An Abba Museum!

The latest reason to go on living is the news that came out recently that there will be an Abba museum in Stockholm, Sweden.

I'm not quite sure what will be in there, aside from some gold records, some photographs, maybe some stage props from their concerts.

A museum to memorialize Abba:
A reason to go on living!

Maybe there could be some artifacts of things that come up in  Abba songs. Kind of like a Madame Tussad's wax musuem

There would have to be a Dancing Queen, of course, some dippy woman in a tiara doing the Hustle with her hot 1970s partner. Or they could hold dancing queen contests, in which melodramatic gay men can vamp to Abba songs, in or out of drag.

Maybe the museum can steal a bust of Napolean from another museum, since Abba has a song that goes "My, my! Waterloo! Napolean did surrender! 

My, my, all right.

Some of their songs are hard to turn into a visual cue for a museum. What do you do with "Take a Chance on Me?"  Just hang a fuzzy dice and display a poker game or something in a room and leave it at that?  Maybe sell Abba lottery tickets? Win the scratch off Abba ticket and win their hit "The Winner It All" for your iPhone?

There's quite a Spanish element to Abba's oueve. "Fernando," "Chiquitita"  Maybe pics of Abba in Spanish garb?

Who would be the Abba museum curator and employees and what would they  look like? The men wear Saturday Night Fever style polyester suits and the women have sort of '70s Dorothy Hamel haircuts?

Anyway, on your next trip to Stockholm, be sure to check out the Abba museum and let me know if it's worth going to.

Cannibal Cop Creates Crazy Headlines

The news last month was disturbing. A New York City Police officer is accused of plotting to kill, cook and eat as many as 100 women, including his girlfriend.  

It was an elaborate plot involving getting information on his victims from a police data base, slow cooking the victims and elaborate fantasies of the meals.

Really, really bad. His parents must be so proud.

Luckily, nobody died before this moron got too hungry. When the news broke, the ever helpful New Yorker magazine listed a series of headlines that would have worked in the New York Post.

Some of my favorites:  "NYPD Chew," "Stop and Fricassee", "Cook 'em, Danno" and "Don't Braise Me, Bro."

I'm not sure what the post ended up running.  But I bet our arrested cop has plenty of time these days and in the future reading the papers and coming up with his own headlines.

Yes, I know this blog post is, um, tasteless

Best Anti-War PSA Ever!

I stumbled onto this video over at Copyranter a week or so back.  

It's a PSA from a group called War Child Canada, who say their mission is to highlight how war affects communities and to help children reclaim their childhood through access to education, opportunity and justice.

The ad has been a source of a lot of buzz in the advertising agency, with many critics talking about how brilliant it is. People have noted part of it is brutal to watch.

The first half of the one minute ad really does have some images that might be disturbing for some viewers. But stick with it the whole ad until the end.

It makes its point brilliantly, and packs quite an emotional whallop. Do watch!

High School Footballers Defy Stereotype.....

So here's the stereotype. The high school quarterback, the popular guy, is the one who bullies the unpopular students, the ones that are not jocks, not fashionable, not  what he likes.

Chy Johnson hangs with her buddy, Carson Jones
at an Arizona high school

It's nice to see stereotypes are often wrong, as is the case in an Arizona high school, where Chy Johnson, 16, a special needs student was bullied because of her disability. (People who bully this way deserve a special place in hell. )

The girl's mom called Carson Jones, the high school's star quarterback, because she was friends with the family. The mom just wanted a bit of intelligence on who was bullying her daughter, and when.

Jones and his buddies fixed that problem in a hurry by taking Chy under their wing, Marie Saavedra reported for TV3 in Arizona last month.

The hang out with her, have lunch with her, just friends. In high school culture, you don't go against the quarterback, so the bullying stopped pretty quicky.

So here's to Jones and his buddies to prove that just a bullying culture can change, if the right people take action in the right way.

Idiot Posts False Sandy News Updates, News Outfits Annoyed

Chaotic disasters like Hurricane Sandy can make it hard to figure out which reports about the catastrophe are true, which aren't.

It didn't help when a New York financial worker and campaign manager for a Republican congressional candidate decided to spread false stories through his Twitter feed, ComfortablySmug

And it didn't help that the guy, identified as Sashank Tripathi,  thought it would be harder for people to unmask hin than he thought.

Happy Halloween, Sashank!

Yes, they did put sandbags in front of the NYSE, but
unlike Tweets the media bit on, it didn't actually flood.

