I'm still trying to come to terms with the fact that two of my cousins are stationed at Fort Hood, but the one who's currently deployed in Baghdad was probably safer yesterday. Thankfully, the one who's still based at Fort Hood, and the family of the other, who are also there, are all OK. Bizarre.

Who says manatees are dumb animals? Ilya hung out way too long in North Jersey (he knows where to find the best pizza, clearly), and scored a free charter flight to Miami, all the romaine he can eat and he gets to shack up with a nice young lady. Ilya's a pimp.

Oh, those clever conservatives: they're showing their disapproval for Olympia Snowe by mailing her bags of rock salt (it melts Snowe, ha-ha!).

Wait, rock salt does melt snow.

And they're mailing those bags to her office.

Her office in Maine, with a nor'easter having just slapped the East Coast, with winter right around the corner.

This should go well.

This should serve as a warning to everyone searching Craigslist for cut-rate wedding photographers (and any other service, really): remember, you get what you pay for.

C'mon, AP, let's do some basic fact-checking: Jurassic Park was on Isla Nubar and Isla Sorna, not in France. I mean, c'mon, France? What, are velociraptors reading poetry on the Left Bank?

Because they didn't already have the reputation as the most incompetent team in football in the last decade, the Oakland Raiders stand a good chance of having their head coach arrested. Chances people will get 1/100th as riled up over a coach assaulting and seriously injuring another human being as they did with Mike Vick getting signed this summer? Low, at best.

Hey, you know what would be fun? Another column about how newspapers should die! And it should basically rehash what everyone's already said, take some ha-ha shots at some of the big guys (call the Boston Globe a college paper? Perfect!) and point to a bunch of internet-based news sites that don't pay their staffers as being successes! Yeah! For unintentional irony, let's put this up on the website of some other print publication, preferably one owned by a newspaper company. Can we get that done? Fantastic.

Don't get me wrong, I more or less agree with the general point - that newspapers shouldn't get bailed out, and bad papers should go under - but burying it under a ton of douchebaggery doesn't help.

Now I don't feel bad about playing so much Tetris (damn you, tetrisfriends.com) lately: since it turns out Tetris is good for your brain. Between that and Half-Life 2 helping my visual perception, I'm pretty much good to go.

You know why I read newspapers and listen to NPR?

Because if I watched cable news, I'd have to deal with morons like Maria Bartiromo.



Even if I could get past the questioning a 44-year-old why he isn't on Medicare, the tone of the question belongs on a playground, where the other five-year-olds can discuss the merits of a public option.

Legitimately sad news: Reading Rainbow is ending after a 26-year run. You can partially blame George Bush for this one - apparently the show's end is due, at least in part, to a shift in the Department of Ed under his watch toward teaching the fundamentals of reading through television, and not the more advanced, reading-is-awesome-and-you-should-read-more-books philosophy that gave birth to Reading Rainbow.

In other news, LeVar Burton looks great for a dude in his 50s.

Proof the NFL has a twisted sense of humor: you can get an NFL-licensed Michael Vick dog jersey.

Velvet Revolver and Audioslave aside, there haven't been many good supergroups in the last decade or two, and then I heard about Them Crooked Vultures on Radiolab the other night. Talk about potential with those three.

The one person - Jack, one of our night editors - who I expected to go on a tirade about the Eagles signing Mike Vick turned out to have one of the most reasonable opinions out there - ( and because the link will die: )

While everyone freaks out about Michael Vick becoming an Eagle, let's consider some of the other class acts from Philly.

Brett Myers: beat up his wife in public. His wife later had the charges dropped, against the wishes of Boston prosecutors. Haven't heard much about that since the World Series.

Allen Iverson: got jailed as a teenager on a maiming charge, regularly got in trouble with the law in Philly - including waving a gun in a couple guys' faces while looking for his wife - and AC casino staff.

Marvin Harrison: apparently can't keep track of his guns.

Ugueth Urbina: in jail for an attempted murder that happened right after the '05 season.

Jason Michaels: beat up a cop outside a nightclub.

Pete Rose: banned from baseball and the Hall of Fame, and served time for tax evasion. Also, he's kind of a jerk.

