If you’re really stuck on something for the Thanksgiving table for this year, you could always toss out “I’m thankful that I didn’t just learn that Charles Manson is my biological father”.

John Marcotte is hard at work, working to protect traditional marriage. Proposition 8 in California, banning gay marriage, clearly didn’t go far enough, so he’s working to end divorce as well. Hey, you said “Til death do us part”. You’re not dead yet.

Perhaps the best line is this answer from an interview with Rob Cockerham, on Cockeyed.com:

Q: This initiative does seem like it would “Protect Marriage”, but if two people decide to not be married anymore, shouldn’t they be in charge of their own lives?

A: Sometimes other people need to sacrifice in order to protect my ideas about traditional marriage. It’s just a fact of life. It’s not about their soul-sucking sham of a marriage, it’s about what we value as a society.

Beautiful.

Down 21 – 22 with under two minutes to play in yesterday’s game against the Jets, Jacksonville Jaguars running back Maurice Jones-Drew took a knee just before the end zone. In so doing, he kept his offense on the field, and took the Jets’ offense out of the game. The Jaguars proceeded to run down the clock before kicking an easy field goal to win the game, 24 – 22, as time ran out.

This was a blow to fantasy football owners, however, who earns points based on how players perform. A touchdown by a player you own will net you 6 points. A game-winning knee-taking at the 1/2 yard line followed by the player’s team running down the clock and kicking a last-second field goal, however, isn’t worth anything. Following the game, Jones-Drew apologized:

“Sorry to my fantasy owners. I apologize. I had myself today. It was a tough call, but whatever it takes to get the victory, that’s what counts.”

This does, of course, beg the question: Are there weeks when Jones-Drew doesn’t have himself on his own fantasy football team?

Update: Via Twitter, @IainDelaney linked me to this tale of Matt Hasselbeck benching himself, only to score 27 fantasy points – the most in the NFL that week. Oops.

I’ve never seen one of these phones with an instant-$1.99-charge button, but that’s just abysmal. The cell phone industry is incredible in its awfulness.

Just look at this mouse. It’s a thing of…well, grotesqueness. The OpenOffice Mouse, also known as the OOMouse, also know as the WarMouse, has even more controls than it has names. It’s got 18 buttons, a scroll wheel, and an analog joystick. Can you imagine trying to use this thing? Hell, I shudder at the mere thought of trying to set it up.

I started to write that this is the work of a diseased mind, but that’s not true. This is almost certainly the work of many contributors, with no design lead. That means no one to fight for simplicity, no one to cut an unnecessary feature or six, and no one to say “Dear god! This mouse has more memory than the original Macintosh!”.

Real answers to real(ly stupid) questions. Highlights include “What do you think about the number 19?” and “The cord of my power ball has become tangled inside the unit…”

It’s worth noting that someone gets paid to do this.

Update (November 8, 2022): The Powerball site has changed greatly, killing the old link of http://www.powerball.com/real-letters.asp. Fortunately, these wonderful letters can be found via the Wayback Machine’s archive of the page.

U2 is playing a free show in Berlin to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The show will take place at Pariser Platz, just in front of the Brandenburg Gate and surrounded on three sides by buildings.

To prevent those without tickets from seeing the show, the fourth side is to be closed off by a more than two-meter high wall — just a few dozen meters from where the original Wall once stood.

Words just fail.

Recently, CNN unveiled a major redesign of their site. It’s had some amusing consequences.

You can see my own contribution here.