"While It's Always Dangerous to Anthropomorphize..."

When given a choice between steady rewards and the chance for more, monkeys will gamble, a new study found.

And they'll keep taking risks as the stakes rise and dry spells get longer....

The male rhesus macaque monkeys were shown either of two lights on a screen. Looking at a 'safe' light yielded the same fruit juice reward each time. Looking at the 'risky' light meant a larger or smaller juice reward. In the first test, the average reward was the same over time regardless of which light they chose.

The monkeys overwhelmingly preferred to gamble, even when the game was changed so that gambling yielded less juice over time.

'There was no rational reason why monkeys might prefer one of these options over the other because, according to the theory of expected value, they're identical,' said Duke University Medical Center neurobiologist Michael Platt.

Okay fine. So let's change the odds. In test two, the researchers made the average payoff for the risky target less than for the safe target.

'We found that they still preferred the risky target,' Platt said. 'Basically these monkeys really liked to gamble.'

These monkeys, apparently, also liked to smoke, drink, and whore around with airport motel cocktail waitresses; they liked signing "Bobo needs a new pair of shoes," shaking the bones, and losing everything but the red of their widening, ruby asses when they crapped out; and they liked bananas, because, well, they're monkeys.

The one gamble the monkeys wouldn't go for, though, was a state-supported lottery to benefit public education. As one monkey said through an interpreter, "That's a sucker's bet."

And They Didn't Say There Were Drugs or Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Bags, Either

Black people loot, white people borrow. Racist photo captions by Yahoo News/AP illuminate more than Katrina's aftermath.

But nowhere did Yahoo/AP imply that the blacks were carrying raped and murdered white women in those garbage bags. Since they're only "looting," I consider this otherwise offensive slur an advancement in race relations.

Where's the Sanctity of Marriage Act when You Really Need It?

JUDGE SILVERMAN: Friends and relatives, we are gathered here today to witness the marriage of Allison and Cary. To do so, we must perform these vows in an act of ceremony.

But what are these things: to wed, to marry, to take a wedding vow? They are what the philosopher J. L. Austin, in his study How to Do Things With Words, calls “speech acts,” of which there are two different kinds: constative speech acts, whose primary attribute is that they say something; and performative speech acts (of which this ceremony is an example), whose primary attribute is that they do something....

Although we've just begun the ceremony—or have we?—some interesting questions have already gathered on the horizon: Is this set of words, so far, “accepted”? Are they “appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked”? Are we executing the procedure “correctly” and “completely”? Is it enough simply to say, “Do you, Allison, take Cary to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

ALLISON: “I do.”

JUDGE SILVERMAN: “And do you, Cary, take Allison to be your lawfully wedded wife?”

CARY: “I do.”

JUDGE SILVERMAN: As it turns out, it is enough, and the words just uttered by both Allison and Cary are sufficient—but not because of the words themselves.

First of all—according to Austin and according to the law—the words must be meant “seriously” and not self-referentially.

The problem with that, though, as Jonathan Culler has pointed out in his discussion of Jacques Derrida's critique of Austin, is that the distinction between serious and nonserious is always uncertain, always subject to deconstruction, and any attempt to solve that problem by insisting on the “proper” context for a statement is bound to fail....

It's because his work inspired others into flights of crap like this that Jacques Derrida was assassinated by wet works agents of the French and American governments anyway.

What?

Oh, come on. You don't really believe a 74-year-old man just "developed" pancreatic cancer, do you? How naive.

Theirs Is the Superior Society. No, Correction: They're Going to Hell

On the sex toy floor, there was a large wall with dozens and dozens of cans - all of them in different colors and sizes, and all of them with different naked cartoon girls on them. A great deal of Japanese men were perusing this wall, carefully studying and comparing the different cans before making their decision. With nothing in English, it took me a few minutes of analysis to figure out that the cans were actually fake vaginas. ...

Yes, I bought one, purely out of curiosity as to what might be inside. ...

