Archives for October 2012

The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but it becomes a super highway when bad intentions are involved. I’ll give you a humorous example. On May 9th, in a resounding repudiation of President Obama’s support of marriage equality, North Carolina passed Amendment 1. Yes, I know, the name is so trite it sounds like it escaped from a 1950’s horror flick swathed in echo. In their attempt to avoid the gay bacchanal that was clearly poised to overrun Raleigh, they kind of over shot their mark and stripped all rights from any couple not in a traditional marriage. As I noted then that means child support cannot be enforced. That means unwed mothers are now, both legally and morally, the progenitors of bastards who will have no rights. And so on. Divorced couples could find themselves in a wonderful legal quagmire. It is still floundering in various courts. I wish I had the time to head down there to hear the justifications.

Not to be outdone, on May 26, 2012, the Kansas state legislature decided to stop the influx of Sharia laws that were clearly overrunning our lands, they passed Senate Bill 79, which outlawed any foreign, or religious, interference with the laws of their fine state.

Allow me to share my earlier summation of that train wreck.

For those of you who slept through school, the New Testament section of the Christian Bible (part of the basis for banning gay marriage) was written in Greece and Rome. Mostly Rome. Its original (written) language was Greek and its first translation of value was into Latin and it was used as the basis for numerous onerous laws that led to the social perversions of the Middle Ages. The other half of the Christian Bible, the Old Testament, was written in Aramaic and is the basis for existing laws in Israel. In other words, it is in clear violation of Section 2 above.

And the denial of marriage rights, or any other rights, to gays or anyone else is a clear violation of Section 3. Especially if the denial of those rights is based on any Biblical admonition.

So Kansas, in its attempt to return to the Dark Ages, has just managed to make San Francisco look like Utah.

GO KC!

Yeah, as you might have guessed, lots of lawyers are having fun in Kansas.

Especially when people, who actually stayed awake in school, start pointing out that “gay marriage” predates the bible.

But even before these messes I took a look at what happens when hardcore immigration – ahem – reform is instituted. Back on December 9, 2011, I cataloged the death of Postville Iowa. Once the home of immigrants from numerous lands it is now a ghost town. Companies have been forced to close and relocate. Jobs dried up. The local meat packing plant, which paid $19 an hour now pays around $8 to locals. And it’s prices to consumers rose as it was taken over by “honest American” people and not them “dern forners.”

Yeah, try living on $8 an hour.

So, that experience would seem to be a clear warning sign to most people to tread carefully and consider the consequences of their actions.

Who am I kidding?

Last year Alabama passed HB 56 which has led to the arrest of executives from Mercedes Benz for having foreign accents (German) and the recreation of Exodus as even legal immigrants feared for their lives and livelihoods.

The result?

Alabama is teetering on total insolvency. Van Le, an alleged American, has the whole story.

This time last year, Alabama had just begun implementing its worst-in-the-nation anti-immigrant law, HB 56, causing chaos in the state and forcing neighborhoods full of immigrants to flee. At the time, state senator and HB 56 sponsor Scott Beason rationalized the law as “a jobs bill,” one that would drive immigrants out of the state and return American jobs to Americans.

A year later, it turns out that Alabama has the worst economy in the Southeast.

“Worse than Louisiana,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Joey Kennedy at the Birmingham News. “Worse than South Carolina. Heck, worse than, my goodness, ThankGodforMississippi.”

“There is a saving grace,” however, as he noted. “While Alabama’s economy sucks more than any other in the Southeast, it’s only the fourth worst economy in the United States. Yea us! We’re No. 47!”

The slowdown in Alabama’s economy can be traced back to HB 56 and its incredibly harsh anti-immigrant measures. A few months after Alabama began implementing the law, University of Alabama economist Dr. Sam Addy released a report finding that HB 56 could ultimately cost Alabama as much as $11 million in economic output and as many as 70,000 to 140,000 jobs. It turns out that when immigrant laborers and field workers left the state, American workers—contrary to Beason’s theories—didn’t want to do back-breaking manual labor, and crops suffered severe labor shortages. And when all these workers leave, suddenly there are fewer people buying the products they would’ve bought, and needing the services they would’ve needed—and economic output goes down.

That’s why, Kennedy writes, “Unemployment [in Alabama] is down to about 8.3 percent, from last October’s 8.8 percent, but economists attribute that to jobs that have simply disappeared, not to jobs having been created.”

And yet the state leaders who got Alabama into this mess seem unwilling to recognize the consequences of HB 56. As Kennedy writes:

Our state leaders are nothing if not in profound denial. There is no telling how many business opportunities we’ve missed because companies took Alabama off their lists of possibilities after our hateful law was passed and our national reputation as an open and accepting state was destroyed…

Alabama has self-inflicted this economic wound, just so a group of self-serving politicians could score political points at election time by pandering to our worst natures. They accomplished their goal. Meanwhile, Alabama’s weak economy continues to suffer, unable to reach even the most modest of its goals.

A few months ago, the US 11th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down much of HB 56, declaring it mostly unconstitutional while tentatively leaving a “show me your papers” component standing. The move came too late for Alabama, though, where it seems the damage has been done.

The three states worse off than Alabama are Nevada, West Virginia and Mississippi. Oddly enough all four states have minimal diversity in their economies or populations.

I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

Until later, I remind you that the world is round and what we do forward will always come up from behind.

One Day on Earth – Motion Picture Trailer from One Day on Earth

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

But what does she charge? BWAH HA HA HA HA! Yeah, I’m 12, what of it? I just thought that with the east coast about to be swallowed by the biggest blow job that nature can give, they might need a smile. And since nothing evokes a smile from me more than a blow job, I’ll just rudely assume that everyone agrees with me and move on. A surprising stat found was that women who perform oral sex, and swallow, are at lower risk of developing preeclampsia. Not just that, researchers also found that it can help lower blood pressure. My guess is that last part applies to men too. I know they relax me. Just as importantly, from a female’s point of view anyway, is this nugget that was reported in the New York Daily News;

One academic is proposing a cure for morning sickness that some moms-to-be might find in bad taste — sperm.

Gordon Gallup, a psychologist at SUNY-Albany has a theory that pregnant women who are continually exposed to the father’s semen are less like to suffer from AM nausea.

Gallup, who specializes in human reproductive competition and behavior, offers the theory that expectant women become ill and vomit because their bodies are rejecting the semen’s genetic material as something foreign and unfamiliar.

That’s right honey, embrace my genetic material and make it a part of you.

How would you like to be in that research group. I mean, what possible placebo could they use as a baseline?

Okay ladies, spitters to the left ….. (??)

Sign me up Gordon, I’m all about the science and stuff.

Okay, obviously Hurricane Sandy – which, despite what you may have seen on FOX! News, is not named after the squirrel from Spongebob – is set to land in Atlantic City before sunrise tomorrow and do millions upon millions of dollars worth of damage. Hopefully, since they got the evacuation orders out early, no one will be injured or killed.

Oddly enough, considering that America gets hammered with a few hurricanes every year, most people are ignorant about what they are.

Well, a lot of people are just ignorant in general, but that’s another blog.

Anyway, the nice people at Hurricane Facts have, and I know this is shocking, facts about hurricanes that they are willing to share.

The word hurricane comes from the Taino Native American word, hurucane, meaning evil spirit of the wind.

The first time anyone flew into a hurricane happened in 1943 in the middle of World War II.

A tropical storm is classified as a hurricane once winds goes up to 74 miles per hour or higher.

Hurricanes are the only weather disasters that have been given their own names.

All hurricanes begin life in a warm moist atmosphere over tropical ocean waters.

A typical hurricane can dump 6 inches to a foot of rain across a region.

The most violent winds and heaviest rains take place in the eye wall, the ring of clouds and thunderstorms closely surrounding the eye.

Every second, a large hurricane releases the energy of 10 atomic bombs.

Hurricanes can also produce tornadoes. They are not as strong as regular tornadoes and last only a few minutes.

Slow moving hurricanes produce more rainfall and can cause more damage from flooding than faster-moving, more powerful hurricanes.

