Chris Hansen’s blog

…is here. It makes Diary of a Nobody look positively rip-roaring…

I wouldn’t have thought of it, but this artist in Australia uses a unique tool for a brush. Thanks to Mrs. Candy’s Amateur Cock Review for the reference.

from, of all places, the Daily Torygraph:

Three Texan surgeons were playing a round of golf. As they’re walking down the fairway, they strike up a conversation and the first surgeon says, “I reckon I’m the best surgeon in the world”. The other two enquire why and the first surgeon says, “I had a patient brought to me recently who had lost both his hands in an industrial accident. I sewed them back on and today that man has an audience to play the piano for Her Majesty the Queen”.

The second surgeon scoffs at this and says,”that’s nothing. Why I had a patient who lost both his arms in an automobile accident and I sewed them back on. At the last Olympic Games that man won a Gold Medal in the Field events”.

The third surgeon says, “that’s nothing. Several years ago a cowboy, high on alcohol and drugs, was riding his horse down a railroad track and collided with an oncoming express train. All I had to work with was the horse’s arse and a cowboy hat. Today that man is President of the United States.”

…from soc.org.freemasonry:

In the late 1960’s a US Navy cruiser anchored in Mississippi for a week’s shore leave.

The first evening, the ship’s Captain received the following note from a wealthy society matron:

“Dear Captain, Thursday will be my daughter Melinda’s Debutante Ball. I would like you to send four well mannered, handsome, unmarried officers in their formal dress uniforms to attend the dance. They should arrive promptly at 8:00 PM prepared for an evening of polite Southern conversation. They should be excellent dancers, as they will be the escorts of lovely refined young ladies. One last point: No Jews, please.”

At precisely 8:00 PM on Thursday, Melinda’s mother heard a polite rap at the door which she opened to find, in full dress uniform, four smiling, handsome, black officers.

Her mouth fell open, but pulling herself together, she stammered, “There must be some mistake.”

“No, Madam,” said the first officer. “Captain Goldberg never makes mistakes.

Those of you who, like HWMBO, enjoy solving sudoku puzzles owe your enjoyment partially to this gentleman.

NATHAN MENDELSOHN, SCHOLAR 1917-2006 Absent-minded polymath who taught mathematics at the University of Manitoba for 57 years made his name in combinatorics, a dazzling bit of science that no Sudoku puzzle can be without

RON CSILLAG Special to The Globe and Mail

TORONTO — Nathan Mendelsohn may well have been the absent-minded professor from central casting. He would go to work by car and return home by bus. His wife would send him shopping and he would come back with the wrong items (“I’ll cook what he brings,” she once said with a shrug). And there was the time he took his family to the movies and agreed to stand in the rain to buy the tickets while his wife and two sons took shelter indoors. Prof. Mendelsohn decided he didn’t want to see the movie after all, so he drove home.

Then there was the brilliant mathematician who saw beauty in the abstract. The Order of Canada member who made his own furniture, jewellery and wine, and delighted in performing hypnosis and magic tricks. The one who never wrote anything down because he didn’t have to. With his sly sense of humour, he would appreciate the designation of polymath.

Prof. Mendelsohn taught mathematics at the University of Manitoba for 57 years, ending his career in 2005 as distinguished professor emeritus. He headed the math department for about 20 years, authored 140 research papers — about double the average professor’s career output — and was a leading light in a branch of pure mathematics called combinatorics, which deals with the abstract relationships of objects to each other. One application is the math that underlies the popular Sudoku puzzles.

His and others’ theories bore practical applications in such areas as scheduling, cryptography and software testing, often decades after they were promulgated. Helen, his wife of 62 years, had another name for her husband’s work: “dreamy mathematics” (though she had no qualms pronouncing that she “really” hated math).

Prof. Mendelsohn worked in other fields of mathematics, including computing and numerical analysis, graph and design theory, and many branches of algebra. But it was combinatorics for which he was best known.

