18 posts tagged “humor”

As anyone who was born poor will tell you, it would have been a hell of a lot better to have been born rich. Some poor bastard showing up in an industrial parking lot wearing a shabby coat and dirty hat in the hopes of an afternoon’s work would give up a lung to live the kind of life of privilege that the silver-spoon set take for granted from the day their first solid poop is cast in bronze and shipped to Royal Doulton.

Some rich people blend into their sickening excesses – their furs and diamond studded gotchies — and they never bother us poor people unless it’s to murder a service person or marry one of us in a moment of slumming they’ll live to regret in the divorce courts.

We keep ourselves in concrete, noise and squalor, and they live on their miles-wide estates large enough to house multiple golf courses, complete with horses who shit healthier than 90% of the rest of us. But it’s been that way forever, and one comes to learn to accept the inevitable.

With the internet spreading their exploits faster than some fat sweaty asshole with a toupee in Santa Barbara can finesse his connections to try to stop it, the daughters of the privileged have made their nauseating selves familiar to a wider and poorer lot than could be summoned for a Country Club circle jerk.

Part of the reason for this is these women are far better looking than the male heirs to big money (see Steve Forbes, and all men in the Royal Family, whose women, it must be said, do not follow the good looking heiress rule. ). But whatever the reason, our screens have been filled with these nauseating ladies to the throne who redefine frivolity and shamelessness every time they appear on camera.

What do you get when you mix a staggering family fortune with a genetic tendency toward megalomania and fail to temper that with any manner of restraint or introspection? The Top 10 Most Annoying Celebrity Heiresses. We’ve chosen 10, but the list could have been much longer, and  their ranks will continue to swell as long as young rich women continue to prim naked and machine-tanned in front of a mirror and meet with a positive response when they ask the pool-boy “Do you really think I could be a star?”

10. Vanisha Mittal

Vanisha Mittal is the richest heiress in the world and the daughter of Lakshmi Mittal, whose work you will recognize in the 1000-yard stares on the faces of former steel union representatives worldwide. While her father did appoint her to run Mittal Steel, nepotism is about as common as an unflinching sense of entitlement and a cold  ignorance of the lives of the majority of the population among the uber-rich, and she does seem to be serious about her business and lacking the more odious qualities of others on this list.

Mittal makes it on here for her wedding in 2004, one that was so grand and expensive it makes the synonyms one would normally apply – such as “obscene”, or “a 2×4 to the ribs of every decent person who works for a living” – seem inadequate. Her wedding to Guy Smiley in the photo (pictured drinking liquid gold) cost nearly 80 million, and involved rentals of top Parisian properties including, appropriately enough, the gallery at Versailles, where the debauched rich of yesteryear lorded it up before a change of events made a cutting argument for a more equal distribution of wealth.

9. Guinness Heiress Clare Irby

Clare Irby is a scion of the Guinness brewing dynasty, and that alone is likely enough to encourage most of our male readers to sharpen their No. 2 pencils, break out a legal pad, and get started on some poetic verses to win her heart. But, like the Guinness Brewery itself, where you have to traverse endless floors filled with the tedium of the beer-making process before finally arriving, panting, at the top floor to guzzle a pint, she might be more effort than she’s worth.

Earlier this year, Irby was arrested for being drunk and disorderly on an 11-hour Bangalore India to London. It was alleged that Ms. Irby got friendly with a seatmate, whose girlfriend was asleep and thus blind to her husband conducting a first-hand inspection of the Guinness family lineage beside her. (Click here for a hilarious Daily Mail cartoon on the subject). Others on the plane said that she kept repeatedly ringing the call button, loudly demanding “more booze”, and that she was deaf to the cries of her toddler child, whose dirty nappy she is also alleged to have tossed on an empty seat behind her. (We were cool with her until that final bit. Screaming children should be kept in the overhead compartment).

Irby was found not guilty, but the reason for that may have been that the prosecutor had to prove she was drunk in British airspace, which would have been only the final 20 minutes of the 11 hour flight. Since she had been cut off hours before then — presumably somewhere between the time she flashed her underwear to her fellow passengers and later when she flipped off a cabin attendant — she had had a chance to sober up.

