Yes, A Man From Texas Running For President Actually Said This

I won't keep you very long today because I don't want to dilute the point.

Here is Presidential candidate Ron Paul, while in Gilford, New Hampshire, while saying that we shouldn't bother calling in FEMA over Hurricane Irene:

"We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960," Paul said. "I live on the Gulf Coast; we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district."

If you didn't just shoot out your screen and aren't quite sure as to why this is the single stupidest thing Ron Paul has ever said in his entire life, head here and find out how Galveston made out in 1900. It comes complete with authorities downplaying the danger of an oncoming hurricane.

BONUS: Thanks to Penny Arcader Tomanta, who dug up the 1940's (1943, specifically, the forecasts for which were actively censored by authorities), 1950's (1957, specifically), and 1960's (1967, specifically, which at least saw evacuation efforts). All of which hit Texas.

Morning Disaster

This morning, a construction worker in Owensboro, Kentucky found what he thought was a homemade firework near a gas tank. As people naturally do in these situations, the man lit the firework near the gas tank. The make of the firework, which was actually commercially-made, was rather moot because either way it went blammo and sent the man to the hospital.

This is not the dumbest thing I can think of that has been done with fireworks.

The dumbest thing I can think of that has been done with fireworks involved a morning-zoo radio show called "Ray Lytle's Morning Disaster" at WQLZ-FM in Springfield, Illinois. Specifically, the dumb thing involved a man named Jim McGill, aka "Jim the Photographer", the show's resident butt monkey. McGill, as a stunt to entertain people standing in line for concerts, often stuffed a tube up his buttocks and shoots bottle rockets out of the tube.

But wait, there's more!

In May 2004, WQLZ was sponsoring a battle of the bands. Jim the Photographer was needed to once again supply his unique, horrifying idea of fun. Some rounds were deposited down the tube, and fired successfully.

Then a further round went not so well.

According to Lytle, one round must have had more sparks in it than usual. However many sparks it had, the firework blew up 5-10 feet from McGill's buttocks, and some of the sparks went down the tube.

McGill went to the hospital for a brief stay, but found no sympathy from the radio listeners. Not because they thought McGill was being stupid. Because they thought it was a prank. Remember, McGill was the station's butt monkey. On March 29, the Morning Disaster crew "mourned" his "death" from "severe rectal trauma". (Not to be confused with McGill's actual death in 2007 from undisclosed but presumably unrelated causes.) And if this didn't qualify as severe rectal trauma, who knows what does.

It's not often you get to say "thankfully, the construction worker only lit the firework next to a gas tank". As opposed to McGill, who in addition to being next to a group of people, was standing on top of a Hummer at the time and therefore was also next to a gas tank.

In conclusion, do not light fireworks next to any part of your body- hands, rectum or elsewhere. Nor anyone else's body. Or whatever petroleum deposits are laying around.

Live, Cause You're Living Today

Barring a deal- and honestly, I'm increasingly doubtful that one will be reached (though I've made wrong predictions here before)- on August 2nd, the United States will default on its debt.

We've already covered here a rough overview of what would happen in a default. Pain. Lots of pain.

And also, reality shows.

In our last talk about debt default, it was noted that when Argentina defaulted in 2002, as part of the fallout, their local television stations moved heavily towards reality shows. They are the cheapest to air, and anything else was simply too expensive to keep the network afloat. So if and when we default, if you don't like reality shows, bad news: it's gonna get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

And with reality shows come people you really don't want to get to know very well. You may have wondered at some point what would happen if a reality show simply filled the cast with generally decent people who enjoyed each others' company. What would happen if there were a reality show without jerks. Without contrived conflict.

It has already happened. And it was a laughingstock.

Flash back to July 2000. The first season of Survivor had just wrapped up a few months ago. It was not merely a smash hit, it was an American cultural event. How much of one? Ask around, and odds are eventually you will find someone who can, 11 years later, still give you the first and last names of all 16 original Survivors. Not only that, they could quite possibly name them in the order they were voted off. Some of them, such as Richard or Susan, can still be found kicking around the news wires every so often. Others, such as Colleen and Greg, have essentially dropped off the face of the earth with no intention of being found again. It took the Survivor Sucks board's "where are they now" thread, named for fan favorite Colleen, until this past June to get a lead on Colleen's current whereabouts after a four-year search- apparently, she's a producer for an intentionally-unnamed company in New York and, while as good-natured as she was on the show, really wouldn't mind if people stopped bringing up her Survivor tenure to her because it was a whole entire decade ago and she's done other things in her life too, you know. The search for Greg has been entirely fruitless.

I, incidentally, happen to be one of those people that can still name all 16. Play along if you wish; the answer is at the end of the article. Needless to say, you've already been given four first names.

Now try the same thing with any other elimination reality show, including future seasons of Survivor. Including shows that are airing right now. I'd bet cash money that you can't do it. That's how big Survivor 1 was.

A few months after that, Survivor's network, CBS, launched the second reality show of the modern era (which basically means everything but Real World and An American Family). This second show had already proven itself in Europe as a drama-filled screamfest.

This show was Big Brother.

