Early this morning, a once in a century event took place. I tried to stay up for it, but I didn’t make it. Did you?!

I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, but for those not in the know, our clocks experienced the following rare event:

01:02:03 04/05/06

Some folks will have to look at that for a minute to figure out the significance. The rest of us will wait for them to “get it”.

…

Ah! See now?! Isn’t that cool? Oh one, oh two, oh three… Twenty one minutes later, a slightly less cool event took place, which I also slept through:

1:23 4/5/6

Some folks say that you can enjoy this again this afternoon, but that doesn’t really count. Every good geek knows that 1 PM is really just 13 o’clock and there’s nothing cool about 13:02:03… Yeah. I’m a geek. Get over it.

Thanks for sharing this amazing second with me. I look forward to sharing 12:34 5/6/7 with you next year!

(Shamelessly scraped from The Sneeze.)

St. Paul City Hall has ordered that a “religious display” of a “cloth Easter bunny” be removed from the building’s lobby. How dare they infringe on my right to worship a comically over sized rabbit and psychedelic chicken embryos. According to the Third Testament of Saint Sponge Bob, we are all required to grovel before the Bunny of the Lord and burn offerings of plastic grass in order to receive our reward of eternal gingivitis.

In the past, St. Paul has banned red poinsettias from the building, because, of course, they symbolize the Holy Order of Red Messianic Shoe Shiners.

According to the article, the city’s Human Rights Director, Tyrone Terrill, demanded that the horrible hare display be removed, although no citizens had complained. Well, this citizen demands the removal of Mr. Terrill. If anything in that City Hall is offensive, it’s him.

Short answer: No.

I remember seeing a picture where some folks tiled their bathroom with those annoying, unsolicited, AOL “Free Trial” CDs. I thought that was funny. But this… This is just sad.

Randypants sent me a link to AOL CD and Tin Collecting. It would be funny if it weren’t true. This guy has a huge wish list, an eBay store, even a book all about collecting “rare” AOL CDs.

This book vividly discusses ways to organize your AOL CD collection and help it grow, the financial worth of rare AOL CDs, codes, packaging and much more. There are over 50 photos that bring to life the allure of these frequently overlooked disks.

“Vividly”?! How can you vividly discuss junk mail? “Financial worth”?!! Dude, seriously. If you pay anyone anything for a junk mail CD, you need to have your bank account taken away. I’d be willing to bet that this guy lives in his mom’s basement.

You’ll notice the price of the book has been “slashed” to $5 (plus $3 S&H). Maybe he’d do better if he sent the book out, free and unsolicited, to everyone in America and then charged them $30 if they read it. It worked for AOL, right?

Do Days of Our Lives and Jerry Springer make you stupid? I always thought so.

Research conducted by Brooklyn College has found a direct correlation between intelligence and day-time TV.

A study of 289 older women without dementia found that those who rated talk shows and soaps as their favorite programs performed more poorly on tests of memory, attention and mental quickness than their peers who cited other types of shows.

The researchers warn that the cause and effect can’t be shown, but that some relationship is certain.

That doesn’t mean that daytime television is a brain drain, they say … it’s not possible to tell whether the programs somehow contribute to cognitive decline or whether women in the early stages of decline gravitate toward those shows

In “day time TV” terms, that means they don’t know if Oprah makes you stupid or if stupid people like Oprah. It’s a thin gray line if you ask me.

Full article.

I love science. I’m the kind of guy who takes comfort in certainty. Two plus two is always four. (Well, unless you’re using a number system that doesn’t include four. Or you’re trying to add incompatible objects. Or you have overloaded the plus operator. Or… oh never mind.)

But it irritates me to no end when scientist tromp all over the beauty of the scientific method with statements that we are supposed to accept as fact, but are based on ridiculous assumptions. Just because you get paid to be a scientist doesn’t make you immune from the scientific method!

We’ve seen this behavior from archeologists, geologists, biologists, ecologists and about ever other “ologist” you can think of. It defies reason that so many of our worlds “smartest” people can be so blind to their own bias and pride that they have become completely unreliable. Can you really trust anything a scientist tells you anymore? I don’t.

The easiest example is “global warming”. We’ve been indoctrinated for over two decades that man’s abuse of technology is going to bring about the end of the world by gradually raising the Earth’s temperature until the sky falls. Okay, not exactly, but something along those lines. I dare say it would be hard to watch 24 hours of news without hearing some nut job mentioning global warming.

However…

A recent study found that less of the sun’s energy is making to the Earth in the last five years (not more), and yet, miraculously, the world’s temperature has remained the roughly unchanged. According to this study, the Earth should be getting colder. How do scientists sum up this article?

“No doubt greenhouse gases are increasing … No doubt that will cause a warming. The question is, ‘Are there other things going on?'”

GAH!! He just finished saying that they can not explain what they’ve observed, but somehow he remains certain that the sky is still falling.

Okay, okay. So, let’s just say the sky is falling. Record hurricanes, droughts, blah blah blah. So the Earth is getting hotter. That would explain why it’s been so hot in Africa this year, right? Oh wait. It’s not hotter in Africa this year?!

No! In fact, for the second year in a row, there has been record snow in the Sahara! SNOW!! IN THE SAHARA!!

