Archives for December 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!