Exxon to Offer Special Xmas Tree Flocking

A federal appeals court cut the $5 billion punitive charge by about 50% for Exxon's role in the Valdez oil spill in Alaska some 17 years ago.

That would have been 5,000,000,000 Washingtons. That would buy my house approximately 7,680 times over. It would also approximately pay for $200,000,000 of my winter heating bills. As I don't drive much, and fill up about twice a month, Exxon could pay for my gas for 62,500,000 years with gas at its current cost. Of course, don't expect to see gas remain at a constant price after this.

Exxon will most likely need to "pass the savings" to the end user (read, you and me) in order to recoup their loss. Never mind that Exxon earned $10.49 billion in the third quarter of 2006: the second-largest quarterly profit ever recorded by a publicly traded U.S. company. The perfect mental image that comes to mind here is the Texan from The Simpsons - YEEEEEHAAAAWWWWW!!!!

If this penalty does anything to measure the damage upon the environment (there were about 11 million gallons dumped as a result of Capt. Hazelwood's glug-glug, honk-honk, crash-crash) just know that this wasn't even the largest oil spill.

HAHAHAHHAAHHAHAAA!! That's awesome. Awesome like all the completed human genome work getting shredded by Pat Robertson.

Kirk Cameron Getting Kung-Fu on Harry Potter

OK, it's not really Kirk, it's a mom in the state of Georgia (in the U.S., not in Russia) who had been advocating to get the Harry Potter books taken off the shelf because she believed they indoctrinate kids into witchcraft and expose children to wanton witchcraft-related violence, general wizardry, and spell-casting.

I believe the mom is also a big backer of the Left Behind games, which exposes children to wanton Christlove-related violence, general intolerance, and heathen conversion.

The Georgia Board of Education voted to deny Laura Mallory's request, and sentenced her to actually read the books and see all the movies while wearing a sexy witch outfit.

Grand Theft Auto: Book of Revelations

This is a game that's actually been out for a while. I read an early review on it when it was going gold (ready for mass production), and was filled with Christ-love. I was so taken aback by the message of tolerance delivered in this game, that I had to pause my viewing of The Passion of the Christ while breezing through some of the recent Promise Keeper literature which had been stuffed into my Jesus/Santa mailbox.

In the game, titled Left Behind: Eternal Forces, you are a person left behind on Earth after the Rapture has come and taken all the true believers to Heaven. If you don't know what this means, then you're a doomed sinner, so put your head between your legs and kiss your forked tail goodbye. 666 Satan hearts you.

The point of the game is to convert people into disciples in order to combat the Anti-Christ. Those who cannot be converted you must kill. The bad guys are rock stars and Arab-esque people.

Seriously folks...there's nothing I can say that isn't already implied by the existence of this game, but let me go ahead and say that from a strictly empirical standpoint, the game suffers from a host of design and gameplay issues. It also includes what some people would consider spy ware, which the developer (Double Fusion), evangelizes by saying:

The Ad Engine is the seamless interface between the game and the advertiser servers, and works as a broker between the two, calling advertising creative elements as needed, providing them to the game to be displayed as ads in the game, and tracking impressions and views and reporting back to the advertising management servers.

This means that if the player in the game strolls by a building in the game, and there's a banner ad on the side of the building that banner ad is actually tracking behavior and information about the user, and sending this information to the advertiser. Hallelujah! Finally, Capitalism and Christianity give each other a well-needed back-rub, and maybe a [wink-wink] "happy ending"?

Even more wonderful than the message of love and tolerance that murmurs deep within the rotten, festering code is the fact that there are also a horde of books and movies out in the Left Behind franchise. In fact, our beloved Kirk Cameron plays the lead character. I'm betting that these films are real popular in Montana, you know, next to Ted Kaczynski's cabin?

So to sum it all up my good people, it's a lame game that installs spy ware on your machine, and it sends a message of hate and intolerance. I'm going to give this one a big fat no, although my man Mel Gibson paid me $50 to give it a thumbs-up.