Dog with a bandage on its leg walks into a bar, goes up to the bartender and says, "I'm lookin' for the man who shot my paw."
A man walks into a bar and sits down next to a man with a dog at his feet. "Does your dog bite?" he asks. "No." A few minutes later the dog takes a huge chunk out of his leg."I thought you said your dog didn't bite!" the man says indignantly. "That's not my dog."
January is National Stalking Awarenes Month, about which no smart remarks or attempts at whimsy. I've watched a couple of friends go through it, and obsession is a scary thing when it has that manifestation. The worst thing is how the victims tend to make excuses for the stalkers when it's someone they've been involved with who just won't let go. Even when there's no suspicion that things might get violent, they end up allowing their lives to be made miserable.
Re: State of the Union. What was the point? No domestic policy will go anywhere, because Democrats are deep into the "whatever Bush is for, we're against" mode. That is not leadership, but it's the way it is. Roughly 70 percent of the country is against the administration on the war in Iraq, and there won't be any coherent discussion of that because we seem headed for obvious defeat, and the implications are scary. Such a major address shouldn't be irrelevant, but it probably was.
The reaction to this California proposal is breaking along predictable lines -- liberals supportive, conservatives generally scornful:
Of course Oprah, J.K. Rowling and Martha Stewart lead the list of the richest females in entertainment. But look at No. 13 -- Judge Judy. She makes more than the nine Supreme Court justices put together. OK by me. Not a single decision she's made has screwed up the whole country.
Different people look for different signs that civilization as we know it is ending. Mine is America's rapidly disappearing sense of humor:
An article in the annual joke issue of Princeton University's student newspaper has left some readers accusing its staff of racism.
Boy, Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his grave:
The White House reacted with alarm and anger last night after China successfully destroyed a satellite with a ballistic missile, the first space test of such offensive military technology by any nation in over 20 years.
Art Buchwald has died at 81. He was the premiere political humorist of his time, a Jon Stewart of print. He made fun of everybody of all political persuasions, but his humor was a little more gentle than what we see today. I grew up reading him, and I never thought about it, but his influence probably contributed to my interest both in newspapers and writing about government and politics.
As with many outwardly funny people, he had his demons, but he had a warped take on those, too:
Headline of the week: Amnesia is worse than thought. Actually thought is much worse than amnesia -- all those dark, conflicting ideas colliding instead of being able to sink into blissful ignorance.
It is five minutes to midnight -- do you know where your planet is tonight?
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which 60 years ago began keeping tabs on humanity's temporal distance from self-annihilation with the concept of a “Doomsday Clock,” apparently found things sufficiently dire to nudge the minute hand forward two clicks, indicating that we are now “five minutes to midnight” — or Doomsday.
