Archives for 2011

Today is the last day of 2011. At least according to this version of the calendar. According to the lunar calendar used by Jews and others 2011 ended about a thousand years before Christ was born. And according to the Julian calendar we may or may not be ending 2011 but we certainly will, possibly – depending on what part of Africa you currently live in, need to deal with crop planting in two weeks. Don’t even get me started on the Babylonian calendar … those wacky garden freaks. Let’s be honest, the common Gregorian calendar has as much to do with political intrigue, occasional science and a dollop of religion as it has to do with anything resembling our planet’s rotation around the sun. The fact that the originators retrofitted events to the new, and essentially arbitrary, dates just makes history more fun. Still, they did manage to finally deal with leap years and other stuff that had vexed previous calendar makers so it’s probably as good a calendar as we’re going to get.

All of this, oddly enough, brings us to the point of today’s blog. Yesterday I did my end of the year wrap up on WBIG 1280 AM with Ryan Gatenby and we ended up talking about some disturbing trends. While our current calendar is, despite all the intrigue that went into making it, scientifically correct, the same cannot be said about many of its modern adherents. Many people are falling prey to pseudoscientists, frauds and mountebanks.

I’ll start with the obvious one – since I was given the chance to endure a previously eliminated disease thanks to an idiot neighbor – people who refuse to vaccinate their children. For the record, there is a scientific term for these people, they are known as morons.

Skepdic.com has a lengthy, but great, article refuting the anti-immunization idiots point by point. I’ll share the most obvious one with you here.

do vaccines weaken the immune system?

Finally, some people think that the immune systems of children are being weakened by vaccines, making them vulnerable to illnesses later on in life. Quackwatch calls this misconception #7. For example, some think that their child’s asthma or respiratory problems may be due to “vaccine overload” on their immature immune systems.

In fact babies have an ability, right from birth, to cope with lots of different germs. The body is constantly surrounded by germs and has to react to them in different ways. The advantage of being immunized rather than catching the disease is that the vaccine uses only part of the germ, or, if the whole germ, it is either killed or toned down (“attenuated”). In this way, the challenge to the immune system is less than that from the disease, but it is enough to produce protection.

In 2002, the Immunization Safety Review Committee of the American Institute of Medicine made a detailed examination of all the evidence about the effects of multiple immunizations on a baby’s immune system. They concluded that there was no evidence to support the suggestion that multiple immunizations overwhelm the immune system. They strongly supported the continuing use of vaccines against multiple diseases….

If immunizations are delayed, a baby will remain unprotected for longer than necessary. This could be particularly dangerous for whooping cough and Hib. Very young babies, if they catch whooping cough, are likely to be much more seriously ill than older children and are more likely to need hospital care. Babies under a year old are more likely to catch Hib than older children Studies have shown that when the vaccines are given at the younger age, babies have fewer reactions such as fever, sore injection sites etc, while at the same time they are still protected.*

There have been many well-designed studies that have examined claims that vaccines cause chronic diseases such as asthma, multiple sclerosis, chronic arthritis, sudden infant death syndrome, and diabetes. The studies have not found compelling evidence for any such links.* That has not stopped some anti-vaccinationists from speculating that some children are “especially sensitive” to vaccines and that scientific control studies can’t be refined enough to validate this claim.

That last sentence pretty much defines the logic behind pseudoscience. Since they can’t prove their claims they assert that technology or knowledge hasn’t caught up with them. Or that someone is withholding something from them.

Science doesn’t work that way. I won’t bore you with links but I’ve already written about numerous instances of scientists sitting patiently through presentations hoping, praying if you will, for the presenter to have a valid point. There is absolutely no proof that any vaccine causes autism, yet parents cling to that horrid belief like it’s a life preserver in a turbulent ocean. The fact that autism existed before any vaccines were discovered means nothing to them. The fact that effect does not equal cause is lost on them. The fact that there has never been a single case proved to justify making their children susceptible to serious diseases only proves to them that science is hiding something from them.

As I noted above, these people are morons.

The fact that I suffered through freaking whooping cough when I shouldn’t have means nothing to them. Although I did get an apology. Still their kid looks like death. And, unless they get him his shots, my guess is he won’t make it to seven.

But it isn’t just the anti-immunization crowd that refutes logic. There is a growing number of people who are making Isaac Asimov’s famous quote – Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’ – seem hopeful by comparison.

Ignorance, I can forgive. No one, not even the well trained staff here at the World News Center, knows everything. What I can’t forgive is willful ignorance. When the knowledge is there and has been vetted, often by centuries of research (see vaccines as example A), and people choose to not only ignore, but rabidly avoid, the truth then the world has a problem.

Quackwatch has a great article about how to tell science from pseudoscience. I’m just going to share a small part of it. I strongly suggest you read it and bookmark it in case you are confronted by an idiot.

Pseudoscience argues from alleged exceptions, errors, anomalies, strange events, and suspect claims—rather than from well-established regularities of nature.
The experience of scientists over the past 400 years is that claims and reports that describe well-understood objects behaving in strange and incomprehensible ways tend to reduce upon investigation to deliberate frauds, honest mistakes, garbled accounts, misinterpretations, outright fabrications, and stupid blunders. It is not wise to accept such reports at face value, without checking them. Pseudoscientists always take such reports as literally true, without independent verification.

Pseudoscience appeals to false authority, to emotion, sentiment, or distrust of established fact.
A high-school dropout is accepted as an expert on archaeology, though he has never made any study of it! A psychoanalyst is accepted as an expert on all of human history, not to mention physics, astronomy, and mythology, even though his claims are inconsistent with everything known in all four fields. A movie star swears it’s true, so it must be. A physicist says a “psychic” couldn’t possibly have fooled him with simple magic tricks, although the physicist knows nothing about magic and sleight of hand. Emotional appeals are common. (“If it makes you feel good, it must be true.” “In your heart you know it’s right.”) Pseudoscientists are fond of imaginary conspiracies. (“There’s plenty of evidence for flying saucers, but the government keeps it secret.”) And they argue from irrelevancies: When confronted by inconvenient facts, they simply reply, “Scientists don’t know everything!”

Pseudoscience makes extraordinary claims and advances fantastic theories that contradict what is known about nature.
They not only provide no evidence that their claims are true. They also ignore all findings that contradict their conclusions. (“Flying saucers have to come from somewhere—so the earth is hollow, and they come from inside.” “This electric spark I’m making with this electrical apparatus is actually not a spark at all, but rather a supernatural manifestation of psycho-spiritual energy.” “Every human is surrounded by an impalpable aura of electromagnetic energy, the auric egg of the ancient Hindu seers, which mirrors the human’s every mood and condition.”)

Pseudoscientists invent their own vocabulary in which many terms lack precise or unambiguous definitions, and some have no definition at all.
Listeners are often forced to interpret the statements according to their own preconceptions. What, for for example, is “biocosmic energy?” Or a “psychotronic amplification system?” Pseudoscientists often attempt to imitate the jargon of scientific and technical fields by spouting gibberish that sounds scientific and technical. Quack “healers” would be lost without the term “energy,” but their use of the term has nothing whatsoever to do with the concept of energy used by physicists.

Pseudoscience appeals to the truth-criteria of scientific methodology while simultaneously denying their validity.
Thus, a procedurally invalid experiment which seems to show that astrology works is advanced as “proof” that astrology is correct, while thousands of procedurally sound experiments that show it does not work are ignored. The fact that someone got away with simple magic tricks in one scientific lab is “proof” that he is a psychic superman, while the fact that he was caught cheating in several other labs is ignored.

Pseudoscience claims that the phenomena it studies are “jealous.”
The phenomena appear only under certain vaguely specified but vital conditions (such as when no doubters or skeptics are present; when no experts are present; when nobody is watching; when the “vibes” are right; or only once in human history.) Science holds that genuine phenomena must be capable of study by anyone with the proper equipment and that all procedurally valid studies must give consistent results. No genuine phenomenon is “jealous” in this way. There is no way to construct a TV set or a radio that will function only when no skeptics are present! A man who claims to be a concert-class violinist, but does not appear to have ever owned a violin and who refuses to play when anyone is around who might hear him, is most likely lying about his ability to play the violin.

