Fresh From the Department of Redundancy Department

More Fake News

Al Gore makes a dynamic point to Ivanka Trump

"National Public Radio?" Yeah, right. Never heard of 'em. That's got to be one of those fake news sites. I mean, look at this crazy story for  instance: Al Gore Meets With Donald and Ivanka Trump in Search for Common Ground. Like that'll ever happen!

RIP Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro

Photo: Roberto di Fede

Rest in Peace, Fidel Castro.

That's about all I have to say. I desire that every human being will rest peacefully when their term is done here. I've seen a lot of people today hoping that Mr. Castro does not, though.

It seems to me that Castro was trying to do something good for the Cuban people when he began his revolution. And it seems that old saying about absolute power corrupting absolutely came truer and truer in his case. In other words he was an average man who, like most men in that situation, eventually became a despot. But even despots do some good for their despotisms.

Barbarians at the gates in New York

The bone of contention in Albany

In the world of politics, the participants can sink pretty low sometimes. Just look at how this year's presidential contest is shaping up.  But there's low, and then there's deny-toilet-paper-to-your-adversaries low.

The New York Senate is currently in the hands of the Republicans, meaning that they are in charge of supplies. Now, Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan swears everything's on the up and up and that bathroom tissue is distributed in an equitable and evenhanded manner.

But "Not so!" desperately cry the Democrats. According to their statistics the minority party is only getting half as much. And it's ONE-PLY!!

It is said that Alaric and the Visigoths used this same tactic to defeat and sack Rome (although the romans used sponges on sticks instead of TP, but the principle is still the same). Of course, that could be a myth (not the stick sponges. Those were a hard fact).

Let's hope cooler heads prevail in Albany.

Kids, don't try this at home!

Noticing the current trend of trusting the news more if it's delivered by comedians, ABC News decided to try some of that hilarious Bad Lip-Reading on the Prime Minister of Canada. But they really should have practiced more first.

Click here for more!

Civilization encroaches on the beer can house

The man who built the famous (?) Ft. Worth beer can house is moving. You can't stop progress and what was once a quiet residential neighborhood is now chock full of development. In fact, his is the last home left on the street.

But never fear! The unstoppable Louis Torres vows that thanks to his prodigious beer drinking abilities a new and better beer can house will rise from... well, from the normal looking house he's moving into.

The return of Bio-Duck!

The cities of Brazil are seething with turmoil these days as thousands fill the streets of São Paulo and Rio, clamoring angrily for the ouster of their corrupt President Dilma Rousseff.  A historically large 500,000 person demonstration flooded São Paulo last Sunday, so large and focused on impeachment that no one seemed to notice the enormous, ominous, otherwise inexplicable yellow figure looming above them all... as though orchestating the chaos.

Demonstrators attend a protest against Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff, presided over by a mysterious giant duck. Photo: REUTERS/Paulo Whitaker

As indeed he was. Sure, you've got your Bilderbergers and you've got your Illuminati, but behind it all yellow wing-tips truly manipulate the levers of power.

The citizens of Brazil did not recognize this golden threat and blanked it out of their minds as humans so often do. But longtime readers of A Few Paragraphs know it well. For this non-sequiter saffron menace lurking in the shadows of São Paulo and quacking maniacally at the pandemonium is none other than... the dreaded Bio-Duck!! (<--- Read our earlier coverage, if you dare!!)

Bio-Duck spreading havoc earlier in the orient

Photo by 玄史生

A Song for International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day, so in honor of that I present this inspiring video by the female Gregory Brother. (There are some emphatic cuss words).

So my question is: Why is this taking so long? 

Cavemen Ate Their Oats

Quaker and bryanwright5@gmail.com www.flickr.com

Archaeologists have long fretted that ancient cave persons concerned about their cholesterol had few options. A steady diet of Mammoth steaks no doubt clogged their arteries quickly, leading to an early death.

But now comes news of a stunning paleolithic health breakthrough that, together with exercise and a healthy diet, was guaranteed to increase lifespan by decades -- not to mention helping with annoying irregularity!

