DOMEOFGLASS.COM

Mc-Revolution in Mc-Food.

2012-05-24T04:00:00Z

    Emails arrive once or twice a month at my computer-step from an outfit called ImportFood.com, "Your online Thai supermarket with a huge selection of groceries, cookware, cooking videos, and over 295 authentic Thai recipes."
    I love Thai cuisine and I like these guys. Their prices are fair. They fulfill orders on time. Their recipés and photos are excellent Their emails are attractive, entertaining, and professional. And unlike most of the other crap that arrives in my In Box (penis enlargement services, Viagra tablet offers, Nigerian phishers) I look forward to hearing from them.
    Occasionally ImportFood.com wanders afield with food-related news from the mother country. A few weeks ago I was greeted with this item:

McDonalds Thailand Thai Fast Food
"McKhao Namtok Gai Krob"

McDonalds is known for offering the same tasty hamburger and French fries around the world, but that's not the only thing you will find in Thailand. In Bangkok, McDonalds has a new, delicious crispy chicken namtok salad served with jasmine rice. For now it's only 69 baht. Also included in the price is a 16 oz coke.

                 McKhao Namtok Gai Krob fresh from a Bangkok McDonald's vat of bubbling fat.

. If you’re curious (which you’re probably not) and too lazy to Google (which you probably are), a baht (pronounced baht), is listed at 31.38 to the dollar. So the next time you’re in Bangkok and have 69 baht or $2.19885 burning a hole in your pocket or purse, drop in the local McDonald’s, pick up a delicious McKhao Namtok Gai Krob, and wash it down with 16 ounces of Coca-Cola.
    One cannot but admire McDonald’s initiative. Not content to stand (or sit) idly by in the wings resting on their laurels while their competitors in the dog-eat-dog fast food business steal a march on them by beating them to the punch, McDonald’s is launching pre-emptive food strikes throughout its far-flung chopped meat empire.
    You’d have to be a brilliant marketing asshole, indeed, to get a leg up on the boys and girls at McDonald’s!
    In order to expose the titanic hamburger purveyor’s closely-guarded international foodie schemes, Dome of Glass has secretly unleashed its renowned one-man team of hackers and phone tappers.
    Here, for the first time, are early results of our illegal prying ─ a small plethora of astounding new locally-themed McDishes that the McCompany is about to McFoist on helpless McPopulations around the McGlobe:

● North Korea: McGoyangi Gupta Maeun. (Hot and spicy crudités of young cat served on a bed of refried sawdust)

● France: McCuisses de grenouille gros frit a la Americaine. (Obese legs of American bullfrog sautéed in deep fat in the style of Walmart.)

● England: McSqueek-and-bubble blood pudding. (Caramelized sheep intestine stuffed with rotted cabbage, hung beef, and maggot eggs on a slab of stale bread,. Beer, skittles, and access to a stomach pump included.)

● Scotland: McHaggis. (Pulverized hog offal and random barnyard leavings infused with oatmeal and molded into a soccer-ball-like mass, then crammed into the bladder of either a dead horse or cow and boiled for several days to kill the taste.)

● Zimbabwe: McMugabe Mbodza maBhunuka. (Southern-fried White Man.)

● Australia: McSuckling jumbuck on the barbie. (An aborigine-inspired stew containing eucalyptus leaves and salt-water crocodile tail seasoned with the scent-glands of poisonous snakes.)

● Germany: McJudenkinder. (Fondue of braised young Jew in liquefied Tilsit cheese)

● Japan: McFugu. (Sex organ sushi of pufferfish genus Takifugu, Lagocephalus, or Sphoeroides. Sales restricted to Koreans, women, and fat American tourists wearing shorts.)

● Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Dearborn, Michigan: McGamael. (Roast camel hump au jus infused with exploding jockey shorts, readings from the Koran, and oil of pressed extra-virgin virgins. First 100 customers receive one-way tickets to Nirvana.)

● Washington, D.C.: McObama. (Stale bullshit wrapped in marinated sheets of New York Times Op-Ed pages.).

As additional results and lawsuits pour in, Dome of Glass will work to keep you up-to-date and thoroughly disgusted..

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Thomas Sowell on Race Wars

2012-05-20T16:57:55Z

                                      Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at
                                      Stanford University. His website is http://www.tsowell.com

    I don’t know what’s the matter with Tom Sowell. The man must have a screw loose somewhere.
    He seems to believe that honesty and intelligence and common decency are somehow important in today’s America rather than cowardice, race hustling, conformity, Political Correctness, and lies.
    It is no wonder that leading liberals and progressives in the media and Hollywood as well as future Nobel Laureates like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan despise him so.
    I for one can’t wait for Bill Maher, a truly courageous non-combatant, an amazingly politically incorrect conformist, and a multi-millionaire member of the 99%, to deconstruct Mr. Sowell.
    And just wait until Paul Krugman and the crème de la crème of the entertainment industry gets after him! With mental giants such as Cher, George Clooney, Rosie O’Donnell, Kenya West, and Sean Penn on the case, Dr. Sowell won’t stand a chance.
    Doesn’t Sowell realize that 250-pound black high school athletes live in constant fear of bullying by sinewy 98-pound Asian boys and girls with their horned-rimmed glasses and threatening schoolbooks at the ready in their backpacks?
    Doesn’t he grasp the fact that attacks by black mobs on white teenagers and grandmothers are righteous payback for years of Jim Crow segregation?
    Doesn’t he appreciate the deprivation that inner-city black boys suffer by living among inner-city black boys?
    Ah well. The man’s incorrigible.
    Anyway, for your information, here’s a prime example of Dr. Sowell s ugly rationality, hateful evenhandedness, and despicable common sense plucked from (wouldn’t you know) National Review Online:

A Censored Race War
The media ignore racially motivated black-on-white crime.

    When two white newspaper reporters for the Virginian-Pilot were driving through Norfolk, and were set upon and beaten by a mob of young blacks — beaten so badly that they had to take a week off from work — that might sound like news that should have been reported, at least by their own newspaper. But it wasn’t.
    The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News Channel was the first major television program to report this incident. Yet this story is not just a Norfolk story, either in what happened or in how the media and the authorities have tried to sweep it under the rug.
    Similar episodes of unprovoked violence by young black gangs against white people chosen at random on beaches, in shopping malls, or in other public places have occurred in Philadelphia, New York, Denver, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, Los Angeles, and other places across the country. Both the authorities and the media tend to try to sweep these episodes under the rug.
    In Milwaukee, for example, an attack on whites at a public park a few years ago left many of the victims battered to the ground and bloody. But when the police arrived on the scene, it became clear that the authorities wanted to keep this quiet.
    One 22-year-old woman, who had been robbed of her cell phone and debit card, and had blood streaming down her face, said, "About 20 of us stayed to give statements and make sure everyone was accounted for. The police wouldn’t listen to us, they wouldn’t take our names or statements. They told us to leave. It was completely infuriating."
    The police chief seemed determined to head off any suggestion that this was a racially motivated attack by saying that crime is color-blind. Officials elsewhere have said similar things.
    A wave of uch attacks in Chicago were reported, but not the race of the attackers or victims. Media outlets that do not report the race of people committing crimes nevertheless report racial disparities in imprisonment and write heated editorials blaming the criminal-justice system.
    What the authorities and the media seem determined to suppress is that the hoodlum elements in many ghettoes launch coordinated attacks on whites in public places. If there is anything worse than a one-sided race war, it is a two-sided race war, especially when one of the races outnumbers the other several times over.
    It may be understandable that some people want to head off such a catastrophe, either by not reporting the attacks in this race war, or by not identifying the race of those attacking, or by insisting that the attacks were not racially motivated — even when the attackers themselves voice anti-white invective as they laugh at their bleeding victims.
    Trying to keep the lid on is understandable. But a lot of pressure can build up under that lid. If and when that pressure leads to an explosion of white backlash, things could be a lot worse than if the truth had come out earlier, and steps taken by both black and white leaders to deal with the hoodlums and with those who inflame them.
    These latter would include not only race hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson but also lesser-known people in the media, in educational institutions, and elsewhere who hype grievances and make all the problems of blacks the fault of whites. Some of these people may think that they are doing blacks a favor. But it is no favor to anyone who lags behind to turn their energies from the task of improving and advancing themselves to the task of lashing out at others.
    These others extend beyond whites. Asian-American schoolchildren in New York and Philadelphia have for years been beaten up by their black classmates. But people in the mainstream media who go ballistic if some kid says something unkind on the Internet about a homosexual classmate nevertheless hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil when Asian-American youngsters are victims of violence.
    Those who automatically say that the social pathology of the ghetto is due to poverty, discrimination, and the like cannot explain why such pathology was far less prevalent in the 1950s, when poverty and discrimination were worse. But there were not nearly as many grievance mongers and race hustlers then.

