Pun Salad

• For your amusement, you can compare reviews of President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: the reliably sycophantic Joel Achenbach thought it was "classic Obama", and he's also appreciative that it avoided the usual implicit-to-explicit Bush-bashing.

  The Minuteman was less adoring:

  If platitudes were warheads Obama would have violated a treaty. Oh, well, it probably sounded better in the college dorm where it was written.

  In addition, he pissed off some Norwegians. As a Weegie-American myself, I observe: (1) that's hard to do; (2) on the other hand, who cares? There's a reason my ancestors emigrated: to get away from those guys.

• Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek notes that Congress isn't content merely to screw up the big issues, like health care and energy policy. They're also eager to intrude on college football.

  Words fail me when trying to describe the disgust I feel for the obnoxious, officious, opportunistic, unprincipled, lying (Do they really mean their oaths to uphold the U.S. Constitution?), arrogant, imperious, and duplicitous creeps who are in Congress.

  They are utterly and without question worthy only of ridicule and disrespect.

  Note: this is what Professor Boudreaux says when words fail him. One can only imagine what happens when they don't.

• 

  Christmas is a mere couple of weeks away, and you may be stressing out over what to get that special someone. And that someone would have to be some kind of special if you even consider getting him or her anything from Dave Barry's Gift Guide 2009.

  Through the magic of Amazon, an example item is shown over there on the right. (No, your right.) Pun Salad takes no responsibility for any repercussions if you decide to buy this for anyone.

• Literally minutes of fun can be had at Autocomplete Me, a website devoted to the compilation of wacky guesses made by the Google as a search phrase is typed.

  Unfortunately, this did not work for me: when I typed "dinosaurs we" at Google, none of the autocomplete-guesses were "dinosaurs were made up by the cia to discourage time travel."

  But I did notice that as I was typing "Norwegian ethnic" for the first item up there, Google was quick to (correctly) intuit that I might be looking for "Norwegian ethnic slur." (Whoa: Rjeindeer-Fjucker? Really?)

Sometimes I get a hankering to see an old fondly-remembered flick, and that's the case here. If you're a screwball comedy fan, this is a great effort, a conscious homage to the classics of the 30's and 40's.

Here's a sobering thought (for me, anyhow): this movie came out in 1972, about 34 years after one of its major inspirations, Bringing Up Baby. And it's now (as I type) 37 years since What's Up, Doc was released.

Anyway: Ryan O'Neal plays the Cary Grant role of Dr. Howard Bannister, a musicologist from Ames, Iowa, in the big city of San Francisco with his shrewish fiancee, Eunice (the wonderful Madeline Kahn). He's in the running for a prestigious grant from the Larrabee Foundation, which involves him carrying around a large plaid travelling bag full of rocks.

Complications: three other identical bags, each with its own valuable content, rendezvous at the hotel where Howard and Eunice are staying. Worse, one of those bags belongs to Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand's finest role), and she falls hard for Howard. (That's inexplicable, but in screwball comedies, that sort of thing happens all the time.) Coincidence piles on happenstance, which are mixed together with puns, slapstick, and sight gags.

Seen today, some flaws appear: the pacing is uneven, some jokes fall flat, and the big chase scene at the end is dated. But I defy you to not laugh at "What are you doing? This is a one way street!" "We're only going one way."