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At least King of the Hill won’t need to awkwardly deal with the passing of Britney Murphey since it was canceled last season…

RIP

More proof that I’m on a version of The Truman Show and that everything revolves around me came this afternoon when I saw FoxNews.com’s front page headlining the existence of a short clip of Anne Frank on Youtube, which is the only footage of her that exists. I’ve had an Anne Frank obsession the last week and a half that won’t end until I know every relevant detail there is to know (which is how these things go) and have been watching and reading as much I can.

Synopsis of the story: The Frank family knew shit was going down and started planning to go into hiding in the annex of Mr Franks business building (a company called Opekta which sold a kit to make home made jam). They had to bump up the move after eldest daughter, Margot Frank was sent a summons to report to a work camp. “Fuck that” was the obvious response, and the family moved into the annex attic that night, taking whatever they could carry without looking suspicious and wearing several layers of their clothes since they couldn’t be seen with suit cases.

They were joined shortly afterward in their hiding place by family friends Mr and Mrs Van Pels and their teenage son Peter. Later, their dentist and friend Fritz Pfeffer (see my companion piece to this post I wrote for BetweenShowers.com here) was added after in inquiring to Miep Giess, one of the office workers who brought the hidden families food and supplies, on a place to hide.

Anne’s father, Otto Frank was the only one to survive.

This is one of the few television interviews Otto Frank gave. Sitting in one of the rooms of the Secret Annex, he is talking about his surprise at the things Anne Frank wrote in her diary. Her thoughts on life, her self-criticism: this was not the daughter he had known

Things I learned that everyone should know:

-The “E” at the end of her name is not silent. Her name is pronounced Ann-eh. kinda like “Anna” but with an ehh instead of the “uh” sound an “A” makes.

-If only whoever betrayed the family (no one knows who made the anonymous call to the Gestapo that gave the tip) had waited a month, Anne and maybe more probably would have survived (Anne died one month before the camp was liberated).

DEATH:

-She suffered. Her last months were pain filled in every sense, starting with seeing her precious diary thrown away by the German police as they ransacked the attic and ending with her death among piles of sick, dying and bodies in the infirmary hut at the camp where she died 3 days after her sister.

-If Anne had not been infected with Scabies (a skin infection caused by mites burrowing into your flesh), her whole family most likely would have lived. 1) because her mother and sister were selected to leave the death-work camp they were in and go to an actual work camp where most of the slave laborers lived but Anne was denied due to her scabies infection and her sister and mother chose to stay with her. and 2) Anne’s expected cause of death, Typhus, was caused by the scabies.

-If Anne had known her father (whom she was closest to) were still alive, I bet she too would still be alive. When the family arrived at the camp, families were immediately forced apart into 4 groups: first the men and women were separated and then each split into either off-to-the-work-camp or straight-to-the-gas-chamber. One of Anne’s friends who ended up in a neighboring camp from her heard from Anne that she believed her father was put into the straight-to-the-gas-chamber group and died that night. She (accurately) believed her mother to be dead and her sister Margot died while Anne was taking care of her. Anne died 3 days later, evidence would suggest, because she just gave up. Her whole family was dead and there was no light at the end of the pitch black hell tunnel she was in, and she just let her illness claim her. If she had known her dad was alive, I believe she could have hung on those 4 more weeks to be liberated.

I wrote a post last night about Ted Kennedy before anyone knew he had died, saying that he seems nice enough and everything but he’s a useless hack of a politician who should have resigned awhile ago. Now, while I have the deepest sympathy for his family and am not glad he’s dead or anything – I can’t help but not be indifferent towards his passing on account of his prementioned uselessness to the public he was supposedly serving and that other thing. The “other thing” being how he killed a girl and got away with it.

Since the news media has been respectful of the murder and not dwelled on it since it happened or since news of Kennedys death was released this morning, people have been taking to teh Googlez to find out more and indeed the second and 4th most searched term on the search engine is the Chappaquiddick “incident” and the 5th highest is the girl who died there.

At first I was going to just show the top 5, but then I saw 2 more in the 26-33 column to the right, so I included that also just for context.

