[The refrigerator makes a loud clunking sound, as it is wont to do.]
Mr. Shakes: What dae ye fink aboot refrigeratoors that make lood cloonking soonds?
Liss [cravingly]: I think that I wish they had something sweet in them.
Mr. Shakes: Dinny we have any sweeties?
Liss: Nope. Not even a piece of fruit. We've got nothing sweet in the whole house—except for that Jell-O you bought and have yet to eat.
Mr. Shakes: Och, it's noot like it's gooing tae goo ooff anytime soon. That stooff would survive a nuclear hooloocaust.
Liss: Mm-hmm. Ground up hooves are awesome that way.
Mr. Shakes: And if we ever have a nuclear hooloocaust, you'll be glad I booght that Jell-Oo!
Liss: Naturally. Because after a nuclear holocaust, I'm sure there will loads of clean water with which to make it.
Mr. Shakes: We coold make it with urine!
Liss: Mmm, tasty.
Mr. Shakes: I woonder what Jell-Oo made with urine tastes like?
Liss: Salty, I'd wager.
News from Shakes Manor: The Jell-O Chronicles, Part II
Reality Derangement Syndrome
Paul Krugman has a good piece about the reaction from the right wing to Al Gore's winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.I'll take it a step further and say that this madness over Al Gore is just one more sign of a larger syndrome that has afflicted the right wing for the last fifteen years or so: Reality Derangement Syndrome. Much as the right wing accuse the left of being afflicted with an inordinate and incalculable hatred for President Bush, what they call "Bush Derangement Syndrome", the conservatives aversion to reality has taken on a stridency and hysteria that makes the left’s jabs at Mr. Bush seem mild by comparison. Yet we are the ones who get chastised for being angry about the state of the nation at the hands of the current administration.
And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.
What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?
Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.
And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.
The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.
But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening.
I grant you that the left’s mockery of Mr. Bush, including the name-calling, the cartoons, and the questioning of his intelligence are the stuff of schoolyard taunts, but then how can you look at the assault on reason – to coin a phrase – by the right wing and the Bush administration and not be just a trifle irked? How can any reasonable person look at the realities around us – a war started on lies and deceit, the wholesale spying on American citizens at home without the protection of the Bill of Rights and the blind acceptance thereof by the party that promotes itself as being the advocates of “limited government,” the incredible budget deficits defended by the same party that called itself the party of fiscal discipline and swooned over very thought of the slightest tax increase that might stave off the debt that will saddle the future, or look at the demonization of an entire class of people and the denial of their basic rights of citizenship such as the freedom to marry the person of their choosing based on superstition and prejudice, plus the wholesale carpet-bombing of any opposition to the president’s policies through such means as politicizing the Department of Justice and the firing of U.S. attorneys who do not meet the strict standards of political correctness, or the leaking of the name of a CIA operative to exact political revenge, or the stalking and terrorizing of a blue-collar family in Baltimore because they happened to speak up for a popular and effective health insurance program – and not come to the inevitable conclusion that both the administration and its vocal supporters are clearly the ones who are deranged? It’s gotten to the point that even the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, no bastion of liberalism, is saying that the Swiftboating of the Frost family was over the top. (Not to mention the people who are upset that the Nobel Peace Prize didn’t go to their nominee, Rush Limbaugh.)
It is perhaps that the right wing is finally grasping the sense of impending doom that has them in such a fury; they see the oncoming disaster and are blindly lashing out in a flailing attempt to ward it off. That would explain their behavior and desperation. It would explain why the leading candidate for the GOP nomination in the 2008 election, Rudy Giuliani, is a man whose past record on gay rights, reproductive choice, gun control, and his marital history could [cynic alert] make him a leading contender for the moderate Democratic vote. The GOP is going through these conniptions in an attempt to cling to power and will do anything, including throw reality to the winds, in order to achieve it.
Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.
Research, Bitchez!
A Vatican official has been suspended after he was totally busted on hidden camera hitting on some guy and telling him that gay sex is, like, no biggie, dude. But it was just part of his research!
