• WIKIMEDIA

WHAT A SUCCESS. Oh, I'm just kidding. Smedley pleaded guilty in a Baltimore federal courtroom today to "transporting misbranded medicine across state lines" and spending eight years performing the illegal and really dangerous injections.

Commercial grade silicone is not supposed to go into human bodies. It's supposed to be used to polish furniture and stuff like that. In the incident that led to Smedley's October arrest, she administered 18 shots of the stuff to a Baltimore exotic dancer's butt cheeks. The woman fell ill when the silicone seeped into her lungs, causing her to experience pneumonia-like symptoms. "You almost killed me," the dancer said in a text she sent to Smedley.

Prosecutors say she performed similar procedures on women in Washington, New York, Detroit and Philadelphia — but not Atlanta? — and faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Should've gone with that at-home degree in TV/VCR repair instead, girlfriend.

• Joeff Davis

Rene Pennington, wife of former Atlanta Police Chief Richard "Perception of Crime" Pennington, was arrested for DUI on Saturday morning according to WSBTV.

Apparently, police noticed a vehicle "driving on a rim" in the vicinity of Peachtree and Pine streets at around 2 a.m. Pennington was "arrested after a series of field sobriety tests" and was booked into the Atlanta City Jail.

• YouTube
• What? You've never heard of Birkendahl?

The video — which we posted yesterday evening — is good for a laugh. The ceremony itself is inherently ridiculous. On top of that, Messer repeatedly botches the pronunciation of Birkenau (maybe Buchenwald?), creating a word that sounds something like "Birkendahl." He misquotes scripture. He attempts to turn the Torah into that awful Jim Carrey movie "The Number 23." As someone on a religious forum put it, "Ralph Messer's no more a rabbi than my mom's a cat."

Worth considering, however, are the greater implications of a guy running around, claiming to be a Jewish holy man, and completely misrepresenting Judaism in front of thousands of people.

In a post on The Feminist Wire, religious scholar Wil Gafney was compelled to refute the "specious claims" made by Messer during the bogus ritual. It's worth reading in its entirety, but her are some highlights ...

Regarding Messer calling the Torah cover "a foreskin," which Gafney says was not only gross, but also inaccurate:

The Torah cover is not a “foreskin.” Hyper-masculine, hyper-sexualization of the Torah reduces the holy Torah to a problematic phallic symbol — God’s? or Long’s? — and categorizes the most destructive behaviors associated with New Birth ministries in recent years. Grammatically and symbolically, the Torah is feminine in Hebrew and is personified as “She,” as in “She is a Tree of Life,” in Prov. 3:18.

On the average Jew's relationship to Torah scrolls:

The claim that 90% of the Jews in the world have “never seen, approached or touched” Torah scrolls is utterly without foundation. The Torah is taken out of the Ark during Shabbat and other services; it is processed through the assembly twice where people reverence it (Her!) by touching and kissing it/Her.

On Messer's attempts at number symbology:

The frequent references to significant numbers may be an attempt to mimic the Jewish mystical tradition of Gematria that elicits meanings from numbers and their contexts. However, the speaker is devising his own system without reference to any of the classical texts in Judaism, frequently by simple free- and word-association.

Most important:

His address of Eddie Long as a biblical or Israelite king is without foundation in the scriptures or in reality.

• REGRETSY

See any similarity between the images above? Get more details on the latest chapter of corporate retailers stealing from Atlanta-based artists.

• Not abortion, that's for sure.

Moveon.org sent out an email yesterday — dramatically entitled "iPhone's big secret" — revealing that if you ask your iPhone 4S where you can get an abortion, it will either tell you it can't find any abortion clinics in your area (as it did when asked in New York) or it will refer you to anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centers (as it did when asked in D.C.).

This story begs several questions. First, who was the pregnant lady who discovered this glitch? Did she ever get that abortion? Why didn't she Google it rather than shouting about it all over the place?

I borrowed my colleague/friend/role model Thomas Wheatley's iPhone 4S so I could shout about abortion into it (Curt Holman approached me shortly afterward to find out if I'd gotten that abortion I needed — I appreciated the concern). When I asked where I could get one, Siri said she couldn't find any clinics. Oh, and when you ask why she's anti-abortion, she says, "I just am." Well then.

Of the glitch, an Apple spokesperson told CNN, "These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone. It simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better and we will in the coming weeks."

As Moveon.org points out, Siri will help you find strip clubs, escort services (apparently, if you ask where you can get a blow job), and where you might be able to buy marijuana.

• Tomasz Sienicki/WIKIMEDIA

Anyway, this is all to say that hatching a criminal plot to avoid paying Georgia's paltry tobacco excise tax seems misguided. No one 'splained this to Paresh Patel, Nizarali Isani, Shabir Isani or Zohebali Isani.

Yesterday, all four men were indicted on a variety of racketeering and counterfeiting charges for buying untaxed cigs and then slapping counterfeit stamps on them. And, according to the Georgia Attorney General's office, the fruits of their scheme weren't terribly impressive: the Isanis — who were charged in Cobb County — are alleged to have acquired more than 1.5 million untaxed cigarettes, which means they would have avoided paying less than $29,000 in state cigarette excise taxes. Patel, charged in Hall County, is alleged to have avoided paying less than $2,000 in cigarette taxes.

The penalty for faking the tax stamps — a felony — is a prison term of between one and ten years.

This weekend in Snellville (which happens to be the name of my new cable access show), a dog named Oscar got fucked up on LSD, stole his owners' clothes and then got hit by a car to make them look bad.

Of course, police and the lamestream media are blaming Oscar's human counterparts ...

[Snellville police Capt. Harold] Thomas said police were alerted to the situation by reports of a naked man and woman running along Pinehurst Road at about 8 p.m. The couple [Nicholas Modrich and Jamie Hughes, both 25] fled to their home ... and Modrich answered the door naked after police knocked, said Thomas.

"They were tripping pretty hard," said Thomas.

During questioning, the man and woman said they had taken LSD and had given some to Oscar, who was missing. Police determined Oscar was a dog and began a search, but soon learned the animal had been hit by a vehicle on a nearby road.

Inside the home, police found a bong, marijuana and Gummi worms, which were allegedly used to take the LSD, said Thomas. No LSD was found in the home.

Some people shouldn't have pets. And some pets shouldn't have access to hallucinogenic drugs.