So it’s come to this: the head of a Hollywood studio objects to popcorn, fercrissake.

One of the most powerful studio bosses in Hollywood … would like to see cinemas selling healthier snacks.

Michael Lynton, chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures, says that audiences would be better off nibbling on granola bars, fruit salad, yogurt and vegetable crudités with dips. “I can almost imagine the Romans eating popcorn and drinking Coke at the Colosseum 2,000 years ago,” he told a convention of cinema owners in Las Vegas. “But by bringing healthier snacks into your concession stands you would be helping our country meet an urgent public health need.”

I generally confine myself to a single pack of Raisinets, but I’ll be double-damned and pickled in brine before I’ll spend $7.50 for a medium-sized Yoplait.

Of course, Lynton doesn’t give a flip about that. Hollywood routinely extracts the lion’s share (in its literal sense, which means “damn near all of it”) of ticket-sale proceeds, which means that the cinemas have to make it up at the concession stand, and there aren’t enough soul-dead health obsessives out there to justify a Big Unbuttered Arugula.

If he wants to do the movie-going public a favor, this should be top of his list: Release better films. We eat more when we’re bored.

(Via Bill Quick, who properly styles “food nazis” in lowercase.)

“We will protect our revenue stream at any cost.” Including, it appears, the cost of one’s credibility. Get a whiff of this:

The Indonesian government’s policy… simply weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness by creating an artificial preference for companies offering open source software and related services, even as it denies many legitimate companies access to the government market.

Rather than fostering a system that will allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market, irrespective of the development model, it encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations.

As such, it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights and also limits the ability of government or public-sector customers (e.g., State-owned enterprise) to choose the best solutions.

That’s the International Intellectual Property Association, recommending sanctions against Indonesia because Indonesia, to keep costs down, is encouraging the use of open-source software, rather than fork over cash to IIPA members. “Fails to build respect” apparently translates to “fails to pay tribute.”

And of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg:

It turns out that the [IIPA], an umbrella group for organisations including the MPAA and RIAA, has requested with the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its “Special 301 watchlist” because they use open source software.

What’s Special 301? It’s a report that examines the “adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights” around the planet — effectively the list of countries that the US government considers enemies of capitalism. It often gets wheeled out as a form of trading pressure — often around pharmaceuticals and counterfeited goods — to try and force governments to change their behaviours.

There is nothing particularly unusual about this: it’s standard-issue, Econ 101-level rent-seeking, justified by the usual Lofty Motives. But I can’t bring myself to shed any tears over the deleterious effect on Steve Ballmer’s lunch money wrought by some Jakarta bureaucrat installing a Linux distro.

(Via Fark.)

One of the more exasperating aspects of 42nd and Treadmill is the fact that our customers are a blabby sort, and if one of them manages to sneak something past the Gods of Customer Service, eventually it goes viral.

To keep costs down, we aggregate credit-card transactions: rather than constantly being on the horn to the merchant bank in East Fiji, we bundle a bunch of them and send them in batch format. (Apple does something vaguely similar to this with the iTunes store: they’re not going to make much of anything with a 99-cent Visa transaction, so they’ll save yours up for a couple of days until you have a respectable $3.96 or so before putting it through.) Downside: people have figured out the cycle, and are buying stuff, discovering that MasterCard won’t cover that much, and then calling in to switch to some other card — even somebody else’s card — before the hammer comes down. It never, of course, occurs to them to check with the issuing bank before they start spending the money they don’t have.

What annoys me, though, is not so much the extra work they generate, but their farging sense of entitlement. Quite apart from their well-rehearsed “You did it for [so-and-so],” there’s a self-righteousness to them that makes me want to take their cards and bring them into close contact with certain internal body tissues of theirs. (Yes, I have gloves for tasks like this. Why do you ask?) It’s probably just as well that they don’t let me talk to the miscreants personally.

Alan Sullivan suggests that “it didn’t occur to [Joe] Stack that he would be giving statists a political weapon to use against those who would shrink the state.”