In an interview published Sunday, Monsignor Tommaso Stenico told La Repubblica daily he frequented online gay chat rooms and met with gay men as part of his work as a psychoanalyst. He said that he pretended to be gay in order to gather information about "those who damage the image of the Church with homosexual activity."Uh-huh. That makes perfect sense. Obviously Monsignor Stenico has attended the Miss Peter LaBarbera School of Totally Not Gay Detectives.
…"It's all false; it was a trap. I was a victim of my own attempts to contribute to cleaning up the church with my psychoanalyst work," La Repubblica quoted Stenico as saying.
Stenico said he had met with the young man and pretended to talk about homosexuality "to better understand this mysterious and faraway world which, by the fault of a few people — among them some priests — is doing so much harm to the church," La Repubblica quoted him as saying.Ooh, the mysterious and faraway world of Teh Gay! If only Monsignor Stenico's work hadn't been brutally cut short by the unimaginative and unsympathetic Vatican who fail to recognize his genius, he would have finished his spaceship and made his gay-detecting psychoanalyst odyssey to Planet Limpwrist.
But now that the Vatican has suspended him just because he was caught on film "making advances to a young man and asserting that gay sex was not sinful" in his Vatican office and the video was aired on an Italian television program about gay priests, he'll probably never get to go one-on-one with the Sod Squad.
And then where will the church be, hmm? Still being "harmed" by gay priests, I guess!
Our Awesome Media
Frank Rich thinks that Americans need to pay more attention and hold their government accountable. Tristero thinks—and I couldn't agree more—that, by virtue of the media establishment in which Rich is an entrenched member, maybe he should STFU and look in a mirror—or, at minimum, hold one up to his bosses before he starts going off on the American people, of which I am one who spends all day every day immersed in the news, and even I sometimes have trouble finding the wheat for all the chaff, never mind how difficult it would be if I were one of the millions of time-starved citizens reliant on the bloody Times and the manifestly useless 6:00 news.
Frank Rich's column today is a rant about America's "whatever" attitude towards Bush's torture policies. Normally, I would agree with him, this country is indeed far too complacent. But when Rich's employer, and the paper of record, leads off its Sunday editorial section with a long article about reporters and their cats, blaming the public for not taking the news seriously strikes me as grotesquely misplaced.Meanwhile, Fred Hiatt & Co. pen a heartbreaking sob story on behalf on our nation's poor, long-suffering telecoms, and Glenn Greenwald uses it as Exhibit One in The Beltway Establishment's Contempt for the Rule of Law.
Cats, for crissakes.
Let's leave to the side Hiatt's inane claim that these telecoms, in actively enabling the Bush administration to spy on their customers in violation of the law, were motivated by the pure and upstanding desire to be "patriotic corporate citizens" -- rather than, say, the desire to obtain extremely lucrative government contracts which would likely have been unavailable had they refused to break the law. Leave to the side the fact that actual "patriotism" would have led these telecoms to adhere to the surveillance and privacy laws enacted by the American people through their Congress in accordance with the U.S. Constitution -- as a handful of actual patriotic telecoms apparently did -- rather than submit to the illegal demands of the President.I don't even know what to say anymore, although this continually seems ever more appropriate.
Further leave to the side that these telecoms did not merely allow warrantless surveillance on their customers in the hectic and "confused" days or weeks after 9/11, but for years. Further leave to the side the fact that, as Hiatt's own newspaper just reported yesterday, the desire for warrantless eavesdropping capabilities seemed to be on the Bush agenda well before 9/11.
And finally ignore the fact that Hiatt is defending the telecom's good faith even though, as he implicitly acknowledges, he has no idea what they actually did, because it is all still Top Secret and we are barred from knowing what happened here. For all those reasons, Hiatt's claim on behalf of the telecoms that they broke the law for "patriotic" reasons is so frivolous as to insult the intelligence of his readers, but -- more importantly -- it is also completely irrelevant.
There is no such thing as a "patriotism exception" to the laws that we pass.
