Free Republic

From Steve Irwin to U.S. soldiers in Iraq, there's still one video you ain't gonna see on YouTube - There is, apparently, videotape of beloved Aussie TV star and naturalist Steve Irwin getting stabbed by the nasty bayonet-like tail of a giant stingray. The video shows Irwin removing the lethal blade from his chest, where it had pierced his heart, just before he loses consciousness and dies almost instantly. We will, most likely, never see this film. This is not because Irwin had, so far as we know, no chance to utter "Crikey!" one last time before leaping into the...

(former Jesuit seminarian, to be exact) Excerpts from a New York Times article - and, no, this is neither fiction nor satire. A "wedding" ceremony incorporating every stupid New Age liberal thing you can think about - mind you, some of it can be found in some more nutty dioceses - like the "prayer to the four directions" - like Los Angeles. They really managed to stuff everything into one ceremony. It's incredibly funny, regardless of the homosexual context, given how corny it is. THE groom’s mother wore a peach silk suit and an expression of mingled happiness, anxiety...

When all the fanatical Christians disappear, will traffic finally improve? Wait, did I miss it? Did it happen three days ago, on 6-6-06, a.k.a. Tea Time with the Beast, a.k.a. the Great Day of Reckoning, a.k.a. the National Day of Slayer, all the world crashing down in a heap of hissing steam and belching smoke and balmy gusty breezes sometime around noon just after lunch but not before rush hour and hitting right around siesta? I might have been napping. Did the Apocalypse finally hit? Did the deep wish of roughly a half-billion zealous believers come to pass and were...

No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree? Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV...

Think sex and drugs destroy America? Try naive chastity. Oh, and "Purity Balls" There are these things. These unholy events called "Purity Balls" and you should probably fall to your knees right this minute and thank a merciful and lubricious and happily polyamorous God that you do not know what they are and that you have access right this minute to vast quantities of wine to deflect their nasty karmic arrows because, you know, oh my God. But hey, free country. Purity Balls. No, not some sort of newfangled spherical chastity device to be inserted using vacuum tubes and pulleys,...

It's a shockingly eco-friendly plan from the world's most toxic retailer. Did hell just freeze over? Sometimes you just have to let the possibility breathe. Sometimes you just have to allow that something grand and good and healthy might actually be born from the bowels of the dank and ravenous megacorporate world, like flowers from a dung heap, like vodka from old potatoes, even if it comes right alongside the nastiest, most abusive federal environmental policy you will see in your lifetime. Take Wal-Mart, the most famously offensive, town-destroying, junk-purveying, labor-abusing, sweatshop-supporting, American-job-killing, soul-numbing, seizure-inducing, hope-curdling retailer in the known...

Fears that Iraqi captors might harm a Canadian hostage if they knew he was gay forced his partner to remain silent as loved ones called for an end to the ordeal, a director from the freed hostage's aid group said Monday. During his four months of captivity, James Loney's sexuality was kept out of the media at the request of his family, said Doug Pritchard, co-director of the aid group Christian Peacemaker Teams. "It's a sad fact that around the world gays and lesbians are more vulnerable to attack than straights," Pritchard said. "When Jim was already in a vulnerable...

I was all wrong about "Narnia." Which is to say, about six months ago in this space I was hell-bent on the white-hot idea that Hollywood and the Christian-right group/billionaire that helped produce the tepid and saccharine flick would absolutely ruin "The Chronicles of Narnia" books, ruin the deep magic and the astounding sense of wonder these books held for millions of children (including this writer) by regurgitating them as a slick, dumbed-down, poorly acted smarm-fest full of ham-fisted Jesus allusions and excessive special effects, all from the director who brought you, ahem, "Shrek 2." Things did not, shall we...

HOT Oscar tip Heath Ledger yesterday compared US bans on his gay cowboy film to racism. Critics' Choice Awards Picture Gallery Ledger said he was not surprised a Utah cinema had banned Brokeback Mountain, which depicts a lifelong love affair between two Montana cowboys. "I heard a while ago that West Virginia was going to ban it. But that's a state that was lynching people only 25 years ago, so that's to be expected," Ledger said. "Personally, I don't think the movie is (controversial) but I think maybe the Mormons in Utah do. I think it's hilarious and very immature...

Yes, I know you were drunk. Must've been. Either drunk or on serious meds and/or you just didn't give much of a damn about anything anyway because you're just one of those people, one of those types who comes lurching around the city like a chunk of numbed pain in your big-ass mid-'80s burgundy car with the white top and chrome bumpers -- an old Cadillac? Monte Carlo? -- early last Sunday morning to wreak casual havoc. Is that about right? Do you remember any of it? Here is what I'm guessing: probably not. Let me tell you what happened,...

