Last week's fish

You may be aware that a federal jury in Manhattan last week took all of less than three hours to award writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3M in damages (of which $65M was punitive) in her defamation suit against the Kleptocrat.

A couple of things—the award in her previous lawsuit (for sexual assault and defamation) was $5M, of which $300K was punitive. That jury, in May 2023, found that Cadet Bonespurs did assault Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman’s dressing room in the 90s and then he defamed her by calling her a liar. In that trial, the primary attorney for the defendant was Joseph Tacopina, an experienced litigator, who was crass and pretty bolshie on behalf of his client. But he did not piss off the judge and jury by disrespecting them and he kept Bonespurs out of the courtroom because he understood that his client’s worst enemy was the client’s inability to STFU.

This time around, the Kleptocrat fired Joey Tacos just before the trial opened and went with Alina Habba, whose pre-Klepto experience was largely limited to representing a parking lot owned by her husband. (Her experience with Bonespurs has been less than stellar: she and her client were sanctioned a year ago to the tune of nearly $1M for filing a frivolous RICO lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, James Comey and half of Washington, D.C.) It showed in her performance throughout the trial—the woman doesn’t have the most elementary understanding of even how to enter evidence into the record. The kind of thing you could pick up from watching reruns of Perry Mason episodes on TBS. This was in addition to Bonespurs’ antics in the courtroom—muttering audibly his objections to various things, shaking his head, even swanning out of the courtroom during plaintiff’s counsel’s closing argument. Every orange pore oozed contempt for the judge, the jury, the process and even the notion of justice. Evidently juries notice this kind of thing.

(Also, I’m guessing it was very uncomfortable having to sit on that wooden chair in a full diaper and girdle.)

So the Find Out part of this life experience cost him $83.3. Habba swore on Friday they’ll appeal the outrageous judgment (although there appear to be no legal grounds for an appeal; Judge Lewis Kaplan was careful to ensure that). "We are just getting started," she said; actually, she was just getting finished. If he carries through, he’ll have to post a bond of about $92M with the court (award plus interest) and that will have to be either his money or through a bonding company (if he can find one that will take the risk of fronting a notorious no-pay guy), which would also cost him fees in addition to the $92M.

Either way, Habba found out Tuesday what every human on the face of the planet could have predicted: the Kleptocrat is dumping her for a yet-to-be-named legal draft pick. She found out via a post on his lame-ass social network:

Now we see if there are any law firms willing to take him on.

And if there are any non-spousal parking lots willing to take her on.

 

Painted green and pagan

Here’s another indicator that civilization is headed straight to hell in a handbasket: The Guardian’s page of photos of the Beltane festivities held Sunday at Glastonbury.

It’s not just that the photos look like they might have been submitted by what the Brits refer to as Members of the Public. (They’re colorful, but not especially well composed.) It’s that the captions are mindless. “A woman holds up a bunch of flowers”; “A dance is performed”; and (my favorite) “A man painted green and dressed in green”.

It’s like The Guardian has turned over the amateur photos to a caption-bot. Or possibly outsourced the work to Minsk.

Just for ducks, I checked out the Telegraph, The Guardian’s polar political opposite. Their picture page is not materially better. My only take-away from them is that Beltane is a pagan festival. Because they say so in eight of the 14 captions.

Tweelight zone

You know, the British Empire is long gone, despite the heroic efforts of Winston Churchill to hang on to it. And even the hip supremacy of the Fab Four and Carnaby Street has settled down to the Geriatric or Petrified Stones. But there are still features of whimsy and daftness that will remain Forever England.

Because, let’s face it, nobody does nutty quite like the Brits.

Case in point: Currently in Somerset, they have a problem with Fairy Doors. Well, an overabundance of them. They’re becoming as common as Starbucks, and authorities are therefore required to Take Action to halt the proliferation.

What’s that, you ask? Fairy doors? Why—they’re teeny little doors built into trees in Wayford Woods, for the, um, fairies. Just like it says.

I absolutely dunno how they got started, but at this point I can totally understand why “Fairy Control” is necessary. Because—in the absence of a homeowner association or town council, you can see how door builders have just lost the plot. 

No central design planning, so every possible shape, color and, er, ornamentation imaginable. Think glitter, people. And worse.

