FunctionalAmbivalent

Bar Promotion of the Year

Nine British women have been charged with prostitution for taking part in an oral sex contest on the Greek island of Zakynthos. A dozen men, including two bar owners, have also been charged.

Reverend Bluejeans

The Merriam-Webster people are out with their list of new words. My favorite: Mondegreen.

a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung <“very close veins” is a mondegreen for “varicose veins”

Not only are deliberate mondegreens a great source of humor for me -- if not the people around me -- but they're something I do accidentally all the time, usually with music. The title of this post is a reference to a Neil Diamond song, "Forever In Blue Jeans," that I thought for years was about some kind of itinerant preacher, "Reverend Bluejeans." When my wife found out about that she mocked me unmercifully for...well, so far, forever. She still brings it up.

Anyway, now I have a word for that which turns Creedence Clearwater Revival's "There's a Bad Moon on the Rise" into instructions on how to get to the bathroom.

Soon, the act of "mondegreening" a phrase (let me be the first to use "mondegreen" as a verb) will be a recognized disorder, with a pharmaceutical cure advertised on TV, most likely during football games.

Cracked Glass

A 21-year old man presses his buttocks against a window and has to be hospitalized when the window breaks. He also has to pay for the broken window.

Inevitability of History Fun Fact

Of the seven California Supreme Court justices who just ruled that the state can't discriminate in its allowance of marriage rights and responsibilities, six were appointed to the bench by Republican governors. Remember that as conservative Republicans go apeshit about judicial activism.

There's going to come a time 10 years or 25 years or 50 years from now when we're going to marvel at how we argued about gay marriage, the same way we now marvel at how we argued about whether blacks should be allowed to use the drinking fountain. We're going to wonder what was the matter with people "back then," and some of us are going to regret what we said and believed.

By Definition

Hillary Clinton is vowing to fight on to the end.

This is the political equivalent of marveling at how something is always in the last place you look for it. Of course it is. Once you've found something, why would you keep looking?

The end of the primary race will be, by definition, when Hillary bows to reality, no matter when that might be. So yeah, I guess she'll fight on to the end.

Maybe It's Just Someone Crying Yellow Tears

Oprah Winfrey's magazine has a staffer who's peeing all over everything.

Fun With Internet Research: Putting Cheese In Perspective

In 2007, cheese production in the United States rose 1.6%. The leading cheese producing state was, of course, Wisconsin, which was responsible for 25.3% of the 9.7 billion pounds of cheese produced in the U.S.

That cheese, rolled into one ounce slices, would form the heart of a grilled cheese sandwich 24.8 miles on a side -- 615.8 square miles in total. The loaf of bread from which that sandwich would have to be cut would be 75 miles long. The flour used to make that loaf of bread represents an above-average harvest on more than 40 million acres of land, more than twice the entire wheat output of Canada in 1921. Serving that grilled cheese sandwich with an appropriately sized side dish would require a bowl of tomato soup the size of Wayne County, Michigan, which has a population of just over 2 million people, each of whom could invite 16 friends over for grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. There would still be enough left over the citizens of Wayne County to have leftover soup and sandwiches for lunch the next day, assuming no one made a pig of himself.

The United States also imported 206,000 tons of cheese in 2007, enough to make a plate of nachos the size of Manhattan Island. Nachos on that scale would require a lot of sliced jalapeno peppers, and if you were to grow a single pepper big enough to provide all the slices necessary for Manhattan-sized nachos (and assuming it was a pepper of standard girth), that pepper would have to be long enough to stretch from the International Space Station to the surface of the Earth.

Not the First Politician To Make Me Want To Kill Myself

Convicted felon and suicide enthusiast Jack Kevorkian is running for Congress.

Another Example of a Lack of Self-Awareness

Geraldine Ferraro got the most significant job she ever held -- candidate for Vice President -- because she's a woman. She's a supporter of Hillary Clinton, who has accomplished everything in life that she's accomplished because of who she married.

Think About This Next Time You Buy a Car Without Considering Its Mileage Per Gallon

At a charity auction last week in the oil-saturated United Arab Emirates, the vanity license plate "1" sold for $14 million.