Pun Salad

Not that it matters, but: one of the deadest places to work in all of the USA is an institution of higher education on Monday, July 3. I think I could hear the crickets chirping outside.

• The big news in the blogosphere is Senator Ted Stevens' comments on Net Neutrality, containing gems such as:

  I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

  Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially. …

  They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

  It's a series of tubes.

  And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

  Senator Stevens has been the object of derision, to put it mildly. See, for example, Meryl Yourish, Slashdot, and GeekPress. And, on other issues, Pun Salad has deemed Stevens a moron, a fiscal profligate, and someone we wished we could vote against. So we're not exactly fans either.

  But you should also check out Don Luskin's contrarian take:

  If unscrupulous political opponents can't attack what you stand for, they'll attack the way you express yourself. … [Stevens,] speaking out against the left-wing regulatory horror called "net neutrality" -- is speaking extemporaneously, and he makes lots of stupid mistakes (says "internet" when he means "email", he gets the techspeak slang wrong when he says "tubes" instead of "pipes", and so on). So he is held up to ridicule by the left, even though everything he says is basically correct. Actually, he is held up to ridicule because everything he says is basically correct.

  So you can make the call on whether Senator Stevens' lack of felicitous expression makes him wrong on this issue.

• Ranking at a 9.5 on the Bizarrometer is this story:

  He may have Sympathy for the Devil, but Keith Richards also jams for Jehovah.

  The 62-year-old Rolling Stone is a guest guitarist on My Soul is a Witness -- a collection of African-American spirituals released without fanfare last month.

  The book and CD project is the brainchild of Richards' sister-in-law, concert vocalist Marsha Hansen.

  It's true! You can buy it right here. And if you play it backwards, you can hear Mick Jagger recite selected verses from the Sermon on the Mount, and urging you to accept Jesus as your personal savior.

• Oh, yeah: heh. Major heh.