Q: Where is T.A.M.S.Y.?

A: New research indicates that I may have blogged myself to death.

Q: Why do I hate the media?, pt. 7,593: Why do I hate the tech media?

A: Fake Steve Jobs sums it up nicely.

Q: Oh British press, what won't you say?

A: Lindsay Robertson thinks she's soooo special, just because she reads past the second paragraph of the stories she blogs about. WHO HAS THE TIME!?

In my previous post, though, I did forget about my rule not to pass along the insane gibberish of the British press, without confirming the story through a trustworthy (i.e., non-British) source. I couldn't be more embarrassed if I had been proven wrong about Osama bin Laden being dead. Which I won't be.

The Smiths
Bigmouth Strikes Again
The Queen is Dead, 1986

Q: Is former astronaut Lisa Nowak living the hundreds of miles High Life?

A: You can call Lisa Nowak a lot of things — crazy; a diaper-clad homicidal astronaut; a disgrace to NASA — but you CANNOT call her drunk in space. Or so says the man paid to lie on her behalf.

• EXCLUSIVE: Lisa Nowak Not Drunk in Space, Lawyer Says [ABC News]

Congratulations, ABC News, for boldly going where no other news network had cared to go before, or ever should have.

ABC News: What was you [sic] reaction when you first heard the reports of drunken astronauts in space? [Hmmm, me wonder if this exclusive interview was conducted by special correspondent Cookie Monster. -- ed.]

Attorney Don Lykkebak: Well, what bothered me about the reports is simply this: All of the news stories that I saw and even the one on ABC News linked my client Lisa Nowak with the reports of the astronauts flying impaired in space. What bothers me about that linkage is it's totally untrue. ... It's unfair and inaccurate as to Lisa Nowak.

To be fair to the previous news stories, I don't think they specifically accused Nowak of being drunk in space. I think it was more along the lines of, "Having already been disgraced by crazy diaper-clad homicidal astronaut Lisa Nowak, NASA is now drunk and crying alone on the moon."

BACKSTORY: Houston, We Have a Drinking Problem

Q: When is a Bush administration Friday afternoon news dump GOOD news?

A: Hmmm. Today?

Hey! That does sound like good news!

Oooh, good guess, Washington Post. But the correct answer, submitted by the New York Times, is never:

Hey! That sounds like the EXACT OPPOSITE!

I guess what it comes down to is whether you take the administration's bullshit at face value or not. So A+ to the NYT for reading comprehension. Maybe Tom Tomorrow is rubbing off on them.

Point being, don't trust headlines. Or the liberal media. Or conservatives. Or anyone but me.

In other news, Satan is getting Bush and Cheney's room ready.

Q: Why did the mainstream media fail to cover the "strange death" of the woman who filed a rape lawsuit against George W. Bush?

A: If you're looking for hot reading material, the popular social media site Reddit's always got plenty to offer — but one story in particular today has all the makings of a must-read. Sex! Crime! Death! Mystery! The world's most powerful man! And that's just the headline: The Strange Death of the Woman Who Filed a Rape Lawsuit Against Bush, by Jackson Thoreau.

Granted, the premise here is a bit, ahem, far-fetched: that George W. Bush and FBI agents may have drugged and raped a Houston woman, Margie Schoedinger, in 2002; and that the woman's purported suicide in 2003 may have been state-sanctioned murder. Nonetheless, the story was an immediate hit with Redditors, who voted it up near the top of the front page within a few hours of its being posted late last night.

I suspect that a major part of the story's popularity has less to do with President Bush drugging and raping women, per se, than it does the entirely plausible accusation that the media has failed us. As Jackson Thoreau (a pseudonym, btw) writes in his conclusion:

For all I know, maybe Schoedinger did kill herself. Maybe she dreamed up a lot of this stuff. But I don't know, am I "deranged" to think it's weird that in this mass-media, detailed-information age, so few people are even asking any questions about how a woman who filed a rape lawsuit against the president could be dead less than a year later?

It seems like a reasonable question. Unfortunately, it turns out there are a few teeny little details Thoreau neglected to mention...

The author makes a big deal out of the fact that only one other reporter, LeaAnne Klentzman of the Fort Bend Star, covered Schoedinger's original lawsuit. So why doesn't he include Klentzman's story among his links?

