Schwarzenegger's double take

California governor and likely steroid abuser Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an $8 Million endorsement deal with the publisher of bodybuilding magazines two days before being sworn into office, and there wouldn’t ordinarily be anything wrong with that — except that the funds come from 1% of magazine ad revenue, many of which are health supplements.

And, oops, Arnold vetoed legislation last year that would have imposed government regulations on… the health supplements industry! Talk about things that make you go “holy shit!”

Elected officals can keep their outside jobs by law, and in his defense his office said he vetoed the bill because it focused on the wrong thing, namely banning certain substances that haven’t proven harmful (or, for that matter, effective) rather than focusing on steroid abuse. In his veto, he said most dietary supplements are safe (and, he did not add, highly profitable) and that the bill would have been difficult to implement.

Plus, $8 million out of his pocket.

800 a month. 26 every day.

You hear about how many people were killed on a daily basis in Iraq by the insurgency, but have you ever actually added them all up? Luckily for you, the New York Times has people who’ll do that for you, and the total they’ve come up with is 800 civilians per month have been killed between August, 2004 and May, 2005.

According to the Iraqi Interior Minister, approximately 12,000 Iraqis are not leading better lives since the American occupation — because they’re dead. That’s an approximation. A study last year upped the number of civilian dead to as many as 100,000.

This number doesn’t include deaths caused by American and Iraqi soldiers in military offenses, at checkpoints or on raids. The Bush administration and the Pentagon have deliberately avoided posting body counts, and another online resource puts the numbers between 22,000 and 25,000 civilian dead.

Problem Solved!

You love pornography, you’ve got no shame. But everyone else is so damn uptight. I mean, who doesn’t want to enjoy hot barely legal girl on girl action at Starbucks, while sipping a triple lowfat soy latte with a shot of caramel and nibbling on a cranberry scone? Now you can watch girls (and boys) go wild anywhere you are so that even the guy sitting next to you in the cheap seats on your LaGuardia to Denver flight won’t know what you’re up to — unless you do something disgusting to give yourself away. New Sharp monitors now will not only project in both left and right directions, you can control how wide the viewing angle of your screen is - narrow if you’re being secretive, wide if you want to share. Now instead of watching Blues Brothers 2000 on your flight, feel free to watch the Paris Hilton video, but make sure you’ve got your headphones on, the part where she stops riding Rick to catch a cell phone call will be a dead giveaway to your seat mates you’re up to no good.

Make mine meat!

Okay, so… here’s a little something to think about when you’ve nothing better to do than ponder the future of meat production. A team of scientists is divising a way to grow meat in a laboratory that would be edible and more nutritious than standard cow-based food.

They’ve already produced small amounts of edible muscle tissue that could be used in future space missions, and cultured meat for mass production is the next step in the process.

How would they do it? Hold on to your gorge! One method is to grow healthy muscle tissue in large flat sheets on thin membranes that they’d then pile up to simulate meat. The other is to grow muscle cells on small beads that stretch with changes in temperature, resulting in faux meat McNuggets — just like regular McNuggets!

Growing it is no challenge. The problem is making it taste like animal protein, with the necessary fat/muscle ratio and somehow “exercising” the meat just like an animal would.

Riding the Jesus-Go-Round

A judge in Florida has ruled that The Holy Land Experience, a Christian theme park, is being used “to spread what it considers to be God’s word,” and is therefore exempt from all property taxes.

Zion’s Hope, which runs the park in Southwest Orlando, uses walk-through dioramas and reproductions of relics and cities to present the history and stories of the Bible for its visitors. Guests, assuming their attire is not “immodest” and they refrain from smoking and bringing any outside food or drink inside, pay $29.99 per adult and $19.99 per child to enter the park.

And don’t leave without visiting the Jerusalem Street Market! Why? Two words: Biblical ties!

Chinese sex idiots

If you’re wondering which country can boast the population most ignorant about sex — you’re wrong if you immediately thought, “America!” Because while we here in the states may be backwards and puritanistic and thumping our Bibles harder than we’re thumping each other, turns out it’s the Chinese people who are woefully inept, sexually speaking.

And you have to give this a little weight, at least, because the ones saying it are the Chinese themselves. Xi Tianming, president of the China Sexology Society, calls both children and adults in China “sex idiots,” being more ignorant about sex than most other subjects. This is mostly because they’re sheltered from the subject and don’t start a normal sex life (whatever that is) until the age of 25.

Historical inaccuracy

Here’s a fun little lawsuit to think about, even if it is ultimately doomed (unless there’s a really dumb judge out there who doesn’t understand some Web indexing fundamentals). First, one company sues another company for trademark infringement. So, the second company hires a lawfirm to go out and find historical data over use of the trademarked phrase, so the lawfirm visits the Wayback Machine, a standard action in such cases, to pull up old web pages and see how far back the use extends.

Here’s the catch: The first company complains that they had a robots.txt file in place to prevent the Wayback Machine from archiving certain pages, but that 92 times it ignored those instructions and allowed the lawfirm to get pages already on the Web that it had no right to get.

So the company is now suing the lawfirm, the company (again) and the non-profit Internet Archive for violating the DMCA because they supposedly circumvented “technological measures” to gain access to copyrighted material.

The lawfirm says it wouldn’t know how to bypass a block, and anyway the robots.txt convention is purely voluntary and robots don’t have to read the file or agree with its conventions anyway. In effect, once you post it — it’s out there for anyone to see.

P.S. Man, I sure used to love Photoshop filters.

Roving reporters

If Newsweek is right, and it appears that they are since no one’s denying anything, then the Minister of Darkness, Karl Rove, is the mouth that spilled the beans to the press about Valerie Plame’s C.I.A. lifestyle. Or one of those who did — either way, it’s coming clear that it was the White House that leaked the name in one way or another, and now their dance of legal speak begins.

It depends on what your definition of “is” is, to quote another legal dance expert.

It’s not hard to predict that, once again, the administration is likely to squeeze its way out of this sticky wicket just as it has again and again, over much larger issues like fixing the documentation over the war in Iraq and bringing in the Enron boys to help plan out the nation’s energy policy.

One can hope, however, that it’s a simple mistake like this one, perhaps done in the heat of the moment as a way to get back at Ms. Plame’s husband, that puts the first nail in the coffin of the worst presidential administration since Nixon.

Also: Watch for deflection tactics. Already, Republicans are trying to make an issue out of Hillary comparing our fearless leader with Alfred E. Neuman, which I think we can all agree does a huge disservice to Alfred.