BRAND X, FARE THEE WELL, OLD FRIEND: American business lost one of its oldest and best-known names this past week as Brand X Inc. filed for bankruptcy. In its heyday during the 1950’s and 1960’s Brand X products were Madison Avenue’s favorite whipping boys, the products that advertisers compared their clients’ products with, always to Brand X’s detriment. But the negative advertising never seemed to bother Brand X products, which always sold well no matter how many times their paper towels did not absorb, their cars not run, or their aspirin not cure headaches. Brand X loyalists refused to fall for the exaggerated claims made by advertisers and clung to the products they knew and loved, which made the company one of the most stable and valuable stocks on Wall Street for many years.

The company began to lose its grip on the market in the 1970’s when Madison Avenue decided to attack their competitors’ products directly by name. This caused a fall off in business, but the spurt of interest in mid-century retro helped keep the company profitable for many years. The end, however, could not be staved off forever, and after an ill advised move into Internet marketing and a five year fight with Wal-Mart that alienated the firm’s core customers, Brand X then had to defend itself against several hostile takeover attempts. Last week the company, stricken by the effort to defend itself, finally succumbed, taking with it a great name, one of the last great names associated with the golden age of television.

MOORE WINS IN CANNES: Ah well, I suppose French people, like people everywhere, enjoy having their prejudices confirmed. As this is a natural human reaction, what can you do?

DNA BLUES, OR IT'S A DOG'S LIFE: …to test their genetic breed groupings, the team…took "blind" genetic samples from 414 dogs to see if they dropped into the proper breed groups. Only four of the dogs came up wrong: a beagle was identified as a Perro de Presa Canario, a Chihuahua as a Cairn Terrier, and two German Short-haired Pointers as a Kuvasz and a Standard Poodle. All of these mistaken dogs belong to breeds that were also among the hardest to identify solely by genes in the first part of their study, the team reported.

In a similar study performed on humans at Johns Hopkins University, researchers found that all persons identified as trumpet players were, in fact, IRS agents, seven out of every ten persons previously identified as middleaged African American women from Baltimore were in reality prepubescent Chinese dwarf acrobats from Shanghai, and that the control group of 712 white men between the ages of 17 and 45 used to judge the effectiveness of the study were, upon closer inspection, found to be 439 tuna fish sandwiches on whole wheat bread with a Pepsi and a pickle on the side. The director of the study, Dr. Thomas Herrick, said that given these results the study’s basic methodology would have to be re-examined and, if necessary, brought back to Wal-Mart to be replaced.

JAWOHL, MEIN FUHRER: Isnt the German proclivity for obeying any order barked at them loudly enough one of the reasons why the world is where it is today? Do we really need to be encouraging this sort of behavior? German men, stand up for your rights and DISOBEY!!!

BLAMING DA MARE:Families Lash Out at Giuliani at Hearing. Why? He didnt fly a couple of planes into the Twin Towers.

CONSPIRACY THEORY: I would be all for gay marriage if I were not absolutely convinced that the whole concept is a plot by divorce lawyers to double the pool of prospective clients.

PUTS THE MORON BACK IN OXYMORON: Canadian satire. There is such a thing. Read on, MacDuff.

CRUSHING OF POLITICAL DISSENT: The ongoing and extremely controversial assault on the civil liberties of punctuation marks by British police and the Security Service, MI-5, continued today despite the Labor Government's denial that any such crackdown is underway. Twelve question marks and a comma were arrested on unspecified charges in London today, while in Liverpool an asterisk and a parentheses were taken into custody, questioned, and then released. Punctuation marks have been the subject of government harassment recently due to their belief that the European Union is full of foreigners seeking to take the jobs of English punctuation marks. Today the exclamation and the semicolon both announced that they would emigrate to the United States or Australia to get away from one exclamation point described anonymously as "an increasing dangerous situation here in Britain." Other punctuation marks have not gone on record as to what they would do in the hostile atmosphere in Britain, but a spokesman for the apostrophe community announced the creation of the Apostrophe Protection Society as a way of preventing violence towards apostrophes and to protect the civil liberties of apostrophes throughout Britain.

JON LOVITZ, STUDMUFFIN?: Protosupermodel Janice Dickinson says that there is nothing wrong with her eysight and that suggestions that she get glasses are the jealous fumings of people who can't see her boyfriend Jon Lovitz for the stud that he is. Yeah, yeah, that's the ticket!

I THOUGHTTHAT there weren't any chemical weapons in Iraq. My mistake.

