This funny Vernon Robinson for Congress ad reminded me of Robert L. Kocher's Analytic Papers.

Both share the theme that someone awakening in today's America would surely think that they were in the Twilight Zone.

Time again for a favorite game: Editorial or Reuters' news story:

President George W. Bush signed legislation on Thursday to build 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexican border, an election-year move against illegal immigration aimed at helping Republicans.

That's right, it's the opening sentence of a Reuters' news story.

Awesome police work
One of his arrests came after a victim spotted his X-rated Web site address on his jacket.
It only took them two months to find him.

Colgate Luminous Paradise Fresh has to be the most godawful tasting toothpaste in the history of toothpaste.

They should call it Colgag.

It tastes like that sensation you get in your mouth when you're too close to a spray of Febreze.

In fact, it smells a bit like Febreze, that grapy, neutral non-smell that obliterates other smells.

Flouridated Febreze.

Yuck.

It doesn't quite taste like hurt, but it's close.

A fun phone pic from my seldom coblogger Tuba Boy, who is spending this week at the Bondurant 4 day racing class.



Vroom vroom!

I get giddy just thinking about the fact that this product finally exists.


The Towelie Towel - 30" by 60", made of a million little fibers, it's shoeless, clueless, banned, burned, funky & fun.

A near miss is a hit.

Joe Sharkey's harrowing first-person account of an almost unbelievable mid air collision between an Embraer Legacy business jet and a commercial Boeing 737.

With the window shade drawn, I was relaxing in my leather seat aboard a $25 million corporate jet that was flying 37,000 feet above the vast Amazon rainforest. The 7 of us on board the 13-passenger jet were keeping to ourselves.

Without warning, I felt a terrific jolt and heard a loud bang, followed by an eerie silence, save for the hum of the engines.

And then the three words I will never forget. “We’ve been hit,” said Henry Yandle, a fellow passenger standing in the aisle near the cockpit of the Embraer Legacy 600 jet.

...

And so began the most harrowing 30 minutes of my life. I would be told time and again in the next few days that nobody ever survives a midair collision. I was lucky to be alive — and only later would I learn that the 155 people aboard the Boeing 737 on a domestic flight that seems to have clipped us were not.

Investigators are still trying to sort out what happened, and how — our smaller jet managed to stay aloft while a 737 that is longer, wider and more than three times as heavy, fell from the sky nose first.

But at 3:59 last Friday afternoon, all I could see, all I knew, was that part of the wing was gone. And it was clear that the situation was worsening in a hurry. The leading edge of the wing was losing rivets, and starting to peel back.

...

A panel near the leading edge of the wing had separated by a foot or more. Dark stains closer to the fuselage showed that fuel had leaked out. Parts of the horizontal stabilizer on the tail had been smashed, and a small chunk was missing off the left elevator.

A Brazilian military inspector standing by surprised me by his willingness to talk, although the conversation was limited by his weak English and my nonexistent Portuguese.

He was speculating on what happened, but this is what he said: Both planes were, inexplicably, at the same altitude in the same space in the sky. The southeast-bound 737 pilots spotted our Legacy 600, which was flying northwest to Manaus, and made a frantic evasive bank. The 737 wing, swooping into the space between our wing and the high tail, clipped us twice, and the bigger plane then went into its death spiral.

It sounded like an impossible situation, the inspector acknowledged. “But I think this happened,” he said. Though no one can say for certain yet how the accident occurred, three other Brazilian officers told me they had been informed that both planes were at the same altitude.

Those Brazilians sure build a tough airplane.