Wednesday, Jan. 30, 42 A.B.

Your Title Here - Just 50 Cents
 

"At Wedau, he had watched nursing women fish by leaning over a stream and milking their breasts into the water, then quietly scooping up with a hand net the little fish that rose to the cloudy bait." - Errol Flynn, in his 1946 novel, Showdown

Amazing, isn't it?

Even more amazing: The women of Wedau still pass their time this way.  Only these days the government of Wedau periodically samples their bait to make sure it's safe for the fish.

On Monday, these samples revealed the presence of blather.

Wedauan troops immediately shut me down cold.

It wasn't until this afternoon that further tests cleared me and my journal of all responsibility and I was allowed to resume posting entries.  It seems that the women had simply gotten hold of some bad malarkey.  Malarkey is broken down into blather and drivel by the human body.  While drivel tends to pool in the nasal cavities, blather goes straight for the breasts.

Anyway, I've been cleared.  Time to get back to work.
 

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My wife and I listened to President Bush's State of the Union address last night.  But not together - oh, no.  NEVER together.  We watched it in shifts the way we always do.  This way, in the event the president says something that triggers a fatal case of the giggles, at least one of us will be left to carry on.

I spent my shift simultaneously doing the dishes.  It's a proven fact  that we humans can process data far faster than we can generate it, so I was easily able to track his words while washing mugs and glasses.  Washington being so far away, however, I did need the help of our under-the-counter radio to do so.  I had the TV on in the living room, too, just in case the radio burned out in the middle of a particularly good dirty joke.  Well, as luck would have it, NO good dirty jokes popped up at all - but something almost as good did occur.  Apparently CBS TV was running the speech with a 3-second delay and the radio was not - which meant I'd hear Bush say something in my kitchen, and then I'd hear him say it again in the living room.  It was the strangest thing... like kitchen time and living room time had gotten out of synch.  Or at least like being in that movie in which Gary Cooper portrayed Lou Gehrig giving his farewell address over a stadium's wildly reverberating PA system.  Because I much prefer the idea of time ripping apart than baseball, let's stick with the first idea.

Heh, you'd think that getting to hear Bush's speech twice would increase the chances of my remembering at least a bit of it once, but no.  I was too fascinated by the dual nature of the experience to pay any attention at all to the details.

Bush's blue tie sure sounded beautiful on the radio, though.
 

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To make sure I didn't miss anything important, I read the transcript in my newspaper today.  Although I read it with two eyes, I can only recall reading it once, though.

The weirdness of life just never ends, does it?

Anyway, let me see if I have this straight: We're engaged in a war on terror, and we've taken terrorists prisoners in the course of that war, but they aren't prisoners of war, can't be called prisoners of war, and anyone who thinks otherwise is just being silly....

And while the majority of the terrorists who attacked us on Sept. 11 came from Saudi Arabia, it's actually Iraq, Iran, and North Korea we need to slap around.

AND (correct me if I'm wrong here) we as a nation also need to clamp down on business, make sure business plays by the rules, and punish business when it breaks the rules, even as we let Microsoft off with a slap on the wrist for breaking the rules.  We're also expected to forget that this call for stricter accountability is coming from a president whose party has long called for government to get off the back of business.

Oh, and this Republican president is now telling me that we actually need to expand the AmeriCorps and Peace Corps programs even though Republicans have been berating these programs for years.

BRB - Gotta go slap on a neck brace before my whiplash gets any worse.
 

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Did you know that the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. has 112 gargoyles?  Did you know that I don't have any?  Is this fair?  Well, IS IT?!

I mention this only because it's possible that my reaction to Bush's speech is merely sublimated gargoyle envy.

But I honestly don't think it is.
 

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Did you hear the REALLY big news?  There's going to be a new color M&M!  We even get to vote on it, too.  In March.  And the Supreme Court PROMISES not to interfere.

Our choices: Purple, pink, and aqua.

To register to vote, go here.

To suffer a fatal case of the giggles instead, go here.  (Has tastelessness ever been this sweet?)
 

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Fun Fact Of The Day:  Columbus has 48,000 street lights.  Sounds like a lot, doesn't it?  Yet incredibly, 2000 new ones are being added every year!  That's 8 every single work day!!  Alas, Columbus needs 90,000 for the streets to be adequately lit.  Meaning that it'll be about 2025 before y'all can come and safely find me in the middle of the night when you get a hankering for personalized blather.

If 2025 comes and you show up in the middle of the night claiming you didn't have time to stop and get me some M&Ms, don't be surprised if I snap and read you Bush's speech.

Twice.
 

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(©Now by DJ Birtcher despite the utter
lack of assistance from his radio)
 

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DID YOU KNOW...?



Today is Wednesday, January 30, 2002.  Only 335 days left
in the year.  Be sure to reserve one for yourself SOON!
 
 

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You know, if Errol Flynn had played Lou Gehrig, I bet he never would have died....