To which Mary P. Madigan replies, in comments:

Even if it did occur to him, he would have flown the plane into a building anyway because he was a self-obsessed yet completely un-self aware psycho and that’s what they do.

I see parallels between this jerk and psycho Amy Bishop — both were politically active and often obsessed, both thought violence was a solution and both made their professions look bad, but neither was trying to solve any political problems or change anything. They just wanted to express their anger and cause pain.

Stack may have claimed to have an agenda, but it was all over the place: basically, he hated everything that got in his way, with the notable exception of himself.

And I’d bet that every single provision in the US tax code, up to and including the requirement to sign a tax return, has pissed off someone at some point.

This month in Playboy, singer John Mayer steps on his schwanz. (The heavier steps have been reproduced all over the place, including the HuffPo.) Those who track the Zeitgeist more effectively than I do, which is almost everyone, seem to be split on whether Mayer is some sort of racist for disdaining black women and blaming it on the Little Head, or whether he’s simply an asshat with a Big Mouth.

Aaryn B. leans toward the latter explanation:

Honey, you are an affront to frat boys everywhere and that’s a damn near impossible feat. You are not smart. You are not cute. You are not deep. You are not intellectual or witty or cool or hip or dope or fly or whatever it is you fancy yourself to be. You have a small, small, small brain and a very big mouth. You are a self-important asshat raised to the 11th power, quadrupled by dickheadery, topped with three servings of phony and one heaping scoop of overcompensation.

I’m glad I didn’t piss her off.

Warning: That page from which I quoted incorporates some photos that some people — those with taste — may find disturbing.

Although technically, I suppose he’s already there:

We have a young female teacher new to the school. She is funny, lively, and quite the attractive young thing. Apparently, Mr. Lowjack in her class has noticed this, and has made a few comments. She was being tolerant, not wishing to appear to be one of those people who write up young miscreants at the drop of the ol’ pants, but…

The other day, he complemented her on her attire and then suggested she had gotten some of her jewelry at a Mardi Gras celebration. Think about this for a minute. You’ll get there.

On the way there, the thought might occur to you that this might be cause for suspension. Perish said thought:

So of course, that’s sexual harassment, and she did write up said miscreant. Here’s where it gets fun: the admin who is responsible for this alleged student basically gave him a slap on the wrist and is now putting pressure on her to allow him to remain in her class.

What does she have to do? Plant a butter knife on him?

Of course, the first time he tries this crap in Real Life™, he’s going to be frogmarched to the nearest emergency exit.

Why are we constantly beset with malware and other horrible digital excrescences? Too much tolerance for things that go wrong, maybe:

We’ve become an eight-cylinder SUV society. For all the nonsense we babble about global warming and how worried we are about it, we’ve become a culture in which we just press the gas down when we want to go somewhere, and we really don’t care about the imperfections in the system that makes it all go until the bill for gassing it up again is ten dollars higher than what we’re used to paying. And then, we don’t fix anything until the power steering makes a godawful squealing sound or the transmission conks out. Then we bitch and cuss about how it cost three thousand dollars and the mechanic must be out to screw us over.

I’ve had one transmission rebuilt. Then again, it was a two-speed Powerglide, which is about as complicated as a Waring Blendor.

Still, I’m not sure this is the answer:

I will expand the government to start a Bureau of Malware Damage Compensation. It will be responsible for filing civil suits against these guilty parties and placing liens on their property and income. It will accept and validate claims for anti-virus software licensing, computer services, and time lost by the victims, and as the proceeds of these liens are collected, it will compensate them.

Which is admittedly easier than, oh, say, creating a digital buzzbomb which will trace these evil little scripts to their evil little masters and setting off an explosion in their evil little shorts, but it’s a hell of a lot less gratifying. And if I have to scrape things off a hard drive, I want the culprit to suffer before I want him to pay; I want his attitude adjusted in such a manner as to make his testicles flee halfway up his abdomen at the very thought of trying that crap again. (If there are in fact any women writing malware, make the appropriate alterations.)

