Bush Wins By Incredible Landslide
2000-11-09 13:03:57
So, you've probably seen in the conventional news that the Presidential election is incredibly, painfully close, with one state's electoral votes making the whole difference for the free world. You probably bought a newspaper to get more information, and you're probably watching news shows more, and buying their sponsor's products. That's because you're a total sucker.
Fact is, Bush won over 350 electoral votes, mostly in a landslide, but CNN called up the rest of the news stations and told them they'd all win out if they agreed to report the news in a much more exciting manner. So, instead of the clean, simple vote that actually occurred, we're hearing this hyped-up, it- will-take-weeks version of the story.
It's no big surprise. Sports radio announcers used to do it all the time; long after the baseball game was over, they'd fake a much more exciting sequence of events that would end up, at the end of it, with the same score as the real game, but with a lot more drama.
And so, we're getting the same thing. We're flooded with last-minute-to- midnight images of little old ladies in Florida getting the ballots wrong, voting booths closed and reopened and closed again in Missouri, quirky Gore congratulations-retraction phone calls, press errors, and so on.
The same day in the news, just to let us know that they're making it up, we're informed that a man in San Francisco was arrested for biting his dog. Man bites the dog. The old journalism hack phrase.
Actually, Al Gore dropped out of the race two weeks ago so that he wouldn't be a spoiler candidate to Nader. Nader was then thrown into a bear-fighting pit by Cheney's stormtroopers. No one would run the story, so we still have the fiction of a Gore-Bush race.
But I call bullshit on that. The story of the 2000 Presidential Election is actually the most boring election story ever, and they're just reporting it the way that will sell the most diapers.
Admit. You don't give a shit about the functioning of this country. If you did, you would have written a letter to your congresspeople at some point this year, but you didn't, did you? You're just following the story because it's just like the movies.
WELL, YOU'RE MAN NUMBER THREE, FUCKO! PUT THEM APPLES IN YOUR PIPE AND SMOKE IT!
T O P S T O R I E S
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
Vacationing from Somnambulant Narrow Realities
So about six months ago, I was chilling in Chang Mai, Thailand with ICBINJ, perursing the Bangkok Times over my banana pancake and Big Chang breakfast when I spotted this article reprinted from the LA Times. It was about some kooks from California (where else?) who were claiming to have been to the front lines in Afgahnistan in mid-December and had recorded the whole feat on their website. "Holy Fuck!" I thought, "Now That's web journalism. Who are these guys!?" (More...)
It was early in May last year when I first heard about Spock Mountain Research Labs. I was working on a story about a Hungarian scientist's new approach to nucleopeptide synthesis when I got a call from my friend Albert. (More...)
A Day in the Life of a Beverotologist
It was starting to look like a very boring Saturday, trapped as I was in the suburban wastelands of the outer Bay Area, so I called my Able Assistant (AA) and proposed that we perform some Spocktail field tests. For some time I've been working on creating the quintessential cinematic beverage and even tho' SMRL does most of its testing during nocturnal hours, this seemed an opportune time to roll up the sleeves of our labcoats and get some science done. While the beverotology creation tested this day (The Neurotoxin) must be deemed a success, this article focuses more the journey of the experimenters, rather then the science of beverotology. (More...)
Report from Spiritual Machines
Arkuat gives you the inside scoop on the "Spiritual Machines" panel and conclave. Wacky excitement ensues! (More...)
Naked Australian Redhead -- Missing!
She posed naked on the web, fought for pornography online, and even kept an online "Diary of a Virtual Girlfriend." But after earning a place in internet history, Bernadette Taylor vanished without a trace. (More...)
During a magnificent sunny day in a fast receding autumn, the Spock Science Monitor reporters once again blew the playa dust off of their computers and covered the 2002 Burning Man Decompression – held every year just east of Portola Hill in beautiful San Francisco. Both an afternoon and evening issues were released to the unsuspecting crowd of freaks attempting to in some small way experience the euphoria of the playa – if but for a brief afternoon far from the desolation of Northern Nevada. (More...)