Category: News

Study proves: Smokers are stupid

Actually it just showed that Smokers Have Lower IQs Than Non-Smokers, but I’m going with the words “proof” and “stupid”, cuz duh.

Cigarettes are the only drug type substance people get hooked on that starts with a horrible experience. You do heroine or wine coolers and anything in between and you’re like “dude, this is AWESOME” or at least “ya, this is giving me what I want enough to keep doing this”, but with smoking it’s horrible for everyone. You cough, it hurts – everyone reports bad first try’s, yet they are stupid enough to force themselves to get hooked and dependent on this expensive life shortening and quality-of-life decreasing product. Good one…idiots.

According to the investigators, 28 percent of the study participants smoked at least one cigarette a day, around 3 percent said they were ex-smokers, and 68 percent had never smoked.

The smokers had significantly lower intelligence test scores than non-smokers, and this remained true even after the researchers accounted for socioeconomic status as measured by how many years of formal education a recruit’s father had completed.

The average IQ for non-smokers was about 101, while it was 94 for men who had started smoking before entering the military. IQ steadily dropped as the number of cigarettes smoked increased, from 98 for people who smoked one to five cigarettes daily to 90 for those who smoked more than a pack a day. IQ scores from 84 to 116 are considered to indicate average intelligence.

Recruits aren’t allowed to smoke while intelligence tests are administered, the researchers note, so it’s possible that withdrawal symptoms might affect smokers’ scores. To address this issue, they also looked at IQ scores for men who were non-smokers when they were 18 but started smoking during their military service. These men also scored lower than never-smokers (97 points, on average), “indicating that nicotine withdrawal was probably not the cause of the difference,” the researchers say.

The researchers also compared IQs for 70 pairs of brothers in the group in which one brother smoked and the other did not. Again, average IQs for the non-smoking sibling were higher than for the smokers.

This French anti-smoking ad campaign (whats next? German anti-bratwurst commercials?) says the message nicely.. Continue reading Study proves: Smokers are stupid

Jay Leno is not a creep but this remixed ad is clever

Jay Leno moves from his canceled variety show at 10pm back to his role as host of the Tonight Show at 11:35pm on March 1st, so naturally NBC found it necessary to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties to have a Beatles song score the Public Service Announcement of the change. A clever Youtuber however has flipped the sentiment of the ad to make it a bash on Leno.

The original ad features the Beatles’ “Get Back,” at a point in the lyrics that say “get back to where you once belonged” which I guess is their way of saying the whole ‘Conan O’Brien as host’ thing was a big mistake and that Jay should have never been pushed out in the first place.

UPDATE: I’m leaving the embed here even though it’s expired cuz… wtf? that’s weird that a network would let a commercial for themselves expire on their own video distribution website. Hulu videos and whatnot, I understand expiring – but a commercial for the Tonight Show? really? you don’t wanna just leave that up for posterity and another excuse to show people a preroll commercial? whatever dude…

While I think Leno is getting smeared to hell over this debacle, I can’t deny that this Leno-bashing remix of the above promo is diabolically clever. It’s the same ad, slowed down for an unsettling effect and the audio replaced with Radiohead’s “Creep”, ending in the lyrics “I don’t belong here”.
Ouch + Zing = Win.

Aging disease makes 13 yr old look 50

At the age of 13, Zara Hartshorn already looks 50.

Hartshorn, who is from Rotherham, England, suffers from a rare genetic disease known as lipodystrophy. The disease causes layers of fatty tissue under the surface of the skin to disappear. Only around 2,000 people in the world are said to have the condition, and there is currently no known cure.

The effects of the disease have caused Hartshorn a great deal of hardship and discomfort.

“People call me ‘granny’ and ‘monkey,’ ” she told the New York Post. “Sometimes I’ll just go into the toilet and cry.”

It was more entertaining when Robin Williams did it =(

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Stop lying about Jay Leno

Late Night Lesson: Separating emotion from reality.

I hate guns. I feel like they’re dangerous killers and the fanatics who love them so much are creepy and awkward to me. I also know that that’s all emotion. I emote at a desire to have a large government apparatus to tightly restrict the use and sale of all firearms everywhere, but I’m not an animal – I’m more than just a sack of chemical causing emotions. Intellectually I have to observe reality and make an analysis from that, not my primal girly feelings, and that tells me that the 2nd Amendment makes a safer nation. More guns equal less crime. Which is one of the many blocks that pushed me into realizing more and more that I’m a Libertarian: I don’t ever want a gun, but I want everyone else on my block to have one… It’s not right for me to impose my illogical, baseless anti-gun emotion on others and that’s why it enraged me when Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine came out and I found out that it was a start-to-finish lie-fest. I saw the commercials for it on tv and thought “dude, this is AWESOME” and indeed it was – it was a very well crafted, interesting, emotional and most of all – persuasive film promoting a thesis I agreed with. So when I found out that nearly nothing in it was true (see BowlingForTruth.com for the library of staged scenes, factual misstatements, inaccurate statistics, gotcha interviews and truly despicable slander against Charlton Heston – from editing his speeches to editing the interview he was kind and open enough to grant Mr Moore). The point was that lying to your side is not only still wrong, but worse. because you are setting us up to be fools. Lying in service to push an agenda you feel is good is punishment in that it’s only a matter of time before those lies are exposed – and then what? you’ve done a disservice to both the cause AND it’s followers. You’ve hurt and embarrassed everyone for no damn reason.