8. Anna Anisimova

“The Russian Paris Hilton”. We can’t speak for all Russians (just the vast majority of them since we’re huge there), but we’d guess that being likened to the frivolous blonde, grainy-video blowjob-giving heiress would not be something most would appreciate.

But Anisimova has come to earn that name, renting a house in the Hamptons for a couple of months for US$550,000*, buying up New York real estate, and throwing tightly-packed wads of hundred dollar bills hard into the faces of poor people and shouting, “Yes, I’m rich, isn’t it glorious!” Ok, we made that up, but she was Paris Hilton-like in her ability to successfully inflict herself upon the social scene, in her case New York’s.

7. Tori Spelling

Spelling, the daughter of TV mogul Aaron (whose productions and co productions included The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Ve$as, Hotel, and TJ Hooker) somehow managed to get herself cast in one of daddy’s productions, Beverly Hills 90210, which was set at Beverly Hills High school (where she went). Previously, also by sheer coincidence, she’d guest starred on The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Ve$as, Hotel and TJ Hooker.

As a testament to her incredible versatility as an actress, Spelling portrayed Donna, the good-looking daughter of a wealthy cardiologist and socialite, which meant inhabiting the character of someone who wallowed in the upper 6-figure income bracket rather than the mid 7. Her book sTORI Telling (rejected title: Spelling Disaster) sat atop the New York Times bestseller list and with any luck, has been put to a more useful purpose being burned under bridges to warm the homeless.

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The feet are the ugliest part of the human body. Pull the shoes off any old-timer snoozing on a park bench (check for a pulse first) and you will be met with yellowing, callused, crusty awfulness that will make you forever be grateful that sandals, at least without socks, are not popular among that generation. Feet, however, are ugly even when well maintained – toenails painted, corns and calluses sawed off with liquid nitrogen– and not made even more hideous by long toes that give the appearance of deformed hands that you walk on.

Several cultures rightly denigrate feet, and in many of them, Thailand, for example, showing someone the sole of your shoe is a grievous insult, while walking with upturned shoes on both hands has a Kryptonite-like effect useful for keeping crowds at bay.

Mankind has long struggled to find ways to best cover these hideous appendages. In medieval times, foot bags protected against debris—a design feature that didn’t inspire confidence when most medical treatments consisted of finding someone to lop off an offending part. Fast forward to modern times and composite materials like rubber have provided much better protection, not only in the workplace, but for mobsters looking to avoid getting wacked in the rain.

A good shoe, like a good sock, should cover feet, be comfortable and not attract attention. For the unfussy man, a pair of black running shoes with the white logos of the brand colored in with black marker should suffice.

Here we focus on 10 of the ugliest pieces of footwear currently offending the sensibilities of everyone, even the blind, who are sickened even at the description. We are not talking about shoes that may look terrible, but serve some useful purpose – cement ones that expedite a trip to a lake bottom—but footwear that is so garish, it would give even a tranny hooker buyer’s remorse.

So, kick off your shoes and if they’re included here, leave them off and make a note of garbage day, as we kick ass and take names (kicking ass and not taking names is essentially a census) with our list of the Top 10 Worst Shoes.

10. Boxing Boots.

Some footwear is practical; Doc Martens for stomping fans in a soccer riot, for example and while you might not be caught dead in them unless a storm washed you ashore, hip waders are great for fishermen. By the same token, boxing boots are meant for, you guessed it, the chess with a spit bucket that is the sport of boxing. For some reason, as the world of a boxer (outside of the shorts), is one which is unlikely to intersect with the realm of fashion, these monstroties took off, but not in a good way, like in a direction other than wherever we happen to be looking.

For a brief period, manufacturers like Prada jumped on the bandwagon (there is no generally accepted footwear for jumping on bandwagons, but those shoes that give white guys extra vertical leap might help) with footwear inspired by a sport most women find repugnant…Speaking of repugnant

9. Gladiator Sandals.

For the gal on the go who wants to look as if she just might hurl a spear at a charging lion at a moment’s notice, may we recommend gladiator sandals. The gladiator sandal trend has had a longer lifespan than most Roman slaves but why would someone want shoes that require the fastening of more straps than a seat on the space shuttle? Like emperors of yore, we give these an emphatic ‘thumbs down’, though such a declaration won’t, unfortunately, meet with the same result as it did in Ancient Rome.