“It is probably safe to say that there is not a combinatorialist or universal algebraist in the world who has not heard of Nathan Mendelsohn, and that probably very few of them have not quoted at least one of his papers or worked in an area of research which he has helped develop,” stated the Royal Society of Canada in awarding the Henry Marshall Tory Medal to Prof. Mendelsohn in 1979.

Mathematics, he declared in a 1985 National Film Board short, “is my vocation, my avocation, my hobby, my playground. I do other things for relaxation — I enjoy them — but my greatest pleasure is working with mathematical concepts.”

He first encountered that pleasure in Grade 3 when he became aware of two things: the power of immediate recall, and that he knew more math than his teacher did without really trying.

His father, Sam, an ironworker, came to Toronto with his four children in 1918 to join relatives after they had been burned out of their tenement in Brooklyn. The clan settled on Euclid Avenue, and its descendants note the connection to the ancient Greek mathematician.

Young Nathan amused himself by taking apart clocks (usually putting them back together). He was awarded a four-year scholarship to the University of Toronto, where he completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees and, in 1941, his doctorate.

While still an undergraduate, he belonged to the team that won the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, said to be the toughest math test in the world. Meantime, he was advised to take up magic as a way to calm tremors in his hands, and he studied the hucksters and pitchmen at the Canadian National Exhibition. His sleight of hand landed him second prize at an International Brotherhood of Magicians contest, just behind a young amateur named Johnny Carson.

But there was a war on, and Prof. Mendelsohn’s talents were needed in defence research. He was enjoined from talking about the work — he volunteered bits and pieces much later — but his family believes it involved code-breaking and artillery simulations, continuing the age-old use of mathematics for military applications. (A similar stint in the early 1960s at the Rand Corp. was even more hush-hush.)

At war’s end, he headed to Kingston, Ont., to teach at Queen’s University, where he stayed for three years.

Asked about the short interval, his son, Eric, a professor of math at the U of T, explained: “He understood that, as a Jew, he would never get a permanent position. Queen’s already had a Jewish professor in the department.”

So he settled in Winnipeg, where the University of Manitoba welcomed any and all to build its fledgling math department, and where Prof. Mendelsohn became deeply involved in the city’s vibrant Jewish community. Raised in a modern Orthodox family, he was drawn more to Judaism’s teachings on morality than its ritual. Evidence for the existence of God, he reasoned, was “circumstantial” — not quite enough for a scientist.

But with a salary of about $3,000 a year, he was forced to work during the summers, driving to Quebec City with his family for teaching jobs.

He first came to international notice after co-authoring a paper in 1961 on Latin squares — grids in which no two numbers may appear in the same row or column (essentially a numeric Sudoku puzzle). Tough enough on a standard 9×9 grid — but Prof. Mendelsohn raised eyebrows by successfully constructing five pairs of 12×12 grids. Visualized in three dimensions, with each grid placed over its pair, the numbers repeated neither in rows and columns nor up and down. And it was all done without a computer.

“That was absolutely extraordinary,” said Michael Doob, whom Prof. Mendelsohn hired to teach math at the University of Manitoba. “He was known for idiosyncrasies, but he taught without any notes at all. And I don’t think he had a mean bone in his body. He was a real mensch.”

Prof. Mendelsohn forged friendships with some of the leading names in the rarefied world of higher math, including the eccentric Hungarian number theorist Paul Erdos, who made a habit of showing up on fellow mathematicians’ doorsteps unannounced and with no money.

Prof. Mendelsohn also built his own cabinets. “He’d make four or five pieces of furniture and then stop,” his son recalled. “He was like that with math, too. He was more interested in finding a new problem and solving it than worrying about one classical problem.”

Two modern theories bear Prof. Mendelsohn’s name. Both of them, said his son, are “just a genius’s slight twist on an old idea to get mathematics to give up one of her profound secrets.”

Prof. Mendelsohn guided graduate students until a year ago, and he never stopped doodling on the proverbial napkin. The page proofs for his last paper arrived the morning he died.

