Warning: Plot spoilers to Tim Green’s Exact Revenge follow; also for A Separate Peace, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Sixth Sense.

This is a running theme, and I’ll come back to it whenever I see a particularly egregious example. Today I saw one.

Note to reviewers: If you give away huge chunks of the book of movie’s plot in your review, you are an asshole. That’s what you do in fifth grade when you have to write a book report, not when you’re a professional.

Here is Publishers Weekly’s write up of the aforementioned Exact Revenge:

The world is Raymond White’s oyster: a working-class boy from Syracuse who made good, he’s got a Princeton degree, rugged good looks and the gorgeous girlfriend to match, and partner status at a law firm by age 25. But in this lively modern-day retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, just as White is poised to run for Congress, he is framed for murder, convicted and thrown into solitary confinement. After almost two decades of hard time, White is befriended by a fellow prisoner, lifer, “thief and part-time murderer,” Lester Cole. “Exact revenge…. If you don’t do it, you’ll be a professional victim. You exact it and it’s exact. Not just a reaction, but planned out. Precise. It needs to send a message,” Cole advises, beginning his tutelage about life, literature and the location of a billion dollars worth of loot that they’ll split after they escape. Cole dies in the breakout through the sewers of the Big House, but White goes on to retrieve the money and put in motion his reprisal plan against the former colleagues who framed him for murder. White takes down his enemies one by one in a fun, fast-paced update on the Dumas formula that will have readers booing the bad guys and rooting for the wronged hero.

ARGH! What the hell is wrong with those people? Look at the enormous amount of plot they give away!

I don’t need to read about Raymond White’s run for Congress, because I know he’ll be framed for murder. I know he’ll be convicted. I know his friend will die during their escape. I know he’ll win in the end.

All those surprises are ruined for me by the idiots at Publishers Weekly. New flash: Some of us actually read books for the stories. Some of us don’t want to know that Phineas dies at the end, or that Darth Vader is Luke’s father, or that Bruce Willis is really dead all along.

ARGH!

Seen at a local mall:

I’ve never liked people who either praise or bash everything the President does simply because they love or hate many of his policies. Blind faith in anything as either good or evil is never a good idea.

That said, this article deserves mention:

Bush Has Quietly Tripled Aid to Africa
Increase in Funding to Impoverished Continent Is Viewed as Altruistic or Pragmatic

[snip]

The president has tripled direct humanitarian and development aid to the world’s most impoverished continent since taking office and recently vowed to double that increased amount by 2010 — to nearly $9 billion.

Bravo.

I received the following letter from a Mrs. Helen Hicks in response to my recent USA Today column about cell phones. In the column, I had brought up concerns about the capabilities of most phones — that they can be turned into microphones to act as roving wiretaps, and that the Federal government had gotten itself the right to demand a map of your travels from your cell provider without a warrant.

Here is the entirety of Mrs. Hicks’s letter:

Subj: How STUPID you are!!!

How in the world did you get to be a writer on things that come up on the computer?? Do you think our government wants to use their expertise and their time to track a normal American citizen such as me(A 67 year old Texas (American) lady , living in Texas, minding my own business—-daily.? I think you get your kicks, trying to make ort government sound like the KGB!!! Really! If you are not doing anything—– they could care less!!! Stay focused on “The American Dream—- and Christian Morals and you sure won’t have to worry. What are you doing, that you would not like to be tracked????

Mrs. Helen Hicks

In fact, I don’t know whether the government is interested in tracking you. Then again, my column wasn’t written about you, or anyone in particular. It’s about the other people in this country who are minding their own business — business the government seems intent on sticking its nose into.

It’s a matter of privacy, Mrs. Hicks. Maybe I don’t think it’s the government’s damn business if I’m a member of the ACLU and the NRA. Maybe I don’t think it’s the government’s damn business if I subscribe to the National Review and Playboy. Maybe I don’t think it’s the government’s damn business that I own a copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook or that I borrowed Moneyball from the library.

As for ‘getting kicks, trying to make our government sound like the KGB,’ maybe you should read the news more. I wasn’t the one who set up secret prisons, or gave the OK to torture “detainees” or to withhold their right to a fair trial. I’m not the one asserting that the President has the right to detain anyone for any reason without charge or access to counsel. If you want to accuse someone of making our government sound like the KGB, I suggest you look toward your friend from Crawford.

And rehashing the age-old and, frankly, idiotic argument of ‘If you have nothing to hide, why are you worried?’ is just sad. We all have things we keep private.

If I asked you what your favorite sexual position was, or who you fantasize about during your marital relations, I suspect you’d be offended. Then again, if you have nothing to hide, why wouldn’t you answer? How much money do you have in your bank account, Mrs. Hicks? What was the last sin you committed? What do you wash first in the shower? What did you do on your third date with your high school sweetheart? If you won’t answer, I have to assume you have something to hide.

Privacy, Mrs. Hicks. Some things are simply no one else’s business.

There’s a reason warrants require — or at least used to require — probable cause. The police and the government cannot have the right to snoop where they feel like it without good reason. I would have thought we all learned that lesson from McCarthy and Hoover, but a lot of people in power these days seem to have a tough time with the whole history thing.

