Archives for December 2011

Sometimes I just sit and stare at the empty space where words are supposed to go and wonder what the heck I can say. After all, some of the stuff I find on the internet needs little or no preamble. There’s only so many ways to work the word “idiot” into a sentence before you start boring people. But then, just when I’m about to bust open a bottle of bourbon and wallow in despair, something comes along and allows me to tie it all together. Because of that I’m going to do something a little different today. I’m going to tell you a little something about the last story now so you can have some context for everything else.

You and I and every other living human being are the true pinnacle of human intelligence.

Just keep that in mind as we move on.

College entrance exams, once the bane of students, are now – for all intents and purposes – Twitter friendly.

U.S. colleges are adding unusual questions to their applications, including the University of Maryland asking to share “my favorite thing about last Tuesday.”

The question, which the university asks applicants to answer in 25 words or less, is part of a recent trend of schools asking short answer questions on subjects atypical for a college application, such as New York’s Columbia University asking applicants to describe “the best movie of all time” with brevity, the Chicago Tribune reported Friday.

“Imagine you have to wear a costume for a year of your life. What would you pick and why?” asks Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

“What is your favorite ride at the amusement park? How does this reflect your approach to life?” Emory University in Atlanta asks applicants.

Katherine Cohen, a college consultant and founder of IvyWise.com, said the questions are designed to help college officials become acquainted with applicants in ways that might not have been possible with typical application essays.

“You really get a totally different feel for who that person is, especially with the short takes. It allows colleges to learn things they may not get from a transcript and a resume,” she said. “That’s why they’re fun.”

Fun? Shouldn’t there be stuff about – oh, I don’t know – grades and activities and stuff like that? Who the heck really cares about last Tuesday? I know I don’t. Heck, I’d bet half of you can’t remember anything about last Tuesday. Tuesday’s the crappiest day of the week.

You and I and every other living human being are the true pinnacle of human intelligence.

Just reminding you. This next shining example attacked a fast food clerk with … I kind of like this … bags of fast food.

Florida authorities said a man accused of hitting a McDonald’s employee in the head with a bag of food was found passed out in his driveway.

The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office said Todd Rogers, 30, went through a McDonald’s drive-through in Holiday with his girlfriend, who was driving, shortly after midnight Sunday and returned a few minutes later when they found they were missing a drink, the St. Petersburg Times reported Tuesday.

Rogers, who deputies said was extremely intoxicated, screamed obscenities at a 22-year-old woman working at the McDonald’s and poked her, causing her to step back, investigators said. Rogers then allegedly threw a bag of food at the woman, striking her in the head. He threw a second bag of food when the woman closed the window, the arrest report states.

Deputies said they found Rogers sleeping in a Buick in his driveway. He was arrested on a charge of simple battery.

“I hit her in the … head with a bag of food, so what?” Rogers allegedly told deputies.

“I deserve to go to jail,” the report quotes him as saying. “I don’t care.”

Yeah, not a single mental issue on his end whatsoever.

I can just hear the girlfriend’s parents; “Oh, honey, what a catch. You must be so proud right now.”

You and I and every other living human being are the true pinnacle of human intelligence.

As this next story proves. Obviously it, too, comes from Florida.

A Florida school board suspended for 10 days without pay a teacher who hosed down a pre-kindergarten student who soiled his clothes.

Stephanie Wilson, 52, a teacher at Dunedin Elementary who has been teaching for 30 years, received the suspension from the Pinellas County School Board after she hosed down the student at the side of the building Oct. 28 when he soiled his diaper and pants while playing outside, the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times reported Friday.

The punishment, which will cost Wilson $3,010, was recommended by Superintendent John Stewart.

Clearly 30 years of teaching did not prepare her for the whole concept of diapers. I can see how that slipped through the cracks when all she deals with are two year olds. They’re normally completely potty trained and registered to vote.

At least in Florida,

So why do I keep saying that you and I and every other living human being are the true pinnacle of human intelligence? Because, sadly, it may be true.

So say some smart people.

A new research paper argues that there are limits to our mental evolution and that humans are not likely to ever develop a “supermind.”

Studies of human evolution show that as natural selection, nutrition, and medical technology have improved, so has the upward trajectory of the human body. But Thomas Hill and Ralph Hertwig write in Current Directions in Psychological Science that our bodies may have their own self-imposed evolutionary ceilings.

“A lot of people are interested in drugs that can enhance cognition in various ways,” Hill and Hertwig write. “But it seems natural to ask, why aren’t we smarter already?”

According to Hill and Hertwig, humans have grown in height over time but because of the limited ability of the heart to pump blood to the brain, it would not be feasible for people to suddenly become eight feet tall. Likewise, sudden growths in brain capacity are most likely limited by our own evolutionary caps:

A baby’s brain size is thought to be limited by, among other things, the size of the mother’s pelvis; bigger brains could mean more deaths in childbirth, and the pelvis can’t change substantially without changing the way we stand and walk.

Hill and Hertwig also argue that supposed cognitive-enhancing drugs like Ritalin and amphetamines may temporarily improve focus, but usually only work on people with “lower baseline abilities,” and those who don’t suffer from conditions like Attention Deficit Disorder actually perform at lower levels under their influence.

“If you have a specific task that requires more memory or more speed or more accuracy or whatever, then you could potentially take an enhancer that increases your capacity for that task,” the two write. “But it would be wrong to think that this is going to improve your abilities all across the board.”

And then there are the psychological and emotional issues associated with higher intelligence. Hill and Hertwig point to conditions like post traumatic stress disorder, a condition brought on when someone literally cannot forget a past trauma. They also point to the case of the Ashkenazi Jews, who possess IQ’s significantly higher than the general population of Europe but also disproportionately suffer from Tay-Sachs disease.

“Memory is a double-edged sword,” Hills says. “If something bad happens, you want to be able to forget it, to move on.”

That’s all well and good, I guess, but why do we only use about ten percent – or obviously less – of the brains we have? Answer that question and maybe I’ll pay attention.

If I remember.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OArZ9N0Ptg8&w=500&h=319]

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

A lot of debate has been centered on immigrants in this country. Specifically the illegal ones but the legal ones do get dragged into the fray from time to time. The usual rants run one of two ways. One, these people are criminals and need to be jailed and deported. Or, they are the very fabric of what it means to be America. There’s not a lot of middle ground there. I think about this because of one very simple reason. If the anti-immigration people held sway in 1921 I wouldn’t be here today. My grandfather came to this country illegally in that year. Escaping rampant poverty in post war Ireland, with barely a third grade education, he, like many others, caught a ride on a ship whose captain turned a blind eye to his passengers. For a fee, of course. Eventually he met, and married, my grandmother and became a citizen. That task was easier back then than it is today. He worked for Packard during World War Two and then moved to Ford when he couldn’t handle the fumes from the paint guns any more. He owned a home in Melrose Park, where I was raised, and was a model citizen by most any accounting you could use. No, he wasn’t thrilled about having to raise a toddler in his golden years, but that’s a story for another day.

While losing me to the immigration clamp down may have been no great loss to the American psyche, I wondered what would happen if we lost all our immigrants. Believe it or not a town in Iowa found out, rather abruptly. Liz Goodwin, of The Lookout, takes a look at the strange case of Postville, Iowa.

A group of Jewish boys in yarmulkes and winter coats walked past the “Taste of Mexico” restaurant on Lawler Street last week on their way home from school. Minutes later, a Somali man wearing a keffiyeh scarf around his neck passed by, perhaps on his way to the town’s makeshift mosque on Main Street.

This improbably diverse rural town of about 2,000 people in northeastern Iowa suffered a near-fatal shock more than three years ago when a federal immigration raid scooped up 20 percent of its population in a single day. An ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher Jewish family from Brooklyn bought the town’s defunct meatpacking plant in 1987 and attracted workers from Israel, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. The plant became the largest producer of kosher beef in the world. When the plant was raided one spring morning in May 2008, most of the workers on shift were Guatemalan and Mexican, and undocumented. Many workers later said they had been physically or sexually abused at the plant, and at least 57 minors were illegally employed there, some as young as 13.

Six months later, the plant shut down abruptly. Sholom Rubashkin, the chief executive, was convicted of fraud and sent to prison. The national and local news media documented the near-demise of the town that followed, as businesses were shuttered overnight and hundreds of homes abandoned. The town shrank to nearly half its former size, as many of the illegal immigrants who were not netted in the raid left out of fear or because they couldn’t find a job.

Immigration is one of the most contentious issues facing the Republican presidential candidates as they prepare for Saturday’s debate in Des Moines, sponsored by Yahoo! and ABC News. Earlier this year, Rick Perry’s candidacy suffered because of his support for allowing illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition at public universities in Texas. Last month, Newt Gingrich struck a moderate tone on the subject, saying, “I don’t see how the party that says it’s the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families that have been here a quarter century.” Other candidates say Perry and Gingrich support policies that amount to amnesty for people who have broken the law. Yahoo News visited Postville to examine what immigration looks like in the Republican presidential campaign’s first battleground state, one that is 90 percent white but that has outposts like Postville that are changing the state’s ethnic makeup and driving its population growth. Though still less than 4 percent of the population, Iowa’s foreign-born population increased by 159 percent between 1990 and 2008, while the native-born population increased by only 5.7 percent.

