Let's Just Kill This Old Guy, We Need This Bed!

Slate article about assisted suicide

The crazy-ass Dutch aren't doing it right:
"Several thousand people are terminated by physicians each year without giving consent, says Hendin. He quotes a doctor who said he euthanized a patient because 'it would have taken another week before she died, and I just needed this bed.'"

Okay... I'm all in favor of assisted suicide, especially where it concerns seriously ill people whose existence is days full of pain and misery, Michael Jackson, and people who talk on cell phones in movie theaters. But this is going a touch too far. People shouldn't be killed because you need to empty the hospital room, unless they have nice organs you can harvest. It just isn't right.

Now, where did we land on the Michael Jackson thing?

Does "Rumpelstiltskin" show up in the baby name list?

The Baby Name Wizard: NameVoyager

And yet again, the Internet tosses something up on our beaches that could never, ever have existed, before computers, except in people's imaginations: The Baby Name Voyager!

Type in one letter and: Watch! as the whole UNIVERSE of names filters itself for your edification and amusement. I gotta tell ya, taking something as boring and everyday as baby names and putting it into this visual, dynamic format? Awesome.

It might take something like this to prevent the travesties of the past from recurring. In my niece's class at school, ALL the girls are named Ashley, and ALL the boys are named Tyler! In the interests of not dooming ourselves to vanilla blandness and a fatal lack of imagination, we need to use more names. We need more Zulmas and Xiomaras and Galens and Garretts and Bobs.

No! Scratch that! NO MORE BOBS! We should pass a law against naming anyone Bob anymore. In fact, we should retroactively make existing Bobs change their names! Of course, considering the lack of imagination in their families that caused the Bobbing in the first place, they'd probably all just change to the same new name. We'd have eight million new Johns.

My half-hearted apologies to any Bob that reads this.

Popstrology: What's Your Sign?

Popstrology: What's Your Sign?

This link shows you what song was number one when you greeted the world outside your mom for the first time. Was it sweet and loving and kinda boring, like "I Just Called to Say I Love You," by Stevie Wonder? Was it a harsh and totalitarian view of the future world, like Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall"? Was it John Ashcroft's "Let the Eagles Soar," because you are a.) very young, and b.) you were born in an alternate universe where people have very bad taste and are also insane?

There ya go. WAY more useful than astrology. Although... come to think of it, why WOULDN'T all the stars in the visible universe orchestrate the minutiae of our daily existence? What was I thinking? It makes PERFECT sense.

I was born when "Hey Jude" by the Beatles was number one, because I am old, very very old, and also because I am very cool. (I probably will disprove this claim within thirty seconds of making it. I am just that dorky.)

Play With Your Food! / Good Eats Drinking Game

Good Eats Drinking Game
I love Alton Brown! He makes food shows way interesting! Who doesn't like food? I like food! I eat food, sometimes daily!

Alton Brown's Good Eats show is very educational! But entertaining! And it makes you hungry! But that's not his fault!

Play the drinking game! But don't drink, though! Except if it's cooking sherry! No, wait! Maybe I mean you shouldn't drink cooking sherry! I don't drink at all, hardly! I'm lying! I'm drunk right now!

I'm kidding -- I'm just goofy! It looks the same as being drunk to my Graceful Readers! But smells way less alcoholly-ish!

A Lasting Token of Undying Something

Biojewelry
This company wants to make engagement rings for couples... using each other's bone tissue.

Yes, that IS just as bizarre as it sounds on first reading. They want to take bone tissue from each of the two people, and place it on a pair of scaffolds, called "bioglass". The scaffolds are ceramic, but porous. Like, um, I don't know. Candy that you've sucked on a while, and it's got lots of holes in it. (I got nothin'.)

So they put the tissue on this round scaffold, and the bone tissue grows in the form of a ring, which your partner wears. They're just doing this with one couple so far, and they're looking for the couple they want to use.

Doctors have developed ways to grow bone tissue in the lab, to transplant into patients. Now these folks are using the same technology... but for EVIL! EVIL purposes! They're basically a bunch of shmucky art people who want to stir up "discussion."

I'm not really sure I get it. Maybe if I had taken the "Interaction Design" course at the Royal College of Art in London, I would be on the same page.

This is just way too much like the little vials of eachother's blood that Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob wore around their necks. Let's just keep our body tissue inside our bodies, hey? Let's not parade it around in vials and make it grow in funny shapes and stuff. People, we do NOT WANT to someday see people taking this the next step, and growing new THINGS to add on to their bodies! You know they'll do it! Let's head them off!

We should all just get his and her kitties, like my friend Justin and his girlfriend. Kitties are so great... More people should have kitties anyway.

You Rich Ba**ard

Global Rich List

You are freakishly rich! But you didn't know it!

None of us know that we are freakishly rich, and it's all P. Diddy's fault. He bought a man to hold an umbrella over his head when it's sunny out. He takes baths in Cristal. He wipes his butt with $5000-an-ounce caviar. He drives a Pepsi truck.

People like him buy $100,000 toy cars for their four-year-olds. So any time you think you're spoiled because you go through the drive-through or use paper plates instead of real ones, um, you're not.

No, you still are. Psych!