I sacrificed myself

South Africa’s Apartheid-era Law and Order Minister, Adriaan Vlok, washed the feet of Rev. Frank Chikane, a man Vlok tried to have assassinated in 1989 by poisoning his clothes. Vlok said that if Jesus could do it (the foot-washing, not the clothes-poisoning), so could he. “I sacrificed myself,” Vlok says of the incident, adding, “I give up my pride, my own self, my superiority, my uncharitable attitude, and my selfishness.” If I were Chikane, I’d begin to feel like my feet were being insulted. Actually, if I were Chikane, I would have walked through some dog shit first. Which is probably why I’m not a reverend.

The kidnappers of the two Fox reporters forced them to convert to Islam, or else. I can’t imagine what they thought they were accomplishing.

Or the Islamists in Malaysia who are obstructing the attempts to marry of a woman who converted to Christianity. She’s being refused permission by the sharia courts, which she thinks that, no longer being a Muslim, shouldn’t have jurisdiction over her. The constitution of Malaysia, however, defines Malays (that’s an ethnic group, as distinct from Malaysians) as Muslim.

The group in Gaza holding the Fox reporters, by the way, calls itself the Holy Jihad Brigades. Which is redundant and trying just a little too hard.

As long as we’re doing Muslims Behaving Badly stories, Islamist legislators in Pakistan went on a minor rampage in Parliament a few days ago when the government tried to reform rape laws, which make it almost impossible to convict rapists, and then leave the victims in failed cases vulnerable to adultery charges.

In other news: elsewhere, various Muslims were nice to each other, kind to animals, and were perfectly pleasant people you’d be glad to know.

Contest

British cabinet ministers are getting “life coaches” at taxpayer expense, to improve their emotional intelligence and blah blah blah. So what would a life coach advise Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales or other members of the Bush cabinet? Offer your sage advice in comments (example, for Condi: “He’s just not that into you.”)

Exposed

Bush’s radio address today is about Katrina. In contrast to the Iraqi people, who he has said have expressed insufficient gratitude for all we’ve done for them, he had Rockey Vaccarella, who “drove to Washington to thank the federal government for its efforts to help people like him.”

Here’s the sentence I like: “And the floodwaters exposed a deep-seated poverty that has cut people off from the opportunities of our country.” Exposed? I’m pretty sure the poor people already knew about their own poverty. What you mean, George, is that that poverty was temporarily brought to the attention of over-privileged, uncompassionate, oblivious assholes such as yourself.

Appropriate programs and activities

I distinctly remember the first time I road an AC Transit bus in Oakland. There were people smoking underneath the No Smoking sign. Someone tried to sell me a watch. Now, the buses are getting Wi-Fi.

George W. Bush has signed a proclamation making September National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery Month, and he “call[s] upon the people of the United States to observe this month with appropriate programs and activities.” I’m thinking toga party. He praises his own policy of funneling federal drug treatment dollars through religious groups “answering the universal call to love a neighbor.” Of course he didn’t write this proclamation himself, but you’d think he’d have a, ahem, personal interest in the subject matter which might impel him to actually read it before signing it. My concern being the passivity and lack of personal responsibility attributed to addicts in the document, especially in the section on methamphetamine: it is called a “scourge,” and Americans are described as needing to be “protect[ed]” from meth “reaching” them. Anyway, the White House website provides a helpful link to a government website for National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery Month, which suggests as one of those appropriate programs and/or activities a “Recovery Walk.” I don’t know what that is, because I was too scared to click on a link featuring this picture.


Speaking of scary clowns, Jenna and Dubya have been demonstrating this week how much fun you can have without alcohol:

Dwarf-planet tossing: In your tiny, icy face, Pluto!

What is the possessive for Harper’s? Harper’s’s Luke Mitchell has a fascinating discussion with Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr. about the ethics and morality of force-feeding of hunger strikers at Guantanamo. The man is a master of logic origami. Winkenwerder claims (wrongly) that the World Medical Association’s 1991 Malta Declaration allows doctors to substitute their own judgment for the prisoner’s when he or she reaches the final stages of delirium or coma, but, he says, why wait that long, let’s strap them into restraint chairs and shove NG tubes into their nose while they’re still healthy and mentally competent.

