SHOULD SMALL BORE RIFLERY be treated as a real sport, given that so many large bores have bodyguards to protect them? The whole thing seems horribly unfair to me and I am surprised that nothing has been done about such sizeism in our politically correct world. I am all for giving the small bores an equal shot with the big guys, except for life insurance salesmen, who are too irritating for words whatever their size and therefore should be hunted down and slain without mercy.

READERS OF THIS BLOG, all ten of you, know that I try to keep this place as humorous as possible. I believe, as did the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, that there is no new thing under the sun, and that it's always best to give other people the benefit of the doubt and that we should all remember to laugh at the absurdities of humanity. Sometimes, however, this is not really possible. Over on Indymedia, which I read even though I disagree politically with almost everything I read there, several commenters could not wait to piss on Pat Tillman's grave. The insults began with dumb jock and proceeded to get worse. I will not recount what was said; people can go to Indymedia and read for themselves; but let me make my position on this clear: Pat Tillman was an American hero, and the hateful scum trying to mock his life, his service, his death, and his memory are despicable bastards.

BIG GUNS: The United States Army asked several Western ski resorts for the return of howitzers used to cause planned avalanches. In what may be an unrelated development, the Dallas Cowboys agreed today to return a nuclear device given the team by former Gov. John Connally when he was Secretary of Defense.

RE: JOHN KERRY'S MEDALS: Did he look under the couch for them? They are probably there next to his ratty old sneakers.

HUBERT SELBY, JR, has passed away at the age of 75. His best known work, Last Exit to Brooklyn, was massively controversial in its day, given the book's notorious gang bang scene. Most works of literature pre Mr Selby managed to skip the graphic description of gang bangs; even Dostoevsky chose to gloss over the details of how Sonia made a living in Crime and Punishment, and we did not get a blow by blow account of Temple's rape by corncob in Faulkner's Sanctuary, but we live in a much more literal age and we must see what is going on, even when we know what is going on. A failure of the imagination on our part, I think.

THE BERLIN / BOSTON AXIS: The city of Berlin, Germany, recently installed garbage cans throughout the city that say thank you in three languages to whoever uses them, an invention being hailed as one of the great technological innovations of our time. News of this innovation has made its way to the United States, where, until now, garbage cans have been singularly skimpy with the praise. All of that is now changing. The city fathers of Boston, Massachusetts, for example, concerned about the heaps of garbage inundating the city and the lack of civility that comes from living up to your eyeballs in garbage laden Hefty bags, are thinking about importing the new German garbage cans, except that the Beantown bins will not say thank you but rather "The Yankees Suck!"

DRAFTY IN HERE:There’s a lot of talk going around these days about bringing back the draft, and I suppose many of the reasons its proponents give are valid and legitimate. But it strikes me that that a lot of these very same people spent their salad days thirty or forty years ago shouting “HELL NO! WE WON’T GO!!!” Which may be neither here not there; I certainly wouldn’t want to be judged by opinions I held thirty years ago; but it does lead me to suspect that calls for the resumption of the draft have very little to do with fairness and everything to do with recreating the anti-Vietnam War movement. Without the power and anxieties of the middle class behind them the antiwar movement in this country is just a tranquilizer away from the lunatic fringe. The greatest proof of this is what happened to the student movement after the draft ended in 1973. The student revolutionaries on the campuses, who thought they were going to lead the great upheaval against the evil, corrupt, warmongering AmeriKKKan establishment, found themselves abandoned by their foot soldiers, the scions of the middle classes who found that life in the USA was fine once they found they wouldn’t have to get shot at by the Vietnamese peasantry. The great revolution never came because it was strictly a one trick pony, and once the war went away so did the revolution. I strongly suspect that most of these antiwar types know deep down that they are largely irrelevant without the middle classes they despise so much, and that thought makes them nauseous. But politics makes strange bedfellows, to coin a phrase, and so long as the answer to “HELL NO! WE WON’T GO!!!” is “so who’s asking you to?” these people are going nowhere. On the other hand, I don’t think they’ll mind strange bedfellows at all. They are all for letting people do what they want in bed.