Thomas Sowell - May 15, 2012

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Workers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Jobs

2012-05-17T04:00:00Z

The seemingly endless and increasingly boring Euro Farce that has been bedeviling, investors, stock markets, and financial experts throughout what passes as the civilized world, has reached a new pinnacle of idiocy with elections in Greece, France, and Germany.
As is traditional in European politics, voters randomly sprayed their ballots among 30 or 40 disparate parties ranging in creed from neo-Nazi to neo-Maoist with stops along the way for various shades of socialist, fascist, racist, nationalist, and anarchist. Nonetheless, a powerful central theme has emerged, like the Creature From the Black Lagoon, from amidst the fetid rubble of the latest European exercise in pseudo-democracy:

The European man-in-the-street utterly rejects
the injustice of having to work for a living

    The authorities are not standing idly by sitting on their hands and twiddling their thumbs as Southern Europe stinks up the financial atmosphere like an overflowing septic tank.
    Quick as one can say, "Beleaguered Greek President Karolos Papoulias confers with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President-elect François Hollande," an emergency meeting of the financial ministers of the 17-nation Euro Block has been called to address the steadily deteriorating situations in Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, and California.
    And what will this assemblage of giant intellects, "these choice and master spirits of the age," discuss?
    Why they’ll discuss what they always discuss ─ bailouts, bank reform, sovereign debt, interest rates, recapitalization, growth stimuli, defending the Euro, debt restructuring, incentives, tranches, devaluation, bond prices, floating-rates, cash flow, emergency liquidity assistance, inflation, deflation, austerity budgets, tax reform, and the Dutch tulip crop.
    In short, they’ll chew over everything ─ except the core of the problem; set up dozens of sub-committees and task forces to address everything ─ except the core of the problem.
    Listen up (as Tommy Lee Jones says in most of his movies). Listen up, all you technocrats and kindred learnéd fools Listen up to your huddled masses yearning to be supported by the state. Listen up to your hundreds of millions of leisure-loving government drones that you have been attempting to drag into a golden future as the United States of Europe. Vox populi has spoken as if with but one vox: Your fellow Europeans are deeply committed to shorter and shorter work days, shorter and shorter work weeks, longer and longer vacations, earlier and earlier retirements, larger and larger pensions. They will settle for nothing less.
    Here, then, is the €64 trillion ($82 trillion and counting) question:

How can a gaggle of European political hacks and brain-dead academicians meeting in Brussels, best create a peaceful, prosperous Europe in which no European will ever again be forced to work for a living?

For an answer, we must turn to the French ─ those masters of rigorous thought whose minds, from birth, are infused with the cutting edge brilliance of Cartesian Logic and whose consequent scintillating military strategies and fighting élan have produced famous French victories in two World Wars by cleverly allowing Russia, Britain, and the United States to do the bulk of the fighting and bleeding and dying.
In an exclusive interview with a New York City chambermaid, French financial genius and bon vivant Dominique Strauss-Kahn has outlined a bold plan for rescuing Europe’s remaining employed from their arduous 6-hours-a-day, 4-days-a-week, 35-weeks-a-year jobs. After reminding his Guinean tidbit of how Lafayette aided the nascent American republic 225 years previous, M. Strauss-Kahn outlined a market-basket of steps that should be taken "tout de suite."

1. American President Barack Obama (PBUH) must institute an aid package similar to WW2’s Marshall plan (suitably adjusted for 65 years of inflation) that will download several trillions of U. S. taxpayer dollars into the European "trou du cul noir" (politely translatable as "black hole"). The money would be used to cover unemployment benefits for European non-workers (i.e., everyone) thereby staving off both employment and revolution for at least a year or two..

2. French President-elect Hollande must send a trade delegation to Holland...No...No That’s not right. French President-elect Hollande must send a caucus to the Caucasus...No, No, No. That’s not right either. I’m sorry. What I mean to say is that French President-elect Hollande, must fly to Beijing, New Delhi, and Tokyo to make China, India, and Japan charter members of the EuroZone.

3. With the three Asian powerhouses in the fold, China’s Renminbi will replace the Euro as the zone’s currency unit, beer sales will be restricted to Tsingtao and Sapporo, and all tech support will be handled in Mumbai, India.

4. After signing a non-aggression pact with France, Germany must be persuaded to re-arm. Once fully outfitted with atomic weaponry, ballistic missiles, supersonic stealth aircraft, advanced armor, and a fleet of nuclear submarines, the revived Wehrmacht will be encouraged to sweep through the low countries (a matter of an hour or two) then turn south and east to the Mediterranean and the Urals to unite whatever’s left of Europe’s smoldering ruins into an Aryan superstate under the banner of the Fifth (and hopefully final) Reich.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Information About Comments

2012-05-15T20:29:16Z

    Anyone who’s tried to post a comment on Dome of Glass, knows how difficult it can be.
    In order to prevent spam from swamping its system and possibly introducing viruses, the blog host, Act Now Domains, employs a service known as reCAPTCHA that requires commenters to enter two sequences of letters ─ one sequence being a reasonably readable (if often lengthy) English word, the other a scrambled and twisted concoction that is difficult if not impossible to decipher.
    Here are samples of reCAPTCHA's work:

and

    As I've told the folks at Act Now Domains, reCAPTCHA's algorithm not only foils evil cyber bots, it also foils human beings.
    I'm trying to get Act Now Domains to amend its policy by giving individual bloggers the option of bypassing reCAPTCHA or by instituting a process that requires commenters to log in before posting a comment. A third possibility, employed by many other blogs, is to use a scrambled-letter provider whose scrambling is more legible than reCAPTCHA's.
    It might help if you emailed Act Now at suggestions@secureserver.net in support of my request.
    Meanwhile, if you want to post a comment, but don't want to waste time trying to read those scrambled letters, email the comment to dog@myfairpoint.net and I'll make sure it gets posted.

