Archives for July 2011

Before we begin, in an effort to maintain our journalistic transparency, I must admit that I don’t smoke pot. Like many high schoolers in the 70’s I tried it, and I most certainly inhaled, but I quickly found that my body can’t process THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, so I would develop horrible allergic reactions. Fortunately for me I had a non-judgmental doctor with a sense of humor. That being said, I have nothing against pot smokers. My ex wife is numbered among their merry band. As long as they don’t blow pot smoke in my face I’m good to go.

To be fair, I also think it should be legalized. The position that pot is the gateway drug to heroin is akin to saying Bugs Bunny cartoons are the gateway to transvestism. Some people like to unwind with a puff or 12 off of a fatty in the same way people like me enjoy a frosty cold adult libation. Neither of us a threat to society.

The views expressed above reflect the views of the author alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any of NBC 5.2’s related organizations. In particular, the views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the staff of Nude Hippo, nor any of its Producers.

However, there is one difference between pot smokers and beer drinkers. In the main, when drinkers break a law, there’s a tragedy involved. When pot smokers do it, there’s laughter.

Back in April the NY Daily News reported that a pot dealer sent $50,000 worth of pot to the wrong address.

Ooops.

A Manhattan dentist got a mystery UPS package Friday from a real dope – it was filled with 31 pounds of very pungent pot.

Dr. Richard Lyons couldn’t believe his nose when he opened the box that was delivered to his Chinatown office.

“From my 70’s days, when I saw the green and smelled it, I knew it was marijuana,” said Lyons, whose graying ponytail could qualify him for a bit role in a Cheech and Chong movie.

Lyons, 61, said he had no idea how the pot – worth up to $50,000 on the street – wound up at his place, but he immediately called the cops.

Now, imagine you’re the dude who has to explain that little mix up to your boss.

“Man, … dude, … like, you know, it was like just a couple of like numbers kind of off, you know?”

I’m sure everyone will be very understanding.

But not all pot smokers are so sensitive and forgiving. UPI is reporting that one young gentleman shot his drug dealer over a delivery mix up.

A Port St. Lucie, Fla., man was arrested for allegedly robbing and shooting at a drug dealer he said gave him hamburger meat instead of pot, authorities say.

Timethy Delarrance Morrison, 22, was charged Thursday with attempted murder, burglary, escape, possession of marijuana and providing a false name to a law enforcement officer, TCPalm.com reported.

The alleged victim said he was to meet Morrison Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. behind a gas station to sell him $100 worth of marijuana. The dealer said Morrison walked up to his car and demanded the drugs. He said that he then gave Morrison a white paper bag and then sped away.

Morrison told police he looked in the bag and found hamburger meat instead of drugs and then began firing at the dealer’s car.

When police arrived at an apartment building in Port St. Lucie Thursday afternoon to arrest Morrison, he fled on foot. However was apprehended shortly, near the apartment building. Detectives said found 4.7 grams of marijuana in his possession.

Morrison was being held without bail ain the St. Lucie County Jail.

Quick question, if he was delivered hamburger meat, where did the pot come from?

Given all the things that are wrong in that story I see no reason to mention that it obviously happened in Florida.

Of course, no article about marijuana would be complete if it didn’t have a blurb grandmothers who use it to feed their rabbits.

No, they are not cross dressing rabbits. Sorry.

Police in Germany say they have caught an 84-year-old woman who had been feeding her pet rabbits with cannabis.

The pensioner was contacted by cops after they spotted a field of the metre-high pot plants growing in a field she owned next to her home.

While the elderly woman denied growing the plants herself – she says they just sprung up – she did admit using them to feed her pet rabbits. Police say this is plausible.

According to Tagesspiegel she said that no only did the rabbits really enjoy munching the plants, but because they grew back so quickly they were an ideal food.

Unsurprisingly the cops chopped down the cannabis plants and took them away in three large plastic sacks … maybe they have a rabbit hutch at the police station.

This just in, 100 stressed rabbits attacked a police station in Germany.

But, okay, so you’re smoking your weed, enjoying the buzz but you have a government grant to fulfill. What do you do? The answer is obvious. You mess around in a genetics lab and create a glow in the dark dog.

Scientists in South Korea have created a genetically modified glow in the dark dog which they say can be turned on and off like a light switch.

The glowing beagle was born two-years-ago thanks to a cloning technique which boffins claim could be used to find cures for diseases including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Tegon’s luminosity – which can be seen under ultraviolet light – is said to be controlled by adding a doxycycline antibiotic to her food at Seoul University.

While the £2million research could lead to huge leaps in medical science, it’s already solved one of life’s great questions, are dogs or cats the brightest.

A spokesperson for the research said: “The creation of Tegon opens new horizons since the gene injected to make the dog glow can be substituted with genes that trigger fatal human diseases.”

I’m sure that there’s an error in translation there somewhere, or maybe the scientist was stoned, but I doubt that there are going to be lots of people lining up to be injected with fatal diseases.

“MOM MOM, I just went to the clinic and got Ebola!”

Nope. Still don’t see it.

Colors of My Weed (Official Music Video) ft. Cheech & Young Fudgemack from Kris Canonizado on Vimeo.

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

You might think that today’s blog is going to be about John Boehner holding our country hostage for a couple of months and then finally presenting his grand plan written in crayon laden with references to Dark Lord Sauron. You would be wrong. While there is a certain level of sad humor in that whole mess, I thought I would focus on stuff that impacts people a little more directly. Yes the U.S. budget is important, but it’s also important for folks to have their garbage picked up and make sure their little worlds are kept safe. I know it might seem a tad parochial, but I hope you’ll trust me when I say there’s lots of fun stuff happening in neighborhoods around this great land of ours that is just as worthy of being lampooned as anything in Washington D.C.

For example, local voting can often be more contentious than the national version. So a company in Lansing, Michigan is helping voters remain calm by giving them pot when they register to vote.

See, isn’t this better already?

A medical marijuana shop’s offer of free pot in exchange for registering to vote appears to have gone up in smoke.

Your Healthy Choice Clinic of Lansing, Mich., had been offering a half gram on its website ahead of a vote for city council seats and after the council approved capping the number of medical marijuana dispensaries within city limits and setting a $1,000 application fee.

Clinic owner Shekina Pena earlier said she wasn’t trying to buy votes.

“We really got to fight to get the voters out there because the polls are showing there’s 4-5,000 people in Lansing that are patients or caregivers,” she told NBC affiliate WILX TV. “So we need those 4-5,000 people to come forth to the polls and vote for whomever they feel is in support of what they want for access.”

“We let them know how we feel, we don’t tell them who to vote for,” she added. “We definitely want to support the ones (city council members) who are supporting us.”

On Wednesday, the state’s attorney general, at the prodding of a state senator, said he was looking into whether the clinic crossed a legal line.

Lansing City Clerk Chris Swope said if the clinic tied the offer to voting for or against a particular person then it would definitely have crossed the legal line.

Pena insisted that wasn’t the case, but Swope still had concerns that a line might have been crossed, noting that a website tagline — “Vote for us and we’ll vote for you.” — suggested a close tie to candidates.

A clinic employee contacted by msnbc.com on Thursday had “no comment” on whether the website offer still stood, and Pena had not yet returned a call seeking clarification.

The website also offers advice on how not to bogart a joint when you’re a group situation.

Does that count as “group therapy?”

But, as mellow as things are in Lansing, Sheboygan, Wisconsin is a different sack of cats all together. Their mayor, in an effort to get to know the little people better I’m guessing, went on a 3 day bender that included a bar fight and passing out in public.

The mayor of Sheboygan, a self-described alcoholic who admitted to drinking, getting in a fight and passing out in a tavern in Elkhart Lake over the weekend, apologized but says he refuses to step down from his job.

“I have every intention of (surviving the latest challenge). It’s nothing I’m proud of,” said Mayor Bob Ryan on WTMJ partner station WHBL Radio in Sheboygan.

The Sheboygan City Council will be considering a resolution on Monday asking for Ryan’s resignation.

“I do not blame the council for asking for my resignation. What I did is indefensible. I’m not proud of it. I’m an alcoholic.”

“I’ve been successful in spite of it, and I will continue to be successful.”

Ryan explained the events of the weekend.

“I consequently went out for dinner on a Friday, began drinking and it began a three-day drinking session. I’m not proud of it. That’s not me, but that’s the alcoholic within me,” said Ryan.

“Did I pass out on a bar? Yes I did. I’ll admit that. Was I in a scuffle? Yes. Did I start it? No, I did not.”

He claims that his job performance has never been affected by his alcoholism.
Read the original story and see video from WTMJ

“Alcohol has never affected the way I do my job. Alcohol has affected my personal life greatly,” said Ryan. “I have never walked into a city meeting or council meeting under the influence of alcohol.”