I mean—looks like some low-life no-better-than-they-should-be fairies have moved into the forest and at any moment will start putting tiny clapped-out washing machines in their front yards. Plus—they’ll start playing the radio loud at all hours and toss wee empty beer bottles about instead of placing them in the dumpsters like decent fairies would.

Apparently the actual door constructors have not been caught pink- or yellow-handed, which I find interesting. I mean—there are so many of the dag-blamed things that you’d expect that people would be tripping over one another as they install their work. Not to mention coming to blows over who has the rights to “door” a particular tree.

The local council has its work cut out for them in the door-abatement process. I’m sure there will be protests over the very concept of removing the fairy-portals. And how can you give esthetic reasons for demolishing the tacky ones and leaving only the twee? There might be fisticuffs yet.

I’m looking forward to the video.

The week in weird

We are surrounded by news of the weird, and I’m not exactly sure from which direction the weird winds blow wildest.

First off, on Wednesday, the day the UK’s defence [sic] secretary harrumphed that the Baltic nations should be on the lookout for Russian incursions, given the undeclared war going on in Ukraine, the RAF scrambled Typhoon fighters to warn off two Russian Bear bombers that were skirting the coast of Cornwall.

Cornwall is in the south of England; it’s the little part that juts out to the left on this map:

And you’ll notice that it is a goodly distance from any territory that belongs to Russia. So it’s not like those two Bears took a wrong turn on their way from Smolensk to Nizhny Novgorod and the next thing they know they were skimming past Newquay trying to find the best place for winkles and chips.

There have been other incidents, both in the air and undersea, where Russian units have pushed the envelope in various parts of Western Europe. Testing the boundaries, as it were, kind of like teenagers trying to get their curfew extended. Only with Putin, it’s more like recovering either the old Soviet Union or possibly the pre-1917 Russian Empire. Hard to know with that guy.

But, as Sancho Panza used to say, whether the rock hits the pitcher or the pitcher hits the rock, it’s going to be bad for the pitcher.

However, there’s good weird to balance the bad.

Well, I suppose the modifier “good” all depends on whether you’re one of the protagonists involved in these two stories.

First, from Orlando, a woman believed to be under the influence of some “heavy unknown substance” was arrested last Sunday after peeling off her clothes, walking naked into traffic, grabbing herself in a place where Minnie Mouse doesn’t even have a place and then climbing onto a car and stomping on it.

The report I read makes a point of identifying the car in question as a Lexus, as though that’s somehow more of an affront than a Chevy or a Volvo. And one of the passengers in said Lexus reported that the miscreant (one Amie Carter, 31, if you care) also threw a mobile phone at the car behind the one she was mounting. (Well, that’s the verb the news story uses.)

Sadly (and I do find this difficult to believe) there appears to be no video footage of this incident. Go figure.

Well, naturally I thought this all very interesting, but my big question is this: where did Carter get the mobile phone to throw if she was naked? And my answer to myself is: no place I want to know about.

But from sunny Florida, let’s move up to Michigan where last month Christina Bond fatally shot herself through the eye while adjusting the handgun she was carrying in her bra holster. Bond, an evangelical Christian, biker and Republican, was 55. She was also obviously a gun nut.

Now, as with the case of Carter (and, what the hell, Putin, too), my mind just started filling with pictures. Like—did the folks at the Road to Life church edge away from her when she was taken by the spirit and began speaking in tongues and clutching her chest? What about the Friday night fish fry fundraiser for the Republicans—did they try to keep her away from the deep-fry baskets? Did anyone ask her to dance?

Apparently this bra holster is a whole thing, which I did not know about. I wonder if you have to get a conceal-carry permit for these things, or is the gun not really concealed?

I’m also betting it’s a lot harder to get a guy to look at your face when you’re wearing one of those things. Kind of a double attraction for him. Triple, maybe.

Well, I also wonder what happens when you’re out at the tavern, and you’re three or eight Black Jacks into the evening, and you get a little confused about which cup has your cash and which your carry? Makes me also wonder why we haven't heard of more incidents along these lines. But perhaps we will.

But that’s all the weird I can handle for now. What would be really weird would be if Putin started packing a piece in a bra and then… Oh, never mind.

Don't go there

Shortly after the Islamic terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris early this month, those whacky guys at Fox News extruded a huge steaming pile and jumped straight into it. Since then, the hits just keep on coming.

Some self-styled “terror expert” named Steve Emerson on Fox proclaimed that Western Europe, and particularly the UK, is swamped with Muslims, and that there are many “no-go” areas within these countries, places where non-Muslims fear to tread.