This reminds me of a story I know I'm going to regret telling, but here goes: Quite a few years ago I was passing through New York for some reason or another, and one night I went out bar-hopping with a couple friends. We stumbled out of the last bar around 3am, drunk and giddy, laughing and tripping as we walked back towards our hotel. On the way we passed a porno store, which aside from the occasional pizza place was the only thing open at 3am. I'm not sure why - I think one of my friends wanted to buy a magazine - but we went in, ...The most absurd thing we found was a large plastic beer can - meant to look like "Coors Light," or something, but much larger - and when you unscrewed the cap at the top, there was a latex vagina inside, that you were meant to stick your dick in and fuck the can. Well, not really "fuck" the can, exactly, but masturbate with it....

So of course we have to buy the beer can vagina, because we're drunk and it's funny, and we figure we'll find some entertaining unintended use for it. So we paid for it and continued on our merry way back to the hotel. Once there we said our goodbyes and retired to our rooms, and I realized that somehow I'd gotten stuck carrying the bag from the sex store. "Maybe I should just try it. Just see what it feels like..." You know. Just for kicks, right? So you know what? I fucked it. Yeah. I fucked a plastic beer can. I fucked the shit out of that can. And you know what? It felt alright. It did the trick. That is, until it was all over. Until the moment after, when I was hit by a sobering freight train of humility, looking down at my dick stuck inside a latex vagina housed in a plastic beer can. Moments like that you start to question everything - "How the hell did it come to this? Who am I? What am I doing with my life?"...

The next morning, when the subject of the previous night came up and someone said, "oh, where's that funny beer can thing we got? Rob, you had it, right?" And everyone looks at me, and I just stare at them for a moment, and then say, "...I fucked it. I fucked it and I hated myself, and now it's gone." There was a slight pause, followed by uproarious laughter. The ridicule took months to subside.

Anyway, back to weird Japanese sex toys."

I'm convinced, "Tokyo" is Japanese for "New Orleans." Sure, differences abound. Tokyo's a lot bigger, and its resident speak English to a reasonable degree. And there's the whole Asian thing. I grant you all that. Still, rising above those differences is the overpowering sense that in both of those places, you'd have to go out of your way to find an appetite that would frighten the locals.

I like that in a city.

In fact, if I'm found dead of unnatural causes, I hope it's in one of those wonderful places, laid low by some appetite, fetish, or apparatus catering to one or the other, and I hope it causes the police officer or emergency medical technician who finds me to say, "Now, there's something you don't see every day." (I can't tell you how much I hope he's saying it in Japanese.)

I've Got Four Words for the Teens Who Can Remain Celebate for Five Months: Welcome to Biff Country

No Sex Please, We're Teenagers is the brainchild of Christian youth workers Dan Burke and Rachael Gardner, who beg the question, "Where's a sexually active priest when a couple of kids really need one?"

The duo are to set up a "Romance Academy" to teach the teenagers the ways of good old-fashioned courting, rather than the booze-fuelled romp that led to one of the young folks, 15-year-old Wesley, losing his virginity at the age of 12.

Of the teens, all from Harrow in northwest London, three will start the show with their virginity intact.

They include 17-year-old Andre, who became a Christian after hearing a speech on saving sex for marriage...

That must have been some speech.

The only speech that ever made me celibate was "No. Not with you. Not ever." And it had a limited shelf life.

Remember Mary Kay Letourneau? Well, He's the Mary Kay of the Horsey Set. Or He Was. Rest His Soul

Growing up in Seattle, we always knew those motherfuckers in Enumclaw were weird, but 'the farm?' We had absolutely no fucking idea that the shit existed, I swear.

It's been said, no man know-eth the hour and manner of his death. And while I'm not one to argue with scripture -- or something I cobbled together that sounds scripture-ish -- I can say this with some degree of certainty. Though I have no clue as to the hour, true enough, I know this about the manner: It won't be because Trigger forgot the safe word.

And that link IS NOT SAFE FOR ALL READERS: IT INVOLVES CONGRESS BETWEEN A MAN AND A HORSE (a picture is included with the article). You've been warned.

Whoa.

"Just as Keanu Reeves fought against the powers of evil, a priest comes to help people fight against sin. There is a battle out there," explained Father Jonathan Meyer, associate director of youth and young adult ministry for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.
He made the comments in an interview with Catholic News Service about a new vocations recruitment poster being distributed by his archdiocese.

The poster, which is modeled after an advertisement for the movie "The Matrix," is the brainchild of Father Meyer. It features a priest in full cassock -- and the requisite Roman collar -- holding a cross in one hand and a rosary in the other. And he is wearing sunglasses.

That simple juxtaposition provides the mood Father Meyer said he was aiming for when creating the poster -- he wanted to say something about today's seminarian.

And what he wanted to say is, "If you have to be touched by a priest -- and you do (we're putting Rohypnol right in our wafers now) -- wouldn't you want it to be by this guy?"

Really, that's what the small print beneath "The Catholic Priesthood" says. You can't see it because that picture is too small, but, trust me, if you could read it for yourself, that's what it would say.

What I'm Listening To

Just in case you were wondering, Yes, I am William Shatner's bitch. I'm not proud of it. I'm just saying.

And Bill, if you're reading this, call me.

That's Just The Booze Talking (and I'm Listening and Laughing)

Finally, after hemming and hawing and playing with our wine glass, we blurted out a confession. “I just saw Leonard Maltin’s dong,” we said.**

“Pardon me?”

“The film critic. Leonard Maltin. I saw his dong. He was standing at a nearby urinal and I just had to look.”

“You had to look?”

“Well, how was it? Was it nice?”

...

“Was it nice? I’m not sure how to answer that.”

“I mean, was it trustworthy? Leonard Maltin has a face you can trust. He’s very smiley and seems like he’d be a good next-door neighbor. Like, he’d water your plants when you were on vacation and fetch your mail for you. That’s what I mean....

“Like versus yours. You have a completely untrustworthy penis. If it could get up and walk around on its own, it would probably commit crimes. It just looks like it wants to get into trouble. But Leonard Maltin’s probably isn’t like that at all.”

For the first time in our life, we were struck dumb. We had learned more about our lovely friend and ourselves than what would have been dug up by years of cohabitation and couples therapy. We learned that the woman who regularly allows us to see her naked thinks our dick has criminal tendencies. We also learned that other men’s dicks can be seen as “trustworthy.” And we learned that Leonard Maltin is packing a good eight inches, which is probably the source of that beatific smile of his.

Thank you, Leonard Maltin, for the gift of your unexpectedly large penis.

You know that voice in your head, the one you hear when you’re reading? Yeah, that one? Even with that voice, I never thought I’d hear myself say, “Thank you, Leonard Maltin, for the gift of your unexpectedly large penis.”

Never.

Harry Potter and the Magic of Puberty

During Harry’s second semester that year, he began to develop what we Muggles refer to as pubic hair. Now, try as Harry might to apparate himself from his freshly born curlies, it was to no avail.

Was everyone experiencing the same transformations Harry wondered? Being a Wizard in training certainly had its perks but one serious knock on Hogwart’s was that children were sent off at such a young age and didn’t have the opportunity to be corrupted by good Muggle television. Hence, Harry and his mates didn’t have the slightest chance to study pornography or the chance to have their imaginations sparked by the melony flesh of Cassandra on “Up All Night.” ...Months passed and Harry couldn’t keep his secret any longer.

“Dumbledore, can we talk?”

“Sure Harry, you know my door is always open.”

Harry stepped into his chambers and dropped his pants. “What’s with the hair? One night I’m casting a homework spell, the next thing I know I’m waking up with… with…. THESE!”

“Harry, perhaps you’d better have a seat. I’ve been through this before.”

Harry pulled up his trousers and took a seat in the massive Hagglestooth chair across from Dumbledore. That’s when Harry began to spill his guts. He told of the time he woke up in a hot sweat in the middle of the night and had to change his sheets and skivvies before his roommate Weasley woke up. Then there was this odd feeling he’d been getting every time he saw Hermione. It was especially strong when Hermione would fly her broomstick or practice casting her Expellarimus.

“It’s at times like that Dumbledore; I want to just blow my Floo Powder and apparate myself into Hermione’s bosom. Is that weird?”

I don't have anything against Rowling or her Hairy Potter series. Really.

What?

That?

That's a typo.

Tell Us about the Foreskin, Grandpa! Tell Us about Your Foreskin!

"I am covered and have overhang." R. Wayne Griffiths, 70 and a grandfather, is speaking frankly about his foreskin -- which really is the only way one can speak on that topic. More to the point, he is gleefully describing the sensation of having his foreskin back after decades of living with a circumcised penis. "It's delightful," he says.