Ryan also detailed his attempts to cope with his alcoholism and his plans moving forward.

“I work every day on it. I do go to group meetings. I have been through treatment. I do meet with doctors. I do meet with psychologists. I will continue to do so. I am going into an intensive outpatient program which will allow me to work on my issues more readily and still continue on my job. That will be an evening and weekend group session, and I will still be able to carry on my duties as mayor.”

A past YouTube video detailed Ryan making sexual comments about a relative on a cell phone, and he also faces a sexual harassment accusation from a female employee he fired.

No one living in Sheboygan has filed a formal complaint against Ryan, which would be a necessary step for the Common Council to be able to remove Ryan from office. If no one resident launches such a complaint, Common Council members, as taxpayers, stand ready to act.

“We’ll lodge the formal complaint and do the judge and the jury all together,” Alderman Scott Varsey told TODAY’S TMJ4 reporter Cody Holyoke.

“This needs to be taken care of sooner rather than later. And not a slap on the hand, either,” he continued.

Residents say it’s about time for Ryan to battle his demons in private.”If [the story is] as it appears on its face, a change needs to be made, because Sheboygan is bigger and better than this story is making us look,” said Scott Kautzer of Sheboygan.

This marks the second time that the City of Sheboygan has made our blog. Kind of impressive for a town the size of my closet.

But, believe it or not, the mayor’s following a grand political tradition. There’s even a website dedicated to politicians who have been arrested for various forms of drunkenness. With some obvious exceptions, all of which are clearly noted, most of them serve their communities well.

Of course, none of them were heinous criminals like the South Carolina sexagenarian, yes that’s a real word and it fits, who was arrested for driving with testicle hanging off her mirror.

The police chief of a small South Carolina town will ask a jury to decide if a woman broke the state’s obscenity laws by driving a pickup truck with plastic testicles hanging from the back.

Bonneau Police Chief Franco Fuda ticketed Virginia Tice, 65, in early July at a local convenience store after spying the adornment dangling from her truck.

South Carolina law considers a bumper sticker, decal or device indecent when it describes, in an offensive way as determined by contemporary community standards, “sexual acts, excretory functions, or parts of the human body.”

The offense carries a maximum fine of $445 but no jail time, Fuda said.

“This is certainly not a staple of my ticket writing in Bonneau,” the police chief told Reuters on Wednesday.

The Charleston law firm Savage & Savage will represent Tice for free, attorney Scott Bischoff said. The trial had been scheduled for next week but was delayed because the defendant will be out of town.

“She’s such a sweet lady and she just says ‘I don’t want to pay the fine.’ We’ll let a jury decide whether this is really criminal behavior. I don’t want to take away from the importance of free speech, but it’s really comical,” he said.

Lawmakers in some states have sought to ban the colorful plastic or rubber devices that go by brand names such as Bulls Balls and Truck Nutz.

Fuda said if the fake testicles were a free speech issue, “I don’t know what they would be trying to express.”

“I went to (a) few websites that said, excuse the expression, ‘show your nuts,'” he said. “I didn’t see anywhere it said support your local proctologist or farmer.”

Um, not to belittle Chief Fuda’s ability to read English, but the phrase is “Show you’re nuts” which is clearly a constitutionally covered statement concerning one’s personal mental state.

Of course, he may be baffled about how that whole Interweb thing works. Much like this New York genius who taunted cops using Facebook.

A fugitive from upstate New York who taunted police on his Facebook page to `catch me if you can. I’m in Brooklyn’ has been arrested.

The Daily News says U.S. marshals and NYPD detectives tracked Victor Burgos down to an apartment in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood Monday night, sitting at his computer with his Facebook page open.

The 29-year-old suspect was wanted by Utica police on multiple arrest warrants for domestic violence and harassment of his former girlfriend.

He allegedly issued the Facebook challenge after his mug shot appeared on the Utica Police Department’s 10 most wanted list.

Utica Sgt. Steve Hauck tells the News: “He told us via Facebook to come and get him and we did.”

See? Despite being cold sober and a member of law enforcement, he still manages to have a sense of humor and do his job.

It can happen.

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

Many moons ago, a television show called WKRP in Cincinnati had an episode where Dr. Johnny Fever interviewed a, self proclaimed, child psychologist who proposed that all children under the age of 13 should be locked away in concentration camps. It was a funny bit. It may also have been prescient. Way back on July 15th I wrote about how a restaurant had banned children under the age of 6. In it I noted that this wasn’t even the first restaurant to do so. But now it seems that the floodgates have been opened. Children around the world are being denied the privilege of making our lives a living hell.

This despite the fact that some adults seem to think it is their child’s God given right to do just that. I don’t blame the kids for this turn of events, I blame their parents. Kids don’t know how to behave in public. There is no “social skills” gene that kicks in when they learn to talk. It is up to the parental units to teach their kids how to say please and thank you and to show respect to not just their elders but to all around them regardless of age. Little Timmy and Suzy aren’t going to magically learn their manners watching mommy and daddy fart on the couch while watching Wheel of Fortune.

Our regular reader, Jordan Brandes, pointed me to an article written by Piper Weiss & Shine Staff which reports that the child banning trend is starting to become entrenched.

What’s the matter with kids today and why doesn’t anyone want them around? In June, Malaysia Airlines banned babies from many of their first class cabins, prompting other major airlines to consider similar policies.

Lately, complaints about screaming kids are being taken seriously, not only by airlines, but by hotels, movie theaters, restaurants, and even grocery stores.

Earlier this month, McDain’s, a Pittsburgh area restaurant that banned kids under 6 became a mascot for the no-kids-zone movement.

According to a Pittsburgh local news poll, more than half of area residents were in favor of the ban. And now big business is paying attention.

“Brat bans could well be the next frontier in destination and leisure-product marketing,” writes Robert Klara in an article on the child-free trend in AdWeek.

Klara points to Leavethembehind.com, a travel website for kid-free vacations, with a massive list of yoga retreats, luxury resorts and bargain hotels around the world that ban children.

“Call me a grinch, a misanthrope, a DINK (dual-income-no-kids), or the anti-cute-police, but I hate (hate a thousand times over) ill-behaved children/infants/screaming banshees in upscale restaurants (ok, anywhere, really, but I don’t want any death threats),” writes Charlotte Savino on Travel and Leisure’s blog. She lists a slew of a popular destination restaurants with kid-free areas and policies for travelers looking for quiet vacation dining.

Traveling is one thing, but what about in kids’ own hometowns? Should kids been banned from local movie theaters, like they were at a recent adults-only Harry Potter screening? In Texas, one cinema chain has even flipped the model, banning kids under six altogether, except on specified “baby days”.

Even running errands with toddlers may be changing. This summer Whole Foods stores in Missouri are offering child-free shopping hours (kids are allowed inside but childcare service is available for parents who want to shop kid-free.) Meanwhile in Florida, a controversy brews over whether kids can be banned from a condominium’s outdoor area. That’s right, some people don’t even want kids outdoors.

When did kids become the equivalent of second-hand smoke? Blame a wave of childless adults with money to spare. “Empty nesters continue to wield a huge swath of discretionary spending dollars, and population dips in first-world countries mean more childless couples than ever,” writes AdWeek’s Klara.

Catering to the child-free community may be good for business but is it good for parents? It could help narrow choices and make kid-friendly environments even kid-friendlier. And let’s be honest, babies won’t miss flying first class. They won’t even remember it. But their moms and dads will.

Most parents with young children have self-imposed limits on spending and leisure. This new movement imposes limits set by the public. And the public isn’t as child-friendly as it used to be. As businesses respond to their new breed of ‘first-class’ clientele, are parents in danger of becoming second-class citizens?

No, parents aren’t in danger of being marginalized. They have a long way to go before they get treated like smokers and porn lovers. All people are saying, and they are saying it loudly and with their wallets, is that people deserve to be able to spend their leisure dollars leisurely. It’s not that freaking much to ask.

Also, as my radio co-host Taylor Harris noted, it’s hard for restaurants to make money off of kids. They have cheaper menus, can’t be upsold on drinks and tend to require more clean up than adults. That would seem like all the more reason for parents to make sure that their public dining experience is pleasant.

I do understand that parents who are traveling are stuck. It’s not like they can toss a kid into their neighbor’s yard and hope their little bundles of joy can fend for themselves for a couple of weeks. And, thanks to that pesky nanny state, you can’t drug the little darlings so they’ll be quiet for the flight.

I’m not sure what the solution is for them, but there has to be an alternative to listening to a child scream bloody murder for four hours straight.

It’s really not any fun.

Sesame Street breaks it down from Wonderful Creative on Vimeo.

