Monday, January 31, 2011

Pro Bowl quarterbacks of the future?

"http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2011/01/31/cat-set-on-fire-in-baltimore-city/ Looks like someone has taken the first step towards becoming an All Pro QB #AnimalCruelty #MichaelVickIsAScumbag"

    The above was what I put on Twitter this morning. The day after everyone is cheering  for that waste of human flesh Michael Vick in the Pro Bowl, this story was all over the news in Baltimore. What's described in this story isn't that far off from what he did. The only difference is these scumbags only got sick amusement out of it. Vick got sick amusement AND money.
    This is the kind of person so many you have forgiven. The person many of you have managed to forgive because he's a really good football player. It's this mentality that is the reason people like Ray Lewis and Donte Stallworth are playing for the Ravens. Just like Michael Vick, it doesn't matter what you've done. If you've got skills, people will forgive and forget anything. Refuse to help the police in the investigation of a double homicide? No problem if you're a great defensive player. Kill someone while driving drunk? Well, can you catch a football? If so, no problem. Did you torture and kill dogs? Did you have them tear each other apart for your amusement and profit? That's ok, if you can throw a football really well. Heck, you might even get your teammates to unanimously vote for you for the Ed Block courage award (because it takes so much courage to commit animal cruelty and then come back to the job that gives you fame and fortune) and be voted into the Pro Bowl.
     Michael Vick is scum. I don't care what that sanctimonious jackass Tony Dungy says. I don't care what that fat piece of crap Andy Reid says. Vick is scum and anyone who roots for him is too.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Mark Harris and Ricky Gervais

     Some people might consider today's post a bit of a cheat because once again, it is partly a letter to the editor of a magazine, but oh well, deal.
     This whole so-called "controversy" over the jokes Ricky Gervais made while hosting the Golden Globes really bugs me. They were JOKES, people. And, you know, sometimes jokes aren't nice. In fact, they almost always aren't. Someone or something is usually the butt of the joke. I'll admit that comedians can sometimes go beyond what some people consider good taste. But a joke pointing out what everyone knows about what a farce the Golden Globes are ? A joke about Robert Downey Jr. having been a drug addict ? These are horrible ? Please !
     What makes it worse is we're supposed to feel sorry for these movie stars. "Oh no, Ricky Gervais made a joke about me, nobody's ever done THAT before. I'm going to go home to my mansion and wipe my tears with $100 bills." To any movie star who got their feelings hurt, why you don't go talk to some of the people who have lost their jobs and homes and tell them how rough you have it and how much you suffered that night.
     Anyway, today, I was reading the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly (1/28/11). And before you say anything, I have never claimed that everything I read is of the highest intellectual caliber, ok ? It's not surprising to find celebrity ass-kissing and poor judgment in this magazine. In the same issue, they had a page devoted to "Under-rated movies". One of the movies included ? "Joe Vs. The Volcano". That movie isn't under-rated, it is a total and complete piece of garbage. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are lucky that people haven't sued them for compensation for that 102 minutes of their life they'll never get back. A regular columnist for the magazine, Mark Harris wrote a column in this issue basically whining about how mean Ricky Gervais was. I wrote the following letter in response, I meant to include a comment similar to the one in the paragraph above commenting on the stars' "suffering" vs real suffering, but I forgot. I think this still works, though. Hope you enjoy it.

  I have to thank Mark Harris for opening my eyes with his latest column ("Icky Ricky", 1/28/11). Sure, the Golden Globes only exist so that members of the HFPA can mingle with movie stars and, yes, those stars tend to be spoiled, pampered multi-millionaires who attend this event knowing full well they usually haven't done anything to deserve any kind of award and, all right, NBC did run promos where Ricky Gervais said he was going to do exactly what he did that evening. But, hey, he was just such a big meanie, right Mark ?
    Maybe next year they can just have someone get up there and tell knock knock jokes. Heck, maybe Mark Harris could do it himself, that is if he can pry his lips away from the nearest celebrity's ass long enough.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Just when you think she can't get any stupider

