Apparently viral videos were a thing even when all we had were VHS players

Nepal, 1959: The US Embassy issues rules governing what one can and cannot do in pursuit of a yeti

Steven Seagal to train posse in how to respond to school shootings, because that is a decision that makes total sense

Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been out of the headlines for a few months now, which is probably a good thing since when he does show up it's usually for embarrassing things like investigating Obama's birth certificate or failing to maintain decent living conditions in prison.  Or abusing his power to launch illegal investigations of political rivals. Or somehow managing to violate election laws while not actively running for office.  Or creating a fake assassination plot against himself which caused an innocent man to be locked up for years.  You get the point.  That last one is totally real, by the way, and after reading it I'm amazed that Arpaio is not in prison, let alone working in law enforcement as the Sheriff of Maricopa county.  Anyway, he's back in the news, and here's why:

MARICOPA -- Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is planning a training exercise aimed at helping his volunteer posse members respond to school shootings.

Arpaio's exercise Saturday at a closed school site in suburban Fountain Hills will simulate scenarios for posse members who volunteered for patrols that the sheriff launched last month just outside schools to guard against shootings.

So, to clarify, here's the timeline:

1. People express concern about school safety.
2. Arpaio deploys an armed "posse" to hang around outside schools.
3. Arpaio trains the posse.
4. No, I did not switch steps two and three.

Anyway, that's not even the important part.  Guess which law enforcement expert Arpaio got to run this training exercise:

Action-film star and posse member Steven Seagal will serve as an instructor at the event.

I was curious if Arpaio and Seagal had any history of working together, because otherwise it'd be a pretty odd choice (or, rather, a more odd choice).  As it turns out, they have, and it's weird:

You guys did what?

So, what happened there, guys?

PHOENIX — Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and actor Steven Seagal deny accusations by a Phoenix man and his lawyer that a family dog was killed during a raid for Seagal's reality TV show.

Sounds really illegal! 

The sheriff's office said in a news release the allegation is without merit. Seagal added he's outraged.

The action movie actor was participating in the raid as a special deputy sheriff for his show "Steven Seagal Lawman" on the A&E cable channel. His movie credits include "Under Siege," "Above the Law" and "Fire Down Below."

If you're denying illegal behavior relating to a police raid performed in the course of a reality show, you probably would rather not have a movie called "Above the Law" listed among your credits.

According to witnesses at the raid, a dog was present on Jesus Llovera's property when deputies and SWAT team members, including Seagal, entered the premises with a search warrant to arrest Llovera on cockfighting charges and seize all evidence pertaining to the crime.

Arpaio said there's no evidence to back up the claim that his officers killed a dog.

"If my deputies, or posse man Seagal for that matter, had done something so awful like shooting a family dog, then where are the photos to prove it?" Arpaio asked.

Pretty convenient that you guys were the only people who could have photographed that, huh?  Anyway, how did this all go down?  Seems like there shouldn't be much collateral damage in your typical execution of a search warrant.

In Llovera's claim, the sheriff's office and Seagal are accused of setting off explosives to create a distraction and confusion. 

At this point, this can't possibly get more outrageous, right?

The claim says Seagal was free to commandeer a tank and crash through an iron gate on the southeast corner of Llovera's property in southwest Phoenix.

So the plan was to set off explosions to create a distraction, bust in the front door, and have Seagal run over an iron gate with a tank, so that you could arrest one person.  If I had to guess whether this was a real life thing or the plot of a Seagal movie, I would have guessed movie, because as soon as I saw the words "tank" and "search warrant" in the same article I assumed that no one would really do this.

In an interview with KTAR Radio in Phoenix during the March raid, Seagal said he was there to help guard one side of Llovera's house.

"We're just sort of, you know, trying to guard one side of the house and see if anybody would run out or anything like that or, do anything worse than that," Seagal said. "We're kind of just doing that and I didn't really enter the house today."

"I was just securing the perimeter, you know, standard procedure.  With a tank.  Yes, that's normal."

Given the tremendous success of Arpaio and Seagal's previous collaborations, it makes total sense to have Seagal lead training exercises for Arpaio's new school posse.  The only real question at this point is which of Seagal and Arpaio is less qualified to be working in law enforcement.  On the one hand, Seagal unnecessarily used a tank in a police operation and doesn't appear to possess any real qualifications; on the other hand, Arpaio, as sheriff, permitted this to happen.  It's a conundrum!  A depressing one, if you live in Maricopa and aren't a fan of Steven Seagal knocking your gate down with a tank.

