Satire, Politics, New England, Bullshit
Mc-Revolution in Mc-Food.
Emails arrive once or twice a month at my computer-step from an outfit called ImportFood.com, "Your online Thai supermarket with a huge selection of groceries, cookware, cooking videos, and over 295 authentic Thai recipes."
I love Thai cuisine and I like these guys. Their prices are fair. They fulfill orders on time. Their recipés and photos are excellent Their emails are attractive, entertaining, and professional. And unlike most of the other crap that arrives in my In Box (penis enlargement services, Viagra tablet offers, Nigerian phishers) I look forward to hearing from them.
Occasionally ImportFood.com wanders afield with food-related news from the mother country. A few weeks ago I was greeted with this item:
"McKhao Namtok Gai Krob"
McDonalds is known for offering the same tasty hamburger and French fries around the world, but that's not the only thing you will find in Thailand. In Bangkok, McDonalds has a new, delicious crispy chicken namtok salad served with jasmine rice. For now it's only 69 baht. Also included in the price is a 16 oz coke.
McKhao Namtok Gai Krob fresh from a Bangkok McDonald's vat of bubbling fat.
. If you’re curious (which you’re probably not) and too lazy to Google (which you probably are), a baht (pronounced baht), is listed at 31.38 to the dollar. So the next time you’re in Bangkok and have 69 baht or $2.19885 burning a hole in your pocket or purse, drop in the local McDonald’s, pick up a delicious McKhao Namtok Gai Krob, and wash it down with 16 ounces of Coca-Cola.
One cannot but admire McDonald’s initiative. Not content to stand (or sit) idly by in the wings resting on their laurels while their competitors in the dog-eat-dog fast food business steal a march on them by beating them to the punch, McDonald’s is launching pre-emptive food strikes throughout its far-flung chopped meat empire.
You’d have to be a brilliant marketing asshole, indeed, to get a leg up on the boys and girls at McDonald’s!
In order to expose the titanic hamburger purveyor’s closely-guarded international foodie schemes, Dome of Glass has secretly unleashed its renowned one-man team of hackers and phone tappers.
Here, for the first time, are early results of our illegal prying ─ a small plethora of astounding new locally-themed McDishes that the McCompany is about to McFoist on helpless McPopulations around the McGlobe:
● North Korea: McGoyangi Gupta Maeun. (Hot and spicy crudités of young cat served on a bed of refried sawdust)
● France: McCuisses de grenouille gros frit a la Americaine. (Obese legs of American bullfrog sautéed in deep fat in the style of Walmart.)
● England: McSqueek-and-bubble blood pudding. (Caramelized sheep intestine stuffed with rotted cabbage, hung beef, and maggot eggs on a slab of stale bread,. Beer, skittles, and access to a stomach pump included.)
● Scotland: McHaggis. (Pulverized hog offal and random barnyard leavings infused with oatmeal and molded into a soccer-ball-like mass, then crammed into the bladder of either a dead horse or cow and boiled for several days to kill the taste.)
● Zimbabwe: McMugabe Mbodza maBhunuka. (Southern-fried White Man.)
● Australia: McSuckling jumbuck on the barbie. (An aborigine-inspired stew containing eucalyptus leaves and salt-water crocodile tail seasoned with the scent-glands of poisonous snakes.)
● Germany: McJudenkinder. (Fondue of braised young Jew in liquefied Tilsit cheese)
● Japan: McFugu. (Sex organ sushi of pufferfish genus Takifugu, Lagocephalus, or Sphoeroides. Sales restricted to Koreans, women, and fat American tourists wearing shorts.)
● Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Dearborn, Michigan: McGamael. (Roast camel hump au jus infused with exploding jockey shorts, readings from the Koran, and oil of pressed extra-virgin virgins. First 100 customers receive one-way tickets to Nirvana.)
● Washington, D.C.: McObama. (Stale bullshit wrapped in marinated sheets of New York Times Op-Ed pages.).
As additional results and lawsuits pour in, Dome of Glass will work to keep you up-to-date and thoroughly disgusted..
Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net
Thomas Sowell on Race Wars
Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at
Stanford University. His website is http://www.tsowell.com
I don’t know what’s the matter with Tom Sowell. The man must have a screw loose somewhere.
He seems to believe that honesty and intelligence and common decency are somehow important in today’s America rather than cowardice, race hustling, conformity, Political Correctness, and lies.
It is no wonder that leading liberals and progressives in the media and Hollywood as well as future Nobel Laureates like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan despise him so.
I for one can’t wait for Bill Maher, a truly courageous non-combatant, an amazingly politically incorrect conformist, and a multi-millionaire member of the 99%, to deconstruct Mr. Sowell.
And just wait until Paul Krugman and the crème de la crème of the entertainment industry gets after him! With mental giants such as Cher, George Clooney, Rosie O’Donnell, Kenya West, and Sean Penn on the case, Dr. Sowell won’t stand a chance.
Doesn’t Sowell realize that 250-pound black high school athletes live in constant fear of bullying by sinewy 98-pound Asian boys and girls with their horned-rimmed glasses and threatening schoolbooks at the ready in their backpacks?
Doesn’t he grasp the fact that attacks by black mobs on white teenagers and grandmothers are righteous payback for years of Jim Crow segregation?
Doesn’t he appreciate the deprivation that inner-city black boys suffer by living among inner-city black boys?
Ah well. The man’s incorrigible.
Anyway, for your information, here’s a prime example of Dr. Sowell s ugly rationality, hateful evenhandedness, and despicable common sense plucked from (wouldn’t you know) National Review Online:
A Censored Race War
The media ignore racially motivated black-on-white crime.When two white newspaper reporters for the Virginian-Pilot were driving through Norfolk, and were set upon and beaten by a mob of young blacks — beaten so badly that they had to take a week off from work — that might sound like news that should have been reported, at least by their own newspaper. But it wasn’t.
The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News Channel was the first major television program to report this incident. Yet this story is not just a Norfolk story, either in what happened or in how the media and the authorities have tried to sweep it under the rug.
Similar episodes of unprovoked violence by young black gangs against white people chosen at random on beaches, in shopping malls, or in other public places have occurred in Philadelphia, New York, Denver, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, Los Angeles, and other places across the country. Both the authorities and the media tend to try to sweep these episodes under the rug.
In Milwaukee, for example, an attack on whites at a public park a few years ago left many of the victims battered to the ground and bloody. But when the police arrived on the scene, it became clear that the authorities wanted to keep this quiet.
One 22-year-old woman, who had been robbed of her cell phone and debit card, and had blood streaming down her face, said, "About 20 of us stayed to give statements and make sure everyone was accounted for. The police wouldn’t listen to us, they wouldn’t take our names or statements. They told us to leave. It was completely infuriating."
The police chief seemed determined to head off any suggestion that this was a racially motivated attack by saying that crime is color-blind. Officials elsewhere have said similar things.
A wave of uch attacks in Chicago were reported, but not the race of the attackers or victims. Media outlets that do not report the race of people committing crimes nevertheless report racial disparities in imprisonment and write heated editorials blaming the criminal-justice system.
What the authorities and the media seem determined to suppress is that the hoodlum elements in many ghettoes launch coordinated attacks on whites in public places. If there is anything worse than a one-sided race war, it is a two-sided race war, especially when one of the races outnumbers the other several times over.
It may be understandable that some people want to head off such a catastrophe, either by not reporting the attacks in this race war, or by not identifying the race of those attacking, or by insisting that the attacks were not racially motivated — even when the attackers themselves voice anti-white invective as they laugh at their bleeding victims.
Trying to keep the lid on is understandable. But a lot of pressure can build up under that lid. If and when that pressure leads to an explosion of white backlash, things could be a lot worse than if the truth had come out earlier, and steps taken by both black and white leaders to deal with the hoodlums and with those who inflame them.
These latter would include not only race hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson but also lesser-known people in the media, in educational institutions, and elsewhere who hype grievances and make all the problems of blacks the fault of whites. Some of these people may think that they are doing blacks a favor. But it is no favor to anyone who lags behind to turn their energies from the task of improving and advancing themselves to the task of lashing out at others.
These others extend beyond whites. Asian-American schoolchildren in New York and Philadelphia have for years been beaten up by their black classmates. But people in the mainstream media who go ballistic if some kid says something unkind on the Internet about a homosexual classmate nevertheless hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil when Asian-American youngsters are victims of violence.
Those who automatically say that the social pathology of the ghetto is due to poverty, discrimination, and the like cannot explain why such pathology was far less prevalent in the 1950s, when poverty and discrimination were worse. But there were not nearly as many grievance mongers and race hustlers then.
Thomas Sowell - May 15, 2012
Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net
Workers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Jobs
The seemingly endless and increasingly boring Euro Farce that has been bedeviling, investors, stock markets, and financial experts throughout what passes as the civilized world, has reached a new pinnacle of idiocy with elections in Greece, France, and Germany.
As is traditional in European politics, voters randomly sprayed their ballots among 30 or 40 disparate parties ranging in creed from neo-Nazi to neo-Maoist with stops along the way for various shades of socialist, fascist, racist, nationalist, and anarchist. Nonetheless, a powerful central theme has emerged, like the Creature From the Black Lagoon, from amidst the fetid rubble of the latest European exercise in pseudo-democracy:
The European man-in-the-street utterly rejects
the injustice of having to work for a living
The authorities are not standing idly by sitting on their hands and twiddling their thumbs as Southern Europe stinks up the financial atmosphere like an overflowing septic tank.
Quick as one can say, "Beleaguered Greek President Karolos Papoulias confers with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President-elect François Hollande," an emergency meeting of the financial ministers of the 17-nation Euro Block has been called to address the steadily deteriorating situations in Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, and California.
And what will this assemblage of giant intellects, "these choice and master spirits of the age," discuss?
Why they’ll discuss what they always discuss ─ bailouts, bank reform, sovereign debt, interest rates, recapitalization, growth stimuli, defending the Euro, debt restructuring, incentives, tranches, devaluation, bond prices, floating-rates, cash flow, emergency liquidity assistance, inflation, deflation, austerity budgets, tax reform, and the Dutch tulip crop.
In short, they’ll chew over everything ─ except the core of the problem; set up dozens of sub-committees and task forces to address everything ─ except the core of the problem.
Listen up (as Tommy Lee Jones says in most of his movies). Listen up, all you technocrats and kindred learnéd fools Listen up to your huddled masses yearning to be supported by the state. Listen up to your hundreds of millions of leisure-loving government drones that you have been attempting to drag into a golden future as the United States of Europe. Vox populi has spoken as if with but one vox: Your fellow Europeans are deeply committed to shorter and shorter work days, shorter and shorter work weeks, longer and longer vacations, earlier and earlier retirements, larger and larger pensions. They will settle for nothing less.
Here, then, is the €64 trillion ($82 trillion and counting) question:
How can a gaggle of European political hacks and brain-dead academicians meeting in Brussels, best create a peaceful, prosperous Europe in which no European will ever again be forced to work for a living?
For an answer, we must turn to the French ─ those masters of rigorous thought whose minds, from birth, are infused with the cutting edge brilliance of Cartesian Logic and whose consequent scintillating military strategies and fighting élan have produced famous French victories in two World Wars by cleverly allowing Russia, Britain, and the United States to do the bulk of the fighting and bleeding and dying.
In an exclusive interview with a New York City chambermaid, French financial genius and bon vivant Dominique Strauss-Kahn has outlined a bold plan for rescuing Europe’s remaining employed from their arduous 6-hours-a-day, 4-days-a-week, 35-weeks-a-year jobs. After reminding his Guinean tidbit of how Lafayette aided the nascent American republic 225 years previous, M. Strauss-Kahn outlined a market-basket of steps that should be taken "tout de suite."
1. American President Barack Obama (PBUH) must institute an aid package similar to WW2’s Marshall plan (suitably adjusted for 65 years of inflation) that will download several trillions of U. S. taxpayer dollars into the European "trou du cul noir" (politely translatable as "black hole"). The money would be used to cover unemployment benefits for European non-workers (i.e., everyone) thereby staving off both employment and revolution for at least a year or two..
2. French President-elect Hollande must send a trade delegation to Holland...No...No That’s not right. French President-elect Hollande must send a caucus to the Caucasus...No, No, No. That’s not right either. I’m sorry. What I mean to say is that French President-elect Hollande, must fly to Beijing, New Delhi, and Tokyo to make China, India, and Japan charter members of the EuroZone.
3. With the three Asian powerhouses in the fold, China’s Renminbi will replace the Euro as the zone’s currency unit, beer sales will be restricted to Tsingtao and Sapporo, and all tech support will be handled in Mumbai, India.
4. After signing a non-aggression pact with France, Germany must be persuaded to re-arm. Once fully outfitted with atomic weaponry, ballistic missiles, supersonic stealth aircraft, advanced armor, and a fleet of nuclear submarines, the revived Wehrmacht will be encouraged to sweep through the low countries (a matter of an hour or two) then turn south and east to the Mediterranean and the Urals to unite whatever’s left of Europe’s smoldering ruins into an Aryan superstate under the banner of the Fifth (and hopefully final) Reich.
Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net
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Want to Kill a Good Product? Contact Norm Mack at Dome of Glass
I’ve done more than my share of sneering at people who believe Stephen King writes documentaries and who hold truck with rot such as UFOs, Extra Sensory Perception, Spontaneous Combustion, Empaths, Psychokinesis, Pyrokinesis, Ghosts, Ghouls, Psychics, Exorcisms, Poltergeists, Angels, Gods, Sons of Gods, Devils, Demons, Sorcerers, and Honest Politicians.
