Saturday, April 11, 2009

Passover Humor

Mama Poop's hysterical toilet seat cover.

let my people go toilet seat cover

I Was Literally Cracking Up and Rolling on the Floor Laughing My Ass Off, Literally

As someone who loves too take things too literally I found this video hilarious. It's the 80s classic "Take On Me" by A-ha, except the lyrics have all been changed to literally represent that which is going on in the video.



And here's the original video for those of you love it and think the spoof version bastardizes it.

Friday, April 10, 2009

Nothing Good Happens in the First Three Innings Anyway

Fox has an exclusive contract with Major Leage Baseball which gives them exclusive rights to show games between 4 and 7 pm on Saturdays.
This Saturday however the Mets Marlins game begins at 6, so the team's 2,000 ancient fans can enjoy a postgame concert and still get home early.
That means SNY is not allowed to show the first hour of the game.
I just hope we don't miss a Reyes triple.

No One Can Be That Dumb

This video reportedly comes from the birthday wishes segment on KTVO, a station in Missouri. But there's no way the anchors wouldn't have caught on eventually. It was probably a gag for the Christmas reel.

Thursday, April 09, 2009

They Always Blame the Jews

As a lover of good ethnic jokes I normally don't blink an eye when people make fun of jews for having big noses or overbearing mothers. Even cheap Jew jokes can make me laugh. But I often remind the teller the basis of those jokes is also the basis for the Holocaust. Throughout times Jews have always been targeted during times of economic distress. And now is no different. Ira Stoll writes a great piece in the Wall Street Journal about it:

"Walking down the street in my solidly upper-middle-class New York City neighborhood the other day was a neatly dressed man angrily cursing into his cell phone about "Jew Wall Street bankers."

I was headed in the opposite direction and didn't stop to interview him about his particular grievances, but the brief encounter crystallized for me a foreboding that the financial crisis may trigger a new outbreak of anti-Semitism.

It is a fear that is being articulated ever more widely. President Bill Clinton's secretary of labor, Robert Reich, frets on his blog, "History shows how effective demagogic ravings can be when a public is stressed economically." He warns that Jews, along with gays and blacks, could become victims of populist rage.

In the New York Jewish Week newspaper, a column by Rabbi Ronald Price of the Union for Traditional Judaism begins, "In the 1930s, as Germany's economy collapsed, the finger was pointed at the Jews and the Nazis ascended to power. The famous Dreyfus Affair, in which a Jew was falsely accused of treason in France, followed on the heels of economic turmoil."

At this juncture, the trepidation may yet seem like paranoia, or special pleading akin to the old joke about the newspaper headline, "World Ends in Nuclear Attack: Poor, Minorities Hardest Hit." Everyone is feeling the brunt of the recession; why worry about the Jews in particular? After all, Jews today have two refuges: Israel and America, a land where Jews have attained remarkable power and prosperity and have a constitutionally protected right to exercise their religion freely. In that case, why worry about potential danger to the Jews at all?

One answer is that the historical precedents are exceedingly grim. The causes of the First Crusade, in which thousands of Jews were murdered, are still being debated, but some historians link it to famine and a poor harvest in 1095. As for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the foremost historian of its causes, Benzion Netanyahu (the father of Israel's new prime minister), writes of the desire of the persecutors "to get rid of their debts by getting rid of their creditors." More generally, he writes, "it is an iron-clad rule in the history of group relations: the majority's toleration of every minority lessens with the worsening of the majority's condition."

Lest this seem overly crude economic determinism, consider that the Jews have been victims not only of unrest prompted by economic distress but of attempts to remedy such economic distress with socialism. Take it from Friedrich Hayek, the late Nobel Prize winning Austrian economist. In "The Road to Serfdom," Hayek wrote, "In Germany and Austria the Jew had come to be regarded as the representative of Capitalism." Thus, the response in those countries, National Socialism, was an attack on both capitalism and the Jews.

There are ample indicators of current anti-Semitic attitudes. A poll conducted recently in Europe by the Anti-Defamation League found 74% of Spaniards believe Jews "have too much power in international financial markets," while 67% of Hungarians believe Jews "have too much power in the business world." Here in America, the Web site of National Journal is hosting an "expert blog" by former CIA official Michael Scheuer, now a professor at Georgetown, complaining of a "fifth column of pro-Israel U.S. citizens" who are "unquestionably enemies of America's republican experiment." And over at Yahoo! Finance, the message board discussing Goldman Sachs is rife with comments about "Jew pigs" and the "Zionist Federal Reserve."

So will the Jews come under attack? The existence of the Jewish state guarantees refuge for Jews around the world, but it carries with it its own risks. Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has said that if the Jews "all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them world-wide." It's a comment all the more chilling as Nasrallah's Iranian sponsors are on the brink of making a nuclear bomb.

