PARIS...PUNCHED OUT??

OK, I SIMPLY CAN'T RESIST.

HERE IS MY SEMI-MONTHLY POST OF SHOCK AND DISMAY ON THE ABSOLUTELY INNANE ADVENTURES OF PARIS HILTON AND WHY WE ACTUALLY CARE.

But first, we need to set the stage and describe the so-called "average North American Family" pictured above.

This family consisted of a former Playboy Playmate and a so-called rock star from Blink 182 who looks more like Pee Wee Herman on a bad hair day than anything else. And doncha just love all those tats?

Anyway, this once-in-a-lifetime couple are now split, apparently (who knows the fate of those kids and how they'll ever grow up "normal").

And today's story, which follows, is likely on Enterpainment Tonight and whatever other sleaze TV shows are out there. By the time you read this, if you do, it will be old news.

In our news meeting today (I work at a daily newspaper), someone actually said, "This will be the most read story in the entire newspaper Thursday." And the sad thing is, that person is probably right.

SAD, I said.

The only laughable thing about this is that Paris Hilton apparently got punched out. And as far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing. But these two kittens were scratching each other over THIS loser?

Paris Hilton vs. Shanna Moakler: Round 1
The Associated Press

Wednesday, October 4, 2006; 1:27 PM
LOS ANGELES -- Can Travis Barker really make women go this crazy? His ex-wife, Shanna Moakler, was involved in a nightclub fracas with Paris Hilton early Wednesday morning.
Barker, the drummer for Blink-182, filed for divorce in August from Moakler, a former beauty queen now appearing on "Dancing With the Stars." In September, Barker was apparently videotaped kissing Hilton, who needs no introduction.
Then Hilton encountered Moakler at the Hyde club in Hollywood last night. The following re-enactment is based on reports by police, publicists for both women, but unfortunately no pugilistic experts:
Hilton says Moakler walked up to her, "used the most vile of language" and then punched her in her jaw.
Moakler contends she exchanged mere profanities with Hilton, at which point Hilton's ex-boyfriend Stavros Niarchos emerged from the entourage, bent Moakler's wrists, poured a drink on her and shoved her down some stairs.
Hilton, 25, and Moakler, 31, both filed police reports alleging battery. Officer Karen Smith said police took pictures of Moakler and Hilton at the station, and that police planned to speak with witnesses at the club as part of their investigation.
Moakler and the tattooed punk rocker Barker were an unlikely pair when they married in 2004, documenting their lavish wedding and life on the MTV reality show "Meet the Barkers." They had two children.

Moakler also has a 7-year-old daughter with boxer Oscar De La Hoya.

All I can say is...ARGHHH!!! Why are we consuming this pap and caring about it when there's so many other things that don't get nearly the attention they deserve from us, which is just the way our so-called leaders want it?

VIDEO: DON'T GIVE UP by Peter Gabriel

BOYS CAN BE BONEHEADS

THIS is what my son used to be...a goofy kid with his hat on crooked holding up a rooster outside the back door of my sister's place.

A beautiful, innocent boy with little awareness of the outside world, struggling a bit in school, concerned with just having fun -- just the way it should be for any eight-or-10-year-old just figuring out what life's all about.

But in the span of what seems to me as if it was about 10 seconds, he has grown into this...a 14-year-old who now is into girlfriends, who is now almost as tall as me...

...Whose voice is changing and is getting near as deep as mine, who is weary about hugging and kissing me any more but who is still willing to let me hug him, whose shoulders are getting wider...

...Who has a zillion friends and is a year away from high school, who is exploring his interests in singing and art and creativity, who is mobile and more independent and whose body is changing at a mile a minute...

And now, inevitably, it has come to this:

And I had TOLD him about this. I WARNED him. He doesn't live with me full-time, so I said to him, as I and he could see the peach fuzz growing beneath his nose and above his lip, do NOT shave before you talk to me and I can show you how.

Because once you START to shave, you won't be able to stop. You'll be doing this for the rest of your life. But what does he do? He shaves. And he shaves over a zit, and it doesn't look that great. But he recovers. Thankfully, with no permanent emotional or physical scarring.

