[ Saturday, September 13, 2003 ]
A tribute in color
Okay, pretend this site always had a white background.
Now, imagine you just clicked here after months of loyal readership and found a black background much to your surprise. Yes, yes, I know the background has been black basically from the outset. Just go with this.
Anyhow, look at the black as a tribute to the man in black - Johnny Cash - for the next few days.
Johnny Cash 2-26-1932 to 9-12-2003
Dave Sutor [1:01 AM]
[ Thursday, August 14, 2003 ]
Blackout babies
Looks like folks will be makin’ babies tonight in northeast America and southeast Canada.
Yep, it’s blackout time again.
Sometime during the afternoon of August 14, something happened somewhere and the power went out over a couple hundred miles throughout that region. (Forgive the vagueness. This is still an ongoing event. Obviously, the blackout did not hit western Pennsylvania - PhugIt’s home territory. Or as we like to call it, The State with Electricity.)
That means people will stay home since there might not be many places open due to a lack of power. They’ll get some red wine, have a few drinks and make sweet, sweet lovin’. Or some people might get piss drunk on tequila and get to humpin’. Either way, there’s gonna be some babies shooting out of some wombs come nine months from now.
Dave Sutor [6:12 PM]
Darkness coverage
Doesn’t it seem a bit odd to interrupt network television broadcasts and dominate cable news shows with stories about a blackout from Detroit to New York City since the people most hampered by it don't have the energy to run their television sets?
Dave Sutor [6:11 PM]
Slappin’ the donkey
We can only hope Al Sharpton meant the Democratic Party.
Please God, let that be the case.
During a recent debate between Democratic Party presidential candidates in Philadelphia, Sharpton stated, “If you want to move a donkey, you have to slap the donkey. I intend, in the next eight months, to slap this donkey all the way from Iowa to the last primary. I intend to slap this donkey until it stands up for the American people. I intend to slap this donkey until this donkey kicks George Bush right out of the White House.”
Logic would conclude Sharpton intended the statement as a message of his intention to spur debate in the Democratic Party - one with a donkey as its national symbol. However, pervert innuendo could create another image from those words.
And - just as a hunch - the average PhugIt reader probably knows something about pervert innuendo. (We’ve done studies.)
From that perspective, the image of Sharpton kicking President Bush out of the White House by slapping his donkey across the country falls somewhere along the spectrum between comical and mind-bendingly disturbing.
Fortunately for Sharpton, the Democrats never adopted a monkey as their symbol or he would be in prison, since ‘slapping the monkey’ would be a more widely recognized reference to a certain act by males. At least the donkey reference kept it in the realm of where a person would need to have at least some perversion on the mind to use the alternative meaning.
Dave Sutor [2:39 AM]
[ Tuesday, August 05, 2003 ]
Sutor for Governor
Larry Flynt won’t let a background in porn stop him. Gray Davis won’t let an apparent lack of ability hinder him. Dozens of Californians won’t let obscurity hamper their case.
All of those individuals have faced their obstacles and at least made some initial effort in pursuing the position of California governor.
So, I will not let my obstacle stop me.
I am not a resident of California. I have spent about a grand total of one hour in the state roaming in the desert somewhere off Route 15 between Las Vegas and Los Angeles just north of the Mojave National Preserve. Why should I let that stop me?
My lack of residency does not make me any less qualified than a bunch of other people who will likely meet the standard of bucking up $3,500 and collecting 65 signatures in order to get their name on the state’s upcoming governor recall election ballot. I am just as fit as any individual whether basically unknown or one of the country’s greatest pornographers.
That is why I demand my spot on the ballot. And that is why I demand my spot in this political circus.
And remember my slogan: Who the hell is he? Ahhh, just PhugIt ... vote for Sutor in 2003.
Dave Sutor [10:03 PM]
Hussein / Taylor ... Goin’ Wild for Asylum
Forget Lennox Lewis.
If the heavyweight boxing champion wants to retire, so be it. The boxing community will do fine without him because there is a world class fight waiting to occur.