    Well, Sarah Palin has once again shown what a complete and utter moron she is. She posted a video on her Facebook page about the shooting rampage in Arizona that wounded Rep. Giffords and killed 6 other people  (On a side note about that, if you want to know one of the reasons I have problems with organized religion, three words :Westboro Baptist Church) After the shooting, many people were quick to blame her and others like her for the tragedy and this video was obviously her response to that.
    She had an opportunity to address the vile, hateful, VIOLENT rhetoric that she and others like her spew out. She could have suggested that while she doesn't feel that her words and her map with the targets caused this tragedy that she understands that maybe things have become a little too polarized in this country and that it might be time for a return to something approaching civil discourse.
    But she's not smart enough for that. Instead, she basically denied that political rhetoric is any more heated now than it has been in the past. That would be bad enough, because it would just be more evidence of how stupid, clueless/dishonest she is, but she wouldn't be Sarah "Death Panel" Palin if she didn't take the opportunity to stick her foot so far in her mouth that she could feel her toes in the back of her throat.
     So, she delivered this quote:

     “Especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn,” she said. “That is reprehensible.”
    
     For those of you don't know what blood libel is, here's the deifinition :
    
     The accusation that Jews murder non-Jews to obtain blood for Passover rituals. This accusation was repeated in many places in the Middle Ages and was the cause of anti-Jewish riots and massacres. It was a regular motif in anti-Semitic propaganda until the Second World War.
    
     Sarah Palin compared what was being said about her by some people to blood libel. The cherry on top ? Gabrielle Giffords is Jewish. I've said it before and I will say it again. Sarah Palin is one of the biggest idiots ever to enter politics (and that's really saying something). I will hate John McCain until my dying day for bringing this woman to national prominence and inflicting her on all of us.
    I would like to believe that maybe this would put an end to her political life, not because I'm worried that she might ever be elected President, which you know she wants, but because I just want her to shut up and go away. Unfortunately, most of the people who are fans of hers aren't the kind of people who are going to see anything wrong with what she said.  So, we'll probably still be hearing from her for years to come. Luckily, it will mostly be on Fox "News" (ha!) and never from the Oval Office.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

A Few Thank Yous

I want to say thanks to a few people :

First, I want to say thanks to Agent Orange and the rest of the Republicans in control of the House now. While our economy is still in the toilet, people are still losing houses and can't find work and we still have men and women in harm's way in Iraq and Afghanistan, what's your first priority ? Reading the Constitution on the floor of the House (which I haven't seen or heard any of, did they skip Article VI, paragraph 3 which says that religious tests for office aren't allowed and did they skip the first clause in the 1st Amendment saying that the government can't make a law respecting the establishment of religion because I would think that would cause the explosion of the heads of the ultra-religious right wing nutjobs who seem to make up the Republican Party these days who insist this is a Christian nation) and making a show of trying to repeal health care (actually health insurance) reform. In two years, I'm sure voters will really appreciate that you tried to repeal an act that will, at that point, have given them all these benefits-
http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/keyprovisions.html -  for two years and will be thrilled you considered that (and reading the Constitution) to be the thing that was most important to do as soon as you got into office. Thank you for ensuring that the Democrats will have control of the House back in 2012.

Second, I would like to issue a pre-emptive thank you to all the idiots who believe that the world is going to end on either May 21, 2011 or December 21, 2012. If you could do me a huge favor and just kill yourselves now, that would be great. Just yourselves, though. Don't take anyone else with you which is what I'm afraid some of you may end up doing since you're so convinced the world is going to end. Just kill yourselves without taking anyone with you and you will have my eternal gratitude.

