ACTIVISTS ARE ATTEMPTING to end the practice of terminating racing greyhounds that run out of the money. The dog-racing industry will retort that that’s going to make it harder to motivate the ones that are running. (You don’t think they’re fooled by that mechanical rabbit, do you?)
Babies are fun if you can hand them back to their mothers when they cry. Fathers used to be able to get away with that. Now you have to be a grandparent.
Al Gore claims that he asks himself What Would Jesus Do? Right. How about driving the money-changers from the Temple?
IN CLASSICAL ATHENS, tuna with cheese sauce was considered a delicacy. So much for the wisdom of the ancients. (Kampfer considers it sacrilege to serve tuna any way but raw.)
I was reading a Captain Marvel Jr. comic book, in which the Little Blue Cheese was battling Captain Nazi for control of a uranium mine, when it suddenly struck me: This was published in 1943. How many people knew about uranium then? How did the FBI react to finding it mentioned in a comic book?
Military historian Victor Suvorov has pointed out that the Russians had the very dangerous habit of using liquid-fuel missiles in their submarines. (Solid fuel is much safer, but harder to produce.) A likely explanation for the fate of the Kursk?
THE SOUND OF Music has followed in the tracks of The Rocky Horror Show, attracting an audience that comes in costume, sings along with the songs, and talks back to the actors. As Dorothy Parker would say: “What fresh Hell is this?”
One expects that it will be a long time before the cast of Survivor can face another bowl of rice. They could have made better use of that fat little dog than the cast of Big Brother.
The original secular Zionists, who regarded Jerusalem as a sinkhole of super-saturated piety, would be disgusted to watch the fight over it now.
REACTIONARIES TEND TO confuse “normal” with common, or average.
Those who are willing to settle for half a loaf will end up with crumbs.
AUTHOR FRANK HARRIS once remarked that sex for men follows an opposite course from shooting. As a novice you start out with a semi-automatic, but by the time you’re an expert, you have to use an unreliable single-shot.
Editor’s Note: This seems like the appropriate place to note that our friend Tuli Kupferberg, whose cartoons frequently grace this space, is out with a new book of Political, Social, Artistic and Idiosyncratic Cartoons and Collages. Actually, that’s the subtitle; the official title, which you might use for a challenging round of charades, has three words of which the first two are Teach Yourself while the third is a seven-letter participle. Illustrated with a cover photo as explicit as it gets, and probably not suitable as a holiday gift for Tipper and Al, this handsome coffee-table volume (ISBN 1-57027-100-3) can be ordered ($15) from Autonomedia, POB 568, Williamsburg Station, Brooklyn NY 11211-0568 (info@autonomedia.org, website www.autonomedia.org).
ATC 89, November–December 2000