Pretty soon, I'll only be as smart as a neocon.

They want the End Times to happen real soon, and they figure if God sees this he'll start turning the Apocalypse crank to take the Internet out so people stop playing it.

I didn't realize that I'd already seen that celluoihhdic garnet until the bit with the firefighters in the clouds showed up.

I suspect my brain put a protective shroud around the trauma so I could get on with my life.

So, when I read the description up above, I clicked on the link, thinking "Huh, how could it be that bad?"

Something similar happens when I eat food at Long John Silver.

BTW, my friend had a hard time telling if the Clinton entry in Conservapaedia was satire or somebody serious....I lean towards satire myself, but I admit the signal is a bit tangled.

The article's been edited several more times without the "devil incarnate" bit being removed, including at least once by Aschlafly.

But that video... Oh, dear God, it burns us!

You'd have to strap me into a Poetry Appreciation Chair to make me watch that crap again, thanks.

As anybody who's ever taught Freshman Lit can tell you, not even Swiftian irony comes across 100 per cent of the time. There's always somebody in the class who has to have the irony in "A Modest Proposal" gently explained to him or her.

Although to me Ameraca sounds more like a bank or a prescription drug than a country.

If you haven't seen it, try the first chapter.

....isn't he?

And I'm not going to watch the video to listen for myself. Sorry, but these days I'm being careful not to destroy too many braincells all at once . . .

Mary Frances

It doesn't even have to be a freshman lit class. A 40-something friend recently sent me an email entitled "A Modest Proposal", with an entirely serious proposal in it. I thought it was ironic (it wasn't something I'd want to do), but, um, it wasn't.

I have before me the March/April 2007 issue of The Skeptical Inquirer, which has a review of her book Godless, titled "The Coulter Hoax: How Ann Coulter Exposed the Intelligent Design Movement".

It is irony.

The Large Chain Bookstore I work at is run by someone who can't stand That Woman, so our Coulter endcap was amusing. On one half of it was Godless, on the other half was Ageless, Suzanne Somers' latest diet book.

#2: Avram, you're forgetting the Amnesia Effect.

I didn't realize that I'd already seen that celluoihhdic garnet until the bit with the firefighters in the clouds showed up.

Sounds like my experiences with spy novels by John le Carre. My dad picked up one and he read it and when he was done I read it and--well, let's just say it did not successfully achieve liftoff. (Sorry, leCarre fans!) The only interesting point was in the last 25 pages when Smiley showed up for a walk-on. So I sold it off and some years later figured it wasn't fair to judge a successful author from just one book so I picked up a paperback and tried his stuff again. It was a slow slog, but it wasn't until Smiley showed up for his walk-on that I realized I'd bought the same damned book again because it was so lame the title had scraped off the surface of my mind like pancake splatters on Teflon. I'll try him again someday--but I'm going to get one of his fans to suggest which one I start with first.

Then again, the first time I heard Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" I thought it was parody. Then I realized that I had my car radio on scan. I was listening to a country music station. Given the whole Dixie Chicks fracas, I figured the song had to be for real. So what do I know?

(Of course, this makes me wonder if people takes Mitch Benn's "This Ain't Your Country Anymore" seriously rather than as parody.)

Bad lyrics, check. Bad music, check. Painfully bad singing, check. Supremely over-the-top imagery...errr....checkcheckcheckcheckcheckcheckcheck.

In every previous war, we brought our dead home to public honors, and acknowledged the wounded in the tallies of our casualties. In this war the dead come home in secret, forbidden to even be photographed. Tallies of our losses don't include eyes or limbs or spines. And the site where the FDNY lost 345 people and the NYPD lost 23 got turned into an inspirational background for George Bush to film commercials for himself. "America, We Stand as One" is a faithful reflection of the spirit of this war.

And one more thing:

That scene in the graveyard? Totally bogus. When did you last see anyone laid to rest under a headstone that tall, made to that shape? That may be the young lady's great-grandfather's headstone, but it's not her husband's.

Meet The Press for Idiots -- 59 seconds of idiocy. Hooo-weeee!

Also, successfully playing an intelligent and interesting character (assuming for the moment that those are accurate descriptions of said character) does not necessarily entail being intelligent and interesting in real life. For one thing, your "spontaneous wit" can be the product of half a dozen people collaborating for a week.

If it were a real headstone, Mrs. Mourner couldn't have hidden that babe-in-arms behind it.

That's the only justification required.

His first two Smiley novels, Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality are almost straight detective novels rather than spy thrillers, set in an England that was just starting to slough off its grey postwar miasma and antiquated class structure.

These were followed by the classic Smiley novels, the ones people mean when they talk about LeCarre: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (little Smiley there), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People. These are the ones to read if you want to know what LeCarre got his reputation for.

LeCarre continued writing straigt spy thrillers until the end of the Cold War, after which he broke out of his template of English spies playing games with their Russian or Chinese counterparts; The Constant Gardener is a good example, with western medical conglomerates playing games in Africa.

And you are still bad, bad, bad for linking to that Washington video, which has eaten my brain. Bad, bad, bad.