Tebow headed for San Diego

[pointing at your face] HAW, HAW!

Funniest Bonanza ep ever:

You may recall that a fella charged with murder named OJ Simpson fled the city but decided to return, prompting a tedious coverage of the “White Bronco” trek back to town.

Local station KTLA 5 showed the “breaking news” full screen, but also kept showing the Bonanza rerun they always ran at that hour in a window in a lower corner of the screen.

Thing is, as an increasing number of cop cars began to follow OJ, the Cartwrights came barreling out of the Ponderosa ranch house and saddled up and rode off in the same direction as the full screen chase, making it look as if they were joining in the chase, and I didn’t think I’d ever stop laughing.

KTLA didn’t use that gimmick ever again, I think.

But those old TV westerns always pan out the same way:

In a typical Bonanza ep, a posse is assembled to go after a couple of escaped criminals, and there’s a young hothead in the bunch lookin’ ta put his first notch on his shooter.

Despite fifteen or twenty clear indications that the young hothead is a loose cannon unfit to carry the saddlebags for this crew, the sheriff stupidly does not disarm him, and sure enough, when the wrong man is taken into custody (Adam Cartwright, in this instance), the lynching talk starts up right away, and the sheriff is disarmed by the hothead and a coupla other easily duped posse members.

At the last moment, the truth is revealed, the hothead is rebuked, and everyone stands around staring at their shoetops saying, “gee, we’re sorry, Mister Cartwright.”

Man, hasn’t Jeff Goldstein ever seen a damn Bonanza episode?

Lt Col Bateman’s guest posts are a wonderful contribution to Pierce’s already excellent blog, and he has been absolutely invaluable in patiently explaining what is so very wrong and so very stupid about what Jeff Goldstein and his fellow morons believe about this type of incident.

Also, I’ve not heard a single resident of Boston express a sentiment similar to that which Goldstein drooled.

Wonder why that is.

In other news, “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead” is currently in the top ten on the UK Billboard charts, and no, I’m not kidding.

Puns are the lowest form of humor, and the only appropriate response is a groan and a rolling of eyes. Personally, I’d also suggest a punch in the nose. It’s the low hanging fruit, but still, they are a favorite form of humor among my exasperating Mensa acquaintances.

I dunno, maybe I’m just not intelligent enough to appreciate the humor, or maybe we need to fucking redefine “intelligence” or something, you know?

Check out Dana Bash some time. Hey, Dana, why the long face?

I have to go kill myself again.

You can lead a whore toe culture, but–

I am so sorry for that, I’m going to kill myself now.

I’m going to repeat something I said over at TPM after seeing a close up of Sarah there, and the observation is buttressed by the picture accompanying Tom’s post.

Look closely: her eyeglasses most definitely do not have any amount of diopter; that is to say, they are not prescription lenses, and instead are just a prop to make her appear intelligent.

Fucking pathetic.

Sure, whatever.

Dan, you might wanna look up Mr Brevity, who can help you whittle down your thousand word posts into the dozen words that would express the same comment.

Government, supposedly our government, does screw people, frequently, and has a huge variety of tools with which to do it.

This explains your anger, or more charitably, bewilderment, in a nutshell.

You can’t see a number of people doing their jobs at the federal, state and local level, you can only see a simple-minded monolith: “the Government”.

Look, Dan, I don’t want to be an ass about this, but I do need to point out that your panic-stricken concerns are overwrought.

Nobody gives a shit what you do, pal. Nobody is sitting in a room watching fifty video monitors. That’s not what surveillance cams are about.

They record to DVR. In the aftermath of a crime, review of the vid they’ve collected is extremely useful in piecing it all together. As a result of this, it’s pretty much impossible now to kidnap a child at a shopping mall.

And hey, if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about, right?

This is a phrase traditionally employed in a complaint about illegal search and seizure.

The fact you can’t see the difference between that and simply being looked at tells us more about you than about anything else.

Again, there’s meds for this.

The year that Bristol was pregnant with the immaculately conceived (while woozy from so many Bartles & James) baby Sled.

And the following year, baby Mush.

And before anyone brings it up, there is no law preventing Gladys Kravitz from peering though her blinds at the Stevens family and Samantha’s witchery.

My advice to Sam is to draw the damn blinds if she feels a nose-wrinking coming on.

The NSA or other agencies monitor all websites carrying political discussions in any way of interest to the U.S. government, including this one – no if, ands or buts about it.

Which you regard as “surveillance of citizens,” evoking the phrase “spying on us citizens.”

Internet websites are essentially public places, and no one in this country has the right to be unobserved in public. In fact, when you attend a talk by a author or someone down at the local community center, you have no guarantee that the person sitting next to you is not a federal agent.

You’d be easy to spot on an MTA bus, I bet. You’d be the one shouting “STOP LOOKING AT ME!” into one of the security cams.

Pathetic.

So the guy’s essential point is neither paranoid nor crazy, as any number of “unfortunate incidents and/or tragedies” demonstrate going clear back to that paragon George Washington. Hey, ask Crazy Horse.

Or John Dillinger, who was, as you little girls breathlessly put it, “assasinated” by federal agents while emerging from the Biograph Theater in Chicago in 1934.

There’s meds for excessive paranoia, you know. Just sayin’.

Amazing, isn’t it? In commenting on an MST3K ep starring Ben Murphy, it was pointed out that casting Ben Murphy was like the kiss of death for any crappy TV series Universal tried to crank up in the seventies with him as the star, and yet they JUST. KEPT. HIRING. HIM.

My suspicion is that he brought the best coke to the set. McMegan?

[laughing] Oh, if only it worked that way.

O my God– I just noticed that the short McMegan bio at the Daily Beast piece identifies her as a “former Senior Editor at the Atlantic”, and I didn’t realize that the Atlantic had finally wised up and cut her loose.

When did this happen? Why [laughing] wasn’t I notified?