Van Gogh's killer speaks out in court

Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh's killer confessed in court today. Here are a few of the highlights from the Islamic extremist wacko:

"I can assure you that one day, should I be set free, I would do exactly the same, exactly the same," he said, speaking slowly in sometimes halted Dutch. He said he felt an obligation to Van Gogh's mother Anneke, present in court, to speak, but offered no sympathy. "I have to admit I do not feel for you, I do not feel your pain, I cannot -- I don't know what it is like to lose a child," he said as Van Gogh's family and friends looked on. "I cannot feel for you ... because I believe you are an infidel," he added.

This is the kind of thing we're up against.

Night Hawk frozen dinner soars on flavor, aesthetically shits on windshield

I promised yesterday that I would eat and review a Night Hawk frozen dinner. Being a man of my word, I rolled into Kroger today, slammed $2.15 on the counter and picked one up. Specifically, it's a Night Hawk "Taste of Texas" frozen dinner. The box describes it as a "Charbroiled Beef Patty with Gravy, Western Style Beans and Cornbread." Federally mandated nutrition facts are as follows:

Calories: 340 Calories from Fat: 130 Total Fat: 15g (23% of RDA) Saturated Fat: 5g (25%) Cholesterol: 65mg (22%) Sodium: 850mg (35%) Total Carbohydrates: 32g (11%) Dietary Fiber: 3g (12%) Sugars: 3g Protein: 20g Vitamin A: 8% Vitamin C: 4% Calcium: 10% Iron: 20%

I calculated the Weight Watchers Points value at 7, or 23% of my daily allotment of tasty vittles. Next, the hype. Night Hawk's package declares:

Charbroiling... it's what has made the Night Hawk Flavor Unique for over 35 years! Every Night Hawk meal features a top quality meat entree that's been charbroiled over an open flame to sear in the natural juices and that great charbroiled flavor. And, Night Hawk's homestyle side dishes perfectly complement every meal. Night Hawk meals are delicious and easy to enjoy because we take the time to prepare our meals the way would would...if you had the time.

Now, the review. The meal predictably is delivered in a thin cardboard box, festooned with stylized flames and pictures of a delicious meal served on an attractive stoneware plate with colorful vegetable garnish. After lustily tearing the box open, I discovered that the actual meal is served in a three-compartmented polyethylene terephthalate tray with a thin wrapper on top. A few wrapper punctures and 2800 microwave watt-minutes later, lunch was served:

The subject.

The meat was excellent, once I let it cool to below fusion temperature. Though the package lists the patty's ingredients as "beef, water, textured vegetable protein," It was an attractive piece of meat, with grill marks that didn't look very fake. It had a good beefy flavor without the overwhelming salty taste of most TV dinners, and it was properly juicy, not soggy or rubbery. Good texture. The gravy had separated into its components, Brown Liquid Stuff and Translucent Gelatinous Stuff. Pretty nasty looking. After a quick mixing with a fork, however, it turned into decent, but unremarkable brown gravy. The beans were nearly indistinguishable from Ranch Style beans in flavor and appearance, though the sauce was somewhat congealed. The good people at Night Hawk would do well to thin it out a little bit. The cornbread was mangled beyond all recognition. Somehow, the upper half of the cornbread nugget had migrated beyond its borders, sticking to the plastic wrap. After cooking, this portion was somewhat rubbery, but served nobly in its function of sopping up the newly reconstituted brown gravy. The bottom half of the cornbread, on the other hand, wasn't very functional. It was hard, crispy, and not at all suited for soaking up remnants of gravy and congealed bean vehicle. The color was perfect, though. Alas, I mistakenly selected probably the only Night Hawk meal that doesn't come with the vaunted Steak Sauce Packet, so no review on that. All in all, it was pretty good, but I'm still kinda hungry. Appearance: (out of four) Taste: Nutritional Value: Bang for the Buck: Overall:

