From Reason’s “Brickbats,” March 2005: As a judge, Antonio Mareiro gets to be called “Your Honor” or “Your Excellency” in court. The Brazillian jurist liked it so much, he went to court and won an order granting him the right to be called by those terms even outside of court. Anyone in his Rio de Janeiro neighborhood who slips and calls him by his name risks being fined. I was
February 2005
February 4, 2005
Breaking: Churchill’s fate known?
Former UC staffer Robert Hayes at “Let’s Try Freedom” receives an internal university message and from the subtext concludes Ward Churchill will likely be shitcanned. My thoughts here. **** update: I take it Ace and I disagree. **** update 2: Bryan S. at AWS corrects certain misconceptions about tax payer entitlement with regard to professors and universities.
February 4, 2005
Milestones, 7
My son, who turns 13 months Superbowl Sunday, has learned to clap—and he generally does so with the kind of unabashed glee reserved for children, the mentally challenged, and Michael Moore in a room made from cotton candy and thinly sliced corn beef. Which is why I was surprised when—in the middle of the President’s SOTU address the other night—he began booing mentions of Social Security reform. I’m not going
February 4, 2005
Thirty-sixth in a series of real-time empirical observations
In the time it takes you to read this post, Air America’s Janeane Garofalo—fresh off the 694th media appearance in which she’s compared Republicans to Nazis and American soldiers to misled dupes drunk on adrenalin—will slip into a pair of fashionable clogs and prepare to take a taxi from her Upper West Side apartment to her favorite Soho Indian restaurant, where she’ll sip cardamom tea—never fearing for one moment that
February 4, 2005
My sixteenth brief conversation with a McIntosh apple
me: “Ted Kennedy is such an ass!”* apple: “Yup.” me: apple: me: “Well. That was easy enough.” apple: “Hey, when you’re right, you’re right.”
February 4, 2005
red pills found behind the sofa cushions, prolepsis 8
When debriefing a potentially compromised beet, the careful examiner will pay special attention to the condition of the attatched foliage, where any edge burn or crystalline damage to the cellular structure of the leaves could signal a low-grade Magnoliophyta trauma of the kind commonly found in angiosperms having undergone graduated, temperature-intense torture regimens. Should the examiner notice such physical peculiarities in his subject, he is advised to secure the beet
February 3, 2005
If instead of a dead old kleptocrat surrounded by a legion of horny, circumcised demons, Yassir Arafat were the new chairman of the DNC
Arafat: “Frankly, I think this whole so-called ‘global terrorist threat’ has been overhyped by the ‘neocons’ for partisan political gain.” update: “And by ‘neocons,’ I naturally mean ‘Jews.’”
February 3, 2005
UNquestionable malfeasance
From FOXNews The man who ran the U.N. Oil-for-Food program “seriously undermined” the integrity of the United Nations, a U.N.-authorized investigation of the troubled program found in a report released Thursday. The report found that Benon Sevan broke the rules by allegedly trying to obtain oil vouchers from Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. Sevan has been accused of receiving about $1 million worth of lucrative oil vouchers but he has