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

We’ve all had days we’d rather forget. The kind where you wake up in the morning, go to the store and, somehow, end up in a hospital staring at a ceiling being asked if you can spell your name. Bonus points if you have no idea what that name is. Alex Trebek had one of those days yesterday. In an attempt to stop a burglar in his hotel room, things went slightly south. He explained, “It happened at 2:30 a.m., chasing a burglar down the hallway of my San Francisco hotel, when my Achilles tendon ruptured and I then fell on carpet, bruising the other leg in process. Surgery on Friday.” Smart as he is he forgot the one fundamental rule of staying in a hotel, lock the chain and not just the knob. I have a friend, who’s one of the good guys (thankfully), who once showed me how he could bypass any hotel level electronic card lock with a 9 volt battery and a generic key card. No, I will not tell you how he did it. Nevertheless, that quibble aside, what the heck was he thinking? That nut job could’ve been armed!

Oh well, all’s well that ends well. The suspect was apprehended, Mr. Trebek got back everything but his spending cash and no one was killed.

Speaking of people who get one over on electronic systems, let’s take a peek at what happened in Florida this week.

Authorities say an inmate at a central Florida jail used a glitch in the facility’s phone system to bond himself out.

The Lake County Sheriff’s Office says 32-year-old Larry Stone discovered the glitch earlier this month. The phone system charges inmate accounts for calls but refunds the money if the call doesn’t go through. But the system was reimbursing inmates twice for incomplete calls.

Authorities say Stone repeatedly made calls and hung up until he had more than $1,250, enough to bond out of jail. Stone had been arrested in April on property-crime charges.

Stone was only free for a few hours before he was re-arrested. Officials became suspicious by the inmates’ increased phone use.

The software error has been fixed and accounts restored to their previous totals.

He gets an “A” for Effort in my book. However I admit to being concerned that an inmate noticed this glitch before the people in charge of accounting did. They must have been out partying at the local amusement parks or something.

If they’re not careful they could end up being accountants in Taipei. Not that there’s anything wrong with Taipei, it’s a beautiful city, but now the city is attempting to turn dog poo into gold.

A city in northern Taiwan is trying the Midas touch to persuade reluctant residents to clean up after their canines: offering a chance to win gold bars to anyone handing in bags of doggy deposits.

Starting Aug. 1, dog owners and other residents of New Taipei City, bordering the capital Taipei, can hand in waste to government cleaning teams in exchange for tickets to a lucky draw. The prizes: three gold ingots worth T$60,000 ($2,100 US), T$18,000 and T$12,000.

The number of draw tickets is unlimited, and the winners will be named in October, the city government said in a statement.

“We are hoping the draw will attract a wide participation, especially as the gold price is rising,” said New Taipei City Environmental Protection Department official Chen Chao-ming.

The city will give free garbage bags to would-be collectors. It is also beefing up more conventional measures, including rewarding people for photographing dog owners leaving mess uncleaned, and stepping up its own poo patrols in dog haunts.

But it will be hoping for better results than the central city of Taichung saw in 2009, when its offer of T$100 shopping vouchers for each kg of excrement collected yielded little more than criticism and ridicule.

“What do you do for a living dad?”

“I count bags of dog poo.”

And at that exact moment every one of those child’s dreams died.

Even so, at least dear old dad is contributing something to society and is free to walk among us.

How would you like to be arrested for writing a thank you card?

No, I’m not making this up.

A woman will go to court next month after she was charged with first-degree trespassing after sitting at a picnic table at Weatherby Lake.

Jennifer Payne is in the Kansas City area on business. She said she went to the lake on Monday, found a picnic table by the water and filled out thank-you cards.

“On my way to my next appointment, I wanted to go sit in a park and get some work done. I knew the lake was across the street,” Payne said.

KMBC’s Dan Weinbaum reported that the problem was the lake is private. Payne said she failed to see the signs saying it was private property. A Weatherby Lake police officer showed up and told her she could not be on the property.

“‘I’m so sorry. I had no idea this was a private lake. I don’t want to cause harm, and I’ll get out of here and won’t ever come back,'” Payne said she told the officer.

But it wasn’t going to be that easy.

“He said I need to start calling people because he was going to place me under arrest. I was like, ‘What for?'” Payne said.

The officer said for trespassing.

Weinbaum reported that Weatherby Lake is both public and private. The streets are public and so are the handful of city parks. But the lake, the water and the access areas are all private property.

The board that oversees the property pressed charges against Payne.

“I was sitting on a bench writing thank-you cards. ‘Can’t you let me go with a warning?'” Payne asked.

The answer was no. Payne was arrested, fingerprinted and had her mugshot taken. She was kept for a couple hours at the Weatherby Lake Police Department and was about to be sent to the Platte County Jail for the night until her boss bailed her out.

The Weatherby Lake police chief told Weinbaum that this is standard operating procedure. The property owner has the right to file charges.

Just a moment, I’m adding Weatherby Lake to the list of places I’ll never visit. No word on whether that hell hole is named after Principal Weatherbee.

Not that it really matters.

But, if you think her day was bad, try this, a guy fell down at home and woke up in a morgue.

A South African man awoke to find himself in a morgue fridge — nearly a day after his family thought he had died, a health official said Monday.

Health department spokesman Sizwe Kupelo said the man awoke Sunday afternoon, 21 hours after his family called in an undertaker who sent him to the morgue after an asthma attack.

Morgue owner Ayanda Maqolo said he sent his driver to collect the body shortly after the family reported the death. Maqolo said he thought the man was around 80 years old.

“When he got there, the driver examined the body, checked his pulse, looked for a heartbeat, but there was nothing,” Maqolo told the Associated Press.

But a day after staff put the body into a locked refrigerated compartment, morgue workers heard someone shouting for help. They thought it was a ghost, the morgue owner said.

“I couldn’t believe it!” Maqolo said. “I was also scared. But they are my employees and I had to show them I wasn’t scared, so I called the police.”

After police arrived, the group entered the morgue together.

“I was glad they had their firearms, in case something wanted to fight with us,” Maqolo said.

He said the man was pale when they pulled him out.

“He asked, ‘How did I get here?'” Maqolo said.

The health department said the man was then taken to a nearby hospital for observation and later discharged by doctors who deemed him stable.

Kupelo, the health department spokesman, urged South Africans to call on health officials to confirm that their relatives are really dead.

The man’s family was informed that he was alive during a family meeting convened to make funeral arrangements. They’re very happy to have him home, Maqolo said.

But Maqolo said he is still trying to recover from the traumatic experience.

“I couldn’t sleep last night, I had nightmares,” he said. “But today I’m much better.”

Mr. Maqolo is the one traumatized? The guy surrounded by armed cops and his employees is the one who needs a hug? What about the poor sap who was locked in a freezer drawer? That had to be somewhat worrisome. One minute he’s getting ready for a nice family dinner and the next he’s naked on a slab, flat on his back, waiting to be buried.

That kind of thing can cause all sorts of stress.

Now, in case you’re wondering how to tell if I’m yanking your chain, Bernd Wurm has developed an online BS detector. With zero being a perfect score and 1 being a fail, I tested 5 random World News Center article and averaged as close to zero as you can get without being nominated for sainthood. How did others fare? I’m glad you asked.

So does it work?

That’s a matter of perspective. The texts for both President Obama’s speech about the debt ceiling and John Boehner’s response ranked very low in B.S.: Obama earned a .1 rating while Boehner scored a .2.

Meanwhile, a press release about Miracle Whip’s new offer to contribute $25,000 towards a wedding or a divorce to couples who can’t agree on the condiment came in .24, with this comment: “Your text shows some indications of ‘bullshit’-English, but is still within an acceptable range.”

Since some people might assume HuffPost Weird News stories are, well, B.S., it’s only fair to put ourselves to the test.

For instance, a story written by this reporter about an artist who has created gay pin-up pictures of famous superheroes earns a .12 rating because there are “only a few indications of bullshit.”

Meanwhile, Lee Speigel’s story, “UFOs Exist … At Least On Google Earth, If You’re Gullible” ranks in at .09 with “no or marginal indications of bullshit English.”

However, Ben Muessig gets a .2 mark for his story, “Rat Catcher’s Day: Exterminators Celebrated On July 22 Holiday,” which means there is some “bullshit,” but it’s still within acceptable guidelines.

HuffPost Weird News Senior Editor Buck Wolf was pleased to discover that the stories on the site have relatively little B.S., but jokes, “that just shows how inaccurate the technology really is.”

Wurm insists he doesn’t intend to mock people’s writing, but hopes the “BlaBlaMeter” will allow writers to pre-check their stories for B.S. before publication.

“Surely there are many writers who do an excellent job and will not need this tool,” he said. “But there is no harm checking their own writing from time to time. Even I use this tool occasionally.”

