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Ugh.

Let's Get This Shit Rollin, Shall We?

The 2010 LBEH campaign has come to a close and me being a numbers kid of guy, decided I'd give you guys a nice by-the-numbers breakdown of things. Thanks to the tremendous efforts of Michael Sorrentino, Heather Childers and everyone else at FOX News, we more than surpassed our goal of breaking $100,000 in donations this year. And when I say we eclipsed it, I mean we crushed it to the tune of well over $150k!

Back To The Snow They Go.

Well the fam was down this past week so they provided a nice break from the rat-race the past six weeks have been. It didn't rain while they were here but the weather was still a little squirrely and so we didn't get the chance to do most of the 'touristy' things. I did however get to introduce my nephew to the awesomeness that is the Second Ammendment, and everyone else to the awesomeness that is Five Guys. Collectively we ate enough to feed Ethipioa for the next four years and I have the gut to prove it. But now that they're gone and I have the house to myself again, it's back to my usual routine: coffee in the morning and then working on EHOWA. And since it's the New Year, that means it's time for my annual Dry-Our-Your-Liver marathon. We'll see how long I can keep that up.

If He Had Retired Back In 2005, None Of This Would Have Happened.

Well today is the big day: Machete is being released on DVD/Blu-ray. And yes, motherfuckers, I'm all over it as soon as I can get out the door. But hand in hand with the DVD release are all kinds of other goodies such as some behind the scenes footage (dyke or not, Michelle Rodriguez still looks good when she's not scowling), a new Machete/Brisk iced tea commercial, and an extended interview with Danny Trejo. As I will do anything Danny Trejo tells me to do, by the time you read this I'll be on my way to Best Buy for the hook up. And remember: Machete don't text.

Long Live Dr. Peter Venkman.

You know, I used to think he was all washed up... couch... cough... Garfield ...cough... Then he came back with great shit like The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost in Translation, and of the course the cameo in Zombieland so hey, I can admit when I'm wrong. And thus I've got two words for you: Bill. Fucking. Murray.

Before The System Fucks You, Big Bird.

Police are on the hunt for a man who held up a Manassas convenience shop with a very large stick! In the video you can see suspect burst into the super market on Liberia Avenue just after 6:30am Tuesday. The 58-year-old clerk then grabbed a hammer. The two had a standoff for about a minute before the stick-wielding suspect jumped the counter and knocked the clerk down, hitting him several times in the face. After the wrestling, the suspect grabbed some cash and ran out the back door. Anyone with information is asked to give Benny Hill a call.

Insert Your Favorite Weekend Joke Here.

Listen To Me, For I Am The Voice Of Reason.

"Gun control is like trying to fight drunk driving by making it harder for sober people to buy cars." - Unknown

Let The Kneejerk Reactions Begin!

Well, that didn't take long, now did it? Nope. And what kind of party would this be without letting uber-attention whore DJ Fred Phelps rock the mic like a vandal? Awwww yeah. Christ if there's anyone out there in the world who deserves to get mouth cancer, it's him.

I Know There's An 'Eating Cock' Joke In There Somewhere.

Whew, and here I thought I was the only person who went to bed with a glass of water on my nightstand. Last night I woke up around 3am or so and leaned over to get a drink, misjudged how far away the corner was and beaned myself right in the mouth. This morning I woke up with a big fat lip!

This my friends, is why the internet was created: "I land a job working at the most magical place on the planet: The Walt Disney World and finally confess to some of the crazy stuff I did while working there." That's right, it's time for confessions of a former Disney employee. That's right, an orchestra in bacon, sausage, and eggs.

I Love Disaster Movies.

Plane crashes. Train crashes. Asteroid impacts. Comet impacts. Tidal waves. Earthquakes. Toronados. Core drilling. Global killer. Aliens invasions. If it's got global mayhem and lots of explosions, I'm there. And I'm not the only one, either. People flock to the theaters to see the likes of 2012, Independence Day, Deep Impact, and even Armageddon which had head shaking physics. Shit, even the Discovery channel has gotten on board. With that in mind, there are two upcoming flicks I'm looking forward to. First I've always liked Ray Stevenson who played Titus Pullo in Rome; a show I was very saddened to see cancelled. Anyway, this time around he's portraying Danny Greene in Kill The Irishman -- probably the most exciting thing to come out of Cleveland since The Drew Carey show. But back on the disaster theme, the next good one looks like it's going to be Battlefield Los Angeles... here's a nerly released two and a half minute trailer. It reveals a little more than the previous trailers.... such as those ain't comets. See, science can be sexy sometimes.

DVDs Are The New Betamax.