Today, the meatpacking plant, under new ownership, uses the federal e-verify system to check workers’ immigration status. The hourly wage on the poultry line is higher than it was before the raid, but few Iowan-born locals work there. Ridding this small community of its illegal workforce, far from freeing up jobs for American-born citizens, has resulted in closed businesses and fewer opportunities. Even nearly four years later, many homes still remain empty, and taxable retail sales are about 40 percent lower than they were in 2008.

In order to staff its still low-paying jobs with legal immigrants, the new owner of the plant has recruited a hodgepodge of refugees and other immigrants, who often leave the town as soon as they find better opportunities, creating a constant churn among the population. The switch to a legal work force has made the community feel less stable, some locals say, and it’s unclear if Postville will again become a place where immigrants will put down roots, raise children, and live in relative harmony with their very different neighbors.

‘For me, it was a fairy tale’

Postville thinks of itself as a place where people of all backgrounds and nationalities can come, do hard and unsavory work, and get ahead. Svetlana Vanchugova, who teaches English classes to non-native speakers at the high school, is one such immigrant. Called “Ms. Lana” by her students, Vanchugova came to Postville in 1995 from Ukraine in order to escape an unhappy marriage and to start a new life with her two sons. “For me it was a fairy tale when I first came to this little town,” she says.

Vanchugova taught English at a university in Ukraine, but when she arrived in America, her only option was to work at the plant, packing chickens. “Just imagine what a university professor feels working for agriprocessors for three years,” she told Yahoo News as her high school students worked quietly behind her. “One thought was torturing me: that I didn’t belong there.”

She was quickly promoted to making labels for the food products and eventually became the quality control manager for the entire plant. The plant’s managers sponsored her for a work visa, helping her to get legal immigration status after she overstayed her visitor’s visa. Today, because of tighter federal rules, Vanchugova would most likely not have been able to adjust her immigration status.

“I prayed every day because I knew that … if you are illegal here, there is no way for you,” she said. “You cannot get any job, you cannot do anything. All you can do is work at agriprocessors, and that is it.”

When Vanchugova’s sons attended school in Postville, officials there–desperate for a way to deal with an influx of students from dozens of countries who could not speak English–learned that she used to teach English at a university. They asked her to set up an English as a Second Language program at the high school. Now, about a third of the K-12 students in Postville are in ESL classes. Over time, the school has enrolled children from at least 35 different countries.

Three years after arriving in the town with two children, two suitcases, and no money, Vanchugova became a K-12 ESL teacher. She is now an American citizen.

Vanchugova thinks of Postville as her “motherland,” the place where she was reborn. The immigration raid permanently changed the spirit of the town, she told Yahoo News. “Things changed, and not for the better,” she said. “It is not that Postville anymore.”

‘I came here to work and have money’

For the next generation of immigrants to Postville–the Guatemalans and others who were netted in the raid–the fairy tale never came true. A few dozen were granted visas for cooperating with law enforcement in cases against their supervisors, but most of them are gone, according to Steve Brackett, the pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church who led the community’s response to the raid’s aftermath.

The wave of immigrants that replaced them has been less willing to put down roots and call Postville their home, locals say. “From my perspective as a community we were stabilizing in 2008,” Brackett says. “Rather than single males working, they had brought their families. We had people who were buying houses and planned to stay here.”
Wilson Eduardo, a native of the Pacific island of Palau, is one of four remaining Palauans, of about 150 who traveled 8,000 miles to Postville four months after the immigration raid in 2008.

Then-C.E.O. Sholom Rubashkin was desperate to find legal workers immediately after the raid, and sought them out in Palau (a former U.S.-administered United Nations territory, which means Palauans can live and work legally in America), homeless shelters in south Texas, and a Native American reservation in Nebraska, among other places. He offered to pay their way to the plant and promised them a land of opportunity.

The Palauans showed up in September 2008 in T-shirts and sandals. The newcomers were incredulous when they were told that winter temperatures could reach 20 degrees below zero, easy. And two months after the Palauans got to Postville, the plant went bankrupt, putting Eduardo and his 150 countrymen out of a job. Unlike nearly all of the other Palauans, who quickly fled home or to other states in a mass exodus, Eduardo decided to stay. He got a job cleaning apartments, and when the plant reopened in 2009 he went back to the chicken line, where he eventually earned $11 an hour.

Three years later, on a chilly December morning, Eduardo was fortified from the cold with a puffy coat and a knit hat adorned with a dollar sign. He bought a scratch-off lottery ticket and a phone card at the Guppy’s gas station, chatted pleasantly with the woman behind the counter, and began walking home to his apartment, which is close to the new Dollar General store on the edge of town.

“Now I got a lot of people to know here,” he says. “When I go around I meet some people I know and I talk. That’s good for me.”

As one of only four Palauans left in the town, Eduardo gets lonely. “But I don’t mind because I came here to work and have money and help family,” he says. In Palau, where he learned English in grade school, he made only $3.16 an hour working in the country’s court system. Working in the meatpacking plant made him sick—the ammonia and chicken fluff irritated his lungs, and the repetitive chicken-hanging motion caused his wrists to swell painfully—but he was able to send home extra money to help his family.

A little more than a year after moving to Postville, Eduardo quit his job at the plant to work for a plastics company in nearby Decorah, a safer and more pleasant job. But a month ago, Eduardo was laid off from that job for the winter. He’s planning on going back to the meatpacking plant, at least for now.

‘There’s less feeling of community’

Today, the meatpacking plant is called Agri Star, and its new owner, Hershey Friedman of Montreal, says he uses e-verify to ensure his workers are authorized to work in the United States. Legal refugees from Somalia, most of them men without families, have come to work. Chad Wahls, the principal of Postville’s elementary and middle school, says only six Somali kids are enrolled in the town’s schools, even though Mohamed Hassan, a Somali who moved to Postville from Minneapolis three months ago to work at the chicken slaughtering part of the plant, told Yahoo News he estimated the population of Somali adults to be more than 100.

“Guatemalans came husbands, wives, cousins, brothers, sisters … and everyone could see in the Guatemalans, you know, family values,” said Aaron Goldsmith, a former city councilman and the first Orthodox Jewish politician to hold elected office in Iowa. Over the years, the Jewish population has built a synagogue, a kosher grocery store, and a gender-segregated religious school in Postville.

“When you have more of this eclectic crowd, there’s less feeling of community and bond,” Goldsmith said. “I think it makes it a little colder. I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m just saying it’s different.”

Hassan, the Somali immigrant, says he likes his work. But he thinks the Hispanic immigrants in the town–Postville is still 32 percent Hispanic, according to data from the 2010 census–don’t like him. “They don’t want Somali people here,” Hassan said. He left his father and brother back in Minneapolis, and says he is looking for a wife but hasn’t had much luck. (Finding a spouse is no easy thing to accomplish anywhere, but it’s especially hard in Postville. Wahls, the principal, says it’s difficult to recruit teachers to come here in part because “if you come here single, you’re going to stay single. There’s not a lot of fish in the sea for you here.”)

Town officials let the Somalis worship in an empty restaurant storefront on Main Street, even though the mosque technically violates building codes. “Some of those things you just have to let go,” says Leigh Rekow, the mayor.

Postville’s leaders are used to religious and cultural negotiations and concessions. For the holidays, Postville’s streets are lined with alternating Christmas wreaths and menorahs. The city council “negotiated with the Jewish people and they get the intersections and we get the rest,” Rekow said.

One menorah was placed at an intersection by the Lutheran church. “Some people complained about that,” Rekow said. “We talked to them and we moved it back one pole.”

‘The only good thing I see about this raid’

One reason immigrant turnover in the town is higher than before the 2008 raid may be that legal immigrants have more employment options than the mostly undocumented Guatemalans and Mexicans who used to work at the meatpacking plant. They are also less vulnerable to abuse.

“The only good thing I see about this raid is at least it brought to the front page that our food is cheap in part because immigrants are exploited and are victimized,” said Sonia Parras-Konrad, a Des Moines immigration lawyer who represented, pro bono, dozens of the Postville detainees. Undocumented people are often afraid to report labor abuses and crimes for fear of being deported, she says.

Parras-Konrad and Brackett, the Lutheran pastor, both told Yahoo News that the undocumented population is on the rise in the town and speculated that the plant may be hiring illegal immigrants again. That could happen even without the plant managers’ knowledge: A 2009 federal study found that e-verify is only 46 percent accurate when checking unauthorized workers, because it can’t detect some kinds of fraud. Friedman, the plant’s owner, said in an e-mail that the plant uses e-verify and that he has no difficulties finding legal workers to staff the plant.

What the federal immigration raid did not accomplish, however, is returning the meatpacking plant to how it was in the past, when Iowa-born Postville residents were paid middle-class wages to work on the all-beef kill floor. Harlan White, a retired appliance repairman and volunteer firefighter, said he made $2 an hour in 1960 (which, in inflation-adjusted dollars, would now be more than $15 an hour) to carry used cow hides from the plant’s basement and pack them onto a train, one of the lowest-paying jobs at the company. In 1981, the Hygrade beef plant in Storm Lake, a four-hour drive west of Postville, paid $19 an hour as a starting salary–$47 an hour in today’s dollars.