The Best Column Maureen Dowd Has Ever Written
Because she let Stephen Colbert write it:
Surprised to see my byline here, aren't you? I would be too, if I read The New York Times. But I don't. So I'll just have to take your word that this was published. Frankly, I prefer emoticons to the written word, and if you disagree :(He gets off a few really superb lines, and although "In my opinion 'Law & Order' never sufficiently explained why the Manhattan D.A. had an accent like an Appalachian catfish wrestler" is probably my favorite, "I share Americans' nostalgia for an era when you not only could tell a man by the cut of his jib, but the jib industry hadn't yet fled to Guangdong" is a close second.
I'd like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, she's watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito. Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:
Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn't have to think about. It's all George Bush's fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.
There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich's column too.
Pulp Fiction That's Totally Gay
Anyone familiar with the trashy dimestore pulp novels of the 50s & 60s might also know that there was a similar genre at the time aimed at (or for??) gays and lesbians. This subgenre of sleaze was arguably even trashier and seedier than its heterosexual counterparts. Instead of naughty nurses sneaking in shadows with horny detectives, dirty male hustlers and gangs of pink predators roamed the night streets spreading their perversity across the land.
Although on the surface the subject matter is condescending and exploitative of gays, there is a campy wink, a knowing nod, a sense of adventure, that seems to suggest that this was all in fun. This naive representation of the gay "lifestyle" was nonetheless surprising simply for the existence of a discussion of anything gay at all in this straightlaced period of American history. Pre-Stonewall, pre-gay rights movement, these off-the-wall subversive images stood alone in their own little world.
Ryan Richardson of GayontheRange.com states, "Like most every other 1960's sleaze publication, gay paperback covers portrayed a fantasy world full of clichés and misguidedness and absurdities." Along with the fun and the camp, he acknowledges, "There are, of course, plenty of pathological and unfunny treatments mixed in as well." In essence, we can look upon these artifacts as time caspule-type benchmarks of how far we've come in cultural representation of gays and lesbians, and in some respects - because we still see some of these stereotypes even today - how far we have left to go.
Below are more of my favorites:
9/11 Didn't Change Everything; Bush Did
Another day, another impeachable offense that will come to nothing:
Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to court documents unsealed in Denver this week.The article says that the "allegations could affect the debate on Capitol Hill over whether telecoms sued for disclosing customers' phone records and other data to the government after the Sept. 11 attacks should be given legal immunity, even if they did not have court authorization to do so." Gee, ya think?! If it doesn't "affect the debate" that the telecoms and the administration were quite likely fucking lying about the rationale for and timing of the whole thing, then it's really not much of a debate. (No news there.)
...Nacchio's account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.
...In a statement released after the story was published, Nacchio attorney Herbert Stern said that in fall 2001, Qwest was approached to give the government access to the private phone records of Qwest customers. At the time, Nacchio was chairman of the president's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee.
"Mr. Nacchio made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request," Stern said. "When he learned that no such authority had been granted and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process, including the Special Court which had been established to handle such matters, Mr. Nacchio concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act."
The White House, the Justice Department, the NSA, and the Director of National Intelligence all declined to comment on the story. Ongoing investigation, bitchez!
Lambert has much more.
"Catastrophically Flawed"
From the New York Times:
In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top American commander called the Bush administration’s handling of the war incompetent and warned that the United States was “living a nightmare with no end in sight.”The predictable reaction from the White House will be that Lt. Gen. Sanchez is entitled to his opinion and that the president disagrees with it. They will leave it to Rush and Fox News to call him a phony soldier and a traitor.
In one of his first major public speeches since leaving the Army in late 2006, retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez blamed the administration for a “catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan” and denounced the current “surge” strategy as a “desperate” move that will not achieve long-term stability.
“After more than fours years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism,” Mr. Sanchez said, at a gathering here of military reporters and editors.
General Sanchez is the most senior in a string of retired generals to harshly criticize the administration’s conduct of the war. Asked following his remarks why he waited nearly a year after his retirement to outline his views, he responded that that it was not the place of active duty officers to challenge lawful orders from civilian authorities. General Sanchez, who is said to be considering a book, promised further public statements criticizing officials by name.
