Quick Hits

Once again we have a bunch of stories which don't warrant a full post, but are too interesting not to comment on...

-Late Friday afternoon my news feed started buzzing with the story that Fox news had just aired a live suicide. Now, I obviously wasn't watching, because it's Fox News, but apparently the network had been following a car chase in Arizona and when the suspect was cornered he decided to take his own life rather than be arrested. Despite being on a 5-second delay Fox didn't cut away in time, allowed the footage to go out to the world and the anchor quickly apologized for the mistake. Now, I would love to crush Fox News here and point out that they have officially lost the right to question violence in video games or swearing on celebrity Twitter feeds going forward. However, I'm willing to give them a pass on this incident simply because it is live TV and things happen really quickly. It is the same reason I never freak out when a celebrity says something crazy in an interview because I think we have all said something that we realized was going to sound wrong before the sentence even finished. Five seconds seems like it should have been plenty of time to cut away, but when it takes a couple seconds to realize what you just witnessed and then find the dump button your window has closed. So, we shouldn't be to upset at Fox News for letting this one slip through. But, if you really feel like crushing them, believe me, there are plenty of other things to choose from.

-Moving on to lighter news - Detroit police have announced they plan to start digging up a suburban driveway this weekend as they look for the remains of union boss Jimmy Hoffa. Apparently a dying man gave them a credible tip that people buried something in his neighbor's yard many years ago so police did a scan of the land and found enough intriguing evidence to follow up on it. Sure, because Detroit has solved every other problem facing the city. Look, I know that unsolved mysteries can be a lot of fun to dig into, but at some point this sort of stuff should be left up to amateurs. This effort seems like it could end up costing a lot of money and since I'm pretty sure Hoffa would have died from natural causes well before now, it is not like there is any hope for a happy family reunion. If any private citizens out there are really that curious they should foot the bill themselves. For example, there is new evidence which suggest Amelia Earhart's plane went down in the South Pacific. The person leading the search and coordinating all the digging and renting of equipment to find her plane is doing so with their own, privately-raised funds. Detroit needs to pour every cent it has into figuring out what to do with acres of abandoned neighborhoods and an economy that was in tatters before the latest recession. Besides, I'm not so sure that if I was running the city I would want this search to be successful. People looking for Jimmy Hoffa's body might be the second-most profitable business in town.

-If officials really want to find Hoffa's body they should be looking in random attics because, if you ever watch any of the dozen shows on TV about picking through other people's junk, that appears to be the sweet spot of treasure hunting. People are always finding paintings from famous artists in their grandparent's attics, or at least their bank vaults, which is where a painting allegedly done by Leonardo Da Vinci was stored for the last 40 years. The foundation which currently owns the painting claims it is a portrait of the same woman who would later pose for the famous Mona Lisa, except in their painting she is a decade younger. If you look at the two paintings there is a similarity, but the newly discovered painting looks more like what would happen if a talented artist was asked to paint their version of the Mona Lisa. Personally I'm always skeptical when stories like this surface, because aren't the odds overwhelmingly in favor of someone bringing this to light before now? The Mona Lisa has held the title as "most famous painting in the world" for almost 200 years. Even if this private art organization had been holding onto the painting for the last 40 years, shouldn't there have been a record of it before then? Wouldn't someone have come forward saying something like, "Hey, don't these two pictures look kind of alike? Maybe we should check if they were done by the same person." I'm not saying this second painting wasn't done by Da Vinci, I'm just saying that I will be more surprised if that is the case than if it turns out to be a fake.

-Speaking of things which need to be authenticated, today the Vatican put out a statement regarding the piece of parchment which alleges that Jesus may have had a wife. Now, this may shock you, but it turns out they think it is "probably fake". What? You don't believe a randomly-discovered text which could call into question several core beliefs of our religion, as well as key principles such as not allowing priest to get married may be fake? Never saw that one coming. At this point I think Jesus himself could come down to refute a couple things in the Bible and the Vatican would ask for six forms of identification, so this thing never had a shot to be taken seriously. But even with that as a given, to me they are going about this all wrong. Rather than trying to discredit the artifact, they should be attacking the fact that people are drawing pretty wide conclusions from a piece of papers which came from the year 400 and only says, "Jesus said to them, "My wife...". What I would have rather seen the Vatican do is release a statement of possible phrases which finished that sentence, like a Biblical mad-lib. At least then we could see which Bishop had the best sense of humor.