Oh, in case you were wondering, this story ranks a .15, which means it has “only a few indications” of B.S.

In case you want to test the meter for yourself, just click here to have some fun.

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

You all know that I love a good conspiracy theory. Completely devoid of facts or rational thought they’re like living out an episode of the X-Files.

Egyptians had batteries, Delco makes batteries, therefore Delco is ruled by the Goa’uld!

Don’t even get me started about the Energizer Bunny a/k/a the true spawn of Satan.

As you can see, they’re pretty easy to conceive. In fact, if you want to kill some time, feel free to create some of your own and share with us. I’ll post some of the fun ones here for our readers. Since our readers are all intelligent and good looking I’m hopeful to get some winners.

In all senses of the word.

All you have to do is email me by clicking that link. Yes, it’s really my email address and not some bizarre scam to add you to a mailing list you hate. Speaking of which, if you do want to join our mailing list, just fill in the “Join Our Mailing List” box at the top right of the page. You’ll have to enter a cpatcha code to prove you’re a real person and not a spam bot, but the whole process takes less than 30 seconds so it’s not painful.

What is painful is listening to the end of the world theorists, and I use that last word very loosely, who keep informing us that our lives are forfeit and worth nothing so we may as well kill ourselves yesterday. These raving ignoramuses have been proven wrong so often that it stopped being funny, yet they keep popping up on the internet and my TV to warn of doom and gloom and basically put me off my feed.

The whack job favorite of the week is the Mayan Calendar. All life will end in December of 2012. All of the people who tell us this manage to be devoutly anything but Mayan. Tony Phillips, from AOL.com, decided to do something completely nutty and ask a real Mayan about their calendar.

The life of Luis Calderón de Huatapotliz y Barca de Madera is essentially identical to the lives of his distant ancestors (except that he’s fictitious). Luis, a Yucatec Mayan, wakes each morning with the sun’s first glow and enjoys a light breakfast of plantains and horchata. He then leaves behind his wife and 14 children, setting off on a 43-mile walk into the jungle where he plies the trade of his heritage — foreseeing the future.

En route to the fabled Vision Rocks of Tlacolopatatlanqatl, Luis follows the trail blazed by those venerable truth seekers whose stories are now lost to colonial history, kept alive only in the undying memories of modern-day prophets like Luis and the half-dozen other Mayan holy men who travel each day from their huts, some as far away as Houston, to summon the spirit mediums and invoke their sustenance of life on this fragile earth. Their ritual involves gruesome self-mutilation, ingesting live scorpions and channeling the harnessed energy of five-pinioned jaguars representing the five primary elements: earth, air, fire, water and crinoline.

Luis and his compatriots are among an estimated seven million Maya living in Southern Mexico and Central America (that’s actually true). Like most other contemporary Maya, Luis speaks a derived form of his people’s traditional language as well as a regional Spanish dialect. His life and culture exhibit clear evidence of his ethnic connection to pre-Columbian Mayan civilization, though heavily influenced by the encroachment of Hispanic society.

Having learned recently of the approaching end of time (December 21 of next year) marked by the end of the ancient Mayan calendar, we traveled on horseback several weeks through the treacherous, steamy growth of the subtropics to find Luis and learn once and for all what the Maya have to say about that ominous date.

Luis told us through a translator, “Get a life.”

A quick perusal of the most prominent 2012 pundits turns up a cast of international characters representing many cultures and many traditions save one, but no Mayans. There are self-styled spiritualists, hack meta-physicists, and this huckster. There are White Americans, Europeans, Scandinavians, a few Canadians and a Russian or two all invested in the End-of-Days industry. There are sites devoted to selling memberships in underground survivalist colonies and others to selling survival gear for do-it-yourselfers. There are handbooks and guidebooks and textbooks and rulebooks. There are testimonies, acrimonies and sanctimonies and the one thing lacking from any expert account of what’s going to happen to turn our globe to a cinder two winters hence is a single Mayan who might actually know what he’s talking about.

Back to the fiction …

Pressed for details, Luis addressed our queries about the supposed end of the Mayan calendar, saying, “The calendar is circular. Where is the end of a circle?”

He pointed out that other remnants of history have run their course — the Sumerian Language, British possession of Hong Kong, The Golden Girls — and the world has not yet ended. In the sacred, liturgical tongue of the Mayan priesthood, Luis proclaimed, “In k’aabae’, tikin oot’el, chi’il chi’ u chi’chi’al, u chá’acha’al tumen u dzay máako’ob. Dzok in pitik u nóok’il in k’aaba’ je bix u podzikubal kan tu xla’ sóol,” meaning, “No kidding. Get a life.”

At trek’s end we — my faithful cameraman Lars and I — found ourselves no closer to solving the mystery of 2012, Luis having chosen to keep the secret to himself. Such is the way of the Maya. There can be no doubt they know the truth. The wisdom of their ancients is evident from the record — human sacrifice, animism, putting up a heckuva good fight against a few hundred Spaniards with swords and funny hats. Luis himself bears a heavy burden, laden as he is with foreknowledge of the apocalypse but unwilling to speak it lest humanity be thrown into chaos.

One ponders and one fears. But should one instead welcome the impending terminus of all our journeys? Ought we to embrace the arrival of comets and sun blasts and tsunamis and volcanoes and earthquakes, birds, snakes and aeroplanes and John Cusack’s worst role in decades? To each soul falls the task of preparing itself for the end. To each life is given knowledge of the eternal and to each wallet, discretion. Should we rather seek in the purveyance of charlatans or in the wisdom of the forest our own path to Revelation or…

Seriously y’all — get a life.

I think that sums things up very nicely.

I was in college, back in the 80’s, when I first heard about the calendar. After being scared poo-less by a devotee of the arcane a teacher, who was of Mayan extraction, pointed out the same thing as Tony’s shaman; the calendar is a circle, it just starts over. What that means is anybody’s guess, but mine is that it won’t mean much.

Decemeber 22nd 2012 will be the day you’ll be out hustling to get all those last minute Christmas gifts you put off because you thought Armageddon was coming.

For today’s closing musical number, I’d like to thank my bud, Joshua B Ludzki for sharing this gem with me this morning. There just aren’t enough Klezmer/Punk bands in the world singing about the end of all life.

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

We all grew up aware of superheroes. Whether or not you were like me and rabidly followed the breathtaking adventures every month, the iconic images of men and women in tights defending our freedoms are an integral part of Western society. From advertising to movies to cartoons to novelty items, you can’t really escape the mythos. Some people will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on rare comic books and related items. Every generation has its favorites. From the macho heroics of Superman and Captain America to the cerebral, yet still macho, machinations of Batman and Green Arrow each character developed their own following. Fans would argue with other fans about the strengths and weaknesses of each and then go back to their hum drum lives. They were fuel for our young imaginations.

The one thing they all had in common was that they were as family friendly as puppies.

But time doth march merrily on and some people just can’t leave well enough alone. David Moye takes a look at the reimaginings of Joe Phillips and how his personal vision is upsetting some traditionalists.

It’s common for superheroes like Batman, Superman and Spider-Man to have secret identities, but there has long been speculation in certain circles that they have other secrets as well.

The whispers began in 1954 when psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham wrote “Seduction Of The Innocent,” a book that alleged, among other things, that Wonder Woman was a lesbian and that Batman and Robin were gay lovers.

Although Wertham’s allegations have been long been ridiculed by the comics community, some industry insiders like Joe Phillips see a gay subtext throughout the superhero genre.

“It is there,” he insisted to The Huffington Post. “Think about it: A guy develops the ability to do something incredible and the first thing he does is to wear something tight-fitting and colorful and tell the world, ‘I’m going to fight crime’?”

Phillips has illustrated heroes like Superman and the Avengers for DC and Marvel. He says he’s fascinated by the underlying “gayness” of the superhero, and he’s taking it out of the closet and into a series of paintings he calls “Beefcake Heroes,” currently on display at a San Diego art gallery.

The series shows classic characters like Batman, Dr. Strange, Superman and Captain America bearing their oiled, rippled physiques in either tight jockey shorts or skintight spandex and wearing come hither looks more common in gay magazines like Blue Boy than, say, the pages of “Superboy.”

He admits the pictures are provocative, especially because he’s using iconic male characters, but takes a “what’s good for the goose” posture.

It’s common for superheroes like Batman, Superman and Spider-Man to have secret identities, but there has long been speculation in certain circles that they have other secrets as well.

The whispers began in 1954 when psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham wrote “Seduction Of The Innocent,” a book that alleged, among other things, that Wonder Woman was a lesbian and that Batman and Robin were gay lovers.

Although Wertham’s allegations have been long been ridiculed by the comics community, some industry insiders like Joe Phillips see a gay subtext throughout the superhero genre.

