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Mar. 25th, 2009 @ 03:08 pm Your Assertion Should Not Be Misread
There’s a pesky little lawsuit coming before the Supreme Court about a tiny little situation from a little middle school that had the teensiest little step over the line a few years ago.

That’s when an assistant principal decided that a 13-year-old, accused by a former friend who had “gone Goth” of “providing prescription drugs” to other kids, needed some serious attention.

We have a strict 100-percent tolerance policy in this country for Assistant Principals, which is why the American People are very proud of the school officials who dragged Savana Redding into an office and forced her to remove her butterfly-decorated stretch pants and pink top, and to examine her Interesting Parts by forcing her to hold her underwear away from her body, in an effort to make sure that our national War On Drugs was not compromised by any of the Ibuprofen tablets she was alleged to be dealing.
( Pull em down )
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Mar. 23rd, 2009 @ 03:54 pm Traffic Stop -- Detroit Style
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So today, from sunny Detroit, comes what may be the most pathetic indicator so far of just how hapless the entrepreneurs of this city of 22 percent unemployment have become.

According to an Alert Local Newspaper, police were called to a CVS drugstore in northwest Detroit (for those of you not from this area, that would be the part of Detroit that is to the north, but also west, of the city center, which as far as we can tell has drifted gradually over toward Windsor if defined by population or possibly toward Omaha, Neb., if defined by economic success).

There they found a stolen U-Haul truck being used in a valiant attempt to yank an ATM machine from the CVS wall.( Quick Cash Withdrawal )
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Feb. 2nd, 2009 @ 01:02 pm Magic Trick for Economy!
Most magicians, professional or amateur, cause audiences to gasp and applaud when they perform illusions by using the audience’s imaginations in the same way a Judo participant uses their opponent’s body.

That’s right. The illusionist points at the audience and says “Wow, does your ill-fitting gi ever reveal what a great big pot belly you have, and, by the way, that sports bra is pathetic and you have once again tied that belt in the wrong knot form.” At which point the opponent punches the illusionist smartly in the face, making it, instantly, into a Jiu-Jitsu match rather than Olympic Judo.

This is not to be confused with sleight-of-hand illusion.

( Ippon for us all! )
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Dec. 4th, 2008 @ 11:45 am A Better, More-Efficient Titanic
Those of us who have been paying attention to the elevator floor lights as they flash by here on the fun-ride known as “The Economy” know that the folks at the Florida amusement parks had it just about right when they designed their “Tower of Terror” ride.

That ride, we might remind those of you who have not heard of it in previous writings, is the one in which you enter through a murky mockup of a hotel basement, wait for an elevator, and, when that elevator arrives, scream in terror because the sole occupant is a funereal-looking Wall Street banker with a $700 billion government check made out to “cash” in his hands.

Haha. No, what actually happens with the “Tower of Terror” is that you get strapped in to a seat and the “elevator” shoots you up and down an elevator shaft at great speed, occasionally popping open doors to give you a glimpse across the Florida plain of your car being towed from a distant parking lot. This leaves you shaken and, in some cases, vomiting.

( Fundsapoppin’ )
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Dec. 3rd, 2008 @ 04:24 pm Grim News from the Academic Trenches!
Americans have been bewildered at the declining quality and content of higher education these days, especially as new studies tracking the cost of college have found that people are paying some 461 percent more for college now (after indexing for inflation) than they did in the mid-1980s. Worse, many cannot actually determine what that percentage means.

Now comes Google News with a story lead that explains why: It’s their software.

According to Google, leading in to an article by the Christian Science Monitor, the paper that took the paper out of being a paper this year, here’s the problem:

Nearly half of students at four-year colleges don't finish after six years, a report finds. This feature requires a newer version of Macromedia Flash Player and javascript-enabled browser.

