Well, of course they can. It’s right there in the name of their party: RepublICan.

So why do they make themselves sound like illiterates every time they’re forced to utter the dread name of the other party? Why do Republicans, almost without exception, refer to their opposition as “the Democrat Party”?

Are they truly as ignorant of the English language as they sound? Do they all come from trailer parks? Don’t they know that “Democrat” is a noun and “Democratic” is the adjective form?

Sure, they know. The lock-step illiteracy is a marketing device.

“Democrat” ends in r-a-t. “The “DemocRAT Party.” Deliver it with a sneer, as the Republicans always do, and it also brings to mind other r-a-t words. “Bureaucrat”, for example.

Incredibly, enough people fall for this shit that the Republicans have kept it up for at least a decade.

So I have a suggestion for Democrats: an i-c for an i-c.

From now on, take the “ic” out of “Republican” and pronounce it “Re-pubble-un”, for no reason other than that it sounds silly and will irritate the hell out of them.

C’mon, say it with me now: RE-pubble-un. Or just “Pubble” for short. The Grand Old Pubbles. The party whose leaders would rather sound like morons than say “ic” at the end of a word.

…except to thank Dave Kraft for passing this along.

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Not together, unfortunately.

However, for those who didn’t know, Maher is doing a weekly show called “Fishbowl” on Amazon.com. You’ll find it here.

Tom Wolfe’s Jefferson Lecture to the National Endowment for the Humanities gave me a terminal case of neuron envy. Pay particular attention to his comments on “the fiction absolute” and “championism.”

It’s a Comedy Central trade ad celebrating South Park‘s Emmy nominations.

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Ellis Weiner at the Huffington Post offers a unique way to resolve to the Middle East situation.

He’s only half-kidding. Something like this may be the only solution to a conflict which, at its core, is neither political nor religious, but tribal.

When did America’s official cheer become “Woo!”?

Am I alone, or does anybody else think it sounds utterly ignorant and infantile?

This afternoon, Chris Matthews was broadcasting his “Hardball” show from outdoors at Rockefeller Plaza. He asked who in the crowd thought the U.S. should support Israel exclusively in the current Middle East conflict. Large numbers of the crowd went “Woo!” to express their approval.

“Woo!”?

Do these ignoramoids think anybody in Israel — or Lebanon — is going “Woo!”? As if the war were an entertainment?

Even fucking Hezbollah isn’t going “Woo!”.

I swear, there are moments when I think this country deserves every goddamn thing that happens to it. Because we don’t know when we’re being stupid. Because we seem to think everything is a show or, worse, a sport.

On the other hand, maybe this is an American value we should be promoting directly to the jihadists, to cripple their ability to recruit. I mean, how seriously could you take a terrorist group whose battle cry was, “Death to America! Woo!”?

About as seriously as you can take The Nation that Goes “Woo!”.

Just a small musing by David Mamet at the *Huffington Post*.

Rummaging around my hard disk, I came upon these notes from a brainstorming session circa 2002. Reading them cracked me up, so I thought you folks might get a snicker, chortle, or possibly even a muffled guffaw out of them, too.

Mise en scène: The ex and I were probably sitting either in a coffee shop at the Suncoast Hotel in the middle of the night, or under the spritzers at the Starbucks next to the Borders on Rainbow Blvd., on a scorching Vegas afternoon. I would have been blathering non-stop. She would have been typing like a madwoman on the fold-up keyboard of her Palm Pilot and, when the spirit moved her, tossing ideas of her own into the mix. (She was highly creative and very witty in her own right. I can’t pinpoint her contributions to this session, but the “tuna” line and the one about the rock band sound a lot like her.)

The material is, of course, both unstructured and uncensored. That’s the point of a brainstorming session, to let ideas flow free and unrestrained. Critique comes later.

One other thing you need to know before you read further: At the time, I had just finished up the *Howard the Duck* Limited Series for Marvel Max, and Marvel had offered me another assignment — scripting the book that would eventually be published as *Marville*. I turned it down because I wasn’t prepared to participate in the character assassination of someone I’d known for thirty years and whom I value as a personal friend.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve yet to be offered another assignment by Marvel.