Is it maybe because — in his effort to convince you that his theories are totally plausible — he was hoping you won't notice that Schoedinger apparently suffered from a mental disorder not unlike paranoid schizophrenia?

Here are some of the other claims made by Schoedinger, revealed in Klentzman's piece, which Thoreau conveniently glosses over:

• George W. Bush raped her several times in her home in a suburb of Houston, beginning in Oct., 2000 — a few weeks before the election. Just to make sure this point is clear: In the heat of campaigning against Al Gore — a period during which he was being followed by reporters and camera men at all times — Bush was making secret trips to the Houston, for the purpose of raping this woman. He would continue to make secret rape trips, apparently even after he became President.
  
• The alleged victim did not actually remember any interactions with Bush during the period that he was raping her. In fact, she did not even know that she was being raped; she didn't find that out until later, when an unnamed FBI agent revealed to her that it was part of a large conspiracy organized by a racist organization (Schoedinger was black).
  
• The FBI agent also revealed to her that Bush was spying on her, and also continually raping her. And that the people who traveled with Bush, who were apparently also FBI agents, were also raping her. Thoreau does mention that, although he leaves out the detail that Bush and the FBI agents also may have raped her husband (but apparently he was drugged too, so he couldn't know for sure whether or not he had been repeatedly raped). The alleged victim was not sure how many times she had been raped, obviously, given than she didn't even know she was being raped until the FBI agent revealed it to her.
• "Section VII of the lawsuit states; 'Whether or not Plaintiff's husband was raped remains in question, as Plaintiff was drugged after she was raped and her husband was drugged before her rape. Plaintiff can only state that these men purported to be FBI agents raping her for the purpose of covering for how many times they had drugged her and allowed the Defendant to rape her in the same manner.'" Sorry, I was unable to figure out what any of that meant.
• The FBI and local police department refused to take any actions to protect the alleged victim. The police department, however, "conducted a background investigation into Plaintiff's past activities. In the end, this investigation yielded the following information: Plaintiff had seven dates, (which became seven lovers), had told no lies, committed no crimes, gotten 2 traffic tickets and dated George W. Bush as a minor." Why the police would have revealed such information to Schoedinger — or why their internal investigations are recorded in the form of brief nursery rhymes — remains unclear.
  

Gosh, all of that stuff seems kinda pertinent, doesn't it? Maybe Thoreau was going to mention it, but he forgot. Or maybe Thoreau is just part of the cover-up himself!!!

Still, before you get up on your high horse about how journalists are afraid to reveal the truth, Mr. Thoreau, maybe you should try to avoid being such a shitty journalist.

Back to Thoreau's original essay (riding high with 141 points, as of this writing, and still among Reddit's top stories):

But I remember being puzzled by Schoedinger's attitude after hanging up the phone. I wondered that if she had made up such a wild story, why she didn't come up with something a little less outlandish, in which people couldn't necessarily dismiss her as a kook...

Besides Pravda and Internet ezines - one of whom referred to Schoedinger as "deranged" - I haven't seen stories on this strange death of a woman who filed a rape lawsuit against the U.S. president and wound up dead nine months later. I can't say I'm surprised. Or even angry. I don't know what the hell to think. All I know is I was one of the last - if not the last - reporters to speak to Schoedinger, and she didn't sound "deranged" to me in July 2003. She sounded like someone who had gone through something weird and was trying to sort it out. She sounded like someone who wanted the truth to come out.

The truth? I'm beginning to suspect Jackson Thoreau can't handle the truth.

(And look, I don't mean to make light of this poor woman's mental illness. The fact that she was suffering from delusions clearly wasn't her fault, and isn't something to laugh about, especially considering she ended up taking her own life. But trying to suggest that those delusions deserve to be top news — and attempting to politicize her death as an assassination — is entirely laughable. Or, no, cryable maybe. I can't decide.)

(Anyway, maybe you should shut up about George Bush being a rapist and instead focus on how he's a shitty president who has done nothing positive for health care — or, say, for the treatment of the mentally ill.)

---

Redditors, I should note, are generally a discerning lot (and less susceptible to propaganda and yellow journalism than their peers at Digg). So I'll forgive them for this lil' misstep.