Right now, Liberian dictator Charles Taylor is playing a shell game with the world by repeatedly suggesting he would give up power if he could get asylum. Then he backtracks in a desperate attempt to cling to power for another week or so. Meanwhile, in a desert far, far away, Saddam Hussein is in hiding - no doubt pondering his mistake of being a brutal, oppressive killer without being an ally of the United States at the same time.
He only understood half of that equation - unlike the folks in Saudi Arabia.
Anyhow, who knows? Maybe he would also consider living out the rest of his life in a palace owned by some other third-world dictator. Maybe not.
Either way, both men honestly have to know they are screwed with no real way out. Basically the odds fall into the pretty-damn-certain range they could soon be captured in some way with an international war crimes trial looming as a possible outcome. That’s where boxing promoter Don King could enter the picture, as he promotes Goin’ Wild for Asylum at the MGM Grand or a north Africa desert crossroads ... who the hell cares?
Here’s the plan, put the two men into a boxing ring together.
The loser gets a trial where international prosecutors will spell out the graphic nature of their inhumanity to their fellow man. A likely life sentence or death sentence would follow.
Meanwhile, the winner would get exile and asylum in some country where the person would live like a king except for the ability to give the go-kill-50-people-for-laughs command.
Dave Sutor [10:01 PM]
Brother can you spare a whole lot?
Damn, Mike Tyson wasn’t already bankrupt.
Who knew?
Honestly, it just seemed like something that would have happened to the former boxing heavyweight champion a while ago. Didn’t it?
It’s a pretty standard story: Boxer wins title, makes obscene amounts of money, weds beautiful woman, beats said woman, loses said woman, loses said title, goes to prison (possibly repeatedly), discovers he has no money. It just seemed like Tyson would have already completed the circuit during his swirl of madness.
Maybe Tyson just didn’t want to lose all his money MC Hammer-style to the tune of tens of millions. Apparently, he was on a path to trump that number with serious aggression. Tyson just filed for bankruptcy after reportedly losing $300-$400 million.
At least nobody can repossess his tattoo ink.
Dave Sutor [10:00 PM]
[ Wednesday, July 30, 2003 ]
Gambling on corpse counts
Thankfully, no futures trader will have to utter the words, “I can’t believe I lost all that money because those damn terrorists did not kill enough people by the end of the quarter.”
In a rare relocation of a collective backbone, Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle and other members of his party actually stood up to a recent Pentagon proposal that put the government close to endorsing a gambling on death policy that could have led to such a comment. The idea was to setup a futures market based around potential terrorist attacks or other events like the possible assassination of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
It was recently stopped, though.
If Pentagon officials had their way, people would have basically wagered on the likelihood of an event occurring within a certain time.
The idea was for the Pentagon to gather information in order to possibly predict future events based basically upon seeing where the smart money went. Aside from all other arguments about devaluing human life to a gambling formula and the idea of profiting directly from death, the proposal forced the question of how bad is the current state of intelligence gathering if the military wanted to rely on 10,000 online investors to help form policy?
Sources:
MSNBC
YAHOO
CNN
WBAL
Dave Sutor [4:05 AM]
Oh yeah, they played a game, too, by the way
Okay, NFLHS.com did not want me to write a story about the skydivers who jumped into Hersheypark Stadium and the helicopter that maneuvered above the field prior to the Big 33 football game. That was too bad because those events provided more entertainment than the actual high school all-star football game between Ohio and Pennsylvania.
They just wanted a story about the game.
So, go read about Ohio’s one-sided victory here.
Dave Sutor [4:00 AM]
One less link
Probably nobody noticed the reduction of this site’s links by one in recent days. But it happened. I thought I found an interesting site that approached news from outside the mainstream and provided links to interesting perspectives. So I linked to it.
I do not believe a link means a 100 percent endorsement of a site. It’s just meant to provide easy access to sources that might feature material of interest to people who visit a site, like PhugIt. This recently deleted site, which shall go nameless here, was an aggregation website that seemed to raise some legitimate questions about current political situations and media negligence. Some of the stuff was farfetched and slanted toward one side. But there were some interesting questions raised.