“It is there,” he insisted to The Huffington Post. “Think about it: A guy develops the ability to do something incredible and the first thing he does is to wear something tight-fitting and colorful and tell the world, ‘I’m going to fight crime’?”

Phillips has illustrated heroes like Superman and the Avengers for DC and Marvel. He says he’s fascinated by the underlying “gayness” of the superhero, and he’s taking it out of the closet and into a series of paintings he calls “Beefcake Heroes,” currently on display at a San Diego art gallery.

The series shows classic characters like Batman, Dr. Strange, Superman and Captain America bearing their oiled, rippled physiques in either tight jockey shorts or skintight spandex and wearing come hither looks more common in gay magazines like Blue Boy than, say, the pages of “Superboy.”

He admits the pictures are provocative, especially because he’s using iconic male characters, but takes a “what’s good for the goose” posture.

“There’s a huge audience that loves seeing pin-up pictures of girls,” he said. “I wanted to take the same approach with these iconic characters and have them them do the same sexy looks and poses.”

By design, Phillips makes his pictures perfectly suitable for publication in a mainstream comic — except he has the character raise an eyebrow or stare provocatively at the viewer.

“We are so used to seeing women as sexual beings, but we don’t want to see men doing the same thing. Men are supposed to be stoic and distant,” he said. “I wanted these works to show off these heroes’ strength, but also their cockiness and competitiveness.”

Although the typical reader of a superhero comic is tagged as a heterosexual young adult male, Phillips says the characters have also had a big influence on the gay community. For instance, much of what is considered the ideal modern physique among that demographic is greatly influenced by the hyper-masculine illustrations of seminal artists like Jack Kirby and John Romita in the 1960s.

“It really actually started with the California body building movement in the 1960s which promoted a more well-defined physique,” he said. “But the superhero genre recognizes body-conscious clothing. Take Comic-Con: If a chunky guy knows he wants to wear a Batman outfit, he knows it doesn’t look right unless he works out.”

Phillips sells his works for $1000 each and, so far, he has been amused by the reaction to his work.

“I’ve seen some guys buy a piece for their girlfriend — at least, they say it’s for their girlfriend — and I think it’s because they realize, ‘Hey, I’ve been looking at boobs!'” he said.

Meanwhile, he says he’s getting an interesting reaction from professional artists.

“It’s a mixed bag,” he said. “It’s not overwhelmingly negative, but different people have different comfort levels.”

Phillips is considering doing a similar series involving villains like the Joker, and he believes that will be even more provocative.

“Villains would be interesting,” he said. “They take power and have this attitude of ‘Look at me! I don’t play by the rules.'”

Gallery owner Alexander Salazar, who is displaying Phillips’ series, thinks his work is a sign of the times.

“Comic art is finally coming out of the closet,” he said. “The heroes and their fans can’t ignore they are sexy.”

Although Phillips is openly gay, Salazar admits putting a gay-friendly spin on popular superheroes is an act of bravery since he still works in the industry.

“We do have to play it safe in some ways, because he’s still in his career as a comics illustrator,” Salazar said. “He’s long been doing this in some respects. All of his males have bulges. They’re well-hung.”

Will Phillips’ interpretation of Superman being super-sexy play to the mainstream? Well, the verdict is still out on that one.

One Comic-Con attendee, a twenty-something male who asked not to be named, admits admiring Phillips’ artistry, but not much else.

“He’s a good artist — I’ll give him that — and I’m cool with guys who are gay, but I want to see superheroes saving the world, not picking each other up,” said the man.

Dear Anonymous Man:

What about the romance between The Question and Huntress? Or how about the wedding of Green Arrow and Black Canary? Or have you forgotten the red hot romances of Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle and the sultry undertones of Superman and Lois Lane?

And before you say “Gosh Mr. World News Center, those are straight people so they’re gosh golly fine” I remind you of the many lesbian innuendos in multiple episodes of Wonder Woman, the entire lesbian Batwoman series, Buffy the vampire slayer’s girl on girl fling, or the same sex bedroom scene with Powergirl. There is no way you thought about those without needing a quiet moment alone and paper towel.

Don’t even get me started about the many Hentai titles that are popular in the west.

In other words, the only people who haven’t been getting any comic booty were gay men. And given the ever changing world in which we’re living, it makes me think it’s a crime …. sorry, I had a Paul McCartney moment.

Anyway, let’s be honest. As we got older we looked at those men in tights and wondered, seriously, how the heck we thought that was macho. It’s clearly not a look anyone I know could pull off.

And one that no one wants to see me attempt.

So, Mr. Anonymous, unless you feel that there are a plethora of hard bodied superheroes wearing tights who have their sights set on you, I really wouldn’t worry too much about this.

Sincerely yours,

Bill McCormick
World News Center

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

Do you like to have fun? I don’t mean sitting around on your couch and playing Double Solitaire with your grandma. I’m talking about actually interacting with other humans, laughing, joking, making fun of Stew, who still believes that

Today, here at the World News Center, we’re going to help you achieve all your goals in a satisfying manner.

Well, okay, not all of them. We can’t make you rich, or good looking or help you nail a supermodel. What we can do help out with your kids and then give you some fun stuff to do.

Let’s start with your adorable urchins.

Greg Wilson, of Chicago’s very own NBC television, tells about an exciting new spate of children’s programming coming soon to a TV near you.

Did I mention it’s being broadcast by Al-Qaida?

Al Qaida’s latest plan to radicalize little kids is a children’s cartoon aimed at inspiring them to fight the west, according to experts who watch the terror network.

Word of the cartoon was announced by a contributor calling himself Abu al-Laith al-Yemen on the password-protected Arabic-language al-Shumukh online discussion forum, according to British think tank Quilliam, which monitors militant websites. Al-Yemen said the terror group is in the final stages of creating a cartoon about al Qaida’s Yemen-based branch. It would teach kids the history of al-Qaida and inspire them to become terrorists, Quilliam reported.

“The cartoon movie ‘Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula’ (AQAP) is a very exciting story that tells the facts about who let down the Islamic religion and the Prophet, and how the Arab leaders are agents of the West and other Islamic issues,” Quilliam quoted al-Yemen as saying.

Stills from the cartoon posted by the group showed masked figures executing captives.

“This movie is a religious effort to educate our sons and youth about how to live a noble life under the shade of the Sharia,” al-Yemen said. “It’s an alternative to the poison that is broadcast by other TV channels broadcast to our children and youth,” he said.

Will McCants, an expert on militant Islam, is skeptical the cartoon will ever emerge, according to Reuters..

“But if it’s legit and anywhere near like the purported screen shots and promotional banner, it would indicate that AQAP is becoming even more sophisticated in its efforts to reach out to youth,” he said on the Jihadica.com website.

Yes, that’s right, your bundles of joy can learn their ABCs from Achmed the Dead Terrorist and his pals.

A is for Armageddon
B is for Bomb
C is for Car Bomb
D is for Dead Americans

and so on.

What? You don’t think that’s funny? SILENCE! I KILL YOU!

Sorry. I’m much better now.

But after spending a day with the J is for Jihad crowd I’m betting that mommy and daddy could use a drink.

Or 12.

And that’s a specialty around here. The Huffington Post has a list of the best places to go in Chicago to get a drink. Assuming that “best places” mean places where you can get drunk with a turtle.

Whether it’s cocktails, straight liquor, wine or (most likely) beer, we Chicagoans love to throw a few back now and again. What makes it even better is a little entertainment and friendly competition. Shuffleboard and trivia nights can get old after a while, though, so it’s a good thing that our city has a few bars that offer truly unusual bar games. Between rock-paper-scissors, turtle races and ping pong, there’s always another hidden gem to be found on the Chicago bar scene.