Nathan Saul Mendelsohn was born in New York on April 14, 1917. He died in Toronto on July 4, 2006, of hepatitis C contracted through tainted blood. He was 89. He leaves two siblings, two sons, five grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. His wife died in January of 2005.

From a mailing list I’m on comes the following:

President George W. Bush was scheduled to visit an Episcopal church outside Washington as part of his campaign to restore his poll standings.

Bush’s campaign manager made a visit to the Rector of the church, and said to him, “We’ve been getting a lot of bad publicity because of the President’s position on stem cell research, the Iraq war, Katrina and the like.

We’d gladly make a contribution to the church of $100,000 if, during your sermon, you’d say the President is a saint.”

The Rector thought it over for a few moments and finally said, “The church is in desperate need of funds, so I’ll do it.”

Bush showed up for the sermon and the Rector began:

“I’d like to speak to you this morning about our President. George Bush is a liar, a cheat, and a low-intelligence weasel. He took the tragedy of September 11 and used it to frighten and manipulate the American people. He lied about weapons of mass destruction and invaded Iraq for oil and money, causing the deaths of tens of thousands and making the United States the most hated country on earth.

“He appointed cronies to positions of power and influence, leading to widespread death and destruction during Hurricane Katrina. He awarded contracts and tax cuts to his rich friends so that we now have more poverty in this country, and a greater gap between rich and poor, than we’ve had since the Great Depression.

“He instituted illegal wiretaps when getting a warrant from a court would have been a mere administrative detail; he had his henchmen lie to Congress about it, then claimed he is above the law.

“He has headed the most corrupt, bribe-inducing political party since Teapot Dome. The national surplus has turned into a staggering national debt of $7.6 trillion, gas prices are up 85% and vital research into global warming and stem cells is stopped cold because he’s afraid to lose votes from some religious kooks.

“He is the worst example of a Christian I’ve ever known. But compared to Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, George Bush is a saint.”

…is here, from Nightcharm. A very perceptive and charming appreciation of Mae West, several decades after her death.

…to . Many happy returns of the day!!!

I’ve hooked up a router in the kitchen, wired to the router in the study, and connected the iMac and my Dell laptop to it. Unfortunately, while you can see files on the main computer from those computers, you cannot access them (so, for instance, HWMBO tried to play an mp3 file which he could see from the laptop. It gave him an error message. So it seems that adding the router has screwed up the networking and file sharing. Fuzzbuzz!

We’re going to Cardiff tomorrow for a short break, so I won’t be able to try to fix it until Sunday or Monday at the earliest.

Will post when we get back.

Homepages are a bit easier to change than email addresses. I’ve bought the domain “christianphansen.com” and have switched my website there, with redirects from the old site that will be good for a few months, and then expire when I cancel my Demon account.

Here is my new website address.

There isn’t much new on it at the moment, but I am slowly refreshing some of the immigration and dual citizenship information and trying to brush up the nap of it, so to speak.

I left the seminary because I didn’t see myself as celibate. This gentleman, from Africa, seems to have had no such qualms.

…is here, but for Gawd’s sake DON’T try this at home, kiddies. You will have instant high blood pressure and probably a stroke. I would rather eat my own head.

…is here, and again you must look at “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…” Why buy a pill when you can use the Sweat DVD and have the real thing!

…is here, but watch out for the white vans cruising your town’s streets; you may end up doing KP in Baghdad.

…is here, but don’t let your boss see you looking at it.

…is here (see the “People Who Bought This Item Also Bought…” section). And remember, those sheep don’t like hairy guys.

…is here. And if you say it’s lame, I will probably agree with you.

…because I was wondering whether Prince Philip is a Freemason. Didn’t find out anything about that (a Masonic friend thinks he is, but there is no firm pronouncement), but did get the following result at the bottom of the first page. I’ve airbrushed out the address in case anyone fancies a shopping trip.