Kobe Bryant: accused rapist.

Rock lost the guy who could arguably be called its founder when Les Paul, the man with the eponymous guitar, died today. What I didn't realize was that he was also responsible for the advent of multitrack recording - modern pop basically doesn't exist without this guy. What a loss.

C'mon, Russian botnets, why'd you have to go and DDoS LJ, Twitter and Facebook today? Can't you guys go after Wikipedia or CNN or some other website with no useful content?

Seriously, though, why attack Twitter? Sure, occasionally stuff like the Iran election happens, but 60% of the posts are people texting while drunk and/or pooping. I'm not saying it's shallow, because that'd imply Twitter had any depth at all.

Damn it, Big Papi was dirty. This explains his injury and consequent slump - and again, the modern slugger has to be presumed guilty and proved innocent.

Man, New Jersey: where else could you get a corruption probe involving the mayor of Hoboken, orthodox rabbis, a state Cabinet member, a black market kidney and bribes for just about every elected official in the state. Pay attention, the other 49: this is how you get it done.

(And yes, if you were thinking this is somehow familiar, it's pretty much a repeat of the middle of Season 2 of The Sopranos).

If you ever needed a reason not to eat fast food any more, here you go. From what we're hearing, this story's only going to worse - especially considering corporate was running this one for at least two years with the same problems.

Yeah, this pretty well sums up my day.

Note to self: don't fly Caspian Airlines... or, for that matter, anyone else who flies old, crappy Russian jets designed in the 1960s. North Korea, I'm looking in your direction.

From the "People still take Fox News seriously?" files: Brian Kilmeade endorses eugenics, screws up basic biology on live TV.

Alternately, you can look at this as being accidentally funnier than SNL is on purpose.

If you're going to die in a bizarre way, it might as well be from falling into a vat of chocolate.

Looks like the Brett Favre Unretirement Watch 2009 is over, since he's buying a condo in Minneapolis. Since it's still not official, you should've bet the over.

It turns out Sarah Palin could be under federal indictment for embezzlement soon, which would explain her unintelligible resignation late yesterday.

So that's two people who won't get to dance in the Republican 2012 Presidential Candidate Hoe-Down. Who's next, GOP?

The GOP apparently has cornered the market on hyperbole: first House Republicans are like Iranians fighting for fair elections, and now Mark Sanford is comparing himself to the biblical King David. These guys would be over the top even if they were hanging out in the exosphere.

I don't know if I want a Glassboro without the weird chocolate smell. I mean, what's next, they raze the Italian Affair and give Bowe Boulevard the same name for its entire stretch?

It's kinda interesting how radio mirrored news outlets in the Michael Jackson tributes - I left work around 6:30, and I spent most of my drive home scanning the dial to see who had already jumped into King of Pop Tribute Mode. For the first half, it was scattered - the R&B station had a couple in a row, other stations had a random song or two (including Thriller inside of the first 10 minutes of my drive), but by the second half, the only FM stations not playing him were the All Jesus, All the Time frequencies, NPR and whatever the hell 94.1 is these days (which, as far as I can tell, is mostly Guns 'N' Roses).

For those of you who were tired of the bajillion Thriller-at-weddings-and-every-other-event videos on YouTube, well... uh, hate to break it to you, but it's gonna be jam-packed for the next month or two.

Oh, and one radio station was taking random upset callers and putting them on the air, including one girl who claimed to be 11. Now, I don't know what the hell kind of Michael Jackson fan you can be when you were born in 1998, but I feel for the kid: I mean, back in the '80s, we had Michael Jackson, Madonna, early U2, GNR before Axl went competely batshit insane, and so on. Sure, we also had hair metal and the Bangles, but what do kids have today, besides Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears after she went batshit insane?

Hi-O! one last time, Ed.

The more I read, the more this Air France disaster sounds like a freakish Stephen King novel. I mean, c'mon: giant, lurking Thunderstorms of Doom, explosions that aren't explosions, crazy, harried computer transmissions, the black boxes probably sinking into a three-mile-deep ocean trench, this story has it all.

