Thursday Blog Meat: Satan, P&G Had no Operational Relationsh

As Rannoch Donald said when he sent this link, “unfuckingbelievable”:

The Devil is not in league with global consumer brand Procter & Gamble, a U.S. court has ruled. P&G won a $19 million lawsuit against four distributors of rival Amway over rumors tying it to Satanism.

The court concluded a 12-year lawsuit in P&G’s favour, after it ruled that the four had spread a false accusation that P&G subsidised Satanic cults. The case is one of several unfair competition suits P&G has brought refuting the Satanism slurs.

According to P&G, the four distributors had passed on to customers the notion that its logo — featuring a bearded man looking over a field of 13 stars — was a symbol of Satan.

According to Snopes.com, the bearded-guy logo was trademarked in 1851, and the 13 stars represented the country’s original 13 colonies. I found that in five seconds. So why did it take a court 12 years to sort it out?

How much wood would a right-handed pitcher chop …

This story about ballplayers’ unusual off-season training programs is a fun read.

I got that link from Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus, who in the same entry linked to this, a loving compendium of HBWs: hot baseball wives.

If you can’t do the time, you’d better hope you’re attractive enough to sway the jury against sentencing you to do time

This isn’t much of a surprise:

Juries trying criminal cases are likely to be more lenient when the person in the dock is physically attractive, psychologists say.
Scientists gave a fictitious transcript of a mugging to 96 volunteers, along with a photograph of the defendant.

The York and Bath Spa universities team found the jurors were less likely to find attractive defendants guilty. … Unattractive black defendants were given the harshest sentences, irrespective of the ethnicity of the “juror.”

So if you’re an unattractive black guy, try to stay out of trouble. Or play in the NBA.

Global warming? Yeah, that sounds scary. But what about Al Gore’s waistline?

I understand that people want to speculate on whether or not Al Gore’s going to run for the presidency. And I understand that someone connected to Hillary Clinton said they’d start worrying about him if it looked like he was losing weight. And I fully understand that right-wing hacks like Glenn Beck are going to take their shots at the guy no matter what he does.

What amazes me, though, is how many fat guys — including the megachinned Beck — are yukking it up over Gore’s waistline. Even on the relatively liberal MSNBC, Chris Matthews and David Shuster took their shots.

Shuster looks to me as if he’s gained 10 pounds in his face alone since I’ve been watching Hardball. Check out his bio picture, then look at this recent clip. Even on the tiny screen, you can see his surplus chin flesh bobbing along like a milk jug on the ocean.

So why are all these guys spending so much time talking about Al Gore’s weight? Especially when Gore isn’t even pretending to be running for office, and in fact lays out such stringent anti-global-warming measures that he couldn’t possibly by elected?

Tags: Tags: society