Arkansas mom gives birth to a whole freakin' baseball team. How deeply should you cringe? Who are you to judge? Who are you to say that the more than slightly creepy 39-year-old woman from Arkansas who just gave birth to her 16th child yes that's right 16 kids and try not to cringe in phantom vaginal pain when you say it, who are you to say Michelle Duggar is not more than a little unhinged and sad and lost? And furthermore, who are you to suggest that her equally troubling husband -- whose name is, of course, Jim Bob...

Apparently, it wasn't just "invade Iraq and Afghanistan in my name." A special report: Scene: White House private residence, night, not long ago. President Bush present in his most favoritest guns 'n' bunnies PJs. Laura asleep, knocked out by a combination of too much Good Housekeeping and excessive hair-spray fumes. Suddenly, a burst of black smoke. A deep, resonant voice speaks: "Psst! George! God here, taking a break from supervising the well-being of eight billion troubled souls along with infinite galaxies of unimaginable vastness to speak with you directly one more time because, well, you're special, aren't you, George? Yes...

Leather, techno, sex & war: more only-in-SF juice to make you proud. Take that, uptight neocons. It was the moment when we walked by a jam-packed S.F. City Hall and realized it was open to host a VIP techno dance party, while immediately outside its gilded doors upward of 50,000 revelers wandered and shimmied and flaunted their costumes and drank nasty Red Bull cocktails in the huge Civic Center plaza for the third annual Love Parade, everyone baring flesh and shaking their groove thangs to any one of 200 world-class (well, some of them) DJs spinning their wares on over...

At last, one scientist BushCo will definitely -- albeit resentfully -- listen to. Sometimes. So now we know. This is what it takes. This is how far the nation has to crumble and this is how many people have to die and this is how many tens of billions it has to cost and this is how far his dirt-low poll numbers have to fall before Bush will finally come out and say he agrees with one of those godforsaken gul-dang book-learned scientist types. You know the ones. Those informed and well-educated data-crunchers he normally despises like a kid hates...

An Austrian couple with 12 children have split up - after the husband admitted he was gay. Mum Alina Look dumped husband Hannes after his shock revelation. Hannes had announced that he was leaving the family home at Graz for another man. Hannes told Alina he only made her pregnant so she had "something to do". Alina said: "I received a phone call from a friend who told me she had seen Hannes with another person, she said they had been kissing and cuddling. "I didn't believe her when she told me the other person was a man, but when...

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) - Pink is the new color at a Tampa juvenile facility. The Hillsborough Regional Juvenile Detention Center West is plastering the color on its cells in the hopes of calming the youth. And it's not just any pink. The shade used is known as "Baker-Miller Pink" which looks like Pepto-Bismol pink, only deeper. The juveniles in the center stay enclosed in the pink cell for 15 minutes. It's all part of a study to see if this special shade of pink really calms inmates as some research suggests. The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice is relying on...

Many argue that communism will never be possible because of "human nature". The essence of this false argument is the belief that a communist society would consist of an all-powerful central government that would tell everybody what to do--and would therefore undermine the creative initiative of individuals and the search for happiness. • This argument is based on two false assumptions: (1) It assumes that a communist society will look like the former Soviet Union, or the current China, North Korea, etc (ie: corrupt police states with a feudal-style ruling class) (2) It assumes that people will only work in...

Little proof to the contrary that we are indeed in a very long, bleak tunnel. Is there any light? Then come those times when you read about a 16-year-old girl slashing the throat of a 75-year-old woman for no apparent reason, a woman who was merely walking with her husband near a Berkeley public garden and it's right next to the one about the 16-year-old kid smiling and waving and donning a bulletproof vest before shooting nine people and himself to death in a remote, poverty-stricken region of Minnesota and you can feel the numbness like a wave.

Corporate radio sucketh, whole and large and true. . . .

What happens when habitual warmongering and BushCo lies become part of our daily diet? And then you read the appalling little story about how BushCo is now "taking steps" to further the investigation into why their original intelligence on Iraq was so painfully, treasonously, colon-clenchingly wrong, why they thought Saddam had giant Costco-sized warehouses stacked to the rafters with snarling nukes and nasty biotoxins and active warheads when, in fact, he had nothing but a couple Dumpsters full of rusty 20-year-old shell casings and a bucket of stale glue.