Puppy Power

Billy "Backdoor Classic" Packer out as CBS head douche nozzle

Surprisingly, google gives me only one response for the search Billy "backdoor classic" Packer, and an unrelated at that, which saddens me. I think he said it during a UNC-UK game a few years back, and always thought that, given all of the inappropriate gay-overtoned quotes he has produced, this should be an unheralded entry into his quote Hall of Fame.

Jesse Helms is dead, and Billy Packer is out at CBS. It's a great year to be a human being.

Bo Cowgill on Prediction Markets

For feed users, go to post for video.

"It's incentive, nonetheless."

Very good stuff.

Where the entitlement never ends

Harvard's undergraduate commencement speaker is selected by, according to the NPR article, alumni and parents, people who respect the tradition of the institution with the benefit of added perspective. Apparently selecting someone with a unique, lighter-weighted career didn't sufficiently stroke the egos of a few of the graduates, and some of these quotes remind us of what the hell is wrong with this world.

"I think we could have done better," shrugged computer science major Kevin Bombino. He says Rowling lacks the gravitas a Harvard commencement speaker should have.

"You know, we're Harvard. We're like the most prominent national institution. And I think we should be entitled to … we should be able to get anyone. And in my opinion, we're settling here."

You have to listen to this tool stumbling over his "we should be entitled to" remark. It's like, somewhere in that education, he learned about entitlement, about how maybe he and some of the kids around him are some of the most entitled human beings on the face of the earth, but it never occurred to him that maybe that entitlement had some limits.

Speaking of past speakers:

"It's definitely the 'A' list, and I wouldn't ever associate J.K. Rowling with the people on that list," says senior Andy Vaz. "From the moment we walk through the gates of Harvard Yard, they constantly emphasize that we are the leaders of tomorrow. They should have picked a leader to speak at commencement. Not a children's writer. What does that say to the class of 2008? Are we the joke class?"

Yes, you Tool. If you are graduating from that class, either your class is the joke class, or every class behind you has been as well, and nobody told you. Your $200,000 education obviously dropped in value because one of the most successful human beings who didn't have your background got to speak to you for twenty minutes.

To be fair, I'm betting that a tremendous number of Harvard kids enjoyed having Rowling there, and I bet plenty of them don't take themselves as seriously as bunch of asshole 22-year olds who some how avoided picking up any perspective while hanging out with some of the brightest young people on the planet for the past four years. And NPR might have sought the only naysayers in the whole class in order to write their "look how much better YOUR intellectual snobbery is than this guy's intellectual snobbery, you dashing hipster you!" article. But maybe they didn't.

This tunnelvision of the "we're the University X, bow before our shit which does not stink" mentality probably trickles down to, say, the top 40 undergraduate institutions in U.S. News and World Report and probably 20 of the "liberal arts" colleges that get their own perverse ranking system. And probably the top 25 medical schools, law schools, business schools, speech pathology schools, etc. So it goes.

So, congratulations Kevin Bombino and Andy Vaz, on those pieces of papers that will provide you with all the entitlement you could ever imagine. And, when you become one of those "leaders" you're so worried about, may God have mercy on all of us.

More U.S. Children Being Diagnosed With Youthful Tendency Disorder

REDLANDS, CA-Nicholas and Beverly Serna's daughter Caitlin was only four years old, but they already knew there was a problem.

Vaccine Smack

Mostly because I'm sick of seeing that scary Huckabee-Squirrel picture every time I pull up my site for link shortcuts, here's another Slate video, this time with some good old-fashion take-your-autonomy-and-shove-it vaccine cautionary tales.

To be clear, I think people who don't vaccinate their children are about as smart as people who eat their own poop. But I wouldn't kick someone out of my practice for any reason save concerns of personal harm, and I don't think it's particularly responsible for pediatricians to threaten parents that they will no longer be their child's pediatrician just because the parent smokes mercury-laced crack.

Don't punish a child just because the child's parents are idiots. The kid is going to have enough problems surviving 18 years with their anti-vaccine asshat mom and dad without getting fired by their pediatrician.

The day when I'm proud to be a redneck

So, much of my residency decisions have centered around not only geography, but that personal conception of self. Am I a fly-over country kind of guy, could I fit into the Smooth of the west coast, could I become snotty enough to make it in the Northeast? Those sort of existential questions.

Thankfully, the folks at Slate clarify this for me, with their highly enlightening segment, Can You Eat Squirrels?, in response to Mike Huckabee's claim that rural Americans will relate to him because he cooked squirrel in a popcorn popper while in college.

In point of disclosure, I do not support the eating of any animals, especially not ones that require such a large shotgun blast to hunt. But I'd like to have a better Explainer video: are there really people in this country so ignorant of Upland South culture that they don't know that people eat squirrels?

Seriously, watch these squirmy New Yorkers jaw-drop as they learn about burgoo, about using non-certified appliances for frying food, and the idea, that, oh my god, people eat meat that runs around in a forest when shotgun shells are cheaper than McDonald's. The latter is a little less relevant nowadays, but, yes, I had family that hunted squirrels because it was more accessible than McDonald's.

I've never been hunting in my life, but I had a hard time explaining the significance of Dick Cheney shooting that guy in the face with a 20-gauge while quail, realizing that my coastal city-folk friends couldn't even conceptualize the process of quail hunting, and how Cheney's inability to follow the most basic of safety precautions on a bird hunt was quite the microcosm for the administration's approach to the Iraq war.

But I digress.

If you don't know that people hunt squirrels, or if you couldn't select an appropriate firearm for doing so, then you have as much to learn about America as I do.