THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: The time has come, boys and girls, for yet another one of Uncle Akaky’s patented thought experiments. Today, let’s imagine that you are the head of MI-6 or the Mossad or the BND. You need American cooperation on a politically sensitive intelligence operation, but the Americans want to know how reliable your information is, how well placed your agent is, or worse, who your agent is. This might not be a problem at any other time, but at the moment you’ve got that gurgling in your guts that tells you that something bad is about to happen. It’s not your CIA, DIA, or FBI counterpart that’s causing the intestinal distress; no indeed, it’s knowing that however much you might trust the guy across the table from you, he or she still has to share your valuable information with Congress, which may or may not be a bad thing, depending on your point of view, and that the next head of the House Intelligence Oversight Committee might be Rep. Alcee Hastings, Democrat of Florida.

Now, that name may not mean anything to the average citizen of your country, who has better things to do with his or her time than know who represents Florida's Twenty-third Congressional District in the the House of Representatives, but you are the head of an important and top secret government agency and it’s part of your job description to know who Congressman Hastings is. Therefore, you already know that in a former incarnation Congressman Hastings was Justice Hastings of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, and that as such he was only the sixth Federal judge in American judicial history to be impeached by the Senate on charges of perjury and bribery. Given that Rep. Hastings has already demonstrated a problem with peculation and malfeasance, do you (a) share all of your operational secrets with the Americans, confident that Rep. Hastings has learned his lesson, (b) tell the Americans as little as humanly possible, or (c) tell the Americans that they should check out the horoscopes in the Washington Post if they want to find out what happens in the world tomorrow?

UPDATE: Well, this will remain an experiment, as I see on Instapundit that Rep. Hastings is not going to be the next chairman of the House Intelligence Oversight Committee. And all of God's espionage agents sighed, Hallelujah!

LUCK BE A LADY: Well, it’s the day after Thanksgiving and I am one lucky duck, I have to tell you. Here I am, stuck in this egregious mold pit and thinking what a moron I was for not putting in for a day off today, and then I open my email, and guess what? I have won the Irish, UK, South African, Nigerian, and Philippine national lotteries, all on the same day! It’s truly mind boggling how that happened, given that I didn’t buy any tickets for any of these worthy enterprises. It’s just my lucky day, I guess, although I still think having to send these folks my credit card information and Social Security information goes a long way to proving my heartfelt contention that most government run operations are inherently inefficient. Still, now that I can afford that Leica MP3 rangefinder camera with a super fast 50mm lens that I’ve always wanted, life can only get better and better. Oh frabjous day, callooh, callay, I chortled in my joy.

Paris Hilton is ordure. She is; I got this information from a damn near unimpeachable source. Paris Hilton is ordure because Tina Fey says so. Ms. Fey did not say ordure, of course; in her recent interview with Howard Stern Ms. Fey referred to Ms. Hilton as a piece of the English word most commonly used to refer to ordure, but I am sure you catch her drift without my being scatological. This is a blog for the entire family, you know.

I bring this subject up—not ordure, of course, although I suppose if we were all farmers we could carry on a rip-roaring intellectual donnybrook on the virtues of various types of ordure, with the partisans of cow dung, many of whom have jobs in the government, media, or academia, manning the battlements against the Young Turks who think horse manure is the acme of the fertilizer’s art—because I must admit to a certain fascination with both Ms. Fey and Ms. Hilton. Ms. Fey is, to my mind, one of the funniest women writing today, and maybe the funniest since the death of Veronica Geng. She was, for almost ten years, the head writer on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, during which time she sharpened the satiric edge of a program that had gotten safe and stodgy riding on the reputation it made in the 1970’s, and now she has a show of her own, 30 Rock, which I recommend to your attention. Obviously, there will be a problem here for some of my fellow red-staters, as the show also stars one of our favorite liberal loathes, Alec Baldwin; I also recommend you get over it—Baldwin’s funny as hell in the show, and red state or blue state, we can all use a good laugh.

