Category: News

Why Christine O’Donnell walked off Piers Morgan

I think I know what happened here… First the setup: in the 2010 midterm election, things were looking bad for Democrats, and they turned out to be. But Democrats kept control of the open senate seat in Delaware made vacant by Senator Biden becoming Vice President Biden. Barack Obama’s Illinois Senate seat was won by a Republican, Mark Kirk, and Bidens seat was marked as an easy pickup for Republicans at the beginning of the race, which would have been an interesting symbolic victory as the opposition party took both senate seats of the sitting President and Vice President. but it didn’t happen that way because of Christine O’Donnell who played the “pesky kid” who Scooby Doo’ed the Republicans track to grab the seat.

A guy named Mike Castle was running for the Delaware senate seat but the Tea Party wing of the Republican party did not consider him sufficiently conservative and so Christine O’Donnell, who had ran against Biden and lost the last time around, ran against Castle in the primary and beat him for the Republican nomination. While Castle, Delaware’s only congressman at the time (that one congressional seat is now in Democrat hands) and the states former Governor was widely popular in the state and expected to win in a landslide, O’Donnell instead lost in a landslide because she was portrayed as ditzy, a religious nut and way too conservative for the state.

So now it’s awhile after the election and she has a new book talking about it and is making the rounds to promote it. Piers Morgan asks her a bunch of Socially Conservative and religious based questions which she was specifically told by her handlers to stay away from since that is what gave her such a bad rep in the first place. Indeed she started this strategy on debate night against her opponent, now the junior Senator from Delaware, Chris Coons, where she stuck to fiscal policy and legislation. Clips from her appearances on Politically Incorrect and an MTV special form the 90s where she espoused her hardcore Catholic religious views were being played everywhere and sinking her credibility as a viable candidate. So when Morgan brings these subjects up again, she keeps trying to steer the conversation away until finally coming out and saying “I don’t want to talk about this shit” (not an actual quote). Piers naturally responds “why the fuck not?” (more accurate, but still not a verbatim quote) and she doesn’t know what to say other than to repeatedly ask him to stop asking such questions.

On the one hand, Piers is asking these questions precisely because they play to the negative stereotype O’donnell is trying to clear her name of, but on the other… c’mon. battle it out with him instead of being the outraged Duchess at the tea party (pun intended) and chiding him for being rude to his guest. Her minders in the studio with her go as far as to stand in front of the camera as they direct her to walk out of the interview. Bizarre…

The same thing happened with Miss California on Piers’ predecessor, Larry King and I mean exactly the same thing: her handlers told her to not ruin her image further with this religious and social conservatism crap and she got frustrated when the host of the show she was on wouldnt oblige that request.

Creative types are full of themselves, study confirms

It’s a funny title. but I’m not persuaded.

The research, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, stopped short of labeling creative types as jerks, but it didn’t paint a pretty portrait of some aspects of their personalities, either. Psychologists asked more than 1,300 college students to complete a personality test and various creativity questionnaires. The data they collected was self-reported and measured creative abilities mainly in arts, crafts, drama, and creative writing.

The researchers looked at how six different personality traits influenced creativity. They found an openness to experience is the personality characteristic with the largest influence on creativity, a result seen in previous studies. Extroversion had a smaller effect, while emotionality and conscientiousness made no difference.

Agreeableness, which indicates that people can compromise, sympathize and get along well with others, also had no effect. But honesty-humility was shown to have a negative influence on creativity.

“Our research didn’t find a huge effect, and we certainly aren’t claiming that all creative people are insufferably arrogant but, on average, people with a lot of creative accomplishments were less humble and modest,” says Paul Silvia, an associate professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the study’s lead author.

Judge Judy deals with welfare abuser

This won’t change anyone’s mind as people against a large welfare state will say “see!?” and people who want it will say cases like these are rare enough to not outweigh the need to blindly send out tax payer money to anyone who asks with no follow up or rules on how exactly that money is spent. But it’s still an interesting exchange to watch if only for the choice quotes:

“I don’t want to pay your rent. The government says that I have to pay your rent. Even officer bird doesn’t want to pay your rent, but if we have to pay your rent, we don’t want the money we send to you for rent to go to anything else other than rent.”

“Just me bein around is payin rent. I’m 21, messin with her. she 30. you know what im sayin? thats what she there for.”

Lucille Ball’s 100th Birthday

I hate it when a dead persons birthday crosses a milestone that they absolutely could have made it to, or at least closer to than their actual age at death. Too bad.

She died April 26, 1989 at age 77.

Her last show on television was Life with Lucy, which is available on Youtube. It was a flop and Ball felt scorned by the nations television audience. She didn’t deserve to go out on that sour note. What a shame…


Some better and classic moments below. The first was one of the most memorable for me, where Lucy keeps stealing Ricky’s punchlines. I loved it cuz I was a show-stealing little puke at that young age (long before I matured into the Richard you know today).