To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times offers some hair care tips:
I’ve never stolen any hotel shampoo because of course I always wash my hair with Guinness and condition it with Harp. It’s been a family tradition since 1917.
Take it from the guy. he’s got the metrosexual thing going on. Although it does seem like a waste of Guinness to me. Perhaps he means Extra Stout, not Draught, which is more appealing.
Buy My Books!
Clap the, well, clapboard, for the St. Louis Post Dispatch has a new reason to oppose the discontinuation of emissions testing in the St. Louis area:
In 1999, Robert Bowers, a buyer for the Office of Administration, signed a contract on behalf of the state with Environmental Systems Products, a Connecticut-based company that runs the 15 inspection stations in Missouri. The company is the largest provider of emissions tests in the world.
Its contract runs through August 2007. Ending it early could mean the state would have to refund $40 million to company.
With a general fund that already faces shortfalls, that could mean the death of legislation that narrowly won first-round approval in the Missouri House on Monday.
Pardon my simplistic understanding of contracts, but I don’t think Environmental Systems Products paid forty million dollars to the State of Missouri for the privilege of conducting business which the state will have to refund if it revokes that privilege. I would guess that the buy-out payment is less than what the government, and buy government I mean we citizens would have to pay out to keep the program going. Not to mention our own hassles of sitting in our cars for an hour waiting our turn on the rollers.
But it’s not about just payng the forty million, oh no:
The state would also lose the $2.50 fee it collects from each $24 inspection if it ends the program. That would mean about $600,000 a year in lost revenue.
Oh, there’s the loss of the ability to strip money from motorists in the St. Louis area. That hurts the state budget, which will undoubtedly be forced to cutback to roller skates from nicely-painted vans on some meals on wheels program or another.
It’s good to see persistence on the part of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. They hit us with the dreaded runny nose and lost jobs attack, now it’s contract “refunds” and lost state revenue. What will it be tomorrow, lack of emissions testing leads to increased ecstasy use and removes St. Louis from consideration for an NBA expansion team?
Buy My Books!
Something seems awfully familiar about Anne Taintor’s new book:
Whether becoming your mother thrills you or terrifies you, it’s likely you’ll find something to laugh about in artist Anne Taintor’s new collection of collages in “I’m Becoming My Mother” (Chronicle Books, 112 pages, $12.95). Taintor takes images that promote the domestic ideals of the early 1950s and slaps one-liners – often hilarious, always unexpected – on them.
I just can’t put my finger on it.
Buy My Books!
Dale Franks examines the beauty in the boondoggle that is the Navy/Marine Corps Internet.
Oh, yeah, an enterprise-caliber, best-in-breed solution designed to do nothing but cause money to exchange hands. Lots of money. Taxpayer money. Beautiful.
Buy My Books!
In his current column in the Chicago Sun Times, stings Bob Greene in a simile:
My room at the David Intercontinental looked down on the beach. The first night I couldn’t sleep, so went downstairs to slog through the Mediterranean and join what looked like about 10,000 people partying on the sand. I expected young adults dancing the hora. What I found were high school students, some falling-down drunk, clutching tequila bottles. I tried assessing the mood of Israeli youth, which seems to have absorbed our core American values. “I want to be a star!” exuded Tal Zolti, 16. Their English was good, but I started feeling like Bob Greene crashing the junior prom, and after one kid called me “Grandpa” I decided it was time to head back upstairs.
Remember, Bob Greene resigned his position at the Chicago Tribune after having an affair with a seventeen-year-old girl (legal in Illinois, fellows!) whom he met on the job.
Me, I am disappointed. Not because I am a fan of Greene’s, which I am, but because I’ve been polishing my own Greene zingers since I’m reading Bob Greene’s America and will undoubtedly deploy those zingers in the online review.
Unfortunately, now they’ll seem derivative of a real writer. Thanks a lot, Mr. Steinberg.
Buy My Books!
Instead of having a life, I have blogged a pile already tonight and I have updated Pop-Up Mocker.
More value for your blog-reading dollar. Can I have that dollar? A couple more and I could buy a Guinness.
Buy My Books!
Apparently, you have reached the number two hit in Poland for proposal swapping my wife.
Not interested. Don’t offer. Go away.
Buy My Books!
Although this story from yesterday has been retracted, I stand upon my inferences thereupon.
Viva la economie!