Workers at Agri Star now start out at $8.50 an hour, according to Eduardo and Mayor Rekow, a lower wage than they were offered three years ago in the aftermath of the raid. Rekow says some non-immigrants from Postville work in the plant’s clerical office, but he’s not aware of any who work on the line.

So what did they accomplish? The town’s destroyed, the jobs are worse than they were before and a whole bunch of people were ripped from their families. Alabama, which has the toughest immigration laws in the country, saw its migrant workers flee the state and now millions of dollars worth of crops have gone to waste.

While I’m not sure exactly what the answer to illegal immigration is, it’s clearly not this.

There has to be some method to allow people to become legalized once they get here, or to get temporary visas to work. I ask you to remember that most illegal immigrants are not paid “under the table.” They are given paychecks that are taxed just the same as you and I. They spend their money at grocery stores and for clothes just like you and I. And, more often than not, they do the work that you and I can’t or won’t.

The lesson from Postville must be learned before we can get to any useful dialogue. Clearly just screaming out ideological monologues hasn’t gotten us anywhere.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2hZ6OytDxo&w=480&h=360]

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

A long time ago in a land far, far, away, back when I was a wee little Big Bad, I met my first real idiot. My family was small and not encumbered with idiots so it took me a moment to realize that this newcomer was different. A couple of years older than me, a bully and an idiot all rolled into one. I won’t bore you with what he did. Well, to be more accurate, tried to do. Suffice it to say he ended up gloriously, and very publicly, humiliated. His father, also an idiot, attempted to get his revenge on me and a couple of my friends. His father, unfamiliar with the new fangled device called a telephone, was introduced to one of its primary functions when my grandmother called the cops. The cops, not being idiots, had a wonderful time explaining the rules of humanity to the nice man who, within two weeks, moved his idiot family to safer climes. Probably Florida. It was my first experience with the reality impaired and it left a deep impression on my young soul. I decided then and there that I didn’t like idiots. Obviously, as the years have gone on I’ve matured and become more embracing of other cultures and lifestyles. But I have never gotten over my aversion to idiots. And, sadly, it seems that their number is growing.

HomeGoods recently conducted a poll to see what famous person Americans most wanted to meet. Was it the president? No. Was it the pope? Not even close. No, the person everyone most wanted to see at their dinner table was ….. drum roll please …. Jennifer Aniston.

Really.

Actress Jennifer Aniston and her ex-husband Brad Pitt would be the preferred guests at a holiday meal for many Americans, along with the Duchess of Cambridge.

Aniston, the former “Friends” star, topped the list with 30 percent in the survey that asked Americans which celebrity they would like to sit next to at a holiday meal.

Pitt polled third with 16 percent, while the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, came in second with 21 percent.

Actors Charlie Sheen and Ashton Kutcher and reality television star Kim Kardashian rounded out the top choices.

But when it came to party guests, food doyenne Rachel Ray was the person chosen by 31 percent of people, followed by late night talk show host Jay Leno, who was a distant second at 17 percent.

Celebrity chef Paula Deen was named as the cook most people wanted to prepare their holiday meal. Cantankerous chef Gordon Ramsey came in second, while Martha Stewart was third.

Now Charlie Sheen and Ashton Kutcher at the same dinner might be fun, but that’s still a pretty pathetic list. There isn’t one of those people I’d want to be in an elevator with let alone allow them into my home.

Of course, when it comes to idiots they are not merely resigned to shopping at discount stores. No, some of them are teachers. WPBN in Michigan is reporting that a teacher was faced with the difficult task of teaching her students something useful and immediately went to plan B.

A Michigan elementary school principal says students are back to singing “gay apparel” in a well-known Christmas carol after a music teacher had them sing “bright apparel” instead.

Cherry Knoll Elementary School Principal Chris Parker told television station WPBN on Monday that he was disappointed with the decision to make the change to “Deck the Halls” after children kept giggling.

One line in the popular version of the song is “Don we now our gay apparel,” referring to festive holiday clothing.

Parker says it’s a teachable moment for the educator and students at the school in the Traverse City Area Public Schools district.

I’ve got news for you, kids will giggle at Bible passages. It’s what kids do. That’s why teachers take those moments to teach kids the history of the word, what it means in context and why they should limit their giggling to outside of class. But, I guess asking a teach to teach is a little to much up there.

Oh well, as long as we’re in the Holiday spirit, let’s take a trek on down to Georgia where a man was arrested for following a holiday tradition.

It wasn’t a silent night.

A Georgia man preparing for the Christmas season spent a night in jail after he was arrested for shooting at mistletoe outside a Decatur shopping mall.

William E. Robinson, 66, was charged with reckless conduct and discharging a firearm on someone else’s property after he opened fire on a tree that held a sprig of the plant, which is commonly used as a Christmas decoration.

Robinson told CBS Atlanta that he was merely following a holiday tradition when he used his double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun to knock the plant out of a tree outside the North DeKalb Mall.

“Every year I go somewhere to get some mistletoe to decorate the house,” Robinson told the station. “I get some for my friends that can’t get mistletoe. The best way to get it is with a shotgun.”

Most people simply purchase mistletoe. But in some parts of the country, it’s a tradition to shoot first and decorate later.

Southerners preparing for Christmas have long used shotguns loaded with birdshot to knock mistletoe from trees, National Geographic wrote in 2001.

It was the place — not the practice — that put Robinson behind bars.

Robinson told CBS Atlanta he wanted to hunt for mistletoe on a friend’s property, but when his acquaintance wasn’t home, he turned his attention to a tree that he claims is on the mall’s “fence line.”

A passing motorist contacted authorities after spotting Robinson firing one shot and collecting his yuletide bounty near an Applebee’s restaurant at 5:30 p.m., The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports. The driver trailed the suspect to a Citgo gas station, where police took him into custody.

According to investigators, Robinson was shocked others weren’t aware of his holiday tradition.

“He said he does this every year, but never in the mall parking lot,” a police report, acquired by Decatur’s 11 Alive, notes. “The suspect was surprised he was getting arrested.”

Williams posted bond and was released on Dec. 5, according to the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office website.

Ah yes, the annual gunning of the mistletoe. Fun for the whole family. I guess hitting the local Wal-Mart and ponying up fifty cents is out of the question. The fun part of this article is that anthropologists for National Geographic noted the tradition, just like they were studying some weird tribe they found in a jungle east of Bora Bora.

Which isn’t that far from the truth, now that I think about it.

But, my prize winning idiot today comes with a story.

Every year before the Fourth of July, police in Melrose Park, where I grew up, would collect food and stuff from the local groceries, often paying for it themselves, to distribute to indigent families and so on. One store that actually donated was the local Jewel. So, one day in early July, I was in the Jewel waiting to cash my pay check, which is what you did back in those days. I was standing in front of an elderly black woman and behind a about 20 cops. In front of them was a guy who was clearly focused on the cashier at the counter.

He pulled out a gun and the lady behind the counter did something he probably didn’t expect. She started laughing very loudly. That sound was accompanied by the sound of multiple guns being drawn and cocked. It kind of sounded like kids popping bubble wrap. Anyway, when the lady at the counter finally got herself pulled together she was able to point behind the man and wave her finger in the general direction of the cops. He turned, dropped the gun and was promptly arrested. The cops finally assigned one of the younger guys to officially make the collar so they wouldn’t be stuck doing paperwork all day.

The elderly woman behind me sighed, looked to the ceiling and said “Thank you Jesus for allowing me to live long enough to see the stupidest white man you ever made.”

Today, I introduce you to his progeny, at least in spirit.

Walmart security had it pretty easy over the weekend when a man allegedly decided it would be a good idea to shoplift while 50 police officers held a charity event at the store.

Officials in Maryland arrested Timothy Randall Clark on Saturday after he allegedly attempted to steal over $500 in video game products at the same time that law enforcement authorities were holding their “Shop With A Cop” community program, according to a Charles County Sheriff’s Department press release.

The store’s loss prevention unit discovered the 22-year-old cutting open and shoving video games and accessories into his shirt and promptly contacted police — they were everywhere, anyway — before the suspect could make it to the door.

Shop With A Cop is a nationally held charity program intended to build good relations between law enforcement and local youth.

Authorities say they found 26 Play Station and Xbox games, two controllers, and various other video game accessories valued at $635.04.

Clark is charged with theft.

Yeah, sorry buddy, all those people wearing blue uniforms with guns are not really elves, no matter what your mama told you.

The good news is that the cops are getting the idiots off the street one by one. The bad news is they have a lot more work to do.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkmEZs_Kcms&w=640&h=360]

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

You may have heard a silly rumor that the Allied forces won World War II and defeated fascism. You may even have relatives who fought in that war. Unfortunately, one quick look out of the window and you’ll find that claims for victory might have been a touch premature. I had recently written about a game on Facebook called Left Behind: Eternal Forces. It was immediately pointed out by several astute readers that the article I had referenced, and am referencing here, was five years old and that the game had been banned. That is what’s known as half-right. The article is, indeed, five years old. And it did result in the game being banned. Kind of. It was banned from Wal-Mart, which had been selling it and its predecessors for years, until even Wal-Mart customers figured out that a game with the tag-line “Kids will assume the role of a member of a “Christian” gang wandering the streets of a post-apocalyptic Manhattan, killing or converting as many Jews, Atheists, and other unsavory types in the employ of the Anti-Christ as possible to get to the next level. If the heathen won’t convert, the character can kill them” might – just might – be offensive to someone. The fact that Wal-Mart carried the game and had to be informed that it might – just might – be offensive tells me more about Wal-Mart than I’ll ever need to know.

