In local news, I'm about to be a couple of rats short of a half dozen.  Both of my older females are really fading fast, one of them in her steady decline, the other going from fully healthy bout 3 days ago to listless and almost motionless today.  She's not eating, even when I hold food up to her, and she's always been fat and trying to get fatter, so that's a really serious sign.

This isn't at all unusual for rats; they quite often go along looking fine, and then in 2 days they just shrivel up and die, or have to be euthanized as they are clearly suffering.  If this one isn't better later today I'll probably put her to sleep.  I've got a bunch of pics of all the rats and one of the snakes now, and just need a few hours to organize a pets section and get them cropped and captioned and posted.  I'll apparently be doing at least one of them in memorial, the way it looks now.

I just had the two younger females out for about 10 minutes while I was in the other room (I block off the door with a box so there's air flow to the fan blowing out the bedroom window, but the rats are confined to the room), but left both the older ones in the cage, as they showed no desire to get out of bed.  Nevertheless when I returned to check on them and put them back in the cage, all 4 were out on the floor.  I can't even imagine how the biggest female got out, much less down the sheer 4 foot drop, when she's hardly able to move around in the cage.  I suspect she went down with all the agility of a bag of wet cement.  Rats are very good at falling from heights with no damage taken; they have a layer of blubber all around, they have big fat bellies they can land on like a cushion, and their legs are short and stumpy, sort of like they're wearing a baggy suit, so there's not really any protruding fragile limbs to break.  She seemed to survive the descent no worse for wear (though she was pretty bad to begin with), anyway.  I put her back in, by the dish with some corn, but she ate nothing and just crawled into bed and laid there awkwardly.  *sigh*

Don't be sad, rats very seldom live more than 18 months, so it's entirely expected, sudden or not.

Now for some non local news.

• Pat Tillman, a cornerback for the Arizona Cardinals football team turned down an offer of $3.6m for 3 years to play football.  He's instead going to try to become and Army Ranger, the parachute special forces type guys.  Every few years some sports guy with too much money will lose his steroid-addled mind and start thinking he's 17 again, and wants to join the army like his dad did.  They generally last about 3 weeks before getting a discharge due to their total inability to conform to the spirit-breaking discipline that the military is so well known for.  There's a reason adults don't go to boot camp; once you're used to being a real person and making your own decisions and know you have other options in life, you're not willing to put up with the constant screaming and humiliation that being a recruit entails.  Pat here will probably be kicked out by mutual agreement by August, and sign as a restricted free agent for about $300k with some last place team.  Hopefully he'll learn something from the experience, or at least serve as an example to others.

• Sporadically amusing article about how to become a conservative pundit.

• More stories about the police brutality in Inglewood.  The mayor of the town is not exactly pulling any punches.  Of course neither did the cop...

Inglewood Mayor Roosevelt Dorn, a former prosecutor and judge, called on prosecutors to charge Morse with at least four felonies and said he had no patience for investigations and did not care what happened before the tape started rolling.

"I'm not concerned at this point what happened before the video was turned on," Dorn said. "In my mind, I can't think of anything that this teenager could have done that would justify the conduct that I observed on the video."

"When this officer picked this young man up and slammed him face-down into the hood of that car, in my opinion, (that was) number one, felony assault," Dorn said. "Number two, assault with a deadly weapon ... Number three, battery. Four, child abuse. And I'm sure if I looked there are other crimes."

Before you feel all happy inside that this is being brought to light, keep in mind that until the video was seen, the cops had zero charges against them, and the kid was being tried for assault on the cops.  There were at least 5 other cops there in the video, all of whom saw what happened, several of whom separated the kid from the cop who was beating him, and none of whom filed any sort of report about the brutality, nor would have, I suspect.  Code of silence or loyalty or back-scratching or whatever you want to call it, it's just a reality of law enforcement, and evidence of why you really don't want to piss off cops if you can possibly help it.

• Funny story about Al Unser beating his girlfriend.

When confronted by police early on Tuesday, Unser at first denied knowing Soto, but then said she hit him first.

