The ‘Bama Taliban still rule down in the Bible Belt. But what can you say about folks whose idea of erotic vibration comes from a chain saw?

To say that this wine label is pornographic is ridiculous. It’s a classic piece of art from the late 1800s and originals are sold for as much as $50,000.”

The whole turgid tale is told by Bill Leigon, President of Hahn Family Wines which produces Cycles Gladiator Wines. Leigon said that the wines, ” available to consumers in Alabama for three years, have been banned from restaurants and retail establishments this week by the Alabama Beverage Control Board which has deemed the wine brand label as “pornographic.” Cycles Gladiator Wines has complied and wine distributors across Alabama have been forced to remove the wine from accounts.

Leigon notes that the Cycles Gladiator label “bears a replica of an antique French poster created in 1895 to advertise bicycles. It features an artistic rendition of a nude woman flying alongside a bicycle across a star-filled night sky.”

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This post from the Fail Blog seemed like the beginnings of an urban legend, but turns out to have a verifiable source.

With a little Googling, this turned out to be a “Speak Out” item in the Daily Journal in in Kankakee, Ill. The newspaper’s links are a little wonky so, to find the original clueless post, go to the newspaper’s home page and enter “to all you hunters” in the search box.

You’ll find a reply that is interesting in its own right.

One of the sloppiest, most flawed, and contextually misleading health articles is making global headlines and scaring the knickers off women wine drinkers.

“Drinking just a glass of wine a day increases women’s risk of breast cancer, as well as several other types of the disease, a new study concludes.”

Take a drink. Get cancer. Any questions?

But what it neglected to say is that the links are equivocal, not-conclusive and that scores of peer-reviewed studies, published over the past 20 years agree unanimously that people who consume alcohol in moderation live longer than either abstainers or heavy drinkers.

This longer life span, according to the research, comes from a 30 to 50 percent drop in deaths from cardiovascular disease — the number one killer in the developed world.

Read more about it. It will drive you to drink.

This sort of garbage appears on Google News all the time. When you have news untouched by human hands, you come up with bad information that gets repeated over and over. And, Vladimir Lenin once said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth”

The gun pictured above is a semi-automatic handgun. One shot each time you pull the trigger. Eight to maybe 12 shots in the magazine depending on the caliber and manufacturer. The pistol is lethal but in a whole different class from the Uzi submachine gun. Just pull the Uzi’s trigger and hold on as this full-automatic weapon fires 1,700 rounds per minute.

Google News has presented photos of armored personnel carriers labeled as “tanks,” hunting shotguns labeled “automatic weapon” and more. Does it matter? Do facts matter?

This sort of incompetence bodes badly for a company who wants you to trust them with all your applications and data.

This boy’s death should be prosecuted. There is such a thing as criminal negligence and this is it. So, too, the idiots at Fresh News and the equally stupid Google news bots responsible for repeating the error.

You’d think the public schools have dumbed America down enough without Google’s help.

UPDATE: My thanks to reader Dusan Maletic for his corrections. I now have the photo of the correct Uzi and its firing rate. I made my own dumb mistake by just reading the story posted by the Googlebot and not tracking the story back to the original article. My bad, and double bad on Google and Fresh News. Thanks Dusan.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a raging racist killed Taneka Talley in March 2006 while she was working as a clerk at a Dollar Tree store in Fairfield, north of SF. But the company’s worker’s comp insurance company denied her 11-year-old son the $250,000 in death benefits because they claim it was a hate crime and not job related. Dollar Tree supports the insurer.

“They’re saying (the killing) didn’t arise out of her employment, except that in this case she wouldn’t have been killed if she hadn’t been at work,” said Frazier’s attorney, Moira Stagliano. “This person didn’t know her, just walked into the store and picked her out.”

The killer, Tommy Joe Thompson, 45, of West Sacramento — had previously served a prison sentence for beating his young son in 1994 — walked in and stabbed Talley.

[A] defense psychiatrist, Herb McGrew, testified that Thompson had told him he stabbed Talley because she was black. Thompson is white.

“You know that he got up that morning, and he said, ‘I’m going to kill a black person,’ ” said Deputy District Attorney Dane Neilson, according to a transcript of the hearing. “She was, unfortunately, the first person he saw, correct?”

“Correct,” McGrew replied.

We had 26 family and friends for Thanksgiving. People brought a dish, dessert, bottle of wine — you name it. As we were throwing out garbage today, we ran across this example of fake killer food:

Not only does it contain no cheese, but they did include artery-clogging partially hydrogenated oils and blubber-enhancing high-fructose corn syrup. AND a list of chemicals and faux-foods that would do my college organic chemistry lab credit. Oh yes, if you look carefully (click on photo for larger image) you will see “cheese culture” right after the killer fats and under the section for “2% or less”

That ain’t cheese folks. It’s a crime to call this beaker-load of chemicals and processed crap “cheesecake.”

The fact that I didn’t eat any is one more thing to be thankful for!

Comcast may be guilty of many things, but competence is not one of them. All over the country, ordinary users are finding their mail access blocked by bots.

One of the latest victims is retired technology publishing exec Michael “Mac” McCarthy, the fellow who invented the “Dummies” books among many things (Editor of Linux World, Sun World etc.)

The other day I got a robomessage (an automated email) from my ISP, Comcast.net, saying that my computer was being used for spam, and thus they were blocking me — I would be unable to send email.

Not a big problem, I thought, I’ll just use Gmail as my Reply ISP, which I did – for two weeks, and then that stopped working too.

