1,000 Points of Stupid, Part One

Before I begin, I'd just like to say that this massive, 3-part, superrant stems from the simple fact that I was absolutely deluged with silliness over the last few days, without a long enough gap in the goofball news to take the time to blog any of it. Finally, I have a bit of a break, so I'm just going to kind of regurgitate the last couple of days' worth of weird news at you, all at once and in no particular order.

Ready?

Good. Take a deep breath, and click.

First, there was iTunes. They sold music, and it was good. Well, decent. Well...
...But I digress. Someone had the brilliant idea to start selling TV shows over iTunes, and Steve Jobs liked it.
And then, CBS said "Suck it, Apple." Steve Jobs was not happy. They grumbled, and swore dire retribution. CBS, in a rare case of remorse, reversed their position overnight. Good backbone, CBS! Way to stand behind your web design team like you stand behind your reporters!

Science predicts that cats and dogs are not enough; it may well rain fish and pink frogs, too. That is all.

What do you do if you go to an amusement park in Hong Kong on vacation, and it's sold out for 8 straight days? Why, throw your kids over the wall into the park, of course! Why didn't I think of this?!?
Oh, yeah, it's because if I had any kids, I would love them enough to want to AVOID leaving them on their own inside an amusement park for any length of time. But maybe that's just me.

According to Really Important Phone Polls, the U. S. is "the second biggest bummer in the world." Iran is first - nukes + fanatics = scary - and Russia is third - I guess people are just getting tired of hearing about their Mafia problems. China is fourth, for reasons that should be immediately apparent, but oddly North Korea isn't in the top ten at all, despite the whole previously mentioned nukes and fanatics thing. Go figure.

Russian hackers are bragging about having stolen as many as 53,000 credit card numbers from Rhode Island's website. The spokesman for New England Interactive, the company that maintains the state's website, said that it was actually far fewer, maybe only as many as 4,000. No attempt was made to contact the individual cardholders; the state notified the credit card companies, but let the voters swing. Lots of bona fide concern for the constituents, there, RI.

The British Navy apparently doesn't love the record industry, but they do love their sailors these days. The newest warship in the Royal Navy, HMS Daring, comes equipped with a full combat load of the latest technology, and iPod charging stations. Wouldn't want your sailors to run out of juice; they need their badass soundtrack to shoot missiles, and stuff. Nice use of 605 million pounds.

Today marks the day the Kama Sutra computer virus was scheduled to delete everybody's hard drives and ruin their day. Clearly, since you're reading this, it didn't actually happen. This is good, because if it had, you'd have been screwed - Microsoft refused to update their Malicious Software Removal Tool to counter Kama Sutra until the 14th, nearly 2 weeks after the scheduled date for the virus attack to take place. I can't quite decide if this is because Microsoft looked at it a little more realistically than Kaspersky Labs, Symantec, MacAfee, and Panda Software did, or because they just plain didn't give a damn if your computer gets fried, as long as their schedule didn't get disrupted.

Now let me tell you, I know ONE good reason not to fall asleep at work: I don't want to get taken to Turkey. No kidding! This luggage handler at the Saudi airport at Jeddah fell asleep in the cargo hold of a Turkish Airlines plane, which then took off and flew him to Diyarbakir. That's some travel by red line, I tell you.
On arrival, he was hospitalized and treated for pneumonia and hypothermia, because planes fly high, and stuff. He only survived because the crew heard him banging on the walls to get out and turned on the heater for the compartment. Couldn't go let him out, of course, but they could keep him alive so they could laugh at his shivering, "WTF am I?" ass when they landed. That's just plain rude, guys, really.

Japanese people have too much freakin' free time. You think I'm kidding? A radish - yeah, the one they use in salad - started growing out of the sidewalk in the city of Aoi. It was so weird the residents nicknamed the tiny plant Dokonjo Daikon, which translates as "radish with great spirit," or some such. And then...

Imagine their dismay then when one morning, they found the radish had been decapitated.

Yes, do. Imagine how upset they were that a local sidewalk weed got killed. Oh, The Drama! But wait, there's more!

The local town council has since been trying to re-grow the radish from its severed top.
It now hopes to extract its seeds or DNA.
The wilting leaves and shrivelled top of the radish were carefully packed in a cool box and accompanied by a throng of reporters and cameramen, driven to an agricultural research centre.
There, evening news programmes showed white-coated scientists pronouncing gravely on the radish's prognosis.

That's right, they called in the scientists, who harvested its DNA and are trying to regrow it from the severed top. "What the Fuck?" just somehow doesn't seem large enough. But wait, there's more! The friggin' radish has its own website!

I.
Am.
Agog.
This, of course, is the only fitting conclusion to the first part of this little opus, don't you think?