It was a long time ago… though there isn’t really a statute of limitations on murder (or to be fair: “involuntary endangerment of life that only turned into manslaughter when the suspect leaves the victim to die a horrible death and doesn’t tell the police until the next day”).

In 1969, on the little island of Chappaquiddick on Martha’s Vineyard, Ted Kennedy was leaving a party, driving drunk with a 28-year-old girl he was banging and probably impregnated (oops) named Mary Jo Kopechn. He drove right off a frigging bridge and into the water but was able to escape the overturned vehicle and swim to safety… and then said oh well and went home probably to do a line of coke and masturbate. Wait, what happened to Mary Jo? Ya, she friggin drowned in the car and Kennedy not only left the scene of the accident, but didn’t say nuthin to nobody until Kopechne’s body was discovered the following day. Fortunately, there’s a happy ending for everyone who didn’t die that night: Kennedy apologized and denied being drunk or banging Mary Jo, was never indicted, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court accepted the request by Kennedys lawyers for the inquest on the matter to be conducted in secret.

Even though they found that a lot of Kennedys claims were not true and that he was at fault, nothing happened and Kennedy easily sailed to re-election as senator the following year, and every year since then.

Radio host Mark Levin told the story last month:

In 2004, I posted this video from the short lived Spike TV cartoon This Just In that references the crash at the end:

Don’t drive with Ted Kennedy!!!!

UPDATE: Former editor of Newsweek and New York Times Magazine, one of Kennedy’s close friends, Ed Klein, tells something called the Diane Rehm Show that Chappaquiddick jokes were high up on the list. full audio of the show here. The line comes at 30:10, or you can just listen to this little wow-moment isolated in the clip below:

I don’t know if you know this or not, but one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself. And he would ask people, “have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?” That is just the most amazing thing. It’s not that he didn’t feel remorse about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, but that he still always saw the other side of everything and the ridiculous side of things, too.

Out at dinner tonight, the subject of Ted Kennedy came up and I realized that he’s pretty douchie and useless as an American politician.

Throughout the years I always thought he was a pretty cool dude, seemed happy and decent enough and his critics always seemed over the line to me.

I never understood wtf Sean Hannity was whining about when I’d listen to him on the radio bring up Ted friggin Kennedy as an attack target. I could never understand how the hell this dude could be thought of as so relevant by people like Hannity. Likewise with Limbaugh, who would often refer to him as “the swimmer” (though I haven’t heard him make such references in a few years) and show Photoshopped pictures of the senator in a snorkel mask on his website (referring to that one time when he killed a girl he was having an affair with by driving off a bridge into 8 feet of water, drunk, one night and then leaving the scene to let her drown to death and only coming forward after police found the body). I always had a “dude. come on. it was a long ass time ago, give the guy a fkking break” about it. But now… not so much.

It was back a few months when Kennedy suggested a Portugese water dog for the Obama’s new pet when I realized my attitude on the “swimmer” jokes were starting to shift. Then I found out that Kennedy has one of the dogs himself and its named Splash and my WTF couldn’t be held back. Notsomuch because if you kill a girl by drowning that you then should never be able to have water-related things in your life and maintain decency, but because the hateful lefty fringe hippies would make exactly that rule if Kennedy was a Republican. That kind of double standard is just annoying.

Speaking of double standards: Kennedy is demonstrating his non-principalled political hackery douchiness, that bothers me notsomuch because it exists – cuz duh, politics – but because he is not called out and ridiculed by the mainstream watchdogs (paging John Stewart).

Seriously though, check this out: Kennedy wants his home state Legislature to take back a law it passed 2004 – at his urging – that stripped away the governor’s longstanding power to temporarily fill a Senate vacancy. He urged the change in law because the other Massechesettes senator was John Kerry and he was running for president at the time, which meant that if he won, he would obviously leave the senate and the governor would appoint his replacement. The problem with that was that Republican Mitt Romney was governor; and Kennedy didn’t want him to appoint a republican, so naturally he lobbied state Democrats to change the law so that Romney couldn’t name Kerry’s successor.

They followed his advice with gusto. When the final vote took place, the Boston Globe reported, “hooting and hollering broke out on the usually staid House floor,’’ and House Speaker Thomas Finneran acknowledged candidly: “It’s a political deal. It’s very raw politics.’’