Hurricane Floyd was barely a category I hurricane, but it still managed to mow down 19 million trees and caused over a billion dollars in damage.

Most people who die in hurricanes are killed by the towering walls of sea water that comes inland.

In the Pacific Ocean, Hurricanes are generally known as typhoons. In the Indian Ocean they are called tropical cyclones.

The man who first gave names to hurricanes was an Australian weather forecaster named C. Wragge in the early 1900s.

The first hurricane of the year is given a name beginning with the letter “A”.

Hurricane season is from June to November when the seas are at their warmest and most humid, which are ripe conditions for a hurricane to develop.

The planet Jupiter has a hurricane which has been going on for over 300 years. It can be seen as a red spot on the planet. This hurricane on Jupiter is bigger than the Earth itself.

Okay, “Earth itself” is a redundant phrase (what else could be the Earth?) but this is a hurricane blog not a grammar quiz.

Now, since you’re too lazy and I’m having too much fun, let’s talk about C. Wragge for a moment. Besides naming hurricanes, Clement Lindley Wragge was patently insane. He hung out with Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (a guy who claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus) and was a devotee of Theosophy (the study of the divine).

Not sure how you study the divine.

“Hey, God, how ya’ doin? Cool, just take a seat here and we’ll begin …”

Nope. That doesn’t seem like it’s going to work.

Don’t get me wrong, Wragge was brilliant. He had a degree in law as well as meterology and founded a museum. He just happened to be nuttier than grandma’s fruitcake as well.

On the other hand, we could probably use a few more people who are nutty like he was.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

This week has seen a series of scientific announcements that might boggle lesser blog readers, but not you. We can start with the Italian scientists who were convicted by an Italian court of, well – nothing really, and sentenced to seven years in prison. This is a great example of what happens when religion and science collide. The court made the assumption that science was magic and that, as magic, it should be able to do the stuff it had seen in the Harry Potter movies. For the record, officially, the scientists were convicted for not being able to do what no one has ever been able to do; predict an earthquake. Not since the Spanish Inquisition have logic and facts taken such a beating.

Meanwhile, while the Italian court system was adhering to the logic espoused by a homophobe in a bedazzled hat, science was finding stuff that could scare the pants off of you. Just in time for Halloween NASA has announced the discovery of the first ever ZOMBIE PLANET!!!

MU HU HA HA HA …. etc.

An enormous alien planet that some astronomers thought was dead and buried has come back to life, a new study suggests.

A new analysis of observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found that the bright nearby star Fomalhaut does indeed host a huge exoplanet, which scientists dubbed a “zombie” world in an aptly Halloween-themed video on the alien planet. This conclusion contradicts other recent studies, which determined that the so-called planet — known as Fomalhaut b — is actually just a giant dust cloud.

“Given what we know about the behavior of dust and the environment where the planet is located, we think that we’re seeing a planetary object that is completely embedded in dust rather than a free-floating dust cloud,” co-author John Debes, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in a statement.

Okay, so it’s the perfect zombie, it brings its own mist, it lurks in the shadows and … well, I don’t know if planets eat brains or not.

Probably not.

Of course, while the zombie planet is is a safe distance away, Mars is much closer to home. In fact it’s close enough now that we can make our first visit there a shining example of genocide.

Wait? What?

It seem some scientists are worried about the effect we will have on the local microbes, which, as of this writing, don’t exist.

Humanity has long dreamed of putting boots on Mars, but those boots have the potential to stomp all over any lifeforms that may exist on the Red Planet.

A seething, swarming mass of 100 trillion microbes will accompany every astronaut who lands on Mars. This diverse “microbiome” has evolved with humans for eons and provides a number of services, from helping people digest their food to keeping pathogenic bacteria at bay.

While these microbes are intimately tied to humans, many of them will jump ship if transported to the Martian surface — with unknown consequences for a planet that may or may not host life of its own.

“We have the responsibility to Mars, I think — even if it’s just Martian microbes — not to kill them by the act of detecting them,” Cynthia Phillips of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute said at the SETICon 2 meeting in June in Santa Clara, Calif.

“If you have human astronauts there,” Phillips added, “there’s no way to sterilize them. They’re spewing out thousands of microbes every second. So it’s a real problem.”

Umm, okay, nice way to hit the alarm button with no real facts to back up the panic. As to the effect we would have on an alien world, my guess it would be about the same as when the friendly Spanish came to visit the happy Mayans.

Oh, wait, that resulted in the near extermination of the Mayan race.

Of course, there has to be something complex enough living on Mars to be effected and, so far, such a being has not been found.

So why am I bringing all this up? As I noted before, scientists have been discovering new planets almost every day thanks to the Kelper telescope. And more and more scientists want to go visit some of them. And while isolationists will worry about our polluting the local microbes, real scientists will be worrying about the important stuff like “How can I get laid on an interstellar flight?”

In September of 1992 astronauts Jan Davis and Mark Lee became the first married couple to leave the planet together. But NASA didn’t originally plan on it happening that way.

NASA had an unwritten rule that married astronauts couldn’t be sent into space together. Davis and Lee had been assigned to the mission in 1989 but were later married in January 1991. After the agency learned of their marriage, NASA took two months to review the situation and believed that both were too important to the mission (the second flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour) for either of them to be removed. The couple had no children and NASA explained that if they had, they most certainly wouldn’t have flown together.

Their flight was a minor public relations scandal because of an obvious question that reporters of the time were not shy about asking: would they be having sex in space? The answer from the astronauts and NASA was an unequivocal “no”.

Outside of science fiction, the topic of sex in space has received surprisingly scant attention. But it was science fiction that inspired Dr. Robert S. Richardson to write an article in the March 1956 issue of Sexology: The Magazine of Sex Science, wherein he describes his vision of what sexual relations might look like when space travel is a reality. This was a year and a half before the launch of Sputnik, so the Space Age wasn’t even firing on all thrusters yet. But Dr. Richardson opens his article by discussing his frustration with the fact that sex is never addressed in any of the sci-fi shows on TV. Given the reputation of 1950s broadcasting as a sexless environment — where married couples on programs like I Love Lucy had to sleep in separate beds, and wouldn’t even say the word “pregnant” — Richardson’s surprise comes across as a bit disingenuous. Nonetheless, Richardson makes his case for what he believes the future of sex in space might look like.

From the introduction to the 1956 article:

Recent announcements by the United States and Soviet Governments that they are planning space satellites and space rockets have stimulated universal interest in the problems of space travel. Space voyages to Mars will take a long time, and settlements on the distant plants will be lonely. While much has been written about the various scientific aspects of space travel, this is the first article which deals with the important medical problem: How will the natural sexual needs of early space travelers be met so as to provide a modicum of mental health for the space pioneers?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dr. Richardson’s views on women in space aren’t the most enlightened. He writes under the assumption that only men will be astronauts and that these men will have certain carnal needs to be met during long missions in space. Many of Richardson’s ideas about space, and especially Mars, clearly come from the Collier’s series of articles on space travel from 1952 to 1954. Interestingly, Richardson becomes fixated on Mars throughout the article, ignoring the moon — a place humans wouldn’t even sink their boots until a full 13 years after his article was published.

Richardson compares the establishment of an inevitable Martian base to the experience of military men in remote regions of the Arctic. But unlike relatively short tours in Greenland of a year or less, he acknowledges that a trip to Mars would be an adventure of three years or more.

But can healthy young men work efficiently and harmoniously for long without women ?

Reactions to this question vary widely. There are some who think it outrageous that sex should enter into the question at all. Just forget about the women. Keep busy and you won’t need to worry.

Others recognize sex as a disturbing factor, but feel it is not too serious. In the old days, sailors made long voyages without women and still managed to perform their duties and bring the ship into port. They admit there was sexual over-indulgence soon after the sailors got on shore, but that was only to be expected. The remark heard most often is that the men turn to homosexualism and auto-eroticism during extended voyages.

None of these answers meets the problem squarely. They either side-step the issue or suggest some degrading compromise solution.

