Observations: Christina Aguilera was horrible. The Black Eyed Peas were every bit as bad, just with a more elaborate sucky performance. The commercials were really bad this year.

What we have now is a series of the improbable. First, the Rangers beat the tar out of the defending champion New York Yankees to advance to their first ever World Series, and now my hometown Giants have joined them.

I think my favorite thing about the Rangers’ series victory over the Yankees is the fact that the final pitch was a called strike three to Alex Rodriguez. When you consider the fact that the Rangers still owe millions of dollars to Rodriguez, as a result of that huge contact they gave him in 2001. He only played for them for three years (2001-2003), yet was still the Rangers’ biggest creditor at their bankruptcy hearings recently. I think it’s fantastic that they beat him.

Does anybody else see the irony in this?  First, we get this huge health care debate thing going on, and then we see this article with a headline like “U.S. Life Expectancy Reaches All Time High.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32477402/ns/health-aging

Old age is often blamed for causing us to misplace car keys, forget a word or lose our train of thought.

But new research shows that many well-known effects of ageing may start decades before our twilight years.

According to scientists, our mental abilities begin to decline from the age of 27 after reaching a peak at 22.

Crap.

A 23-year-old inmate beaten to death at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary had been put in a cell with convicted killer he had testified against.

Prison spokesman Jerry Massie says Paul Duran Jr. fought with one cellmate and then was put in a cell with Jessie James Dalton.

Duran was found beaten to death about 15 minutes later.

In February 2003, Notarbartolo was arrested for heading a ring of Italian thieves. They were accused of breaking into a vault two floors beneath the Antwerp Diamond Center and making off with at least $100 million worth of loose diamonds, gold, jewelry, and other spoils. The vault was thought to be impenetrable. It was protected by 10 layers of security, including infrared heat detectors, Doppler radar, a magnetic field, a seismic sensor, and a lock with 100 million possible combinations. The robbery was called the heist of the century, and even now the police can’t explain exactly how it was done.

Read the rest of it.  It’s long but really interesting.  If you’ve seen Ocean’s Eleven, you’ll see that there are some parallels.

Two prisoners in New Zealand are facing more charges, and major embarrassment over an escape attempt gone bad.

The men were handcuffed together as they fled a courthouse, but apparently forgot that little fact as they ran to opposite sides of a light pole, with predictable results.  The men slammed into each other and fell to the ground.  End of escape.

Three Oklahoma City men were arrested after playing “chicken” with a police car. Police said a 23-year-old man drove his car at the oncoming patrol car driven by Capt. J.D. Reid and didn’t move until Reid swerved out of the way.  Reid then chased the car until it crashed. The driver was found inside the car, another 22-year-old man was found lying outside the vehicle and a third man was found hiding behind a traffic sign.

Two of the men were hospitalized and the third was treated and taken to the Oklahoma County jail where he’s being held without bond.

Police say the driver apparently decided on a whim to play chicken car and didn’t realize the car was a police car.

Oh, like it would have been more acceptable if it hadn’t been a police car.  Idiots.

LAWSUIT AGAINST GOD DISMISSED for failure to obtain personal service. But Ilya Somin objects: “I’m not entirely convinced that the ruling is correct. After all, if God exists, he must be omnipresent and omnipotent. Therefore, it logically follows that he can be served with court papers anywhere; after all he is present everywhere in the universe at all times. Indeed, service of process is a pointless formality when it comes to God. Since the Lord is omniscient as well as omnipotent, he surely knew about Senator Chambers’ lawsuit even before any process servers were sent out. Indeed, he must have foreseen that Chambers would file the suit long before Chambers himself knew that he would do it.”

Yeah, wasn’t there something like that in Jeremiah? “Before you were formed in the womb, I knew you would sue me. . . .”