I don’t know about you, but when 70-year-old grandfathers start talking about their foreskins, I move away – far, far away – and quickly, long before they can get to the “It’s delightful” part. But that’s just me, weird, prudish me.

Of course that Victorian pose is nowhere to be seen when grandma starts talking about her labia. Uh, uh, when that old girl starts getting gynecological, I’m all ears, rapt and encouraging, full of “mm, hmm”s and “you go, girl!”s. You should hear her. Really, there’s no comparison. Unlike granpa’s speaking frankly about his foreskin, grandma talking about her wizened love curtains, that’s good stuff.

Bow Your Heads in Appreciation of a Life

We are gathered here today to celebrate the life and memory of our dear friend Maker's Mark. A modest soul, Mark would splash himself liberally into shot and rocks glasses alike, eagerly taking the shape of the vessel into which he was poured with no pretensions no matter how strange.

... Ever a good friend and companion, Mark was always looking for opportunities to bring his friends closer together. Some of you in this room owe the joy (and shame) of your hookings up to Mark and his selfless matchmaking and generosity.

So young.... So loved.

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?!

I'm going to need a minute.

"Nobody Likes Hippies"

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Ten Precepts From The Art of War That Never Made It Past Sun Tzu's Editor.

BY JOHN KEARNEY

- - - -

1. When you sally forth to meet the enemy, show your contempt for him by the haughtiness of your prance.

...

8. Demoralize your enemy by whispering and giggling and then suddenly going silent as he draws near. When he asks what you were talking about, say, 'Oh, nothing.'

They had me at "prance."

From McSweeney's: No, no, I swear. The site has found the funny again.

Happy Anniversary to Meeeeeeeeee!

Things have been so hectic lately that I blogged right past my anniversary: I started this blog one year ago last month, and I can't believe I'm still going at it. (I would've thought some shiny new thing would have caught my attention by now.) Good on me, I say.

To mark the occasion, here's a link to the post that started it all way back when. Go back and remember the good old days, won't you?

And the first anniversary is the paper anniversary, so if you feel inclined to send a gift, remember, nothing says paper like money.

"LET'S EAT PILLS, EAT FOOD, AND EAT EACH OTHER"

I am looking for a woman, 18-35, who wants to spend the day/evening eating pills, drinking champagne, ordering food and eating each other and having wild, dirty sex. Must be attractive, pretty face, at least a b-cup, under 130 pounds. Photo is preferred

Dude, if these are the kinds of pills you imply they are, you can skip the picture. Ask for other things, like references for the "wild, dirty sex" or, perhaps, a bachelor's degree in nursing, because, trust me, for your Lost Elvis Weekend, you won't need pretty, nor petite (B-Cup, phbbt!). You'll need experienced, by which I mean someone who no matter what kind of trip the pills take her on can still perform acts of depravity so exciting they'll have you denting the hotel room walls with the force of your errant man goo and confounding the scholars of urological science with your consequentially raisined prostate for years to come (sorry).

"The nursing degree?" you say. "Why would I ask for that? Wouldn't a degree in the stripping arts be more appropriate?"

Questions like that make me wonder how you got your hands on pills and champagne in the first place, but in the spirit of charity in which this post is given, let me simply say you'll appreciated the earning of a nursing degree when the pills and champagne and erotic asphyxiation turn to bloating and incontinence and loss of consciousness. (And they will, they always do.)

Again, trust me on this.

The Onion: Why Somebody Always Around Every Time I Drop My Baby?

I love my baby so bad. I don't wanna smack him around. His older sister, Rywanda, that's the one I wanna fuckin' take down once in a while. But only 'cause she don't behave, not 'cause I like to hit my babies for no reason.

Besides, it wouldn't of happened if he hadn't been leaning over trying to grab that jingly-jangly thing off the toy shelf. I had him in my right arm and he, like, let go of my shoulder and was arching his back and spreading his arms, and I got my other hand on the grocery cart, so all a sudden he topples over! Like, that's fuckin' wack! Don't he know I can't watch his ass every second?

I've only dropped 'Drae maybe four times.

I love The Onion.

A Conversation with Fran Lebowitz, One of My Favorite Humorist

[Fran Lebowitz]: The one I really like is the least Law and Order-ish… I can’t remember his name …

SM: Is it the Law and Order spin-off with Vincent D’Onofrio? Criminal Intent? I love that one—it reminds me of Columbo.

