Holy Fucking Shit You’re Dumb!

Yeah, it’s that dingus John Edwards.  One-time Democratic nominee for Vice President and former Presidential candidate.  He’s finally admitting that the child his mistress gave birth to in early 2008 is his.

In case you don’t remember (or didn’t care–and I can’t say as I blame you if you didn’t), Edwards’ infidelity was a hot topic during his brief stint as an also-ran during the 2008 Democratic primary season.  Well, as hot a topic as can be expected when it involves a dude who had no shot at winning the nomination.  He and I won the same number of primaries, as I recall.

Cheating on your wife is bad enough.  But Johnny’s wife also has incurable cancer, so he’s like a double shithead for cheating on a dying woman.  Seriously man, that’s just low.  Fuck you.

But here’s the real thing.  Why on earth did you get your mistress pregnant?  That’s like the dumbest thing in the world.  This isn’t the friggin middle ages here.  We have pretty reliable methods of birth control.  Wrap it up, dumbass!  At least Clinton was smart enough to pull out.  Nothing good can come of getting your mistress pregnant.  There’s no upside to that at all.  This has already ruined him politically, and now will likely ruin him financially as well.  Not only will he have to support (and rightly so) his child, he’ll likely have to give tons of money to his ex-mistress, and it wouldn’t surprise me if his wife finally decided to stop standing by her man and took a big chunk out of him in a divorce settlement.

And it couldn’t have happened to a shittier guy!  Sayonara, asshole.

Nobody ever claimed criminals were smart.  Well, I guess super villains like Lex Luthor claim that sometimes, but for the most part, they’re wrong.  Most criminals are criminals because they’re either too dumb to know any better or too dumb to be anything else.  Or they’re Bernie Madoff.

But this guy here is about as dumb as they come.  Dude breaks into somebody’s house and… settles in.  He takes a shower, watches some TV, and fries up some chicken!

It’s a little hard to figure out what exactly he thought he was doing.  Maybe he figured he’d just stolen the house?  He broke in, and now it was his!  Just like that time he stole that car–he broke into it, and now he could use it whenever he wanted.  It must work the same way with houses, right?

Right?

So here’s a story about a doctor who removed the wrong kidney from some poor dude.

This is pretty bad.  But it’s also at least somewhat understandable.  I mean, kidneys look pretty much the same.  And everybody has two of them.  A quick screw up of right and left, and bam–you took out the wrong one.  Oops!

But that’s not all.  The same doctor apparently accidentally biopsied another patient’s pancreas instead of his kidney.

Now, I’m no doctor.  I don’t even play one on TV (or the intertubes, even).  But I do own a copy of Gray’s Anatomy (the book, not the TV show) and I’d like to think that, should I ever find myself confronted with a person with an open abdominal cavity and was asked “quick, identify the kidneys!” I’d be able to avoid pointing at the goddamn pancreas.

Here, check for yourself:

There’s a lot of crap in there, I admit.  And I’m sure when someone is cut open, there’s like blood and stuff obscuring your view.  But see those kidney bean shaped things in the back?  Those there are kidneys.  And that big thing that sort of wraps all around and goes every which way in the middleish of the picture?  That’s a pancreas.

See the difference?  Yeah, I admit, there is some stuff that’s omitted in that diagram.  For instance, I don’t see a liver in there, and I’m fairly sure there ought to be one.  And those intestines probably aren’t just cut open and disconnected like that in real life.  But still, a surgeon spends years and years learning this stuff.  They’re not expected to just cut into people and fish around randomly after just a few weeks of boot camp training.  So I feel justified in thinking that this guy is a complete incompetent asshole.

Little French bastards are choking themselves to death.  I guess because it feels good?  I don’t know, I’m not a fucking idiot, so I haven’t tried this “game”, but supposedly cutting off the blood supply to your brain gets you high.  Hey, that’s basically how alcohol works, so I guess it’s a cheap way to get briefly drunk.