But despite having been accused of being close-minded, ignorant, intolerant, and failing to wash behind the ears (not true! I do so wash behind my ears) I’ve stuck doggedly to my guns and laughed to scorn those who would impugn or otherwise wash my brain...until a week ago Wednesday.
I had finished my evening meal ─ a bowl of pasta fagioli (familiarly known as "pasta fazool"), one gin and tonic, half a pound of pistachio nuts, several Bloody Mary’s, and one beer (doctor’s orders) ─ and had fallen asleep during a Perry Mason tape when my wife buzzed me on the intercom. I lurched awake, still cobwebby from my nap.
"Did you pick up the My-T-Fine chocolate pudding mix at Market Basket like I told you?"
"Oh...Hi, babe. It’s you. Market Basket doesn’t carry My-T-Fine. Neither does Shaw’s or Hanneford’s. Maybe Microsoft bought the company and turned it into an app. I got Jello instant chocolate pudding instead."
There was silence in Peterborough about the space of half a minute. She spoke again, her voice terrible with despisement or phlegm. "Jello instant? Jello instant is crap! You’re useless."
"Don’t start," I said.
"Every time I tell you to do something you..." she continued.
"You’re starting," I interrupted. "It’s not my fault the store doesn’t have My-T-Fine."
"It’s you," she said. "It’s your vibes. Whenever there’s something I like, you send out negative vibes and they take it off the shelves."
"You’ve started," I said.
The intercom went dead with a thud. I returned to Perry Mason.
My slumber that night was not full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing. Instead, my wife’s words rattled around and around in my skull case ─ "Whenever there’s something I like, you send out negative vibes....negative vibes...negative vibes..."
* * *
I awoke the next morning from uneasy dreams to find myself transformed into a gigantic insect....No...Wait a minute...That’s the wrong story...
I awoke the next morning from uneasy dreams to find the ominous words still echoing in my brain.
I crawled to the bathroom for a badly needed morning piss, then crawled to the kitchen, poured a cup of stale coffee, and staggered to the living room couch into which I, the coffee, and a copy of the Union Leader sank, more or less as a unit.
My wife appeared in her morning regalia ─ 20-year-old greenish bathrobe, tan leotards with a hole in the left lower quadrant of the ass, pink flip flops from Ocean State Job Lot, hand-knitted woolen wrist warmers, blond hair au naturel (stringy and uncombed). She spotted me and turned her back.
I dropped what I was doing (except for the coffee) and knelt at her feet. "I’m sorry," I groveled, "Forgive me. I’m torn with remorse for my behavior ─ whatever it was."
"You lie," she said. "You’re a liar. You lie and lie and lie. That’s all you do is lie. How can you keep lying like that?" She pivoted into the kitchen.
I followed her, continuing to grovel and lie.
No dice.
I persisted, however, and was rewarded several days later when I was granted forgiveness ─ perhaps because she got sick of the groveling and lying.
A frosty armistice in place, we sat down to discuss my negative vibe problem
She began by listing products she had liked that had vanished over the years. Next, after browbeating and a session on the rack, I was forced to concede that I emitted powerful ESP radiation from my frontal lobes which was picked up by receptors in the sensitive assholes of marketing experts. A few meetings in four-star Caribbean resorts later, production of the product would be halted.
Our joint research is summed up below in a chart listing her favorite commodities and brands that have vanished from showrooms and supermarket shelves.
Alongside each entry, is the excuse given out by the marketing assholes for scrapping the products. Apparently, they refuse to acknowledge the power of my negative vibes.
Here’s the chart:
|
Dead Products |
Supposed Reason for Killing |
|
Endurance (peach flavored) Vitamin Water |
Although Endurance was the only Vitamin Water flavor that didn’t taste like acidic crap, as soon as Coca Cola took over the company their marketing assholes discovered it cost an extra tenth of a cent per bottle to manufacture |
|
Yuban 100% Colombian Coffee |
Ranked Number 1 by Consumer’s Report a few years ago, the marketing assholes at Kraft decided to get on the Green bandwagon by creating a brew that tastes like dried dog turd, but is 30 percent rain forest friendly |
|
Waverly Wafers crackers |
They tasted good, so Michele Obama would probably claim they cause obesity in black people |
|
Sealtest ice-cream |
Bought by Kraft who let the brand be swamped by the ads of Breyer’s and other manufacturers of crap ice-cream |
|
Sky Bars |
They tasted good so the marketing assholes were afraid someone would start a class-action law suit on behalf of. teenagers with zits. |
|
Chocolate Grahams |
Ralph Nader secretly informed Dan Rather that Chocolate Grahams were addictive to children who drank milk |
|
Original Freihofer chocolate chip cookies, bread. and other baked goods |
Freihofer’s was taken over by something called Bimbo Bakeries whose team of marketing assholes decided no one would notice when they substituted cheap crap for the original products. |
|
Soup chickens |
There’s more profit in using hen chickens for dog food. |
|
Specialty meats (veal kidneys, sweetbreads) |
There’s more profit in using specialty meats for dog food. Besides, marketing assholes and their families think organ meats are disgusting |
|
Red Dog beer in bottles |
Brewery wouldn’t kick back enough to supermarkets to keep the brand on the shelves |
|
Fleischmann's Light Margarine |
Contained so little trans fat and saturated fat and tasted so much like real butter that it cut into sales of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter |
|
Kraft chocolate malted milk mix |
Marketing assholes hold meeting. Lead asshole says, "I don’t drink malted milk. Do you drink malted milt?" Product killed. |
|
Genuine (salt-cured) lox |
Marketing assholes hold meeting: Lead asshole says,: "I bought some lox at the deli. It was salty. I went back and threw in their faces." Product killed |
|
Levi’s rye and other fresh-baked bread |
Marketing assholes hold meeting. Lead asshole says, "People don’t want bread fresh from the oven and with a crust. My kids scream if we don't serve 'em week-old mush wrapped in plastic." Products killed. |
|
Locally grown fresh produce (peaches, tomatoes) |
Marketing asshole analysts discover that plastic tomatoes from Mexico and concrete peaches from Nigeria are cheaper. |
|
Great old cars like Hudson and Packard |
"Ya gotta keep up with the times like us at GM. Big fins, chrome, big cars. Marketing, man, marketing. People are suckers. Them Japs and Koreans’ll never get anywheres." |
|
A&P Mel-O-bit American cheese slices |
With market share down, and after weeks of brainstorming at Little Dix Bay Resort on Virgin Gorda, a crack team of A&P marketing assholes scrapped the company’s house brands and did away with Mel-O-bit and other products, thereby succeeding in sending the firm into a death spiral |
|
Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain breakfast cereal |
Marketing assholes meet in Aruba, decide that Americans are so dumb it would be a waste of money to promote a whole-grain cereal with no sugar. Sales restricted to UK, Australia, and New Zealand where people are smarter. |
Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net
Le Pauvre Henri
The two videos below are first-cat accounts of the suffering that so many of our helpless animal friends in France endure during their brief and tragic lives. I feel sure that even the stoniest of hearts will melt upon viewing the torment that Henri bears so bravely and so patiently.
Should your heart be sufficiently melted (or your stomach sufficiently turned) by Henri's plight, you can help by sending whatever you can spare to Le Société Générale des Chats Franςaises, c/o Dome of Glass, Peterborough, NH 03458.
To contact fellow friends of French felines, Google one of the many Chat Rooms located hither and yon on the Web.
Henri I
Henri II
For additional insights into the status of the French cat population, click Sofia Becerra, a jeune fille [a virgin girl horse born in June] who speaks touchingly of le grandeur of French chats [cats] in the magazine "Le Millefeuille." (A millefeuille is either a disgusting kind of bug that scares my daughter Loren when she takes a shower or else some sort of stupid pastry that causes the French to lose to the Germans whenever they have a war.)
Mlle. Becerra writes,: "Les chats Franςais sont très minces, pas comme les chats obèses des États Unis" [Translation: "French cats are tasty trays of mince pie, not like lard-ass American cats that shop at Walmart.."]
She adds, "Les chats français sont, en fait, juste comme les français. Toujours élégants, toujours raffinés. Les femmes impeccables, les hommes tirés à quatre épingles."
Very loosely (and incompetently) translated into English, all that crap means:
"French cats are like, totally, the same as French chicks, two jaws elegant, two jaws something or other. The femmes [girl cats] are impeccable [that means they regularly groom themselves between their legs with their tongues],* and the hommes [guy cats] are like Michelin tires with a quart of épingles."
Hey ─ don’t complain ─ no normal person without a double-hinged lower jaw can pronounce the fucking language let alone translate it. If you're not happy with my efforts go dig up a native Frog on your own.
In conclusion, as Tiny Tim might (and did) say, "God bless you one and all."
* If you think that's crass, you oughta see what I wrote before my wife made me change it.
Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net
Obama Comes Out of the Closet
Reluctantly setting aside his legendary modesty, President Obama has come out of the closet to admit that it was he and he alone who was responsible for killing notorious terror chief Osama bin Laden.
In a remarkable video, crafted by Mr. Obama's brain trust of Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, and longtime spiritual advisor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright ─ and narrated by former President and Hero of the Republic, Bill Clinton ─ the gut-wrenching courage of our President in deciding to off bin Laden is shown with grim words and powerful imagery.
Once they see this video, the question all patriotic Americans must ask themselves is whether a weak, super-rich, right wing, middle-of-the road, white Mormon extremist waffler like Mitt Romney would have had President Obama's intestinal fortitude and intellectual brilliance to plan and authorize the amazingly ingenious and daring raid.
It is to laugh!
Furthermore, in a story so late-breaking it may never break, Dome of Glass has uncovered controvertible photographic proof that it was the President himself who led the team of Navy Seals, and he himself who took by the throat the circumcised dog bin Laden and smote him dead as either a dorrknob or doornail.
President Obama, disguised as a reality show host, is seen about to wheel and fire on a cringing bin Laden
In another development, the Obama camp, sick and tired of being maligned by Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman, and the rest of the right-wing cabal at the New York Times, is about to release YouTube clips of a youthful Obama leading the raid on Entebbe, landing with the troops in Normandy, and raising the flag on Mount Suribachi
Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairp;oint.net
Roots
Now that I’m approaching my hundredth year on earth (if you think about it, everyone other than a few astronauts is approaching his hundredth year on earth though few will make it while still breathing) and with the vast resources of the Internet literally at my fingertips, I’ve decided to delve into the past with figurative pick and shovel to literally dig up my roots and any other debris that might be lurking in the figurative shrubbery.
Many a storm-tossed night have I lain awake (or layed awake if you prefer and are illiterate) on my futon, crusted as it is with dried-up bodily fluids, tossing and turning in helpless androgyny as I ponder the many mysteries of the past and the literally thousand of genomes and God knows how many sexual couplings that have resulted in the appearance of the unique life form that my wife calls "Mack" and that I call "Me" when I’m sober.
● By what bizarre happenstance did Me arise from the ashes after eons of nothingness starting with the Big Bang and continuing for 14 billion years or so up to and including Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak?
● From whence did the clan Mack originate?
● For what reasons did it originate?
● What crimes were committed in the name of Mack in centuries gone by?
● Will Mack children and Mack grandchildren and Mack great-grandchildren (etc.) preserve their surnames for posterity or will they hire expensive lawyers and switch to Lady Gaga or Metta World Peace or Rip Torn or Malcolm X or World B. Free or Abdul-Jabbar in order to meld better into mainstream America?
My first tentative step in the dangerous expedition into my Roots ( the word should be pronounced "Rutz" to rhyme witrh "Puts" to distinguish it from Alex Haley’s immoral masterpiece) was to turn to Haley himself for aspiration. After a cursory study of the great author’s methodology, I raced slowly to the Peterborough Town Library in my rusting 1996 Ford Ranger pickup and signed out every volume I could find dealing with the White Man’s suffering and enslavement at the hands and other body parts of the opposite sex. Two days later, having scanned the various works and highlighted significant passages with yellow magic marker, I plagiarized all relevant material (and a lot more that wasn’t relevant), invented ridiculous names for several thousand imaginary forebears, and downloaded all the shit into my five-year-old Toshiba laptop’s overcrowded memory.
Now I’m sure you’ll all understand that I cannot give away for free the mass of misinformation that I amassed in my massive and as yet unpublished tome. (At this very instant my manuscript is in the rejection phase with several prestigious publishing houses.) However, I have decided to whet (wet?) your collective appetites with a selection of titillating facts:
* * *
The earliest confirmed existence of a Mack that I could exhume, was one Gunther Mack, a fur-bearing petty thief and confidence creature recently evolved from monkeyhood who flourished alongside the wooly mammoth and giant eight-toed ground sloth in Middle Mongolia (a strip of desolation wedged between Inner and Outer Mongolia) during the early Epicene. Unlike most of his hominid brethren and sistren, Gunther sported a prehensile tail. As you might imagine, this made him very popular with the ladies and, since condoms, diaphragms, and The Pill hadn’t yet been invented, the unfortunate result for the future well-being of humanity was the propagation of a large number of baby Macks with prehensile tails.
This era in my family’s history was (alas) followed by the sudden obliteration of all records of Macks coincident with a meteor impact off the coast of Pre-Cambrian Mexico and the consequent amelioration of the dinosaurs.
Thus it was not until recent times ─ about a million years ago ─ that a large colony of Macks was spotted lying or laying amidst the jungles and tundra of what is now the Horn of Africa, but was then its left buttock.