Richardson’s solution to the problem of loneliness for astronaut men sailing towards Mars is rather offensive, proposing that women tag along as sex objects with a mission to serve the crew (and take dictation when necessary).

In our expedition to Mars, let our healthy young males take along some healthy young females to serve as their sexual partners. (Of course it would also help if they could operate a radio transmitter and take dictation.) These women would accompany them quite openly for this purpose. There would be no secrecy about this. There would be nothing dishonorable about their assignment. They would be women of the kind we ordinarily speak of as “nice girls.”

“But then they wouldn’t be nice girls any more!” people will object.

Judged by the arbitrary standards of our present social reference system, they certainly would not. But in our new social reference system they would be nice girls. Or rather, the girls would be the same, but our way of thinking about them would be different.

It is possible that ultimately the most important result of space travel will be not what we discover upon the planets, but rather the changes that our widening outlook will effect upon our way of thinking. Will men and women bold enough to venture into space feel that they are still bound by often artificial and outmoded conventions of behavior prevalent upon a planet fifty million miles behind them ? May not men and women upon another world develop a social reference system — shocking as judged by us on earth today — but entirely “moral” according to extra-terrestrial standards?

This last bit of speculation — of proposing that on other planets people may develop their own set of cultural and moral standards by which to judge sexual activity — would certainly be an interesting discussion to have, if it weren’t predicated on the notion that women would necessarily be secretaries and sex objects acting at the pleasure of the all-male astronaut crew.

As far as we know, no one has yet had sex in space. But when they inevitably do, I suspect neither party will need to supplement their astronautic duties by taking dictation.

The Russians have had a co-ed space station for decades and it contains vodka. All that’s missing ins the press release folks. It has happened.

And to make it work they had to resort to velcro straps, restraints and harnesses. In other words, astronuats are super perverts.

God, I do love science!

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

If you’ve had the chance to visit a maternity ward in the last decade or so you noticed a new sign reminding people not to have conjugal relations in the prep room where the woman is being monitored to see when she will be ready to give birth. The reason these signs exist is because it had become a problem. “Aww, honey, your contractions are still five minutes apart, let’s slip one more in for old times sake.” Who said romance was dead? What I’m saying is that some rules are necessary, even if they are painfully obvious to others. They are put in place not by overly officious poltroons but by people who realize that there are those who walk among us who might not be as socially adept as the rest.

That being said, there are rules that seem to be the famous solutions in search of a problem. Like the Voter ID laws or cell phone banking. The former could disenfranchise 20,000,000 or more people to solve the horrible problem of the 10 people who have tried, and failed, to commit voter fraud this century. As to the latter, who really needs to pay a bill that fast? As it has turned out, almost no one.

Although, to be fair, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph so dying people could easily record their will. He saw no other uses for the device. So, maybe these other ideas will find uses just as his did.

But …..

These next set of rules just baffle. IN an effort to keep our children safe governments around the country are drafting, and passing, reams of legislation that will have the desired effect. If the desired effect is to turn all children into self absorbed sociopaths with severe self esteem issues. TruTV has released the 14 dumbest laws out there right now.

No Hugs
Plain ol’ hugging is “inappropriate” according to school officials in New Jersey, who have banned the evil practice. Students need to be “focused on academics” (because hugging takes a lot of time, apparently.) Other schools have instituted “no hugging” policies, with punishments that include suspension.

Hand-Holding Is Too Sexy
For teens, hand-holding is just one step away from having sex. That is, according to Tennessee’s abstinence-based sexual education program, which includes warnings about “gateway sexual activity,” a.k.a. hand-holding. The legislation also prohibits teachers from demonstrating any “gateway sexual activity.” So, to recap: hand-holding can lead to sex, students must be warned that hand-holding can lead to sex, but teachers cannot demonstrate how hand-holding. Got that?

No More Bike Rides
For one school district in the South Bay Union School district of San Diego County, safety concerns outweigh any potential health benefits of bicycling; students are not permitted to ride bikes to school.

Banned Home Cooking
One Chicago school has banned all packed lunches from home, stating that school lunches are more nutritious and better quality. That not only gives the school unprecedented power over children’s nutrition, it also lines the pockets of the district caterer who now has a fixed and captive market.

Baggy Pants
If your pants are kinda baggy, they might violate a new school dress code in Chicago. If the school isn’t able to enforce the dress code, some city council members even want to instate citywide ordinance to control the pant problem.

The End Of Bake Sales
Massachusetts has been working to combat childhood obesity, removing vending machines from school hallways and potato chips from the lunch line. But banning bake sales? Currently, the state law prohibits junk food on school grounds during the day, but some are pushing to make the ban a 24/7 operation, which would prevent school groups from raising money (to fund healthy sports teams) by selling baked goods.

Spying On Lunchboxes
At preschools in North Carolina, children are required to have a balanced lunch consisting of one serving each of meat, dairy, and grain, plus two servings of fruits or vegetables. This regulation covers cafeteria lunches as well as those brought from home. In order to enforce this regulation, government employees actual travel to preschool and daycare centers to examine kids’ lunch boxes and force parents to pay to supplement their child’s “unhealthy” lunch.

Tight Or “Revealing” Clothes
In case baggy pants aren’t your thing, be careful that your pants are not too tight either. A school in Ohio banned yoga pants for being too revealing. In addition to tight skirts or low-cut tops — if comfy cotton pants are too tight, they might also be distracting. Students that wore the pants anyway in protest received in-school suspensions.

Dreads And Cornrows
Hampton University’s Business School and its high-ranking MBA program don’t permit cornrows and dreadlocks in class. The school claims they are preparing students for corporate life. When confronted with accusations of racism, the dean of the business school retorted: “When was it that cornrows and dreadlocks were a part of African American history?” Guess he hasn’t heard of Bob Marley.

Recess Is Over
Remember those days of carefree running around the playground playing tag? Those days are over for schools in several states: tag might cause injuries — or worse, hurt feelings. One school allows kickball to be played, but only if the score is not kept. At least they get to play with balls: after a Toronto, Ontario parent was hit in the head with a soccer ball and suffered a concussion, the local school board banned the use of all hard balls on the playground.

Applying Sunscreen
If you do not have a doctor’s note, you cannot apply sunscreen at schools in New York and other states. A doctor’s note and a signed parental permission slip are required to apply sunscreen, since it is considered a medication by the FDA. Cough drops, Vaseline, Chapstick, and antibiotic ointment… all require sign-offs. However, after two girls were hospitalized for severe burns because the school refused to let them wear sunscreen, it seemed like the policy would be repealed.

No Boobies
Raising money for Breast Cancer is a noble cause, but not if the fundraiser includes a bracelet that says “I (heart) boobies!” In one Pennsylvania school district, students were told of this policy, which they claim violates their freedom of speech rights. District officials say that the word “boobies” is vulgar.

Got Milk?
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is currently entertaining a proposal to ban milk in school. According to the proposal by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, milk is “high in sugar, high in fat and high in animal protein that is harmful to, rather than protective of, bone health.” They say instead that kids should just eat broccoli, tofu, or collard greens. So refreshing.

So this will be the result; your unloved, fashionalbly dressed, conservatively coiffed, future serial killer who has no clue how to show or receive afeection, will be set loose on the world as a shining example of what regulations have wrought.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, besides everything?

Do you remember the “don’t keep score” mania? It was so children would be spared the pain of losing. It also prevented them from knowing the joys of winning or a job well done. An entire generation for whom accomplishment was anathema. I worked for companies that were forced to hire those mutant spawn. It usually took about three months, on average, to beat that crap out of them and teach them to succeed.

Not how to be the next Trump, just how to set a goal, achieve it and move on.

No, I am not kidding. They had no clue.

On the plus side, none of them insisted on speaking French, which is a side effect of sociopathic behavior.

Or so I’ve heard.

Sociopathe – Marre (2011) from Wesh Conexion

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

This site has long proposed that it would benefit everyone if people made educated choices. I know it sounds like a simple idea but its implementation has been woefully lacking. The current presidential election is a shining example of this phenomena. I don’t care if you vote Republicrat or Demican, but please do so based on the facts. For the record I can assure you that Governor Romney is not now, nor has he ever been, a unicorn. I can further assure you that President Obama is not now, nor has he veer been, a Muslim. That’s not to say that a Muslim unicorn wouldn’t make a fine candidate in the future. Even so, both claims can still be found, and clung to, on the web.