Rock-Paper-Scissors: Ravenswood Pub boasts a weekly rock-paper-scissors tournament that perfectly combines one of the best things about being a kid (simple, juvenile games) and one of the best things about being an adult (alcohol). Get there early to sign up for the competition which starts at 10 pm every Thursday. The winners are rewarded with a gift certificate to Ravenswood Pub, which of course can be used to fuel another heated match the following week. If that isn’t enough, check the bar’s website to find out when they’ll be having their next round of “Crapple.” On these nights, patrons can buy raffle tickets and if they are lucky enough to have their number called, they receive a useless item – think random junk from the local Goodwill or your crazy neighbor’s yard sale.
Ravenswood Pub, 5455 N. Ravenswood Ave.; 773-769-6667

Turtle Racing: Another place to hit if you’re craving some bizarre entertainment is Big Joe’s 2 & 6 Pub. Located just a few blocks from Ravenswood Pub, this bar’s claim to fame is its weekly turtle races. Every Friday, the bar places a special ring on top of a pool table. Meanwhile, patrons earn raffle tickets for each pitcher of beer they purchase. An announcer calls out ticket numbers – if you have the matching ticket, you’re randomly assigned to one of the racing turtles. Just before the race begins, the turtles are placed in the middle of the ring under a clear container. When the buzzer goes off, the container is lifted and everyone starts cheering, hollering and generally confusing the turtles on the table. The first turtle to reach the outer edge of the ring wins, and the person assigned to that turtle gets a T-shirt. The bar takes pity on the last place turtle, giving the assigned patron a free beer as his or her reward. This goes on once every 15 minutes for a large portion of the Friday night festivities. For a peek at this unusual form of entertainment, check out this YouTube clip of the turtle races at Big Joe’s.
Big Joe’s, 1818 W. Foster Ave.; 773-784-8755

Raunchy Bingo: For something a little naughtier, head to The Burwood Tap in Lincoln Park. Though this pub has been around since the Prohibition days, it’s definitely keeping up with the times thanks to fun activities like Raunchy Bingo. Every Thursday at 9 pm, The Burwood Tap hosts this saucy event where patrons use bingo cards filled with dirty words and sexual positions rather than numbers. There are even a few bonus games thrown into the mix, like the Banana Deepthroat Challenge and the Penis Toss. It’s just $10 to play and the prizes include everything from dildos and porn to drink tickets.
Burwood Tap, 724 W. Wrightwood Ave.; 773-525-2593

Old-School Video Games: If you want to relive the your late 80s childhood, then head to Goldie’s Bar in North Center. Sure, there are plenty of bars with Wii consoles and big projector screens, but how many bars have a Super Nintendo? At Goldie’s you can play your favorite video games from your childhood – think Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Madden NFL, Super Mario Allstars, etc. Thanks to wireless controllers, players can sit right at the bar with prime viewing of the wall-mounted TV. As if that weren’t enough to recall great memories from the past, Goldie’s also uses their 106-inch HD projector to screen campy flicks from the past like “Sleepaway Camp” and has a stack of old board games – anyone for a round for a round of Guess Who?
Goldie’s, 3839 N. Lincoln Ave.; 773-404-5322

Movieokie: Finally, there’s The Whistler. With classy cocktails, a chic atmosphere and plenty of hipsters, there’s nothing particularly weird about this Logan Square bar. However, a visit on the first Monday of the month brings in the unique (and hipster-friendly) feature of Movieoke. Much like karaoke, bar-goers make a selection then get up on stage to perform. In this version, however, you get to choose a movie, pick out a costume and then act out a scene from your chosen film. The fact that the actual scene is played out behind the impromptu actors on a big screen just makes this all the more entertaining.
The Whistler, 2421 N. Milwaukee Ave.; 773-227-3530

Astute readers will note that the Huffington Post doesn’t have the budget to get all the way to Chicago’s south side. That’s okay. Just click here to get hundreds of choices in neighborhoods where you don’t have to be a Cubs’ fan or wear an Izod.

I also doubt that there’ll be any turtles.

Anyway, all you need to remember is that a suicide bomb is different from a Jaeger Bomb and you’ll be fine.

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

Normally, I devote Sundays to scientific topics. However the events of this week, and the varied responses to them, caused me to put aside my personal fun for a day and do something I rarely do; take a look at the events that are actually in the news. It’s not that there’s any editorial decree which states I should avoid hard news, it’s just that those topics are usually well covered and tossing another voice in the choir doesn’t change anything. But two days ago Anders Behring Breivik killed, at least, 90 people and yesterday Amy Winehouse died. Both were described as “shocking.” However, only one really was. How we deal with tragedies says a lot about us and, based on the responses to each item listed here, what is said about us is not very good.

Once it was discovered that Breivik was a blond haired, blue eyed, Christian, many media outlets stopped calling him a “terrorist” and switched to the term “madman.” To be fair and balanced the usual suspect for that kind of revisionism, FOX News, wasn’t among them, clinging to the term terrorist throughout their coverage. How their commentators will deal with it is probably another story, but at least the editorial tenor has been set and set correctly.

Breivik had a political and religious goal and used violence to make his point. That is the purest definition of terrorist that I can think of. “Agree or die” has been the credo of terrorists for time immemorial. In case you weren’t clear as to why he did this, he left a 1,518 page manifesto for you to peruse.

–The writer describes himself as “Justiciar Knight Commander for Knights Templar Europe and one of several leaders of the National and pan-European Patriotic Resistance Movement.”

–He anticipates a European civil war taking place in three stages, ending in 2083 with the execution of cultural Marxists and the deportation of Muslims.

–The first stage runs through 2030 and includes “open source warfare, military shock attacks by clandestine cell systems (and) further consolidation of conservative forces.”

–Between 2030 and 2070, the author predicts “more advanced forms of resistance groups (and the) preparation for pan-European coup d’etats.”

–The final stage — when the author anticipates Europe being 30%-50% Muslim by country — features the “execution of cultural Marxist/multiculturalist … traitors,” deportation of Muslims and “implementation of a Cultural Conservative political agenda” following the overthrow of existing governments across the continent.

He also lists multiple examples of violence inflicted on white people by Muslims in Norway but, as of this writing, police can’t seem to confirm any of them.

The change from terrorist to madman made me wonder how Muslims would view that obvious slant, all terrorists are from the Middle East and everyone else is just insane, so I went up to Al Jazeera to see what they had to say and found this fascinating look at the whole affair.

A few years ago, the respected Cambridge scholar T J Winter, also known by his Muslim name of Abdal Hakim Murad, gave a fascinating lecture to Humanities staff and students at the University of Leicester. The title was “Islam and the threat of the West”, turning on its head the more usual – then and now – “Islam and the threat to the West”.

It was a novel approach which, in a nutshell, illustrated that, historically, aggression has been directed more from Europe to the Muslim world than the other way round. His evidence for such a view was impeccably sourced.

I thought about Abdal Hakim’s talk this morning as I read the reports coming in of the dreadful bombing and shooting in Norway wherein, of course, there was speculation that these two events were “Islamic-terror related”. No doubt we will learn more over the coming days, but the early signs are, in fact, that the perpetrator was a “blond, blue-eyed Norwegian” with “political traits towards the right, and anti-Muslim views”. Not surprisingly, the man’s intentions were neither linked to these “traits”, nor to his postings on “websites with Christian fundamentalist tendencies”. Any influence “remains to be seen”; echoes of Oklahoma 1995.

Interestingly, this criminal is described by one unnamed Norwegian official as a “madman”. He may well be, but this is one way that the motivations for heinous crimes can be airbrushed out of the story before they have the chance to take hold in the popular imagination.

In 1969, for example, Denis Michael Rohan, an Australian Christian who set fire to Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, was dismissed as a “madman” and sent for psychiatric treatment; end of story. The right-wing fundamentalists plotting to destroy the mosque, and the nearby Dome of the Rock, lived to fight another day. I suspect that that is what will happen with the Norwegian bomber/shooter; his right-wing links and Christian fundamentalist contacts will be dismissed as irrelevant. This, we will be told, was the work of a “deranged” person “acting independently”. Ergo, the only organised “terror threats” to civilisation are still “Islamic-related” and the focus of anti-terror legislation and efforts must remain in the Muslim world and on Muslim communities in Europe and the USA.

If we allow this to happen, we will be doing the world a great disservice, not least because the new right is on the rise across the West – and Oklahoma was proof that its followers are capable of immense destruction.

Neo-Nazi immigrants from Eastern Europe have even been active in Israel where the government, while deploring such far-right activity in its midst is actually edging ever more to the far-right on a daily basis. Ministers advocate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in order to purify Israel as a “Jewish state”; precious human rights for which the world has struggled are overridden in the name of “state security”; criminals in uniform are allowed to get away, quite literally, with murder.

All of this takes place with the collusion of Western governments which are themselves showing right-wing tendencies towards double-speak on matters of respect and tolerance for minorities. If you are even remotely “different” in Europe today, especially if you are a Muslim, you are eyed with suspicion and must go out of your way to “prove” your loyalty to a state which, if the truth was made known, would get rid of you if only it had the guts to pass the necessary legislation to do so. In some cases, such legislation is virtually in place in the guise of “anti-terror” measures.

All of this is backed by a vociferous and influential right-wing media which supports Israel right or wrong – and a pro-Israel lobby which acts as if it is untouchable. Given the political context across the West, it probably is.

For the most part the shift in coverage of these murders switched from “act of terror” to “tragedy” so fast it made my head snap. As though we were just talking about a tree that fell on a car and killed a little old lady and not innocent people being gunned down mercilessly. It also went from a top of the hour news story to something that got mentioned later in each broadcast. Maybe after the cute piece about puppies and where to go swimming.