8. Adidas Kobe II.

Most sneakers are uncompromisingly and almost willfully ugly. Indeed, this list here could comprise kicks exclusively. However, one model, which looks like a bug shield on a cheap sedan, is worth inclusion here for being unspeakably ugly, while at the same time not taking advantage of the rainbow of colors that are typically the toolbox of weapons running shoe designers use to attack good taste. Behold the Adidas Kobe II. We can’t imagine what the Kobe I looked like, but it can’t be uglier than the hightop abortion pictured here, which resembles something that would float by on Mystery Science Theater.

After the tawdy details of Bryant’s personal life completely saturated the media like so much cheap musk,  it’s unlikely that he’s being inundated with calls to attach his name to anything whatsoever, which given this midnight turd of a shoe is probably a good thing.

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Ivan the terrible machinist

As the longevity of organized religion makes painfully clear, imaginary friends hold a powerful allure. They are not, however, limited to the fiction of holy texts. Imaginary friends manifest themselves in the lives of many — the overly creative person whose genius spills over into the make believe, the psychopath with a second face for dark deeds, or the friendless kid who’s practical.

There is something to be said for befriending a figment of one’s imagination. Unlike the real kind, an imaginary friend is incapable of, say, borrowing money and not paying it back. And if an imaginary friend asks to use your bathroom, it’s unlikely that he will rifle through your medicine cabinet or deposit anything of substance in your toilet.

In some films,  imaginary friends are depicted in a positive light, like an imaginary Humphrey Bogart  in Play it Again Sam, who encourages Woody Allen to grow a backbone and other advice that  unfortunately excluded both passing on Stardust Memories and not romancing someone whose school consent forms he once signed.

Here though we are looking at 10 imaginary characters in films who — like that kid in elementary school who enjoyed trapping birds — you would not want to befriend. These are the 10 Worst Imaginary Friends in Movies.

Children from yesteryear were as creepy as all get-out.

10.The Kids, The Orphanage

Do-gooder couple take their HIV-positive son, Simon to an orphanage in order to convert it into a home for kids with special needs. Along the way, the kid discovers playmates—not the good kind that bring you warmed hors d’œuvres in Heffner’s grotto—but imaginary ones who involve him and his mom in a dangerous game which ambiguously plays itself out when the kid goes missing and psychics are hired to track him down (never a good option, even as a last resort for the dumbest police officers).

Dishonorable Mention: Imaginary Friend, Dark Water

A divorcée moves into a concrete bunker of a building with her daughter and tries to piece her life back together after a bitter custody dispute, which the child eventually finds out she was on the losing side of when their ceiling starts to drip—an awful outcome for anyone renting an apartment under a compulsive toilet clogger. In this case though, while far less odoriferous, there lurks upstairs something even more frightening: the ghostly presence of a girl who drowned in the bathtub and comes to torment the new tenants. What follows is more murky water than even the most backed up shitter.

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The occasional good looking flasher or 10-car pileup aside, long driving trips are often boring. Drivers usually rule the stereo, realizing just how precious a fiefdom this is when you’re crammed into a giant steel box with five people and no hope of escape that wouldn’t involve serious injury at high speeds. Ask any truck driver and they’ll tell you that if it weren’t for  highway strip clubs and strangling the occasional hitchhiker, their jobs would be too dull to tolerate.

Bumper stickers offer a welcome distraction from the drudgery of the open road that doesn’t involve a point system for running over woodland creatures (squirrels, 5 pts, raccoons, 10 and up to maximum points for a bear. Rulebook must be consulted if, say, a giraffe escapes from the zoo and you somehow manage to bring it down with your Toyota Corolla).

Part of the fun with bumper stickers is that many people who aren’t using them to identify where they work or go to school are yahoos. They are somehow affiliated with a cause that a critical mass of people don’t care about or openly repudiate, and they want to share that with everybody mentally finalizing their orders at the McDonald’s drive-thru.