Pseudoscientific “explanations” tend to be by scenario.
That is, we are told a story, but nothing else; we have no description of any possible physical process. For instance, Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) claimed that another planet passing near the earth caused the earth’s spin axis to flip upside down. This is all he said. He gave no mechanisms. But the mechanism is all-important, because the laws of physics rule out the process as impossible. That is, the approach of another planet cannot cause a planet’s spin axis to flip. If Velikovsky had discovered some way that a planet could flip another’s spin axis, he would presumably have described the mechanism by which it can happen. The bald statement itself, without the underlying mechanism, conveys no information at all. Velikovsky said that Venus was once a comet, and this comet was spewed out of a volcano on Jupiter. Since planets do not resemble comets (which are rock/ice snowball-like debris with connection whatsoever to volcanoes) and since Jupiter is not known to have volcanoes anyway (or even a solid surface!), no actual physical process could underlie Velikovsky’s assertions. He gave us words, related to one another within a sentence, but the relationships were alien to the universe we actually live in, and he gave no explanation for how these could exist. He provided stories, not genuine theories.

Pseudoscientists often appeal to the ancient human habit of magical thinking.
Magic, sorcery, witchcraft—these are based on spurious similarity, false analogy, false cause-and-effect connections, etc. That is, inexplicable influences and connections between things are assumed from the beginning—not found by investigation. (If you step on a crack in the sidewalk without saying a magic word, your mother will crack a bone in her body; eating heart-shaped leaves is good for heart ailments; shining red light on the body increases blood production; rams are aggressive so someone born in the sign of the ram is aggressive; fish are “brain food” because the meat of the fish resembles brain tissue, etc.)

Things get even more confusing when celebrities, often with the best of intentions, spout complete bull …. stuff. Simon Cowell was the latest, with his B-12 cocktail crap, but he is far from alone. And because he’s famous people assume he knows what the heck he’s talking about. They are just as wrong as he is but that doesn’t slow the process down in the slightest.

What kills me when celebrities spew this crud is that they have the resources to know better. A simple phone call can get them in touch with the CDC, who would be thrilled to have someone famous actually spread the truth about science, and many other agencies. There is no excuse for their stupidity other than laziness.

The belief in stupid, and un-provable, phenomena has gotten so bad that Wikipedia, not always the first bastion of truth and logic, has gathered up all the pseudoscience related topics and stuffed them on one page. There are almost a hundred of those suckers to weed through.

Of course it doesn’t help matters that Twitter, which requires you to limit your thoughts to 140 characters or less (including spaces), may be too complex for many. That is the only explanation for a list of pre-written Tweets.

On the other hand, you can have a lot of fun with idiots. Tell them that the world is being polluted, daily, by massive spills of Dihydrogen Monoxide.

Dihydrogen Monoxide (H2O) is also known as water.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH9A6tn_P6g&w=560&h=315]

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!

We rocked into 2011 surrounded by idiots and Floridians. We leave 2011 in the dust with much the same crowd. In fact I can’t remember a year where there has been so much bad science. Oh, sure, you’d get the occasional “this bracelet cures arthritis” or something like that. But recent years have given way to pseudo-science and outright fraud at an alarming rate. From the anti-immunization insanity – thanks for helping people catch previously wiped out diseases you morons – to the flat out fraud of anti-evolution crowd, people seem more willing than ever to put even the most obvious evidence to the curb so they can snuggle up with fallacies. Alan Boyle, a science editor at MSNBC, tries to have some fun with it – and succeeds for the most part – but it is a depressing year in review for him. How do you stop people from believing that the Mayan 2012 predictions are true when “scientists” (usually unnamed or unaccredited) say it’s true? Anyway, if you click his link he’s got a list of 30 “scientific” stories for your enjoyment.

I’m going to hop off my hobbyhorse and get back to finding stuff that makes people laugh or wince. Sometimes, on the really good stuff, both.

In Miami, of course it’s Miami, the prison system is plagued by strippers posing as paralegals.

The Miami Federal Detention Center is reportedly plagued by women posing as paralegals who instead strip for incarcerated drug lords, according to several people interviewed by the Miami New-Times.

The Riptide blog of the New-Times reports that lawyers representing drug lords help the strippers gain access to the prison by having them pose as “legal assistants.”

From the report:

Among the offenses allegedly committed by so-called paralegals: smuggling in a Playboy, feeding alcohol to an inmate by slipping a straw through a grate, and sneaking in $3,000 inside a purse.

“They take off their tops and let the guys touch them,” said defense attorney Hugo Rodriguez. “The majority of these young, very attractive women are noncitizens brought in exclusively for the purposes of visiting the FDC. Any lawyer can sign a form and designate a legal assistant. There is no way of verifying it. The process is being abused.”

“If you want some good people-watching, try the FDC,” said attorney Marc Seitles. “It certainly beats paying a cover and waiting on lines to get into [Miami night club] LIV.”

Before you ask, all you need is a note from a lawyer saying your a legal assistant and you qualify. Funny side note, real female lawyers are required to wear bras with no metal parts when they enter a prison. The strippers cum paralegals have no such restrictions.

Don’t ask me, it’s Florida and that’s how they roll.

In other topless news, courts in Montreal have forced waitresses to wear tops and are bankrupting their business.

It’s the end of an era for a topless landmark in the Montreal borough of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.

Waitresses at Restaurant Les Princesses d’Hochelaga have been serving eggs and pancakes to patrons nude from the waist up for 11 years.

The restaurant doesn’t have a permit to exhibit eroticism and can’t obtain one because of where it is located, near the Olympic Stadium.

After a series of legal battles with the City of Montreal over the past seven years, the restaurant owner has agreed to have the servers cover up.

Kim Menard, who has worked at the restaurant for two years, said the waitresses now wear jackets or minidresses.

“The business was much better before because you had a lot of people from United States [and] Ontario [who saw] on the internet we had nude girls,” she said, noting that the tourist business has dropped off.

She said she’s lost about half her tips since the restaurant made the change a few months ago.

Court ruling

According to the 2010 Quebec Superior Court ruling, the original offence that launched the court battle happened in October 2005, when an inspector found the restaurant offered table service, “by topless waitresses that had a small, transparent scarf around the waist leaving their genitals in full view.”

Televisions in the restaurant were also showing pornographic films.

The restaurant’s owners argued that the main purpose of the business was a restaurant and the erotic element was secondary, so they should be permitted to operate outside the city’s prescribed zone.

They also argued they should be grandfathered based on the previous restaurant that operated in the space.

After an acquittal by a municipal court judge, Superior Court found the restaurant was breaking the bylaw by allowing its staff to serve topless. It also ruled there was no evidence to show the previous restaurant permitted topless serving staff.

There are several similar restaurants on the island of Montreal that may also be illegal, according to city zoning laws.

Liquor licence reinstated

The restaurant lost its liquor licence in 2008 and only recently regained it.

Borough of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve Mayor Réal Ménard declined to comment. A city spokesperson said no one was available for comment on Wednesday.

You know what else is near Olympic Stadium in Montreal? Freaking nothing. It may as well be the moon. The only people who go there are tourists. Specifically American tourists on their way to Montreal’s finest strip clubs. There is no other reason to be anywhere near that section of the city.

That judge is an idiot.

Oh, and the food really is pretty good.

Let’s head back to Florida to meet a woman who gives idiots a bad name. Naples police took several hours to stop laughing after this arrest.

A San Carlos Park woman is facing a DUI charge after authorities say she pulled up next to the Lee County sheriff’s deputies who were in the process of arresting an acquaintance of hers.

Deputies say they were responding to a vehicle burglary in progress around 4 a.m. Sunday, in which the suspect got into an altercation with the vehicle owner, according to an arrest report. They were interviewing witnesses when a woman pulled up in a red Chevy Blazer.

Deputies approached the vehicle and spoke with Courtney Sha Greene, 21, of the 9100 block of Aster Road. She inquired about the person they apprehended. She asked for him by name. When they responded it was in fact the person she was asking about, deputies say she did not seem surprised by their response.

Deputies noticed a strong odor of alcohol emanating from Greene’s mouth, reports said. Her speech was slurred and her eyes bloodshot. It took her about two minutes to remove her ID from her purse, reports said.

Greene failed field sobriety tests and almost fell during one of them.

Yes kids, stopping the cops in the middle of an arrest while you’re drunk isn’t really as good an idea as it may have sounded. I just thought you should know.

Anyway Naples is rapidly becoming the party capitol of the world for idiots. 39 year old Dennis Greig was arrested for beating his step son.

He beat his step son because the boy was eating peanut butter.

No, I am not making this up.