And hey, perhaps it's not so surprising if the story is striking a chord, at this particular moment in American history. Strip away the specific accusations, and consider the underlying themes fueling the article itself:

• Blanket distrust of governmental authority.
• Loss of faith in a justice system corrupted.
• Disgust for the mainstream media, and its distorted sense of perspective.
  
• A nightmarish characterization of a president whose dangerous actions seem completely disconnected from a sense of rationality or consequence — and who will go to any lengths, no matter how destructive or criminal, to hide his own misdeeds.
• A world defined by lies, selfishness, cowardice and disregard for human life.
  

If those concepts sound familiar, it's probably because they're your inner monologue.

Q: Bush's Queen gaffe: Charming icebreaker — or international incident that took us to the very brink of nuclear armageddon?

Killer Queen: Guaranteed to blow your mind.

A: Something unexpected happened between President George W. Bush and Queen Elizabeth II on the South Lawn of the White House yesterday. Whether it was LOL hilarious or a horrible disgrace depends on whom you ask, the American press or the British press. Oh, wait, President Bush was involved, so it was probably both.

The video record of the moment in question is indeed ambiguous, particularly vis a vis the Queen's bemusement and/or blood-curdling rage:



So how can we find out what really happened? Only one way: He Said, She Said — Yanks vs. Brits Edition — to determine once and for all which nation's reporters are slightly less incompetent!

We say tomato; they say tomahhto; let's fight it out to the death!!!

---

THE CHALLENGERS

Representing the red, white and blue, it's Bush's hometown Houston Chronicle, running a syndicated piece from the right-leaning Chicago Tribune. Representing the other configuration of red, white and blue, it's the London-based Daily Mail, taking a brief break from reporting on what Robbie Williams was wearing yesterday or whatever. And we're off!

WHAT HAPPENED?

HOUSTON: "The queen, a sprightly 81, gave an embarrassed Bush a gracious nod after he suggested she had celebrated the United States' founding in 1776. He meant to say she had attended 1976 bicentennial festivities. 'You helped our nation celebrate its Bicentennial in 17 ... ' Bush said, quickly correcting himself, ' ... in 1976.'"

LONDON: "When you've just made it sound like the Queen is more than 200 years old, there may be a few ways of recovering from the gaffe. But turning to her and giving her a sly wink is probably not included in any book of royal etiquette... The Queen received the wink with a frosty glare."

HEADLINE?

HOUSTON: "Bush's verbal slip adds humor to queen's visit; Bush faux pas also manages to show how well the 2 nations get along."

LONDON: "Blundering Bush makes ANOTHER gaffe as he winks at the Queen"

CONTEXT?

HOUSTON: "The U.S. and United Kingdom share more than centuries of history. Queen Elizabeth II commemorated the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia with this, her fifth visit to the U.S. and her first in 16 years. The erstwhile adversaries, their colonial ties severed by revolution, stand as the staunchest allies at war in Iraq and Afghanistan."

LONDON: "Mr Bush is the leader who once greeted Prime Minister Tony Blair with: 'Yo, Blair. How are you doing?'"

WINNER?

In the category of being delightfully entertaining, the Daily Mail is the clear winner — although it did have an unfair advantage, given that it is, like all British tabloids, extremely drunk.

In the category of being journalistically sound, the Chronicle wins simply by virtue of not blatantly lying. Regular T.A.M.S.Y. readers (by which I mean "all of the Western world") will know that it pains me to even sorta defend El Presidente, but just look at the Daily Mail's photographic retelling of Bush's verbal blunder.

Bush: Pissed in the U.K. sense. Queen: Pissed in the U.S. sense.

The Mail implies these two things happened in sequence. That only makes sense if the Queen was running laps around Bush — either in an effort to show how not 250 years old she is, or just as a tribute to Street Sense. Actually, I like that version of the story best. I encourage the Telegraph to cover it in the evening edition.

---

NOTE TO LAW ENFORCEMENT: The image at the top of this post is merely an artistic rendering of hypothetical events. It does not constitute a call for the president to be assassinated by the Queen, or anyone else. Please do not send me to Guantanamo. [image via Getty, via Sullivan]

Q: Are you ready to be so surprisingered that it will take you a second to react?

