This Might Be Less Interesting To You Than Usual
I'm going to be honest with you people: I'm completely exhausted. Between healing all the deep social rifts in this country (as I did yesterday) and the regular Tuesday hoo-ha, I'm spent.

Creatively, I have nothing left. My committment to excellence stems from my responsibility to put out a blog of the highest quality as an example to the young and impressionable Bucketeer legion which now numbers very nearly in double-digits.

If I were following the path of my high calling, I would write a scathing and (no doubt) hi-larious breakdown of all the debt projection figures that came out yesterday. The problem: I don't understand them. Not a one. Sure, you're thinking "that never stopped you from posting about a topic before. Remember yesterday?" to which I am obliged to reply "Shut up." Look, I have problems with basic math, OK? Once we start talking about trillions of dollars I'm just about ready to put the shotgun barrel in my mouth.

Denied the only obvious avenue of reflection and analysis, I have decided to go the MPH route and lazily steal things from the newspaper and then tack on enlightening commentary like "Isn't that crrr-azy?!"

These are local news, making them even less relevant to you and your daily life. Enjoy.

1) Riverside County Sheriffs arrested a guy. The end. Good night!

No wait, there's more! The guy they arrested used to be a volunteer assistant high school football coach at a local school. In the course of making the arrest, the also confiscated "a cache of white supremacist propaganda... 45 firearms, ammunition, body armor... and a variety of drugs." The accompanying picture (you might need to register to see it... sorry) is the Sheriff standing behind a giant Nazi flag strewn with weapons. Not really how I'd want my picture taken, but I'm not the Sheriff.

Anyway, this guy was one of 19 arrested in a sweep of parts of Riverside County that are exactly where you'd expect to find Nazi skinheads: in the vast expanses of brown land occasionally pocked with trailers. They can only be one of two things: white supremacist hideouts or meth labs. The two are not mutually exclusive.

What's interesting is that the coordinated effort of sheriff, police and FBI uncovered this ring of a prison-born white supremacist sect calling itself "Public Enemy Number One". In the acronym they gave themselves (again, gave themselves) they decided to use the Roman numeral instead of the Arabic "1" (damn you, Toby Keith!) so that the short version: PENI.

You can't make things like this up. A prison group operating on the outside calling itself PENI.

Robes and hoods on white-supremacist jackholes is more of a Southern thing. Out here it's more tattoos and bumper-stickers that point them out, which I think is kind of tragic. Think of the comic potential of watching a parade of hooded PENI. As I recall, a hooded PENI is the easiest way to tell a man isn't Jewish.

ba-doum-SHA!

I told you I was spent.

2) A psychology professor at UC Riverside, my alma mater, has been awarded a $1 million grant to study happiness.

Every once in a while I really kick myself for leaving academia. The National Institute of Health apparently has all this money just laying around that they can throw at people for no reason whatsoever. From what I hear you can get $1 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities really easily. All you have to do is promise to somehow befoul, defame or discredit Jesus in your work. Easy money.

This is a proposed five-year study. I can already tell you the outcome, as this professor is about to find. Having $1,000,000 you don't have to pay back tax free makes people happy. And past that--if she's anything like every other psychologist I know--massive amounts of mood-altering drugs. Study done! Meanwhile she gets a pool dug behind her summer home in Newport.

No, I'm just kidding. You can't buy a house in Newport for $1,000,000.

OK, that's it. I'm going to leave out the story about the guy who killed his mom and then cut off her head and her hands because he saw Tony Soprano do the same thing after he killed Ralph Ciffaretto. I'm worried I'll be contributing to giving my home a bad name.

And as we all know, that's the white supremacists' job.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 7.9


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 9:44 AM