The format for the fateful first season was quite different from the form Big Brother currently takes. In Big Brother's 2000 incarnation, ten people were placed into the house. There was no immunity, merely nominations. Each week, each contestant would nominate two of their fellow contestants for elimination. The two with the most votes would be put to a vote amongst the audience, who would decide which one left.

This sounds reasonable enough. It worked just fine in Europe, and would continue to work fine, with various tweaks, as each of the international editions ran through their respective lifespans (or continue to do so). Even so, America's Big Brother, in its current format, is a unique incarnation. It remains the only version of Big Brother, out of 45 franchises worldwide (one of which happened in the online game Second Life), to have the contestants vote each other out directly.

America's Big Brother 1 is why.

Big Brother 1 opened to high hopes. Much was made on premiere night about all the cameras in the Big Brother house, the total lack of privacy, how the toilet was the only place where footage would not be broadcast-- unless, of course, things started happening in there.

Here's that happening:



Who's that guy? I have no idea. I forget. But look at he and main-and-soon-only host Julie Chen go on and on about this house and what a huge event living in the house is going to be. Look at the sheer production made out of this. Look at the crowd gathered to see them go into the house. This went on for the rest of the premiere. Clearly, everyone involved expected another huge hit. Clips from foreign versions were played as well, just to make everyone aware of exactly what to expect.

Had they cast properly, odds are they would have been just fine. A game that takes the ultimate power of elimination out of the hands of the players requires a cast that is naturally antagonistic, that needs little to no prodding to set upon itself, so as to create more interesting television. An audience, or at least an American audience, is not overly inclined to provide a large cash reward to someone they find abhorrent. Should a contestant figure this out and become more likable than the others, all the nominations in the world will not eliminate them, as the audience will vote to save them every time. Their victory is assured. Therefore, a good cast must be full of people to whom such a thing would never occur while in each other's company.

Big Brother 1 had two contestants that fit this role: Will "Mega" Collins of Philadelphia, who upon his elimination would be revealed as a Black Panther, and Jean Jordan, a stripper and exotic dancer from Roanoke, Virginia who went by her last name.

The problem, of course, was that there were ten contestants, not two, and none of the other eight would prove to have much of a problem with each other. They did, however, have problems with William and Jordan; William quickly made enemies by accusing fellow contestant Brittany Petros of racism. So when it came time to nominate two people for the vote, William got 6 nominations out of a possible 9, and Jordan, who hadn't exactly been friendly either, got 5. Nobody else got more than 3.

Uh oh.

William was promptly booted. Jordan was the subject of a campaign by David Letterman, also of CBS, called "Save The Stripper", in both rounds 1 and 2.

It didn't work. Jordan was the second person cut loose, with New York lawyer Curtis Kin kept in favor in the Round 2 vote. Gone were the linchpins of drama in the Big Brother house. And with those linchpins gone, the other eight came to enjoy each other. And with little to do in the house but hang around, talk, and participate in the occasional reward challenge- some of which were done over the course of an entire week- all drama vanished in a flash. The house had eight nice, decent people, and nobody there to wreak havoc as they sat around and generally enjoyed each other's company for the remainder of the summer. Voting held little interest for them, because all eight knew that in the end, the audience would decide which of them would win. So they all just hung around and let the audience do just that.

Jim dandy if you're one of those eight. Absolute catastrophe if you're a producer looking to get ratings out of it.

Third to go was Karen Fowler of Columbus, Indiana. Why did she leave? She asked the audience to vote her out so that she could see her kids.

The fourth elimination saw the votes fall in such a way that five of the seven contestants were tied for second. Had one vote fallen differently, all seven would have been tied with two votes each. This is how much they acknowledged their ultimate control over their fate. When the audience voted out Brittany, the surviving contestants all ran to the walls of the house and screamed "WE LOVE YOU, BRIT!" as she departed.

Double uh oh.

In Round 5, the contestants openly talked about mutually splitting the money for the top three places- the only three that earned money- evenly amongst themselves. Ratings were plunging. "Chicken" George Boswell of Rockford, Illinois, who got the nickname from caring for the chickens the house was given, debated whether to lead the house in a mass walkout, which would basically bring the season to a screeching halt.

This could be exploited. In fact, the producers had little choice.

First, CBS played up the walkout in an attempt to boost ratings. Second, they grabbed an alternate from the casting process, Beth. She described herself as "opinionated" and a "bitch". She was a bald-faced attempt to inject drama back into the house. The only problem was, in order to get her into the house, someone in the house would have to leave voluntarily. The producers weren't particularly worried. After all, George was leading a rebellion! They were going to offer $20,000 to the first person to volunteer, but, as they stated, only the first person. So speak up quick! Beth, for her part, was informed that upon entering the house, if she won, she would only be eligible for $140,000, an amount based proportionally on the amount of time she would be in the house.

There were just two little snags in this plan:

1: By the time of the live elimination show, the walkout had been cancelled. "The Chicken Man's staying." And so was everyone else.

2: When actually offered the money, none of the contestants wanted it. The offer was upped to $50,000- "third-place money", as Chen made sure to note to the contestants. And remember, one of you is leaving tonight in sixth and getting nothing! You might as well take it! Come on! Anyone!

