After investigators said an engineer in last week's collision had been texting on the job, regulators temporarily banned the use of all cellular devices by anyone at the controls of a moving train.
First Mark Sanford governor of South Carolina simply vanishes for a week, and then comes back to admit an affair with a married woman in Argentina…
This is so weird you just can’t make this stuff up.
Sheesh not even your northern liberal press even and they got the Emails, too. This outdoes anything that ever happened in Minnesota. Not even Jesse the Body did anything this flamboyant while he was in office. Sanford didn’t even leave a way for his staff to get a hold of him had there been an emergency. Gone over Father’s Day on top of everything else.
To be perfectly honest I couldn’t give a rat’s ass whom he pokes. That is for his wife to clean him out on in divorce court. As far as I am concerned that is for her to make whatever hay on she decides to. But if the state of South Carolina lets him get away with simply vanishing for a week, completely out of touch, without forcing him out of office, then SC does a real sloppy job of running its affairs. Conservative or liberal this guy is a sleaze bag, and no more deserves to retain his office than Elliot Spitzer did in New York.
This is the kind of movie you could expect to see in South Africa in the mid-1970s:
Aren’t you glad that Hollywood had moved beyond that sort of bigotry by that time? Instead, they were making films like Death Wish II, which featured THREE separate scenes of white women being raped by black men. The actual number of rapes was much higher, though, as they were all gang rapes. This clip features the least graphic of the scenes (WARNING: nudity, violence, and offensive stereotypes):
DeNiro’s screen test for Sonny Corleone in Godfather I
Robert DeNiro got the break of a lifetime when he was passed over for the role of Sonny Corleone in The Godfather. The role of brash eldest son of Vito Corleone was a great supporting role that helped establish James Caan as major Hollywood star. The Godfather swept the Oscars, and some critics still call it the best movie of all time. DeNiro must have been crushed.
It must have been especially painful for an Italian to lose out to a Jewish actor like Caan in a movie in which every other Italian/Sicilian role was played by an actor who was actually Italian or Sicilian. But the role demanded Caan’s big physical presence and Caan’s explosive style, rather than the implosive and relatively diminutive DeNiro, so Robert was out of luck.
Oh, how we wish we’d been able to get down to Glastonbury last week. But hey, sometimes that’s the way the cookie crumbles, eh? And, we’d promised ourselves we’d post this a little earlier in the week but, like we just said, sometimes that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Anyway, better late than never.
So ensure your speakers are switched on, the volume’s turned right up, your voice is in fine enough fettle and that you’ve got some brand new ’stompers’ on.
Richard of This Old Brit informs us that Viacom has now won the right to obtain and peruse records that show the viewing habits of every person who has ever logged onto YouTube.
Viacom obtained a judgment giving them that right as part of a billion-dollar copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube, which is owned by Google. So what’s really going on here? Why was Viacom so eager to get its hands on data that is of quite limited value to the company?
Mentalism is big business, which is amazing when you consider the fact that there’s no evidence that anyone can see the future, read your mind, talk to the dead, or heal people. Maybe that’s why there’s been such an outcry from Britain’s psychic community over a new regulation that would require psychics to either prove they can perform as advertised, or state that their performances are for entertainment or research purposes only.
I’ve had friends who worked as psychics, and I can attest to the fact that most psychics sincerely believe in their powers, and provide harmless entertainment and, in some cases, comfort to their clients. But there are also charlatans who warn of impending disasters unless they’re given a sizable payment, or who pretend to communicate with their clients’ dead relatives, or whose claims of healing powers convince their clients not to seek medical treatment for serious conditions. Those are the psychics that the new law is aimed at, and they are throwing a fit:
Here’s the latest atrocity that Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network has unleashed on America. It’s called Moment of Truth, and the rules are simple. A contestant answers a series of humiliating questions. Each time an answer is cleared by a notoriously unreliable polygraph test, the contestant wins more money. In the final rounds, the questions revolve around opinion rather than fact, making it nearly impossible for any contestant to win the grand prize.
The right wingers on Fox News love to say that the entertainment industry is undermining American society. But it seems to me that Fox is the primary offender.