Here’s a thought though.  The drinking age in France is like, what, four years old?  Why not just get drunk?  Go down to the store, buy some cheap wine, and get shitfaced like normal teenagers do.  Don’t goddamn choke yourself to death in order to get a few seconds of feeling high.  You’d think nobody would have to explain this, but apparently kids today are that stupid.

Here’s a great quote from the article.  “The medical community remains divided over whether to publicize asphyxiation games. “There’s a fear that if you raise awareness then other people will start to copy it.”"

Yeah, that’s a great reason to not tell people shit.  We also shouldn’t tell people how HIV is spread, for fear that more people will have sex.  “Wait, you mean all this time I could have been having sex?  Why didn’t anybody tell me this??”  Don’t tell people about the dangers of playing Russian Roulette, because then more people might play!   And definitely don’t tell people about the dangers of smoking, because more people might smoke!

How about we just let people be responsible for their own damn selves?  If you tell people about how choking themselves to death is bad and they still do it, well, hey.  You tried, right?  It’s probably for the best that we eliminated those genes from the pool…

So did you see this one about the woman punching out a McDonald’s drive-through window because they didn’t have any McNuggets?

Seriously lady.  There’s a McDonald’s on every corner.  Next time, try the next one.  No need to get all worked up!

It’s about time we had some more content related to Alex Rodriguez on this blog.  Considering he has his own category and was basically the entire inspiration for this blog, it’s a shame (for me) when he doesn’t do anything dumb for awhile, or some good things happen to him.

But, thankfully, we’ll always have vindictive ex-girlfriends looking to drag the man down.  And we’ll always have US Weekly, that great bastion of journalistic integrity, to give these ladies a forum.

This story has everything.  Well, everything I need for this blog, anyway.  Specifically, it has Alex Rodriguez, and it has Alex Rodriguez being an incredibly self-absorbed douchebag.

The dude allegedly has not one, but two paintings of himself as a centaur hanging in his bedroom.  Let me say that again in case you maybe missed it.  TWO paintings.  Of himself.  As a centaur.  In his own bedroom.

In his own bedroom!

I really don’t think I have to say any more, but I’m going to anyway, because I’m enjoying this so much.  Let’s just make sure we’re all on the same page here.  You know what a centaur is, right?  It’s a mythical half-horse, half-man creature.  It looks something like this here.  Although I find this one to be more representative of the species.

Teenage girls love them because they combine the hunky parts of men with the business parts of a horse.  I think.  Well, for some reason, anyway.  Bottom line is, nobody but teenage girls and women who never matured past the mental age of a teenage girl care anything at all about centaurs outside of D&D or maybe Harry Potter books.

Well, those people, and Alex Rodriguez I mean.  Apparently he loves centaurs so much he wants to be one.  And he went so far as to hire somebody to paint his portrait as one.  Twice.  And then, he hung them up in his bedroom just as if that’s something a totally normal person would do.

This totally makes up for him winning a World Series.

Turns out the whole “balloon boy” thing was probably all a big hoax.

For anybody who doesn’t know, last week a Ft. Collins, Colorado family made international headlines when they claimed their 6 year old son had gone aloft in a homemade balloon.  Authorities chased the thing for near on 50 miles, traffic to and from Denver International Airport was briefly re-routed in order to stay out of the potential flight path of the balloon, and the National Guard scrambled two helicopters to assist in the rescue effort.

Of course, the thing landed gently out on the plains of eastern Colorado and… no kid.  He wasn’t inside.  Authorities initially thought the worst, that he had fallen out during the flight.  A few hours later, the kid turned up at his home (which the police had searched twice already) safe and sound!  He claimed to have been hiding in the attic the whole time.