Anyone?

Please?

Pretty please with sugar on top we're on our knees begging here?

No takers. Beth would never enter the house. The elimination proceeded as normal, knocking out Cassandra Waldon of New York City, and the season proceeded to play out its boring, boring life. By the time it got down to four, said four were given the task of playing the show's official board game. It was a long way south of the sex, profanity and titillation promised on premiere night. When those four went to nominate for eviction, it was, in fact, a four-way tie.

Eventually, the game was won by Eddie McGee of Commack, New York, who received 59% of the final, three-way vote. Eddie was a one-legged cancer survivor. Audiences, at least what is left of them, feel warm and fuzzy giving money to one-legged cancer survivors when given the option to do so.

At the finale, Will Mega proclaimed that, without him, the show was "Big Boring". He found little disagreement, and while the producers were duty-bound to put a happy face on the numbers in public, behind the scenes they bowed to reality.

The season was swiftly disavowed. The game format was torn down and rebuilt from the ground up to become "a summer-long power struggle", with twist after twist dominating the proceedings ever since. Contestants would now not only nominate each other, but vote each other out directly, veto and/or replace each other's nominations, compete against and alongside exes and blood relations and previously unknown blood relations and former contestants, and institute Survivor's jury system, in which previously-voted-out contestants vote for the winner. Only two people would ever be nominated at a time from then on. For several years afterward, not only was Big Brother 1 not mentioned by the show, but future contestants were asked not to bring it up either. The house was changed. The logo was changed. The theme music was changed. The live audience would not return until season 10.

The only true nod to Big Brother 1 came in season 7, an all-star game, in which all previous seasons contributed at least two players to the cast... except Big Brother 1, which contributed one out of a sense of obligation more than anything else. The producers sent in Chicken George. Placed in a game alien to him and thrown to the wolves against some of the most skillfully manipulative people ever to play a game that now attracted them like flies, he came in 5th in a field of 14, surviving three consecutive nominations before losing to eventual winner Mike "Boogie" Malin of Concord, New Hampshire.

This time, people were actually interested in seeing how he did.

Three postscripts to this story:

1: Will Mega ran for Philadelphia City Council in 2003 as a member of the Education Party, describing himself as a "hip-hop political activist candidate". Shockingly, this didn't work.

2: In season 12, the American producers made another attempt at adding a Beth-style mechanic to the game. This time, they added a 'Saboteur' to the initial cast, Annie Whittington of Tampa, Florida. She was not eligible to win, but if she could wreak five weeks of havoc in the house without being voted out, she would win $50,000.

She was voted out in round 1. In fact, she was voted out unanimously. This was the big twist of the season. Panicking again, in round 5, another player, Ragan Fox of West Hollywood, California, was offered the Saboteur role for two weeks and $20,000. He warily accepted and avoided eviction, though only because he had won the right to veto his own nomination in the second week.

3. In case you're wondering about the article title, at one point the Big Brother 1 contestants were subjected to their own season's theme song. It had lyrics.



-----------------------

As for the identities of the original 16 Survivors, in the order of their ouster, here's the answer: Sonja Christopher, B.B. Andersen, Stacey Stillman, Ramona Gray, Dirk Been, Joel Klug, Gretchen Cordy, Greg Buis, Jenna Lewis, Gervase Peterson, Colleen Haskell, Sean Kenniff, Susan Hawk, Rudy Boesch, Kelly Wiglesworth, Richard Hatch.

Bad Credit? No Credit? No Problem!

Credit is a fickle, fickle mistress. Used the way it's meant to be used, you can break down one gigantic payment into a number of smaller, more manageable payments.

But, as so many people have so harshly learned, there are so many ways credit can come back to bite you. And when it bites, it bites down hard. The Jews in the Old Testament had a novel way of overcoming this. Deuteronomy 15 describes a process where, once every seven years, all debts were cancelled. That simple. The system could, conceivably, be gamed by simply not extending credit as the cancellation day drew near, but this is addressed in Deuteronomy 15:9- "Be careful not to harbor this wicked thought: “The seventh year, the year for canceling debts, is near,” so that you do not show ill will toward the needy among your fellow Israelites and give them nothing. They may then appeal to the LORD against you, and you will be found guilty of sin."

While that essentially was the invention of bankruptcy, we're not quite that lenient these days. Debtors must pay, and creditors must collect.

This story is not about the debtor. Kind of.

W.T. Grant was a dying 25-cent store. (The price point has altered over the years to reflect the times, from Woolworth's beginning the format at the five-and-dime price point, to today's dollar stores.) Poor, uneven design of new stores, and insistence on paying dividends no matter what the balance sheet said, had brought them to the brink by the late 1960's. In an effort to get sales numbers back up, W.T. Grant decided they would set up a generous credit program.

Quite generous.

36-month, $1-per-month repayment plan generous.

In addition, while some companies today advertise that they don't require a credit check, Grant actually meant it. Every single customer was offered credit at the register. Every single one. In fact, if a customer wanted, they could open up multiple credit lines simply by going to multiple stores. The store managers, failing to properly communicate with each other, would not know that the person they were offering credit already had it.

