The World Last Week

So . . . I decided today to just briefly comment (me, briefly comment? Ha!) on a few news items from last week's paper. I'll get back to my screeds and didacticism in my next post.

From the "Republicans Can't Do Math" department: Republican Senator Mitch McConnell said that "There’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue." Forgive me if I'm wrong, I'm not mathemagician, but don't tax cuts, by their very nature diminish revenue? I understand the fundamentals behind trickle-down economics, but if I let a person keep $100, and the tax rate is 10%, that money would have to be spent ten times over to make back the money I originally let go. There are intelligent arguments behind tax cuts, and this ain't one of them.

From the "While We're Mocking Republican Senators" department: Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska died last week. And while many remember him for corruption, pork-barrel politics, and generally being nasty, I choose to remember him for this quote:

"And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

What's odd is that I didn't even find out about his death via the series of tubes, but rather in a newspaper.

From the "Really? I'm Remembered For That?" department: Shirley Thompson, former director of the National Gallery of Canada, also died this past week. She is best known for paying $1.8 million for Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire, a painting that consists of one red stripe flanked by two blue stripes. I actually went to the National Gallery while it was there, and it was explained to me that if you look at the border between the red and the blue, you see what looks like fire. The optical illusion worked, but I was left wondering why they needed to pay so much for it - a trip to Home Depot and some canvas would have done fine.

On the other hand, I'm not expert in art. But I am well-versed in marketing, and I don't think the gallery would have gotten many visitors if they hadn't paid such an ostentatious sum for it.

From the "Not Getting to the Root of the Problem" department: The town of Shitterton, in England, unveiled a 1.5 tonne rock with the town name carved into it, to serve as the town's welcome sign. The problem was that conventional signs would often get stolen, because they say "Shitterton" on them. In my opinion, a better solution would have been to change the name of the town. Maybe the sign won't get stolen now, but the citizens still live in a town called Shitterton.

And finally, from the "Best Story of the Week" department: A 75-year-old man in Massachusetts was found to have a pea plant growing in his lung. The plant was discovered when his doctors ordered a biopsy of a dark mass in his lung, fearing cancer. It seems the man had accidentally inhaled a pea and it had sprouted. Apparently a similar thing had happened in the past to a man in Russia, who had a fir tree growing in his lung (well, the sprout of a fir tree).

And the pea-man's first meal after the operation? You guessed it, peas.