Woody's Place

The Parking Lot Attendant

Outside the Bristol Zoo, in England , there is a parking lot for 150 cars and 8 coaches, or buses.  It was manned by a very pleasant attendant with a ticket machine charging cars £1 (about $1.40) and coaches £5 (about $7).

This parking attendant worked there solid for all of 25 years. Then, one day he just didn't turn up for work.

"Oh well", said Bristol Zoo Management - "we'd better phone up the City Council and get them to send a new parking attendant . . . "

"Err . . . no", said the Council, "that parking lot is your responsibility."

"No", said Bristol Zoo Management, "the attendant was employed by the City Council... wasn't he?"

" . . . No." insisted the Council.

Sitting in his villa somewhere on the coast of Spain (presumably), is a man who had been taking the parking lot fees, estimated at £400 (about $560) per day at Bristol Zoo for the last 25 years. Assuming 7 days a week, this amounts to just over £3.6 million ($7 million - or $280,000 every year for 25 years)!

And no one even knows his name.

60

Iowahawk: Please Don't Touch The Bureaucrats

Iowahawk gives us a peek at the new marketing strategy of the Washington Post.  Journalisim wasn't paying tha bilz baby, so they got a new thang goin' on:

Katherine Weymouth: Hey fellas, after a hard week lobbying down on K Street, we know what you want. When the sun goes down on the capitol dome, you want to kick off those white shoes and get comfortable with the Beltway's hottest journalists and public policy analysts. And they're all waiting for you at the Washington Chrome Post.

Sexy Reverb Voice: mmmm.... the Washington Chrome Post.

Katherine Weymouth: The Washington Chrome Post, home of DC's most uninhibited panel discussions, with dozens of key government policy analysts waiting to make all your lobbying fantasies come true. Whether your tastes run to heath care, union pensions, or asphalt contracting, let the Washington Chrome Post show you the kind of full-frontal journalism that will make yours an evening to remember. 

Go read the rest, and you'll see why Iowahawk is the Howie Mandel of the blogosphere.

Happy Birthday America!

It was fun while it lasted...

This is all that's going to be left for our kids and grandkids once Obama and Pelosi are finished bringing their "change".

Hat tip to Mitchieville for the pic.

 

50 Cent "Hate It Or Love It"

You can hate it or love it, but this rap tune's got a really great groove to it and sounds like a nice way to coast into the holiday weekend to me.

Embedding on this clip is disabled by YouTube, so you'll have to click through to watch it.

Keep an ear out for the last guy complaining about people "throwing babies in the garbage" and thanking his mother for not having an abortion.  These guys aren't ALL bad... just mostly.

Vida Guerra

Cuban born, New Jersey raised Vida Guerra is this week's babe.

A former bank loan officer, Vida took a chance and replied to an FHM magazine casting call for "the girl next door" and she's been laughing all the way back to the bank ever since.

Washington Post Pimps Obama Officials To Lobbyists

Via The Politico:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off the record, non-confrontational access to “those powerful few” — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health-care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it’s a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”

The offer—which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters—is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

I'm not sure I agree with that characterization.  I take this as a sign of just how incestuous the links between the press and the Administration have gotten.  For them to be so bold shows us just how smitten they are.  Like Governor Sanford and his Argentinian mistress, they've finally met their "soul mate" and they just don't care what anybody thinks anymore. 

Ed Morissey at Hot Air poses the most important question:

OK, OK, perhaps it isn’t fair to call the Washington Post a pimp for the White House.  Maybe it would be better to call this what it is — prostitution of the press in order to gain cash and sell itself out for access, both for itself and for its clients.  After all, with the Post grabbing between $25K-$250K for these soirees, it won’t do to risk its cash flow by being too critical of the White House and its occupants, would it?

Journalistic integrity?  Yeah right.

This is just the latest sighting of the mythical MSM/DNC Cabal.  Like the Loch Ness monster, many choose not believe in it's existence, but all these ripples in the water and long necks popping up out of the waves aren't just my imagination.  It's real, it's out there hiding in plain sight, and it's up to no good...  I just know it.

UPDATE: The pimp party's been called off, but Powerline sees through the Post's attempt to spin this as an innocent mistake.