Back in August, when I wrote about the chap who went on a killing spree in a women’s gym in Pennsylvania after whining about his lack of success with the ladies — his whining, not mine — several women pointed out that he most likely gave off a creepy vibe long before he hit upon his Final Solution.

But what are the chances that someone who looks pretty creepy actually is? Perhaps better than we think [redirects to PDF file]:

Despite the crucial role of physical appearance in forming first impressions, little research has examined the accuracy of personality impressions based on appearance alone. This study examined the accuracy of observers’ impressions on 10 personality traits based on full-body photographs using criterion measures based on self and peer reports. When targets’ posture and expression were constrained (standardized condition), observers’ judgments were accurate for extraversion, self-esteem, and religiosity. When targets were photographed with a spontaneous pose and facial expression (spontaneous condition), observers’ judgments were accurate for almost all of the traits examined. Lens model analyses demonstrated that both static cues (e.g., clothing style) and dynamic cues (e.g., facial expression, posture) offered valuable personality-relevant information. These results suggest that personality is manifested through both static and expressive channels of appearance, and observers use this information to form accurate judgments for a variety of traits.

Or, as Fausta notes: “In plain English, if someone looks creepy, odds are they are.”

I have got to find myself a cloaking device.

You can write a letter to The New York Times:

Who should bear responsibility when consumers use products, such as cellphones, in unreasonably dangerous ways? Generally, the narrative of personal responsibility has precluded courts from allocating a share of responsibility to product suppliers.

But when we focus on the aggregate things look different.

Cellphone suppliers know that in the aggregate a predictable and high percentage of consumers will fail to exercise reasonable personal responsibility and drive while texting or talking. These companies know that no warning will alter this predictable behavior.

Given the completely predictable way consumers will use the product, selling cellphones is not so different from releasing a deadly toxic agent. In both cases a certain predictable number of innocent people will die.

The misuse of cellphones by drivers is too predictable and too unavoidable to shield cellphone suppliers from partial responsibility.

Shorter version: “Joe Sixpack’s pockets are insufficiently deep. Let’s go after Motorola.”

There are people who will argue that our mutation from a nation of laws to a nation of lawyers is somehow a Good Thing. You will not find me among them.

(Spotted by Greg Hlatky.)

Someone had the audacity (not the audio-editing software) to ask this at Yahoo! Answers:

I am interested in finding a blog response tool that will automatically post comments to relevant blog topics to help promote our business/products (ie. someone blogs about one of our products, then our automatic response posts a comment with a link/promotional code to buy that product).

Does anyone know if a tool like this exists?

In other words, he would like to spam, and he’d like our assistance in getting started.

Let’s see. There’s “No,” and then there’s “Hell, no.” What’s next?

Women, we are told, really go for bad boys, and you can’t get much badder than this:

Mussolini’s mistress, Clara Petacci, recorded intimate details of her affair with Il Duce in her journal. Her newly published diary reveals Mussolini as a sex-addicted anti-Semite who found Hitler “very likeable” — and who occasionally suffered from impotence.

Those diaries were published for the first time last week, to the considerable consternation of one of Mussolini’s descendants. “This woman would be convicted of stalking today,” says Alessandra Mussolini, Il Duce’s granddaughter. She insists that “not a word” of what Petacci wrote about her grandfather is true.

This is not to say that little Benito was exactly faithful or anything:

Mussolini was as obsessed with sex as he was with his own power. Until the day of his removal from power, July 25, 1943, he had “a woman brought to him every day, every afternoon,” as his valet Quinto Navarra recalls. The women were recorded in the guest book as “fascist visitors.”

“There was a time when I had 14 women and took three or four [of] them every evening, one after the other,” Mussolini said. But now, he insisted, Claretta was the only one. “Amore,” he said, “why do you refuse to believe me?”

Despite this, they were together until the end:

When the miniature Salò Republic came to an end in April 1945, Mussolini offered his mistress the option of fleeing to Spain, but Petacci declined. A short time later, she was hanging upside-down next to Il Duce above the Piazzale Loreto in Milan, shot by partisans. A passerby is believed to have said: “One thing you can say for her: She did have nice legs.”