As for the idea that Jewish professional, political, and economic success in America is a guarantee of security, that, too, has its risks. As Yuri Sleskine recounted in his book "The Jewish Century," in 1900 Vienna more than half of the lawyers, doctors and professional journalists were Jewish, as were 70% of the members of the stock exchange. In Germany, after World War I but before the Nazis came to power, Jews served as finance minister and as foreign minister. Such achievements have a way of being fleeting.

It may yet be that the Jews escape the current economic crisis having only lost fortunes. But if not, there will have been no lack of warning about the threat. When Jews gather Wednesday night for the Passover Seder, we will recite the words from the Hagadah, the book that relays the Israelite exodus from slavery in Egypt: "In every generation they rise up against us to destroy us." This year, they will resonate all the more ominously."

I Love This British Stuff

If you've ever looked at London newspapers online you will notice they are unabashed about using sex to sell papers. They frequently post random pictures of the WaGs (wives and girlfriends) of the National Soccer team.

Note: Alex Curran is my favorite WaG.

But this picture accompanying a story about changing the clocks, seems a little gratuitous, even for me.

I was thinking of purposely leaving out one letter in this filename to get some cheap hits on Google, but I think that's beneath me

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Winnie Cooper Gets Married

The smoking hot Danica McKellar (best known for playing Winnie Cooper on "The Wonder Years" and the girl in Ted's bedroom in "The Pineapple Incident") who is also incredibly intelligent and gave up acting to pursue a degree in math, got married to some douche, so I might as well post pictures of her.
Becky Slater was her maid of honor, because she's also her sister.
Kevin Arnold wasn't there. I guess it hurt too much.





Method Actor

A disturbing new anti-smoking ad shows a small child losing his mother in a crowded train station. The poor little boy gets sadder and sadder and heart-breakingly, starts to cry.
As if that weren't cruel enough, turns out he wasn't acting.
The Australian company that produced the ad said the boy's reaction was real.
His mother really did walk away from him and they recorded his natural reaction.
I can't think of anything more cruel.
But the company says just a few seconds later he was back in his mother's arms.

Joe Paterno is So Old He Remembers When Jews Dominated the NBA

It's getting to the point where I don't even need to make jokes anymore. Paterno provides such great material it's better to present it unvarnished.



Btw, I do hope they strip Bowden of those 14 wins, because Paterno deserves the record. He may be a senile old fool now but he was a great coach for many years and always did it the right way. As opposed to Bowden who cheated, recruited thugs, and always excused their behavior while hiding behind the veil of Christian charity.

Song of the Week

"Jai Ho" - Pussycat Dolls

Mrs. Poop and I finally saw "Slumdog Millionaire." I loved it, I think Mrs. Poop said she thought it was pretty good, but not worthy of all that hype. But she does love this song, and I love the PussyCat Dolls and my girl Nicole Scherzinger.

Note: This is the New World Order of Song of the Week. Tightass record companies don't allow their videos to be embedded. And instead of clicking on 100 different videos to find one that might be embeddable, I'm just going to paste the link, and no one is going to click, but that's the way it is.

Blame youtube and greedy record labels, not me.

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Gruesome Sports Injury

Turkish wrestler Serkan Ozden breaks his finger during a competition and will join Billy and Anthony Munoz in living the rest of his life as a deformed freak.

Jessica Biel Plays a Stripper in a New Movie

Jessica Biel plays a stripper in "Powder Blue" and here's an awesome look at how she got ready for the role.



Update: it has been confirmed that Jessica Biel will show her tits in this movie.

No One Shakes Hands Like Johan Santana

In addition to never losing anymore (10-0 in his last 18 starts) the great Johan Santana is blending in in the clubhouse.

And he also has personal handshakes with every member of the team. The only people I ever knew who could remember 25 different handshakes were Jose Lima, and Juice.

Mrs. Poop Comes Out on Top

When I tried to encourage you all to enter The Poop's tournament challenge group, I promised the winner a "laudatory post."
And there is no one about whom I'd rather write a laudatory post than my wife, the lovely Mrs. Poop.
But since I've often described this entire blog as "a love letter to Mrs. Poop" it's not necessary to repeat all that here.
Plus, her accomplishments speak for themselves. She got 3 out of the 4 Final Four teams correct, nailed Michigan State vs. UNC with UNC winning. And for good measure, in her tiebreaker she correctly predicted Michigan State would score 72 points in the title game.
Her 1570 points placed her in the top half-percent nationally, pretty good. She finished in a multi-way tie for 20,587th place, a remarkable accomplishment in a field of more than 4,000,000 people.

Now the question everyone is asking, how did Mrs. Poop do it? First of all, she picked the least creative entry name possible. Seeing as how "ton" finished second, there must have been something to this.

Second, she did not have me standing behind her while she was making the picks, clearing my throat when she made a bad one. Although, if I had been I wouldn't have let her pick UCLA or Duke over Villanova.

Third, with Mrs. Poop first and jusTON second, maybe being good-looking helped. But considering I finished third and Special K finished last, I doubt that had anything to do with it.