Pluto has been sent down to the minors, and is now a “dwarf planet.” I think they prefer “little planet.” According to the BBC it was because of its oblong orbit. For me, it was always that its orbit left the plane of the ecliptic that did it.

Now, about Xena...

The President is a people person

Nearing the anniversary of Katrina, Bush finds the one guy from Louisiana who doesn’t hold a grudge, a Republican failed office-seeker, as it happens, which the White House says they had no idea of when they invited him. He is one Rockey Vaccarella, who finds it “amazing” that “a small man like me” could meet the president of the United States. It’s the American dream, really. He lost everything he owned, but now he has this precious, precious memory. “The President is a people person,” Mr. Vaccarella informs us. Oh, and FEMA trailers, he thanked Bush for all the FEMA trailers, and drove a replica of one from Louisiana to DC. Read the transcript at the first link, it’s an odd little photo op.

China is considering legislation to ban strippers from funerals. According to Reuters, they’re used to boost attendance. Evidently in China funerals have Nielsen ratings.

The WaPo report today on the Haditha massacre says in as many words that the Marines involved didn’t think that anything unusual had taken place, quoting the statement of a sgt in a “Marine human intelligence exploitation team” who walked the scene and talked to the Marines a few hours later. The Post writer suggests that the Marines “viewed the civilian deaths as accidental rather than the result of a vengeful rampage.” 24 accidental deaths. Oops. Certainly their colonel didn’t consider those deaths to be anything remarkable, much less worthy of investigation. What these stories leave out is the attempted cover-up. As I’ve said before, when the first story the Marines told was a blatant lie (that they were all killed by an IED), it behooves you to look fairly carefully at their next story. Also, I’m not sure how exonerating it is if they killed dozens of civilians calmly following procedure rather than in a furious rage after the death of a Marine, directed not at those responsible but at the nearest available Iraqis. Even had they thought themselves under attack, which they claim and which I don’t believe, how many innocent people do you get to kill in the name of preserving your own life? In the last scene of “Saving Private Ryan,” Ryan wonders if his life had been worth the lives of the men who had been killed “saving” him. How is that question changed if you’re the one who pulled the trigger?

All of a sudden

After opening with his customary fart joke, Bush gave a talk about “health transparency” today. I would say if you’re transparent, you should definitely see a health care professional immediately. Maybe one of those Gray’s Anatomy chicks in the shower (cause you’re transparent, see, try to keep up). He said, “I think the new trend in medicine is going to be to encourage transparency in pricing, as well as transparency in quality. ... How do we encourage consumerism.” As I’ve said before, the language of consumer choice disguises, and not very well I’d have thought, that he wants to “empower” patients to make decisions based on cost rather than health. Nowhere does he suggest any way in which doctors posting their prices would improve medical care, although he does mean to give the impression that it would. He even made an interesting slip, which I’ll highlight:

Think about the system today as a third-party payer, how many of you have got insurance and you never really cared about the cost because somebody else is paying the bill, right? You don’t really care about the quality, because some person in an office somewhere is paying the bill on your behalf.

Said quality, meant cost.


The new focus on “transparency” leaves out any mention of the mechanism of change, which is more or less magical.

And if we can get a system down where people are able to have a good program, a good product, good insurance, but where the consumer has more to say with what’s purchased or not, all of a sudden the dynamic begins to change, and costs begin to go down. ... if consumers have more information from which to make decisions, all of a sudden, costs begin to become less of a burden on the system

He brings up his favorite, because untypical of most medical decisions, example, Lasik surgery, whose cost has also dropped... wait for it... “all of a sudden.” The mechanism of change hidden in all this suddenness is the imposition of economic penalties on sick people who choose to seek medical care. If you’re the sort of person fooled by that sort of vocabulary, you might find the sight of someone signing their name a great source of fascination and entertainment.

Oh, wait a minute, now I’m going to sign an executive order. And I think you’ll find this interesting. It doesn’t take very long, and we usually have people stand behind me when I do it.

“Can I see a price list for pulling this cadace... coodace... wingy snakey thing out of my head?”

News you can use

BBC headline: “Saddam Trial Hears of Gas Attacks.” Someone alert George Bush, ‘cause we hear he totally loves this stuff.

Hey, did you hear? George Bush likes fart jokes!!!

