It's been a great long while since I've done one of these, but I thought it might be interesting for a Saturday evening I'm stuck at home. As some of you may already know, I like writing diaries about pop culture. While some claim it rots people's brains, I think it offers a glimpse of Humanity that can sometimes explain other "relevant" issues. So that's brings me to this diary's question of the night: Which movies & television shows are keeping your attention?

Thought this might make for a nice little science diversion. I was originally going to make this a segment in an upcoming "Totally Irrelevant Crap", but that diary is running a little long (and a little late as usual), so I thought I would rework it for some much needed late-night fun.

Over at Cracked.com, they've just put out a list of "5 Scientific Theories That Will Make Your Head Explode", in the sort of 'Scanners' kind of way. I'll let the evolutionary biologists & quantum technobabble whateverists in the land of Kos judge the science of the piece (they are a comedy website after all), but I did think it was interesting, and makes people think about perspective.

For example, we are organisms living on the surface of a gravity well, going round & round a nuclear fireball, in a Universe for which we're not exactly certain of all of its properties. And somehow, we all get up every day thinking this is all normal.

I've been away from home for about the last week, so I haven't had the time to sit down & put together anything "irrelevant & crappy" recently, but my travels & recent news have me thinking about something else. The state of air travel.

It still amazes me that after 9-11 & all the money that was spent on "Homeland Security", the level & quality of said security at any major airport. American taxpayers spend about $5 billion a year on the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA), and it's largely a clusterfuck of "Epic Fail" proportions. I mean don't you feel safe by the crack TSA security staff, whose prior experience was probably working at McDonald's, worrying about whether you have more than 3 ounces of toothpaste or the content of sippy cups?

But I did not come to pick on the TSA tonight. No, it is the shittiness of the airline industry that has drawn my attention. So, for the question of the night, which airline is the worst to fly?

What was the first car you ever had?

I got the idea for this after reading a spate of stories over at Jalopnik about teenagers and the automobiles their parents bought for them. For example, the image to the right is of what's left of a BMW M3 that parents bought for a 19-year-old.

Potential idiot parents take note — the 2008 BMW M3 is a finely crafted, high-performance, German-engineered rocket sled. It is not a present to buy for your LA-area 19-year-old. When parents like you buy cars like M3s for your kids, things like this happen — they pile a couple of guys in the car, then take it out for high-speed foolishness. At the peak of teenage testosterone, they will hit the "M button," rocket up a hill, lose control, jump a curb and bash into a house.

So was anyone else lucky enough to have parents that shelled out $50,000 for Bavarian ///M Power, or were you making due with a piece of shit beater?

Or maybe it exists in some parallel universe where I have a goatee? I got into a conversation today about the future. Not the future, as in the election or what will be the state of the stock market in the next quarter, but the sort of future people believed in as children. The one where our cars would fly and computers would talk to us, and be servants that tackle the mundane & serious problems of life. Instead, at the beginning of the 21st Century, we're struggling to find ways to keep the road cars running without damaging the planet, and when not suffering from blue screens of death, computers still aren't "smart" like HAL (well, a non-homicidal HAL) and more likely being used to watch "2 Girls & A Cup" or some other thing going around the series of tubes.

So I thought it might be interesting to see a few of the ideas that never were... or at least... not yet.

What better way to waste time & brain cells than pondering nostalgically about useless crap? In this case, the best & worst music videos of yore.

Oh, Mickey what a pity you don't understand
You take me by the heart, when you take me by the hand
Oh, Mickey you're so pretty, can't you understand
It's guys like you, Mickey
Oh, what'cha do Mickey, do Mickey,
Don't break my heart Mickey

Now that I have that song stuck in your head the rest of the night.....

I wasn't going to do another one of these this week, but since there was a bit of fluff happening, I thought it might be fun. Plus, I had some free time to waste.

The standard warning for those of you who've never seen one of these before: If you would like to see some of the latest entertainment news, celebrity gossip and odd crap making the rounds, keep reading. However, if you are easily offended by half-nude men & women or other such things, you might want to stop right now.

You've been warned.

