The Smarmy Carny

The 2,996 Project

Here is a touching September 11 tribute project that I have been watching develop for the past month or so. Thousands of blogs across the blogosphere will each be posting one tribute for one victim of the September 11 attacks.

Rather than further regurgitate the information provided over at 2,996, here is how that site describes the project:

2,996 is a tribute to the victims of 9/11.
On September 11, 2006, 2,996 volunteer bloggers will join together for a tribute to the victims of 9/11. Each person will pay tribute to a single victim.
We will honor them by remembering their lives, and not by remembering their murderers.
. . .
Thank you,
D.Challener Roe

Head over to the 2,996 page or see the list of 2,996 names along with links to their tributes.

For a categorized list, see the list of September 11 victims. (If the webpage is too busy, just check out Google's cache of the 9-11 victim list.

In April, I wrote about the fact that Casey Sheehan's headstone had not yet been installed, even two years after Casey's death.

Just in time for Memorial Day, Casey's headstone was installed on May 25, 2006. Happily, since Casey's father Patrick took over the task a couple months ago, plans for the headstone finally started in motion and the monument is in now place.

The tombstone reads:

Our Casey
Ever faithful, kind, and gentle, good son, beloved brother, brave soldier, dear friend, you loved your family and lived your life serving others to the end.

On the back of the headstone, there are six symbols, presumably notating six things that Casey enjoyed: The military, the theatre, Eagle Scouts, Superman, Van Halen, and the WWF (World Wrestling Federation).

A picture of the headstone can be seen on the site for Vacaville's The Reporter.

Snopes.com: Rumor has it.

Snopes is an urban legends reference page that I have been reading for almost ten years now.

You'll be surprised at what's true and what's not. Keep in mind that a story doesn't have to be false to be an urban legend. According to Snopes, here are the three conditions to be fulfilled for a story to be classified an "urban legend":

1. The story circulates widely.
2. The story is told and re-told with differing details.
3. The story is said to be true.

Some stories you've believed and retold others for decades turn out to be false. Stories you've rolled your eyes at turn out to be completely true. Here are some items that might surprise you:

• Does hair grow back darker/thicker after it has been shaved?
• Is celery a "negative calorie food"?
• Do the horses in Young Frankenstein neigh every time they hear Frau Blucher's name because "blucher" is the German word for "glue"?
• Will you get cramps if you go swimming less than 45 minutes/an hour after eating?
• Was a suicide captured in the background of The Wizard of Oz?
• Does eating turkey make you drowsy?
• Does the Swiffer WetJet pose a danger to dogs and other household pets?
• Did Kentucky Fried Chicken change their name to KFC to remove "Chicken" from their name because their mutant birds could not be legally considered chickens, or was it to remove "Fried" from their name in order to seem healthier?
• Was the Titanic screening The Poseidon Adventure when it hit the iceberg?
• Is Jell-O made from bones and hides?
• Was an actor killed during the filming of the chariot race in Ben Hur?
• Do Twinkies never expire?
• Was television's Mr. Ed a horse?

Snopes is an overall great site to spend time on. Whether you're looking for some interesting reading to pass the time or settling a bet on whether Pop Rocks and soda pop will kill you, Snopes is the place to be.

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.

Casey's grave

As most of us have heard by now, Casey Sheehan, the mechanic from the Army's First Calvary Division, was killed in combat on 4/4/4. The nation is aware of Casey's death due to his mother, Cindy Sheehan, and her continuous anti-Bush, anti-Iraq ranting in the months leading up to and since the 2004 presidential election.

Despite Cindy Sheehan's continual attempts to "memoralize" her son by denouncing the war in Iraq and anything else (war-related or not) that Bush does, Casey Sheehan's gravesite still does not have a tombstone of any sort.

Why would Cindy not put up a tombstone? First, she blamed the mortuary. When the mortuary director came forward and outlined all he had done above and beyond his expected duties (including the standard payment for a tombstone), Cindy seems to have moved on to a different explanation:

For the first year after Casey was killed, I didn't want to believe it. I didn't want to place a TOMBstone on my son's grave. I didn't want one more marble proof that my son was dead. I couldn't even call where he was buried a "cemetery," I had to call it "Casey's Park."

Make of that what you will.

This story does have a satisfactory conclusion, though: Cindy's soon-to-be ex-husband, Patrick Sheehan, has taken over this matter, and a local monument company is constructing Casey's permanent headstone.

Update: Casey's headstone was finally installed on May 25, 2006, in time for Memorial Day.

Get more information on Casey's tombstone at Snopes.

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.

Inspired by the death today of the Saturday's Simpleton theme, I remembered one of the best resources for simpletons: the Darwin Awards.

By now, most people are familiar with the Darwin Awards. If you're one of the few who are still unfamiliar with the Darwin Awards, here's the official explanation:

In the spirit of Charles Darwin, the Darwin Awards commemorate individuals who protect our gene pool by making the ultimate sacrifice of their own lives. Darwin Award winners eliminate themselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species' chances of long-term survival.

You can read ::amazon("0452291925", "The Complete Darwin Awards")::, which includes 400 stories of Darwin Award nominees!

Entries include "Chimney-Cleaning Grenade," which teaches us to never weld a hand grenade to a chain . . . and not because the chain is dangerous. About a year before ::wikipedia("Characters_of_Lost#Leslie_Arzt", "everyone learned on Lost that old dynamite sweats nitroglycerin")::, the man in "Do-It-Yourself Landmine" learned it first.

There are plenty more to read on the site, and I suggest you read through some of the many selections if you haven't already.