NBM

Want to Kill a Good Product? Contact Norm Mack at Dome of Glass

2012-05-10T04:00:00Z

    I’ve done more than my share of sneering at people who believe Stephen King writes documentaries and who hold truck with rot such as UFOs, Extra Sensory Perception, Spontaneous Combustion, Empaths, Psychokinesis, Pyrokinesis, Ghosts, Ghouls, Psychics, Exorcisms, Poltergeists, Angels, Gods, Sons of Gods, Devils, Demons, Sorcerers, and Honest Politicians.
    But despite having been accused of being close-minded, ignorant, intolerant, and failing to wash behind the ears (not true! I do so wash behind my ears) I’ve stuck doggedly to my guns and laughed to scorn those who would impugn or otherwise wash my brain...until a week ago Wednesday.
    I had finished my evening meal ─ a bowl of pasta fagioli (familiarly known as "pasta fazool"), one gin and tonic, half a pound of pistachio nuts, several Bloody Mary’s, and one beer (doctor’s orders) ─ and had fallen asleep during a Perry Mason tape when my wife buzzed me on the intercom. I lurched awake, still cobwebby from my nap.
    "Did you pick up the My-T-Fine chocolate pudding mix at Market Basket like I told you?"
    "Oh...Hi, babe. It’s you. Market Basket doesn’t carry My-T-Fine. Neither does Shaw’s or Hanneford’s. Maybe Microsoft bought the company and turned it into an app. I got Jello instant chocolate pudding instead."
    There was silence in Peterborough about the space of half a minute. She spoke again, her voice terrible with despisement or phlegm. "Jello instant? Jello instant is crap! You’re useless."
    "Don’t start," I said.
    "Every time I tell you to do something you..." she continued.
    "You’re starting," I interrupted. "It’s not my fault the store doesn’t have My-T-Fine."
    "It’s you," she said. "It’s your vibes. Whenever there’s something I like, you send out negative vibes and they take it off the shelves."
    "You’ve started," I said.
    The intercom went dead with a thud. I returned to Perry Mason.
    My slumber that night was not full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing. Instead, my wife’s words rattled around and around in my skull case ─ "Whenever there’s something I like, you send out negative vibes....negative vibes...negative vibes..."

* * *

    I awoke the next morning from uneasy dreams to find myself transformed into a gigantic insect....No...Wait a minute...That’s the wrong story...
    I awoke the next morning from uneasy dreams to find the ominous words still echoing in my brain.
    I crawled to the bathroom for a badly needed morning piss, then crawled to the kitchen, poured a cup of stale coffee, and staggered to the living room couch into which I, the coffee, and a copy of the Union Leader sank, more or less as a unit.
    My wife appeared in her morning regalia ─ 20-year-old greenish bathrobe, tan leotards with a hole in the left lower quadrant of the ass, pink flip flops from Ocean State Job Lot, hand-knitted woolen wrist warmers, blond hair au naturel (stringy and uncombed). She spotted me and turned her back.
    I dropped what I was doing (except for the coffee) and knelt at her feet. "I’m sorry," I groveled, "Forgive me. I’m torn with remorse for my behavior ─ whatever it was."
    "You lie," she said. "You’re a liar. You lie and lie and lie. That’s all you do is lie. How can you keep lying like that?" She pivoted into the kitchen.
    I followed her, continuing to grovel and lie.
    No dice.
    I persisted, however, and was rewarded several days later when I was granted forgiveness ─ perhaps because she got sick of the groveling and lying.
    A frosty armistice in place, we sat down to discuss my negative vibe problem
    She began by listing products she had liked that had vanished over the years. Next, after browbeating and a session on the rack, I was forced to concede that I emitted powerful ESP radiation from my frontal lobes which was picked up by receptors in the sensitive assholes of marketing experts. A few meetings in four-star Caribbean resorts later, production of the product would be halted.
    Our joint research is summed up below in a chart listing her favorite commodities and brands that have vanished from showrooms and supermarket shelves.
    Alongside each entry, is the excuse given out by the marketing assholes for scrapping the products. Apparently, they refuse to acknowledge the power of my negative vibes.
    Here’s the chart:

Dead Products	Supposed Reason for Killing
Endurance (peach flavored) Vitamin Water	Although Endurance was the only Vitamin Water flavor that didn’t taste like acidic crap, as soon as Coca Cola took over the company their marketing assholes discovered it cost an extra tenth of a cent per bottle to manufacture
Yuban 100% Colombian Coffee	Ranked Number 1 by Consumer’s Report a few years ago, the marketing assholes at Kraft decided to get on the Green bandwagon by creating a brew that tastes like dried dog turd, but is 30 percent rain forest friendly
Waverly Wafers crackers	They tasted good, so Michele Obama would probably claim they cause obesity in black people
Sealtest ice-cream	Bought by Kraft who let the brand be swamped by the ads of Breyer’s and other manufacturers of crap ice-cream
Sky Bars	They tasted good so the marketing assholes were afraid someone would start a class-action law suit on behalf of. teenagers with zits.
Chocolate Grahams	Ralph Nader secretly informed Dan Rather that Chocolate Grahams were addictive to children who drank milk
Original Freihofer chocolate chip cookies, bread. and other baked goods	Freihofer’s was taken over by something called Bimbo Bakeries whose team of marketing assholes decided no one would notice when they substituted cheap crap for the original products.
Soup chickens	There’s more profit in using hen chickens for dog food.
Specialty meats (veal kidneys, sweetbreads)	There’s more profit in using specialty meats for dog food. Besides, marketing assholes and their families think organ meats are disgusting
Red Dog beer in bottles	Brewery wouldn’t kick back enough to supermarkets to keep the brand on the shelves
Fleischmann's Light Margarine	Contained so little trans fat and saturated fat and tasted so much like real butter that it cut into sales of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter
Kraft chocolate malted milk mix	Marketing assholes hold meeting. Lead asshole says, "I don’t drink malted milk. Do you drink malted milt?" Product killed.
Genuine (salt-cured) lox	Marketing assholes hold meeting: Lead asshole says,: "I bought some lox at the deli. It was salty. I went back and threw in their faces." Product killed
Levi’s rye and other fresh-baked bread	Marketing assholes hold meeting. Lead asshole says, "People don’t want bread fresh from the oven and with a crust. My kids scream if we don't serve 'em week-old mush wrapped in plastic." Products killed.
Locally grown fresh produce (peaches, tomatoes)	Marketing asshole analysts discover that plastic tomatoes from Mexico and concrete peaches from Nigeria are cheaper.
Great old cars like Hudson and Packard	"Ya gotta keep up with the times like us at GM. Big fins, chrome, big cars. Marketing, man, marketing. People are suckers. Them Japs and Koreans’ll never get anywheres."
A&P Mel-O-bit American cheese slices	With market share down, and after weeks of brainstorming at Little Dix Bay Resort on Virgin Gorda, a crack team of A&P marketing assholes scrapped the company’s house brands and did away with Mel-O-bit and other products, thereby succeeding in sending the firm into a death spiral
Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain breakfast cereal	Marketing assholes meet in Aruba, decide that Americans are so dumb it would be a waste of money to promote a whole-grain cereal with no sugar. Sales restricted to UK, Australia, and New Zealand where people are smarter.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Le Pauvre Henri

2012-05-03T04:00:00Z

    The two videos below are first-cat accounts of the suffering that so many of our helpless animal friends in France endure during their brief and tragic lives. I feel sure that even the stoniest of hearts will melt upon viewing the torment that Henri bears so bravely and so patiently.
    Should your heart be sufficiently melted (or your stomach sufficiently turned) by Henri's plight, you can help by sending whatever you can spare to Le Société Générale des Chats Franςaises, c/o Dome of Glass, Peterborough, NH 03458.
    To contact fellow friends of French felines, Google one of the many Chat Rooms located hither and yon on the Web.

                                                        Henri I

                                                Henri II

    For additional insights into the status of the French cat population, click Sofia Becerra, a jeune fille [a virgin girl horse born in June] who speaks touchingly of le grandeur of French chats [cats] in the magazine "Le Millefeuille." (A millefeuille is either a disgusting kind of bug that scares my daughter Loren when she takes a shower or else some sort of stupid pastry that causes the French to lose to the Germans whenever they have a war.)
    Mlle. Becerra writes,: "Les chats Franςais sont très minces, pas comme les chats obèses des États Unis" [Translation: "French cats are tasty trays of mince pie, not like lard-ass American cats that shop at Walmart.."]
    She adds, "Les chats français sont, en fait, juste comme les français. Toujours élégants, toujours raffinés. Les femmes impeccables, les hommes tirés à quatre épingles."
    Very loosely (and incompetently) translated into English, all that crap means:

"French cats are like, totally, the same as French chicks, two jaws elegant, two jaws something or other. The femmes [girl cats] are impeccable [that means they regularly groom themselves between their legs with their tongues],* and the hommes [guy cats] are like Michelin tires with a quart of épingles."