(Via Common Sense & Wonder.)

With the spectre of mandatory health insurance looming in the shadows, Miriam has decided that we probably shouldn’t have mandatory auto insurance either:

I have car insurance, because I own assets, including property. I can’t afford to be sued. Poor people, however, don’t have anything to lose.

If everyone didn’t have to buy this expensive and totally useless product, those who do want it — like me — could purchase additional coverage for accidents involving uninsured drivers for a nominal sum. That’s the way things used to be before mandatory car insurance was instituted.

I dunno how “nominal” this coverage is: it costs me over $300 a year. Then again, this isn’t so surprising, since something like 25 percent of drivers in Oklahoma can’t be bothered to obtain insurance, the state mandate notwithstanding, which gave the Department of Public Safety a less-than-wonderful idea:

State officials are looking at beefing up the state’s electronic insurance verification system by setting up cameras across the state to randomly record vehicle tags.

Cameras set up at about 200 locations along selected highways would focus in on a tag’s bar code — found at the bottom of each tag — and record it. Bar code scanners would match the tag numbers with a national database containing real-time vehicle insurance information. Vehicle owners without valid insurance would be mailed a ticket.

Beyond the usual Big Brother considerations, this will not work worth a damn: a substantial proportion of drivers have metal or plastic plate frames that obscure the bar code, and J. Random Deadbeat is a lot more likely to fork over $19.95 for a piece of frippery than to pay for actual insurance.

Suggestions are welcomed, since I can’t see any plausible way to improve the situation.

A phrase I’d not seen before, it shows up in this comment by Enoch Root:

[I]t is the contention that in every human creature — and therefore every group comprised of human creatures — there is approx 8.5% corruption. Something I have been toying with for years, but wonder if there is any “there” there.

Judas represented 8.3 percent of the Apostles, though one should not forget Peter’s denial, which surely counts for something.

Of course, there is upward pressure on that 8.5 figure. Consider the Oklahoma county-commissioner scandal of 1981, in which 69 of 77 counties had at least one commissioner involved, and 13 had all three. Or, for that matter, consider Chicago of just about any year.

And does anyone believe there are only 45 practitioners of skullduggery in Congress?

Suzette is dealing with a particularly noxious comment troll, and Dogette explains the pathology involved:

I have theories as to why people do this. Let me list them.

1. They are sitting too close to their monitors. Seriously, this is probably the number one cause of troll-comment-leaving. People spend too much time on the computer but also they are just sitting too close to the monitor. After a while it makes them insane. All those little particles and shit. It’s brain damage.

This presumes the existence of a brain, but this isn’t too difficult a leap, so we will so stipulate. To continue:

2. They are repressing anger at some REAL issue(s) in their lives. Like, maybe they are really angry at their mailman. Or their trash guys. Instead of dealing with that anger through medication and therapy, which costs money, they troll blogs and get “upset” and leave these little comment turds. For a time, they feel better. But then the nagging thoughts, in the dark at night, alone: “I still hate my trash guys. I should go back to that Cripes Suzette site and spew at her some more. That felt good, I remember.”

Alternatively, we could charge people for commenting, which would make this maneuver something less than cost-effective, but so doing would drive away the non-trolls, and there are enough trolls who seem to be financed by [fill in name of shadowy rich guy who seems to have a thumb in all sorts of pies] — how else could they have so damn much free time? — to make such an action counterproductive in the extreme.

3. They have just lost touch with “reality.” “Reality” is this case must always be in quotation marks. “Reality” is pretty personal and customized in these cases. It’s not the same “reality” you and I might be in. It’s a “Special” reality. So I should have written “special” “reality” with both words in their own “separate” “special” “quotation marks.”

I suspect that “concern trolls,” of which there have been an abundance in blogdom generally of late, straddle the line between #2 and #3.

