Day: June 25, 2010

You Missed It: Four-star mistake edition

As some of you know, I live in the Washignton, D.C. area, so reports of President Barack Obama are not unusual, but this week Obama took Russian President Dimitry Medvedev to a burger joint a few blocks from my office called Ray’s Hell Burger. It’s great stuff, but it’s the sort of place that reminds you what toilet paper is for. And here two presidents chatting over burgers at a tiny table. I’d imagine that was a bloated flight back to Moscow. If you were having problems with the signal on your iPhone 4 because you were, you know, holding it, odds are you missed it.

McChrystal clear (that one took me a while)
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, head of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, stepped down this week after he mocked just about everyone in the Obama administration except Malia in a Rolling Stone article. He is not the first general to break the sacred “never do an interview for a magazine that will have a woman in a rifle bra on the cover” rule of war. Gen. Douglas MacArthur made the same mistake in 1951, when Betty Page appeared on the cover of Life magazine with a repeating rifle bra. MacArthur was recalled by Truman for comments made in his interview.

Yet another Muslim country we can conquer
As any historian knows, Jesus was an excellent soccer player. But now Our Risen Lord has a rival, and his name is Landon Donovan. He scored the winning go(oooo)al in the USA-Algeria World Cup game earlier this week, moving America to the second round. The goal was the only one in the game. Really. People watched for over 90 minutes waiting for something to happen.

A whole new web
It’s here. It’s finally here. After years and year of waiting, the Internet finally has what it really needs: .xxx domain. Now, you can tell that something is a NSFW site just by seeing what the domain is. That and it ushers in a whole new era of domain parking. Stay tuned for SeriouslyGuys.xxx

Profiles in Sadness: Trojans on kindergartners!

In a country where we just can’t muster the energy (ah? get it?) to be angry at BP anymore, we need a new story to enrage us. Where’s the fire? Where’s the passion? The inappropriate romance?

In Provincetown, Mass., of course. The P-town school district found itself under fire for a new sex education policy that would allow students to ask for free condoms from a school counselor without parental permission.

But the outrage isn’t over the parental permission part, not really. It’s that this policy gives condoms to children as young as six-years-old! How dare P-town give pre-adolescents the go-ahead to have sex without their parents’ permission!

And that’s where the story gets sad: they’re not simply handing them out.

Any student who asks for a condom has to go through counseling before that counselor considers giving one to the student. The policy is written so that no ages are set because, well, nobody is on the same sexual schedule, and when was the last time a parent successfully talked a moderately intelligent adolescent out of sex?

So, it looks like the school district will cave to political pressure and put an age limit on condoms, which the state doesn’t even do at drug stores. When the teacher pregnancy rate skyrockets, don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Getting state money, one wrapper at a time

San Francisco officials say the city’s fast-food litter has gotten out of control. Thousands of impromptu picnics on bus benches, in public parks, and on city sidewalks have left the landscape riddled with abandoned wrappers, napkins and bags.

The question is, who should pay to clean it all up? San Francisco politicians want to add a fee at the restaurant register to cover the costs of fast-food trash removal. It’s a potentially lucrative proposal: a similar tax on cigarettes of 20 cents a pack was added to offset the cost of cleaning up cigarette litter, and that fee will generate about $2.5 million during the fiscal year-not exactly chump change.

“Fast-food wrappers are really the next biggest identifiable source [of litter],” Department of Public Works Director Ed Reiskin told the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee. The proposal will be considered in the next few months, officials say.

It’s creative thinking from a city that’s facing major budget trouble: San Francisco is looking at a $400 million deficit next year alone. But will residents balk at the idea? After all, the majority of consumers don’t litter, so the fee would essentially be paying for the transgressions of the minority. And adding a tax to food that’s intended to be low-cost is sure to rile up the industry. Which, y’know, is always good for public relations.

Wine on the go

So, Great Britain might not be all that great of a place to live, as we have gently pointed out recently. But what about the good parts of England, you know, aside from Mr. Bean?

Folks, over there you can get wine sold in glasses–at a convenience store. James Nash created individual glasses with wine in them for sale, and apparently they are selling like tea and crumpets over there. All you do is tear off the lid like it’s a serving of pudding, and enjoy!

That gives us a great idea: whiskey-in-a-glass.