And they had plenty of places to go. Grant had a concurrent plan to open stores in places competitors weren't. Between 1969 and 1973, Grant opened 369 stores in small towns.

Suffice to say that there was a reason the competition wasn't in those places.

Not that the store managers were in much of a position to care where customers got their credit or how many lines they had, just so long as one of those lines was with them. They were under an incentive program for the ages. On one hand, managers were offered a $1 bounty for every customer that was signed up. On the other hand, they had quotas to meet. Managers did not want to miss these quotas. Missing these quotas might mean getting served beans instead of steak at the next promotion dinner. Or getting a pie thrown in their face. Or getting their tie cut off. Or being dressed in a diaper and sent running through a hotel lobby. Or made to push a peanut across the floor with their nose (the last one via Cultural Anthropology: A Problem-Based Approach by Richard H. Robbins).

Of course, the problem about extending credit is making sure people pay the debt back. If they don't pay the debt back, you've essentially given them free stuff. Allow this to happen too often, and you soon run out of merchandise with no money to purchase more. (There are of course the issues with usurious interest rates, but as we've long since established, they do not apply here.) In order to prevent people not paying the debt back, one would do well to not extend credit to people unlikely to repay.

Grant, meanwhile, was offering credit to "every deadbeat who breathed." Even the fact that a large and growing number of accounts showed bad debt was obscured by Grant's accounting system, which would every so often consolidate those multiple accounts from customers into a single account. Every newly-consolidated account was labeled current at the end of the process, even if no component account actually was at the beginning. Two delinquent accounts would be merged into one account in good standing. A customer that was delinquent could also refinance their account and pay a tiny amount of money to make it current again. Remember that the original plans could be for 36 months with $1 minimum payments.

Shockingly, this didn't work.

In 1974, the credit system was scrapped. But by then, the damage was done. They had reached the point where, as it was warned two years earlier, "Grant would run out of money if it paid all of its bills" (as told in the 1975 case Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York v. Charles G. Rodman, as Trustee of the Estate of W. T. Grant). The rest of Grant's story consists of various banking maneuvers to keep the company afloat, none of which were able to dig them out of the gigantic hole they'd created for themselves. Eventually, the banks just stopped extending credit.

Something W.T. Grant might have learned from, had they survived the lesson.

World Fails To Spontaneously End, Again

If you're reading this, you have already figured out that the Rapture has not come.

Normally, this would go without saying. But today it's apparently news. For the second time in a short while.

How many times do we have to go over this? How many times does the world have to not end before people get the point? How many times do we have to hear that the world will end "soon" before we start asking these people to stop predicting things? I understand you only really need to be right once, but come on now. This isn't predicting. This is throwing a dartboard at a calendar.

And how many people do we have to hear predict the end of the world more than once?

A cursory search of all the times the world has been predicted to end but failed turns up so many entries that I quickly lost count trying to pin down an exact number. All I can say for certain is that we are numbering in the hundreds. It's not even worth my time to try and pin down an exact count.

There is a culture, the Piraha tribe in the Amazon, that has no word for any number beyond two, and just refers to any number bigger than that as "many". (And 'one' and 'two' aren't necessarily one and two, but rather relative values, more akin to small, medium and large.) This is that. There are "many" predictions.

Let's just put it this way. Here's a list of failed end-of-the-world predictions, with the restriction that all the predictions were set for 1998.

Not that this will stop anyone from bringing up the Mayans and December 21, 2012. Or, when that prediction gets proven wrong too, simply moving on to some other guy who will predict the Rapture will come just in time for New Year's.

How To Become Internet Famous

Step 1: Come up with a plan to set part of a playground on fire with the intent of taping yourself playing on that playground while it's on fire, with the intent of broadcasting the stunt to the Internet.
Step 2: Ignite said part of playground.
Step 3: Watch fire spread to rest of playground, causing 20-foot flames and $50,000 in damage.
Step 4: Run. Run like the wind.
Step 5: Fail to run sufficiently. Get arrested.
Step 6: Do this in New York City, where New York media and half of Brooklyn will try and figure out figure out what might possibly have possessed someone to set a playground on fire.
Step 7: Be the son of the guy who runs Alliance Films, which just so happens to be the distributor of The King's Speech, a picture of irony that will prove irresistible to anyone considering reporting on the story, here being no exception.
Step 8: Also, do this at a school attended by the son of a Real Housewife.

Congratulations! You're famous! Just not in the way you'd hoped! Also I never actually mentioned any of your names! Hope that's okay!

Do Not Let This Man Near Your Smartphone

So let's recap where we stand on the upgrade-ancient-computer front...

THE INTENT: Buy a webcam. Also, buy computer- as it turns out, an HP carrying 4 GB of RAM- to replace the current computer carrying 256 MB.

THE REALITY:

Hoo boy.