As some of you may know, I write a lot about the entertainment industry & the gossip that surrounds it. One thing I've touched on in the past is the robbery that occurs at the snack bar in movie theaters. I've recommended theater owners dress their staff with ski-masks & guns so the atmosphere is right when charging people $4 for a Coke, $6 for a bucket of popcorn, and $5 for a hot dog that has been spinning in a rotisserie oven for God knows how long.

But there are places worse than the movie theater snack bar. I know that's hard to believe, but it's true. They're called university bookstores.

By some estimates, college textbook prices are up 186% since 1986. To add insult to injury, after a student spends an exorbitant sum for books, at the end of the semester the very same bookstore will only buy them back for a fraction of what they charged, if they'll buy them back at all since they need to waste trees by using a new edition of world history next semester. Unless Doc & Marty got in the DeLorean, traveled back to ancient Greece & screwed up the space-time continuum, I don't think much has changed about the Peloponnesian War.

I know my limits. I leave the relevant & serious issues like "Purity" & John McCain's teeth for others to ponder. No, here we contemplate the questions that arise from the fluff of life, while hopefully having a little fun. So in addition to the usual stuff, I thought I would throw a question on the table tonight.

Like many of you, I decided to have fun during the 4th of July holiday. At a party thrown by some friends, I met someone. She's smart, funny, and very hot, basically everything a heterosexual male could ask for. We had a good time, but there is one issue. It wasn't until later that I found out she's 19. I'm in my late 20s & maybe it's a sign of me starting to feel old as I approach 30, but there is something just a tad odd about going out with someone who a short time ago was worrying about Homecoming & a Prom dress. Although I'm sure she might feel a bit strange if she knew I was on a website as "Rimjob" posting gossip about Lindsay Lohan.

So all of this led me to wonder whether people think there is an age, a point of no return, where it gets "creepy" to date someone 18 or 19? Well, enough about my hangups, on to the crap.....

I've always seen the continuing hole at Ground Zero as symbolic of the last 8 years of political leadership. With the full weight of New Yorkers & the American people behind them to do what's right after a terrible tragedy, instead the reconstruction at what used to be the World Trade Center has been plagued with cronyism, flawed engineering, piss poor aesthetics, numerous design revisions, cost overruns and general ineptitude that has left more or less a 16 acre hole in Manhattan 7 years after the attack. It's basically the same quality of judgment exemplified with Iraq & the rebuilding of New Orleans.

To pour more salt on the wound, this week a report by the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey said the project may go as much as 20% over its $15 billion dollar budget. Also, construction at the site, originally slated to be done by this year, may not be completed until as late as 2014. That would make the rebuilding process at Ground Zero longer than the time it took NASA to put men on the Moon.

The economic slowdown & rising gas prices were expected to take their toll on car sales, and it did. With people either losing their jobs or losing a chunk of their disposable income to $4 gas, sales of automobiles in the United States showed their worst half-year performance since 1993, including a more than 18% sales plunge for the month of June compared to the same time last year, and June 2007 wasn't exactly a good month for the auto industry either. It's also double the sales drop experienced in the wake of the September 11th attacks.

Detroit automakers were hit hard. Ford Motor was down 28 percent in June, General Motors was off 18 percent, and Chrysler dropped 36 percent.

Despite its sharp decline, G.M’s results were better than expected, which industry analysts attributed to a sales blitz with offers of zero-interest, long-term financing deals. The cut-rate loans helped G.M. retain its historic position as the top-selling United States automaker over Toyota, whose sales fell 21 percent.

On Thursday I promised to have this damn thing ready by Friday night. However, the fickle finger of fate intervened, and made that impossible by occupying my time with other matters for the last 3 days. And like some of my better moments in life (i.e. like cramming a semester's worth of organic chemistry inside my brain in a 7 hour period), I have somehow pulled it together to give you this... Crap.

The standard warning for those of you who've never seen one of these before: If you would like to see some of the latest entertainment news, celebrity gossip and odd crap making the rounds, keep reading. However, if you are easily offended by half-nude men & women or other such things, you might want to stop right now.

You've been warned.

I've spent the last couple of days dealing with car trouble. A car's failing alternator, & having to deal with the dealership trying to find a part, has delayed work & publishing of all things "Irrelevant & Crap" until tomorrow night.