Maybe Mrs. Poop just knows a lot about college basketball. Or maybe she really did travel into the year 2015 and buy a sports almanac.

Who knows?

Congratulations to Mrs. Poop, a deserving winner of the 2009 Poop Tournament Challenge.


Mrs. Poop's adoring fans congratulate her on her victory.

If Women Really Wanted Smart and Funny I'd be on the Cover of Magazines Instead of that Humorless Dolt Brad Pitt

A new study has found that ladies adore men who make them laugh.

According to the research, women think that funny men are smarter and more likely to be honest than more dour counterparts.

Women may have evolved to find intelligence an attractive quality because it suggests that a man will be a good provider for her and her children.

The study included 45 heterosexual women who were asked to read shorts descriptions of themselves compiled by 20 men, 10 of which were scored extremely funny and 10 as only slightly funny.

Then women were asked how intelligent and honest they thought that the men were and how likely they would be to go on to develop a friendship or a long-term relationship with them.

The findings show that men who used the funniest descriptions of themselves were thought to be significantly more intelligent than those who weren't as witty.

Funnier men were also seen as a better catch for a long-term relationship, according to the findings.

Monday, April 06, 2009

Mets 2009 Season Preview

After two disappointing collapses, GM Omar Minaya resisted the calls to blow up the Mets core and start over. Instead, Minaya identified the team’s biggest weakness then went after the best possible solutions to his problem. In doing so Minaya has turned a horrible bullpen into what very well could be one of the best pens in the majors.
Minaya realized the difference in the last two season was just a few games, not a few miles. The Mets were just a couple moves away. So he stayed the course and kept his good young players together.

With Reyes, Wright and Beltran, the Mets have a great trio to build around for at least the next 3 years until Beltran’s contract expires, and Wright and Reyes should play together for the next 10. Around them is still a weak lineup.

Carlos Delgado is old and getting older and I still believe his performance of the past two season is more evidence of his diminishing skills than the two hot months he had last year. A similar situation surrounds new acquisition Gary Sheffield who got old in a hurry. If either of those guys can deliver 30 home runs, the Mets will once again have a powerful offense like the one that carried them in 2006.

The other half of the lineup is fairly weak, with Brian Schneider and Luis Castillo amounting to almost automatic outs. Daniel Murphy and Ryan Church should still get a lot of playing times, playing together nearly everyday against right handed pitchers. I really think Murphy if put in between Reyes and Beltran can develop into a great, patient hitter with a .400 OBP and .900 OPS.

The starting pitching is the strength of this team and with six more years of Johan I don’t see that changing. I expect a huge year from Santana and if he gets some run support he can easily win 22 games. He could last year. There are a few question marks behind him though. Mike Pelfrey was a legitimate #2 last year, if he keeps up that growth he’s looking at 15 to 17 wins. And I still love Oliver Perez. He will never be Cy Young caliber like we thought be might in 2004. But he can be a very good to above average pitcher, especially under the tutelage of Dan Warthen. John Maine is a major question mark who can be the best #4 in the league, if healthy. The last spot will likely be a black hole all season with veterans and rookies shuffling in and out of the rotation.

The bullpen solidified by K-Rod and Putz should become a strength and all the other pitchers should be more effective in reduced roles. If Putz is for the 8th and K-Rod the 9th, then the other relief pitchers will likely be called to get throgh one inning, assuming the starters can go 6 on a regular basis. So that solves that problem.

But one more problem exists, one even more insidious, and more destructive over the last three seasons the the bullpen. As bad as the bullpen has been, the real reason for the devastating collapses has been the lack of timely hitting. We've already established the Mets do not do the little things (good defense, taking extra bases) that win games, but even when they get hits, they don't get them at the right times. They don't advance runners. They don't hit sacrifice flies. They leave tons of men on base.

A lot of the improvement needed in that area could be attributed to luck, but whatever it is, it will be the difference in 5 games this season. And those 5 games will be the difference between 93 wins and a division title or 88 wins and another out-of-it October.

Sunday, April 05, 2009

NASCAR Rubes Duped

The hicks and bumpkins who watch NASCAR were tricked by an April Fool's prank played by Car & Driver.
The magazine's website said a stipulation of the automakers' bailout required GM and Chrysler to stop participating in NASCAR.
That would mean the end for drivers of the Chevy or Dodge cars.
NASCAR fans freaked out over this and Car & Driver was forced to apologize and admit they may have "gone too far."
Chrysler's spokesman called the prank the most irresponsible thing he's ever seen.
It was a joke, lighten up people.

Josh's Favorite Poker Player

In order to be a successful poker player, you have to be able to tell your opponents a lie and make them believe it.
On a recent "Poker After Dark" Phil Laak says that when he starts playing poker, he just can't stop telling lies. One time he was in a casino and he was starving but when someone asked him if he was hungry and wanted to get something to eat, he said "no thanks, I just ate."