The Smarmy Carny

According to Reuters, 69-year-old Russell Teeter has been sentenced to 22 months of wearing a shirt saying "I am a registered sex offender."

Why? For one, because he is a registered sex offender. What's more, however, is that he exposed himself twice to a 10-year-old girl at the gardening business he runs. If this weren't enough, just add the 10 or so previous convictions in the last 30 years, and you've earned yourself a t-shirt.

I have a problem with this whole t-shirt idea — They should make him pay for the shirt, too.

Douglas Adams fans will be pleased to know that today, May 25, is Towel Day.

Be sure to grab your towel and carry it with you all day long in order to memorialize Douglas Adams. DNA (Douglas Adams) fans will appreciate this. For those who may not already know, Douglas Adams outlines the entry for "towel" in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value—you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you—daft as a brush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough. More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value.

Should you carry the towel with you all day long? The Towel Day page answers this: " Yes, you should really carry a towel with you all day. You might get teased or looked at weird, but then you can just hide behind your towel until the offensive people go away."

For more information about Towel Day, you'll want to check out the Towel Day page, which explains things better than I have here. You can also find out plenty more about ::wikipedia("Towel Day"):: and ::wikipedia("Towel", "towels in general")::.

Never leave home without your towel, and always be thankful for all the fish.

No Pants Day!

Forget Cinco de Mayo, it's No Pants Day!

On the first Friday of every May, you owe it to yourself to experience the freedom of not wearing pants! Today is "a day where everyone, be they students, respectable businessmen, or cherished community leaders, leave their pants behind."

If you're a MySpace addict, add No Pants Day to your friends list!

Unfortunately, I'm sick today, so I'll probably be celebrating a pantsless No Pants Day in bed, which really isn't much of an experience if you think about it.

This story is coming a bit late, but the day after the Academy Awards, Ben Stein wrote a scathing yet well-deserved review of the Oscars this year and Hollywood in general.

The commentary appeared in The American Spectator on March 6, 2006:

. . . there was not one word of tribute, not one breath, to our fighting men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan or to their families or their widows or orphans. There were pitifully dishonest calls for peace — as if the people we are fighting were interested in any peace for us but the peace of the grave. But not one word for the hundreds of thousands who have served and are serving, not one prayer or moment of silence for the dead and maimed.
Basically, the sad truth is that Hollywood does not think of itself as part of America, and so, to Hollywood, the war to save freedom from Islamic terrorists is happening to someone else. It does not concern them except insofar as it offers occasion to mock or criticize George Bush. They live in dreamland and cannot be gracious enough to thank the men and women who pay with their lives for the stars' ability to live in dreamland. This is shameful.
The idea that it is brave to stand up for gays in Hollywood, to stand up against Joe McCarthy in Hollywood (fifty years after his death), to say that rich white people are bad, that oil companies are evil — this is nonsense. All of these are mainstream ideas in Hollywood, always have been, always will be. For the people who made movies denouncing Big Oil, worshiping gays, mocking the rich to think of themselves as brave — this is pathetic, childish narcissism.
. . .
Hollywood is above all about self: self-congratulation, self-promotion, and above all, self-protection. This is human and basic, but let's not kid ourselves. There is no greatness there in the Kodak theater. The greatness is on patrol in Kirkuk. The greatness lies unable to sleep worrying about her man in Mosul. The greatness sleeps at Arlington National Cemetery and lies waiting for death in VA Hospitals. God help us that we have sunk so low as to confuse foolish and petty boasting with the real courage that keeps this nation and the many fools in it alive and flourishing on national TV.

There's plenty more great commentary within, so head over and read the entire article.

For those who are unfamiliar with ::wikipedia("Ben Stein")::, he first achieved popularity for the monotone teacher in ::amazon("B00001MXXH", "Ferris Beuller´s Day Off"):: and a similar character in ::amazon("6305053987", "The Wonder Years")::. He later obtained his own game show, Win Ben Stein's Money. Before all that, however, he was a speechwriter for Nixon and Ford, and he received the 2003 Pro-Life Award.

The ESLEDBB in action!

Have you ever wished your pants could do the talking? Well, now's your chance.

Brain Buster Enterprises has created The Electronic Scrolling LED Belt Buckle. (I'm going to call it ESLEDBB for short. Won't you?) Is it electronic? Yes! Does it scroll? Yes! Does it use an LED? Yes! Is it a belt? Umm, no. Is it a buckle? Yes!

The belt allows you to store six separate messages of up to 256 characters each. I'm curious about how you change the messages. Is there some sort of keypad on the back or under a panel, or do you connect it to your computer? For $30 plus S&H, you can get your very own ESLEDBB. Batteries and directions are included, but the actual belt is not.

Head on over to the ESLEDBB webpage (and I mean webpage literally!) and check out the details.

On the website, you can also see a brief quicktime movie of the ESLEDBB in action. Spoiler Alert! The video will bring you no surprises.

And when it comes to putting messages on your pants, the possibilities are endless.

The NBA announced their Player Dress Code, which requires all players to wear business casual attire whenever they are engaged in team or league business.

No more sunglasses indoors! No more medallions over clothing! As expected, several players are outraged and have been vocal on this issue already, even though the league (voluntarily) passed it by the players' union first.

When in attendance at a game (but not playing and in a jersey), players are required to wear a sport jacket. This certainly puts the "sport" back in "sport jacket."

Of all the quotes from players, most of them are understandable. You can actually see where they are coming from. The most outlandish quote comes from Camby:

"I don't see it happening unless every NBA player is given a stipend to buy clothes." -Marcus Camby, Denver Nuggets (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 10/19/05)

How's this for a stipend? How about your team overpays you by a bajillion dollars??? Marcus Camby . . . 2005 . . . $8,500,000. That's all I need to say . . .

. . . but I'll say more. As I mentioned in my "Pro Sports Unions Are Worthless" post, the NBA minimum salary is $385,277. For comparison, the salary for a WNBA's salary was capped at $174,000, and many of the WNBA players earned less than I do annually! Even when you're a huge freak, I think you can afford a couple suits and business casual attire without demanding a clothing stipend. Camby, get over it! You win the "Weakest Excuse Award." No one is going to feel sorry for you and your new dress code because of the cost to the players. I earn well under 1/8 of the league minimum, and I can manage to buy some business casual clothing.

The "Take It Like a Pro" Award goes to Mo Williams:

"You know when you put the rules in, Allen Iverson is not going to abide by it. But he's one player, and that's the way they look at it. I have dress clothes at home, so I get to break them out. That's cool. I can see what they're trying to do." -Mo Williams, Milwaukee Bucks (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 10/19/05)

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Here is the Foto Friday for this week. I think I have finally figured out where all those missing socks have gone!

I recently joined up on Flickr.

As of right now, there's not much on my account (that is public, anyway), but bookmark it. You never know what will pop up there.