Conflict Of Interest

Never before have two of my interests collided so tragically. The final season of Lost, the greatest show ever made, will be preempted for two weeks because of the Winter Olympics, a sporting extravaganza I once attended in Lillehammer, Norway and love to watch as well (I once pretended to be a speed skater to pick up a chick... it failed miserably).

Can't the creators of Lost find some solution other than stopping the season for two weeks? Like maybe they can do some crossover episode in which Hurley attempts the luge in order to escape the Others, and John Locke shows off his deadly accuracy while biathlon-ing through an ice age version of the mysterious island?

Hey, there was a polar bear on Lost once. And Ben Linus does look bad-ass in a parka.


If Ben could push this...


... then couldn't he push this?

I'm just sayin, lets be creative here. Maybe change the time slot for those two weeks of Lost to coincide with a Winter Olympics event no one really wants to watch, like Curling. It's shuffleboard on ice, people! You don't watch shuffleboard, do you?

Yeah yeah. I know, keep dreamin. Bob Costas better bring his A game.

Weed For Kids With Autism??!

I saw this article today and was completely horrified. The author, a teacher at Brown University (so much for the Ivy League), admits to doping her nine year old autistic son because she can't deal with his tantrums.

My sister has autism. A severe case similar to this author's child. And my parents and my sister's teachers dealt with years of her tantrums through traditional therapies, which, while long, frustrating, and often-times grueling, have helped my sister learn to live life in spite of the limitations autism attempts to place on her.

The author of this piece didn't have the patience or time for that. Her solution was to drug up her 9-year-old... basically, keep him high all day so he didn't act out. Because the author saw her child as a problem, and not, well, a child, she didn't have any issues with this.

Let me make this analogy: Say your baby keeps you up at night all hours with crying. A traditional parent would rock the baby back to sleep, give it a bottle, play music, read another bedtime story until the child finally went back to sleep, even if it came at the cost of their own slumber. But the author of this piece would probably fill a baby bottle with a couple shots of Southern Comfort and make their baby drink till she passed out from drunkeness. Problem solved!!!!

This author is getting her child high... because it makes him easier to deal with. It's hard to get an autistic child to swallow pills, or undergo therapy. But give a kid with autism a cookie? They'll eat it right up. And then it's easy to get a high child to do just about anything... like Jaycee Dugard's kidnappers discovered.

What a horrific person!

The author wrote a part 2 presenting evidence of how pot has helped her child. For instance, he smiles more! But then again, she's not concerned with helping her child adapt to the world and gain some sense of independence. Rather, she is perfectly content to make her child a drug-dependent invalid, who will go his whole life not learning how to live with his condition, but instead, how to live in a cloudy daze.

Her concern is with a happy child. What if all parents tried to make their children happy in the same way? Maybe my mom could have fed me pot every day since childhood. I'd be pretty happy... at least until the drugs started to wear off and I realized I was a pothead still living with my mom at age 27.

What happens when the marijuana runs dry? The author better hope it never happens. Because she'll be left with a child who hasn't learned, hasn't grown, and hasn't adapted to cope in the world, despite his limitations. She'll be left with a kid begging for his pot.

She's learned to control her kid with drugs. Congrats.

Bon Voyage!

I'm off to Paris for a week. So the blog will go quiet (yes, more than it has already). But feel free to take this time to look back and bask in almost 8 years of Adam's Life (several of which have been erased for security purposes). Like my rants. Or Guest Blogger Robbie Republican. You can recall the time I met a weird girl at Macy's. Or you can just marvel that its been more than a year since the virgin shark was killed, and the apocalypse hasn't yet happened.

PETA Kills Pets????

This was very disturbing: PETA kills 95% of its pets.

Of course, I don't really take a figure like that at face value. And neither should you. Any intelligent person would immediately wonder... what's the source??

Well, five minutes of digging revealed that the information comes from the Center for Consumer Freedom:

The CCF has drawn harsh criticism for having taken its startup funding from the Philip Morris tobacco company and for lobbying on behalf of the fast food, meat, and tobacco industries while representing consumers.

Some groups the CCF has targeted have questioned its ethics and legitimacy. The president of the American Federation of Teachers referred to the CCF's leader as "a shameless lobbyist who has shilled for pesticide, alcohol and tobacco companies." A USA Today journalist said that they should change the name of their website to FatForProfit.com. It has also been criticized for its efforts to portray groups such as the Humane Society of the United States as "violent" and "extreme," and for its opposition to banning the use of trans fats. The group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has also campaigned against the CCF's validity as a non-profit tax exempt charitable organization, filing an IRS complaint in 2004 attacking the CCF's claims that its advocacy campaigns were "educational" in nature.

That's from Wikipedia. Yeah, I know. But this was five minutes of digging. And the Wikipedia entry rings of truth, while the PETA claim continues to sound ridiculous.

The CCF claims to have received their information from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. They post documents they claim are from 2007, revealing the deaths.

However, when I checked the records from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (you can do it too, just visit their website-- no "freedom of information act request" needed), it tells a different story.

The CCF claims PETA received 1997 pets, and killed 1815 of them. However, according to the VDACS, PETA actually received 8362 animals... and euthanized 1815 of them. That's a pretty big discrepancy.

I wonder why that is...

Hmm...

Maybe it's because an organization that's sole mission is to discredit "liberal" organizations is lying? Nah, can't be.

Look, some PETA people are certifiable. But then make that argument. Say that they value animals over humans. Okay. But don't make up lies that they sport-kill Fidos. That's just not gonna help your cause.

30 Awesome Inventions



Life Magazine gets it totally wrong. They have a list of the 30 "Dumb Inventions," but to my mind, these are all awesome.

I mean, how pimp are these illuminated tires??

And a Clive Sinclair's Mini-TV idea? How is that dumb? Isn't it an ahead-of-its time iPod nano?

Life, you're dumb. All these ideas are the coolest things ever. Including the Yodel analyzer.