this one's for the right to petition

SERIOUSLY HARDCORE MUTUAL FUNDS ARE NOW AVAILABLE FROM THRASHER CAPITAL!
G
I am not making this up.

They have youtube videos, a myspace page...

"The GendeX™ Mutual Fund was developed and is managed by young adult investors for young adult investors. A group of more than 60 million Gen X and Y'ers largely untapped by the financial market place...until now.

The GendeX™ Mutual Fund offers this demographic the opportunity to leverage their youth, along with a disciplined investment and savings strategy to help use what they already know to engage the stock market. We provide this Next Generation of investors the opportunity to invest in markets near to them, while providing the structure, fundamentals, and diversity currently available in investment products aimed at older generations."

Okay. I had to get up too early this morning but now I get to decompress. This is your problem now.

Only $152.50 by current bid from this eBay auction. It has some advantages over the real Pete including: less cost, easy storage, your choice of outfit not his, and permanent protection from male pattern baldness!

I enjoy both the limited headgear selection and the tats on the doll myself.

Pirate kittens and music fans everywhere, alert. Saul Williams, Trent Reznor, and Alan Moulder present an awesome downloadable album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust. Free or $5, your choice. Hard big heavy sound. Highly recommended by Ignatz Industries.

"I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today."
--Glenn Beck, Syndicated Radio Host, CNN Journalist and ABC Affiliate

Stay away from Oceanside, CA and particularly away from Camp Pendleton, Glenn. It could get ugly.

There's nothing like the magic of Christmas, and it's coming sooner than you think! Today's the day to beat the rush and order your BLACKWATER MERCENARY MURDERER CORPORATION CHRISTMAS ORNAMENT.

They put it better than I could:

Editorial in The Economist, September 20 2007

When liberals put the case for civil liberties, they sometimes claim that obnoxious measures do not help the fight against terrorism anyway. The Economist is liberal but disagrees. We accept that letting secret policemen spy on citizens, detain them without trial and use torture to extract information makes it easier to foil terrorist plots. To eschew such tools is to fight terrorism with one hand tied behind your back. But that—with one hand tied behind their back—is precisely how democracies ought to fight terrorism.

...

Human rights are part of what it means to be civilised. Locking up suspected terrorists—and why not potential murderers, rapists and paedophiles, too?—before they commit crimes would probably make society safer. Dozens of plots may have been foiled and thousands of lives saved as a result of some of the unsavoury practices now being employed in the name of fighting terrorism. Dropping such practices in order to preserve freedom may cost many lives. So be it.

I live in Newport Beach, California. As you may have gathered from the TV, some of my neighbors have way more money than anyone should. When you're this loaded, you run out of useful and attractive things to do after a while, and it's important that you then do something totally idiotic and wasteful so that the rest of the world hates your guts.

That's why the good people at the Fairmont resort are ready to give you a $350 24 Karat Gold Facial.

Yeah, I know. I think something about having tens of millions of dollars makes a person lose the Irony Organ.

I'm sorry, but this would send me screaming even when I was 15. At least one kid went for it, though. Brrr.

No, I don't know either.

Cold poached salmon, dolmades, caprese salad, steamed French beans, toasted pita.

There are a few reasons 2008 will be 1968 in the U.S. Notably, the Democratic Party has fallen apart and will nominate an unelectable candidate in a fixed convention. It won't be necessary for cops to remove their badges and beat up delegates this time. It's likely that an unpopular war will have its worst year yet. Let's hope that the worldwide events of 2008 don't match 1968, though. Let's review, in roughly chronologic order, how much fun that year brought us:

• The Prague Spring and its bloody and depressing end    
• The Tet Offensive.   
• The My Lai massacre   
• The May revolution in France   
• Martin Luther King is assassinated   
• Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated   
• The Pope forbids birth control   
• Saddam Hussein takes power in Iraq   
• The 1968 Democratic Convention dissolves into rioting and out of control police brutality; delegates and others are beaten in the streets; Daley engineers the nomination of Hubert Humphrey.   
• The Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City: the army kills hundreds of people, most of them students demonstrating against the government.   
• Nixon becomes president.

There were some good things that year too, but I don't think they make up for the body count and the loss of freedom and the defeat of idealism worldwide. Let's hope we get a better 2008. Note: links are to Wikipedia because I am lazy.