“There was been a glaring and unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders,” he said, adding later in his remarks that civilian officials have been “derelict in their duties” and guilty of a “lust for power.”
The White House had no initial comment.
Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.
"Triviality and Artifice and Nonsense"
Bob Herbert contrasts not just the current president, but the current GOP presidential frontrunner, Giuliani, with the man who should have been president, Al Gore, and finds both GOPers wanting in today's The Trivial Pursuit. It's the bits about what Gore said the last time Herbert spoke with him that are the most heartbreaking, though:
Mr. Gore knows the system is in trouble, and not just because of the way he lost in 2000. The last time I spoke to him, a few months ago, he said: "Having served in the White House with the Gingrich Congress, and having watched the best of intentions so often turned into small changes ballyhooed as revolutionary, sometimes having no lasting mark, I really do believe that fixing the dynamic of democracy is an urgent task."And that would be why he won't be running for president again. We've let our political system become a place in which serious wo/men with serious ideas don't even have a place anymore.
That's just the kind of thoughtful comment that can't get a real hearing in our sound-bite politics.
...Al Gore is a serious man confronted by a political system that is not open to a serious exploration of important, complex issues. He knows it.
"What politics has become," he said, with a laugh and a tinge of regret, "requires a level of tolerance for triviality and artifice and nonsense that I have found in short supply."
I Guess Rudy Doesn't Want to be President
That's the only explanation of which I can conceive for the lunacy of defending the (allegedly, ahem) mobbed-up jackass Bush once nominated (on Giuliani's recommendation) to head the Department of Homeland Security, who had withdrew himself from consideration after all sorts of dirt was unearthed on him:
Rudy Giuliani on Friday offered his strongest defense yet of Bernard Kerik, his former close associate and top New York City cop now targeted in a federal criminal probe, calling him an "excellent police commissioner" and praising him for being courageous on Sept. 11, 2001.If Rudy Giuliani were replaced with a parrot that had been taught to squawk "9/11!" would anyone notice?
Kerik is facing possible bribery and obstruction of justice charges as soon as next month. Giuliani rejected the idea those charges would harm his campaign and said on balance Kerik had done a good job.
..."He was there on Sept. 11," Giuliani said. "He was heroic on Sept. 11."
Yeesh.
Congress' Wide Stance on ENDA
by Marti Abernathey of TransAdvocate, Trans Group Blog, and The Bilerico Project
Tonight I had a surge of optimism at the latest news from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC):
BREAKING NEWS: In a meeting with the Human Rights Campaign and other gay groups this afternoon on Capitol Hill, Speaker Nancy Pelosi committed to moving an inclusive employment anti-discrimination bill forward in the House as soon as the votes to pass the legislation were delivered.Sounds pretty encouraging, right?
This is an unprecedented commitment from a Speaker of the House to fast track important gay civil rights legislation protecting the entire GLBT community.
They continue:
The Human Rights Campaign has collaborated with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to craft a solution to the controversy surrounding the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. Today, in a meeting with HRC and other gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender advocacy groups, Speaker Pelosi took an unprecedented step and committed to giving H.R. 2015, the fully-inclusive version of the bill, a floor vote in the House once enough support for it to pass has been secured.In this finely crafted piece of propaganda, the HRC hopes to hide the fact that this could have been written after the whip vote. It includes no new information. Once the support has been secured they'll pass the bill? Well duh HRC, this isn't anything new.
To get the straight dope I had to go to Pride At Work's press release:
Today in the U.S. Capitol, a coalition of LGBT and allied organizations, including Pride At Work, met with leadership from Speaker Pelosi, Congressman Frank, and Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin's office about the status of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).According to their press release the effects of this move are already having a domino effect on legislation being introduced in Florida.
Pride At Work is part of the United ENDA campaign which is calling for passage of H.R. 2015, ENDA, which includes gender identity. Our community has spoken and demanded an inclusive bill. Rest assured that this demand was vocally expressed to leadership in the House. Unfortunately, House leadership has decided to go ahead with the strategy of pushing an inadequate bill that does not include gender identity.
