What’s more fun than colorful toy beads that fuse together when sprayed with water? Colorful toy beads that fuse together when sprayed with water and also happen to turn into GHB when they fuse with your stomach acids. Holy crap. Yes, it’s another recalled toy from China. Please allow all manner of jingoistic parental freak outs to commence at once. Also please commence the rejoicing of ludicruously-dressed candy ravers everywhere.

I don’t suppose this has anything to do with recent statements by China that they might stop investing in the US dollar, does it?

It’s swell how every news outlet is just skipping any mention of the drug itself and just going for its seedier application as “a dangerous date rape drug.” Believe it or not, people still take GHB for fun (exhibit A: David Boston). I mean, come on. It does all this:

Common effects include intoxication, increased energy, happiness, excessive talking, the desire to socialize, strong feelings of affection and playfulness, enhanced sexual experience, loss of coordination due to loss of muscle tone, difficulty concentrating, and loss of gag reflex.

Seriously, if there’s one thing you need to learn by the age of twenty it’s that the phrase “loss of gag reflex” is just another way of saying party.

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Dudes and dudettes, you are a bunch of ijiots if you don’t join us tonight at the unveiling of the new Devil Rays uniforms at Straub Park. You might be asking yourself why the shit you’d actually care about being present at a uniform unveiling, but wait… there’s more! Entertainment will be provided by none other than Kevin Costner and his ass kicking band “Modern West.” No, seriously, for free! And they ain’t no rinkydink outfit, they’ve been around for ages!

Modern West has played original rock-and-roll songs for the last two years, and it was in the Tampa area where the band had its first paying gig. What better place, then, to return and help the Rays celebrate? “When I’m on a baseball field, I know where I’m at,” Costner said. “And I think playing for the fans that love baseball, and have maybe had a 20-plus year relationship with me going into movies, is kind of a perfect fit.”

Dude, it is the perfect fit. Costner, baseball, bad music… man, only one thing could make that better:

Thursday evening will conclude with an 8 p.m. fireworks show, but that’s only Day 1 of the entertainment.

Shut the flip up! I was totally about to say fireworks and another day of entertainment. That Kevin Costner can read your mind, man… your damn mind! Which totally proves my theory that Waterworld was autobiographical. The Mariner had a sixth sense, Costner has a sixth sense. The Mariner had gills, Costner has gills. The Mariner loved rock music, Costner fucking makes rock music.

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Yes, I said fuck in the title, this is a big fucking deal. It appears as though no one, including you heartless readers, notified me that Thumbelina, the world’s smallest horse, was at All Children’s Hospital on Monday. W. T. F?!

It isn’t often that we get celebrities here in the ‘burg, so I really would have liked the opportunity to at least get some paparazzi shots of Thumbelina. Guess I’ll just have to settle for Tampa Bay 10’s crack reporting.

Goddammit. A 17.5″ horse? That’s like a cute’splosion. I’m not getting over this any time soon I hope you know.

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Well screw me silly, a “media” company in the ‘burg doing some pretty good work. CMR Studios is a video production company that’s been around for 22 years and I recently got a press release saying they had done some work for Hillsborough Kids Inc. (HKI) out of Tampa. HKI is a pretty rad organization that provides lots of great services for children, so being my normal asshole self I was convinced this CMR outfit probably screwed HKI into some cheesy video project that cost a bunch of money.

Wrong! This comes from the press release:

Studio president and creative director Mike Weber presented HKI with the concept of writing a script that was the blending of several true cases into the story of one child. The treatment would be done in a form parents can relate to: a storybook. More specifically, a pop-up storybook that would become a virtual set for the six-minute video. The live action actors would be inserted into the pages using green screen compositing. Every page turn reveals one of eleven scenes depicting: the Tampa skyline, the University of Tampa, a house, various interior settings, Busch Gardens and Lowry Park Zoo.

Well, that sounds like a cool idea, but certainly someone will screw it up. Wrong! In a totally un-Florida turn of events the video is actually pretty damn well done. Check it out here. There’s a cool little behind the scenes thing as well, check that here. Bravo to CMR, granted this isn’t some groundbreaking, super kickass, Academy Award stuff, but for the ‘burg I’m pretty impressed. And dammit, I think we need to congratulate people around here when they manage to avoid sucking.