Ten years ago if you'd have told me I could buy a TWO FUCKING TERABYTE DRIVE for under a hundred bucks, I'd have called you a liar. but here I am, proud new owner of 2,048,000,000,000 bytes of storage in exchange for a Benjamin, a Lincoln, and a Washington. So now what I'm doing is ripping all of my DVDs to this hard drive. And then with this new drive plugged into the back of the PC I'm using for Hulu/Netflix, all of my movies will be no more than a few mouse clicks away. This of course opposed to the previous method of fishing around through all two hundred movies (which refuse to remain in alphabetical order despite my best efforts), finding the right goddamn case only to open it to discover the wrong disc inside. So yeah, this is going to be much nicer. And before you ask, I'm using DVD Decrypter to do the actual rip of the DVD. This step takes anywhere from 12-20 minutes depending on how fast your DVD drive is, and the resulting ISO files are around 6 gigs each. Then I use Hand Brake on the ISO files to do the final encoding of the movie to an .MP4 file. This step is completely 100% processor dependant -- the faster your CPU the faster the encoding goes. I have an eh-so-so middle of the road Intel Core i5 750 @ 2.67GHz and it takes my machine about 15 minutes per movie. For shits and grins, I tried it on an older AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6000+ and it took 1 hour and 17 minutes! Yikes! Anyway, once that second step is done, the ISO files can then be deleted so they're not wasting drive space. In MP4 format, each movie is averaging a little over 1 gigabyte each - meaning I'll be able to fit roughly two thousand movies on this drive. The image quality is about the same as a standard DVD player, which isn't to say it's horrible but it's not quite as a pretty as upscaling progressive scan DVD player. but for the convenience, you can't beat it. Next step: ripping my Blu-Rays.

Insert Your Favorite Weekend Joke Here.

And The Word Of The Day Is...

Schadenfreude is pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. This German word is used as a loanword in English and some other languages, and has been calqued in Danish and Norwegian as skadefryd and Swedish as skadeglädje. A New York Times article in 2002 cited a number of scientific studies of schadenfreude, which it defined as "delighting in others' misfortune." Many such studies are based on social comparison theory, the idea that when people around us have bad luck, we look better to ourselves. Other researchers have found that people with low self-esteem are more likely to feel schadenfreude than are people who have high self-esteem. A 2006 experiment suggests that men, but not women, enjoy seeing bad people suffer. The study was designed to measure empathy, by watching which brain centers are stimulated when subjects inside an fMRI observe someone experiencing physical pain. Researchers expected that the brain's empathy center would show more stimulation when those seen as good got an electric shock than they would if the shock was given to someone the subject had reason to consider bad. This was indeed the case, but for male subjects the brain's pleasure centers also lit up when someone else got a shock that the male thought was well-deserved.

Just When I Thought I've Seen it All.

You. Have. Got. To. Be. FUCKINGKIDDINGME. That is -- and I'm not kidding -- some of the scariest shit I've ever seen on the internet. We are fucking doomed.

Fuck You, You Little Green Motherfucker.

So this morning I let the dogs out to 'water the lawn' and I see this little green caterpillar crawling its way up my screen door. I figure I'll be the nice guy and give it a lift over into some nearby bushes since being on the door leaves it pretty exposed to predators (and Bianca). So I reach down to give the little guy a lift and the instant I touch it, GOD COMES DOWN AND SMASHES MY FINGERS WITH A SHOVEL. What the FUCK?! I yelp out in pain and shake my hand like a motherfucker. Go to touch my fingertip to see whats wrong and AGAIN GOD COMES DOWN AND SHUTS MY FINGERS IN AN INVISIBLE CAR DOOR. What the fuck again. So if anyone happens to come across one of these little motherfuckers, my advice is to give them a wide, wide, wide berth. Poison spines my ass. Try spines of a thousand deaths. I had to go inside and look up urgent care for removing caterpillar spines.

Sorry, Did I Make You Hungry For Lunch?

Boy, Australia sure is getting this shit kicked out of them by those floods, eh? Entire streets, entire buildings washed away. It's always heartbreaking to see people forced to wade around their neighborhoods. But leave it to the Aussies though, they always make the best of it.

Stealing Underpants Is Big Business.

Well, personal responsibility has come full circle here in the great United States. Phase one: text while walking. Phase two: get all butthurt. Phase three: profit!

Insert Your Favorite Weekend Joke Here.

'At's Not a Pair Of Brass Bawls. 'Is's A Pair Of Brass Bawls.

It was October 2010, at the height of the fighting season in Afghanistan, and a large Taliban force had established numerous firing positions around several heavy machine guns. More than 24 elite Perth based diggers from the Special Air Service Regiment were enduring withering fire. Realising his mates were in grave danger, and with little regard for his own welfare, the SAS Corporal charged head long into the Taliban machine gun fire. The sight of the

I Think There Might Be A Carbon Monoxide Leak In My House Somewhere.