Bazan details MetroRail stray current problem

MetroRail has a problem, in addition to the cost overruns, low ridership, even lower paid ridership, foul-smelling panhandlers, outages and scores of accidents. You see, due to poor design, the MetroRail power lines are leaking "stray current" into the ground. At first, this might not seem to be such a big deal. So what if a little electricity leaks into the dirt? It's a potentially huge problem. Local activist Tom Bazan -- who has been a tireless advocate of fixing this problem --sent me an email with the details:

The St. Luke's Medical Tower foundation, as well as the other hospitals, appears to be within fifty feet of a documented Stray Current generator, the electrified METRORail tram, which operates at 750 volts DC, and each power substation is rated at 8,000+ amperes of current. If one ampere of stray current will dissolve 20 pounds of iron in one year, then a stray current loss of merely 5% (400 amperes) would result in FOUR TONS of iron, yes rebar is made of iron, in one year. I am curious if the city fire hydrant line was properly protected from the stray current? Also, one should wonder if the natural gas service line as well as the building foundation of the Texas Medical Center's CROWN JEWEL, which is now situated in close proximity to the tram, was properly protected from the ravaging corrosion resulting from the underground stray current likely radiating from the tram line.

Yikes. Just think about the terrible possibilities this could cause. We're talking about potential gas leaks near hospitals with partially-dissolved foundations and spotty fire hydrant service. What's worse, we just don't know how bad the problem is, because Metro refuses to release its report on stray current. To understand the mechanics of corrosion by stray current, take a look at Rorschach's comment on blogHOUSTON.

This Hawk kills its prey slowly

Over at Slightly Rough, Rob regales us with tales of steak dinners made entirely out of multicolored salt:

I have to agree, Night Hawk is the best frozen food, hands down. If you can't purchase them in your local area, move.

Having never eaten a Night Hawk dinner, I can't really comment on the quality of the food though I suspect this one would make Edd Hendee's head cave in. However, I like Rob's choice of beverages:

Fortunately for my dear readers, I am willing and able, in the interests of science, to conduct some research this weekend into what beverage pairs well with a Night Hawk frozen dinner. I'm thinking perhaps a nice burgundy, or maybe a Miller High Life tallboy.

It is, after all, The Champagne of Beers. I still stand by my NightNight pairing as a good alternative:

Wash it down with some Night Train and you've got yourself... well, one hell of a Night.

I'll have a Night Hawk for lunch tomorrow and report back.

'And if you don't mind, I'd rather not go mad."

Thanks to Rob's prompting, I felt compelled to take a sanity test. The results:

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid:	Low
Schizoid:	Low
Schizotypal:	Low
Antisocial:	Low
Borderline:	Low
Histrionic:	Moderate
Narcissistic:	Moderate
Avoidant:	Low
Dependent:	Low
Obsessive-Compulsive:	Low
-- Personality Disorder Test -- -- Personality Disorder Information --

One less thing to worry about, I guess. I'm reminded of a great scene in "Lawrence of Arabia:"

Freddy: "Are you off your head?" Lawrence: "No. Oddly enough, I'm not."

Child sex on the rise in South Africa

From the "Society Rapidly Tumbling to its Inevitable Moral Collapse" file:

One out of every three children is having sex at the age of 10, and 17 out of 100 will deliberately spread the virus if they know they are HIV-positive. These are the findings of a comprehensive survey by the Community Information, Empowerment and Transparency (CIET Africa) in November and December 2002.

Some of the other disturbing findings included that, at 18, two out of every three children had had sex. Two out of 10 pupils did not believe condoms prevented pregnancy or other sexually transmitted diseases. One in 10 said they believed sex with a virgin could cure HIV/Aids, and one in 10 had been raped in the past year. Three out of every 100 pupils thought that girls liked sexually violent boys and one out of every 10 thought that girls who got raped, asked for it, according to the study.

The study also reached an interesting conclusion:

Public campaigns and activism, said the study, had very little impact on service provision in respect of prevention or management.

You mean the government can't just throw money at this? You mean people might actually have to stop being promiscuous and start setting decent examples for their children? Who could've guessed that?

