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No sooner do I post this than the New York Times comes out with a big article on left-handedness. I’d never realized the extent to which lefties were discriminated against in the past.

Still, of late, they seem to have overcome their past mistreatment. As the article points out, four of the last seven Presidents are left-handed. And according to Wikipedia (who would have thought there would be a whole article on the subject?) six out of the last 12 Presidents were left-handed.

Well, as I blogged about two weeks ago, a poll asking who was the greatest President just came out recently, and I couldn’t help seeing that four left-handers are in the top ten. Admittedly, this is probably explained by the fact that the poll was heavily biased in favor of recent Presidents, and the left-handed President trend is a new one, but still, I have to fight the urge to say: “I, for one, welcome our new southpaw overlords.”

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I posted about the trailer for the movie Atlas Shrugged, Part 1 a few weeks ago. Well, now it seems the film’s producer has revealed he’s thinking of doing Part 3 of the trilogy as a musical. No, really.

Oh, I think making it a musical is an excellent idea, though probably not for reasons Objectivists would like. For some reason, I can see very clearly in my mind’s eye John Galt singing a lightly altered version of “Ya Got Trouble” from The Music Man to an assembled crowd of industrialists.

Honestly, though, I think this must be a joke. But on the other hand, if it is true, I will admit that my prediction that they would be too faithful to Rand’s novel would be quite wrong.

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I am not good at telling jokes. I once tried to tell a joke to some people, at their request. I figured my only chance was to tell a joke I knew to be “bad” and hope it was funny by virtue of its sheer “badness”. This may have been a mistake. Anyway, I forget where I read this joke originally (some magazine, I know) but it went something like this:

A Priest, a Rabbi, and an Atheist walk into a bar. The bartender turns to them and says “Is this some kind of joke?”

The reaction was, as you might imagine, stony silence. I might have felt embarrassed, but it hadn’t been my idea to tell a joke, and I felt they deserved what they got.

Some people, including relatives of mine, are very good at telling jokes. I don’t know how they do it. I suppose part of it has to do with the “delivery”, which is obviously hard to discuss on a blog.

I don’t think of myself as being a particularly humorless person, either. It’s just that I prefer humor in the form of a witty observation, or a well-crafted piece of dialogue in a book, film or video game.

Not that there’s anything wrong with jokes, but it’s just not my thing, for some reason.

P.S. I realize it’s possible you’ll want to tell jokes in the comments. That’s fine, but keep it PG-13, if you would.

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…just kidding. The stock market isn’t controlled by the President, or the Congress, or the Fed chairman, or anyone else.

And yet, when the Dow hit 14,000 back in 2007, some Republicans seemed to think that the President did deserve the credit, so I guess the fact it has nearly doubled in value over Obama’s two years must be due to his excellent work.

Right?

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I was interested to see this Time article about us potentially getting a second sun next year. It has been cold lately, so that would help.

Naturally, though, killjoy scientists say it turns out not to be happening.

Most people talking about the possibility of two suns referenced the twin suns of Tatooine in Star Wars, but from the way the Time article described it, I thought it sounded more like the Isaac Asimov story Nightfall.

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I was doing some research on historical Presidential campaigns, and I came across this 1952 ad for Eisenhower:

…and now I have that song running through my head.*

Anyway, interesting to compare that to the campaign ads of today, no?
 

*And I guess now you might, as well. Sorry.

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“The other night, from cares exempt,
I slept — and what d’you think I dreamt?
I dreamt that somehow I had come
To dwell in Topsy-Turveydom!”

Really, I don’t know what to make of this very strange excerpt from Rush Limbaugh’s show. He said:

“[L]ook at all the things that were built in five years during the Great Depression: The Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building came in ahead of schedule, built during the Depression, back in the days where we actually built things. And back then there wasn’t talk of extended unemployment benefits. There wasn’t talk of national health care. That mind-set just didn’t exist. And because those things didn’t exist people had to do what they could to fend for themselves, and if that meant picking up, moving to San Francisco, working for whatever you got paid in a dangerous job like building the Golden Gate Bridge or the bay bridges or the Hoover Dam or the Empire State Building, it’s what you did, you found work wherever you could.”

Um… wasn’t building all that stuff part of a government program; and under a Democratic President, no less? Isn’t that supposed to be, like, Socialism? Or else “Liberal Fascism“? I don’t think any of that exactly shows off the virtues of the free-market, at any rate. I may be wrong, but I would have thought Limbaugh would be railing against such awful, awful Government things.

If anyone reading this happens to have more knowledge on this subject, I’d appreciate some enlightenment.

(And yes, for those of you wondering, evidently I lied about not blogging till I could finish that big post I’m working on. I can’t help it.)

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Via Private Buffoon, it seems that the apocalypse will soon be upon us. At least, according to one group of Christians, it will come on May 21, 2011.

Here’s another weird coincidence for you: I myself blogged about the, ah… reasoning behind this prediction exactly one year ago today. (And then promptly forgot all about it.)

Okay, so this is probably not a random coincidence. I assume that the news media always puts the Prophets of Doom in the news around New Year’s. Trying to relive the “Y2K bug” days, no doubt.

However, I’m sure that if you’re into numerology, you can make up discover much more sinister reasons for this fact.

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It’s funny how much we use common expressions without really thinking about them. For example, is it: “toe the line” or “tow the line”? (Answer here.)

I was reminded of this by something I was writing today. I was going to use the expression  “the whole nine yards”. But I wondered where the expression came from, so I looked it up on Wikipedia:

“The origin of the phrase is not definitively known, although a vast number of explanations with varying degrees of plausibility have been suggested. Perhaps the most frequently quoted is from World War II, where to “go the full nine yards” was to fire the entire aircraft’s machine-gun ammunition belt at the enemy, which is nine yards long.”

So, having seen this, I opted not to use the expression in what I was writing at the time, which was:

“Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Man–the whole nine yards.” 

 I think it might have undercut my point in that instance.