Just like their modern counterparts, especially in Scotland, good little cave girls and boys sat down every morning to a hearty, steaming hollowed out rock of oatmeal.  Thus fortified they hopped on the  bronto-bus and headed off for a full day at hunting and gathering school.

Long Road to Salem

Kate Brown Secretary of State (and

maybe next Governor) of Oregon

Politics in Oregon, land of old hippies and majestic scenery, is getting weird... weirder. On Tuesday Governor Kitzhaber, himself an old hippy who wears blue jeans to his inaugurations (he's had 4), suddenly and mysteriously summoned the president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, Kate Brown,  away from a high-powered Washington, DC conference for a 1-on-1, personal, secret meeting in his office.

She, being his own Secretary of State, dutifully hopped the next jet back to Salem, leaving all her fellow Secretaries mystified. But when she breathlessly hurried into the Capitol, the Governor looked up and asked, "Why'd you come back so soon?"

Now mystified just like the other 49 Secretaries of State, she politely asked what in the name of Lewis & Clarke was so freaking important that it merited a nine hour plane flight?? "Oh," he said, "Well, I'm not going to resign."

Now, the Secretary of State, who is also next in line for Oregon's throne by the way (that's how they do it there, because they're hippies and they like to be different from states like Mississippi where they have a boring, establishment-type Lt. Governor), didn't think the Governor was resigning either when she left for DC. But he's in some hot water these days, what with his live-in fiancee who once committed a federal crime but the statute of limitations ran out and is also a paid government consultant on clean energy. And there are two 'Recall-the-Gov' campaigns currently running. The main thing tho, according to the New York Times, is that folks are just sick of him.

So the scuttlebutt is that in between the time his Secretary of State left for the nation's capitol and when she rushed back, Gov. Kitzhaber firmly decided to finally resign, then just as firmly changed his mind.

Stay tuned for more adventures!


UPDATE: OK, he's really, really resigning for real next Wednesday. Really.

RIP Don Pardo

Don Pardo

I'm very sad to hear the news that Don Pardo, the renowned TV announcer, is dead. Everybody who's ever stayed up watching TV on the weekend knows his voice from Saturday Night Live. In fact he's the only person who's been on the show all the way through.

I remember hearing his voice as the announcer on Jeopardy when I was a little kid. Don Pardo's voice was part of the background noise of my life -- there, but almost ignored because I'd gotten so used to it. But you can tell when it is gone.

RIP Don Pardo.

Things are Tough all 'Round

Headline:

God Denied Car Loan

Man, credit is tight these days!

For That Special Bookworm in Your Life...

Bound in Grave robber skin

Harvard is an elite school boasting many claims to fame -- their Nobel laureate professors, their sterling worldwide reputation, and perhaps most impressive of all the 3 books in their libraries bound in human flesh. One of them (the ever-popular Practicarum Quaestionum Circa Leges Regias Hispaniae) even has an inscription telling us whose flesh it is: "King Mbesa did give me the book, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it. Requiescat in pace."

So you can imagine their chagrin and horror when it was discovered the other day that that's not real people skin at all! Instead it's just plain, ordinary, blotchy sheep skin. Harvard alumni are today are slinking dejectedly through the halls of power and wealth, doing their best to avoid eye contact with the other plutocrats -- especially the ones from Yale.

But worry not anthropodermic bibliopegy fans! Binding your favorite reading material in the flesh of your neighbor had a bit of a vogue at one time, so there are still plenty of places to go other than Harvard. Click here to see a list of the Top 10 books Harvard yearns to possess.

Slurpees Were the Key

Artist's impression of Bigfoot going for
a Slurpee

Just in case you were wondering, remember the Bigfoot shot in 2012 by an intrepid yahoo using $200 in ribs as bait? It was a fake.

Which is good in a way, since he claimed to have killed it near San Antonio and it's unlikely that Bigfeet live a solitary existence. He would have had family lurking around the fringes, in the vast San Antonio wilderness. That's what made me doubt his story: The 7-Elevens haven't reported an upsurge of Sasquatches walking in to order Slurpees.