Hey ─ don’t complain ─ no normal person without a double-hinged lower jaw can pronounce the fucking language let alone translate it. If you're not happy with my efforts go dig up a native Frog on your own.
In conclusion, as Tiny Tim might (and did) say, "God bless you one and all."

* If you think that's crass, you oughta see what I wrote before my wife made me change it.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Obama Comes Out of the Closet

2012-05-01T20:54:12Z

    Reluctantly setting aside his legendary modesty, President Obama has come out of the closet to admit that it was he and he alone who was responsible for killing notorious terror chief Osama bin Laden.
    In a remarkable video, crafted by Mr. Obama's brain trust of Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, and longtime spiritual advisor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright ─ and narrated by former President and Hero of the Republic, Bill Clinton ─ the gut-wrenching courage of our President in deciding to off bin Laden is shown with grim words and powerful imagery.
    Once they see this video, the question all patriotic Americans must ask themselves is whether a weak, super-rich, right wing, middle-of-the road, white Mormon extremist waffler like Mitt Romney would have had President Obama's intestinal fortitude and intellectual brilliance to plan and authorize the amazingly ingenious and daring raid.
    It is to laugh!
    Furthermore, in a story so late-breaking it may never break, Dome of Glass has uncovered controvertible photographic proof that it was the President himself who led the team of Navy Seals, and he himself who took by the throat the circumcised dog bin Laden and smote him dead as either a dorrknob or doornail.

President Obama, disguised as a reality show host, is seen about to wheel and fire on a cringing bin Laden

    In another development, the Obama camp, sick and tired of being maligned by Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman, and the rest of the right-wing cabal at the New York Times, is about to release YouTube clips of a youthful Obama leading the raid on Entebbe, landing with the troops in Normandy, and raising the flag on Mount Suribachi

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairp;oint.net

Roots

2012-04-26T04:00:00Z

Now that I’m approaching my hundredth year on earth (if you think about it, everyone other than a few astronauts is approaching his hundredth year on earth though few will make it while still breathing) and with the vast resources of the Internet literally at my fingertips, I’ve decided to delve into the past with figurative pick and shovel to literally dig up my roots and any other debris that might be lurking in the figurative shrubbery.
Many a storm-tossed night have I lain awake (or layed awake if you prefer and are illiterate) on my futon, crusted as it is with dried-up bodily fluids, tossing and turning in helpless androgyny as I ponder the many mysteries of the past and the literally thousand of genomes and God knows how many sexual couplings that have resulted in the appearance of the unique life form that my wife calls "Mack" and that I call "Me" when I’m sober.

● By what bizarre happenstance did Me arise from the ashes after eons of nothingness starting with the Big Bang and continuing for 14 billion years or so up to and including Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak?
● From whence did the clan Mack originate?
● For what reasons did it originate?
● What crimes were committed in the name of Mack in centuries gone by?
● Will Mack children and Mack grandchildren and Mack great-grandchildren (etc.) preserve their surnames for posterity or will they hire expensive lawyers and switch to Lady Gaga or Metta World Peace or Rip Torn or Malcolm X or World B. Free or Abdul-Jabbar in order to meld better into mainstream America?

My first tentative step in the dangerous expedition into my Roots ( the word should be pronounced "Rutz" to rhyme witrh "Puts" to distinguish it from Alex Haley’s immoral masterpiece) was to turn to Haley himself for aspiration. After a cursory study of the great author’s methodology, I raced slowly to the Peterborough Town Library in my rusting 1996 Ford Ranger pickup and signed out every volume I could find dealing with the White Man’s suffering and enslavement at the hands and other body parts of the opposite sex. Two days later, having scanned the various works and highlighted significant passages with yellow magic marker, I plagiarized all relevant material (and a lot more that wasn’t relevant), invented ridiculous names for several thousand imaginary forebears, and downloaded all the shit into my five-year-old Toshiba laptop’s overcrowded memory.
Now I’m sure you’ll all understand that I cannot give away for free the mass of misinformation that I amassed in my massive and as yet unpublished tome. (At this very instant my manuscript is in the rejection phase with several prestigious publishing houses.) However, I have decided to whet (wet?) your collective appetites with a selection of titillating facts:

* * *

    The earliest confirmed existence of a Mack that I could exhume, was one Gunther Mack, a fur-bearing petty thief and confidence creature recently evolved from monkeyhood who flourished alongside the wooly mammoth and giant eight-toed ground sloth in Middle Mongolia (a strip of desolation wedged between Inner and Outer Mongolia) during the early Epicene. Unlike most of his hominid brethren and sistren, Gunther sported a prehensile tail. As you might imagine, this made him very popular with the ladies and, since condoms, diaphragms, and The Pill hadn’t yet been invented, the unfortunate result for the future well-being of humanity was the propagation of a large number of baby Macks with prehensile tails.
    This era in my family’s history was (alas) followed by the sudden obliteration of all records of Macks coincident with a meteor impact off the coast of Pre-Cambrian Mexico and the consequent amelioration of the dinosaurs.
    Thus it was not until recent times ─ about a million years ago ─ that a large colony of Macks was spotted lying or laying amidst the jungles and tundra of what is now the Horn of Africa, but was then its left buttock.
    How, you ask, did these hairy, pasty-faced, prehensile-tailed proto-Macks wind up in darkest Africa?
    The answer is shrouded in misery. A famous Duke University professor of lacrosse (and former presidential candidate) has hypothesized ─ without any evidence ─ that a tribe of hairless, black-skinned pueblo dwellers enslaved the aboriginal Macks, docked their tails to a fair-thee-well, and transported them (the Macks, not the tails) to Africa on camelback via the Silk Route. There the unfortunate Mack remnants were compelled by their merciless masters to work long hours in the sun-scorched sorghum plantations after which they were forced to breed like rabbits (with surprisingly little resistance from the Macks).
    By the time several ice ages had rolled around, the Macks, with their lush pelts of body hair to keep them warm, and led by the infamous Barney Mack and his common-law husband Frank Mack, had turned the tables on their black masters (who themselves had evolved into extremely efficient Marathon runners and seven-foot-tall basketball players) and escaped via stagecoach as recounted in the Book of Exodus to what is now southern Italy, but was then southern Italy.
    A period known as The Golden Age of Macks ensued followed every few thousand years by the Silver Age, the Brass Age, the Plastic Age. and the Shit Age.
    This entire edifice of Ages literally collapsed like an outhouse made of cards when Alexander the Great crossed the Rubicon and began his disastrous conquest of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
    Stimulated by the subsequent rape of Carthage and Hannibal’s implantation of elephants into what was left of Italy, the few surviving Macks coalesced into what was to become the Royal House of Mack culminating in the accession to the Game of Thrones of Julius Mack, Augustus Mack, Nero Mack, Caligula Mack, and the Mack Truck Company.
    Five centuries later, after Attila the Mack had conquered the decadent rotting husk of the MackDonald Empire, the era known to infamy as the Dark Ages began its calamitous run on Broadway.
    This unpleasant interlude was, however, a happy time for Macks.
    Relieved of their onerous duties as members of the once powerful and cultured House of Mack, they quickly descended into the metaphorical gutter where they wallowed affably with the pigs, rooting in the mud and earning meager livings as muggers, hitmen, swindlers, breakfast sausages, and professional riffraff.
    This lowly but enjoyable condition obtained until the Renaissance when Leonardo da Mack in partnership with Mackelangelo demonstrated that the earth was not flat, but shaped like a bagel.
    Almost immediately (i.e., several hundred years later) a contingent of fanatical British Macks rebelled against the crown (as well as the fedora and homburg) and set sail for the Orient amid great fanfare and laughter on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.
    The rest is History.
    Not only didn’t they get close to India or China, but they wound up shipwrecked on the barren shores of what is now known as America, but then had some crazy Indian name like Massachusetts that no one could pronounce without spitting out a mouthful of food.
    After a Thanksgiving Day feast courtesy of friendly local redskins, the surviving Macks were wiped out and their scalps put out to dry on Plymouth Rock.
    This brings us to the present when a few debased remains of the once proud clan can be found scattered throughout parts of New York, Kentucky, and what is now New Hampshire. but was then Wisconsin. In these disparate locales they scrape out ignoble livelihoods as corporate lawyers, marketing executives, carbon fiber engineers, computer programmers, graphic artists, physical therapists, and bloggers.

