There's some pretty good stuff out there this morning:
Microsoft has been caught trying to pay a blogger to edit its Wikipedia entry. It's no crime, and there are no allegations that the proposed edits were inaccurate. Word to corporate types out there: You can pay me to edit your entries, and I'll treat it as a professional confidence. Just make sure you give me accurate information. I'd hate to earn this extra beer money dishonestly. The guilt would prompt me to drink more.
Brad Pitt says strippers changed his life:
"My job was to drive them to bachelor parties and things. I'd pick them up, and at the gig I'd collect the money, play the bad Prince tapes and catch the girls' clothes. It was not a wholesome atmosphere, and it got very depressing."
He's right. As a young man, I'd go to bachelor parties, drink about 20 beers, and watch the stripper. No matter how much I had drank and fun I was otherwise having, the thought always went trough my head, "How freakin' degrading, primarily for the stripper, but also for us ogglers."
A potentially explosive dispute in the City Too Busy to Hate is taking shape over a proposal to break Fulton County in two and split off Atlanta's predominantly white, affluent suburbs to the north from some of the metropolitan area's poorest, black neighborhoods.
Opponents are screaming "racism." Proponents are screaming "greater efficiency." But racism and efficiency have nothing to do with it. It's money. "Residents of north Fulton represent 29 percent of the county's population of 915,000 but pay 42 percent of its property taxes, according to a local taxpayers group. A split would lead to the loss of $193 million in property taxes alone for Fulton County." I suspect residents of north Fulton also require far fewer county services, too, due to less crime and social services.
Lonely farmers in North Wales are to be pictured on milk cartons to help them find love. . . . Stickers on Calon Wen's organic milk will feature three men and two women looking for a date.
Kind of ironic, no? The farmers are tired of cows, so they advertise on a cow by-product.
God Hates Goths. A new website dedicated to attacking the goth sub-culture. Goodness knows, the gothic sub-culture of loathing needs to be attacked, but could we get a different name? I'm guessing this site is run by the Phelps family types, so it'll be fanatical and useless in the gothic wars.
Writing about Dakota Fanning's new movie of sex abuse:
"During the Golden Age of Hollywood, the entertainment industry understood the value of a star's reputation. Especially young stars like Shirley Temple and Elizabeth Taylor. Good wholesome young stars were groomed to appear that way in every movie so that they would be seen as celebrities that moviegoers would admire and want to see again and again. Now, Hollywood chews them up and spits them out like the used prostitutes on Hollywood Boulevard in L.A. or the streets of Bangkok. This is reprehensible."
But not nearly as reprehensible as the parents who put their children into that moral grist mill called Hollywood.
