It's over a week since we looked at the phony numbers!
What's the haps? It's been another period of solidly increasing
phoniness across the board, is what:
Reductio ad absurdum: sometimes it happens quickly,
but in Merrimack, NH, it takes two years.
A New Hampshire teenager's yearbook photo has been rejected, because
she's holding a flower. Merrimack High School student Melissa
Morin's senior photograph featured her and a small red flower.
School officials, however, said the picture is not going to make it
in the yearbook because props aren't allowed. […]
The policy stemmed from a 2005 controversy in Londonderry, where a
student posed with his gun. A judge ruled in favor of the school,
but Merrimack officials said they didn't want to face similar
scuffles.
As a wise man once said: "Sailing the ship of policy to avoid
controversy guarantees it will run aground on the rocky shore
of ridicule."
Under a new school rule, students at Hobbton
High School [in Newton Grove, North Carolina] are not
allowed to wear items with flags, from any country, including the
United States.
The new rule stems from a controversy over students wearing shirts
bearing flags of other countries.
Surely some other state can give NH and NC some competition in the
coveted "dullest school administrators" competition?
Radley Balko has a good
piece at Politico excorciating the GOP for being
weak on federalism, specifically with respect to federal raids on
marijuana clinics in states that have legalized medical pot. Fred
Thompson is the lone Republican hope:
Thompson is the only candidate yet to take a public position on the
raids. While he's right to note his impressive pro-federalist voting
record in the Senate, he also voted for a number of bills
strengthening the federal war on drugs.
And while Thompson's campaign essays rightly decry the
federalization of crime and the soaring U.S. prison population,
they're curiously silent on the war on drugs — a leading cause
of both of these troubling trends. Thompson's campaign did not
respond to inquiries about his position on the DEA raids for this
article.
In response to the recent request
for blogospheric Fred-questions, I submitted:
How does your enthusiasm for Federalism apply to the War on Drugs?
… it'll be interesting if I hear anything back on that.
I spotted the New York Times using my favorite euphemism
for aging boomers: "New Social Sites Cater to People of a
Certain Age" (emphasis added). Also amusing was
the reporter's apparent cluelessness in passing along this quote from
"Martha Starks, 52, a retired optician in Tucson":
"They don't even know who Aretha is — she's the queen of
soul!" she said.
Martha not only remembers Aretha from the 60s, she also remembers
Steely Dan
from 1980. Hard times have befallen the soul survivors.
[UPDATE (2007-09-30): Ms. Starks wrote me to confirm
my guess about the NYT's reporter:
... during two different conversations, the reporter couldn't even
PRONOUNCE Aretha correctly!
Ah, kids these days!]
In the same vein, the Torch points out how modern-day
University administrators are probably too young (or, more likely,
too humor-impaired) to remember the line from 1975's Monty Python and
the Holy Grail: "Now go away,
or I shall taunt you a
second time!" Specifically, failure
to have a well-rounded Pythonesque background can
cause one to write ever more idiotic speech codes.
This is the year 2000 entry in James Lee Burke's series
about Louisiana police detective Dave Robicheaux. As usual,
Burke is an unequalled master at putting the reader
into a scene, showing the
vivid colors, smells, and textures. Also as usual, he puts all the characters
in the book through several assorted flavors of Hell; no modern
fictional detective suffers from this treatment more than
Dave Robicheaux.
In this outing, Dave is trying to assemble evidence to provide
clemency for Letty Labiche, a woman on death row who has (apparently)
killed a cop that used to abuse her. But soon he and his colorful
sidekick Clete run into a lowlife
who claims he has information on the foul-play death of Dave's mother
years ago. Various other characters appear: the colorful but
ficticious Louisiana governor; the Louisiana attorney general; a
sociopathic hitman who develops a connection to Dave's daughter Alafair;
a dirty cop who used to have a relationship with Dave's wife Bootsie.
Everything is resolved at the end, with many of these people becoming
deceased along the way.
I notice that they're bringing out a movie based on In the Electic
Mist with the Confederate Dead, a previous book in the series.
(They've shortened the title to In the Electric
Mist.)
Dave is played by Tommy Lee Jones, which (to my mind) is just about
perfect casting; I've "seen" Dave Robicheaux as Tommy Lee Jones
since I read the very
first novel long ago. (A previous attempt at a Dave Robicheaux movie,
Heaven's Prisoners had Alec Baldwin as Dave; this wasn't as bad
as it sounds, but it wasn't great. It's your go-to movie for seeing Teri
Hatcher in the altogether, though.)
Disclaimers:
Unquoted opinions expressed herein are solely those of the
blogger.
Pun Salad is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates
Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a
means for the blogger to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.