Personally, I think Dogette should formalize these subgroups and their definitions, and the rest of us should get used to the idea of referring to the troll in the previous comment as a “Type 1″ or a “Type 3″ or whatever. This would make, I think, a good Greasemonkey script, along the lines of Trollhammer. In fact, it could be incorporated into Trollhammer; in the process of eliminating the offending comment entirely in your browser, it would leave a reference to the troll type, for future reference.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have had it with those [expletive deleted] snakes in the [same expletive] drain:

A man who caught a 14-foot python in a Florida drain pipe was charged with perpetrating a hoax after wildlife officers discovered he owned the snake and put it in the pipe in order to stage the capture.

Justin Matthews, a professional animal trapper, later admitted that he had “staged the event to call attention to a growing problem of irresponsible pet ownership,” the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said on Thursday.

Matthews was charged with misusing the 911 emergency system and maintaining captive wildlife in an unsafe manner.

I can only conclude that this guy couldn’t afford to send the snake up in a balloon.

(Via House of Eratosthenes.)

Let’s see if I have this straight. Rush Limbaugh can’t be permitted to own a sliver of an NFL team because he said something uncomplimentary about Donovan McNabb, but Donald Sterling, who owns a whole NBA team, can keep on losing actual racial-discrimination suits and hardly a word is heard.

Oh, and no points for “Hey, it’s just the Clippers”; it’s not like the Rams are so hot these days.

Update, 9 November: Ed Driscoll takes note.

Update, 10 November: So does the Thunder’s Etan Thomas.

Spotted at the blog québécois:

The actual story, which dates back a few years, is worse.

As an interstitial in An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, the Professor discoursed briefly on the career of Dr. Samuel Gall, putative inventor of the gall bladder, which began rather inauspiciously:

His educational career began interestingly enough in agricultural school, where he majored in animal husbandry — until they caught him at it one day.

Along similar lines, I suggest that you would be much happier if you do not click on this, although in terms of commentary on the subject, it’s arguably the best you’ll see all year. (Not safe for much of anywhere, really.)

Stacy McCain handily disposes of that idiot California lawmaker who boasted about his extramarital activities:

What kind of women’s underwear is not “skimpy”? I mean, whoever heard of a politician having a mistress who wears long johns?

The only thing I know about women’s underwear is how it looks on the floor, and I don’t know much about that.

But this is perhaps a bit more important:

What’s up with stupid Republicans? Having an affair is stupid enough. Bragging about having an affair is stupid on steroids. Bragging about having an affair, resigning from office, and then claiming you just made it all up — dude, we need to invent a whole new word to describe such extreme stupidity.

Sanfordesque comes most readily to mind.

The shopping cart debuted in an Oklahoma City supermarket in 1937, the handiwork of Sylvan Goldman, and I’m guessing the first one probably wasn’t left out in the parking lot.

Nowadays stores often have dedicated spaces to leave your cart, so you don’t have to trudge back to the entrance with it after you’ve loaded up the truck, but not everyone understands the concept:

Guilty: The idiot who left a shopping cart in the middle of a parking space rather than push it ten extra steps to the cart corral in the next spot over.

Sentence: To wake up with a shopping cart in his bed — the one with the square wheels — dripping wet from having been left out in the rain.

The German-owned ALDI chain has a kinder, gentler approach: you want a cart, it will cost you a quarter, which you’ll get back after you return it to the place you got it.

Westbound, I-44 near the Broadway Extension. I’m going to exit at Classen, so I’ve moved into the left lane, which is moving at around 62 mph. Not bad for 5:05, if I say so myself.

Then it drops to 50, to 40, to 30. To twenty-seven. As I and the truck ahead of me ease down the ramp, I spot the culprit: an Oldsmobile, vintage early-1990s, being driven at the pace of an Oldsmobile, vintage early-1900s. The poor sod had his flashers on, so I refrained from denouncing him, on the basis that he’s probably afraid to stop, lest he never get started again, and God only knows where he’s going to get off.

A few minutes later along the Northwest Distressway, it becomes apparent that I’m not going to get through the signal at Pennsylvania, and mouthing an inaudible curse, I bring Gwendolyn to a halt.

And as I do so, along comes Mr. Curved Dash to my left, and he runs the light.

This time, the curse wasn’t inaudible.

