Hide the Pickle

This might come as a shock, but I was perusing a catalog of Catholic holiday decorations and came across the strangest "Catholic" tradition I believe I've ever seen. It's a game called "Hide the Pickle"

From the magazine:

A pickle is used as decoration on the Christmas tree seems odd at first, but it is an old German tradition. When decorating the Christmas tree, it is traditional to hang the pickle last, hidden among the branches. The first child on Christmas Day to find the Christmas pickle receives a special blessing for the year and an extra gift! Great tradition to share with your family this year and for years to come!

Now, I say this with as much love in my heart as possible for my Church; but,
given the black eye sex scandals have given the Church in recent years, is it really appropriate to be hawking a game called "Hide the Pickle?"

Anyway, this may help explain some of the larger Catholic families.

Sorry for the downtime

Sorry we've been AWOL the past couple of days. There was some maintenance that needed to be done on the blog, and the holiday's kept me from making those changes in a timely manner.

We're back up and running, ready to accept Google searches for the Myotron (which scares the hell out of me) and Linux Blue Screen of Death. [Those are the top two internet searches that drive people to our humble site.]

Regardless, I'd be remiss if I didn't wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving.

I hope your turkey is bald and your bellies are fat!

Happy Thanksgiving

President Bush Resigns!

I have for you readers the first draft of President Bush's resignation letter.

Normally, I start these things out by saying "My Fellow Americans". Not doing it this time... If the polls are any indication, I don't know who more than half of you are anymore. I do know something terrible has happened, and that you're really not fellow Americans any longer.
I'll cut right to the chase here: I quit...! Now before anyone gets all in a lather about me quitting to avoid impeachment, or to avoid prosecution or something, let me assure you, there's been no breaking of laws or impeachable offenses in this office.

The reason I'm quitting is simple; I'm fed up with you people. I'm fed up because you have no understanding of what's really going on in the world. Or of what's going on in this once-great nation of ours. And the majority of you are too damned lazy to do your homework and figure it out.
Let's start local. You've been sold a bill of goods by politicians and the news media.

Meanwhile, all you can do is whine about gas prices, and most of you are too damn stupid to realize that gas prices are high because there's increased demand in other parts of the world, and because a small handful of noisy idiots are more worried about polar bears and beachfront property than your economic security.
We face real threats in the world. Don't give me this "blood for oil" crap. If I were trading blood for oil, I would've already seized Iraq 's oil fields and let the rest of the country go to hell. And don't give me this "Bush Lied... People Died" crap either. If I were the liar, you morons take me for, I could've easily had chemical weapons planted in Iraq ;so they could be "discovered." Instead, I owned up to the fact that the intelligence was faulty.

Let me remind you that the rest of the world thought Saddam had the goods, same as me. Let me also remind you that regime change in Iraq was official US policy before I came into office. Some guy named " Clinton " established that policy.
Bet you didn't know that, did you?
Now some of you morons want to be led by a junior senator with no understanding of foreign policy or economics, and this nitwit says we should attack Pakistan , a nuclear ally. And then he wants to go to Iran and make peace with a terrorist who says he's going to destroy us. While he's doing that, he wants to give Iraq to al Qaeda, Afghanistan to the Taliban, Israel to the Palestinians, and your money to the IRS so the government can give welfare to illegal aliens, who he will make into citizens, so they can vote to re-elect him. He also thinks we just need to sit down and talk to Iran and things would be better (what the hell do you think we have been doing behind the scenes), and we should stop our foreign aid to Israel . Did you sleep through high school or what?
You idiots need to understand that we face a unique enemy. Back during the Cold War, there were two major competing political and economic models squaring off. We won that war, but we did so because fundamentally, the Communists wanted to survive, just as we do. We were simply able to outspend and out-tech them.

That's not the case this time. The soldiers of our new enemy don't care if they survive. In fact, they want to die. That'd be fine, as long as they weren't also committed to taking as many of you with them as they can. But they are. They want to kill you, and the bastards are all over the globe.
You should be grateful that they haven't gotten any more of us here in the United States since September 11. But you're not. That's because you've got no idea how hard a small number of intelligence, military, law enforcement, and homeland security people have worked to make sure of that. When this whole mess started, I warned you that this would be a long and difficult fight. I'm disappointed how many of you people think a long and difficult fight amounts to a single season of "Survivor."

Instead, you've grown impatient. You're incapable of seeing things through the long lens of history, the way our enemies do. You think that wars should last a few months, a few years, tops.
Making matters worse, you actively support those who help the enemy. Every time you buy the New York Times, every time you send a donation to a cut-and-run Democrat's political campaign, well, dang it, you might just as well Fed Ex a grenade launcher to a Jihadist. It amounts to the same thing.
In this day and age, it's easy enough to find the truth. It's all over the Internet. It just isn't on the pages of the New York Times, USA Today, or on NBC News. But even if it were, I doubt you'd be any smarter. Most of you would rather watch American Idol or Dancing With The Stars.
I could say more about your expectations that the government will always be there to bail you out, even if you're too stupid to leave a city that's below sea level and has a hurricane approaching.

I could say more about your insane belief that government, not your own wallet, is where the money comes from. But I've come to the conclusion that were I to do so, it would sail right over your heads.
So I quit...! I'm going back to Crawford. I've got an energy-efficient house down there (Al Gore could only dream) and the capability to be fully self-sufficient for years. No one ever heard of Crawford before I got elected, and as soon as I'm done here pretty much no one will ever hear of it again. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to die of old age before the last pillars of America fall.