(Link seen on Instapundit.)
Buy My Books!
Today, in the Chicago Sun-Times, Richard Roeper takes on the American Idol racism manufactuversy. He sums it up:
That’s what happened recently when Chicago’s Jennifer Hudson and two other young black women finished in the bottom three in viewer voting, while that Doogie Howser-lookin’ 16-year-old, John Stevens, was among the top vote-getters, despite the fact that he CANNOT SING A LICK. (To the shock of the judges and anyone with working ears, Hudson was sent home, which turned out to be a great career break. You don’t get to read a Top Ten List on “Late Show With David Letterman” unless you’re making real news.)
How could this happen? How could arguably the three most talented performers finish with the three worst vote totals? Hmmm, could it have something to do with the fact that they’re black?
A lot of people, including Elton John, seemed to think so.
Roeper’s take?
I thought the cries of racism in the wake of Hudson’s ouster were emotionally cheap and intellectually lazy. (Personally, I was glad to see Stevens go because I’m a rabid anti-schmaltz-ite.) To slap the “racist” tag on millions of people because they preferred a hokey teen-boy singer to some over-emoting junior divas is quite a leap. Maybe there are just a lot of Nebraska grandmas and New York teenyboppers who voted for Stevens, while fans of the Bottom Three felt so secure about their favorites that they didn’t bother to vote. I mean, if the vote two weeks ago is proof that America is racist, then last week’s vote means America has learned its lesson, and isn’t racist any more. Right?
I agree it’s not about race, but for a different reason.
From what I understand, you vote by calling a 900 number for your favorite singer. You can vote as often as you want or your parents can afford. That sort of election process selects a special subset of viewers, a subset that has superfluous money, time, and motivation to call a 900 number.
It’s not white versus black. It’s idiots versus people with lives apart from the television.
Thank you. Please note, this Internet is not an idiot box because it has more than a box. It is two boxes, a big calculator with letters on it, and a unicycle with two buttons on it. That is all.
Buy My Books!
Good news: The Missouri Legislature has begun the process of eliminating emissions tests required for automobile licensing in the St. Louis area. As cars become cleaner, these tests’ burden, in terms of resident money and time spent, have not yielded that many results. The sponsor says:
Bill sponsor Rep. Jim Lembke, R-south St. Louis County, said the testing is unnecessary, unpopular and a burden to the elderly and poor. He said the program should be eliminated because 92 percent of all vehicles pass the test and the biggest polluters – motorcycles and many trucks – are exempt from the law.
Good work. Hey, I once met Lembke, back when he was running unsuccessfully for the position he now holds. He was canvassing door-to-door, and I had to hammer him a bit on conservative consistency–particularly his love of “incentives” to draw industry to Lemay, but his opposition to welfare and government handouts to individuals. But enough about me.
The bad news: opposition invokes a scattering of silly reasons to keep the program running:
Rep. Barbara Fraser, D-University City, said ending the clean-air testing could exacerbate the symptoms of allergy sufferers and would mean the loss of 250 jobs.
Got that? A slightly runnier nose and throwing 250 hard-working bureaucrats into the private workforce. Oh, the horror, the horror!
Politicians like this think you can legislate full employment by creating enough government regulations and divisions and offices. It got us out of the Greast Depression, didn’t it?
Hmm, no, I think that was the techno-military-industrial complex gearing up for WWII, not the CCC. But hey, I was less alive than the Baby Boomers were to experience it first hand. What would I know?
Buy My Books!
The LA Times is reporting that presidential campaign spending in this cycle may exceed $1 billllllion dollars. (Thank God we have campaign finance reform.)
Hot digduggity! So that’s a billion dollars of excess wealth drained from willing participants in the political process to be spent and redistributed to print and broadcast media, creative agencies, and in bars and restaurants where sales are struck. God bless America, and it’s not compulsory. Unlike tax money for social programs, which are too often spent the same way.
Buy My Books!
Via Snopes.com, a story about President Bush jogging with an injured serviceman:
Attached is a picture of Mike McNaughton. He stepped on a landmine in Afghanistan Christmas 2002. President Bush came to visit the wounded in the hospital. He told Mike that when he could run a mile, that they would go on a run together. True to his word, he called Mike every month or so to see how he was doing. Well, last week they went on the run, 1 mile with the president. Not something you’ll see in the news, but seeing the president taking the time to say thank you to the wounded and to give hope to one of my best friends was one of the greatest/best things I have seen in my life. It almost sounds like a corny email chain letter, but God bless him.
