Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

A farmer went out one day and bought a brand new stud rooster for his chicken coop. The new rooster struts over to the old rooster and says,

'OK old fart, time for you to retire.'

The old rooster replies, 'Come on, surely you cannot handle ALL of these chickens. Look what it has done to me. Can't you just let me have the two old hens over in the corner?'

The young rooster says, 'Beat it: You are washed up And I am taking over.'

The old rooster says, 'I tell you what, young stud. I will race you around the farmhouse. Whoever wins gets the exclusive domain over the entire chicken coop..'

The young rooster laughs. 'You know you don't stand a chance, old man. So, just to be fair, I will give you a head start.'

The old rooster takes off running. About 15 seconds later the young rooster takes off running after him. They round the front porch of the farmhouse and the young rooster has closed the gap.

He is only about 5 feet behind the old rooster and gaining fast. The farmer, meanwhile, is sitting in his usual spot on the front porch When he sees the roosters running by.

The Old Rooster is squawking And running as hard as he can.

The Farmer grabs his shotgun and - BOOM - He blows the young rooster to bits. The farmer sadly shakes his head and says, 'Dammit.....Third gay rooster I bought this month.'

Moral of this Story? ...

Don't mess with the OLD FARTS –

Age, skill, wisdom, and a little treachery always overcome youth and arrogance!

David, in DC

Deer Tick Alert

I hate it when people sound so many false alarms, but this one is important!

Send this to everyone--repeat, everyone--on your e-mail list!

If someone comes to your front door saying they are conducting a survey on deer ticks and asks you to disrobe and dance around,

DO NOT DO IT !! It is a SCAM.

I wish I'd gotten this yesterday.

I feel like such a fool !!!!!!!!!!!!

Spike Milligan, the Goon Show, and the World's Funniest Joke

This article is about what makes jokes funny.

It contains some very funny jokes.

This article is about a comic sketch. If you remember the sketch, I defy you to read the article without smiling.

I'm declaring Be Grateful for Monty Python Week.

It starts yesterday, so you're already late.

It ends 2 days past tomorrow.

Go rent, borrow or buy some Monty Python.

You'll be glad you did.*

*Not an actual guarantee.**

**This IS an actual disclaimer.

Computer Haikus

With thanks, as always

for these sweet comedic gems,

to my friend, Michel.

Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.

The Web site you seek
It cannot be located
But Countless more exist.

Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.

Program aborting:
Close all that you have worked on.
You ask far too much.

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.

Your file was so big.
It must have been quite useful.
But now it is gone.

Stay the patient course.
Of little worth is your ire.
The network is down.

A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes and lost data.
Guess which has happened.

You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will.

Having been erased,
The document you're seeking
Must now be retyped.

Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. All is blank

Sometimes a Reply to a Comment Grows into a New Post

Trust me, I never thought I'd be one to yearn for the intellectual depth of the Reagan Administration.

Bill Clinton's worst sins were to turn a previously honorable word like "intern" into a national punchline and to force millions of parents to explain what a blow-job was earlier than they would have chosen.

W.'s were errors that struck at the core of our national identity. The secret legal opinions undergirding the Bush "War on Terror" turn out, in the light of day, to be fraud and tomfoolery. Vicious, corrosive tomfoolery.

One can scarcely believe lawyers wrote them with a straight face.

Obama's acts overruling these fiction-filled "legal briefs," and then exposing them to the disinfecting light of day, give me confidence. And pride to be an American.

Hang on. I just re-read something. I'm quoting Reagan and you're quoting Time? Yikes! If anyone sees any lions lying down with lambs or swords being beaten into plowshares, please let us know.

Ronald Wilson Reagan: American Prophet

"A moment I've been dreading. George brought his n'er-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida; the one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work."

From the REAGAN DIARIES -
entry dated May 17, 1986

(From the REAGAN DIARIES, recently edited by historian Douglas Brinkley and published by HarperCollins.)

Richard Cohen on Israel

Richard Cohen isn't always right. But Chaim Weizmann usually was.

From yesterday's WaPo: Whose Israel Shall it Be?

Virg Bernero Is My New Hero

Who Does What?

With thanks to my cousin Debbie, in Buffalo, for this gem:

A man and his wife were having an argument about who should brew the coffee each morning.

The wife said, 'You should do it because you get up first, and then we don't have to wait as long to get our coffee.

The husband said, 'You are in charge of cooking around here and you should do it, because that is your job, and I can just wait for my coffee.'

Wife replies, 'No, you should do it, and besides, it is in the Bible that the man should do the coffee.'

Husband replies, 'I can't believe that, show me.'

So she fetched the Bible, and opened the New Testament and showed him at the top of several pages, that it indeed says:

Wait for it
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'HEBREWS'

Hey, They Still Rhyme

As always, thanks to Michel for these.

Say Anything

I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.

Who Moved My Shoulder?

I was coming home from a fairly useful pshrink appointment. The doc stayed awake, my tenuous grasp on reality was reinforced, and I had prescriptions to top of my bottles of Happy Pills.

Driving eastbound on I-66, at the height of rush hour, I encountered a little problem.

Just inside the Beltway, there's a stretch of superhighway with a shoulder on the right that stops being a shoulder from 3:30 until 7:00 pm.