A dork goes berserk in a Pennsylvania health club:

Friends mourned for three women fatally shot during their exercise class at a Pittsburgh-area gym by a man whose online diary revealed he felt ignored by women and had an “exit plan” to avenge his rage.

George Sodini went to a sprawling L.A. Fitness Club on Tuesday night, turned out the lights on the “Latin impact” dance-aerobics class for women, and opened fire with three guns, spraying dozens of bullets before committing suicide.

Idjit. Didn’t someone tell him you shoot yourself first, and then you spray the bullets?

Huh? What? Oh. Sorry. Let us continue:

His 4,610-word Web diary appeared to be a nine-month chronology of his plans to end his misery with a shocking act of carnage at his gym. He couldn’t understand why women ignored him, despite his best efforts to look nice. He wrote that he hadn’t had a girlfriend since 1984, hadn’t slept with a woman in 19 years.

“Women just don’t like me. There are 30 million desirable women in the US (my estimate) and I cannot find one. Not one of them finds me attractive,” the 48-year-old computer programmer lamented.

Do the math. He slept with someone in 1990. If not with a girlfriend, then with whom?

I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for this lout, despite having spilled way more than 4,610 words on the same sort of whiny poor-me material, if only because not once has it ever occurred to me to shoot anyone as payback.

Donna’s analysis:

I am going to take a stab here… I think women didn’t like him because he was creepy and seemed like a psychopathic killer. JUST A GUESS!!!

Usage question: We’re talking about the motives of a gunman. Is “take a stab” correct?

Donna certainly does:

I run into them all the time. They just love to tell you that you’re not doing enough or not doing whatever right but they won’t lift a finger to help. I wonder if there is a word to describe them? Non-actionable critics? Critical do-nothings? Stupid jerk heads?

I have a few words to describe them, which you can well imagine — or, if need be, you can find at Urban Dictionary.

They also exist in pixel form:

I think it’s the same (or very similar) personality quirk that makes people go to blogs and write invalidating, weird, argumentative comments. If we were to remove it from cyberspace and place it into a real world setting, it would be like a person coming to your house and taking a huge stinky dump on your front doorstep. No one has yet taken a dump in my living room (not including Bobo, but he’s a dog so he doesn’t count) but I have cleaned up many stinky dumps from my comments section. I don’t get it. I don’t understand it.

Pseudo-courage, made possible by net anonymity. Ninety-nine point something percent of the people who would crap on a blog post wouldn’t dare crap on someone’s porch. I have been fortunate, I suppose, in that relatively few such individuals have shown their feces around here.

Then again, the real reason for posting this:

It’s been one week since I loaded ole Donnaville with advertisements. In that one week period, I made $5.73. I was about to say that I saw my readership plunge but I just remembered Dustbury linked to me on the 21st and that always gives me a little traffic lift.

It ain’t Stacy McCain money, but it ain’t bad.

This afternoon, I had the distinct displeasure of witnessing two amazing acts of sheerest nerve, and not in the good Knievelesque sort of way either.

First, one of our more unhinged customers was trying to explain her way out of some sort of error on the last request she sent us, pointing out to our beleaguered phone person that she’d never had such a problem in all of thirty years, and by “thirty years” she apparently meant “90 days.” (I keep fairly good records.)

Earlier in the day, I posted this comment regarding some orange shoes:

I looked at that BCBGirls sandal and thought “Maybe it’s a tad loud for Lynn.” My apologies.

A few minutes ago, I dropped into the Dashboard to see if anything was going on, and there was a comment in the spam queue. It read like this:

I looked at that BCBGirls sandal and thought “Maybe it’s a tad loud for Lynn.” My apologies.

Sorry, forgot to add great post! Can’t wait to see your next post!

The sorry sack of Siberian sheepdip had copied my comment and slapped my name on it, although underneath the name was a different URL.

You’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to get something past me. (And given my druthers, I’d sleep ’til 10:30.)

Do you know where your governor is?

Singing in some karaoke bar, maybe?

Or buying a gadget?