This strategy is already having disastrous effects in the states as well, with Florida elected officials removing an inclusive non-discrimination bill from the legislative docket for one bill that contains sexual orientation and a separate bill for gender identity.Never mind that the LGBT community has said they don't want this bill, never mind that 60 percent of the electorate support transgender inclusion, Congressional Democrats are bound and determined to do as they please. With their reluctance to do the will of the people concerning the Iraqi occupation and S-CHIP veto, it seems like they are desperate for any victory...even one the majority of the GLBT community doesn't want.
What's really frustrating is that the Human Rights Campaign seems to be a willing propagandist. I have to wonder if Bill Clinton's Lewinsky legal team or the folks that came up with the name GW Bush's "Clear Skies Initiative" are writing press releases for them. How they can continue to try and spin crap into golden fleece and have anyone buy it is beyond me.
The following is the list of the Democratic members on the Education and Labor Committee. The future of an inclusive ENDA is in their hands. Please call them on Monday and urge them to only send the fully inclusive ENDA (HR2015) bill to the floor.
Education and Labor Committee: Democrats:
1. George Miller, Chairman - CA-7 - 202-225-2095 - George.Miller@mail.house.gov
2. Dale E. Kildee, MI-5 - 202-225-3611
3. Donald M. Payne, NJ-10 - 202-225-3436
4. Robert E. Andrews, NJ-1 - 202-225-6501
5. Robert C. ``Bobby'' Scott, VA-3 - 202-225-8351
6. Lynn C. Woolsey, CA-6 - 202-225-5161
7. Rubén Hinojosa, TX-15 - 202-225-2531
8. Carolyn McCarthy, NY-4 - 202-225-5516
9. John F. Tierney, MA-6 - 202-225-8020
10. Dennis J. Kucinich, OH-10 - 202-225-5871
11. David Wu, OR-1 - 202-225-0855
12. Rush D. Holt, NJ-12 - 202-225-5801
13. Susan A. Davis, CA-53 - 202-225-2040
14. Danny K. Davis, IL-7 – 202-225-5006
15. Raúl M. Grijalva, AZ-7 - 202-225-2435
16. Timothy H. Bishop, NY-1 - 202-225-3826
17. Linda T. Sánchez, CA-59 - 202-225-6676
18. John P. Sarbanes, MD-3 - 202-225-4016
19. Joe Sestak, PA-7 - 202-225-2011
20. David Loebsack, IA-2 - 202-225-6576
21. Mazie K. Hirono, HI-2 - 202-225-4906
22. Jason Altmire, PA-4 - 202-225-2565
23. John A. Yarmuth, KY-3 - 202-225-5401
24. Phil Hare, IL-17 - 202-225-5905
25. Yvette D. Clarke, NY-11 - 202-225-6231
26. Joe Courtney, CT-2 - 202-225-2076
27. Carol Shea-Porter, NH-1 - 202-225-5456
Al Gore Presser on Winning Nobel Prize
Enjoy!
MUSIC REPORT: Stars
Here's the scoop: I like all kinds of music really, but I hate when you ask people "What kind of music do you like?" and they say "All kinds - except country (or, insert other demonized genre of choice)." When I list specific bands or artists I like, people typically give me a blank stare or say "Never heard of 'em," and then run far away. However, given the chance to actually hear the stuff in question, people often nod and admit that maybe that doesn't sound so bad, they were just never exposed to it before.
So here we go. I've taken it upon myself to start exposing people to new (or old) music I love and am passionate about in the hope that it will broaden their horizons and open them up to something they might not have considered before. I always appreciate when someone does the same for me. If you think my taste is shit, that's cool. If you've already heard of it and don't give a shit, okay. If you've never heard it but can't believe what you've been missing, well awesome! I hope someone will get something out of it. As much as I enjoy sharing and talking about music, I know I will.
The first band I want to talk about is Stars. They are an off-shoot of the Canadian indie rock collective Broken Social Scene (which also contains singer Feist and members of the band Metric, to name only a couple). Vocals are handled by Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan in a male-female back and forth that almost always enhances each song, whether it's about the pain of relationships or the current political climate.