* * *

    And so ends my strange, stupid journey of discovery, one which took me to many dark corners of the Internet and many secretive regions of the Web including Wikipedia, Amazon.com, Yahoo, Facebook, Google Earth, Drudge, Outlook Express, and any number of XXX-rated sites. Some were stimulating, others were boring, and all were devoid of relevant information.
    (At present, my Toshiba is with Matt Burke of Antrim Computer being cleansed of several thousand viruses, spyware bots, and trojans.)
    Even more fruitless than the Web, however, was, my association with Carlos the Jackal, perhaps the world’s leading Internet pain-in-the-ass, who flooded cyberspace with spam on my behalf in order to contact all the planet’s Macks.
    In a brilliant stroke of idiocy, the Jackal couched the emails as originating in Nigeria from a certain Mrs. Gladys Mugwab, wife of the late Lord Colonel Doctor Faustus Goldfarb, former Zimbabwe Generalissimo of Incest. The grieving widow Mugwab was desperately seeking a trustworthy Mack to help spirit $20 million in goldbricks out of Uganda and into a Canadian account with Citibank located on Barclay Street in Cambodia.
    So compelling was the Jackal’s email, that I myself sent Mrs. Mugwab a $500 retainer, my social security number, several credit cards, and my mother’s maiden name to demonstrate good faith.
    And, oh yeah, she has a terminal case of Bucephalus and I get to keep the all the loot after funeral expenses.
    The results of the mass emailing were astounding.
    Did you know that there are 37 Macks cowering amidst China’s millions including Mao ZeMack, Chang Kai Mack, and a bunch of Macks with the first name of Yung-Fat all of whom are in prison for bigamy, polygamy. monogamy, and having intercourse with cows.
    I also unearthed (literally) an ancient Mack tribe in the ankle of Africa, living problematically amongst the people who make clicking sounds with their tongues instead of using the letters G, X, or R.
    So, in conclusion, I implore you all to buy Roots (Rutz) when it comes out. You’ll be enthralled from first word to last. If you’re not, that’s just tough tomatoes.
    The pub date is not yet established since the liberal-dominated publishing industry has yet to pick up my manuscript (literally). Even E-book giant Smashwords has rejected it under pressure from the Obama administration.
    Should nobody bite by next Christmas, I’m thinking of contacting my former literary agent, Tony Outhwaite, as soon as he gets back from lunch ─ which should be within four or five years.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Thoughts on Abortion

2012-04-19T04:00:00Z

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it {Genesis 2]

     Just about every woman and quite a few men have passionate opinions, pro and con, about abortion. As a consequence, it’s a subject most of us avoid at the dinner table, in the office, or on a date.
    To put it another way, and to roll out one of the more overused of the current crop of media clichés, abortion is a Polarizing issue, pitting male against female, housewife against professional woman, religious against secular, liberal against conservative, old against young, and, in an area that’s seldom mentioned, race against race.
    And the frosting on the cake is this: The opposing viewpoints are not subject to compromise...not now...not next year...not ever..
    Yet, strangely, despite the gulf between the pros and the cons, both have chosen to employ euphemisms for their respective stances ─ "Pro-Choice" for those upholding the right of a woman to abort her fetus, "Pro-Life" for those who would deny her that right.
    And, in what passes for debate about the virtues and evils of the popular and lucrative industry of fetus annihilation, the opposing camps never have and never will reach any sort of resolution.
    The reason for this unpleasant contretemps is that what passes for debate involves two totally unrelated and, therefore, unresolvable issues. One cannot come to any sort of agreement or compromise between philosophies that have absolutely nothing in common. If party A insists that apples are oranges and party B insists that cats are dogs, it would be a total waste of time to have them sit down and hash out their differences.
    For Pro-Choicers, the bedrock of their position is the supposed right of a woman to do whatever she damn well pleases with whatever happens to be inside her body, be it a gallstone, a portion of recently consumed quiche, or a fertilized ovum. Pro-Choicers consider outlawing abortion to be nothing more nor less than sexual enslavement.
    For Pro-Lifers, the bedrock of their stance is the supposed sanctity of human life, often, though not always, based on various religious tracts and the preachings of various Men of God up to and including the Pope. Pro-Lifers consider abortion to be nothing more nor less than infanticide.
    Despite the two irreconcilable positions, however, there are few Pro-Choicers who are in favor of infanticide, and almost no Pro-Lifers who favor the enslavement of women Nevertheless, female enslavement versus infanticide is exactly what the debate boils down to which, of course, leads to the Pro-Choice coterie claiming that their opposite numbers are a bunch of male chauvinist pig bastards, while the Pro Life crowd hurls back at their foes various gospels and dogmas to the effect that abortion is morally and logically nothing more or less than the slaying of human beings and that abortionists and their patrons are a bunch of Godless, amoral murderers.
    On another front, Pro-Life zealots often bring up cases of famous men ─ Steve Jobs and Tim Tebow, for example ─ whose mothers, it they had been Pro-Choice, would certainly have opted to abort their fetuses, thus depriving the world of iPads, iPods, iPhones, and one muscular Christian quarterback.
    In contra-distinction, Pro-Choice fans could (though seldom do) counter with examples such as Taylor Swift, Keith Olbermann, and Adolf Hitler whose expeditious termination wombwise would have spared us from some terrible music, several years of insane television commentary, and 50 million corpses.
    And so the argument rages on an on like a sort of endless scream dragging with it the concomitant baggage of placards, editorials, newspaper ads, sit-ins, boycotts, demonstrations, divorces, lawsuits, and an occasional homicide.
    No doubt the screeching will continue until doom cracks or hell freezes over.
    The result of all this is that political decisions regarding abortion revolve around whether support for or against abortion rights is likely to improve or hurt one’s chances at the polls. This presents a nightmare quandary for the political class.
    In an effort to extricate themselves from the morass, liberal politicians, their staffs feverishly at work in the minefield, have gravitated to the totally lily-livered stand: "I, personally, am against abortion, but I believe that the decision is a matter for each woman to make for herself without interference from the government."
    Conservative politicians, their staffs feverishly at work in the minefield, have come up with a different though equally lily-livered position: "I believe it is up to the individual states ─ not the federal government ─ to legislate the issue of abortion. The Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade ruling should be reversed."
    Net result with respect to abortion policy? ─ Zero.
    Net result on voting patterns? ─ Conservatives continue to vote for conservatives, liberals continue to vote for liberals, and dogs continue to howl at the moon.
    Well, we’re a democracy (of sorts) so this must be a good thing, .right? The majority (or at least that part of the majority that chooses to vote) speaketh every year or two, and having spoketh goes back to its TV sets until the next election cycle.

