Coyote Excuses Predatory Behavior; Claims Was Molested By Cocker Spaniel — Tom Attea-NewsLaugh.com

A coyote was caught molesting a flock of lambs. Confronted about his predatory behavior, he became immediately repentant and explained how he could have fallen into such disgraceful behavior. According to the coyote, he was, as a youth, molested by a cocker spaniel. After providing his excuse, he immediately sought rehabilitation as a vegetarian. A transcript of his entire confession follows:

I am truly sorry for molesting lambs. I just couldn’t help myself. You see, when I was a young coyote, I myself was molested by a cocker spaniel – not just once, but repeatedly, over a period of more than a year.

There I was, an innocent and youthful coyote on the prowl, with never a thought of clamping onto a lamb by the throat, dragging it to the ground, and making a meal out of it. No, sir, I was, like all normal coyotes, at least as far as I knew at that innocent time of my life, a complete vegetarian.

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Smart People Say Stupid Things Too! — Gabriel Adams

Have you ever made a comment that was simply ridiculous, but you didn’t realize it until you saw the smiles on your friends faces? You may have been totally mortified afterwards, but the truth is everyone makes comments like that; even the smartest people in the world make dumb comments too. The best part is: the smarter they are, the harder you laugh.

My friend Jessie recently graduated from MIT and headed off to Princeton to get her PhD. A month after she moved in, she c...

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World Chess Championship Literally Goes Down The Toilet — Tom Attea-NewsLaugh.com

Sometimes the cartoon world, at least as reflected in the colorful pictures and captions of mass media, gets so bonkers that a real-world headline would be right at home in a humor magazine. Take the ludicrous bauble that prompted this article. It appeared in no less a distinguished place than the front page of The New York Times on the Web: "Bathroom Dispute Halts Chess Championship."

We could have gone with that. No doubt about it.

But we prefer to see the everyday zaniness through our own eyes, so we did a bit of a redo.

If case you missed the debacle, the world chess championship was halted when a player, Russia's Vladimir Kramnik, was locked out of his private bathroom because of inferences that he was going there too often and cheating while there. Expectedly enough, the bathrooms were part of the private areas of both players that were not under video surveillance.

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Very Clever Mozart: For not having Mohammed’s head in the original production of Idomeneo — Tom Attea-NewsLaugh.com

As all the world now knows, Berlin’s Deutsche Oper closed a production of Mozart’s perennially harmless opera Idomeneo, because of “incalculable risk” due to a threat from a Muslim group or individual over the director’s decision to include a scene in which the heads of Mohammed, Jesus, and Budda are presented without their accompanying bodies.

The heady scene is reportedly an effort on the part of the director to mix opera with his own anti-religious sentiments.

While Mozart was not above being a bit of a rabble rouser – note the antagonism he bestirred among the nobility due to the amorous ways and eventual comeuppance of the broadly ignoble Don Giovanni – we give him the belated accolade of Clever Monkey of the Week for not finding if necessary to present disembodied prophets in the original production.

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Woodward Publishes New Exposé: Names Secret Source “Deep Tragedy” — Tom Attea-NewsLaugh.com

Bob Woodward, the columnist for The Washington Post who famously wrote, with fellow journalist Carl Bernstein, an exposé on Watergate, for which the source of secret info became known as Deep Throat, has just published a new exposé on administration missteps in Iraq. Appropriately enough, the new source is labeled Deep Tragedy.

While Deep Throat eventually revealed his identity, as S. Mark Felt, a highly placed official at the FBI, the identity of Deep Tragedy has already been revealed as S. Common Knowledge.

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The Invention Of Water; Part Three of The Invention of Everything, An Eyewitness Account — Tom Attea-NewsLaugh.com

Now that we had invented land, everybody wondered, what could be missing? The day before, there was some talk about an idea called water. Today, we were scheduled to work on it. As usual, the big boss kicked things off.

“OK, it’s time to dive into water. Any thoughts?”

“I’m concerned.”

“Why?”

“Well, we just invented land. Why cover it up?”

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Senate Approves New Legislation Aimed At Interrogating Itself — Tom Attea-NewsLaugh.com

The Senate, immediately after voting to approve legislation governing the interrogation and overall treatment of terrorism suspects, voted on new legislation that would compel it to interrogate itself about why nearly every member’s speechifying has been directed, not so much at the nation’s problems, but at the November voter.

