Sluggo Needs a Nap

I got scammed last week by a guy who claimed to have been a security guard in my building and dying of some unspecified liver disease. I realized as soon as the fiver left my hand that I'd never met this guy in my life and, of course, I felt foolish, but I told myself that the guy was a real artist. He was very good. And I'm an idiot.

I had a girlfriend once who fell for the old dropped wallet scam and lost a couple hundred and some jewelry.

My mother once got a call from 'bank security' asking her to come to the bank, withdraw $500 and pass it to one of their agents to test one of the tellers they suspected of passing phoney bills. She would have done it, too, if I hadn't been there.

There's a certain residual sheen of innocence on the most jaded of us that endows others, unless their hands are actually dripping with blood, with an initial deposit of plausibility. Always rejecting a stranger's presentation of himself as a matter of policy is no way to live and scammers make a living hopping over our suspicions and making common cause with our greed or fear.

The guy in the picture was going door-to-door in Florida with a black medical bag offering free breast exams. At least two women, ages 33 and 36 took him up on it. I know, your first thought is (smacking forehead) 'Why didn't I think of that?' Perhaps you're not quite as cheesy a douchbag as you've become accustom to believing. Or, you're not a 76 year old loser who just wants to remember one more time what they felt like. And, since there's no mention of money changing hands this may actually be less of a scam than a uniquely Floridian ritual. It definitely is a warning, though. Itinerant proctologists cannot be far, um, behind.

The Smoking Gun via Environmental Republican.

Finally, a burly, gray-bearded Vietnam veteran rose
and said what no one else dared. After identifying
himself, he choked out, "Kids, I just hope to God none
of you ever have to experience what we went through."
Then he sat down, leaving a small pocket of shocked
silence. No one applauded his effort at honesty. On
the contrary, the hot gym air thickened with a tension
that implicitly ostracized the man, and by extension --
because we agreed with him -- me and my husband.

The 20-year-old man was walking beside railway
tracks on Sunday, the Norwegian heavy metal band
Gorgoroth cranked on his portable CD player,

when he was hit by a freight train.

Maggrah said he did hear the blast of the train horn
just before he was hit.

"I tried to jump out of the way, but I guess not in time,"
he said yesterday from his bed at Red Deer Regional
Hospital Centre.

"It was just instant. I was just walking and then I was on
the ground. I wasn't sure what happened. Then I saw
the train stopping up ahead. I thought, 'Holy crap dude,
you just got hit by a train.' "

"Maybe the metal gods above were smiling on me and
they didn't want one of their true warriors to die on
them. Otherwise, I'd be up there in the kingdom of
steel."

This picture accompanied a short article in today's Metro section of the Times about Bethesda Fountain.

The Warrior Robin

I never knew a warrior,
However brave and strong,
Who dared to try his fortune with
A scimitar of song.

But once I heard a robin
Before the dark was gone,
Take three shrill notes and go against
The elemental dawn.

Hugh Robert Orr.

I was looking for a nice, uplifting robin poem to go with the picture, but the canon is packed with dark, ironic robin poems which express the poets wised-upness to the whole phoney, happy 'oh, here comes spring!' thing. This little trinket I found on something called Poetry of Kansas, which you're going to want to bookmark. Just shows you how far afield you have to go to to find verse that's not abusive to birds.

Another good, light piece concerned Norman Goodman, the County Clerk whose name is on the bottom of every jury summons sent out in Manhattan. I love jury duty, but the excuses people come up with are amazing.

Woody Allen sent a note, in cramped printing, protesting
that he had been so traumatized by his experience in
court during a child-custody dispute with Mia Farrow
that returning to sit on a jury was out of the question.

Mr. Goodman, a strong believer in equal treatment,
insisted that Mr. Allen show up, bad memories and all.
Mr. Allen arrived wearing what Mr. Goodman describes
as "army fatigues and a Fidel Castro cap," surrounded
by his lawyer, his agent and a bodyguard. Mr. Goodman
escorted him to the jury room, where Mr. Allen insisted
on standing, rather than sitting like everybody else.
The rest of the jurors gawked at him.