Get ‘im while he lasts (he’s 85, you know).

I was directing very important truck traffic through a water hazard somewhere or other, at night. Suddenly my mobile phone beeped, and I looked at it and continued. A few minutes later I woke up and heard a beep.

My mobile phone was telling me it needed recharging. So I went downstairs to connect it up to the mains.

Interesting that the first beep didn’t wake me up, just directed me in my dream to look at my mobile phone, which was not at all like the Motorola Razr V3 I use. Darned beta-blocker.

…an awesome commercial.

…and I’m not talking about cars (Do they still make Triumphs??)

Yesterday I went for my yearly retinal exam at St. Thomas’s Hospital. I got the all-clear for another year, and the doctor remarked how stable my eyes had been for the past 10 years or so. Hopefully this will continue.

Also yesterday I finally cracked the problem of connecting my laptop up to the wireless network. It seems that uninstalling the card, reinstalling it, and making sure that I allowed Windoze to control access to the network works. So I won’t have to run a wire out to the kitchen, attach a router to the end of it, and wire up the iMac and the laptop both. I can do with the wire we’ve now got there. Hurrah!

Now to get the other laptop connected up.

…along with the person who points the mouse at the screen to make it move and the one who makes a xerox copy of a diskette and sends it in to customer service.

So how does the machine read the signature on your credit cards? Find out here.

here, on a dark and stormy night.

I love this….I think it needs to be on every TV station at least once an hour.

Courtesy of Ron’s Log comes this obituary. I suspect the booze, myself.

BOLD those shows you’ve seen three or more episodes of in your lifetime.

I won’t tag anyone, but you’ll find that your answers will be greatly affected by your age. I added two myself.

