP dude had around forty IDs in his hand, which I find to be completely ridiculous. People in Quincy, Mass. are either really fucking stupid or they really, really love their IHOP.

I was reading a Wired article about the statistics of death in the United States compared to the “Politics of Fear” type shit you see on the news left and right. To believe the news, I’d be insane to not flee New York for the hills because Al Qaeda’s going to kill my skinny, white ass any second now and if I was smart enough to head for the mountains, I should probably dig a bunker because they’re going to nuke that shit too. However, Wired points out the actual statistical reality of mortality in the States, complete with a nice little color-coded chart á la Dept. of Homeland Security’s absolutely retarded threat advisory chart.

Sanely speaking, death by terrorism ranks second to lowest (lowest being that radical, extremist, Jihad-freak: Carbon Monoxide). The flu, a hernia, driving and just about everything else you might prefer to die of all rank much, much higher.

What caught my eye, was the fact that you’re more likely to be shot by law enforcement (3949) than killed by a terrorist (3147). I wonder what the numbers might rise to if being killed by the government, such as being shipped off to Iraq or being neglected in New Orleans after Katrina were to be factored in. Who would be the bigger killer of American citizens? Al Qaeda or the Bush administration?

I was reading in the news this morning that Sichuan Airlines in China will now require it’s flight attendants to have martial arts training as part of their prerequisites.

To work as a flight attendant, young women, for the first time in the country, are to be required to have martial arts skills, sources close to Sichuan Airlines confirmed this week.

Next Thursday, the airline is to recruit 70 hostesses from Chengdu and Chongqing to work for a new flight route from Chengdu to Seoul in South Korea.

One of the priority conditions for candidates will reportedly be knowledge of kung fu, as staff with such experience are believed to be able to help the airlines further secure its aviation safety.

I think this is the best fucking idea I’ve heard in a long time. Screw air marshalls with low-impact guns. Screw those motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking plane—give me deadly kung-fu bitches on a plane any day!

I can just imagine some dude jumping up with his Gatorade-and-Ipod bomb, all ready to blow things to pieces, only to have both his arms broken and larynx torn out by the stewardess, who then calmly returns to doling out little packages of peanuts. Now that’s an airline with balls!

I fired up my usual slew of news sites this morning and just about spewed coffee everywhere when I saw this gem (highlights and “D’Oh” are mine):

My first mental picture was the eight Canadian citizens being slaughtered, Aztec-style as penance for George Bush’s inability to reign in the foul language when on the microphone. Hail Satan!

Anyway, what was obviously an editorial screw-up was fixed in a matter of minutes, but not before I had the presence of mind to take a screengrab.