Picking My Brain 06-11-01

It's 10 PM. Do you kow where your beer-drinking, friend-shooting, publicly-lying, creepy-looking, Vice President is?

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"I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the Secretary of Defense." - George W. Bush, White House, Apr. 18, 2006 [So, he's hearing voices, eh?]

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"The Flintstones Chewable Vitamin" of news. That's how a guest on Joe Scarborough described "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report." I have to go back through the transcripts because I haven't quite figured out whether or not Joe or his guests get these two great shows. They say they do, but then get all worried that they might have an effect on the election! So, what's wrong with that? As near as I can tell, the biggest problem that YOU have, Joe, is that you can't predict what that effect will be, and it scares the shit out of you.

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"The troops are plenty smart." - George W. Bush, while doing another freebie stump job on the campaign trail yesterday. Kerry had botched a joke, one which may or may not have been funny even if he got it right, but that's beside the point. He was on a roll, doing one-liners in the opening to his speech, and when he went into the whole "You get stuck in Iraq" thing, he left out the word "us". He went to say that the uneducated president and his henchmen (the "you") "get US stuck in Iraq." Whole nuther thing. So naturally, the Republicans ignore the corrections issued by Kerry and his people and keep accusing Kerry of saying that our troops are dumb. But our Yale-educated, Harvard MBA president set the record straight, "The troops are plenty smart." You think he could have found a more grammatically correct way of expressing that particular sentiment?

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So the Australians are all upset over the recent hilarious episode of
"South Park". Satan has decided that he wants to have the most awesome Sweet Sixteen Halloween party ever even though everything he wants to do has already been done by P Diddy. He lays down firm rules about who can get in and who can't, and one of them is that you have to have a costume. A minion approaches to tell him that someone dressed as Steve Irwin (famed Crocodile Hunter who died, tragically, in a freak accident) has shown up. Now here is where our good friends down under aren't getting the whole story, I think. Because Satan immediately says that this is wrong and that it's too soon for someone to be dressing up like Steve Irwin. Only it's the real Steve Irwin, so Satan kicks him out for not having a costume. That's all. Oh, and the fact that Irwin had a stingray barb sticking out of his chest might have been offensive (if they haqd actually seen it, which they won't 'til next year.

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So I finally sit down to read the book and who's the very first nominee? Willis Stephens! New York State Assemblyman Stephens was monitoring an online discussion group of 300 of his constituents. He sent the following e-mail to his assistant, "Just watching the idiots pontificate." Only he didn't send it to his assistant, he accidentally sent it to the 300 people involved in the online discussion. Faux pas! Republican Willis Stephens is MY New York State Assemblyman. Can you guess who I'm voting for on Tuesday? Can you? Because I don't even know his name and I'm voting for him. (Just kidding, it's Ken Harper. Go Ken!)

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More stuff later today (maybe after work, when I have time at the office to do this.) Until then, keep watching the skies!