Among these he named Birmingham as being so “totally Muslim” that no one else will even enter the environs.

Well, the Twitterverse lit up like a Grateful Dead concert with the hashtag #FoxNewsFacts. The tweets were flying so fast and thick it was like machine gun fire on Omaha Beach. Like:

(I also read that they'd changed the name to Birming, on account of ham isn't Halal.)

(Cleverly combining the cat meme with the #FoxNewsFacts hashtag.)

I mean—you get the drift, right?

After my first beverage snort onto the keyboard I stayed away from liquids and just laughed until tears came. I found about six new people to follow in just a couple of hours.

Even British Prime Minister David Cameron, who is somewhere in the Attila the Hun range of the political spectrum (If Attila wore Savile Row) got it right. “This guy’s clearly a complete idiot.”

Cameron was educated at Eton College and Oxford University (Brasenose College). He has mastered the use of language.

Eventually Emerson apologized (although I don’t believe the phrase “talking out my ass” was used), but clearly their target audience lapped up the fear mongering like frat boys at an open bar. And clearly he's still clueless about Birmingham:

(Also, other Foxoid “experts” named several European cities as being no-go zones. The mayor of one of them, Paris, has announced her intention to sue the network, which should be interesting.)

But wait—there’s more. Because on Monday, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal (right up there with the Attila crowd, though not as well-spoken as Cameron) flapped his hands about at a speech at a British think tank and re-declared that Europe is rife with Muslim-dominated enclaves where Christians fear to tread, including parts of London.

When asked for clarification on where, exactly, these no-go areas were, Jindal got a little vague, brusquely insisting that he’s talked with people (you know—people) who assured him that there are parts of London where women don’t want to walk alone.

Well, yes indeed there are. And parts of Los Angeles and parts of Buenos Aires and parts of Brooklyn and parts of Seoul that I don’t really want to walk around alone in. But my reluctance has nothing to do with the religious or even necessarily the ethnic makeup of those areas. They’re really mean streets and I’m not equipped to deal with them. (Like I wouldn’t want to walk the halls of JPMorgan Chase, one of the most alien and alienating environments I can think of.)

Jindal—like Fox—is unapologetic. They operate on the well-established principle that if you make a lie big enough and repeat it often enough, it eventually becomes the truth.

Meanwhile, plan on staying upwind of them. That pile is still steaming.

Rum-pum-pum-pum

Okay, I may have moved up the loathing spectrum on “The Little Drummer Boy.”

My long-held conviction has always been that it is not possible to sing that piece without sounding drunk (yes, even children’s choirs do); it just has a tempo and melody that sound like sots hanging on to bar stools at closing time.

(The corollary to this is that you really want to be well and truly lit before listening to it, because otherwise it’s just too painful.)

However, in the past few days I’ve come across a couple of renditions that have opened my eyes, and possibly my ears, to the notion that LDB might have…possibilities.

I shared the reimagined version with you last week, the one that might possibly count as dog abuse. But yesterday I came across this one, with Christopher Lee singing. Singing Heavy Metal:

Yes, obviously, I am not making this up. Dracula-Saruman just lets it rip in a way that you won’t believe until you hear it. Maybe not even then.

You’re welcome.

Only goats matter

For Halloween, let’s close out the month with BuzzFeed’s take on how the media will report the apocalypse. On the whole, I think they’ve rather holed it in one.

They certainly got the zeitgeist of Twitter right. (Especially that #prayforLondon thing.)

Someone wondered why the Statue of Liberty always seems to figure in apocalyptic visions, which caused me to run through the images again to investigate.

In fairness, it’s only the faux-New York Times that uses that particular icon. And you’d pretty much expect the editors there to conflate Liberty rising from the ruins with the destruction of civilization as anyone worth his fair-trade espresso defines it.

Or else people are just fixated on The Planet of the Apes.

However, I got the biggest charge out of modern farmer’s headline. Because, in the end…

Boys will be idiots

It’s been a weird week or so in the world of men and women in the, um, world. I know I’m not always the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I’m a little befuddled by some recent news reports out of the United Nations.

It seems that Iceland and Suriname have announced that they’re hosting a conference on gender equality, to be held in January 2015. 

For men only.

Okay, look—you know I’m not making that up, don’t you?