Buy webcam, buy computer. Have brother install computer because I know not what the hell I'm doing. Things go semi-smoothly right up to the point I install the brand-new webcam which should now easily run on the literally-just-out-of-the-box computer. A restart is required to complete installation. I restart. The webcam works fine- though it turns out my voice, long thought to be at about the pitch of Local Newscaster, is actually about at the pitch of Star Wars Basement Dork- and also the Internet no longer connects. Call to Charter tech support ensues. Call ends when, instructed to disconnect the router, I discover that the very first plug out of the router was for the phone I was currently using. Call to HP tech support ensues. An hour and 26 minutes later, I have reformatted my just-out-of-the-box computer and am now stuck at a screen where I'm asked the name and password the computer is registered under. This information has been lost to the mists of time as the person who supplied it has since moved to Colorado and changed his phone number. Many blind guesses ensue. Shockingly, none of them work. A SECOND call to Charter ensues, in which we start by asking for the password. They don't have that. After long-winded bouts of frustrated babbling, I hand the computer off to a member of the family that can sort of speak Tech Supportese. Bouts of alchemy later, a guy is scheduled to come over on Monday, and until then I will have essentially swapped my old, fuddy-duddy 256 MB computer for a spanking-new, freshly reformatted 0 MB computer.

In the meantime, I attempted to throw a pizza in the oven for lunch. By the time I was roused from computer malinstallation long enough to remove the pizza, it had turned roughly the color of Selena Gomez's hair and could be turned upside down without losing its shape or any ingredients. Potential use as a Frisbee was considered.

In the meantime, here are people with brains.

Or Perhaps Not!

Apparently, completing installation requires 256 MB of RAM. Apparently, I don't have that at the moment.

Fly-by-night operation around here, folks.

Today's Episode of 'You Can't Win'

On May 14, 1896, Nicholas II was crowned the tsar of Russia; as it would turn out, he'd be the last tsar. We're not interested today in the end of his reign. We're interested in his coronation.

A celebration of his coronation was held at Khodynka Field in northwest Moscow (now the site of an airport) four days later, to be attended by anyone that wanted to show up. It was to be followed by a ball at the French embassy; that was for the diplomats and aristocracy. The people attending the celebration at Khodynka were informed that there would be free stuff at this celebration. And there was. Everyone was to get a sausage, some gingerbread, some pretzels, a bread roll, and a beer mug. For free. What a deal. Estimates are that half a million people showed up. (To compare, remember that Obama's inauguration drew about half that.)

During the celebration, though, a rumor began to make its way through the crowd. A shocking rumor. A rumor that would rock the Russian people to their core.

There might not be enough free beer or pretzels for everybody. (There is also the account that the people were simply told of 'expensive gifts' and they thought 'the gifts' would soon run out. We're going here with the version that contends they knew what the gifts were.)

Now, let us reiterate, in case it hasn't drilled into your head yet, that this beer, these pretzels that the people MIGHT not get- that there's a CHANCE they won't get- is free. A normal person might respond 'Aw, man, that sucks. But it is a huge crowd, and hey, I'm still getting free sausage and gingerbread and a bread roll and perhaps still the mug even if there isn't any beer in it. So I'm still making out pretty well.' And even in the 'expensive gifts' version of the story, and they worried they might not get anything at all... free. That's the worry no matter what the story is. That there might- MIGHT- not be enough free stuff to accommodate half a million people.

But that is why you were not a Russian on May 18, 1896. The correct response to this rumor of a minor inconvenience is as follows:

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I WANT MY FREE BEEEEEEER! AND THE PRETZELS I GUESS! BRAIN! SHUTTING DOWN! ACTIVATING STAMPEDE MODE!"

There were about 1,800 policemen on hand. But there were 500,000 people to corral. 500,000 people rushing to the free beer are too many for 1,800 to handle. The exact number of dead varies, but seems to settle at 1,389, with 1,300 more injured.

Nicholas was shocked at the news. And not just because he had learned how nuts his people would go to make sure they got every single bit of the free stuff that was offered. He wanted to forget the rest of the ceremonies and head to the hospital to meet with some of the victims. He certainly didn't feel like attending the ball at the French embassy. However, the younger brothers of the previous tsar, Alexander III, basically forced him to go, because they figured not going would be an insult to France, and that would be even worse than ignoring the death of nearly 1,400 people.

Ultimately, Nicholas went to the ball. Wrong move. Even though he made sure to follow it up with plenty of aid to the victims and their families, not only did Nicholas catch harsh criticism for attending the ball, the disaster itself was enough to cripple Nicholas' approval rating right out of the gate. Some mystics took Khodynka as a bad omen for the rest of his reign. (Mystics were a thing back then; remember that Rasputin arrived later in Nicholas' reign.) It wouldn't have mattered if he had attended or not, but Nicholas didn't improve his image any.

All for having the audacity to maybe not provide enough free stuff.

Rapid-Fire Book Club, Epic Fail Edition

Two of the topics that will most reliably get me to buy your book are:

1. Stupid people.
2. Epic fail.

My bookshelf is littered with those two topics. On one level, it's a way to become less stupid yourself; part of knowing what to do is knowing what not to do. On another level, it's just plain entertaining.