How, you ask, did these hairy, pasty-faced, prehensile-tailed proto-Macks wind up in darkest Africa?
The answer is shrouded in misery. A famous Duke University professor of lacrosse (and former presidential candidate) has hypothesized ─ without any evidence ─ that a tribe of hairless, black-skinned pueblo dwellers enslaved the aboriginal Macks, docked their tails to a fair-thee-well, and transported them (the Macks, not the tails) to Africa on camelback via the Silk Route. There the unfortunate Mack remnants were compelled by their merciless masters to work long hours in the sun-scorched sorghum plantations after which they were forced to breed like rabbits (with surprisingly little resistance from the Macks).
By the time several ice ages had rolled around, the Macks, with their lush pelts of body hair to keep them warm, and led by the infamous Barney Mack and his common-law husband Frank Mack, had turned the tables on their black masters (who themselves had evolved into extremely efficient Marathon runners and seven-foot-tall basketball players) and escaped via stagecoach as recounted in the Book of Exodus to what is now southern Italy, but was then southern Italy.
A period known as The Golden Age of Macks ensued followed every few thousand years by the Silver Age, the Brass Age, the Plastic Age. and the Shit Age.
This entire edifice of Ages literally collapsed like an outhouse made of cards when Alexander the Great crossed the Rubicon and began his disastrous conquest of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Stimulated by the subsequent rape of Carthage and Hannibal’s implantation of elephants into what was left of Italy, the few surviving Macks coalesced into what was to become the Royal House of Mack culminating in the accession to the Game of Thrones of Julius Mack, Augustus Mack, Nero Mack, Caligula Mack, and the Mack Truck Company.
Five centuries later, after Attila the Mack had conquered the decadent rotting husk of the MackDonald Empire, the era known to infamy as the Dark Ages began its calamitous run on Broadway.
This unpleasant interlude was, however, a happy time for Macks.
Relieved of their onerous duties as members of the once powerful and cultured House of Mack, they quickly descended into the metaphorical gutter where they wallowed affably with the pigs, rooting in the mud and earning meager livings as muggers, hitmen, swindlers, breakfast sausages, and professional riffraff.
This lowly but enjoyable condition obtained until the Renaissance when Leonardo da Mack in partnership with Mackelangelo demonstrated that the earth was not flat, but shaped like a bagel.
Almost immediately (i.e., several hundred years later) a contingent of fanatical British Macks rebelled against the crown (as well as the fedora and homburg) and set sail for the Orient amid great fanfare and laughter on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.
The rest is History.
Not only didn’t they get close to India or China, but they wound up shipwrecked on the barren shores of what is now known as America, but then had some crazy Indian name like Massachusetts that no one could pronounce without spitting out a mouthful of food.
After a Thanksgiving Day feast courtesy of friendly local redskins, the surviving Macks were wiped out and their scalps put out to dry on Plymouth Rock.
This brings us to the present when a few debased remains of the once proud clan can be found scattered throughout parts of New York, Kentucky, and what is now New Hampshire. but was then Wisconsin. In these disparate locales they scrape out ignoble livelihoods as corporate lawyers, marketing executives, carbon fiber engineers, computer programmers, graphic artists, physical therapists, and bloggers.
* * *
And so ends my strange, stupid journey of discovery, one which took me to many dark corners of the Internet and many secretive regions of the Web including Wikipedia, Amazon.com, Yahoo, Facebook, Google Earth, Drudge, Outlook Express, and any number of XXX-rated sites. Some were stimulating, others were boring, and all were devoid of relevant information.
(At present, my Toshiba is with Matt Burke of Antrim Computer being cleansed of several thousand viruses, spyware bots, and trojans.)
Even more fruitless than the Web, however, was, my association with Carlos the Jackal, perhaps the world’s leading Internet pain-in-the-ass, who flooded cyberspace with spam on my behalf in order to contact all the planet’s Macks.
In a brilliant stroke of idiocy, the Jackal couched the emails as originating in Nigeria from a certain Mrs. Gladys Mugwab, wife of the late Lord Colonel Doctor Faustus Goldfarb, former Zimbabwe Generalissimo of Incest. The grieving widow Mugwab was desperately seeking a trustworthy Mack to help spirit $20 million in goldbricks out of Uganda and into a Canadian account with Citibank located on Barclay Street in Cambodia.
So compelling was the Jackal’s email, that I myself sent Mrs. Mugwab a $500 retainer, my social security number, several credit cards, and my mother’s maiden name to demonstrate good faith.
And, oh yeah, she has a terminal case of Bucephalus and I get to keep the all the loot after funeral expenses.
The results of the mass emailing were astounding.
Did you know that there are 37 Macks cowering amidst China’s millions including Mao ZeMack, Chang Kai Mack, and a bunch of Macks with the first name of Yung-Fat all of whom are in prison for bigamy, polygamy. monogamy, and having intercourse with cows.
I also unearthed (literally) an ancient Mack tribe in the ankle of Africa, living problematically amongst the people who make clicking sounds with their tongues instead of using the letters G, X, or R.
So, in conclusion, I implore you all to buy Roots (Rutz) when it comes out. You’ll be enthralled from first word to last. If you’re not, that’s just tough tomatoes.
The pub date is not yet established since the liberal-dominated publishing industry has yet to pick up my manuscript (literally). Even E-book giant Smashwords has rejected it under pressure from the Obama administration.
Should nobody bite by next Christmas, I’m thinking of contacting my former literary agent, Tony Outhwaite, as soon as he gets back from lunch ─ which should be within four or five years.
Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net
Thoughts on Abortion
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it {Genesis 2]
Just about every woman and quite a few men have passionate opinions, pro and con, about abortion. As a consequence, it’s a subject most of us avoid at the dinner table, in the office, or on a date. * * * I led off this post with a quotation from no less an authority than God Himself who made it a point to warn Adam not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge (though He fails to explain why He planted the tree in the first place). ● Does life begin with conception?...after three months?...after six months?...just before the fetus emerges from the uterus?...just before its head emerges? I tell you, it’s tough being human. Contrast our plight with the fun our animal buddies have: ● Does the lady spider go to church on Sunday dressed in widow’s weeds seeking absolution for dining on her husband the previous Tuesday? The late anthropologist Loren Eiseley addressed the problem in "The Star Dragon," one of his most powerful, beautiful, and disturbing writings. :I think we are now well across the last ice, toward the beginning. There is no fire of any sort but we do not miss it. We are far to the south and the climate is warm. We have no tools except an occasional bone club. We walk upright, but I think we are now animals. We are small ─ pygmies, in fact. We wear no clothes. We no longer stare at the stars or think of the unreal. The dead are dead. No one follows us at nightfall. Do not repeat this. I think we are animals. I think we have reached beyond the bridge. We are happy here. Tell no one. What Eiseley has done, of course, is to retell the story of Genesis. It is a recounting in geologic terms of man’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden which is also the Garden of Ignorance. Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net
To put it another way, and to roll out one of the more overused of the current crop of media clichés, abortion is a Polarizing issue, pitting male against female, housewife against professional woman, religious against secular, liberal against conservative, old against young, and, in an area that’s seldom mentioned, race against race.
And the frosting on the cake is this: The opposing viewpoints are not subject to compromise...not now...not next year...not ever..
Yet, strangely, despite the gulf between the pros and the cons, both have chosen to employ euphemisms for their respective stances ─ "Pro-Choice" for those upholding the right of a woman to abort her fetus, "Pro-Life" for those who would deny her that right.
And, in what passes for debate about the virtues and evils of the popular and lucrative industry of fetus annihilation, the opposing camps never have and never will reach any sort of resolution.
The reason for this unpleasant contretemps is that what passes for debate involves two totally unrelated and, therefore, unresolvable issues. One cannot come to any sort of agreement or compromise between philosophies that have absolutely nothing in common. If party A insists that apples are oranges and party B insists that cats are dogs, it would be a total waste of time to have them sit down and hash out their differences.
For Pro-Choicers, the bedrock of their position is the supposed right of a woman to do whatever she damn well pleases with whatever happens to be inside her body, be it a gallstone, a portion of recently consumed quiche, or a fertilized ovum. Pro-Choicers consider outlawing abortion to be nothing more nor less than sexual enslavement.
For Pro-Lifers, the bedrock of their stance is the supposed sanctity of human life, often, though not always, based on various religious tracts and the preachings of various Men of God up to and including the Pope. Pro-Lifers consider abortion to be nothing more nor less than infanticide.
Despite the two irreconcilable positions, however, there are few Pro-Choicers who are in favor of infanticide, and almost no Pro-Lifers who favor the enslavement of women Nevertheless, female enslavement versus infanticide is exactly what the debate boils down to which, of course, leads to the Pro-Choice coterie claiming that their opposite numbers are a bunch of male chauvinist pig bastards, while the Pro Life crowd hurls back at their foes various gospels and dogmas to the effect that abortion is morally and logically nothing more or less than the slaying of human beings and that abortionists and their patrons are a bunch of Godless, amoral murderers.
On another front, Pro-Life zealots often bring up cases of famous men ─ Steve Jobs and Tim Tebow, for example ─ whose mothers, it they had been Pro-Choice, would certainly have opted to abort their fetuses, thus depriving the world of iPads, iPods, iPhones, and one muscular Christian quarterback.
In contra-distinction, Pro-Choice fans could (though seldom do) counter with examples such as Taylor Swift, Keith Olbermann, and Adolf Hitler whose expeditious termination wombwise would have spared us from some terrible music, several years of insane television commentary, and 50 million corpses.
And so the argument rages on an on like a sort of endless scream dragging with it the concomitant baggage of placards, editorials, newspaper ads, sit-ins, boycotts, demonstrations, divorces, lawsuits, and an occasional homicide.
No doubt the screeching will continue until doom cracks or hell freezes over.
The result of all this is that political decisions regarding abortion revolve around whether support for or against abortion rights is likely to improve or hurt one’s chances at the polls. This presents a nightmare quandary for the political class.
In an effort to extricate themselves from the morass, liberal politicians, their staffs feverishly at work in the minefield, have gravitated to the totally lily-livered stand: "I, personally, am against abortion, but I believe that the decision is a matter for each woman to make for herself without interference from the government."
Conservative politicians, their staffs feverishly at work in the minefield, have come up with a different though equally lily-livered position: "I believe it is up to the individual states ─ not the federal government ─ to legislate the issue of abortion. The Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade ruling should be reversed."
Net result with respect to abortion policy? ─ Zero.
Net result on voting patterns? ─ Conservatives continue to vote for conservatives, liberals continue to vote for liberals, and dogs continue to howl at the moon.
Well, we’re a democracy (of sorts) so this must be a good thing, .right? The majority (or at least that part of the majority that chooses to vote) speaketh every year or two, and having spoketh goes back to its TV sets until the next election cycle.
So what does God go ahead and do for an encore? He plucks out one of Adam’s ribs, sculpts an attractive young chick to keep Adam company in the evenings (since television, football, and computers hadn’t been invented yet), and lets them both cavort naked in the Garden of Eden.
Well! You can imagine what happens next! A sneaky old serpent (No, not Barney Frank) ingratiates himself with Eve and beguiles her into sampling some of the forbidden fruit, upon which the stupid bitch (probably a blonde) persuades Adam to join in the repast.
What a fuckin’ disaster!
That damned serpent! That dumb broad! That weak-kneed ass Adam!
Now look at the mess we’re all in!
And here’s where we get to the root of the abortion debacle. The inescapable and unavoidable problem with abortion is that we humans, alone here on earth, perhaps in the universe, have eaten from the tree of knowledge.
● If it’s entirely up to the female of the species to either abort or bear, why should the putative father be held hostage to the mother’s whim and tossed in jail for failure to provide child support?
● Does a fetus feel pain? If so at what stage of pregnancy? Day one? Day 60? Day 270? And does it matter?
● Is abortion proper if the mother's life is in danger or if the fetus has Down Syndrome or if the pregnancy is the result of incest or rape?
● Is it a sin to use condoms or The Pill and thus destroy human lives even before they have a chance to exist?
● If contraception’s a sin, why is it okay to employ the rhythm system or practice coitus interruptus? And anyway, why is contraception the night before any different logically than taking a morning-after pill the next day?
● And why does the law say it’s fine to snuff a child just before it exits the uterus, but a crime to kill it one nanosecond later when it officially becomes a baby?
● Does the male lion suffer pangs of conscience when he kills a bunch of his cubs and eats a few so he can get laid again?
● Do the bird police haul the cuckoo before a magistrate for laying her eggs in another bird’s nest?
● Does the mommy rat shed rivers of tears as she digests one of her ratlings?
In his essay Eiseley speaks of lying sleepless in bed at night, haunted by the vision of Halley’s Comet tracing its endless lonely orbit through the heavens. And as the comet moves though time, Eiseley thinks of man’s lonely voyage through the same vastness of the past ─ from the present, backwards to the crude trenches of Neolithic man and back further through the millennia, moving ever southward across two ice ages, shivering speechless in brute terror of the dark and the unknown, hunted and killed by the great cats of the Pleistocene, growing ever more helpless, ever more confused, ever angrier at his own impotence, ever more like an animal until, at last, he arrives at the start of things, at the very origin of our strange species when, our consciousnesses dimmed over the eons, the last glimmer of light within our brains extinguished, we arrive at that final outpost ─ we are no longer human.