Here we have 7 bumper stickers we’d like to see, starting with a tribute to the man who gave us our most visited blog of all time:

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We now return you to our regularly scheduled program already in progress. (CLICK HERE FOR PART ONE OF 2008 PSYCHIC PREDICTIONS THAT WERE HILARIOUSLY OFF THE MARK).

2008 CELEBRITY PREDICTIONS

Hollywood fuels the psychic trade to the same extent it does Scientology and drug rehabilitation clinics. The best paid in the business are “psychics to the stars”, who hold seances in Bel Air mansions invoking the spirit of Coco Chanel and assure an anxious Dr. Phil that the general public will remain in the dark about him for at least one more year. When it comes to the end of the year and fans everywhere want to know what the next 365 hold in store for their favorite celebs so they can reorganize their lives accordingly, these upper-tier psychics are sure to turn up on television with their grocery list of predictions. Everyone will forget these over the 12 months to follow, during which most if not all of them will have been proven wrong.

Of course, if we were going to get all Vegas bookie-minded about the psychic business, we’d have to say that celeb predictions are probably second only to natural disasters as the safest bet for a sooth-sayer. First, as mentioned, the audience for this sort of crapola can’t remember what they just ordered through the drive-thru clown’s head speaker and is unlikely to remember what some charlatan medium had to say while testing the legs on one of Montel Williams’ loungers.

Along with short attentions spans, the repetitive nature of celebrity news also favors a lazy psychic. Celebrity marriages will crumble. Others will result in an instant narcissist of a child with a name that sounds like a brand of exotic coffee. There will be: DUI’s; drug busts; weapons-related offenses; celebrity sex tapes that may or may not have been circulated by the person featured;  grown-up child actors whose road to ruin will be covered; some celebs will start a fashion label, while others will call their agents and ask what’s the money like in reality television.

It’s predictable, or so you would think:

Sylvia Browne correctly guessed this woman's gestation period.

First let’s start off with Sylvia Browne, one of Montel Williams favorite guests who is not on a day pass. We may have been unduly negative about Sylvia in the first part of this blog. We praised StopSylvia.com and may have used the terms hideous crone in reference to her. Perhaps we were too hasty. A quick look at Sylvia’s celebrity predictions reveals one off the top that she got right:

Sayeth Sylvia: Jamie Lynn Spears, 16-year-old sister of Britney Spears, will have her baby.

And you know what? She did! In June! Sylvia baby you got the sweetest sooth in town. But wait… Sylvia the revelator made this stunning prediction on December 31, 2007. News about the Spears sister being 12-weeks pregnant broke about 10 days before that and she made it pretty clear that it was her intention to see the pregnancy through. Unless Jamie-Lynn was looking to wow the world of science with a 12-month-plus long pregnancy, the odds are pretty good that she would have popped before the year’s out. OK, Sylvia, we’ll give you that one, but how about some others:

Sylvia said: “Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie will adopt another child, but the couple will not stay together.”

Wrong, and wrong again. Brangelina gave birth to twins, didn’t adopt another kid, and are still together. It was a nice try as Angelina tends to adopt children from the duty-free at airports and Brad Pitt must tire of trying to get all the names straight, but, alas, it didn’t happen Syl. We shall return to Lady Browne the All-Seeing later on in this blog.

Astrologer to the stars Susan Miller predicted: Jamie Lynn Spears’ career will ‘take off like a rocket’…but it won’t be with Nickelodeon!

Nikki, a Toronto-based “psychic to the stars,” gave us this hatrick of celebrity predictions that missed the mark entirely:

George Clooney will get married and have a child. Penelope Cruz will run for political office in Spain, and Sean Penn will be wounded in a visit to the Middle East. Nope, nope, and, uhmmm, right - nope. Reasoning behind these guesses: George Clooney is a playboy who drinks and they usually tend to marry somebody for at least a weekend — the child bit was a strech; the Penelope Cruz bit seems like a bizarre stab in the dark; and anybody who goes to Iraq these days has a fair-to-middling chance of having their ass shot off in that country.

Richard Gere: the talented actor is set for a huge comeback, said Jennifer Angel of the New York Daily News. Huh? Didn’t Gere already make what could be considered a comeback in ‘07 with the Bob Dylan inspired “I’m Not There” (despite his portion of that being the worst) and the entertaining The Hoax?  But ‘08 was a write-off. We, along with everyone else we know and every 10 people removed from them didn’t see “Nights in Rodanthe,” which screened for several nights and we’re guessing in not too many places other than Rodanthe.

