The article (which is incomprehensibly only the second most-read article on the Las Vegas Sun's website) focuses on the "safety" and "decency" concerns raised by locals re: the mobile sin platform, which was devised as an advertisement for Deja Vu Showgirls and is described thusly:

It's akin to a small U-Haul truck but with Plexiglas surrounding the brightly lit cargo area instead of walls. In the middle is a gleaming stripper pole. Swinging around the pole is a scantily clad young woman. Two of her fellow strippers are in the back of the truck too, awaiting their turns.

Puttering up and down Las Vegas Boulevard on Monday night, it was photographed by nearly everyone it pulled alongside, from CityCenter construction workers to an SUV-load of 20-somethings from Colorado.

Yes, that sounds pretty distracting. In fact, I would say if a driver making his way down the Strip was watching a DVD of Wall-E on a television screen that covered his entire windshield while simultaneously breaking up with his girlfriend via text message and solving a complex math problem on an abacus he would be only 76% as distracted as if he was watching the stripper-mobile wend its way through Sin City. Imagine seeing the Pope-mobile driving down the road, only the Pope was stripping in it. That's the level of distraction we're dealing with it.

Concerned citizens have been complaining to city officials about the stripper-mobile. But it turns out, unsurprisingly, that Las Vegas does not have any laws precluding women from stripping in a truck:

Nothing about the women or the truck is illegal, a Metro Police spokesman said. "As long as it's not impeding traffic, it's fine," Officer Jacinto Rivera explained.

Yes, everything is kosher so long as people continue driving their cars while they photograph the stripper-mobile, like in this CNN report:

And if the mere existence of the stripper-mobile does not prove to you that Las Vegas is a gloriously wasted blight upon America from which our eventual destruction will spring, consider the hilarious way councilwoman Chris Giunchigliani went about expressing her concerns about it:

I don't care about the content or that they're female dancers. I'm sick of the women, in fact - let's get some men up there for once. But this is just illegal.

Viva Las Vegas!

UPDATE: A blog calling itself the "Nevada Progressive" is defending the Stripper-mobile as an example of "free speech." Now the stripper-mobile has confirmed my preconceived notions of progressives, too!

(photo via Roadsidepictures' Flickr)

Thousands of people lined up for assistance, with some arriving the night before, like a new iPhone was being released, except the opposite. The line went around the block. The Police Gang Unit showed up. A fight broke out.

The city was directing people with additional questions to call 313-224-0316, but no one was answering before calls to that number were automatically disconnected just before noon today.

And here is the part where some stupid, hippy-dippy liberal pantywaist would be like "huh so banks get literally billions with the understanding that eventually they should maybe pay some of it back but we will only help 5,000 human beings pay their electric bills, and only if they get their application in by 2 p.m. today. Crazy!" But, as we said, only someone fat and annoying like Michael Moore would say that.

This kinda takes the shine off that 12th-inning Twins victory, right?

[Old Tiger Stadium photo: Heyroob via Flickr]

Other seven-ish things about Michael Jackson: He was born in 1958, and 19+58=77. He died on June 25, and 2+5=7. There are the makings of a Jim Carrey movie in this.

Brewer is on the right track, but she's missing the big picture: Michael Jackson ain't Seven. He's Six. New Wineskins, a blog devoted to guiding us through the End Times, has pegged Michael Jackson as the latter-day incarnation of the Golden Calf, because we all worshiped him yesterday on the exact 3,322nd anniversary of the creation of the actual Golden Calf from the Bible:

Tammuz 16 [July 8th] was the 40th day following the Giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, and the people of Israel wrongly expected Moses' return from the mountain (he would actually return on the following day). When their leader failed to return, they demanded from Aaron: "Make us a god that shall go before us". Hur (Moses' nephew, the son of Miriam and Caleb) tried to stop them and was killed by the mob. Aaron fashioned a calf of molten gold.

MJ's golden-coffin funeral, idolized by (perhaps) billions. The service began (in LA) just after sundown Israeli time. In other words: Tammuz 16, aka July 8th.

Oh yeah—did we mention that Michael Jackson's coffin was made of gold!? According to Wikipedia, here's what happened with the real Golden Calf, which some Jewish people started worshiping after Moses brought down the Ten Commandments from Mt. Sinai and then disappeared for a while, back in the Bible-times:

Moses burnt the golden calf in a fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on water, and forced the Israelites to drink it.... Moses then gathered the sons of Levi and set them to slaying a large number of men (3000). A plague struck the Israelites.