No, no—Iceland’s Foreign Minister Gunnar Bragi said, “We want to bring men and boys to the table on gender equality in a positive way.” He described it as a “Barbershop conference”, and promised “a unique conference, as it will be the first time at the United Nations that we bring together only men leaders to discuss gender equality.”

Well, where to start? Where to start?

What, exactly, does “in a positive way” mean in this context? And by including only men (and boys—I wonder a little about that), is the implication that women (much less girls) sitting around the metaphorical gender equality table would somehow produce something less than positive? Negative, even?

Is “barbershop” some new code word for “XY only”? Are they planning on breaking out into song, or trimming a little off the sides?

I can’t find where they say this anywhere, but are they afraid that if they let women in, they might have expectations of, you know, contributing to the discussion; put forward ideas, recount experiences, that sort of thing? Does that really make world leaders’ blood run cold?

Is the concern that with women in attendance the men (and boys) might not get a word in edgewise, because you know those gals can gab? Or that any attempts at condescension and other forms of testosterone-powered bullshit will be driven from the stage by shrill catcalls?

Perhaps they feel that they need to get their Y-chromosome stories in synch for when they emerge smiling through the conclave's white smoke to dictate to everyone in the world what gender equality looks like, and how and when it will be achieved? Or they just think that 50 percent of the population shouldn’t worry its pretty little head about this stuff because they have it in (strong, male) hand?

And, P.S. What’s up with Suriname being one of the sponsors? I mean, I understand why Saudi Arabia might not be leading the charge on this one; or India; or Serbia. I’m just…Suriname?

Finally—a global conference on gender equality without one of the genders present? And not only conceiving it, but announcing it with such panache, like you’re expecting nothing but kudos for the idea? Guys—what were you thinking? Could you possibly—any way at all—have been using the wrong head for this one?

Was there no female around—mother, mistress, manicurist, money manager—you could have run this by; ask, “So whaddaya think, Babycakes—cool, huh?” Or did you get that far and then just ignored the incredulous guffaws that ensued?

Well, evidently the reaction from pretty much anyone with three synapses firing in sequence has got our Suriname and Icelandic menfolk to backpedal with some degree of urgency. They have graciously condescended to amend their original plans to include allowing women (no mention of girls) to attend the conference on gender equality. Although not all the meetings.

Of course, it may just be that they were suddenly struck by the horrified realization that with nothing but males at a conference, there’ll be no one to fetch the coffees. It’s stuff like that that prods some men to action, sad to say

Really mean streets

Y’all know how I like to keep up on matters ophidian, wherever in the world they might be or whatever the season. In a pinch, I’ll go with performing crocodiles.

And—as you know—I do not make any of this stuff up.

And it’s my own home town, the great city of Los Angeles that gives me the most recent adventure, because it seems that an albino cobra went on the lam for four days, before it was taken into custody by authorities.

Four days, folks. Four long, hot and anxious days.

(The snake might look something like this.)

It turns out, according to killjoy WaPo, that this particular serpent isn’t so much albino as leucistic (meaning it lacks pigment, but has blue eyes instead of pink). 

However, I don’t believe you’d think that particular hair worth splitting if you came across the cobra in question on your way home from your gang initiation or the medical marijuana dispensary.

Which exit?

This story came around recently—about the motel in New Jersey where a body lay undiscovered and undisturbed for five years… Pretty gripping, really, and a testament to the power of Febreze.

Sadly, it’s a hoax, people. Although I admit that the New Jersey setting gave it quite the weight of verisimilitude.

Apparently I need to file Empire News along with The Onion when it comes to weird Internet stuff. The challenge, as always, is that even though these sites make up their “news”, I’m pretty sure that somewhere, somehow, everything they write about is in fact happening in some form or another.

Especially in New Jersey.

Counting croc

You know, you just don’t come across stories like this one every day. And thank God for that—both for animal welfare and so we don’t get so used to really weird stuff that we fail to enjoy it properly.

It starts out like this:

A crocodile and an accountant get on a bus…

No, really—it seems that there’s this Russian circus, which was travelling…somewhere in Northern Russia last week. And evidently (for possibly some cost-saving reasons, or I don't know, maybe some Russian circus tradition), at least one “performing” crocodile, named Fedya, and one accountant, unnamed, were in a bus. The same bus. And the accountant, at least, was not wearing her seatbelt.

So, when the bus hit a pothole, well, as the Moscow Times reported, “a dangerous reptile sustained injuries after being squashed by a portly circus accountant”.

