I was skeptical when my sister Andrea forwarded me this story, but it appears to be true, as seen in the LA Times:

Former FEMA Director Michael D. Brown, heavily criticized for his agency's slow response to Hurricane Katrina, is starting a disaster-preparedness consulting firm to help clients avoid the sorts of errors that cost him his job.

"If I can help people focus on preparedness, how to be better prepared in their homes and better prepared in their businesses — because that goes straight to the bottom line — then I hope I can help the country in some way," Brown said in Denver.

"I'm doing a lot of good work with some great clients," he said. "My wife, children and my grandchild still love me. My parents are still proud of me."

Today (the day after Thanksgiving) is Buy Nothing Day. Wouldn't it be more successful if they held it on Thanksgiving, when most stores are shut anyway?

I like saying something slightly different from what people ordinarily expect and seeing if they notice the difference. A sort-of example is when, as a kid, I asked my mother if chocolate milk came from brown chickens, and she replied, no, they come from regular chickens.

Here are some sayings from my (nominally) adult household:

• Cleaner than a baby's bottom
• I feel like a needle between two haystacks.
• More fun than a bowel full of monkeys

I welcome additions.

According to an article in the November 11 Chronicle of Higher Education, today's college "students favor connecting with others via cellphones instead of e-mail, which they view as an obsolete technology used 'to communicate with old people.'"

From Reuters via ABC News:

In the sharpest White House attack yet on critics of the Iraq war, Vice President Dick Cheney said on Wednesday accusations that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify the war were a "dishonest and reprehensible" political ploy.

Cheney called Democrats "opportunists" who were peddling "cynical and pernicious falsehoods" to gain political advantage while U.S. soldiers died in Iraq.

This reminds me of the 2004 Onion article about Bush campaigning to replace the corrupt incumbent administration and bring integrity back to the White House.

From Dan Savage's Nov. 9 column

As I mentioned a few months ago, a vaccine for two of the most common strains of HPV, the virus that causes genital warts, is currently moving through the federal approval process. HPV can also cause cervical cancer in women, and the cancers caused by the virus kill 4,000 American women every year. Who could possibly be against the introduction of a vaccine—one that has proven 100 percent effective in clinical tests!—that will save thousands of women's lives every year? Those "culture of life" assfucks, that's who.

In a Medscape article, Jack Sobel, MD, treading dangerously near my trademark phrase, calls the opposition "beyond belief".

A discussion of the opposition appeared in web.morons.org post entitled "Why Does the Extreme Right Love Cancer?":

The Family Research Council is concerned that vaccinating against HPV might encourage kids to have sex. This is probably a legitimate concern-- I know that when I got a tetanus vaccine, the first thing I wanted to do was to run out and play on rusty manure-spreading farm equipment in an effort to get as many puncture wounds as possible....

Physicians Consortium director Dr. Hal Wallis says he has mixed feelings about the vaccine, saying "This has the potential to be a wonderful medication that is going to prevent a lot of heartbreak, but I do have a concern about the message we send." Allow me to help clarify things: the message we send is "there is a disease you could contract some day that we'd like to protect you from." That's it. That's what a vaccine does. That's the message it sends.

Abstinence Clearinghouse founder and president Leslee J. Unruh asks, "If you tell a 13-year-old, You are protected against this STD, will she suddenly start thinking she is protected against all STDs, and therefore does not worry about having premarital sex and becomes sexually active?" Maybe if your 13-year-old is no smarter than Ms. Unruh. Yet, when I was 13 and vaccinated against tetanus, I strangely didn't start thinking I was also vaccinated against HIV and syphilis.

No mention is made of the biggest recent accomplishment of the abstinence-only movement: an increase in sexually-transmitted disease transmission through oral and anal sex.

The increasingly political behavior of the Religious Right has me almost looking forward to being left behind by the Rapture.

I was pleased to read on Slashdot that "the Vatican has issued a stout defence of Charles Darwin, voicing strong criticism of Christian fundamentalists who reject his theory of evolution and interpret the biblical account of creation literally". A Slashdot comment pointed to this Chick tract, in which a Christian quotes Genesis, causing a brainwashed believer in evolution to recant and beg Jesus to save him from Hell.

I recently saw an ad on fark touting The Lean as a right-wing Onion alternative. I visited the site and particularly liked these headlines:

• Scientists Still at Odds over "Bill and Ted vs. Back to the Future" Time Theory Debate
• Illegals Willing to Accept Welfare Checks for Amounts Americans Won’t Take

From The Lean, I followed a link to The Satire Awards, where I found these headlines

• Critics charge Harry Potter used performance-enhancing potions
• Pfizer, FDA Dismiss Claim Linking Infant Acne Medication with Baby Suicides as "Coincidence"
• Supreme Court ruling protects patients from Medical Marijuana

Actually, isn't that last one true?

From Snopes:

You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named Bush, Dick, and Colon. Need I say more?

This has been attributed to Chris Rock, but the exact origin is undetermined.

My opinion (in two words): beyond satire.

I'm back to featuring material beyond satire: RealDoll, "the most realistic love doll in the world", priced $6499 and up. The first time I saw the site, I wondered if it was satire, including Howard Stern's testimonial:

Best sex I ever had! I swear to God! This RealDoll feels better than a real woman! She's fantastic! I love her! This RealDoll is for real, I swear! Better than a woman! My wife isn't as good as that! May God take away all my ratings if I'm lying!

It's for real, though, and a recent article shows it's even further beyond satire. Here is an excerpt from Real Dolls: Love in the Age of Silicone by Meghan Laslocky:

Sirens all – luring men to an exclusive cyber island where high-tech and age-old male fantasy fuse. Imagine! A beautiful woman whose face one can pull off and replace with another. A beautiful woman who poses for countless pornographic photographs and won’t mind when you show them to your friends. She never lies, cheats, get pregnant, or passes on disease. She offers great sex unfettered by the pesky daily push-pull of a relationship. She never says, "No."

A beautiful woman who, when a man whispers in her soft, slightly sticky ear that she is his one and only love, he can almost hear murmur that the feeling is mutual.

For some owners, a Real Doll is simply a 3-D Playboy -- voluptuous and eager to please, an inanimate co-conspirator in a thrilling dip into synthetic love. For others, with their torn breasts and mangled genitals, Real Dolls are speechless vessels of violence.

But for yet another group of doll loving men, Real Dolls are gentle courtesans whose silicone curves offer companionship and relief beyond orgasm. In their world, regular sex with 100 pounds of silicone just might be preferable to intimacy between two breathing beings. Depending on how you look at it, doll love is either the perfect solution to or the symptom of any number of problems -- plain old-fashioned loneliness, a dysfunctional personality, or a brain that is simply not wired for love. Lust for the inanimate is nothing new. But combining lust and plastic, with a dash of the Internet, makes for a potent cocktail: love in the age of silicone.

A shorter version of the article, entitled Just Like a Woman, appeared in Salon.