But, that does not mean the game went away. Nope, there is a website devoted not only to the game but its two follow up versions. And, yes, each is just as offensive as the first only with better graphics. And, yes, you can order in quantity for stores. And there are stores that are carrying the whole set.

Now might be a good time to mention that Jesus and all his apostles were Jewish. It somehow seems salient.

To those who say “Yeah, but they’re not selling it in store near me” I say you have woefully missed the point. The point is that there are enough people out there to fund this industry. And I would dare to venture that more are your neighbors than you might be comfortable with.

Of course, if it were just one little item I would ignore it. But it isn’t. As part of their “Austrian Legends” collection, a company in Austria has released a festive, holiday oriented, line of Hitler Schnapps.

A prosecutor is investigating whether a man selling wine and schnapps with pictures of Adolf Hitler on the labels is breaking a law prohibiting displays glorifying the Nazi era.

Wilfried Siegele says he will examine whether the alleged sales break the law after complaints from a Green party member.

The man was identified Tuesday by officials and the Austria Press Agency only as Roland M., in keeping with privacy laws.

A website posting with a Facebook link to Roland Marte shows bottles with portraits of Hitler and the swastika. The site offers sales of spirits in “nostalgic bottles of former historical greats.”

A woman answering the telephone listed under Marte’s name confirmed he sold such bottles but said Marte wasn’t home. She would not identify herself.

Eva Braun mayhaps?

Again, if there weren’t customers they wouldn’t be selling this crap.

Speaking of crap, I wonder why the nice attorneys for Monopoly haven’t completely shut down this train wreck; ‘Pogromly,’ Neo-Nazi Version Of Monopoly!

No, I am not making this up.

The Holocaust is just fun and games to some hateful individuals.

A German terrorist group sold a Neo-Nazi version of Monopoly to fund its illicit activities, according to authorities.

The Local reports that “Pogromly” features a Swastika starting point, concentration camps instead of railways and “gasworks”.

The Telegraph reports that proceeds from the game were used to help finance the illegal doings of the National Socialist Underground. The group is accused of murdering at least nine men and a police officer between 2000 and 2007 and carrying out 14 bank robberies, according to the paper.

The classic Hasbro-produced version of board game focused on Atlantic City real-estate development, whereas the skinhead game center on the final solution. Players use reichsmarks, the currency of Nazi Germany, to buy up valuable properties like Dachau and Buchenwald,

The game sold for the equivalent of about $78, according to The Local.

The German Herald reports that authorities say they confiscated several sets of the game in connection with a raid on a bomb-making operation run by the group last month.

Um, Google it, you can still buy it. That raid accomplished nothing.

Above and beyond the spiteful vitriol espoused by each of these products it is sad to think there are people who’s world view is so restricted that it allows for none other than themselves. If they realized, when all is said and done, just how boring and insipid they are they might open up to some new ideas.

That would be my holiday wish.

Really, Peace on Earth isn’t all that much to ask for is it?

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8OYvHPpGDY&w=480&h=360]

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

I don’t have kids. But I have cared for my friends’ children, either babysitting or just giving the folks a day to themselves, on enough occasions to feel safe in saying that kids aren’t such bad things. Of course the problem children have is that they trust adults to do right by them. After all, isn’t that what adults are for? Well, that and the occasional hot dog. Simply put kids expect us grown ups to actually know what the heck we’re doing and, whenever possible, to send clear and consistent messages on what we expect. It’s not that hard but it does require more than 2 seconds of random thought. I guess that’s why all of today’s stories amaze me. Each and every one of them should never have happened. Simple common sense could have avoided every single one. But NOOOOOO, these adults have to act like children trying to follow the rules for the very first time. Look, that’s cute when your little T-baller runs to third instead of first, not so cute when the T-baller in question is around 30 years old.

So let’s start with the first example of modern parenting gone awry. For today’s blog I’m taking the stories in chronological order, youngest child to the oldest.

So, you send your kid off to toddler school. You pack them a nice lunch and make sure they have crayons. So far you’re doing pretty good. But, you can’t stop there can you? Of course not, you have to go and pack a joint with your kid’s pudding.

Police say a 33-year-old man sent along a little something extra in his 18-month-old son’s lunch box this week: a marijuana cigarette.

Clinton police arrested John Sulzbach of Killingworth after workers at the Clinton Child Care Center reported finding the pot in the child’s food container on Thursday, NBCConnecticut.com reported. The child is 18 months old, police said.

The cigarette was accidentally dropped in the food container while Sulzbach made the child’s lunch the night before, police said.

Police found less than one ounce of marijuana in Sulzbach’s basement after searching his home. He faces charges of risk to injury to a minor and drug possession.

Sulzman was charged with possession of a controlled substance and risk of injury/impairing the morals of a child. He was released on a written promise to appear in court on Dec. 22.

Okay, a couple of commons sense moments are needed here. First, yes dad, you screwed up. But, really, “impairing the morals of a child?” Do they really think that 18 month old kid was going to spark up a fatty to get through the alphabet song?

Okay, let’s move on. This next story has me wondering if the people in charge are really as dumb as they’re pretending to be or if every child in the Boston Metropolitan Area should be home schooled.

A 7-year-old boy has been accused of sexual harassment after punching a fellow first-grader in the groin, but the boy’s mother says he was acting in self-defense.

Tasha Lynch told The Boston Globe that her son, Mark Curran, was being choked during the Nov. 22 incident on a school bus, and has been afraid to go back to school in South Boston ever since.

“I think my kid was right to fight back [after he was choked],’’ she said. “He wasn’t doing anything except protecting himself.’’

A spokesman for the Boston public schools confirmed the incident had been classified as possible sexual harassment, but declined to comment it. Curran faces suspension or being transferred to another school if his actions are deemed to be sexual harassment, according to a letter from his school.

“Any kind of inappropriate touching would fall under that category,’’ school spokesman Matthew Wilder said to The Globe. “The school administration is conducting a full investigation that has not concluded yet. Certainly, once that investigation is through, we’ll then make a final conclusion as to who will be disciplined and how.’’

Lynch said she could tell her son was upset when she picked him up from the bus stop after school on Nov. 22. She said she asked him what was wrong, and he told her another boy had choked him and taken his new gloves.

Furious, Lynch said she went up to the bus driver and demanded to know what had happened.

“He just smiled and shrugged,’’ she said. She called school officials but no one got back to her, so the following week she had her older son took Mark into the principal’s office to tell her, reported The Globe.

“I just thought they were going to call the parents, tell us both to come in and make the boys shake hands,’’ Lynch said. Or, at least, make the other boy return her son’s gloves. Instead, Tynan Elementary school officials began questioning Mark about his role in the scuffle.

“They didn’t believe me,’’ Curran told The Globe on Thursday. “I didn’t get my gloves back.’’

Tynan Elementary School Principal Leslie Gant didn’t believe that Mark was acting out of self-defense, Lynch told The Globe.

“She said, ‘It doesn’t matter who hit who first,’ ’’ Lynch said. “‘He said he hit him in the testicles. That’s assault. That’s sexual assault.’”

I said: ‘The kid choked my son first and that’s called attempted murder. He said he couldn’t breathe.’’’

The school sent a letter to stating her son was accused of sexual harassment and endangering physical safety of other students.

A hearing for Curran will be held on Monday.

Lynch has told the school she doesn’t want her son riding the bus without an adult there to make sure he’s safe.

The kid was choked and robbed and they’re mad at him? Do they really tell kids stuff like “You go apologize to Bluto for bruising his hand with your face.”?

I kind of hope the school sticks to its guns on this one just because the resulting lawsuit will be funny as heck.

In other news involving juvenile sexual delinquents a 9 year old kid was suspended from school for …. saying his teacher was cute.

A 9-year-old boy was suspended from school for two days for sexual harassment last week after he called his teacher “cute,” his mother says.

Chiquita Lockett of Gastonia, N.C., told WSOC-TV of Charlotte, N.C., which first reported the story, that her 9-year-old son, Emanyea, shouldn’t have been sent home from Brookside Elementary School.

“It’s not like he went up to the woman and tried to grab her or touch her in a sexual way,” Lockett told WSOC. “So why would he be suspended for two days?”

The Gaston County school district said it couldn’t discuss the incident beyond confirming that Emanyea was suspended for “inappropriate behavior” after making “inappropriate statements.”

HE’S FREAKING 9 PEOPLE! Everything is “cute” to 9 year olds. Puppies, cars, teachers, they’re all the same. Way to overreact there Puritan Polly. Maybe a quick trip to your local Lovers Lane would help loosen up those rusty hinges.

This next one involves the TSA, Florida and fashion. The pregnant teenager is just a bonus.