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Are you too old to use “party” as a verb?  Have you often wondered whether or not there was a local group of people who would party on your behalf?  I often find that the constraints of time, space and general mortality keep me from keeping the party going strong 24/7.  That’s why I was happy to learn that the Satanic Musicians Network will party for me.  Seriously, bonus.  I am particularly interested in their promise that they will “have wild sex of all forms that might scare more timid folks” on my behalf.  This is like a large bucket of debauched win for the whole Tampa Bay area.  Party.

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I was soooooo excited about the news that Bay News 9 got a dual-pole doppler that I got this amazing dual-pole tattoo. What do you think?

Oh wait, I’m sorry, I confused the above image with a Google image search for “world’s gayest tattoo.”

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You have to be kidding me. No, seriously. There’s you, and you’re totally kidding me. Imagine us together, sitting on a couch of some sort - we’re talking and you totally decide to kid me. That’s where we’re at just prior to you saying something about an autopsy on a flaming corpse in a park.

Authorities said firefighters discovered a teen’s body near a rural intersection in eastern Polk County. Authorities have not identified the teen. But investigators know her body was set on fire. “Well, obviously they were in a hurry,” said Chief W.J. Martin with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. “They wanted to dispose of the body quickly. And they wanted to get rid of evidence and avoid us possibly being able to identify her.”

Where the FUCK do we live? I seriously want to make a joke about a flaming corpse, but like… what the fuck?! Remind me like 400,000 times not to go to Poinciana, Florida.

PS The image at right is the #1 Google image search return for “flaming corpse”. Don’t ask me.

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It takes something special to pry me out of my apparent blogging sabbatical: A news item in which a kid punched his mom after she killed his Halo 3 network connection and subsequently gets taken to juvi after the parents call the coppers.

God bless you, Indian River County, for allowing this to happen.

The official account of the story is sadly lacking specific gaming details and statistics, but we do know that the kid’s parents told him to shut off his game and Mom pulled the Wireless Adapter out of the Xbox after he refused. The dude went off like an enraged Brute, failed to find the adapter, and then charged his mom and gave her a serious melee attack directly in the face — which conveniently helped him fulfill the “Up Close and Personal” achievement.

He finally retreated to the cover of his bedroom and camped there until Sheriff deputies forced him out. Fucking campers.

Seriously though, I’ve been searching all the wire-services for any of the really important details. Was he in matchmaking? Was it a ranked match? Was he in a team-based ranked match? Was he about to improve his rank after that last killing spree, only to see it all negated after bailing on the game? These are the questions that the media and the Indian River Sheriff should be asking.

As a moderately poor yet heavily addicted Halo 3 player myself, I totally sympathize with the little dude. Granted, the little bastard has probably teabagged my corpse with too much glee, but this doesn’t change the fact that you simply don’t fuck with somebody playing Halo at certain key moments.

On the other hand, if the child was only playing the campaign single-player on Easy then he’s a fucking little brat.

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Bay News 9 has a pretty unsophisticated website. That’s fine with me, but it did make me a little shocked to see that someone had accidentally restored an archived mirror of their site this morning. I mean, how else can you explain the presence of this article alerting us all that 2007 is the new 1984. No, seriously, websites can keep track of who you are and what you do. As impressive as it is from a webmastering standpoint that they could restore a perfect archive of their site from the year 2001, someone should probably get on the horn and inform them that people might get the impression that they’re painfully late to the internet paranoia party.

I suppose it is possible that this isn’t an archive of the entire Bay News 9 site. Maybe that crazy-haired dude was actually telling me the truth when he said his Delorean was a time machine. I thought he was just saying that to get me into his car. Well, hey it worked. He didn’t have to touch me like that, though. You know, come to think of it, time travel is seeming like the more plausible of the two situations. The last three songs on 97X were Harvey Danger’s “Flagpole Sitta,” Pumpkins’ “Disarm,” and “Down” by 311. Ah, it’s good to be back, six years ago.

Anyway, yes, the Internets can see what you’re doing. You go to websites. The web server and your browser do a little hand jive that requires the exchange of some information. Sometimes it’s just an IP address. If your browser is a total whore, sometimes it’s a little more than that. Maybe you’re logged in. Bonus for the web server. Now it can be like, “Hey, I know that dude, I saved some shit about him the last time he was here.” For the past 3,000 web years, companies have been able to use this very basic information to sell targeted ads. Um, yeah, not news.

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