Locating Flight 370

The other day they announced that the mysterious Malaysian Airlines flight 370 had definitely flown all the way to the Indian Ocean and then crashed. How did they figure that out? 

It's really kind of ingenious. What they did was use the plane's satellite 'pings', the Doppler Effect, and information from other jets that flew that route.

The Doppler Effect, one of those things you probably heard about while sleeping through science in High School (so it must be in your subconscious someplace!), is the very technical scientific principle that train horns and police sirens sound higher when they are coming toward you than they do when they're going away. 

As it happens, that works on radio signals too, and the one form of communication that was still operating on MH370 was it's satellite 'pinger' (where the satellite repeatedly says, "Need anything?" and the plane usually responds, "Nope.")

Mr. Doppler's effect

So basically what some British scientists did was use the pings to determine the plane's distance and direction (east) from the satellite -- and how long it existed before crashing. The Doppler Effect told them if the plane was moving towards or away from the satellite (away) and at what rate of speed. Then they compared that with past plane flights that gave off similar pings. They also knew how much fuel flight 370 had, which gave them the outer limits it could possibly reach.

This aviation blog reports there was one last incomplete ping received from the plane at about the time it would have been running out of fuel. That may have been transmitted at the moment of impact.

Now they just have to find it in a very deep, very inaccessible stretch of ocean.

Another Theory Shot Down

Artist's conception of black hole downing flight MH370 --
and the rest of the Earth

The disappearance of Flight MH370 is certainly mysterious and the uncertainty of it all is apparently getting to the reporters. Proceeding on the principle that, "There's no such thing as a dumb question," a CNN newsman on Friday posited the theory that maybe the plane was taken down by a black hole.

However, experts generally discounted the idea due to the fact a black hole would annihilate the Earth, not just one plane.

Mary Schiavo, ex-Inspector General for the US Department of Transportation explained it this way: "A small black hole would suck in our entire universe, so we know it’s not that."

And so the search for answers goes on.

Throwing off the Yoke of My Oppressors (i.e., Apple)

Another thing that happened while I wasn't writing: a dream of my youth became real.

I was an odd kid.  Other kids wanted motorcycles and BB guns; I dreamed of AP and Reuters teletypes in my basement, and weather maps transmitted daily from NOAA. I didn't want to wait for the 6:00 news-- it was too short anyway. I wanted to know everything right now! 

Now, of course, we've long since had access to all that and more via the Internet. One of the blessings I count is that I got to live on a time when that childhood dream came true. But, you know, PC's can't be carried around in your pocket and with laptops you still need to sit down, open up, turn on... And it's difficult to read your laptop while you're walking down the street.

Then Steve Jobs said, "Let there be iPad!" And it was cool. But I looked upon the iPad and behold it was very expensive. Plus, umm... I believe that Apple products are elitist. Elegantly designed, but elitist. On principle I refuse to buy them as a token of my solidarity with the underprivileged of the world. 

So I trudged on, padless, through the icy metaphorical snows of Apple oppression, bitterly watching thebloated plutocrats, their arrogant, Starbucks-sipping children at Dartmouth and Yale, and the NPR reporters -- all chuckling contentedly while perusing Proust on their patrician devices.

Young plutocrat elitist sipping Starbucks.
(Borrowed from BitterBlackCoffee.com. 
Hope they are amused.)

Ah, but then Google came out with the incredibly good but cheap  Nexus 7 last summer and I bought one. Now that my dream of a low priced gadget that funnels all the latest movie reviews  to me is realized, it is I who chuckle smugly as I glance at the upper crust with their high priced toys.

And what's this? A glimmer of insecurity in your eyes monsieur elitist, perhaps a glimmer of fear? For now the "average person" as you call them now has access to your precious tablet technology as well, eh? Yes, now we can enjoy lol cats and play 'Fruit Ninja', just as you once did!  And all for hundreds of dollars less, do you hear? For hundreds less!!

And that's how my childhood dream came true. Thanks for listening!