Stat of the day, courtesy of the WSJ: Ultra-high performance sport motorcycles represent 10 percent of sales and 25 percent of motorcycle fatalities. Who’s buying these bikes? Baby boomers. Kids can’t afford them. Sure, young squids die on motorcycles. But a lot of middle aged folks are returning to bikes, can afford the best, and hop on after 20 years of not riding.
Apparently, teenagers aren’t the high-risk age group these days: their parents are.
Greenspan now joins the chorus of people who had a chance to make a difference years ago, but kept their mouths shut and toed the Bush line, and only now speak up to say “oh, that was wrong.”
You supported those tax cuts when you said “responsible tax cuts are good.” You and I might know what a responsible tax cut is, but you knew then that Bush was sponsoring no such thing, and that you’d be quoted as saying “tax cuts are good.”
I hope you and the retired generals all sit around in the nursing home poisoning yourselves with regret. Jerks.
Alternet has video of a minister trying to get into the Petraeus hearing, getting told to go to the back of the line, and then getting his ass kicked by police for no apparent reason. Apparently he’s got a broken leg and is now in the hospital.
Good to know that our nation’s warriors are safe from middle-aged ministers.
I think it’s still cute. Maybe “cute” isn’t the right word. Funny. I guess I’m not cut out to be a televised pop-psychologist.
Helmet Hair pointed me to this amusing promo video for the absurdly large-engined motorcycle by Triumph:
This Luna cover of Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up” is absolutely incredible.
Wow, I miss Luna.
Some Republican died, but we think he died in a heterosexual fashion, so it’s totally OK.
Autoerotic asphyxia counts as straight, right? Just checking.
I was told once, by a friend taking an anthropology class, that the ubiquitous dead-baby jokes (‘what’s grosser than gross?’ and its ilk) began during the Vietnam war as a coping mechanism to make the My Lai massacre seem less horrific. They went on to say that the Challenger disaster jokes were the way that Americans dealt with that tragedy, that gallows humor was the folklore mechanism humans used to deal with the gallows.
It makes sense, sort of. I mean, there’s the classic joke about the old man in the shtetl who reads the anti-semitic rag because it contains nothing but good news about how Jews are running the world. The Jewish cultural wealth of humor could have been developed to fend off the Jewish cultural burden of tragedy.
So, how come we don’t we have any good jokes about 9/11?
I mean, we’ve got jokes about terrorists. There’s that sitcom script running around about the terror squad who starts a bowling league… there’s your standard jokes about terrorists trying to make bombs (“don’t worry, we’ve got another one in the trunk” goes back at least to the IRA days, and is basically a joke about how the Irish/Arabs/whoever are stupid). And of course you’ve got your jokes about TSA security and toenail clippers. (No, Encyclopedia Dramatica doesn’t count. Lulz are not laughter.)
I have heard only one, and that just last week:
Knock knock
Who’s there?
World Trade Center
World Trade Center Who?
YOU SAID YOU WOULD NEVER FORGET!
But I wouldn’t say that really constitutes “jokes” in the plural. Nor would I argue that it’s any sort of evidence that the US as a nation is coping with 9/11 in any sort of constructive way.
But as a friend pointed out, you don’t hear any Pearl Harbor jokes either. So maybe we only create jokes for some tragedies, and not others? Maybe humor isn’t the way we cope with tragedy at all? Maybe I’m just missing out on a trove of hilarious WTC-related humor (probably not.) Got any good ideas?
At last, the US catches up with the Japanese hygiene revolution: the washlet smart-john is now available in America.
I’m likely to be offline til Monday. In my absence, ponder the nature of human absence:
Secretly Ironic 