Before we get to the main thrust of today’s blog, I’d like to share a little political advice my grandmother gave me long ago.

“It is the politician’s job to make you like him. Ignore him and look at the people who support him directly. They will let you know what kind of person he is.”

Of course, when my granny was young there were almost no female politicians so I’d hope you’d cut her some P.C. slack on this one.

Even so, it’s good advice.

That simple amount of research can save you years of anguish. In many other cases the same principle holds true as well. For example, if you’re a nurse, knowing that injecting a patient with coffee instead of blood might be a bad idea is knowledge worth having. It’s a pity that no one told Rejane Moreira Telles that.

A student nurse in Brazil has been charged with involuntary manslaughter after allegedly injecting a patient with coffee, rather than a blood drip.

Rejane Moreira Telles, 23, had been working at a Rio de Janeiro clinic for only three days
when the incident occurred, the New York Daily News reports.

“Anyone can get confused,” Telles told TV Globo, pointing out that the blood drip and a feed drip filled with a coffee and milk mixture were right next to each other. She also noted that she had not received training in this particular procedure.

The patient, 80-year-old Palmerina Pires Ribeiro, died last week, hours after the mix-up, according tot he Daily Mail.

Nutritional specialist Dr. Armando Carreir told the network that Ribeiro’s death “would have been as if [she] was suffocating.”

Two nurses and other student at the clinic have also been indicted for manslaughter.

A similar incident occurred in Rio de Janeiro in late September, when a nursing technician allegedly injected a patient with soup.

For the record, soup really is good food. It’s just a lousy blood substitute. See? Knowledge is power

Here’s some more advice; if you rob a bank don’t go back and tell them you were shortchanged.

Going back to a bank you just ripped off to claim you’d been shortchanged isn’t likely to end well.

That’s what police say led to an arrest Monday in upstate New York.

Syracuse police say 28-year-old Arthur Bundrage, of East Syracuse, went into a bank at about 9 a.m. and demanded $20,000. Authorities say a teller initially refused, but relented and gave him some money, even though he never showed a weapon or made a threat.

Investigators say Bundrage left but returned when he found he hadn’t been given $20,000. Officers say they found him at the bank’s locked front door, trying to get back in.

Bundrage is in jail awaiting arraignment Tuesday on a charge of fourth-degree grand larceny. Police say he doesn’t yet have a lawyer.

But these are examples of individual stupidity. Let’s take a look at group stupidity. And we are talking on an epic scale here. The Arizona legislature wants to force the Grand Canyon to secede from the United States and become their personal property.

No, I am not drunk.

When voters in Arizona go to the polls next month, they will be asked to decide a landownership tug of war: Should the Grand Canyon belong to all Americans, or just the residents of Arizona?

A controversial ballot measure backed by Republicans in the state legislature is seeking sovereign control over millions of acres of federal land in the state, including the Grand Canyon.

Proposition 120 would amend the state’s constitution to declare Arizona’s sovereignty and jurisdiction over the “air, water, public lands, minerals, wildlife and other natural resources within the state’s boundaries.”

The measure is the latest salvo in the so-called “sagebrush revolt” by Republicans in the West aiming to take back control of major swaths of land owned by various federal agencies, much of it by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management.

State Senator Sylvia Allen, one of the Republican backers of the measure, argues that federal retention of the land hurts the economy of the Western states and leaves them struggling to fund public education, nurture their economies, and manage their forests and natural resources.

“We do not have the ability in rural Arizona to provide jobs for our citizens due to the fact that the federal government controls all the land,” Allen told Reuters. “It leaves us at a great disadvantage. We’re not able to bring in industry and provide for the jobs that we need,” she added.

The exact area of public land targeted by the measure – which excludes American Indian reservations and federal installations such as arsenals – was not immediately clear on the Arizona Secretary of State’s website.

The Sierra Club pegged the area at between 39,000 and 46,700 square miles (101,000 and 121,000 square km) – or 34 percent to 41 percent of the entire state.

BATTLE OVER LAND

The ballot measure is just the latest move in a decades-old federal-state skirmish over control of a wide range of natural resources in Western states, often pitting mining, drilling and logging companies against those seeking to protect the environment.

The efforts have had mixed success. In May, Arizona’s Republican Governor Jan Brewer vetoed a state bill calling on Washington to relinquish the title to 48,000 square miles (124,000 square km), arguing that it created uncertainty for existing leaseholders on federal lands in difficult economic times.

But similar legislation was signed into law by Governor Gary Herbert in neighbouring Utah in March, despite warnings from state attorneys that it was likely unconstitutional and would trigger a costly and ultimately futile legal battle.

Opponents of the latest drive to assert Arizona’s ownership say that, if successful, the initiative could undermine protections provided by federal environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, and Clean Water Act, and would saddle Arizona with lands for which it would be unable to care.

“They can’t even fund and ensure that their (state) parks are protected, so how they would take on an additional 25 to 30 million acres of land is a big question mark,” Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter, told Reuters.

No polls have given a sense of whether Prop 120 will prosper during the November 6 election. But Bahr cautioned that, should it pass, it would inevitably trigger fresh litigation for Arizona, which recently fought a legal battle over its tough 2010 crackdown on illegal immigrants all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“This one is just blatantly unconstitutional,” Bahr said of Prop 120. “Does Arizona really need another lawsuit?”

Problem #1; (click this to see a map) The Grand Canyon is also in Nevada.

Nevadans are fun loving people but they might be a bit miffed at seeing a 20th of their state taken away from them.

Problem #2; see the excuse above: “We’re not able to bring in industry and provide for the jobs that we need.”

So, to solve that problem they would have to pave over the Grand Canyon. Or use it as a dump. Either way my guess is that people who rely on the Colorado River (whcih flows thorugh it) and Lake Mead (which is entirely in the canyon) for water might be just a touch miffed.

Given the fact that the Southwest is in a state of perpetual drought in even the best of times I could easily see this leading to armed conflict.

Problem #3; Arizona doesn’t even come close to having the resources to poperply manage the thing.

In fact, the state already has millions of acres of unused land. The fact that they have, thus far, used that land to build publicly funded baseball parks and money losing strip malls is not the fault of the federal government.

Nor is it the fault of the Grand Canyon.

Not that I wish to impugn the intelligence of the average Arizonan – well, I guess I do, actually, now that I think about it – I would like to remind them of this bon mot from H.L. Mencken, “People deserve the government they get, and they deserve to get it good and hard.”

Nyle “Let The Beat Build” from Last Pictures

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

Before we begin today let’s take a moment to be completely honest with ourselves. Had the technology existed when we were young there would be some very embarrassing memories being shared right about now. I know you’re riding the high hobby horse now when you are in the “My Morals Corral,” but even when we were barely old enough to know what the heck anything meant “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine” was a time honored tradition. And we honored it. So, if we’d had cell phone cams and so on just imagine the world of **** we’d be in right now. Or, to quote Matthew 7:1, “Judge not lest ye be judged.” Now, that being said, that doesn’t make doing it now any smarter than it would have been doing it then.

But the one thing that most people who sext never seem to consider is what happens after they hit send. I’m not talking about the occasional cad who shares your intimate gift, although they are a real concern, I’m just talking in general. Think about it for a second. The internet isn’t some device that’s hardwired into your phone or camera. It is a collection of ever crossing electronic pathways. Smart people who have no lives sit in the junctions of those pathways looking for exactly the kind of pic (NSFW) you were sending your BF or GF or Unsure F.

Ben Weitzenkorn of NBC News has some real bad news for you.

Eighty-eight percent of homemade pornography, including videos and still images, finds its way onto porn sites, often without the owners’ knowledge, a new study concluded.

The study analyzed more than 12,000 sexually explicit images uploaded by young people and found that the great majority of images had been stolen and published to what Britain’s Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which published the study, calls “parasite” websites.