GIRAFFES HAVE NO VOCAL CORDS, which, given that they so seldom have anything very interesting to say, is probably just as well. I learned this particular bit of zoological trivia from a bottle cap, the bottle said cap was on having contained a popular brand of spearmint flavored iced tea. The brand shall remain nameless here, given that they haven’t paid me to advertise the company’s product (write a check, guys; I can be bought!). Bottle caps are much more educational than they used to be. When I was a boy bottle caps and box tops did little more than promote contests to win your very own super decoder ring or maybe some fake space monster tattoos that glowed in the dark and caused skin cancers in laboratory rats thirty years down the road. There was not too much you could do with a bottle cap, although Ted McGuire down at our local firehouse took a big piece of plywood and created a ten by twenty foot mosaic of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence for the Bicentennial using nothing but bottle caps (usually from beer bottles; Ted, may he rest in peace, was not a big fan of soft drinks) and chewing gum wrappers. That was something you don’t see everyday.

In any case, this iced tea has taught me that pigs sunburn, that mosquitoes have forty-seven teeth (of which more anon), and penguins are the only swimming bird that cannot fly; apparently all other swimming birds can fly either on their own or use their frequent flyer miles to get to Cancun for spring break. Now, can bottle caps be wrong? You bet they can. The dictum that mosquitoes have forty-seven teeth is not true. I have searched here and there, hither and yon, high and lo, who slapped me for being fresh, and I still can’t find any evidence that mosquitoes ever had teeth, much less forty-seven of them. Mosquitoes have two needle-like structures in their noses: one to pierce skin with and the other to drink the blood. They don’t have teeth; the little bastards are stabbing you, not gnawing on you. But then, all new educational technologies have these troubles; it’s part of the testing process.

For example, it took years for teachers to accept chalk over the hammer and chisel in the classroom; many teachers thought that students wouldn’t learn anything if there weren't actually chiseling their lessons into the schoolhouse walls, even if all that hammering and chiseling undermined the schoolhouse's structural integrity. People believed in education then and were willing to pay for it. Building contractors loved the hammer and chisel method as well, especially since an upscale school district could go through three or four schools in a year. Those days did not last; they never do, unfortunately. As always, an increasingly misinformed public's smallminded demands for lower school taxes took priority over educating children and school districts everywhere abandoned the hammer and chisel in favor of chalk. Not coincidentally, the price of building a new school skyrocketed after the introduction of chalk, as building contractors, used to building several schools a year, dropped the economy of scale practices they used up to that time and now charged huge amounts for a single school.

But even with its many problems the bottle cap may represent a great leap forward in education. For years teachers have tried, usually without success, to pass some of humanity’s collected wisdom on to the nation’s young. The reason for this failure is self-evident; the purpose of school, especially high school, is to keep kids off the streets and provide them with a social life in the idle hours between spells of watching television and going to the mall. If someone manages to beat the odds and actually acquires an education along the way so much the better; it keeps the parents from getting too suspicious.

But relief is on its way to the beleaguered taxpayer. These new educational technologies mean that more students can be educated in less space and for less money. The coming of the informational bottle cap, and its extension to box tops, beer cans, and candy bar wrappers, means that the thousands of teachers now working are no longer necessary and and can be replaced with minimum wage lunchroom workers. The American public will shortly see a return to the one room schoolhouse, that room being the cafeteria. SAT anxiety will become a thing of the past for high school seniors; rather than go through a labor intensive application process college admission offices will require a recent picture of the applicant; any kid who doesn’t look like a sumo wrestler can forget about getting into Harvard. Parents anxious about their child’s future will know that a skinny child is just not applying him or herself. The new technologies will effect other industries as well. Broccoli and spinach farmers will go bankrupt, as will many health food stores, as parents demand that their children eat more junk food. Medical supplies salesmen will get rich selling weight scales to America’s banks. Any student loan applicant who can see their feet without bending forward at the waist can forget about getting a loan. They are too great a risk. Yes, education will be a serious subject then, you’ll see…well, maybe not. To be honest, I’m still wondering whether or not educational bottle caps are a good thing. They could be, but I might be wrong. It’s been known to happen.

DUTCHESS COUNTY now has air as polluted as New York City's, according to the Poughkeepsie Journal. This is neither here nor there for you folks, but I havent been able to think of anything to write for quite a spell now and I figured I'd just write about something, anything, to see if I could pull something funny out of it. I havent had any luck really; I suppose I should care that the air I breathe is as bad as the city's but it doesnt really. When its as bad as Mexico City's air then I'll have something to say but at the moment apathy is rearing its ugly rear. In other news, a fellow here in town is under arrest for trying to shoot himself in the head; he failed and is now in the Dutchess County Jail. The director of the local public library will wear any company's t shirt on her morning walk in order to get money for the construction of a new library. The free advertising will cost donors $25 per walk, and I'm sure someone will eventually figure out how many t shirts she will have to wear in order to get the 10 million dollars needed for a new library. The news that IBM had a good quarter is also cheering everyone in our happy little burg, Dutchess County being a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of IBM. And the sun is shining and the forsythia are in bloom; spring is in the air, as is the pollen. Hay fever season is here again, dammit.