After all, the importance of the fact that there is a growing number of blond haired, blue eyed, people who want to kill you and anyone else who disagrees with them pales in comparison to the fact that Amy Winehouse died.

Winehouse had a long history of abuse, both drug and alcohol, as well as a tremendous amount of talent. Much has been made of the fact that she became the newest member of the 27 Club and that her life was “cut short.” In fact so much was made of this event that I was forced to turn off my Twitter and Facebook pages because there were over 100 posts in a row expressing sorrow and wishing her well in heaven and so on that it became nauseating. Not that I’m a callous man, having beat my battles with drugs I am sorry she lost hers, but this should be a mention not the most important thing in everyone’s life.

I know there are people for whom this story didn’t make their radar, but they are the minority. Unfortunately.

ABC’s World News made her death their lead story and dedicated over two minutes of air time to her death, that’s a lot by news standards, and then re-ran an earlier segment from Good Morning America about her problems in Serbia. In case that wasn’t enough they also added a web page, written by Lara Salahi, with a complete story.

Singer Amy Winehouse, who died inexpectedly in her London home Saturday found many of her career success overshadowed by her drug and alcohol addiction.

While Winehouse publicly acknowledged her drug and alcohol abuse, some addiction experts said, like many addicts, Winehouse may not have grasped the severity of her addiction.

“I think she minimized the extext to which her life was impacted by drugs and alcohol,” said Dr. David Sack, CEO of Promises Treatment Center in Los Angeles, Calif. “She was denying the extent to which it affected her.”

In one of her hit songs, “Rehab,” Winehouse sings that she will not go to rehab, even though her father encouraged her to go.

“It’s not just my pride, it’s just ’til these tears have dried,” Winehouse sings.

Winehouse admitted in several interviews during the album’s release that she suffered from depression, had an eating disorder and engaged in self-injury.

“I do drink a lot. I think it’s symptomatic of my depression,” Winehouse said in an interview on the British TV show, “The Album Chart Show.” “I’m manic depressive, I’m not an alcoholic, which sounds like an alcoholic in denial.”

The song “Rehab” cited a real plea by her friends and father to seek treatment, she said.

“I just felt, no. Do they have a gym there? Who’s going to feed my cats?” Winehouse said. “Alcoholism is a horrible thing, but if you can’t remember the practical issues, that’s when you know you’ve got a real problem.”

Winehouse enrolled in rehab a few times, but left early from each program.

Sack said the anticipation of phsyical withdrawal, and the likelihood that the addict would lose his or her relationship with those that hinder their sobriety, keep many from accepting treatment.

“Most who are drug dependent are afraid to seek treatment,” said Sack. “Winehouse did better than many others by trying.”

Winehouse’s environment may have fostered her drug dependency, he said.

“Drugs get glamorized in the creative community,” said Sack. “There’s a lifestyle situation that creates an environment where it’s acceptable.”

Winehouse’s father Mitch Winehouse, publicly cited multiple family problems that he said may have spiraled Winehouse into depression and addiction.

Mitch Winehouse told the British paper, the Daily Mail, that he had a public decade-long affair with his coworker that started when Winehouse was 2 years old.

“It was difficult,” Mitch Winehouse told the Daily Mail in 2008.

Besides the chemical addition to drugs and alcohol, many addicts have previously suffered from a traumatic event or even a psychological disorder such as depression.

“There are many children of bad marriages that don’t go into addiction,” said Sack. “But it does raise the risk of the child to get involved in drugs and alcohol.”

Winehouse had reconciled with her father since then, but that did not seem to help her to stay sober.

Mitch Winehouse, an aspiring singer himself, said he knew his daughter’s career and the publicity surrounding her personal life helped his chances at a music career.

“It [the relationship between father and daughter] was complicated,” said Ian Drew, senior music editor of US Weekly magazine. “She loved her father, but he also fed off of her.”

“He couldn’t rein her in as much as he loved her,”said Drew.

Although family members are primary motivators for addicts to seek treatment, the ultimate decision to follow through lies with an addict, said Sack.

While Winehouse was not seeking formal treatment, she was looking to continue her career. Winehouse was reportedly working on another album.

“It is clear that she was hopeful she’d be well enough to make another album,” said Sack. “She was looking to do better.”

“She wanted more than she was getting in her life,” said Sack.

To be fair, their main page has several other stories about the events in Norway, and they do seem to be trying to make sense of it all, but they, like many others, run with the “madman” slant and try to downplay any larger issues.

So, in summation, Amy Winehouse dies and we get in depth looks at the problems of addiction as well as a historical retrospective on same. A terrorist guns down over 90 people, blows up a government building and we get told not to worry, it’s just one guy. It’s not like there’s lots of crazy white people who know how to make bombs and are willing to kill anyone who disagrees with them, is it?

Are there Mr. McVeigh?

How about you Mr. Rudolph, do you have anything to add?

What about you Mr. Stack, do you have any thoughts?

I guess with only a few more than 250 examples over the last 20 years, it’s nothing we should be concerned about. After all, it’s just “one guy.”

Yeah, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll worry more about the bombers and their ilk than I will about the sad life of a lost soul.

LOWKEY – TERRORIST (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO) by wahrheitsaktivist

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

Conspiracy theorists grasp at the flimsiest pieces of flotsam to try and stay afloat. A grainy photo, even when millions of people have high quality digital cameras, is enough to prove to some that whatever it is they think is out there is truly there. A word from the guy who knew the guy who met the lady who once knew the girl who became a man after a career as a circus performer has the same veracity as first person testimony with incontrovertible evidence. The kind of stuff that would set off your BS detector in any bar suddenly ends up in the news as legitimate news because some members of the media are desperate to fill space. You kind of expect stuff like that in papers that feature topless women on page three or drawings of vampire women on the cover. Rational people know that those sources are about as reliable as that guy who wants to borrow ten bucks for a couple of days.

But sometimes one of these stories slips through the cracks and ends up in the mainstream media. That’s when it’s important to forward these fine journalists this link which shows the amazing problems with the basic tenets of any UFO conspiracy. The most obvious problem is that the basic conspiracy relies on the fact that beings can travel millions of light years through space, avoiding black holes and the rest only to crash into our planet. Over and over and over …..

Don’t they have some version of Driver’s Ed in space? And, anyway, how hard can it be to miss a planet?

Oh well. Here we go again. Lee Speigal at Huffington Post – who’s actually a very good journalist, but keeps his opinion to himself here – tells about another guy who has proof, PROOF I TELL YOU, that Roswell was a cover up and there’s a bunch of stuff about UFOs that some evil cabal in “the government” is keeping from you, and only you.

Yes, this particular guy’s a general, but I don’t care.

The Roswell UFO controversy may be 64 years old, but it shows no sign of heading into retirement.

One thing we know for sure: On July 8, 1947, the front page of the Roswell Daily Record proclaimed that a flying saucer had been captured by the Roswell Army Air Field.

The U.S. Air Force had issued a press release that day stating that a flying saucer had been “captured,” and photos were released of soldiers examining metallic-looking objects, presumably pieces of a crashed balloon.

Then the controversy began. At a press conference later that day in Ft. Worth, Texas, Air Force Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey essentially recanted the entire story, announcing instead that the debris was simply pieces of a fallen weather balloon.

Speculation of what really happened has never truly ended. George Filer, a retired Air Force intelligence officer, told The Huffington Post that he believes Ramey was forced to lie about the Roswell incident.

And, in news that will come as a shock even to ardent UFO researches, he told The Huffington Post in an exclusive interview that Ramey’s wife told him he was “embarrassed about having to lie about the weather balloon.”

Over his 20-year career, Filer regularly briefed generals and congressmen about a wide range of security issues, including UFO sightings, up through the Vietnam War.

“It is my opinion that President Truman was there [at Fort Worth] and that he made the decision that it should be held at the highest levels,” Filer said.

“The reason I believe that is that I had talked with Mrs. Ramey. She would never admit that she knew anything about aliens, but she did say that [her husband] was very embarrassed about having to lie about the weather balloon — he was very upset about that.”

“She also admitted that they became good friends with the Trumans,” Filer added. “My point is: How does a one-star general become a good friend with the president of the United States?”

None of this comes as a surprise to former nuclear physicist Stanton T. Friedman. He’s the original civilian investigator of the Roswell UFO incident and the most outspoken scientist who believes there is overwhelming evidence that alien spacecrafts are visiting Earth. He, too, has talked with Mrs. Ramey.

“From talking to her, I had no reason to believe A) that she knew intimate details about Roswell or any other such event; or B) that she made up this story because it is consistent with a man of reasonable character who followed orders as one would certainly have expected him to,” Friedman said.