A dispute over a tasty treat led to the arrest of a Golden Gate man who is accused of attacking his step-son.

Collier County deputies say an altercation began when 39-year-old Dennis Greig told his stepson he couldn’t eat a peanut butter ball.

Greig, who resides at the 4200 block of 22nd Avenue Southwest, was arrested Monday at home.

According to a sheriff’s office report, when Greig’s 16-year-old stepson went down stairs for a snack he was told that he was not allowed to because his mother wasn’t home and Greig told him he was king of the house.

Greig’s stepson told deputies that he ignored his step-father’s comment and grabbed a peanut butter ball from the refrigerator anyway and headed upstairs to his room.

But Greig followed him up to his room, grabbed him and then pushed him on to his bed, according to reports.

Greig’s stepson told deputies he tried to defend himself but was then thrown into a wall, causing him to have bruising and swelling to his forehead.

Deputies said Greig was intoxicated during the incident.

Greig faces a charge of domestic violence.

I’m sure he was a wonderful catch for that kid’s mom. And I’m sure that kid will be living in a different state in two years or less.

But not all the idiots in Florida are in Naples. No sirreee doggie, some of them live in Tampa. Police there arrested a man who came up with a unique way to keep his girlfriend out of his home.

He burned it to the ground.

He stood outside, covered in soot, watching the MacDill Avenue home burn on Dec. 14, according to police.

On Tuesday, Kent Perusse posed for his booking photo at the Hillsborough County Jail.

Tampa police said Perusse, 48, told officers at the fire that “I did it.” He explained he didn’t want a woman he was involved with to move into 5703 S MacDill Ave. so he set it on fire. Investigators found the single-story, wood frame house had been doused with an accelerant.

He also told officers his dog, a female pit bull, was still inside the burning house. It died.

Perusse was taken to Tampa General Hospital, where he remained for two weeks being treated for smoke inhalation and third-degree burns to his calves.

He was charged with first-degree arson and animal cruelty. The self-employed lawn service owner, according to jail records, was being held on $55,000 bail.

The house, which was Perusse was renting, was a total loss estimated at $72,804 in damages.

Now, me? I’d just break up with her. But, I don’t live in Florida so I can’t think like him.

If “think” could be considered a valid term. I’m not entirely convinced it is.

Of course, no matter how bad things look, there’s always someone who’s got it worse. But I’m going to be hard pressed to top this guy. He’s being sued for not caring for his body parts after he was killed.

Dead men tell no tales — but they can be sued.

A state appeals court ruled that a dead man can be held responsible for the injuries his body parts caused after he was struck by a train.

The Chicago Tribune reports that the court found it was “reasonably foreseeable” that the Amtrak train would kill 18-year-old Hiroyuki Joho, sending his body parts flying.

In 2008, Joho was killed while running to catch a train in the pouring rain, the Tribune reports. His estate is being sued by Gayane Zokhrabov, whose leg and wrist were broken after the collision.

Zokhrabov’s lawyer, Leslie Rosen, argued that the case should be treated like a regular negligence case, “no different than if a train passenger had been injured after the engineer hit the brakes,” according to the Tribune.

Gawker writes that the ruling should serve as a warning to people who are killed in train crashes.

“If you die in a horrific train accident, be sure to aim your severed body away from any bystanders,” writes Adrian Chen.

Complex blogger Tanya Ghahremani writes that the court’s ruling offers proof that “not even death can prevent the system from biting you in the ass.”

Joho isn’t the only dead person to be sued for causing injury. In 2010 the New York Post reported that a cop involved in the fatal shooting of Sean Bell filed a lawsuit against his estate claiming that Bell injured him with his car.

Let’s start with the NY lawsuit first. The cop that’s suing in the one who killed the guy and caused him to lose control of is car. I have no idea how that’s still in court, but it is.

Now, as to the unfortunate Mr. Joho, I’m not sure why they wouldn’t sue AMTRACK instead. After all, they’re still here and Mr. Joho’s body parts wouldn’t have been anywhere other than attached to his person had the train not splattered him all over the parking lot.

I’ll grant that Mr. Joho showed a serious lapse of judgement since trains a very big things that kill people all the time and shouldn’t be messed with. But, still, isn’t dying enough of a punishment for his mistake?

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHkirYZd1Aw&w=500&h=319]

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, Friday morning around 9:10 for his version of a New Year’s special!

Lots of things seem like good ideas at the time. I’m sure 20% of marriages could be chalked up to “Why not Smootchie-Poo? There’s a chapel in Vegas.” The same reason hospitals now post signs in maternity wards reminding people that carnal relations, at this point of events, are a bad idea. Why? Because someone said “Hey honey, my water jes broke, wanna get one more time in afore they wheel me away?” I’ve already regaled readers with my own attempts at creative suicide when I tried to pretend I was Evel Knieval and when I tried to build my own mortar launcher. Yes, I was a kid and, yes, they seemed like great ideas at the time. And, yes, I’m living proof that God looks out for fools and for children. I think I got bonus points for being both.

So, I feel secure admitting that I can sympathize with these folks.

Let’s start, where all sad things start, in Florida where a nice lady scored a date with a younger man and they went to the movies, Because, as we all know, movie dates are a time honored success.

A Florida man who got up in the middle of his movie, telling his date he had to get something out of her car, wound up stealing the auto, aaccording to police.

Michael Pratt, 27, was at a cinema in Tampa with his 35-year-old date when he told the woman he needed to get something from the car, according to the St. Petersburg Times. She gave him her keys and that was the last she saw of him or her 2012 Ford Focus, which happened to be a rental.

When she called him, Pratt just laughed and said he had stolen her car, according to authorities.

Pratt, who has been arrested and now faces grand theft charges, ignored his victim’s calls for the next two days, prompting her to call police. Pratt finally did call her four days after the date to say he left the car in a Walmart parking lot in New Port Richey, authorities said. Deputies found it and arrested Pratt.

According to the Times, Pratt previously served more than a year in prison for the same charge, as well as fraud, uttering forged bills and failing to return rental property.

Wait, seriously? It took her two days to figure out that calling the cops might be a good idea? The addition of a Walmart to this story is just a bonus. And this guy, our winner of the week, this is his idea of a career? Please don’t let him procreate.

Pretty please!

Another good idea is bra ads. I am a big fan. I have even been inspired to buy a few, for that special someone, at certain points in my life. You can’t screw up a bra ad. Well, that’s what I thought. The Dutch – yes, those wooden shoes, windmills, tulips and apartheid fans – have screwed this up for everyone.

A Dutch department store has hired a man to model its push-up bras.

Six-foot-two Andrej Pejic is shown in the ads for Hema’s Mega Push-Up Bra sporting an ample bosom under V-neck dresses. According to an observation he tweeted, the gig surprises even him.

“Did I ever think I had enough booty to advertise a push-up bra? No. but am I working it or what??,” the 20-year-old model tweeted.

“It’s revolutionary… I’ve never known a man to do a women’s lingerie campaign before,” his agent, Joseph Tenni, told Frockwriter.

Pejic, who was born in Yugoslavia but moved with his family to Australia when he was eight, is known for an androgynous look that allows him to model as a woman or a man. In a fashion (show) in Paris earlier this year, he walked the runway as a woman for Jean-Paul Gaultier and as a man for Marc Jacobs. He has not had a sex change, though.

Pejic told the British magazine Grazia he follows a punishing diet in order to keep his girlish figure.

“Let’s be honest,” he said. “You can’t eat much if you want to do this.”

No, no, no. There are some things that are sacred. Bra ads are two of them. Hopefully this maniac will be stopped before he does something very bad to thong ads.

Oh well, another good idea is a night out with the old gang playing a little roulette. Sure the odds are horrible but it’s fun and you can make small bets for several hours, so it’s a good way to enjoy the evening. Well, it was until some freakish whack-job decided to make roulette balls out of Michael Jackson’s hair.

No, I am not making this up.

A gambling website is betting that Michael Jackson’s hair will make a worthy roulette ball.

OnlinegamblingPal.com bought up a chunk of it for $10,871 and explained their transformative plans for the hair with a pun as shameful as their purchase. “Together, we can ensure Michael Jackson continues to rock and ‘ROLL’ forever,” a statement on the website said.

More creepy than the idea of a gambling site converting a dead man’s hair into game paraphernalia, is that the sellers collected the hair sample from the Carlyle Hotel in New York after the pop icon stayed there, Rolling Stone reported.