I realize that as a Republican you believe in big government and intrusive government — but I don’t. I believe that nine times out of 10 it should just butt out. That my business is my own, whether in my bedroom or my bank or my office. But that’s where we differ.

Seriously. It’s apparently one of those little tidbits that was overshadowed by the Nixon pardon and Chevy Chase pratfalls.

Via Pandagon:

The former president was a member of the Republican Unity Coalition (RUC), a gay-straight board of heavy hitters, including former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, which advocates “making homosexuality a ‘non-issue’ for the Republican Party.” (An FYI: Mary Cheney, of all people, served on RUC’s board in 2002-2003). Clearly there are very few Gerald Fords in either party today.

And from the Advocate, Oct. 29, 2001:

In an interview published Monday, former President Gerald Ford said the federal government should provide the same benefits for same-sex couples and married couples.

His comments make him the highest-ranking Republican ever to publicly support equal treatment for same-sex couples.

Ford told Detroit News columnist Deb Price in a telephone interview that the provisions should include Social Security, tax and other federal benefits.

“I think they (same-sex couples) should be treated equally. Period,” he said.

In addition, he stated support for a federal law banning workplace discrimination against gays: “That is a step in the right direction. I have a longstanding record in favor of legislation to do away with discrimination.”

Well.

… when your shipping options look like this:

(Click to enlarge.)

Your bang-your-head-on-the-wall quote of the day:

Citing state data, the (Hagerstown) Herald-Mail reports that 28 kindergarten students in Maryland were suspended for sex offenses in the last school year — 15 of those suspensions for sexual harassment.

Link

Oh-oh. It’s “Roundup-Ready” marijuana.

Now, if someone could isolate the gene that lets the marijuana plant produce THC and splice it into kudzu… well, that would certainly change things, wouldn’t it?

This is funny.

An AP reporter in Iraq, Qais Al-Bashir, wrote a story about Shiites burning Sunnis alive. Conservative bloggers, who hate the AP and the media in general for daring to report what’s actually happening there, called into question a source for that story — and indeed a source for a lot of AP stories: Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein.

But a US military officer and an Iraqi official said that Hussein was not an authorized spokesman. Then, suddenly, they claimed he didn’t exist at all. Despite the absurdity of that switcheroo, the bloggers decided that the AP must be lying and started to raise a fuss.

Their “evidence”? The AP’s statement on the whole pile of nonsense (they called it a “news release,” although it wasn’t) was different on the AP’s site and in the version printed by USA Today. Then, apparently, the AP site changed so it was identical to USAT’s.

How is this evidence? Easy: They simply assigned motives to the AP for the difference!

In posts with titles like “AP Covering Its Tracks,” they implied that the AP made the change because it was backtracking — that it had lost confidence in parts of its statement.

They have no evidence for this; they just like to believe that something nefarious is going on. Maybe the wording changed because the guy who is supposed to approve things like that was out of the office, and requested the change when he returned. Maybe they shortened it to focus on key points. Maybe some idiot uploaded the wrong version.

Maybe if you asked the AP why the change was made, someone would tell you.

Nah. Instead, the right-wingers conveniently ignored all but the one possibility they liked best. Without evidence.

Here’s an excerpt from the AP statement:

Some of AP’s critics question the existence of police Capt. Jamil Hussein, who was one (but not the only) source to tell us about the burning.

These critics cite a U.S. military officer and an Iraqi official who first said Hussein is not an authorized spokesman and later said he is not on their list of Interior Ministry employees. It’s worth noting that such lists are relatively recent creations of the fledgling Iraqi government.

By contrast, Hussein is well known to AP. We first met him, in uniform, in a police station, some two years ago. We have talked with him a number of times since then and he has been a reliable source of accurate information on a variety of events in Baghdad.

No one – not a single person – raised questions about Hussein’s accuracy or his very existence in all that time. Those questions were raised only after he was quoted by name describing a terrible attack in a neighborhood that U.S. and Iraqi forces have struggled to make safe.

Note that none of the bloggers calling this into question is actually there, or has spoken to anyone. All their “reporting” is based on reading statements from the AP and the US military.

Some go even further by making up false charges against the AP and then getting people to discuss them as if they’re real.

Confederate Yankee, a right-wing extremist, has a perfect example in an amusing post entitled, “Absurdly Unethical: The Potential Ethics Case Against AP.”

Note the word “potential.” That’s there because he has made up the ethics violations.

The entire post is based on this sentence:

But what happens if it is determined that Jamil Gholaiem Hussein is not the name of AP’s long-running source? What if it is a pseudonym?

It then goes on to quote various journalism sources about the use of pseudonyms.

But wait. Where did the concept of “Jamil Gholaiem Hussein” being a pseudonym come from? Why, from Confederate Yankee. In other words, he has fabricated a possible charge against the AP, then asked people to comment on it as if it’s real.