You think John Kerry would trip over him and call him a son-of-a-bitch?
Buy My Books!
It’s hard to tell if the author and the sources for this piece in Time are helping Kerry, or damning him. Explaining why John Kerry sounds like an unprincipled opportunist when he’s just the opposite:
Kerry’s verbal meanderings are partly a reflection of a mind that sees complexity in almost every issue. The son of a diplomat, educated partly in boarding schools in Europe, Kerry learned to look at current affairs from multiple perspectives. Says an adviser: “It’s not like he’s trying to shade the truth. He overintellectualizes his explanations.” Asked by TIME in a March interview whether the Iraq war would be worth the costs if no weapons of mass destruction were ever found, Kerry replied, “No, I think you can still — wait, no. You can’t — that’s not a fair question. You can wind up successful in transforming Iraq and changing the dynamics, and that may make it worth it, but that doesn’t mean [transforming Iraq] was the cause [that provided the] legitimacy to go.” Kerry may in fact be right when he argues that a successful outcome does not justify an illegitimate war, but a listener has to work hard to understand his point.
You got that? No? Put a little effort into understanding it, and you’ll come away with the message that John Kerry is too smart for you to understand.
Perhaps the Kerry campaign should not deploy senators whose understanding of nuance match Kerry’s own:
“If you look at his public career, it’s been just the opposite. He’s not been unclear on the environment, on labor and education issues,” says former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey. “His reputation in the Senate is that you can trust his word. If he believes in something, he’ll fight for it.”
Got it?
Thanks for not being a cartoonish or obfuscating character, little Kerrey. No, that sort of babble conveys precisely the slippery meaning the speaker intends, and both Kerry and Kerrey know it. They just have to tell the American people that they don’t, sort of, know it or mean it except when they don’t not.
Buy My Books!
More from the Brian J. Noggle “Capitalism: It’s All Good” School of Economics. Take this story, which says:
High gas prices are forcing families to shop in cut-rate grocery stores, a food industry analysis finds.
“High oil prices, both at the pump and for home heating, depress consumers’ ability to spend more,” said a report by the Food Marketing Institute released at its annual trade show in Chicago yesterday.
“It is not surprising that more shoppers are buying food today in discount stores and other low-price venues than ever before,” the study said.
It’s all good. As rational consumers, those who allocate their resources to fuel and to food discount stores are acting in their own best interests. The free market at work.
What about the grocers out there? Well, people are choosing low price over….what is it again a full grocery offers?
You see, the Brian J. Noggle “Capitalism: It’s All Good” School of Economics sees through every little ping of “bad” news as a net positive. When the man on the radio says copper prices are going up, that’s good for the miners and it’s good for the people who make alternatives to copper. Copper prices going down? Good for people who want to buy or make things with copper. Gas prices going up? Good for refineries and Big Oil, as well as for people who make hybrid automobiles, mass transit, and pastimes close to home. Gas prices coming down? Good for transportation companies, consumers, and tourist destinations.
Keep that in mind when these reports come out. The news is typically bad for whomever is releasing the report (well, probably good fro whomever got paid to prepare the doomsday scenario), but it’s good news for someone else, and it’s probably not zero sum. It’s better news for everyone when capitalism is unfettered.
Buy My Books!
This book is supposed to be a whodunit. It’s more a WTF?
The book is set in 1962. The backdrop: The end of the Mets’ miserable season. During a ballgame in late September, Jerry Fielder, a “businessman” with a shady reputation, is murdered in the pressbox with a number of people nearby. Who could have done it? Who cares?
For starters, the first person narrator is a somewhat minor character, recounting things that happen to other people. It’s kind of jarring to try to keep that bit straight. Second, it takes like 70 pages until the murder is committed. Thirdly, it’s difficult to keep the suspects straight, much less the investigating characters and the partners and whatnot. Some characters call suspects by their first names, others by their last names, and at by the middle of the book, I gave up trying to keep it straight, instead, I just wanted to get through the book.
Someone did it. Or did someone else? Who knows? The Mets didn’t win the pennant that year, and the scorecard for the game in question was the vital clue. A fielder’s choice was marked an error. So you see, the title’s a pun playing on that, not the character’s name! Ha hah! The gimmick got ya!
