Byron Crawford blows it up

And it’s not like he has to sweat losing the black community at this point. He’s got them (us?) in his back pocket on a level I wasn’t even aware was possible. Pimps don’t have this control over their whores. Never mind throwing his pastor under a bus; Barack Obama could shoot a black baby in its face on live TV, and black people would be like, “Well, maybe that’s what he needed to do to win the election. Let the nigga get in office first and see if he’s still shooting children.” That’s how ridiculous this shit has gotten.

Daaaaaaaammmmmn!

Smoking bans kill

According to researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, counties that have instituted bans on smoking indoors have experienced dramatic increases in the levels of drunk driving and drunk driving deaths. Apparently drunk smokers are hopping into their cars to drink in outdoor bars or to adjacent counties without smoking bans. The bottle opener/lighter combination that the dealer for my first car gave me must be catching on.

The researchers analysed data from 120 American counties, 20 of which had banned smoking. They found a smoking ban increased fatal alcohol-related car accidents by 13% in a typical county containing 680,000 people. This is the equivalent of 2.5 fatal accidents (equivalent to approximately six deaths). Furthermore, drunk-driving smokers have not changed their ways over time. In areas where the ban has been in place for longer than 18 months, the increased accident rate is 19%.

I'm curios as to what percentage of accidents are being caused by drunk drivers dropping their car cigarette lighters in their laps? But let's look on the bright side! Smokers are now doing more to improve the costs of healthcare for everyone else, by killing people off before they get sick.

Unlucky Strikes

OMG! Kids have money, love text messaging

A spat of upcoming ad campaigns, including Degree deodorant for teen girl's "OMG! Moments," are going to feature text-messaging slang marketed at the youth of America. Since parents clearly don't understand what the hell their kids are talking about these days anyway (note the success of Juno: "They talk so funny!"), companies figure that they might as well go straight to the source and try to stay fresh and fly with the kids. Are kids still saying fresh and fly?

"We wanted to show the teens that we understand them and know how they communicate with their friends," says David Lang, president of WPP Group's MindShare Entertainment, which created the print, TV and online effort.

Marketers Try to Be 'Kewl' With Text-Message Lingo

Nerds (ruining the fun for everybody)

Two brave citizens have mounted a legal campaign to prevent nerds and their particle physics toys from destroying the earth in a black hole fueled apocalypse. Global warming can hop on the back burner for this shit.

Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.”

Bummer.

Kids love internet, hate magazines

Looks like the inevitable pool of young talent for the magazine industry is drying up as the young people these days flock to that new fangled internet. Is this really surprising? Why spend hours researching and interviewing for a piece that just gets axed or edited beyond all recognition when you could, ya know, just hunt for sexual innuendo headlines on the NYT and Google pictures of dinosaur bongs. It's a recession, there's nothing out there for ya anyway.

Mr. Talese had definite opinions on the subject. 'These people don’t leave their fucking laptops,' he said. 'It used to be, you would go outside. It’s leaving home, getting on a plane or a bus or a bicycle, and going somewhere. It doesn’t mean you have a fixed interview. It’s hanging around.'

The Decline and Fall of the Writer