From my friend Susan: Another Blonde Joke

A few days ago I was having some work done at my local garage. A blonde came in and asked for a seven-hundred-ten. We all looked at each other and another customer asked, "What is a seven-hundred-ten?" She replied, "You know, the little piece in the middle of the engine, I have lost it and need a new one.." She replied that she did not know exactly what it was, but this piece had always been there. The mechanic gave her a piece of paper and a pen and asked her to draw what the piece looked like. She drew a circle and in the middle of it wrote 710. He then took her over to another car which had its hood up and asked "is there a 710 on this car?" She pointed and said, "Of course, its right there.! "

If you're not sure what a 710 is Click Here

SavareseLowry: You're adopting who?

Super commentary in today's paper.

SavareseLowry: You're adopting who?: "'Why would anyone adopt a badly abused, autistic 6-year-old from foster care?'

So my wife and I were asked at the outset of our adoption-as-a-first-resort adventure. It was a reasonable question in this age of narrow self-concern — far more reasonable, or at least more reasonably put, than many of the other questions we fielded."

Woman: Blame devil for infant in microwave - CNN.com

Just when you think you have heard it all. No wonder so many people (including myself) are so cynical when it comes to religion. With any luck this idiot will be spending the rest of his life preaching his fellow prison inmates.

Woman: Blame devil for infant in microwave - CNN.com: "GALVESTON, Texas (AP) -- A woman blames the devil, and not her husband, for severely burning their infant daughter in a microwave, a Texas television station reported.

Eva Marie Mauldin said Satan compelled her 19-year-old husband, Joshua Royce Mauldin, to microwave their daughter May 10 because the devil disapproved of Joshua's efforts to become a preacher."

Mrs. Betty Bowers' Eulogy to Reverend Jerry Falwell : All's Well That Ends Falwell

This of course is satire but Mrs. Betty Bowers has outdone her self in this column. No tears shed for Falwell here.

Mrs. Betty Bowers' Eulogy to Reverend Jerry Falwell : All's Well That Ends Falwell: "Gossipy paramedics told me that Jerry died of a faulty heart. Frankly, my only surprise was that he had one at all. Nevertheless, his yammering mug finally being silenced because he had a failed heart seems marvelously fitting. After all, while he was alive, this obscenely wealthy miser's heart seemed to fail him at even the most mundane opportunities. Jerry never gave anything to anyone other than an interview. Indeed, so parsimonious was this vain, oily swindler, in the aftermath of our nation's great tragedy on September 11, 2001, the only thing Jerry thought to give those who grieved was blame."

What to say - Advice from Miss Manners

From time to time someone says something incredibly boorish about our situation. I thought the following advice from Miss Manners was right on.

"Dear Miss Manners:

My family and I have just been through the difficult and draining experience of caring for my father through his terminal illness and grieving his loss. While so many have brought comfort and care to us, this milestone has been made more difficult on occasion by allegedly well-meaning people and their almost unbelievably insensitive comments.

For example, to my unmarried sister, 'I guess you'll have to find someone else to walk you down the aisle, dear' or to my mother after church, 'I'll bet the hardest part is waking up in the morning alone.'

What does one say to such people? Is there a polite way to let them know how inappropriate and painful their remarks are to us?

Yes: 'I'm sure you meant to be kind.'"

The Ten Rules of Housekeeping

From my dad. We really weren't raised this way though.

1. Vacuuming too often weakens the carpet fibers. Say this with a serious face, and shudder delicately whenever anyone mentions Carpet Fresh.
   
2. Dust bunnies can evolve into dust rhinos when disturbed. Rename the area under the couch "The Galapagos Islands" and claim an ecological exemption.
   
3. Layers of dirty film on windows and screens provide a helpful filter against harmful and aging rays from the sun. Call it an SPF factor of 5 and leave it alone.
   
4. Cobwebs artfully draped over lampshades reduces the glare from the bulb, thereby creating a romantic atmosphere. If your husband points out that the light fixtures need dusting, simply look affronted and exclaim, "What? And spoil the mood?"
   
5. In a pinch, you can always claim that the haphazard tower of unread magazines and newspapers next to your chair provides the valuable Feng Shui aspect of a tiger, thereby reducing your vulnerability. Roll your eyes when you say this.
   
6. Explain the mound of pet hair brushed up against the doorways by claiming you are collecting it there to use for stuffing hand sewn play animals for underprivileged children.
   
