Day: July 2, 2010

You Missed It: On with the fireworks edition

Have you seen the new Twilight movie? Me neither! OK, let’s face it, you saw it at midnight on Thursday. I won’t tell anyone you were there, I promise. Besides, no one is reading this in the first place. They have all headed out for their long weekends. If you were busy running from Hurricane Alex, odds are you missed it.

Spies like us
Shortly after Russian President Dimitry Medvedev (hey, two mentions in YMI in two weeks!) left Washington, D.C., the FBI swooped in and arrested 11 suspected Russian spies, three lived in the D.C. area, and the rest were in New York, I think. The media seized upon this important national security story with all the maturity that we have come to–wait, one of them’s a lady spy and she’s pretty? Put her on the front page!

Call it Ishmael
Twelve million years ago, a giant beast swam the seas and preyed upon whales. Some sort of shark? A squid? Some other sort of fodder for a Peter Benchley novel? No, turns out it was an ancestor of the sperm whale. Scientists announced their discovery of the whale this week after finding most of a skull and huge teeth in a desert in Paraguay. They named it after Herman Melville, because, of course, he wrote Bartleby the Scrivener.

Well, the British did set fire to his house
In other Russkies-related news, Mel Gibson has some problems with people who have Russian-sounding names, like Oksana Grigorieva, ex-girlfriend mother of his daughter. A tape surfaced this week in which Gibson took a break from blaming Jews for everything, and instead it’s a taped phone conversation, where among other things, he threatens to burn her house down, but first she must do a sexual act on him first. Remember that when you watch The Patriot this weekend. Happy Independence Day, everybody!

Wal-Mart fires inept employees?

You wouldn’t know it by walking in one, but Wal-Mart has employment standards. They proved it by firing Joseph Casias, 2008’s Associate of the Year.

How had Casias fallen so far in only a year? Marijuana.

Well, also cancer, living in Michigan and a prescription for marijuana from his doctor.

But still: Joseph Casias is a reefer addict, and The Store That Sam Built can’t abide junkies jeopardizing “the safety of its customers and associates.” (They will continue to sell three-day old hot dogs to stoner customers, however.)

And just in case you aren’t on the exploitative global corporations’ side yet, guess who’s leading the fight against them? The ACLU. We’re not saying you’re wrong for agreeing with the ACLU per se, just that God may not be able to tell the difference when you die.

Fish deadly to humans, this time for eating purposes

The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program has assigned a red “avoid” recommendation to wild-caught California and Oregon salmon, based on continued low levels of salmon returning to the Sacramento River. Gee, that’s helpful. While that advice may seem clear cut, the change in recommendations can be confusing.

The avoid rating for Oregon salmon applies only to fish caught south of Cape Falcon. It does not apply to the entire state of Oregon. That’s because there are two different salmon stocks being fished on the Pacific coast-those that spawn in the Sacramento River, where stock levels have been troubled in recent years; and salmon fished from the Columbia River, thought to have moderately healthy population levels.

Hey, nature, I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but when you came into existence, you agreed to an unspoken social contract. The terms were that we wouldn’t eat all of you, just the strong majority of you, and as such, you wouldn’t try to kill us. By keeping your population in a perpetual declination, you are clearly trying to kill us, albeit, very slowly. Knock it off.

Nightstalkers are jaywalkers

It’s obvious that vampires are en vogue lately, thanks to Twilight and True Blood and the like. But in the midst of all this, we are forgetting the real issue here: vampires don’t actually like us very much.

In Colorado, a woman told police that she ended up in a ditch when she saw a vampire on the dirt road she was on that night. It was blocking her path, so the began backing up, but that did not end so well. The cops don’t think that alcohol or drugs contributed to the crash, so that means they’re real.