I hate the tv

Youtube, today I realized, contains a plethora of funny live news outtakes. Whether its the fox news perverts slipping up or rowdy bystanders (ahahaha) harassing the reporters…there’s a lot of giggles to be had.

And of course, let’s not forget about these pre-YouTube classics: QVC and grapes

The Changing World from the BBC had a moving piece by Vera Frankl on kids who were tried as adults under the whole “get tough on crime” political fad of the 1980 and 90s. Part two of the piece hit much closer to home as it covers the situation of four guys who are serving terms of life in prison for things from accidental homicide to attempted robbery in which someone else in the robbing party shot and killed someone. One of the 16 year olds helped a friend who killed his abusive mother try to cover up that crime.

For these men sentences as boys, there is apparently no hope of parole and no hope of review of their case. Once the decision was made by the DA to try these kids as adults, there is no going back. They are also kept in the same maximum security prisons that adults are. Children as young as 14 can end up in with adult murders!

After hearing this piece, I feel there’s a need for a review of this system. There should at least be a chance for the case and sentence to be reviewed after 10 years or so. As the sister Jennifer of one of the prisoners, Trevor Jones, points out: “I still keep in touch with a lot of my childhood friends; nobody is the same person that they were when they were 16. You change, you change so much. So of course [Trevor] is not the same person [now]. How could he be”.

@ The Changing World
Download the MP3s directly here:

Part 1: This issue in Pakistan

Part 2: This issue in Colorado
Web Version

I remember being amused the first time my dad told me about the Three Rules of Real Estate: “Location, Location, Location!” I was somewhere in my teenage years and I thought of how clever it was, and it was very true in my native south Florida. But that doesn’t seem to hold here in Texas to my amazement. I’ve been scouting around for some investment properties around Dallas and Richardson (city immediately north of Dallas). What I’ve found is that Dallas is subject to some very serious “White Flight”.

I’d say it would actually be more accurate to describe it as middle class New Money flight. Some people here in Texas want new more than anything. More than location, more than convenience, more than community. I’ve tried to understand it and I don’t get it. While I want something convenient, with an established community, people here seem to just want brand spanking new.

I find it surprising that people seem to have this goal in life….to pay some asshole developer 150k dollars profit to turn a cornfield (green below)…

…into a zero-lot line house (the parking lot shapes above) in an insanely regular subdivision out in the middle of nowhere. Basically to air condition 3000 square feet of a 5000 square foot lot, with just enough room outside to park a couple of 40 thousand dollar trucks (that is a daily driver to work 30 miles away) and a big fucking stainless steel grill from the Home Depot and a few lawn chairs. Pink flamingos wouldn’t be far off, but I guess that market has gotten squashed by the post-911 American flag craze and rubber truck balls.

So I got to wondering, if you get one of these 2000 square foot McMansions for 200 grand….(Click on them for more info from Zillow.com)…

…What do you get for a million bucks? If the land value is practically zero, you should get a whole bunch…..well Here’s some of the ones I could find:

Not bad: 6000 square feet, 6br/4.5 bath and all a hop skip and a jump (32miles one way) away from downtown Dallas

Next up is so new, it doesn’t show up in the satellite photo, Old Sandy:

Okay, this one isn’t quite a million. Just a modest 785k today: A modest 8000 square foot property built in 2005 on the Appropriately named “Kings Lake Road”.

And finally here’s one from over to the West some: Coppell, Tx…(The above were in McKinney)

A comfy little 6/6, 7700sf on 2.0 Acres. Located conveniently 20 miles from downtown dallas and 30 miles from Fort worth.

Maybe I’m just saying this because I don’t have a million dollars to spare (or at all), but I think I can find better things to do with my money than that.
-Glen

For 100 pounds sterling you can buy a yak for some needy Tibetian children…

I applaud the people who thought this one up….seems like a very concrete, practical way to help someone directly…

It looks like Save the Children has a fairly good rating on Charity Navigator, too.
Found this thru the inq.

Over at Improv Everywhere they’ve got the details.  And pictures on Flickr.  Thanks pevo.

So the other day was 4/20, and most young people were celebrating the numerical co-incidence commonly associated with pot. Others, including myself, remembered the Collumbine shootings which occurred in 1999 and were orchestrated to occur on 4/20, which was Adolph Hitler’s birthday.

Today I was cleaning my desk of worthless receipts, and I noticed that I bought gas in Littleton, CO while I was passing through Denver on the way back from Vail, CO. I wondered how close I was to where the shootings took place and did a little search for “littleton high school shooting map” which gave me an interesting first result: “SCHOOL SHOOTINGS HAVE A PATTERN THAT IMPLICATE THE PRESIDENT AND HIS GOVERNMENT — GUN CONTROL IS THE OBJECTIVE! BLACK MAGICK WITCHCRAFT IS THE POWER!” They show this nice map:

The site goes on to say that the school shootings have been orchestrated by the Illuminati…and they make the shape of the horns of some beast. In my opinion they missed a few….or cherry picked at least..

With that many points I could probably write my name.

They also say that the results match up to some electro-magnetometer mumbo jumbo meter reading that was measured in Alaska….

The idea of plotting one thing against another is a great way to figure out something….I’d just like to see a more useful plot…of say poverty vs school shootings….or gun population vs school shootings…..cow hormone additives (in milk) consumption vs school shootings…etc.

The weather control stuff which reminds me a lot of a lecture by Tom “I’ll buy a fisheye lens when I can afford it” Bearden. The lecture is fascinating because he explains things in terms of physics that I can’t follow…..talk of a few extra dimensions here and there which energy can be pulled from and pushed to. If you’re in on a rainy day with nothing to do, I highly suggest watching it. I watch it with the hope that he’s not a crackpot and that he’ll prove it to me sometime, but I haven’t been convinced otherwise yet. Oh yea, he also created a machine which creates energy from nothing, breaking the first law of classical thermodynamics….

John

Yanni

Christopher, was arrested early Friday and faces a domestic battery charge, according to a police report.