Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Potential Katrina looters — for example, Halliburton — had better watch out, says Adina Levin.

Corruption in awarding fat no-bid contracts is no longer possible. Why? Because…!

“…the Democrats will be keeping an eye on the Feds and the Republicans will be keeping an eye on the locals.”

Maybe the “blame-game” has a good side after all.

Two brothers motorcycled west and found retro-paradise “Fifty miles east of Fargo“:

Mark surely enjoyed motorcyles and fast cars. Thrill was his mantra. But to be complete, Mark even more loved women. All of them. He adored and worshiped them. They were in many ways his holy grail.

This is a short tale of Mark and motorcycles and women, though not in that order. It is also a moral play, as it shows that sometimes, perhaps not often, the tales of a storyteller are far truer than one might expect.

Wonderful story from one of the greatest escape-blogs.

Struggling to write that company report? Get your sexy, hot, cross-media mega-prose from Andrew Davidson’s Corporate Gibberish Generator!

For example, we here at MegaSexySocksCorp have…

“… permanently altered the idea of integrated branding. The TQM factor can be summed up in one word: killer. We will maximize the term “value-added”. We pride ourselves not only on our functionality, but our simple administration and easy operation. Is it more important for something to be integrated or to be scalable? Think granular. Think user-centric. Think global. But don’t think all three at the same time. The B2B2C, visionary wireless, leading-edge process management factor is clicks-and-mortar…”

The 2.0 version will surely add “glocalization.”

Just home from Storrs, CT, the safest place in the US, according to Slate.
It’s a tiny college town ringed by stone-walled meadows. At this season, apple trees hang down heavy and fall colors are starting to paint some leaves.

The University of Connecticut has morphed from ag school into a powerhouse of science and basketball. The Katzenstein Distinguished Lecture Series honors their first physics Ph.D., Henry Katzenstein.

I recommend Storrs not only for beauty and safety but also for warm hospitality, a pretty B&B called Still Waters (no website, alas, but it does have good wifi), and legendary ice cream at the Dairy Bar.

We raced home this morning right after breakfast, however, because Hurricane Ophelia was threatening Storrs with flash flooding. Eek!

Now it turns out that Ophelia skipped Storrs, and all the rest of New England.

We should have listened to Slate, not the weatherman!

A small company in southern Sweden wants to hire 20 witches, says today’s Swedish Local:

In the job ad, the company stated that “we are a young company with ancient wisdom. Customers turn to us with big or small problems. Customers are helped through tarot, runes, crystals, dreams and meditation.”

The successful applicants will work by telephone from home and will earn 210 kronor per hour of calls.

So, if you can see into the future and tell people’s fortunes, the Skåne Witchline wants you–but then again, you probably already know this.

Errol Morris in the Onion on why the 2004 Kerry campaign never used the real-people-who-switched from Bush to Kerry ads he did for MoveOn:

EM: … And so everyone knew—this is what puzzles me even now as I talk about it, it’s just so immensely frustrating—everybody knew that the election was going to be decided by a small fraction of the voters! …

AVC: Maybe there’s polling data that shows that attack ads and profile ads are more effective, no matter how much they reportedly turn off voters. Maybe the political machines know better.

EM: No, they don’t know more than we know, because they lost the election. If they knew so much, why’d they lose? [Laughs.]

I went looking for French, and found seven dialects of it–nine, if you count Frankish and Franco-Provençal–among the Language Museum’s online samples. Here’s what they have for F:

Faiwol, Fali (South), Fang, Faroese, Farsi, Fasu, Fe’fe’, Fijian, Finnish, Finnish (Meänkiele), Fipa, Flathead-Kalispel, Folopa, Fon-Gbe, Fordata, Fore, Franco-Provençal, Frankish, French, French (Berrichon), French (Dgernesiais), French (Jerriais), French (Medieval), French (Picard), French (Walloon), Frisian (Northern), Frisian (Western), Friulian, Fulfulde (Adamawa), Fulfulde (Jelgoore), Fulfulde (Kano-Katsina-Bororro), Fulfulde (Pulaar), Fungwa, Ftuna-Aniwa, Ftuna (East), and Fwâi.

For thousands of samples of spoken language–I’ve only listened to English ones like this man from Smith island, Maryland and a
woman from Brooklyn–there’s a wonderful speech accent archive at George Mason University.

Cold chocolate pudding inspires Lisa Williams to blog about “unsung and unnoticed happinesses.”

She has this to add about unsung grouchinesses:

If I’m in a bad mood someone could give me a pound of gold and I’d probably say, “Dammit, don’t they know how cluttered my house is?”

I completely agree…

But I’m sure I could always find room in my house or fridge somewhere, if somebody gave me a pound of chocolate pudding…

On September 11, 2001, I got a strange phone call from my daughter Amity. Something very scary had happened, she told me. An airplane had crashed into a big NYC building.

The rest of that day, as the news got stranger and scarier, our own lives were jolted out of their normal pattern. Afraid that some nut might target MIT, I drove down there and fetched home both Frank and our sophomore daughter Mira. My next anti-disaster activity was organizing a big super-family dinner for that night, to include also Zoe VanderWolk and three of her fellow Harvard freshmen.

We didn’t talk much about the World Trade Center news over dinner. None of us really had any wise things to say. In retrospect, the implicit Wilczek position was that in time of disaster you grab your family, reach out to others you love, and find some useful, preoccupying work.*

For weeks afterward, the country drew together. Even the usual noisy Cambridge drivers stopped blowing loud horns at pedestrians and one another.

Now, four years later, we’re fresh from a different national disaster, Hurricane Katrina. This one has divided our nation instead of uniting us.

We can’t blame Al Qaida for the misery and chaos in New Orleans–or the many extra deaths when expected help arrived too late. Democrats blame FEMA, which congratulated itself only last year on the great success of its hurricane-readiness activities in New Orleans. Republicans blame local governments, which acted too slowly and then failed to use all the proper phrasings and secret handshakes when asking for federal help.

If we all agree that our own government failed miserably to keep US citizens safe, then is the solution to keep cutting taxes and starving government agencies, as Republicans hope? They seem to be dealing with the political storm much more successfully than with Hurricane Katrina. If catastrophe should hit your town or mine, I really, really hope they don’t win this one.

Funny ha-ha of the morning: “Things Hagrid the Half-Giant Would Say If He Served Jesus Instead of Harry Potter,” by Hart Seely over at McSweeney’s.