Thursday, March 5, 2009

Assortment

1) Sign of the times: poison oak, the gears of a perpetual spending machine, and a handful of smallpox vaccination scars.

2) Just talking about guns can get you into trouble.

3) Jack Cafferty is bewitched by Michelle Obama; Andrea Harris reaches for the barf bag (you got an extra one, Andrea?)

4) Dr. Gupta drops out as Surgeon General nominee (H/T: Coalition of the Swilling). I suspect he found out that he would have to dress up like an admiral in the navy of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

5) They say it's futile to try to polish a turd, but Queen Elizabeth gives it the old college try.

6) True story. A guy who works for me coaches a kids' basketball team. He has an FBI baseball-style cap that he got somewhere, and he wore it to practice one day. The next day, the family of one of the kids on the team packed up and moved back to the Dominican Republic.

7) Important update to this week's Paco's Library selection: I meant to include this information in the weekly book review, but forgot. You may also be interested in the Facts on File publication, The Atlas of the Crusades, edited by another top scholar, Jonathan Riley-Smith. This book is also a general history, and includes many full-color maps, photographs and illustrations.

8) And now a word from our sponsor...

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Samllpox vaccination scars? Huh. I thought they were stars, for the only remaining solvent states.

Retread

TW: bilen: what I have to clear from my throat everytime The Won appears on TV.

Anonymous said...

You're assuming that cancer treatment for smokers won't be ration-alized right off the table.

Paco said...

Yojimbo: We would have been delighted to include that caveat, but, as you can see, there just wasn't room on the warning label.

Paco said...

Retread: Could be, but are there eight solvent states left?

Anonymous said...

Paco: sure, out of the 57 states The Won claims exist, there must be eight that can still pay income tax refunds.

Retread

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I'm waiting for the buttons and stickers of that stupid logo to show up at the office. That's when I pull out my red permanent marker. I don't think yellow would stand out as well......

TW: dress. Yup, The Won™ sure dresses purdy!

RebeccaH said...

Righteous fisking by Andrea.

Anonymous said...

Read on another blog about the logo (Treacher's maybe) that the gear teeth don't even mesh so that they are functional - appearance over utility - we Aussie's are suffering it too at the moment.... must be the age for it.

MB from Blair's

Paco said...

Welcome, MB!

You said it; it must be the age for it. Of course, the appearance isn't going to hold up too well either, pretty soon.

TimT said...

Knighting Ted Kennedy Sounds more like a Gordon Brown thing than a Queen thing really - I don't quite know how the knighthood system works these days, but the Queen would officially get advised by the Prime Minister as to who to knight.

In other words, British left-wingers saluting American left-wingers - intercontinental masturbation. Not much more than that.

We have OAs (Order of Australia's) which are similarly ideologically motivated.