Plus, it had a good conspiracy vibe going.
However, it also recently featured a few articles that seemed basically anti-Jewish in nature just to be anti-Jewish. Most notably, one seemed to basically support the idea that a Zionist conspiracy has controlled American politics, the media and the military since around World War I. Much of the supposed proof operated under the idea that if any Jew had a hand in making a policy, then it was part of a Jewish plot. Of course, it also explained in detail the belief that the 9-11 attacks were all part of the conspiracy. That was the heart of the story that suggested if somebody did not believe the ideas then they were just lemmings.
We here at PhugIt are all for digging beyond the easy answers. The same goes for reading about good conspiracy theories from UFOs to Skull and Bones. (By the way, Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone and there is life on other planets ... but those are just opinions.) We also believe there is a lot of wagging the dog going on with the Bush Administration. But those towers sure as hell fell down. That wasn’t faked.
But back to the story.
The article just seemed hate-filled, though, and based around the idea of assuming a conspiracy and then looking for any supposed evidence whatsoever to prove it.
Unlike providing a sidebar link, this site provided a direct link to the article, which seemed to imply support for the ideas. The site and the anonymous author can support those ideas all they want. PhugIt also has the right to not endorse them.
This is not suggesting the work should be censored in any way. PhugIt just does not want to give the publication a hey-go-see-this-kind of plug.
Plus, it is not meant to be some thin-skinned reaction to hurt feelings. We’ll make fun of anybody here at PhugIt - Jews, blacks, whites, Asians, Muslims, conservatives, liberals, men, women ... whoever. I’m Slovak in my heritage. Slovak culture has had so little influence that it does not even have a stereotype associated with it - not even something like Irish drinking jokes or cliche Indian accents.
Dave Sutor [3:58 AM]
[ Thursday, July 17, 2003 ]
Word count
President Bush only spoke 16 words, so what could that matter?
People cannot say anything that changes society in so few words, right? It’s not like Neil Armstrong spoke for the citizens of all the world when he stated, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." That was only 11 words, so it must have really been irrelevant.
And Dr. Martin Luther King did not define the Civil Rights movement with the words, "I have a dream." Four words ... that’s barely talking at all. Then there is the Bible. That cannot matter because its first line is just a little, bitty sentence: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."
Of course Armstrong did speak for mankind, King did define a cultural movement, and the Bible does matter.
So do Bush’s 16 words.
However, courage-deficient hawks want to dismiss Bush’s likely deception due in part to its shortness. Maybe the most impressive point was that Bush, who sometimes seems to mispronounce at least 16 words in a speech, was able to string together the sentence, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," during his State of the Union Address.
The point was clear. Bush used the quote to paint a picture of Hussein attempting to restart a nuclear program. Now, it appears the statement was inaccurate at best or a lie at worst.
Supporters rallying around the president now suggest the statement was not a main cause for the war. Somebody would basically have to believe the mentioning of nuclear weapons in the most important annual speech given by anybody on the planet is irrelevant to support that argument.
Bush backers also attempt to brush aside the statement by reducing its value to a word count, as if that is the deciding factor of a comment’s value. "It is 16 words, and it has become an enormously overblown issue," said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on CNN.
In case Rice was wondering, the United States Constitution Amendment (the 13th) that freed an entire race of people counted less than 50 words - just like the First and Second Amendments.
Dave Sutor [11:04 PM]
At least he said, “I’m sorry”
Hopefully some British Prime Minister - circa 2200 - will make the apology current Prime Minister Tony Blair should have made on Thursday.
During an address inside the United States Capital, Blair told a story about how the British burned the United States Library of Congress in 1814. He then quipped, “I know this is kind of late, but sorry.”
Those in attendance laughed.
However, the statement probably did not go over as big with some grieving parents who recently bought coffins for their soldier children thanks to the combined policy of Blair and United States President George W. Bush based on ulterior motives and verbal shell games.
Maybe some British leader can pick up the slack for him two centuries from now.
Dave Sutor [11:02 PM]
[ Wednesday, July 16, 2003 ]
A title suggestion
Maybe Ann Coulter can just call her next book Naaa, Naaa, Naaa, Naaa, Naaa, I Can’t Hear You, Liberals Have Cooties.
