Abram Sauer Online

Oh hey, here’s the one of several videos of Wisconsin legislator Jeff Wood getting arrested for DUI. Look out for that first step Jeff, it’s a dooooooozzzzie!

WKRG.com News

“What the hell is that noise?”

That was my first thought upon entering the post office in the small Wisconsin town yesterday. I was there to mail a package of tax documents. The small post office was overwhelmed with the chirping of birds. Baby birds. Chicks. The post office was full of chirping chicks.

The chicks were all in small cardboard boxes with holes and one of the attendants was weighing each one and posting it. Yes, the chicks were being mailed. It was a bizarre sight and sound. The postman even gave me a look inside one box.

Apparently, the USPS calls this “special handling,” which “is for unusual items that need to be handled specially through the mail – like live poultry and bees. For these items, Special Handling is required. Your package will receive preferential handling to the extent that it’s practical in dispatch and transportation.” (Bolding, mine)

Mail order your poultry today!

Left: North Dakota Rep. David Weiler: “David Alan Weiler, 44, was charged Friday with Class A misdemeanor simple assault-domestic violence. He pleaded not guilty. The police report said Nicole Weiler reported David Weiler became angry and punched her in the face several times. The report did not say what began the alleged dispute… David Weiler pleaded guilty in April 2009 to Class B misdemeanor simple assault for assaulting his wife on March 27.”

Right: Wisconsin Rep. Jeff Wood: “State Rep. Jeff Wood fought to save his job Wednesday, expressing remorse for a past drunken driving offense but saying he would fight charges in two subsequent arrests. Wood, who said he had no memory of his most recent arrest in October 2009 for driving under the influence, conceded he’s struggled with alcoholism and admitted to driving drunk in December 2008. Wood also testified that the stress of his re-election bid in 2008 pushed him to drinking ‘pretty much daily.’ But he said he would contest charges related to his two arrests in September and October 2009, which he linked to prescription medications.”

Here’s the story of a Wisconsin girl being charged with first-degree reckless homicide for sharing some of her relative’s prescription drugs with a friend who then died.

She’s 14 years old but being tried as an adult anyway.

Red Box movie rental stations are great. For $1 per day you get a recent release. Unlike Netflix, which appears to have so many users now that the “Long Wait” tag is basically the default setting for any newly released film anyone might even be remotely interested in seeing. Red Box though: It’s fast. Economical. Efficient. Easy. So I expect they will soon be somehow removed by the film industry.

One enjoyable detail of Red Box is the knock-off B films meant to capitalize on popular current releases. Right now there is a film floating around in there titled “Alice.” Alice is no total shitburger though. It stars Tim Curry and Kathy Bates as the Red Queen.  It appears to have been some kind of TV show that was shown on the SyFy (Sci-Fi) channel. So how does it stack up?

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Something tells me this Beaver Dam, Wisc. bar isn’t a legal brand extension.

This charming lady is Laura Francese. Not only a Buffalo Bills cheerleader, she is also a bit of an avid outdoorswoman. And I don’t mean she likes camping in the back of the minivan in the parking lot at Lake George. No, Laura likes killing things that had parents (and presumedly, eating them). This includes deer, boars and fish. Yes, she shoots fish with fucking arrows! Here is her Biffalo Bills “Jills” cheerleader page. Her favorite color is pink and she “adores every animal.”

Here is her personal hunting page of her killing all those animals she adores.

And that’s all well and good. Nothing blows off steam after a season of having to cheer for Terrell Owens like shooting something through the spleen with a sharp rod. But what is this?!

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Student newspaper The Badger Herald recently made the very stupid decision to run a Holocaust-denying ad on its website. The editor’s defense? “As much as I hate what I think Bradley Smith [the man who bought the ad] was trying to say in that ad, and as much as I hate what the Holocaust deniers are saying, they do have a right to say it.”

Um… I see a fine future for this Jason Smathers fellow; In the current climate who doesn’t want an EIC who will take any amount of ad money for any crazy thing?

Following last year’s “East Coast Jewish Honeys” rap, the University of Wisconsin-Madison student body is quickly redefining the campus from a hotbed of crunchy hippie liberal idealism to one of cultural intolerance and antisemitism. That’s not going to help property values.

Full Disclosure: I wrote various (terrible) articles for The Herald’s competition “The Cardinal” years ago just before the Cardinal, the “commie” student paper, went bust after a century.

Russ Darrow, an auto-dealer in Wisconsin, is giving away a free iPad with every Mazda purchase. The commercial in its entirety.

National Public Radio (90.7 in Wisconsin; <3) carried a round-table discussion with scientists on promoting reliable science and technology news?  One subject was how scientists could “spice up screenplays with science.”

The scientists recognized the idea of “product placement” as a powerful force. And some argued that there should eb an effort for “reality-based science” to be the “product”:

“Well, we actually recognize the power of Hollywood to inspire people, to inspire imaginations. When I was working as a journalist, I always would talk to scientists about what made them want to become a scientist. And invariably it would be a book they read, a movie they saw, or someone they met, but in general it was this entertainment industry.

It has the power to reach people with a very strong, inspiring message and it can get across very broad, general messages about, you know, the good or bad of science. And so this is a way of doing that by essentially finding a way to get entertainment people and scientists in a room together and talking.”

The panel discussed very specifically how it could work:

“It’s good when it’s done well. For many, many years I was on and still am - on advisory boards to Hollywood, and I keep trying to tell them that it’s not so much your job to tell the science story, but to tell the science process, because that’s not where people are going to get their science information, so you need an accurate thing.”

With some amusing anecdotes, speaking of The Day After Tomorrow:

“…big special effects. One of the things that our other speaker, Sid Perkowitz, brought up during our session was, okay, yeah, the science was ridiculous in terms of the time scales on which it happened, but it did have a measurable impact on people’s attitude towards climate change. People came out of there with a sense of immediacy and urgency that they did not get had they happen to see “Inconvenient Truth.”

Plus, it has scientists getting emotional about climate change deniers. Something you don’t always se. It is as enjoyable as it sounds:

“I completely agree and I got to put down the blogosphere. The blogosphere is one of the worst places to go for information, because, unlike Paul and others, most public people are not going to spend three hours a day doing this. We really need to reestablish the mainstream media in putting some specialists back in who can smell the north end of a southbound horse, because most general assignment reporters can’t and certainly their editors can’t.”

Listen to the whole wonderful thing.