Fake NYT Headline:

Economists Say Periods of Prosperity A Perfect Time To Put Your Head In An Oven

But Treasury Secretary John Snow explained, "YouÂ’re not gonna give me the time of day and lay down for me, well, somebody else in this town will because IÂ’ve got this thing thatÂ’s working, you know? And I'm very gracious for that."

Thanks to TaxProf.

Who also rounds up coverage of the House's passage of, yes, even more tax cuts.

Posted by: Ace at 06:15 PM | Comments (23)
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No, I'm not a great writer, but I've got plenty of bad sex to offer.

Scott sends this compilation of really attrocious sex-writing from famous authors, including John Updike, Salman Rushdie, and, uhhhh, Marlon Brando.

Minor content warning past the jump. If you got through Dick Cheney, you can get through this. more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:51 PM | Comments (28)
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Apparently he was considered for UN Ambassador last year, but was rejected after extensive vetting revealed he did not, in fact, have a moustache.

Continuing the theme of the day: Study Shows More Men Think It's Funny To Call Their Moustaches "Flavor-Savers" Than Women Do.

Posted by: Ace at 01:32 PM | Comments (13)
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You know that old gender fight about boysÂ’ toys versus girlÂ’s toys? That boys play with toy cars and guns and girls with dolls because of an oppressive patriarchy molding their little blank slates into arbitrary gender roles?

Yeah, a lot of that wilted in the face of previous studies on just how early boys and girls preferred their respective sexes’ “assigned” toys.

Also, try as you might with all that “Free to be you and me” noise, boys forced to play with dolls would often start using them as guns and cars, comically using them to shoot at each other, or racing them over tables. Vroom, vroom.

Now, tossing a little more dirt on the grave, researchers say those toy-play 'gender rolesÂ’ show up even in monkeys:

WASHINGTON — Just like human boys and girls, male monkeys like to play with toy cars while female monkeys prefer dolls, a research project has shown.
Â…

Researchers put a variety of toys in front of 44 male and 44 female vervets, a breed of small African monkey, and measured the amount of time they spent with each object.

Like little boys, some male monkeys moved a toy car along the ground. Like little girls, female monkeys closely inspected a doll. Males also preferred balls while females fancied cooking pots. Both were equally interested in neutral objects such as a picture book and a stuffed dog.

People used to think that boys and girls played differently because of the way they were brought up. Now scientists such as Alexander say a creature's genetic inheritance also plays an important role.

Part of my delight in stories like this has nothing to do with sticking it to the extreme sect of feminism. ThatÂ’s just a bonus. Really, anything that helps bury the notion of manÂ’s infinitely malleable nature is just double-plus good to me. Tired but true, history's greastest evils have been leveled by utopia-seekers remodeling societies in accordance with their vision of what manÂ’s inner character could be, if only.....

Anyway, I draw pleasure in knowing thereÂ’s something retrograde in mankind that wonÂ’t go along for the ride, an intractable imperfection guaranteeing them failure.

But then again, I also love sticking it to the Dworkin crowd. Their predicted feminist research counter-offensive? "Study shows monkey math biased against female monkeysÂ’ "ways of knowing.'"

(h/t comment on Althouse.)

Posted by: Dr. Reo Symes at 12:59 PM | Comments (20)
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Another huge advance in science. This ranks right up there with the double-helix.

Friendships between women are special. They shape who we are and who we are yet to be.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess this is a female writer writing for a female audience. What, couldn't work Haagen-Dazs and Desperate Housewives into your thesis sentence?

They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage and help us remember who we really are.

And sometimes, when we're writing utter pap, they reassuringly coo to us "That's really quite good. I like the use of the words 'soothe' and 'tumultuous.'"

But they may do even more than that. Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our girlfriends can actually counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience daily.

A landmark University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), study suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that tend to make them seek out and maintain friendships with other women. It's a stunning finding that has turned five decades of stress research - most of it done on men - upside down.

Posted by: Ace at 12:52 PM | Comments (27)
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I don't know. If they're for men, doesn't that take 95% of the fun out of it?

