Orly Taitz's meltdown is epic

I almost feel bad for her.

I know that everyone has already seen this, but it's worth watching again just for the utter insanity of the clip.

ESPN banning Twitter for most instances

The Worldwide Leader in Sports, ESPN, is like a lot of companies these days. Seemingly every person on their staff has a Twitter account. I follow about a dozen of these folks to find out the latest about sports news, including their RSS feed Twitter account.

But now ESPN has decided that all this Twittering by their reporters isn't a good thing and has banned tweeting except for cases where it serves ESPN's interests.

Ric Bucher, who covers the NBA for ESPN and ESPN.com, said in a Twitter post today that the sports giant is prohibiting Twitter posts that don't serve the network. Bucher has more than 18,000 followers on the site.

I caught the tweet by @RicBucher.

Here it is:

The hammer just came down, tweeps: ESPN memo prohibiting tweeting info unless it serves ESPN. Kinda figured this was coming. Not sure wh ...

He followed up with a tweet that says,

My guess is I can still tweet about my vacation/car shopping, etc. Which I will do, if I can. But the informal NBA talk is prob in jeopardy.

In other words, there is no longer any reason for me to follow ESPN personalities for scoops on sports news.

Rap song about Twitter: "Hit me on Twitter"

And no, it isn't one of those jokey, "I'm a guy who can't rap, isn't it funny!?" rap songs. It's an actual rapper (Mista F.A.B.) telling people, "Hit me on Twitter."

Listen to it.

Modest Mouse music video directed by Heath Ledger debuts

You can watch the animated video for the song "King Rat" over at MySpace.

Ledger directed part of the video and the rest was finished by his company, The Masses.

G.E., News Corp muzzle Olbermann and O'Reilly

So says the New York Times at least.

For years Keith Olbermann of MSNBC had savaged his prime-time nemesis Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel and accused Fox of journalistic malpractice almost nightly. Mr. O’Reilly in turn criticized Mr. Olbermann’s bosses and led an exceptional campaign against General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC.

It was perhaps the fiercest media feud of the decade and by this year, their bosses had had enough. But it took a fellow television personality with a neutral perspective to bring it to an end.

At an off-the-record summit meeting for chief executives sponsored by Microsoft in May, the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose asked Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of G.E., and his counterpart at the News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, about the feud.

Weird.

I can't even describe this story in a headline

Via @m_ruth, a story otu of a soap opera. If it was based in New Mexico:

A black bear in Espanola touches off an odd series of events leading to an animal control officer being arrested, accused of battering an underage girl.

There are four main characters in the story: A large black bear, an animal control officer, and his two unsuspecting girlfriends.

And, since it's from a TV network, here's the story in video form as well!

What the "beer summit" could have been...

From the always-great (even if I don't get it about 32 percent of the time) XKCD:



Click for full size.

Should WEC fold into UFC?

WEC (World Extreme Cagefighting) isn't a pro wrestling organization like it sounds like. Instead, it is the little brother of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). They are both owned by Zuffa, and run by Dana White.

So Yahoo! Sports columnist Kevin Iole says it is time for the two to merge and let the names like Miguel Torres, Dan Brown and Urijah Faber be on par with the Georges St. Pierres and BJ Penns of the world.

It makes business sense to add two divisions to the UFC and create bigger stars. So will they do it? Or will someone beat UFC to the punch and offer a higher profile fight organization for the lower weights?

Boston police officer sends racist e-mail to Boston Globe

Holy crap. I know I usually take a beat or two before sending an e-mail just to make sure that I didn't mess anything up... but this guy should probably not be sending e-mails at all.

This came, obviously, after the arrest of Harry Louis Gates.

Here's an excerpt of the letter from the Boston Globe (the full letter is at the link, but below is just an excerpt):

Your defense [4th paragraph] of Gates while he is on the phone while being confronted [INDEED] with a police officer is assuming he has rights when considered a suspect. He is a suspect and will always be a suspect. His first priority of effort should be to get off the phone and comply with police, for if I was the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC deserving of his belligerent non-compliance.

Wow.

Huffington Post health coverage sucks

I'm not sure about the Huffington Post. The site is undeniably popular and many people reference it (I have done so a few times at my other blog). But sometimes it is just... wrong.

Especially on health coverage, and Salon Took them to task for their poor, misleading and occasionally outright wrong coverage.

As a physician, I am not necessarily opposed to alternative health treatments. But I do want to be responsible and certain that what I prescribe to patients is safe and effective and not a waste of their time and money. A recent Associated Press investigation stated the federal government has spent $2.5 billion of our tax dollars to determine whether alternative health remedies -- including ones promoted on the Huffington Post -- work. It found next to none of them do. The site also regularly grants space to proponents of the thoroughly disproven conspiracy that childhood vaccines have caused autism. In short, the Huffington Post is hardly a site that promotes "a reasoned discussion," in its founder's words, of health and medicine.