Stupid Question of the Week You Don't Have to Answer

Mac and Dick McDonald owned a burger joint called McDonalds. One day Ray Kroc visited, liked the place, bought a franchise, and the entire fast food industry was born. Years later, McDonalds started selling a double burger named after one of the original brothers, the Big Mac. Why wasn't it named after the other brother?

Personal Problems

This week I had personal problems that make your personal problems look like getting your toes tickled by a squadron of buxom French maids with feather dusters while the Luxembourg String Quartet plays Debussey. 

If my personal problems were in a triathlon with your personal problems, my personal problems would butterfly past your Australian crawl in the swimming competition, pump faster than your cottage cheese thighs in the bicycle competition, and huff past your sweaty ass in the running competition. 

If my personal problems met your personal problems in a dark alley, I'd end up with your wallet and your kid wouldn't become Batman. 

My personal problems had numerous run-ins with authority while your personal problems were hiding behind 100 seersucker suits in the bedroom closet. 

My personal problems had to keep explaining themselves, stretching the limits of diplomacy to the breaking point, while yours turned into a windmill and provided electricity for thousands. 

If our personal problems were sudoku puzzles, yours would be solvable in 10 minutes in pen while mine would remain unfinished with pages of penciled scratch notes. 

If your personal problems were my personal problems I'd rejoice. If my personal problems were your personal problems, you'd write me an angry letter. 

When our personal problems walk towards each other down the center of a dusty western street at high noon, my personal problems mow down your personal problems without the help of the schoolmarm. 

There's nothing wrong with my personal problems that a little bit of your personal problems wouldn't cure. 

My personal problems shove your personal problems off the lifeboat of the Titanic to make room for more personal problems. 

Your personal problems are the ape. My personal problems are the monolith. 

If personal problems were pies, yours would be freshly baked and mine would be already eaten. 

My personal problems are itching for a fight and don't like the way your personal problems are looking at them. 

My personal problems have staged a coup in my brain, keeping my hippocampus prisoner and my medulla oblongata in chains, while your personal problems step aside for material obligations in your cranium. 

You've got your personal problems rounded up nicely while mine are roaming the streets in a hopped up Buick. 

When Buddhists light incense called "Your Personal Problems," they're reminded of heaven. When Buddhists light incense called "My Personal Problems," they're reminded of Los Angeles. 

When personal problems get together for drinks in local bars, your personal problems buy a round on the house while my personal problems are barfing in the men's room. 

In spite of all this, my personal problems get 25,500 hits at Google while your personal problems get 45,100.

I guess you win.

Stupid Question of the Week

How many personal problems does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Send your answers to personal problems.

 Tattoo of the Week

15 Questions for Bob Woodward

1. If you didn't tell your editor, Len Downie, about the CIA leak because you were so afraid of being subpoenaed, why did you supposedly tell Walter Pincus? Did you trust Pincus but not Downie? 
2. Why were you afraid of being subpoenaed in 2003? Subpoenas of reporters didn't begin until 2004. And how would telling Downie lead to your being subpoenaed? 
3. What are your ground rules for your books? Since Plan of Attack was published, weren't you free to use the material from your source? 
4. Why did you come forward to Len Downie in late October to reveal your source? This was supposedly before your source approached Fitzgerald, so what motivated you? Did the source call you or did you have sudden pangs of conscience? Why didn't this occur to you in 2003 or 2004? 
5. On October 27, you were on Larry King saying you had no big scoop. Was that true or a lie? 
6. Why did you criticize Fitzgerald and his investigation without revealing that you had something to hide from him? 
7. You said you got permission in writing from all three of your sources to testify about your conversations with them. Two of these sources, Andrew Card and Scooter Libby, have been identified. Can you release their letters? And did Libby write any poetry to you? 
8. Why did you say categorically that there was no harm done by the outing of Valerie Plame? How do you know this when the CIA has yet to issue an after-action report? 
9. Can you at least tell us some of the atmospherics of your dealings with Fitzgerald? 
10. Did the prosecutor indicate that you might be called back? 
11. Are you now writing about the Plame affair, and if you are is it for one of your books or for the Post? 
12. You've praised Judith Miller's decision to go to jail and offered to do time for her. Still feel that way? 
13. Did you remind your source of the June 2003 conversation and did that prompt him or her to go to Fitzgerald? 
14. Had your source testified previously to Fitzgerald or before the grand jury? 
15. Is there any chance your source was Bill Casey being channeled from the dead?

