Well, this is interesting. I was figuring the next public official to get indicted around here would be the ex-mayor. I was apparently wrong.

It's important to note we may be well into the meta-region here. We're going to need talking heads on news shows to talk about the legal case against a talking head on news shows.

One thing however is for sure, with 84 counts, the prosecutors knew it would take more than one bullet to take him out.

UPDATE: Now that's a headline. Awesome.

We may have to open up another level of FraughtWatch, because Maurice Clarett is utterly shattering the parameters by which we judge this. Our latest:
robbery. Seriously, at this point, he's reached his limit, the only thing I can see that can top this is escaping the country to Paraguay and then being found attempting to cheat centenarian Nazi collaborators out of their canasta winnings. And of course it would fail as a bystander would recognize him.

Marginalia from the holiday.

1. The Coke holiday ad this year is just annoying me, mostly because I keep wanting to tell people when I watch it, "You see that, that's appeasement. The little penguin will come back and say the polar bears have promised peace in our time."

2. I have a housepet now. I got a Roomba for Christmas, now I have to restrict the urge to mod it with a speaker and chips so it screams "Exterminate!" while it works.

3. Plans to see the ABA Pittsburgh Xplosion fell through on Monday as their holiday games were postponed, because of event competition. They apparently scheduled the game on the same night as the annual appearance of the Harlem Globetrotters.

4. I think I'm becoming overwhelmed by the tyranny of Avenir. Avenir is the sans serif that seems to be everywhere right now. Not quite a Futura, not quite Avant Garde, not really at all Helvetica. And when I say it's everywhere, I mean it. Yahoo's using it for titling, as is USA Network, as is Toyota in an ad, as is one of the books I'm trying to read. It's not so much that it's actually overwhelming me mentally, I'm just struck by the suddenness with which it took over the slot the other fonts took, and the mental association I have with that suddenness is overwhelming whatever messages the text is trying to convey.

I finished reading Freakonomics, (which is interesting in ways that people wanting to find interesting ways to look at things will love, and for those of you that don't want to find that will hate,) and I got stuck on a passage, in parentheses no less.

"(In Finland, whose education system has been ranked the world's best, most children do not begin school until age seven but have often learned to read by watching American television with Finnish subtitles.)"

Am I wrong in thinking (outside of the obvious correlation does not imply causation issues), that a cheap way to simulate this in America is to turn on the closed captioning on the TV? And how many paranoid parents can I take in with this?

Well, if this doesn't kill the ABA, nothing will. Read this.

I place the odds of a stinging expose at 70%. The odds of a comic novel at 90%.

More here.

This article

Paragraph 2

Cuidado. Cuidado.

That is all.

Somehow, I figured this interesting article titled Iceberg 'sings under pressure' was going to result in the punchline, "no, sorry, we were wrong, it was actually Ice, Ice Baby."

WHOA!

Not the top story. The bit immediately after the top story.

A while back I found an article noting that Pittsburgh has the lowest percentages of immigration from Latin America of any city its size (or even significantly lower). Well, somehow I can't see this plan fixing it, unless they're expecting to capitalize on a massive influx of Aztec-Americans.

If I were Al Julius, I'd be eating my script right now.

This election result positively shocked me. I had realized there was a backlash against incumbents rolling through the state after the literal midnight pay raise, but this is something else. Even on a 51-49 rejection, we've never had a judge tossed before. If this anger continues, and it probably will, you could see every contested office in the state up for grabs next year.

Okay, with all of this being planned, how long before the Weather Channel follows the long slow path of descent into unwatchability previously traveled by MTV and ESPN.

Incidentally, the last time I heard celebrity weatherman used as a gimmick, it was some failed iteration of CBS This Morning, and their guest was Henry Kissinger. That went well.

For anyone who ever doubted that data mining occurs, and that the results are untouched by human hands, I give you this proof. If this had ever gone past human eyes it would have been stopped or the person who reviewed this would have collapsed in laughter unable to continue.

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have purchased Audio CDs by William Shatner also purchased Christmas Album...

Okay that's two "low-cost" airlines that I've flown on, only to see them go bankrupt shortly after. (ATA being the previous, won't count USAir since I hadn't actually flown them in two years.)

So, should I just Priceline myself out, where the lowest bidder is the one I fly on, dooming it?

You know if it's not the zombies, and it's not the robots... It's the deer.

Somebody discussing this on Fark noted that there was a time in the '90s when the city of Pittsburgh declared complete open season on deer. If they were in the city, they were legal to hit. Didn't matter if you had a permit on that weapon, didn't matter what the weapon was, it was a legal hit. I really want to know two things:

-- Was this actually true? Did Murphy just snap one weekend after his rhododendron got eaten or something?
-- Was this before or after the weekend that the bear did a bar crawl down Carson Street, then escaped when animal control came by swimming across the river to downtown? (This would have been about 1996-7ish.)

While it's a little too possible in a crazy-ass way, I fear we haven't quite made enough fans of ironic football to make this a workable venture. Then again, if we turned it into a reality show, it would probably be less embarrassing than Dick Butkus' turn coaching high school.

1 | 2 | 3

Craig mentioned the insidious creep of the Christmas season, which I noted this evening already has absorbed the section where the candy was at the drugstore and one rack of CD's at Best Buy, but I caught this article today, and got completely creeped out by this website which tries to map out all the best deals for the Friday after Thanksgiving like it's Ain't It Cool News or something, except it for the circulars you normally roundfile. What got me was the "24 Days Left" at the top. Great... It's only 24 more shopping days before.... SHOPPING DAY! PANIC! Yes, we're now marking Black Friday as the holiday, not Thanksgiving....great....

I think I'll stand down by the door and catch the retailers when they fall from the fourteenth floor.

The things people in Pittsburgh worry about... If it's not the zombies, it's the robots.

Updating our previous story, it appears that the Pittsburgh Xplosion has managed to rent out the Civic Arena for 14 home games.
And now a word problem:
Given their pricing structure, courtside $55, low end D level tickets $12.50, it costs approximately $15,000 an event, and last year they seemed to average about 300, how fast do I have to get to a game to enable me to see it before they fold?

The first game is Sunday, and the Steelers play Monday night. Talk me in to going, folks. I'd bring a camera.

ABA Mania Returns

We have a new team, the Xplosion, and a new coach, who hopefully won't die on us during the first game, and a new arena.

You know, it would be good if they get the arena contract down and signed before they promote it. Wouldn't you think?

Were I Keith Olbermann commenting on what I had previously written, (And with the whole Michael Jackson Puppet Theater, I'm not sure he doesn't) I'd say that the most recent story out of Minnesota means that Mr. Scrabble Dictionary has failed Mr. Wlf yet again.