Odds and Ends

No, this post is not about psychotics and football linemen. It's just that I'm feeling unusually disorganized this morning, so I thought I'd just share a few random things from my Blog Fodder files with you. It's my blog. I can do that.

I have the good fortune to work with a group of tremendously intelligent, intellectually stimulating people. Not that I'd ever tell them that, of course, because they'd just get swelled heads and make fun of me. Nevertheless, we do have some very interesting discussions which often result in some seriously out-of-the-box thinking on the issues of the day. A few days ago a wide-ranging discussion of American foreign and defense policy, and how it gets encapsulated in glossy documents no one reads, resulted in this diagram of the Bush Administration's National Security Strategy:You never knew it was that simple, did you?

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My Daily Curmudgeon quotation list yesterday offered this wonderful summation from Orson Scott Card of how we approach electing our leaders: "If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side."

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One of my old college friends suggests that we really need to live our lives backwards:

You start out dead and get that out of the way right off the bat.

Then, you wake up in a nursing home feeling better every day.

When you are kicked out of the home for being too healthy, you spend several years enjoying your retirement and collecting benefit checks.

When you start work, you get a gold watch on your first day. You work 40 years or so, getting younger every day until pretty soon you're too young to work. So then, you go to high school: play sports, date, drink, and party.

As you get even younger, you become a kid again. You go to elementary school, play, and have no responsibilities.

In a few years, you become a baby and everyone runs themselves ragged keeping you happy.

You spend your last 9 months floating peacefully in luxury, spa-like conditions, with central heating and room service on tap.

And finally you finish off as an orgasm.

I could get into that.

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And finally, the sort of story you thought only Mike could dredge up for your entertainment: from MSNBC comes this amazing report - Cops: Burglar Wakes Men with Spice Rub; Suspect Also Strikes Sleeping Man with Sausage Before Fleeing. Datelined Fresno, California, the story begins, "Authorities say they've arrested a man who broke into the home of two California farmworkers, stole money, rubbed one of the men with spices and whacked the other with a sausage before fleeing."

Only in America.

Have a good day. More thoughts coming.

Bilbo