Slate has a piece about Günter Grass, which I would rather eat grass than actually read, entitled “Snake in the Grass: The pompous, hypocritical hucksterism of Günter Grass.” It is written by... wait for it... Christopher Hitchens, who I assume has already written an attack on Mel Gibson for getting drunk and then saying stupid things.

In Britain, “Tom and Jerry” cartoons are to be censored, with scenes “glamorizing smoking” removed.

Blogs have been complaining about the tv news shows focusing so exclusively on JonBenet Ramsey rather than more important issues. Today, for example, the blogs have all been relaying the news from US News & World Report that George Bush likes fart jokes.

Iran finally gave its answer to the UN: it is ready to enter into “serious negotiations” about its nuclear program. So better not send George Bush; he’d just open with a fart joke.

Bush press conference: disasters, objectives, strained psyches, what good, decent people say, and what we won’t do so long as he’s the president

Bush held a press conference today. He praised himself for giving humanitarian aid to Lebanon, which he called “disaster relief,” as if it was hit by a flood or an earthquake rather than American-made munitions.

Actually, I think he may simply have forgotten just what “disaster” it is that happened to Lebanon, since he also accused Iran and Syria of “working to thwart the efforts of the Lebanese people to break free from foreign domination and build their own democratic future.” He seems to think that the only foreign domination Lebanon has had to contend with recently has been by Iran and Syria.


WILL THIS BE ON THE FINAL? Asked if Iran’s influence in “the region,” meaning Lebanon, is growing, Bush says, “The final history in the region has yet to be written.” Final history? That sounds pretty ominous. “They sponsor Hezbollah. They encourage a radical brand of Islam. Imagine how difficult this issue would be if Iran had a nuclear weapon.” Er, how would the one affect the other? And would it have anything to do with that “final history”?


OBJECTIVELY SPEAKING: Bush has been very big on the word “objectives” for a while now. Just in this presser, he said that the US has a plan to help the Iraqis achieve their objectives, that we should help Middle Eastern reformers achieve their objectives, that a UN force will help the Lebanese government achieve “some objectives,” that in relation to Iran’s nuclear program, “we will work with people in the Security Council to achieve that objective, and the objective is that there’s got to be a consequence for them basically ignoring what the Security Council has suggested through resolution.” Also, the terrorists “want to achieve objectives.”

YA THINK? “Obviously, I wish the violence would go down, but not as much as the Iraqi citizens would wish the violence would go down.”


The key sentence was the announcement that we’ll be occupying Iraq at least until January 2009: “We’re not leaving, so long as I’m the President.”

He says that politicians who disagree with that policy are good, decent people who are undercutting our national security and betraying our troops for political gain: “This is a campaign -- I’m sure they’re watching the campaign carefully. There are a lot of good, decent people saying, get out now; vote for me, I will do everything I can to, I guess, cut off money is what they’ll try to do to get our troops out.”

Our old friend Sum has been expressing unlikely opinions about terrorists again: “Now, I recognize some say that these folks are not ideologically bound. I strongly disagree. I think not only do they have an ideology, they have tactics necessary to spread their ideology.” Chimpy may just be stringing words and phrases together in a random order, but I think he just said that terrorism is an effective means of persuading people to believe in an ideology.

Sum’s cousin Sumbody has also been talking: “And somebody said, well, this is law enforcement. No, this isn’t law enforcement, in my judgment.”


On whether the violence in Iraq is now mostly sectarian, i.e., a civil war: “No, al Qaeda is still very active in Iraq. As a matter of fact some of the more -- I would guess, I would surmise that some of the more spectacular bombings are done by al Qaeda suiciders.” I suppose it’s an improvement that when he has no evidence, he now admits he’s just making stuff up.

On Lebanon: “You can’t have a democracy with an armed political party willing to bomb its neighbor without the consent of its government, or deciding, well, let’s create enough chaos and discord by lobbing rockets.” That’s from the Federalist Papers, right?

On Iraq: “Leaving before the job is done would be a disaster, and that’s what we’re saying.” There’s that word again.


Asked about reports that he expressed frustration about the lack of gratitude of the Iraqi people: “Frustrated? Sometimes I’m frustrated. Rarely surprised. Sometimes I’m happy. This is -- but war is not a time of joy. These aren’t joyous times. These are challenging times, and they’re difficult times, and they’re straining the psyche of our country. I understand that.” But “if we ever give up the desire to help people who live in freedom, we will have lost our soul as a nation, as far as I’m concerned.” So we’re straining our psyche but not losing our soul.