The conservative shrill machine could also place a picture of herself on the cover with her fingers in her ears.
It basically would make an appropriate follow-up to her recent release entitled Treason. In the book, Coulter takes 355 pages to explain what she perceives as the evils of liberalism, as she compares them to her view of patriotism through examples like former Senator Joseph McCarthy’s approach to shaping America. It was known as McCarthyism, which basically amounted to him attempting to quarantine people he did not think were as American as he was.
Coulter, of course, calls McCarthyism a liberal creation that never really existed.
She stated as much in a recent 10-question interview with Time.
Coulter also took the time to pay tribute to McCarthy by posting a picture of herself standing by his grave at www.anncoulter.com.
During the interview, Coulter relied on her usual mix of hyperbole, intolerance, and general confusion that for some reason everybody in the world does not think like a middle class, white, Christian, conservative American. When asked about liberals’ approach to the war on terror, Coulter stated, “They are rooting against America.”
Coulter, who can cram as much foolishness and narrow-mindedness into a square inch of text or second of speech as anybody, continued. Time asked her: “Do you see a way forward for Americans to come together politically, as a country?”
She answered: “Oh, yes. I do. The Democratic Party has got to go away. It's got to just hang up its stirrups. I really think it has functionally gone the way of the Whigs, and it's just a matter of enough Democrats figuring that out.”
Maybe that could be her opening paragraph to Naaa, Naaa, Naaa, Naaa, Naaa, I Can’t Hear You, Liberals Have Cooties.
Dave Sutor [12:49 PM]
[ Friday, July 11, 2003 ]
Always learn the local hunting rules
Randall Simon apparently forgot to read his Wisconsin pork product hunting manual.
The Pittsburgh Pirate went over his bag limit during a recent hunt at Miller Park - the home of the Milwaukee Brewers.
And his second mount might cost him.
Simon, during a recent game, stood in the dugout as four individuals ran past him in a race. They were dressed as an Italian sausage, a bratwurst, a Polish sausage and a hot dog, respectively. Simon decided to tap the Italian sausage - known in the real world as 19-year-old Mandy Block - with a baseball bat.
She fell.
Block also bumped into the hot dog - a.k.a. Veronica Piech, 21.
They fell to the ground, leading to possibly the best quote of all from this event tailor-made for one-liners. “I just looked over and saw our wieners in a wad," said Brewers manager Ned Yost in a quote found at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Block took the incident in good nature and asked for nothing more than the bat Simon used. Simon, who received a $432 fine for disorderly conduct, would have been okay if he just bagged the one pork product. However, he harvested a second running link.
And Piech showed no sense of humor concerning the joke gone wrong.
Piech, speaking to the MJS, stated, “From the moment this has happened, I've had utter disgust with the situation. I did not think it was a funny practical joke. He could have ended my career just like somebody could end his."
She also added: "It's definitely more of an emotional toll than I ever would have realized. It's a dangerous job. But out of the 100 things you plan for, you wouldn't plan for that."
If the idea of somebody worrying about their career as a running hot dog was not pathetic enough, Piech’s ‘emotional toll’ statement screams of an immature personality. It also resembles the statements one would expect from somebody already plotting a lawsuit.
And that’s why Simon’s second harvest might cost him.
Dave Sutor [2:39 PM]
19 years of change
Terry Wallis still mentally lives in a world in which Saddam Hussein is an American ally, Michael Jackson’s skin tone is black and the Detroit Tigers have the best team in baseball.
In July 1984 - the year the Tigers last won the World Series - Wallis nearly died in a car wreck. He then slipped into a 19-year coma that just ended. Wallis came out of the darkness and actually started to speak.
However, he has no knowledge of anything that happened during basically the last two decades.
He is presumably okay and well rested.
Dave Sutor [2:37 PM]
Just follow the instructions
Go to Google.com.
Type ‘weapons of mass destruction’ into the search box without the quotes.
Then click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.
Dave Sutor [2:33 PM]