Both Filer and Friedman — the military man and the scientist — said they believe the Roswell UFO was an alien spacecraft, that Earth is currently visited by extraterrestrials and that only individuals with very specific “need to know” credentials have access to this information. Both are speaking at next week’s MUFON Symposium in Irvine, Calif.

“We are being visited on a regular basis — probably for thousands of years — by aliens from other planets,” Filer said. “Their technology is much more advanced than what we have. Even though we don’t like to think of ourselves in this way, in a lot of ways, we’re primitive compared to them.”

New wrinkles are constantly being added to the Roswell conspiracy theory. Author Annie Jacobsen unveiled a whopper this year in her book “Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base,” that alleged the alien spaceship crash was actually a hoax contrived by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Nazi scientist Josef Mengele. There was no crash, according to Jacobsen, but the Communist dictator and “the Angel of Death” allegedly sent children surgically altered to look like aliens to Roswell in a remote-controlled craft to frighten Americans.

Friedman echoed Filer’s sentiment. “People need to recognize that the real situation about where we fit in the scheme of things is very different from the way it’s been portrayed,” Friedman said. “In my view of what’s going on, there are loads of civilizations out there all over the place, and that we are not very significant.

“[The aliens] would instantly recognize that we don’t qualify for membership in a galactic federation because we’re such a primitive society whose major activity is obviously tribal warfare.”

Let’s take this one part at a time.

Gen. Ramey could have been forced to lie for a far more prosaic reasons. That was about the time the government, the regular one, was testing the Northrop Delta wing bomber and a couple of other crafts that they would rather not have featured on the front page news.

Now, which one makes more sense? An alien flew billions of miles only to slam into the desert or an experimental craft that had stability issues flopped to the ground?

If you picked door number one, you’re hopeless.

If the pilot of that craft died it’s easy to see why the general would have been embarrassed. Not being able to honor a man who died in the service of his country would bother any member of the military.

As to Mr. Friedman, if he would just click this link he would see the many holes in his – for lack of a better term – theory.

‘Space Girl’ The Imagined Village from Henry Lambourne on Vimeo.

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

You looked at the title of today’s blog and immediately assumed that something bad had happened to my brain. I can understand that. I kind of felt the same way when I realized what I was going to write about. After all, it’s so hot outside that your sweat is sweating. It’s so hot that you’ve been re-reading my Nakee Posts just to pretend you’re not bogged down with sweat laden clothes and smelling a little funky.

I know that this is supposed to be a blog dedicated to exciting events in the world around us but, sometimes, it does the soul good to step back from it all and enjoy something silly. I could write about the nice Texas lady who, in an effort to cure her boyfriend’s fear of heights, threw him off a 150 ft. high bungee tower. While the rope snagged and forced the couple to be stranded 75 ft. in the air for three hours, it worked out all right. He’ll never go anywhere near stuff like this again and they’re getting married.

Or I could take a look at the darker side of life and write about the McDonald’s manager in Georgia who punched out a woman for having a service dog for her autistic children. That worked out okay too since he was fired and then jailed.

But neither story presented me with anything really happy to write about.

Then, last night, on TV I saw a story about the World Santa Claus Congress in Denmark. What could be better for reminding us that snow is on the way than a healthy dose of Ho Ho Hos? The funny thing is that when I searched American web sites for the story, all I got were blurbs and a couple of pics. I had to go all the way to Beijing to get the complete story. Mo Hong’e seems to think that the mutant Santa Olympics are of real interest in China.

Santas from all over the world gathered at the World Santa Congress in the Danish capital Copenhagen on Wednesday.

As usual, there were plenty of games to be played included throwing sacks of presents and firing canon balls. Now, let’s go to Bakken amusement park outside the Danish capital for Christmas in July.

Two teams of Santas – one from Denmark and the other from the United States, Sweden, Russia, Germany and other countries – competed for the coveted trophy of Best Santa Team.

The Danish Santas won, and team captain Niels Preus vowed that his Santas would come back and defend their title next year.

Niels Preus, captain of Danish Santa team, said, “Today we won the international championship, and we are having it for the whole year, until the next world Santa Congress next year.”

Aside from throwing presents, Santas also had to master a Christmas obstacle course, ride bumper cars and compete in a horse race game.

Kris Kringle, Santa from USA, said, “Nobody lost, Santa Claus won. That’s the important thing, Santa won! Maybe it was a Danish Santa, maybe it was an American Santa, whatever, but Santa always wins!”

The World Santa Claus Congress was created in 1957 and gathers around 150 Santas from around the world, including both female and male Christmas pixies and elves.

Activities in the three-day program include a Christmas parade down Copenhagen’s main pedestrian street and a dip in the harbor for the annual saltwater footbath.

The round-bellied participants also debate and exchange views on Christmas-related issues such as how yuletide greetings are done in different parts of the world.

The conference was created by Professor Tribini, Bakken’s legendary entertainer, who refused to accept the idea that Christmas is only celebrated once a year.

And as the Santas are usually very busy in December, the professor decided to create “Christmas in July.”

Santa won …**sniff**… could there be a nicer sentiment?

With Christmas in July becoming a semi-official holiday thanks, in no small part, to these Santas it seems appropriate to look at the true meaning of Christmas and see if it gets involved in the fun.

I’m very pleased to report that it does. MilPitas Patch, a California based web site run by Adelaide Chen, is reporting that giving without asking for anything in return is alive and well in, of all godforsaken places, San Francisco.

Sending care packages to troops overseas are not new, but it was less than five years ago that the Girl Scouts of Northern California began teaming up with a San Jose-based nonprofit to do just that.

About 33,600 boxes of the Girl Scout cookies were distributed from Moffett Field last Thursday to military families. Before that, another ten pallets were delivered to a warehouse for Operation: Care and Comfort to ship overseas.

Last year, the cookies were dropped off, from Coast Guard Island in Alameda to Camp Parks in Dublin. This year, due to the volume of the cookies plus donated items collected by Old Navy, they asked the bases to send trucks.

“It was just easier to do it that way,” said the organization’s Co-founder and President Julie DeMaria.

Each cookie season, through the Gift of Caring program, customers have the option of donating a box to a food bank or to military troops.

In the beginning of the partnership, there were just a few cases here and there, she said. This season, troops from the Girl Scouts of Northern California altogether collected about 107,000 boxes of cookies, split in half between food banks and Operation Care and Comfort, according to spokeswoman Dana Allen.

In Milpitas, Girl Scouts collected about 635 boxes. That’s a pretty average number, said Allen.

But at the last minute, when five Girl Scouts were given the opportunity to help distribute the cookies at Moffett Field, it was Milpitas’ Troop 60596 that responded to the call.

They were Girl Scouts Allison Eacret, Megan Brobst, Anna Chiang, Jennifer Bunnell, Megan Farley along with leaders Michelle Eacret, Stacy Brobst and Elaine Farley.

“We have certain [Girl Scout] troops that are on standby that we know if we have a quck request for a parade, city council…” said Allen referring to them as a “go-to troop”.

“They’re always ready and very, very active,” she said.

After a few hours, the Girl Scouts had loaded about three-fourths of the cookies that were distributed that day onto military vehicles as far as Oxnard and Fresno.

The main distribution that Operation: Care and Comfort handles is ship packages overseas once a month to about 150 units deployed oversees. The number goes up to about 200 during the holiday season.

Cookies containing chocolate are a big no-no during the summer, but they go out once fall starts, said DeMaria.

The care packages often get thank you emails and Facebook messages from the recipients, and some curiosity too.

“They’re always really surprised that this is happening from the San Francisco Bay Area,” said Co-founder and President Julie DeMaria.

“They’re really surprised because they don’t think the Bay Area is very supportive of them,” she said of the anti-war sentiment.

An email from Andrew J. from Santa Clara read:

… it was a nice surprise to see the generous and kind gesture of support from the folks. It made me proud to be from the valley when I was able to break out the goods for all the soldiers (most of them are from Michigan and the mid-west) and show them your letters of support.

Outside of the seasonal cookie distribution, the organization sends out toiletries and necessary items such as razors and sunscreen.

For military families, they re-distribute tickets to events, knowing that some may be unable to afford them.

“As a former military kid [of a family of five] we could never afford it,” said DeJesus. But she said she knew one family who took their son to his first hockey game.

“It’s very expensive living in the Bay Area,” she said. “They don’t have extra money to do anything like that.”

To learn more about the program, visit www.occ-usa.org.

While I admit that it bugs me that we can’t provide our service men and women with necessary toiletries I’ll leave that rant for another day. What matters here today is that even unlikely people can do good. That even includes you.

So, in the spirit of the season, I hope you’ll take 10 minutes out of your miserable day and do something nice for someone. You’ll be amazed at how much cooler you’ll feel.

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