While wasting moments of my life in a dealership waiting room, I decided to spend the time talking to my Mother on the cell. So with all that's happening & all the issues in the world, she wanted to talk about the price of gas, other drivers, and roads. It's an issue that probably resonates more on a local level, but if you wanna get "Mama Rimjob" pissed off, just ask her about the quality of roads. My home state of Tennessee is the only place I've ever lived where the solution to a pothole was to put a 5 inch thick metal plate on the problem for vehicles to drive over at 60 mph, so TDOT (Tennessee Department of Transportation) can take their sweet ass time to fix it.

So with that in mind, it gave me an idea for a topic. Which state has the worst drivers and/or roads?

Oh my, it's been a good bit since I've done one of these diaries. It's always like piecing together different sources for a term paper with this damn thing, and over the past two weeks the phone would either ring or something else would come up that required my attention. And so without further ado, let me see if I remember how to do this.

The standard warning for those of you who've never seen one of these before: If you would like to see some of the latest entertainment news, celebrity gossip and odd crap making the rounds, keep reading. However, if you are easily offended by half-nude men & women or other such things, you might want to stop right now.

You've been warned.

All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again... or maybe not. Last night's episode of "Battlestar Galactica" brought multiple storylines to a head, as well as seeming to answer one of the series' biggest questions.

Or did it?

It was reported this episode was originally intended to serve as part of the series finale, before the advent of the Writers Guild strike resulted in the Sci-Fi channel expanding BSG's final season. It did feel like an "end", but it left some loose threads & raised just as many questions to be resolved as it answered. And you won't see the 2nd half of this season until 2009, but there is word the remainder of the season has been expanded to 11 hours (the series finale is now 3 hours long), more on that later.

So let's get on with it. Spoilers after the jump.....

This is probably not the biggest news of the day, but it did make me giggle when I read it. According to The Daily Telegraph, the United Nations Human Rights Council has issued a report saying the United Kingdom must "consider holding a referendum on the desirability or otherwise of a written constitution, preferably republican".

However, the kicker comes when you find out which countries on the UN Human Rights Council were concerned about the plight of Her Majesty's subjects.

The council has 29 members including Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Sri Lanka. It was the Sri Lankan envoy who raised concerns over the British monarchy.

Sri Lanka has been called "the world's worst perpetrators of enforced disappearances". And pray tell how Queen Elizabeth gets called out for being what is in practice a ceremonial Monarch by the Saudi Kingdom, which has an actual old fashioned authoritarian Monarch.

I wrote a diary about the worst fashion trends ever a couple years ago, so let me see if I can go back to the well again, and provide some late-night fun.

Clothing & fashion can say a lot about people. On the one hand, it's an expression of self & personal taste, on another it can have aspects of herd behavior. Of course there are some people who like what they like, with the "skunk hair" & enough eye-liner to make Tammy Faye Baker wince, but there's also that segment who're basing their style on what others think is cool. I still think the tie says a lot about humanity. I have to believe Sigmund Freud must have seen some psycho-sexual masochistic symbolism in millions of people spending almost every morning of their lives tying a constricting piece of cloth around their neck that serves absolutely no purpose.

So without further ado, let's remember all the bad shit people once thought was cool.

The manipulation of language is always a tricky thing. It's usually done with vagueness & imprecise words that are intended to make things "better." But when you start creating a world where people are obscure in saying what they mean, it makes it that much easier for people to not mean what they say, or deal & talk about the underlying problems the vague words are meant to mask. Whether the motivations or intentions are good ones is a matter of perspective, but what about when it's done in the name of fairness?

In yesterday's Kansas City Star, they recount the story of Tory Bowen. She alleges that four years ago when she was a University of Nebraska student, she was raped by Pamir Safi. The really interesting part of this story is Ms. Bowen's contention that her 1st Amendment rights have been violated by the trial judge that supervised two trials, one ending in a hung jury & the other a mistrial. The problem? Lancaster County District Judge Jeffre Cheuvront would not allow the use of the word "Rape" at a trial about whether a rape occurred, because it might be prejudicial to the defendant.