I Read the News Today...Oh Shit...

I like going to the main page of Yahoo! news, where they display all the biggest headlines of the day, organized by section. It's a good way to get an idea of what's happening all over the Web without having to actually read anything. And I find that it's a good way to gauge what's being read and discussed, more than just jumping around between blogs and news sites at random.

Today, there are a number of articles on there that warrant discussion, so I figured I'd just link to the whole page.

Peter Jennings is Dead

The first sentence of the Associated Press' Peter Jennings obit refers to him as "suave." I don't know if he was suave exactly. I'd have probably gone with "avuncular." Suave, I don't know...news anchors aren't really suave. They speak with authority, they're proper, and they're well-groomed and soft-spoken, but none of them, Jennings included, struck me as particularly suave characters. If Cary Grant and Peter Jennings were both coming on to some woman at a bar, she probably wouldn't end up going home with Peter Jennings.

She'd probably end up dazed the next morning in the alley behind the bar with missing panties and an autographed Grant 8x10. Now that's suave!

(By the way, no offense to Peter Jennings, who was probably a good guy.)

Bros Before Hos

According to London's Daily Mail, the male brain has a much easier time understanding male voices than female voices. Seriously.

Men deciphered female voices using the auditory part of the brain that processes music, while male voices engaged a simpler mechanism, it said.

The Mail quoted researcher Michael Hunter as saying, "The female voice is actually more complex than the male voice, due to differences in the size and shape of the vocal cords and larynx between men and women, and also due to women having greater natural 'melody' in their voices.

From an evolutionary standpoint, this is kind of interesting. If the men who are alive right now have brains that don't easily hear women's voices, and natural selection chooses the most fit men for survival, then it almost seems like Nature doesn't want men to listen to women.

Now, when it comes to female stand-up comedians, I'd say yes, it seems ideal to not be able to understand what's being said. But to not understand women at all? That makes it easier to mate and pass on your genes for another generation? Interesting...

An Army of One...Hundred Thousand

Lots of lots of angry Muslims living all around the world are forming their own "local" branches of al-Qaida. Neat! It's like a reverse Neighborhood Watch; instead of old ladies spying on the Arabs who live a few doors down, it's the young Arabs who live a few doors down actually planning to blow up the old lady!

I say, good for them. It's important to get involved in local government.

With its founding fathers in hiding, and dozens of key operatives under watch, al-Qaida has changed. No longer considered capable of large transnational attacks, it is taking advantage of people who don't have to cross borders, receive cash from abroad or engage in other international transactions that might alert authorities, said Brian Jenkins, a senior adviser to the president of the Rand Corp.

"We are now dealing with many little al-Qaidas with the potential of neighborhood al-Qaidas," Jenkins said. "They may not be able to carry out specialized operations ... but they can still operate at a lethal level."

I remember, as a child, hanging out at the neighborhood al-Qaida. You know, those were the good old days, when people still did things together, dammit. We didn't just sit around watching the dang TV all night like a bunch of zombies. We made our own fun, like flying a kite or writing scary stories or planning nuclear attacks inside major Western cities.

Bush Administration Introduces New Line of Comforting Bullshit

Here's Cunnilingus Rice:

"It's a lot easier to see the violence and suicide bombing than to see the rather quiet political progress that's going on in parallel," Rice said.

"If you think about how to defeat an insurgency, you defeat it not just militarily but politically," she said, adding that she believes the insurgents are "losing steam" politically.

Wait, wait, wait...They're getting the order wrong. The insurgency is supposed to start losing steam before we turn the corner, not after, and then we should have hit the home stretch. See, Dick Cheney said that we've turned the corner months ago, and Condoleeza Rice says that the insurgency has just now started to lose steam politically.

Now I'm all confused. It's almost like they're just making arbitrary, optimistic progress reports from time to time that aren't based on any real information whatsoever.

Give Nigerians Your Bank Account Number! Right Now!

A fascinating story on why Nigeria has become the Internet scam capital of the world.

English is the nation's official language, it is Africa's most populated nation and 1/4 of all college graduates in the country are unemployed. So you get guys who can communicate with dumb Americans, who know a little something about the Internet, who are pretty smart and who can't find any actual job.