So, how is it that scientists are so wrong? Allow me to explain. In the last half century of so, scientist in every field have gotten into the habit of extrapolating. That is to say that they observe an event and then extend that event infinitely into the past or future and make assumptions based on the math.

For instance, scientists have noticed some major earth quakes on the Horn of Africa in the last few years. There are large fissures opening up in the ground. So, a scientist says, “Look! The ground has opened up 100 meters in only a few months. At this rate, Africa will be split in half in only a few thousand years!” WHAT? It would be funny if it weren’t true.

That is equivalent to someone observing a house fly traveling three feet through the air. “Look! That house fly flew three feet in only half a second. That means that in the last year, that same fly has flown 36,000 miles! He must be tired!”

As stupid as that sounds, it is exactly what we are being taught. Global warming, evolution, archeological dating, and pretty much our entire understanding of astronomy are all based on these kinds of retarded extrapolation. And you and I are expected to swallow it with a smile. Well, excuse me, but I don’t have much of a stomach for poo. Do you?

Now, I loves me some good food, especially cake and cookies. But even a gastronome like me has to draw the line somewhere. And THIS is waaaay past my line.

Kitty Litter Cake

Notes:
This is a fun cake! It might look gross, but it does taste good!

Ingredients:
1 (18 oz.) box spice or german chocolate cake mix
1 (18 oz.) box white cake mix
1 pkg. white sandwich cookies
1 large box vanilla instant pudding mix
12 small tootsie rolls
1 litter box (preferably a NEW one!)
1 plastic scoop
green food coloring

Blech! Just the thought of cat poo cake makes me want to uneat my cheerios.

(Flagrantly filched from The Sneeze.)

A while back, I posted about Richard Hatch, the Survivor contestant in a heap of trouble over his financial misdeeds. The verdict is in. Hatch was found guilty on all counts of tax evation, but was let off the hook for the fraud charges. His defense: Hatch was the “world’s worst bookkeeper” and never meant to do anything wrong. Pshyeah right. And monkeys might fly out of my butt.

Hatch faces a maximum sentence of 13 years in prison and a fine of $600,000. Read more details.

Just yesterday I mentioned Mayor Ray Nagin’s “chocolate city” comment. Now “Willy Nagin” is an international super star. T-Shirts featuring Nagin’s face photo-chopped into a Willy Wonka logo have been selling like made and the company producing them (ImNotChocolate.com) says they’ve received orders from as far away as Malaysia and Norway.

In related news, Willy Wonka himself has announced plans to run for mayor of New Orleans. Read the double-scoop here. (Note to bitter leftists: This last part was what you call “satire”.)

Today’s “too stupid to be real” news story comes to us from none other that “The Donald”.

Now, pardon me, but anyone who is so pompous as to allow their name to be used as a noun does not deserve any fame, nor attention, but that’s beside the point.

In a recent book, Timothy L. O’Brien claims that Trump’s net worth is not, as “The Donald” purports, in the billions. Rather it is in the mere millions. “The Donald” has taken issue with this claim and sued O’Brien and the New York Times (for which O’Brien works) for defamation of character. (Again, I’m not sure there is much character left to assassinate, but that’s be side the point.)

“The Donald” is asking for five billion dollars in damages. Yes, billion with a “B”. Uhhh… Yeah.

So, basically, “The Donald” is saying, “Nuh uh! I am too a billionaire. And just to prove it, I’m going to make you give me enough money to make be one if I wasn’t one already. But I am. So there. And my dad can beat up your dad too!”

Like I said, for character assassination charge to stick, they’re going to have to prove that he had any character to begin with. But that’s beside the point.

Oh! I am in 80’s Geek heaven. I just found RetroJunk.com which hosts all sorts of old TV clips and movie trailers from the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.

They even have the ORIGINAL Mrs. Fletcher!!

Now, I’ve openly admitted my Monkishness. At this very moment, there is a bottle of Purell hand sanitizer on my desk next to my monitor. So it should be no surprise that I can get a little grossed out by my keyboard and mouse.

Everybody’s mouse and keyboard get a little gross from time to time. If you still have a ball style mouse, you know that you have to pop it open now and then and scrape the crud off of the wheels inside. (You DO clean your mouse, DON’t YOU?!) Once in a while, while I’m applying sanitizer to my hands, I’ll run my hands across the keys on my keyboard hoping that I’ll kill at least some of the nastiness on the surface of the keys. But when I catch a glimpse of the dust and crumbs underneath, or even worse, when there’s some kind of gook building up on the side of a key, I just get grossed out.

Well, it turns out that my freakish phobia is justified! Yes! You keyboard is a death trap after all. I was RIGHT!

According to this article posted on Slashdot, a Swedish magazine commissioned a study of the average computer keyboard. They found 33,000 bacteria per square centimeter. I repeat: 33,000 bacteria PER KEY!! Just to put that into perspective, the average toilet seat has about 130 bacteria per square centimeter. That means that the “J” key upon which your index finger is currently resting probably has two hundred and fifty times more bacteria on it as the same surface area of the toilet seat on which your little brother pees every day.

Think about that the next time you lick that little bit of french-fry salt off that same finger tip!!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go soak my fingers in undiluted bleach until they turn pasty white and wrinkly.