Eiseley writes:
And so Paradise, with God’s flaming cherubim guarding its gates, is that faraway land of long, long ago where we were free of the dreadful curse of intellect and the terrible burden of knowledge that makes us conscious of our mortality. .makes us aware of our sins....makes us human.
Alas! Time is a one-way street, a river that only flows downhill and only in one direction.
There is no going back
We must suffer under the yoke of the knowledge of good and evil until death releases us from all suffering and all knowledge.
And so, when I consider Pro-Choice vs. Pro-Life, I think of the Beatles song, "Hey, Buffalo Bill, What did you kill?"
And I think of my own children and how poor and meaningless my life would be without them.
Therein lies the rub as Shakespeare might have put it and as every parent knows. The abortion question, like other mysteries that plague us, is a problem without a solution.
It is like a vast, ethereal class-action lawsuit in which we all are respondents and upon which the human condition depends ─ but where is that celestial court than can adjudicate it?
Our inability to know what we are killing versus our ability to kill is our punishment for having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge.
I guess we’ll just have to live with the consequences ─ until we die.
Alliteration, March Madness, and Basketball
Thanks to the antics of European rabbits during mating season ─ and to Lewis Carroll’s March Hare in Alice in Wonderland ─ there’s a well-worn old saw, "Mad as a March hare."
So what.
Who cares whether or not a rapidly-reproducing rodent-like European mammal with long ears and a twitchy nose goes berserk every spring.
What’s more, "Mad as a March hare" is one of these pointless aphorisms, like "An elephant never forgets" or "A dog is man’s best friend" that have no utility whatsoever. I mean, would you interject "Mad as a March hare" into a conversation with your doctoral thesis supervisor in order to impress him? Or would you whisper "An elephant never forgets" into your date’s shell-like ear in hopes of luring her to your digs?
And anyway, what do deranged rabbits have to do with the seemingly endless collegiate basketball ritual involving 68 schools that descends on us like a toxic fog every March?
March Madness?
March Bullshit!
Neither March nor rabbits nor madness have a goddamn thing to do with college basketball.
So why does every asshole sports commentator and every asshole sports writer feel impelled to repeat the fucking phrase "March Madness" a few hundred times every day during every fucking sports broadcast and in every fucking sports column until, blessedly, one collection of "student-athlete" thugs defeats another collection of "student-athlete" thugs on prime time following which the most-hyped members of the "student-athlete" thug crop sign up for duty in the NBA at $10 million a year for five years?
Okay.
There is an answer.
Prepare to be enlightened.
The word "March" and the word "Madness" both begin with the letter M!
Wow!
Fantastic!
Who woulda thunk it!
Why...why... it’s...it’s...it’s...ALLITERATION!!!
Lucky the tournament doesn’t take place in April or it might be known as April Asininity...or in January when it would probably be christened the January Jerk-off...or in November when we could dub it November Nausea.
All right. I concede that people like alliteration. They also like cheeseburgers, chocolate mousse, and Grand Marnier.
So what? Must we therefore be suffocated by an avalanche of cheeseburgers, chocolate mousse, and Grand Marnier every March?
I’m aware (even if you’re not) that poets often use alliteration as a poetic device. In years gone by. Shakespeare wrote "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought" in one of his most famous sonnets and Samuel Taylor Coleridge got carried away on a veritable sea of alliteration in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with "The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free; We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea." Like, wow, that’s seven F’s, two B’s, two W’s, and a pair of S’s in one short stanza!
But Will and Sam and other old guys and gals like them made sense with their admirable artisanship and able alliteration ─ unlike that miserable March Madness clichéd crap
Face it: There is nothing in the least "Mad" about the NCAA’s annual basketball orgy.
If the sports scrivener and TV talk classes feel they simply must alliterate, March Moneymaking would be a hell-of a-lot-more accurate and March Monotony a hell-of-a-lot more descriptive.
Which brings me, somewhat ungracefully, into a discussion of the game of basketball itself.
With the possible exception of soccer (which the rest of the world incorrectly calls football), there is no sport as stupid, boring, and repetitious as basketball. (Small wonder it’s become so popular in Europe, Asia, and South America.)
Up the court, down the court, up the court, down the court; pass, pass, pass; shot, shoot, shoot; miss, miss, miss; dunk, dunk, dunk; whistle, whistle, whistle, whistle, whistle, whistle, whistle, whistle, whistle, whistle, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul; free throw, free throw, free throw, free throw, free throw, free throw, free throw, free throw, free throw, free throw...
I admit I watch a lot of basketball, not because I like the damn game, but (a) because almost everything else on television other than Two and a Half Men and Perry Mason reruns is crap and (b) because I’m a typical sports fan who’ll root for his hometown team no matter how idiotic the sport.
Right now, for example, I’m a partisan of the Boston Celtics. (I’m even beginning to root for my former hometown team, the Knicks, now that Dolan's been forced to get rid of his lover, that bigoted jackass Isiah Thomas.). What’s more, I have a certain affection for various players and coaches ─ Doc Rivers, for example, and Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, Rajon Rondo, Ray Allen, Greg Stiemsma, and Big Baby Davis
But all that aside, dispassionate analysis shows that the game of basketball is unalterably stupid.
Why, for example, in this supposedly non-contact sport, are certain players ─ Charles Barkley for example in years gone by or current golden boy LeBron James ─ allowed to back their way to the basket by means of shoving their huge butts into defending players until they’re close enough to lay the ball in?
And why are low-echelon players, standing immobile as statues, called for "blocking" when a LeBron or Derrick Rose or Dwight Howard or other anointed superstar crashes into them, elbows flying?
And why do announcers insist on using semi-illiterate neologisms like "athleticism" and "physicality" whenever a showboating idiot performs a triple pirouette slam dunk rather than simply laying the ball in the basket?
And why, if Team A chances to lead by 20 points after the first quarter, is it guaranteed that Team B will make up the deficit in the second quarter then go ahead by 20 in the third quarter only to see Team A come back to tie the game in the final seconds of the fourth quarter and send things into overtime to the delight of the broadcast sponsors?
And why, if seven players are scrambling for a rebound, will the ball be awarded to the supermost of the superstars involved while the least consequential run-of-the-mill participant will be charged with a pushing, hacking, or shoving foul as he lies bleeding on the woodwork?
And above all, why, given the rule that one must continually bounce the ball (dribble it) when running hither and thither about the court, are designated "superstars" such as the recently retired Michael Jordan allowed to race from half court cradling the ball without dribbling until they’re close enough to the basket to leap up and dunk it? (In the meanwhile, of course, members of the hoi polloi are being whistled for "walking" if one of their toes twitches.)
Ask any sports commentator, such as loudmouth moron Chris Berman, to explain and he’ll tell you that "The Fans" love it. Well "The Fans" love lots of things ─ like fist fights and topless cheerleaders and free piña coladas, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to get them. In Tuesday's Celtic-Miami Heat game, instant replay showed a Miami player taking about ten steps without dribbling the ball and without being called for traveling. Celtic play-by-play man Mike Gorman dryly remarked, "There’s no such thing as traveling in the NBA."
Is there is a solution to all this crap?
As usual, Dome of Glass has the answer, one that will transform basketball into a truly enjoyable and pulse-quickening spectator sport while making the annual March Madness whoop-de-do truly Mad if not truly whoop-de-do:
● Make the game a contact sport
● Do away with the dribbling rule
● Redesign the ball so that it bounces funny and is easier to throw by making it smaller and oval-shaped
● Clad the warriors in high-impact plastic armor
● Eliminate backboards and baskets (which discriminate against short people) and replace them with goal posts
● Play the game out of doors in huge stadiums
● Institute a bounty system that rewards players who damage other players
Oh...wait a minute...that would be football.
Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net
Tom Sowell: A Voice of Reason in the Wilderness
Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at
Stanford University. His website is http://www.tsowell.com
Once again Tom Sowell has brought his unmatched intellect, rationality, and research to bear on one of the many liberal dogmas that plague our nation ─ that statistical disparities in employment, loans, college admissions, etc. between certain favored groups (women and blacks) and their numerical representation in the country at large, is proof of discrimination. This invidious and nonsensical quasi-theological doctrine has infected our legal system since the days of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the concomitant usurpation of the courts by liberal activist judges.
A LONGSTANDING legal charade was played out again recently, when Federal Express paid $3 million to settle an employment discrimination case brought by the U.S. Department of Labor.
Federal Express was accused of both racial discrimination and sex discrimination. FedEx denied it.
Why then did they pay the $3 million? Because it can cost a lot more than $3 million to fight a discrimination case. Years ago, the Sears department store chain spent $20 million fighting a sex discrimination charge that took 15 years to make its way through the legal labyrinth. In the end, Sears won — if spending $20 million and getting nothing in return can be called winning.
Federal Express was apparently not prepared to spend that kind of money and that kind of time fighting a discrimination case. The net result is that the government and much of the media can now claim that race, sex and other discrimination are rampant, considering how many anti-discrimination cases have been "won."
At the heart of these legal charades is the prevailing dogma that statistical disparities in employment — or mortgage lending, or anything else — show discrimination.
In both the Federal Express case and the earlier Sears case, statistical differences between the mix of the workforce and the population mix were the key evidence presented to show discrimination.
In the Sears case, there was not even one woman who worked in any of the company’s 900 stores who claimed to have been discriminated against.
It was all a matter of statistics — and of the arbitrary dogma that statistical disparities show discrimination.
Once statistical disparities have been demonstrated, the burden of proof shifts to the employer to prove his innocence, contrary to centuries of legal tradition that the burden of proof in on the accuser.
No burden of proof whatever is put on those who argue as if there would be a random distribution of racial and other groups in the absence of discrimination.
Happenstances may be random but performances seldom are. Most people are right-handed but, among major league hitters with lifetime batting averages of .330 and up, there have been 15 left-handed batters and only 5 right-handed batters since the beginning of the 20th century. All the best-selling beers in the United States were created by people of German ancestry. Anyone who follows professional basketball knows that most of the leading stars are black.
Some years ago, a study of National Merit Scholarship finalists found that more than half were first-born children, even in five-child families. Jews are less than one percent of the world’s population but they won 14 percent of the Nobel Prizes in literature and the sciences during the first half of the 20th century, and 29 percent during the second half.
It would be no problem at all to fill this whole column — or this entire page — with examples from around the world of gross statistical disparities in outcomes, in situations where discrimination was not involved. But those who take the opposite view — that numbers show discrimination — do not have to produce one speck of evidence to back up that sweeping conclusion. Human beings are not random events. Individuals and groups have different histories, cultures, skills and attitudes. Why would anyone expect them to be distributed anywhere in a pattern based on statistical theories of random events? Much less make the absence of such a pattern become a basis for multimillion dollar lawsuits?
However little evidence or logic there may be behind the belief that an absence of random distribution shows discrimination, there are nevertheless strong incentives for some people to cling to that belief anyway. Those who lag behind — whether educationally, economically or otherwise — have every incentive to think of themselves as victims of those who are more successful.
Those who want their votes have every incentive to go along, or even to actively promote that idea. So do those who want to see issues as moral melodramas, starring themselves on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.
The net result is an invincible dogma — and a polarized country
Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net
Hundreds of Dwarfs, Thousands of Dwarfs, Millions and Millions And Millions of Dwarfs
Nowadays, after collapsing into my wine-stained recliner for a little after-dinner relaxation ─ be it Television, Television, Television, Television, or Television ─ I find that it’s here a dwarf, there a dwarf, everywhere a dwarf dwarf. Frankly, this pisses me off. I don’t fork over $80 a month to DirecTV in order to pay homage to under-sized men and women. When it comes to relaxation and entertainment, dwarfs rate at roughly the same level on my abomination scale as mimes, ventriloquists, Regis Philbin, and Taylor Swift.
Recent TV shows that have featured one or more of the Little People include Seinfeld, Touched by an Angel, Becker, Darma and Greg, Fantasy Island, Diff’rent Strokes, Carnivale, Knee High PI, Game of Thrones, and the more-or-less reality series Little People, Big World
As for big screen productions, significant quantities of dwarfs found gainful employment in Goldmember, Foul Play, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Court Jester, Ship of Fools, The Spy Who Shagged Me,: The Man With the Golden Gun, Prêt à Porter, Saratoga Trunk, Willow, Legend, The Elephant Man, Amadeus, several Harry Potter movies, various Star Wars movies, and Werner Herzog’s bizarre allegory, Even Dwarfs Started Small.
(Note that the expressions "Dwarf," Little Person," and "LP" have been declared OK by the elders of the First Church of Political Correctness. The word "Midget," however, has joined niggard, retard, Chinaman, and squaw in the elders’ lexicon of proscribed nouns.)
* * *
Once upon a time, after the Munchkins and Oompa Loompas and Seven Dwarfs* had run their deplorable courses, I dared hope that the little person market had maxed out and that the dwarf fad would disappear into the shrubbery just as the horrific chimpanzee craze of the 30s and 40s had faded into obscurity in conjunction with Johnny Weissmuller’s expanding waistline and the appalling Cheetah’s long-awaited ascension to that great monkey farm in the sky.
But no such luck.
It turned out that Dopey, Sleepy, the Munchkins, and the Oompa Loompas were not mere zits on the face of a still-pubescent entertainment industry, but a foretaste of the future...the proverbial tip of the proverbial iceberg...the early rumblings of the proverbial earthquake that would spawn a proverbial tsunami of proverbial dwarfs (proverbially).
At this point ─ in a desperate attempt to avoid the wrath of the New York Times, Chris Matthews, the Dwarf Defense League, and the Little People Caucus of the Anti-Defamation League ─ I want it known that I have nothing personal against the altitudinally challenged among us.