Well, that's not funny, but it's at least ironic.  This is the sort of thing I'd expect from a football player, or at least a stock car driver.  Not one of those wimpy European-style Indy drivers.

• The funniest classified ad ever.

The interesting thing about the finances of the movie is how many people have a big chunk of the gross, on top of the enormous up front fees.  From the Box Office Mojo report:

Smith jumped from $5 million for the first picture to a reported $20 million plus 20% of the studio's revenue until the movie hits $200 million and then again after $300 million. Top-billed Jones got $20 million as well and 12.5%. Also in on the action are director Barry Sonnenfeld with 10% and executive producer Steven Spielberg with 7.5%, mainly for deciding to make the Men in Black comics into a movie in the first place.

I think that's a mistake, personally.  No one really cares about Will Smith or Tommy Lee Jones.  They could have cast 2 other less-expensive actors and had virtually the same opening, since it's all hype and special effects.  However when you look at the absurd costs, said to be around $140m, paying $40m of that to the stars isn't really that big a chunk, since the special effects and sets and such cost $100m, and then there's tons more on marketing.  It's not like getting Smith and Jones back doubled the price or something.

I didn't think much of the first movie, with the goofy, campy, childish overtones ruining any potential suspense or fright.  Which was the idea, I mean it's a movie for children with a few amusing adult things, but I'd much prefer it rated R and with a tone similar to Aliens.  Obviously that would be a much different film though, and probably much less profitable.  And maybe not any better; it's not like there aren't 5 Sci Fi movies a year that rip off Aliens and totally suck doing it.  I saw the first film once in the theaters, and haven't felt any compulsion to see it again on video or cable.  I doubt I'll ever see this second one, not after the reviews it's getting.

And in the hot chicks (depending on who you ask) department:

It's funny to compare RateHerAss.com to HotorNot.com.  If you've seen my Hot or Not? page, you'll know that the thing I find most amusing about that site is how absurdly-high the scores are for virtually any woman with an even number of limbs and a pulse. That's the main thing I point out/ridicule on the page here, with links and images to back up my opinions.  Showing how relative voting is, you can look at virtually any pretty woman in next to nothing on RateHerAss, and the vast majority of them have a 6 or 7 average.  They have their "Hottest Asses" page, with the top 10 by viewer votes, and the best ass on earth is only an 8.7, with #10 being just a 8.0.

The comparison to Hot or Not, the scores are unbelievably low.  Hot or Not doesn't have a top 10 list, at least not one I know how to access, but just the first woman I saw on the site, as I write this, was her. She had an 8.0 average at the time, on 1127 votes (BTW, her caption is pretty funny, given what she's wearing in the picture, eh?). Four votes later I saw this woman, who has a 9.4 average on 1754 votes.

Now explain how exactly these Playboy bunnies in g-strings on RateHerAss get a 6 if they are in a bad pose, while some girl who looks like the cashier at a 7-11 gets an 8.9 on HotorNot?  I've long railed on HotorNot for the amazing grade inflation, and this certainly doesn't do anything to change my mind.   Right now this woman is the 2nd lowest rated on all of RateHerAss, with a 3.5 on 875 votes.  I guarantee you that picture would get at least a 9.2 on Hot or Not.  I would actually take her pic and submit it there just to find out, but Hot or Not doesn't allow shots with a bunch of skin visible, so they'd just delete it. Or look at this cutie.  This shot might be allowed on hot or not, and she's got a 7.0 on 900 votes on RateHerAss.  That girl would get a 14 on HotorNot.

My point, if I have one aside from using this as an excuse to look at more women's bare asses, is how weird the voting is on these two sites.  Virtually any half-decent woman gets an 8+ on HotorNot, while in theory the same sort of people are visiting RateHerAss, and voting 5's and 6's for women who would break the scale on HotorNot. It looks like guys viewing a semi-porn site have a lot higher standards and are much pickier than people looking at innocent shots on HotorNot?  I figured every shot on RateHerAss would be about a 9.8 when I first saw the site, and was just shocked at the 7's and 6's being given out.  I actually tend to vote higher there than the average, which is quite the opposite of my HotorNot viewing habits.