The headline NASCAR looking to expand into the hip-hop lifestyle should be enough, but the press release itself takes it all the way. Pullquotes of note below:

• As for the messages and products in development specifically, Earnhardt said they will be dope because adidas "always keeps it clean."
• During the recent race weekend in Chicago, rapper and Chi-Town native Twista rolled to the club in a Red Bull painted NASCAR street ride to promote his new album Adrenaline Rush Oh-Seven which touts a NASCAR tie-in.
• Over the years, the sport's crossover into the urban demographic has been hit and miss, but today one could say it's "On and Poppin'."
• Team Red Bull driver Brian Vickers, who has made appearances on MTV's TRL, tried to do his thang with Bow Wow and throw up a paint scheme to promote the rapper's music, however, nothing panned out but the two are said to be buds and Bow Wow has since been to a few NASCAR races.

It's fresh and dope that they've discovered the 1985-era Run DMC Adidas phenomenon. I hope they work their way forward to NWA soon!

Full-length camouflage pattern cargo pants style skirt with embroidered white roses and ragged hem: FASHION DISASTER

From the Daily Telegraph story ( link to click here ), I paste a few of the best snippets below. Man, I wanna be a louche aristocrat.

Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.

...led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.

...von Bismarck continued to appear in public in various eccentric items of attire, including tall hats atop his bald Mekon-like head. At parties he would appear in exotic designer frock coats with matching trousers and emblazoned with enormous logos.

His removal from Oxford was so abrupt that he was not given time to settle his bills; Prince Ferdinand sent a servant who did the rounds of von Bismarck's favoured watering-holes, restaurants and his tailor bearing a chequebook.

and the last and best line:

He never married.

My water heater broke. DAMNIT.

A very long time ago some Americans were held hostage in Iran, and because of the "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" song by Tony Orlando & Dawn, people put ribbons around trees and on their clothes and cars and things as a gesture of solidary and sympathy with the poor bastards being held hostage.

Later on, a horrible horrible disease showed up and started killing people like crazy, but because the people were mostly gay or foreigners, no one cared. As part of an effort to change this, many people began wearing red ribbons. This was especially effective when famous people did it on television, and it helped to make support for AIDS research and treatment more popularly acceptable. There was a need to raise awareness, urgently, and the ribbons helped.

Then at some point everybody with a disease, a political opinion, a social problem, or a general sense of public urgency got a ribbon color. Some people have four or more ribbon stickers on the car and a couple of rubber bracelets going. Or more.

For the confused, the friendly merchants at "CauseKeeper" have provided us with a handy guide and key to the colors. There are some puzzlers and problems here that I'd like to hear solved. Was a brown ribbon a good idea for colon cancer? I understand why black was chosen for mourning and melanoma, but who thought it was appropriate for gang violence? And what the heck are you supposed to do if your ribbon color means something you support and something you despise simultaneously? If you support the end of child abuse and want more awareness of Education, for example, you have to be anti-tobacco. Bone cancer victims are required to oppose abortion. It's a mess.

Barring federal intervention, this will continue until complicated checkerboard patterns are required, making gay bar bandanna codes and hazmat signs look easy.

Can't we all just be aware? What would Tony Orlando do?

PS The original song was about a man waiting to get out of prison and return to his family. We don't let people out of prison now; they just rot there. Sorry, Tony.

I hate the medical-industrial complex SO SO SO MUCH

STRAWBERRY TRIFLE

I had a little botox party today.
It's not for wrinkles. My skin is as smooth and unblemished as a baby's. No, I had a doctor shoot botulism poison into both sides of my neck and both shoulders.

The idea is to cure a problem called "focal cervical dystonia," which is fancy medical talk for "wow, your neck and shoulders sure do go into spasm a lot!"  I don't recommend it as an experience. It won't kill you, but it puts a damper on things.

Unless the neurologist is lying, I should be feeling a lot better in five days or so. I'm looking forward to it!

Medicine is weird and getting weirder. As my friend Sean says, in ten years they'll just give you a $15,000 croissantwich and it'll regrow your pancreas. For now, I'm happy with the $2500 worth of botulism, especially since Blue Shield is paying most of it. Apparently it's good for migraines sometimes, too. Who knew?

I offered to bring in a swelled up can of oysters instead of spending all that money on Allergan's fancy schmancy poison, but they said that was okay.

It's not just that they insisted on violating the law and the Constitution. It's not just that they tried to pressure the Attorney General to approve it when he had already refused. And it's not just that they did it while he was ill and not acting as Attorney General.

They did it at night in his hospital room, causing the acting Attorney General and the director of the F.B.I. to go lights-and-siren through the nation's capital and run upstairs to the hospital room and stop them.

And then tried to refuse a witness to the discussion afterwards.

And then, after Ashcroft had walked over the whole deal, they got what they wanted anyway because Gonzo got the job.

How close are we to a coup, anyway? Who's got five bucks on it?

Reference:

New York Times article today

 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/washington/15cnd-attorneys.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin