Stay Classy, Jerry.

Ticketholders were essentially turned away at Cowboys Stadium after Jones’ bid to set the attendance record resulted in about 400 unusable seats.

The ticketholders were offered a few options, including SRO seats or the ability to watch the game on “big screen TVs”, along with the possibility of refunds of a multiple of the tickets’ face value — which, of course, ignores the fact that many tickets were bought on the secondary market, and that most attendees spent nontrivial money getting to Dallas, staying in hotels, etc.

Nice one, Jerry!

Best Wrestling EVAR: “How is this legal?”

This is the most awesome video you’ll see today: the Osirian Portal completely OWN these poor boys with sekrit Egyptian hypnosis moves!

Doomsday, you’re on notice. I thought your Dyketron 3000 — the Lesbian Robot from the Future! — couldn’t be topped, but it turns out actual wrestling has become even more hilariously absurd than your show. I eagerly await your response.

Oh, Fox. Just when we thought you couldn’t sink lower.

Via MediaMatters:

If you follow the link, you are taken to a page on Fox Nation that claims Obama “misquoted a familiar Bible verse” during his address yesterday:

President Obama misquoted a familiar Bible verse during a faith-based address at the National Prayer Breakfast.

“Those who wait on the Lord will soar on wings like eagles, and they will run and not be weary, and they will walk and not faint,” the president said during a speech to several thousand people at the breakfast.

But the actual passage, from Isaiah 40:31, states: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”

Somewhat ironically, while Fox Nation appears to be positioning themselves as the arbiters of authentic Christianity, they seem unfamiliar with the fact that there is more than one version of the Bible.

Obama was quoting from the New International Version, while Fox Nation was pointing to the King James Version to “debunk” him.

This would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.

Ah, airport security. You never stop being hiliarious

Man puts wife on no-fly list:

According to the Daily Mail Online, an immigration officer who worked for the UK Border Agency managed to get his wife out of his hair for three years by putting her name on the no-fly list while she was visiting the in-laws overseas. Officials confirmed on January 30 that the man had confessed to adding his wife’s name to the list after she left for Pakistan, with the result that she was not allowed to get on a plane to come home. Airline and immigration authorities refused to explain to her why she was not being allowed to travel, although I imagine she put two and two together after her immigration-officer husband stopped answering his phone.

Wait. What?

This is impossibly rich:

Earlier this week the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety issued a relatively uncontroversial report saying that urban roads are safer than rural roads in terms of traffic fatalities, since urban roads generally have slower speeds and better access to hospitals.

The Governors Highway Safety Association (last spotted blaming pedestrian fatalities on Michelle Obama), however, begs to differ:

Many traffic safety groups such as the Governors Highway Safety Association argue that such comparisons don’t accurately reflect how safe a state’s roads are. A better measure, they say, is whether states have enacted proven safety enhancements such as motorcycle helmet laws and primary seat belt laws, which allow police to stop motorists solely for being unbuckled. […]

Judith Stone, president of Washington, D.C.-based Advocates for Auto and Highway Safety, says the group does not consider fatalities when issuing its annual report card on states. “We look at laws and whether they’ve been passed,” Stone says. (Emph. added)

Advocates of stronger laws say it’s difficult to persuade a state such as New Hampshire, which has no seat belt or motorcycle helmet laws, to enact such rules when its death rate is below the U.S. average. “States like … New Hampshire could certainly save more lives by passing stronger laws,” says governors safety association spokesman Jonathan Adkins. “Legislators note these states have relatively low fatality rates and tend not to see the benefit in passing stronger laws.”

Lies, lies, lies

I’ve been meaning to point this Slacktivist post and its followup out for a while, and now’s as good a time as any.

As always, Fred Clark is worth reading all the way through. For both posts.

A moment, from the second post:

I continue to believe that when you encounter someone who is saying something that they know is not true, there is great power in saying as much. When someone says that they believe health care reform will lead to socialist tyranny, simply tell them that, “No, you do not believe that. It is not true and you know it is not true.” When they say that “abortion is murder and America is a blood-stained, murderous country,” simply say, “No, you do not believe that. It is not true and you know it is not true.” You will not need to raise your voice. Truth doesn’t require amplification to dispel falsehood. The falsehood wasn’t ever really there in the first place.

MOAR SPIDERS

This video is pretty cool: time lapse footage of a spiderweb being built, plus slow-motion footage of subsequent bug capture, and — as a bonus — some spider-on-spider food theft.

What a smoking gun looks like

NYT:

A newly disclosed document reveals that Vatican officials told the bishops of Ireland in 1997 that they had serious reservations about the bishops’ policy of mandatory reporting of priests suspected of child abuse to the police or civil authorities.