It’s not unusual for 17-year-old to find themselves in hot water with the fashion police. But on a flight from Virginia to Florida, Vanessa Gibbs found herself detained by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) over the appearance of her purse.

And just to be clear, it wasn’t the content inside the purse that the TSA objected to. No, agency officials took exception with the design of a gun on Gibbs’ handbag.

“It’s my style, it’s camouflage, it has an old western gun on it,” Gibbs told News4Jax.com. Gibbs didn’t run into any trouble while traveling north from Jacksonville International Airport. But on her way back home, TSA officials at Norfolk International Airport pulled her aside.

“She was like, ‘This is a federal offense because it’s in the shape of a gun,'” Gibbs said. “I’m like, ‘But it’s a design on a purse. How is it a federal offense?'”

After TSA agents figured out the gun was a fake, Gibbs said, they told her to check the bag or turn it over. By the time security wrapped up the inspection, the pregnant teen missed her flight, and Southwest Airlines sent her to Orlando instead. The changed itinerary created no small amount of anxiety for Gibbs’ mother, who was already waiting for her to arrive at the Jacksonville airport.

“Oh, it’s terrifying. I was so upset,” said Tami Gibbs, the teen’s mom. “I was on the phone all the way to Orlando trying to figure out what was going on with her. It was terrifying.”

Less terrifying is the actual design on the purse, which is only a few inches in size and hollow. “I carried this from Jacksonville to Norfolk, and I’ve carried it from Norfolk to Jacksonville,” Vanessa said. “Never once has anyone said anything about it until now.”

Nonetheless, the TSA says the design could be considered a “replica weapon,” something that the agency has banned since 2002. Just imagine what would have happened if Gibbs had also been wearing stiletto heels.

“Replica weapon?” Really skippy? How the heck do you walk and breathe at the same time without continuous assistance? By that incredible standard a picture of a gun would qualify. On the other hand, one thing does confuse me; what the heck is that kid doing flying around the country so much?

Maybe a custody thing.

Okay, now we have a complete head scratcher. Boy applies for job, boy has questions about job, boy attemtps to ask employee said questions, boy is arrested and tossed in jail.

Charleston, S.C., teen Kieon Sharp, 18, tried taking the direct approach to landing a new job. Instead, it landed him in jail, on suspicion of armed robbery.

Sharp was hoping to find a job with Brinks security. He had already applied for a job with the company but decided he wanted more information about the day-to-day details of driving one of the company’s armed trucks. And what better way to gather information than going straight to the source? So he went up to a driver inside one of the company’s vehicles and knocked on the window.

The driver mistakenly thought Sharp was holding a gun and called the police. Charleston Police Sgt. Bobby Eggleton described the situation as “more than just a misunderstanding.” In the aftermath of Sharp’s failed informational interview, police held him behind bars for several hours before releasing him.

“He banged on the window and that scared the driver,” Eggleton said. “You don’t approach those guys very often. They are on high alert because they carry a large amount of cash.”

Of course, when police actually searched Sharp they didn’t find a gun, just copies of the job applications he had filled out that day, including one for a position with Brinks. Eggleton said Sharp was cooperative with police and that they even offered Sharp a job application with the city’s street department after he was released on Thursday.

Let’s be honest here, the driver didn’t “mistakenly see a gun” he actually saw a young black man and freaked out. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail and these charges will be dropped. But, as of now, they are still pending.

So, as you can plainly see, we are a nation of idiots. I mean, seriously, common sense has just been tossed out the window of a fast moving car and all we’re left with is a bunch of rules being enforced by people who probably have to have them read to them.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afam2nIae4o&w=480&h=360]

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

Businesses all over the world are looking for innovative ways to bring people into their humble stores. They offer huge discounts on some items in the hope that people will pay full price for other items once they’re inside. This called the “loss leader” philosophy. In the 60’s the main loss leader was cigarettes. You could get a pack below cost at any gas station because they expected you to buy gas. That changed in the 70’s when no one could get gas due to the embargo. By the 80’s loss leaders had gone the way of the dodo. But, at the end of the 90’s, as the economy was starting to dramatically tank, loss leaders made a come back. After the turn of the century they were becoming part of everyday life again. Just not for cigarettes. Anyway, into this growing trend came Groupon. A Chicago based company that takes 50% of the value of any coupon it issues and then passes those coupons out to thousands upon thousands of people.

At its essence this seems like a good idea. In practice there are a couple of things that need to be considered. First off, Groupon is still operating at a loss and shows no signs of coming out of it. That means that everyone in upper management is getting filthy rich off of their sexy, $700 million, IPO, but that’s about it. Second is the fact that some businesses really don’t need several thousand people marching through their doors.

Let’s take a look at a couple of businesses in Portland, Oregon.

Ethan Powell and Tobias Hogan, two typical restaurant workers with more than a decade’s experience between them, wanted more. Two years ago they stepped out and took a gamble that has lured—and then consumed—many other hospitality industry pros: They opened their own place.

EaT: An Oyster Bar has beaten the odds. Powell and Hogan’s midmarket Cajun-style restaurant has won positive reviews and continues to draw customers to its trendy North Williams Avenue neighborhood.

Three months after opening their doors, Powell, 33, and Hogan, 39, took what they thought wasn’t a gamble at all. This one had to do with a new form of online marketing—the latest next big thing. They signed up with Groupon.

You might have heard of this company, Groupon. Rhymes with “coupon.” Groupon sells vouchers for deep discounts at restaurants, stores, spas and countless other businesses. The businesses agree to honor the vouchers—and risk losing money on the deal—hoping to draw new customers.

Groupon sent out tens of thousands of “daily deals” by email offering $25 worth of seafood at EaT for anyone willing to pay Groupon $12 for a voucher.

Within hours, Groupon had sold 1,544 of the EaT vouchers. And Powell and Hogan were committed to serving that many meals, each at a big discount, in hopes they could attract far more business.

Indeed, they were swamped. “We probably made money,” Powell says. “And we still wouldn’t do it again because it was such a nightmare.”

“It was,” Hogan adds, “absolutely horrible.”

Swarms of first-time customers (most of whom never came back again) crowded out, undercut and alienated their regulars who were paying full price. Servers got stiffed on tips. Powell even had a Groupon thrown in his face by a customer after he declined to let the man redeem the same gift certificate twice.

For everyone else, Groupon worked exactly as planned—the diners got a great deal, and Groupon (which often pockets half of the voucher’s price) walked away with an estimated $9,200 for doing little more than sending out emails. In all, Groupon is on track to collect $2 million from Portland businesses this year, based on WW’s estimate of Groupon’s likely share of its Portland business.

Okay, maybe that was a fluke or the owners are being whiny little children.

Or not. Today will mark the first time I’ve ever been able to use the phrase cupcake horror. Hopefully it will be the last.

A bakery owner was forced to make 102,000 cupcakes after being swamped by customers taking up her cut-price Groupon offer, according to reports Tuesday.

Rachel Brown offered a 75 percent discount on 12 cupcakes, which normally cost $40 (£26), the BBC reported.
However, Brown under-estimated the popularity of the deal and was unable to cope when 8,500 people signed up for the $10 (£6.50) bargain.

Brown’s Need a Cake bakery, which employs eight staff in Reading, U.K., had to bring in temporary workers through an employment agency to fulfil the orders, at a cost of $19,500 (£12,500) — wiping out her profits for the year.

She also lost between $2.90 (£2.50) and $4.70 (£3) on each batch she sold, the BBC reported.

“Without doubt, it was my worst ever business decision,” she told the BBC. “We had thousands of orders pouring in that really we hadn’t expected to have. A much larger company would have difficulty coping.”

Chicago-based Groupon sells Internet coupons for everything from spa treatments to cosmetic surgery.

Actually they were forced to stop selling cosmetic surgery when it turned out that they were, for all intents and purposes, forcing people to have surgery in a limited time frame without outside medical consultation.

Ooops.

Even used car dealers have better morals than that. Not by much, but still ….

But, you wisely ask, what does any of this have to do with making an elf or two cry?

Quite a bit actually.

Groupon offered free train rides at a winter carnival in York, England.

But …. there was no train and things got ugly after that.

It is supposed to be the season of goodwill, but Santa’s elves were verbally abused by parents at a Christmas display after a holiday offer on discount website Groupon ended in disappointment.

Almost 2,000 families turned up to the event in York, England, after receiving an email voucher that promised train rides around a winter wonderland, according to a report in the city’s daily newspaper, The Press.

When they discovered no train, and long lines to get into the area, some parents began shouting and swearing at a female worker who was dressed as a Christmas tree.

The situation, last Saturday, became so hostile that one of the elves resigned, the report said.

Organizer Penny Ward told the newspaper: “It was a complete nightmare. Children were crying and upset. One man even verbally threatened the lady who is dressed as a Christmas tree. One of the elves was so upset that she has resigned.”

She said the event was only able to handle 40 children an hour, but staff had worked beyond their normal hours and without breaks to try to ensure children did not miss out.

Groupon apologized for the error about the train but said the offer voucher was sent out with Ward’s agreement.

Ward was not immediately available for comment on Friday.