“The ball itself will be made to the highest professional standards, ensuring it will be eligible for use at any licensed casino’s roulette table,” OnlineGamblingPal’s statement said. “Indeed, considering Jackson dedicated his life to entertaining millions, the prospect of this very special ball captivating crowds at roulette tables seems like a fitting use for it.”

Michael would not have approved. Gamblers need to be 18 and older. They’re not his crowd.

Moving on.

Another good idea is strip clubs. Also helping children. And because Chicago is the greatest city on the planet, we have managed to put them together. Sandra Torres, the reporter – not the stripper, has the whole wonderful story.

A Chicago strip club is once again hosting its holiday toy drive with a naughty-and-nice twist.

For the second year in a row, the Admiral Theatre on Lawrence Avenue is offering a lap dance in exchange for an unused, unwrapped toy.

The “Lap Dances for the Needy” event goes until Saturday, Dec. 16.

Dances are limited to one per customer.

Last year, the club collected five carloads of toys and donated them to churches around the Albany Park neighborhood.

Does it bother you that I really do know a stripper who goes by the name Sandra Torres? I didn’t think so. You know me too well.

Anyway, this is a good idea surrounded by more good ideas. Which is exactly the kind of thing good ideas are supposed to be.

Make sure top make your reservations early for next year. And, just to be safe, get in for a couple of practice lap dances before you aim high for the holidays.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyANvfHo7hM&w=480&h=360]

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, Friday morning around 9:10
for his version of a New Year’s special!

First off, a moment of silence. Hollywood lost one of its greats today. Cheetah, the true star of many 1930’s Tarzan movies as passed away at the tender age of 80. For those of you considering a simian companion, I feel I should point out that most of you won’t even sniff 80, let alone live that long. So, you might want to go the puppy route instead. Or kitty. Kitties are nice too.

Okay, before we get to our big story of stupidity today, I want to look at one that’s been getting lots of Twitter play and so on. As you know, if it’s on Twitter it must be important. That’s where I found out that Chad Ochocinco has good taste in men’s foot wear.

Anyway, the nice people at MSNBC have the complete story of a line of profanity laden dolls.

They play. They giggle. But, then, say some angry consumers, the You and Me Play and Giggle Triplet dolls say “OK, crazy b****.”

The adorable-looking dolls, clad in their pajamas with matching nightcaps, make babbling sounds and move their heads and are made exclusively for the Toys “R” Us brand, reported NBCPhiladelphia.com on Monday. The store defended the product and said what customers claim they are hearing is a misunderstanding.

“Obviously we would not sell a doll that uses profanity. What you’re hearing is just baby babble…There are no plans to pull it off the shelves,” Toys “R” Us spokeswoman Jennifer Albano told the NBC Philadelphia’s Lu Ann Cahn.

But others disagreed. An Oaklyn, N.J., grandmother, Pauline Davis, had bought the Giggle Triplets as a last-minute gift on Christmas Eve and was appalled when she got home to test out the dolls before giving them to her grandchildren, the website reported.

“I’m stunned … There’s no mistake about it. The baby does use the B-word that ends in H,” Davis said.

Davis called up the Cherry Hill, N.J. store where she bought the dolls. The store apologized to her, Davis told NBC Philadelphia.

“They were appalled,” Davis said. “But it still doesn’t change things. Who released this doll?”

NBC Philadelphia went to the Cherry Hill Toys “R” Us to test out the dolls and found them on sale, all saying the same thing. Toys “R” Us maintained the toy wasn’t using profanity, and said they had no plans to take it off shelves.

I would imagine it can’t be that hard to distinguish between “ga ga goo goo” and “OK, crazy b****.” For the record, when I listened to the doll online, I clearly heard the “crazy b***h” part, but the “Okay” was kind of lost.

Yep, that was funny and stupid.

Now let’s move on to scary freaking morons. Reuters is reporting that there are people who think they get sore throats from dirty colons – no, I don’t want to think about how – and others who think the ocean became salty due to excess whale sperm.

Yes, these people are idiots. But, since they are famous, even stupider people believe them.

From whale sperm to colon cleansers to the shape of a woman’s foot when she has an orgasm, celebrities did not disappoint during 2011 with their penchant for peddling suspect science in the world’s media.

In its annual list of what it considers the year’s worst abuses against science, the Sense About Science (SAS) campaign named U.S. reality TV star Nicole Polizzi, Republican presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann and American singer-songwriter Suzi Quatro as top offenders, with their dubious views on why the sea is salty, the risks of cervical cancer vaccines and the colon.

“I used to get a lot of sore throats and then one of my sisters told me that all illnesses start in the colon. I started taking a daily colon cleanser powder mixed with fresh juice every morning and it made an enormous difference,” Quatro told the Daily Mail newspaper.

But SAS was keen to dispel such myths. It asked qualified scientists from various disciplines to comment on some of the worst celebrity science offences.

“The colon is very important in some diseases, but it certainly is not the cause of all illnesses,” said Melita Gordon, a consultant gastroenterologist said in the review.

“Sore throats do not come from your colon; they are caused by viruses that come in through your nose and mouth. Taking ‘colon cleansers’ has no beneficial effect on your throat – or on your colon.”

While the review is partly about entertainment, the campaign group stresses it also has a serious aim – to make sure pseudo-science is not allowed to become accepted as true.

After Bachmann used an appearance on a U.S. television show to tell a story of a woman from Tampa, Florida, who said her daughter had become “mentally retarded” after getting an HPV vaccine designed to protect against cervical cancer, doctors said they feared the damage done may take many years to reverse.

“It’s tempting to dismiss celebrity comments on science and health, but their views travel far and wide and, once uttered, a celebrity cancer prevention idea or environmental claim is hard to reverse,” said SAS’s managing director Tracey Brown.

“At a time when celebrities dominate the public realm, the pressure for sound science and evidence must keep pace.”

The review also highlighted a bizarre quote from U.S. TV personality Polizzi, who declared recently: “I don’t really like the beach. I hate sharks, and the water’s all whale sperm. That’s why the ocean’s salty.”

Simon Boxall, a marine expert and oceanographer dismissed Polizzi’s suggestion. “It would take a lot of whale sperm to make the sea that salty,” he said.

Some of the most intriguing pseudo-scientific suggestions came via repeated second hand information picked up at parties – never the most reliable source.

Christian Louboutin, a French footwear designer, was taken with something a fellow party guest told him about shoes.
“She said that what is sexual in a high heel is the arch of the foot, because it is exactly the position of a woman’s foot when she orgasms. So putting your foot in a heel, you are putting yourself in a possibly orgasmic situation,” he explained.

Kevan Wylie, a consultant in sexual medicine, responded drily that it’s important to differentiate cause from effect.
“A woman’s foot may be in this position during orgasm, but that does not mean that putting her foot into this position under other circumstances will result in orgasm,” he said.

To recap:

(1) There aren’t enough whales on the planet to spooge an ocean salty. Not even a hundred times their number could accomplish it.

(2) While the throat does lead to the colon, the trip is one way only. If something goes so far up your butt that it comes out your throat, you’re dead, not ill.

(3) If women could orgasm just by bending their foot men would never see them again.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2up7su7CeMU&w=500&h=319]

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, Friday morning around 9:10
for his version of a New Year’s special!

Today’s a pretty good day to be me. Not that you’d want to do that, your family would have you committed, but if you were used to the rigors of living my life then today would not be a bad day in the great pantheon of days. Thanks to the Divine Ms. Freak I got the Christmas present I really wanted. Some would say sorely needed. Plus I scored a new gig for the new year and got to eat Chinese. Not a bad way to start a week if I do say so myself. In fact it was much better than some of the alternatives we’re going to look at here today. We’ll start in Florida, naturally, where a man was shot while robbing a home. What makes this story so Florida-like is that he was shot by his co-burglar and not the homeowner. The homeowner just added insult to injury by beating him with a bat until the cops arrived to take the poor sap to the safety of jail. After a stop at the local hospital to retrieve the bullet, of course.

Not to be outdone, a man in Connecticut shot himself while peeing. This incredibly difficult task was accomplished by dropping a loaded gun onto the edge of the toilet and having it discharge. Personally I think he should get a whole episode of Stupid Human Tricks dedicated to him. But, since he’s a convicted felon in possession of an illegal firearm, the cops just arrested him instead. After they finished laughing at him and getting him stitched up, that is.