They have had four albums, but their 2004 release Set Yourself on Fire was their break-out masterpiece. Their current album, In Our Bedroom After the War, is a solid piece but can't quite live up to the brilliance of its predecessor. However, the first single "Take Me to the Riot" (posted below) is a perfect slice of Morrissey-ish pop.
A good example of the interplay between Campbell and Millan can be found in Fire's "Your Ex-Lover is Dead":
Poetic Justice
Josh Marshall wishes everyone a Happy Al Gore Day:
There are several layers of irony and poetic justice wrapped into this honor. The first is that the greatest step for world peace would simply have been for Gore not to have had the presidency stolen from him in November 2000. By every just measure, Gore won the presidency in 2000 only to have George W. Bush steal it from him with the critical assistance of the US Supreme Court. It's worth taking a few moments today to consider where the country and world would be without that original sin of this corrupt presidency.If you're not with them—well, you know the rest.
And yet this is a fitting bookend, with Gore receiving this accolade while the sitting president grows daily an object of greater disapproval, disapprobation and collective shame. And let's not discount another benefit: watching the rump of the American right detail the liberal bias of the Nobel Committee and at this point I guess the entire world. Fox News vs. the world.
Caption This Photo
It was the tam o'shanter that finally drove Mr. Whiskers to murder.
A Don Sphinx cat wears a blue hat during the international "Pet Expo" show in Riga September 23, 2007. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins (LATVIA)
When You Least Expect It...
SCENE: It's a beautifully sunny day in the amusement park as Ted is being led by his son, Freddy, to his next ride of choice.
Freddy: Come on, Pop! This coaster is supposed to be completely awesome! Can we go on it? PLEASE?!
Ted: Tell you what, Freddy. Let's take a little break since we've been at this all morning.
Freddy: But POP!
Ted: Now, Freddy. The coaster will still be there after we rest, and you need to take it down a notch for a few minutes ok?
Freddy: Okay, Pop!
Ted: That's a good boy. Now, run and get yourself some gumballs.
The boy runs to a nearby gumball machine and throws in some coins. One by one, he scoops out each gumball, then throws them all into his mouth at once.
Freddy: Great idea, Pop! These gumballs are gr—
Ka-BLAM!
Freddy explodes.
VOICEOVER: No one wants this to happen to their child. That's why we, The Aldermen, have listened to your pleas to keep terrorists from blowing up your children with explosive gumballs. Gumball terrorism is not a joke—the terrorists could strike the gumball machines of our shores at any moment!
We may have been too late to save little Freddy, but rest assured that The Aldermen will never rest from their sworn duty to protect all citizens (of Dover, New Jersey) from the ever present threat of gumballs of mass destruction.
Paid for by Aldermen Against Unnecessary Gumball Hijinks.
Freddy: Come on, Pop! This coaster is supposed to be completely awesome! Can we go on it? PLEASE?!
Ted: Tell you what, Freddy. Let's take a little break since we've been at this all morning.
Freddy: But POP!
Ted: Now, Freddy. The coaster will still be there after we rest, and you need to take it down a notch for a few minutes ok?
Freddy: Okay, Pop!
Ted: That's a good boy. Now, run and get yourself some gumballs.
The boy runs to a nearby gumball machine and throws in some coins. One by one, he scoops out each gumball, then throws them all into his mouth at once.
Freddy: Great idea, Pop! These gumballs are gr—
Ka-BLAM!
Freddy explodes.
VOICEOVER: No one wants this to happen to their child. That's why we, The Aldermen, have listened to your pleas to keep terrorists from blowing up your children with explosive gumballs. Gumball terrorism is not a joke—the terrorists could strike the gumball machines of our shores at any moment!
We may have been too late to save little Freddy, but rest assured that The Aldermen will never rest from their sworn duty to protect all citizens (of Dover, New Jersey) from the ever present threat of gumballs of mass destruction.
Paid for by Aldermen Against Unnecessary Gumball Hijinks.
