• Capitol Hill Workshop: 2008 Election, November 12-14, 2008, in Washington, DC – from Congressional Quarterly (CQ) and TheCapitol.Net

• The New Congress 2009: Understanding The 111th Congress, January 27, 2009, in Washington, DC
• The President’s Budget, February 24, 2009
• The Defense Budget, February 27, 2009

“Stand back, cause I’m about to wreck this, you don’t wanna make me take off my puka shell necklace…”

“Now I’m looking in the mirror for my daily affirmation, skins still glowing from my microdermabrasion….”

“My mom looks 24 but she’s really 62.”

“Life behind bars aint nothin new to me, I was born and raised in a gated community.”

“I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.”
– Fred Allen

Here are two new “You have two cows….” from Janne Tuukkanen

DRM: You have two cows. You sell both of them, but all the milk still belongs to you.

INNOVATION: You have two cows. You patent “cow” and claim license fees from all the milk of the world. (All your milk are belong to us.)

For more, see YouHave2Cows.com

Trunk Monkey #6 – Chaperone Version

How do you order a burger, fries, and a milkshake in a library?

A company president was given a ticket for a performance of Schubert’s unfinished symphony. Since she had previous plans and was unable to go, she passed the tickets along to the Company’s Quality Assurance Manager. The next morning, the president asked the QA Manager how he enjoyed the symphony, and, instead of a few pleasant observations, she was handed a memorandum that read as follows:

1. For a considerable period, the oboe players had nothing to do. Their number should be reduced, and their work spread over the whole orchestra, thus avoiding peaks of inactivity.

2. All twelve violins were playing identical notes. This seems unnecessary duplication, and the staff of this section should be dramatically cut. If a large volume of sound is really required, an amplifier should be used.

3. Much effort was involved in playing the demi-semiquavers. This seems an excessive refinement, and it is recommended that all notes should be rounded up to the nearest semiquaver. If this were done, it would be possible to use trainees instead of craftsmen.

4. No useful purpose is served by repeating with the horns the passage that has already been handled by the strings. If all such redundant passages were eliminated, the concert could be reduced from two hours to twenty minutes, with attendant savings.

In light of the above, one can only conclude that had Schubert given attention to these matters, he probably would have had time to finish his symphony. And the finished symphony would have been of a much higher quality and able to be produced at a much lower cost.

Source unknown

• Symphony No. 8 (Schubert) – Wikipedia

• Franz Schubert – Wikipedia
• Franz Schubert – Fritz-Haber-Institut der MPG, from The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music, edited by Stanley Sadie
• Franz Peter Schubert – Classical Net
• “Franz Peter Schubert: Master of Song,” by Charles K. Moss
• Schubert Society of the USA

If you want to see a holiday panto this Christmas, we found one in DC and another in Malvern, PA. Let us know if you are aware of others in or near DC.

• “The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen’s Guild Dramatic Society’s production of A Christmas Carol,” through December 31, 2006, at the Church Street Theater, 1742 Church Street NW, Washington, DC, near DuPont Circle, 800-494-8497

• “Robin Hood,” through December 31, 2006 on the Main Stage at People’s Light Theatre Company, 39 Conestoga Road, Malvern, PA, Rt. 401 (between Rts. 30 and 202) Box Office: 610-644-3500

This is from a list of lawyer jokes a friend sent.

ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: But could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.

An alien sings “I will survive”

Are you an eBay junkie? This song, based on the music from “I Want it That Way” by the Backstreet Boys, is for you!

Joanne Jacobs describes a very funny post by Ms. Cornelius of A Shrewdness of Apes: “high school is organized into concentric circles of despair and Sisyphean drudgery which align quite nicely with the Nine Circles of Hell our friend and eternal optimist Dante Alighieri described so fully.”
Joanne Jacobs “favorite is Circle 5 for the ‘wrathful and sullen’ seniors.”

Circle 5 – The River Styx; the Wrathful and the Sullen: The seniors have slogged their way through all these levels only to discover that they are merely on the verge of true Hell. They’ve figured out to take AP and honors classes their first semester, and as soon as the transcripts are mailed off to their fifteen dream colleges to “drop them like it’s hot” and coast through the rest of the year. The ones who SWORE that they would never want to go to college or trade school have lost a bit of that sneer as they are slowly coming to the realization that after antagonizing Mom and Dad for the last six years, what with the brushes with the law and the suspensions and the phone calls from school and the poor grades, their parents are COUNTING the days until they can tell their offspring that their bedroom has become an exercise room, and seven bucks an hour at TWO part time jobs at fast food joints minus something called FICA and social security will get them a run-down one bedroom apartment with three roommates, rides to work on a bus, peanut butter sandwiches, no vacations EVER– much less three months in a row off, no health care, and tennis shoes from K-Mart, not Foot Locker. No bling, no phat threads, and no pimpin’ any rides. Suddenly four years of sitting in a classroom listening to someone drone on and on about 18th century British literature or the principles of accounting doesn’t sound nearly as stupefying as fifty years of soul-destroying repetitive labor where you come home at the end of the day with the smell of fried food permeating even your HAIR, which you now have to get cut at Great Clips four times a year.

We also like Circle 4:

Circle 4 – The Hoarders and the Improvident: Most of the juniors are engulfed in a tsunami in post-high school planning, as the first deadline to register for the ACT was on the Friday after we started school, and they are frantically collecting honors to list on their aplications and recommendations from harried staff. Those who swear that they’ll NEVER want to go to college or trade school or sit in a classroom again are sneering at their classmates who are wigging out. They can’t wait to get out of school so they’ll never have to do what anyone tells them, EVER AGAIN.

“When teaching school is like… a divine comedy,” by Ms. Cornelius, A Shrewdness of Apes, August 27, 2006
Meg Greenfiled described Washington as a “stunted, high-schoolish social structure” so Ms. Cornelius’ descriptions kind of work here….

Careful who you honk at …

We are shocked, shocked, that the two parties are practicing the art of politics in regards to the thwarted terror bombings. And even more shocked, shocked, that each party is criticizing the other for, gasp, playing politics.

“The Saturday Brunch,” Hotline on Call, August 11, 2006