"We eventually offered him the opportunity to get out
of there," Mr. Goodman said. "Frankly, we were glad
to get rid of him."

Three wives! Or in the case of the picture above, five or six! It always gets a little fuzzy there with the mid-adolescent females. For Lizard-Sluggo it's an easy call. Stax o'chix. All good. Fortunately, I stopped listening to Lizard-Sluggo some time ago and the issue becomes a bit more nuanced.

First of all, there's The Goddess. They don't call her that just because of her benevolence and wisdom. There's a wrathful element there, too. Vengeance is mine, she always says. She's a jealous Goddess and right there you can forget about all of us sitting around playing Boggle and drinking cocoa. Not without blood on the wall, we don't.

Then there's me. Women have always been to me what VCR manuals and Ikea instructions are to the wife: fiendishly complicated, pointlessly obscure, and missing a part or two. Getting married is simply the mature way of saying 'Okay, I give up, I'll never get it.' Getting married again while the first one is still breathing and watching 'The View' is like saying 'Okay, I give up, I'll never get not getting it.' It's doubling down on fives.

Getting married the second time (sequentially) saved my life and I'm happy for anyone to know it. I'm as happily married as a shnook can be. I never understand players who win a jackpot and then go double or nothing.

More intelligent commentary may be obtained from Jonathan Rauch at Reason OnLine, who discusses the structural downsides to polygamy, even for libertarians.

This may look like the dental impressions of my Uncle Bubba, but it's actually one of The Top 10 Weirdest Keyboards Ever according to fosfor gadgets.

Some of them are a good deal stranger.

Real historical understanding is not achieved by the
subordination of the past to the present, but rather
by our making the past our present and attempting
to see life with the eyes of another century than our
own. It is not reached by assuming that our own age
is the absolute to which Luther and Calvin and their
generation are only relative; it is only reached by fully
accepting the fact that their generation was as valid as
our generation, their issues as momentous as our
issues and their day as full and vital to them as our
day is to us.

It seems to be assumed that in history we can have
something more than the private points of view of a
particular historian; that there are "verdicts of
history" and that history itself, considered
impersonally, has something to say to men.

One may be forgiven for not being too happy
about any division of mankind into good and
evil, progressive and reactionary, black and
white; and it is not clear that moral indignation
is not a dispersion of one’s energies to the great
confusion of one’s judgement.

So we have the press on one side who know that
fear sells, and we have the scientists on the other
side who know that fear gets grants, and on the third
side we have our “fascism lite” governments who will
take any opportunity to acquire more power.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of Westerners don’t
raise birds and therefore doesn’t need to hear
another f*cking peep about a disease that’s killed
on the order of 100 people in the entire world and
requires intimate contact with birds. Here, I’ll give
you all of the information you need to know: don’t
get intimate with birds. There. Done.

This must refer to the recent study done at the
University of Illinois, comparing fourth- and eighth-
grade math scores. That study actually showed that
public school students performed worse, but after
the researches used regression analysis to "control"
for race/ethnicity, gender, disability, limited English
proficiency and school location, they managed to
conclude that public school students outperform
private and charter school students.

A Government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always
count on the support of Paul. George Bernard Shaw

Lord, the money we do spend on goverment, and it's
not a bit better than the government that we got for
one-third the money twenty years ago. Will Rogers

Taxation with representation ain't so hot either. Gerald
Barzan

Virtually everything is under federal control nowadays
except the federal budget. Herman Talmadge

So what does this tell us about the lure of the
Jersey myth? What's the secret of Da Jersey
Code? Here's my take. New Jersey is America
at its most vulnerable, most human, least heroic,
least easily definable. It's the rest of us -- old
gangsters, old cities, old rockers, old suburbs, new
suburbs, too much traffic, too much pollution, too
many crooks. It's Abbott and Costello and Philip
Roth, Frank Sinatra and Ice-T, Allen Ginsberg
and Aaron Burr. Sometimes it seems like a rocky
romance that's seen better days, but at its best,
and in its dreams, it's still the Garden State.