7. If unexpected company is coming, pile everything unsightly into one room and close the door. As you show your guests through your tidy home, rattle the door knob vigorously, fake a growl and say, "I'd love you to see our den, but Fluffy hates to be disturbed and the shots are SO expensive."
   
8. If dusting is really out of control, simply place a showy urn on the coffee table and insist, "This is where Grandma wanted us to scatter her ashes."
   

Oldies enjoy a renaissance

From Kim Komando:

Thanks to online music stores, old recording artists are making a comeback. Often, their music has been long out of print. But now fans are rediscovering it. Even one-hit wonders are finding that fans are downloading their music.

I have been very happy to find songs that I loved when I was younger on ITunes. I was surprised to find out that I could download music from the Electric Prunes!

Red State Update: Everybody's mad at George Tenet

Yahoo Lyrics Search

This is great when you can't remember the lyrics of a song. Just type in the few words you do remember and Yahoo! searches for a match.

For instance, I can finally know the lyrics to "Louie Louie."

http://music.yahoo.com/lyrics/7460586

Leap of Faith

Sobering cartoon.

"Worse than Nixon"

War Room - Salon.com

Glad to see that someone else thinks so also.

On the day that Rep. Dennis Kucinich is introducing articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney, former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern is predicting that the vice president and his boss will be out of office soon enough anyway. "It is my firm belief that the Cheney-Bush team has committed offenses that are worse than those that drove Nixon, Vice President Spiro Agnew and Atty. Gen. John Mitchell from office after 1972," McGovern writes in a Los Angeles Times Op-Ed. "Indeed, as their repeated violations of the Constitution and federal statutes, as well as their repudiation of international law, come under increased consideration, I expect to see Cheney and Bush forced to resign their offices before 2008 is over."

-- Tim Griev

Virginia Tech shooting victim had local roots

Just when I didn't think the shootings could get any more sadder I found out that one of the students who was killed used to live down the street from us. Rachel used to babysit Michelle years ago.

Virginia Tech shooting victim had local roots
Austin Michelle Cloyd remembered as a well-liked student, an eager learner.

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, April 21, 2007

Austin Michelle Cloyd, an 18-year-old victim of this week's Virginia Tech shooting, lived in the Austin area as a child and attended Laurel Mountain Elementary School in far northwest Austin in the Round Rock school district.

Principal Jan Richards on Friday remembered Cloyd as a "delightful little girl, with beautiful, curly red hair."

"Austin started kindergarten here in 1994 and graduated in the 1999 as a fifth-grader," Richards said. "I was teaching first grade back then, and she was in my class. She was an eager learner and was well liked by the other students."

She said she learned of Cloyd's death via e-mail this week.

Richards said that Cloyd's mother, Renee, had been active in school activities.

"You could always count on her mom whenever you needed anything," Richards said.

Richards, who has been at Laurel Mountain for 18 years, the past five as principal, said she thinks the family moved from the Round Rock district during the summer of 1999, shortly after Cloyd graduated from Laurel Mountain.

Her father, C. Bryan Cloyd, taught at the University of Texas from 1993 to 1999.

After leaving UT, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before becoming a professor of accounting at Virginia Tech in 2005.

Austin Cloyd had a double major in international studies and French, with a minor in environmental policy.

She spent four summers working with the Appalachian Service Project and wanted to work at the United Nations.

The teenager loved to act, sing, play volleyball, read and shop, The Washington Post reported Friday.

Bailey Hampton, a 17-year-old friend from Illinois, told the newspaper that Cloyd was "high-maintenance, in a good way."

saddam in heaven

More cruelty from right-wing crackpots

Nothing like blaming the victims.

The difference between liberals and conservatives, Chapter 973: While liberal Salon readers were debating the decorum of criticizing the president on a national day of mourning over the Virginia Tech massacre, conservative bomb throwers wasted no time criticizing ... the victims.

It's not just Mad John Derbyshire yesterday -- "Where was the spirit of self-defense here ... [W]hy didn't anyone rush the guy?" That was bad enough. Today the National Review's Mark Steyn blamed the "awful corrosive passivity" of Virginia Tech students for not defending themselves against Cho Seung-Hui. He even mocks the male students as somehow not quite being men. (I found this at Think Progress.)

"I’m not sure I'm ready to go the full Derb but I think he's closer to the reality of the situation than most. ... Point one: They're not 'children.' The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and -- if you'll forgive the expression -- men.

"We do our children a disservice to raise them to entrust all to officialdom's security blanket. Geraldo-like 'protection' is a delusion: when something goes awry -- whether on a September morning flight out of Logan or on a peaceful college campus -- the state won't be there to protect you. You'll be the fellow on the scene who has to make the decision."