He was Tweeting all these storm updates during the worst of Sandy that the New York Stock Exchange was flooded out, or that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was stranded in New York City.

None of this was true, but he apparently hoped some news outlets would bite and report this stuff. A few actually did.

Um, you can't always believe what you read on the Internet, right?

Tripathi's ComfortablySmug was what The Guardian newspaper described as a friendly troll. He often posted over the top remarks, just to be snarky and fun. Unlike a lot of trolls, he usually didn't aggressively attack people.

Problems started during the storm when some of his Sandy Tweets seemed plausible, like the Stock Exchange flooding. And the rush to be first, and the struggle to get news out, prompted some retweeting, which ended up in places like the Weather Channel.

Which, as the Guardian article points out, shouldn't have happened. A quick check would have shown that ComfortablySmug was unreliable, but this of course is 20/20 hindsight.

Maybe part of the reason why we in the media are mad at ComfortablySmug because some of us got hoodwinked?

Yeah, ComfortablySmug, aka Tripathi, was irresponsible and stupid for Tweeting falsehoods in the middle of a crisis, but this is a lesson for us in the media: Even when things are happening at a breathless pace, does every bit of information have to go out immediately? If it's a life and death situation, maybe. But if the public had to wait five minutes to learn whether it was true the New York Stock Exchange was a giant bathtub, we would have all survived.

Our buddy ComfortablySmug was one of many people to post false images and statements in social media during the superstorm. Especially during a crisis,  they crave attention so intensely that they have to make sure they get it.  There were an incredible number of photoshopped, misleading or photos that had nothing to do with Sandy posted on Facebook and Twitter during and after Sandy.

During disasters, people quite naturally pay attention to storm victims, the news, the destruction. They don't care about some loser Tweeting in his basement. And the loser in the basement resents everybody turning attention away from him.

Well, our guy Sashank sure got attention once Buzzfeed figured out who he was and blabbed it to all of us. 

Once he was unmasked, he apologized, I think mostly because he was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He never did explain why he posted false stuff, though.  Maybe  he thought he was committing harmless jokes. That was his M.O, after all, and he probably didn't think to switch tactics when people were in the middle of a disaster.

The whole episode really screwed up his job as a consultant for a Republican congressional candidate though. He resigned from that gig after this came out.

On the bright side, when there is a lot of false stuff swirling around out there, a lot of self appointed fact  checkers go through and tells us which is true, which is not.

So inaccurate information gets out there and spreads far and wide. But if at least if we pay attention, we can get the right story.

Sometimes.

Hideous Sandy's Beautiful Skies

Here in northern Vermont, we escaped the wrath of Superstorm Sandy. Just a little wind, a little rain, no big deal. Too bad we can't say the same for the entire Northeast.

A bright sunrise over St. Albans, Vermont
as Hurricane Sandy approached Monday

I feel a little guilty doing what I'm doing here, given the terrible destruction and heartache across Sandy's path, but here on the edge of the storm, Sandy gave us some beautiful skies.

Funny how a terrible thing could give us a bit of beauty. This beauty is not worth the pain of Sandy, of course, but I guess we have to take the silver linings where we can get them.

As the storm approached Monday morning, Sandy gave us bright, orange lit up dawn.  After the storm moved inland, the outer tropical rainbands of the storm swept across Vermont, giving us spells of quick downpours, blue skies and lots of rainbows.

Finally, as the remains of Sandy limped off into Canada at midweek, she threw more rain showers our way, with a parting blast of a setting sun lighting up the landscape below the lingering dark clouds.

Pics, of course are in this post. As always, click on them to make them larger and more visible.

After mostly bypassing, Vermont
Sandy threw up some rainbows over the state
This one is in Underhill.

As the lingering dark clouds and showers of Sandy
began falling apart Wednesday, a shaft of setting sun
lit up this hill in Milton Vermont

The Hurricane Sandy Wacko Brigade

Last week,  I mentioned those weird conspiracy theories about President Obama and how he somehow controlled the path of Hurricane Sandy.

This destruction in New Jersey was caused by gay people,
evidently. Photo by Tim Larsen, N.J. Governor's office

Huge storms like Sandy always bring out the wackiest of the wackos, saying the wackiest things to distract us from our worries about the storm, and more importantly, gain a tidy profit for themselves.

Now that the storm has passed, the blame game has begun.  Mostly gay people and those who insufficiently support Isreal caused all this death and destruction, we're told.