(And, seriously—most journalists have been waiting their entire careers to have a chance to use that line.)

It seems that Fedya, who is 6’5”, with green eyes and a big, crowd-pleasing smile, sustained an “accidental full body slam” from the accountant, who’s reported as weighing 120 kg, no other physical description. (And yes, I made that up about the eyes and smile; but the crocodile is reported at 2m in length.)

According to the UPI report, “The animal vomited for several hours after it was crushed by a 264-pound accountant.” Well—as you do.

Fedya was examined by a veterinarian and excused from performance duty for a few days after his traumatic assault. The accountant—oh, hell, I’ll call her Masha—suffered cuts and bruises, and was given an official Russian circus ticking off for not wearing her seatbelt.

Now I have some questions. You knew I would.

Like: what’s up with the crocodile (by all accounts “a dangerous reptile”) being on a bus with Masha? Was the dangerous reptile bus full? Was his transport cage in the shop? And where was Fedya’s human performer partner? And why wasn’t he (Fedya) wearing a seatbelt?

By the way—what the hell does a “performing crocodile” actually do? In a circus, I mean.

And where, exactly, do you put a 6’5” crocodile on a bus? I’m thinking that even if you had those flat-bed seats like on trans-oceanic flights, a crocodile would kind of flop over the edges. Plus, you’d never get him to put his tray-table back into the upright position.

Also—it seems to me that if I were that bus driver, and I knew there was a 2-meter-long crocodile unsecured somewhere in the bus behind me, I’d have a really, really hard time concentrating on the road. So that whole bus-meets-pothole situation was just an accident waiting to happen.

Finally—how do they know that Masha weighs 120 kg? If they took that from her driver’s license, she lied. And Fedya probably lied about his length, too.

Cram it, clowny

Let me begin by unequivocally stating my neutrality on the issue of clowns. I find them neither creepy nor amusing.

Well, okay—I must specify: by “clowns” in this context I’m referring to the sort who dress in baggier clothes than high school boys, wear garish polystyrene hair and generally sport big, round red noses. Not CEOs or Congress. Those clowns are both creepy and extremely dangerous.

Regardless, apparently there’s an imminent shortage of the variety not wearing $2500 suits. NPR reports that the old ones are fading away, retiring, slap-foot walking into the sunset, whatever; while there seems to be a dearth of youngsters looking to run away and join the circus.

The World Clown Association membership is down by 1000 from 3500 in 2014, and most of the remaining members are over 40. Damn.

On the up side, people are still applying to Ringling Bros Clown college, although if they’re only training 14 at a whack, I’m thinking there’s some kind of Darwinian elimination process going on here.

We’ll just have to see how this story, uh, plays out, won’t we?

The truth about cats and dogs

I really got a giggle out of this research undertaken at the University of Tokyo: it seems (after an eight-month study of 20 animals) that cats actually do recognize their, uh, owner’s voices when they call. But they just don’t care.

The astounding thing about this study is that anyone felt the need to conduct it. All you’d have to do is ask a couple of feline-servants, and we’d have told you. For nothing.

Actually, I believe that Gary Larson nailed the whole cats/dogs vocal recognition thing 30 years ago. Tokyo researchers—I give you this for nothing, too.

Dunk or no--what's the done thing?

Well, alrighty then—for today’s Friday frolic, I’m giving you the social story of the week: the posting on Mumsnet headed, “Do you dunk your penis?”

And, no—I am not making this up.

First of all, I didn’t even know Mumsnet existed until something came across my Twitter feed. Oddly—only my blog account; the folks in Big Data, Enterprise SaaS, Social Media advice & the like appear to have missed it.

(But speaking of Big Data—evidently there was so much traffic to the thread that it crashed the Mumsnet servers. Too much of a good thing, it seems.)

Anyhow—the user named Sara Crewe described her post-sex hygiene arrangements, for herself and her partner, and then asked if anyone else didn’t do the same thing. Anyone? Anyone at all?

Because, “apparently our penis beaker is strange and not the done thing.”

Oh, yeah—Miss Manners was on local PBS radio station earlier this week, taking listeners’ calls on how to handle (um) various situations. I dearly wish someone had phoned in with this one.

Except I’d probably have driven into a tree.

Pas de Maru, Pt. 3

You may not be aware of this but there was an Internet cat video festival last month. People actually gathered at the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis to watch a curated collection of videos that people took of their cats and posted to the Web.

