The Jena Six

Holy crap... This makes me sick to my stomach:

'Stealth racism' stalks deep South

It all began at Jena High School last summer when a black student, Kenneth Purvis, asked the school's principal whether he was permitted to sit under the shade of the school courtyard tree, a place traditionally reserved for white students only. He was told he could sit where he liked.

The following morning, when the students arrived at school, they found three nooses dangling from the tree.

More at While Seated.

Fucking fantastic to hear the legacies of the likes of David Duke are alive and well in Louisiana, eh? Makes me wonder what's going on in Mississippi and Alabama that we don't hear about.

Dawn of the Superbug

Strange but True: Antibacterial Products May Do More Harm Than Good

Unlike these traditional cleaners, antibacterial products leave surface residues, creating conditions that may foster the development of resistant bacteria, Levy notes. For example, after spraying and wiping an antibacterial cleaner over a kitchen counter, active chemicals linger behind and continue to kill bacteria, but not necessarily all of them.

I friggin' told you so!

(via Garret)

A Burning Ring of Fire

This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of taking in the Ring of Fire 29: Aftershock mixed martial arts fighting event at the Broomfield Events Center. As I mentioned before, this followed after taking my company founder (I'm not supposed to treat him like "the boss"...) out to roller derby last month. As it turns out, his wife is friends with the wife of the local fighter who was the main event of the night. This fact would turn out add both interest and stress to the night for her. I don't have the wherewithal to run down all of my observations from the night, but the fights leading up to the two big fights were enjoyable. The results are available for those who care. A few highlights:

  • There was one premature stoppage. Dude got clocked but was defending himself "intelligently" by the time he landed on his back.
  • One of the referees looked like The Wife's brother in a couple decades. No worries, he was a handsome devil.
  • The crowd was... Wow. Now that I think about it, it should have been what I expected.

Which brings me to the two big fights of the night, both in the 205lb weight class.

First we had Big Mike Nickels the Denver-based tattoo shop owner who had a short stint on the Spike "reality" show, The Ultimate Fighter. He was fighting a guy named Carpaccio (yeah, that's what we thought) who is Army Airborne. Seven second knockout by Big Mike. Wow. Afterwards, they gave the mic to Carpaccio, who is a great guy, obviously. He apologized for not putting on a better show and then proceeded to tell us that he's shipping out to Iraq, like immediately and asked that "even if you don't support the war, please support your troops". This generated a lot of "Awww, bummer." and even more patriotic applause.

Then Nickels got on the mic... He started off well, letting us know that his next fight may be against Stefan Bonner in the UFC. Then he went completely off track. He was trying to say something nice about his opponent, but it came out as something like "I don't believe in murdering women and babies" at which point the ring announcer snatched the microphone and said "LET'S HEAR IT FOR OUR TROOPS!"

Odd.

Then of course, he got accosted by the two supposed Marines sitting in front of us. (I say "supposed" because they looked like overweight frat boys, not the type of Marine I know.) It was good drama, if you're into that sort of thing. I just hope Dana White doesn't pull the plug on his big fight because he decides he doesn't want any anti-war hippies in his league...

Then we had the main even, featuring the afore-mentioned friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, Eliot "Fire" Marshall. His opposition had such a classic "heel" entrance I had to laugh. Hailing from Las Vegas, Marcus Sursa came out strutting and posing and tossing autographed play money and photos into the crowd. Fantastic. Everyone hated him instantly. The fight itself was good. Marcus made a strong go at it at first, applying good pressure with his striking game, but he just couldn't hang with Eliot on the ground. Eliot finished him off with one of many chokes in the second round of what I would consider a fun fight. Eliot's wife and the boss's wife didn't seem to have a whole lot of fun, however.

Fighting sports might not be the best thing for family participation...