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Amnesty International Grants Stay Of Execution To Victims Of Terrorism — Tom Attea-NewsLaugh.com

The laudable but not overwhelmingly effectual organization, Amnesty International, released an unusual report that had two well-balanced goals.

The first was, as one would expect, to point out abuses that suspected terrorists can be exposed to, for instance, summary shipment to Gitmo, with a reward paid for their apprehension, and to advocate that the rights of the suspects that are being wronged be transformed into wrongs that are being righted.

But the second goal demonstrated an unusual sensitivity for those who have been tortured and executed. The always fair-minded organization brought its name to life by declaring that the victims had amnesty and therefore were not really dead.

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This Week’s Driving Tip: It’s Not If The Cops Are There. It’s Where Are They? — Tom Attea-NewsLaugh.com

We have noticed along the highways and byways that, while we used to see an occasional trooper or local police officer waiting around the next curve with his radar alert for speed infractions, we now spot the cagy gentlemen nearly every time we drive for even a few miles. Alert to the high price of tickets and annoyed because we think being stopped, unless one is recklessly speeding, is an invasion of privacy, a new defensive principle popped into our watchful consciousness that we thought we’d share with you.

Forget the days when you used to push the speed limit and think, “If I’m lucky, I won’t get spotted by the cops.” The new way to think is, “I better stay pretty close to the speed limit, maybe push it by three to five miles an hour at most, because the question isn’t if the cops are there, tucked in somewhere around a bend. It’s where are they?”

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Swift Bank To Comply Slower — Tom Attea-NewsLaugh.com

Just when George Bush was winning a victory in the Senate for the right to handle terrorists in a moderately terrifying way, it looks as if he can expect slower help from Swift, the Belgian banking consortium known as the letterhead-heavy Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications.

The banking group was reprimanded by Belgium’s privacy protection commission for aiding the US counterterrorism effort by providing confidential data about money transfers.

The commission’s report stated, “It has to be seen as a gross miscalculation by Swift that it has, for years, secretly and systematically transferred massive amounts of personal data for surveillance without effective and clear legal basis and independent controls in line with Belgian and European law.”

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Poll In Iraq Proves It’s Hard To Be Grateful When You’re Being Blown Up — Tom Attea-NewsLaugh.com

One would think that the number of American lives that have been sacrificed or maimed and the enormity of American treasure that has been expended in Iraq would elicit some degree of gratitude among Iraqis. But a new poll, which was done for the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes, proves that it’s hard to be grateful when you could be blown up or otherwise assassinated at any moment.

Here are a few absences of gratitude that the Bush administration now has to stare at:

71% of Iraqis who responded to the survey agreed that "they would like the Iraqi government to ask for U.S.-led forces to be withdrawn from Iraq within a year or less.”

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The American Umpire. Conducting The American Empire In A Way That’s As Fair As The Calls In Yankee Stadium. — Tom Attea-NewsLaugh.com

We were sitting here trying, as usual, to figure out how today’s America, saddled with the burdens of inadvertent empire, could conduct itself in the world so Americans are happy about how we’re doing and the rest of the world might actually either approve or have a hard time disapproving of our behavior. We finally hit on an answer that’s so moronic we knew right away it has real potential.

We behave as if we’re the American Umpire, that is, we call the balls and strikes in the global games based on the principle we’ve all grown up with, can understand, and most of the world even admires: fair play.

And, being the ump, we expect the players to respond with good sportsmanship, no matter which way the calls go.

Needless to say, part of this easily understandable and highly commendable modus operandi requires us to call the balls and strikes fairly on ourselves, too, even when Uncle Sam strikes out.

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For Parents Weary of the Green — Mary Fagan

Tips for parents to protect and preserve their cash from typical teen tricks.

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The Invention Of Land; An Eyewitness Account, Second Half - Part Two Of The Invention Of Everything — Tom Attea

"Always metaphysical. Can we just stay with the practical stuff for now?"

"Sure. Just thought I'd bring it up."

"Anybody got a name suggestion?"

"Well, since the whole thing is so sudden it could all kind of go bang."

"Sounds reasonable. So we call it a 'bang.'"

"You mean, 'The Bang.'"

"Right."

"That’s it? Something this big?"

"OK, OK, how about 'The Big Bang'?"

"Very workable. But I don’t know if it captures the romance of it all."

"Only a scien...

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Riddles That Make You Smile — Steve Gillman

Riddles are good brain exercise. These ones will also make you smile.

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