Speaking of strained psyches:

My day in court

As is so often the case with the criminal justice system, it all came down to earwax.

Today I had the opportunity to participate in that sacred duty of every citizen: weaseling my way out of jury duty. Here is my diary of that experience (John Grisham would have spun this out to 400 pages):

8:01 Why am I here at 8:01 am? Every judge in the land is still a-bed. Filled out juror info form. They ask for an email address. No way. At least the tv is off. Last time I was in one of these rooms I was trying to read while they blared Regis Philbin at me. And there’s a not uncomfortable couch. Not long enough to take a nap on, though.

I am by no means the only one in sweatpants. After careful consideration, though, I left my formal Cat in the Hat t-shirt at home.

8:13 The bureaucrat has said she’s going to “go ahead and” do one thing or the other for the 6th time by my count.

Update: 11 12.

8:22 Oh boy, there’s a video. Evidently Cal. is a beautiful state, the greatest of all the states, but it still has crime. Oh no, please tell me where I fit in in addressing that situation!

Uh oh, the video says I’m supposed to use my everyday common sense.

8:40 The Go Ahead Girl must be past 25X now

8:48 45? It’s a little awe-inspiring, really.

9:30 Waiting. Half the people here have no reading material (and some of the rest didn’t bring any, but are reading from the room’s eccentric collection of magazines, none of them news magazines). They’re just sitting there, nearly half of those with their arms crossed. Maybe they have rich inner lives and need no external stimulus. Maybe they’re drunk or hung over. The room is also provided with one jigsaw puzzle, which a guy in his 20s is working, not very efficiently. I’m reading a book on World War I & taking these notes, and feeling a welling civic pride. Or possibly gas.

9:42 Going into the courtroom in a minute. It was in fact gas.

9:51 Jeez, I could take those bailiffs.

And then there was an hour of voire dire, half of which I couldn’t hear (the earwax thing). The case was “resisting an executive officer,” which is something like resisting arrest, I guess. The lawyers on both sides seemed to be in their 20s, as was the IQ of the defense attorney, who asked if prospective jurors believed it was okay to protest being arrested, whether police can make a mistake, whether police can use any kind of force. She didn’t know how to ask a question that would have elicited an answer which would have alerted her to a problem juror. She asked a woman whose son is a cop in Sacramento whether, when he tells her about his job, she always takes his side.

Someone who worked the night shift was excused. Someone with child-care issues was excused. Someone who said he’d been hassled by cops, but wouldn’t say how, and said that police were, he guessed, a “necessary evil,” was excused. An FBI special agent was excused. Several people whose problems I couldn’t make out were excused. And then I was called, corrected the clerk’s pronunciation of my name, told the court about the earwax thing and was excused.

Er, you weren’t expecting a big payoff to this story, were you?

Stubbornly rubber-stamping

The International Astronomical Union has voted in favor of the broad definition of “planet,” so we’ve got 12 now and they’re threatening us with more to come. That’s what happens when you let a union make these decisions: inventing mnemonics for 20 or 30 planets, teaching schoolchildren how to pronounce Quaoar, Varuna, Ixion, etc, it’s like guaranteed employment for the “I’ve got a really big telescope” crowd.

Quaoar, indeed.

I’m serious: Charon is not a planet, it’s just not.

Speaking of jumped-up satellites with delusions of grandeur, Joe Lieberman called today for Rumsfeld to resign. The Lamont campaign says this won’t disguise his “many years of stubbornly rubber-stamping Bush’s failed policies”. Stubbornly rubber-stamping?

Snipers, mysteriously undeterred by the ban on automobiles, have fired on a Shiite pilgrimage in Baghdad, which if the photo illustrating the BBC story about this is correct, is one of those pilgrimages with flagellation. It must be very annoying when you’re flagellating yourself and people start shooting at you.

Duck herders?

The LAT reports that while the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division knew that members of the 173rd Airborne tortured detainees in Vietnam (some of them to death, and some using a form of waterboarding), information they kept to themselves, although 3 low-ranking soldiers were fined or reduced in rank, their real concern was digging up dirt to smear the people who said there was torture. The people in the military, obviously, the Vietnamese didn’t count. No one noticed when all these files were declassified in 1994. When the LAT started investigating, they were re-classified (but not before the LAT read most of them).