Ha hah! I paid under a buck for it in hardback, of which the author got what he deserved: nothing!
Excuse me, I am bitter because my own masterpiece has not yet been published, and it only takes fifty pages to get interesting. Where’s the justice, I ask you.
Buy My Books!
Once again, highly paid academic consultants decide what’s good for cities: the creative class.
From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on April 29:
Yet another theory is dumping on St. Louis’ ability to create jobs, bashing the region and others like it on the most unlikely of economic measures: its lack of gays and bohemians.
It’s an argument waged by author Richard Florida, and it has set off a firestorm of debate about what makes up a vibrant economy.
Easy for someone to say, but what really makes a city? Hmm, why do people come together from their scattered hovels on the steppes? It’s because the city offers:
Cities do not arise, or afall, because of gays and bohemians. The “artistic” class arises from a vibrant city.
Stupid schnucking city planners and elected officials keep shoveling money to consultants who want to elevate their cool, unemployed academic bohemian friends, all the while anticipating the day when they’re highly-paid consultants with with cool artistic friends.
Buy My Books!
James Joyner has uncovered a conspiracy to keep Republicans home on November 2:
A 72-year streak links the victory or defeat of the Washington Redskins on the eve of election day with the presidential race. If the Redskins go down to defeat or tie, the sitting president?s party loses the White House.
***
The Redskins? performance has aligned with the presidential outcome in the last 18 elections ? a probability of 1 in 263.5 million, according to Dave Dolan, an assistant professor of statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.
Actually, Joyner only posted the story. My keen mind discovered the conspiracy:
I don’t know what to make of this, because the professor is an academic, so he probably wants the Democrats to win, and he’s from
Green Bay, so he probably wants the Green Bay Packers to win when they play the Redskins on October 31 (Schedule).
Go Packers, Go Pachyderms.
Thank you, that is all. See you in the voting booth on November 2.
Buy My Books!
As some of you know, I enjoy Chris White’s Top Five List, and I am a paying member of Club Top Five.
So it’s with great honor that I was awarded the number nine spot on a recent Club 5 list for the topic “The Top 16 Celebrity Contributions to Humanity”. My entry:
9. Kim Basinger and Angelina Jolie — Showed society that girls with unsightly, overweight lips can lead normal, healthy lives.
Oh, yeah, it’s the equivalent of the Internet Pulitzer for humor. To read the whole list, go to Top Five and plunk down a couple bucks for membership. Unlike some Internet people, I won’t post or rebroadcast copyright information, even things compiled from Internet serfs by overlord Chris White who exploit unpaid minions for to generate his own wealth. Of course, I’m not bitter, because I’m just a Club 5 member who got lucky; I’m not a contributor.
Buy My Books!
Here’s a newsbit on CNet dated April 29:
Google denies FBI link to Gmail
Google on Thursday denied that it has had any contact with the FBI regarding the design of its Gmail Web e-mail service. The search firm’s denial came after the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI seeking information about whether the bureau was considering the “possible use of Google’s Gmail service for law enforcement and intelligence investigations.” EPIC, which gave an award last week to a California state senator who is trying to ban Gmail, announced the request immediately after Google said it was filing for an initial public offering.Critics immediately criticized EPIC’s request as a publicity stunt and because the nonprofit likened Google’s Web-based e-mail service to the FBI’s controversial Carnivore wiretapping utility and the Pentagon’s discontinued “Orwellian Total Information Awareness program.” EPIC’s request also asked whether Google had discussed licensing its search technology, in use by customers in the private sector, to the FBI “to further law enforcement investigations or intelligence gathering activities.” Google spokesman Nathan Tyler replied: “I cannot confirm whether they’re using our technology.”
Funny, I don’t remember the program having Orwellian right in the title.
But I’d better not draw attention to it, or it’s off to Room 101 for me for questioning CNet.
Buy My Books!
From a story on Yahoo! news:
A judge gave a Tennessee zoo six months to convince him that an African elephant named Ruby is adapting well to her new home after being separated from a pachyderm friend in Los Angeles last year.
Judge George Wu ordered the report from the Knoxville Zoo on Thursday during a hearing in a lawsuit that seeks to return Ruby to the Los Angeles Zoo.
I think the judicial system’s rapidly becoming a joke, and this story is but one punchline among many.
Buy My Books!