2008 NATURAL DISASTERS PREDICTIONS

Levi and earthquakes go way back.

Predicting how mother nature will beat the living snot out of the red-headed stepchild that is humankind is one of the most effective weapons in the get-rich-being-a-psychic start-up kit. Psychics have been feasting off mother nature’s fury ever since Nostradamus saw a commode getting frequented too often at an orgy and predicted the ensuing flood. They are often that obvious. If we predict that some natural disaster or another will befall Indonesia and an earthquake hits right on schedule that does not make us a pair of Canadian Kreskins, but just that we have a firm grasp of the obvious as that is the kind of country that regularly sees its citizens legging it for higher ground. If we predicted a tsunami in Saskatchewan and that happened, well we’d be charging admission to peak through curtains at us at the county fair.

As Mark Edward (it’s a safe bet he’s no relation to one of our all-time least favorite TV people Jon Edward) on Skepticblog wrote:

“It’s not that difficult if you have nothing else to do all day. Utilizing collected information culled from Googling, almanacs and seasonal demographic breakdowns makes predicting natural disasters like hurricanes, floods and great storms stiil a safe bet, but who wants to hear about all that on Montel?”

“I don’t feel like we’re going to have a big hurricane season this year,” said “Dr. Rob” (of the Florida town half-full of psychics we mentioned in part one). According to the Farmer’s Almanac, the 2008 hurricane season was the third busiest on record since 1944 and “one of the most damaging in history.”

Psychic Levi writes: “Instead of a long detailed list of quakes I will give you a few zones to watch for now but will update coming earthquakes through my blog.” Welcome to the age of the Internet psychic who can update his predictions quicker than we can delete something we posted here while we were drunk. How generous of Levi as well to touch on a “few zones.” Why be so specific? Why not just discuss possible developments somewhere on the planet Earth, or better yet, the known universe?

Levi does narrow things down though with: Indonesia and surrounding areas are becoming very unstable and should have been scientifically monitored last year. We cannot stop earthquakes but we can save lives by relocating people from priority danger zones. The government of Indonesia let out a collective gasp upon hearing of this revelation and have begun contact with the world of science. Levi’s insights are piercing.

Soothsayer and seer Barbara Garcia challenges Levi for the mantle of vaguery with: “It is a turbulent year in natural disasters particularly tidal waves, possibly a tsunami.” Maybe yes, maybe no — maybe rain, maybe snow.

(Thanks to LiveScience for pointing to the following). Volcanoes are always a popular one for scientists to toss into a batch of predictions as they make for stirring mental imagery and a bunch are bound to blow every year, so they’re safe enough, But psychic medium Michael R. Smith took it a step further by stating that a “a major supervolcano is poised to erupt, sending ash all over the Earth, affecting world-wide political and economic systems. It will blow Mount St. Helens away in terms of magnitude, and an eruption may occur in the Washington state or British Columbia area.” Smith claimed this was “… special area where I seem to be especially accurate.”

What will 2009 hold in store for us? Might someone who got knocked up in late 2008 give birth in 2009? We do not possess the mystical credentials to answer such questions, but we’ll be back next year to see how our favorite psychics did.

CLICK HERE FOR PART ONE

England’s Prince Albert was quite a trendsetter back in his day. Along with being an early proponent of piercing one’s junk, he also brought England the German tradition of hauling in a tree for the holidays and weighing its branches down with various chachkas. It is a tradition celebrated in the noodle-headed holiday favorite “O Tannenbaum”, which loosely translates as “I hope these pine needles don’t ruin my vacuum cleaner.” The tradition caught on and hacksaws have been roaring in wintry woods ever since.

Christmas is a time that tends to bring out the gauche and tasteless person within us all — there is no need to have all nine of Santa’s reindeer accounted for in your front-lawn tableaux. Here though we will focus on 20 items that surpass even the traditional standards of Xmas tacky. These are 20 Christmas ornaments that should not be hung on any Christmas tree that is not located in a home with rubber walls. So dump half a bottle of rum in the egg nog and take out the pruning shears as we run down our list of the Top 20 Crappiest Christmas Tree ornaments!