A second story tells of a sergeant convicted of murdering three Vietnamese farm workers (an irrigation worker and 2 teenage duck-herders) who not only served no prison time but was allowed to stay in the army another 12 years, not even transferred out of Vietnam.

Strip poker, running backwards, and the Middle East situation – but I repeat myself

The Israeli commandos driven back from Lebanon today, who Israel claims were trying to interdict arms shipments from Syria and/or Iran, but who Lebanon more plausibly asserts were trying to seize or kill a Hezbollah leader, were reportedly disguised in Lebanese army uniforms. Aren’t there rules against that sort of thing? Certainly, Israel has forfeited its right to demand that the Lebanese army take any action to disarm Hezbollah, since they have put Lebanese soldiers at risk of being attacked as possible Israeli infiltrators.

And now the sports news:

Switzerland is hosting the retro-running championships, in which contestants run backwards 11 kilometers up a mountain.

That’s very picturesque, no doubt, but not as picturesque as the World Strip Poker Championship in London. Brings new meaning to the phrase Texas Hold ‘Em. You can look for the pictures yourself: I’ve already been quite sufficiently traumatized by the sight of the guy with the huge Arsenal tattoo and the unfortunate case of acne on his back, thank you very much.

Test in progress

Reuters headline: “Israel Raid in Lebanon Tests Truce.” If a squadron of Israeli attack helicopters leave Haifa Air Force Base traveling north at 150 miles per hour...

Presumably if they’re only “testing” the truce, that’s okay because it’s not like they’re breaking it or anything. However Lebanese PM Siniora calls the raid a “naked violation” of the ceasefire. So it’s like one of those dreams where you’re taking a test naked.

Bush in his radio address talked yet again about how “foster[ing] the development of young democracies” in the Middle East will defeat the terrorists. And Israel has seized the Deputy Prime Minister of Palestine. Because sometimes young democracies need a “time out.”

People were trying to come and kill people

The Indy asked some Labour MPs whether they agreed with Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott that Bush’s Middle East policy was “crap” (which Prescott denies saying but no one believes him, because it sounds just like him, and anyway we’ve all just been enjoying watching the BBC use the word as often as possible). Says Ian Davidson MP: “I think that John Prescott is to be commended for the quality of his political analysis.”

CentCom’s new slogan: “It’s fun to shoot some people.” To be fair, they may just have promoted Mattis because they were scared of him. Wouldn’t you be?

Bush had a meeting with his economic advisers, who advised him not to wear a tie, then they all did the traditional “Buckaroo Banzai” walk to the microphones


to answer questions, none of which were about the economy. He was asked to explain why he thinks Hezbollah was defeated: “The first reaction, of course, of Hezbollah and its supporters is, declare victory. I guess I would have done the same thing if I were them.” Ya think?


“But sometimes it takes people a while to come to the sober realization of what forces create stability and which don’t.” Ya think?


(Update: While waiting for the pictures for this post to upload, I looked over to Bob Harris’s site. Sigh.)

“Hezbollah is a force of instability. ... Hezbollah, they’re pretty comfortable there in south Lebanon.” If you like sitting on piles of rubble. “They’re now going to find themselves not only that which caused the destruction, but they’ll find themselves with now a Lebanese army, with U.N. help, making it clear they won’t have the safe haven necessary -- that they think is necessary to launch attacks.”

On yesterday’s ruling against his warrantless surveillance: “I would say that those who herald this decision simply do not understand the nature of the world in which we live.” See, this is what happens when they let him read Camus; he starts talking about the “nature of the world.” Next thing you know he’ll be dressing all in black and smoking unfiltered cigarettes.

Why just last week, he says, “we disrupted a plot. People were trying to come and kill people.” Peoples is the craziest people. “The judge’s decision was a -- I strongly disagree with that decision, strongly disagree. ... I made my position clear about this war on terror. And by the way, the enemy made their position clear yet again when we were able to stop them.” Just as long as we’re all clear.

All you need to know about today’s eavesdropping ruling

Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, ruling the warrantless wiretapping program both illegal and unconstitutional: “There are no hereditary kings in America”.

