Fillers

It used to be that newspapers ran “fillers,” little one or two paragraph items to fill up what would otherwise be white space. I assume that the use of computers for composing the pages makes that unnecessary now, but I’m not sure. In any event, some filler-type material has been sticking in odd places on the hard drive here at No. 3:

I saw some video of a trendy nightclub full of beautiful people on the news. I wondered: Come sunrise, do any of those people DO anything useful that justifies the oxygen they breathe?

Once everyone is wearing the bright lime yellow shirts, will highway workers wear black to stand out and be noticed?

On Le Tube d’ Boob, there’s an ad for a “neckline slimmer,” a piece of exercise equipment which “targets the muscles of the neck and jaw to create a firmer, younger-looking you,” and so forth. The secret? The devise uses “resistance coil technology.” Translation? It has a spring in it.

Pointed observation: In the barber shop, it’s impolite to leave the toilet seat down.

“Some guys are born with the idea in his head that they can automatically drive fast, make women happy, and shoot a gun just based on his gender.” Not the greatest grammar, but true. (From Introduction to Firearms and Their Usage in Self Defense, by David Nash)

Seen on a sign at a Tea Party rally: No Socialized Anything!
I do understand that the Health Care “Reform” (see below) is castigated as “socialized medicine,” which invokes the old “communist” images. (Insofar as it restricts choice of providers, they’re right, although PPO’s and HMO’s have gone a long way down that road already.) Sorry to say, we are already heavily socialized. We have socialized highways. Socialized police and fire departments. Socialized municipal water systems. You get the drift.

And reform? I’ve been looking on WestLaw to find a quote from an opinion by my friend, former Justice Richard Neely, when he was on the West Virginia Supreme Court. I can’t find it, so I called Richard and he can’t remember where it was, either. (We did have a delightful chat - lots of people really disliked Richard because he always told the truth as he saw it. I always enjoyed raised-voice arguments with him.) The comment was about the Judical Reform Amendment and it was something to the effect that if the Legislature wanted to kill all women over 60, they’d call it the Grandmother Improvement Plan. (When can you recall ANY legislation which had ANY bad effect having a name which admitted the possibility of that effect?)

And in honor of my friend and brother Oce Smith, now returned to the inked presses of the traditional Fourth Estate, I bid you: Mizpah!

R