Fortunately for humanity, not all idiots are armed. Some just reside on Facebook. Cops in Pittsburgh arrested one such moron after he posted pics of himself holding a bunch of stuff he’d just stolen. There was no word on whether or not they thanked him for making their job pathetically easy that day.

Of course, as regular readers know, danger can lurk in some very unexpected places. For example, numerous people were hospitalized in Chile when they tried a new recipe for Churros.

Chile’s Supreme Court has ordered a newspaper to pay $125,000 to 13 people who suffered burns while trying out a published recipe for churros, a popular Latin American snack of dough fried in hot oil.

The publisher of La Tercera must pay individual damages to 11 women and two men ranging from as little as $279 to $48,000 for one woman whose burns were particularly severe.

The high court’s ruling was announced Monday, seven years after the readers burned themselves while trying out the recipe.

Judges determined that the newspaper failed to fully test it before publication, and that if readers followed the recipe exactly, the churros had a good chance of exploding once the oil reached the suggested temperature. Grupo Copesa, which publishes the paper, said it will abide by the ruling.

Days after the recipe was published in the paper’s “Woman” magazine in 2004, hospitals around the country began treating women for burns suffered when the dough boiling in oil suddenly shot out of kitchen pots.

Seriously? Exploding food? How cool is that? Oh, wait, it wasn’t supposed to. Yeah, I guess I can see how that might be a problem.

But wait a minute there mister blogger person. What about aliens? You mentioned aliens.

Indeed I did.

As dedicated Hippo-ites know, I love debunking UFO stories. But it is a rare treasure to have some UFO enthusiasts do it for me. Huffington Post has a great story about how this all came about.

The quiet of a rural strip mall in Connecticut is suddenly interrupted by the appearance in the sky of a glowing blue-green disk. Shoppers stop in their tracks, staring at the unexplained craft moving up and down, back and forth.

But it’s all a hoax, a very clever ruse concocted by Marc Dantonio, the chief photo and video analyst for the Mutual UFO Network.

And he did it for a very specific reason for a National Geographic Channel special, called “The Truth Behind: UFOs,” airing this month.

“They wanted me to do some image analysis, and when they said they were looking for some dramatic videos to kick it up a notch, I suggested to them that I could create a functional UFO that we can actually fly,” Dantonio told The Huffington Post.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9sEXgag868&w=500&h=319]
Dantonio knows a thing or two about building sophisticated working models. His Connecticut-based company, FX Models, creates special effects for the History Channel and the Learning Channel, and has contracts with the U.S. Navy, Congress and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, D.C.

So Dantonio set up his UFO hoax at a mall in Winsted, Conn. To do it just right for the National Geographic cameras, he launched three separate nine-minute flights.

“They used several main cameras — one to gauge crowd reaction — but they wanted to film it in ways that didn’t look obtrusive,” he said.

“Our point was to illustrate that technology can cause confusion, and we succeeded. And after we flew it, we totally exposed the technology so people could see exactly what we did,” said Dantonio.

What he and his company created was a “quadcopter” with a 4-foot circumference and an X-shaped configuration that had motorized propellers at each end of the X (pictured at right). Several inches beyond the propellers was a big circle of lights.

“My mission was to try and build a vehicle that would be big enough to be seen from a great distance, but small enough such that I wouldn’t need exorbitant power requirements to get it up into the air,” Dantonio explained.

“We flew it out from a big field behind the mall and then shot it vertically up and maneuvered it around, [and then] dropped it down to a lower altitude and shut off the lights on it. Then we rocketed the thing up in the air about 800 feet and turned the lights back on.”

Numerous people said it looked like it vanished from one spot and reappeared in another — a typical UFO eyewitness account.

“We wanted to hit that UFO myth and show how it can be accomplished with technology,” Dantonio added.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZqoj3V107g&w=500&h=319]
The overall point of this little UFO charade was to help people report UFOs in a way that better separates the truly unknown aerial objects from those that are easily explained.

“With the number of people who have recorded UFOs with their cellphones, there’s a much higher likelihood they’re going to capture objects in the sky. But not all of these things are true unidentified flying objects,” said Dantonio.

“My main tenet of doing this production was to show how there’s existing technology that can fool you into thinking you’re seeing a real UFO,” he said. “The more people are educated, that’s the way we’re going to find a real UFO someday.”

No, this will accomplish nothing of the sort. It will just encourage kids with RC copters to freak the crap out of their idiot neighbors. Which is perfectly acceptable as far as I’m concerned.

It’ll give me more to write about.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTNQGs97YmA&w=500&h=319]

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, Friday morning around 9:10
for his version of a New Year’s special!

I didn’t know how much I missed depravity and idiocy until I spent a week writing about Christmas. Oh, sure, there’s a lot of violence and booze associated with the holiday, and that’s just the officially sanctioned stuff, but it wasn’t the same. Most of it was historical and I missed the immediacy of the real world. Not that sharing how Christmas caroling evolved from stoning your neighbors wasn’t fun, but it’s not like I could share a video or anything. And, really, is there a holiday story that can warm the heart like hearing about a guy who crashed a $380K sports car that he’d won earlier in the day? Sure it was lime green and from the Utah equivalent of a Quickie Mart, but, really, less than 6 hours after he picks it up he drives it into a tree? Memo to fellow Hippoers, just because a car CAN do 200 mph, does not mean it’s a good idea to do so on an icy road in the middle of bu fu nowhere.

Okay, you’re starting to get in the spirit of things. Let’s jump over to a lovely story about a man who took a dump in a bank parking lot just prior to robbing the bank.

A Connecticut man with a drug addiction and a spastic colon allegedly defecated in the parking lot of a New Milford bank before robbing the establishment. The man’s wife and kids were with him and sat in the getaway car, police said.

Russell Mace, 55, was arraigned in Bantam Superior Court Monday, charged with first-degree robbery, third-degree larceny and two counts of impairing the morals of a child. Judge Richard Marino set Mace’s bond at $100,000 and ordered him to appear in court again on Jan. 4.

Mace’s charges stem from a bizarre bank robbery that occurred on the afternoon of Dec. 16 at the Union Savings Bank on East Street in New Milford. While the robbery itself was par for the course, police said that Mace’s alleged activities prior to the heist were far from normal.

“It’s a first in my career,” New Milford Police Lt. Lawrence Ash told The Huffington Post.

Minutes before the robbery, a female witness saw Mace exiting a white Toyota Camry that was in the bank parking lot. Afterward, he squatted down and began “pooping,” the witness said according to the arrest affidavit.

“The customer told me that the man was going to the bathroom and [said] ‘he’s not doing what you think he’s doing,'” the teller told police. “The customer said he’s doing a number 2, and he’s not being discreet.”

After allegedly finishing the bowel movement, Mace, dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants, headed for the bank entrance.

“Before they had any time to react to what was occurring outside, the accused robber entered the bank and demanded money,” Ash said.

Mace, whom a male teller later described as “sweating” and “nervous,” allegedly put his hand in his pocket and said: “This is a robbery. Give me all your money. Don’t include any singles … and don’t do anything stupid.”

The pooping bandit was given more than $3,000 in cash. Money in hand, he exited the bank and got into his waiting getaway vehicle, where his wife and two children, ages 1 and 4, were waiting, police said.

It did not take long for investigators to come up with a suspect in the case.

“He was identified by bank surveillance images,” Ash said. “Some of our officers recognized him from prior contact.”

Yeah, his list of “prior contacts” would take too long to get into here. If you’re curious, just click on the link above and have fun. The police do note that Mr. Mace has a “nervous bowel.” Well, you’d be nervous too if the guy you were in kept standing in front of people with guns and trying to steal money.

Of course, no stupid criminal blog would be complete without a story from Florida. And this one’s a winner.

It has a bank robbery and beer. What more could you possibly want?

Authorities say a Tampa Bay area man ordered a beer at a bar, left to rob a nearby bank then came back to finish his beer.

The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office says 52-year-old John Robin Whittle was arrested at the Hayloft Bar in Port Richey on Thursday afternoon. Deputies say he’s the man who robbed a Wells Fargo & Co. bank branch earlier, but not before stopping off at the Hayloft for a brew.

A bartender there says Whittle ordered a beer, disappeared for about 30 minutes and then returned to his beer. Deputies say they arrested him at the bar about 10 minutes after he left the bank.

Whittle remained in jail early Friday on $10,000 bond.

