Pleading the Fifth

Two hundred and twenty five years ago, John Hancock woke up with a large hangover and said, “Damn! I knew I should have made everyone sign that thing right away.”

You see, John Hancock signed it on July 4 and was the only one to do so. The others didn’t sign until July 19 at the earliest, the official signing ceremony. When the first copies of the Declaration of Independence were disseminated, they bore only Hancock’s signature. And now he’s dead and another posthumous advertiser, like Fred Astaire with that stupid vacuum cleaner and Einstein with Pepsi. There’s really nothing that gets my goat like seeing dead people endorsing product. Every time I see John Wayne with a Coors, I retch.
So here’s to you, John Hancock. May you rest in peace, and ignore the fact that your famous signature is now a trademark of a company founded nearly seventy five years after your death.

Nevertheless, Hancock was really wealthy; having inherited an ungodly sum at the age of 27, so he might not be so against the company’s usage of it. Another of our founding fathers who got his wealth by happenstance was Alexander Hamilton, who was a prototypical Republican in that he wanted to use the power of government to aid the wealth holders. I think it’s terribly ironic that in the famous ideological dispute between Hamilton and Jefferson it is Jefferson who is remembered and revered by history, yet it was Hamilton’s side that won.

This is beginning to interest me, so I’ll pick it up next time.

They fought for my right to post LAPIs

This jury has had to sit through over five hours of hard core sexual videos in the trial they are deciding in New Orleans. I think if I was in New Orleans, I would be very unhappy with the District Attorney that decided to bring that case to trial.

Shades of Candiru: two New Guineans have died after fish apparently bit off their wankers. Ouch.

Not a LAPI, but an interesting tale of the blog: I found this photo, reputedly of an entire iceberg a few weeks ago and was amazed. I posted it to 1142 and Brad rapidly pointed out that the photo is not real. The woman whose site I found it on got the picture from her mom.
My mom sent me the same picture two weeks ago and I got to give her the same debunking. The web is weird.