7th Heaven
Adam-12
Aeon Flux
ALF
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Alias
American Idol/Pop Idol/Canadian Idol/Australian Idol/etc.
America’s Next Top Model
Angel
Are You Being Served?
Arrested Development
Automan
Babylon 5
Babylon 5: Crusade
Battlestar Galactica (the old one)
Battlestar Galactica (the new one)
Baywatch
Beavis & Butthead
Beverly Hills 90210
Black Adder
Bonanza
Bosom Buddies
Boy Meets World
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Bug Juice
Car 54 Where Are You?
Chappelle’s Show
Charlie’s Angels
Charmed
Cheers
Columbo
Commander in Chief
Coupling – UK
Cowboy Bebop
Crossing Jordan
CSI
CSI: Miami
CSI: NY
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Danny Phantom
Dark Angel
Dark Skies
Davinci’s Inquest
Dawson’s Creek
Dead Like Me
Deadliest Catch
Deadwood
Degrassi High
Degrassi: The Next Generation
Designing Women
Desperate Housewives
Dharma & Greg
Different Strokes
Doctor Who
Dragnet
Drake & Josh
Due South
Earth2
Emergency!
Entourage
ER
Everwood
Everybody Loves Raymond
Facts of Life
Family Guy
Family Ties
Farscape
Father Ted
Fawlty Towers
Felicity
Firefly
Frasier
Friends
Futurama
Get Smart
Ghost Hunters
Gilligan’s Island
Gilmore Girls
Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.
Green Acres
Grey’s Anatomy
Grounded For Life
Growing Pains
Gunsmoke
Hannah Montana
Happy Days
Hercules the Legendary Journeys
Highlander
Hill Street Blues
Hogan’s Heroes
Home Improvement
Homicide: Life on the Street
House
I Dream of Jeannie
I Love Lucy
I Spy
In Living Color
Inuyasha
Invader Zim
Invasion
Iron Chef (Japan)
Iron Chef (US)
It Takes a Thief
Hell’s Kitchen
JAG
Jackass
Jamie Oliver’s Twist
Joey
Keen Eddie
Kitchen Confidential
Knight Rider
Kolchak: The Night Stalker (original)
Kolchak: The Night Stalker (reincarnation)
Laverne and Shirley
Law and Order
Law and Order: Special Victims Unit
Life On Mars
Little House on the Prairie
Lizzie McGuire
Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman
Lost
Lost in Space
Love, American Style
M*A*S*H
MacGyver
Malcolm in the Middle
Married… With Children
Melrose Place
Miami Vice
Mission: Impossible
Mod Squad
Monk
Mork & Mindy
Murphy Brown
My Three Sons
My Two Dads
My So-Called Life
NCIS
Ned Bigby’s Declassified School Survival Guide
Nip/Tuck
Numb3rs
One Tree Hill
Oz
Perry Mason
Pokemon
Power Rangers
Prey
Prison Break
Profiler
Project Runway
Quantum Leap
Queer As Folk (US)
Queer as Folk (British)
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
ReGenesis
Relic Hunter
Remington Steele
Rescue Me
Road Rules
Rome
Roseanne
Roswell
Saved by the Bell
Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?
Scrubs
Seinfeld
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
Sex and the City
Six Feet Under
Slings and Arrows
Smallville
So Weird
Soap
South Park
Space: Above & Beyond
Spaced
Spongebob Squarepants
Square Pegs
Star Trek
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Star Trek: Voyager
Star Trek: Enterprise
Stargate Atlantis
Stargate SG-1
Starsky & Hutch
Strange Luck
Stingray
Strictly Come Dancing/Dancing with the Stars etc
Strange World
Superman
Supernatural
Surface
Survivor
Taxi
Teen Titans
That 70’s Show
That’s So Raven
The 4400
The Addams Family
The Andy Griffith Show
The A-Team
The Avengers
The Beverly Hillbillies
The Brady Bunch
The Champions
The Cosby Show
The Daily Show
The Dead Zone
The Dick Van Dyke Show
The Flintstones
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
The Golden Girls
The Honeymooners
The Invisible Man (2000s)
The Jeffersons
The Jetsons
The L Word
The Love Boat
The Magnificent Seven
The Man from Atlantis
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
The Monkees
The Munsters
The Mythbusters
The O.C.
The Office (UK)
The Office (US)
The Outer Limits (original) I saw all of them, and have ’em all on DVD and tape.
The Outer Limits (new)
The Phoenix
The Pretender
The Professionals
The Real World
The Rockford Files
The Saint
The Shield
The Simpsons
The Six Million Dollar Man
The Sopranos
The Suite Life of Zack and Cody
The Sweeney
The Twilight Zone (original)
The Twilight Zone (reincarnation)
The Waltons
The West Wing
The Wonder Years
The X-Files
Third Watch
Thirty-something
Three’s Company
Threshold
TJ Hooker
Top Gear
Touching Evil
Twin Peaks
Veronica Mars
Whose Line is it Anyway? (US)
Whose Line is it Anyway? (UK)
Will and Grace
Wings
Wire in the Blood
Witchblade
WKRP in Cincinnati
Wonderfalls
Xena: Warrior Princess
You Can’t Do That On Television
Young Hercules

HWMBO tells me that Italy won.

I’m very pleased. Now TV, radio, and newspapers will return to normal.

What game are they playing anyway? I’ve disallowed comments to ensure that I never find out!

…and it has nothing to do with flu. I wonder if they’ll get an ornithologist to study it…

Only people interested in the arcane way that the Church of England is financed will be interested in this post. However, yesterday, at Southwark Diocesan Synod, I moved a motion to as the Archbishops’ Council to assess the status and accountability of the Church Commissioners. There was more, but an amendment cut off the end. The motion read: “THIS SYNOD requests an urgent review by the Archbishops’ Council of the status and accountability of the Church Commissioners[, together with their commitment to an ethical investment policy, with a view toward bringing the financial resources that are currently under the control of the Church Commissioners fully under the stewardship of the Archbishop’s Council and accountable to the Church and to God through the General Synod].” The italicised part was amended out of the final resolution.

