Archive of entries posted on September 2019

Song Parody: Disaster Election

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[To the tune of Billy Joel’s “Downeaster Alexa”]

♩♩♪

Well I’m in this disaster election
And I’m losing to blockheads around
While Obama’s, of course, on the Vineyard
And renaming it “Barack Island Sound.”

I took on Beto and the Mohawk yesterday
Leftists moaning “Get the hell out of Bernie’s way”
Frightened the yokels, then he bought another home
Too proud to work, I let my minions work the phones

So I could
Run my disaster election
And I go where the pockets are deep
There’s compliance out there where I canvas
And a good shepherd can’t fail his sheep.

♩

They’ve got bills to pay and children who need clothes
I know they think I care, but why God only knows!
Blue-collar voters aren’t what they used to be
But I got people back of them who’re backing me.

So if you see my disaster election
And if you’re “woke,” and looking for your free meal
Get a life; I am trolling The Apprentice
Got no use for news that is real.

♩

Now what drives my disaster election?
The media, more and more every year.
Since they told me they’d help sell my whoppers
And there’s no lack of gaslighting here.

I was obeyin’ like my father did before
Can’t make a living just obeying anymore
There ain’t much future for a man who bucks D.C.
But bucks are flowing to left candidates like me. . . .

[Lie, Lie, Lie, Oh! . . .]

♩♩♪

Inspirational Way To Start The Week: 5 Fun Facts About You

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Every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turns cancerous and your immune system captures and kills them. Think of that. 
A couple of dozen times a week, well over 1,000 times a year, you get the most dreaded disease of our age, and each time your body saves you.
Our bodies are a universe of 37.2 trillion cells operating in more or less perfect concert more or less all the time.
. . .
Ben’s field is orthopaedics, so he loves bones and tendons and cartilage the way other people love expensive cars or excellent wines. “See that?” he says, tapping a small, smooth, very white obtrusion at the base of the thumb, which I take to be a bit of exposed bone.
“No, it’s cartilage,” he corrects. “Cartilage is remarkable, too. It is many times smoother than glass: it has a friction coefficient five times less than ice.
“Imagine playing ice hockey on a surface so smooth that the skaters went 16 times as fast. That’s cartilage.
“But unlike ice, it isn’t brittle. It doesn’t crack under pressure as ice would. And you grow it yourself. It’s a living thing.”
. . .
“Bone is stronger than reinforced concrete,” says Ben, “yet light enough to allow us to sprint.” All your bones together will weigh no more than about 20 lb (nine kilograms), yet most can withstand up to a ton of compression.
“Bone is also the only tissue in the body that doesn’t scar,” Ben adds. “If you break your leg, after it heals you cannot tell where the break was. There’s no practical benefit to that. Bone just seems to want to be perfect.”
Even more remarkably, bone will grow back and fill a void.
“You can take up to 30 centimetres of bone out of a leg, and with an external frame and a kind of stretcher you can have it grow back,” Ben says. “Nothing else in the body will do that.”
. . .
Altogether, you are about 40 per cent muscle if you are a reasonably slender man, slightly less if you are a proportionately similar woman, and just keeping that mass of muscle uses up 40 per cent of your energy allowance when you are at rest and much more when you are active. Because muscle is so expensive to maintain, we sacrifice muscle tone really quickly when we are not using it.
Studies by NASA have shown that astronauts – even on short missions, from five to 11 days – lose up to 20 per cent of muscle mass. 
. . .
In the second or so since you started this sentence, your body has made a million red blood cells. They are already speeding around you, coursing through your veins, keeping you alive.
Each of those red blood cells will rattle around you about 150,000 times, repeatedly delivering oxygen to your cells, and then, battered and useless, will present itself to other cells to be quietly killed off for the greater good of you.
Altogether it takes seven billion billion billion (that’s 7,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000, or seven octillion) atoms to make you. No one can say why those seven billion billion billion atoms have such an urgent desire to be you.

— You Cure Yourself of Cancer 24 Times a Week … Without Knowing It
The Mail On Sunday | 21 September 2019 | Bill Bryson

A Sincere Request from Frank J.

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So, I’m still kind of in shock Harvey is gone now.

It’s been what? Over fifteen years he’s been blogging at IMAO? Of course, for a number of years now, IMAO has been much more him than me. It’s really hard to imagine the blog without him. Though I’ve basically abandoned it from lack of time, this blog has given me so much–I only have my family because of it–and Harvey was the person with the humor and dedication I could trust it to. I still remember how he beat me in an early contest on doing top test lists I did against my readers to prove how great I was; it was a humbling experience that I learned absolutely nothing from.

Still, he has to move on, and I certainly understand that. He has his own family and life to take care of. So I ask of you, if you’ve ever enjoyed IMAO, please hit the PayPal button in the upper right sidebar. That goes straight to Harvey and he is in some financial need right now. Let’s give him a going away gift he deserves.

Thank you.

Llamarick

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From Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

The directors of the firm hired to continue the credits after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked.
The credits have been completed in an entirely different style at great expense and at the last minute.
.

