There's Always 2010 John

John Daly has always reminded me of a Florida version of Charlie Sheen, minus the good looks and pretty haircut but blessed with the ability to hit a golf ball 350 yards. The guy is a beast, in every meaning of the term. A living legend of kinda-but-not-really-functioning-alcoholics everywhere, he has gambled away over $50 million in his life and wasted rare, god given talent like few others. He's been suspended by the PGA yet again this time for a wide-ranging list of "unbecoming" offenses:

John Daly smashed one tee shot off the top of a beer can during a pro-am. At another tournament, he returned from a rain delay with Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Jon Gruden as his caddie. And his most memorable photo this year came in an orange jail suit, eyes half-closed.

Daly said Wednesday that such unwelcome publicity is why the PGA Tour suspended him for six months.

The best part is his explanation of how he ended up spending that night in jail:

He drew the most attention from the night in jail. Daly told the AP that his friends called police when they feared he had passed out, claiming they were unaware he sleeps with his eyes open when he's had too much to drink. Daly was put in jail under a state law called "Assistance to Intoxicated Persons."

I'll miss him when he is gone for good. Daly alone makes following professional golf worth it.

Nipple Outrage

A sign of the times: New mothers protest for right to show nipples on the internet:

Web-savvy moms who breast-feed are irate that social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace restrict photos of nursing babies. The disputes reveal how the sites' community policing techniques sometimes struggle to keep up with the booming number and diversity of their members.

Facebook began as a site just for college kids, but now it is an online home for 140 million people from all over the world. Among the new faces of Facebook are women like Kelli Roman, 23, who last year posted a photo of herself nursing one of her two children.

One day, she logged on to find the photo missing. When she pressed Facebook for an explanation, she got form e-mails in return.

Facebook bars people from uploading anything "obscene, pornographic or sexually explicit" — a policy that translates into a ban on pictures depicting certain amounts of exposed flesh.

Roman responded by starting a Facebook group called "Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!"

I've been half following this story over the past week or so, and not just because my first jacking material was a black-and-white You're a Mom Now book - complete with breastfeeding and where-babies-come-from-pics, but also because I'm totally fascinated with all things social networking.

I'm not sure I really get the draw of a site like facebook (although now that I know that young mothers are posting pictures of their nipples on the site, I may spend a bit more time changing my status to things like "Rob is jerking off to you breastfeeding"), but I'm intrigued by how fast this stuff has exploded into mainstream culture.

Happy New Year Massachusetts

The new year marks the implementation of the state's marijuana decriminalization law passed by the voters in November.

It's no longer a crime to have one ounce or less of pot. The state's new marijuana decriminalization law, approved by voters in a November referendum, goes into effect today.

Those who are caught with an ounce or less would get a ticket similar to a building code citation. They could appeal the civil infraction in court within 21 days or pay a $100 fine set in the law. Juvenile violators would have to pay the fine and attend a drug abuse counseling course, or have the fine increased to $1,000.

Story here.

Hello, Officer Friendly

Thailand has come up with a novel way of making its policemen appear less threatening to people.

Battling the Flu and Urban Violence

I'm working on the former, Baltimore is working on the latter. The Baltimore Sun recaps the significant drop in murders in 2008:

Baltimore will end 2008 tonight with its fewest homicides in two decades, fighting through a late-year spike to mark one of its biggest year-to-year drops.

The decline - a drop of almost 50 killings, from 282 to 234 as of midnight - continues a trend that began in late 2007 when Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III took command of the Police Department. It restores the city's homicide total to levels not seen since the late 1980s, before an infusion of crack cocaine routinely drove the annual body count above 300.

But the improvement has been tempered by several confounding factors. While homicides and nonfatal shootings are down, violent crime overall is largely unchanged and Baltimore remains one of the most violent large cities in the country. The killing of a former city councilman also served as a sobering reminder that while the majority of the victims are involved in the drug trade, the city's crime problem touches all corners.

I'm about as pessimistic as anyone could be about turning around Baltimore (I firmly believe that until you deal with the war on drugs, or find another economic driver for the city besides the drug trade, the city can only make incremental progress), but credit is deserved for drastic reduction in violent crime over the last year or so; even with increases in other crimes. Reducing the stigma of an astronomically high murder rate is an important step for the city to make, I just question whether it lasts or not.

Full story here.

Unless You Count My Pained Penis, There Are No Victims of Online Pornography

Another installment of -- Things I Read So You Don't Have To.

Mary Eberstadt writing over at The Catholic Thing on Lust and porno:

The news – and as it happens, there is some real news about all this – is that this sophisticated game of dumbing down the costs of Lust has left many people disarmed at what may be the worst possible time. Such was the plain meaning of a conference at Princeton last weekend on “The Social Costs of Pornography.” The Witherspoon Institute and two other groups organized a gathering that for once truly deserves the adjective “groundbreaking” – an unprecedented assortment of psychiatrists, psychologists, authors, scientists, and professors of sociology, psychology, law, and philosophy, summoned from around the nation to tally up and explain, in particular, the human toll of internet pornography.


