Musing's musings

And now for something completely different...

Given the rather grim news of late, I figure we can all use a laugh. Recently, someone sent me a little Excel widget; when you type in a name, it tells you what that person's "ideal" job would be. On a whim, I ran a few of the more prominent names in politics of late through it:

Name	Ideal job
John McCain	Village idiot
Barack Obama	Animal therapist
Hillary Clinton	Permanent temp
Bill Clinton	Prostitute
George W. Bush	Vibrator tester
R-n P--l	Rally car driver
John Edwards	Funeral director
Mike Huckabee	Quiz show contestant
Joe Biden	Circus freak
Ralph Nader	Rally car driver
Mitt Romney	Rear end of pantomime cow
Fred Thompson	Clown
Joe Lieberman	Lumberjack

I can't really say I disagree with many of them--except the last one. Many of my relatives, back in the day, worked as lumberjacks. And I can tell just by looking at him that Joementum! doesn't have anything close to what it takes to survive in that profession.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go blot my computer dry

You have to go look at this Jimmy Carter op/ed from The Onion. But only if you're not at work or anyplace else where people are going to look at you strangely when you drop to the floor in convulsive laughter with tears running down your face. I can't even provide you with a snippet of it here without ruining the effect.

A Boxing Day ghost?

After getting up at the ungodly hour (to me, anyway) of 4:30 this morning so I could take Dave back to the airport for his flight home, I stopped off at my mother's house to bring back a couple of things I'd borrowed and to get the place ready for the folks' return home tomorrow afternoon. While I was over there, I borrowed her printer to print out some special pages. But the whole time the printer was running, the print head, as it traversed the page dispensing the requisite ink colors, kept making a noise that sounded remarkably like someone saying "Holy Cow!" Surely the ghost of Harry Caray, wherever he may be, is smiling.

And so am I. I had a lovely four days with my best friend in the world. We didn't quite get to do everything we'd planned, but what we did get around to was just wonderful. The weather, while cold, was mostly cooperative. (Well, apart from the London-of-Sherlock-Holmes-style fog that socked in northern Illinois last Friday afternoon and delayed his flight by an hour and more. But on the other hand, that delay did let me get all of my last-minute cleaning done without having to kill myself to make it out the door in time to meet his original flight arrival time.)

Now I've got the rest of the week and the weekend to while away the hours doing exactly as I please. I'll probably put in some time on an overdue paper that I'd like to have out of the way before the start of the new semester, but otherwise, I anticipate watching a lot of television, reading some of my Christmas haul of books, and perhaps hitting the after-Christmas sales to see what little things I can pick up for our family Christmas celebration in a couple of weeks. (We had to put it off, what with the folks being in Florida and my sister's having to work.)

Why I love France

I went wandering for a post-prandial stroll this evening (it's just after 9 p.m. here in France), and for once I remembered to take my camera along--though I'm going to have to stop someplace on the way to the archives tomorrow morning and get more batteries: I'm down to my last pair, I've been snapping so many document photos this past week. Wandering through some of the byways in Colmar's pedestrian zone, I happened upon a monument I've walked or ridden past about three dozen times in the two times I've been to Colmar thus far, and never noticed. It's tucked away down a side street I'd never had occasion to bother with before now, and I probably wouldn't have ever thought of walking down it from the end I usually see, since all that is visible from that end is houses.

Anyway, a couple of things to know before you drop below the fold to look at this picture. First is that above the niche is an inscription in Latin, Veritas ex fonte, "Truth from the fountain." Second, the fountain itself is attached to one wall of what used to be the Palace of the Sovereign Council when Colmar was an imperial city, a building which now houses the Tribunal de Grande Instance (roughly the equivalent of a local circuit court in the United States, from what I can gather online) and a detachment of the local Gendarmerie. Just behind it is one of the local prisons. All of which makes the symbolism of the fountain itself all the more wry.

Intrigued? Follow me below the fold for a symbol of the real meaning of life.

Bluffing on a busted flush

Tom Toles got it about right:

Now if only our nearly naked nudnik weren't playing with real people's lives on the line. And understood the rules of poker.

Irony seems lost on these people

I think the White House should consider revoking Rich Little's invitation to headline at this year's White House Correspondents' Association dinner. Why pay a comic whose rose lost its bloom a couple of decades ago when you could get just as good an evening of entertainment from people who are going to be there anyway?