If this doesn’t lead to an Archimedian moment, I don’t know what else will.
( Tricksy )
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Nov. 13th, 2008 @ 12:11 pm Having a Car Attack
So medical experts (they wear white coats and are often quoted, along the lines of “medical experts say”) tell us that the body cannot feel the gradual hardening of the arteries and plaque buildup that so plague consumers of donuts these days.

Not sensing that what used to be a nimble and elastic system is gradually becoming a frangible monument to Dunkin’ and Tim Horton’s, the donut-eaters amble contentedly around their narrowly-defined little world, doin’ the drive-thru thing. Sprinkles here, glazed there, sometimes cake old-fashioned, sometimes raised and fried, they just keep do-nutting along.

Then one day they get a utility bill in the mail with an unexpectedly large amount shown for a child’s cell phone, or the neighbor’s dog is observed excreting in their peony bed, and the adrenaline flows, the heart pumps, the jellyroll rolls and – prang! – the fatal flake blows off the inflamed vessel wall, and it’s off to the vibrant funeral parlor.

If this week’s headline writers were to review the incident, they would jot:

“Disaster for Donut Workers: Customer loss kills jobs, community tax revenues.”

( Car Attack! )
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Oct. 28th, 2008 @ 05:29 pm Golly, Mr. Answer Person!
Intrepid readers want to know: Have any of the many different things written about in recent weeks actually come to pass?

And, as Mr. Answer Person this very moment, we can only say: Sorta.

( Events Continue To Happen )
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Oct. 24th, 2008 @ 12:19 pm Future Beckons for ConCar?
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Back when I was a happy gamete and unaware of “commercial paper,” let alone paper of any kind, two giant railroads got into huge business trouble.

This led directly to the wonders of Amtrak and Conrail, two of the most-praised international business entities. Haha. Hahahahaha. Bwahahahahaha. (Brief cooling off period).

So here’s the cool deal about history, which often repeats itself but with the kind of minor variations that let you do, say, a new version of High School Musical that rakes in an audience of millions, even though the audience knows that nothing new is going to happen, that no actual high school is involved and that there’s no Richard Rodgers behind the turgid lyrics here. History is always just different enough that, just about the time you *think* you know what is going to happen, it happens but with different people involved. So, in the Franco-Prussian War, France and Germany fought and there were 194,000 casualties. Then, in World War I, France and Germany fought and there were 24 million casualties. Different story, right? That history, it’s cool the way it does that. That's why we need to think "automotive" today, rather than "railroad."

We’re playing the theme from the WayBack machine here, and Mr. Peabody and His Boy Sherman are jumping into the hopper to revisit: The Penn Central bankruptcy.

( Come Way Way Back )
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Oct. 23rd, 2008 @ 05:07 pm 139 thieves per year
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There are just times when numbers make you want to sing crazy songs, take out your fire extinguishers and shoot them towards the moon, or put duct-tape and tin foil on your head to restore nature’s balance and stop the Martians from playing annoying Captain & Tennile songs at you for a while.

Today’s crazy numbers come from the anti-car-theft people in Michigan, an organization known as H.E.A.T. (named, not after pre-menopausal flashes, as one would suspect, but based on the good old concept of coming up with an acronym that spells out a slogan, in this case having to do with people who believe some strange things).

H.E.A.T. just released a summary to celebrate its wonderful success in Michigan at moving toward its goal of “eliminating” auto theft. The reasons for the celebrations are:

1. It has paid out more than $3.3 million in rewards for tips leading to auto thieves’ arrests.
2. It has recovered $49 million in stolen autos.
3. More than 3,200 suspects have been apprehended.

Over 23 years.

Pass the tissue box, please.

( mostly )
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Oct. 15th, 2008 @ 06:40 pm Recession, Depression … Words Being Worn Out
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If you, like me, have switched your morning radio away from NPR simply to avoid morning headlines like “Another catastrophic day on Wall Street, which is proving worse for the Left-Handed and those who have Sex With Cantaloupes …” then you, like me, have also noticed that some of our nouns, verbs and descriptive adjectives are getting a bit shop-worn.