This tolerant attitude, however, does not mean I want to be deluged with dwarf heroes, dwarf heroines, dwarf villains, evil putty-nosed dwarfs, song-and-dance dwarfs, leprechaun dwarfs, computer-generated dwarfs, and reality series dwarfs. As far as I’m concerned, the boob-box functions best as a soothing electronic lullaby that gentles me to sleep, mouth agape, beer bottle lolling in hand. Any intrusion of dwarfs, singing or otherwise, is like a mis-set alarm clock or a nighttime wake-up call from an insomniac rooster.
* * *
A case in point: HBO’s maxi-series, Game of Thrones.
I’ve caught quite a few segments of this lurid amalgam of made-for-TV fantasy crap even though I haven’t the vaguest idea of what the hell is going on. The plot (if there is one) is so complex and there are so many characters with so many beards and so many unpronounceable names that it’s impossible for anyone not on an acid trip to sort out a coherent story line. Moreover, most of the episodes I’ve seen are randomized reruns. The not unexpected result is that the entire saga has devolved in my mind into a vast non sequitur.
Nevertheless, I keep watching.
Why do I keep watching?
Why does anyone keep watching?
I and anyone keep watching for the same reasons that millions upon millions of other emotionally immature, brain-dead idiots keep watching.
1. Breathes there a man with soul so dead as not to enjoy head-loppings, disembowelments, throat-slittings, spurting blood, tongue removals, scalded bodies, skull bashings, impalements, gaping wounds, and the ripping out of beating hearts?
2. What red-blooded male viewer (and quite a few female viewers) can fail to be stimulated by Tits and Ass sequences featuring some of the most delectable broads appearing in prime time ─ for example the hot blonde ingenue who gets mounted by a seven-foot-tall surfer-type barbarian with a three-foot-long pigtail. (Damn the luck! Why couldn’t I have been born a seven-foot-tall surfer-type barbarian with a three-foot-long pigtail.)
But alas and woe! When last I chanced upon an episode, the seven-foot-tall barbarian and his three-foot-long pigtail had been snuffed, the gorgeous blonde had fallen on hard times resulting in smudged eyeliner and disheveled hair, and the plot (whatever it is) had been hijacked by a dwarf.
Okay, I’ll concede that the dwarf in question, the British actor Peter Dinklage, is good looking as dwarfs go and not a bad little actor to boot, but it strains credulity ─ as well as my powers of identification ─ for Mr. Dinklage to wind up between the fictional sheets with an attractive fictional brunette.
Granted, the whole show strains credulity (in fact it demolishes it), but my point holds ─ this particular directorial gambit ─ dwarf as sex object ─ is gratuitous at best, liberal propaganda at worst. The obvious aim is to convince all us heightists out there (heightism is an actual liberal Newspeak word) that Politically Correct chicks are as itchy to jump into the sack with Toulouse-Lautrec as with Brad Pitt. I mean, like, don't-y’-know, it’s not how a man looks that matters nor how much money he has, it’s what he is. (If you’re not sure as to what the meaning of "is" is, give Bill Clinton a buzz.)
* * *
I’m not the only one who gets a bit queasy watching love scenes involving dwarfs (though to be honest, motion picture love scenes of any sort have been inducing nausea in me ever since I was a little boy). In Betty Adelson’s meticulously-researched pro-dwarf opus, "The Lives of Dwarfs: Their Journey from Public Curiosity to Social Liberation," the author disapprovingly quotes a critic’s review of five-foot-tall Danny DeVito in the film "Living Out Loud:"
I cannot watch Danny DeVito in a love scene without barfing. Dwarfs should not be permitted by law from having love scenes in movies...I don’t have anything against these people. I just think they should stay the hell out of the movies I patronize. Or at least we should have a dwarf warning: You know WARNING, THIS MOVIE WILL SHOW DANNY DEVITO IN A LOVE SCENE.
Putting aside the fact that Danny is not a dwarf (4’ 10" and under is the qualifying altitude), I tend to agree with the critic’s sentiments. I watch television to be entertained ─ not to be preached to by liberal assholes or educated by artsy-fartsy surrealist directors or encouraged to worship at the feet of Frog cinematic poseurs whose brain cells have been flushed away over the years by a regimen of dope, booze, psychedelic drugs, Bolshevik propaganda, and a market basket of social diseases.
Ms. Adelson, who clearly considers herself to be on the side of the angels, bemoans the shortage of "challenging" roles for Little People, particularly for female members of the clan. She notes with a touch of huffiness, "Since exceptional, youthful beauty is the sine qua non for most movie roles for women, female dwarfs are automatically ruled ineligible,"
Well duh...I wonder if the same sort of sexist bigotry is at play in the cover art for every goddamn women’s magazine in the world? You say female dwarfs have a tough time finding jobs in the acting profession? Shocking! Just another example of the sort of vile, uncalled for prejudice that keeps Refrigerator Perry from playing Hamlet or Rosie O’Donnell from being cast as Peter Pan or Smoky the Bear from appearing as Sylvester the Cat.
And how about me? Why should unfortunates like myself who were born with a congenital inability to perform on stage, screen, or television be prevented from pursuing lucrative careers as actors?
Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net
* I’ve always suspected there was hanky panky going on between the Dwarfs and their attractive, if comatose, young charge. I mean, like, I wouldn’t trust Happy, Doc, Bashful, or Grumpy with any daughter of mine. And as for Sneezy, I have it from highly peachable sources that his real name is "Sleazy" and that Disney changed it to avoid offending the Sleaze community.
A Prophet Without Honor
A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country... |
Christian Johann Heinrich Heine |
Channel after channel, week after week, month after month, decade after decade the dead dictator rises from the ashes of his unknown grave like a vast column of smoke from Aladdin’s lamp to regale us with his hate-filled rants and breast-beatings, and contorted visage.
What made this bizarre freak so popular, so written about, and so documented?
● Was he a human tuning fork that resonates with some dark tumor of savagery within our souls?
● Was he a devil-god, a mephistophelean messiah, a charismatic shaman out of hell who would free us from the vile constraints of civilization?
● Was he merely a random and trivial manifestation of "The banality of evil?"
● Was he an example of the "Fascination of the Abomination," a real-life vampire, an embodiment of that old serpent from the Garden of Eden who so easily seduced Adam’s all-to-willing Eve?
All of this and none of this.
It is not the man or his monstrous crimes or his bloodlust or his screaming oratory or his reptilian coterie of degenerates that leads me to tune into the Military Channel or the History Channel or National Geo to watch the likes of "Hitler’s Fatal Attraction," "Hitler’s Last Gamble," "Hitler and the Occult," "Hitler’s Bodyguard," "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," and the rest of the digitized repertoire of evil associated with the Austrian sociopath.
What keeps me glued to the screen is not the Nazi leader or his henchmen, but his minions, the 80-million-strong supporting cast of Volksdeutsche ─ the German People ─ the masses that worshipped Hitler, fought for Hitler, murdered for Hitler, bred themselves for Hitler, and died for Hitler.
I recall reading of an Englishman who attended one of the Nuremberg rallies in the 1930s. Amid the roar of sieg heils and marching bands and stiff-arm salutes and searchlight colonnades and jackbooted storm troopers and two hundred thousand wildly applauding supplicants the Englishman turned to a companion and asked, "I say, what are they all so worked up about?".
At a different rally, the one at which Hitler announced,, "It is our wish and will that this state and Reich shall last for a thousand years," Deputy Führer Rudolph Hess saluted his master after his speech, turned to the assembled multitude and bellowed to the accompaniment of a thunder of sieg heils::
"Hitler is Germany!
Germany is Hitler!:"
Adolf Hitler did not seduce the German people ─ Hitler was the German people.
Among no other race could Hitler have risen to power.
Perhaps you think I'm exaggerating...allowing personal bias to distort impartial analysis?
Pick up a DVD of Nazi whore Leni Reifenstahl's propaganda masterpiece "Triumph of the Will" and study the faces in the crowd.
It was those beaming blond fräuleins strewing Hitler’s path with flowers, those hausfraus teary-eyed with adoration as they kissed their beloved Führer's hand, those stone-faced schutzstaffel troopers parading through Nuremberg’s narrow streets, those shiny-eyed, clenched-mouth little boys in their Hitler Youth shorts, those reverential burghers nodding over their beers ─ that not only created Hitler, but were Hitler. In their thick, slow, mindless, bovine, Germanic fashion they were the Frankenstein ants who assembled the monster, then followed it like slaves to ignoble deaths and the eternal damnation of their race.
* * *
A while ago, in the Quote of the Week sidebar, I included Heinrich Heine’s famous insight, written a century prior to the Nazis’ book-burning extravaganza, "Where they burn books," Heine wrote, "they will ultimately also burn people."
In 1834, 55 years before the birth of Adolf Hitler, a hundred years before his accession to power, Heine made an even more remarkable, even more chilling prophecy in his book "The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany."
- Christianity - and that is its greatest merit - has somewhat mitigated that brutal Germanic love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals...
- Do not smile at my advice ─ the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder is of true Germanic character; it is not very nimble, but rumbles along ponderously. Yet, it will come and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then you know that the German thunderbolt has fallen at last. At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in the remotest deserts of Africa will hide in their royal dens. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.*
It is one of the gruesome ironies of history that Heinrich Heine, poet, playwright, and philosopher, a convert to Christianity who saw so deeply into the character of his fellow Germans, was hated by his countrymen for being born a Jew and despised by the Jews for his apostasy. If ever there was an embodiment of a Cassandra it was this man.
Will human hatred and bigotry and ignorance never cease? Or is our strange species ─ the naked ape that walks upright and writes books and makes many sounds with its mouth ─ doomed to vanish into the universe’s empty maw without having ever having achieved revelation or received absolution?
*Abstracted from a Wikipedia article
Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net
Five Boring Dreams and Then I Die
When I was an undergrad at Cornell, Vladimir Nabokov taught a course in Russian literature. His wife often attended the lectures, hanging on her husband’s every word, quiet as a nun breathless with adoration.
Among the great novelist’s many endearing idiosyncrasies was his unfashionable hatred of Sigmund Freud whom he characterized as "Dot Viennese Qvack." Looking back, with the opinionation that accompanies maturity, I’ve concluded that Nabokov was entirely correct, particularly in connection with Freud’s unscientific, quasi-mystical belief in the significance of dreams.
In my unconsidered opinion, dreams are utter bullshit. They mean nothing, signify nothing, and run (or trot) the gamut from the boring to the annoying to the disturbing.
As far as I can tell, some semi-insane little pain-in-the-ass section of the brain that’s kept locked up in a padded cell during the day ─ I’ll call it Sam ─ gets loose at night and takes revenge on the rest of the brain by torturing it with nonsensical, illiterate, ill-plotted, and thoroughly absurd stories.
It seems to me that if Sam had an ounce of decency in him, he’d come up with yarns that were entertaining, pleasurable, even titillating. Instead, he treats us to a nutty hodgepodge of angst-ridden crap that leaves us in a cold sweat, pulse pounding at 180 rpm, mouth dry and tasting of garlic and stale romano cheese.
In an effort to put a stop to this abusive behavior, Dome of Glass has joined forces with Franklin Pierce College’s Institute of Paranormal Bullshit to identify and lobotomize the Sam segment of our brains. As a first step, a subcommittee of incompetents under the inept leadership of Norm Mack has put together a catalogue of the most common, tedious, stupid, and annoying dreams that plague us:
* * *
Dream 1: It is the end of the year at college and you’re in a huge building with hundreds of classrooms. You’re late for the final exam which is either in Russian History, Particle Physics, or Organic Chemistry. You have been wandering around the campus for hours looking for the building. Your entire future depends on doing well in the exam. As you hurry down endless corridors you spot your professor supervising your classmates as they busy themselves with the test. The students are bent over their desks writing furiously, obviously well-prepared. With an overwhelming sense of dread, you realize that you haven’t attended a single class all semester and that you know absolutely nothing about the subject. You also notice that you’re naked from the waist down and have an intense urge to urinate. The only bathroom is several floors up. The elevators are out of order. You begin climbing flights of stairs. You pass dozens of people, most of them coeds, but no one says anything about your pants being missing. You finally reach a bathroom. All the urinals are occupied and the toilets have no seats. Everything is hopeless. You wake up.
Dream 2: You’re driving in a large city in search of a store that you know...or think you know...or think that somebody may have told you about. The store sells used magazines, but after a while it sells antique furniture, and before long it’s picture frames. It’s sunny out. You’re on foot and you walk past shop after shop without success. The stores gradually peter out and things get shabbier and shabbier like Front Street in Provincetown. You decide to give up the hunt and get your car, but you have no idea where you left it. You think it’s in the vicinity of South Station in Boston which is also downtown Glasgow. The streets are tangled and before long you can’t tell east from west, north from south, up from down. You ask a girl in the drugstore for directions, but she’s not too swift and is new to the area and doesn’t know anything about anything. She’s kind of pretty though, and you’re aware that you’re dreaming so you decide "What the hell," and start feeling her up. She’s soft and compliant. You wake up with a king-size erection.