It still is. Now that Massachusetts has a Democratic governor, Kennedy is lobbying to restore the gubernatorial power to name an interim appointee. That would guarantee Democrats in Washington two reliable Senate votes from Massachusetts, even if Kennedy isn’t there to cast one of them.

Ridiculous. Kennedy needs to GO. Not from the earth, (he has brain cancer and should live and be well for many more years – just not in the United States government), but from the frigging senate. He’s useless. He does nothing positive. He’s just a political bullying hack and should be consistant for once and LEAVE.

If Kennedy is sincere – if his chief concern is that Massachusetts not be left for months without the services of a full-time senator – then he should do the right thing right now: He should resign.

For well over a year, Massachusetts has not had the “two voices . . . and two votes in the Senate’’ that Kennedy says its voters are entitled to. Sickness has kept him away from Capitol Hill for most of the last 15 months. He has missed all but a handful of the 270 roll-calls taken in the Senate so far this year. Through no fault of his own, he is unable to carry out the job he was reelected to in 2006. As a matter of integrity, he should bow out and allow his constituents to choose a replacement.

There’s a reason Mayor Quimby, the lying, cheating, philandering, corrupt, career politician from the Simpsons has a Boston accent – he is a Kennedy parody. And we don’t need any Mayor freakin Quimbys in our real life government.

Ted Kennedy sucks and should go away from public “service” and enjoy retirement in the private sector while he struggles with his unfortunate disease.

UPDATE: While I was writing this blog, Ted Kennedy succumbed to the deterioration his brain cancer was taking and died at the age of 77.

100% awful: Jasmine Fiore, a former Playboy model who was found dead in a suitcase with her fingers and teeth removed, has been identified by her breast implants.

And as if to follow one of those “whats gross? – whats grosser than gross?” black humor jokes, the parents of Ryan Jenkins, the fugitive millionaire reality TV star sought in connection with the murder, have been accused of helping him to evade capture.

Also, if you’re trying to find her Playboy pictures, you’re out of luck because although she worked for Playboy in various capacities, she was never a centerfold and never posed nude for the magazine or any of its representations online or in print.

Fiore’s body was found in a trash bin in Buena Park, Orange County, (about 20 miles south-east of Los Angeles). Her frigging teeth had been pulled out and her fingers cut off, apparently to prevent the body from being identified. Investigators used the serial numbers on her breast implants to identify her, a spokesman for the Orange County’s district attorney’s office said.

And the murder suspect only makes it weirder more wtf-ish…

Authorities believe Mr Jenkins, a millionaire property developer who appeared on the VH1 show “Megan Wants a Millionaire”, fled via car, boat and on foot to enter his native Canada.

Investigators said his father’s private jet flew from Honduras to the US around the time Mr Jenkins made his escape.

They believe he has been in contact with his mother, who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, and, despite the international manhunt, she has allegedly been assisting him.

I feel like we skipped over this just a little too quickly. Reminder: “The victim had been badly beaten, all of her fingers had been cut off, and all of her teeth had been forcibly removed,” said a statement from the California prosecutors…

Now the suspect boyfriend found dead. ug…

Marc Lamont Hill is too bright a guy to be peddling this bad of a race-based FAIL. as O’Reo opined: dude lives his life non-culturally black, bleaches his skin white and chooses to in vitro 3 kids with 2 white parents and he’s a “Black icon”? um. how bout an “American icon” since there’s zero things “black” about him beyond his DNA.