Coming soon: cell-phone service on airliners

This story has me torn. On one hand, I have a pretty libertarian view on freedom of expression. On the other hand, maybe we ought to have summary executions for people who talk on cell phones when they should sit down and shut up:

Germany's Siemens has joined forces with an Airbus joint venture to develop technology that will make ordinary mobile-phone calls possible for passengers in flight by 2006, the companies said on Monday. Siemens will supply lightweight on-board base stations for the GSM mobile network and channel selectors that will ensure mobile calls do not interfere with aircraft systems or mobile networks on the ground. Airbus, which is 80-percent owned by European aerospace giant EADS, will build the technology into its existing electronics systems, market it to airlines and maintain it.

OnAir said aircraft crew would be able to switch the on-board mobile-phone system into different modes, such as text-only, to ensure quiet times in the cabin.

That's good, anyway.

Minutemen plan Houston ops despite Chron

The Chronicle reports that the Minuteman Project will be launching its neighborhood watch program right here in Houston:

Leaders of the controversial group dedicated to stopping the flow of illegal immigration said they will patrol the streets of the Bayou City beginning in October, as part of a campaign that will extend north from the Mexican border. Houston volunteers will gather near day labor centers and corners where immigrant workers solicit work, in an effort to draw critical attention to the city's hands-off policy toward illegal immigrants. "We will be videotaping the (day laborers) and we will be videotaping the contractors who pick them up," said Bill Parmley, a Goliad County landowner who heads the Texas chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. The Minutemen will only observe to draw attention to the problem and will not attempt to make arrests, he said.

Good to hear. However, the Chronicle's choice of facts is less than stellar.

It was not immediately clear what reaction the Minuteman effort would have in greater Houston, which is home to an estimated 350,000 to 400,000 illegal immigrants, according to demographers. Polling finds Houstonians generally support immigration.

Yes, Houstonians generally support immigration. Legal immigration. That's a very important distinction that Chron reporter Edward Hegstrom either can't grasp or refuses to acknowledge. I defy the Chron or anyone else to declare that a majority of Houstonians favor illegal immigration.

Nearly 60 percent of Houstonians do not think illegal immigrants are a major cause of unemployment in the area

Is that supposed to mean we support it? I don't think serial killers are a major cause of unemployment in the area, but it doesn't mean I support serial killing.

and 67 percent think the diversity brought by immigration is a good thing, according to recent data from the Houston Area Survey, annual studies conducted by Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg.

Again, notice that the word "illegal" is omitted again. The fact is that Houstonians -- just like Americans in general -- overwhelmingly oppose the uncontrolled flow of people whose very first action in the United States is a federal crime.

IOC cuts baseball, softball from 2012 Games

Ugh:

Baseball and softball weren't big hits among International Olympic Committee members. Both American-invented sports were dropped today from the program for the 2012 Olympics in London -- the first events cut from the Summer Games in 69 years. The IOC couldn't immediately agree on their replacements. Each of the 28 existing sports was put to a secret vote by the IOC, and baseball and softball failed to receive a majority required to stay on the program. The other 26 sports made the cut.

But have no fear. Ping-Pong is still an Olympic "sport."

Chron knows what makes Houston tick

As usual, the Chronicle proves itself to be right on the pulse of the Bayou City with its "Ultimate Houston" ballots. Here are a few of the races, sure to be hotly contested by the average mainstream Houstonian:

Adult Novelty Store Bizarre Bazaar Cindie's Eros Erotic Cabaret Boutique Zone D'Erotica

Public Access TV Show Charles Snider Show Drugs, Crime and Politics Democracy Now!

Gay Bar Guava Lamp JR's Bar and Grill Meteor Rich's South Beach

That'll get circulation up. I can just hear the cascade of thousands of news consumers saying, "I can't stand the Chronicle's overwhelming liberal editorial bias and its week-old New York Times rehashes, but at least they let me vote on my favorite synthetic-genital outlet!" By the way, the following contests didn't quite make it on the Chron's list: "Favorite Indicted Member of Lee Brown's Administration" "Favorite MetroRail Crash Site" "Favorite Largest Daily Newspaper in the U.S. Never to Win a Pulitzer Prize"