Florida Standard Time

A sheep grazing in the Turkish town of Gevas jumped from a cliff last Thursday, causing nearly 1,500 others to follow. The leap resulted in the deaths of 450 of the animals, in addition to prompting several million college radio DJ's worldwide to play the Monty Python "Flying Sheep" sketch over the course of the next week.
(AP Photo)

Actual conversation I had with the woman sitting next to me in the jury lounge today:

Crazy old woman: (Refering to a spot for Space Shuttle coverage on the TV:) What time is that supposed to happen?
Me: I think it's around 4:00 or so.
C.o.w.: Is that their time or our time?
Me: Well, it's in Florida, so it's the same time.
C.o.w.: How can that be? It's 18 hours away!
Me: Yeah, but it's in the same time zone.
C.o.w.: Even though it's 18 hours away?

So I pretty much spent the next five minutes trying to explain to her that time zones only change when you're traveling East-West. She eventually gave up trying to understand it and just went back to watching whatever crap it is that NBC kills the time between Today and the 12:00 news with. The defendant ended up pleading guilty, which was probably a good move, considering that his fate would have otherwise been decided by people like her.

This does, however, explain why a thief can successfully sue his victim for injuries sustained during a burglary. Let's hear it for the American legal system, everyone!

Heil!

Man, Bush is almost starting to make this too easy...
(AP Photo)

(AAAARRRRRRRGH!, part V)

So a few weeks ago, I mentioned the oddness of the current Pop Tarts stick figure campaign, stating that I really had no problem with it until I came across that dinosaur thing. I would now like correct that statement.



I couldn't put my finger on it earlier, but I knew that I've seen that style of stick figure somewhere before (yes, stick figures now have unique styles, apparently). It turns out that the Pop Tarts thing is just an extremely blatant ripoff of Don Hertzfeldt's film, "Rejected", which is apparently another one of those hipster standards that I've just never been subjected to for some reason, despite encountering an almost insane number of references to it (one WUSR DJ even used this frame from the movie as her profile image for a while). So there you go, it's just another case of "giant corporation stealing the work of independent artists to make a quick buck (and getting away with it, thanks to the fact that they can afford better lawyers than the little guy can)".

I suppose I'm going to have to switch to Fig Newtons now, assuming that they aren't ultimately made by the same company. It's so hard to keep track of these things anymore. Pretty soon, everything will be owned by one corporation, and our choices will be to either obey them or starve to death. We'll probably all die from the lack of healthcare anyway, but still.

Finally, a cause we can all agree with.
(AFP Photo)