This is, of course, the long way of saying, "Holy crap, how did something this insanely horrific happpen?"

The NYT's photo blog has a great piece on the Tank Man photos from the end of the Tiananmen Square protests. It's hard to believe that it's been 20 years already.

OK, Jen and I might be a little crazy about Disney World, and we might be going back there again (c'mon, the deal was insane), but I can be reasonably sure we won't ever fake our kidnapping, then turn up at the Grand Floridian. That's a special kind of crazy.

President Obama: serious business, all the time.

Now that everything's been posted online, I figured I'd do a giant post ( talking about all my clip-winning photos from '08: )

Well, now it looks like Manny needed 'roids to be Manny.

At this point, I'm only going to be surprised when a slugger doesn't test positive for anything.

For those of you who bet the under in the 2009 Edition of the Brett Favre Unretirement Tango, you may already be a winner.

I got this from a source at the NIH today: a helpful resource when trying to determine if you have swine flu.

I'm grabbing Jen and heading for Madagascar. Fuckers only have one seaport and no airport, and it's damn near impossible to infect that stupid island and wipe out humanity.

Oh, wait, you were serious?

For his next trick, Joe Biden will tell us that duct tape and plastic sheeting will protect against swine flu.

So Arlen Specter's a Democrat now, which is less good news for the Democratic Party than horrible news for the GOP. Specter's about the last thing resembling a centrist Republican... and, uh, well - now he isn't. It's tough to be the party of the people if sensible people don't want anything to do with you.

Man, I spend a couple days at the Penn Relays, then have a busy weekend (including a day at Ocean City that looked straight out of August), and everything goes to hell: between Captain Trips starting up, the Eagles sort of maybe figuring out how to draft players, and the Mets finally signing some serious relief pitching, I don't know what's happening. I mean, if Al Davis and the Raiders weren't still the biggest bunch of morons on the planet, I'd think I'd stumbled directly into a Stephen King novel.

Best line from a press release:

"We take 100 percent responsibility for this event and we regret any embarrassment for the Nationals organization, players and fans."

Dude, they're the Nationals. The only way they could be more of an embarrassment to anyone would... I don't know, get together with the Pirates and give birth to an even more inept baseball team.

The Pulitzers are out, and I'm actually kind of surprised that election coverage won the feature photography award.

My paper's decided to sort of maybe move into the 21st century, so now there are actually photos with stories - crazy idea, right? OK, sure, it's just sports stories, and they're all pretty tiny (the large versions are 500 pixels wide), but hey: it's a start. So far, it's been a lot of my stuff, which is a nice plus.

Oh, and when I get around to making some real ones, we're also pushing photo galleries all of a sudden. Who knows, maybe this internet thing will turn out to be some kind of massive pipeline of information and bring about worldwide communication or something*.

*nah, it'll just be a faster way of delivering porn.

I missed this on Thursday, but: manatees defeated pirates! Uh, not on the high seas, though. On a baseball diamond.

Dear the Internet:

Just a reminder, if you're dumb enough to commit a serious enough crime and leave your Facebook profile open to anyone in your network, newspapers will grab photos off your profile.

That is all.

From the Dumbass Acronym Department: workplace Internet leisure browsing makes people better employees, according to the guys who update their Facebook status every 12 minutes.

I forgot about the best April Fool's joke I saw yesterday: Sports Illustrated picked the Yankees to win the AL East for the 437th straight season, and their World Series prediction is the Mets over the Angels. The Angels part I won't quibble with, but the Mets? The same Mets that have tanked it two seasons in a row, and are largely unchanged from last year's team? Yikes.

The House passed a federal shield law yesterday, with a similar bill in the works in the Senate. Now, sure, the House has passed similar bills in the past, but with Arlen Specter pushing the Senate bill and the Obama administration backing the idea since the campaign trail, journalists have to feel good about this.

Of course, whether there are still going to be all that many journalists to protect with a federal shield law after this year, well... that's another matter.

Forget about the recession or international relations: the news you need to know is that the ShamWow guy got busted for beating up a hooker, and a bunch of other people had their poor choices memorialized forever in awesome mug shots.