As for Ms. Fey, there’s even a bit of mystery about her; speculation amongst geeks, nerds, dorks, and other asocial males like myself about how Ms. Fey acquired the scar next to her mouth runs from the utterly mundane (she cut herself shaving…don’t ask—I know this guy and he’s a moron) to the more or less fantastic (space aliens in league with the Trilateral Commission needed a DNA sample in order to clone a race of super-smart, super-funny Greeks unconnected with the restaurant industry…okay, all in all, I’d say that tends to the more fantastic side of the scale; this is the sort of thing that happens when some people don’t take their meds on schedule). As more than one magazine has put it, and quite rightly, I think, Ms. Fey is the thinking man’s sex symbol, complete with good looks, sharp wit, and nerdy eyeglasses. Ms. Hilton, on the other hand, is an Irish setter.

This, I know, is a somewhat jarring comparison, since Ms. Hilton is in no way a dog, as that term is understood in certain male quarters like Gallagher’s Sports Bar & Grill or Don German’s Hair Cut & Hand Gun Emporium down the street. Ms. Hilton is a beautiful young woman, just as Irish setters are beautiful dogs, but as I learned from a neighbor who breeds them, the beauty of Irish setters comes at a price, and that price is that no matter how beautiful Irish setters may be, as a breed they tend not to be the brightest bulbs in the canine universe. In short, they’re dumb as posts, as one of my neighbor’s setters proved when it ran after and tried to catch the Amtrak express train from New York to Albany as it roared through our happy little burg one fine summer day six years ago. I will leave the results of said misadventure to your imaginations.

In a somewhat similar vein, and without the deus ex machina intervention of Amtrak or any other poorly run quasi-governmental transportation entity, Ms. Hilton is the purebred scion of one of the best-known brands in American capitalism, and is, along with Arthur Sulzberger of The New York Times, a prime example of why giving lots of money to your children, like letting them subsist on a diet of cotton candy and Coca-Cola, may not be such a good idea. Ms. Hilton is now a celebrity, a celebrity in the modern sense of the word, which is to say she is famous for being famous. But why is she famous? Other than a somewhat infamous tape and the endless attention of the paparazzi, which she parlayed into a somewhat silly “reality” show, can anyone think of a single memorable thing that Ms. Hilton has said, other than the stunning vapid, that’s hot, and the somewhat more interesting, I don’t think I can get my mouth around that (no, I haven’t seen the tape, I am merely speculating for comic effect here)? I can understand why Anna Nicole Smith is famous, although I’m at a loss to understand why anyone would care one way or the other, but Ms. Hilton lacks even the interesting back-story Ms. Smith brings to the table. Like the European aristocrats mocked in Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro, Ms. Hilton has done nothing to gain her current status except take the trouble to be born.

In her interview with Howard Stern, Ms. Fey relates that when Ms. Hilton guest hosted Saturday Night Live, she wanted the writers to come up with a skit mocking Jessica Simpson because she didn’t like Ms. Simpson. Now, it goes almost without saying that Ms. Simpson is a very easy comedic target. She is just as blonde as Ms. Hilton, she is just as good-looking as Ms. Hilton, and I am sure that Ms. Simpson will be living down her now infamous televised Chicken of the Sea space-out for the rest of her life. The problem with the comparison, however, is that Ms. Simpson has actually done something for her fame: she is a singer. I am not sure what Ms. Hilton does for her celebrity other than simper for photographers and look good in clothes, a talent she shares with many a department store window mannequin, not that the casual observer would notice any real difference between the two.

TURKEY AND ALL THE TRIMMINGS: Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in our happy little burg, just as it is Thanksgiving everywhere else throughout the length and breadth of this our Great Republic, and I suppose I would be properly thankful for the many blessings the Almighty has bestowed on me this past year if only I could find some way of convincing my relatives not to show up for Thanksgiving dinner. The reasons I’ve given so far don’t seem to be working very well; the number of Taliban fighters, dyslexic left handed accordion-playing Albanian neo-Nazi midgets, and divorced Lithuanian lesbian Stalinists in the last throes of Ebola fever in this neck of the woods is shockingly small, unfortunately, and so no one believed me when I told them they couldn’t come because swarms of all the aforementioned were infesting every nook and cranny of my home. Clearly, I will need to find some better rationales next year, but I fear that this year I am stuck with the relatives.