The War on Drugs used to be a real war with medieval weapons and shit

If we don't talk about flail control now, we leave the population exposed to mass flailings.

Taken from Life Magazine's site

A brief summary of news you may have missed over the weekend, as well as an Alex Jones story from 2010

• The city of Edmonton, Canada has seen a surge of interest in naked yoga, despite a winter where temperatures average less than 0 degrees Fahrenheit.  Instructor Chris McBain: "For some it’s about naturalism and just being nude and for other people it’s just a bucket list endeavour." 
• From the 2010 archives: Well-known radio host and general asshole Alex Jones claimed that he has documents proving the government is introducing chemicals into juice boxes, potato chips, and the water supply which are causing children to become gay.  Jones said, "After [little boys] are done drinking your juices, [they're] ready to go out and have a baby... [they're] ready to put together a garden of roses... [they're] ready to go put lipstick on..."  It's pretty crazy to think that at the time, people must have thought it was literally impossible for him to sound more insane than this!  Live and learn, I guess. 

 

• Kerry County in Ireland has moved to legalize "moderate" drunk driving in order to allow lonely older people to get out and socialize without worrying that they might lose their license.  "These people that are being isolated at present, all the wisdom and all the wit and all the culture that they had, the music and the singing, that’s all being lost to the younger generation because these older people might as well be living in Japan and Jerusalem because the younger generation don’t see them at all anymore. These characters are being isolated now at home, and a lot of them falling into depression."  This being Ireland, the idea of driving and simply not drinking has not occurred to anyone.

Thanks to Merrie for the Kerry County link

Nowhere is American ingenuity more apparent than in our local automobile advertising

At no point does Cal have much to say about cars, but dude is strapping himself to the top of planes because that's how much he wants to sell you a car.  Also, the banjos in this are fierce.

OK, there's a decent chance this isn't real, but I don't care.

This one has about a .001% chance of being real.  We can dream, though.

h/t Jesse for informing me of the existence of the "Fuck You Baltimore" video

A German student [VERB]ed a group of [PLURAL NOUN] and [VERB]ed a [NOUN] at them before [VERB]ing on a [ADJECTIVE] [NOUN], police have said.

You really have to love a news story where it's literally impossible to predict what might happen in the next sentence. Suddenly, a bulldozer!

Source: BBC

Oh god 1984 what have you done

This is what happens when people in the 1980s hear "Take Me Out to the Ball Game", decide it needs to be jazzed up, and then give serious interviews about their motivation for doing so.  

Foxnation, wtf r u doin

The Patriot Guard Riders, a pretty cool group of bikers who follow groups such as the Westboro Baptist Church around in order to blockade them from protesting funerals and such, is now in Newtown.  Which: that's good to know, because the WBC is one of the few groups I can think of that I'd like to see disrupted in any legal or illegal way possible, because fuck them, for serious.  Foxnation is reporting on this, but they seem to have done a little bit of editorializing:

I don't really get this at all.

Just to be sure, I checked out the Patriot Guard Riders site, which states on the front page:

So Fox Nation made it up.  Despite being concise, that sentence is excessively redundant.

Can you drink beers that were near an atomic bomb detonation site?

Yes.

There must have been some scientist bet where one guy bet that he could successfully publish a study titled "The Effect of Nuclear Explosions on Commercially Packaged Beverages."

2000 Onion article is oddly prescient

The Onion posted a piece back in 2000 which made fun of the idea that we might someday use the internet for everything--apparently, this idea was ludicrous in 2000.  I guess I do remember my WebTV being so incredibly slow that I often wouldn't notice for several minutes that someone had picked up the phone and I was no longer connected because seriously, fuck dialup.  Ah, childhood.

Jesus fuck, WebTV.  I just want to look up my damn Pokemon walkthroughs why is this so hard fuuuuuuuck.

 Here's the Onion headline I mentioned:

Comedy in 2000 becomes a boring factual article in 2012.  Progress!