And so it was that The Little Book of Big F*#K Ups: 220 of History's Most Regrettable Moments by Ken Lytle and Katie Corcoran Lytle was added to my ranks.

RAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNNNN!

Voting closes tomorrow on the 2011 Time 100 poll. Mercifully. Time intends for you to, given a list of notable people from the past year, help decide who is influential and who is not. The winner, the person who is voted most influential (by way of 'influential' votes minus 'not influential' votes), gets a place in the Time 100.

That's the intent. Being a poll on the Internet, it has devolved into a gigantic popularity contest. The defending champion is Korean pop singer Rain, who it cannot possibly be argued has been influential beyond influencing Korean girls to yell EEEEEEEEEEEEEE, and given the current standings, he is winning again going away. In a distant second is Jay Chou, AKA Kato from The Green Hornet, and far behind Chou in third: Susan Boyle.

The rest of the top 25, as it reads when I get there:

4- Cheng Yen, head of the Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation
5- Beyonce
6- Chris Colfer, aka Kurt from Glee
7- Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great
8- Bradley Manning, the soldier being held for leaking to Wikileaks
9- Lady Gaga
10- Julian Assange
11- Ron Paul
12- Glenn Beck
13- Fukushima power plant workers
14- Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit-cart owner who set himself on fire and in the process kicked off all the Arab protests and wars and revolutions
15- Wisconsin's 'Fab 14' state senators (these would be the Democrats who went to Illinois)
16- Han Han, a Chinese writer/blogger who gets away with criticizing the government because he is also a celebrity and racecar driver
17- Rihanna
18- Dan Savage and Terry Miller, founders of the It Gets Better Project
19- Tawakul Karman, head of the Yemeni group Women Journalists Without Chains
20- Mohamed Elbaradei, part of the Egyptian opposition to Hosni Mubarak
21- Alan Mulally, CEO of Ford
22- Gabrielle Giffords
23- Wael Ghonim, who kicked off the Facebook movement to bring about Egyptian revolution
24- Mark Zuckerberg
25- Mahinda Rajapaksa, president of Sri Lanka

Exhibit B that the poll has descended into farce: the middle of the pack. Michelle Obama, the First Lady to Barack, is 26th. Barack himself, the president of the United States, is 46th. Aung Sun Suu Kyi (40th) comes in six spots back of Betty White (34th). Vladimir Putin (67th) is 15 spots behind Conan O'Brien (52nd). Benjamin Netanyahu (86th) is two spots back of Jamie Oliver, aka the Naked Chef (84th). David Cameron (110th), John Boehner (112th), Joe Biden (109th) and Dmitri Medvedev (105th) are all losing to Katy Perry (100th). Justin Bieber (137th) is four spots up on Kathleen Sebelius (141st) and 17 spots up on Hamid Karzai (154th). Aaron Rodgers (176th) is two spots ahead of the Nobel Peace Laureate, Liu Xiaobo (178th).

Exhibit C: the other end of the list; the bottom. Supposedly, the 'least influential'. The bottom 25 (of which Xiaobo only misses by one spot):

179- Ai Weiwei (Chinese artist and activist; detained by Chinese authorities earlier this year)
180- Jenna Lyons, executive creative director of J.Crew; Michelle Obama wears a lot of their stuff
181- Bruno Mars (aka the guy who would catch a grenade, throw his head on a blade, jump in front of a train, take a bullet straight through his brain for you, but is miffed that you wouldn't do the same)
182- Bob Dudley, CEO of BP
183- Dilma Rousseff, president of Brazil
184- Sarah Palin
185- Grant Achatz (American chef doing molecular gastronomy, like pretty much everyone else at that level of cooking after they heard about Ferran Adria, who now can't go out for a simple cheeseburger without getting three-hour presentations of pizza foam or malted scallops or other insane things he's done himself, better)
186- Michael Vick
187- Annette Bening (from The Kids Are All Right)
188- Russell Brand
189- Aziz Ansari (from Parks and Recreation)
190- Silvio Berlusconi
191- Willow Smith (aka 'I WHIP MY HAIR BACK AND FORTH I WHIP MY HAIR BACK AND FORTH I WHIP MY HAIR BACK AND FORTH I WHIP MY HAIR BACK AND FORTH')
192- Newt Gingrich
193- Lady Antebellum
194- Rooney Mara (The Social Network, the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)
195- Gwyneth Paltrow
196- Scott Walker
197- Zach Galifianakis
198- Chelsea Handler
199- Kim Kardashian
200- Charlie Sheen
201- Snooki
202- Amy Chua, the Tiger Mom
203 (last by miles and miles and miles)- Kanye West

Thankfully, the very bottom is mostly populated with annoying celebrities. Where they should be, assuming they even belong in the poll at all. But then you've got Scott Walker and Sarah Palin in there. And two different heads of state. You may hate them. You may want them out of the political arena. But to say they're not influential? You might make a case for Newt Gingrich, who has had a problem getting traction in Republican primary polls, but Sarah Palin not influential? Come on now.