* * *

    I led off this post with a quotation from no less an authority than God Himself who made it a point to warn Adam not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge (though He fails to explain why He planted the tree in the first place).
    So what does God go ahead and do for an encore? He plucks out one of Adam’s ribs, sculpts an attractive young chick to keep Adam company in the evenings (since television, football, and computers hadn’t been invented yet), and lets them both cavort naked in the Garden of Eden.
    Well! You can imagine what happens next! A sneaky old serpent (No, not Barney Frank) ingratiates himself with Eve and beguiles her into sampling some of the forbidden fruit, upon which the stupid bitch (probably a blonde) persuades Adam to join in the repast.
    What a fuckin’ disaster!
    That damned serpent! That dumb broad! That weak-kneed ass Adam!
    Now look at the mess we’re all in!
    And here’s where we get to the root of the abortion debacle. The inescapable and unavoidable problem with abortion is that we humans, alone here on earth, perhaps in the universe, have eaten from the tree of knowledge.

● Does life begin with conception?...after three months?...after six months?...just before the fetus emerges from the uterus?...just before its head emerges?
● If it’s entirely up to the female of the species to either abort or bear, why should the putative father be held hostage to the mother’s whim and tossed in jail for failure to provide child support?
● Does a fetus feel pain? If so at what stage of pregnancy? Day one? Day 60? Day 270? And does it matter?
● Is abortion proper if the mother's life is in danger or if the fetus has Down Syndrome or if the pregnancy is the result of incest or rape?
● Is it a sin to use condoms or The Pill and thus destroy human lives even before they have a chance to exist?
● If contraception’s a sin, why is it okay to employ the rhythm system or practice coitus interruptus? And anyway, why is contraception the night before any different logically than taking a morning-after pill the next day?
● And why does the law say it’s fine to snuff a child just before it exits the uterus, but a crime to kill it one nanosecond later when it officially becomes a baby?

I tell you, it’s tough being human. Contrast our plight with the fun our animal buddies have:

● Does the lady spider go to church on Sunday dressed in widow’s weeds seeking absolution for dining on her husband the previous Tuesday?
● Does the male lion suffer pangs of conscience when he kills a bunch of his cubs and eats a few so he can get laid again?
● Do the bird police haul the cuckoo before a magistrate for laying her eggs in another bird’s nest?
● Does the mommy rat shed rivers of tears as she digests one of her ratlings?

    The late anthropologist Loren Eiseley addressed the problem in "The Star Dragon," one of his most powerful, beautiful, and disturbing writings.
    In his essay Eiseley speaks of lying sleepless in bed at night, haunted by the vision of Halley’s Comet tracing its endless lonely orbit through the heavens. And as the comet moves though time, Eiseley thinks of man’s lonely voyage through the same vastness of the past ─ from the present, backwards to the crude trenches of Neolithic man and back further through the millennia, moving ever southward across two ice ages, shivering speechless in brute terror of the dark and the unknown, hunted and killed by the great cats of the Pleistocene, growing ever more helpless, ever more confused, ever angrier at his own impotence, ever more like an animal until, at last, he arrives at the start of things, at the very origin of our strange species when, our consciousnesses dimmed over the eons, the last glimmer of light within our brains extinguished, we arrive at that final outpost ─ we are no longer human.
    Eiseley writes:

:I think we are now well across the last ice, toward the beginning. There is no fire of any sort but we do not miss it. We are far to the south and the climate is warm. We have no tools except an occasional bone club. We walk upright, but I think we are now animals. We are small ─ pygmies, in fact. We wear no clothes. We no longer stare at the stars or think of the unreal. The dead are dead. No one follows us at nightfall. Do not repeat this. I think we are animals. I think we have reached beyond the bridge. We are happy here. Tell no one.

    What Eiseley has done, of course, is to retell the story of Genesis. It is a recounting in geologic terms of man’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden which is also the Garden of Ignorance.
    And so Paradise, with God’s flaming cherubim guarding its gates, is that faraway land of long, long ago where we were free of the dreadful curse of intellect and the terrible burden of knowledge that makes us conscious of our mortality. .makes us aware of our sins....makes us human.
    Alas! Time is a one-way street, a river that only flows downhill and only in one direction.
    There is no going back
    We must suffer under the yoke of the knowledge of good and evil until death releases us from all suffering and all knowledge.
    And so, when I consider Pro-Choice vs. Pro-Life, I think of the Beatles song, "Hey, Buffalo Bill, What did you kill?"
    And I think of my own children and how poor and meaningless my life would be without them.
    Therein lies the rub as Shakespeare might have put it and as every parent knows. The abortion question, like other mysteries that plague us, is a problem without a solution.
    It is like a vast, ethereal class-action lawsuit in which we all are respondents and upon which the human condition depends ─ but where is that celestial court than can adjudicate it?
    Our inability to know what we are killing versus our ability to kill is our punishment for having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge.
    I guess we’ll just have to live with the consequences ─ until we die.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Alliteration, March Madness, and Basketball