 - Arianna Huffington: Woodward: From Watergate Hero to Plamegate Goat -

The Case Against Evolution

Religious fundamentalists are making the wrong argument against evolution. The real argument is that our air is filthier, our water is more polluted, we're still using outdated forms of energy, and we still slaughter and maim and torture each other in the name of progress. This is the opposite of evolution. If mankind were evolving, our air would be purer, our water clean, free flowing, and readily available to everybody, all our energy needs would be endlessly supplied by sun, wind, tides, and thermal plants, and we would all be nurturing each other to ever greater plateaus of health and happiness and personal fulfillment. 

Answers to Last Week's Stupid Celebrity Question

"The light, the light, the light, every mystic in the world has 'seen the light.' That brilliant, blazing energy, brighter than a thousand suns, it is locked up in everything. Now imagine this. Imagine you're seeing it. Like you see aureoles around Buddhas. Like you see the beatific vision at the end of Dante's Paradiso. Vivid, vivid light, so bright that it is like the clear light of the void in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It's beyond light, it's so bright. And you watch it receding from you. And on the edges, like a great star, there becomes a rim of red. And beyond that, a rim of orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. You see this great Mandela appearing this great sun, and beyond the violet, there's black. Black, like obsidian, not flat black, but transparent black, like lacquer. And again, blazing out of the black, as the yang comes from the yin, more light. Going, going, going. And along with this light, there comes sound. There is a sound so tremendous with the white light that you can't hear it, so piercing that it seems to annihilate the ears. But then along with the colors, the sound goes down the scale in harmonic intervals, down, down, down, down, until it gets to a deep thundering base which is so vibrant that it turns into something solid, and you begin to get the similar spectrum of textures. Now all this time, you've been watching a kind of thing radiating out. 'But,' it says, 'you know, this isn't all I can do,' and the rays start dancing like this, and the sound starts waving, too, as it comes out, and the textures start varying themselves, and they say, well, you've been looking at this as I've been describing it so far in a flat dimension. Let's add a third dimension; it's going to come right at you now. And meanwhile, it says, we're not going to just do like this, we're going to do little curlicues. And it says, 'well, that's just the beginning!' Making squares and turns, and then suddenly you see in all the little details that become so intense, that all kinds of little subfigures are contained in what you originally thought were the main figures, and the sound starts going all different, amazing complexities of sound all over the place, and this thing's going, going, going, and you think you're going to go out of your mind, when suddenly it turns into... Why, us, sitting around here."
- Alan Watts -

"This investigation has cast a constant searchlight that the White House can't turn off the way it has succeeded in turning off the press. So their methodology and their dishonesty and their disingenuousness - particularly about how we went to war - as well as their willingness to attack and rough up people who don't agree with them are now there for all to see. They can't turn off this searchlight, which is shining on a White House that runs a media apparatus so sophisticated in discrediting its critics it makes the Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Ziegler press shop look like a small-time operation."
- Carl Bernstein -

    "By this time in 1996, the Iraqis had put together a fairly sophisticated matrix of who the inspectors were and who they ultimately worked for. So whenever we submitted a roster of inspectors to the Iraqis, they were pretty locked in on what kind of inspection it would be, and what kind of emphasis there would be, and who on the inspection team they should be concerned about. So they have a good feel for that. But the Mukhabarat also had to deal with aspects of protecting Saddam Hussein that had nothing to do with UNSCOM, such as the CIA's own efforts to recruit people inside Iraq to target Saddam. And what the Mukhabarat did is they were tracking these two separate issues and found that there was crossover - that the CIA was using the inspection process to facilitate a coup d'etat by another group of Iraqis that was being handled by the CIA outside the framework of the weapons inspections.
    "And the Iraqis tracked this. They infiltrated the coup and they pulled the plug on it, executed the plotters and terminated the CIA's effort. But in the process, they got definitive proof that the CIA was using the inspection process as a vehicle not only to gather intelligence, but to trigger a coup d'etat. And it destroyed the integrity of the inspection process."
- Scott Ritter Tells the Complete Story Why We're in Iraq - It Begins with the CIA's Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein -

"Dissent is the essential aspect of patriotism." 
- Thomas Jefferson -

"It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers."
- James Thurber -

"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
- Mark Twain -

"How is the world led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print."
- Karl Kraus -

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong."
- Eugene V. Debs -

"Unanswered questions are far less dangerous than unquestioned answers."
- Harvey Spooner -

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. -

"There is being created a growing revolutionary force in American life. The capitalists hold in their hands a mighty power. But within the capitalist order there are generated those forces which weaken and disintegrate that power in the form of the continuous class conflict which capitalism engenders. What is needed is the organization which can combine for the struggle against the capitalists all the forces of opposition which it creates."
- C.E. Ruthenberg, 1924 -