We’ve now evolved to Eight Epsilon:

Pursuant to Directive 1D/0T of our Eight Epsilon quality prevention system, the Standardization Committee for Unified Management has determined that employees of the Company may be reprimanded for actions including (but not limited to) the following:

• below-average performance, average performance, and/or above-average performance,
• not following Instructions, and/or following Instructions,
• not giving the customer what (s)he requested, and/or giving the customer what (s)he requested,
• thinking inside the Box, thinking outside the Box, not thinking inside the Box, not thinking outside the Box, and/or thinking whatsoever on Company time,
• failure to Suck Up.

Apparently sucking in other directions is still acceptable.

And remember: you can’t have arbitration that isn’t arbitrary.

Group wants R-rating for any movie that has smoking in it and NC-17 for depiction of drinking, eating red meat, and driving without a seat belt on.

(Linked to this.)

Thread winner: “spasemunki,” for the following:

This will be really useful to kids trying to talk their clueless parents into letting them see rated R movies:

Dad: So why is Basic Instinct rated R?

Kid: Well, there’s this scene where Sharon Stone is being interrogated by the police and she’s sitting in a chair at the police station in this short dress, and you can see that she’s holding a cigarette.

Such wickedness.

The only online game I play is Blogshares, which I’ve been pounding away at for about five and a half years. I have no idea how many players they have — new additions are getting ID numbers around 50,000, and I’m #945 — but after several reverses and restarts and finagles I’ve climbed into the top 800 or so, and without having to resort to Sneaky Tactics, the sneakiest of which will get a B$ player branded as “Cheatypants.”

Apparently Xbox Live does something similar:

When abnormal achievement or gamerscore activity is found, LIVE modifies the gamerscore of players who meet specific and automated criteria.

A LIVE player who obtained their gamerscore in this abnormal way will

• Find their gamerscore reset to zero, and
• Be unable to regain all previously earned achievements, and
• Be labeled as a “cheater” for the community to view.

To Lynne, this is a “total waste of resources”:

I’d prefer they put more effort into fixing the seemingly endless problems with their console, a complete redesign would be nice loading the console with parts not bought from a 99c store.

Then again, had I had two game consoles out for repair simultaneously, I, too, might wonder about Redmond’s priorities.

The Guinness Book of World Records is planning an entry for Jonathan Lee Riches as the man who has filed the most lawsuits in the history of mankind.

Riches’ response? He’s suing:

Riches, aka Irving Picard, filed his latest legal fight this week in the Richland office of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, although he is incarcerated in the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Ky.

Riches alleges that Guinness is planning to print false information about the number of lawsuits he has filed, which he says is more than 4,000 worldwide. And he objects to the names Guinness intends to call him, including: “The litigator crusader,” the “duke of lawsuits,” “Johnny Sue-nami,” “Sue-per-man” and the “Patrick Ewing of suing.”

Riches, inexplicably, has not sued Wikipedia, which has a list of several of his suits. In one case alone, Riches v. Bush et al. [pdf] he managed to sue everyone from George W. Bush to Jimmy Hoffa to Ariel Sharon to Tony Danza to the Doobie Brothers. Oh, and “Weird Al” Yankovic and the Colossus of Rhodes.

Riches is in Lexington being treated for, um, mental-health issues.

(Via Fark.)

Earlier today I said something about time being in short supply for all of us, and indeed it is, but some guy in a Mercedes-Benz is not conserving it effectively:

I wasn’t amused when you cut me off as you weaved in and out of traffic in your oh-so-important way. I suspect the other drivers you cut off weren’t amused either. What was amusing was your reaction when the blue lights popped on back in the crowd you slalomed through. You immediately pulled into the far right lane, trying to blend in with the line of slower moving cars.

Guess you forgot about that bike racked up on the roof, eh? You stood out like a punker with a mohawk at a bald men’s convention. That attempted bit of camoflage amused me, as did the cop’s reaction.

As well-hidden as an ostrich buried beak-deep in the sand. (For some reason, that phrase from a Mary Stewart novel — This Rough Magic, I think — has stayed with me for many years, probably because I never could figure out which end was up.)