The Anti-Love Boat, Tim Tebow, and Move Over Las Vegas its Fargo!..North Dakota!

Were Going To Fargo, Baby! ....FARGO! - You may be surprised to learn that North Dakota actually has a Tourism department with the thankless job of trying to entice people to actually come to North Dakota. The dream is to have a plane full of tourists fly into Fargo which doesn't involve a emergency landing on its way to somewhere else. Below is their latest genius promotion. Look at it and let it sink in for a moment:

So let's say you are a strapping young lad with money to burn and wild oats to sow. Why waste your time in Las Vegas, Miami Beach, or New Orleans when you can go to Fargo, eh? Pretty much feel free to write your own caption below but my top favorites:

'And dude you wanted to go to Bismarck (high five)'

'So in No'rleans you throw beads to get chicks topless, so how's that work here?'

'The 4H Hokie Pokie? Were so there man!'

Who Knew...that Eli and not Peyton would be the Manning with the most Super Bowls? - With Giants' latest SB win, Eli has 2 Super Bowl rings to Peyton's 1. And to add insult to injury Eli won both over Peyton's arch-nemesis, Tom Brady and the New England Patriots. Anyone else have a feeling Thanksgiving at the Mannings could get interesting when Peyton tries to pull the big brother card?

Who Knew...that Michele Williams and not Katie Holmes would be the breakout actress from Dawson's Creek? - When we first watched Dawson's Creek we always thought that Katie's spaced out , ineffectual performance was just her character. Evidently that was basically upper limit of her acting ability.

In American politics, There Actually Are Some Things Money Can't Buy - This past month on January 18th you may have noticed Wikipedia, along with a host of other social media sites went black for a day to protest SOPA or Stop Online Piracy Act, the latest in a string of really bad ideas to come from the US Congress. Under the law, say you decided to share the latest funny moment from The Office over Facebook (yes, I know The Office jumped the shark long ago, but hypothetically speaking work with me here) In essence the Gov't could order Facebook to shut down your account and you could be fined or face jail time, because you technically stole copyrighted material and pirated it over the Internet.

The more you learn the more the flaws in the law become obviously apparent. Like how could Facebook enforce it? how could Gov't enforce it? how would anyone actually know The Office was still on TV? etc. Which is why public outcry managed to drown out the millions of dollars major entertainment companies lavished on lawmakers to try to enact SOPA. After that blackout day, majority of Congresspeople who supported it quickly backtracked and the law is about as dead as Tori Spelling's career.

In response I'd like to propose for Congress the IDIOT Act. No acronyms, just an act that says lawmakers must actually understand technology before trying to pass laws to regulate it. During the blackout, many congresspeople who sponsored were outed as having violated their proposed law on their own social media pages. Besides I don't know about you but those FBI Warnings they put at front of DVD's put the fear of God into me if I ever thought about pirating the latest crap TV show so why would we need SOPA?

Breaking Health News: Its good to have blood in your fat stream - Paula Deen, the queen of buttah, announced she has Type II Diabetes. Here's where you insert your shocked face that someone could get Diabetes from high fat, greasy, fried cooking. Of course in true American fashion she decided to capitalize on it by teaming up with Pharmaceutical company NovoNordisk to be their celebrity spokesperson for a new line of Insulin products. In business terms it's a WIN-WIN. Paula Deen's fans gets Diabetes from her recipes and then need high priced Insulin products to treat it. For all you Business students this is what they call a revenue stream.

For The Love of God - I'm sure Tim Tebow is a nice guy and his deeply held Christian convictions are sincere. But having grown up in a generation where we watched holier than thou religious leaders proclaim to be living embodiment of Jesus only to fail spectacularly (regardless of whether Evangelicals ever took notice). So it's not I'm rooting for Tebow to fail so much as waiting for the other shoe to drop.

What I teach my kids about faith is that no one is perfect, we will always have moral lapses but that's OK. It's part of the process for gradually becoming a better person because faith is lifelong process of learning about yourself in relation to God. The danger is in thinking and proclaiming that you are perfect and you alone speak for Christ. Because then you are just setting yourself up for failure since God has a way of making fools out of those people (just ask Eugene Robinson or better yet Google 'Eugene Robinson+That Super Christian football player busted for prostitution night before Super Bowl 33+that football player who gave up the game winning TD in Super Bowl 33 presumably because he was distracted from his arrest the night before')....