This scenario is playing out again. and I hate it.

Here are the FACTS:
-Jay Leno was removed from the Tonight Show replaced by Conan O’Brien and moved to a new show at 10pm.
-Both the 10pm Jay Leno show and the 11:30pm Tonight Show suffered large ratings losses for NBC.
-In response, NBC asked Leno to cut his show in half, from an hour down to 30 minutes, and return to his own time slot, thus pushing Conan’s Tonight Show back a half hour.
-Jay accepted the change. Conan didn’t. as a result, Conan decided to leave NBC.
-Now left with a Tonight Show that has no host, NBC offered Leno his old position back. Leno accepted.
-Conan’s future in television has yet to be announced.

I watched the full hour of the Oprah edition with Jay where she asked him to appear (Conan got a separate invitation too, but he declined) and even went to him (the interview took place on the set of the Jay Leno Show in Burbank, not Oprah’s in Chicago).
He said everything right. Every. Single. Thing. Right.

Oprah, whom I’ve never seen so skilled and probing in an interview, tried to trip him up at every turn and nothing worked. Nothing. Jay won’t say anything bad about anyone. He said he was right to be fired from his 10pm show because he didn’t deliver for the network – a kind of responsibility acceptance you don’t often see in showbiz – but said he was heartbroken at being fired 5 years in advance from the Tonight show when he was #1 and remained #1 until his last show – and it’s a legitimate point.

None of the smears against Jay I’ve heard showed themselves as even being possible. The diabolical “he’s just painting himself as the victim so he can be the good guy” stuff makes no sense in context and the “he should have retired and stepped aside to let Conan in” is equally redonulous. The guy spends his vacation time doing stand-up comedy in Vegas. Why should he quit his one passion in life just because someone else wants his job? Answer: Because we like that other person better. Okay, fine – so support that other person. You don’t need to tear down the other guy with lies and tales of villainy to do it. Oprah’s only super lame moment was when she said Leno’s one joke about David Lettermans sex scandal with his employees was “beneath thim”. so… Sanford jokes and Clinton jokes and John Edwards jokes – but David Letterman is off limits? huh?

Stop lying about Jay Leno. There is no evidence that any of this debacle was his fault and just because you – like me – prefer the alternative, Conan Obrien, that doesn’t give you license to lie.

As Oprah noted in explaining why she thinks people are so anit-Leno: People don’t understand the way television works.

So stop it. You’re pissing me off. I’m sick of you lying to me.

TEAM COCOJAY.

Bush Bashin Obama, Hacky Hannity and the facts

Sean Hannity just played a clip from Obama’s speech where he talked about Bush and came back with the awesome come back of “will the Bush bashing ever stop!?”. ooooo! zing! LOL Sean! Good one! that is such an annihilating smackdown that it in no way illustrates what an untalented hack you are! who cares if Obama’s list of Bush foibles was accurate – YOU SURE TOLD HIM! lulz. Hannitee 4 Prezident LOL lulz roflma fml.

This part of the speech is what Hannity was referring to:

The worst part is that he could have actually made a point there if he weren’t such a knee-jerk Republican shill that thought non-hilarious one-liners like that were acceptable retorts to the opposition in power.

He could have, for instance, maybe brought up the fact that Obama is going to triple the national deficit this year and even the Whitehouse’s own estimates show they plan to put Bush’s spending to shame.

And it doesn’t stop there, Woody. This Buzz Lightyear is going to Infinity and Beyond:

Karl Rove gave an ACTUAL response to the Bush stuff (is it too late to give him Hannitys job?):


transcript from Karl Rove’s segment with Greta Van Susteren:

“I can find no administration in which there is such a frequent recourse to blame the previous administration…

They want to blame the Bush Administration for the debt. I happened to be last week in a debate with David Plouffe in which he blamed the Bush Administration for the deficit this year. And I said, “Wait a minute, what about your spending bill? It was your bill, President Obama’s $787 billion Stimulus Bill. What about the $33 billion SCHIP bill that he signed? What about the $410 billion Omnibus Bill?” In reflection didn’t Senator Obama support the rescue package the recovery package last fall, the $750 billion to help rescue the banks? $350 billion dollars of that was spent by the time he got into office. If he didn’t like that spending he could have said, “You know were not going to spend another dime of that $350 billion,” and yet he did…

I think this is wearing thin. This is causing the American people to say, “Wait a minute. This is all your spending. Why do you keep blaming the guy who came before you?”

iPad is finally here to change the world. or something

Would have been more impressive a year ago. i would have bet everything i owned that there was no way in hell the Apple Tablet device would be called a freaking iPad. good thing i didnt. ifail. Being one vowel off from the company’s flagship product is an equally wtf-ish move.