A: Gawker has the shocking story! I hope you're sitting down. [via Susie]

Q: How good are Krispy Kreme donuts?

A: So good, you'll... well, just ask the news team at NBC Augusta.



As Ohio's own Livin' in Cowtown notes, "This is what happens when you hire idiots that get their on-air graphics from a Google Search without even looking at the results." [story via Scotty Jay, who does not have a Web site]

UPDATE: Unshockingly, NBC Augusta is none too happy about the hubbub surrounding this clip. As you can see, YouTube took it down.

Also unshockingly, the Internet is smarter than NBC Augusta. But I guess you already knew that.



As far as I can tell, the network doesn't really have a leg to stand on here, legally. See: Fair use under United States law. Airing ten seconds of a thirty-minute news program does not copyright infringement make. -- 3/4/07, 12:48AM

Q: What happened to the Sands?

A: Hey, remember that episode of Full House where Stephanie and DJ Tanner won $100,000 from a slot machine at in Lake Tahoe casino, and then their dad made them give it back to teach them an important lesson about underage gambling?

Danny Tanner sure was an idiot. He could have used that cash to get Michelle a much-needed college education. On a related note:

Casino told to fork over jackpot won by minor [Reuters]

Macau's gaming bureau has ruled that the Sands Macao casino — operated by U.S. gaming giant Las Vegas Sands — must pay an under-age player's HK$740,000 ($94,900) jackpot winnings to her mother, a local daily said on Saturday.

The Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau — Macau's gaming watchdog — made the decision after meeting the 16-year-old girl and her mother, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported.

The Hong Kong teenager was playing at [the] Sands on Tuesday with her mother and grandmother, the paper said. She put HK$100 into a slot machine, and it stopped on the winning number.

Uncle Jesse Katsopolis could not be reached for comment.

By the way, I kind of get the feeling that Reuters has never actually been in a casino. It "stopped on the winning number"? Was it a roulette-themed slot machine? This sounds like the easiest $100,000 jackpot ever. No wonder the Sands Atlantic City went bust.

---

PAS/CAL: Left us out in the cold?

SHODDY TRANSITION: Hey, speaking of what happened to the Sands, what happened to Detroit indie poppers PAS/CAL? They were supposed to release their debut full-length, Citizen's Army Uniform, two months ago; but two months ago has come and gone, and the LP hasn't so much as leaked yet. Curious.

Anyway, Tiny Mix Tapes says the album will revisit a couple of old PAS/CAL songs, including this old T.A.M.S.Y. favorite:

PAS/CAL
What Happened to the Sands
Oh Honey, We're Ridiculous [EP], 2004

---

SHODDIER TRANSITION: The Brothers Maloof do not own the Sands. They do, however, own the Palms, as well as the NBA's Sacramento Kings. The Palms is a great casino. The Kings are not a great basketball team. They are, in fact, in last place.

Joe Maloof recently referred to his team's coach, Eric Musselman, as "inexperienced." It is generally not a good sign when you are one of the highest ranking employees of a company, and your boss refers to you as "inexperienced." It is also not a very good sign for your boss, especially if he's the one who hired you. So it wasn't long before the other Maloof stepped in to clarify the issue.

"He's still our coach, plain and simple," Gavin Maloof said. "It's still what it's always been. We're behind him, and that's the way it is. We're going to move forward until he's not our coach. That's the way it's always been. We're behind him, and that's the way it is."

So don't worry about your job status, Eric! Plain and simple, you are not going to be fired until you are fired.

Q: Now can we officially agree never, ever to use this lede again?

A: I mean, at least until the sequel.

• "The devil didn't wear Prada, but Meryl Streep did..." [TIUK]

GOOD ONE!!!

Also oy-inducing:

If there was a unifying theme, it was the popularity of the winners — at least with the audience inside the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. They roared with approval for Mirren, gave Scorsese his long-delayed ovation, and poured out so much love for Gore and... An Inconvenient Truth, it was a wonder the red carpet on Hollywood Boulevard didn't turn rainforest green.

Indeed. In summary, it was an Oscar ceremony in which all of the winners were applauded, and none of them booed. Also, nobody got stabbed.

This reporter's beat must be Parliament.