-This is the funniest, cleanest and smartest joke I have read in some time, which I will now impart with you. Fortunately it is not seven hundred lines long:
Saturday Morning, 2:00 am
Early Saturday morning a policeman waited across the street from a popular bar, hoping to nail a drunken driver, possibly preventing a tragic accident.
At closing time the patrons came out and the officer spotted his potential quarry. One man was so obviously inebriated that he could barely walk. He stumbled around the parking lot for a few minutes, looking for his car.
After trying his keys on five other cars, he finally found his own vehicle. He sat in the car a good ten minutes, as the other patrons left. He turned his lights on, then off, wipers on, then off. He started to pull forward into the grass, then stopped.
Finally, when he was the last car, he pulled out onto the road and started to drive away.
The patrolman, waiting for this, turned on his lights and pulled the man over. He administered the breathalyzer test, and to his great surprise, the man blew a 0.00.
The patrolman was dumbfounded. "This equipment must be broken!" he exclaimed.
"I doubt it," said the man, "Tonight I am the designated decoy!"
-I am following along with a course at my soon-to-be home, University of Ottawa, on the inestimable Samuel Johnson, whom I haven't read in years (I think Dr. J shares the same problem: not reading whom we want to read for so long). I just finished his life of Richard Savage. If you haven't heard of him, don't worry, because no one has. In fact, if it weren't for Samuel Johnson, no one would ever have heard of him. If you wake up one morning and wish to read the life of an extremely obscure semi-hack poet who had a very rough life, read this.
I still contend that Samuel Johnson wrote the best non-fictional prose in the English language, especially his "Preface to the Dictionary" and "Preface to Shakespeare," the latter being one of the sanest pieces of criticism in the English language, and one which certainly got be back on to Shakespeare after the damage high school had done (I'm convinced high schools now do more harm than good by "teaching" Shakespeare). As for periodical prose, I've come to the realization that his predecessor, Joseph Addison, was better.
-Wrote an indignant letter to a newspaper in Nova Scotia (the something "Herald") after I had read a very offensive piece wherein the writer essentially said that the Armenian Genocide never took place, and that Stephen Harper was wrong to acknowledge it as such (he even impeaches the wisdom of Motion 380 passed 2 years ago). I have seen Turkish propaganda that is less biased than what this man wrote, which makes me wonder just how big his cheque from the Turkish government was. I find it ridiculous that this man (a nobody, as far as I know) is somehow more sagacious than an entire community of scholars and historians. This is tantamount to me saying the Holocaust never happened on a hunch. Simply Nauseating.