Last Dance With Mary Jane, One More Time To Kill The Pain

Important news update (via The Awl):

If you're holding Percocet or Vicodin, start hoarding (also, come sit by me): An FDA advisory panel has recommended that the pills be taken off the market because the acetaminophen in them tends to blow up your liver when taken at high doses or with alcohol. The move has been condemned by some doctors who worry that it will have an adverse impact on patients who use the pills to combat severe pain, but let's be honest: Most of you guys use it because it gives you that sweet, fucked up, itchy underwater feeling. Get ready to start lying to your friends about how you're all out while surreptitiously sneaking into the bathroom to knock one back.

Now somebody give me some. I've never had some. Really. I dislocated my kneecap in college and was in an immobilizer for like six weeks, and the strongest shit I got was Ibuprofen.

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Hey, SFist, I know one guy at KTVU who is definitely pro-sparkles and fun: Traffic Guy Sal Castaneda!

Sadly, my attempt to post this as a comment didn't work at SFist, so now I feel stupid.

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Also, my new beard has led a friend to start calling me "Fozzie Bear" and randomly saying "Wocka, Wocka, Wocka" whenever I'm around.

Another friend said I looked like a grizzled war veteran.

That's quite the dichotomy: A Muppet, and a PTSD-inflicted solider.

I told the second guy that I probably look like a grizzled veteran of the Muppets. Now I'm starting to wonder what ever happened to Fozzie Bear after the cameras finally shut down. Maybe I'll put together a VH1 special on him.

This is almost certainly completely not true, but from Fozzie's Wikipedia page:

In the late 1990's Fozzie Bear was forever immortalized when Mr. T., a popular pop culture icon from the show "The A-Team" had Fozzie's face tattooed on his right Bicep, along with the phrase "Fozzie pitys the fool!"

That is too awesome to be true. Can't find any evidence online that Mr. T does have said tattoo. Goddamn, Wikipedia, for get my hopes up like that.

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And how do you handle having a bearded lady as the maid of honor at a wedding? Well, for one, don't ask the bearded lady to be the maid of honor. Or two, you can ask Dear Abby!

So Fuck All Your Protests And Put Them To Bed

One of the things that annoys me about SFist is how not-on-top of local events they sometimes are. For instance,

This morning was another example. Did you know (San Francisco people) there's a vigil being held today from 6:00-8:00 for Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two Current TV reporters being held in North Korea for, uh, illegally breathing? There is! (A webcast of it, also, at the link above.) It's being sponsored by the Academy of Art (at the Morgan Auditorium at 491 Post St.), normally best known for buying every single piece of real estate they can find and stuffing them with Parliament-smoking 19-year olds, but which also graduated Euna Lee.

I heard about this from... an Associated Press link on my Yahoo! homepage (Yes, I still use my.yahoo as my homepage. I am old and stupid and fat and deserving of your ridicule). The Associated Press told me what's going on in my city -- my neighborhood, even, almost-like. But SFist? Nothing. I'd guess that there likely will be some news about it on SFist later today, maybe around 3:30 pm or so, which is kind of late in the day to be finding out about this kind of shit. Anyhow, 3:30 is my bet, based on past SFist experiences.

Now, in SFist's case, I think it's just that they are kind of perpetually out of the loop about things. They're not that good at finding out important or entertaining or interesting news or events, or at least, they're wildly hit-or-miss on them. Plus, they're presumably a shoestring operation, and there's only so much they can do.

On the other hand, there's the Bay Area's least favorite collection of idiots, Indybay (they get no link). Now, normally a vigil for two imprisoned women of color is something that Indybay would be all over -- assuming said women were imprisoned here, in America, or at least, Israel. BUT! Lee and Ling had the unfortunate luck of being imprisoned in North Korea -- a friend of Indybay ("US general menaces North Korea with the "military option")!

A search for "Euna Lee" on their fuckdiculous site yields nada.

But, uh, hey, maybe the tools at Indybay are out of the loop as well! They're busy writing and reporting other shit, like...

"Is the Uprising in Tehran a CIA Backed Exercise? Tehran Protesters Address Progressives"

Uh, no. Fuck you, Indybay.

With A Sweet Hangover And The Headlines Too

"High school grad finished college too"

Really? So did I. So did most people I know. None of them saw it as something that deserved to be celebrated on the home page of the LA Times. A more interesting link would be, "Web editor for major American newspaper writes least interesting link ever." A little wordy, I guess.

(Of course, if you click on the story and read it -- or even bother to just read the story's actual headline ("The graduate wears two caps and two gowns") -- then you would realize it's about a guy who finished high school the same time he finished getting his B.A., and right now is putting a bigger smile on your girlfriend's face than you ever have with just his penis.)

Newspaper Taxis Appear on the Shore

Saturday morning, the four most viewed articles on the LA Times site were all about porn:


This kind of interest over a unnamed and apparently not well-known porn contracting HIV leads me to wonder where the LA Times should establish a permanent porn beat to drum up circulation and views.

Also in the news, the unhappiness over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's apparently sham re-election caused riots in the streets. According to Bill Keller at the NY Times:

"On the streets around Fatemi Square, near the headquarters of the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, riot police officers dressed in RoboCop gear roared down the sidewalks on motorcycles to disperse and intimidate the clots of pedestrians who had gathered to share rumors and dismay."

It's fantastic that a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter is now using "Robocop" to describe riot police gear. Charles Manson, what do you think of Robocop gear?



(It's times like this when I regret not having any Photoshoppin' skills. Cuz I'd totally color Robocop in Iranian national colors. Robocoppin'. With Robotussin'.)

And then, today, a kinda inspiring story of UCLA legend (and one-time fellow student) Ed O'Bannon, trying to maintain in Nevada despite the disappointment of his adult life. Go Ed!