Dream 3: You’re in a big old Victorian House with many rooms. Things are dark and disorderly. You’ve lived there for years, but are unfamiliar with most of the house. You walk along a narrow hallway peering into room after room. Nobody is there. The hallway gets narrower and narrower. The rooms get smaller and smaller. Finally you’re on your hands and knees trying to make your way through a small, dark tunnel. Then you’re crawling on your belly. You feel something pushing into you, kicking you. You think it might be Artie Kaledin. You’re furious and ready to punch someone. You awake gasping for air. Your wife has both her feet planted in the small of your back and is in the process of shoving you out of bed. "You and your fucking apnea," she says. "I can’t get any sleep." You spend the rest of the night on the couch.
Dream 4: You have to pack for the trip home from vacation in Curaçao. The airport is miles away and you have no idea how to get to it. The flight is scheduled to depart in 15 minutes or two hours or possibly the next day. The closets are jammed full of suits, shoes, shirts, scuba equipment, blankets, boxer shorts, hair brushes, cell phones, computers, and sweaters...lots and lots of sweaters. There seems no way to fit everything into your old Korean War duffel bag, but you doggedly try anyway. As soon as you pack an item, you immediately forget what you’ve packed. One of your daughters shouts up to you to get a move on ─ the limo driver has been waiting for over an hour. You need to piss but the bathroom has three doors all of which are open. You attempt to close the doors, but the frames are warped and the doors won’t stay shut. You drop your pants and sit down on the pot while attempting to keep the doors closed with your arms and legs. People you know but have never seen before wander in and out. You piss all over the floor. You wake up. It takes a while before you calm down enough to get to the bathroom.
Dream 5: You’re driving down 2nd Avenue in an old Chevy Malibu. The light turns red so you step on the brake to stop, but the brakes are spongy and no matter how hard you press and pump you can’t bring the vehicle to a halt. You stick your foot out the door and try to stop the car with the heel of your shoe. The car starts going in reverse. You’re in the back seat without access to the brakes, gear shift, ignition, or accelerator. You have to reach over the rear of the front seat to get at the steering wheel. The vehicle begins to pick up speed. The avenue is one-way. You crane your neck to look out the rear window. Other motorists are coming at you. You weave back and forth frantically to avoid a crash. You let go of the wheel and clamber over the seat to get back in the driver’s position. This seems to work because now you’re kneeling on a skateboard propelling yourself with your knuckles like an orangutan. You zoom down a big hill with cobblestones and trolley tracks. You wake up. A cat is sleeping on your chest.
* * *
Dream 6: You’re alone in a fortress-like stone structure overlooking the ocean. You’re young, but you know that you’re old. You’ve just come from visiting your mother who’s alive and very frail, but you know that she’s dead. You climb upward along cold, damp, winding stairways until you’re far, far above the waters. The wrinkled sea crawls beneath you. A wind rises from the west. Clouds with the noses of wolves obscure the sun. Miles below, the boiling ocean smashes against massive granite cliffs. The surf explodes higher and higher, crashing against the ancient battlements and the fragile window that shields you from the tempest. Your heart beats with excitement. You're filled with a sensation of peace and beauty and adventure and fear. A giant wave rolls toward you across the dark green waters. Its white foam fingers claw at you like Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa. All becomes quiet. The wave reaches you, lifts you in its arms. It has come from afar and travels sedately on ─ a shrug of eternity. You don’t wake up because you’re dead.
Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net
Business Opportunities for the Newly Unemployed
1. Rent-A-Brat
Fed up to the gills with obnoxious juveniles racing up and down supermarket aisles screaming "Look at me, look at me" to their doting parents?
Have the urge to throttle tear-soaked, puling four-year-old girls at checkout counters who keep whining, "But why, mummy?...Why can’t I have a Gummy Bear, mummy?...I want a Gummy Bear, mummy?"
Ever felt like using a flame-thrower on a morbidly obese woman who coos to her Ritalin-sodden offspring, "Now, Tyler, you really should stop spitting on that nice old gentleman’s sweatpants?"
Don’t just stand there doing nothing like an impotent sack of hog slop!
Man up (or Woman up as the case may be) by starting your own game-changing Rent-A-Brat child-abuse service and watch the money roll in.
Here’s how it works. Imagine you’re a typical big box customer:
For only $5.99 ─ cash or any major credit or debit card accepted (no American Express please) ─ the computerized, state-of-the art Bratomat© brat-launcher will eject a vicious, whimpering, screeching, snot-nosed unhousebroken disposable little demon directly into your shopping cart along with a complimentary muzzle and self-rewinding doggie-leash.
Turn the little bastard loose at your favorite food chain or Walmart and watch as the other brats and their porcine mothers vacate the premises.
Think of it! Within minutes you’ll have the whole place to yourself! And when you’ve spent all your food stamps, strap the brat into your cart and drop it off at the nearest parking-lot corral. In an hour or two one of our trained staff of idiots will probably stop by to recycle the brat into the brat-launcher ─ usually before he or she freezes to death,
But wait! there’s more!
Call now and we’ll send you not one, not two, but THREE Organic cartons of PetCom Organic Dog Chow to feed to your own brats for breakfast. (Shipping and Handling extra.).
2. Name-UR-Band, LLC
Attention all would-be Rock-N-Roll, Hip Hop, and Country and Western superstars: Stop wasting your parents’ money on coke, heroin, crack, crystal meth, ecstasy and other pricey crap during those exhausting all-night bullshit sessions where you and your DUI pals try to come up with suitably ridiculous names for your pitiful group.
With the help of Liverpool-based Name-UR-Band, LLC, losers like yourself and your pot-head buddies will receive a totally asinine name for your non-existent band. Imagine! You’ll be able to enjoy your recreational drugs in peace and quiet without having to wrack your tiny brains
Based on a unique algorithm developed by a crack team of geeks, Name-UR-Band’s patented random name generator automatically combines words and phrases from our huge data base of old New York Times headlines into totally meaningless titles, then spits them out onto your very own Facebook page.
Here are some samples of Name-UR-Band’s previous successes.
Low Slung District: This trailblazing all-girl Bulgarian acid rock group is all the rage in several Euro-Zone countries as well as Nigeria and Outer Mongolia. Clad in their iconic mini-burkas and sporting several days of facial stubble, the girls were last seen fleeing from a mob of music haters not far from Piccadilly Circus in London.
Boiled Turtle Eggs: Kudos upon kudos has been rained upon neoclassic sleaze-rock sensation "The Eggs," an avant garde ensemble of transsexual hula-hoop artists. The boys/girls/its are currently booked into long-term gigs as waiters and busboys in several Greenwich Village eateries.
Chocolate Gingrich: You’ll soon be hearing more ─ if not at all ─ of this exciting retro-trad folk group whose trademark guitar riffs while wallowing in a vat of molten Hershey bars are the talk of the town in Anonymity, Kansas, and Bratislava, Slovakia.
Artificial Hip Implants: Henniker, New Hampshire’s own one-man homage to the Big Band Era is basking in the warmth of glowing reviews by Hilton Als of the New Yorker magazine and "Name Withheld" of the North American Man/Boy Love Association.
Unauthorized Castration: Seven racially diverse and sexually ambiguous rappers from Boondocks, Alaska, have joined forces to create one of the most original sounds to hit the music industry in weeks ─ an indecipherable cacophony of noise that is deafening audiences from Westchester County Airport to Peterborough’s Mariposa Museum, from the McDonald’s on Route 202 in Jaffrey to the landmark Chuck e Cheese emporium in Toledo, Ohio
3. International House of Tofu
Thinking of starting your own Mom and Pop hamburger stand?
Fuggedaboudtit. You’ll work your ass to the bone and then watch the government steal your profits and throw you in jail for e coli and lack of toilet paper.
Introducing the Next Big Thing to hit suburban America’s strip malls ─ Johnson Kokubu’s International House of Tofu! Here’s your once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get in on the ground floor or subbasement of a red-hot, sure-fire new franchising scam!
For a modest contribution of up-front seed money to Kokubo-Matsushita Heavy Industries (and a crushing mortgage) you can have your very own McDonald’s-like drive-through restaurant on better highways and secondary roads everywhere, (Hurry, though, choice locations are being snapped up like hot tofu cakes)
"But why Tofu?" you ask.
Good question!
Stupid answer!
Several focus groups and push polls have inconclusively proven that America is on the cusp of rejecting GREEN and turning to LIGHT TAN!!!
Trust us:
Green eggs are OUT.
Brownish-Yellowish soy curd is IN.
And the International House of Tofu is poised like a ravening wolf to attack this vast new market of food freaks, eco-nuts, phony intellectuals, anorexic bitches, clothes designers, Massachusetts politicians, and Michelle Obama with its unique menu of fried tofu, baked tofu, boiled tofu, sparkling tofu water, flame-broiled tofu, 100-year-old tofu, licorice-flavored tofu, tofu wine, tofu flavored vodka, tofu a la Kiev, tofu sweetbreads, and much, much more, all served piping hot by topless waitresses with tofu breast implants
4. Charles Ponzi School of Business
Dare to be great!
So what if you wind up in stir when you’re in your seventies? Think of what a hoot it’ll be in the meantime ─ yachts, private jets, sexy broads, New York City penthouses, dinners at Le Bernardin, ski chalets in Colorado, French maids in the pantry, a live-in butler over the garage, mansions in Palm Beach, Air Jordan sneakers, sleepovers at the White House.
All this and much, much less can be yours when you enroll in the Charles Ponzi School of Business.
The experienced inmates at our beautiful campus in San Quentin, California, a few miles over the bay from the bustling slums of Oakland, will take you by the hand and lead you down the garden path to wealth, fame, cutting edge electronic toys, trophy wives, exciting mistresses, exotic vacations, costly bathrooms, dinner dates with the rich and famous, expensive automobiles, and, the pièce de résistance, imprisonment for life followed by spectacular world-class humiliation.
Talk about fun!
Think of all the lives you’ll ruin before the SEC gets wise to what you’re what you’re up to!
Picture those trusting old ladies you’ll bring down with you when your whole despicable scheme collapses like a bunch of overcooked broccoli!
Founded in 1920 by Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi, the Charles Ponzi School of Business is a fully discredited institution of lower education. As school President Bernie Madoff so aptly says, "Collectively, as a university community, we must value diversity and inclusion and reject both active and passive discrimination before we are thrown in jail."
5. bdsm-Harmony.Com
Calling all masochists, sadists, and bondage freaks!
Have you been searching for that "Certain Someone" with whom to share your deepest yearnings, your profoundest dreams, your most treasured perversions?
Now, at last, your quest is over!
With the help of bdsm-Harmony.Com you’ll be able to zero in on an ideal life-partner to join with you in your fondest fetishes no matter how bizarre, dangerous, illegal, or disgusting they may be.
Ya vol mein herr! The end of the road is in sight, light glimmers at the end of the tunnel; that fabled pot of gold at the bottom of the rainbow is within your grasp,
Longing to be dragged into to a serial killer’s private dungeon, chained to a stone wall, and whipped to death?
bdsm-Harmony.Com has an up-to-date inventory of sadistic murderers to pick and choose from.
Frustrated with a wife who pleads "headache" every time you’re in the mood to torture, pierce, burn, and humiliate her?
bdsm-Harmony.Com has a rich assortment of subs, slaves, and wimps pining to be abused.
bdsm-Harmony.Com’s patented Whip-‘N-Bleed mate-matching process is designed to ensure compatibility between yourself and other psychopaths.
First-off, applicants begin by filling out a questionnaire ─ age, sex (if any), race, bra size (if any), favorite perversions, skin plasticity, mother’s maiden name (if any), recent felony convictions.
Second-off, Masochists and Sadists are segregated into separate groups known as "Perversion Pools."
Third-off, each Masochist is strapped onto an iRack©, an organic, fully-automated, medieval-type torture device, to ascertain pain tolerance, stretchability, and blood type. While the Masochist is screaming in agony, a small group of candidate Sadists, secreted behind a one-way mirror and wired with the latest electronic sensing devices to measure excitement and pleasure response, witnesses the brutal torture.
Once low-scoring sado-masochists have been culled from the herd, those remaining (fourth-off) are processed through a final screening by a team of licensed perverts to ensure thoroughgoing depravity after which they are issued (fifth-off) a certificate of sickness and put on bdsm-Harmony.Com’s exclusive "Fit-2-B-Tied" dating registry.
Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net
Life's a Slippery Business
Chart of the Week
(Click to enlarge)
Correct Me If I'm Wrong, But...
Not sure what this implies with regard to Facebook’s future profitability and, therefore, its IPO value ─ I, personally, do not understand how the company, despite its vast audience, can become another Google-like gold mine. On the other hand (or foot or kidney) I felt the same about Amazon.com when it first went public.
A negative vote from Norm Mack may be a signal to investors everywhere to buy, buy, buy.
***Yet another stunning page-one pronouncement from the New York Times, this one courtesy of food activist Mark
Bittman.
Under the banner "School Breakfast, the New Food Fight" the following subhead
pins the proverbial tail on the well-known donkey’s ass::
We should work
to prevent hunger
and obesity
Wow!
Them’s
fightin’ words, Mark!
That’ll put the lie to all those meat-eating, right-wing neo-Nazi homophobes who
want to starve our children to death by making them as fat as Walmart mothers-in-law.
Thank God for the fearless New York Times and their brave columnists!
Ever since the Super Bowl I've had this unaccountable urge to rush out and buy a Fiat 500 Abarth.
FYI: The incredibly gorgeous girl in the video is 26-year-old Romanian model Catrinel
Menghia.
Here's a translation of what she's saying (courtesy Autoevolution.com):
What are you looking at, Huh!?
What are you looking at?! (slap)
Are you undressing me with your eyes?
Poor guy…you can’t help it.
Is your heart beating? Is your head
spinning?