Ha-ha, checking a newspaper website for movie times?  How quaint.  We all have apps to do that now. 
The article continues:

Larry has used the Internet to assist friends, as well. "Last week, we had a houseguest who was wondering if there were any Jesuit colleges in Ohio," Wisniewski said. "All I had to do was open up my AOL software, enter my password, point the browser to www.yahoo.com, and click on Society & Culture, followed by Religion & Spirituality. From there, I had only to click Faiths & Practices, then Christianity, then Denominations & Sects, and then Catholic. Then I simply clicked on Orders, Jesuits, Colleges & Universities, Ohio, and boom, right there in front of me are Xavier University in Cincinnati and John Carroll University in Cleveland."


Aside from the ladders of links that Area Man has to navigate to find information, this is basically how a lot of people look things up now.  Google was in existence in 2000, but hadn't totally taken off yet, so people were still going through page after page of Yahoo! links and using AOL keywords to find things. 

No, Grandma, that's not where that goes, and you should really pick a new password.

Wisniewski's friends, for their part, are impressed by his technological savvy and access to limitless global databases. "I feel like such a caveman for looking up phone numbers in a phone book," neighbor Steve Lindblad said. "All those pages and that ink–it's so embarrassing."

It's funny because that really would be kind of embarrassing now.  I don't think I even have a phone book.  The last phone book I remember having was the one we set on fire in a dorm basement (NOTE: depending on who's asking, I did not set a phone book on fire in a college dorm.  I was studying that night).

For all of Wisniewski's success in surfing for online info, he said Pamela is "still getting the hang" of the Internet and its power. "Pam is always asking stuff like, 'Why don't we just look the word up in our old-fashioned dictionary?'" Wisniewski said. "The answer, of course, is simple: because we don't have to."

I can only assume that this article was funny when it was written because there was a time when early adopters were a little over-excited about the internet.  It used to be super slow, and there was a time when retrieving a dictionary was faster than waiting for this:

And this:

The use of an old-timey wooden sailing ship tiller in the loading screen turned out to be quite appropriate.

Just to look up one word, that might be excessive.  Actually, looking at all this old internet stuff, it's pretty amazing just how quickly this Onion article became factually accurate.  Thanks for being ahead of the curve, Area Man!

And that's why you always wear your television reporter helmet

UPDATE: Sometimes a helmet won't cut it.

Dole/Kemp '96 website still operational, still extremely old

Here is a site which should have vanished long ago but luckily has not, so we can explore the natural beauty that is a 1996 presidential campaign page.  The homepage appears below (seriously, full quality, as it appears on the page). 

According to this, Dole had 2 issues he cared about: K-12 education, and Technology and Internet.  

Reading through the updates yields the following description of the page:

On August 1, Dole for President unveiled the first individually 
customizable political web site. If you haven't been to the new site, 
here's a rundown:

When you first visit the site, you are given the option of setting up a 
custom Dole web page. (Requires a Netscape 2.0 compatible 
browser)

That is in fact the font that they used.  For all I know, that was the only font on the internet in 1996.  Sadly, without a Netscape 2.0 compatible browser, I was unable to customize my Dole web page (I wanted to focus on the issues most important to me: federal regulation of bourbon quality and photogenic cats getting the right to vote).  Having been stymied on that front, I went back to the homepage, when I noticed this image:

Pretty sure we've found the oldest gif on the internet.

After admiring that for several minutes, I moved on to the "Dole Kemp '96 Interactive" page, because all of the other links are broken.  Alas, the crossword, make-a-button, and send-a-postcard options were no longer active--you can, however, still obtain Bob Dole desktop wallpaper!  There are 9 options:

Is his dog named Leader?  I think his dog is named Leader.

Attempting to get a large version of any of these was an ultimately failed endeavor--here's what a Dole/Kemp wallpaper at full size looks like:

Maybe he just had one of those really old computers with a tiny screen?

After some further research, I found the issue:

Right now, we feature a variety of downloadable wallpaper images. Decorate your desktop with Dole for President graphics! The images below are shown at 50% of their actual size and are designed to tile seamlessly on your desktop.

Ummmm...no.  That can't be right.  Can it?

I guess the campaign strategy was to convince everyone that total control by our robot Dole overlords was inevitable.

So, yeah, that doesn't look great.  Also I can't locate any of my desktop icons now, and my computer is refusing to do anything for me until I change the desktop back.  Let's keep in mind the most important thing here, though.  It was time for the internet to change, and thanks to Bob Dole, IT HAS...

The future is here, and it's a tiled desktop wallpaper.

Q: What to do when your toaster is possessed by Satan?

A:  Make excellent evening news stories.