I mean, is Little seriously going to be able to top yuk lines like when the preznit assured anti-abortion protesters in Washington yesterday that "...his administration is making progress toward fostering a 'culture of life'..."? Or how about spokes-hamster Tony Snow's assertion at yesterday's press briefing, that Bush's State of the Union message was so brilliant that it was hard to pick out its best part because "It's like looking in a drawer full of diamonds." I particularly liked the statement, attributed to Mr. Snow, that I heard on NPR this morning, to the effect that Bush was going to include proposals in his speech tonight that were designed to regain the trust of the American people. I may have bust a gut laughing at that one.

I mean, seriously. "Fostering a culture of life"? Those words, in the mouth of a man who signed off on upwards of 200 executions while governor of Texas, even going so far as to publicly mock one woman whose petition for clemency he turned down, are positively blasphemous. If the Shrubbery truly wanted to begin fostering a culture of life, it would have to stop fomenting wars as a solution to all of its problems. It would have to care at least as much about babies after they're born as it claims to care about them before that moment. (And for what it's worth, I'm not even convinced that the Shrubbery cares all that much for babes in the womb. What they really care about is the political punch they get from proclaiming, loudly and at every possible opportunity, how much they care--even as their policies demonstrate how little they actually do.) It would have to eschew capital punishment, come up with a realistic plan for universal health care, and make provision so that no one in this country need ever skip a meal or sleep without shelter unless s/he wishes to do so. Thus far, I have seen no evidence to suggest that the Shrubbery has ever considered any of those things, and I am frankly skeptical that they ever will--except, perhaps, to score a political point or two, after which they will revert to type.

A worthy goal and a worthy cause

I'm not sure how good the music will be, but I'm pretty sure that won't matter.

As I was watching the Red Wings lose a nail-biter to the Columbus Blue Jackets (of all people!) last night, I caught a mini-feature during one of the intermissions about several of the Blue Jackets getting together to record a CD of holiday songs. According to the Versus report, the players' goal is to sell more copies of their CD than K-Fed does of his new rap album. Sounds like a reachable goal to me!

From the Columbus Blue Jackets Foundation site (scroll down almost to the bottom; no direct link is available):

Tired of that same old holiday music? Check this out! This year you can stuff your holiday stocking with the Blue Jackets CD. Listen to all of your holiday favorites sung by Anson Carter, Jody Shelley, Manny Malhotra and the other members of the Blue Jackets team!

Proceeds from the CD will be donated to the Blue Jackets Foundation Family Resource Center at Children’s Hospital and the Riverside Cancer Service’s KidShare program.

[edit]

CDs are available for $10 at the Foundation tables behind section 110, in The Blueline, at The Chillers, by calling the Foundation 614-246-4168, by downloading and returning an order form, or by emailing cbjfoundation@BlueJackets.com.

And now for something completely unsurprising...

Apparently McCaca McFartypants is addicted to fart jokes and likes to rip a few in front of his staff. On the one hand, this is about as surprising as the learning that water is wet or that the sky is blue. Bush and his handlers have been trying for most of the last decade (if not longer) to make this preppy trust-fund baby born in Connecticut with a silver coke spoon up his ass, indifferently educated in the finest prep schools and Ivy League colleges, into the kind of down-home, NASCAR-watchin', beer-drinkin', country-music-lovin', aw-shucks Texas cowboy-type dude that the Republicans' largely ignorant and intolerant base wouldn't want to beat up on sight. The fact that he howls at fart jokes is entirely in keeping with his carefully maintained folksy public persona: just like that faux ranchette he suddenly acquired in Crawford just before he decided to run for the job of Decider-in-Chief.

It would be easy to see this bit of innuendo (notice that nobody will actually go on record and confirm the story, or admit to having passed it along--no pun intended) as a Rovian antidote to some of the other "image" pieces that have been circulating about McFartypants lately: that he's allegedly an avid reader and a history buff to boot (from Reuters last December; sorry, but the story isn't archived. You can read my initial reaction to the story, which quotes the relevant bits, if you like.). Earlier this month came the shocking revelation that Bush was not only reading philosophy (Camus' The Stranger) on vacation, but one of those damned Frenchy philosophers to boot.

It wouldn't do to have the base thinking that the man that asinine bit of rumor-mongering linked to at the top of this post called the "First Frat Boy" was goin' all soft and intellecshual on them, so out comes that asinine bit of rumor-mongering. Poof! (Again, no pun intended.) Problem solved.

Zing!

Tom Toles sure hit this one out of the park:

"Between the sheets"

That was the phrase we always joked about adding to the end of the fortune-cookie fortunes when I was in my salad days. It came back to mind this noon, when this popped out of my fortune cookie at lunch:

An old friend will introduce you to new people and pleasures.

So, any of my old friends want to represent?