The document appears to contradict Vatican claims that church leaders in Rome never sought to control the actions of local bishops in abuse cases, and that the Roman Catholic Church did not impede criminal investigations of child abuse suspects.

Hold them accountable.

Stuxnet Explained

The NYT has a nice long piece on Stuxnet today. Basically, it’s pretty much clear now that the worm that did major damage to the Iranian nuke program was a joint project of the US and Israel.

This is what “cyberwar” looks like. We released a targeted computer virus that did real-world damage to an enemy’s offensive capability.

How you are probably wrong.

How many spaces do you put after a period?

If you said anything other than “one,” you are unequivocally and completely wrong.

If you think two is correct, it’s probably because of your (outmoded) typing training:

Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule, too, if it weren’t for a quirk of history. In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology — the manual typewriter — invaded the American workplace. To accommodate that machine’s shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do.

The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type — that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks “loose” and uneven; there’s a lot of white space between characters and words, so it’s more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule — on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here’s the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we’ve all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.

Like a Boss

Mark Ingram is so awesome that he’s already signed a 7-figure deal with a sports marketing company before he’s even been drafted. I guess a national championship, a Heisman, and no hint of NCAA impropriety will do that for you. Go Mark!

(Just don’t go to the Pats, please. Or Dallas. Christ, please not Dallas.)

People, this is what “serious badass” means.

You think Julius from Pulp Fiction was a bad motherfucker? Did John Wayne embody “tough sumbitch” for you? Yeah, they’re pansies. Check out Samuel Whittemore, hero of the American Revolution:

Samuel Whittemore (1694 – February 3, 1793) was a farmer. He was eighty years old and living in Menotomy, Massachusetts (present-day Arlington) when he became the oldest known colonial combatant in the American Revolutionary War. […]

On April 19, 1775, British forces were returning to Boston from the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the opening engagements of the war. On their march, they were continually shot at by colonial militiamen.

Whittemore was in his fields when he spotted an approaching British relief brigade under Earl Percy, sent to assist the retreat. Whittemore loaded his musket and ambushed the British from behind a nearby stone wall, killing one soldier. He then drew his dueling pistols and killed a grenadier and mortally wounded a second. He managed to fire five shots before a British detachment reached his position.

N.B. that the revolution was fully 100 years before “firing five shots” was possible without reloading, manually, 5 times. Whittemore was, of course, not yet done:

Whittemore then attacked with a sword. He was shot in the face, bayoneted thirteen times, and left for dead in a pool of blood. He was found alive, trying to load his musket to fight again. He was taken to Dr. Cotton Tufts of Medford, who perceived no hope for his survival. However, Whittemore lived another 18 years until dying of natural causes at the age of 98.

7-0. War Eagle.

They’re not my favorite SEC squad by a damn sight, but Auburn money put food on the table at my house growing up, so they’re not my least favorite, either.

Auburn did the SEC proud tonight, shutting down Oregon’s tempo attack and bagging the conference’s fifth consecutive title, and preserving the SEC’s status as the only league to never lose the title contest; we’re now 7-0 in title game play.

As long as we’re counting, the SEC is also the only conference to send so many teams to the big game (5: Alabama (2010), Auburn (2011), Florida (2009, 2007), LSU (2008, 2004), and Tennessee (1999)). The runner up, by the way, is the Big XII, with 3, only two of whom won (Texas in ’06, Oklahoma in ’01).

See you next year.

I swear to God this isn’t gloating

I just got this on the only Alabama alum mailing list I’m on (thanks, Hatch). I checked; it’s actually excerpts from a Michigan State sports board thread during the Capital One Bowl. I highlighted a couple favorites.

“Julio takin’ us to schoolio”

“why are they allowing Alabama to play with 35 players on defense?”

“I think their punter is currently drinking around the world in Epcot.” [from the early 3rd quarter]

“If we played 10 times, they would win 15”

“If Cam Newton costs $200,000 for a season, how much is a 2nd half rental?”

“and now [MSU starting QB] Cousins is dead”

“If I was our QB I would hire an attorney and sue them for negligence or intentional infliction of physical and emotional distress.”

“I’m ready to accept MSU boosters paying for an offensive line. If we get caught I can deal with it.”

“This is getting out of hand…an Alabama d-lineman just popped out of my TV and threw me 10 yards behind my couch.”

“Do you think this is how Custer felt?”

“We’re going to have a wing named after us at Orlando Regional Medical Center by the time this game finishes.”

“This is embarrassing. So are we officially a basketball school again?”

“I want to know how many times in the history of organized football that teams have punted on 4th and goal”

“So this is what they mean by team speed”

“if i’m [backup QB] Maxwell, I fake an injury on the way to the huddle” [Maxwell was knocked out of the game three plays later.]

“good lord. Their 4th string running back just ran through our entire defense and all we could do was swing our purses at him.”