2012-04-12T04:00:00Z

    Thanks to the antics of European rabbits during mating season ─ and to Lewis Carroll’s March Hare in Alice in Wonderland ─ there’s a well-worn old saw, "Mad as a March hare."
    So what.
    Who cares whether or not a rapidly-reproducing rodent-like European mammal with long ears and a twitchy nose goes berserk every spring.
    What’s more, "Mad as a March hare" is one of these pointless aphorisms, like "An elephant never forgets" or "A dog is man’s best friend" that have no utility whatsoever. I mean, would you interject "Mad as a March hare" into a conversation with your doctoral thesis supervisor in order to impress him? Or would you whisper "An elephant never forgets" into your date’s shell-like ear in hopes of luring her to your digs?
    And anyway, what do deranged rabbits have to do with the seemingly endless collegiate basketball ritual involving 68 schools that descends on us like a toxic fog every March?
    March Madness?
    March Bullshit!
    Neither March nor rabbits nor madness have a goddamn thing to do with college basketball.
    So why does every asshole sports commentator and every asshole sports writer feel impelled to repeat the fucking phrase "March Madness" a few hundred times every day during every fucking sports broadcast and in every fucking sports column until, blessedly, one collection of "student-athlete" thugs defeats another collection of "student-athlete" thugs on prime time following which the most-hyped members of the "student-athlete" thug crop sign up for duty in the NBA at $10 million a year for five years?
    Okay.
    There is an answer.
    Prepare to be enlightened.
    The word "March" and the word "Madness" both begin with the letter M!
    Wow!
    Fantastic!
    Who woulda thunk it!
    Why...why... it’s...it’s...it’s...ALLITERATION!!!
    Lucky the tournament doesn’t take place in April or it might be known as April Asininity...or in January when it would probably be christened the January Jerk-off...or in November when we could dub it November Nausea.
    All right. I concede that people like alliteration. They also like cheeseburgers, chocolate mousse, and Grand Marnier.
    So what? Must we therefore be suffocated by an avalanche of cheeseburgers, chocolate mousse, and Grand Marnier every March?
    I’m aware (even if you’re not) that poets often use alliteration as a poetic device. In years gone by. Shakespeare wrote "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought" in one of his most famous sonnets and Samuel Taylor Coleridge got carried away on a veritable sea of alliteration in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with "The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free; We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea." Like, wow, that’s seven F’s, two B’s, two W’s, and a pair of S’s in one short stanza!
    But Will and Sam and other old guys and gals like them made sense with their admirable artisanship and able alliteration ─ unlike that miserable March Madness clichéd crap
    Face it: There is nothing in the least "Mad" about the NCAA’s annual basketball orgy.
    If the sports scrivener and TV talk classes feel they simply must alliterate, March Moneymaking would be a hell-of a-lot-more accurate and March Monotony a hell-of-a-lot more descriptive.
    Which brings me, somewhat ungracefully, into a discussion of the game of basketball itself.
    With the possible exception of soccer (which the rest of the world incorrectly calls football), there is no sport as stupid, boring, and repetitious as basketball. (Small wonder it’s become so popular in Europe, Asia, and South America.)
    Up the court, down the court, up the court, down the court; pass, pass, pass; shot, shoot, shoot; miss, miss, miss; dunk, dunk, dunk; whistle, whistle, whistle, whistle, whistle, whistle, whistle, whistle, whistle, whistle, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul; free throw, free throw, free throw, free throw, free throw, free throw, free throw, free throw, free throw, free throw...
    I admit I watch a lot of basketball, not because I like the damn game, but (a) because almost everything else on television other than Two and a Half Men and Perry Mason reruns is crap and (b) because I’m a typical sports fan who’ll root for his hometown team no matter how idiotic the sport.
    Right now, for example, I’m a partisan of the Boston Celtics. (I’m even beginning to root for my former hometown team, the Knicks, now that Dolan's been forced to get rid of his lover, that bigoted jackass Isiah Thomas.). What’s more, I have a certain affection for various players and coaches ─ Doc Rivers, for example, and Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, Rajon Rondo, Ray Allen, Greg Stiemsma, and Big Baby Davis
    But all that aside, dispassionate analysis shows that the game of basketball is unalterably stupid.
    Why, for example, in this supposedly non-contact sport, are certain players ─ Charles Barkley for example in years gone by or current golden boy LeBron James ─ allowed to back their way to the basket by means of shoving their huge butts into defending players until they’re close enough to lay the ball in?
    And why are low-echelon players, standing immobile as statues, called for "blocking" when a LeBron or Derrick Rose or Dwight Howard or other anointed superstar crashes into them, elbows flying?
    And why do announcers insist on using semi-illiterate neologisms like "athleticism" and "physicality" whenever a showboating idiot performs a triple pirouette slam dunk rather than simply laying the ball in the basket?
    And why, if Team A chances to lead by 20 points after the first quarter, is it guaranteed that Team B will make up the deficit in the second quarter then go ahead by 20 in the third quarter only to see Team A come back to tie the game in the final seconds of the fourth quarter and send things into overtime to the delight of the broadcast sponsors?
    And why, if seven players are scrambling for a rebound, will the ball be awarded to the supermost of the superstars involved while the least consequential run-of-the-mill participant will be charged with a pushing, hacking, or shoving foul as he lies bleeding on the woodwork?
    And above all, why, given the rule that one must continually bounce the ball (dribble it) when running hither and thither about the court, are designated "superstars" such as the recently retired Michael Jordan allowed to race from half court cradling the ball without dribbling until they’re close enough to the basket to leap up and dunk it? (In the meanwhile, of course, members of the hoi polloi are being whistled for "walking" if one of their toes twitches.)
    Ask any sports commentator, such as loudmouth moron Chris Berman, to explain and he’ll tell you that "The Fans" love it. Well "The Fans" love lots of things ─ like fist fights and topless cheerleaders and free piña coladas, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to get them. In Tuesday's Celtic-Miami Heat game, instant replay showed a Miami player taking about ten steps without dribbling the ball and without being called for traveling. Celtic play-by-play man Mike Gorman dryly remarked, "There’s no such thing as traveling in the NBA."
    Is there is a solution to all this crap?
    As usual, Dome of Glass has the answer, one that will transform basketball into a truly enjoyable and pulse-quickening spectator sport while making the annual March Madness whoop-de-do truly Mad if not truly whoop-de-do:

● Make the game a contact sport
● Do away with the dribbling rule
● Redesign the ball so that it bounces funny and is easier to throw by making it smaller and oval-shaped
● Clad the warriors in high-impact plastic armor
● Eliminate backboards and baskets (which discriminate against short people) and replace them with goal posts
● Play the game out of doors in huge stadiums
● Institute a bounty system that rewards players who damage other players

Oh...wait a minute...that would be football.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Tom Sowell: A Voice of Reason in the Wilderness

2012-04-10T18:25:08Z

                                      Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at
                                      Stanford University. His website is http://www.tsowell.com

Once again Tom Sowell has brought his unmatched intellect, rationality, and research to bear on one of the many liberal dogmas that plague our nation ─ that statistical disparities in employment, loans, college admissions, etc. between certain favored groups (women and blacks) and their numerical representation in the country at large, is proof of discrimination. This invidious and nonsensical quasi-theological doctrine has infected our legal system since the days of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the concomitant usurpation of the courts by liberal activist judges.

    A LONGSTANDING legal charade was played out again recently, when Federal Express paid $3 million to settle an employment discrimination case brought by the U.S. Department of Labor.
    Federal Express was accused of both racial discrimination and sex discrimination. FedEx denied it.
    Why then did they pay the $3 million? Because it can cost a lot more than $3 million to fight a discrimination case. Years ago, the Sears department store chain spent $20 million fighting a sex discrimination charge that took 15 years to make its way through the legal labyrinth. In the end, Sears won — if spending $20 million and getting nothing in return can be called winning.
    Federal Express was apparently not prepared to spend that kind of money and that kind of time fighting a discrimination case. The net result is that the government and much of the media can now claim that race, sex and other discrimination are rampant, considering how many anti-discrimination cases have been "won."
    At the heart of these legal charades is the prevailing dogma that statistical disparities in employment — or mortgage lending, or anything else — show discrimination.
    In both the Federal Express case and the earlier Sears case, statistical differences between the mix of the workforce and the population mix were the key evidence presented to show discrimination.
    In the Sears case, there was not even one woman who worked in any of the company’s 900 stores who claimed to have been discriminated against.
    It was all a matter of statistics — and of the arbitrary dogma that statistical disparities show discrimination.
    Once statistical disparities have been demonstrated, the burden of proof shifts to the employer to prove his innocence, contrary to centuries of legal tradition that the burden of proof in on the accuser.
    No burden of proof whatever is put on those who argue as if there would be a random distribution of racial and other groups in the absence of discrimination.
    Happenstances may be random but performances seldom are. Most people are right-handed but, among major league hitters with lifetime batting averages of .330 and up, there have been 15 left-handed batters and only 5 right-handed batters since the beginning of the 20th century. All the best-selling beers in the United States were created by people of German ancestry. Anyone who follows professional basketball knows that most of the leading stars are black.
    Some years ago, a study of National Merit Scholarship finalists found that more than half were first-born children, even in five-child families. Jews are less than one percent of the world’s population but they won 14 percent of the Nobel Prizes in literature and the sciences during the first half of the 20th century, and 29 percent during the second half.
    It would be no problem at all to fill this whole column — or this entire page — with examples from around the world of gross statistical disparities in outcomes, in situations where discrimination was not involved. But those who take the opposite view — that numbers show discrimination — do not have to produce one speck of evidence to back up that sweeping conclusion. Human beings are not random events. Individuals and groups have different histories, cultures, skills and attitudes. Why would anyone expect them to be distributed anywhere in a pattern based on statistical theories of random events? Much less make the absence of such a pattern become a basis for multimillion dollar lawsuits?
    However little evidence or logic there may be behind the belief that an absence of random distribution shows discrimination, there are nevertheless strong incentives for some people to cling to that belief anyway. Those who lag behind — whether educationally, economically or otherwise — have every incentive to think of themselves as victims of those who are more successful.
    Those who want their votes have every incentive to go along, or even to actively promote that idea. So do those who want to see issues as moral melodramas, starring themselves on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.
    The net result is an invincible dogma — and a polarized country

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Hundreds of Dwarfs, Thousands of Dwarfs, Millions and Millions And Millions of Dwarfs

