Adventures in "The Cloud"

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Adventures in "The Cloud"

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Um.... Oookay

Car left behind in WI... Story of my life is:

Performing TONIGHT: Bipolar Bears

The GED for Dummies

R. Kelly Trial: Week in Review (even though you lost interest 5 years ago)

This week, the child-porn trial of R&B auteur R. Kelly caught an unpleasant case of blue balls. Key witness Lisa Van Allen was never actually called to the stand as expected, so everyone speculated about what she was supposed to say: She had an ongoing love affair with Kelly and at one point participated in a ménage a trois with the girl said to be in the video. Swear! The woman plans to come forward and say that she, too, had sex with a minor. (Juries and judges love this shit!) Also, they videotaped it, though the tape is nowhere to be found and not to be discussed. Hearsay all, of course. Other than the fact that R. Kelly's life is potentially stranger than his videos, what did we learn, if anything?

• R. Kelly's "mole defense" is getting hairy. Upon further review, experts now claim to see a mole on the man in the video, a "maybe-cancerous" mark Kelly sports on this lower back. If you stare long enough, you also see a 3-D unicorn.

• The sex tape is probably real, probably not doctored.

• Never show the hired help your inner freak. Lindsey Perryman, a former personal assistant to Kelly, testified that she is "110 percent sure" that the man in the video is Kelly, and that the girl in the video is his goddaughter—who was between the ages of 12 and 13 at the time. She cites as evidence the girl's comely cheekbones.

• Music journalists: stick to writing reviews if you want to avoid taking the stand. The Sun-Times writer who first broke the Kelly story, Jim DeRogatis, may have to testify as to the provenance of the tape in question and whether he made kinky copies for home viewing. Our guess for the latter: Yes, yes he did (and good for him!).

• And this Lisa Van Allen chick? Heavy drama with her ex and her fiancée. To start, her betrothed can't shut the hell up, dishing to the Chicago Tribune on each and every intimate detail of the woman's life. Her ex, on the other hand, he's the silent gangster type, and was asked by the defense to testify as to what kind of woman Van Allen really is. Namely, a slutty liar who's also the mother of his baby. (Interesting side note: Van Allen once starred in a Kelly video as a hair-braider, a role that just so happens to be the title of Kelly's most recent single. Actually, that's not very interesting.)

Online Paper Refers to Madison's Brat Fest as a "Record Breaking Sausage Fest"

Organizers of Brat Fest in Madison, Wis., say the event broke its own world record by selling 191,712 bratwurst sausages during its four-day run.

Tim Metcalfe, one of the organizers, said the 2004 record of 189,432 brats was beaten when a huge dinner rush near the end of the festival led to 10,000 brats being sold in a single hour, The (Madison) Wisconsin State Journal reported Tuesday.

The stage bands got up and said, 'If everybody buys one brat right now, we can break this record,' Metcalfe said. I think everybody just had one more.

Metcalfe estimated the bratwurst celebration raised more than $100,000 for the charities chosen by volunteer servers.

The Post-Chronicle

Former Bush Aide: Bush Administration Not As Perfect As You Thought

Remember Scott McClellan? He was the doughy White House press secretary whose goofy incompetence served as a lighthearted bridge between Ari Fleischer's nerdy intransigence and Tony Snow's polished duplicity. (We haven't yet figured out a descriptor for current briefer Dana Perino, but since the Bush administration is, at this point, one prolonged exercise in running out the clock, it doesn't make much of a difference.) Anyway, old Scott's gone and published a memoir called What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, in which he says some not so nice things about his former employers. The highlights:

• President Bush "convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment... to this day, the president seems unbothered by the disconnect between the chief rationale for war and the driving motivation behind it."

• Both Scotty and the president were victims of deceit over the Valerie Plame affair: "He too had been deceived, and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who knew the truth—including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney—allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie."

• Hurricane Katrina? Not so good for the administration. "One of the worst disasters in our nation's history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush's presidency. Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush's second term. And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush had made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath."

• The war in Iraq was a needless conflict sold on deception and propaganda, with an assist from the media: "If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. ... In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."

• Bush may very well have tried meth, heroin, and PCP, but due to the voluminous quantities he used to consume, he burned away the part of his brain that retained those memories. "'The media won't let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors,' I heard Bush say. 'You know, the truth is I honestly don't remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don't remember.'"

