It was a dark and stormy night...

The 2009 winners in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, the annual competition to write the worst opening line for a novel, have been announced.

I won't spoil the surprise and give you the winner, but here are some of my favorites from among the runners-up and dishonorable mentions:

It could have been no more than midnight's icy incipit when Clifford, stumbling in hitherto sanguine emprise through the tombstone teeth of the raven lit Kirk-yard like some well-performed but lichen-hushed human bullet-catch, heard the manifest bactrian vociferation which betrayed with desperate flourish the inexplicably wretched fact that his camel was out there, out on the ice - and she was in mortal peril. (Mr. S. J. Crawford, Redlynch, QLD, Australia)

On a lovely day during one of the finest Indian summers anyone could remember--a season the Germans call "old wives' summer," obviously never having had Native Americans to name things after, but plenty of old wives, and "Indian summer" in German would refer to the natives of India in any case, which would make even less sense than the current naming system--on such a day, however named, John Baxter fell in the creek and drowned. (Deanna Stewart, Heidelberg, Germany)

If she wasn't the poster girl for the word voluptuous, with her not exactly "bedroom," but definitely "walking-down-that-hallway" eyes, her hair a palomino mane rather than platinum blond, lips reminding me of Marilyn Monroe not Angelina Jolie, and that slow hip-swaying walk that sweet-talks a man's thoughts into dim, smoky rooms where R & B is played, she should've been. (Sandra Trentz, Yakima, WA)

Read the rest, and see the best - er, worst - here.

To the slaughter

"They are hauled in crowded trailers as far as 1,000 miles from auctions and feedlots to abattoirs across the border. Many end up in unregulated slaughterhouses, where they are sometimes paralyzed with knife stabs in their backs, leaving them conscious as their throats are slit."

They are horses, and upwards of 72,000 were slaughtered in Canada and Mexico last year. Many of those came from the U. S. Washed-up racehorses, unwanted foals, horses and ponies whose owners can no longer afford to keep them - sold for a few hundred dollars or less, to be shipped across the border and slaughtered in "unspeakable" conditions.

Coleman concedes!

Welcome, Senator-elect Al Franken.

Note to Harry Reid: you've got 60 votes now. Get off your butt.

I reckon not

Texas governor Rick Perry recently told the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce that Texans will keep driving pickup trucks no matter how high the cost of gasoline goes, because "You can't put a bale of hay in the back of a Prius. It don't work."

Over at CleanMPG.com, Austin American-Statesman columnist John Kelso relates how he decided to test Perry's statement. Turns out you can't fit a bale of hay in the back of a Prius: you can fit five.

Unprecedented!

A network is given "unprecedented" access to the White House. Is this a good or bad thing?



I guess the answer depends on which network it is.

Quote of the week

Andy Ostroy, writing about the "Freedom Cruise" co-sponsored by Ollie North's Freedom Alliance and the National Rifle Association:

So who exactly is the Freedom Alliance? On its website, it states that its mission "is to advance the American heritage of freedom by honoring and encouraging military service, defending the sovereignty of the United States and promoting a strong national defense." As for the NRA, well, that's just an organization of he-man wannabes with small dicks who like to shoot shit up.

Who says liberals have no sense of humor?

Yet anther domestic terrorist attack

The head of a so-called "minuteman" vigilante group is among three suspects arrested for the May 30 murder of a man and his eight-year-old daughter when the suspects allegedly invaded their home in Arizona.

Yet another case where right-wing activists are obviously engaging in terrorism by any definition of the word.

Yet another case where the terrorists are not charged as terrorists. It seems that distinction is reserved for those who protest at political conventions.

Yet another case where talking heads in the media (are you listening, Lou Dobbs? Sean Hannity? Rush Limbaugh? Genn Beck? Beuhler?) incite the wingnuts to commit violence and go scot-free.

I fear for my country's future.

And this is surprising because...?

You mean he's not the Messiah? O Noes!

"The Obama administration is not going to represent an abrupt departure from Bush-era [secretive government] policy," Steven Aftergood, who runs the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, told TPMmuckraker. "If we thought they were, we were mistaken."

He added that it's no longer realistic to think that Obama's administration will take a strong stand in favor of openness on national security issues. "We have to recalibrate our expectations."

Recalibrate our expectations? Only if we had unreasonable expectations to begin with. What we have to do is redouble our efforts. Reform does not come from the top - it bubbles up from below. FDR asked the people to make him do the right thing, and eventually he did it; in the same vein, we have to keep the pressure on Obama and make him be the president we hoped he could be.

I don't know what Aftergood's expectations were. My expectation, campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, was not that Obama would step in and fix everything. My hope was that with Obama in office, we had at least some chance to have our voices heard. But voices can't be heard if they're silent. We have to write Obama. We have to write our legislators. We must demand open government as policy and as law. Then we should write them again on health care reform, and then on corporate influence in government. We have to write them letters and call their offices and demand they do the right thing on every issue. Then we have to tell our friends what we've done and encourage them to speak up too.

I haven't been doing nearly enough along those lines, but I plan - no, I pledge - to start today.

You Bet Your Health!

Here is a pretty good model of how for-profit health insurance works. Pretend it's a game show and see if you can win.

Smiles outlawed in Virginia

The Commonwealth of Virginia's Department of Motor Vehicles has declared smiling verboten when sitting for your driver's license photo. I am not making this up.

As part of the DMV's effort to develop super-secure driver's licenses and foolproof identification cards, the agency has issued a smile ban, directing customers to adopt a "neutral expression" in their portraits, thereby extinguishing whatever happiness comes with finally hearing one's number called.

And Virginia is not alone, nor first, in forbidding smiles at the DMV. Indiana disallowed smiles - as well as hats, scarves, spectacles, and certain hair styles - last year when it joined about 20 other states that use facial recognition software "to detect fraud in drivers' licenses." It seems Big Brother's machines have trouble distinguishing your smiling face from someone else's, but do a better job if you're deadpan.

Ah, the land of liberty!

The founding fathers held that among the inalienable rights bestowed on us all is the "pursuit of happiness" - but in today's paranoid society, there's no recognition of an inalienable right to show happiness.