Starting yesterday in California, you now can not hold a cellular phone next to your head while driving anywhere in the state. I really hate new laws that take away liberties that I used to take for granted. On Monday night on my way to pick up the wife at the airport I rang in the new day, new month and ridiculous new law speeding along the 405, gabbing away until 11:59p. The first-offender fine is supposedly only $20, and I have no idea how tough they will be on enforcing the new law, but until I hear some evidence that the cops don’t really care, I’m going to go hands-free while driving.

The ridiculous part of this new law is that you can still handle your phone, just not hold it to your head. You can still text, surf the web and dial from your phone, just so long as you don’t bring it to your ear. So if I forget my Bluetooth headset and have to send a message I’ll prolly text, and from experience, that’s infinitely more dangerous than having a hand off the steering wheel. I usually have one hand on the wheel and one hand on my shifter anyway. My guess is that at least in the short run, there’ll be more accidents from people trying to find their headset or trying to pair their Bluetooth devices. In the long run, I imagine this stupid law will make no difference at all, other than create more douche bags who wear their Bluetooth headset all the time.

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. — A Charlotte teenager fell from the 12th floor of a hotel and survived. It happened early Wednesday morning in Myrtle Beach.

Police believe William Panas and his friends were goofing around when Panas fell from the 12th floor, and hit a ledge and landed on the 10th floor.

Paramedics took Panas to a local hospital. The incident report said Panas was intoxicated at the time of the accident. It also said the victim’s nurse told officers he was “conscious and talking” Wednesday night.

Thursday, Panas was in the surgical intensive care unit at Grand Strand Regional Medical Center.

they might as well have made the headline read “boy falls from 1000th floor”, and bury somewhere in the article that he landed on the 998th.

now that i’m once again a hardcore honda fanboy, i’ve been reading and posting on different forums a lot more often. i was interested in some suspension parts someone was selling so i shot him a PM through the forum software:

me: “which coilovers are they? do you have any pics of it on your car? price?”

95sir: “Apexi EXV coilovers. i think they either 24 or 32 way adjustables. whats your email? i can email u some pics.”

so i send him my email address…

95sir: “ur email came back censored. LOL kento@ishi****a.com”

me: “man, that’s fucked up. that’s my real name.”

but he does take steroids, and why does anyone care? its obviously helped him out in his baseball career, and he might not have beat the homerun record without it (thankfully marc ecko will help keep that whole record straight)… but what the fuck does this have to do with congress and grand juries and federal indictments? this is a problem with baseball, granted it’s america’s great past time, but not something that the government needs to be involved with.

i was telling ben yesterday that it would’ve been great if he got indicted during the season before he beat the home run record, and was sentenced for the full 15 years (5 years for perjury + 10 years for obstruction of justice). Then he’d get out and be 58, and it would be like a life-imitating-art mr. 3000, with barry bonds playing bernie mac playing stan ross… ooh, that’d be sweet.

while i think barry’s a douche, it’d be lame if he went to jail. if they catch him with large quantities of steroids that are illegal, fine, he can go to jail for that, but not about lying that he doesn’t use them. bud selig, you fix baseball. congress, you fix the war. transformers, roll out!

i’ll prolly just cut and paste this onto fishin-impossible, but since there’s so little actual fishing involved, i thought i’d post it here.

on saturday morning, eric and i went out for an early/quick fishing trip, since we were supposed to meet ben and costin in la around noon. anytime we do anything under a time constraint, especially something that’s supposed to be slow like fishing, things always go wrong. we set up the boat and headed down to the marina in a quicker than normal fashion, but when we got to the gate (where you have to pay $10), i commented to eric, that we should’ve just followed the person that went through since the arm stayed up for so long. so he gunned it, and as soon as he did the arm came back down on the car. it was funny. we paid our money and got the boat out on the water.

we decided not to fish pv and instead just fish sardines off of cherry beach. the current was all messed up and it kept trying to push us to shore and we’d have to drive back out and follow the drift back in again. on one set, we realized we were way too close to the shore (about 10ft depth) and when we went to crank the motor, nothing, no power to anything. we quickly through out an anchor to prevent ourselves from beaching, and after about 5 minutes of checking out stuff, we realized that a main power connector had come lose. we tightened it and got out of there with no harm, but our nerves were rattled by this point.

with time running out before we had to head back in, we thought we’d try casting plastics and drifting sardines near the breakwater where we haven’t got skunked all year. i did catch a single very small calico to have at least something to show for the trip, but shortly after that as were we trying to set an anchor to fish a certain spot, i was reversing the boat slowly, when out of the corner of my eye i saw an orange flash. eric’s main setup (the nice real we bought for him as groomsman’s gift) had been hanging over the stern and the dangling hook had caught the prop, wound up around the prop and flung the rod and reel overboard. amazingly, as we looked over to where it flew, it was still connected to the prop and we were able to gaff it out very carefully and precariously. we got most of the line off the prop and at this point just headed the fuck home. there’s actually a bit of a knocking sound coming from the prop, which might be the weight somewhere in the outdrive, or a baitfish that i accidently dropped into the exhaust. i’ll try to figure it out this weekend =p

it seemed inevitable after his main sponsors left, then the msnbc folks dropped him… but now don imus is altogether out of a job. i honestly hadn’t even heard of him before this controversy, and probably never would have. way to go al sharpton and jesse jackson for making the world a better place, one racist comment at a time.

here’s a great commentary from columnist jason whitlock. i’m just gonna go ahead and quote it in it’s entirety, becuase i think it’s a good read:

Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.