Now that’s either the calmest person on the planet or the dumbest. The two, however, are not mutually exclusive.

Of course you’ve been suffering through a week of me trying to be cheerful. Yes, I know I failed miserably, especially with that whole Google is Racist holiday blog. I did find out that they have very funny lawyers. I haven’t laughed so hard in years.

Anyway, I couldn’t end without a couple of stories about the joys of air travel. First the, poorly trained and woefully over empowered, TSA brings a holiday smile to us all by confiscating a teacher’s cupcake that she’d gotten as a gift from her students.

A woman who just flew back home from Las Vegas says an airport security officer confiscated her frosted cupcake because he thought the icing on it could be a security risk.

Rebecca Hains said the Transportation Security Administration agent at McCarran International Airport took her cupcake Wednesday, telling her its frosting was enough like a gel to violate TSA restrictions on allowing liquids and gels onto flights to prevent them from being used as explosives. She said the agent told her the frosting was conforming to the jar it was inside.

“I just thought this was terrible logic,” Hains said Friday.

Hains, who lives in Peabody, just north of Boston, said the agent didn’t seem concerned that the cupcake could actually be explosive, just that it fit some bureaucratic definition about what was prohibited. She said he even offered to let her eat it away from the airport security area.

Hains, a 35-year-old communications professor at Salem State University, said she told the agent she had passed through security at Boston’s Logan International Airport earlier in the week with two cupcakes packaged in jars, gifts from a student. But she said the agent told her that just meant TSA in Boston didn’t do its job.

The TSA, which is entrusted with protecting the nation’s transportation system, was reviewing the situation, agency spokesman Nico Melendez said. Passengers are allowed to take cakes and cupcakes through checkpoints, he said.

Hains ultimately surrendered the cupcake. But she said the situation highlighted a lack of common sense by the agent and the ludicrousness of TSA policies.

“It’s not really about the cupcake; I can get another cupcake,” she said. “It’s about an encroachment on civil liberties. We’re just building up a resistance and tolerance to all these things they’re doing in the name of security, when it’s really theater. It is not keeping us safe.”

I have noted before how my ex had her lipstick confiscated on the same flight that saw me bring home a disassembled Glok in a carry on bag. I can promise you that my ex-wife had no intentions of doing Extreme Makeover: Terrorist Edition. I guess an automatic weapon is less of a threat than a tube of Ruby Red.

But what about airports in other countries where they actually train people to be security specialists? In fact many are retired police and other law enforcement workers. Well, in those countries they don’t confiscate cupcakes or roust 90 year old women with colostomy bags. They do, however, catch criminals.

A 33-year-old woman was arrested by Italian police after she tried to smuggle more than five pounds of cocaine in her breast and buttock implants.

The woman, who was not identified, hoped to sneak by police with help from her plunging neckline and tight clothes. Instead, she attracted the attention of airport security, according to a Daily Mail story.

When she couldn’t explain her trip to South America, two female security officers searched her and found the fake implants, which had cocaine crystals molded into them, the newspaper reported.

“They stopped her for questioning because she was so alluring and her story about why she was in South America just fell apart,” Antonio Di Greco, police chief at Fiumicino airport, said.

After being pulled aside, Di Greco said the model became aggressive with officers. She was being held at the Rome airport on charges of international drug trafficking.

Had she been stopped by the TSA they probably would have given her a ride to her flight.

Because, as we all know, drug dealers and terrorists all look like little old ladies or Girl Scouts and not hot models.

Okay, I have gotten some flack for not writing stories that parents can share with their kids. I had not realized that was part of my job description. Actually, I didn’t know this job had a description. Still, it’s that time of the year where I’m supposed to be nice, so I’ll give it a shot.

A pet named Fluffy was saved by a brave farmer and dedicated vets.

A young crocodile named Fluffy is back to her cranky old self after being hit by a bus while duck hunting in a city in northern Australia, a veterinarian said on Thursday.

The 4-foot, 3-inch (1.3-meter) saltwater crocodile underwent emergency surgery and then spent 11 days recovering in the Marlin Coast Veterinary Hospital after the late night accident in a beachside suburb of Cairns, Doug English said.

“It was pretty dopey for a couple of days and then it got fairly cranky so obviously it was feeling a lot better,” English said.

While young crocodiles were often killed by cars on Cairns’ roads, Fluffy – so named by vet nurses because she was found with a “fluffy duck” in her jaws – was the first English said he knew of to survive such an accident.

He praised the bravery of sugar cane farmer Andrew Herrington in bringing the injured reptile in.

“Crocs go off like a steel trap – bang! – in a split second,” English said of their powerful jaws. “That’s how they can catch a duck in the air.”

Herrington said he was driving home after midnight on Dec. 10 when he came upon a bus driver trying to coax the injured crocodile off the road with a stick.

The crocodile had caught a duck and was headed across the road with it toward a creek when it was hit.

Herrington said he distracted the croc with a flashlight in the eyes before throwing a pair of overalls over her head.

He then used electrical tape to secure her jaws shut before bundling her into his SUV and taking her to the veterinary hospital where English immediately performed surgery.

“She was quite agitated, but I didn’t think there was any great risk of personal harm,” Herrington said.

“My main concern was for saving the little thing,” he said.

“She’d bagged herself a beautiful little Pacific Black (duck) and was heading back down the creek for dinner and didn’t quite get to eat it, the poor thing,” he added.

Fluffy was transferred Wednesday to the Cairns Tropical Zoo, where she will continue to recuperate before she is returned to the wild.

Crocodiles have become plentiful across Australia’s tropical north since they became protected by federal law in 1971.

Saltwater crocodiles can grow to up to 23 feet (7 meters) long and are the world’s largest reptile.

Isn’t that just the cutest story? They named the little critter after the little critter it killed but didn’t get to eat.

It just brings a tear to my eye.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/10548330 w=400&h=300]

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, Friday morning around 9:10,
for his version of a New Year’s special!

Why did I spell it wrong? Why not?

Anyway, I received an email asking me to come up with a single link for all the Christmas posts that I have foisted on the masses this week. The lady who made the request mentioned that the articles were “informative and disturbing.” That may be the highest praise I’ve ever earned. She also wanted to just send one link to all her friends. I guess she wants everyone to be as informed and disturbed as she is.

Who am I to deny such a simple request?

So, here we go, a simple synopsis and a link to each heartwarming article.

According to Google, only white people celebrate Christmas

All of Santa’s reindeer are chicks and the history of why candy canes reference blood.

The story how Christmas screwed up Hanukkah and forced a mild mannered college professor to invent Kwanzaa.

The tender tale of why Kentucky Fried Chicken is the official sponsor of Christmas in Japan and why it’s sometimes okay to eat your young this time of year.

And, naturally, the evolution of the traditional Christmas carol from village sponsored terrorist attacks to the family fun of today.

And, in honor of the crazy people on TV who think there’s a war on Christmas, I will leave you with this:

Charlie Brown: “Isn’t there ANYONE who knows what Christmas is all about?!?!

Linus: “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’ ” (Luke 2:8-14)

“You see, Charlie Brown — that’s what Christmas is all about.”

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, this Friday morning around 9:10
for his version of a New Year’s special!

I’m a middle aged white guy who’s had a lot on his mind recently so I hope you’ll forgive me taking a while to figure some stuff out. This week, in preparation for the BIG Holiday Special on WBIG today at 9:10 AM Central Time, I’ve been researching the heck out of the history of Christmas. Now, just so you know a little how the World News Center works, I rarely bother checking the images that the daily robots bring back along with the stories they find. They are simply too random to be useful. But once I find a few stories with a common theme I’ll Google that theme to see what I can find. That’s worked pretty well thus far. But, this week, things are different. I’ve turned off the robots to keep my email’s in-box from overflowing and have just relied on holiday related searches through Google. Some I did for pure fun, others for specific research but, yesterday, I started going through my searches looking for something specific in the images. I wanted to find people of color, any color would do, celebrating Christmas.