FL: I love it too. But he’s not like Columbo, he’s like Sherlock Holmes. I was a great lover of Sherlock Holmes as a child, and that’s what I love about it. And it’s completely unrealistic. Unlike Law and Order, which seems pretty realistic most of the time, this character is completely unrealistic. You have this genius cop—and we all know, in the history of policemen, there’s never been a genius. It’s not the sort of gig that really attracts geniuses. It’s fun to imagine that a genius would actually be a policeman, though; and it’s our only opportunity to watch someone look at a dead body and start talking about Tibetan rituals. It’s funny, and I really like it.

SM: I find his monologue at the end of every episode—where he wraps everything up neatly and corners the bad guy into confessing—comforting, even if it’s the most unrealistic part of the show.

FL: You know, the reason it’s comforting is that it provides people who are disturbed with how idiotic the world is, with the idea that—should there be a very smart person in a terrible situation—that person would be listened to. That’s the thing that really attracts me to this show. Now, we all know that this guy would never be a cop. But we also know something much, much worse than that: anytime a person that smart appears someplace useful in society, they are not going to be listened to. Whereas, on this TV show, everyone, including his superiors, listens to him. More than that, they completely defer to him—the D.A., his captain. Why? Just because he’s smarter. We know the world works in exactly the opposite way.

Well, it's never worked that way in my experience, the smart guys getting listened to, not even in the academe, where you'd think something like that would matter. (Ha! You people are so naive sometimes.) In reality, it was probably worse there. There, I saw some of the brightest scholars -- frighteningly bright people -- get passed over in favor of the proles with the most pedestrian of minds. Sorry: There's no joke here, well, no intentional joke here. I'm just saying.

I really don't miss graduate school at all.

Harry Potter and the Hanoi Hilton

Stiv dropped Harry with a fat one to the mug and tossed him behind the couch. He didn't need the kid around for what came next.

...Thi Nhung's belly was heavy with the cheap green tea they used on nights like this.

"I ready, hot shot," she giggled.

Stiv got on his back and shimmied under the thick glass coffee table.

"All aboard!" he yelled, as Uggs helped her climb up.

Finally, there's a Harry Potter story for those of us who don't quite get the Rowling Harry Potter stories.

I can hardly wait for the movie. (What's David Lynch doing these days?)

Okay, I Was Reading McSweeney's Today: What Can I Say? I Was Drunk, I Needed the Money

There's something vaguely Space Age-y about 7-Eleven's new frozen dairy dessert StirCrazy. It's the first soft-serve ice-cream-like product that can be kept in the freezer case. ... This means that people who used to work for NASA dehydrating ice-cream sandwiches and turning tangerines into Tang are now working for 7-Eleven....

I figured there was some scary, new lab-invented additive in this stuff to keep it unnaturally soft, but a quick scan of the ingredients revealed only scary, familiar lab-invented additives (though the sheer number of them was impressive). Intrigued, I bought the cookies-and-cream flavor (other option: cookie dough). Ingeniously, the crushed Oreos are separated from the vanilla 'ice cream' by a thin layer of frozen chocolate. Less ingeniously, the cup is just a little too small to easily stir everything up without losing some of those precious cookie bits and/or inadequately distributing them. This is a problem because the 'ice cream' is so blindingly sweet that you need the cookies to temper it. That's right—the cookies serve as a de-sweetening agent...

Guess who's going to 7-11?

Should I lapse into a diabetic coma, everything you need to know is listed on my Health Alert message bracelet. The operator will give you some initial lip -- the EMTs swore they wouldn't come for me again after the Great Suzie Q-a-thon of '04, but I have it on fairly good authority that they have to -- so don't be dissuaded. Hmm, now that I think about it, don't give them my name -- and use my neighbor's address.

Thanking you while I can, Biff.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Lesser-Known Movie Prequels.

I liked pretty much all of these movie prequels, but my favorite has to be There Are Plenty of Mohicans

I Am So All Over This

Do you know what's great about the Utility kilt, you know, the kilt that made Seattle famous? Its sizing: You can get it in Beer Gut Cut.

Cliff's Notes, Bitches!