The Post, embarrassed by disclosure of its cozy, profitable relationships with lobbyists and the Obama administration, has repudiated the "salon" program. Given that their publisher was the program's host and the paper's "news executives" were set to participate, the paper's suddenly discovering its ethical standards rings rather hollow.

Yeah, pretty much.  The MSM/DNC Cabal can't risk something so exposed, so they'll spike this one just to maintain plausible deniability.

The Rank Hypocrisy Of This Democratic Congress

They scold auto execs for flying on private jets and scold bankers for having meetings at resort hotels, then our elected representatives board their taxpayer-funded private jets to travel all around the globe doing a whole lot of nothing.

Via Drudge Report, Spending On Taxpayer-Funded Trips Rises Tenfold:

Last summer, Rep. Brian Baird (D., Wash.) took a four-day trip to the Galápagos Islands with his wife, four other lawmakers and their family members. The lawmakers spent $22,000 on meals and hotels, records show. Mr. Baird, a member of the House Science Committee, said the trip was to learn about global warming.

On the first day, lawmakers toured a breeding center for giant tortoise and land iguanas before dining with scientists, according to an itinerary for the trip. The next morning, lawmakers headed to the Galápagos National Park while their family members had the option of hiking, swimming or shopping. That afternoon, the group boarded a boat to visit a sea-lion colony and search for white-tip sharks. 

Wow.  That sounds like some very important "work" he did.  What a guy! 

Speaking Of Hoaxes... New Lifeform Discovered In NC Sewer?

Via Hot Air:

"Unknown lifeforms picked up by a sewer snakecam in North Carolina."

WARNING: Kinda gross.  Don't watch during your lunch hour!

Makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck don't it?  I hope it's fake, because these things are disgusting!

UPDATE: Via Geekologie we have an explanation from a scientist:

They are clumps of annelid worms, almost certainly tubificids (Naididae, probably genus Tubifex). Normally these occur in soil and sediment, especially at the bottom and edges of polluted streams. In the photo they have apparently entered a pipeline somehow, and in the absence of soil they are coiling around each other. The contractions you see are the result of a single worm contracting and then stimulating all the others to do the same almost simultaneously, so it looks like a single big muscle contracting. Interesting video.

There you have it.

Man Made Global Warming Is The Biggest Hoax In The History Of Mankind

The myth of man-made (anthropogenic) global warming is nothing more than a cult created by socialists and communists to help engineer the destruction of capitalism and the free enterprise system across the globe.

How do I know this?  Well, it's the facts... those inconvenient truths that Al Gore left out of his movie.  Anybody not blinded by a political and/or environmental agenda can look at some basic science and see that the premise of man's CO2 emissions having a significant effect on the planet's climate is absurd, as we shall demonstrate.

The "-ist" crowd, environmentalist, socialist, communist etc., are always pushing us to reduce our carbon footprint, but CO2 is only a small portion of the greenhouse gases in our planet's atmosphere:

Carbon dioxide makes up less than 2% of the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.  Many studies put out by the "-ist" crowd ignore water vapor, as if it's not a greenhouse gas, but it is and this dishonesty is the first clue that their entire argument is based on lies.

The next step in our logical deconstruction of the global warming myth is to see the sources of this tiny amount of carbon dioxide.

As you can see, the vast majority of CO2 emissions have nothing to do with mankind.  Carbon dioxide was here in the Cretaceous period, it was here during the Ice Age, and it will be here in relatively similar amounts even if the "-ist" crowd got the world's carbon footprint down to ZERO.  Mankind contributes only 3% of the globe's CO2 and Mother Nature herself puts in the remaining 97%.

That BITCH... she's trying to kill herself and take us all with her!

Next, let's take a look carbon emissions broken down by nation:

The USA uses more energy than most other nations, yes without a doubt.  We are more industrialized and more populous than most, but that's only part of the story... the root cause for this disparity is our standard of living.  This unparalleled standard of living in the USA used to be a point of pride with Americans, but nowadays the left's guilt trips are starting to work and even our President is apologetic, saying:

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK."

