www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm_n3hg-Gbg

The guy seen here, Antoine Dodson, walked into his Huntsville, AL house and beat the crap out of some guy attempting to rape his sister. This is his interview, which has since been turned into a autotuned video. Hilarity out of tragedy…gotta love it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMtZfW2z9dw

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHps2SecuDk

It’s a very simple process: arrive to a venue, open the FourSquare app on your phone, and check in.  The more places and more often you check in, the more badges you earn.  You can earn a variety of badges for a variety of different things.  You can also leave tips for others that check in at that venue in the future, shout out to your friends to check out that venue, and compare your weekly “score”, acquired by checking in more and more often, against your friends.  Also, check in often enough and more often than any other person at a venue and you become that place’s “mayor”.

As more and more business start to become foursquare savvy some are even beginning to offer discounts to those that show they’ve checked in at that venue.  I can see this program becoming very useful for on-location and guerrilla marketing tactics (i.e. check in here and come in for 10% off your coffee, check in at this concert and see your name posted on our website, etc.).  It has the potential to be a very cheap and effective marketing tool, different from the realm that Twitter already dominates.  As I’m a politics buff, I even read an interesting article on how Foursquare could prove useful on campaigns here, which seems like a double-edged sword in some situations.

As more and more people hear about this, it’s going to take off, with 1.3 million users in the US in a little over a year.  FourSquare is relatively new to the world of social media and has the ability to be the “next big thing” of social media if enough people catch on…which is why you should join today.  Soon, you and your friends will be battling for mayor of your local watering hole and seeing who can check in first every single place you go.

As we exit the bird house at the Smithsonian National Zoo in DC, my girlfriend and I decided to visit the flamingo enclosure to see the stilted, pink wonders of ornithology.  As we made our way in and out of the outside flight exhibit, where we saw two peacocks sparring, we didn’t think the day could get any better.  Little did we know what we were about to encounter.

We’d continue our journey around the pathway until coming across the flamingo exhibit, boasting about 40 flamingos, a few eggs and baby flamingos as well, and a full flock of ducks.   While we were watching them, one flamingo that was guarding it’s young on a nest decides to turn into Pele and punt the baby bird about 5 feet down the hill.  Wondering what spooked the bird or if was just overcome by World Cup fever, we went to investigate.

As I was snapping pictures of the ousted chick, I heard gasps and “OMG”s overcome the crowd of concerned mothers who had brought their kids here for a gore-lacking Father’s Day at the zoo.  As I looked up from the viewfinder, I see a Black Ratsnake that was at least  6 feet long slowly approaching the helpless infant flamingo.  For a moment, it seemed as if it would slither away towards the flock of flamingos who were dumbfoundedly staring the creature down.  Alas, it didn’t.  It turned right around, struck a kill bite right to the jugular of the baby bird, death rolled it, and gulped it down headfirst.  Within two minutes, the bird didn’t exist anymore outside the bounds of the snake’s digestive system.

Part of the hilarity of the story was that the mothers were far more freaked out about this than were the kids who were watching this unfold and especially more freaked out than one boy who uttered my exact thought….”AWESOME!”  Conveniently located right behind this exhibit was a sign that said, “For Animal Emergencies, please call…”  I didn’t know if that number was for a people emergency involving animals or rather an emergency involving all animals, but nonetheless a mother called and a zoologist showed up right away, presumably to remove the snake and release it back into the wild.

So, if you’re ever wondering who would win between a baby flamingo and a black snake….snake wins.

In the past two months, Barack Obama’s absolute failure to deal with the oil spill, or show any concern for it whatsoever, has caused everyone from the average American citizen to commentators on MSNBC to comment about how horrible the White House is handling this spill. As do I, many tend to blame it on Obama and his team’s lack of experience. There has been no clear chain of command or course of action. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said that BP was the only company that has “the technical expertise to plug the hole” and that it was “their responsibility” to do so.

BP has attempted, with everyone from the Coast Guard to Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to President Obama breathing down their neck, to plug the hole under supervisory regulations, unclear directives, and stonewalling tactics from the aforementioned parties. While no party directly wants to take responsibility for the cleanup or regulation, it’s quite clear that all parties want to have authority and a hand in “resolving” the matter. That, in my opinion is a clear failure of the administrative capabilities of the Obama White House and something that needs to be swiftly corrected.

In addition to playing defense, Obama went public and on the offensive this week by demanding that BP set up a third-party claims compensation fund or threatening that the U.S. would take legal and criminal action against the company. Well, those threats sent the British markets into a frenzy as BP’s stock, which makes up nearly a tenth of British pension funds, fell. With the EU economy in shambles and Britain being the only relatively sound economy in Europe, this British market unrest can only exacerbate the current economic climate in Spain, Germany and Greece. In all, these threats by President Obama have the ability to tip the scales in Britain, send the rest of Europe into economic chaos, and hurt American markets and investments oversees in return.

Obama’s administrative actions also have the potential to hurt the economy, even more so than lofty threats. He recently issued a six-month moratorium on offshore drilling. This action will undoubtedly push prices higher on everything as domestic oil prices slowly creep back up due to a lack of supply. In addition to these higher fuel and transportation costs, the Bush tax cuts expire next year. With the expiration of the tax cuts, many business will shutter and many more families and individuals will be added to the government rolls. The average person will pay far more in taxes and have far less expendable income to pump back into the economy. Nevertheless, the Obama administration wants us to feel as if recovery is currently in full swing. However, what they don’t explain is that businesses are taking advantage of the current tax breaks by hiring people to increase production, ramping up sales, and shoring up profits this year in order to tighten their belts and survive next year when the cuts expire. This time next year, business will start to cut back causing a chain of events: cutting jobs due to cutting production due to lower demand due to less individual expendable income due to higher taxes. The end result is that businesses will fail, more jobs will be lost, unemployment will skyrocket, and this double-dip in the economy will make recovery even more difficult than it is now.

Last and certainly not least, Obama is using this spill as a linchpin for cap-and-trade legislation, which, if passed, could have a potentially disastrous effect over the next few years. Aggressive cap-and-trade policies will inevitably cause energy prices to rise. By punishing traditional energy markets like coal and hydroelectric and essentially attempting to put them out of business by outrageous tax burdens, these policies view greener and cleaner forms of energy (wind, solar, nuclear, etc.) as a “better” form of energy. These forms of energy cost substantially more to develop than the traditional forms of energy generation and those infrastructure and production costs will fall directly on the consumer, causing average Americans to pay hundreds more in power per month in addition to the strain of higher taxes and increased costs of living mentioned above.

From what I can see, unless something major happens like a political backlash in the mid-term elections, the United States under the Obama/Pelosi/Reid machine’s leadership is, in my humble opinion, not looking very well from a variety of different directions.