News Item: QT resumes writing–now at the Beachwood Reporter.
Son of Svengoolie, a Chicago reader, writes:
“Keep it going, Zay!”
OK. But what does the guy at your front door say?
Lest We Forget that the Dark Ages Were a Faith-Based Initiative:
Eleven members of the House Science Committee belong to the House Prayer Caucus, the members of which have been known to pray for rain.
News Item: “Two physicists . . . Nobel prize for physics . . . enables scientists to directly observe . . . subatomic analogue of cats that are alive and dead at the same time, predicted by the quantum laws that. . . .”
Then again, didn’t you like physics better when it was falling apples instead of cats alive and dead at the same time?
News Headline: “Romney reverses on immigration.”
News Headline: “Romney flip-flops on assault weapons ban.”
News Headline: “Romney changes position on the 47 percent.”
News Headline: “Romney’s reversal on foreign aid.”
News Headline: “Romney changes stance on tax cut plan.”
News Headline: “Romney surges in polls.”
Hey.
If it works, it works.
News Item: “. . . PBS accounts for .012 percent of the federal budget. . . .”
Too hard to visualize.
We need a new unit of measurement.
Let’s see.
The annual federal support for PBS is $223 million.
So. . . $223 million = 1 Big Bird.
+ Subsidies for the five largest oil companies: 9 Big Birds.
+ Profits of the five largest oil companies: 614 Big Birds.
And there is Mitt Romney’s 10-year tax cut at a cost of 22,421 Big Birds. . . .
As for the rest of us on down the line:
Brother, can you spare a 1/2,230,000,000th of a Big Bird?
News Headline: “Afghanistan embraces rock ‘n’ roll.”
The British Empire failed there.
The Soviet Empire failed there.
But neither offered rock ‘n’ roll.
QT End of the World and Other News Update:
Asteroid 2012 TV was discovered Saturday, a day before it passed between Earth and the moon.
But at worst, if it had hit Earth, it would have created a crater only a mile wide and destroyed everything within only seven miles.
In other news, Asteroid 2012 TC4 was discovered Sunday.
It will pass closer to Earth on Friday than the orbits of some artificial satellites.
Give or take.
News Headline: “Video surveillance cameras everywhere in our lives.”
News Headline: “Congress OKs drones over U.S. cities.”
News Headline: “Texas schools punish students who refused to be tracked by microchips.”
Do we need to review the notion that 1984 was a warning and not an instruction manual?
News Headline: “Thousands of Wall Street traders follow astrology.”
Interesting.
But let’s get back to how the government should be run like a business. . . .
News Headline: “Obama lacks Clinton’s ‘astute’ political skills.”
QT is reminded of President Clinton’s way of arriving on Air Force One.
He always smiled and waved past the camera crews toward the people waiting to greet him.
He did this even when no one was waiting to greet him.
S.P., a Chicago reader, regarding QT’s worry that the Samuel L. Jackson video for President Obama might be one too many “takes on the campaign,” writes:
“I’m not sure how many more of these plays on ‘Snakes on a Plane’ I can take before it makes me complain.”
Or. . . .
News Headline: “Washington D.C. tops list of nation’s richest cities.”
Now how on Earth did that happen?
News Headline: “NFL concussions: The hits keep coming.”
CXXXII Days Until Super Bowl XLVII Concussion Count:
NFL player concussions through the season’s fourth week: XXXIX.
The count including the pre-season: LXXXVII.
News Headline: “Romney: Big Bird focus by Obama has me scratching my head.”
And he is right, too.
We shouldn’t let a goofy bird distract us from wondering what Mitt Romney is hiding in his tax returns.
Today’s Birthdays: Isabella II, 182; Adlai III, 82.
QT Grammar R Us Seminar on the English Language:
News Item: “Closer to the road, the limbs of the fire-ravished trees were . . .”
As Theodore M. Bernstein, the usage boss at the New York Times for many years, once pointed out:
“The word you want is ‘ravage.’ Only God can make a tree.”
Something happening presently, by the way, isn’t happening at present.
Write to QT at qt@beachwoodreporter.com
QT appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Posted on October 10, 2012