At first, everyone was relieved, of course.  But then the inevitable question was asked–if the kid was never in the balloon to begin with, why did his family think he was?  Turns out, they were all standing around watching when the thing “inadvertently” took off–there’s even this video of the takeoff, which to my eye clearly shows the kid in question walking away before the thing flies off without him in it.  Then his dad gets all ripshit about something (was the wife supposed to keep a hold of the tether?  I guess…) and kicks randomly at stuff.

Well, now we know (the alleged) whole sordid truth.  Turns out the whole thing was staged because… the couple thought it would get them a reality TV show?  Wow, really?  I guess you have to be completely insane to make that connection–pretend to send our son up in a helium balloon, incite massive media frenzy, get TV show!  Sure, it makes sense!

All I know is, this story needs to go away now.  Ok, yeah, it’s not every day a kid goes up in a homemade helium balloon.  But, now that we know he didn’t, actually, and that his family are a bunch of oddball weirdos looking for attention, I think the best thing to do is to start ignoring the shit out of them.

…in a suck contest.

Man, check this out:

Here’s the deal, for those not in the know.  King Diamond (the dude in the silly hat and the face paint) and his band Mercyful Fate were something of an underground hit back in the day, inspiring such current metal giants as Metallica to do their thing.  Later, Metallica released a CD of cover tunes, and included a “song” called Mercyful Fate which was really a medley of several Mercyful Fate songs.

The vid is from Ozzfest 2008, where someone decided it would be a good idea to have King Diamond come onstage with Metallica to sing while they played their cover versions of his songs.

Now, let me say right now that I’m a HUGE Metallica fan.  But I’m not blind to the fact that James Hetfield is a terrible singer–in the studio he can do a thousand takes and they can do their editing magic to make him sound good, but live… well, live it can get a little painful on the ears.  Normally everybody just overlooks the fact that James can’t sing live because the concert experience is all about the energy and the rocking guitars and hammering drumbeats and much less about the vocals.  Also, James wisely writes songs that fit comfortably within his tiny vocal range, which is basically “growling in the key of E”.

But when you throw another singer up there, especially one as… unique… as King Diamond, you put the focus squarely on the vocals.  You bring them front and center.  Hey, it’s King Diamond singing his tunes with Metallica!  This should be great!

It’s not.  King and James spend the next eleven minutes trying to out-awful each other.  When James tries to sing harmony with King’s erratic falsetto, it borders on comical.  No, hell with it–it IS comical.  James Hetfield requires a million takes and fancy editing tools in order to sing harmony with himself in the studio–he sure as fuck can’t pull it off live with a guy who is singing all over the map like King is.  He wisely gives up after a few tries.

For my money, the height of awful comes near the four minute mark, where they segue into a snippet from “A Corpse Without a Soul” and King and James try to do the echo vocals part together.  King’s grating falsetto barely even cuts through James’ off-key growling, and it turns into a giant clusterfuck of awful.

I seriously can’t decide if this is dumb or awesome.  I guess I’ll just let you decide…

I’m not sure what they expected to find, but apparently some sharp Israeli scientists have discovered that cannonballs really could sink ships!

By firing cannons at replica wooden ships, these intrepid scientists discovered that, indeed, cannonballs really do puncture hulls and can cause ships to sink!

I’m sure there was a good reason to carry out this research, and I’m not generally one to rag on scientists for doing “dumb” research, but this really does strike me as something that ought to be self-evident from the historical record.  It reminds me of all the people who like to claim that mail armor was “useless”.  Well, no, it wasn’t.  It was the dominant form of armor for something like a thousand years, and people would not have worn it if it didn’t offer some benefit!

Similarly, nobody would stock their warships with cannons if they were ineffective at sinking other ships!  Did you think they just repeatedly fired these things at the side of enemy warships, watched them bounce off, and then shouted “SHIT!  That one bounced off too!  What are the odds of that??”

I’d be willing to bet that the actual research was done to determine how effective cannons were at sinking ships, not whether they did anything at all–but it makes for a much better headline to shout “OMG CANNONS REALLY COULD SINK SHIPS!!!”