2012-04-05T04:00:00Z

    Nowadays, after collapsing into my wine-stained recliner for a little after-dinner relaxation ─ be it Television, Television, Television, Television, or Television ─ I find that it’s here a dwarf, there a dwarf, everywhere a dwarf dwarf. Frankly, this pisses me off. I don’t fork over $80 a month to DirecTV in order to pay homage to under-sized men and women. When it comes to relaxation and entertainment, dwarfs rate at roughly the same level on my abomination scale as mimes, ventriloquists, Regis Philbin, and Taylor Swift.
    Recent TV shows that have featured one or more of the Little People include Seinfeld, Touched by an Angel, Becker, Darma and Greg, Fantasy Island, Diff’rent Strokes, Carnivale, Knee High PI, Game of Thrones, and the more-or-less reality series Little People, Big World
    As for big screen productions, significant quantities of dwarfs found gainful employment in Goldmember, Foul Play, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Court Jester, Ship of Fools, The Spy Who Shagged Me,: The Man With the Golden Gun, Prêt à Porter, Saratoga Trunk, Willow, Legend, The Elephant Man, Amadeus, several Harry Potter movies, various Star Wars movies, and Werner Herzog’s bizarre allegory, Even Dwarfs Started Small.
    (Note that the expressions "Dwarf," Little Person," and "LP" have been declared OK by the elders of the First Church of Political Correctness. The word "Midget," however, has joined niggard, retard, Chinaman, and squaw in the elders’ lexicon of proscribed nouns.)

* * *

    Once upon a time, after the Munchkins and Oompa Loompas and Seven Dwarfs* had run their deplorable courses, I dared hope that the little person market had maxed out and that the dwarf fad would disappear into the shrubbery just as the horrific chimpanzee craze of the 30s and 40s had faded into obscurity in conjunction with Johnny Weissmuller’s expanding waistline and the appalling Cheetah’s long-awaited ascension to that great monkey farm in the sky.
    But no such luck.
    It turned out that Dopey, Sleepy, the Munchkins, and the Oompa Loompas were not mere zits on the face of a still-pubescent entertainment industry, but a foretaste of the future...the proverbial tip of the proverbial iceberg...the early rumblings of the proverbial earthquake that would spawn a proverbial tsunami of proverbial dwarfs (proverbially).
    At this point ─ in a desperate attempt to avoid the wrath of the New York Times, Chris Matthews, the Dwarf Defense League, and the Little People Caucus of the Anti-Defamation League ─ I want it known that I have nothing personal against the altitudinally challenged among us.
    This tolerant attitude, however, does not mean I want to be deluged with dwarf heroes, dwarf heroines, dwarf villains, evil putty-nosed dwarfs, song-and-dance dwarfs, leprechaun dwarfs, computer-generated dwarfs, and reality series dwarfs. As far as I’m concerned, the boob-box functions best as a soothing electronic lullaby that gentles me to sleep, mouth agape, beer bottle lolling in hand. Any intrusion of dwarfs, singing or otherwise, is like a mis-set alarm clock or a nighttime wake-up call from an insomniac rooster.

* * *

    A case in point: HBO’s maxi-series, Game of Thrones.
    I’ve caught quite a few segments of this lurid amalgam of made-for-TV fantasy crap even though I haven’t the vaguest idea of what the hell is going on. The plot (if there is one) is so complex and there are so many characters with so many beards and so many unpronounceable names that it’s impossible for anyone not on an acid trip to sort out a coherent story line. Moreover, most of the episodes I’ve seen are randomized reruns. The not unexpected result is that the entire saga has devolved in my mind into a vast non sequitur.
    Nevertheless, I keep watching.
    Why do I keep watching?
    Why does anyone keep watching?
    I and anyone keep watching for the same reasons that millions upon millions of other emotionally immature, brain-dead idiots keep watching.

1. Breathes there a man with soul so dead as not to enjoy head-loppings, disembowelments, throat-slittings, spurting blood, tongue removals, scalded bodies, skull bashings, impalements, gaping wounds, and the ripping out of beating hearts?

2. What red-blooded male viewer (and quite a few female viewers) can fail to be stimulated by Tits and Ass sequences featuring some of the most delectable broads appearing in prime time ─ for example the hot blonde ingenue who gets mounted by a seven-foot-tall surfer-type barbarian with a three-foot-long pigtail. (Damn the luck! Why couldn’t I have been born a seven-foot-tall surfer-type barbarian with a three-foot-long pigtail.)

    But alas and woe! When last I chanced upon an episode, the seven-foot-tall barbarian and his three-foot-long pigtail had been snuffed, the gorgeous blonde had fallen on hard times resulting in smudged eyeliner and disheveled hair, and the plot (whatever it is) had been hijacked by a dwarf.
    Okay, I’ll concede that the dwarf in question, the British actor Peter Dinklage, is good looking as dwarfs go and not a bad little actor to boot, but it strains credulity ─ as well as my powers of identification ─ for Mr. Dinklage to wind up between the fictional sheets with an attractive fictional brunette.
    Granted, the whole show strains credulity (in fact it demolishes it), but my point holds ─ this particular directorial gambit ─ dwarf as sex object ─ is gratuitous at best, liberal propaganda at worst. The obvious aim is to convince all us heightists out there (heightism is an actual liberal Newspeak word) that Politically Correct chicks are as itchy to jump into the sack with Toulouse-Lautrec as with Brad Pitt. I mean, like, don't-y’-know, it’s not how a man looks that matters nor how much money he has, it’s what he is. (If you’re not sure as to what the meaning of "is" is, give Bill Clinton a buzz.)

* * *

I’m not the only one who gets a bit queasy watching love scenes involving dwarfs (though to be honest, motion picture love scenes of any sort have been inducing nausea in me ever since I was a little boy). In Betty Adelson’s meticulously-researched pro-dwarf opus, "The Lives of Dwarfs: Their Journey from Public Curiosity to Social Liberation," the author disapprovingly quotes a critic’s review of five-foot-tall Danny DeVito in the film "Living Out Loud:"

I cannot watch Danny DeVito in a love scene without barfing. Dwarfs should not be permitted by law from having love scenes in movies...I don’t have anything against these people. I just think they should stay the hell out of the movies I patronize. Or at least we should have a dwarf warning: You know WARNING, THIS MOVIE WILL SHOW DANNY DEVITO IN A LOVE SCENE.

    Putting aside the fact that Danny is not a dwarf (4’ 10" and under is the qualifying altitude), I tend to agree with the critic’s sentiments. I watch television to be entertained ─ not to be preached to by liberal assholes or educated by artsy-fartsy surrealist directors or encouraged to worship at the feet of Frog cinematic poseurs whose brain cells have been flushed away over the years by a regimen of dope, booze, psychedelic drugs, Bolshevik propaganda, and a market basket of social diseases.
    Ms. Adelson, who clearly considers herself to be on the side of the angels, bemoans the shortage of "challenging" roles for Little People, particularly for female members of the clan. She notes with a touch of huffiness, "Since exceptional, youthful beauty is the sine qua non for most movie roles for women, female dwarfs are automatically ruled ineligible,"
    Well duh...I wonder if the same sort of sexist bigotry is at play in the cover art for every goddamn women’s magazine in the world? You say female dwarfs have a tough time finding jobs in the acting profession? Shocking! Just another example of the sort of vile, uncalled for prejudice that keeps Refrigerator Perry from playing Hamlet or Rosie O’Donnell from being cast as Peter Pan or Smoky the Bear from appearing as Sylvester the Cat.
    And how about me? Why should unfortunates like myself who were born with a congenital inability to perform on stage, screen, or television be prevented from pursuing lucrative careers as actors?

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

* I’ve always suspected there was hanky panky going on between the Dwarfs and their attractive, if comatose, young charge. I mean, like, I wouldn’t trust Happy, Doc, Bashful, or Grumpy with any daughter of mine. And as for Sneezy, I have it from highly peachable sources that his real name is "Sleazy" and that Disney changed it to avoid offending the Sleaze community.