Do you feel lost thinking that I could be
yours forever?
I believe the paper was justified. That’s what a free press is supposedly about.
As the editors put it ─ after acknowledging the likelihood that the photos would inflame anti-American feeling ─ "At the end of the day, our job is to publish information that our readers need to make informed decisions."
In 2005, the Los Angeles Times refused to publish some rather innocuous Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed that had inspired a typical murderous Islamic spree. The Times justified the censorship by saying the drawings might incite Moslem rioting.
Is there a more perfect example of the hypocrisy and cowardice that characterizes American media?
The Los Angeles Times did not publish the Mohammed cartoons because the editors were terrified they would become targets of Moslem retaliation. .
They did publish the Taliban photos because they knew the U. S. military wouldn’t retaliate.
How proud the Times reporters and editors must be as they look forward to another Pulitzer in recognition of their intrepid reportage.
Journalism is a profession of whores.
***I don’t know about you, but I’m bloody well sick of all the liberal crap being vomited from Washington
about Wall Street this and Wall Street that and Wall Street sucks and Wall Street is stealing money from all us good, hard-working, unemployed Americans.
For Chrissake already, Wall Street is a fucking street, and a narrow one at
that with traffic restricted to emergency vehicles and residents of the White House. It is not a Scroogy old man with pince-nez gloating over his hoard of gold and plotting how to rob the 99%
of their hard-earned unemployment checks. That would be Warren Buffet or Barbra Streisand.
Evil ca;pitalist swine (left), attractive capitalist swine
(right0. Neither is Wall Street. Note pince-nez, however.
Face it ─ Wall Street is paved in asphalt, has concrete sidewalks, its gutters contain a traditional New York City display of trash, and I can assure you from personal
experience, that there is not a mean bone in its body.
But none of that is going to stop Nancy Pelosi,
Harry Reid, or Jeanne Shaheen, (when she’s sober) from railing against the helpless little lane.
Dome of
Glass, therefore, am going to contact our congressman ─ as soon as we finds out who they is ─ and demand that he, she, and it introduce a bill in Congress to change the name from Wall Street to
Barack Obama Road or Barney Frank Alleyway or Ted Kennedy Bridle Path.
That outta put a stop to all the
nonsense!
Keith Olbermann (left) explaining to Dave, "I am a
chandelier, I tell you, a $10 million chandelier!"
(Click pic to enlarge.)
Olbermann’s session on the show ended prematurely after he began reciting a poem of his own composition ─ "Shall I compare me to a summer’s day?/I am more lovely and more brilliant..." Letterman gestured offstage and several burly nurses subdued the foaming Olbermann with tranquilizer darts, strapped him into a gurney, and carted him off to Bellevue.
With the departure of its star anchorman, Current TV lost no time in replacing him with former New York Governor and leading hooker-fancier Eliot (call me john) Spitzer.
***The dread word "niggardly" has again reared its head (or headed its rear) this time from out of the mouth of a card-carrying DEMOCRAT.
Speaking on MSNBC, Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, a WHITE man (i.e., a honky) chastised Congress for being NIGGARDLY in its treatment of veterans.
Some apologists claim the left-leaning senator was unaware the word has been redefined by the PC police from its ancient meaning of "stingy" to the modern "behaving like a nigger."
I don’t buy into that crap. The man is obviously a neo-Nazi swine deserving of the severest possible punishment under the hate-crime statutes of this great land. Removal from office followed by a sound thrashing at the hands of Al Sharpton, Valerie Jarrett, and Jesse Jackson and 24 hours of taped speeches by President Obama are the least he deserves.
But perhaps some good may come from this shocking incident. Niggardly is far from the only racially, ethnically, religiously, sexually insensitive word in the language.
If you are of German extraction, how could you not but be offended by being asked if you take sauerKRAUT with your hotdog, or by being called HUN by your girlfriend?
Suppose you’re Italian, how would you feel if you were given a Burger King WHOPper or invited to visit New GUINEA; or if Hispanic, by someone suggesting you use SPIC and Span to clean your linoleum?
Imagine the hurtfulness for a gay executive when his boss tells him not to QUEER the deal or for a Japanese gentleman when he overhears some roundeye saying that crime must be NIPped in the bud or a rock climber in Alaska crassly remarking that "there’s a little NIP in the air."
Try to put yourself in the shoes of an Asian-American housewife when a plumber informs her of a CHINK in the bathtub that needs repair...or an African-American lad whose teacher tells him that his work SHINES.
And what of our Hebraic countrypersons who are bombarded daily with words and phrases such as JEWelry, JUnior, JUry, and "DJOU see the boobs on that chick?"
So listen up good, all you Liberals out there: It’s time to call a SPADE a SPADE, to roll up the sleeves on your little cashmere wool sweaters, and to get to work. There are so many wrongs to right and so much print space and bandwidth in which to do it.
***William C. Rhoden, a sportswriter for the New York Times and one of the few black journalists employed
on the paper, is a man who pole vaults into bed each night for fear that some white bigot lurking beneath might grab him and rape him.
Here’s an observation from his latest column:
"When was the last time a young, untested professional African-American athlete received the type of adulation Tim Tebow and Jeremy Lin have seen this year?"
Forget Tebow ─ he’s taken as much flak as he has praise for his outspoken Christianity. Tebow is window
dressing. Rhoden’s target is Lin.
William
Rhoden Jeremy Lin
What pisses Rhoden off is that a polite, young, talented, self-effacing Chinese-American kid from Harvard has dared intrude on the African-American preserve that is the NBA.
Motivated by a racially-tinged mixture of envy and bile, Rhoden hopes to spoil one of the few genuinely heart-warming stories to emerge this year, a story that has captivated Asians, Americans, and
sports fans everywhere.
Rhoden isn’t worth the time, effort, and energy it would take to lampoon
him.
He, the paper he works for, and the idiots who read his trash are self-satires. The man is a
race-hustler. He butters his bread with lies about anyone who isn’t black.
***After Super Bowl XLVI, when a few asshole fans began shouting insults at her about her husband Tom Brady, Brazilian supermodel,
actress, UN goodwill ambassador, diet guru, and new mommy Gisele Bündchen, shouted right back:
"You need to catch the ball when you're supposed to catch the ball. My husband cannot fucking throw the
ball and catch the ball at the same time."
Gisele ─ who else? (Click to
enlarge)
Right on girl!
I’m a Giant fan, but that’s what I call standing up for your man.
***I’ve commented previously on the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) fad, an
amazingly absurd technology that replaces a simple push on a phone button with a protracted and pointless conversation with a female automaton. This pervasive and nonsensical bullshit exists because
an army of marketing assholes concluded that "IVR be cuttin’ edge an’ ever’body am doin’ it so us has got to be doin’ it too...duh."
In a similarly asinine vein more and more news-oriented web sites (e.g., Drudge and USA Today) have rolled out Auto Refresh, a
Medieval torture device that causes the page you’re watching to vanish every minute or two, then, (after a delightful pause to allow your blood pressure to rise) gradually
reemerge.
Why?
Once again, following a few thousand meetings, the marketing assholes who run the corporate world merged
their tiny brains and came up with this marvelously inane idea, upon which the leading cretin among them was assigned to draft a form email to be sent to all Chief Executive Morons:
Uhhh, duhhhh...Boss Man or Boss Lady as Yous Cases Might Be.
Uuuuhhh...Us marketing assholes been tinkin’ hardly and us agrees dat sum kinda AutoFrescha ting am gonna make peoples tink dat yous web sight is right on top of all da latest news stuff becawse ever’ time th’ page shuts off dey’ll...duuuhhh...tink yous is postin’ sum kinda hot new news tip stuff when yous aint. Y’followin' me?
Of course, for you hundreds of millions of internet users who feel that Auto Refresh is infuriating crap, you
can always take action. For example, email your thoughts to drudge@drudgereport.com . In a month or two you’ll hear
back....nothing.
Is there an alternative? Sure. Just resolve never to watch fucking Drudge or any
other Auto Refresh site again..
***In a speech Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder said that voting rights for "minorities" are under assault. His chief complaint was that some states require voters to provide ID at the polls.
For the sake of clarity, Dome of Glass offers this translation of Mr. Holder’s remarks:
"Some states are preventing illegal immigrants, prison inmates, underage juveniles, dead people, and African-Americans with multiple identities from voting for Barack Obama."
***Lost in the pointless hoo-hah concerning the whereabouts of Ann Dunham at the time baby Barack vacated her womb, is a far more significant question: Why have Obama, his enablers, and his lawyers quashed disclosure of any objective information concerning his education, test scores, college theses, scholarly articles (or lack of same), scholarships, and academic performance?
When a man and his camp followers invest major amounts of time, money, and financial resources in preventing the disclosure of what is, for most of us, totally innocuous information, the inescapable conclusion is that the man has something to hide.
Among undisclosed documents and data:
● LSAT (Law School Admission Test) scores
● SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) Scores
● GRE (Graduate Record Examination) scores
● AFQT (Armed Forces Qualification Test) scores
● AGCT (Army General Classification Test) scores
● IQ test scores (routinely given to grade-schoolers)
● Achievement test scores (routinely given to grade-schoolers and high-school students)
● Records from kindergarten, grade school, high school, college, and law school
● Columbia University thesis
● Scholarships (if any)
● Scholarly articles (if any)
● Mentions in law reviews (if any)
As I suggested in a prior post, long before Donald Trump started shooting off his mouth, the answer to this obfuscation is obvious.
The man who was elected President in 2008 is a cardboard cutout, a puppet, an ignorant manipulandum who rose through the ranks of academia and politics via affirmative action, political pull, and the machinations of vultures like Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, Khalid al-Mansour, and Bill Ayers ─ people whose sole interest was to ride the Obama hobby-horse into power regardless of the consequences to the country.
To say that Obama is arrogant or elitist or demagogic or a socialist is nonsense ─ the man doesn’t have the intellect to be any of those things.
Barack H. Obama is a plain, out-and-out, natural-born ignoramus whose dim mind fancies that the American people are as stupid as he is.
So far he is being proven correct.
***The New York Times, in a despicable exhibition of arrogance, bias, and intellectual corruption, hired the whining, brain-dead, little left-wing wimp Michael Kinsley to review President George W. Bush’s best seller, Decision Points.
Be prepared for a shock. Kinsley didn’t like the book! What a fucking surprise!
What plans do Sulzberger, Keller, et al have for future assignments? Ann Coulter to review Darwin?...Paul Krugman to critique Glenn Beck?...Katie Couric to discourse on Sarah Palin?...Chrisopher Hitchens to analyse the Old Testament?
From Kinsley’s review:
Bush’s policy [on stem cell
research] continues to do damage by leaving the impression that stem cells are controversial and require some sort of compromise between science and morality.
From the European Consortium for Stem Cell Research:
Because a
single, well-identified type of cell is affected in Parkinson’s disease, stem cells offer great potential for treatment.
And this news item:
In December 2001 Michael Kinsley announced that
he has been suffering from Parkinson's disease for eight years.
Let me sum up Kinsley’s belief system: "When it comes to my own skin, my own life, and my own well-being, morality can go fuck off."
If this sorry excuse for a man had an atom of ethical fiber in his minute soul he would have recused himself as a reviewer for
being hopelessly biased. But minor considerations such as ethics, fairness, intellectual honesty, journalistic standards (an oxymoron?), and common decency have never interfered with a true Liberal’s
readiness to prostitute himself for a few dollars ─ nor with the New York Times readiness to cough up the 50 bucks per needed to purchase their scrawny butts.
***Question: Why is it that women with ponytails look cute and sexy, but men with ponytails look like total assholes?
The Correct Me Archve
While the civilized world (and Muslims as well) were dancing joyfully over the mutilated corpse of Muammar el-Qaddafi , the Times’ editorialists came swiftly to the aid of the nascent republic with profound and insightful advice. "Libyans must channel their passion into building a free and productive country" the headline screamed atop the NYT web site.
Ohhh....My...God! Why didn’t I think of that!
And here I was about to tweet the transitional Libyan government advising it to set up a repressive tyranny in their newly liberated tract of sand and clamp down on any signs of growth, prosperity, or happiness.
Thank God for the New York Times! The newspaper of record deserves every Pulitzer Prize and Order of Lenin it has ever received or ever will receive.
And there’s more good news! The Times has dispatched renowned columnist Paul Krugman and his sexy co-columnist Maureen Dowd to the desert non-kingdom to help the nation get on track for receiving massive American aid by ensuring that their camel-herding-based economy collapses.
***By coincidence, George Will's September 15, 2011 op-ed column, "All in the Federal Family," echoes my post of the same date, "In the Beginning Was the Word." Mr. Will, a well-known and respected syndicated columnist, writes:
In societies governed by persuasion, politics is mostly talk, so liberals’ impoverishment of their vocabulary matters. Having damaged liberalism’s reputation, they call themselves progressives. Having made the federal government’s pretensions absurd, they have resurrected the supposed synonym "federal family."
Having made federal spending suspect, they advocate "investments for job creation," a euphemism for stimulus, another word they have made toxic
In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll describes Alice’s trial by a pack of cards led by the tyrannical King and Queen of
Hearts.
"Hold your tongue!" said the Queen, turning purple.
"I won't!" said Alice.
"Off with her head!" the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
"Who cares for you?" said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) "You're nothing but a pack of cards!"
Friends, there is no need to knuckle in to a limp-wrist cabal of timorously vicious assholes.
It’s time and past time to take up arms against liberalism’s war on the English language. Liberals are nothing but a pack of cards.