Some, indeed, are already mildly smoking from over-use and should probably have the hose played on them for a bit.

( trouble )
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Sep. 29th, 2008 @ 02:56 pm You Put the Lime in the Coconut, you Bite it Really Hard …
… and the little, pressurized $5 aluminum bottle of extremely toxic Coconut Lime scent that the Missing Girl Who Moved To College used to use shoots all over your snout, leading you to leap off the bed where you were chewing the damned thing, allowing the little canister to go whalloping all over the carpeted room.

Then, using the cover of the Big Dog, who thinks the “whoosh-BUMP-silence” noise is the return of Seventh-Day-Adventists to the Front Door, you rush down the stairs barking helpfully, leaving the hominids in the house to yell “What was THAT!” at each other from, respectively, the attic office and the dining room office. You ignore them; you are barking at the Communist Invasion at the front door.

Meanwhile, a tropical stench begins to spread on the second floor.

( Tropical Stench Continues )
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Sep. 25th, 2008 @ 03:09 pm Bailout! Bailout!
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So President Bush failed to follow correct radio policy during his address to the nation, because he should have begun by saying “Pan – Pan – Pan.”

That’s the signal meant to be used over the emergency hailing channel when you’re in a heaping helping of emergency trouble, but the ship is not actually in the process of sinking yet.

I have some predictions about what is likely to happen to $700 billion of future earnings that might once have belonged to you, me, and our kids if the earnings are left lying around on K Street near a convenient pickup spot for Mortgage Bankers, or, as we call them, the Armani Unemployed.
( What Comes Next )
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Sep. 17th, 2008 @ 09:53 am Cuteness of Welds – or – What’s Inside the Clear Glass Door
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Many, many years ago when I was trying to earn enough money to pay for the next fall term of school and, haha, for parts of a wedding as well, such as a ring put on the bride’s finger, I went to work for a tiny welding factory named (with great precision and descriptiveness) something very close to “Enormous Industries.”

At Enormous, you could get several things. You could get severely burnt while welding, for example. ( Read more )
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Sep. 5th, 2008 @ 01:36 pm Are the Nude Squirrels Still There?
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Important Answers to Unasked, Burning Questions


Many of you, over the past several weeks, have not asked trenchant questions about the aftermath of some previous postings. Questions such as “Hey, you are such a styling dude, may I share your ego?” have failed entirely to materialize. Under this relentless pressure, then, we feel that it is important to assure the general public that there ARE answers to their unasked or, as we say, “pre-utterance” queries. And we are willing to give those answers. Here. Now. Without waiting for, say, a national election:

Q: Are there still nude, lactating squirrels in the roof of your Florida Room?

( Well? Are there? Read on ... )
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Aug. 27th, 2008 @ 05:26 pm The Exhaust Terrorists Win
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It only took one crank of the ignition key in the GM interlock to realize that, once again, our Global War on Terrorism had come up a complete failure.

Some time between 9 p.m. and the next afternoon, possibly even while Hillary Clinton was delivering her keynote speech in a harsh portable-saw-like tone at the National Democratic Convention, terrorists equipped with power tools swept through our neighborhood and used high-tech battery-powered saws to remove the catalytic converter from innocently-parked minivans and SUVs.

“Man, these guys are good!” marveled a report-taking police officer. “I mean, we had seven of these the night before, right down a block, boom-boom-boom-boom, and nobody – I mean NOBODY – heard a thing. How do you think they do that?”

( How They Do That! )
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Jul. 11th, 2008 @ 03:43 pm Guns ‘n Mice ‘n Things that go Boom
Ever attentive to the REAL issues that Move America Forward, we have learned that a Walt Disney Company spokesperson may have coined a new slogan for the theme company.

To whit: “We deal in explosives every day.”