And that's why every day I get lucrative offers from Nigerian "bankers" in my Inbox. Thanks, American and European trade policies which cause crippling Third World unemployment rates!

Where the White Women At?

Greta van Susteren has the audacity to defend her non-stop "Missing Aruba White Girl" coverage.

Common sense is all, "Hey, one missing white girl in Aruba is not news, even if she is kind of hot."

And Greta's all, "Hey, I just report on what the people want to hear, and I even beat Bill O'Reilly this week!"

And common sense is all, "But Greta, the news isn't just about finding some inane story that inspired morbid curiosity in a lot of Americans. It's about disseminating important information to the public that would be otherwise unavailable."

And Greta's all, "Information doesn't play well to my demographic. Cute teens named Natalee do."

Top One List of the Stupidest Polls of All Time

#1. Uncut Magazine's 100 movies, songs, TV shows and books that Changed the World.

What? So 100 things that changed the world, ever. Wow. Hard list. I mean, books that changed the world! So many choices! Shakespeare's Folio, The Bible, "Origin of Species," "Wealth of Nations," "The Feminine Mystique," "The Autobiography of Malcolm X."

And movies! I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang helped to end the use of chain gangs in the South. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner tried to teach an entire generation about tolerance. The Blackboard Jungle depicted harsh life at an inner-city school for the first time on screen and was the first movie to feature a rock song on the soundtrack ("Rock Around the Clock").

I mean, it's hard to even compare products from all of these forms together in one list, but whatever, you could still come up with some interesting choices.

So what's #1? Of all time, the 1 song, book, movie or show that changed the world?

Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone."

Okay, I love Bob Dylan, it's a great timeless iconic song, and I'm sure it's here to represent Dylan's combination of traditional folk music with rock and roll.

But, come the fuck on, people. It changed the world more than any book ever written? Are you mental?

I mean, even if you confine the list to the 20th Century, which isn't specified but would really help narrow things down, I can think of 10 more important books. It wouldn't even be hard.

At least Dylan's song "Hurricane" actually helped a guy get released from jail! That's more significant in terms of "changing the world" than bridging the gulf between two musical genres, right?

So #2, #2 has to be "Interpretation of Dreams," right? Or Citizen Kane, right?

Nope. #2 is Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel."

Are you fucking shitting me? This is ridiculous.

Ex-Beatle McCartney picked "Heartbreak Hotel" as his number one choice.

"It's the way (Presley) sings it as if he is singing from the depths of hell," McCartney said. "His phrasing, use of echo, it's all so beautiful. Musically, it's perfect."

I...I mean...I'm dumbfounded. Were these people even told the concept of the list? It's not "Favorite Song" or "Song With the Coolest Echo Effect." It's Thing That Changed the Goddamn World.

"Heartbreak Hotel" did not change the world. It helped introduce the world to a cute Southern guy who liked to gyrate his hips, eat fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches and shoot at TV's.

"Beyond Good and Evil," that shit changed the world. Fucking Uncut Magazine. Morons.

Woman Insists on Hating the Player

A 22 year old woman is player hating on a 55 year old business executive who sexually molested her on an airplane.

Check out this guy. He's smooth. So he waits for the girl he's seated next to to fall asleep, then he puts a blanket over her lap, then he unzips her pants and starts fiddling around with her genitals.

Nice!

"The woman immediately pulled Jahagirdar's hand from her pants and fled to the rear of the aircraft where she reported the assault to the flight crew," it said.

The crew alerted four U.S. Secret Service Agents who were on board the flight, returning from an assignment in Texas.

As good as that stuff is, the story gets even better.

The plane was met by state police in Boston but Jahagirdar briefly tried to escape by trying to flee in the walkway between the plane and the airport.

Skin cells taken from Jahagirdar, an Arizona man whom authorities said did not know the woman, showed a "significant quantity of the victim's DNA was present on his hands" after the incident, the statement said.

He tried to flee in the walkway between the plane and the airport! Where was he going to go? That's probably the stupidest place to attempt to flee in the world. It's this narrow little hallway, you idiot.

Plus, I love that they had to corroborate her story with DNA evidence. The guy gets totally busted - some girl catches him with his hand inside her pants - and he still denies he was doing anything. They have to go get lab results back.