Ado, ado, ado.
And now, without further ado, here is All the News That’s Fit to Fake.
Missing link found in Germany! Darwin confirmed! Archeologists triumphantly announced the discovery of “Ida,” a 47 million year old fossil that didn’t have the good manners to turn itself into oil. Dubbed “The First Aryan” by the German press, the early primate was found facing east, apparently seeking lebensraum.
Nancy Pelosi leveled new accusations at the CIA today, saying that the agency forcibly took suspected terror detainees to Six Flags and made them watch the dolphin show over and over until they cracked and ratted out their mothers. Pelosi claims she was never briefed about the enhanced interrogation technique known as “Waterparking,” which, according to the Geneva Convention, constitutes torture.
And now, a pubic service message from this column.
Have you ever wondered why the so-called “new economy” isn’t working? I can explain, but first, this disclaimer:
Warning! The author’s dinosaurish notions of chivalry require that he state unequivocally that the following examples refer only to the male half of his audience. Thank you very much.
Gentlemen, have you ever looked at pornography on the internet? Have you done it more than once, more than a dozen times, more than a hundred, have you not, in fact, looked at internet porn until your palms are raw?
Now, with that established, let me ask you this. Have you ever paid for it? Neither have I. The problem with the new economy is that there is no money in it because most of it is free. Therefore the web generates very few jobs, other than the casual, off-hand variety.
The advertisement-supported model works as far as it goes but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. It worked fine when there were two newspapers, three television and ten radio stations in every town and the only alternative for the merchants of the world was an ad in the Yellow Pages.
The papers are gone and going, but a million blogs, social networks, wiki sites, and 500 cable channels have taken up the slack. In order for advertising to support all that media we’d have to buy a car a week. Even the invaluable OpEdNews has to beg for money constantly—it can’t support itself otherwise and maybe not wise, either.
Now, back to our regularly-scheduled programming.
The past few weeks have witnessed a virtual blitz of Dicks and Dons—Cheney and Rumsfeld in particular—on the national media. They are desperately trying to polish their legacies by claiming that the wars they started and the controversial actions they took kept us safe, and if those policies are changed, America is doomed.
I have no problem with Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld wanting to wrap themselves in the flag all the time. I just wish they had the decency to wait and do it right, like all those Americans they sent overseas who came home wrapped in the flag at Andrews.
On a lighter note. The government is trying to impose a tax on soft drinks. Supposedly all that sugar is bad for our health. I don’t like being told what to drink, but I’m okay with that decision if they go all the way and let Coke go back to the original, original formula. I’ll gladly pay three cents extra for that.
Switching to sports: I think I speak for all of us when I say that hockey is much more enjoyable now that we have hi-definition television and we can occasionally see the puck. But what genius decided the season should go on until June when there isn’t a scrap of natural ice to be found in the Northern Hemisphere? (I know, the glaciers, but they’re melting too so don’t bug me with details.) It’s stupid, is what it is. Almost as stupid as if they decided to play baseball in November. Oh, wait….
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