On a less serious note, I would like to thank Katy Perry for the amusement she provided me last night. Before I do that, since some people may say I'm being a little mean here, I want to say I actually do like her music and she does (from what I've read) actually write or co-write most, if not all of her songs which is more then you can say for some "artists" out there. That being said, after seeing this last night, I knew I had to write about it. Flipping through the channels, I came across the People's Choice Awards just as they were about to give out the award for Favorite Female Artist. When they announced her name, she seemed to me like she was trying to look surprised that she won, even though we all know the winners know ahead of time. Hell, they had her sitting right in the front row before they announced it. Then she gets on stage and for some reason, they hand her two awards. She bends down to the microphone until she's almost at a 90 degree angle showing off the thing (or I guess I should say things) that I'm sure played a large part (no pun intended) in her winning the award and she says "I have two of them" and then, even better, "These are heavy, I wish you could feel them !" I don't know if she was aware how that sounded with her practically shoving her boobs into the camera, but it was amusing. I'm inclined to think she may not be that quick-witted though, since she followed that up by doing what they all do at this show, saying how this award means more to them than any other because it's voted on by "The People". Except what she said, and I'm sorry I don't remember the exact quote, was that it meant so much to her because it was voted on by people, not by "The People", but by people ... and that's where she seemed to realize the corner she'd painted herself into (seeing as how all the awards are voted on by people) and said (after a second or two, kind of trailing off)...instead of a computer or something. Brilliant. Thanks, Katy !

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Twittering and 2011

        A new year, another attempt at making this blog something I actually update regularly. I plan to do so, which may be good news or bad news for those who were reading it regularly before. The good news is my posting should be done more frequently. The bad news, possibly, is that part of posting more frequently will be due to the fact that the posts will not all be the politically/socially themed rants that a lot of them have been. I will still comment on news and social issues, but I'm going to write about other things as well. The fact of the matter is that the infrequency of posts before came from me tending to focus on writing those types of posts, which involved a bit of research because if I'm going to make an argument about something, I want to be sure no one can point out an obvious mistake I've made. Doing that research takes time, as does actually writing the post and then editing it before posting and frankly, I have other responsibilities that take precedence. If I ever turn my hobby of writing into a job, then I can devote more time to this, but not right now.
        So I'm going to do something that goes against some of the common wisdom about writing blogs, I'm NOT going to have a particular theme to this blog. A definite point of view, yes, but a theme, no. If you were reading this blog before just to see who I would be tearing a new one this time, you may be disappointed. I hope not. I hope that whatever I decide to write about will be written well enough that you will want to read it no matter what it is.
        Also, I am no longer going to ask people to comment so that I know you're reading. Of course, I do encourage you to comment, but I can just look at the stats to see how many people are reading, so if you want to lurk, go right ahead. I will just say one thing, though. If you're not commenting because you're worried about me unleashing the same vitriol on you that I unleash on some of the subjects of my posts, I assure you I won't do that (unless of course, you write something really ignorant that deserves scorn heaped upon it).
        I also want to let you know that I'm on Twitter as well. My name (or whatever the specific term is for it on Twitter) is @WordsInTheStone. (No "The" at the beginning). You don't have to sign up for Twitter to read my "tweets", just do a search for @WordsInTheStone on the home page. Speaking of Twitter, I have 4 followers, 3 of which I'm not sure where they came from. Only one of them follows someone that I do. I've never commented on the tweets of the mutual person we follow and I doubt my follower looked through our mutual person's over 1,000,000 followers and decided to follow me. The other two, who I just picked up within the last few hours don't even share one person in common with me. The two of them seem to follow a lot of the same people though and neither one has done any tweeting of their own yet, which makes me even more confused. I've had a few "followers" who were obviously either some type of performer who was obviously following as many people as possible in the hopes they would be followed back and be able to talk about how many followers they have. Others have obviously been spam. But these don't seem to fit into either of those categories, so I'm wondering if they read the blog and decided to see if I was on Twitter as well. If you're one of those 3 people and that's how you found me, let me know. If you don't follow me on Twitter now, but you decide to, send me a "tweet" to let me know you found me through the blog. I know I said I'm not worried about comments any more, but if you find my blog interesting enough that you want to read my "tweets" as well, I'd really like to know that. Besides, if you want me to follow you back, that is the best way to make it happen. I'm not inclined to follow people who seem to be following me at random in the hopes that I'll follow them back and boost their numbers.