"In these awful days, George W. Bush has become the American Yasir Arafat, an empty, repetitive, shifty public personality who talks out of both sides of his mouth, with little or nothing to say from either of em. Oh, he's still Israels man: maybe not quite as much as he was on Tuesday, but more than he was on Thursday, though by Sunday, who knows, he might be back in staunch-ally mode again, or conversely he might have a few encouraging words for the Arab side. He's as purposeful as a wind-up toy boat with a bent rudder doing circular putt-putts in the bathtub." 
- Nicholas von Hoffman -

"In my state of the ... my State of the Union or state - my speech to the nation - whatever you want to call it, speech to the nation."
- President George W. Bush, Tuesday morning in Connecticut. (Thanks to CBS News Correspondent Mark Knoller traveling with the president.) -

"Bush, himself the most intellectually backward American president of my political lifetime, is surrounded by advisers whose bellicosity is exceeded only by their political, military and diplomatic illiteracy." 
- Gerald Kaufman: member of Britan's Labour Party -
 

    "This time the court has let stand Florida's infamous 137-year-old ban on voting rights for ex-felons. It was this same Jim Crow ban that the GOP used to disenfranchise thousands of Floridians in 2000, providing the margin by which George W. Bush took the presidency. The ruling continues to take the vote from millions of African-Americans and non-violent offenders----and, in practice, others who have broken no laws at all. It is highly likely to strengthen the lock of the Republican party and its future candidates on the US presidency...
   "In 1870 the US adopted the 15th Amendment, guaranteeing all Americans the right to vote, regardless of race (but not gender). But white racist regimes in the former Confederacy quickly found ways to circumvent the Amendment.
    "One such tool was the ex-felon ban. Along with poll taxes, the grandfather clause (disenfranchising anyone whose grandfather had been a slave), lynching and other violent intimidation, the attack on ex-felon voting rights was aimed directly at a black community that had started to gain political power in the south. Under the white supremacist Democratic Party and its terrorist adjunct, the Ku Klux Klan, blacks were subjected to unjust and often absurd prosecutions that stuck them with felony convictions. As the 20th century dawned, very significant percentages of the black male population thus lost their vote...
   "Today only Florida, Kentucky and Virginia permanently deprive felons of their franchise once they have cleared parole. Ten other states restrict those rights in various ways. But especially in Florida, that ban remains a major key to Republican supremacy.     "According to the Sentencing Project, some 4.7 million Americans - one in 43 adults - have currently or permanently lost their right to vote due to a felony conviction."
- Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman: Supreme Court stabs another GOP knife into US democracy by upholding ex-felon vote ban -     "It was enormously telling, in fact, that the only part of the Senate which did see the un-sanitized National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq - the Republican-led Senate Select Intelligence Committee - shockingly voted in the fall of 2002 against the simple authorization of force demanded by a Republican president. Panicked, the warmongers in the White House and Pentagon pressured CIA Director George Tenet to rush release to the entire Hill a very short 'summary' of the careful NIE, which made Hussein seem incalculably more dangerous than the whole report indicated.    "The Defense Intelligence Agency finally declassified its investigative report, DITSUM No. 044-02, within recent days. This smoking-gun document proves the Bush administration's key evidence for the apocryphal Osama bin Laden-Saddam Hussein alliance -- said by Bush to involve training in the use of weapons of mass destruction -- was built upon the testimony of a prisoner who, according to the DIA, was probably 'intentionally misleading the debriefers.'" 
- Robert Scheer: The Big Lie Technique -

    "In a major shake-up of its editorial pages, the Los Angeles Times announced Thursday that it was discontinuing one of its most liberal columnists as well as its conservative editorial cartoonist.
    "Editorial Page Editor André Martinez said that Robert Scheer, a Times reporter for 17 years before he began writing a column on the Op-Ed pages in 1993, will be dropped."
- J. Michael Kennedy and Rong-Gong Lin II: Times Plans New Op-Ed Lineup -

"It seems a remarkable piece of irony that Scheer is being dropped now that every liberal word he has written about the Bush administration has turned out to be true... [T]he once-mighty Los Angeles Times is rapidly becoming just another newspaper."
- Wanda M. Kuenzli -

"I am disgusted. I am appalled. In fact, I am enraged! Slowly but surely, an interesting and balanced opinion section has been eviscerated. It is not even a shadow of its former, engaging self. Interesting commentary has been replaced by mediocre columnists and a plethora of cartoons. The coup de grace comes with the replacing of columnist Robert Scheer and editorial cartoonist Michael Ramirez. What a sad day for Los Angeles!"
- Frances Solo: Move toward center is a move to mediocrity -