The White House, responding: “We couldn’t disagree more with this ruling”.

Wherein I settle some matters to everyone’s complete satisfaction

Summary judgement 1: The validity of Günter Grass’s writings is not undermined to any significant extent by the revelations about his youth.

Summary judgement 2: I still don’t think Pluto is a planet, but I’m willing to let it be grandfathered in. Charon is not a planet. Indeed, if the argument for Charon not being a satellite of Pluto (that the barycenter [center of gravity, around which both objects revolve] of the two does not lie within Pluto) is legitimate, then Jupiter is not a planet. And Jupiter is obviously a planet. I don’t care about Ceres, and neither does anyone else. 2003 UB 313 can be a planet, but only if it’s called Xena (no, I’m not a fan of the show, but the idea gives me a bit of a giggle).

And there’s some good people in our country who believe we should cut and run

A Gallup poll shows that 39% of Americans interviewed believe that Muslims in the US should be required to carry a special i.d. I just wrote a comment on that before realizing I already wrote one 20 months ago after a similar study (which had it at 27%). I thought what I was writing seemed familiar (although this time I went with “ham sandwich” instead of “pork products”).

Speaking of racists, John McCain was out campaigning for George Allen, because if you’re trying to pretend that “Makaka” isn’t a racial epithet, the person you really want standing next to you is the guy who said (when running for president in 2000), “I hated the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.”

Salon investigates voter security/suppression efforts. A must-read. It could almost make you support Norm Ornstein’s proposal for mandatory voting, providing the fine for a vote not being cast is matched by one for a vote not being counted. This is one of those areas where the left (or even the Dems) have been afraid of sounding like conspiracy theorists, allowing the R’s to, well, conspire. I mean, do you check your supermarket receipts for errors? Your first thought is that the people who work there are idiots and errors happen, but 90% or more of those errors invariably favor the store. By the way, anyone who has to wait on line at the DMV four times like that woman in Indiana in order to register, should get four votes at the next election – it’s only fair.

After Bush toured the Harley plant (“I’m impressed by the fact that they're impressed by the product they make”), Bush gave a speech at a fundraiser for Lynn Swann. His reiterated phrases and stories are not getting less irritating with familiarity, like the things “I happen to believe/disagree.”

They want us to cut and run. And there’s some good people in our country who believe we should cut and run. They’re not bad people when they say that, they’re decent people. I just happen to believe they’re wrong.

Why is that phrasing so much more obnoxious than “I believe they’re wrong” or “They’re wrong”?

Here’s Bush making yet another claim he can’t prove, while pretending that he’s not making it:

I know it’s hard for Americans to believe this, but the enemy that attacked us before has got people that want to act like them, are maybe taking instruction from -- I can’t tell you whether this plot we disrupted was al Qaeda. I’m not going to say that unless I’m certain it was.

Oh, he almost let it slip, and then stopped himself in the nick of time! This is a technique he perfected when tattling on Jeb to his mother when he was 6.

And, if you can stand it, another iteration of his sophisticated understanding of the problems of the Middle East:

Isn’t it interesting today that the most violent parts of the world are where young democracies are trying to take root? Isn’t it interesting that Hezbollah would attack Israel, a democracy in the heart of the Middle East, try to destabilize the Middle East so that Lebanon doesn’t get to be a strong democracy and starts to try to turn the world against Israel? Isn’t it interesting that the young democracy of Iraq is the place where the enemy is trying to stop the progress? That should tell the American people the following things: One, we face an enemy that has an ideology that can’t stand freedom; and secondly, as freedom progresses, it changes the world for the better. Otherwise, the enemy wouldn’t be trying to stop it.

Hezbollah was attacking Israel because Israel is a democracy and it hates democracy. Is there anyone else in the world who believes that? Also, who is “the enemy” in Iraq who is trying to stop the progress? Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Al Qaida, there are so many enemies I have no idea who he’s singling out.

I may get hysterical blindness if I have to read another Bush speech.

What’re you rebelling against, Chimpy?

Shrub went to the Harley-Davidson plant today, and they let him pretend to ride a motorcycle.

“Vroom,” went George.

“Vroom vroom.”

“Vroom vroom vroom.”

“Vrooooom.”

“Vroooooooooooom.”

I dunno, I’m kind of reminded of something, I can’t think what it might be....

“Vroom.”