The Smarmy Carny

Will Albino, a senior at Wilmington's Catholic all-boy Salesianum School, asked female students at Wilmington's Catholic all-girl Padua Academy to sign a petition to end ::wikipedia("Women's suffrage", "women´s suffrage"):: . . . and all to a They Might Be Giants tune!

This prank was originally performed on The Man Show in 1999 and successfully repeated here in 2006 by Albino and Brian Giarrocco. They claim that they had not seen the sketch from The Man Show, but that a fellow student suggested the idea.

Of course, Albino and Giarrocco got into a small amount of trouble for their efforts — one day of detention. Also, as expected, Padua's principal estimated 95 percent of the school's students knew of suffrage before the video. According to Albino, only 4 out of 24 girls (16.7%) refused to sign the petition . . . and one of those girls signed, but she signed "Your mom."

You can read plenty more about the video on Ryan Cormier's Pulp Culture blog as well as Brothers Gentry.

Gloria's Nuts (Pun intended)

Melody Berger reported her (intentional) encounter with Gloria Steinem in an article in The F-Word Ezine. In it, she not only fawns over Steinem the entire time, but even after the interview, she admits that "The two hours we spent chatting over coffee comprised, quite easily, one of the most amazing highlights of my entire life. Basking in the aura of "Glo" was such an intensely inspirational experience." Yikes.

Here's one particularly confusing section of the interview:

Melody: When I saw the picture, the famous picture of him, with a bunch of other white guys, gleefully signing away our rights as women [with the Partial Birth Abortion Ban]… all I could think was, "ok, how is that not just pure evil?"
Gloria: Well, you know, there is certainly evil effect. There are certainly going to be millions of women and a lot of men who simply are not alive because he's in the White House. There are going to be whole species of animals, and living things, and plants that are not alive anymore, and will never come back, because: he killed them. So, that's an evil impact. I don't think it's inevitable. He wasn't born that way.

So, class, what have we learned today? There will be "millions of women and a lot of men who simply are not alive" because we can no longer kill as many of them before they are born? In order to avoid conflicting lessons, we will not be teaching Statistics, Formal Logic, or Ethics today.

Buy this book at Amazon

On May 31, the paperback version of Bill Clinton's My Lies was released. Instead of wasting your money on this fodder, why not get a hardcover book released on the same day. Instead of My Life, check out Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine.

The blurb for this book mentions following "the lives of eight women who crossed romantic paths with Bill Clinton" (including Hillary, I presume). So, that means that Slick Willy had some seven women, and those are just the publicly acknowledged ones.

Seven women? I'm not sure about you, but I was raised to think that two women were sort of too many for a married man. After Wilt Chamberlain heard this, he decided to run for Presidential office in 2008! There must be at least one woman we don't know about because there are only seven women and there were eight years. And don't try to tell me that one year was for Hillary. We don't buy into that here!

Candice E. Jackson's Their Lives chronicles how the Bill and Hillary Clinton's inner circle bribed, intimidated, and harassed seven women who had once been the objects of Bill's lustful desires. The author — a feminist libertarian — does not condemn Bill's philandering ways, but rather in great detail exposes how the Clintons' liberal politics allowed them to justify their attacks against these individuals.

Kathleen Willey calls Their Lives "the most accurate portrayal of…the true nightmare Bill and Hillary put me through."

What has really gotten my goat about all this is that, if you remember the campaigns during Bill's first run, a huge issue during debates was "family values." I'm quite interested in reading about Bill's family values. Buy it today!

Which is it?

Moshe Koppel of Bar-Ilan University in Isreal has developed a program that can tell the gender of the author by the structure and words used in the text. It is about 80% accurate.

You may yawn at this. The interesting thing is what it tells us about the way we interpret and represent the world. You might still yawn at this, unless you're a sociologist.

What may interest you, however, is that someone has written a fun little script that takes the basics of the basics from Koppel's theories and program and allows you to test some of your writing samples. Of course, keep in mind that, despite the fact that Koppel's program is 80% accurate, this simplified program probably does not run at such efficiency.

I guess we can now replace the taunt "He throws like a girl" with "He writes like a girl."