I’m not sure how that all played out but I would hope that someone might have noticed something as large as a missing train. Even those Kiddyland trains that I grew up on were pretty large.

iContact, a social media research service, recently announced that most small businesses hate Groupon. In fact there’s even a Facebook page dedicated to Groupon horror stories.

Anyway, since you’ve read this far I may as well tell you why Groupon is doomed to failure. Big businesses, the ones that can handle several thousand people showing up unannounced, don’t need Groupon. They have their own advertising and coupons already in place. Small businesses, the ones that only need a few people here and there, can’t handle the traffic and end up shortchanging their regular customers. The few niche businesses that fall somewhere in the middle just can’t generate enough revenue to make it work.

Certainly not $700 million worth.

So, if you’re a consumer, go ahead and grab those coupons while you can because one day, just like that train in York, they ain’t really gonna be there.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LD98c-9fGY&w=500&h=319]

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

I love the end of the world. Every time it comes up the really cool people throw the best parties. And, as I learned as a young man, “Hey baby, the world’s ending anyway, so how’s about …” actually works in those circumstances. In fact the best apocalypse party I ever went to was also a toga party. Think of it as ease of access to those end times. And I know that, as dedicated Nude Hippoers, you want to make sure you greet the various apocalypses correctly. The next good one is coming up on December 21, 2012. But you really want to start planning now. You’ll want to make your apocalypse as authentic as possible. That means picking up a couple of those Mayan “long count” calendars that have all the conspiracy freaks going nuts as well as doing a little research so you can have some of the basic Mayan accouterments such as games and alters for human sacrifices. But, remember kids, it’s just a party. That alter shouldn’t be used for anything more bloody than being a place to put the bean dip.

Also, you’ll want to make sure your guests have time to get some traditional Mayan clothing. Don’t worry, it’s the end of the world so you can sex it up if you want. Who’s going to complain when we’re all dead and gone anyway?

Also, if you’ve got a few bucks to spare and don’t mind funding idiots, you can drop by the official 2012 doomsday website and pick up some festive apocalypse T-shirts and read some seriously disturbed rants from the willfully ignorant.

Just as an aside, many doomsday ranters point to the fact that the magnetic north pole is moving. They are 100% correct, it is. And it has been for millions of years. Earth has a molten core, stuff moves as it swirls. It’s just a fact of life. The fact that it will move again sometime next year ranges between meaningless and interesting. The latter if you’re a scientist.

And, while I would guess it’s useless to use logic and facts with loony tunes, our old pal Ian O’Neill, from Discovery News, tries anyway.

Ever since I wrote my very first “No Doomsday in 2012” article for Universe Today in 2008, I’ve been repeating the same message over and over again: The Mayans never predicted doomsday in 2012. And I’ll say it once more, this time with even more expert endorsement: The Mayans never, EVER predicted doomsday in 2012.

Sadly, science and history has been bent and twisted to suit supporters of this doomsday hoax, and when scientists or archaeologists go on the record to debunk the nonsense, the blame falls on some kind of convenient global conspiracy.

But where did this Mayan doomsday idea come from anyway?

The Long(est) Count

The seed of next year’s multitude of “End of the World” theories supposedly occurring on or around Dec. 21, 2012, is that a mesoamerican calendar foretold doom. A particular Mayan calendar is at the center of all the excitement, and due to a numerical fluke, it just so happens the calendar will “run out” next year.

The Mayan civilization existed from 250-900 A.D. in the current geographical location of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and some of Honduras. Archaeologists studying this fascinating culture have been able to decipher their many calendars, but their longest period calendar — the “Long Count” — is what set alarm bells ringing.

The Long Count calendar was created by the Mayans so that history could be chronicled and future events could be planned — you know, not too dissimilar to the calendar on your iPhone.

This long-period calendar, that has a cycle of 5,126 years, is a departure from the other calendars the Mayans used at the time. Some calendars lasted less than a year (such as the “Tzolk’in” — that lasted 260 days), others lasted decades (such as the “Calendar Round” — charting the approximate time span of a generation — approximately 52 years). Then, using remarkable ingenuity, the Mayans created the Long Count calendar that had a numerical foundation — almost like an ancient binary code.

“It’s a Marketing Fallacy.”

Although the exact end-date of this Long Count cycle has recently been thrown into doubt, one thing most Maya experts and doomsday theorists agree on is that the calendar “ends” next year. The calendar consists of 13 “Baktuns” — each approximately 394-years long — and we are coming to the end of the 13th Baktun.

One thing they don’t agree on, however, is what this actually means.

Doomsayers will try to convince you that the “end” of the Long Count 13th Baktun is a Mayan prophesy of the “End of the World.” Because, like any good snake oil salesman, you need to frighten the crap out of your audience before selling them a book on the subject.

But, according to someone who actually knows a thing or two about the Maya culture, the Mayans never made any such prophesy: “We have to be clear about this. There is no prophecy for 2012,” said Erik Velasquez, an etchings specialist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). “It’s a marketing fallacy.”

The National Institute of Anthropological History in Mexico, no doubt getting fed-up of their inboxes getting filled with panicked emails about fake doomsday theories, issued a statement too: “The West’s messianic thinking has distorted the world view of ancient civilizations like the Mayans.”

According to the Institute, of the 15,000 glyphic texts found in the ancient ruins of the Mayan empire, only two mention 2012. You’d think that the “End of the World” would hold more significance, wouldn’t you? Events after 2012 are also mentioned, so this “End of the World” isn’t as definite as the doomsayers make out.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of… Doomsday?

For some reason, modern culture embraces ancient civilizations as having magical powers — they could somehow predict the future and had conversations with aliens (really). And for some who think the Indiana Jones movies are accurate portrayals of historic events, this probably isn’t so surprising.

Experts in Maya culture have a far better perspective as to what the end of the 13th Baktun really means to the descendants of the ancient Maya.

“Because Bolon Yokte was already present at the day of creation … it just seemed natural for the Mayan that Bolon Yokte will again be present,” said Sven Gronemeyer, a researcher of Mayan codes from La Trobe University in Australia.

Bolon Yokte is the Mayan god associated with war and creation; the reappearance of this god is therefore more of a transition from one era to the next, according to Gronemeyer. Indeed, many will be marking the end of the Mayan calendar with celebrations of spiritual “rebirth.”

Mayan descendants have many celebrations planned; the countries located where the Maya once thrived will be excited about the increase in tourism revenue. Contrary to what those dodgy websites are telling you, it won’t be a scary time at all (in South America, at least).

Really, There’s No Doomsday in 2012

As our calendar transitions from 2011 to 2012, we can expect to see more doomsday theories surface, each convincingly portraying the weird and wonderful ways in which the world will be blow-torched in the Fall of 2012.

So long as there is money to be made from people’s fear, we’ll keep seeing the bookshelves stacked with a disproportionate amount of doom and Google ads linking to websites with doomsayers’ warped versions of reality.

But all these theories have a common theme: Whether the purveyor of theorized doom is a killer solar flare, galactic alignment or a brilliantly-timed Planet X (or Nibiru), they are all complete bunk. There is no evidence of 2012 being anything special — next year will have its fair share of war, death, destruction, calamities and financial meltdowns, but the Maya — or any other ancient civilization for that matter — didn’t predict it.

Image: An indigenous Mayan participates in an ancient ceremonial game called “juego de pelota” (ball game) during a ceremony by Guatemalan Officials to welcome the upcoming 13th Baktun, an end to the ancient Mayan calendar on December 2012. Mayan Elders disregard some western views that this date is associated with the end of the world. But Guatemala hopes to economize on the forecast boom in tourism for the upcoming year. Credit: J. Emilio Flores/Corbis

Well, good for Guatemala. At least they have authentic Mayans to fleece the morons. And, let’s face it, Mexico’s very nice that time of year.

Oh, and just FYI, Mayans aren’t extinct. That’s another fallacy of the doomsday cults. They are still thriving in Mexico and parts of South America.

But without the human sacrifices.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSuFhV9X-PA&w=500&h=319]

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

A form the the hallucinogenic drug known popularly as acid is called Sunshine. Florida is the Sunshine State. Coincidence? I think not. Sure Texas and Arizona have been making progress to being named the dumbest states in the nation but, if you want the brain crushingly obtuse, Florida is still the king. Where else but Florida could a woman go in for routine surgery and have the doctors light her face on fire? She went from having cysts to being sizzling in record time. She’s still in intensive care so I’m hoping she’ll survive and get better, but how the hell does that happen in the first place?

Or, on a lighter note, how about the story of Amado Cardenas? He got mad at his girlfriend and then went and completely trashed …. someone else’s apartment. Naturally his mistake was discovered when police found him sleeping in the apartment he’d trashed. Because, well, you know, everyone needs a nap after committing a felony.

In Florida, the “family values” state, it seems they have a slightly different set of definitions for those values than thinking people do. Ramey Newkirk beat his mother nearly to death with a bottle of egg nog and then tased her with a stun gun because …. he’s not sure. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. And, yes ladies, he’s 45, single and lives with mom. Quite the catch if you ask me.

Of course no Florida blog would be complete without a messed up carjacking. St. Petersberg police report that two men attempted to steal a lady’s 2007 Nissan, because those bring the big bucks in Floridian chop shops, but were stymied by the fact it was a stick shift. They finally gave up and ran away while the nice lady and her boyfriend stood on the street and laughed their badonies off.

