DUMB-ASSES! A few rants to start your week off

So, this chick in South Cali died of "water intoxication" in the last couple days. A radio station had a contest called "Hold your wee for a Wii!" In it, they gave contestants water to drink, and the winner would be the one who drank the most and didn't go to the washroom for the longest period of time.

Said chick goes home, and, well, dies.

The station is fucking flabbergasted.

I say they're complete and total fuckwits. I've known people could die of water poisoning for years. There are people out there, even, who are essentially "wateraholics"(my term) -- they drink water to an excess, so much so that their lives are in jeopardy. A decade or so ago, The National Post ran a huge story on this fringe addiction, which is really a psychological problem. Some are so extreme that they've even been known (when they're being deprived of water) to go so far as to take off shoes and scoop water out of the toilet tanks.

Dude, I don't make this shit up, I just report it. (A farcical look at water addiction is here. Cute.) The real deal's called psychogenic polydipsia. I know, my big brains are sexy, aren't they?

But these fucking idiots go and think "oh, hey, pass the bong-- have I got a hilarious notion for a contest!" I hope they get slammed with a lawsuit. But the fucking idiots who joined the contest more or less only have themselves to blame since I'm sure no guns were held to anyone's head. Fuckin' people need to read more. Jesus Christ. A generation of illiterates. Stupid station, stupid contestants. My condolences to the family of the woman who died, but geez, man. You gotta wonder. Ignorance is bliss until it goes and goddamned kills you.

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Glen Beck from CNN strikes me as the stupidest fucking person to ever get his own talk show. He's on there tonight comparing Venezuela's Hugo Chavez to Hitler, Kim Jong-Il, and Pol Pot. The dumb-ass woman on there with him stops him and says, "Oh, I don't know if he's as bad as Pol Pot." C'mon, get a fucking calculator, sweetie. Pol Pot killed 1.5 million people, and there are no numbers, really, available for Jong-il's lovely famine, but some sources claim 10% of the country, or 3 million, met their demise in those dark days. Hitler's known to have obviously killed 6 million-plus with the Holocaust. C'mon, how about Stalin, kids? Is Chavez just like Joe? Betcha Beck thinks so!*

What is this, pin the tail on the America-hater day or something? 'Cause some leftist leader of a nation with a surplus supply of oil dislikes American foreign policy, he gets lumped in with dictators who've orchestrated the deaths of millions? 'Cause he breaks the rules and goes to visit Mr. I-Got-A-Ridiculously-Long-Name over there in Iran, he's some kind of evil-doer who deserves to be bombed to fucking hell and back?

Christ. I didn't know they were allowed to smoke crack during broadcasts down there at CNN's Atlanta headquarters.

But, y'know, then there's the "good ol' days" when you could find pictures of Rumsfeld sitting there pretty with Hussein, being all buddy-buddy back in '84, or when the Americans were helping fund Afghanistan's fight against Russia (which entailed sending weapons to a motivated youngin' named Bin Laden) and all that, but, hey, they were guys who were "on page" with the oil program, right? Or something like. Now they're evil fuckers. Something tells me that their moral compass didn't just go squirrelly overnight, boys. Christ.

What REALLY pisses me off is throwing around the names of these goddamned dictators-cum-mass murderers like it's an everyday thing to see baddies in power offing millions of their citizens. By throwing around their names, we're mocking the severity and horror of those offenses. We're insulting those who've died under those regimes, and those who live today with the ghosts of those regimes. Get serious.

Chavez, if you're going to compare him to anyone, is more of a Castro or Bolivar. The USA's just pissed that all of South America's getting into bed with socialism and Marxism. (And why the hell not? They're mostly too poor to have pots to piss in. They might as well start sharing the goddamned pot.)

But, mostly, Chavez hates Bush and what he perceives as Bush's supremacy mission. He despises what he perceives as an American mentality that, just because they use the most oil in the world, that they have some kind of manifest destiny to possess the oil from other nations. I'm not going to get into that argument today, suffice to say that if you don't have it, don't abuse it, and America AIN'T got no oil, not really, so maybe it's time to learn a thing or two about conservation.

If Chavez wants to get his country to reduce production in order to drive up his prices, then that's their prerogative, isn't it? Or is "capitalism" and "free will" only applicable on American soil? Jesus.

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I love the show 24, but given the whole "real-time" bullshit going on there, I gotta tell you, I don't know how Jack Bauer goes from looking like the Unabomber-gone-ragged with shaggy long hair and 20 months of beard growth to being all nicely shorn and trim in less than 20 minutes of supposedly "real" time. "We've prepared an area for you to clean up in." Yeah, and they had a magic hairdresser just appear outta thin air. The guy literally had a gallon of water in a bowl. I know fiction calls for a suspension of belief, but seriously. Let's not take liberties on purpose here, now, all right?

And, any guy I know who's ever gotten rid of a long-standing beard has skin irritation like all-get-out for the next couple days. Jack, though, is clearly the toughest mofo ever to walk these fair lands -- so too, it would seem, is his skin.

Still, awesome fun episode, except when Jack literally bit a guy's carotid artery to bits and killed him. That was a little creepy. I guess he didn't like the Chinese food and needed a bite.

(Aw, c'mon, it's a GOOD pun!)

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*(The numbers for Stalin range anywhere from 3 million to 60 million, depending who's doing the counting, with experts saying a minimum of 10, but in all likelihood, 15 to 20 million. And I never pass up the opportunity to rave about Adam Hochschild's BRILLIANT The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. Excellent sociological look at a nation trying to live down its past. Brilliant, brilliant, but then that's Hochschild in a nutshell.)