very important news roundup

*Aaaaaaah white trash drama. This little police blurb courtesy of the esteemed Local Paper is special on oh so many levels (I've counted five):

Battery
A 30-year-old Marshfield woman reported an unknown woman in a bride's dress picked her up by her hair at 1:30 p.m. Sunday while she was dancing at Elixir Lounge and Nite Club, 434 S. Central Ave. After getting away from the bride, the 30-year-old woman said a man she identified as the groom pushed her down a flight of stairs inside the establishment.

*Also from the Local Paper is the announcement of the birth of little Kalob Mykal Yeager. Something tells me this poor kid won't be winning spelling bees anytime soon...

*Like the Local Paper but for the opposite reason, Pitchfork is a news source that is frequently just too easy to make fun of. However, despite the incomprehensibly haughty writing, it points me in the direction of good, new music, and sometimes it's so spot on I cry tears of joy. If you've seen the latest Lenny Kravitz video, which "finds everyone's favorite half-Jew waking up with approximately 12 naked models, partying on a private jet, passing out backstage, waking up to shake around more frills than a Roger Daltrey montage, scratching his bidness on a piano, then running backstage again to stare introspectively and drunkly into a mirror," you'll know what this guy's talking about (scroll to bottom.)

*Last but not least, some news commentary via my friend E's boss' friend in Hong Kong:

"Factory workers mangled by machinery. Exploding gas wells poisoning villages. School-fireworks factories blowing up. The glorious motherland consolidates its global leadership in imaginative industrial safety mayhem, courtesy of the Great Garlic Disaster of 2004:

'30 in China Buried in Garlic Pile; 11 Die
BEIJING (AP) - Storage shelves stacked high with garlic collapsed in central China, burying 30 workers and killing 11 of them, state media reported Thursday.'

The accident Wednesday morning in Henan province prompted a large rescue operation to dig out workers weighed down by the massive pile of garlic shoots and broken shelving, the Beijing Times and other newspapers reported. What a way to go. The death toll from the Great Garlic Disaster of 2004 has risen to 15. Clearly, we must treat this substance with more respect in future. Many are the times I have crushed cloves of garlic totally oblivious to the possibility that they can do the same to me."