Commentary

With Sylvester, Rufus, and Chuck now decidedly "out of the closet,"” the situation erupts into conflict and violence. Sylvester seems incredibly conflicted in this chapter; his initial instinct is to leave, but Cathy manages to convince him to stay by appealing to his curiosity. Sylvester is both repulsed and intrigued by Rufus'’s affair with Chuck; just as Rufus saw elements of himself in Sylvester, Sylvester clearly sees parallels to his own situation in Rufus and Chuck's romance.

Although he is a Casanova himself, Sylvester has an obvious aversion to being played. He becomes hurt when it is revealed that Cathy didn'’t use her real name when she courted him at the nightclub, even though it has little bearing on his situation. Although he is unfaithful himself, he is stunned when, at the end of the chapter, a man answers the telephone at his house.

Glossary:

Deep shit: A difficult situation.

Y'all ass is crazy: Your entire ass is crazy.

Bitch, please: Used to express disbelief at a woman'’s words.

Club hoppin'’: Searching for sexual encounters or cheap thrills at nightclubs

I'ma: I am going to"

Who knew Cliff was down with the brothers? (Do the brothers still say, "down with"?)

Does Walter Cronkite Know about This?

This is why I can never be allowed to observe focus groups: I will surely bust through that one-way glass window and administer hard spankings to each and every participant who seems incapable of just paging through a newspaper, looking at headlines and pictures, and deciding whether or not there's something worth stopping on.

I think we've overlistened to people who never read the paper, and yet insist it include more about their neighborhoods, lives, and concerns. A newspaper is filled with criminals, celebrities and fools and I for one am happy when it doesn't include my life or neighborhood in theirs.

Then again, no one is interested in my new slogan for The Post: 'News Flash: Everything's Not Always About You,.'"

My local paper just went through one of these redesigns, so I can feel his pain. In one swift stroke, it went from being a decent paper to being a decent paper for dummies. It's a local version of the USAToday. Well, it's more like a USAToday that's been edited by a high school journalist. Who left his ritalin at home. The who, what, when, where, and why -- the foundations of newspaper writing -- are all there; it's just, now, because the stories are so truncated, they're more like Who?! What?! Where?! How?! and Why?! "Why?!" is exactly the point: What did newspaper publishing ever do to deserve this.

Admission: I love reading the newspaper. Sitting in a big comfy chair, with the morning paper and a cup of coffee, there's nothing better than that that doesn't involve sex and/or ice cream.

Or that's how it use to be. Now, thanks to focus groups and a fascination with making everything in our culture child consummable, everything's gone to hell in a handbasket.

Obviously, that's a longer post for another day. I'm in too foul a mood right now to write it.

So go read one of the blogs listed on the right, kids. Grandpa's grumpy today.

I, Monkey

According to Chinese lore, 'ink monkeys' were an itty-bitty variety of primate trained to mix ink, pass brushes, and turn pages. After a rough calligraphy session with, say, the 12th-century idealist philosopher Zhu Xi (who was said to keep a particularly loyal little buddy), these highly intelligent monkeys would bed down in a desk drawer or brush jar overnight, ready to pop back up like furry, 7-oz. versions of the Windows paper clip. ('It looks like you're writing the Confucian canon. Would you like help?') Scholars fed their ink monkeys peanuts and soybeans. And while their classic works survive, ink monkeys are said to have died out, lovable, undernourished, and overworked: miniature interns with tails.

Actually, that sounds a lot like what I do now. (Please don't stare at my tail: I'm sensitive.)

"Take That Out of Your Mouth! You Don't Know Where It's Been!"

During his legal career, Pakenham became something of a legend, and, 25 years on, accounts of his exploits are still current. During his appearance before an irascible and unpopular judge in a drugs case, the evidence, a bag of cannabis, was produced. The judge, considering himself an expert on the subject, said to Pakenham, with whom he had clashed during the case: 'Come on, hand the exhibit up to me quickly.' Then he proceeded to open the package. Inserting the contents in his mouth, he chewed it and announced: 'Yes, yes of course that is cannabis. Where was the substance found, Mr Pakenham?' The reply came swiftly, if inaccurately: 'In the defendant's anus, my Lord.'"

Probably the best inadvertent argument for smoking pot ever made.

(Thanks to Is That Legal? for the story and the link: I believe that site is going to make a obituary reader of me yet.)