The Church Commissioners are the successor body of Queen Anne’s Bounty, founded in 1704 to assist the clergy in parishes in poor areas of the country. The Ecclesiastical Commissioners were set up in the 19th Century to take over other funding for the Church through the transfer of lands belonging to dioceses and bishops. These bodies were amalgamated in 1947 to form the Church Commissioners.

In the early part of the 20th Century, several social housing estates were formed in South London due to the work of Octavia Hill, a reformer and housing campaigner. They were named after her, and one of these estates is in our Deanery of Southwark and Newington. The Church Commissioners owned these estates, and let them to people who would have trouble renting conventional housing.

Recently, the Church Commissioners decided they were “overexposed to the UK residential property market” (according to their 2005 Annual Report) and sold the properties to a consortium which is going to sell the flats to yuppies as they fall vacant. Meanwhile a social housing association (which is a front organisation for the new owners of the estate) will administer the flats. These houses will be removed from the social housing stock in South London.

The Church Commissioners were lobbied, picketed, and met with in order to get the estates to be sold to a real social housing landlord, who would preserve them as social housing stock. They not only refused, but were considered to be quite rude and underhanded in the way they sold them. The sale was announced on the Friday before a meeting of General Synod (the national legislature of the Church of England), where questions were to be put to the First Church Estates Commissioner, Andreas Whittam-Smith. It was a fait accompli by the time the meeting convened. General Synod was not best pleased.

As a result of this, our Deanery wished to pass a motion to censure the Church Commissioners. After discussion, we decided that, better than censure, we would ask for a review of the status and accountability of the Church Commissioners. We feel that they are not accountable in the normal course of events (as no consequences follow if they do not take heed of General Synod’s directions on investment and disinvestment) and something needs to be done.

We believe the Church Commissioners are worried about this motion, as Mr. Whittam-Smith actually asked to come to Synod and speak to us about accountability. He came (a true Tory grandee of the old style, white coiffed hair and all) but rambled on for much longer than his allotted time. Then, I moved this motion (using my maiden speech in Synod to do so), and after the amendment was debated and passed, the shortened motion was also passed. I was complimented on the speech by several people in a position to judge the quality of such things.

This will be one to watch. I understand that the motion may be debated in General Synod as early as February 2007, which is a meteoric speed for a motion coming from a Deanery. Normally these take three or four years to work their way up to General Synod. If passed, the review will take place and probably report sometime in 2008. I hope that true accountability of the

If anyone needs more proof that the US is chock full of religious nutcases, read this. May be time-limited, so get your squicks soon, folks!

Occasionally HWMBO insists we have fish for dinner. My doctor would like me to eat more broiled, steamed, or baked fish (not fried, of course). However, I really don’t like fish. I can choke down the fish in “fish ‘n’ chips” but that’s fried, thus bad for you. So last night I took two salmon fillets (boneless and skinless) out of the freezer. I bought asparagus, and cooked rice as well. Put salt, pepper, and dill on the fish, and baked it at gas mark 6 for about 15 minutes.

Now HWMBO eats his unadulterated with any sauce. However, I can’t really choke it down unless I load it with ketchup. He scorns, but if I didn’t have ketchup on it I’d be lost, staring at the naked salmon saying “How can I get rid of this without HWMBO knowing?”

So this is the result, photographed this very evening. Note that the fish is almost (but not quite) hidden from view. I was stingy with the ketchup this time.

Seen in alt.obituaries, and it’s probably not safe for work (unless you work in a blue state).

From: cubby77267 at aol dotcom
Newsgroups: alt.obituaries
Subject: Bush losing key demographic
Date: Sat, 01 Jul 2006 06:23:24 -0700

WASHINGTON, June 13 – President Bush appears to be losing support among a key group of voters who had hitherto stood firmly with the president even as his poll numbers among other groups fell dramatically.

A new Gallup poll shows that, for the first time, Bush’s approval rating has fallen below 50% among total fucking morons, and now stands at 44%. This represents a dramatic drop compared to a poll taken just last December, when 62% of total fucking morons expressed support for the president and his policies.