That said, here are the notes:

• “The High Life” — about lowlifes. Alt. title: “High Rollers”. Haunted money. Haunted casinos, gambling tables, etc.
• Soul-eating whorehouse on wheels called the Suck-You Bus.
• “upwardly mobile vampires”
• Sexual terrorists — something to do with kidnapping fundamentalists and corrupting them? bumper sticker: Jesus Is Coming. Subversive Muslim rock band —
  Quran Quran, “Girls on Camels”
• S&M aliens
• Allah does not forbid tuna.
• Miniseries or GN titled “Smallpond”. Story about 2 captains of a dead industry fighting for the last microgram of the industry’s market share. Blood feud. Franchise blacksmith shops, last two manufacturers of 8-track tapes. 2 companies are both subsidiaries of much larger companies that don’t realize the small companies still exist. They service a market that consists of 11 specialty stores, all serviced by one distributor. Distributor has just discovered CDs. Problem with these two companies is that they are staffed entirely by strange little fat boys with beards who only understand 8-track technology and think CDs and cassettes are a passing fad. Not only that, there’s recently been 70’s retro movie released that made $114 million its first weekend and both companies believe that this is a sign that the public is really interested in 8-tracks — they just need to get the word out. One manufacturer, the young upstart, has recently withdrawn from the RIAA and decided to pursue his own standard of recording. The other manufacturer perceives this as a potentially lethal threat to its catalog of Journey and Air Supply and Kansas 8-tracks. In an effort to wipe out the competition once and for all, the young upstart manufacturer decides to unleash a hot new album, available only on 8-track, entitled “MyCompetitorSucksville”. The more established company lashes back with a new album called “Our Second Oldest Act Strikes Back (If It Isn’t Dead).” To the horror of the young upstart, the OSOA album outsells every new release that month. So the upstart decides there’s only one thing left to do — kill the older captain. Meanwhile, 99.9% of the population of the universe doesn’t care.
• Alternative ideas, also called Smallpond: Two gangs of bloodthirsty guppies locked in a life or death battle over a small swatch of plankton on the surface of Farmer Brown’s fish pond. Knife fights, chain fights, swim-by shootings. The pond is awash in blood. Which side will triumph? Ending: Farmer Brown paves over the pond and puts up a strip mall.
• New romance series: Israeli/Palestinian Heartthrobs. Hamas discovers to its horror that Palestinian boys are blowing themselves up over failed romances with nice Jewish girls.
• Dick the Dead Horse — keeps appearing in inappropriate places, and people try uselessly to get rid of him by beating him.
• Rose Hips, Health Food Hooker — hangs around outside health food stores and exchanges blowjobs for vitamins. For a bottle of essential amino acids, she’ll go around the world.

And you thought all the fun this week was in San Diego.

[‘New Comics Ideas – 2002’ is Copyright © 2006 Steve Gerber. All rights reserved. Because you just never know…]

Is anyone else getting a “Stack Overflow” error message when they access this page with Internet Explorer?

I don’t think much about the ex anymore.

No, really.

Her name comes up occasionally in conversation, the talk moves on, and that’s that. No big emotions, no big deal.

However, in the last few days, I finally decided I didn’t like living in an apartment which, six months after move-in, still looks like a Box Brothers store. So I’ve been making an effort to get the rest of my shit unpacked. That process entailed *repacking* some paperwork and a few stray possessions that need to be shipped to her, on the off-chance that some of it may be important. Also because I promised I’d send it, and I’d consider myself a mean sucky bastard if I just threw it away. (Not that I don’t aspire to mean sucky bastardhood, but chucking her stuff seems too petty a way to earn the designation.)

Anyway, handling these artifacts did produce an unwelcome emotional response: acute irritation, directed not at the ex but at Albert Einstein.

The passage of time *is* relative, not only to physical position and velocity but to geographical distance and psychological states.

Major news flash, I know.

Still, something galls me about the fact that, from what little I know of her life since the breakup, she’s moved on — and on — and on. To her, I’m almost certainly an ancient tale written in fading ink on crumbling papyrus. To me, she’s a month-old issue of *Time*; the news is stale, but the ads are probably still valid.

My point, I suppose, is that time dilation is a bitch.

And then you die.