These parasites, exclusively devoted to hosting sexual images featuring young subjects, allegedly obtain their material from anywhere they can get it: lost or stolen cellphones, hacked private accounts on Photobucket, Flickr, or Facebook, or from chat sites and Tumblr, a blogging platform notorious for the amount of explicit self-published content by high school and college-age students.

In 2011, the now-defunct IsAnyoneUp.com published tens of thousands of stolen Facebook photos submitted by jaded ex-lovers or angry friends.

“We need young people to realize that once an image or a video has gone online, they may never be able to remove it entirely,” Susie Hargreaves, CEO of the Internet Watch Foundation, told the Guardian newspaper in London. “Once an image has been copied on to a parasite website, it will no longer suffice to simply remove the image from the online account.”

David Wright, director of the UK Safer Internet Center, agreed with the study and reiterated a warning to youngsters not to send sexually explicit messages via their phones, either.

“Much of the advice for children and young people is, quite rightly, to not ‘sext,’ ” he said.

In its report, the IWF features quotes meant to serve as a warning to others to not even make explicit photos. “One explicit image I took when I was young … is coming up on the first page of [unnamed search engine],” one quote read.

“Every time I begin to feel good and confident about myself … I just remember these pictures and what I did,” another quote read.

The people who gave the quotes may be heartened, however, to learn that they’re not alone. With camera phones and the ability to posting power in the palm of our hands now, self-made sex photos are easier to make and share than ever before. They can bet they’re not alone.

“AHA,” you self righteously exclaim, “this is America! The land of many lawyers and too much free time. I will sue these heinous thieves back into the Stone Age.”

Okay. On what grounds? You can’t copyright porn, so that’s out. The rest of the laws rest on the phrase “reasonable expectation of privacy” which you don’t have if you’re posting your naked wanker on line or sending it over a public cell phone network.

So you have two choices; (1) cower in fear every time someone starts a sentence with “You won’t believe what I found online ….” or (2) own that stuff.

“Yep, that’s my wanker. He’s a beaut, isn’t he?”

But the question still begs, why do it at all? The risks are widely known, the stories are widely told and the consequences, due to the rantings of holier than thou pinheads, can be dire.

Matt Liebowitz of Tech Weekly takes a look at the nitty gritty of it all.

In some social circles, sending a nude photo via text message — sexting — leads to public shame, embarrassment and a ruined reputation for the sender.

There have been countless stories of what happens when a naked or suggestive message falls into the wrong hands — just ask former congressman Anthony Weiner. But rarely do we discuss why people send these messages in the first place.

In some cases, according to Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, peer group pressure creates an environment where sexting is just another part of the conversation.

Next stop: fame

At the Internet Safety Symposium in late June in New York City, Boyd told the stories of two teens whom she observed and wrote about as part of her doctoral dissertation, which she earned from the University of California, Berkeley, while studying how American teens socialize in online social networks.

The first student she discussed, a 15-year-old girl named Traviesa, covered her MySpace profile with “artistically styled but explicitly sexual nude and semi-nude photos of herself,” Boyd said.

Traviesa, Boyd said, took her cues, however misguided, from pseudo-celebrities such as Tila Tequila and Paris Hilton. Both women’s careers were launched after nude photos and sex videos of them were leaked onto the Web.

Although Traviesa didn’t send any racy messages of herself to a specific person, she did put her explicit photos out in the open, where anybody could see them and use them in any way they wanted.

“She told me that she wanted to be a model and that she was going to work hard to break into the business; she believed that she was going to be found on MySpace just like Tila Tequila.” Boyd said. “Traviesa believed that she, too, could become famous if she exposed herself online.”

Sexting to get a date

Some teens see sexting as a stepping-stone to stardom. In other circles, it is merely another form of social currency that can put young girls ahead of their peers — in many young men’s eyes, at least.

Boyd referenced a May 26 New York Times article in which a group of teens from New York City and a Philadelphia suburb were asked their thoughts about sexting. Kathy, a 17-year-old from Queens, spoke frankly about how the practice has pervaded youth culture.

“At my school, if you like a boy and you want to get his attention, you know what you have to do,” she told the Times. She added, “There’s a positive side to sexting. You can’t get pregnant from it, and you can’t transmit STD’s. It’s a kind of safe sex.”

In her presentation, Boyd said the girls “believed they were strutting their stuff and sexting was just another practice in a long line of practices meant to signal that they were cool, sexy girls.”

Don’t panic … yet

Kathy, the Queens teen, had a point, Boyd said.

Boyd clarified that sexting is a sex act, “and as with any sex acts, there are loving versions and abusive versions,” she told SecurityNewsDaily.

When X-rated messages are used to “shame, hurt, or manipulate people, we should be worried,” she said. “But when we see them done lovingly, we should not be panicked. This is why it’s critical to clarify the law. We don’t want kids to be arrested for all of their sex acts, even if we do want to protect them from being violated.”

Panic, Boyd told SecurityNewsDaily, is at the heart of the issue. And it’s an issue that is much larger than a teen sending a racy picture message.

“These are social-level issues more than individual issues,” Boyd said.

Fingers can be pointed at the media, at celebrity culture and at adults who set poor examples, she added, “but it’s all of the above and more. We’re far too individualistic in our approach to these matters, seeing teens as individuals and their parents as the sole actors who are responsible. Society is far more complex than that.”

What’s the future of sexting?

Much of Boyd’s presentation focused on teens and young adults sending risqué photos, but the future of the medium is in the hands of adults, she believes. And that’s a problem.

“People focus heavily on teen sexting because of the legal issues and because of our concerns about teen sexuality. But adults are engaged in this practice just as much if not more than teens,” Boyd told SecurityNewsDaily.

Boyd said teens and adults in their 20s may use sexting “as part of courtship,” but adults are using sexting to cheat.

Herein lies another problem: cheaters never win, especially if they don’t have the tech savvy do it correctly.

“If you think about it,” Boyd said, “most teens have access to technology to sext and they know how to use it; adults are just learning. And boy are they messing up.”

As I’ve noted before, sexy pics have been around as long as man has been able to create a graphic image. Once Ugg and Ogg got done memorializing the mastodon they wanted to eat, they started looking for new things to draw. Things that held their attention and interest.

Naked women were high on that list. Thousands of years before Christ walked the earth artists were posting risque images on walls, in tombs, and anywhere else their little fancies led them.

Still, given the way current employers scour the internet as part of their due diligence it’s better to be safe than sorry. So go a little old school when the “I HAVE GOT TO GET NAKED!!” urge hits. Go find that special someone and get naked in person, without the cameras.

Yes, you still have to wear protection. That should never be a question.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

I don’t know about you but I have had sex. An unofficial poll of our readers last year showed that 100% of them had also experienced the joys of the occasional mattress mambo. That’s a healthy amount. Now, before you get the idea that I’m about to make fun of some backwards group of morons, I remind you that, in Illinois, it is illegal to be caught nuzzling or kissing a reptile and that having an erection in public is also illegal. I actually am guilty of both. Hey! Don’t judge. It wasn’t at the same time. Anyway, I was young and she was willing to get naked but she wanted me to kiss her iguana first. There’s nothing in the bible about iguana smooching so I just followed my heart, which just happened to be following my erection and the iguana got smooched. The iguana seemed pleased. I know I was. She seemed to be as well. I guess she was since I got seconds.

But you never really know. She could have just been filling her calendar.

I brought that up to bring this up. When I was younger I worked with some ladies who worked in the adult entertainment industry. In the late 70’s and early 80’s the industry was changing dramatically. It was becoming more involved in creating technology specifically designed to enhance the erotic experience. Everything from video cameras to most of the Internet owes its existence to porn. Click the previous link to see what I mean.

As porn came out from under the couch and parked itself in our living rooms people became more aware of the intricacies involved in creating it. And, what seems to have been a blindingly obvious result in retrospect, more people, both male and female, decided they wanted a piece of that pie. And as more people got involved more health precautions needed to be put in place. Unlike the 60’s and 70’s, when everyone knew everyone else, the entire porn industry couldn’t fit in a restaurant.

