Sorry Meg, I have a new girlfriend now, and her name is MacBookPro

I just received my new MacBookPro, a sensation similar to simultaneously doing cocaine, lifting weights, and being fellated. With my manly vigor thus restored, my hangover has evaporated and I no longer fear necrotising fasciitis.

Plus, I can now video conference with anyone, at any time, courtesy of the integrated video camera technology present in my new MacBookPro. There are at least several people nationwide who would consent to do this with me.

That's nothing compared to my fucking hangover

The LA Times reports on the spread of methicillin resistant Staph infections, with this killer lede:

"Within 24 hours, the "bite" became a 6-inch welt with a bubble of pus that eventually ripened into a black wound. Over the next few months, scabs dotted her face. A hangnail caused her middle finger to bloat like a sausage. Her pierced ears oozed pus."

And then there's this description of a whole family hopping the train to necrotizing fasciitis-ville:

"When Thomas Lovato's 9-year-old daughter, Cynthia, developed tiny red bumps on her hips and abdomen in August, her pediatrician thought the young girl had flea bites.

The pediatrician prescribed the common antibiotic amoxicillin, but the boils didn't go away, said Lovato, a 38-year-old air conditioner repairman from San Jose.

He tried to help his daughter by popping them.Soon he spotted a pimple on his own neck that looked like an ingrown hair follicle. Within days it grew to the size of a quarter. Then a painful rash 10 inches wide erupted on his groin, he said. Another popped up on his chin.

In about a week, he developed a fever and went to the local emergency room, where doctors cut open the wound on his groin and prescribed amoxicillin, he said.

By the beginning of September, their boils were growing faster than they had before and were three times bigger. Cynthia would scream when anyone touched them. Pus started coming out from beneath Lovato's fingernails."

Wizened Arab Concubinage

The Washington Post reports today that Bob Dole has been sold to the UAE and will take residence in the court harem as the 97th wife of President Khalifa bin Zayid al-Nuhayyan, who will ritually deflower the withered ex-senator amid gently tinkling fountains, jasmine scented air, and the gentle peacock-tailed fanning of court eunuchs.

Career Change

As part of my broader project of self-improvement, I'm quitting my current job and applying to become a DC metro escalator repairperson. Seriously- the fucking things are mostly ornamental anyway (despite a $93 million repair project) so I figure the job itself isn't that demanding, probably mostly involves standing around metro stations and watching the elderly and the disabled get throttled by pieces of clothing caught in the open machinery, something I'm definitely comptetent to do.

'No, no, Dick- it's fine. Hopefully these 6-150 birdshot will be soon migrating the fuck out of my body."

The Washington Post has just released a partial transcript of Cheney's comments about the shooting scheduled to air on Fox tonight at 6:00. Apparently someone convinced a member of Cheney's media staff to stop injecting raw North Dakota crank into their eyeball long enough to realize the 'blame Whittington' strategy wasn't really getting them where they want to go, so, we get this fantastically tardy mea culpa: "I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. It's a moment I'll never forget - it gave me the most vigorous erection of my life."

God, I am so fucking right all the time

So it turns out that birdshot doesn't actually migrate like Salmon or Canadian Geese - in a NYT story this morning one of Whittington's doctors is quoted "we knew that he had some birdshot very close to the heart from the get-go," which means that Hospital staff has been trying to mislead the press in spectacularly stupid fashion. Rather than saying "Homeboy was shot, and some of the pellets lodged in his fucking heart," we got this bullshit about how some of the gentle 'spray' of 'pellets' 'migrated' somehow from his superficial wounds to his left ventricle. The article continues;

Dr. O. Wayne Isom, the chairman of heart and chest surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College, said it was unlikely that a pellet would migrate to the heart through the bloodstream, as some have assumed from the account of the Texas doctors.
The reason, Dr. Isom said, is that the pellet would have to enter a vein, travel to and through the lung vessels that go to the heart, and then lodge in heart tissue, not in one of its chambers. The pellets were approximately five millimeters, about the size of a BB, and larger than most blood vessels, said Dr. David Blanchard, director of emergency services at the hospital.
A more likely explanation, Dr. Isom said, is that the pellet lodged in or touched the heart when Mr. Whittington was shot.