So be prepared for whoever the modern-day Moses is—we're thinking Larry King, maybe?—to force a vile slurry of Michael Jackson's cremated remains down your throat and then kill 3,000 Armenians, or something. And then we'll all get swine flu.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.If you think prophesies and numerology and such are the lunatic fantasies of marginalized and lonely people, you're not listening to the mainstream media enough. Take this CNN report, from the day of Michael Jackson's death:

A Prophetess by the name of Terri Smith-Little prophecy that she did not think that Michael Jackson would live long. This prophecy was recorded I still have the cassette. Over the years I have always thought about the prophecy,June 25,2009 this prophecy comes to pass.

That's from CNN correspondent "bgilbreath" on the network's iReport site, which is reserved for breaking news. OK, ok. It's a nutjob that CNN decided, in the name of user-generated-social-networking hysteria and desperation, to provide a platform for. But in the realm of actual news media, USA Today actually entertains the question of whether Michael Jackson is a contemporary incarnation of the Golden Calf. They don't really know for sure. We'll all find out soon enough.

Twitter is forcing its previously-anticipated "Twitpocalypse" to occur before the weekend begins, so engineers will be on hand to deal with the fallout. When the microbloggins service finally assigns an ID of 2,147,483,647 to a tweet, some third-party Twitter applications may crash, as this is above the limit of what can be stored in a 32-bit data field (assuming the field allows for positive and negative, or "signed," integers).

The Twitpocalypse was originally planned for 5 p.m. ET/2 p.m. PT, but this has slipped. You can watch the situation unfold here or here, or listen for the cries of "32-bit signed integer overflow, woo-hoo!"

Once geeks get past the terror and excitement of the Twitpocalypse (Will Tweetie work? Who knows?!), the Facebook reckoning will soon be upon them, in which users get to try and claim vanity URLs like "facebook.com/yourname" starting at 12:01am ET/9 p.m. PT.

The lucky ones will end up with uninterrupted Twitter service and uber-cool Facebook handles, as they surf the Web, probably alone, late on a Friday night. Yay internet!

(Image via)

It's all the rage, according to the AP. Suburban families who want farm-fresh eggs, free-range chicken meat, and a reliable source of protein after the coming societal collapse are maintaining flocks of their own chickens, in normal neighborhoods close to cities where regular people actually live. This is nice in the sense that it's always a good idea when people take responsibility for the food they consume and come to understand the bloody mechanics of the process. It's also terrifying in the sense that we are becoming Cuba.

[Backyard Chickens'] owner, Rob Ludlow of Pleasant Hill, Calif., attributes the increased interest in raising suburban chickens to three factors: their relative ease of care as pets; increased interest in getting food from humane, local sources; and a desire by some to produce their own food in tough economic times.

"With the way the economy is going, people like the idea they can have access to quality eggs and meat right from their backyard, if they need to," Ludlow said.

Purina Mills, which makes chicken feed, is seeing double-digit growth in its line of feed aimed at people who maintain small flocks for their own consumption.

Iron Age, here we come!

See, conservative superlobbyist Grover Norquist holds a secretive, off-the-record power breakfast each Wednesday with various DC conservative powerbrokers and journalists (WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE, KAUS?) For years, many have wondered what goes on at these meetings. Now we know: they wear ridiculous clothes, for laughs.

Some employee of Grover's got drunk and bought a Snuggie, which is how 100% of Snuggie purchases happen, and then he brought it into work. The rest is history! Terrible internet history! This guy promises to bring the Snuggie to the next Wednesday meeting, which means we'll soon have even MORE of these wonderful photos.

In the meantime, here are Joe, Tucker Carlson, and Andrew Breitbart, all looking ridiculous, wearing memes.

Detroit is a two-paper town, and I don't care what the reasons are for that, but they're very bad reasons. Nevertheless, the company that owns both papers is going to make them much worse, and not deliver them most days! A winning business plan if I ever heard one:

"The papers will deliver to subscribers only on the most profitable days of the week — Sunday, and either Thursday or Friday or both, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the changes and the decisions were not final. On other days, they will still print slimmer single-copy editions. The changes will be accompanied by staff cuts, these people said."