The hideous Michelle Malkin is even worse. "There's no polite way or time to say it: American colleges and universities have become coddle industries," she begins (as if she's ever thought about a polite time or way to say anything). She continues: "Instead of teaching students to defend their beliefs, American educators shield them from vigorous intellectual debate. Instead of encouraging autonomy, our higher institutions of learning stoke passivity and conflict-avoidance.

"And as the erosion of intellectual self-defense goes, so goes the erosion of physical self-defense." Malkin then goes off on a predictable rant against the Virginia law that prevents guns on campus.

So let's sort this out: On a day when people of conscience and common sense are asking what makes a miserable young man turn to guns and violence, conservative provocateurs are insisting the answer is more guns and violence. Over three tragic days, I've found solace in the actions of two Virginia Tech professors: the courageous Holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu, who died blocking the door so his students could get away, and English department chair Lucinda Roy, who tutored Cho personally when other students were afraid to be in class with him; who tried to get him counseling, and even went to the police with her concerns about the dangerously depressed student. But Malkin and Steyn are telling me Librescu and Roy are actually part of the problem.

Of course, I'd rather be in the camp where people debate whether it's OK to criticize the president in a time of tragedy than in the camp where people blame the victims of the tragedy. I actually feel sorry for decent conservatives today, having to be soiled by association with such garbage. But if you ever find yourself wondering why liberals are so often out-shouted in the public sphere, even though most Americans agree with their politics, remember this moment. It isn't easy to compete with wingnuts who will say absolutely anything to make their points. When Ann Coulter's cracks about the 9/11 widows start to look tame by comparison, you know standards of public discourse are continuing to erode.

A Real-Estate Roller Coaster (Literally) from Freakonomics Blog by Stephen J. Dubner

The Yale economist Robert Shiller has indexed American housing prices going back to 1890.

You know how people like to say that such-and-such experience “was a real roller-coaster ride”?

Well, the blogger Richard Hodge at SpeculativeBubble.com wanted to see if housing prices really were a roller-coaster ride. So he plotted Shiller’s inflation-adjusted index onto a roller-coaster video ride. It is pretty fantastic.

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Is it OK to criticize the president again?

Joan Walsh - Salon:

"Bush did a fine job at the memorial service Tuesday. His warm, regular-guy human decency shows up at times like this. You wonder where it goes the rest of the time, when he's presiding over a war that has already killed 3,300 Americans and getting ready to send more soldiers to Iraq. Bombs killed 127 more people in Baghdad today, on the heels of the attack on the Iraqi parliament building last week, the bombing of the historic Jadriya bridge, over the Tigris -- all this after we've been told the surge is working. What would things look like if it wasn't working?"

From the current "Real Time With Bill Maher." George W. Bush's guide to ethics.

Little boxes | Salon.com

Garrison Keillor hits the nail on the head once again. Italics below are mine.

Little boxes | Salon.com: "The Current Occupant, trying to escape the dreaded term Moderate Republican, has done violence to the Constitution and flown in the face of reality. He invades a country and allows neocon ideologues to play at colonialism until the country has descended into chaos and thereby costs the lives of young Americans who had other plans than to be blown up in a war whose purpose now is forgotten. And then he wraps himself in Old Glory and dares you to say otherwise. We are now three-quarters of the way through the Attention Deficit Administration and who knows what dark surprises remain?"

More old folks humor --- so funny yet real.

More from my dad

*Distraught Senior*

A distraught senior citizen phoned her doctor's office.

"Is it true," she wanted to know, "that the medication you prescribed has to be taken for the rest of my life?"

"Yes, I'm afraid so," the doctor told her.

There was a moment of silence before the senior lady replied, "I'm wondering, then, just how serious is my condition. This prescription is marked 'NO REFILLS'."

*Walking Recovery*

From my dad....

An old fellow came into the hospital truly on death's door due to an infected gallbladder. The surgeon who removed the gallbladder was adamant that his patients be up and walking in the hall the day after surgery, to help prevent blood clots forming in the leg veins. The nurses walked the patient in the hall as ordered, and after the third day the nurse told how he complained bitterly each time they did. The surgeon told them to keep walking him.

After a week, the patient was ready to go. His family came to pick him up and thanked the surgeon profusely for what he had done for their father. The surgeon was pleased and appreciated the thanks, but told them that it was really a simple operation and we had been lucky to get him in time.

"But doctor, you don't understand," they said, "Dad hasn't walked in over a year!"