It's not like Time didn't know this would happen. Back in 1998, they opened up their Man (changed the next year to Person) of the Year vote to the public. That is intended to be the person who had the most influence on the year, for better or worse. (This is the standard response every time someone brings up the fact that Hitler won it once, even though Time has been known to shy away from people who would draw a similar reaction in the United States.) The public decided that this should be Mick Foley, professional wrestler and, that year, author of the book Have A Nice Day. Time responded by removing him from consideration. The title eventually went to Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr.

Now, over a decade later, they've just decided to go with it. They've given up. If people want to say Rain is influential and make Stephen Colbert shake his fist screaming RAAAAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNN, then that's what Time is now prepared to do.

And if you take out the people who clearly have no business being 'most influential', leaving it just to the newsmakers, that creates another set of problems, as with votes come campaigns for those votes. Not debates. Campaigns. That's why you see the likes of Palin, Walker and Berlusconi at the bottom. Are they influential? Do they have an impact? Who cares? Suck it, Walker!

The best solution is simple: cancel the vote and put the decision back in the hands of the Time staff. If you want the job of deciding who's influential done right, you've got to do it yourself.

Nicked Votes

Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus has apparently, due to "human error"- namely, her own- failed to input 14,315 votes from Brookfield, which when added into the totals hand David Prosser a 7,000 vote lead. That's just barely enough to push the race out of the realm of an automatic recount, meaning Joanne Kloppenburg would have to pay for it, at the cost of $5 a ward.

When one looks at Nickolaus, as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports, it becomes clear she is used to this kind of attention...

In the 1990s, she worked as a staffer for the Assembly Republican caucus, one of four GOP and Democratic legislative groups that were shut down following a criminal investigation into state staffers doing campaign work on state time.

Prosser led Assembly Republicans as minority leader in that House from 1989 to 1994 and than as speaker in 1995 and 1996, giving him oversight of the GOP caucus in that House.

"To my knowledge (Prosser) has not had any contact with Kathy since she left the caucus," Prosser campaign manager Brian Nemoir said.

The caucus investigation eventually led to the resignations and criminal convictions of leaders in the Senate and Assembly for directing caucus and staff employees to engage in illegal political activity during their state employment.

Nickolaus, who earned $54,000 a year as a data analyst and computer specialist for Assembly Republicans, was granted immunity in 2001 by authorities conducting the investigation.

In a criminal complaint issued in 2002 against then-Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen and others, prosecutors claimed Nickolaus developed a computer software program that was used by state officials to track donations. According to a Journal Sentinel report, Nickolaus said she developed the software on her own time because she wanted to sell it to the state elections agency for use in automating state-required campaign reports. She left the caucus around that time.

Given the timing of the find, the very coincidental amount of votes found, the place they were found being Prosser's and the Republican base, and Nickolaus' previous history, even after 538 pegs it all as incompetence rather than corruption, it seems fishier than the Time Bandit. Either way, it means Nickolaus has messed up badly.

If this is corruption, Nickolaus has stolen an election.
If this is incompetence, Nickolaus has disenfranchised 14,315 people, even if only for two days.

Either way, she should not be allowed anywhere near the inner workings of the political process at any point in the future.

I Pity The Fool

Yesterday, I warned you to watch yourself.

Then I checked the hit counter and watched FlagCounter tell me I got a hit from a pirate.

Here's a repository of some of the other April Fools pranks that were floating around yesterday. Go check and see if you got caught out by anything, because every once in a while one of these April Fools winds up getting legs and goes into urban-legend territory because April 1st came and went with people never getting the joke, thinking it's real.

Practical Home-Invasion Advice

1: Do not engage in home invasion.
2: If you must break into a home, take your shower before performing the break-in.
3: Be out of the house before the owner comes home.
4: Make sure the homeowner does not have a gun.
5: If you are concerned about the owner's gun, you may call 911, but understand it will result in your arrest. Because you broke into his home, remember?
6: Make sure the owner actually has a gun.
7: While many homeowners who own dogs also own guns, many others do not.

(Whether the owner had a gun is uncertain.)

Reading The Stars (Entirely Wrong)

I've been a little reluctant to tackle astrology as a topic here. Scientifically, there's really nothing in it, and the fact that the zodiac everyone's been using turned out to have been a month off and missing a 13th sign didn't exactly help matters. Nor did the ensuing debates over whether the 'new' zodiac was actually new or not, whether only certain age groups should use it, or whether it would ever catch on. Never mind that the altered signs were based on thousands of years of alterations in Earth's position to the sun, and that such positions aren't really up for debate.

At the same time, it's not like it's really hurting anything in the grand scheme of things. It's a fun little thing in the newspaper, it provides something of a mental center for some people, sometimes couples even hook up partially due to having 'compatible' signs. I'm not overly inclined to dump on that.

However, I do enjoys me the stupid people stories.

For today's stupid people story, we have to first bring up another astrology staple, the birth chart. A birth chart maps out the positions of the stars on your time and place of birth. From that, you are supposedly supposed to have your life path predicted.

Apparently, you can get your birth chart here, using the old, fuddy-duddy 12-sign setup. Just for kicks, I did mine. It said, among other things:

Venus in Pisces

Very sentimental. He is easily moved. He is melancholic, romantic. When he loves, it is the most generous of loves.

