entirely safe and fun

Mark Foley put his ass in that seat

Slightly (link update 3 Oct 2006)Rather creepy Florida Republican Representative Mark Foley has resigned over emails which suggest an inappropriate interest in a (then) 16-year-old Congressional page. The page was a young man; this is the sort of thing that makes you un-electable as a Florida Republican. This means that, unless a retired or defeated veteran can be found, another freshman will be joining Congress this year. The campaign I dream of running - Vote Freshman, an effort to rein in the expansion of state power by replacing experienced professionals with a mix of trainees and still-untarnished idealists - is running itself. Yay!

Have a nice election day!

At this point, let me dream a little more: I’d like to see Mark Foley replaced by former professional wrestler Mick “Mankind” Foley. Seriously, I’d pay for tickets.

Speaker: “The gentleman from Florida with the sock puppet on his hand has the floor.”
Mr. Foley: “No, Mr. Speaker, you have the floor… in your face! Mankind has done this to you! Mankind has reduced you to a floor-eating worm!”

So a homeless guy rolls his shopping cart full of cans up to the recycling center. It’s staffed by this guy, Harry Stein, a legend in the business - he did four carts of mixed recyclables a day when he was younger, and now he’s got this steady gig manning the redemption center. Any rate, the first guy has this amazing shopping cart, wants to talk about it. “Check this out. First, the cart takes ten others from the rear. I yank it off of the stack, wrap my hands around the bar at the back, start pushing away. Then my baby son, he takes a big dump that overflows the free diapers they hand out at the aid office. There’s crap everywhere! But the seat is made of Microban - the cart is loving this. We fill it to the top with scrap, and bring it here, completely smothered with trash and feces. And then we do it again!”

Harry leans back, trying to get some distance from the smell. “Interesting. What do you call your cart?”

“The Aristocrat!“

Alert Snoop:

• Addressing a dignitary as “His hizzoner”
• “euphizonious”
• “gazizzetteer”
• “homizeostatic” (and “hizomeostatic”)
• “trivizia” (especially “getting our trivizia on”)
• “televizzle“
• “cizelly” (but not *”cizell phone”)
• “the hizzouse” and being in it

It may also mean “no bowties”

Shipping and industrial outfitters ULINE offer, for the bargain price of $16, a roll of 500 3″x4″ stickers of intially unclear function — at any rate, they are anti-penguin. They offer quantity discounts for larger purchases.

My first thought: At one sticker per ten feet (penguins are apparently somewhat nearsighted on land, but let’s suppose that that’s a good spacing), you could mark an enormous area which needs to be kept penguin-free — you’d have nearly a ten-mile perimeter to work with — for as little as $130 plus shipping.

It occurred to me, though, that the more likely application for these stickers was to mark containers as being full of whatever the opposite of a penguin is. You could use them to label for shipment things such as:

• Aristotle’s conception of arete
• Fischer’s 1972 match against Spassky
• Exactly two oak leaves
• The succession techniques of lost martial arts
• Navigational buoys for the inbound port side of channels
• Epiphenomena
• Back issues of Soldier of Fortune
• Gödel’s results on incompleteness
• Flan
• Shipping, itself

Thanks to Doomstalk for the link.

The return of Battle Pope!

Pope Benedict XVI makes one a little nostalgic for the pontificate of his scholarly predecessor. He is a public figure, wrongly seen as representative of the West in much of the Muslim world (an image he certainly cultivates). John Paul II, at least, had some idea of the value of diplomacy and tact; Benedict exhibited his shortcomings in that department when he cravenly donned the mask of 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus to say “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”But of course, religious wackos never do their best work alone. The predictable response was riots and terror of the kind that makes one almost forget the hundreds of millions of completely non-idiotic Muslims who make up the huge majority of that faith’s adherents. Much of the protest, happily, was peaceful, calling for an outright apology from Benedict over his remarks. I rate it unlikely that he will apologize (after all, his god is bigger or whatever).

In Jakarta, though, the organizer of a reportedly peaceful demonstration trumped the papal pedi-oral insertion with pure absurdity, taking top honors for saying the single stupidest, and funniest, thing uttered in the course of this brouhaha. A certain Heri Budianto proclaimed that “Only Muslims can understand what jihad is. It is impossible that jihad can be linked with violence, we Muslims have no violent character [my emphasis].” Maybe he ought to go on a standup tour with venal former US Representative Tom DeLay and his buddy, Baptist minister Rick Scarborough!

If it weren’t funny, it might be sad. Keep smiling.

Update: Still a putz.