In any case, I am properly thankful for all of you who come and enjoy The Passing Parade, and I wish I could bat these things out at a much faster rate than I do; I know looking at the same thing over and over again must get annoying for you. So, a Happy Thanksgiving to you all, and for those of you who do not celebrate Thanksgiving, enjoy your Thursday anyway.

MACACA BLUES: Well, Senator George Allen of Virginia has lost his bid for re-election, and while it is safe to say that this year almost any Republican would have had their share of troubles, I think most everyone can agree that Senator Allen’s problems stemmed from his use of the word macaca. You may not know what a macaca is, and very frankly, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that the good Senator doesn’t, either. This is one of the reasons why he lost; if he’d knew what the term meant, he wouldn’t have used it. So then, you ask, if those of us here at The Passing Parade are so altogether smart, just what the hell is a macaca then? I hadn’t a clue, but it appears, if we believe the good folks over at Wikipedia, that macaca is indeed a racial slur, and what’s worse, it’s a Belgian racial slur.

By this, I do not mean that it is a slur directed at Belgians in particular or Belgium in general; Belgians are very nice people, I am told, and they make great beer and exquisite chocolate, and they are the proud inventors of the French fry, for which gift a grateful humanity should always remain thankful. There is a great deal of medieval architecture in Belgium, or so I read in the travel books, and it rains a lot there as well, averaging 33.5 inches of rain a year, and it is cloudy for much of the year, so when you go to enjoy the beer and chocolate and see the medieval architecture, do not be surprised if the architecture is a bit soggy. I will venture to guess—I have never been to Belgium so I cannot say this for certain—that, given the abundance of precipitation, Belgium is, in all likelihood, a country with a significant mold problem. So, to return to our premise, and the constant reader will note that I managed to return to the premise in the same paragraph in which I left it, which I feel is indicative of a vast improvement in The Passing Parade’s digressionary skills; macaca is not a word you would use to describe a Belgian—it is a word Belgians used during their colonial past.

That Belgium has a colonial past often surprises people. The phrase, the Belgian Empire, strikes the uninformed listener as rather oxymoronic, causing the same sort of mental whiteout you might feel when hearing the terms fat-free mayonnaise or Democratic tax-cutter, and yet, strange as it might seem, there was such a thing as a Belgian empire. Belgium had one massive colony, the present day Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is the former Zaire, which is the former Congo (Kinshasa), which is the former Congo (Leopoldville), which is the former Belgian Congo, and none of which is identical with the Congo (Brazzaville), which borders the Congo and all of the aforementioned places, but was a French colony, not a Belgian one. Movie fans will remember that Brazzaville is the place where Rick and Captain Renault escaped to at the end of Casablanca, and Brazzaville is also where, in 1944, the Free French announced that French colonies could forget about independence after the end of World War II. I’ll bet they’re still chuckling about that one in Hanoi. Those French, what great kidders they are, they just slay me! We will skip over the sorry history of Belgian imperialism, which you can read about in Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, an excellent book and one that I recommend highly, and only say that the Belgians ruled the Belgian Congo in much the same way that Tony Soprano collected outstanding loans from deadbeats, except Tony didn’t slice the deadbeats’ hands off if they couldn’t come across with the vig; King Leopold and his merry band of malevolent Belgians, on the other hand, had no such qualms about cutting off the other hand, and sometimes a nose or an ear as well, just to break the monotony.

In any such venture, of course, it helps if you can convince yourself that, by virtue of your skin color or your religious beliefs or your aristocratic station in life or your political ideology, you are a wholly superior being to the rabble you are so callously oppressing, and should not therefore trouble yourself with the suffering you are causing large numbers of people who never did anything to you in their lives. As they are inferior to you, you may dismiss them and their suffering from your mind with a contemptuous remark, and so the Belgians did just that. Macaca, as you can read for yourselves in Wikipedia, is a name derived from a species of monkey; French-speaking Belgians in the Congo, and for those of you who don’t know this, Belgians come in two handy linguistic varieties, Dutch speaking and French speaking, used the term to describe the indigenous population of their unwilling colony.

