Capitalism for the Kids

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Damn Rubes

They’re going to run me out of town

A newly appointed manager of a chocolate shop had to flee his job after branding the town a “s***-hole” online.

Steve Beall was moved from his home town in the North East to run the new Cafe Thorntons in the shipbuilding town of Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, two weeks ago.

But he kept an online diary, or blog, on the popular Myspace.com website – branding his new home “rough and boring”.

After news of his comments became known, locals descended on the shop – and the police had to be called. Beall, 20, has now left his post, and the boss of the chocolate firm has made a grovelling apology to the town.

Middle America’s soul

It tastes like creationism and grits:

“Cool” people think country is hopelessly square. Country singers neither cuss like rappers nor grapple so boldly with “edgy” subjects. “Some messages are clearly not allowable [in country music], like ‘Fuck tha police’ or ‘I got 99 problems and a bitch ain’t one’,” writes Chris Willman in his excellent book “Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music”. “But then there are messages that aren’t allowable in any other popular-music genre that flourish here, such as: I wish I’d been there when my mama died. I miss my husband in Iraq. Babies and old people rule. If I die, take care of my kids for me.”

Jesus is a Komodo Dragon

Jesus is doing it again, this time, as a Komodo Dragon (PS I heard the Virgin Mary stuck a snake up her puss — unsubstantiated rumor):

LONDON, England (Reuters) — Flora, a pregnant Komodo dragon living in a British zoo, is expecting eight babies in what scientists said on Wednesday could be a Christmas virgin birth.

Flora has never mated, or even mixed, with a male dragon, and fertilized all the eggs herself, a process culminating in parthenogenesis, or virgin birth. Other lizards do this, but scientists only recently found that Komodo dragons do too.

“Nobody in their wildest dreams expected this. But you have a female dragon on her own. She produces a clutch of eggs and those eggs turn out to be fertile. It is nature finding a way,” Kevin Buley of Chester Zoo in England said in an interview.

He said the incubating eggs could hatch around Christmas.