The always helpful Joe Jervis at the Joe.My.God blog has been cataloging some of the people who don't offer us some creative theories as to why Sandy caused such heartache and destruction and how we can prevent this in the future.

I'm sure storm victims are thinking the same thing I am: If these losers really want to help, they should just shut up. But, of course they won't.

We begin our exploration of our Hurricane Sandy wacko brigade with Cindy Jacobs, who instructed us before Sandy hit  on how to pray the storm away from the East Coast.

Jacobs had a lot of prayers up her sleeves that she thought would work, as quoted by Jervis:

"Rebuke this storm in Jesus' name. The authority of the believer is powerful enough to shift weather patterns! (Matthew 17:20). Declare that the Prince of Peace reigns over this hurricane, and that His peace will cause the storm to diminish. (Isaiah 9:6).  Pray that this storm will not disrupt our Reformation Day prayer initiatives in the eastern states. (Isaiah 54:17).  Pray that the Lord would protect every person on the eastern coast, and that there would be no fatalities or serious injuries. (Psalm 91; It would also be good to declare this passage of scripture over the eastern states.)  Worship God for his provision, protection, and peace in the midst of storms. (Psalm 59:16)."

Somehow, as we know now, her prayers didn't work. Maybe her prayer recipe went bad. Or she was praying to the wrong god. Or God was so annoyed by her he made the storm worse to spite her. I guess we'll never know.

Big storms are always gay peoples' fault.  Every time there's a bad storm, The Gays did it. As if God was going to kill perfectly nice and heterosexual people because other people on the other side of the country are minding their own business, but are gay.  Because the straight people should have worked harder to convert gay people to straight? Even though that's not even possible?

Predictably, a virulently anti-gay rabbi in New York, surrounded by residents of a city stunned and mourning over the damage to their area, said of course it was The Gays fault that the city and the surrounding region were trashed, Jervis noted yesterday.

Of course, the guy who was helping the rabbi perhaps the most in his efforts to overturn gay marriage in New York was a guy named Michael Long. Long's home was destroyed in the hurricane. It's terrible that happened, and I feel bad for the guy, but if God was mad at The Gays for everything, why did the hurricane destroy a home of sonebody who was supposedly on his side?

Another guy, somebody named Pastor John McTernan, really throws the kitchen sink at this issue and blames The Gays, and people who don't like Israel, or something in this incredibly dense  blog post he wrote

"Just last August, Hurricane Isaac hit New Orleans seven years later, on the exact day of Hurricane Katrina. Both hit during the week of the homosexual event called Southern Decadence in New Orleans! Hurricane Sandy is hitting 21 years to the day of the Perfect Storm of October 20, 1991.  America has been under God’s judgment since this event. Both of these hurricanes were cause by freakish weather patterns that came together to create. Twenty-one years breaks down to 7 x 3, which is a significant number with God. Three is perfection as the Godhead is three in one while seven is perfection. It appears that God gave America 21 years to repent of interfering with His prophetic plan for Israel; however, it has gotten worse under all the presidents and especially Obama. Obama is 100 percent behind the Muslim Brotherhood which has vowed to destroy Israel and take Jerusalem. Both candidates are pro-homosexual and are behind the homosexual agenda. America is under political judgment and the church does not know it!"

Whew! That's quite a spew of words, isn't it?   I can't follow it, either.

I love how he came up with those random numbers to explain why God wrought Hurricane Sandy on us  But anybody can make up their own number system. Here, I'll try:

My birth date is 9/9/62.  Hurricane Sandy hit on 10/29/12. There's two nines in my birth date, so the storm hit on the 29th, see, two nines. There's two twos in the date 10/29/12,  so that proves that I'm the one who created Hurricane Sandy and steered it into the East Coast.

Or not.

As it turns out, every hurricane to affect the United States apparently comes at moments when we are insufficiently pro-Israel, according to a lot of these wackos. They explain it all to us at World Net Daily:

The "Long Island Express" Hurricane of 1938 came as the Nazis were consolidating power and we should have stopped them then.

"The Perfect Storm" of 1991 came when then President George H.W Bush was at some conference at Madrid where he was being insufficiently pro-Israel, according to WND

Katrina in 2005 came for the same reason. Apparently, the president was congratulating Israel for evacuating Gaza or something.  So a minor day politically pissed off God so much he trashed an American city unrelated to Israeli politics. Makes perfect sense.

Now that we've established that The Gays and the not supportive enough of Isreal are causing bad weather, who's causing good weather?