Reflecting at the Year's End

We in the fictional news business have had a great year! We've had so much to be sarcastic and unpleasant about.  Just consider:

• Kim Chee Who, the restrained and civilized leader of North Korea. What more need we say?
• Vladimir Putin, the last in a long line of statesmen, including Richard Nixon, Dick Cheney, and Benito Mussolini, who can be trusted with a weapon, since they only shoot their friends or their own feet.
• Pakistan, a country now regretting its long-standing policy of nurturing savagery and violence on its Western border. (Pro tip: a buffer state is supposed to keep the bad guys away from you.)
• Nigeria, where the government has sentenced a number of its soldiers to death for refusing to go into combat without guns or ammunition.
• The Scots voters who (narrowly) expressed a preference for being part of the United Kingdom.
• The rest of the United Kingdom, which (narrowly) decided to turn down a US offer to become the fifty-first state.
• Raul Castro; just visualize him making a scale-balancing gesture with his hands: "Russia, the US? Russia, the US? Gosh, why didn't I think of this before? Thanks, Your Holiness."
• The fringies and nut jobs who will find, in the current outpouring of outrage over police shootings (by and of), an excuse to do some shooting of their own.
• Detroit, where everyone some people a few people are celebrating a successful bankruptcy. Bankruptcy, of course, is a way of legally reneging on debt. But still, whoopee!
• And finally, the good folks of our own state, who want the damn roads fixed and are damned if they'll pay one red cent more in taxes to get it done. See, the problem is, money used to grow on trees, and then the Emerald Ash Borer came along and ...

Problem is, from our stand point, all of that is more or less real.  As the saying goes, you can't make this stuff up, and since that's our stock in trade, we have to look elsewhere for inspiration.  Oh, well. At least we can contemplate a well-deserved retirement on the lake front property in Shiawassee County. The only question is, which lake will get there first, Huron or Michigan?

Have a good festive season, and join us in hoping that we have to make up more of the bad news next year, instead of just reading about it.

It's a good day ...

... for headlines, tweets, and so on that trigger the old imagination.

For example, @irarchaeology tells us: "In 1007 AD the Book of Kells was stolen. Two months later it was found beneath a sod ..." Whether or not the sod was charged with anything, we don't know.

An Ancient Rude Monument

@VoxHiberionacum says: "On the Recent Desecration of an Ancient Rude Monument at Tara ..."


And Vladimir Putin (who is either drunk most of the time or is being very badly translated) said, of Hillary Clinton, "When people push boundaries too far, it’s not because they are strong but because they are weak. But maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a woman." Now, let's see, the last world leader who was pushing boundaries was ... oh, hell, who was that now? It'll come to me.

Your morning idiocy round up

Good morning. And now the idiocy round up for Wednesday, May 21st.

The Guardian reports that the French government has a wee bit of a problem with an incompatibility between new high-speed trains it has on order and some of its older stations. A size problem. With somewhere between 340 and 1800 of the new trains. And 1300 stations.

It's as if you have bought a Ferrari that you want to park in your garage, and you realize that your garage isn't exactly the right size to fit a Ferrari because you didn't have a Ferrari before. We discovered the problem a little late …

By "trains", we assume they mean "engines and cars", by the way. The upshot is that they'll be fixing the stations, not the new trains. And of course, the existing administration is blaming the previous administration. For some reason, they (the previous administration) decided to split the administration of the national railroads in two, with one organization responsible for the rail network and another one moving trains around on it.  One group gave the other one measurements for its stations, but only the more recently built ones. The other group -- the one buying the new rolling stock -- took that information at face value, and ... voila! Une véritable grappe (Grappe appears to be how Google Translate renders "cluster".)

Moving to the world of politics, it is reported that Russian Premier Vladimir Putin's "Palace" on the Black Sea was paid for with money from a vast healthcare fraud  "... in which medical suppliers were making millions by gouging hospitals as part of a health-care improvement program set up by Putin."  Putin says he didn't do anything wrong. I swear, Officer, those aren't my rubles!

In an apparently unrelated incident, Britain's Prince Charles, during a private conversation with a Jewish person whose family fled from Poland to Canada in 1939, is claimed to have said that now Putin is doing "the same thing".  Whether he meant forcing people to flee to escape horrific persecution or whether he believes that the Russian leader himself is preparing to flee to Canada was not clear. However, everyone and his serf are objecting strongly to the gaffe. Even neo-Nazis are upset, insisting that the comparison is an insult to Hitler.

And finally, Italy's former Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, told an interviewer that as far as he's concerned, Germany's Angela Merkel isn't a lard-arse.  (He actually tacked an adjective onto the phrase, but the Wood-Charles policy on naughty words prevents us from repeating it; however, if you run it through Google Translate, it would probably give you "infoutrable".) 