Oh, and by the way, Cheney's quitting too... That means Pelosi is your new President. You asked for it. Watch what she does carefully, because I still have a glimmer of hope that there are just enough of you remaining who are smart enough to turn this thing around in 2008.
So that's it. God bless what's left of America .
Some of you know what I mean. The rest of you, kiss off.
PS - You might want to start learning Farsi, and buy a Koran.
Obama already has his copy.

Strange Job Offer

I walked into my cube this morning to find this:



That has to be one of the strangest job offers I've ever received. Unfortunately, I'm not even through with year one of my five year commitment to Tony. Sorry, TBO.

What's That Daddy?

Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this picture?

Halloween Funnies

A coworker sent me this. I thought you might like it...

The Fantasy

A cabbie picks up a Nun. She gets into the cab, and notices that the VERY handsome cab driver won't stop staring at her.

She asks him why he is staring. He replies: 'I have a question to ask, but I don't want to offend you.'

She answers, ' My son, you cannot offend me. When you're as old as I am and have been a nun as long as I have, you get a chance to see and hear just about everything. I'm sure that there's nothing you could say or ask that I would find offensive.'

'Well, I've always had a fantasy to have a nun kiss me.'

She responds, 'Well, let's see what we can do about that: #1, you have to be single and #2, you must be Catholic.'

The cab driver is very excited and says, 'Yes, I'm single and Catholic!'

'OK' the nun says. 'Pull into the next alley.'

The nun fulfills his fantasy with a kiss that would make a hooker blush.

But when they get back on the road, the cab driver starts crying.

'My dear child,' said the nun, 'Why are you crying?'

'Forgive me but I've sinned. I lied and I must confess; I'm married and I'm Jewish.'

The nun says, 'That's OK. My name is Kevin and I'm going to a Halloween party.'

Poop Cures Intestinal Ailments

From Mental Floss:

His name is Dr. Johannes Aas, and he’s a gastroenterologist. Not long ago, a patient of his was battling a nasty infection that wouldn’t go away, caused by a potent and largely antibiotics-immune bacterium called C. difficile. It’s inside many of us, but is usually kept in check by the population of beneficial intestinal bacterium, or flora, which digest our food and provide nutrients to the body. But if the balance of this ongoing battle is tipped — say, by a dose of antibiotics which kills the beneficial flora but not the C. difficile — then the bad guys can take over, producing a toxin that causes serious diarrhea and over time can destroy the colon lining. In other words: bad news.

From Physorg.com:

Patients like this used to be rare. But C. difficile is one of a growing number of microorganisms that have become resistant to antibiotics, while at the same time becoming more common and virulent. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hospitalizations from C. difficile infections increased by 23 percent each year between 2000 and 2005. Death rates tripled between 1999 and 2004.

Dr. Aas’ patient was facing serious side effects, and even death. Desperate, Aas scoured medical literature, and finally hit upon an old Norwegian folk remedy — the poo cure. Definitely low tech, and a bit nasty-sounding, it involves injecting a bit of stool into a patient, in the hopes that someone else’s flora can replace their own, and tilt the battle of the bacteria back toward the side of good.

Here’s how the procedure, and the recovery, went down:

On a crisp fall day, she sat in the exam room with an opaque tube running through her nose, down her throat and into her stomach.

“We just need that little brown bag,” said Dr. Timothy Rubin, a gastroenterologist who works with Aas. He meant the stool sample from Jolliffe’s husband, which was being processed in the lab. It was mixed with water and filtered to take out the organic matter, leaving a dark brown liquid that contained billions of bacteria.

When the little bag arrived with the sample inside, Rubin used a large syringe to inject the liquid through the tube and into Jolliffe’s stomach. It was over in less than a minute.

“All I felt was cold,” she said.

Rubin says that when Aas first told him about the procedure he thought it was unusual, yes, but also brilliant. “He kept it simple, inexpensive and available to anyone,” he said.

Dr. Khoruts, another gastroenterologist, recently did his first stool transplant. The patient was an older woman whose C. difficile infection was so bad that she had to live in a diaper. Instead of a nose tube, he gave her a liquid stool enema. Within days, she was better.

“It was striking,” he said. Now, he and microbial ecologist Mike Sadowsky at the university are starting a similar research project to identify the crucial bacteria.

The funny thing is, scientists only understand why the poo cure works in the most rudimentary way; little is known about the universe of bacteria in our guts, though new research is underway, including a project nicknamed the “bacteria genome project,” which hopes to identify all the microscopic combatants inside us.

I related this story to a group of coworker's on a trip. One of them said, "Well, if it was the difference between life and death..."

Many other coworkers were less sure.

I Can't I'm Pooping

Funny true story from some family friends with a toddler at home. As a proud parent of a Tiny Turd myself, I completely empathize with this story.

Every morning, wife hits the snooze alarm and asks husband to cuddle with her until the alarm goes off. She asks husband one day and he says "I can't, I'm pooping." This alarms wife because husband is still in bed. She yells "You better not be pooping!" which wakes husband from his slumber. "No, I'm not pooping, I'm dreaming of pooping. Pooping without a toddler knocking on the door. I have to go to work to poop in peace."

I feel your pain. There were times when Mrs. Shit-Admin were working evenings that I had to take a crap with Tiny Turd in my arms. The things you do as a parent.