News Net Bucky Badger do care: UW blocking copyright-infringing porn by snatching up .xxx domains

Since sifting through dull newspapers, hyperbolic blogs, and overflowing RSS feeds for meaningful news can be an arduous process, News Net catches and compiles both the amusing and the significant reports that were overlooked over the work week. Here are some things to think about as weekend begins.

• Taking the Everybody Poops approach to masturbation, last week UW officials elected only to block the purchase of new adult-themed .xxx domains that directly abused their copyright—UWMadison.xxx, UniversityOfWisconsin.xxx, and WisconsinBadgers.xxx—leaving the whole host of other possible Badger-themed porn sites ripe for the plucking. “We couldn’t possibly predict all the ways someone could use our name,” UW Communications marketing director Tricia Dickinson told the Daily Cardinal. “For instance, if someone said, ‘Hey, I’m going to create a porn site called ‘Badgercoeds.xxx,’ there was no way we could know what all the possible variations could be.” Honestly, if the university administrators really wanted to discourage jerking it to Badgers, they should have bought that domain and linked it to this:

• If we’re establishing the victor in the War On Christmas based on the Capitol manger scenes alone, Christianity might need to beef up its game this year. The Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Winter Solstice manger scene includes Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, and an astronaut proclaiming “Who needs angels when you have science?” Jesus Christ might be the Lord and Savior of all humankind, but in competition for the attention of Capitol visitors, he might need a better entourage than wise men for once. Maybe Gov. Walker can hook him up with a Transformer made out of a Wisconsin And Southern Railroad Co. train, just to add a note of reverence to the squabble.

• The recall effort against Gov. Walker crossed the 500,000 signature mark this week, which had conservatives in a tizzy. Not so much because Walker’s recall election seems increasingly inevitable, but rather because it falls to his campaign to prove that “Mickey Mouse” and “Adolf Hitler” are not Wisconsin residents who wish to see the governor recalled. Walker’s campaign responded by suing the Government Accountability Board, partly based on the allegation that non-recall-signing Wisconsinites are being oppressed by overzealous recall supporters. Meanwhile, a 30-year-old progressive somewhere in West Allis continues to curse his alcoholic parents for naming him Adolf Hitler on a bar bet.

• Time Magazine announced that its 2011 person of the year is The Protester, in a nod to the regime-changing political uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Zuccotti Park, Oakland, and definitely not Madison. The pro-union protests got but a single nod, in the form of a photo from the online version of the story, and the story makes no mention of the demonstrations sparked by the budget repair bill even in passing, much less as a potential inspiration for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Well, at least they haven’t taken Bon Iver from us yet.

• After making off with a stack of games and movies from the West Side Target on Tuesday, two local shoplifters imagined they had been the targets of a relentless Jimmy McNulty-type in Madison’s Major Crimes Unit when police surrounded them at Video Game X-Change before they could even unload the stolen goods. Instead, it turns out that one of them butt-dialed 911 shortly before they began a 54-minute brag session about how much shit they had stolen, what they were driving, and where they were headed, all as a police dispatcher listened in and guided officers in for the arrest. The shoplifters probably should have stuck with their scheme that involved drunken ducks and pretend blindness.