Updates & Stuff

First a floor update: After taking yesterday off completely thanks to the chill I caught on the motorbike and general laziness (it is a vacation, after all), I came out firing today. First, I scooted around on the subfloor removing the remaining staples from the carpet pad. After that bag o' fun, I scooted around on the subfloor some more, this time sanding the seams of the OSB to flatten them out enough for the mortar bed not to mind. After a bunch of sweeping and vacuuming and choking on the dust (I'm positively covered...), I finally got around to measuring out a standard centerline by centerline layout and giving it a bit of a dry fit test, as demonstrated below (see also: my Flickr set for this project): Office Slate Project: Testing the Layout SW Originally uploaded by Jake Sutton.

Car update: The mechanic tells me "there's definitely something wrong in the clutch area" of my Rodeo. So he's going to drop the tranny and see what's what. His initial guess (which covers a new clutch and clutch fork) is about $1400. Sadly, this is almost exactly the number I was expecting. Here's hoping it doesn't grow much.

One from teh intarweb: Seriously? People worry about this crap? Myself, I don't sign off personal emails at all. If it's someone I don't know that well or haven't been in touch with recently I might end with "- Jake". On rare occasions, I'll toss in a "Cheers" or "Ta". Work emails generally just get the hyphen-space-name treatment.

A *little* less Santorum in the Senate

So, it looks like the Blues (Have the parties always been denoted by the same colors, or is this a recent, TV-news-map-on-the-wall-influenced thing?) managed to waltz in to control both the House and Senate after voters told the nation, "Hey! These people suck! I'm voting against them!!" Is this a "national referendum" of some sort? Does it signal a major shift in the political landscape of the nation? Hardly.

As Steven Colbert so adeptly points out, the only thing this signals is a shift in who gets to blame whom for all of our problems. Even if the Dems actually wanted to "cut & run" (the Neo-Cons have great PR and marketing minds working for them, you have to admit) in Iraq, it's next to impossible. So, come 2008, who's going to be out there saying "Look at this effed up war we're in, people!" while pointing fingers? Likely both sides. We'll see who it actually makes it work for them, I guess.

I'd say the best news to come out of this election is the fact that "santorum" will soon be nothing more than a nasty slang word.

Unfortunately, my home state tacked up a big "No Queers Allowed" sign... It boggles me, but at least I did my part.

Monkey News Roundup

First, we'll compare and contrast the human/primate relations in India as depicted by two stories:

  1. Monkey throws brick, woman killed -- On the campus of a hospital, no less!
  2. Villagers pray for recovery of monkey -- Little guy fried himself on an electric transformer.

The monkey news in the US is much less... Um... Am I a bad person if I say "entertaining"? Anyway...

Former employee blames UC Davis officials in monkey deaths

Several weeks later, the heater at the Animal Resources Service building blew hot air into the animals' room, raising the temperature to about 115 degrees.

Yeah, that's just gross.

Quick Hits

Two Words:

Holy crap! (The Waxy article is SFW, but the links thereafter are not.) Don't be an idiot on the intarweb, kids. That's good advice for both the people who respond to "casual encounters" ads (never use real names, work emails, etc. dummies) and for those who would bait them -- This Jason Fortuny guy's just begging for a beating (at least).

Catch-22 for Immigrants

Is it better to struggle to make a living in a major metropolitan area with a lot of previously established ethnic diversity, or to try to make a homestead in more easily affordable small communities where the population is more homogenous and potentially ignorant? It's a quandary illustrated by the case of a white guy in Maine rolling a frozen pig's head through a Somali mosque.

While they admit the act was the work of one man, it has heightened simmering tensions in this overwhelmingly white, working-class city of 35,000, where Somali refugees started flocking about five years ago, after first settling in more urban areas of the United States. Many said they came here because housing was inexpensive and Lewiston seemed a safe place to raise their families.

OK, so this incident was just a dumbass who is racist by default because he doesn't know any better playing a "joke" on the dark-skinned people that just happened to turn out to have the worst possible consequences for all concerned. Can we say the same for the open letter the then-Mayor of the town wrote in 2002?