You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.

You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor.

Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.

The bigots win again.

While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.

I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.

It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.

Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.

It’s embarrassing. Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius. Black comedians routinely crack jokes about white and black people, and we all laugh out loud.

I’m no Don Imus apologist. He and his tiny companion Mike Lupica blasted me after I fell out with ESPN. Imus is a hack.

But, in my view, he didn’t do anything outside the norm for shock jocks and comedians. He also offered an apology. That should’ve been the end of this whole affair. Instead, it’s only the beginning. It’s an opportunity for Stringer, Jackson and Sharpton to step on victim platforms and elevate themselves and their agenda$.

I watched the Rutgers news conference and was ashamed.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for eight minutes in 1963 at the March on Washington. At the time, black people could be lynched and denied fundamental rights with little thought. With the comments of a talk-show host most of her players had never heard of before last week serving as her excuse, Vivian Stringer rambled on for 30 minutes about the amazing season her team had.

Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that the comments of a man with virtually no connection to the sports world ruined Rutgers’ wonderful season. Had a broadcaster with credibility and a platform in the sports world uttered the words Imus did, I could understand a level of outrage.

But an hourlong press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction.

In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive?

I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?

When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is — a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim.

No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.

http://www.kansascity.com/182/story/66339.html

since i only have one parking space at my apartment, and the accord is less likely to get broken into, i’ve been parking it on the street for the last couple of months. last night i parked on ximeno instead of a side street, because eric and i were working on the boat until midnight, and by the time i got home all my usual spots were taken. i know thursday and friday’s are street sweep days, but i leave early enough that it should be fine…

got to my car at 7:30a with a $39 ticket that was written at 5:45a. i closely look at the sign, and it says no parking thursday, 4a-8a. double you tee eff.

is the dumbest fucking tv show i’ve seen. the setup is kinda like “who wants to be a millionaire”, but with questions from 1st-5th grade text books. these are the easiest questions evar, and it seems that the catch is that they find the dumbest fucking contestants. i can barely watch this fat, black bitch named lakisha, that isn’t sure what’s the closest star to the planet earth, and was finally completely stumped when she was out of life lines and couldn’t figure out how many decades are in two millennia. and after all that, she still walked away with $100k. i give this show two months before it’s off the air.

i know rape is one of those really touchy subjects for some people, but since this is my blog, i’ll rant however i want. according to the time magazine article, some poor joe was convicted of first degree rape, because while he was having consensual sex with some woman, she changed her mind and he did not stop immediately. it didn’t say how immediately he didn’t stop.

now if someone tells you to stop doing something physical to them, you need to stop, whether you’re banging them or punching them in the face, or what have you. but if both people agree to have sex and then she changes her mind mid-bang, and you don’t immediately stop, it just doesn’t seem fair to be convited of rape. maybe assult or battery or something else, but to call it rape just doesn’t make sense to me. like the article says, it kinda makes rape seem like less of a terrible thing if it can be charged to someone under those circumstances.

i remember in this woman’s studies class i took once (which turned out to be a mistake), the teacher constantly reminded the class that rape was an act of power and agreession, not horniness. but in the situation described above, it started on regular horny pretences. anyway, sure he should’ve stopped, but he shouldn’t've been convicted of rape. he’s appealing the ruling, but until then this guy’s sitting in jail.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1584786,00.html?cnn=yes

there’s some funny/looney stuff on both sides in the article:

If the law doesn’t recognize a woman’s right to say no during sex, they say, there is no recourse for a woman who begins to feel pain or who learns her partner isn’t wearing a condom or has HIV.

how the fuck does a woman find out mid-sex that her partner has HIV?! it’s like:

woman (during intercourse): “Let me just open these test results… WHAAAAAA???”

and how nuts is this guy:

“At a certain point during arousal, we don’t have complete control over our ability to stop,” he says.

are you kidding me? back in the day, if i heard someone come home earlier than expected, you better believe i could turn it off just like that.

eric and i were emailing back and forth about going fishing, and google put this ad in gmail for him:

Imagine reaching for an apple on a tree and having your hand suddenly impaled by a metal hook that drags you—the whole weight of your body pulling on that one hand—out of the air and into an atmosphere in which you cannot breathe. This is what fish experience when they are hooked for “sport.”

http://www.fishinghurts.com/index.asp

lol.