20) Bon Jovi: Putting this tuneless wonder on your Christmas tree is akin to admitting both that you hate music and are about as skilled at holiday decorating as the Jove-ster is at doing cover songs.

19) Dale Earnhardt pit crew ornament: A search for Nascar Christmas ornaments on Ebay brings up an unacceptably large number of hits. There are of course dozens devoted to that patron saint of stockcar Dale Earnhardt, but none of them stranger than this, a tribute to those guys whose job it is to change tires and put out fires. We never thought we’d find ourselves paraphrasing Jeff Foxworthy, but you can be certain you’re a red neck if you have one of these on your tree.

18) Phantom of the Opera ornament with lights and music: A good rule of thumb to go by when decorating your Christmas tree is that if an ornament requires batteries to operate, it is best left in its box. We were unable to find a video of this thing in action, but are certain there a few things less festive than an ornament celebrating a musical about a disfigured guy who lives with rats.

17) Golf Glove: Creativity was not the strong suit of whoever came up with this one. One for the geezers who fly to Florida to bat around golf balls every winter.

16) Mickey Mouse Shorts: The magic of Christmas. Bright-eyed little Johnny skips downstairs, his eyes twinkling with anticipation on the big day and what does he find hanging on the tree? A dismembered Mickey Mouse. Cue therapist in 30 years.

15) Gold Fortune Cookie: Highly auspicious, this little bauble will bring you good luck and remind you about that kung pao chicken growing fur in the bottom of your fridge.

14) Police Officer Set: A good one if you need a reminder of that cop who roughed you up and threw  you in the drunk tank last Christmas.

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Hangovers. Ah yes, when the glorious lies you were telling last night come crashing into the truth of today’s terrible reality. They are nature’s way of reminding you that life is not really as enjoyable as you might have thought when you were slow dancing with the vacuum cleaner and summoning another round of margaritas.

Hangovers, for all their unpleasantness, do teach you something of a lesson, the most pertinent among them being not to drink so much again–or at least to quarter yourself off from others if you do.

In our book, The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery, there are stories with which to comfort yourself the next time you’re shouting for Pepto Bismol and complaining about the weakness of your morning coffee.

Here, in the interest of the finest service journalism (journalists often say you should ‘write what you know’) is a series of tips you can pin to your refrigerator if by the next morning you’re able to make it that far and perhaps revisit its contents that’ve been processed and left on the linoleum floor.

Now, we should point out that, at least until the check clears for the diploma, we’re not real doctors. We are though, festive boozing consultants, so take that with a grain of salt (and a handful of extra strength Advil) and don’t call us in the morning.

Holiday Hangover Prevention Tips

• Attend a Mormon social or a meeting of the Modern Day Temperance Society.

• Stay up as late as possible after a night of heavy boozing. Take in a few infomercials, preferably ones that don’t focus on how you can best work out ‘your core’ or with any combination of punching and kicking as vertigo might set in.

• Keep a jug of Gatorade on hand. Friends swear by this and we have no proof whatsoever of its effectiveness, but at least it’ll make you think of happier times like when you had the powdered version in 5th grade soccer practice.

• If your hand-eye coordination enables turning on a stove (remember to turn it off too, as carbon monoxide poisoning is also a cure for a hangover, albeit a more permanent one) a hefty high-carb plate of Kraft Dinner will mop up much of the alcohol swimming around in your gut.

• A matter of principle as well as concern for your health would dictate that you not consume cheap red wine (note: this warning takes it for granted that you are not the type to attempt drinking Listerine or other “not to be taken internally” refreshments).

• Do not think yourself brilliant for remembering that old song and ordering “one bourbon, one scotch, and one beer,” as such a combination could wreak havoc on your innards.