It’s as if I wrote, without any evidence, “What if Confederate Yankee kicks puppies? I asked police and animal welfare experts about it…”

The trick is to focus people on the fact that you’re quoting experts, and get them to forget that what those experts are talking about has no basis in reality. (I strongly doubt that CY kicks puppies.) Soon enough they think your assertions were true.

Can you imagine a real journalist publishing a story that consists of people’s reactions to a fabrication? “I’m not saying that Bill Gates is a mass murderer, but if he was, what would the police do about it?”

It’s like a twisted version of OJ Simpson’s “If I Did It” — it’s “If They Did It.”

I wonder what the ethics experts CY quoted would think of that.

Just ordered from the folks at Zazzle.com. You either get it or you don’t. :)

Not too long ago, I opined that despite (or because of) the Internet, newspapers are far from dead. In fact, I wrote, they’re one of the most profitable industries in the world.

Now Time magazine backs me up, albeit a few months later.

According to Time, only commercial banks (32.4 percent profit margin) and pharmaceutical companies (24.2 percent profit margin) beat out papers, which have an average 19.3 percent margin.

In comparison, ExxonMobil’s 2005 profit margin was 9.7 percent.

Economics 101 (for those of you who don’t know): While you might read that oil companies are making profits of umpteen billions of dollars, those figures don’t take into account how much those companies are spending. Which is why sites bashing them talk about profit dollars, not profit percents.

Public Citizen (a group I usually like a lot) even twisted the numbers this way:

As Americans shell out more dollars at the pump, the profit margin by U.S. oil refiners has shot up 79% from 1999 (the year Exxon and Mobil merged) to 2004.

See, it talks about an increase in profit margin. But when you’re dealing with small numbers (four to five percent), a small numerical increase becomes a large percentage increase.

Grr.

The story: A Kentucky high school is rife with Confederate symbols. [Link updated 2/26/2007 to one that works.]

The quote:

“To us it’s not about the hatred,” said Tiffany Owens, an 18-year-old cheerleader at Allen Central High School in eastern Kentucky. “I have colored friends around here and they never say anything.”

Update (12/12):: Steve Gilliard points out a couple of things. First, that Kentucky not only didn’t secede and was therefore not part of the Confederacy, but that more Kentuckians fought for the Union in the Civil War than for the CSA.

Further, he quotes historian Ken Burns, who points out that most of the states that adopted the Confederate naval flag (the “Stars and Bars”) did so in the 1950s during the desegregation movement. Ergo, the flag was about preserving segregation, not about anyone’s heritage.

From the Consumer Product Safety Commission: GAMO USA Corp. Recalls Air Rifles That Can Unexpectedly Fire.

The following is true. If you hear this story someday and think it’s an urban legend, drop me a note and I’ll get you in touch with the actual participants.

My sister in law — we’ll call her “Dee” — went out with her husband (”Jay”) while Jay’s teenage son stayed at home. For unimportant reasons, Jay’s son put out the pilot light of their gas stove, and believed that because the burners went “click, click, click” without lighting, the gas was off.

This turns out not to be the case.

Some time later, Dee and Jay returned home to the unmistakable smell of gas. The strong smell of gas.

Most people would have done one of two things: A) Leave immediately and call either the gas company or the fire department, or B) cautiously enter and investigate, hoping it’s a minor thing that can be quickly fixed.

Jay chose option C.

What was option C? It was “Ignite your lighter to verify that it is indeed gas you are smelling.”

It was indeed gas.

When the events that immediately followed Jay’s impromptu test were concluded, Dee pointed out to him that his method of testing for gas might need a little work. I wish I had been there to record her actual words.

His reply: “It was only a little fireball.”

(Thankfully, no one was hurt — had they arrived a half-hour later, though, there might have been a different ending.)

2 Kings 2:23-24:

23 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. “Go on up, you baldhead!” they said. “Go on up, you baldhead!” 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths.

Check out the great list at Church Hopping.

Also included: “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut off shall enter the assembly of the Lord.” (Deuteronomy 23)

Apparently it’s against Associated Press style to use the following contractions — contractions that I bet many of us use regularly.

I’ve, as in, “I’ve been looking for you all over.” Why? Because an apostrophe can only replace an “o” or an “i” (can’t for cannot or he’s for he is).

She’s as in, “She’s gone to the store.” Why? Because the apostrophe is replacing “ha” (”She has…”).

A friend of mine sent me a link to a page in Classmates.com. To access it, I needed to sign up. It’s free, so I did. When it asked for an e-mail address, I did what I always do: I used an address that would let me track any spam that came from their selling my address. I entered classmates at kantor.com, which is a working e-mail address.

It said, “That e-mail address is denied.” Huh? (I’ve never registered there before, so it couldn’t be that.)

I tried again, then tried “classmate” instead of “classmates.” No joy — that was denied, too.

So I set up a new alias and used that, which Classmates.com was happy to approve. So as far as it’s concerned, my e-mail address is fuckyou@kantor.com. Go figure.

If you pass gas while on a plane, lighting a match to conceal the odor is a bad idea. People get a little nervous when they smell burning matches in mid-air.

…at least, according to Amazon, by way of Eric Berlin.