Category: seriously, what the fuck?

Shorter Syriana

In the world of Middle East oil production, multinational petrochemical mergers, and global Wahhabist terrorism, everything is connected.

Except for that whole drunk dad all pissed off and hanging out on Jeffrey Wright's stoop. What was that all about? Seriously, that felt totally tacked on.— DCEIVER

READ MORE: seriously, what the fuck? , syriana

Monkey Trials

Today, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones ruled against the Dover Area School Board's decision to insert intelligent design into their schools' science curriculum. A great ruling for anyone who prefers their science to be based less in folklore and more in, uhm, what's the word for it...oh, yeah: science.

The lawyer who argued the case for the ID sign has, predictably called the ruling "troubling." And, of course, he's crazy wrong. You know what troubling is? Troubling is when your HMO sticks you with a physician who thinks he can cure you with a prayer rug and a piece of the true cross. That's troubling. Though we admit, if we had foreseen conscience clauses that allowed pharmacists to refuse to dispense drugs on the basis of religious belief, we'd have converted to Christian Scientist back in college and would be sitting on our ass at the CVS this very minute.

All of this makes an article from today's Scotsman incredibly relevant, especially if you want to ruminate on the Lysenkoist voodoo crapola from which Dover just spared itself. It's a tale about super-warriors in the service of Stalin, a healthy dose of monkey jizz, and the "expensive failure" of what is rightly called Dumbass Design.— DCEIVER

Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors [The Scotsman]

READ MORE: incompetence , insane theories , intelligent design , scams and flams , seriously, what the fuck? , social dysfunction , top

Remainders: You're About to be Taken to a Dream World of Magic Edition

• Good night, New York City. We sure hope you've arranged alternate travel plans. [Gothamist]

• Time Magazine accords "Person of the Year" status to Bono, Bill and Melinda Gates. Hey, we called it! We're guessing that only one of the three is a big iPod fan. [Time Magazine]

• Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bans Western music, unaware that it only makes us want to subject Iran to it twice as much. [AP]

• Sate your appetite for crazy as hell by watching Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell take in The Chronicles of Narnia. ["Lazy Sunday"]— DCEIVER

READ MORE: bill gates , bono , iran , new york city , saturday night live , seriously, what the fuck? , time magazine

Metro Section: Cakelove Perestroika Edition

•A word of warning: if you live in Fairfax County and are dating a woman with the first name April and the middle name Dawn, you should go to a friend or family member's house, call the police, and hide until they arrive. [Washington Post]
Signs of a dramatic change: For the first time, DCist posts an article on Cakelove that doesn't descend completely into a comment stream idiot-tizzy between self-proclaimed pastry experts and wielders of racial animus. [DCist]
•WMATA's Board is giving serious thought to getting rid of CEO Richard White after a year of problems. Of course, White's just about the only WMATA official who actually uses the system--most of the board wouldn't recognize a red line train if it ran them down in the street. [Washington Post]
•Ward Three Candidate Sam Brooks launches his campaign's "Idea Blog." Now he needs to change his header picture so that it doesn't look like ideas make his brain all hurty. [Sam Brook's Idea Blog]— DCEIVER

READ MORE: cakelove , dcist , metro , metro section , sam brooks , seriously, what the fuck?

Double Fantasy

Alert tipster Darin Ipema provides Wonkette with a Separated at Birth image that'll be sure to hurt your soul just in time for the weekend:

Yeek. Talk about your instant karma!— DCEIVER

READ MORE: disturbing images , john lennon , karl rove , seriously, what the fuck?

Decoding the Note: Has the Eagle Landed?

Oh, Note! Why do you tease and derange us so? We swore we would be lured no longer down your florid yet terminally occluded path of dim insinuation and addled wit. For that is where, we have learned by painful experience, the English language--to say nothing of the mental properties of sensemaking that have sustained its frail development over these many long centuries--goes not merely to die, but to be suckerpunched, pitifully buckled over and breathless, wailing the unanswerable plaint, "Why, Note, Why? What have I ever done to deserve this? Curse your portentous prolixities and your gnomic formulations of the teeth-grindingly obvious!"

Absurdly detailed Notely ruminations after the jump.

But so be it. Today the Notely gauntlet is thrown at the very opening: "The Owl Flies West (?) (A Mysterious Note Headline for Just One Reader)" We know not who this reader, let alone the occidental-tacking bird of prey, may be. But Note, really: What the fuck? The parenthetical question mark already has us woozy. Does the owl merely appear to fly west, while in fact doing something else entirely? Perhaps it is studying its diction--or better yet, punctuation usage! Or maybe there is no owl at all. We have to at least allow that possibility as one outcome of the nonsensical pileup of parentheses: We have clearly entered some dark counterfeit life where none of the usual rules apply. Is the Note playing Matrix to Keanu's Neo? Let us, ahem, Note that "One Reader" can be reconstituted as "Neo Red Ear." Yes, we know that yields only two Matrix terms out of three word formations, but that's a far higher percentage of sense-making value than you get by taking the thing at face value.

But we digress. (Or do we)(?) And we are, alas, entirely spent before the main Note event/news summary, which seems to concern some investigation of some sort of a leak involving the Bush administration. All we can think to do is to plead for the assistance of the owl-spotting (or owl-shunning?) Very Special Note Reader Referenced in Set of Parentheses Number Two. Are you out there, Bird Watcher? Let us know, please, since we now lack the epistemological confidence to believe that we are, in fact, in here. And failing your first-hand testimony, O Binoculared One, let other readers step forward with interpretations of what any of this could possibly mean,at tips@wonkette.com. We retire, meanwhile, to the solarium, for some laudanum and a cold compress. --HOLLY MARTINS

The Note: The Owl Flies West (?) [ABC News] (?)

READ MORE: professional aphasia , seriously, what the fuck? , the note , unintelligibility

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