PLAYBOY AND HOME DEPOT: The shoot is part of Playboy's "girl-next-door" theme, often manifested in photo spreads of girls representing various collegiate conferences. Nesheim acknowledges, however, that Playboy's girls next door aren't exactly representative of most people's neighbors.

This is true, given that the girl next door doesn't usually have enough silicone in her breasts to start her own beach.

JUST ANOTHER SPOKE IN THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE: You know, I am pretty sure the Israelis will stop blowing up the homes of Palestinians at the behest of the European Union when the European Union stops contributing to the problem by financing Palestinian terrorism. That quid pro quo thing bites you in the ass every time.

MY APOLOGIES: This is a humor blog, for the most part, and I seem terribly earnest these past few posts. I apologize to all and sundry for this, and I will endeavor to once again embrace my inner snark in future posts. Thank you

TORTURE AND AMERICANS: In the current New York Observer Richard Brookhiser has an excellent article about torture and the Abu Ghraib scandal. I liked this bit:

"The third reason not to approve torture, often cited in this case, is that it makes us look bad. But I wonder if that is a good reason? How much of the shock here and in Europe is true dismay, how much anti-war preening? Is the Arab world shocked, or resigned to business as usual? Which would be worse? Let us not probe the world of reactions, so falsely bright, so murky in fact. Do the right thing, and let the global audience draw what conclusions it will."

Which strikes me as exactly right. We do not do these sort of things because of who we are as a people. The idiots who did these things will not be punished because they made the American military and the United States look bad in the Arab street: the Arab street hates our guts enough already without any prompting from these idiots. They are going to be punished because what they did was wrong, a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Convention. Whether or not the Arabs approve is not germane. Their governments torture them on a regular basis; Saddam held Iraq together by the threat of death and torture; but why Arabs choose to treat other Arabs like so many sheep to be beaten and butchered is not the subject. The subject is this: Americans and agents of the American government do not torture people. Brookhiser says the same thing in much better prose than I can muster so go and read the whole thing.

I THINK this comes under the heading of muscular Christianity in action. I love the last line of the article: Guerrero is one of the poorest and most violent states in Mexico. When you live in a place where the parish priest gets crocked to the point where he pulls a pistol and shoots the mayor and his son during a religious festival, then I'd say that line qualifies as a masterpiece of understatement.

FREE BEER AND HOCKEY GAMES:Great. Now the players can watch the fans fight in the stands. And it'll be twice as funny since the television audience won't be watching professional athletes playing at the top of their game, but out of shape drunks trying to beat the shit out of each other. This is gonna be more fun than the roller derby, folks. Just you wait and see.

YOU KNOW, I'LL JUST BET that Dubya wishes he could do this to a lot of reporters these days. Then again, I'll bet most of the White House press pool wouldn't mind being sent to Brazil as punishment. It wouldnt bother me any, except for that whole Portugese thing; actually communicating with Brazilians might pose a bit of a problem, given my monoglot status.

PERTUSSIS VACCINE FOR DUMMIES, BUT NOT FOR KIDS: Further proof, as if any were necessary, that no good deed goes unpunished. The moonbats are everywhere, it seems. No sooner have we solved a problem then we start telling ourselves it was never really a big problem in the first place. The stats on this sort of thing are going to get worse before they get better. The first generation of the vaccinated have kids now and they think that these diseases have vanished altogether. They haven't; its just that they couldn't infect anyone before. In every generation, it seems, the stupids have to learn their lessons the hard way. And I wonder how soon it will be before one of these dolts sues a hospital for allowing their child to die of a disease the parents could have prevented with a shot.

I GUESS these guys missed their religion of peace packets in the mail. Damn that Post Office!

DOMINO'S DELIVERS: Giovanni da Verrazano, the first European to breeze into New York Bay, was later killed and eaten raw by Indians in the Caribbean, instituting the first Italian take-out in North America.

THE PATIENT REFUSED AUTOPSY: actual line from medical chart.

Not enough corpses are refusing autopsies these days, but that is just my opinion. No sooner is your typical corpse adjusting to his brand new cadaverous condition than the people who were supposed to keep things from getting to such a pretty pass are all keen to cut him up to see what they did wrong. That they want to correct such mistakes in the future is all very well and good, but it hardly does anything for the poor schnook they’re hot to disassemble, does it?

A THOUGHT: Should you wear a rubber when getting up close and personal with an inflatable doll or does the doll count as the rubber?

