From Alton, Illinois.....
A lament for my future home state:
After years of taking our state down the toilet, the GOP was given more power. Worse, this new crop of teabaggers now have absolute control, and just put a guy in office his fellow republicans thought should be in jail. How could anyone take us seriously?
We were mocked for not knowing how to vote 10 years ago. What is more frightening is when some of us do.
Sigh. Still, I want to move there. We need as many hands as possible to push and shove and yell in America's Wang as we can get!
Doc's Cheers and Jeers begins below the fold, with news from around the nation, around the world, and up your alley! ("Up my alley?" Up yours!)
DISCLAIMER: AAbshier's Cheers and Jeers are not affiliated in any way, shape, or form, with Bill in Portland Maine's Cheers and Jeers. The use of the words JEERS and CHEERS , the swoosh/gong device, pie references, pootie pics, Birdbrain64 and Schwede flirting with each other, mattress references, whomps, goats, kvetching over meta diaries, the heartbreak of psoriasis, and flicked peas are all used with permission of Bill in Portland Maine and the members of the C&J Café community. Any further resemblances to BiPM`s Cheers and Jeers are deliberately coincidental. So there.
NOTE: Today's Cheers and Jeers is brought to you by the letter "L".
Doc's Bad Joke of the Week
Christian fundamentalist humor. Wow. These jokes are so lame they truly fit the criteria for bad joke of the week. Via My Right-Wing Dad, some quick-hit Bible jokes:
Q. What excuse did Adam give to his children as to why he no longer
lived in Eden?
A. Your mother ate us out of house and home.
Q. What kind of man was Boaz before he married Ruth?
A. Ruthless.
Q. Why didn't they play cards on the Ark?
A. Because Noah was standing on the deck.
Thanks! Praise be, I'm here all week! Try the manna, it's excellent!
Speaking of pseudo-Christians:
Jeers to the now ironically-named TLC (The Learning Channel) who has now foisted Moose-alini on a mostly ungrateful nation, in the form of Sarah Palin's Alaska. I'll let Nancy Franklin of The New Yorker provide the succinct but deadly takedown:
I’ve seen only one episode of the show so far, but I’m not optimistic. We do meet her parents, but nearly every other moment comes across as calculated—including, in the first episode, the absence of her daughter Bristol—and we find out nothing about Alaska that we didn’t learn in elementary school. I know that some Americans think Palin is stupid, but I never realized that she thinks we’re stupid.
Emphasis Franklin's. Of course for Palin's many fanboys and fangirls, the show will provide ample wanking material entertainment for the long wintry nights. As for me, I'm through watching TLC! (A sympathetic Cheer to the citizens of Alaska. I don't like their politics, but they still deserve better than to have Moose-alini as their most famous citizen. Also. Too.)
Cheers to one of our nation's greatest composers, Aaron Copland, born 110 years ago yesterday. During his long career of composing, his works defined an American sound in classical music. In his later years he turned to conducting, both his own works and those of other American composers, always championing the cause of American music.
This video combines old 8mm and 16mm clips with Copland's The Promise of Living to great effect.
Jeers to being told, at least from one quarter, that the quality of my jokes is indicative of disease. (?) The Germans call it Witzelsucht, defined as, "a brain dysfunction that causes all sorts of compulsive silliness: bad jokes, corny puns, wacky behavior." It's speculated to arise from an injury or other lesion to the right frontal lobe. Well, there was that bicycle accident where I landed on my head in 1985, but I was telling bad jokes long before then!
(On the plus side, I have a really creative title for Bad Joke of the Week now!)
Cheers to taking-your-pet-with-you-awesomeness. I've been through the desert with a horse in my car.
No, really. It's on YouTube! Speaking of:
And now, a word from our sponsor:
This is obviously a spoof, but a funnier-than-hell spoof! (Language is NSFW)
Cheers to hate mail that approaches the lofty standards (or bottomless depths) of the infamous Dear Socialist Fuckstick magnum opus, in just one sentence:
I have read your website and it is obviously that your a foggot.
Be sure to check out David Thorne's reply, and the ensuing exchange. Suffice to say that "foggot" guy does not come off well. (via Hot Chicks With Douchebags) On that same topic, sort of:
Jeers to homophobic assholes with a radio microphone. Recall that the last time I hosted C&J I ran a YouTube clip of Ft. Worth city councilman Joel Burns telling his personal story of enduring homophobic bullying. What happened afterward? Yep, you guessed it: a douchebag shock jock, one Chris Krok (apt name, actually), a host on KLIF in Dallas, attacked Councilman Burns, even using an affected stereotypic lisp to do so. (KLIF also carries the syndicated radio shows of Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly. Quelle surprise.)
Cheers to science! And pooties! Scientists at MIT and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute studied how cats drink water:
Being engineers, the cat-lapping team next tested its findings with a machine that mimicked a cat’s tongue, using a glass disk at the end of a piston to serve as the tip. After calculating things like the Froude number and the aspect ratio, they were able to figure out how fast a cat should lap to get the greatest amount of water into its mouth. The cats, it turns out, were way ahead of them — they lap at just that speed.
This is why cats don't make a huge mess when they drink, like dogs do. This is just one reason why cats are the superior pet.
Finally, Cheers to laughing and dancing in the face of adversity. Erica McElrath of St. Louis has not been employed full-time since January of this year. She has responded to adversity by spending her days dancing in the street. She's not busking, either:
"I don't want money," said McElrath, 40, of St. Louis. "I come out here to make people smile."
She's also quite modest about her dancing ability--"I can't dance a lick," she says--but that doesn't stop her. I would even call her an enlightened being:
"Just be happy and do what you love," she said. "The money will come."
Inky says, "hit that reco button!"
What's on your mind, my friends?