As you can imagine, being a newspaper in Detroit during the implosion of the American auto industry is possibly one of the shittiest business propositions possible. This is the biggest step towards an online-only future that any major American paper has made since the Christian Science Monitor announced its plans to go totally digital. So perhaps, who knows, it might work? More likely it's a step towards bankruptcy, followed by the inexorable collapse of Detroit into an I Am Legend-style monster-infested ghost town.

But it might work. [NYT, WSJ; pic: Freep]

The Star Tribune's recount counter still has Norm Coleman leading, by 300 votes. But they're not counting any of the ballots challenged by both campaigns, and some of those challenged ballots will count once the canvassing board looks at them later this month.. Meanwhile, the Minnesota Secretary of State is maybe going to allow some 1,000 of 12,000 rejected absentee ballots to be counted, or at least looked at.

Franken just withdrew 633 frivolous challenges, and Coleman says he might do the same next week. Coleman has challenged hundreds more ballots than Franken. So you begin to understand the Franken campaign's math, here, when they tell reporters they're actually ahead in the recount, by 22 votes.

Once Al Franken is a Senator, of course, the Republicans will rally around hating him and retake both houses in 2010 and ban the Amtrak forever.

(If Franken does win by 22 votes, Nate Silver will be appointed Secretary of Predicting Stuff.)

Franken Camp Claims to be Winning Recount [CBS]
Franken claims he is in the lead [The Hill]

And the Department of Homeland Security represents the biggest expansion of government since the New Deal!

“We all want our children to feel safe in this world,” said Meryl Chertoff, wife of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, at a ceremony held at the John Tyler Elementary School to announce the partnership. "And who better to do that than our Sesame Street friends, Grover and Rosita!”

I don't know this "Rosita" but I am pretty sure she is made in China.

• The economy is collapsing. The markets surged on the news that Eliot Spitzer contributed rather too much to the black market economy, but then things miserably continued on their unmerry way. Bear Stearns just collapsed, pathetically, and now the feds are bailing out the banks. Not usually a good sign! Plus the housing market thing, and the plummeting dollar, and all sorts of other stuff we can't for the life of us understand.
• The politics! Man, the politics. Have you seen these politics? They're a mess! A crazy and angry old man toured Iraq, where he wants us to remain for 100 years, and he's mixing up Sunnis and Shiites, still, on the week of the fifth anniversary of our massive fuck-up there. And everyone is too exhausted to be outraged about it anymore! Barack Obama talked about the war this week, but it didn't receive anywhere near as much attention as when he talked about how the blacks and whites still can't get along. The speech was a total inspiring downer, basically. The response to it was pure downer. Even though most people liked it! But his poll numbers are suddenly not looking so hot against the confused old man. He was tortured, so you gotta like him!
• "An elderly man has killed himself by programming a robot to shoot him in the head after building the machine from plans downloaded from the internet."
• Oh, and media. Media's always bad news, right? If we're hearing media news, it's layoffs and revenue shortfalls. Not even awesome old man Sam Zell can reverse Tribune's downward spiral. Also, the internet! If the internet ad boom busts (which it will, Nick Denton keeps insisting), we're fucked. PageSix.com folded this week. After three months! Rupert Murdoch didn't give it a chance—he's not too excited about this internet thing, apparently. He should know! He bought MySpace!
• Stuff White People Like!
• That shit in China? Ugh.
• denton: first time I've really contemplated the horrors of recession
  denton: last autumn it seemed, intellectually, a possibility
  denton: now I'm starting to hear stuff from friends
  denton: paintings taking longer to sell
  denton: (from a dealer friend of mine)
  denton: buyers disappear
  denton: pagesix.com going under
  denton: layoffs where a friend's wife works
• Choire Sicha is terribly lonely.
• It's Easter, the holiday where we celebrate the brutal murder of an innocent man by a tyrannical government. They humiliated him first, see, and also when all the Gawker sites were down the other day (yesterday, right?) we made the mistake of reading the amazing Errol Morris/Philip Gourevitch piece in the New Yorker about the woman who took the photos at Abu Ghraib. It involves a mummified kitten head! We wish we didn't like Errol Morris, then we would have an excuse to skip his Important Movie on the subject.
• A fucking baby moved in across the hall. This is Bed-Stuy! Not Park Slope! The baby is apparently as miserable about the state of the world as the rest of us, and considerably more vocal.

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