Pun Salad

… boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past:

• As Jonah Goldberg notes, the President's big "Gee, I Guess I Should Say Something About the Deficit" speech was "a breathtaking tour de force of dishonesty and tendentiousness."

  For example, from the transcript here, discussing his "approach":

  It calls for tax reform to cut about $1 trillion in spending from the tax code.

  Translating the Obamese into plain English:

  It calls for raising taxes by about $1 trillion.

• Don Boudreaux wonders about the folks who both (a) advocate taxes on "unhealthy" foods, because that will significantly decrease their consumption; (b) deny that raising taxes on income-earning activities will discourage income-earning activities.

• Perhaps such people are believers in the famous F. Scott Fitzgeraldism:

  The true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time.

  Two problems there: (1) despite thousands of web pages claiming otherwise, I think Libby Koponen is pretty convincing that Fitzgerald never actually said that; and (2) even if he did, why would you want to get your epistemological advice from a drunk?

• IMAO observes:

  If you rearrange the letters in Mitt Romney, you get 'mormon robot'.

  This is, unfortunately, less than literally true. Here are some actual candidate anagrams (which I didn't figure out myself, thank goodness):
  • Maraca Kabob

  • Memory Tint

  • Wimpy Talent

  • Dismal Ethnic

  • Damn Turd Pol

  • Anal Parish

  • Meek Hick Beau

  • Machine Man Belch

  Any of these would be a darn fine name for a blog.

  (Or, as Dave Barry might say: "I saw Machine Man Belch open for Moby Grape back in '67.")

• And I embed Memory Tint's Exploratory Committee announcement video here, because—hey!—that's a blurry Mooradian Field ("in Cowell Stadium") (not to mention the "Reggie F. Atkins Track & Field Facility") at the University Near Here in the background:

  He didn't stop by to say hello, however.

This winds up, at least for now, our Thin Man marathon. William Powell and Myrna Loy made six Thin Man movies, but for some (probably economic) reason, Netflix only currently provides four. This one was the last made, 13 years after the first.

So: Nick and Nora are in attendance at a charity function staged on a gambling boat when—darnit, Nicky, something like this always happens—the leader of the ship's jazz band gets shot in the back while attempting to burgle the ship owner's office safe.

Suspicion naturally falls on the ship's owner, but he can't be the culprit, because he's engaged to Jayne Meadows. The band's songbird (Gloria Grahame, woo!) looks suspicious, but—again, darnit—she soon turns up with a knife sticking out of her lovely back.

There are a whole bunch of other suspects and colorful characters. Nick and Nora wind their way from clue to clue, and eventually (no surprise) determine the culprit, thanks to Nora's timely observations and Nick's quick deductive wits.

Trivia: an 11-year-old Dean Stockwell plays Nick Charles Jr. There's significantly less boozing in this movie than in the early ones.