"Scheer is about the most irresponsible columnist I've ever seen in my life anywhere."
- Bill O'Reilly -

"Scheer has also come under attack from [David] Horowitz's website, FrontPageMag.com, which claimed in an April 2003 article: 'Scheer has spent his entire adult life as a passionate America-hating Leftist.' Horowitz has also written articles for FrontPageMag.com attacking Scheer; titles include Is Robert Scheer the Biggest Ignoramus in American Journalism? and Scheer Lunacy at The Los Angeles Times."
- Take Action: Protest LA Times' decision to fire liberal columnist Scheer -

"Assessing the merits of a column, like assessing the merits of a movie, is a subjective exercise, so readers can agree to disagree over the wisdom of our decision. It's inaccurate, however, to ascribe ideological motives to our decision to stop running Scheer's column."
- Andrés Martinez: A Note to our Readers -

    "The paper is in decline. They have 300,000 fewer readers now than when I went to work there nearly thirty years ago....The Times needed me more than I need it...I always have two or three balls in the air at same time...That's why I teach full-time at USC's Journalism school, do my radio show, write books. It's the only way to live. I've been preparing for this moment for 30 years. I wrote this column for 13 years and never missed a deadline.
    "Probably the main reason they got rid of me was O'Reilly and Limbaugh made a living out of attacking me, pounding, pounding away and doing mass mailing campaigns against me and using me as a punching bag. But I'm still standing; the paper may collapse....Would never go back to LA Times, and I start at the San Francisco Chronicle next week. They called Wednesday to offer me a column. And my syndicate stood behind me, and the syndicate's editor, a conservative, was quoted in Editor & Publisher saying he was 100 percent behind me. And it's the same syndicate which runs O'Reilly's column.
    "These bean counters from Chicago are so cowardly that the day after the paper won five Pulitzers they flew into LA and met with chief editors at Burbank airport hotel to let them know of cuts. This corporation doesn't understand that the paper belongs to readers and they forget that it's not just shareholders and wider profit margins that count... And this week, they're going to lay off over 70 editorial people.
   "They may own the paper but they don't own the readers. And LA is the greatest city in the world, and it deserves a great newspaper. Send emails and make them aware that if they want to keep readers, they got to be smarter. Let them know readers don't like being treated with contempt. I know there's shock in the Times building; every switchboard jammed, emails streaming in. [One estimate is that close to 10,000 e-mails have come in; on Saturday, the paper ran a series of articulate, intelligent, reasoned and serious letters protesting Scheer's ouster.] I hear the publisher is walking around in a daze. Didn't anticipate these protests, the level of outrage. Every complaint you send will give space to others who want to do bold, brave reporting."
- Robert Scheer -

     "And don't worry about Scheer. Two weeks from now, he launches his new website, TruthDig.com. 'I think of A.J. Liebling, who said 'freedom of the press belongs to those who own one' and fortunately, now I own one. I think of the site as Ramparts on speed.'
    "'I don't like to get bummed out,' Scheer said. 'Hey, reports of my end are premature. I am not into suffering. Want to enjoy life, act on my passions, write about the truth. And I will.'"
- Katrina vanden Heuvel: Cruising with Scheer -

"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will."
- Frederick Douglass -

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."
- Scott Adams -

"Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
- James Joyce -

"I've been asking for 2 1/2 years why, if you can impeach a President for lying about an extramarital affair, why can't you impeach a President for lying about weapons of mass destruction that led to a war that led to thousands of deaths. In one case, you have thousands of deaths, and in another, you have a dry-cleaning bill for a dress."
- Tim Robbins -

"You have to learn to look at what they do and ignore what they say. Whatever it is that they're doing is not a war on terror, because they haven't caught the terrorists and they haven't cut down on the terrorists. But what they have done is they've managed to break the back of one of the absolute foundations of international law, which is the sovereignty of nations, and broken the back of one of the highest ideals of the 20th Century, established at Nuremberg - that aggressive war is the mother of all war crimes."
- Larry Beinhart Explores 'Fog Facts' - the Vital Facts That Just Get Lost in the Spin -

"Never fall in love with an idea. They're whores: if the one you're with isn't doing the job, there's always, always, always another."
- Chip Kidd -

"I'll have two big dicks and a side of fries.- Elton John at McDonalds -

Everything Else

Meet the Hollywood deal maker of the week. I absolutely promise that next week's issue will make more sense.