I do not know where the good Senator first heard the term macaca, or why he decided to use it to describe a South Asian, who were never, at any time, a part of the Belgian Empire, but I think I feel the revulsion of all real Americans at the sight of an United States Senator using a French racial slur to insult a member of an ethnic minority when there are any number of perfectly good American racial slurs he could have used instead. What is worse, at least from my standpoint, is that technically the Senator did not use a French slur, if by French we mean a slur in use in France, but rather a somewhat cut-rate slur from a francophone minority in a otherwise Dutch-speaking country. If we are to import our slurs, I see no reason why we must import them from the Brussels B-list when we could have gotten a slur just as good or better from Paris. No one, after all, aches to see the newest Brussels fashions or wonders what the next wave in Belgian cinema or literature will be. Let’s face it: when Georges Simenon died and took Inspector Maigret with him, the rest of us stopped caring what happened in Brussels. For most Europeans, Brussels is a place where bureaucrats congregate in large numbers like down on their luck gigolos around a rich American widow, the better to find new and more obnoxious ways of making life as miserable as the Belgian climate. For most Americans, Brussels is a place associated with vile tasting vegetables your mother wanted you to eat because they were good for you. This is always a crock; my mother wanted me to eat carrots because they would improve my eyesight, and today here I am, myopic, presbytopic, and astigmatic all at the same time. I’d be wearing bifocals now too, if I weren’t too cheap to pay for them.

In any case, the misadventure of the soon to be former Senator from Virginia proves one thing above all other things…well, that’s a pretty broad statement, isn’t it, even without the blonde, so let me rephrase and say that it proves one thing almost over a lot of other things that could be just as important, but probably aren’t; if you must dis, dis American. In our politically correct times, the old-fashioned American slur will deeply appreciate the work (since the rise of PC American slurs have had no end of trouble making ends meet) and when you use the slur, everyone listening will know what you’re talking about. The tide of people calling their public libraries trying to find our what you meant will cease, which the librarians will appreciate, since librarians love political correctness and dislike having to repeat ethnic and racial slurs, and the resultant controversy will center on what you said, not on what you said and what did that mean, anyway? Clarity is a virtue, and if you must be insulting, it never hurts to be clear about who it is you’re insulting. Answering why anyone would be so stupid as to use any kind of racial slur during a political campaign, however, remains a Rosicrucian mystery and will probably remain one for as long as we all shall live.

Sloth having set in again, as it usually does when I must think of something new to post here, I have taken to adding more pictures to the photoblog. So enjoy them while I try to think of something new to put here.

SADDAM: Just a short note here, folks. I see that The Economist, a periodical I enjoy reading, editorializes this week that the new government of Iraq should not execute Saddam Hussein, even though an Iraqi court has tried him and sentenced the man to death for murder, more murder, even more murder, committing genocide when he wasn’t committing yet more murder, impersonating a human being while committing still more murder, and having execrable taste in home decoration (those overstuffed nudes on the walls of those palaces were just too too camp, you know). The editorialist offered any number of reasons why the Iraqis should not execute Mr. Hussein, many of them fairly credible to anyone whose legal, social, and cultural outlook does not derive in any way, shape, or form from Mr. Hussein’s Iraq. Iraq, however, remains a place where much of the population knows how to hold a grudge and sees no reason why they shouldn’t kill the people they hold a grudge against. That an Iraqi court sentenced Mr. Hussein to hang should not come as a surprise; the surprise here is that Mr. Hussein received more due process, however imperfect that due process was, than he ever afforded any of the tens of thousands of people he had shot, tortured, or fed into industrial shredders during his thirty year reign of terror. People who worry that this thug did not receive a fair trial should be happy he got any trial at all; the soldiers who found him would have done the world a great service if they'd tossed a grenade down that spiderhole.