This is because Disney has discovered that it is, in fact, immune from pesky Second Amendment meddling by employees who might park a handgun in their commuter vehicle on Disney property. Disney is immune, the company says, because its daily fireworks show required it to obtain a federal permit to engage in the business of importing, manufacturing and dealing in explosives.

( Mouse denies pistol parkers )
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Jul. 2nd, 2008 @ 09:59 pm Missing in Detroit: Fountain Guts
Many of you Informed Readers may be wondering, in light of recent events, just what it is about Detroit that has changed the meaning of the city’s French name from “the straits” to “insert misery here.”

We’re all about tough love in the metro Detroit area, where we view ourselves as scrappy survivors of one of the most vicious parking enforcement systems ever put in place. Many of us have actually lived within the city boundaries of “The D,” as it is now being branded, and some of us still reside so closely to the city that a brisk dog walk brings us well within the city’s boundaries before there has been any need to use the plastic baggie we customarily take with us.

( Guts Below )
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Jun. 16th, 2008 @ 12:36 pm Political Refining to Ease Domestic Energy Crisis
A lot has been said recently about oil. Oil, oil, oil, oil. There. Proof that a lot is being said about oil even today!

Oil is the stuff that comes out of those little boinka-boinka cans that used to be available in hardware stores. Hardware stores are becoming increasingly rare because of the advent of so-called “big box” retailers. These big warehouse places have tons of stuff, including stainless steel barbecue grilles capable of rotisserie-cooking a Boeing 747. In among all this stuff, it has become difficult to find the boinka-boinka cans of oil.

This is partly because environmentalists have erected barricades to exploration, in the form of aisle-clogging displays of compact fluorescent lamp bulbs. The minute a good person tries to find a boinka-boinka can of oil, they are confronted with a fragile tripping hazard that contains trace levels of mercury vapor. Even if they get beyond that, they are often turned back by “Caution: Wet Floor” signs in English and Spanish, representing the victory of the gutless tort lawyers and bilingual weenies over the Ordinary American Citizen.

Is it any wonder, then, that when it comes to finding oil, we have a National Emergency?
( Perfidy! Continues )
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Jun. 12th, 2008 @ 09:52 am Hey! Are those Cobra Eyes?
Every once in a while, it’s important to pull back from the froth of our daily bout of tunnel vision and to collect in a calm and far-sighted manner to seriously evaluate Our Path Into The Future.

Ever-helpful when it comes to this sort of thing, The Wall Street Journal today has included this headline:

Is the West Paralyzed by the Cobra Eyes of Rising Evil?

I think it says it all.

Though the WSJ used it to top a Letter to the Editor written by Charles Pluschnick, of Brooklyn, N.Y. (Mr. Pluschnick believes our military is second to none, that we know all the details of what is going on in Iran, and that it is time to Do The Right Thing), it seems to this writer that the WSJ has come up with the perfect analogue for these perilous times.

As in: Is my wet wash mildewing because of the Cobra Eyes of Rising Evil?

( More Rising Evil! )
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Jun. 11th, 2008 @ 02:05 pm Free Trade and Wedding Global Market!
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We keen Captains of Industry and Wielders of The Sword of Capitalism have every reason to be smug these days, as we see the fruits and nuts of Free Trade falling into our cornucopia of economic success here in North America.

As a participant in the new, expanded, free trade economy I am personally very proud that we have discovered, for example, that it is quite possible to run an iron foundry in a foreign low-tech nation at an unprecedented level of Lean by doing away with needless necessities, such as:
• Pollution controls
• Safety equipment such as shoes
• Worker pay

In fact, I have little doubt that many a former American worker suffered grievous injury when their steel-toed workboots caused them to trip over a pollution control while they raced to the front office to receive their paycheck. These hazards are clearly the fault of the aged Western system of extras, never challenged until these more-progressive times.

So it is with quiet pride that we discover yet another Barrier To Trade falling by the wayside, courtesy of the Rodriguez family in America’s southern reaches.

( Entrepreneurial Vision Elucidated )
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