You see, I live in Chicago. A relatively cosmopolitan, polyglot, metropolis, if I dare say so and I wanted something that represented the world around me. If I walk out my front door and turn right there’s a nice Puerto Rican man whose yard has a fun Nativity scene. The fact that the three wise men happen to look exactly like Larry, Curly and Moe is, I’m sure, a coincidence. A couple of blocks north there lives a nice, African-American, couple who have decorated their home in a tasteful array of white lights surrounding a window display of a, more traditional, Nativity scene and a Kwanzaa shrine. It is quite beautiful. Were I to go south instead I would run into a nice Chinese family who came to America to practice their Christian beliefs openly. As you might guess they are supportive of the whole Christmas thing even if they are a little fuzzy on the details. After all they’ve only been able to base their beliefs on what’s in the Bible and not what’s on TV commercials, so there are gaps in their knowledge.

Which kind of explains the Santa wearing a crucifix on their front lawn.

Anyway, as I said, I was looking for images of people of color for one of my holiday postings. All searches are done with safe Search turned off. Just so you’re aware.

I searched for Merry Christmas. I got some soft core porn, a few religious items and lots and lots of white people.

I searched Seasons Greetings. I got the cast of Twilight – really? – the Mickey Mouse Club and lots of white people. Oh, and some cute cards.

I searched Happy Holidays. I got more cute cards, a menorah, fireworks, still more cute cards and lots and lots of white people.

So I upped the ante. I searched for Sexy Santa. Let’s be honest, even the most xenophobic racists among you have to admit that there are smoking hot women of color on this planet. Certainly one of them dressed up for Christmas. Right? Wrong. You get naked white guys, naked white women, naked white – well, some gender or another, and so on. You also get some pretty interesting costume ideas. What you do not get is an image of a person of color. Well, there is one Asian girl near the bottom but she’s awfully pale.

Okay, so I broadened the search. I went looking for Sexy Christmas images. I got two white women sucking on the same candy cane, a naked guy covering his junk with straw (barely) and so on. But, alas, the only person with skin darker than Wonder Bread is a silhouette for an i-Pod ad. And she’s clearly Caucasian.

So I took one last stab at it. I searched for Sexy Elf. While the back story behind elves is about as white as white can be, the fact is that I have been to a couple of Lord of the Rings parties and seen women of color dressed up, very sexily, as elves. Even if they weren’t Christmas specific, I figured I’d get something.

That’s what I figured. I was wrong.

Not even close. I’ve seen Klan rallies more diverse than that.

In fact, the only time I found any people of color relative to the holiday was when I searched for Chrismahanukwanzaka. That’s right, a cheesy ad for a cell phone plan is the most diverse holiday offering on Google. That is also the only search that did not return any porn, soft core or otherwise.

Even those Hanna-Barbera holiday puppet shows from the 60’s were more diverse than anything I found online.

Now that I’ve told you what I didn’t find, I guess I should share some things I did.

A woman in Danbury, Conn. has been arrested for sexually molesting a department store Santa.

Santa Claus says that a woman who sat on his lap was naughty, not nice. A Santa at the Danbury Fair mall said the woman groped him.

“The security officer at the mall said Santa Claus has been sexually assaulted,” police Detective Lt. Thomas Michael said of the complaint.

Sandrama Lamy, 33, of Danbury, was charged with sexual assault and breach of peace in the weekend incident. She was released on a promise to appear in court on Jan. 3.

Police quickly found and identified Lamy because the woman was described as being on crutches, said Capt. Bob Myles.

Of course, things could be worse for Santa. I do mean, MUCH, worse. A rotten little British brat has promised to kill Santa if she doesn’t get everything on her list.

“This Christmas, I don’t ask for much, so if I don’t get at least two of the things I want, I will literally kill you! Do you understand?! Oh, also, I’ll hunt down your reindeers, cook them and serve their meat to homeless people on Christmas Day,” Mekeeda Austin, 13, wrote in her letter, the Daily Mail reported. “No one wants that, so here’s what I want.”

The girl lists a BlackBerry, money, a dress, high-top Converse shoes and the real Justin Bieber.

“Remember, two of these or you die,” she wrote, signing it, “Love from Keedy.”

Her mother found the letter and said she thought the letter was humorous, and she’ll try to get her daughter everything she wants.

“I know it sounds like she is spoiled but I like to get my daughter what she wants, also you don’t want to get on the wrong side of her,” Tracey Soares told the newspaper, although she admitted getting the Canadian pop singer might be difficult because Bieber “will be busy with (his) own (family) on Christmas Day.”

Austin told the reporter she didn’t see any problem with the letter.

“I want all of these things and I don’t see why I shouldn’t get them,” she said.

Item #1: the mother in this story is an idiot.

Item #2: I bet you’re singing the Veruca Salt classic right now too.

Item #3: see item #1.

Guess what, it could get even worse still. Police in Brazil are still investigating the possible, 2 year old, arson committed on one of the world’s largest Santas.

At 50 feet, this is probably the largest Santa you have ever seen. It’s a pity it got burnt down at the end. A lot of people traveled far to get a picture with it but it went up in flames covering the surrounding area in thick black smoke. This happened in Brazil on December 2, 2009 and it is assumed to be because of some mechanical error although some people speculate foul play. The pictures do make you feel sad about all the efforts going up in flames.

The giant display caught fire during its unveiling. The Santa was well made and placed in an open area surrounded by buildings. Santa getting burned down is probably something you don’t want your children to witness. Once the entire Santa got burned down, all that remained was the metal skeleton. Guess we should just be glad that nobody was hurt during the incident.

Speaking of a smoking Santa, a head shop in Greenville, PA. has a wonderful holiday hookah that features old St. Nick clearly inhaling.

Some people thinks it’s funny others are woefully offended.

That, pretty much, sums up the whole story.

Keep in mind that NORAD is, once again, offering it’s Santa tracker for free online. Keep in mind that, due to the international date line, Santa will actually leave the North Pole in less than 20 hours from mow.

Think of it is as a golden opportunity to prove to your kid that the world really is round.

It’s a start.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__kQ1PCP6B0&w=480&h=360]

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, this Friday morning around 9:10 for his version of a holiday special!

I received a lovely email yesterday from a regular reader. She said some very nice things about me and life in general and then got to the point. The point was that, as informative as this week’s articles have been about the holidays, I was “depressing the (expletive deleted) out of (her).” I guess I can see that. The history of Christmas is one of political compromise, violence and drunken debauchery. Not exactly the first thoughts that spring to mind when you think about ways to celebrate the birth of the Son of God. More likely a way to celebrate a frat party in honor of Biff’s trust fund. But it is what it is. Denying history doesn’t make it suddenly disappear, despite what you may hear from some recent political pundits. Nevertheless, she’s right. There are many aspects of the holiday that are cause for smiles. Honest ones too, not just the rueful ones I usually inspire.

We’ll start with some useless trivia.

Where did the Candy Cane come from? In a small Indiana town, there was a candymaker who wanted to spread the name of Jesus around the world. He invented the Christmas Candy Cane, incorporating symbols for the birth, ministry, and death of Jesus Christ. He began with a stick of pure white, hard candy to symbolize the Virgin Birth. The candymaker formed the stick into a “J” to represent the name of Jesus. It can also represent the staff of the “Good Shepherd.” He thought the candy was too plain so he stained it with a red stripe to symbolize the blood shed by Christ on the cross.

Christmas Games – Weird Ones
Shoe the Wild Mare
Shoeing the Wild Mare is a traditional Christmas game that goes back to at least the early 17th century.

Get a narrow(a few inches wide), strong wooden beam and suspend it from the roof with two even length ropes. The beam is the ‘mare’ of the title and should be level yet high enough above the floor so that a player’s feet are off-ground. A player ‘the farrier’ then sits on the ‘mare’ in the centre, a leg either side. This player has a hammer and has to give the underside of the beam “four time eight blows” at a designated spot. If he falls off, it is someone else’s turn.

Much hilarity, and the odd broken shoulder ensues. (Odd broken shoulders????)

Snapdragons
Apparently this is the best game ever to play on Christmas Eve. Make sure you have the fire department on speed dial though.

Very popular from the 16th to the 19th centuries, Snapdragons (or Flapdragons) has explicably declined in popularity.

Gather everyone around the dining room table, place a large flat dish in the centre. In the dish scatter a good handful of raisins then pour on top a layer of brandy or cognac. Set fire to the brandy and dim the lights. Players take it in turns to pluck a raisin out of the burning liquid and eat it quickly down. For a more competitive edge to the game use larger dried fruit such as apricots, one of which has a lucky sixpence stuffed inside.

Equipment needed: plate, matches, raisins, brandy, address of nearest accident and emergency department

I have actually played Snapdragons. It was how I learned to use saliva to quickly douse my tongue. Oddly enough, and this will be a blog for another day, that knowledge has proved useful.

