Stop me if you’ve heard this joke before:  On the Brazilian Day of the Dead, Ademir Jorge Goncalves walked into his own funeral after his family had thought he had died in a car wreck.  Goncalves had actually been out drinking. According to CNN, “the sight of… Goncalves alive shocked relatives, some of whom tried to jump out of the windows of the funeral home in southern Brazil.”

Man what I would give to be in his shoes to hear what all my friends and family really thought of me.

Even with the recession and some fast food chains doing well, Arby’s is clearly the one joint falling behind.

Perhaps most significantly, the meat of the business isn’t particularly good. On Friday, I stopped into an Arby’s for the first time this millennium. It was clean, and I noticed an array of products beyond the bare-bones menu I recall from my Midwestern youth. Moneybox may be a food snob, but he is a nondiscriminating connoisseur of street food and greasy fare who still makes the occasional run for the border at Taco Bell. (Don’t tell Mrs. Moneybox.) But even I had difficulty completing the reporting for this assignment. Forget about salads and vegetables. As I scoured the menu—the gyro, the french dip, the patty melt—I had difficulty identifying anything that had gone through less processing than uranium. A few bites of a roast beef sandwich slathered with goopy cheddar sauce, and I was done. On the food chain, the thinly sliced beef is about as far from Boar’s Head deli meat as Boar’s Head oven-roasted ham is from the vaunted jamón Iberico.

Well, okay, it probably is the roast beef.  But the restaurant doesn’t even have anything else to offer customers aside from it’s namesake sandwich.  Not a good business decision.

And not just any billboard.  It’s an anti-discrimination billboard! Oh. My. God. How could they?

You know what the best part of this news report is? The ugly lady at the beginning who has no idea she’s the worst kind of hypocrite.  “I cringed,” said Christine Lutz.  “I was disgusted at the same time.  I said how dare you take the scriptures and twist it to fit your needs.”  Which is probably what she does, I’m only assuming, when she yammers on and on about no abortion, no gay marriage, etc.

I could say some other stuff, but I’ll save that for when I’m drunk and at a bar.  [via]

The Big Picture is featuring beautiful photos of Martian Landscapes shot from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

It never ceases to shatter my mind’s comprehension and ability to process things when I read that astronomers have found galaxies 800 million-years-old and that “pinpoints when an era called the reionization epoch likely began.”  I don’t even know what reionization means but it sure as hell sounds important.

My life has been a constant struggle against the futility of existence, that when you think about things like the universe being 800 million-years-old you begin to question your own insignificance.  Still, despite that, the odds of humans even existing in the first place is miraculous.  Let’s not even begin to talk about evolution how we went from single cell organism to complex animals to sentient beings.  That’s impressive.

“So here’s the upshot: of the 4.6 Gy [gigayears] of Earth’s known history, there’s only been enough oxygen in the atmosphere for us to survive for about 0.5 Gy. For roughly 90% of the Earth’s history we couldn’t even breathe the air. And about 10-25% of the time, there have been ice ages so savagely fierce that the glaciers reached the tropics: odds are good that any meat probe landing on solid ground during these periods would rapidly die of exposure. So historically, Earth has only been inhabitable about 8% of the time — assuming you are lucky enough to find some solid ground. Once you factor in the random surface distribution, we’re down to about 2% survivability.”  Almost enough to make you believe in a divine being.  Almost, but not quite.

So now that the Health Care Bill passed Congress (despite not being reformy and including the passing of the dreaded Stupak Amendment limited women’s health care access), it turns out that heavy-set Americans aren’t too keen on the bill.

The New York Times has graphed out the jobless rate for men and women of different races to better understand how the recession has affected each group. If you ever need to emphasize the importance of a college education, this graph is a good place to start.  All you have to do is show them the difference between the jobless rates for those without a high school diploma and those with a college degree.

I find Jon Stewart’s impression of Glen Beck pretty great, unnerving for sure, but still great. Gotta love those inane FOX news chalkboard moments.

I’m not sure why those responsible for erecting a statue to a beloved children’s television icon would design a scary, craggy monster looking statue; but then again, this is Pittsburgh (I have no factual basis to make that claim)?

The six-year project was unveiled on a drizzy day yesterday with the 11-foot bronze statue as a center piece to a children’s tribute area.  Still.  Did NO ONE look at the statue?!?  It is as frightening as the actual Fred Rogers was comforting and inviting.  It looks like the mythical Jewish rock Golem.

This sucks: “In 2005, newlyweds Julie and Mike Boyde of Ambridge, Pennsylvania spent their wedding night at a bed and breakfast, where, for the first time since becoming a couple, they had intercourse without a condom. Immediately afterward, Julie was in excruciating pain. Doctors would eventually diagnose her with a rare and incurable disorder known as seminal plasma hypersensitivity, meaning Julie is allergic to her husband’s sperm.”

She goes on to say on a scale of 1 to 10, the pain is about an eight or nine for a full 24-hours after intercourse.  I don’t know if she’s using my pain scale (10 being decapitation, one being napping in a field of daisies), but this allergy sounds pretty awful to have.

I don’t have anything insightful to say about the tragedy at Fort Hood yesterday except that the media’s handling of the event (blaming PTSD when he’d never been to combat, forcing events to fit into their narrative, the thinly veiled notion that he’s actually a terrorist or that jihadists have infiltrated the military) has been specious at best and at worst yet another reason to never watch network news. 

Still, when the early news broke yesterday, a conspiracy theorists co-worker of mine made the off-hand quip, “watch him turn out to be Muslim, possibly a sleeper terrorist that the right wing will use to their advantage.”  Odd, very odd.  Not that I believe that line of thinking. It’s just a tragedy all-around.

Nidal Malik Hasan’s religion says nothing more about Islam extremism than Timothy McVeigh’s and the Unabomber’s actions say about white men.

We know Afghanistan is a bad situation, or at least that’s what we’re led to believe.  It’s not a situation that decayed over night, which may surprise some who only watch the evening news. 

Still, it’s hard to have an sort of understanding about the country and the war.  Luckily, my good friend Zack served a tour of duty there, came home alive, and was able to shed some light on the complex nature of Afghanistan. 

However, if you don’t have a friend like Zack, then let me suggest you read this extensive analysis by Spencer Ackerman.  It’s really long, but at the end of it you’ll be much better informed about the whole situation regarding the strategies, the decision makers, and what the possible outcomes could be.

Good god, if there is anything more frightening than a bear, it’s the hairless variety.  Leipzig Zoo vets have been unable to determine what caused Dolores and all other female Spectacled Bears in captivity to suddenly go bald. “Some experts believe it could be due to a genetic defect though the animals do not seem to be suffering from any other affliction.  The bears, which originate from South America,  normally have fluffy dark brown fur and would now be growing a thicker fur coat to keep warm during the winter.”

Update: Yup, just as creepy when they are seen in motion.