• Generally, it’s best to stick with clear alcohols such as gin and vodka as the hangovers tend to be less severe than those of the darker variety that contain “cogeners”, noxious by-products of fermentation. And remember, no matter what a lobbyist for the vodka industry tells you (unless he’s buying free rounds) a real martini contains GIN.Bottoms up and best of luck!
• (Above excerpted from “The Mourning After” chapter of The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and an article appearing on Slice.ca)

As we prostrate ourselves in front of shopping mall Santa Clauses during this, the holiest time of year, there are always reports of people who, when they aren’t taking their yuletide shitty store return policy frustrations out on those earning a minimum wage, do so in the lot, when seasons beatings result from disputed parking spots.

Holiday season stress also boils over in vandalism directed at front lawns, which, if they happened during other times of the year would result in a garden gnome getting a pummeling usually reserved for mob informants.

[Editor's note: sometimes vandalism takes the form of vigilante justice, such as when someone kicks out blinding holiday lighting strong enough to have seen action during Pink Floyd’s “Wall” tour. (It is also quite tempting to toss a brick on behalf of Al Gore whenever one comes across a holiday display sucking up the wattage like that in the pic below)].

Being that it’s a time of giving though, (and apparently taking too) people have often awoken to find that their nativity scenes are one wise man short of a power trio.

Sometimes these holiday pranks become very serious indeed, as when one Ohio family’s ice skating penguins and Kris Kringle were bombed by local pranksters. In other instances, they are as blasphemous as replacing a nativity Jesus with “Stewie” from “The Family Guy”, or in many cases, walking off with Him altogether.

Now, the church is fighting back, not with another inquisition, but with high tech.

GPS devices are being offered by BrickHouse Security, a New York-based company lending the hardware and tracking service free of charge to churches and synagogues for the holiday season (Brickhouse Security as a side business, also employ their services to search for the career of one Lionel Ritchie. To listen to the Commodores’ Brick House, click here)

According to the company, they “send an e-mail or text alert and we’ll say, ‘It’s 2 a.m., and your baby Jesus is on the move. Should he be? If not, get your police on the line, and we’ll help track it.””

If it is on the move and a five finger discount is not the immediate cause, well, that just amounts to a Christmas miracle in our books (for not-so-miraculous encounters with JC, check our our Top 10 Jesus Sightings of All Time)

St. Paul tells us in the first Epistle to the Corinthians (who later became known for making fine leather in the 70s) that “thieves shall not inherit the kingdom of God”, and unless that other near divine, Barack Obama does away with current inheritance laws, this likely extends to those who make off with nativity Nazarenes.

In more ways than one Oprah is quite unlike a shark.

However one thing she does share with those ancient, fanged, deep sea predators is a rapacious, ungodly appetite (and if you want to reach for another, like she often does a twinkie, it’s also been said of sharks that they have to keep moving or else they’ll die).

Some of our more astute fans will notice we’re The Shark Guys (the less astute ones just enjoy the site for the pictures). This was a handle given to us in reference to our book The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death) and we thought it was quite apt, as with writing, much like cartilaginous fish, you’ve gotta keep movin’, hence our Salaat like devotion to updating this site three times a week.

There’s a nautical phrase, speaking of the high seas, that ‘it’s not the size of the ship that counts, it’s the motion of the ocean’. Well, the Good Ship Oprah is taking on a lot of ballast water of late, and if you’ll permit the metaphorical shift, is moving north of ‘cruiserweight’ under Marquess of Queensbury rules.

Why the concern for Oprah, whose ego requires a Port of Hamburg just to dock it? Well, we feel a certain kinship with her that includes a) a desire to mace Tom Cruise should he ever jump on our sofa, b) a publication we routinely use to showcase ourselves and c) if you added up our weights and multiplied them by two-thirds, you’d get her current weight.

To put things in perspective, we thought we’d compile a list of other weights and measures factoids, to show that, at the end of the day, (a day when she’d scarf down enough calories to feed an Olympic track team), we’re pretty much all the same inside.

[Low blood sugared Editor's note: Some of us more than others require a personal assistant with a license to drive a forklift]

• Earlier this year, Berkeley Bionics developed what they called a Human Universal Load Carrier, a human exoskeleton (fancy word for a motorized backpack) that can carry or help to carry the equivalent of one Oprah, or 90 kg of weight.

• A study at McGill University, examined hockey players of today versus those that played in the great depression, and, taking into account tuberculosis and hobo stew diets, found that today’s Montreal Canadiens are four inches taller and 37 pounds heavier than their predecessors.  The average NHL hockey player nowadays is roughly equivalent to about one Oprah, in mass.