THE STARS AT NIGHT ARE BIG AND BRIGHT, DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS: Texas is currently the only state that permits voters to cast an absentee ballot from outer space. I don’t know why this should be so; recent polls suggest that the effect of the interplanetary vote on state and local politics in Texas is minimal to the point of nonexistence, but I believe that encouraging citizens to take part in the political life of their state is always a good thing. Not everyone in Texas believes this, however, and they warn of dire problems to come, simply because some people are like that. If it’s a cloudy day it’s going to rain, if it’s sunny you’ll get skin cancer. So you can never win.

These same people point out that at the current level of space propulsion technology voting is still not much of a problem for the concerned extraterrestrial citizen of Texas. Chemical propulsion systems are simply too slow to propel Texans far enough away from the Earth, which, as you may know, is bigger than Texas, but not by much, for their votes not to count. But what of the future? The inevitable advance of space propulsion technology will one day create engines capable of reaching speeds approaching the speed of light, which as we all know from high school physics, provided you stayed awake in class that day, will cause the time to slow down aboard the spacecraft the same way it slows down when your father tells you that you have to be more responsible with the family car.

We see here the crux of the problem: interplanetary Texan voters and the election cycle will be out of whack, thereby threatening democracy in Texas. Look, if you will, at Alpha Centauri, which is not, as you may think, an Italian sports car you will never be able to afford on your current salary, but rather the star closest to the Earth, unless you are a Barbra Streisand fan. Space faring Texans exploring this star could, in theory, vote in the Texas gubernatorial race, but in which one? Alpha Centauri is four light years away from the Earth, and Texans who cast their ballots there on Election Day would not have their ballots arrive in Austin until the next race four years later. This sort of disenfranchisement is clearly unfair and I have heard that a federal judge in Houston is considering an injunction against further space travel until such time as Texas can figure out a way to make the vote of every Texan count. There are also rumors that the ACLU is considering launching a test case challenging the laws of relativity, claiming that these so-called laws were designed by the Texas political establishment to deny extraterrestrial Texans their right to vote. As more details become available I will pass them along.

EVERY SO OFTEN YOU SEE SOMETHING that makes you stop and think a bit. I had that experience today. I was deleting the Spam out of my inbox when I came across a post for a product promising me a permanently growing penis. Not just a large penis, not a porn star penis, but a penis that would never stop growing. That made me stop and think. What would I do with such a penis? What could be done with such a penis? I suppose that in the early stages of growth I could be a porn star. Granted, I am not the best looking guy in the world, but after all, Ron Jeremy is a porn star and the only thing that guy has going for him is his thing. But what would I do about the next stage of development? Clearly no porn actress is going to want to work with a man with a twenty-four inch penis, or a thirty-six inch penis either. A penis several feet long would mean I could not be in the same money shot with the actress in question, and I would have to take a lot of Viagra to maintain an erection, although renting a forklift is always a possibility, I suppose. A ten to twenty foot penis would end my porn career, I think, although at fifty feet I could tie a knot in it and join the rodeo as a cattle roper, and, of course, at a hundred yards I could get work in pro football as a line marker. This would require tattooing my penis with hash marks and numbers, which is a more than vaguely painful thought, now that I think of it. Work as a stripper’s pole might be a way around this, but I don’t think the girls will want to step over the rest of me in order to get a tip.

Beyond what I could do with a permanently growing penis is the problem of how to store it when I am not actually using it. Obviously, there are only so many ways of pleating a pair of pants to hide such a protuberance, and there are only so many times it can be wrapped around my waist before people start asking me if I’m gaining weight. In the privacy of my own home I could paint it green and tell the next door neighbors, who I don’t like very much, that it’s a garden hose, especially after parties where I’ve had too much to drink. I could roll it out and drench their prize azaleas with my beery urine and they’d never know I did it.

Of course, beyond a certain point there’s no hiding the thing. Then my fifteen minutes of fame will begin, as everyone from Oprah to Jerry Springer will want me to appear on their shows. There will be controversy, to be sure, since the FCC will not allow these people to show on American television sets just what it is I’m famous for. Hustler will pay a cool million to see the thing unrolled, I think. Maybe I’ll get invited to the Playboy Mansion and the Playmates will use it for a jump rope, and if I can learn to do some tricks with it maybe I can get on Letterman’s Stupid Pet Tricks. You never know how far you can go with a permanently growing penis, although I suspect to go anywhere with it I'll have to go Federal Express.