Personality Test Q. #1

If you were a politician named "Weiner", would you rather have your name pronounced "Wiener" or "Whiner"?

Obama's VP Pick

All the world is waiting with bated breath, but think about it. It can only be the Pope. At its founding as a nation, America threw its lot in with the Freemasons, in opposition to the temporal power of a distant pontiff. This made sense at the time.

But with Masonic policies leading us to ruin, and a new, vibrant papacy in America's Heartland, it would be foolish to ignore the Pope. Obama is savvy. He knows what happened to Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. Mark my words, January won't find Obama kneeling in the snow outside Delia, KS, praying for the anathema on his administration to be lifted. Safer to bring His Holiness into your cabinet.

"What You Can Find At The Bottom Of A Bottle"

Today, the New York Times conducts an intrepid expedition into the world of poor people, following every subway line to its end, out in the sticks. Such a nakedly elitist article would not be possible in any other city, but luckily this is New York, and poor people all read the Post, so they're fair game. They're so poor, the reporter discovers in the second paragraph, that they use generic Windex. The rest of the article, unsurprisingly, is in the same vein.

Future articles I hope to see from the New York Times:

• Does Anybody Actually Live In Yonkers?
• New Haven: End of MetroNorth -- End of the World
• New Jersey: No Thanks
• The View From My Office Window
  
• None Of My Friends Come From The Deep South
• The Bronx is Scary

Cool in My Code

One of the things they don't tell you about New York before you go to live there is that it has its own TV station, NYCTV. Not only is NYCTV broadcast exclusively in New York, New York is its sole subject matter. Programs include

• NYC Paradetown USA
• Blueprint NYC
• Backdrop NYC
• Eat Out NY
• The Bridge (about hip-hop, but as Wikipedia defensively explains, "hip hop began in New York City")

A lot of these programs have no parallel in the "straight" world. There's no Non-NYC Paradetown USA. Parades in Lincoln, NE and Marquette, MI remain uncommented-on. People in the rest of the country are just as curious about the world around them as New Yorkers, but lack Cool in Your Code, which methodically examines the ZIP codes of New York, to tell us what is cool and what is not.

Really, the programming of NYCTV resembles nothing so much as the Travel Channel. But instead of taking us to Europe to discuss the local pastimes and delicacies, NYCTV leaves us right here. It may not be as glamorous as watching a program about foreign lands, but with NYCTV, you are living the travelogue. Yes, life is one long staycation in New York City.

My Fantasy -- On *NBC*

At the Olympic finals, the next gymnast is announced. Cut to the gymnast, looking at the parallel bars, then down at his feet, pacing nervously. He has stage fright, and can't go on. We see his coach and his family pleading with him, getting increasingly frustrated. We can't hear any of it, but at last he bursts into tears and runs out of the stadium. Bob Costas: "He needed at least a fifteen-point-five, but it just didn't happen."

"Winningest"

Just another adjective that nobody will ever use to describe me.

Wikipedia for Veep

The political story of the day is that John McCain was caught plagiarizing Wikipedia in his latest speech, a primer on Georgia. When it became the duty of presidential candidates to offer fun facts about foreign countries I don't know, but McCain notes, in a similar style to Wikipedia, that Georgia was the very first Christian nation, and that Georgia regained its independence in 1991. For this, McCain is being pilloried with all the mirth liberals can muster. (None.)

But I think he's on to something. If there's one thing Wikipedia's founders and proponents stress, it's that it's good enough. Sure, there's sometimes vandalism or mistakes, but Wikipedia usually knows the score. Can John McCain say that? Can Barack Obama, for that matter? Wikipedia offers competence, gravity and mass appeal. If McCain is going to rely so heavily on it, he should do the honorable thing and make Wikipedia his running mate.

Not Ice, But "Ice"

In the second paragraph of the New York Times' recent piece on ice, the author admits that the premise of his article is "kooky or risible" to almost everyone in the country. Normally that would be grounds for not publishing an article about gourmet ice. But this is the Times, and the people have to know.

The article is primarily a forum for meditation on the nature of ice. The zen-like president of the Ice Council offers these insights to the receptive reporter:

• "Ice is a food"
  
• "Ice is water's sister product"
  
• "Not all ice is the same"

I think that pins it down pretty well. On a scarier note, the article profiles some of the people who Care about ice. "Carolyn Polk," it says, "did not start out as an 'ice snob'". On one level, I'm tempted to say, well, who does? But as I come to think of it, I realize that ice snobbery could happen to anybody. I laugh now, but in a few years, will I be so sanguine about the air bubbles in my ice cubes? Do you have to be predisposed to get upset about a colorless, tasteless, odorless "food", or could this obsession truly claim anyone?

Ms. Polk, we learn, was introduced to ice snobbery by her friends, comforting evidence that such a kooky and risible preoccupation can't just develop spontaneously. Still, she offers this moving coda, which speaks to anybody who thought the Style section could never happen to them:

“I never really thought ice mattered that much to me. At first, all I wanted to do was make my guests happy. But once you go there, you go there, I guess."

Will Kiss For Money

Not to be crass or anything, but I think you could really make a lot of money with a kissing booth. According to tradition, kissing booths are only found in carnivals, but I suspect they never existed at all, and are just a cultural reaction to Lil' Abner. If they did exist, you might expect to find them in Branson, Missouri.

Nevertheless, I think if you swallowed your pride and set up a genuine kissing booth in Washington Square Park, charging two or three dollars a kiss, you'd make money hand over fist. With a wry modern gloss, in a city of hip but lonely young people, a kissing booth would fill a real need. Prostitutes aren't cool. A kissing booth would allow you to both take part in Americana and touch someone, while remaining ironic and detached. And of course, it's all legal.

But there are perverts out there, and America is losing its innocence. You'd better have a pimp.

Concrete Quest

Lost technology, the relics of a decayed civilization, is a trope as old as fantasy writing itself. But history doesn't supply much to back up our fascination with it. The Romans had an empire, sure, and that empire collapsed. But other than self-esteem, what was really lost?

Wikipedia makes a dab at listing Roman discoveries -- "While not strictly invented by the Romans, the double-ended dildo was popularized by Caligula" -- but most of the stuff on the list was never lost, and everything else is pathetic. The Romans may have invented the street map, but does that really push the boundaries of science outward? On the other hand, nobody can say that the abacus has been lost. And a 1st-level mage would turn up his nose at a quest to recover the secret of the grist mill.

The glaring exception is concrete, which the Romans stopped making in the 5th century, and was rediscovered at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution by John Smeaton. Concrete also underlies other Roman triumphs like the coffered dome and the road (Boy, being innovative was easy in those days. You only had to invent a road.) It's hard to believe the Romans could let such a fundamental concept just slip away from them, but rather than orcs or Balrogs, it was carelessness that buried the formula of cement.

Mr. Smeaton had no idea that he was the prototypical RPG'er, the model for countless novels and D&D scenarios. He probably sashayed into his laboratory and rediscovered cement, little dreaming that in another age, such an important secret would be guarded by a powerful wizard and a squad of Concrete Golems.