Just for starters, another outstanding lie of our time – that pornography itself is a victimless, harmless pursuit – has been definitively laid to rest by these researchers. In an age of so many fake victims, they offered a torrent of data about real ones. Lawyers reported that a growing percentage of divorces now come from pornography addiction. Therapists reported that frustrated wives and girlfriends gave the ultimatum, “it’s your porn or me,” only to have husbands and boyfriends choose the former – with family trauma and breakup the entirely predictable results. All this is to say nothing of the children and adolescents dragooned into the “industry” via drugs, prostitution, and rape; or of the many other children and adolescents who have been inadvertently or deliberately exposed to internet pornography as their first template, with consequences that even the most jaded psychologists and related practitioners cannot yet imagine.

So there's a lot to digest there, and I encourage you to read the whole thing if you aren't to busy ignoring your wife and kids and rubbing one out to some ATM porn (ass-to-mouth, Mary). If that's the case let me break it down for you -- Porn is bad. Easy to get, no cost, with as many genres as one could want; internet pornography is even worse. It's the cause of divorces, family trauma and enables rape, drug abuse and paedophilia. In fact, if you watch porn online you are probably supporting the terrorists directly. You didn't know this did you? I didn't either, and truthfully I made that last one up. Sssh, don't tell anyone. I figured with all the exaggerated bullshit in no-fun-Nancy's article you wouldn't notice a made-up statement or two thrown in.

The real take-away outrage from a piece like this is that these people are so blinded by their own value system that they miss the real benefits from something like internet pornography. There has been a lot of serious work done in the academic community that shows a possible correlation between the decrease of reported rapes in this country over the past 25 years and the availability of pornography over that same time. I tend to believe it, but it may just be a coincidence. However, the sharp decline in rapes, and other violent crimes means that you couldn't possibly connect the easy availability of pornography to a surge in rapes and violent crimes. I may not be able to prove the drop is connected to porn, but if you claim it causes an increase, you better be able to show that increase.

The proliferation of pornography has also empowered women who are involved in the industry. Not all women stars will become the next Jenna Jameison, controlling their own commercial empire, but more have that opportunity now than ever before. While recently there has been a trend towards home produced videos with the explosion of streaming video sites, a large majority of produced (and most importantly) commercialized porn is professionally produced by studios where the women actors hold the most leverage. Women are not coerced into this industry, and contrary to what Mary might think most porn isn't filmed Black Snake Moan style in some sceevy guys basement. Even the at-home productions provides women -- some of who may be single mom types -- access to a previously non-existent income stream.

Here's the best nugget of the piece:

And those are just some obvious casualties. Clinicians also spoke of patients progressing rapidly from itinerant use of “soft-core” pornography to compulsive forages for images of “hard-core” child rape, bestiality, and other violence.

"Hard-core" pornography is not child rape, bestiality, and other violent sexual acts. Hard-core pornography describes pornography that shows penetration, and the parts used for that penetration. It covers all porn. Soft-core is the porn that we all grew-up on that could be found late at night on Showtime. Or as Mary would call it, the gateway porn.

Weather Watch

Just to reinterate what has been all over the news -- It's really fucking cold out there today. It's days like this I don't envy homeless people.

I'm Now an Obamaniac

Links to start your short holiday week.

Rob rejoices -- Obama supports lactating mama porn genre. Or at least that's how I read this Slate article. Read the whole thing, or just skip to the middle where the lactating breasts are.

How's this for a little Baltimore holiday cheer:

Travis Makofski, 28, lived in a first-floor rear apartment with his mother, who was superintendent of the building. About 2:15 a.m., the doorbell rang and the mother went to the front entrance door of the triplex. Two men shoved the door open and one of them placed a gun to her head, police said. Makofski left his apartment and asked the suspects what they were doing, and was shot in the face, police said. He was pronounced dead about an hour later at Maryland Shock Trauma Center.

If you ever needed another reason not to open your door in Baltimore, especially at 2:15 in the AM; a home invasion resulting in your face being shot off seems like as good as any.

1,2,3...4 strikes you're out -- if you're a PG County cop:

A Prince George's County police lieutenant charged four times this year with driving under the influence passed out behind the wheel of a running police cruiser in one incident, had to be Tasered and pepper-sprayed in another and was at fault in a hit-and-run in a third, Laurel Police said yesterday.

In February, an officer found Lt. Kenneth W. Parrish, 44, asleep in the cruiser, its emergency lights on, in front of Laurel High School shortly after noon on a school day, a spokesman for the Laurel police said. Parrish's cruiser was in the road, running and in drive, his foot resting on the brake pedal and his body slumped over the steering wheel, spokesman Jimmy Collins said.

Why all the hand-wringing? The guy had his foot on the brake.

In beheading news from the war down south

Reporting from Mexico City -- Twelve men were decapitated and dumped at separate sites in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, authorities said Sunday.

Mexican news outlets quoted Guerrero Gov. Zeferino Torreblanca Galindo as saying that eight of the men were identified as Mexican soldiers and another as a former state police commander. Earlier, Mexican media had said that the victims' close-cropped hair indicated they were soldiers.[...]

Beheadings have become increasingly common around Mexico amid rising drug-related violence that has killed more than 5,300 people this year.

President Felipe Calderon launched a crackdown against drug traffickers upon taking office two years ago, triggering clashes between security forces and gunmen and vicious feuding among rival drug gangs.

Simple solution -- A global War on Beheadings. Problem solved.