• In the state of Texas, where everything is bigger including and especially Oprah if she should ever visit, environmental Health & Safety codes for illegal dumping dictate that anything disposed of for a commercial purpose and weighing 200 pounds or more, is a state jail felony. To put it another way, if you tried to dispose of Oprah in the Lone Star State you’d be doing some heavy time.

• In Touch Health’s flagship product is the RP7 Robot, a “mobile robotic platform that enables the physician to be remotely present”. This device weighs 200 pounds and if you replaced ‘physician’ with ‘personal trainer’, might assist The Big O in dropping more weight than Galileo off the Tower of Pisa.

• Oprah weighs about one fifth of an average golf cart. If you put both in neutral, they’d roll down a hill.

• The Joe Built Wheelbarrow has a load capacity of 1,200 lbs. It’s got a 6.5 horsepower motor and can be used to cart around Oprah, but only on gentle slopes.

• Great heavyweight champs like Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano, were actually cruiserweights according to today’s classifications. If Oprah were to lace ‘em up, she’d fight as a heavyweight and boxing insiders say she’s got solid chins.

• Speaking of punching, the largest heavyweight champ of all time is probably Nicolai Valuev, a massive 7 footer who claims to eat three kilos (more than 6.5 pounds) of meat daily—so does Oprah.

• The shipping weight of the Oprah Book Club tome, A New Earth, Awakening to your Life’s Purpose is 1.3 lbs. To put it another way, you’d require slightly more than 150 copies of this doorstop (provided the door’s hinges are industrial strength) , to equal one Oprah.

• Archimedes’ Principle, ‘Any object, wholly or partly immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object’ would be employed if you wanted to toss Oprah off the dock and see what would make her 200 lbs of fat float.

At home auctions, no longer do bargain hunters need to bid on charming Tudors where “Barry the Butcher” had a walk-in freezer. Yep, foreclosures are the order of the day and everywhere people are waking up from their American Dream to find that, like lookers at a brothel, they’re all gonna get screwed.

During these difficult economic times, with people ousted from their homes and cracking open nest eggs to make omelets, it seems the only people doing booming business these days are movers.

Movers have been kept very busy of late, as have their maligned cousins, repo men, the key distinction between them is that the former move your belongings to your residence, while the latter move them to undisclosed location with you in close pursuit, screaming epithets out the window of your car–if it’s not repossessed that is—until the law is called for backup. [Editor's note: if you have to move all of your earthly belongings into storage, you're likely not someone who requires the assistance of a mover]

There are few vocations more despised than repo men. Sure, there are Department of Motor Vehicle employees, who, with one strike of their pen, can doom you to the city bus and we’re fairly certain enough has been said about lawyers to exempt them from further discussion (we’ll steer clear of journalists too, given that the economic circumstances of late, means it’s become increasingly difficult for them to finance a lifestyle of heavy boozing).

Proving that the recession is indeed a global phenomenon, a retired septuagenarian Australian boxer was stocking the fridge of family friends (say that three times fast and you’ll annoy everyone within earshot) when he found out just how miserable repo men can be as mortgage financiers turned up to repossess his friends’ belongings.

Shoving the female half of the couple aside, one of the repo guys, “25 at most and built like front-row footballers”, according to witness accounts (physical prowess is never exaggerated when relaying the details of a good punch up, as The Shark Guys found out when we recently bested the Michigan State wrestling team who were running their mouths in a local bar) told the aged pugilist to “get out of the way, you silly old goat”. The old puncher, with brick hands, dropped his assailant like a sack of Yukon Golds.

According to reports the heroic Trevor ‘the Smiler’ King, whose upside down frown had been turned the other way around due to a weak heart and leukemia said the fallen man’s co-worker then repeatedly punched him in the stomach, but his fist “bounced off his rock-hard abdominal muscles”.

For all we know his antagonists might well have been clubbed footed midgets and King senile but, nonetheless we salute this tough-as-nails cacker (from a distance of course)

Earlier this year, we covered the story of a drunk who decided to take on a pro boxing coach, with similar results.