Yes, it would have needed to be a big restaurant, but you get the idea.

So, now, porn has become so entrenched in our lives that the government sees the need to get involved. Allegedly due to a (nonexistent) “public health” issue but, really, for money. Think “red light cameras” meet “red light district.”

Our buddy David Moye has the complete story.

Porn performers Jessica Drake and James Deen are hoping to raise awareness — and possibly other things — with a new political ad that protests a controversial condom-only porn measure on the ballot in Los Angeles.

Under Measure B adult film producers must obtain a health permit before filming and performers must use condoms while engaged in sex. It also calls for health officials to be on working sets.

Violators would be subject to fines and criminal charges.

The measure is arousing the ire of porn performers like Deen and Drake who have filmed a satirical public service announcement depicting future porn, wherein sex workers perform with safety goggles and protective headgear while getting down to business.

The climax of the porn film PSA is when Deen almost chokes on a dental dam.

“We’re not mocking safe sex,” Deen stressed to The Huffington Post. “It’s supposed to be a satirical look at government interference.”

James Lee, chief spokesman for the No on B campaign, appreciates the importance of promoting safe sex, but he argues that the proposed measures could screw the industry financially.

“In 1998, the industry went condom only [for a brief time],” he told The Huffington Post. “Business dropped 25 to 30 percent. America isn’t the only place that makes porn. It’s a competitive issue and consumers don’t buy condom-only porn.”

The condom-only policy in 1998 was rolled back.

Lee said the industry now does a good job policing itself with rules that requires performers to get tested every 14 to 28 days “so far beyond what other industries are doing.”

“No other population is tested more frequently except convicts,” he said.

Lee said that the last time a porn performer tested positive for HIV was in 2004.

Deen said that New York Times science correspondent Donald McNeil visited him on set and told him that he considers the Los Angeles porn industry to be “technically a scientific marvel” because there are so few cases of cases of STDs and HIV considering how much sex is being had.

Earlier this summer, a porn performer named Mr. Marcus became infected with syphilis and falsified the results so he could work.

This caused the whole industry to shut down. Although that would seem to make a case for laws such the one proposed in Measure B, Deen thinks the industry reaction to the outbreak actually proves the current policy is working.

“What other industry shuts itself down if there’s a scare?” he said. “McDonald’s doesn’t shut down if someone gets sick from a hamburger. The NFL knows the head gear is not designed to withstand the concussions suffered by players, but it doesn’t shut down.”

Drake believes the outbreak showed that the system for containment and tracking exposures worked, but adds that “crisis is opportunity for growth and change” and the testing has become more rigorous since then.

Drake considers herself a unique spokeswoman for the No On B campaign she is under contract to Wicked Pictures, which makes condoms mandatory for all films.

She admits the policy has hurt the company’s bottom line the way that Deen suggests, but the company thrives, in part, because “perseverance” and because Wicked’s films are plot-driven and cater to couples.

However, if the measure passes, all porn sets will have to have health inspectors on set to ensure that condoms are being used.

“We’re not mocking safe sex,” she told HuffPost. “But we want to show that things will definitely change.”

An earlier, less satirical ad featuring Ron Jeremy and Tera Patrick suggested that passage of measure B could lead to porn companies closing down shop in Los Angeles and moving to places without condom-only rules, which would result in the loss of a $20 billion industry and 10,000 jobs.

Most of the porn industry is against the measure, as are media outlets like the Los Angeles Times, but some porn stars do support it, such as Aurora Snow.

She recently wrote a piece in The Daily Beast saying the proposed law makes sense, even if it isn’t “sexy.”

“Safety isn’t sexy. Wearing a helmet while riding a motorcycle makes me feel like a dork, but I do it because I know what’s at risk if I don’t,” she said. “No one feels or looks sexy wearing a safety hat or knee pads. That’s what the condom is for the porn industry, it’s our safety hat.”

Deen considers Snow to be a good friend, but finds her argument illogical.

“People use the analogy that if you should wear a helmet if you ride a motorcycle, but stuntmen don’t wear helmets. They’re trained professionals working with other trained professionals. Like we are — we’re the stuntmen of sex,” he told HuffPost. “What people see in movies is not real. Adult entertainment is entertainment.”

First off, I’d like to remind you that Jessica Drake is smarter than most of you. Admit it, you would never have thought of the stuntman analogy.

That being said, I would never have casual sex without protection but that’s not the topic here today. Even in the 80’s the girls I knew were insanely careful. They called the act of having sex with a non-porn star “amateur night” and they made sure the rubber raincoats were in full use.

No glove, no love unless you were a member of the professional family.

So, if you have a soul and live in Cali, do whatever you can to kill Measure B.

Secrets of Tantra – Magic in Practice from Asia (Trailer) from Angela Mahr

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

Normally I would not be the first in line to champion the concept of getting heavily armed people drunk. I try not to be the font of very bad ideas. Yet, today, I am going to forgo common sense and advocate allowing police in Florida to carry a half pint in their patrol cars. Or at their desk or anywhere else they may feel it prudent. You see, after years of writing this blog it finally occurred to me that the men and women in blue who patrol Florida’s vast tracts of ineptitude have got to be one step from going postal. As it were. Think about it, in just the last week they have arrested four different naked people involved in various criminal acts, one of whom defecated on himself while being detained. You never hear stories like that on the local news. Not once have you heard (YOUR FAVORITE NEWSCASTER) say “Chicago police arrested a naked man who was carrying a water pistol loaded with taco sauce just outside a nunnery in Hyde Park. The man attempted to elude police by running into the nunnery screaming a request for sanctuary. He was quickly returned to the police by irate, ruler wielding, nuns.” Not once. But, in Florida, this kind of stuff happens daily.

In fact, the whole “naked Floridian criminal” thing has gotten so out of hand that I’ve stopped writing about it unless it involves something truly spectacular.

But even without the nudity and public defecation, cops in Florida deal with stuff other police departments don’t even see in sit-coms.

For example, Police in Tampa had to run down a criminal – in court.

A defendant became belligerent and ran through the Hillsborough County Courthouse, striking a police officer, according to the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office.

Adam Manuel Lee Raicies, 25, reportedly appeared irritated during his sentencing on Tuesday on a charge of giving false information to a law enforcement officer. When the judge sentenced Raicies to probation, he allegedly refused to sign the paperwork before taking off.

Bailiffs and Tampa police officers chased Raicies through the courthouse. When they caught up with him, he allegedly struck an officer in the face with his elbow.

The judge scheduled a contempt of court hearing and filed additional charges against Raicies, including battery on a law enforcement officer and resisting arrest without violence.

Just where did he think he was going? He was in a building where everyone BUT HIM carries a gun and a radio. Those are not good odds.

But, I would still have to say that he had a better plan than these two gentlemen who were arrested in Naples. They thought that the quiet room in the back of the squad car was the best place to smoke a joint and discuss their crimes.

Jacques Leonce Saintil, 19, and Vernon Denard Jones, 21, two suspects in an East Naples home burglary, were picked up after a concerned neighbor saw them enter a house while the the home’s residents were away, reports the Naples Daily News.

They reportedly told authorities they didn’t know anything about the break-in.

But while the duo were being hauled off to the the slammer, they were taped on an in-car video system discussing the burglary and passing a joint back and forth in the backseat of the patrol car, according to an arrest report.

Gotcha! Pass the joint and go directly to jail.

Have you noticed that the newspapers in Florida don’t even bother with words like “jail” anymore? Nope, these dudes were hauled off to the “slammer.” I guess at some point it all becomes somewhat overwhelming having too write about these yahoos day after day after day …..

While we’re here, maybe we should add 911 operators to our list as well. Broward County Sheriffs had to take time out of their busy day to go arrest a woman who was in love with a bologna sandwich.

No, I am not making this up.

Christine Lee Brown was busted for repeatedly calling 911 to thank the Brevard County Sheriff for bologna sandwiches she was served at the jail, reports WKMG CBS News-6 in Orlando.