11/11/1918:

"Lay me doon in the caul caul groon
Whaur afore monie mair huv gaun
Lay me doon in the caul caul groon
Whaur afore monie mair huv gaun

When they come a wull staun ma groon
Staun ma groon al nae be afraid

Thoughts awe hame tak awa ma fear
Sweat an bluid hide ma veil awe tears

Ains a year say a prayer faur me
Close yir een an remember me

Nair mair shall a see the sun
For a fell tae a Germans gun

Lay me doon in the caul caul groon
Whaur afore monie mair huv gaun

Lay me doon in the caul caul groon
Whaur afore monie mair huv gaun

Whaur afore monie mair huv gaun"

-"Sergeant Mackenzie."

For my grandfather, Thomas, Sergeant, The Royal Irish Regiment, who served in India, France, and Egypt from 1914 to 1918, for his brother, Joseph, Serjeant, The Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, who still lies in Flanders fields, and for my uncle, James, Corporal, 1st Infantry Division, United States Army, who served in Vietnam, and returned to the ingratitude of an uncaring nation, and for all those who serve and who have served, thank you and God bless you all.

YESTERDAY'S ELECTIONS: I had a long and not terribly funny post about what I thought of the Republican disaster yesterday, but I think I will forswear spewing all of that bile on an unsuspecting readership and I will simply ask this: if you were a jihadi sitting in a mud hut somewhere in Iraq's Anbar province listening to this news on al-Jazeera, what would you think?

BEARDS: The thing of it is, of course, that once the doctor squirts those drops into your eyes you're going to have pupils the size of damn bowling balls for the rest of the day and the whole world is going to look like someone just pulled the lampshade off the sun, which is what's going on with me at the moment. I still need bifocals, just like he said last year, and I am still too cheap to actually spend the money to get them, just like last year, but other than that, the eyes are fine. This is the last day of my vacation, and this leads to an interesting question: do I shave the ten days worth of beard I have now, or do I continue with the great experiment? Looking like Rutherford B. Hayes is not in the cards, but I've often thought I wouldn't look that bad with a Ulysses S. Grant beard. I'm just wondering if I should keep doing this. Please feel free to chime in with your opinion; the polls on the beards close at 9 pm EST. Thank you for your cooperation.

THE NOSE KNOWS: The first thing I should say here, before I say anything else, in fact, is that I have nothing against crazy people per se. I could hardly afford to entertain such a vile prejudice, much less keep it in parochial school, what with tuitions being what they are these days, here in the politically correct environs of our happy little burg. Our fine community is awash in halfway houses, group homes, mental wards, and a prison specifically designed for those people who think that slicing their mothers up into filet mamam and sharing her with the cat may not be such a bad idea, after all. So here in the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily multigrain bread, I have helped and even befriended many a person who was not only certifiably insane, but whose complete and utter bonkerdom the government of our great state has indeed certified as 100% genuine. Having established that we are speaking here of actual crazy people and not some pretender trying to beat the rap with a psycho act, let me just say that what really bothers me most about crazy people is that they stink.

I do not mean to say that they stink in a metaphorical manner, as if I said that the fiscal practices of our local board of education stink to high heaven, although almost anything you could say about such a collection of gibbering dolts scarcely able to get through their weekly exercises in excrutiating public inertia without flinging handfuls of their own feces at each other would probably be much too complimentary. No, indeed, what I am talking about here is neither simile nor metaphor, synecdoche nor Schenectady; what I am talking about here is your average wacko smelling worse than a sweating horse in three-month old underwear.

I cannot say for certain why so many loonies have a problem with soap and water; I can only say that they do. I know that many of you will think me cruel for bringing up such a sensitive subject, but I suspect that your sensitivity to the aromatic plight of the mentally unbalanced is brought about by your not having to put up with the noxious fumes these people present at almost every hour of the working day. I, on the other hand, don’t have much of a choice. I realize that life is not all perfume and roses, that on occasions we must all put up with some of life’s more noxious fumes, but I would prefer not having the insides of my sinuses scorched down to the cartilage in the process.