Tonight O’Reilly read an e-mail from someone asking if Elvis is a white icon since his music crossed racial lines too. the answer is of course NO because that would be racist and reta–wait a tick…

No Zorbeez can sponge these tears.
No amount of Mighty Putty will heal my broken heart.
RIP u midnight stallion haired prince of sales, Billy Mays…

the Mays Family and Co-host Anthony Sullivan with Conan

I am pretty close with Billy Mays Jr, by which of course I mean that I follow him on Twitter, and he had the following to say for his late father:

# This feels like one of those times when I would call my dad and say “What should I do?” He’s still answering but now it’s from within.about 1 hour ago from UberTwitter

#wearblue4billy – Wear blue tomorrow in memory of Billy- I didn’t come up with this but it made me smile and my dad would surely be honored.about 4 hours ago from UberTwitter

All your replies and messages are a great comfort to me. Thank you all for the condolences.about 4 hours ago from UberTwitter

I’m thankful I got to talk to my dad last night. I miss him immensely already. But I feel him with me.about 5 hours ago from UberTwitter

With the family. Um… Not quite sure what to say right now. All the support from you guys does help.about 8 hours ago from UberTwitter

On my way to the house. He’s gone. I’m gonna be strong for him. Thank you for all the thoughts and prayers everyone.about 8 hours ago from UberTwitter

it seems to be all too real at this point. Thank you.about 9 hours ago from txt

My dad didn’t wake up this morning.. I’m sure you’ll all hear about it. It hasn’t yet hit me but it’s about to.about 9 hours ago from UberTwitter

Mays was unique in the infomercial world for not being a shameless huckster. None of his endorsed products, that I am aware of, have been shown to be junk that is incapable of performing the tasks claimed on their advertising. In addition to just appearing to be a pretty pleasant and genuine guy, Mays had a sense of realness about him that is lacking in both sales and showbiz, and he was holding a commanding lead in both arenas before his passing.

I would never condone violence against the ShamWow guy Vince, but I do feel us Mays fans are called upon to do SOMETHING to avenge his final wishes via “shamPow”…

I last saw Billy on the Tonight show talking to Conan with his co-host Anthony Sullivan about their new show Pitch Men.

First Ed McMahon cashed his final check, then God turned the Fawcett off and shortly afterward the same day, Michael Jacksons heart just beat it.

All media is a contest and thus every event has a winner and a loser.

WINNER: Ed McMahon.
He had the good sense to die when there wasn’t really any important news going on like a revolution in the middle east or whatever, so he soaked up his fair share of the obit spotlight. Where as poor Farrah got totally upstaged by the Jack attack, the lesser culturally significant McMahon received lots of replays of old footage montaged under fond memories.

LOSER: Governor Mark Sanford.

If only he had waited just one day to confess to the world that he wasn’t really hiking on an Appalachian trail, but was really digging an Argentinean hole (by which I mean “), he would have slipped under the radar in the news cycle. In fact, if he had waited that one day, his press conference where he confessed to banging a girl in south america would have literally been cut-off by all the channels covering it live and the reporters there in front of him would have all scrambled away to go cover the more important story of Jacksons passing and just ask the Governor to release a statement to be put on page C9 later on.

WINNER: Farrah Fawcett’s family

They get to mourn in peace.

LOSER: Democracy in Iran

I just found out that long time blogger Lee, died in his sleep while in China where he has been living for the past year. I started reading Lee’s bold take on the news in 2002 when, in a fresh-after-9/11 world, I was just starting to pay attention to politics. Lee was a conservative, operating Right-Thinking.com but later posted on other sites, including his last, LeeinChina.com which covered his exploits in the far east when he moved for work.

His partner on many projects and co-blogger Jim K, also known as the anti-Michael Moore webmaster featured in Michael Moore’s Sicko posted the sad news on Right-Thinking shortly after it happened back in April. I obviously had not kept up with Right-Thinking and just tonight read the sad news.

I’m posting this not because I think random people care that some random blogger has passed away, but because it’s a reminder that I’m going to die some time, maybe randomly like Lee (details are still unknown, but no word was given that he was ill or injured) and someone will have to post on my websites the news of my expiration for my viewers.

Unlike some bloggers who I’ve heard continueing their craft during cancer or some other terminal disease and losing the battle while still active online, Lee was just an average bloke who didn’t wake up one day.

In May the “worlds oldest blogger” died at 97 and in 2007 the wife of ColdFury blogger was killed in a vehicle accident. It’s weird… I have 10 thousand friends on Myspace and have had 3 die in the past several years. I would just visit their page and see memorial comments and tributes.  It was around then that I discovered MyDeathSpace.com which covered Myspace member obituaries (most are car accidents). It’s all very weird in the web 2.0 stage.