Hold in your mind, if you will, the single dumbest thing you have ever heard any celebrity say. OK?
Now, check this out.
Did that knock the one you already had off the top rung? It sure did with me.
Chickens in the Mist, first installment.
A few days ago, Sheila had a funny post mocking how SF writers would answer the age-old question, Why did the chicken cross the road? She also solicits people to try some other authors in her comments.
I, however, will attempt something different: doing it with other bloggers. Therefore, the first two entries in yet another sporadic series which will be eventually fall by the wayside three posts after it stops being funny:
:: GLENN REYNOLDS.
THE CHICKEN, REVISITED: Via Blogger#1, we have the goods on the chicken and the road.
Indeed.
UPDATE: Blogger#2 says that it’s more likely that the chicken merely wanted to cross the road. Maybe. But who can read the mind of a chicken? I’ll stick with the first answer.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Blogger#3 has more on the chicken. Blogger#4 has a lot to say about chickens. And read Mickey Kaus on the road-crossing habits of French chickens. Heh.
:: ATRIOS.
Blame the CLENIS
The WaPo reports that the chicken coop escaped harm when the suicide-bomber chicken only got halfway across the road before the bomb went off. And who is Howie Kurtz blaming for the recent spate of suicidal chickens crossing roads? Bill Clinton. That damn SCLM!
—
Torture Wolf Blitzer
Wolfie’s asking who’s to blame for the chicken! GO!
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If this annoys you, press one.
Sean points out a Dave Barry-inspired turnabout on the telemarketers. I found this hilarious. I’ve written before that generally I don’t hold with being mean to the actual telemarketer making the call, for various reasons (I simply have stopped answering the phone, which isn’t that big a sacrifice for me since I’ve never liked talking on the phone). But this prank actually posed a significant inconvenience to the actual Telemarketing Association, which is great. Mr. Barry said, “They have phones like the rest of us have phones. Their attitude seems to be if you have a phone, people are allowed to call you.”
It’s always fun when people realize that the blade they’ve been using to cut someone else actually has two edges and cuts both ways, isn’t it?
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Well, it’s better than botherin’ people!
In the movie Sleepless in Seattle there is a running joke about a false statistic that a woman is more likely to be killed by a terrorist than get married after the age of 40. At one point, someone says, “That statistic is totally not true. But it feels true.”
Something else that feels true, but isn’t, is the bit about spousal abuse being higher on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day of the year. It’s not true, but it feels true to me, especially when I listen to AM sports radio stations after a Bills game.
Case in point: as I noted in my review of Sunday’s win over the Jags, I didn’t see the whole game, opting instead to go to a movie. So when I came out of the theater, I turned on the radio to check the final score (a Jacksonville comeback would have been staggering, considering they were down 31-10 when we went into the theater). The host was railing on and on about how bad a certain decision by Gregg Williams was, and how could we possibly think the Bills are a Super Bowl contender when the head coach is making decisions like that, and this might be the kind of thing that sinks his career in Buffalo (Williams is, as of now, unsigned beyond this year as head coach of the Bills). Hearing this, I’m thinking, “Jeez, did they let the Jags back in at the end? or worse, did they surrender the big lead and actually lose?”
Well, no. The Bills never trailed in the game. Their smallest lead was seven points, twice, in the first half. Their final margin of victory was twenty-one points. It was a commanding effort, and yet, the folks on the radio were furious about a single play (a gonzo faked punt that failed miserably, in the second quarter, when the Bills were up 14-0). And this, mind you, was two and a half hours after the game had ended.
Maybe more guys don’t beat their wives after their team loses the Super Bowl. But damn, sometimes I can see why we might think they do.
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Boo-hoo-hoo….
It’s official: Corrente‘s hit-count has passed mine, and they only needed about a month to do it. To paraphrase the great Mr. Williams, there are tears in my beer.
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False Witness, and its Bearing-in-progress.
Every so often I’ll encounter a David Horowitz article, in the course of doing Web-stuff, and just about every time I am reminded of what an intellectually-dishonest nut he is. A case-in-point is this attack on Al Franken’s book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, which Horowitz wrote. I found it on Busy, Busy, Busy, where it was helpfully shortened. For no real reason – – I was waiting five minutes for dinner to finish baking – – I read the actual article. And sure enough, Horowitz is still a nut.