For that benighted time period, it becomes an express lane for buses and vans serving the West Falls Church Metro stop. It's a very bad place to hear your tire start to fail.

The stretch of highway probably only goes on for about a mile and a half. It leads to a flyover with no shoulder. That's about 2 tenths of a mile. That leads to a regular superhighway, with a regular, blessedly sufficient shoulder.

As you may have guessed by now, I was just approaching this abomination of civil engineering, at about 60 mph, when I heard a little rumble. I felt a little shimmy. I looked to my right and realized where I was.

Ruh-roh.

I hit my emergency flashers, slowed to 30, and started to sweat. I may have uttered a barnyard epithet. I didn't really contemplate my doom, but I definitely regretted passing up that extra slice of pecan pie at lunch.

Adding the stretch of road with its procession of suddenly-lethal buses and vans to the subsequent flyover ramp, I now calculate the distance to be about 1.7 miles.

It took me roughly three weeks to traverse. Sweating out roughly one-third of the hourly liquid spillover at Niagara Falls --- as measured by the nonpartisan, bilateral U.S.-Canadian Riparian Cooperation Commission.

I have power windows, so I hit the button to roll them down at the start of my escapade, to smell rubber.

It wasn't too bad when I started. I was contemplating wrecked rims by the time I could finally pull off.

I called the police and I called AAA.

When the AAA guy got there, he scolded me for being on my cell phone while he called me trying to hone in on my location. The mile marker (down to a tenth of a mile) I'd given the dispatcher was clearly too general.

The police sent a guy from V-DOT (Virginia Department of Transportation). He got out of his pick-up with the flashing lights and I finally found out where the father in the trio of hillbillies in Deliverance had moved on to. He had three teeth, a weeks growth of beard, a ciggie dangling from his mouth, and shouted to the AAA guy: "How many people did this guy call, anyway?"

I replied "The cops and Triple-A, which one shouldn't I have called?"

"Well, one of 'em," he explained.

Sotto voce, the AAA guy, who looked like a cross between Willem Defoe and John Riggins, said "You did right, you call both and take whoever comes first."

I was starting to like this guy.

He put my donut on my wheel, assured me I'd missed effing up my rim by a matter of moments, and went to his car for some paperwork.

While he was away, Grampa Hillbilly said "Your flashers have been on an awful long time, maybe you ought to start her up after he comes back."

This guy, too, was beginning to grow on me.

Defoe/Riggins comes back, gives me some paperwork, and warns me that I can't drive faster than 50 mph or longer than 50 miles on the donut.

Grampa makes his start her up suggestion again.

Then we all heard the lovely kachuckachuckachuck of a car who's battery won't turn over.

Luckily, Triple-A fixes that too.

Now I had three instructions:

Stay under 50 mph
Don't drive more than 50 miles
Drive at least 15 minutes to recharge before stopping.

I shook both men's hands, thanked them, and drove toward Sears, reflecting on my good luck.

I got to Sears before the fifteen minutes were up.

Going through a McDonald's drive-through keeps the engine running.

Hello Double-Quarter-Pounder-With-Cheese!

(A death-defying daredevil like myself scoffs heartily at cholesterol.)

$600.00 later, I'd done my part for President Obama's goal of stimulating the economy and had four new Goodyear tires, and an alignment.

If anyone wants to start a movement to demand that shoulders be shoulders 24 hours/day, 7 days/week, count me in.

On the Other Hand ...

BAIL 'EM OUT!????

Hell, back in 1990 the government seized the Mustang Ranch brothel in Nevada for tax evasion.

As required by law, they tried to run it profitably.

They failed.

It closed.

Now we're supposed to trust the economy of our country, our banking system and our auto industry to nit-wits who couldn't make money running a whorehouse and selling whiskey?!

Michel sends me the funniest stuff.

The Third House of Congress

A conference committee is often called "the third house of Congress"

Whether we get a clean stimulus package or a Christmas tree festooned with ornaments of pork depends on a committee of notables.

And some near-notables. And a couple of non-notables. And at least one we-wish-he'd-go-away-so he'd-stop-being notable. Maybe two.

They'll hammer out differences between the House and Senate bills. They're also free to delete stuff both houses of Congress approved and insert stuff neither house approved. Or even considered.

Some stuff that's being stuffed in, like fair treatment for Filipinos who fought on America's side in WWII, isn't going to do much to stimulate the economy. It's mostly about America finally acting like America ought. Then again, a few bucks in the pockets of elderly Filipinos and Filipino-Americans might goose prune juice sales in Hawaii a little. I'm just sayin'.

Other stuff being stuffed in is defensible. The President defended one yesterday.

Why wouldn't you require a move toward alternative fuels in the clauses covering the purchase of government vehicles? The stimulus part is buying the damn cars. If, at the same time, he can move forward on something he and McCain agreed on last fall --- weaning ourselves from dependence on energy bought from folks who don't like us very much --- that's a good thing.

Other stuff being stuffed in is utterly indefensible; the conference committee should wield a scalpel, not a ladle.

Bob Dylan sang to an earlier generation of legislators:

Come Senators, Congressmen please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall
For he who gets hurt will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside and it's raging
It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times, they are a changing

It might be a good idea to have that song playing while they meet.

Maybe on a loop with the Springsteen/Pete Seeger performance of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" at the Lincoln Memorial on Inauguration Weekend.

All six verses.