The price is the the big news. Macworld:

$499 for 16GB is the base model.
For 32GB it’s $100 more, for another $100 you get 64GB of storage.
The 3G models cost an extra $130 to build in radios. $629, $729, $829.
These are the six models.
The most expensive model is just $829. Unbelievable price.

So what can you do with this giant iPod? everything the iPhone does (including all the apps) except make calls – BUT – since the screen is bigger, you can burn out your eyes by reading books on the large backlit screen… yeay…

i want one just cuz it’d be easier to surf web stuffs on a smaller hand held thing than my 17inch Macbook but bigger than the iphone. i, along with the human race, have no real use or need for one.

What’s missing? NY Times Blog:

* No ability to play Adobe Flash animations, widely used on the Web.
* No camera, still or video
* No non-Internet phone function
* Unclear whether you can bundle your AT&T iPhone plan with an iPad data plan
* No removable battery for a device that can suck a lot of power
* No removable storage

Some of these are obvious, like the battery and storage being locked in – duh – Apple is even starting to do that with it’s laptops, so of course this thing wouldn’t have those. I don’t know why either is so great anyway. Removable storage would be nice, but not necessary.

No flash however is just frigging unacceptable. wtf is that shit about? no flash? I can’t watch Hulu videos on this thing? uhm… ya. now I’m not buying one. thanks for that necessary deal breaker. No camera? at all? not even a forward facing one like on the iphone? Why are you downgrading, Apple? your previous smaller device has a forward facing camera that takes pictures and video. You just put HD video capturing and editing on the otherwise useless ipod NANO for Christ sake and you cut it out of the iPad? what the hell? the iPad should have 2 cameras facing front and forward (or a single one on a hinge that you can flip to the opposite direction, though that would interrupt Apples one-piece sleekness it goes for in everything). Not having even one camera is a major fail.

Still can’t get over the name… It’s another “why are you making this harder than it needs to be?” moment. why IPad instead of the hundreds of better choices?

If you think the stupid name iPad sounds like a product for a bloody vagina, so did MadTV 5 years ago:

President Obama is set to give a rebuttal speech to Steve Job’s event later tonight.

UPDATE: the actress and writer of the sketch talk to CNN via…webcam for some reason…

Blondes are more aggressive than brunettes

An academic study has found that women with fair hair are more aggressive and confident than brunettes or redheads. This is because blondes attract more attention than other women as they are generally viewed by men as more attractive and so are used to getting their own way, the researchers claim.

The experts found that even those who dye their hair blonde take on natural blondes’ attributes – which might partly explain the longevity of Dolly Parton’s career too.

The country and western singer once said: ‘I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb… and I also know that I’m not blonde.’

The study, which examined links between confidence and aggression, involved 156 female undergraduates in America.


(i have no idea what this is, but it had blonde hair so i posted it)

Conan says goodbye

Tears… filling… eyes…

First, the history that brought us here:

And now: Conan O’Brien ends final NBC’s ‘Tonight Show’ with over 7 million viewers …

“Every comedian dreams of hosting the ‘Tonight Show’ and, for seven months, I got to,” O’Brien said near the end of his last show Friday night. “I did it my way, with people I love, and I do not regret a second.”

Viewers, however, may argue that what they saw was somehow different, at least up until the end, when all bets were off – and O’Brien’s ratings soared.

And his final show didn’t disappoint. It attracted more than 7 million viewers, according to preliminary numbers released by Nielsen, clobbering David Letterman’s 2.8 million viewers and Jimmy Kimmel’s 1.4 million.

Part of O’Brien’s exit talks with NBC centered on who gets the “intellectual property” rights to stuff he and his team created in his run there. One most often mentioned was the Masturbating Bear, a guy in a bear costume who, well, enough said.

The bear was a huge hit with O’Brien’s “Late Night” crowd, yet, wasn’t used on “Tonight” for the first time until Wednesday, when, frankly, it was too late.

The point is that while he’s losing the bear in the $45 million divorce with NBC, O’Brien has a chance to get something bigger back – his sense of humor.

“The networks never really counter-program in late-night,” Brad Adgate, a senior vice president at Horizon Media said of O’Brien’s options now that he left NBC. “I would offer his ‘Late Show’ [the next time]. To do something that’s exactly what Leno and Letterman are offering, I don’t know if that’s what viewers want.”

Fox officials have said they’re interested in O’Brien. And Fox, no doubt, can provide marketing muscle and reach. Anyone doubting that should look at the way Fox promotes “American Idol” to the point that you half-expect Simon Cowell to anchor the news alongside Ernie Anastos.

Farewell sweet prince… until the fall, when the parting agreement with NBC allows you back into our living rooms (or in my case: computer screen, several days after the original airing)…


O’Brien appropriately ended his last “Tonight Show” with an all-star rendition of “Freebird,” a song that includes the line, “Cause I’m as free as a bird now, and this bird you cannot change.”

Conan O’Brien’s after-party details: Irish wake for his final ‘Tonight Show‘.

“All I ask is one thing, and I’m asking this particularly of young people that watch. Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism. For the record, it’s my least favorite quality. It doesn’t lead anywhere.

Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get.

But if you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. I’m telling you, amazing things will happen.”