....Because the only universal absolute I know is this - God does not care about the outcome of football games. Or beauty pageants. Or the Country Music Awards. Or the MTV Music Video awards. Or the winner of American Idol. I'd like to think God has more focus on helping refugees in a war zone reach safety than petty little contests whose outcome is only symbolic in nature. So can we stop thinking Tebow leading the Broncos to an 8-8 record and sneaking into the playoffs was caused by the divine hand of the Almighty. It was the Broncos' defense and special teams, duh!

Karma Really Is A Bitch - According to study in the Journal of Sexual Health from The Univ. of Maryland Medical Center, as many as 50% of penis fractures seen in their ER (A moment for men to reflex in pain) were happened to men while in the act of infidelity (A moment for women to laugh hysterically). Researchers theorize men in the act of cheating may be more under pressure therefore more likely to miss or accidentally hit something hard (well harder than it). Might explain the prolonged absence of Ashton Kutcher from the set of Two And Half Men.

It Was Sort of Like The Titanic...minus the romance, iceberg, or chivarly - When the Italian cruiseliner Costa Concordia got stranded on a sandbar on to the Tuscan coast, it helped ensure that the phrase 'Italian Maritime Safety' will become the hot, new comedic punchline of the year. In engineering theory, major system failures usually do not start from one big mistake but rather from a series of small mistakes that snowball into one big 'We're Sooo F***ed' moment exemplified below:

#1 The ship deliberately went off course so one of the crew members could wave to family onshore.

#2 Being so close to shore, the ship's captain Francesco Schettino should have been manning the bridge but was instead having dinner with a hot Russian passenger presumably in the pursuit of trying to get some.

#3 In American maritime law, cruise ships cannot leave port without conducting a lifeboat drill, just in case that 1 in million chance something goes wrong does come to fruition, crew and passengers know what to do. The Costa Concordia never had such drill because the crew apparently had other more important things to do like trying to score with hot Russian passengers.

#4 Without this instruction, the scene on-board after hitting the sandbar resembled one big Cluster F*** since no one knew where to evacuate safely. The crew having never been properly trained abided by the old maritime tradition of women and children first...it was every man for himself leaving stranded passengers to swim for shore on their own.

#5 Capt.Schettino gallantly stayed on-board til every passenger was safe...actually jumped in the first lifeboat and high-tailed it to shore. Leaving the Italian Coast Guard to have to run rescue procedures on-board.

#6 Someone forgot to put Celine Dion's 'My Heart Will Go On' in the CD player to add the ambiance of the scene.

When politics becomes Cancerous - If you think about it cancer is the ultimate equal opportunist. It does not care if you are rich or poor,  it does not care if you are Liberal or Conservative, it does not care for which race you are or ethnicity you come from, it does not care for gender, geography, age, or religion. It also doesn't care if you have health insurance which is why it was disheartening to see The Susan B. Komen Foundation undo 20 years of goodwill with one bad mistake.

Last week Komen tried cutting off Planned Parenthood with funds to provide breast cancer screenings for low income women, it ultimately was revealed the reason were its Pro-Life Board members did not like that PP provides abortions. Technically as a man I should not care about the abortion debate but this exemplifies why I have such disdain for the Pro-Life movement. They place an almost cult-like stature to the human fetus, and the fact they were willing to sacrifice lives of grown human beings in the name of protecting a fetus regardless of the circumstances surrounding an abortion reveals a distorted pathology.

Now being Pro-Choice, I consider it sad when abortion occurs since so many couples who desperately want a child and can't have one would gladly adopt one. But every situation different so who can really judge except a woman and her doctor. A logical solution to reducing abortion seems to me is to reduce unwanted pregnancies but that's where the Pro-Life folks get really weird. They also tend to be anti-contraception and anti-sex education, which for me explains what they are really about. The Pro-Life movement has never been comfortable with women taking control of their sexuality and reproduction which makes Planned Parenthood for them the ultimate evil. Never mind only 3% of PP involve abortion with rest focused on giving uninsured women access to reproductive health care.

Oh And One Other Thing About Komen... - College students taking Public Relations 101 in the future will study from the Komen-Planned Parenthood fiasco that bad PR can grow exponentially in the age of the internet. Tax returns showed that Komen annually only gave 25% of its charitable proceeds to actual research in combating breast cancer with rest going to Administrative and Marketing costs. Really?

I'm not a non-profit guru but seems like that number should be reversed. Every October I gave money to Komen and wore pink to show support because with a wife and two daughters breast cancer may one day affect me. But if only a quarter of every dollar is going towards fighting breast cancer then why am I donating? Komen says the marketing portion was about raising awareness but breasts tend to raise awareness all by themselves, since women already have them and men like to look at them. Until Komen gets its shit together I won't be giving a dime.