To be clear, Berlusconi was adamantly denying that he ever said such a thing. Instead, he did admit "... jump[ing] out at her from behind a pillar in 2008 and yell[ing] “cuckoo”".  Berlusconi claimed that she found the prank funny, and said he got the idea from Vladimir Putin. (Note: we did not make that up. He is reported as saying that.)

This has been the idiocy round up.  We will not be bringing you the World Violence and General Mayhem Round Up today because no one here could stand to think about it, let alone attempt to mock it.

Update: the world edition of COPS.

Putin says he was invited to invade the Crimea, and those aren't Russian troops, anyway. And he was only trying to distract the world's attention from all the sev 1 incidents the Indian Navy keeps opening on the floating (sometimes) rubbish they bought from him.

I swear to God, officer, some guy just ran up to my armored personnel carrier and threw all those soldiers in here! Those aren't MY mechanized infantry!

The old ways are the best ways

So let's say you're a dim-witted, authoritarian leader of a former world power. You want to show the world that your country is making a come back. Do you:

a) Liberalize your laws and move toward a pluralistic social structure?
b) Try to draw a veil over your country's despicable past?
c) Hire mercenary savages from the same ethnic group that previous tyrants employed, and dress them in their traditional costumes, complete with whips?

If you chose c), congratulations, you're qualified to run the Russian Federation.

Dumb Will Find A Way

So there hasn't been a lot of traffic here lately, mostly because the Wood-Charles staff have been writing other things, in other media. (For extra credit, what's wrong with the following:

vector vList {0,1,2,3,4};
for (int i = 0 ; i <= vList.size() ; i++) 
{ 
      vList.push_back(i); 
}

Show your work.)

Anyway, for those who weren't paying attention, 2013 was the year in which, to paraphrase Trevor Rabin, Dumb Will Find A Way. Viz:

• So the evil state wants to keep you from killing yourself and those around you? The Obama-Pelosi conspiracy is gradually outlawing cigarettes? Nice try, Bloomberg-NannyState-Fascists! We can fix this! E-cigarettes! You can still fool yourself into believing that you look like Humphrey Bogart. You can still lean casually on the bar and ... what? But it's not a real cigarette! It's not even tobacco! I'm not "smoking"! All right, so how about this one? Looks nothing like a cigarette, Okay? I admit, it does look like I'm sucking on a flashlight, but still ... Dumb found a way, at least for a while.
  
• All right, all right. Grump. So we can't give ourselves lung cancer any more. We're losing our freedoms every day. But I know! Skin cancer! Tanning salons! We can expose our pasty white carcasses to artificially harmful rays! Hell, even in Florida there're 1261 melanoma shoppes. Big growth industry. Hint: invest in pharma stocks now. Dumb found a way.
  
• Meanwhile, Comrades, here in Soviet Uni ... I mean, Russia, is big problem. We got nasty country, nasty government, nasty terrorist persons. We host the 2014 Olympics, but many degenerate hooligans refuse to come. What to do? Ah, is brilliant! We arrest punk band, Greenpeace counter-revolutionaries, random gay persons. Then, to show how modern and enlightened is Russia, we let them go! Dumb is find way!
  
• One third of Americans claim not to believe in evolution. Enough said.
  
• Colonial chickens come home to roost! In perhaps the ultimate manner, France is being reminded of just how good an idea it was to have colonies in Saharan Africa, that is, French boys are being killed in an effort to fix their grandparents' mistakes. Alors, l'an dernier, I could not find ze Central African Republic on ze map. Maintenant, Je suis buried there. Dumb eventually found a way.
  
• At least in the CAR, the conflict is between people of two more or less different religions. Elsewhere (South Sudan, Syria, Iraq, etc.), people of the same faith, albeit different sects thereof, are killing each other with everything from modern artillery to machetes. Of course, the actual reason isn't simple bigotry, it's a scramble for what small amounts of power, money, and food are still left on the table, but it's more convenient to say "There go the (insert sect here)! Get 'em!" Post-colonial Dumb continues to find a way.
  
• If you're a small frog in a comparatively medium-sized pond and you have little in the way of ethics and brains, you're at risk. The gateway drug of local politics can lead you to all kinds of disastrous situations. If you're not careful who you hang out with, you might become Mayor! All over North America, big-city mayors are stumbling (sometimes literally) into difficulties, while the morons who voted for them cheer them on. Beds at Marion Barry House are at a premium. In Detroit, Toronto, San Diego ... dumb got found out.
  
• Finally, we offer this transcript of a meeting. "Okay, Mr. Rodman, now, when Hillary ... I mean, the Democrats ... win in 2016, we think you have a good shot at a State Department post. Ambassador or something. But you need some international credentials. Something to show you can go abroad and deal with foreign governments and leaders. Have we got a concept for you!" Dumb appears to be finding a way.
  

One of your editor's resolutions for the new year is to post more of this mean-spirited, sarcastic rubbish that I you know and love. We'll see how it comes out.