The current poll, conducted by phone with 1,409 total fucking morons between May 4 and May 8, reveals that only 44% of those polled believe the president is doing a good job, while 27% believe he is doing a poor job and 29% don’t understand the question.

The December poll, conducted by phone with 1,530 total fucking morons, showed 62% approved of the president, 7% disapproved and 31% didn’t understand the question.

Faltering approval ratings for the president among a group once thought to be a reliable source of loyal support gives Republicans one more reason to be nervous about the upcoming mid-term elections. “If we can’t depend on the support of total fucking morons,” says Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), “then we’ve got a big problem. They’re a key factor in our electoral strategy, and an important part of today’s Republican coalition.”

“We’ve taken the total fucking moron vote for granted,” says Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL), “and now we’re paying for it. We’ve let the Democrats control the debate lately, and they’ve dragged discourse back into the realm of complex, nuanced issues. So your average total fucking moron turns on his TV and sees his Republican Congressman arguing about Constitutional law or the complexities of state formation in the Middle East, and he tunes out. He wants to hear comforting, pandering, flattering bromides and he doesn’t want to hear a logical argument more complex than what you’d find on a bumper sticker.”

For Feeney, the poll is a dire warning that Republicans can ignore only at their peril. “This should send a signal that we have to regain control of the debate if we want the support of our key constituencies in the coming election and beyond. We need to bring public discourse back into the realm of stupidity and vacuity. We should be talking about homosexual illegal immigrants burning flags. We should be talking about the power of pride. We should be talking about freedom fries. These are the issues that resonate with total fucking morons.”

But some total fucking morons say it’s too late. Bill Snarpel of Enid, Oklahoma is a total fucking moron who voted for Bush in both 2000 and 2004. But he says he won’t be voting for Bush in 2008.

“I don’t like it that he was going to sell our ports to the Arabs. If the Arabs own the ports then that means they’ll let all the Arabs in and then we’ll all be riding camels and wearing towels on our heads. I don’t want my children singing the Star Spangled Banner in Muslim.”

Total fucking moron Kurt Meyer of Turlock, California also says his once solid support for Bush has collapsed. “He invaded Iraq and all those soldiers died, and for what? We destroyed all their WMDs, but now their new president is making fun of us and saying he’s going to build nuclear bombs and that we can’t stop him. Well, nuclear bombs are even worse than WMDs, so what did we accomplish?”

Laura McDonald, a total fucking moron from Chandler, Arizona, says she is disappointed that the president hasn’t been a more forceful advocate of Christian values. “This country was founded on Christian values,” she says, “but you’d never know it looking around and seeing all the Mexicans running around. I thought Bush was going to bring Jesus back into the government. Instead, Christians are being persecuted worse than ever before in history, because all these Mexicans come here and tell Christians that we have to respect their religious beliefs. So now it’s illegal for children to pray in school. Soon it will be illegal for them to speak English.”

Not all total fucking morons have turned their backs on the president. Jeb Larkin of Topeka, Kansas says he still fully supports Bush. “He is doing a great job. He is a great president. He is a great decider. I have a puppy. His tail sticks straight up and you can see his butthole.”

And not all Republican lawmakers are concerned about the poll. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), for one, does not find it a cause for anxiety. While he agrees that his party should not take total fucking morons for granted, they “really don’t have anywhere else to go. They’re never going to be able to understand someone like Al Gore or John Kerry or anybody intelligent and articulate who wants to talk about substantive issues. Just try having a conversation with one of them about global warming. They’ll say, ‘Oh, but Rush says volcanoes consume more ozone than humans do.’ I mean, they’re morons! Total fucking morons!”

“They’ve got nowhere else to go,” Alexander reaffirms with a smile, “and they always vote.”

I never got the hang of waterbeds, but I’d bet that the person who invented this got the hang of it…

…is here. Normally one gets ideas in the head, but this gentleman seems to have gotten one in another place…