Yes, I can say “badony” because I’m a mature adult.

Unlike this next lady.

Police in Alachua County are reporting that a woman and her, convicted sex offender, boyfriend broke into a gym and had sex for six hours while the lady’s daughter was trapped in the men’s room. The lady was very surprised to learn that, even in Florida, that will get your kid taken away from you.

Of course, as I’ve noted, in the family values state, they look at things a little differently than the rest of us. For example, when I want to spend quality time with a beautiful woman who’s willing to get naked (and doesn’t charge for that perk) I take her to my place or a nice hotel.

In Florida, you park your SUV in the middle of an intersection and have at it.

See? That’s different.

A 32-year-old woman was arrested on charges of indecent exposure.

According to the Niceville Police report, the woman parked her 1998 Mitsubishi SUV at the intersection of Cadillac Avenue and Martha Street to have sex with her boyfriend.

A woman near the intersection told officers she saw the man and woman, both nude, walk out of the vehicle.

When officers arrived, the couple was instructed to put their clothes back on, but the woman refused.

“Everyone has already seen me naked, I don’t have to get dressed now,” she told the officer while standing outside her vehicle at the intersection for several minutes before getting dressed.

The woman then left the area, but later returned and urinated on the sidewalk of the woman who called in to complain about her. She then went to the woman’s porch and began yelling at the woman for calling police.

The woman was captured on video surveillance urinating on the woman’s sidewalk.

Cops love when people do stuff like that. It gives them fun things to share with their families over the holidays.

But, sometimes, even when sex crimes happen at Wal-Mart, the cops aren’t that amused.

A 61-year-old sex offender accused of exposing himself in a Walmart parking lot was arrested after police researched the tag of the vehicle he was thought to be driving, according to records released Thursday.

Gary Warren Scarfo, of the 5600 block of Southeast Pot O Gold Place in Stuart, was arrested Wednesday on an exposure of sexual organs charge in connection with the Aug. 13 incidents at a Walmart Supercenter in the 10800 block of South U.S. 1.

A man identified as a victim told Port St. Lucie police that as he left the Walmart Supercenter parking lot he saw a man committing a lewd act on himself outside his car. The man said the accused sex organ exposer “appeared to be watching the Walmart customers as he was masturbating,” records state.

The man’s wife also said she saw the lewd act.

The man provided police a tag number of the accused sex organ exposer’s vehicle, saying it was a beige Toyota Camry. The man said the accused sex organ exposer had a dark beard and mustache and was about 45 to 55 years old.

Police viewed video surveillance of the incident, though the footage wasn’t particularly clear.

The vehicle’s registered owner didn’t match the accused sex organ exposer’s description. The owner, however, said his neighbor — Scarfo — had the vehicle. The owner said he lets Scarfo, who was 60 at the time of the incident, use the car whenever he needs to.

Scarfo, a registered sex offender, didn’t return calls from police.

Police got a warrant for Scarfo’s arrest, and he was arrested Wednesday on the misdemeanor exposure charge.

My fifth step father was from Stuart. He wasn’t a sex offender, but he was a jerk.

So, there you have it. More proof that Florida is where the gene pool went to dry up and die.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BBfybCPkjA&w=480&h=360]

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

Regular readers of this blog, and my thanks to both of you, know there are some people who should just be taken to a nice, quiet, place where they can do no harm. Some may not mean ill unto others but they just can’t stop themselves from being a human wave of destruction. Others are evil to the core. Either way they don’t really benefit humanity. Amuse us? Yes. Amaze us? Often. Benefit? Not so much. They are the kind of people who woefully confused by difficult concepts such as capitalization. They can’t tell the difference between “Helping your Uncle Jack off a horse” and “helping your uncle jack off a horse.” And, I assure you, there is a HUGE difference. I won’t even bother with things like punctuation and homonyms. I might make their brains explode. Then again …… Oh, never mind.

Be that as it may, as much as I should be jaded by this gig, I find new things every day to astound me. For example, a lady in Arizona, another state where the gene pool is drying up, tried to hold up a minimart with an exploding penguin.

Sometimes the best reporting comes straight, no chaser, directly from the cops. As the Yavapai County, Ariz., Sheriff’s Office reports with a straight face:

On November 23, 2011, at approximately 6:15 PM, Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded to a reported robbery at the Chevron Station in the 2700 block of Highway 69, Dewey-Humboldt. The Chevron employee stated that a female entered the mini-mart with her right hand concealed under her sweater, claiming she had a bomb, and demanding cash from the register. …

Just after 7:15 PM, deputies located (Andri) Jeffers at her home in the 2900 block of North Kings Highway West, Castle Canyon Mesa. Jeffers was confirmed as the suspect initially by the surveillance photo and also identified by the clerk. Jeffers admitted to her participation in the robbery. Deputies learned the item she held under her shirt was a toy penguin. She was arrested and booked at the Camp Verde Detention Center for one count of Attempted Robbery.

Well, Chumley …. no, that’s too old to be funny any more. Just out of curiosity, in a state where even grammar school kids are packing heat, is a toy penguin really your best choice of weapon?

Okay, so she’s an evil idiot. Let’s move a little further west to meet a clueless one. San Jose police responded to a very scary bomb scare.

Kind of.

An exercise buff caused a ruckus at a San Jose, Calif., post office when he showed up to mail a package donning a mask and a weight-packed vest, gear he says is part of a so-called “CrossFit” workout.

Long Hoang, 29, was at the post office Tuesday simply to mail a package of calendars that had been sent to him by mistake. Struggling to jam the package — which just barely fit into the mailbox — down the chute, Hoang had no idea he was the subject of calls to authorities about a suspicious man who ran up to the mailbox wearing what looked like a gas mask and a bulletproof vest. After he managed to get the box down the chute, Hoang jogged away, continuing on with his workout.

A bomb squad and firefighters showed up. Authorities closed down nearby streets, reported CBS 5 in San Francisco. Investigators, using a robot, detonated the box of calendars Hoang had been trying to send to its rightful recipient.
When the story hit local news outlets, Hoang started receiving phone calls, The San Jose Mercury News reported.

“My friends kept messaging me, Is this you? Is this you?” Hoang, a nursing student who lives near the post office, said. He called police Tuesday evening to clear up the confusion.

“The guy said he was wearing a cardio mask,” Sgt. Jason Dwyer told The Mercury News. “It was his cardio day, and he was trying to lose weight.”

Hoang said he has been following the CrossFit exercise regimen for about there months. The elongated mask he wears over his nose and mouth makes breathing difficult, to simulate high-altitude training; his black vest holds 10 pounds of weights.

The workout is “this really creative combination of weight lifting, gymnastics and rowing,” Hoang told The Mercury News. “It was like straight out of a movie … Some of my friends are telling me, ‘Hello? 9/11? Anthrax? Blah. Blah. Blah.’ And I’m just thinking about my finals and staying in my own little zone.”

Memo to Mr. Hoang; those cardio suits cost serious coin, it would be a shame to get it ruined with lots of bullet holes. Maybe some time at a local YMCA would benefit you and all your neighbors.

Fortunately not all of our stories today involve explosives. Some people, like Peter Theado, just bomb out of life.

Police officers in Amherst, Ohio, on Tuesday arrested a Lorain man they say tried to steal an Amherst police car.

The incident happened outside the police station just before 7 p.m. while an officer was leaving to check on a car crash.

According to a news release from the Amherst Police Department, the officer noticed a man sitting in the driver’s seat of police car 107 with the doors locked. Officers tried to unlock the cruiser’s doors but were unable to remove the man from the car.

Police said the man, 38-year-old Peter Theado of Lorain, used the computer inside the cruiser and the police radio to ask dispatch how to put the car in gear. Theado told officers he wanted to take the car out on “patrol” to protect the people of Amherst, the news release said.

He then told police that he wanted to be a police offid two cer but was disappointed that he couldn’t get the car in drive, Amherst police said.

The police department said the cruiser was not running at the time. The keys were inside, but the car had a security system.

Theado was charged with criminal trespassing, attempted grand theft, obstruction of official business and unauthorized use of a police computer. He was taken to the Lorain County Correctional Facility.

See kids, this is why the nice police people make you take all those tests before they give you a gun and a four wheeled weapon. I told you it wasn’t just some malicious quirk.

But our last story, from Florida naturally, combines all the elements. It has both stupid and evil. It is, if you’ll pardon the expression, DA BOMB!

North Miami police arrested two women for trying to put an evil spell on their boss.

Yes, you read that right.

For two Florida municipal employees, an alleged plan to cast a supernatural spell on their boss was anything but super.

Due to some supposedly mystical birdseed and a janitor who blew the whistle on the seedy hex, one employee has been fired from her post at the North Miami Police Department and a recommendation for termination is pending for the other.

Veteran police officer Elizabeth Torres and office manager Yvonne Rodriguez’s curse was to take place in August amid budget cuts and planned layoffs, but they never got past the planning stages.

“We were looking at a reduction in staff of about 9.4 percent, so everybody was on edge,” North Miami Police Department Public Information Officer Mark Perkins told msnbc.com. “The two employees were conspiring to place birdseed in the city manager’s office to get him to leave, the belief being that if you sprinkle birdseed around it, it will make the person – any person- want to leave.”