When Palm Bay cops showed up at the 51-year-old’s home, she was chatting with a 911 dispatcher, records show.

Now she’ll be getting even more bologna sandwiches.

They’re not that good people, trust me on this one. No one, and I mean NO FREAKING ONE, goes to jail for the cuisine.

While I have made fun of Florida’s politicians, rightly so I might add, for being dunderheads when it comes to writing laws, their police deserve to be lauded for one ongoing program they have had in place for a while now. They run one of the best anti-child sex operations in the country. The latest sting in Valusia County netted some real winners.

Psst, cyber perverts, get a clue: No mom in the real world wants you to have sex with their 14-year-old daughter.

But men seem to continually fall for this undercover online sex sting, actually believing moms would allow their 14-year-old daughters to have sex with a stranger they have connected with online.

And it just happened again in Florida.

This time 23 men were nabbed in Volusia County, traveling as far as 120-miles believing they would have sex with a 14-year-old girl, according to a news release from the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office.

The latest roundup included three students from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Most of the men brought condoms, which shows intent, according to the release.

No way?

Way…as in Paul D. Way, a 36-year-old Army reservist from Melbourne, even brought a teddy bear, along with a couple of hydrocodone pills (and) a handwritten, signed contract with blanks for both mom and daughter to sign giving him permission to perform sex acts on the phantom 14-year-old girl, the release stated.

John F. Williams, 66, a semi-retired doc from Port Orange, reportedly brought a whole box of condoms, a couple of bottles of vino, some sex toys…and Viagra.

Here are some men that fell for the ‘family fun’ sex sting in the past.

Dunnellon: Teacher traveled to meet 14-year-old for sex in sting

It looks like this Naples firefighter’s career just went up in flames: Firefighter falls for family fun sex sting, deputies say

NASA cop busted: Accused of trying to have sex with ‘teen’ and ‘mom’

Minneola: Firefighter sought sex with woman and daughter, 7. This civilian fire captain at a North Carolina Air Force base traveled all the way to Lake County for his “hookup.”

Osceola County: PGA golfer fell for ‘family fun’ sex sting, deputies say

Those are just the recent busts from the last couple of months.

Anyway, kudos to the Florida cops for keeping those creeps in jail where they belong.

Kevin Rudolf featuring Flo Rida “You make the rain fall” from alexandre moors on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

When people think of really crazy people doing stupiid things they tend to focus on Americans. Specifically Floridians like Jeremie Calo who got arrested for getting into a fight with a restaurant manager. This was just after he had sex on his table, with his girlfriend not the manager. Or, if they’re monied people, they look to Massachusetts where a brother and sister team, Bob & Amanda Larrivee, were arrested for stealing a TV from a bathroom (the rich have too much money) but, instead, copped to the fact they were having sex. They did this because incest is far more socially acceptable to the landed gentry than theft. In other words, there might be enough circumstantial evidence to make America seem the logical choice. And, for as much fun as I have at Florida’s expense, it would seem I agree. Sadly, no, I just snag the low hanging fruit every now and then. For the truly bat guano crazy, the kind fueled by buckets of stupid, you have to wander across the pond meet Darth Vader.

No, not him. The other one.

A guy in England legally changed his name to Darth Vader (because there’s no way that could be confusing) and made the news when his girlfriend got punched in the face because dear old Darth was dipping his light-saber in someone else’s death star. Allegedly. Why hit her and not him? Well, because the puncher missed.

But a story about Darth is appropriate today now that Opinion Matters has released a survey of what British people believe is real.

More than 33 million U.K. citizens believe in extraterrestrial life, compared to just over 27 million — less than half the country — who believe in God.

That’s the result of an online survey of 1,359 adults who were asked a variety of questions ranging from belief in alien visits to Earth, suspicions of UFO cover-ups, belief in extraterrestrials vs. belief in God, and whether or not men actually landed on the moon.

The survey, conducted by Opinion Matters, revealed the following statistics among those surveyed:

• 52 percent believe UFO evidence has been covered up because widespread knowledge of their existence would threaten government stability.
• 44 percent believe in God.
• A quarter more men than women claim to have seen UFOs.
• 20 percent of respondents believe UFOs have landed on Earth.
• More than five million British citizens believe the Apollo moon landings were faked.

While the survey was conducted as part of a tie-in with a new video game, “XCOM: Enemy Unknown,” it was a legitimate sampling of opinions that can be taken to represent the population of the U.K., according to the agency that conducted the survey.

“Yes, it has been done with an independent panel through a bonafide research company,” said Karen Brooks, managing director of Opinion Matters, a well-known market research agency that created the survey.

“Surveys can be done face-to-face, over the telephone and online. This one was a U.K. adult sample, which is quite broad, and doing it online is a quick, effective way of getting to that audience,” she continued. “We make sure that all of the questions are compliant from a research perspective.”

But some are skeptical of the results, including Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff, an Anglican priest and director general of the World Dialogue Council, a group that promotes better relations between the West and Islamic cultures.

“Having done a certain amount of work with statistics on religion, I am inherently skeptical about what these statistics tell you, and particularly if there’s a narrow, selective base. Something with about 1,000 people does set off alarm bells,” Macdonald-Radcliff told HuffPost.

“I really do think the failure to define what they’re asking people to believe here is a fairly critical failure for the survey,” Macdonald-Radcliff said. “Because you’ve already set out quite a variety of possibilities as to what they might or might not suppose UFOs to be. I certainly think sliding extraterrestrial and UFO together is a particularly messy thing to do.”

Macdonald-Radcliff suggested that people are “less inclined to be participants in traditional churches,” which might represent a shift of general beliefs that they have about God and extraterrestrials.

“There may be some correlation there,” he noted. “But I have to say the actual hard data has yet to be found. There may be a relationship between people becoming more credulous in UFOs and less credulous in traditional religion.”

The results of the survey are not surprising to Nick Pope, a former U.K. Ministry of Defense UFO investigator. “It’s important to bear in mind that people who believe in alien life don’t necessarily think it’s visiting us,” Pope said in an email to HuffPost.

“The recent upsurge in the discovery of extra-solar planets may be a factor here; as we close in on ‘shadow Earths,’ people are more likely to think that if Earth isn’t unique, neither is life,” he added.

Pope also noted that many of the doubts people might have about religion or about extraterrestrial life are rooted in a similar problem: lack of hard evidence.

“In the case of religion, we have only faith — faith based on some ancient texts where, despite the claims, no divine origin can be proven,” Pope said. “Even where people claim to have had a first-hand experience, why should we believe accounts of miracles and visions any more or less than UFO sightings or claims of alien abduction?”

See? This is where people mess things up. They take one truth, say – a man scratches his head when he thinks, and they take another truth, oh, let’s try a dog scratches when it has fleas and then they come to a completely erroneous conclusion, THINKING CAUSES FLEAS!

You see the problem.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not about to assail another person’s beliefs. You can believe in God, the Giant Spaghetti Monster, or whatever you want. But, and this is very salient here today, it stops being a belief system when it flies in the face of all evidence. Then it starts being a delusion.

Yes, I know what atheists are saying right now, but let’s move past that.

If, and this is a huge IF, a craft from another world came here and didn’t want to interfere in our culture because they have something like Star Trek’s Prime Directive, they would have no need to come anywhere near our atmosphere. They could just hang out in our solar system and monitor our electronic transmissions. Our current level of technology could do that.

If they didn’t have any restrictions like that they could easily say hello from space by broadcasting on every frequency. Our current level of technology could also do that.

Or they could land. Say someplace fun like the White House lawn. Or the Kremlin or in Riyadh or where ever.

The fact is that I can envision numerous ways for an alien race to make contact with us. The Wow Signal comes to mind. Actually it leaps to mind. Anyway, that would be one way.

What they wouldn’t do is travel a few billion miles just to crash into the planet. Nor would they need to hide in clouds and make funny lights. Or mess with our corn. Just looked at from a simple expenditure viewpoint the actions cited by UFO believers make no freaking sense whatsoever.

Think of it this way, and – yes – thinking is required, if you spent a wad of cash to go to Vegas in your coolest ride, would you then sit in a parking lot behind a sign and hope no one saw you?