• Karl Rove once ate three entire boxes of Krispy Kreme Doughnut Holes in front of a starving chief economic adviser Larry Lindsey, who had been made to go a week without food as punishment for revealing the cost of the war to the Wall Street Journal.

Okay, that last one is made up, but if it weren't it would be the only revelatory thing in the book. The administration lied about Iraq and Valerie Plame? They fucked up Katrina? Bush did drugs? The media was spineless and craven during the march to war? If there's anyone out there to whom this comes as a shock, What Happened is available in certain Washington bookstores now. Should you somehow manage to dress yourself and find your way to the shops, you'll be able to discover many more stunning secrets like these.

Via Radar

Social networking for babies???

Now there's social networking for babies, with a bunch of Web sites that do the same thing as My Space and Facebook, but for the toddler set.

Babyspot (www.babyspot.com), Bundlo (www.bundlo.com), MyBabyOurBaby (www.mybabyourbaby.com) and an about-to-launch site called TotSpot (www.totspot.com) are now busily competing to get your baby's profile online.

Big-time ideas. Who likes to brag more than parents, except perhaps grandparents? And they can get into the craze, too, contributing their own content and networking with other grandparents.

Privacy is a big part of the baby sites. before you join one and start posting all the details about your baby and the family, make sure you can limit who gets to see all the details.

You can see where this is heading.

Playgroups and playdates will be arranged online, baby-sitters sought, shared and booked, and first words, first steps and first potty successes will be chronicled and digitally preserved to forever haunt the child as he grows into the easily embarrassed years.

Detroit Free Press

News from the White House: George Bush is not on the ticket

An important announcement from the White House: George Bush is not, repeat, not running for President in 2008. Or as Dana Perino put it:

But remember this election is -- the President is not on the ticket.

But remember, he's not on the ticket.

But again, President Bush isn't on the ticket.

Well, okay, then, no, I'm not -- I'm seeking nothing but to tell you that the President is not on the ticket...

And so begins the tightrope walk we can expect for the next six months. Assurances that Bush is "fully committed, 100 percent committed, to making sure that John McCain is elected to be the next President," while doing everything they can to put distance between John McCain and George Bush. When questioned (six times) on whether Bush and McCain would appear in public together, the best Perino could do was to say, "stay tuned," and to remind reporters that:

President Bush is a formidable campaign fundraiser, as has been reported over the years, and I expect that he'll continue to be.

So, how is that working out?

A Tuesday fundraiser headlined by President Bush for U.S. Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign is being moved out of the Phoenix Convention Center.

Sources familiar with the situation said the Bush-McCain event was not selling enough tickets to fill the Convention Center space, and that there were concerns about more anti-war protesters showing up outside the venue than attending the fundraiser inside.

With the need for repeated reminders that George Bush is not on the ticket, dodging questions about public appearances and failing fundraisers, John McCain is learning that running to carry out the third term of the most unpopular president in history is hard work.

Via: Kos

Not quite a bobblehead

The St. Paul Saints, long known for offbeat, sometimes edgy, promotions, have come up with a real doozy for this Sunday's game.

While lots of sports franchises hand out bobblehead dolls, usually depicting their players, the Saints are handing out 2,500 "bobblefoot" knicknacks.

The keepsakes consist of a miniature bathroom stall with a couple of lower legs and feet. One of the feet is springloaded and "taps," which, the Saints' press release says, is in honor of National Tap Dance Day.

Right.

The team also takes pains to note: "It doesn't matter if your tapping style is done with a 'wide stance' or is used as some sort of code."
That's a none-too-subtle reference to Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig, who pleaded guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct after an undercover police officer arrested him for allegedly soliciting sex in a bathroom stall at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

The undercover officer who arrested Craig said the senator's foot-tapping, bumping feet and swiping his hand under the bathroom stall amounted to well-known code used in soliciting sex.

Craig, however, said his foot-tapping was the result of the fact that he has "a wide stance."

Star-Tribune

America: John McCain is lying right to your face.

Here is some video to prove it:



It is crucial that we alert the public to the REAL McCain, and it is crucial we act now, before it's too late.

A big thank you to Brave New Films for the pretty pictures of the senile old man lying on camera.