Having succeeded in bringing up noses and their place in the modern world, which place is the same as it was in the ancient world, with the exception of Hollywood, California, where the plastic surgeons can move that thing any place they want to, let us consider for a moment that most humble of beasts, the library cart. The cart is a simple beast, feeding exclusively on a diet of worn-out videotape and those subscription cards that fall out of magazines, and apparently content with its servile lot in the library world. Unlike the llama, the library cart will not lie down on the job if it thinks it is overburdened, nor will it, like the donkey, behave like a recalcitrant ass simply because it is in a bad mood. The library cart will not spit at you like a camel, nor it will do whatever it is that yaks do to register their discontent with their lot in life, and the cart will not swear at you under its breath when you tell it to clean up its room and mow the lawn before going to see their hooligan friends at the mall. I think it’d because the library cart is such an endearing, hardworking little cuss that the struggle amongst library employees to get a hold of one tends to be an exercise in Darwinism gone stark raving mad. The sight of normally well-behaved and orderly librarians behaving in such a rabid fashion is not one guaranteed to inculcate a feeling of respect for librarians in general or for the library as a civic institution in particular. There is nothing like the prospect of an empty library cart that will turn even the nicest of librarians into a vicious, monstrous, backbiting snake in the grass willing to gut their own mothers with a dull fish knife in order to get their hands on one.

The competition is not pretty, folks, not by a long shot. Watching two of your co-workers going at each other with a copy of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary and volume 14 of the Encyclopedia Britannica is enough to show even the most innocent of library naïfs that they are not in Kansas anymore. For those of you interested in such things, the Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary won by knockout. The Britannica was good, but it is much more of a team player than the Webster’s, and the former lacked the battlefield survivability built into the latter’s lexicographical defense systems. The librarian wielding the Britannica will return to work just as soon as her blunt force trauma wounds heal in a couple of months or so. The bettors were disappointed as well; many a pundit of the fight game had the Britannica ahead on points into the last round, but a surprise left hook from the letters QRST put the encyclopedia down for the count (kount) n. //ME. counte /OFR conte< L comes (gen. comitis), companion// a noble of several European nations, having an aristocratic station equivalent to that of an English earl.

While on the subject of the egregious mold pit, I went there the other day, primarily to see if the place had moved any in my absence, and to pick up my paycheck. The constant reader will be happy to know that the egregious mold pit is where I left it last week, and they did have a paycheck available for my use. Both facts pleased me no end, the first because I like knowing where my money is coming from, and the second because I like having my money on me, if not at all times, then at least reasonably close to all times. I would just as soon, however, not have my lungs used as a living Petri dish for the encouragement and advancement of mycological science. That’s what lab rats are for.

As I entered the architecturally undistinguished doors of this mildewed monstrosity, a sight so strange that it actually offended the eye to see struck me to the quick, or in my case, the not so quick but rather a slow and steady stroll. There, at one of our tables, in the middle of the babble and hurly-burly of modern library life, sat a young girl sitting quietly and reading a book. Faced with this sudden descent into human depravity at its most vicious, I immediately called the police and had this young miscreant carted away to the city jail; the police provided their own cart, as we were unwilling to give them one of ours. I am as tolerant as the next fellow when it comes to the grotesqueries that modern youth put themselves through; I was young once, strange as that may seem to you; but there is a limit to anyone’s patience. The modern library is a portal to the digital future, a place where young people can sit and play computer games in a safe environment while they socialize with their friends. For this child to do something as completely anachronistic as sit at an analog table and quietly read a book threatens the moral underpinnings of the modern library and questions all that those of us who cherish the modern library hold sacred. Clearly, we cannot allow such behavior stand without calling into question why the modern library should exist at all. Therefore, the board of trustees is currently considering pressing charges against this young whelp, or whether they should demand that the state remove her from her clearly unsuitable home environment and ship her off to foster care. A suggestion that the staff feed the child to a clutch of starving badgers did not elicit much interest, due to the regrettable insufficiency of badgers in the immediate area.

Knitting is a good thing, and if you want a good healthy dose of knitting and common sense then I advise you go over to Just muttering and partake of the wisdom contained therein. You know, I'm starting to like this linking thing; it's so much easier than having to think up my own material.