Hussein Ahmed, 31, said the mosque incident came as Somalis here felt that they had finally started to move on from a 2002 open letter written by Laurier Raymond, then the mayor, which asked them to stop other Somalis from coming to the city. Mr. Raymond contended in his letter that the city was “maxed-out financially, physically and emotionally.�

Overall, though, it seems like the people of Lewiston, ME are good and accepting people. It's good to see.

Homerun by Schneier!

Bruce Schneier: What the Terrorists Want

I'd like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.

What a ridiculously good post!

WTF, MySpace?!

For the past week or so, MySpace has been flakier than your pain pill-addicted cousin. They blamed a power outage in LA, but the errors I saw didn't really jibe with that excuse. Anyway, after the weekend it was mostly back up. Until now... Now When I log in, I get this message:

Invalid Friend ID. This user has either cancelled their membership, or their account has been deleted.

Holy crap! They've flat-out lost accounts?! What the hell is going on over there? Hardly the kind of behavior I'd expect from the #1 site in the country. (Hmm... I wonder if they got all those extra hits because people were refreshing error pages hoping to finally get logged in...)

Hypersensitive Much?

I have some friends who are of Irish descent, and I come from mostly Scottish roots myself. I seldom pass up a chance to rag on the English for historical misdeeds perpetrated on my Celtic ancestors. That said, though, I have to call bullshit on all the uproar caused by Ben & Jerry's naming a flavor "Black & Tan". They were just copying the name of a drink, ferchristsakes. And don't give me the "half & half" nonesense. For one thing, it's a different drink, and more to the point, most people wouldn't recognize that name as readily as they would "black & tan".

Yes, the Black & Tans of the 1920's were right bastards, but you know what? It's time to let go. Besides, before it was a drink and before it was a nickname for the Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force, a "black & tan" was a dog.

Whoa! Whoa! WHOA!!!

Monkey menace? Simply cook and eat them!

Fed up by an army of monkeys that has made life miserable in rural Uganda, a minister has come out with a simple solution: eat the animal!

Junior Agriculture Minister Israel Kibirige Sebunnya has warned that crops would be wiped out if the problem was not addressed. And he has suggested a novel solution to the problem.

'I wish we could adopt the habit of eating monkeys like they do in West Africa,' junior Agriculture Minister Israel Kibirige Sebunnya said here.

Haven't we already established that monkeys are far to similar to us biologically to be consumed? I mean, seriously... How does this seem like a good idea to anyone?

The AB in the OC

Monster's Ball: Feds, Aryan Brotherhood come to paint the OC courthouse white

Based on claims by prosecutor Emmick and Smith, the AB—though much smaller than the Dirty White Boys, Nazi Low Riders, Mexican Mafia and Black Guerrilla Family—is the elite prison-based criminal organization in America. The Brotherhood recruited people who were fiercely loyal and street-smart; more than anything they were “psychopaths,� according to Smith, not excluding himself from that category.

An interesting peak through the window at the Aryan Brotherhood (You all know how fascinated I am with hate groups and gangs...). Purely coincidentally, I watched American History X last weekend while The Wife was away at work. Effing fantastic, that movie.

Also note, this OC Weekly site always seems to have some good stuff. I think I need to add it to the regular rotation.

The Devil's in the Details

Fears for 'dazed' George That's erstwhile pop star George Michael (aka Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou), who was found in an interesting state:

The 42-year-old singer was arrested after police allegedly found cannabis and GHB - a Class C drug known as liquid ecstasy - in the vehicle.

Sex toys and masks were also found in the boot, according to reports in The Sun.

The paper quoted a witness as saying: "George was completely out of it - he was all over the place. He was found with his head slumped against the wheel. No one could rouse him. He was virtually unconscious. When the police came he could hardly speak."

The former Wham! star was arrested on suspicion of being unfit to drive, but after being taken to a police station and examined by a doctor he was "de-arrested".

So... um... in spite of finding an assortment of drugs in the car with him, he was only arrested for maybe being unfit to drive an auto? Really? And then a doctor's examination reversed that arrest? Really?

Huh. (And yeah, nevermind that junk in the trunk, yo.)