Courtesy of Violet Sharp who seems kinda cool.

I get a lot of junk e-mail. A lot. Most of it is utter crap, computer generated stuff that wouldn’t even trap the most naive user (hint: if you’re trying to sell me fake pills you might want to spell the name of them correctly in your come on).

Every now and then, though, one of the subject lines in my junk folder catches my eye. This one was today’s as I rushed around changing passwords because a certain web vendor who deals with non-profits had their password database stolen.

FW: gynaecological oleomargarine

The mind simply boggles, doesn’t it?

Read this item and tell me if it’s real or if it’s from that satirical “newspaper” The Onion

Sex, Drugs and Premature Death

Study Finds Rock Stars Die Earlier Than Ordinary Citizens

LONDON, Sept. 4 — Living fast and dying young has long been part of rock-and-roll lore.

And now there are statistics that affirm the image, according to a study released Tuesday.

Researchers at Liverpool John Moores University, whose report appeared in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, studied a sample of North American and British rock and pop stars and concluded they are more than twice as likely to die a premature death as ordinary citizens of the same age.

The team studied 1,064 stars from the rock, punk, rap, R&B, electronic and new age genres in the “All Time Top 1,000″ albums published in 2000. They compared each artist’s age at death with that of European and U.S. citizens of similar backgrounds, sex and ethnicity.

[Read more...]

I’m not a big fan of religious discrimination of any stripe. I’m also not personally convinced that Scientology is a religion and not a cult (my personal breaking point: can I study it without having to pay money? No? Then you’re a cult.). Some people disagree.

All of that said this from the BBC is possibly the funniest headline I’ve seen in a long damn time. And I’m forced to wonder, will people try to smuggle Tom Cruise into Germany the way they try to smuggle dope out of The Netherlands?

I love the tabloids. I really do. Not only do they provide a window into our meaning-starved, navel gazing, brand-obsessed shriveled little souls they also cause the most unintentional of amusements.

Unless you don’t own a TV, haven’t been to a bookstore, or don’t eat anything but McDonald’s happy meals you’ve probably heard of Rachel Ray. 30 minute meals with a side-order of “down to earth” girl from New York have made her not only conglomerate they’ve made her a star, and that makes her a target for the tabloids.

The front page of the current issue of one of the rags, I know not which one for I was too busy laughing, features a professional publicity photo of Ray on about 3/4 of the page while the rest is a grainy photo of a quality so bad it’s not even worth the eye strain to decipher. What got me to look was the 72pt type headline: Rachel Ray caught in bed with another man!!!!!!! (I swear on all I love and hold to be dear that there were multiple exclamation points).

And all I could think was: I didn’t know Rachel Ray was a man.

Yes, the headline presupposes you have the knowledge that Ray is (or was) married but taken at face value it’s much more amusing than the fabrications “supporting” the story could ever be.

Ah, the grocery store on Thursday night. Proof once again that if you try you can have fun just about anywhere.

One of the reasons I hesitated in getting a @gmail.com account was the early buzz that Google was going to serve advertisements based on the content of your messages (easily inferred was the idea that “they” were reading your mail before you did).

I got over it but now I take great amusement in just how comprehensive Google’s cross-marketing algorithims can be. Well, what else would you call the article/news bar at the top of the page giving me recipes that use Spam™ while I’m in my spam folder?

Or perhaps corporate Google actually has the sense of humor it is widely reputed to have. Either way, it made me laugh, and laugh even harder when I realized that Spicy Spam Kabobs weren’t the only recipe available.

Yet another in a long series of pointless amusements, this one from the good folks at Sundance. You’ll need Flash for both the site and the quiz. The shorts are kind of interesting, though.

We have an all-news station here in DC that does traffic and weather every 10 minutes. One of the traffic bits they reported to me at 5:38 was that a truck that had overturned around midnight had finally been set upright but that when it had it had split open spilling the 20,000 pounds of frozen vegetables it had been carrying.

Maryland state police were busy cleaning up the thawed vegetables and traffic on the Beltway was at a stand-still.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words but me, I’ve always been a fan of the radio drama. I’ve got this picture in my head of the state cops in their Smokey The Bear hats walking the road picking up bags of broccoli and peas and carrots.

I’m sure that the reality is no where as interesting as the image in my head of the trooper staggering under a load of frozen corn.