First, there’s the opening graf. Now, I’m only halfway through Franken’s book, so I may very well be wrong here. But I find it vanishingly hard to believe that Franken thinks, or even suggests, that “All Republicans are racists”. At one point, for example, Franken writes admiringly of John McCain, who last time I checked is Republican, and not racist. (I admire McCain a great deal myself, even if I disagree with him on a great number of issues.) And the simple fact is that President Clinton engaged in a good deal of anti-terrorist activity, much of it specifically directed at Osama Bin Laden. Horowitz, of course, is one of those right-wingers who can’t entertain the idea that Darth Clinton accomplished anything at all outside of evading Jedi Master Gingrich, so his discounting of the Clinton anti-terrorism efforts is to be expected.
Horowitz further acts as if the book’s level of factual detail is suspicious:
“Where did a comedian like Al Franken get the time, research power and expertise to cover such a wide range of subject matters, almost all of which are out of his normal depth?”
Leaving aside the obvious question as to how qualified Horowitz is to assess Franken’s “normal depth” (Franken seems to me a very intelligent comedian, much like Dennis Miller, whom I still find enjoyable even though he’s gone over to “the Dark Side”), Horowitz is behaving as if it’s somehow scandalous that Franken had a research team helping him in the factual analysis. He’s shocked! shocked! that Harvard would sanction such a thing, and he thinks that this is an “educational national disgrace” that Harvard allowed its students to be used in such a manner.
Except, when you look at the section at the book’s end where Franken not only names his students but provides their pictures and brief biographical sketches of them, you find this little tidbit:
The fourteen members of TeamFranken [that’s what Franken calls his assistants throughout the book] received no course credit for their work. While carrying full course loads at either the Kennedy School or the College, they did their research out of dedication to the truth and for a home-cooked meal provided by my wife Franni every Wednesday night at the Cambridge apartment we rented. [Emphasis added.]
So, to Horowitz, it is an “educational national disgrace” that Harvard allowed fourteen students to do research for Mr. Franken, on their own time, and for no course credit. They didn’t give Franken his assistants; they did not assign these students to do this. They did it voluntarily, at the behest of Mr. Franken. All Harvard did is say, “OK, fine”, kind of like the University would theoretically do if some students wanted to start up a birdwatching club. If this is Horowitz’s idea of an educational disgrace, then I can only imagine how he might feel about the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons group in which I participated on my own time in college, and for which I received no course credit.
Horowitz’s next graf is even worse:
Although liberals like Franken regularly complain about the unfair advantage “big right-wing think tanks” provide to the Republican cause, Harvard and in fact the entire Ivy League constitute infinitely larger left-wing think tanks that serve the Democratic cause. (For comparison, Harvard’s endowment, according to the latest figures, is $17.5 billion; the Heritage Foundation’s is $63 million.)
Sure, Mr. Horowitz. Those two figures you throw out there, at the very end, are really comparable. I’m sure that Mr. Franken, and liberals like him, have the entirety of Harvard’s $17.5 billion endowment behind them. I’m sure that none of that money goes to Harvard’s physics department or computer science department or athletic program. A better comparison might be the Kennedy School of Government’s budget, but even then, you have to differentiate between any activities the Kennedy School engages in that are of similar function to the Heritage Foundation’s. Horowitz simply tosses out a couple of numbers, one of which is way bigger than the other, and hopes his readers will assume they’re the same thing. Funny how precisely that particular method of lying is demonstrated quite a few times in Franken’s book, eh?
And as for the whole bit about slagging the Ivy League, well – – why do conservatives bash the Ivy League incessantly, except for when they rise to the Ivy League’s defense when some liberal questions President Bush’s intellectual acumen? “How can he be stupid? He went to Yale and got his MBA at Harvard!” Yes, he did – – and he managed to spend all those years hip-deep in all them libruls and managed to become the most conservative US President since Coolidge. That either means that the Ivy League isn’t quite the liberal incubation scheme that Horowitz and his cohorts like to say it is, or it means that the Ivy League actually is a liberal incubation scheme and merely isn’t very good at it, in which case Horowitz and his cohorts should stop acting like the Ivy League threatens the entire fabric of, well, everything.
Of course, the last few grafs are basically where Horowitz pimps out some study performed by his own cohorts that proves liberal bias in academia. My general reaction to that is, basically, to yawn. Maybe he’s right, maybe he isn’t. He doesn’t provide any links to the study, and I don’t much care anyway. My own collegiate experience, anecdotal as it is, was that even the most liberal professors there had little effect on the views of my conservative classmates. Even if academia is overwhelmingly liberal, which I am by no means prepared to grant, I’m not at all convinced that this is in any way pernicious.