According to the Comcastic tech support person, the bot decided Mac was a “zombie.” But Comcast didn’t have a human being who could reverse the bot’s judgment. The rest of McCarthy’s tale is here.

At least Mac got an email. In many other cases, Comcast just changes the mail delivery ports without informing people with the result that mail simply doesn’t get delivered. But the sender gets no notice their mail has been lost. Just like the U.S. Postal Service.

I wrote about the widespread problems in August. Comcast still can’t deliver the mail.

Democrats have been agonizing over how to handle the schism between two major constituencies: Gays on one side of Prop 8 and the Latino/Black vote on the other. This analysis is the best so far showing how the margin of victory to ban gay marriage came from increased voter participation by those minorities.

Turnout made the difference. Historically, black Californians have voted in about the same proportion as their population, in the 6 percent to 7 percent range, while Latinos, although more than a third of the state’s population, have been about 13 percent of voters.

Last week, however, 10 percent of voters were African American while 18 percent were Latino, and applying exit poll data to that extra turnout reveals that the pro-Obama surge among those two groups gave Proposition 8 an extra 500,000-plus votes, slightly more than the measure’s margin of victory.

To put it another way, had Obama not been so popular and had voter turnout been more traditional – meaning the proportion of white voters had been higher – chances are fairly strong that Proposition 8 would have failed.

The outcome should not have been so surprising since Obama made it clear during the campaign that while he supported civil unions, he did not favor gay marriage.

The rest of the story is here.

A team of Mexican scientists has found that the heated vapor from 80-proof (40% alcohol) tequila blanco, when deposited on a silicon or stainless steel substrate, can form diamond films.

“There is no doubt; tequila has the exact proportion of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms necessary to form diamonds.”

For now, the scientists are continuing to taste test different tequilas´ abilities to produce diamonds. They´re also working on creating doped diamonds, which contain impurities, to serve as semiconductors.

Doped diamonds? Would that be, like, with cocaine or something?

Finally! Something that finally makes sense of the election.

See the entire commentary here.

A promise is a promise. But one wacked-out California Obama voter thinks that political promises can also be legally enforceable contracts. All you have to do is prove how you voted.

[B]ecause civil law describes a contract as an offer, consideration and acceptance, in politics we have:

1. (Offer) – The candidate promises/offers to do/not do something specific.
2. (Consideration) – The candidate promises to do/not do this in exchange for a vote.
3. (Acceptance) – The voter casts his/her vote on the basis of the candidate’s positions/promises.

And this might mean exactly what?

Failure of the person or proposition soliciting my vote to uphold their end of the contract is breach of contract. In such a breach, their campaign advertisements could be considered false and misleading (fraud) and those who engaged in the fraud are guilty of conspiracy and, perhaps racketeering.

That’ might be change we need, but ain’t gonna happen until everybody in the U.S. Senate stops wearing togas. The rest is here.

While browsing the wonderful stats at Netcraft, I stumbled over their list of Phishiest countries and the bad boys who host the most phishers.

We keep thinking about Russia, China and Estonia being the epicenters, so the list was surprising. Of course, it’s ranked by the percentage of servers that are phishing, rather than totals.

Click here or on the graphic, above, to get the full list.

Given Comcast’s disdain for consumers, it’s no surprise that they are #3 globally in the percentage of phishers hosted. That’s Comcastic!

Legendary, liberal cartoonist has next weeks strips in the can and in his world, Obama wins.

That has many newspapers worried that, if McCain wins, they’ll be stuck with cartoons that read like an ongoing “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline.

Trudeau sees it differently:

I never considered NOT writing about the election, but to avoid lameness, I had to predicate it on an outcome,” wrote the usually comment-averse Trudeau in an email sent exclusively to the St. Petersburg Times. “The way I look at it is this: If Obama wins, I’m in the flow and commenting on a genuine phenomenon,” he added. “If I’m wrong, there’ll be such a global uproar that a goofy call in a comic strip isn’t going to be much noticed.

The extensive interview with Trudeau is revealing.

Domino’s Pizza text message server has gone berserkers! In a strange digital trick-but no-treat, it is messaging some customers up to ten times per hour. For hours on end!

Customers who have ordered online and checked the box to have periodic specials SMSed to them are getting a message box full!

The local stores have no way to stop it. Domino’s has no phone number to call. The Domino’s email form said that no one’s gonna read things until office hours start again.

There are, of course, no Domino’s representatives to comment.

DING-DONG! Get the frigging text message! It’s @#$@#@!%!! Domino’s … AGAIN!

There ain’t nothing funny about wacky-tabacky when the guys with guns kick in your door and make a beeline for your pot garden. Especially when the weed farm is next door.

[Jeremy]Gardea and about 30 neighbors who echo his complaints say Alan MacFarlane’s annual marijuana crop creates an unholy stench in the neighborhood off West Third Street near Dutton Avenue, causes noise disturbances related to motion alarms and raises the risk of criminal activity.

That risk is underscored by the number of home-invasion robberies tied to marijuana gardens, including one this month in which three robbers wearing clothing to impersonate law enforcement officials burst into a Todd Road home, handcuffed two residents and fled with 30 marijuana plants.

Gardea said reading about that case was one reason he decided to erect a sign outside his home stating, “Please don’t pull a home invasion here. Indoor buds are next door at #116. See Alan.”

“When your kids are getting a contact high and you read about home invasions in the city,” Gardea said, “hell yeah, I’ll put that sign up if it’s going to protect my kids.”

Like Amsterdam and Zurich, California is learning the hard way that legalization and availability increase crime, not deter it.