Saying Goodbye to Mother...

Via my lovely bride:

We were dressed and ready to go out for the New Years Eve Party. We turned on a night light, turned the answering machine on, covered our pet parakeet, and put the cat in the backyard.

We phoned the local cab company and requested a taxi. The taxi arrived, and we opened the front door to leave the house.

As we walked out the door, the cat we had put out in the yard, scoots back into the house. We didn't want the cat shut in the house because she always tries to eat the bird.

My wife goes on out to the taxi, while I went back inside to get the cat. The cat runs upstairs, with me in hot pursuit. Waiting in the cab, my wife doesn't want the driver to know that the house will be empty for the night. So, she explains to the taxi driver that I will be out soon, “He's just going upstairs to say goodbye to my mother.”

A few minutes later, I get into the cab. “Sorry I took so long,” I said, as we drove away. “That stupid bitch was hiding under the bed. I had to poke her ass with a coat hanger to get her to come out! She tried to take off, so I grabbed her by the neck. Then, I had to wrap her in a blanket to keep her from scratching me. But it worked! I hauled her fat ass downstairs and threw her out into the back yard!”

The cab driver hit a parked car.

This Works...

A few days ago I posted this helpful hint, along with a bunch of others.  I decided to try this one myself, as I'd fought our kitchen garbage bag a few thousand times before.

I didn't drill holes, but rather cut triangular holes with my pocket knife.  Took all of 15 or 20 seconds. 

Worked like a champ!  The bag comes right out now, no battling at all...

Why Does This Sound So Plausible?

Via my mom:

An engineer dies and reports to hell.

Pretty soon, the engineer gets dissatisfied with the level of comfort in hell, and starts designing and building improvements. After a while, they've got air conditioning and flushing toilets and escalators, and the engineer is a pretty popular guy.

One day God calls Satan up on the telephone and says with a sneer, "So, how's it going down there in hell?"

Satan replies, "Hey things are going great. We've got air conditioning and flushing toilets and escalators, and there's no telling what this engineer is going to come up with next."

God replies, "What??? You've got an engineer? That's a mistake -- he should never have gotten down there; send him up here."

Satan says, "No way. I like having an engineer on the staff, and I'm keeping him."

God says, "Send him back up here or I'll sue."

Satan laughs uproariously and answers, "Yeah, right. And just where are you going to get a lawyer?"

Conservatives, Liberals – They Really Are Different...

An excerpt from this ScienceDaily article:

In a prior experiment, participants had their brain activity measured as they played a simple gambling game. Dr. Schreiber and his UC San Diego collaborators were able to look up the political party registration of the participants in public records. Using this new analysis of 82 people who performed the gambling task, the academics showed that Republicans and Democrats do not differ in the risks they take. However, there were striking differences in the participants' brain activity during the risk-taking task.

Democrats showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, a region associated with social and self-awareness. Meanwhile Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala, a region involved in the body's fight-or-flight system. These results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk.

In fact, brain activity in these two regions alone can be used to predict whether a person is a Democrat or Republican with 82.9% accuracy. By comparison, the longstanding traditional model in political science, which uses the party affiliation of a person's mother and father to predict the child's affiliation, is only accurate about 69.5% of the time. And another model based on the differences in brain structure distinguishes liberals from conservatives with only 71.6% accuracy.

I wonder how libertarians and other politically independent people measure up in this regard?

And am I the only one who finds this sort of investigation reminiscent of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four or Asimov's psychohistory?