Executive Producer JOHN GOLDSTONE & “RALPH” The Wonder Llama
Producer
MARK FORSTATER
Assisted By
EARL J. LLAMA
MIKE Q. LLAMA III
SY LLAMA
MERLE Z. LLAMA IX
Directed By
40 SPECIALLY TRAINED ECUADORIAN MOUNTAIN LLAMAS
6 VENEZUELAN RED LLAMAS
142 MEXICAN WHOOPING LLAMAS
14 NORTH CHILEAN GUANACOS (CLOSELY RELATED TO THE LLAMA)
REG LLAMA OF BRIXTON
76000 BATTERY LLAMAS FROM “LLAMA-FRESH” FARMS LTD. NEAR PARAGUAY
and
TERRY GILLIAM & TERRY JONES

Well, this is going over like a steel drum!

So here’s today’s unfinished work-in-progress.
And I checked: there are rhymes.

.

That Peruvian creature, the Llama
Reminds me, somehow, of Obama:
It can be black or white,
Push-Me-Pull-You, and bite…

Evel!

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Remember Evel Knievel? Sure you do. But what do you think of when you think of him? Jumping over cars? Crashing after jumping over cars? Jumping that canyon? Astronaut?

Wait. What?


[The YouTube]

Would you have ridden such a rocket?

And They Thought He Was All Barefoot and Free-Lovey

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Next time a liberal gets all poetryish with you, give ’em a few blades from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:

To the States

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.

(That’s the whole poem)

.

. . . or a later poem, in the same book:

.

To The States [To Identify the 16th, 17th, or 18th Presidentiad]

Why reclining, interrogating? why myself and all drowsing?
What deepening twilight-scum floating atop of the waters,
Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol?
What a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North, your arctic freezings!)
Are those really Congressmen? are those the great Judges? is that the President?
Then I will sleep awhile yet, for I see that these States sleep, for reasons;
(With gathering murk, with muttering thunder and lambent shoots we all duly awake,
South, North, East, West, inland and seaboard, we will surely awake.)

Doesn’t sound to me like ol’ Walt was a big fan of Washington, D.C.

[He was a conscientious objector in the first Civil War, but volunteered as a male nurse to wounded soldiers, and this shaped his opinion of war.]

Socialized Education?? Coals to Newcastle.

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In October of 2018, Sam Abrams, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, asserting that “the ever-growing ranks of administrators have the biggest influence on students and campus life across the country.” The op-ed, headlined “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators,” included Abrams’ research on the political affiliation of college administrators.

Teaching faculty across the U.S. are known to have a leftward tilt relative to the general population. Abrams reported that liberal professors outnumber conservative ones by a 6-1 margin. But among administrative staff that ratio skyrockets to 12-1. In New England, Abrams found it to be as high as 25-1. Students themselves, by way of contrast, identify as liberal rather than conservative by a more modest 2-1 ratio. As Abrams put it, “It appears that a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate—and socialized by an incredibly liberal group of administrators.”

. . .

Over the last four decades the share of teaching faculty across the U.S. who hold full-time, tenure-track positions has fallen by 50%. Meanwhile, administrative positions drove a 28% increase in the higher-ed workforce between 2000 and 2012. Not unrelatedly, the cost of college has increased 440% over the past quarter-century.

.

— How Oberlin’s Bias and Bloat Fueled a $33 Million Blunder
Real Clear Education | 10 September 2019 | Nathan Harden

Excessive-Pitch Meeting

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If 2016 was “The Flight 93 Election” . . .

What do we have to lose by fighting back? Only our Washington Generals jerseys—and paychecks. But those are going away anyway. Among the many things the “Right” still doesn’t understand is that the Left has concluded that this particular show need no longer go on. They don’t think they need a foil anymore and would rather dispense with the whole bother of staging these phony contests in which each side ostensibly has a shot.

. . . then the 2020 race — with the persistent and unchecked plummet of the Democrats towards disastrous policies — might be called “The Boeing 737 MAX Election.”

It may augur into the ground, but, if the Democrats win, it won’t augur well.

Not Cowboy Poetry, But Still Poetry — Courtesy of the National Park Service

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For what it’s worth. The final three stanzas of the poem are the Money-Read Quotes:

–

Thoughts on Fort Marcy
by Lillian Money-Read
(Published in the The Washington Post, April 12, 1936)

. . . My dog bounds down and leaves a darkened trail

Along the silvered hillside, wild with mirth,

His mouth is spread, his limpid eyes a-shine,

His muzzle wet with brown, sweet-smelling earth.

On fair Fort Marcy, thus I dream today.

And hear the swollen creek rush to the river,

With muffled roar like a dreadful battle din

Which made, of old, these frightened forests shiver!

Ah, bright the ferns that clothe these silent moats,

And sweet the lanes where walked the sentinel,

Yet scarce a flower springs on this haunted ground

But marks the place where some young soldier fell!

IMAO Time Machine: How to Identify Racists

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This is from 10 years ago this week. — The Editors

I’m thinking that today a lot of people these days don’t know how to properly spot racists. “That’s easy!” some will say, “Just look for white people!” Incorrect! Racists come in all shapes and sizes (except for octagon and venti). Here is what to look for:

* Racists eyes are quite shifty, always darting about looking for things to be racist about.

* If asked a question, a racist will look up and to the left when thinking of a response since the left part of the brains is where racists thoughts come from.

* Racists are constantly drinking water as racism makes you easily dehydrated.

* Racists are scared of fire.

* Racists like shiny things and will often have a cache of them in their burrow.

* Racists often have leg cramps as they don’t get a proper amount of potassium.

* Racist will bite if angered.

If bitten by a racist, make sure to clean the wound thoroughly. Then subject yourself to people of other racists to see if you start to become angry — a sure sign you have now been infected with racism! If you show signs of racism, get to your doctor immediately.