But since they didn’t have access to City Manager Lyndon Bonner’s office, the two approached a janitor, hoping they could recruit her to sprinkle the seeds, which they later told investigators is a Santeria ritual.

Esther Villaneuva, the janitor, was working her night shift on Aug. 29 when Torres and Rodriguez approached her with a container full of seeds, according to the department’s internal affairs report. It was the first time Villaneuva had ever had a conversation with the two women, Villaneuva said. Torres told her to “just take a little bit of the birdseed and spread it,” according to the department’s report. Villaneuva said no, expressing worry about the security cameras monitoring the office, and also whether something bad could actually happen to the city manager.

Torres allegedly told her, “No. Nothing’s going to happen to him. He’s just gonna leave. It’s just going to make him leave. Don’t worry, nothing bad is going to happen to him.”

Torres even allegedly told her that she had used birdseed in her own house in the past, and it had resulted in her son and daughter going away for a couple of weeks.

When Villaneuva asked Torres why she didn’t just spread the birdseed herself, Torres told her she didn’t have an excuse for being in that part of the building at that time of night.

Villaneuva refused the request and told her boss, prompting an investigation that eventually led to Rodriguez, the office manager, getting fired last week.

“The police officer has union protection, the office manager does not, so technically, the police officer still has not been terminated, although recommendation for that is pending,” Perkins said. Officer Torres will go to court for her appeal on Monday, he added.

Both maintained the plot was harmless, according to transcripts in the internal affairs report, which the North Miami Police Department released Wednesday.

‘Nothing malicious … a superstitious practice’
Torres, who has worked as a North Miami police officer since 1987, told investigators, “I want to clarify that it’s nothing malicious and nothing intended to hurt that person. Just, just it can be viewed as either a superstitious practice or a religious practice in the Santeria religion … This is something I was raised with as a child, all these superstitions and this quasi-religion.”

Rodriguez initially denied involvement in the plot, department spokesman Perkins told msnbc.com, and was fired for “conduct unbecoming.” She has worked for the department since 1996.

“The second time, she told the truth,” he said. “If you work for a police department, that’s not an option.”

According to the report, Rodriguez said she didn’t provide accurate information in the first interview because she “wasn’t the initiator of this whole ordeal” and she feared getting in trouble.

Santeria is an Afro-Caribbean religion centered in Cuba that became more widelyt practiced in the U.S. and other nearby countries, particularly following the 1959 Cuban revolution, according to the BBC. The religion is revolves around relationships between humans and spirits, who followers believe will help them in their lives if appropriate rituals are carried out.

And despite what Torres said about birdseed, University of Miami Religious Studies Profess Michelle Maldonado told Miami’s WSVN.com, “In Santeria, you can’t just spread birdseed and make the supernatural do what you want it to do.”

Actually, in any world, religious or otherwise, not that many people are terrified of birdseed. Irritated, maybe, if it’s all over their chair. But not terrified.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17lkdqoLt44&w=480&h=360]

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

The Bible is, if I may use this word, an evolving text. Discoveries have been made that have forced scholars and lay people alike to reconsider what it all means. If we ignore the many politicized revisions of the King James Bible we have a pretty good starting point to base any discoveries on. The same holds true for the Talmud, which was edited and revised to become the Old Testament in the Christian Bible. The Holy Qu’Ran is a different animal. It was, according to Islamic tradition, dictated directly to the Prophet Muhammad by the angel Jibril (Gabriel in western cultures) and was formalized by Caliph Uthman barely twenty years after Muhammad ascended into heaven. Also, unlike the Talmud or the Bible, Caliph Uthman had thousands of copies made at the same time so there would be no historical discrepancies. But the other two books have constantly been challenged by one finding or another through the years. Some, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, enhanced our view of the history of the two earliest western religions but didn’t challenge much in the way of beliefs. Others, such as Nag Hammadi Library challenge the most closely held beliefs and seem to fly in the face of historical record.

What gets lost in the tumult is that all three books are historical records as well as religious texts. Kings, which underpins all three western religions, tells the story of how Israel became a reality and how the Jews finally found a home. The fact that it depicts some incredibly violent moments and some of the most duplicitous behavior in history doesn’t make it any less valid. Quite honestly, if you were to modernize the characters in Kings and keep the plot it would read more like the Godfather than any spiritual journey. But you have to keep in mind the times when it occurred. If everyone wants you dead you either kill them first or fade from view.

However, as I noted, these are historical texts. So, when evidence comes along that says history might have missed something it needs to be addressed. The Gospel of Mark in the New Testament is one example of scholarly dispute. According to a letter, which may or may not have been a forgery, there is a Secret Gospel of Mark.

The “Secret” gospel depicts a moment wherein Jesus befriends a young man and teaches him the wonders and secrets of his ministry. A marvel he shared with only a select few. Many scholars believe that young man was Mark himself. That would make sense since we know that Mark didn’t write his gospel until he was commanded to do so so that Romans could understand the teachings of Peter. Since Mark was barely 30 when he did that one can easily assume that he was around 9 or 10 when he was a disciple of Jesus’. Certainly he refers to himself as a boy, which would mean he had not attained 13 years of age and become a man in accordance with Jewish tradition.

Of course the yahoo brigade read this new text and immediately claimed Jesus was a homosexual. Having never belonged to a club they would be woefully ignorant about the rites of initiation. If their claim had any validity then everyone from Rotarions to Boy Scouts would be involved in homosexual rituals.

In other words, feel free to dismiss them and move on with your life.

But the one book that has had scholars and anyone else who’s read it completely baffled is the Book of Revelations. According to Catholic tradition it was written by St. John the Divine. Most likely while he was in prison. The problem with Revelations, besides it’s use of epic allegory, is the fact that it makes the teachings of Jesus insanely violent. Far from “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” it’s more akin to “do unto others BEFORE they do unto you.” Almost all the violent Christian sects cite it as proof of their beliefs.

But – and you knew there was a “but” coming, didn’t you? – the document used in the Bible has long been known to be a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy and so on. Archaeologists have recently unearthed a much older version of Revelations and realized quickly that there may have been some tiny errors in the multiple translations.

Take the Number of the Beast, they now know it to be 616 and not 666. It has prompted some interesting articles, such as this one from Religion News.

Satanists, apocalypse watchers and heavy metal guitarists may have to adjust their demonic numerology after a recently deciphered ancient biblical text revealed that 666 is not the fabled Number of the Beast after all.

A fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the Third century, gives the more mundane 616 as the mark of the Antichrist.

Ellen Aitken, a professor of early Christian history at McGill University, said the discovery appears to spell the end of 666 as the devil’s prime number.

“This is a very nice piece to find,” Dr. Aitken said. “Scholars have argued for a long time over this, and it now seems that 616 was the original number of the beast.”

The tiny fragment of 1,500-year-old papyrus is written in Greek, the original language of the New Testament, and contains a key passage from the Book of Revelation.

Where more conventional versions of the Bible give 666 as the “number of the beast,” or the sign of the anti-Christ whose coming is predicted in the book’s apocalyptic verses, the older version uses the Greek letters signifying 616.

“This is very early confirmation of that number, earlier than any other text we’ve found of that passage,” Dr. Aitken said. “It’s probably about 100 years before any other version.”

The fragment was part of a hoard of previously illegible manuscripts discovered in an ancient garbage dump outside the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. Although the papyrus was first excavated in 1895, it was badly discoloured and damaged. Classics scholars at Oxford University were only recently able to read it using new advanced imaging techniques.

Elijah Dann, a professor of philosophy and religion at the University of Toronto, said the new number is unlikely to make a dent in the popularity of 666.

“Otherwise, a lot of sermons would have to be changed and a lot of movies rewritten,” he said with a laugh. “There’s always someone with an active imagination who can put another interpretation on it.

“It just shows you that when you study something as cryptic and mystic as the Book of Revelation there’s an almost unlimited number of interpretations.”

The book is thought to have been written by the disciple John and according to the King James Bible, the traditional translation of the passage reads: “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”

But Dr. Aitken said that translation was drawn from much later versions of the New Testament than the fragment found in Oxyrhynchus. “When we’re talking about the early biblical texts, we’re always talking about copies and they are copies made, at best, 150 to 200 years after [the original] was written,” she said.

“They can have mistakes in the copying, changes for political or theological reasons … it’s like a detective story piecing it all together.”

Dr. Aitken said, however, that scholars now believe the number in question has very little to do the devil. It was actually a complicated numerical riddle in Greek, meant to represent someone’s name, she said.

“It’s a number puzzle — the majority opinion seems to be that it refers to [the Roman emperor] Nero.”

Revelation was actually a thinly disguised political tract, with the names of those being criticized changed to numbers to protect the authors and early Christians from reprisals. “It’s a very political document,” Dr. Aitken said. “It’s a critique of the politics and society of the Roman empire, but it’s written in coded language and riddles.”

Of course that last little tid bit also means that Revelations is no more prophecy than I am a ballet dancer.

Ooops.

Nevertheless, I’m sure, as time progresses, other documents will surface to help us understand more fully what everyone was thinking at the time.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrSiIqCpxB8&w=480&h=360]

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