Here’s some other useless trivia for you. In case Christmas isn’t violent enough for you there’s another game, called “Hot Cockles” which can make your week. One person gets blindfolded and then players give a blow to the blindfolded player, who had to guess the name of the person who gave the blow.

Whee!

Okay, let’s move on to some fun facts about Christmas trees.

Which actually had nothing to do with Christmas for centuries.

• The use of evergreen trees to celebrate the winter season occurred before the birth of Christ.
• The first decorated Christmas was in Riga, Latvia in 1510.
• The first printed reference to Christmas trees appeared in Germany in 1531.
• Nineteenth century Americans cut their trees in nearby forests.
• Christmas trees have been sold commercially in the United states since about 1850. Until fairly recently, all Christmas trees came from the forest. (ED: Not from a parking lot?)
• The first Christmas tree retail lot in the United States was started in 1851 in New York by Mark Carr.
• In 1900, large stores started to erect big illuminated Christmas trees.
• In 1856 Franklin Pierce, the 14th President of the United States, was the first President to place a Christmas tree in the White House.
• President Coolidge started the National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony on the White House lawn in 1923.
• Teddy Roosevelt banned the Christmas tree from the White House for environmental reasons.
• In 1984, the National Christmas was lit on December 13th with temperatures in the 70’s, making it one of the warmest tree lightings in history.
• Between 1887-1933 a fishing schooner called the “Christmas Ship” would tie up at the Clark Street bridge and sell spruce trees from Michigan to Chicagoans.

My grandmother used to talk about that ship. She said it was so laden with pine trees that you could smell it from blocks away.

Also, just so you know, all of Santa’s reindeer are chicks.

Anyway, here are ten meaningless facts that you’ll use to impress your friends at holiday parties.

ONE
What percentage of mall Santa applicants were discovered to have criminal backgrounds by Pre-employ.com?
7%

Approximate amount generated by photographs with Santa in shopping malls in the USA in dollars:
$2,255,750,000

TWO
How many houses must Santa visit on Christmas?
842,000,000

How fast must he travel to visit all those homes?
4,796,250 Mph

THREE
Percentage of Americans who believe Santa in the off-season drives a sports car:
4%

drives an SUV:
25%

FOUR
How many presents would you receive if you were to get every present in “The 12 Days of Christmas”?
364

How much would all those gifts cost? (according to PNC Financial Services)
$18348.87

FIVE
Percentage of Americans who finish off their Christmas Shopping on Christmas Eve:
20

SIX
Percentage of pet owners who have their dog or cat pose and photographed with Santa Claus:
27

SEVEN
Percentage of Americans who re-gift:
28

EIGHT
Which type of Christmas tree is displayed more during the holiday season, artificial or real?
Artificial trees are the most popular with 40,694,463 on display in comparison to real trees at 34,335,809

NINE
How many Barbie dolls are sold every minute around the world?
180

TEN
How much trash is generated annually from the gift wrap and shopping bags:
4,000,000 Tons

So, burning question of the day, why does Santa wear red? Well, it’s a Catholic thing. You see, Santa is based, in part, on the life of St. Nicholas and he was the bishop of Smyrna, a spot in modern day Turkey. Bishops wore, and still wear, red capes. Then red was the way Norman Rockwell saw it, and red was the color Coca-Cola wanted when it pretty much created the modern image of Santa in 1931. So, Santa wears red.

Got it?

Cool.

Also, he is, depending on where you’re at at the moment, the patron saint of banking, pawnbroking, pirating, butchery, sailing, thievery, orphans, royalty, and New York City, thus making him the most popular, non-biblical, saint in history. Saint Valentine is a distant second.

Some other stuff that will make our reader feel a little better about the holiday. Contrary to popular belief, suicide rates during the Christmas holiday are low. The highest rates are during the spring.

One reason may be that Christmas has better music. It is estimated that the single “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin is the best selling single of all time, with over 100 million sales worldwide and that 50 million of those sales were of the Bing Crosby version.

Bing’s daughter starred in Star Trek and had sex with an android in one episode.

That has nothing to do with the topic at hand, I just thought I’d share.

I will end this blog with a dinner prayer by cartoonist Berke Breathed.

“Dear Lord, I’ve been asked, nay commanded, to thank thee for the Christmas turkey before us — a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird — a social being capable of actual affection, nuzzling its young with almost human-like compassion. Anyway, it’s dead and we’re gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family.”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmxGMuqAV8k&w=500&h=319]

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, this Friday morning around 9:10 for his version of a holiday special!

Before we begin I’d like to take a moment to wish all of our Jewish readers a Happy Hanukkah. Their festival of eight crazy nights started last night. In all honesty if you asked the average non-Jew what they know about Hanukkah you’d probably get an answer like “it’s that thing that Adam Sandler sings about.” If you got any response at all, that is. To be honest it is only in recent years that Hanukkah has taken on any significance whatsoever. Until recently Hanukkah held the same import for Jews as National Doorknob Day does for W.A.S.P.s and The Festival of Three Yaks does in Lower Mongolia.

“Hey, wait a minute blogger dufus, the subject line says this is supposed to be about Christmas. What does this crap have to do with that?”

Quite a bit actually, please follow along.

You see, while Jesus was a Jew, he never celebrated Hanukkah. He may have noted it, it was a popular children’s story back in the day, but that was about it. A guy, a lamp, a minor miracle, God is good, let’s move on. But the American, and later global, proliferation of Christmas as the be all, end all, holiday scared many Jews into believing their culture and heritage was going to be run over by the Yuletide Juggernaut. They had this minor holiday, it had a couple of similar traditions with Christmas, so they propped it up and let it become the, unfortunately named – all things considered, Jewish Christmas.

The real ramping up of Hanukkah didn’t happen until after World War II. After the war many Americans, joined by others from the rest of the world, were more sympathetic to Jewish beliefs and causes, for obvious reasons, and Hanukkah finally joined the Western Pantheon of wildly misunderstood holidays.

By the 60’s African-Americans realized that they too were about to be buried under an avalanche of White Christmas. And I do mean “white.” Jesus was white, at least in popular media if not in history, the apostles were white, the Virgin Mary was white, Santa was white, the elves were white …. hell, even the weather was white with all that snow. We are talking about one seriously bleached holiday, when you think about it.

And one man did think about it. In 1966 Maulana Karenga, a college professor and member of the growing “Black Power” movement, invented a holiday called Kwanzaa. Originally meant to be the African-American Anti-Christmas it never really worked out that way. The main problem was that so many African-Americans are Christians. Asking them to renounce their faith just to have a holiday that represented their skin color never caught on. However, by the late 70’s Mr. Karenga mellowed a bit and admitted that anyone who wished to celebrate African heritage could celebrate Kwanzaa. Although Mr. Karenga would probably be loathe to admit it, he essentially took the structure of Hanukkah and the core beliefs of Christianity and created a holiday that celebrates the best of both.

Here are the meanings behind each of the seven days of Kwanzaa.

Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves, stand up.
Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers’ and sisters’ problems our problems, and to solve them together.
Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.
Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
Imani (Faith): To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

Nothing very radical there. Basically “Love thy neighbor” and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” split across seven days. You can live with that.

Millions do.

Up until the late 1970’s everything was fine. Christmas was Christmas, Hanukkah was Hanukkah and Kwanzaa was Kwanzaa. However, with the rise in inter-faith & inter-racial marriages, general assimilation and so on the holidays began to get blended. For some this was proof that all that was good and holy had been destroyed and that America had become a godless country. For others it was a celebration of the joys of diversity.

That latter belief was gloriously lampooned in a Virgin Mobile ad for Chrismahanukwanzakah.

As with many issues these days, there’s not a lot of perceived middle ground there. Which is sad, because in reality there’s plenty. There is absolutely nothing wrong with celebrating the holiday you believe in while acknowledging other people’s right to do the same.

Go ahead and say Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah or Peaceful Kwanzaa – as your case may be – to everyone you meet. Just be willing to have them say what they want to say back at you.

If you can handle that then you’ve managed to grab the basic understanding of the season.

Like I wrote in the previous two blogs this week, Christmas has not always been the symbol for universal love and joy. It has evolved from a violent, drunken, holiday into what we know today. It seems to me that if the holiday can bend with the times so can we.

Merry Christmas.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, this Friday morning around 9:10 for his version of a holiday special!