Home of the Soul Cookie

Which is worse: Using people as unwitting lab rats or dropping the f-bomb on TV?

Not so fast… As Rolling Stone reports in a review of a new indecency bill that Bush and the FCC are pushing:

A review of fines levied by other federal agencies suggests that the government may be taking swear words a bit too seriously. If the bill passes the Senate, Bono saying “fucking brilliant” on the air would carry the exact same penalty as illegally testing pesticides on human subjects.

That’s not all.

And for the price of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl, you could cause the wrongful death of an elderly patient in a nursing home and still have enough money left to create dangerous mishaps at two nuclear reactors. (Actually, you might be able to afford four “nuke malfunctions”: The biggest fine levied by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last year was only $60,000.)

Say it with me: PER-SPEC-TIVE.
Now go find some, people!

[via]

This sucks.

It’s not bad enough that the glimmer of hope that JMS could run a new Trek show of his own dashed soon thereafter by circumstance (as Noelle documented in her blog), but now I find out that the plans for a Babylon 5 movie have fallen through.

Read More…

And on a lighter note, I just discovered that the polo shirt I’ve been wearing (all day) has been inside out (all day).

I am sofa king we Todd ed.

Man Cleared to Remove Wife’s Feeding Tube

PINELLAS PARK, Fla. – A judge gave Terri Schiavo’s husband permission to remove the brain-damaged woman’s feeding tube in three weeks, handing him a victory in his effort to carry out what he says were his wife’s wishes not to be kept alive artificially.

Good.

Let me go on record now: If I’m ever completely vegetative, with no reasonable chance of ever coming out of it, don’t keep me hooked up to the machines. Keep me from being a brain-dead, artificially-autonomic lump of flesh in some hospice somewhere.

If I’m not coming back, don’t prevent me from moving on.

In the meantime, the woman’s parents, who want her kept alive, are expected to ask another court to block the order from taking effect.

The judge wrote that he was no longer comfortable granting delays in the long-running family feud, which has been going on for nearly seven years and has been waged in every level of Florida’s court system. He said the case must end.

Of course, no story even parenthetically about assisted suicide would be complete without the Catholic Church weighing in:

“If Mr. Schiavo legally succeeded in provoking the death of his wife, this would not only be tragic in itself, but it would be a serious step toward legally approving euthanasia in the United States,” Cardinal Renato Martino, the head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, told Vatican Radio on Thursday.

Glad to see Those Who Know What’s Best For Us hard at work.

Then again, this is the church whose leader, in his recent pre-tracheotomy days, compared abortion to the Holocaust.

“If you have a problem,
if no one else can help, and
if you can find them,
maybe you can hire
the A-Team.”

…on Craigslist.

[via Fark]

So what happens if you find your arrest for meth possession a front page story on the local newspaper?

One man’s solution was to go around town and buy up all the copies of the paper.

Jack William Pacheco has more copies of this week’s edition of The Chowchilla News than he’ll ever need. … Pacheco estimated that he bought 500 to 600 copies of The Chowchilla News from the newspaper’s office, gas stations, convenience stores and a coin-operated news rack.

A successful CYA of a magnitude most of us could only dream about? Wait, it gets better.

But 500 more copies will be printed and available today.

“We’ve had numerous people come into the office and ask for copies,” said Hank Vander Veen, publisher of the Merced Sun-Star, who also oversees The Chowchilla News. “We need to provide the newspaper to the people who want it.”

[via]

It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these quizzes.

You are Kip!

You love technology,
have an insane craving for nachos,
and can live it up gangsta style.

Peace out!

Which Napoleon Dynamite character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

I heard about a wee plug-in for iTunes called Cover Version. It’s an alternate visualizer that displays the cover art to the track you’re listening to, either flat, flag-wave-y, or 3d-cube-y.

It’s pretty neat, though I admit to having turned it off already (it was making the drop shadows in Firefox’s menus flicker).

Yay!

Whedon and Cassaday announced at the Serenity panel [at WonderCon this past weekend] that they will stick around for another year of Astonishing X-Men. Whedon said that after issue #12 ships, there will be a brief respite, followed by another 12-issues by Whedon/Cassaday. This will be capped off by Giant-Size Astonishing X-Men Annual #1 as Whedon called it.

Newsarama has the skinny.