Wendy Hilton
I don’t know Wasserstein’s oeuvre from a hole in the wall nor do I care to; nor do I know to which planet she sent up the various targets of her displeasure.
Neither do I know Mr. Als and his oeuvre (if he possesses any) nor do I care to.
What I do know is that anyone who refers to heterosexuality as an institution is an illiterate asshole not to mention a paying member of the Church of Gayness.
As President Obama might say and often does: Let me make myself perfectly clear:
● The Smithsonian is an Institution.
● Slavery is an Institution.
● Harvard is an Institution.
● Marriage is an Institution.
But Heterosexuality?
Is a Vagina an institution? Is
Testosterone an Institution? Is Love an Institution? Is Masculinity an Institution? Is Hunger an Institution? Is an Erection an Institution? Is Sexual Intercourse an Institution? Is Death an
Institution?
To pursue Hilton’s logic, I guess he considers Fag-Haggery, Homosexuality, and Pedophilia to be Institutions as
well.
What a friggin’ jackass.
[And yeah, I did a Google
check and Mr. Als is indeed gay. So now we know why the New Yorker hired him.]
Mr. Huntsman is trim, moneyed, and Mormanish with distinguished graying hair, a cute first name, and no discernable moral or political convictions that might get in the way of a sound thrashing in 2012 by Pinch Sulzberger paramour, Barack Obama.
***The last space shuttle has, supposedly, made its final flight. I guess NASA and the D.C. bureaucrats will now busy themselves with
some new scheme on which to squander a few trillion rapidly depreciating U.S. dollars ─ maybe a manned flight to Jupiter to investigate a mysterious black monolith that recently landed on the
moon.
Even when I was an aerospace engineer at RCA, I didn't see much purpose in burning up vast quantities of fuel in order to shoot
Americans into space except, perhaps, to beat the Russians to the punch or to prevent an army of technicians and scientists from going into marketing or becoming hedge fund managers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah....I know...we might not have had space blankets and zero-gravity crappers without the Apollo program, and we certainly
wouldn’t have been treated to Neil Armstrong fucking up his little speech when he set foot on the moon. (If it had been Obama, he would have had a teleprompter to help out.)
As I mention in a recent post, the Englishman George Mallory was keen on climbing Mt. Everest because it was there.
That’s about the long and short of why we send men into space ─ with one important difference: Mallory had the right to do anything
he wanted with his own life and fortune no matter how stupid, but ferrying people back and forth from space platforms or propelling them to the moon, mars, or whatever, involves absurd amounts
of time, resources, and taxpayer money.
In the future, let’s stick to using outer space for what God intended ─ to
provide TV service to Uganda, Antarctica, and New Hampshire, to spy on the North Korean missile program, and to help female drivers find their way home after a few too many in the local
bistro.
This country should get the hell out of the manned space flight business. It’s a total loser. And if, 20 years
from now, we wake up to learn that Mao Zedong has become the first mummified Chinese tyrant to land on Uranus, who gives a good goddamn.
Kathleen and Eliot in happier times.
When Parker was dumped a few months ago, I advised CNN to pair Spitzer with a conservative female who didn’t feel impelled to preface her every observation with "I may be wrong, but..." or "Perhaps your right, however,..." or "In my opinion, Eliot..." Not surprisingly, CNN’s management didn’t heed my advice.
After all, folks, faithful members of the Church of Liberalism, those tingly-legged souls who control the media, would happily see their organizations wither and die rather than allow an opposition spokesperson to enter their crumbling cathedral.
***Plaxico Burress, the wide receiver who caught the winning touchdown pass in Super Bowl XLII that ended the New England Patriots perfect season, has been released from prison after serving two years on a gun charge.
Plaxico's Super Bowl-winning catch for the Giants
You may recall that Plaxico managed to shoot himself in the thigh in a New York City nightclub in 2008. As the tale goes, he had tucked his Glock semi-automatic into the waistband of his sweatpants. Not surprisingly, the gun began sliding down his leg. Not surprisingly, he attempted to stem the descent. Not surprisingly, he accidentally pulled the trigger.
A loud bang ensued followed by EMS workers, police, bail postings, lawyers, sentencing, and a speech by Mayor Bloomberg.
Now that Plaxico has paid his debt to society and is looking for a job, he has pledged to assist the Urban League and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. "Guns don’t help anybody," Plaxico is quoted as saying.
I’m not sure that is a universal truth, but I will say that it is a universal truth that one should not wear sweatpants to a New York City nightclub whether or not one is packing a Glock.
In any event, I wish Plaxico the best. He’s one hell of a wideout even he is a can short of a six-pack..
UPDATE! Plaxico has signed with the Jets. I was hoping he'd return to the Giants, but what the heck, half a cup's better than none.
***The Infidel World (us) is currently being entertained by a traditional media cud-chewing extravaganza involving so-called uprisings that have been roiling the Islamic World (them).
Youthful idealists in Tunisia, Lebanon, Egypt, and Yemen (soon to be followed, no doubt, by faithful followers of The Prophet elsewhere) have been busy for several months rioting, looting, setting themselves on fire, issuing threats, making strange noises with their tongues, stoning women, and Allahu-Akbaring. In other words, as my wife used to put it in re her sons’ activities after they reached the age of jerk-off, they’ve been "doing their thing."
Food shortages, foreign instigators, intrusive journalists, Twitter, Facebook, cell phones, unemployment, rigged elections, despotic rulers, Zionist conspiracies, U. S. perfidy, Hillary Clinton’s stumpy legs, Disney’s glorification of an Unbeliever Mouse, Richard the Lionhearted’s attempt to wrest Jerusalem from the Turks, Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Empire, Danish cartoonists, Koran flushings, and Barack Obama’s failure to perform Wudu after pissing have all been adduced as sparks that set off the conflagrations.
Perhaps. But careful regression analyses and several triple-blind studies by Dome of Glass cast doubt on these explanations.
It now emerges that peoples of Islamic persuasion require periodic mass "freshenings" (rioting, looting, setting themselves on fire, issuing threats, making strange noises with their tongues, stoning women, and Allahu-Akbaring) every 50 to 75 years to freshen and reinvigorate the population’s healthy flow of fanaticism, much as a dairy cow needs to be fucked every few years in order to freshen and reinvigorate her flow of milk.
In the case of a typical cow, the casus fucking is, generally, the cow going into heat in the vicinity of a bull.
In the case of a typical Mohammedan mob, the casus dementia can be almost anything provided a full moon, television cameras, BBC crews, and Jimmy Carter are in the area.
***A few years back, a large, muscular White moron named Mark Gastineau, a defensive end for the New York Jets, took to performing what he called a "Sack Dance" whenever he brought down a quarterback.
Everyone thought he was an asshole.
Everyone was right.
The league outlawed his "dance."
Mark Gastineau doing his sack
dance over a fallen quarterback
Nowadays when a Black football player pulls the same sort of crap or worse the broadcasters and commentators chime in: "He’s letting his emotions hang out"...:He’s having fun"..."The fans love
it"..."Let the kid enjoy himself."
Well I don’t know what fans other than myself love, but when a 300-pound lineman performs simulated sexual
intercourse after he sacks a quarterback or a 250-pound running back prances around jiggling his ass after scoring a touchdown or a six-foot-four wideout does the cakewalk after he catches a pass or
a 260-pound linebacker straddles the man he has just tackled and beats on his chest like a mountain gorilla, he is insulting his opponents, debasing himself, and acting as if his audience is as crass
and stupid as he is...even if he is Black.
What? I’m a racist? Fuck you.
It’s the media
whores and coaches and team owners and NFL officials — the White apologists who think of Blacks as children with ADHD and who, out of fear and bigotry, permit and abet these ugly, undignified,
embarrassing, and unsportsmanlike displays — that are the real racists.
***In a recent NYT recap of L’Affaire Olbermann, replete with typical liberal euphemisms for left-wing fascists ("outspoken,"
"distinctive," "mercurial," "forceful"), reporters Bill Carter and Brian Stelter emphasize Olbermann’s role in hiking MSNBC’s ratings and establishing the channel’s "brand.". According to the
article, Olbermann’s daily rant and frequent Paul Harvey-like cornball readings of James Thurber stories, boosted MSNBC viewership from several hundred thousand to a million plus.
What nobody seems to ask is: What sort of people constituted Olbermann’s following? Since I personally never met anyone who admitted to
watching the show, my assumption is that the audience for a rabble-rouser like Olbermann consisted (you guessed it) of rabble.
Look friends, any psychotic megalomaniac with a prime-time slot on cable TV can entice a million or two zombies to tune in provided the channel is
jake with having the dregs of the earth as an audience and can dig up enough zombie advertisers and wealthy zombie activists like George Soros to foot the bill.
***The New York Times, America’s crusading or jihading Newspaper of Record, has once again trumped the opposition.
In a stunning and highly disturbing exposé published August 11 by two Jews and someone who sounds Polish, the Times has revealed a horrific shortage of "minority" third-base coaches in major league
baseball. Here are the shocking facts straight from the horse’s ass, er, I mean mouth as reported by Alan Schwarz, Thomas Kaplan, and Jack Styczynski:
About 40 percent of the players in Major League Baseball are black, Hispanic or Asian, and the sport is seen as a leading example of
diversity, yet a curious disparity has emerged in a corner of the game.
Among baseball’s 30 teams, only 23 percent of the third-base coaches are members of minorities, compared with 67 percent of its first-base coaches. The disparity has existed for decades but it is
now about twice as large as it was in 1990, based on an analysis by The New York Times.
The question is why.
It is more than a mysterious quirk...
Is there no bottom to the bottomless pit of American bigotry...no top to its topless tower of anti-minority evil?
The Times itself, despite valiant efforts to purge racists from within its own ranks, has unwittingly fallen prey to the awful sickness of discrimination.
Why have Schwarz, Kaplan, and Styczynski failed to note that not one quadriplegic Asian is employed as a batperson by the Boston Red Sox?...That not a single Hispanic lesbian has ever hit in the
cleanup position for the New York Yankees?...That only one midget has ever appeared in a major league game and, after he drew a base on balls on four straight pitches, the powers that be forbade
future midgets from appearing in lineups?
Eddie Gaedel at bat in 1951 for the White Sox,
And how many seven-foot-tall black sportswriters are employed at the Times despite the fact that 11.37 per cent of players in the NBA are seven-foot-tall blacks? None! Coincidence? Mysterious
quirk? I think not.
I leave you with this final thought:
Independent and rather sloppy research by Dome of Glass has found that 99.98 percent of cornerbacks in the National Football League are African American or some other kind of African and yet
There Is Not a Single Black Third-Base Coach in the NFL!
BULLETIN! The Boston Red Sox have just named Daisuke Matsuzaka as their third-base coach. This raises the percentage of Asian-non-American third-base coaches to
3.333% (6.667% if you count Dice-K’s interpreter who will share the position with him since none of Dice-K's teammates speaks Japanese)
***My wife and I went to buy a car last November to replace our ’95 Saturn. Our first stop was the Mazda dealer in Keene. As soon as we arrived, a heavyset member of that peculiar breed of human
known as A Car Salesman bounded smilingly out of the showroom.
"What can I do for you folks?" it inquired.
"We’re looking for a new car," I said.
"Anything in particular?"
it asked.
"Small," I said. "Cheap."
Its smile faded,
but it gamely led us to a collection of several hundred vehicles in various shades of maroon, blue, silver, red, gray, white, and black arrayed in a row like whores in a cat house.
I took one look and said, "What the hell are these things?"
"Introducing the new, updated, redesigned, improved 2010 Mazda3," the Car Salesman proudly said.
.
2010 Mazda3. Teeth, mustache, and pink eyes
available for modest cost at DOMEOFGLASS.com
I stared at the Car Salesman, stared at my wife, stared back at the Car Salesman, gathered my thoughts.. "These are the fucking ugliest
automobiles I have ever seen," I said politely. "Do you have any 2009 leftovers?"
"They’re all sold," said the Car
Salesman.
"I can understand why," I said.
"Let me tell
you about the exciting new features in our ‘10s. There’s..."
"I don’t care how many new features these monstrosities have. I’m
not going to get up in the morning, go to the garage, and be greeted by a gaping, grinning, chrome-lipped black-holed car snout. Who designed the damn thing; the make-up guy who did Heath Ledger as
the Joker?"
"But..."
"Sayonara. I’ll see you at the
bankruptcy proceedings." And with that my wife and I took off as fast as our pickup could manage, praying the while that the horrific image of the new, improved, exciting 2010 Mazda3 would not linger
in our nightmares.
─────
Back home, gin-and-tonic in
hand, Two and a Half Men on the boob tube, I reviewed the day’s events. What in God’s name possessed the executives at Mazda to approve of this abomination, I asked myself.
At first I assumed the idiots in marketing were to blame, but I soon rejected this hypothesis ─ it takes a perverse sort of genius
to come up with something so appalling as the 2010 Mazda3, and it’s well-known that marketers don’t have any genius, perverse or otherwise.
No, I decided, there was only one possible explanation for the vehicle: An agent employed by one of Mazda’s evil competitors ─ Honda, Toyota,
Subaru, Isuzu, Suzuki, Mitsubishi, Hyundai, Kia ─ must have infiltrated the firm’s top management, installed Paris Hilton as head of automotive design, replaced the design team’s engineers with
Haitian Zombies, and then bribed, black-mailed, and seduced the CEO, COO, and Board of Directors into approving the resultant catastrophe.
