It's Hard to Feel Self Pity About Your Inability to Stop Checking Anxiety-Producing Political Websites
When you're reading a biography of Florence Nightingale.
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When you're reading a biography of Florence Nightingale.
..there was no Friday Quiz last week, and there's been virtually nothing from the Wombat for a while, the explanation is simple -- I was way ahead of John McCain.
My friends, the crisis that faces us is too monumental to support the continued distraction, partisan bickering, and typo-laden chatter that is the Wombat File. Leadership demands that in moments such as these we set aside quizzes, comments, tortured sentence constructions, and half-assed satire, composed in the late-night hour when the blood is beginning to leave the centers of higher reasoning. That's why I call upon this community to travel with me, to Washington, D.C., to meet with the president and ask him to consider that saving our economy is urgent enough to require tough-minded and immediate action.
We don't have the luxury of thinking too long about this. I'm reaching out to all Americans, asking you to send via FedEx any items of personal value, including:
-deeds to paid-off real estate
-gold and platinum jewelry
-high-value foreign currency you have left from your last trip to Europe or Venezuela
-plastic gas cans (filled with unleaded)
-signed first-edition copies of Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone
-well-behaved children capable of undertaking work as domestics in the homes of upper-level executives
to Henry Paulson at the department of the Treasury. These items, along with an enormous number of gold bars and crates of single-malt scotch which are being provided by our friends in the UK, will be piled in a mountain of tribute on Wall Street, late Sunday night, topped by an American flag, a yellow ribbon, and a banner proclaiming "AMERICA STANDS BY ITS ROBBER BARONS."
Let's get it done, people. This economy isn't gonna save itself.
Ed Champion has collected an array of responses from the Scribblesphere, mine one of the more undistinguished among them.
It's just terrible.
UPDATE 9/17: Over at Planned Obsolescence, Kathleen has posted her eloquent and moving rememberances of David Foster Wallace as a colleague.
You can't put lipstick on this pig of a late-in-the-day quiz, but come on up and give it a kiss anyhow.
Two provinces of Canada are tied for # of American states they share borders with. What are the two provinces, and what are the U.S. states they border?
First correct answer to the whole shebang posted to comments wins a box of Alaskan Mooseburger Helper. No Googling or accusing the Wombat of being unhealthily focused on overblown political memes: that's as disrespectful as challenging the veracity of the statements of a political candidate. One set of guesses (at each province/states set) per comment, but comment as often as you like.
Sorry there's no Friday Quiz this week. I plead the ill aftereffects of watching the Republican convention on television, which made my head hurt. And my soul.
That there is a cement ship, broken in half, sitting in the water off of Cape May Point. And that no one can satisfyingly explain why anyone would want to make a ship out of cement in the first place.
That while riding down a multiperson circular raft down a jumbo-size outdoor waterslide, you will probably not, most of the time, be able to tell what is going to happen to you next. Especailly if you've removed your glasses.
That the biggest drag associated with elevated waterslides that involve multiperson rafts is the appalling inefficiency of the conveyor-belt technology that is supposed to circulate the rafts from the bottom of the ride to the top.
That higher gas prices seem to mean that traffic is worse than ever.
That small children can be entertained thusly: (1) Dig hole in sand, (2) Pronounce aforementioned hole your "cooking pot," (3) Explain to children that its purpose is to cook them, (4) enjoy hours of delighted shrieking and scampering.
That although it is unlikely, it is quite possible to witness the invasion of a temporarily closed drinking establishment by a confused, possibly sick opossum.
That a confused (and possibly sick or maybe just drunken) opossums when viewed through the glass window of a mostly darkened beachfront bar -- especially if it stares back at you, reared up on its hind legs like a pale, long-snouted homunculus -- strikes a certain combination of fascination, revulsion, and dreamlike fear into the heart.
That an uninsulated beach "house" (*cough*TRAILER*cough*) gets mighty damned hot during the day.
That if you can honestly tell me those dark spots amid the waves out there are dolphins, you've got better eyesight than eye do, dammit.
That you probably have better eyesight than I do.
That if you take two children and two fat books on a week's vacation to the beach, in company with a large team of supplementary adults who express plenty of willingness to help manage the kids, you will return from that vacation having read exactly 23 pages of one of those two books.
That if you insist on packing the car, because of your superior car-packing skills (a sort of automotive patrimony, handed down from your grandfather to your father to you) which allow you to make use of every cubic centimeter of your tiny car's available cargo space, you should be very careful not to leave that one bag behind, with all of the electronics, including in very particular particular your better half's laptop, you should understand that you have reaped only and exactly what, in your pride, you have sown.