That’s the kind of logic that the UFO conspiracies are all predicated on.

As to the whole “fake moon landing” thing, just blow a call out to any of these guys; Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Alan Bean, Edgar Mitchell, David Scott, John Young, Charles Duke, Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidtt, all of whom were there and all of whom are alive as of this writing.

Anyway, all American music heroes and friends of this blog, The Ex Senators, are on tour in England right now, so wish them luck.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

I live in a neighborhood that is populated by a Mexican midget. She is about 80 years old or so. Her favorite hobby in the whole wide world is to walk up to complete strangers and grab their butt. And she knows she can get away with it. After all, what are you going to do? Really Junior, you’re going to beat up an 80 year old midget? Can you imagine what your life in prison would be like? Because I can and that’s not the life for me. So I tolerate one of life’s little absurdities and get to enjoy sharing the story. I think that is also the basic motivation behind Felix Baumgartner’s plunge to certain death last Sunday. It wasn’t the science or the thrill or anything else. Just that he now has a story very few can share. Seriously, it’s him and his trainer, Joseph Kittinger, who jumped from 19 miles once. That’s a small club. But some great stories.

The whole thing seemed like sci-fi when it was happening. A guy, a suit and 24 miles of air. That usually requires someone to yell “Beam me up” or something similar. It does not become a Red Bull ad. And yet, that’s exactly what happened, absurd through it may seem.

And it was the sci-fi element to it all that continued to hog my attention. You see, as we were riveted to You Tube watching this unfold in as close to real time as possible, thousands of people were crammed into the Javits Center in New York trying to have sex with people dressed up like ….. well, like cartoon characters. Which was all well and good until one loser spoiled the party.

Real-life dates can break real-life hearts.

Sci-Fi Speed Dating was a hit for self-proclaimed geeks and nerds at New York Comic Con this year — 200 people signed up and got real fictional. But a love scandal ripped hearts in two during one of the sessions on Saturday, leaving lusty Princess Leias and sexy Superwomen without partners in crime fighting.

The molten hot asteroid of several women’s eye was a man dressed up as Bane, one of Batman’s arch enemies. Ladies who spoke to HuffPost Weird News said the man was a real charmer during the 2-hour quick-date fest, despite his character being a real nemesis.

But it turned out that Bane was a real life Two-Face.

“We found out he was married,” said a disheartened 22-year-old Jessie Sharcoff of New York. “We heard it through the grapevine.”

In Sci-Fi Speed Dating, nobody gives out their names. Instead they’re assigned a number — to avoid the occasional stalker — and at the end of dozens of rounds, each person writes down his or her favorite numbers. It’s all in hopes that someone they picked out wrote down their number, too.

But during one of Saturday’s sessions, married and monogamous Bane skewed the results — for Sharcoff, anyway.

“What a waste of time!” she said.

Bane refused to comment on his alleged debauchery.

Other participants, like Batman — also known as Kamel Nelson, 25 — had a blast talking with other like-minded fanboys and girls.

“It was a lot of fun, I’d definitely do it again,” Nelson said with a grin. “I met some that I liked, but they didn’t feel the same way. At least this time … I’ll go again.”

Ryan Glitch, the event’s founder and self-proclaimed Geek Doctor of Love, said that plenty of participants got second dates out of the deal.

“There was a lot of success out there,” he said. “We had so many people we had to turn away about 1,000.”

How pathetic do you have to be to dress up in a costume so you can cheat on your wife? And does any wife really believe you when you say “Oh no honey, I’m not even going to look at those scantily clad Supergirls and stuff. I’m just going for the beer and the costume contest.”

I am glad everyone else had fun. It looked like a good time.

One guy who missed the speed dating event still managed to grab a little fun on his own by becoming a ……. you saw this one coming didn’t you? ….. FRUIT NINJA!

Great costumes are part of the fun at New York Comic Con, but it looks like one guy actually found a practical application for his get-up.

Keith Lytle is an Apple store genius by day, but his Comic Con alter ego is a more-than-decent looking Wolverine. Although his claws are plastic, Lytle found at least one situation where they came in handy: dicing up virtual melons in a motion-sensor enabled version of Fruit Ninja.

In this video taken at the Javits Center on Thursday, Lytle slices his way through about a minute of fun. If his shadow on the screen can be believed, the claws seem to give him a little extra reach.

While he probably wouldn’t be able to use them in competition at the Fruit Ninja championship in Australia, at New York Comic Con, it’s a totally appropriate cosplay.

Several motion sensor games were prominently displayed on the convention floor at New York Comic Con, so chances are Lytle got to test his mettle again.

While cosplay is an important part of the Comic Con experience, people who take their alter egos into the outside world tend to get in trouble with the law.
Earlier this month, a Michigan man who dressed up as Batman was arrested for obstructing a police investigation. And in July, a Pennsylvania man claiming to be a “real-life super hero” was arrested after agitating patrons in the parking lot of a Home Depot.

Here’s some good advice. Unless you really are a billionaire who trained at the feet of Ra’s al Ghul it’s best to leave the fantasy life indoors. You can end up doing more harm than good. Also, just FYI, those latex costumes can be just as much to take off someone as they are to put on. Keep it in mind as you keep it indoors.

Otherwise, your bad decision making skills will lead you to Denamrk to enter the World’s Smallest Penis Contest.

It’s the little things that matter.

At least that’s the case in a Denmark-based competition that is offering an iPhone to the man with the smallest penis.

The contest is sponsored by erotica website Singlesex.dk, and site owner Morten Fabricius admits the idea is “weird and funny and almost too much.”

“It’s a competition which is at the core of manhood, the most important thing for a man,” he said, according to RawStory.com. “There are so many unhappy men out there, who think you have to have a giant penis, but it’s not normal to have a huge one.”

Contestants are asked to send a photo to the website of their erect sex organ with measuring tape next to it.

The man with the smallest penis will win an iPhone, as will another fellow who will be chosen by the site’s female, er, members. Guys who come in second and third place will get an iPad.

The small penis contest has only been going on a short time, but the site has already received a half dozen photos that Fabricius said are being “vetted” to ensure they haven’t been stolen.

As much as he sees the humor of the contest, Fabricius insists there’s a serious side as well: The competition exposes a problem that rarely sees the light of day.

“Everything has to be bigger, and bigger, and bigger,” he said, according to the Australian. “It’s incredible how the media has frightened people from showing themselves as they are,” he said, in part referring to the porn industry.

Entries for the smallest penis contest will be accepted through Jan. 31, and sex experts believe it may have some positive benefits.

Sex educator Jamye Waxman believes that it’s good to get small penises out in the open.

“The average penis is 5.5 inches and all of the guys who are below average will see that they’re not alone,” she told The Huffington Post. “It’s a good opportunity for guys to accept what they’ve got.”

Lora Somoza, a sex columnist for L.A. Weekly and The Huffington Post, agrees that being open about what you have is better than trying to “act cocky” or be in denial, but wonders if a competition is the way to go about it.

“I don’t know how it’s going to be helping people,” she told HuffPost. “Whoever enters must want an iPad really bad.”

But Sam Phillips, a former Penthouse Pet who now hosts “The Single Life,” a radio show on Sirius XM, believes the contest will not only benefit guys with cocktail-weenie-sized penises, but also women like her.

“I personally prefer smaller penises,” she told HuffPost. “I like the penis to hit my G-spot, not my cervix. These guys should be celebrated, not castrated.”

Phillips believes the men who enter the contest may not be expecting the swell of appreciation they will get for their miniature members.

“The guys will be surprised with the support they get from women,” she said. “Most of the time with size, it’s not about the penis, but the size of the vagina.”

No fair using Fei Lin’s stolen penis to win the contest.

Where else but here would that statement even come up?

As it were.

Anyway, folks, a fantasy life is a wonderful thing. It can liven up those dark and lonely nights like nothing else on the planet. but, and this is important, you need to make sure the people around you are okay with that or they will put you in jail, which is not fun.

Cosplay Highlights 2011 from Angel James de Ocampo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.