Because I've been having some strange fucking dreams lately, and last night's was no exception. It was about my old friend Doug Cole. The dream had a running start and began in Doug's office with me laying back in a chair sitting in front of Doug's desk; his desk had been turned sideways instead of facing the door which is how I remember it. Doug was sitting at his desk and rifling through some papers, and I was laying back looking straight up at the recessed florescent lighting. He asked something to the effect of, "Do you remember that thing that happened?" And I exclaimed that not only did I remember it, but it was a defining moment in my life and I had only recently come around to writing a big blog post about it. Doug was elated as he pulled a clipboard full of handwritten notes from his desk, and explained that he had recently rediscovered the notes that he had taken during the ordeal. He asked me if I wanted them, and I said I did before snatching the clipboard out of his hand. There appeared to be about 15-20 white pages all written on in blue ink, held in place by the shiny piece of metal at the top. For some reason all of the pages were stapled together with one staple at the bottom, but somehow this didn't interfere with reading the notes. I remember being elated as to being able to finally find out if there was really security footage, and being able to find out what Mike SomethingOrOther's last name was. And this is the part that pisses me off about dreams -- he told me Mike's last name and as soon as he did a lightbulb went on like, "Oh YEAH, that's what it was." I remember being so relieved, like finally getting that name off the tip of your tongue. Unfortunately, the instant I awoke from this dream, I couldn't remember what his name was, although I'm pretty sure his last initial isn't K but P. So I guess my subconscious remembers Mike SomethingOrOther's last name, but he's not worthy of my waking mind's attention. Fuck him.

Sure The Schools May Suck, But We Have Great Weather.

On December 23, 2010, The Beagle Rescue Project rescued two Beagles from a medical testing laboratory. These dogs had never seen the outdoors, walked on grass or felt a gentle touch. They had also been de-barked and fed only "laboratory chow." This video captures the dogs' first steps into a kind world. I'll be honest, I wept. Not just because I'm a softy when it comes to animals, but because it's a crying shame what a human being can do to an animal in the name of science, religion, or just plain cruelty. I honestly and truly hope that woman contracts syphilis and dies in agony.

Some People Just Deserve The Tape.

Old and busted: launching a single paper airplane from the edge of space. The new hotness: launching 200 paper airplanes from the edge of space.

Twenty-Five Years Ago Today.

The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster occurred on January 28, 1986, when Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, leading to the deaths of its seven crew members. The spacecraft disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of central Florida, United States, at 11:39 a.m. EST (16:39 UTC). Disintegration of the entire vehicle began after an O-ring seal in its right solid rocket booster (SRB) failed at liftoff. The O-ring failure caused a breach in the SRB joint it sealed, allowing pressurized hot gas from within the solid rocket motor to reach the outside and impinge upon the adjacent SRB attachment hardware and external fuel tank. This led to the separation of the right-hand SRB's aft attachment and the structural failure of the external tank. Aerodynamic forces promptly broke up the orbiter. The crew compartment and many other vehicle fragments were eventually recovered from the ocean floor after a lengthy search and recovery operation. Although the exact timing of the death of the crew is unknown, several crew members are known to have survived the initial breakup of the spacecraft. However, the shuttle had no escape system and the astronauts did not survive the impact of the crew compartment with the ocean surface. The disaster resulted in a 32-month hiatus in the shuttle program and the formation of the Rogers Commission, a special commission appointed by United States President Ronald Reagan to investigate the accident. The Rogers Commission found that NASA's organizational culture and decision-making processes had been a key contributing factor to the accident. NASA managers had known that contractor Morton Thiokol's design of the SRBs contained a potentially catastrophic flaw in the O-rings since 1977, but they failed to address it properly. They also disregarded warnings from engineers about the dangers of launching posed by the low temperatures of that morning and had failed to adequately report these technical concerns to their superiors. The Rogers Commission offered NASA nine recommendations that were to be implemented before shuttle flights resumed. Many viewed the launch live due to the presence on the crew of Christa McAuliffe, the first member of the Teacher in Space Project. Media coverage of the accident was extensive: one study reported that 85 percent of Americans surveyed had heard the news within an hour of the accident. The Challenger disaster has been used as a case study in many discussions of engineering safety and workplace ethics.

Insert Your Favorite Weekend Joke Here.

We will not be silenced. Whether you're a Christian, whether you're a Muslim, whether you're an atheist, you will demand your goddamn rights, and we will have our rights, one way or the other. We will never be silenced!