Now, sure, sometimes I'd like to feel pretty. The idea of wearing lacey silk manties underneath my Eddie Bauer cullottes is certainly an appealing one.

But Manties with bows and ribbons and roses? That's just gay.

Thanks to George, who claims "I'm not sure what to do with this."

Yeah. The website just sort of typed itself into your URL box, huh?

Posted by: Ace at 12:44 PM | Comments (20)
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Howard Dean? He's got some balls.

Really big balls, which unfortunately draw too much metabolic energy from his brain.

Posted by: Ace at 12:41 PM | Comments (2)
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They paid for this study?

They could have just weighed the crotch-cantaloupes Chris Klein is hefting around.

The discovery, which many women may not find surprising, suggests a biological trade-off has to be made between brains and sperm.

It seems that because of the high energy demands, males can't generate large numbers of both.

This is why I gave up learning ten years ago.

Am I still friends with learning? Absolutely. Do we talk? No.

Thanks to Scott.

Posted by: Ace at 12:37 PM | Comments (15)
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He's got a blog now.

This seems like a pretty good rule:

I wrote on this topic more extensively in my book, The Joy of Work. So IÂ’ll just give you the highlights here. The core of humor is what I call the 2-of-6 rule. In order for something to be funny, you need at least two of the following elements:

Cute (as in kids and animals)

Naughty

Bizarre

Clever

Recognizable (YouÂ’ve been there)

Cruel

I invented this rule, but you can check for yourself that whenever something is funny it follows the rule. And when something isnÂ’t, it doesnÂ’t.

Check the Dick Cheney thread. The rules seem to be followed for most entries.

Not that I know as much about gag-writing as the Dilbert guy, but for longer pieces I always thought you needed two basic things: the premise and the tweak. The premise is just the basic strangeness or incongruity of a situation, like Donald Trump judging a poetry contest. The tweak is something unexpected and strange that doesn't derive obviously from the premise, like that Donald Trump is hung up on the lame eighties action show Riptide and gets real life and Riptide confused.

I've had to abandon a lot of pieces I thought had a decent premise but I coudln't come up with a suprising tweak for them.

Wuzzadem's recent Situation Room parody was okay, I thought -- decent premise, okay execution -- but only became genuinely funny when it got to the tweak, with Chris Matthews asking questions about Batman.

Premises are easy. Tweaks are often hard.

Oh, And... Irrelevant specificity always makes things funnier. Saying you maturbated on line in a sandwich shop is "eh." (Actually, depending on the speaker, it might not even really be a joke.)

Saying you masturbated on line waiting for a toasted meatball parm at Quizno's is 10% funnier, for some reason.

Colin Quinn is a big believer in irrelevant specificity. "JFK had Marilyn Monroe, Clinton goes after trashy women" isn't funny. But Quinn delivers it as "JFK had Marilyn Monroe, Clinton drops his pants at first sight of a Fuddrucker's assistant server in a B.U.M. sweatshirt." Which is funny.

Posted by: Ace at 11:49 AM | Comments (63)
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Blame FEMA:

Two days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, thousands of people were trapped in the city without food, water and medical care and growing increasingly desperate for rescue. But a top aide to Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco sent out an e-mail informing his colleagues that his staff had stopped calling for the buses needed to evacuate people from the Superdome and other places of refuge.

"NO MORE CALLS FOR BUSES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Ty Bromell wrote on Wednesday morning, Aug. 31. "My people are not calling for buses now."

Bromell, who heads Blanco's Office of Rural Development, said he had gotten the word from Leonard Kleinpeter, a special assistant to the governor who was spearheading the effort to wrangle buses from school boards, churches and other groups, that the vehicles were no longer needed.

The understanding, Bromell said, was that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had enough buses on the way, while the military would also airlift people out of the Superdome on Chinook helicopters. His staff for the next several hours instead turned their attention to other matters, such as trying to get generators for the local emergency centers hit by the storm.

As George Bush might say, that Ty Bromell was doing "a heck of a job."

Posted by: Ace at 11:41 AM | Comments (4)
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