Then they voted on the “best cat video”.

While I’m sure it was as tough to decide amongst all the submissions as it is for AMPAS members to vote on the Best Picture Oscar, the Golden Kitty award went to…Henri, le chat existential.

(Maru was in the running, but his film was more of a live short, as opposed to the film noir that Henri’s tale represents.)

In case you’ve forgotten about Henri since I last posted about him, here’s the winning vid:

You can find some of the also-rans here. What do you think; did the people choose wisely?

Good, clean fun...

Okay, another example of how the phrase "men are idiots" is redundant: three 20-year-olds in a Vancouver, B.C., suburb found themselves in the dark, drunk and by a self-serve car wash. Apparently they did have quarters, so they stripped stitch-stark naked, piled onto a convenient shopping cart and sent themselves through.

Evidently it was what you'd call a sobering experience.

But I'm betting we'll now be awash in similar reports from all over the world--wherever there are self-service car washes, liquor and 20-year-old males.

Darkness at noon, Part 2

You should not be surprised to hear that Netizens in droves turned out to step into Wednesday’s Great Wikipedia Blackout void—and churned out masses of fake facts on Twitter.

Some of my favorites:

“Ferrets are a legume.”

“Pluto is no longer a planet due to copyright claims from the Disney Corporation.”

The exceedingly hopeful and time-bending “Arsenal has won the Champions League 8 times in the last 6 years.”

“The Keystone XL Pipeline is the 2^nd-largest size for this project. The others were Keystone S. M, L and XXL.”

“Time travel was invented next Thursday.”

“PIPA is SOPA’s prettier younger sister and gets all the attention on her big day.”

“In 1983 Sweden changed the colours of their flag to blue and yellow after the phenomenal success of the IKEA brand.”

This one is just plain wrong, though: “Lego is a Dutch word meaning ‘lost in a vacuum cleaner’” It’s actually a Danish word meaning “lost in a vacuum cleaner”. Or else “lost in your dog’s digestive tract.” Maybe both.

Order in the court

As another indicator that the court system is as much about idiocy as justice, here’s the story of a convicted kidnapper suing his hostage victims for breach of contract. Jesse Dimmick is claiming that Jared and Lindsay Rowley broke their promise to hide him as he was fleeing police.

The alleged promise was made while Dimmick was holding a gun, and he’s seeking damages of $235,000.

Plus legal fees, I’m betting.

Dimmick, BTW, is serving an 11-year sentence for that particular incident, so there’s no legal doubt that he was committing a felony at gunpoint at the time of his eliciting the purported oral agreement.

File it under “America, gonif!”

Love & crime in Colorado

File this under the heading of “you just can’t make this stuff up”: A Colorado Springs man (& I use the adult-male designator loosely) sought help from the police when his online & offline love lives collided at oh-dark-thirty Wednesday night.

His wife got home earlier than he’d expected & when his Craigslist conquest showed up for their assignation, Kevin Gaylor, 24, resolved his dilemma by calling 911 & reporting the girlfriend as an armed intruder.

Once the cops figured out what was happening, they charged Gaylor with misdemeanor false reporting of a crime. & I hope they advised the incipient paramour to Google anyone she meets on Craigslist to see if there's a spouse lurking about. 

There are a couple of things that bother me about this story:

The unnamed college student who appeared for an 0300 date (& what’s up with that, I wonder?) was reportedly driven there by some guy. & evidently he wasn’t her father.

Uh, has dating changed so thoroughly that you have a male friend drive you to your hookups? Or is it the whole Craigslist I-could-be-meeting-up-with-a-serial-killer thing?

& has the concept of meeting someone for coffee for the first date not made it to Colorado Springs?

The other thing that is a serious concern is this: is this Gaylor bloke procreating? If so, God help us.

Flying wonders down under

As though commercial flight wasn’t harrowing enough, two antipodean airlines are pushing the envelope: Qantas features John Travolta dressed as a pilot to bookend their safety announcement video.

And Air New Zealand has tarted up their video with Richard Simmons in sequins.

Travolta seems superfluous; Simmons is just plain OTT. (And, BTW—watch the ANZ video all the way to the end.)

So no change there.

Still—I’m wondering why the Aussies and Kiwis felt the need to import talent for these announcements. Haven’t they got enough home-grown loop-the-loops of their own?