My friend Stephanie has some things to say about her Kaldi Cafe and the Pomplemoose Lodge & Social Club, and she wants you to know if’n you live in Houston.

Somebody’s figured out an amusing use for televangelists, brothers and sisters, and it makes my soul sing. Can I get an amen?

Especially in light of this, which up to now I was sure was a sign of the Apocalypse.

UPDATE: The original link went away pretty quickly, but this one seems more solid. In brief, Snoop Dogg has kicked gin, juice, and pot. Which is sorta like Barry White becoming celibate, but whatever.

“Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt!“

I have a well-documented thing for certain rear-engine air-cooled German cars, so it’s no surprise that I find this to be an abomination. Well, to be honest, this is much, much worse. You may shriek in horror now.

Leonard Nimoy sings about hobbits. No, really.

The folks at Soul Train are assholes.

Actually, there’s more to it than that. A fifteen-year-old California high school student took issue with their choice for their annual lady-of-soul award, viewing Ashanti as a less worthy candidate than his favorite contender, India.Arie. So, like any teen with time on his hands, he started a petition at PetitionOnline.com and circulated it to his friends, figuring at most he’d get 100 or so signatures.

Well, it got more interesting than that. He got more than ten thousand. Soul Train was unaccountably threatened by this act, and their webmaster sent the kid an abusive email for daring to question their judgement. Furthermore, they posted said mail on their site (you’ll have to go to the kid’s site to see screenshots of it), though eventually they removed it in favor of the two diatribes currently on their front page — which include references to “white-owned BET,” apparently their windmill du jour, as well as commentary about how anyone has time to organize petitions in a post-9/11 world (presumably, though, finding time to honor artists in the first place is Just Fine for any Red-Blooded, Soul-Train-Loyal American). Additionally, they cast aspersions on this kid based on his “foreign-sounding” name, and seem to view his opinions as meritless since he’s not black. What the Fuck?

Wow. Way to go, Soul Train! For these actions — i.e., having a very silly and very public fit because a FIFTEEN YEAR OLD disagreed with you — we present you with the first annual NoGators Award for Shockingly Stupid Corporate Behavior! Don Cornelius, come (get?) on down!

Gone crazy? Change your name and create your own community, population 1.

So should you. Especially Rick.

Ladies and gentlemen (and Tom), it is the distinct pleasure of NoGators Internet Entertainment to present the Best Picture Ever.

The courts have ruled that the detainees in Cuba have no rights, at least in terms of any recourse through the US courts for being detained indefinitely without charges or access to counsel or even the formal POW label. This is freakish and bizarre. Bush, et. al., would be screaming bloody murder if some other country held our citizens this way, but it’s suddenly just fine if we do it. So much for rule of law.

Go here to read the NYT editorial that begins:

The Justice Department all but told a federal judge this week to take his legitimate concerns about civil liberties and stuff them in the garbage pail. The Bush administration seems to believe, on no good legal authority, that if it calls citizens combatants in the war on terrorism, it can imprison them indefinitely and deprive them of lawyers. It took this misguided position to a ludicrous extreme on Tuesday, insisting that the federal courts could not review its determinations. This defiance of the courts repudiates two centuries of constitutional law and undermines the very freedoms that President Bush says he is defending in the struggle against terrorism. The courts must firmly reject the White House’s assertion of unchecked powers.

It appears that whole “checks and balances” thing we learned about back in junior high may not apply after all, at least if the Bush Justice Department has its way.

Salon reported today that the Operation TIPS hotline — you know, so you can report suspicious activity by your shifty neighbors after they complain about your stereo? — is actually ringing at America’s Most Wanted. The ACLU has a great press release as well.

Think carefully about this. Fox is involved in domestic, citizen-based spying? I mean, the whole citizen-spying thing was creepy enough, but just exactly what sort of message are we sending by having ratings-whore John Walsh’s televised detective magazine involved?

Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?

In response to the new South African HIV+ muppet, our friends at Modern Humorist have prepared a list of more potential new Sesame Street residents.

Note: Jokes about the third muppet on the list are neither funny nor welcome. Heh.

Don’t Link To Us! is a compendium of brain-dead sites who seem to think we need their permission to link to their sites. Just to be clear, linking happens by including the address of the site you’d like to link to in an HTML link tag, like this:

|*|< a href="http://www.nogators.com/" >NoGators< /a >|*|

which gets rendered on the page like this: NoGators

Links are the essense of the web; free linking is how it got to be the place it is. Promulgating the notion that we need permission to commit this basic act is willfully stupid; these firms deserve our ridicule.

The Sun is reporting that LAX security confiscated the two-inch plastic gun from the G.I. Joe doll a woman was taking back to England for her grandson. Gosh, I feel safe.

Tiny dogs in kimonos. No, really.

It’s good to know that in the fast-paced, herky-jerky world of the Internet, some things stay the same. Ladies and gentlemen, I once again call your attention to a little gem called For Sale By Mental Patient. Enjoy.

Judicial Watch’s process server was threatened with arrest by the Secret Service for attempting to serve Cheney with papers related to its lawsuit over Halliburton’s accounting practices. This is, of course, illegal. And yes, they’ve served at the White House before, but I guess it was different when a Democrat lives there.