So, I’m content to let David Horowitz vanish back into whatever weird ethereal realm he usually inhabits. Better luck next time, Mr. Horowitz.
(Actually, I can’t let this one sentence in the article go without comment:
Ann Coulter has written a parallel bestseller (under her own steam, however) that attacks liberals and Democrats like Al Franken. Can anyone imagine Harvard soliciting Coulter to write her book, “Treason,” by providing her with 14 graduate students to research it?
Frankly, no, I can’t imagine Harvard giving Coulter 14 graduate assistants to research her book. But maybe next time Coulter should ask for some Harvard students, if only to give her insane blatherings a small bit of veracity.)
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Uh-oh….
What, AGAIN?!
Despite all my years of watching public TV, I still never manage to make the logical connection from “Hey, this is a great program! They don’t usually show stuff like this! I’m sittin’ down to watch this puppy!” to “Oh crap, it’s pledge time.” I also wish I had money to give them, alas….
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Captain, let the 12-year old have a try.
For some reason, even though I’ve read WWDN ever since I launched Byzantium’s Shores, I don’t often point out anything specific over there, despite the fact that it’s almost always either funny or moving, and often both. Wil Wheaton is a fine writer, and I am one who never hated him on Star Trek.
Anyway, he was personally moved by John Ritter’s death, and his special Flash-tribute for 9-11-01 from last Thursday, viewable here with background on it here, was simple and lovely.
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In the Second Week, the camp was beset by Jaguars….
The Bills beat Jacksonville, 38-17, in Jacksonville. Yay!
I didn’t watch the whole game, because an opportunity to go out with the wife, and without the kid, presented itself. (We left her in the car while we saw a movie.) (No, not really. But we did go to a movie.) But I did get to see the game get to 31-10, so I was happy.
The Bills are looking like they might just be for real this year. Those who were along for my NFL ride last year, and who actually read those posts instead of ignoring them as sports-babbling, remember that I tend to err on the side of pessimism where the Bills are concerned, on the theory that pessimists are prepared when the worst happens and presently surprised when it doesn’t. Thus, I predicted 6-10 for the Bills in 2002; they turned in an 8-8 record, which made me presently surprised.
So, I’m not just some goofy homer jumping on a bandwagon. The Bills played a tough team today (the Jags aren’t an elite team, but they’re most definitely not the Bengals either) that is coming off a painful loss last week, on the road, in weather conditions they’re not used to (high heat and humidity). And they commanded the game. I was very pleasantly surprised by the way their offensive line controlled the line of scrimmage today, a fact which augurs well for later in the season and especially next week, because I’m not totally convinced that Miami’s defense is the next incarnation of last year’s Bucs or the 2000 Ravens. The lack of yardage produced by the running game is a bit of a concern, but the development of pass protection is a very welcome development.
The defense played pretty well – – they were very physical, but they also looked a bit more susceptible to overpursuit of the run than I had expected. That needs some work. And I’d still like more pass-rush! Oh, and don’t ask me about that fake punt. I have no idea what that was about. Gregg Williams occasionally seems to lose his senses completely, and that was one of them.
All in all, a good game. The Bills are 2-0, still in sole possession of first place in the AFC East, going into their first game against Miami next week. Bring on the Dolphins.
Other notes:
:: The defending champion Bucs are 1-1 after losing in overtime to Carolina. The Bucs really need to find some offense, but they probably don’t need a whole lot of offense to stay on track to win a second championship. In the middle of the 2000 season, a lot of people had a good time making fun of the Ravens, who went something like four consecutive games without scoring a touchdown. That Ravens team ended up winning that year’s Super Bowl behind a defense that was probably as good as the 1985 Bears’ D.
:: The Eagles are in a world of hurt right now. In the little I’ve watched them, they looked terrible.
:: Is the starting job in St. Louis now Marc Bulger’s for good? Or just until Mike Martz blunders up his career too, by refusing to use his running game and refusing to address an injury to the guy? Stay tuned…I happen to not think that Kurt Warner’s career is over, although it may well be, as far as the Rams are concerned. He might not have a 5000-yard, 50-touchdown pass season again, but I think he’ll end up somewhere else and, if the system is right, end up being productive if not a winner again.
That’s all for this week. I always find it hard to focus on football in the early weeks of the season, when it’s still too warm to sit inside for an entire Sunday afternoon. But we’re only two short weeks from October, my favorite month as well as the best sports month of the year!