So the President of the United States is ready to give the rest of the world (the UN perhaps?) veto power over the US citizen's standard of living.  From the type of vehicle you can drive, to what you can eat, to the temperature of your house it will all be decided by left wing (and foreign?) bureaucrats. Did you ever think you'd live to see the day?

This reduction of the US standard of living to a level more on par with the rest of the world is the defacto goal of all these environmentalists, socialists, and communists, despite all the "save the planet" bullshit they try to conceal it with.

The US has, in their view, simply had it too good for far too long and something needs to be done about it.  We defeated communism abroad, which was the last challenger, so now the left is trying to defeat capitalism from WITHIN.

Oh Woody, communists?  You're just a nutjob!

Oh, yeah, I'm totally making up the convergence of interests between hippies and commies.

Riiiiight...

The final nail in the coffin for the left's argument is to just do the math, based upon them getting their way, and see what we get for all those billions of dollars and lost jobs:

• A 15% reduction in US CO2 emissions nets only a 0.0069% reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions.
• A whopping 50% cut in US CO2 (fantasy land) would still only result in paltry 0.0229% reduction of greenhouse gases.

WHAT THE HELL IS A 0.0229% REDUCTION GOING TO ACCOMPLISH?

Also keep in mind that both of these scenarios are based on the rest of the globe's CO2 emissions remaining at the current levels, which is highly unrealistic.  For instance, the proposed "climate change" legislation making it's way through Congress right now would make refining oil in the US cost much more and cause us to import gasoline from other countries.  We are simply pushing the "dirty" business offshore and thereby increasing the world's energy usage because much of our gas will now have to be transported even farther to reach the consumer, and increasing our dependence on foreign oil!

Results are not important though.  Left wingers are not reality based.  Only their so-called good intentions matter.  I, for one, do not buy it.

Environmentalism has nothing to do with saving the planet, and everything to do with getting government more control over every aspect of our lives so they can reign in capitalism and crush the free enterprise system.

The Democrats running the US House Of Representatives just approved a $640,000,000.00 downpayment on the commie's save-the-Earth + destroy America agenda last week.  If the Waxman-Markey Obama-Pelosi cap-and-trade cap-and-TAX legislation is passed by the Senate, the US economy will have one hand tied behind it's back when trying to compete with other nations.  You thought we were losing too many jobs to overseas competition BEFORE?  Just wait until you see what it's like when there's a huge ENERGY disparity to go along with the WAGE disparity!

So long standard of living.  It was fun while it lasted.

Julia Stiles

We're going to go a little classier for this week's babe, with actress Julia Stiles.

Julia is probably most famous (with dudes anyways) for her role as CIA operative Nicky Parsons in the Bourne Identity movies.

I loved her look in that film. Super cute and sexy at the same time.

But Wait, There's MORE!

Well, actually no, there isn't.  TV Pitchman Billy Mays has passed away.

I feel sorry for his family's loss, but my eardrums are kind of glad he won't be shouting at me from the TV screen anymore.

 

UPDATE: I had no idea he was so funny.  Via Wyatt here's a funny commercial Billy did for ESPN:

Hilarious.

Crowder Illustrates Keith Olbermann's Absurdity

I usually catch Crowder every week, but somehow this one slipped by me until today.

Spot on.  Especially the Rachel Maddow impersonation.

Meat Beat Manifesto "Mindstream"

Never mind the goofy name or the cliché anti-establishment lyrics, this band can really groove.

This track is from their '92 Satyricon release, which is still one of my favorite albums of all time.  If you like this one you should check out Edge Of No Control too while you're at it.

Yes, Jack Dangers may be exactly the kind of liberal douchebag who would wear a Che Guevara t-shirt, but he's also an incredibly talented musician who broke a lot of new ground in electronic and industrial music, and whose work laid the foundations for the entire musical genres of drum & bass, big beat and trip hop.

I bow to his immense creativity.

 

UPDATE: I was involved in the music scene back then and I got to hang out with the band for a short while when their tour stopped in my area.  I was able to get some fairly decent photos from the press gallery to the side of the stage, so I'll post them here in case any MBM fans out there want to check them out.

Oversized Sunglasses

Hat tip to Hammer.