So on the left is my son's face, after he has shaved, apparently no worse for wear.

On the right is my face, after a day's unshaven growth. I'm sure he figures that he has arrived, as a man.

I figure he has just gotten himself into a lifelong activity that is little more than a pain in the ass. Not an unnecessary pain in the ass, and not without its rewards, but still a pain.

Like father like son, I guess.

THE FUTURE OF BLOGGING

THE BLOGOSPHERE

OUTSIDE

THE ATMOSPHERE

Can you see yourself posting from Outer Space?

Blogs in space another first for Soyuz tourist

By Laura Smith, The Guardian

"A long, long time ago in a country far, far away ... there was a young girl who had her eyes fixed on the twinkling stars of the night skies over Tehran."
So begins the blog of Anousheh Ansari, who this week created a clutch of precedents, including first paying female space tourist, first Iranian space tourist and first female Muslim in space.
The telecoms entrepreneur who emigrated to the United States at 16 and now lives in Dallas has added another probable first to the list: by blogging from space.
Beginning with launch preparations at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Mrs Ansari used her blog to detail her every thought and feeling during her two-week adventure.

Her observations include that space smells like a "burnt almond cookie" and the difficulty of keeping hold of lipgloss and trying to wash one's hair in space. The day before her return to Earth, she described "drowning in the sadness of my departure".
Yesterday she landed safely in the steppes of Kazakhstan. Mrs Ansari, wrapped in a fur-lined blanket against the early morning chill, smiled broadly as she sat, still strapped into her seat, in the long grass outside the Soyuz capsule.

Her husband, Hamid, crept up behind her and manoeuvred around her space helmet to give her a welcoming kiss, the Associated Press reported.
Mrs Ansari said later, at a ceremony in which she was presented with embroidered Kazakh robes and hats, that the most striking aspects of her journey were seeing the Earth from space and the friendship developed aboard the orbiting station with Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and US astronaut Jeffrey Williams.
"Anousheh has done a good job - she's one of the team," Itar-Tass quoted Mr Vinogradov as saying. Her blog also drew hundreds of responses from Earth, one urging: "Pray for world peace while you are up there. It's probably a local call rather than a long-distance one."

NASTY OFFICE AROMAS

PEE-EWWW!!!!

Our noses can be amazing things, crucial to our understanding of the world and in fact an organ that provides us with one of the most critical senses to our survival.

They can lead us to love and amour and to babies that need to be changed; they can also warn of us danger and set in motion our flight or fight response.

But they can also detect odors that are almost enough to make us vomit.

And when this happens at your place of employment -- as it did at mine yesterday -- it's enough to make your face turn green.

This, for the uninformed, is a red snapper. In this form, and on its own, it's a beautiful fish, although I have never eaten one before. No, the offender yesterday was this.

Red snapper, apparently microwaved in the cafeteria downstairs, and brought up somehow unnoticed to our third-floor office by a wanker of an employee who likes to eat at his desk.

Almost immediately, the unbelievably rank odor of this animal started wafting its way through the entire newsroom and into the olefactory sensory thingies of about 100 noses.

At first, we all laughed. Then somebody found a reference on the Web to how a chemical called arsene (I'm assuming it's where arsenic comes from) can smell like cooked or fried fish.

The smell was so bad, people could not work. Passing supervisors were asked what the smell was. Someone, only half-jokingly, wondered if the office should be evacuated and the HazMat unit called.

Eventually, someone tracked this guy down. He sits in a little cubbyhole behind some screens where no one can see him.

And when the entire office converged on him to express their displeasure (in a joking way) and tease him about polluting us all, his thing was, "What did I do?"

There's enough putrid smells at work as it is, on occasion, with people kissing bosses' asses at times and with the stinky stench of people talking behind others' backs.

He has the right to eat whatever he wants, of course. But did he have to bring into the office and make everybody else smell it? I don't think so. Or maybe our Health and Safety committee needs to provide noseplugs.

What are some of the dunderhead, inconsiderate, me-first things you've seen fellow employees do at your place of work? Or do you think this guy was fully within his rights to do what he did?