SPRING FORWARD. FALL BACK: And so daylight savings time is upon us once more. That daylight savings time is an abomination, the creation of a sick and perverted mind beyond the help of psychological intervention is a fact beyond the most gifted logician’s power to dispute. What galls me, however, is why millions of otherwise levelheaded Americans go along with this diseased idea every year. No daylight is actually saved in this yearly exercise in mass delusion; the planet receives the same amount of sunlight whether or not we turn our clocks backwards or forwards or even toss them into the garbage can along with today’s junk mail and the mashed lima beans little Johnny wouldn’t eat for dinner last night. Why should we as a nation, with the exception of Arizona and Indiana, lose an hour’s sleep and go in to work half asleep when we are being run ragged as it is? The United States already leads the world in the number of shirts, ties, and shoes damaged by the half awake pouring hot coffee on themselves. Doesn’t the government, which insists on this annual foolishness, realize that there are not enough hours in the day now without taking one away? This nation already has a city that never sleeps; I see no rational reason for the rest of the country to stay awake as well.

An ugly rumor credits Benjamin Franklin with the idea of daylight savings time. This is a foul calumny against a great American. Recent research by French scholars at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris suggests that the infamous Marquis de Sade was responsible for the idea. An examination of an early draft of Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, a draft recently donated to the Bibliotheque by an anonymous German named Schmidt, clearly puts the idea at page 167, between the Marquis’ recipe for brownies and instructions on how to play “Frere Jacques” on the strumpet. The idea appears in the manuscript as a way of allowing the Marquis, a late sleeper, to pick up streetwalkers during the daylight hours. The Marquis originally proposed the concept of daylight savings time to the government of the Bourbon monarchy, then to the government of the First Republic, and then to the government of the First Empire; all of them threw the Marquis into prison. Napoleon tossed Sade into a lunatic asylum, where he spent the rest of his life staging avant-garde plays and appearing in movies with Kate Winslet.

Given the provenance of this vile concept one would expect that no true blue American would ever try to implement it; daylight savings time, like many French ideas, such as deconstructionism and eating garden pests, seemed too irredeemably silly to the Founding Fathers to be really dangerous, and one would think that the imposition of such a depraved idea stood no chance in the highly moralistic American marketplace of ideas. If you thought this, you were wrong. American politicians, for reasons best known to themselves, decided to abandon their usual caution vis-à-vis odd French ideas, and in state after state passed daylight savings time into law, with the exception, as mentioned, of Indiana and Arizona. I don’t know how these two states managed to avoid jumping on the bandwagon, but they did, and now people from out of state complain when they call these states because they are an hour ahead or behind, as the case may be. But daylight savings time, I fear, is going nowhere. Having passed this foolish notion into law, politicians would be loath, as if they were not loathed enough as it is, to admit they made a mistake; they don’t want to explain why the emperor not only has no clothes, but is falling asleep as well. And let’s face it, no politician wants to admit that he swindled his constituents out of an hour’s sleep simply to get a contribution from the coffee lobby. That wouldn’t be right.

ESPERANTO: THREAT TO WORLD HEALTH? : Well known experts in this sort of thing, which is not the sort of thing you want people to know about, given the history of this sort of thing, and who will go nameless here because they somehow managed to get to Europe without bringing their wives or even without their wives finding out they were going, testified today before a World Health Organization commission in Brussels sprouts up to their armpits that such languages as Irish, Catalan, Norwegian, Czech, and those sounds computer experts make when they gather together in large numbers contain extremely high amounts of artificial preservatives, and that Esperanto, the world’s most successful artificial language, may actually be carcinogenic. European Union officials in Brussels are under increasing pressure from French snail farmers and Germans with no particular occupation except wandering the streets chanting political slogans through bullhorns calling for the end of the capitalist system while fighting with the police and eating knockwurst, to ban Esperanto completely as a health hazard, and that those languages with artificial preservatives in them be banned altogether from public use until further studies on the health risks they pose can be completed and their findings shouted down as absolutely useless by members of the environmental movement. Until that time, French and German, which are not artificial but are nevertheless high in salt and cholesterol, will be used everywhere in the European Union where Arabic, itself a language high in transfatty acids, isn’t already used.