Short Stories, Long Odds

I’m walking to school after getting off the Orange Line today, a train which prompted me to invent this toy for the paper’s Holiday Dangerous Toys List:

Stabbers! – The Orange Line Activity Set
Price: $19.99
Tagline: “Any More Carnage and They’ll Have to Rename it the Red Line!”
Description: Comes with plastic train, sweat pants, shiv
Hazards: May cause children to act like everyone else on the Orange Line

and I see the guy handing out the Metros. I take one because he’s nice, even though I’ve already read today’s AP dispatch on the train. I grab a Dig outside the station and walk up Mass Ave. I see a brand new BMW parked on the street, and it has a book on the dash board.

The title is: “I wish I felt good some of the time: learning to cope”

I’m not going to give you the usual litany of reasons why we should eat the rich, especially since I’m planning on being rich now. But some things I’ve read about in the last few days make this and America’s normal obsession with unimportant bullshit even more silly than usual. Its easy to say but I can’t tell you how many people I know that are healthy, shod, clothed, sheltered, and HAVE TIVO, for God’s sake, and are still unhappy.

Well, via Tiny Revolution, I have news for them - Jews are now writing numbers on Palestinians!

When they started building the wall, the giant pink elephant in the Judeo living room was the camp, of course: during the Holocaust, Jews were held within walls, and wanted out. We all know that, so everyone sort of wondered what the hell was going on when they started walling themselves in. Now they’ve taken it a step further, and started writing ID numbers on Palestinians, either without a touch of irony or bathed in it.

So then, it should come as no surprise that, in a world where Iraq’s liberators shut off the water and power to a city with thousands of children in it, that a West Virginia man who won $315,000,000 got drunk and crashed his truk into a pylon. He had a pistol and $117,000 in cash on him. In January, the same guy assaulted the manager of a bar.

In this same world, Jason Gambini juices up for the long ball at the same time that the world’s leading supplier of cheap AIDS drugs is going to be legally forced to stop supplying them.

On a final note, I’d like both congratulate and console Sen. Ben Nelson (D - Nebraska) on fending off a potential party disaster by apparently not taking the job Karl Rove offered him a few weeks ago - Secretary of Agriculture. Nebraska’s Reuplican Governor Mike Johanns would have been choosing his replacement had Nelson gone up to The Show, tipping the GOP majority in the Senate even farther: instead, Johanns will be taking the Cabinet job himself. I sure hope the Democratic party is going to throw pantloads of money and support at Nelson for the mid-terms, because he’s going to need it: Bush carried Nebraska by 33 points.