What Will They Do At The Side Of The Highway Next?

I can't help it if he took a liking to me!

Jailing him, Judge Alistair McCallum told Hoyle "Never before in my time at the bar or on the bench have I ever had to deal with somebody who voluntarily allowed himself to be buggered by a dog on the public highway. Frankly it is beyond most of our comprehension. It is an absolutely disgusting thing for members of the public to have to witness.

That's right, folks, this guy had sex with a dog by the side of the road. Some people have too much free time, that's all there is to it.


Apparently, it's not just a myth: getting plastered is part of the Australian lifestyle. Or, at least, that's what the Aussies think:

The National Drug and Alcohol Research Council study of 1,500 Australians found that some 58 percent of people agreed that sometimes having too much to drink was "simply part of the Australian way of life."

In other news, I am packing my bags and moving to Oz.

Want to hear the worst excuse ever from an executive? Try this one on for size: after posting an unrecedented 14 million dollar loss in the third quarter this year, Overstock.com 's president, Patrick Byrne, wrote a letter explaining the problem to investors. he said:

My bad.

No kidding. Thankfully for said investors, he's been removed. About time, too; in the meantime, they've gained a reputation as one of the worst online retailers in the world, just look here.

In ever-so-useful-science news, researchers are now saying they may have figured out how your brain tells time. Our polls suggest the not-so-surprising response, that no-one gives a crap about this.

Falling under the Ok, God Really DOES Hate You category, a Baptist minister got electrocuted during a baptism. In a stroke of genius, he was standing in water, playing with electrical equipment, when all of a sudden, BOOM!

All I could see was this real bright light...

I'm guessing the use of a microphone was God's way of making sure he got the message. Hah.
Maybe He wanted to make sure the audience heard him loud and clear. Heh.
...Or maybe it was just because he was indoors, and God didn't want to miss.

The Canadians are invading Mars. No, I mean it! Apropos of nothing, I wish John Candy were still around. He'd know what to do about this. Or, should I say aboot?
Yes. That was a Canadian joke. Deal with it, eh?

Irish strippers are supporting the peace process. How? By changing the uniform they wiggle out of from the Royal Ulster Constabulary uniform to the uniform of the Police Service Of Northern Ireland. Not, I suspect, that this makes much difference to the men who pay to look at the dancers; I cannot imagine getting upset by the uniform the stripper is shortly going to leave in a wrinkled mess on the floor, when you could be looking at a naked woman, but who knows? When you do some of the things the Irish have traditionally done for entertainment, maybe the clothing the stripper gets out of is actually of some political value to you. Especially before the barflies realize that they're strippers, not cops:

'It's really funny when they walk into a bar. They think they are being raided,' he said. Once, however, the fans of his strippers realise it's not the real PSNI, they relax, Dowey added. 'In fact, they love it. It doesn't matter what part of the country we're in. The stauncher the area, whether it's Catholic or Protestant, the better the response. We're really popular in Crossmaglen.'

Just a word of warning, Mr. Dowey: it's all fun and games until someone tells the Provos.

M. Night Shyamalan, whose name you may recognize as that of the director of The Sixth Sense and Signs, thinks that releasing movies on DVD at the same time as in the theater will put all the theaters in America out of business. I mean, after all, why watch a movie on a 50-foot screen with surround sound, when you could watch it at home on your 20-inch TV in mono? I ask you! (Note to Mr. Shyamalan: some of us are poor, and can't afford huge home entertainment centers. Really, watching a movie for $8 may not happen every weekend, but it sure beats $2000 for a big screen, surround sound kit, entertainment center, and DVD player, not to mention the movie itself. Just a thought.)

Yet another trainwreck from Microsoft: DRM that "protects" legally-purchased music and video content may prevent you from performing hardware upgrades in a fashion similar to that of Windows Product Activation. Just beware of Windows Update right now:

Microsoft's DRM also has another recent issue in that the installation of Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005 may cause DRM protected content to no longer play, since this rollup updates the OS's DRM. So far they are still working on the problem and the only work around is to recover the licenses as with a hardware change and that assumes the user made a license backup before installing the Update Rollup 2.

That's right, update your OS and watch you music collection vanish without a trace. When are people going to learn that this DRM nightmare is going to destroy the music and movie industries? Probably, at a guess, around the time that huge, massive failures of newly purchased products begin showing up... which will be right around the time that Microsoft releases Windows Vista.

I can't wait for the day my computer doesn't "trust" your computer and we, therefore, cannot play online games together, visit the same websites, use the same messenger services, watch the same video clips, listen to the same music, or even send each other office documents through email until you completely upgrade both your computer hardware and your OS for a cost of several thousand dollars! Whoopee!
(You think I'm kidding? Read some of Microsoft's documentation on their "trusted computing" concept for Windows Vista. It's on their website.)