Now why the hospital staff would minimize the seriousness of the injury I have no idea, because it's certainly not consistent at all with the generally autistic media strategy adopted by Cheney's people to date.

More critical reporting from the NYT

Quick rogue shotgun update - Whittington had a heart attack this morning.

According to the Post, "The 78-year-old lawyer who was shot by Vice President Dick Cheney in a hunting accident has some birdshot lodged in his heart and he had a "minor heart attack," a hospital official said Tuesday."

While the Times phrases the same news thusly: "The 78-year-old lawyer who was accidentally shot by Vice President Dick Cheney on Saturday suffered a mild heart attack today after bird shot migrated to his heart..."

Migrated? Fucking "migrated?" After having been "sprayed?" The poor bastard was shot in the heart. Migrate? Steel or lead birdshot isn't fucking flying home to nest in some old man's left ventricle for the winter, what the fuck? Where is it going to migrate next? Do I have to be worry that come springtime I'm going to have to watch out for fucking migrating birdshot lest it end up lodged in my goddamn heart?

Did that stupid whore Maria Newman at the Times perhaps mistake birdshot for a fucking whooping crane? Or Homo Erectus?

It's not a goddamn garden hose

The administration's amanuenisi at the New York Times have once again swallowed whole Scott McClellan's warm, sticky rhetorical spermatazoa. To wit this quotation from Time yesterday (and I swear to god I saw it somewhere else as well):

White House aides can be expected to say that the Vice President did not shoot Whittington, which suggests a bullet, but rather sprayed him with birdshot, a type of ammunition made up of tiny pieces of lead or steel.

Okay. Fine. Whittington wasn't so much "shot," which suggests "bullets" as he was delicately "sprayed," which calls to mind lazy summer afternoons and daffodils. Got it.

Then this from the New York Times:

[Whittington] was listed as stable, with wounds to his face, neck, chest and rib cage from the pellets sprayed at him from 30 yards away by Mr. Cheney's shotgun.

Motherfucker was straight shot, not "sprayed." Cars can be sprayed with water, rose bushes with insecticide, and meth-addicted prostitutes with semen, but people who get shot in the face at close range by someone wielding a shotgun aren't fucking "sprayed."

Seriously - "pellets sprayed at him from 30 yards away by Mr. Cheney's shotgun"? Was this some sort of bad-ass DARPA type animatronic cyborg shotgun? Was it like some fucking "Short-Circuit" shotgun, but without a conscience? Did it go rogue? There are still questions to be answered here, hopefully those dedicated journalists at the Times will get to the bottom of the menacing anthrapomorphic shotgun question before anyone else gets sprayed.

Freedom Flavored Tube Pap

The NYT reports that 'aggressive' methods being used in Guantanamo to deter hunger strikes are 'dramatically' effective. Apparently being strapped to a 'padded cell on wheels' and having a tube threaded through your sinuses, down your throat, and into your stomach gives one the time and peaceful solitidue necessary to reflect upon the ineffable beauty of life and majestic rightousness of the American battle for freedom and liberty, and come to the ultimate conclusion that life is indeed worth living.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention - the same articles cites the military as admitting that only an estimated 8% of Guantanamo detainees were ever members of Al-Quaida, which, if previous experience with Pentagon estimates holds true, translates to meaning that roughly 174% of Guantamo detainees had fuck-all to do with big T Terror.

Worse than the time I forgot my girlfriends birthday

The Boston Herald reports that the husband of a young mother and child who were shot to death in a suburb of Boston missed their funeral, which totally puts the time I had a mild anuerism and blanked on the precise fucking date of my girlfriends birthday for about 2 minutes in the proper perspective.

Sit up... Sit up... That's a good boy!

The BBC reports that the founder of the New Zealand "Mighty Mix" Dog Food manufacturer has offered their "Raw Dry Nourish" biscuits for children in famine-struck Kenya. According to the Iams website, puppies also need a plentiful supply of clean, fresh water and regular visits to the Vet.