Weaknesses: risky and confused loves, insane hopes.

Anyone that actually knows me has just busted a gut.

Pluto in Scorpio

Great sexual activity.

Flattery will get you nowhere, birth chart.

-64 Square Moon - Mars

He is very emotional and is driven to do things by his emotions. He does not think things over or through in a given situation. He is irascible and sometimes violent. Marital disputes.

Marital disputes require the presence of marital.

In any case. On to the stupid, originally pulled out of Discarded Science by John Grant. In April 1968, French statistician Michel Gauquelin ran an ad in Ici-Paris for a free horoscope reading. He got 500 replies. Each and every respondent received the exact same birth chart, that of a man named Marcel Petoit. Gauquelin then waited to see what kind of responses he'd get.

94% of those who responded said the chart, including phrases like "instinctive warmth", "adaptable", "organised", "bathed in a sea of sensitivity", "total devotion to others", "altruistic sacrifices", and "endowed with a moral sense which is comforting", fit them to a T. Moreover, when the chart was shown to friends and family, 90% of them agreed as well. If you'd like to see an online version of Petoit's chart, head here.

This would be a good time to mention that Marcel Petoit was beheaded in 1946 for killing 27 people, though he claimed 63. He would sell people an escape route from World War 2 to Argentina, then kill them and steal their stuff.

On the other hand, you never know. Perhaps Gauquelin only got responses from serial killers-for-profit. After all, the online chart does mention being "unconventional" with "a highly profitable career" and "a commanding presence, which instills confidence and wins trust", though not without "constant moral slippage towards excessive aggressiveness".

We Don't Know Jack

One of my least favorite stories to have to read is the one where someone gives a civics quiz to the American public and then has to report that America failed miserably. You know the ones, where it turns out that half the people can't find their home state on a map, 30% think the Bill of Rights was written by a mind-reading chicken, 25% identify Abraham Lincoln as "perhaps a type of building material", etc.

Well, here's the latest one. This one, however, has a twist on the concept: a subset of the people polled was a group that had been elected to office at some point in their lives.

The general public scored 49% on the quiz.

The elected officials scored 44%.

Ten questions from the quiz are here, click that if you don't want some of the questions spoiled by the article). Without revealing question or answer, I missed Question 6 but got everything else correct. Americans in the audience, please, please PLEASE tell me you can get more than five right.

Today's Handy Home Redecoration Tip

Never pull the pin on a grenade unless you would like the grenade to explode. It doesn't matter how old the grenade is.

Also, do not use grenades as bookends. You know what, in fact, don't even keep grenades in the house at all.

A Bad Idea, Take 87 Billion And One

I'm posting from the Apple Store at Waikiki, first time I've had enough online time to fire off a blog post all vacation. But I'll be damned if I let this place go a week and a half without an update. I've been keeping a near-daily upkeep since I began the blog in February, and the only reason I haven't gotten anything off since Tuesday is due to lack of having Internet access at all.

But, it's still got to be quick.

So... the dollar coin. You hate it. You've rejected it 87 billion times, and even so, a few sad, sad vending machines out there are still trying to get you to bring them your golden Sacajawea coins.

Perhaps you'd be interested if-- no, no, you won't be interested. But here's an Abe Lincoln dollar coin anyway that will serve to win you many bar bets by asking what coin Abe Lincoln is on, and get you in many bar fights by trying to actually use it as currency.

How Rich Can You Get? (Please Don't Answer That)

Richie Rich is a character that only really pops up in the public consciousness in a good economy. And for good reason. People don't really want to see anything in pop culture about what it's like to flaunt wealth almost beyond human comprehension when they're struggling to put food on the table. G.I. Joe can sympathize; his fortunes are subject to America's views toward the military and was retired for a time in the wake of Vietnam.

I shall demonstrate. Look around your house, take a look at your current budget.

Now please view this.



You have now very likely expressed such a desire to shoot out your computer screen that a gun has appeared in your hand out of thin air just for the purpose.

The original comic came out in 1953, with updates in 1980 and 1996, with a movie in 1994. All pretty good economies at their respective times of release.

Which makes it all the more bewildering that somebody thought 2011 would be a good time for a reboot. Seriously, nobody looked out at the economy, looked at their comic book character described as owning "two of everything money can buy", named Richie Rich, who lives in Richville, considered the possibility that Rich's personality- which is, admitted, that of a very nice person- might be overshadowed by the age-old Richie Rich trope of LOOK AT ME AND ALL THE MONEY I HAVE? Nobody said 'No, really, this is really not a good time to put Insanely Rich Guy Is The Big Damn Hero in front of people'? Nobody? Nobody thought of any way this might be taken badly by anyone?

Sound Financial Advice

There are those who went bankrupt through hospital bills.

There are those who went bankrupt via being unable to pay off their house, or property taxes on same.

There are those who went bankrupt because of cash-advance businesses charging excessive interest rates.

But please, please, PLEASE try not to be one of those who went bankrupt because you couldn't stop buying drinks for guys at the bar. And do not buy so many wigs that you need a financial advisor to tell you to stop.