“I do not rule Russia. 10,000 clerks do.” – Czar Nicholas I
“I do not rule Russia. 10,000 clerks do. And I don’t want to get into a whole ‘blame game’ but why did they starve and kill all those people while living such wasteful and extravagant lives?!?”
Fifty states in the union, fifty stars on the flag. Coincidence? I don’t think so!
Original: “No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.” – Theodore Roosevelt
Improved: “No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency because if any ground is sacred, it’s the ground of expediency.”
A judge in Texas (Conchata Ferrell) has been deliberating how to handle a huge custody case involving some 416 children taken from a polygamist sect’s ranch. The children were removed on April 3rd as part of an investigation into physical and sexual abuse. A custody hearing is set to be held on Thursday.
Some mothers (including Jordana Brewster, Jessica Biel and Sienna Miller) have lashed out at a decision to separate them from their children. Texas officials (Chris Cooper and Beau Bridges) say it is standard procedure to keep children from parents during investigations into abuse and neglect.
State troopers (led by Wilfred Brimley and Joe Don Baker) and officials (Bridges and Cooper) acted earlier this month after a teenage girl (Lindsey Lohan) phoned a domestic violence center to say she had been abused at the 1,700-acre Yearn for Zion (YFZ) ranch.
Investigators (Whoopi Goldberg and Treat Williams) have alleged that it was the site of a pervasive cycle of sexual abuse against children, with girls as young as 13 (including Amber Tamblyn and Jamie Lynn Spears) being “spiritually married” to older husbands (Robert Duvall), investigators have alleged.
The compound, located about 160 miles (260km) north-west of the Texan city of San Antonio, belongs to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a breakaway branch of Mormonism.
Some 139 women, some of them grandmothers, (including Christine Lahti, Jobeth Williams, and Glenn Close) had accompanied the children off the ranch.
On Monday, Texas child protection services (represented by Sam Neill and Sam Elliott) moved most of the children from Fort Concho to a single large shelter at the San Angelo Coliseum, which holds several thousand people and is normally used for sport and concerts. Two dozen teenage boys (among them Emile Hirsch and Shia LaBeouf) are being housed at another location, officials (Sam Elliott) said.
Some of the mothers (including Jennifer Connelly and Catherine Keener) had complained that their children were getting sick after living in crowded conditions in the fort, although officials (Elliott) say some of the youngsters already had chicken pox when they arrived. Officials (Neill) said that while they understood that mothers (Scarlett Johansson and Kristen Stewart) wanted to be with their children, “normal protocol is to separate children from their parents during investigations into abuse and neglect”.
Only those with very young children (Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen) were allowed to stay while the rest were given the choice of returning to the ranch or going to a safe location. Some of the women (Connelly and Johanson) later spoke angrily about the way they and their children had been treated.
Speaking at the ranch, Marie, (Ashley Judd) who has boys aged nine (Angus T. Jones), seven (Jonathan Lipnicki), and five (Frankie Muniz), told reporters that they were not allowed to say goodbye to their children.
“We could not even ask a question,” she said. The children had been protected and loved, Marie (Judd) said, adding that she felt they were “being abused by this experience”.
On Monday, Judge Barbara Walther (Ferrell) met dozens of lawyers to work out the logistics for Thursday’s hearing to determine if the children should remain in state care. “Quite frankly, I’m not sure what we’re going to do,” Judge Walther (Ferrell) said. “If I give everybody five minutes, that would be 70 hours of testimony.”
The sect’s prophet is Warren Jeffs (James Woods), a self-confessed polygamist who was jailed in Utah last year for being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl (Miley Cyrus) who married her cousin (Billy Ray Cyrus). The self-proclaimed prophet (Woods) is currently awaiting trial in Arizona on separate charges of being an accomplice to four counts of incest and sexual conduct with a minor stemming from two arranged marriages (to Amanda Bynes and Ellen Page).
His 10,000-strong sect, which dominates the towns of Colorado City in Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, split from the mainstream Mormon church more than a century ago. Members believe a man must marry at least three wives in order to ascend to heaven. Women are taught that their path to heaven depends on being subservient to their husband.
Polygamy is illegal in the US.
The German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer’s work can be described as “a brooding meditation on taboo subjects like genocide, the perversion of art and culture for political ends, the overpowering burden of history, and, naturally, the Holocaust.” But we prefer to describe it simply as “a huge bummer.” Kiefer’s monumental works often incorporate fragile materials like straw and wax as a way of representing the futility of the artist’s quest for immortality. As a sculptor, Keifer’s preferred medium is lead, which emphasizes in the most literal sense the weightiness of his subject matter. Recurrent images of barren fields, railroad tracks, homes aflame, newspaper clippings, and the names of both Norse gods and ordinary individuals connect his general theme of man’s vanity and insignificance against the backdrop of human history with the horrors of Germany’s Nazi past.
The titles of Kiefer’s work often reflect his preferred topics of artistic grandiosity and human frailty, recently with an added overlay of religious mythology. Current paintings include “Palmsonntag” (Palm Sunday), “Der Brennende Dornbusch” (The Burning Bush), and a series of dour works named for the obscure modernist poet Velimir Chlebnikov.
What then is to be done about the gloomy, suicide-inspiring paintings and sculpture of Anselm Kiefer? How are we to retitle them to suggest that perhaps the vast sweep of history will end happily and not with the extinction of mankind at its own hands and the scourging of man’s works from the face of the Earth by the remorseless hand of a righteous Old Testament God?
The American painter Thomas Kinkade, known to his legion of fans by his copyrighted sobriquet as the “Painter of Light,” has a rare gift. Not for painting. His mass-marketed cornball pastel-hued lollipops are justifiably reviled by critics and anyone who takes art seriously. In their own way, the paintings of Thomas Kinkade are as upsetting as those of Anselm Kiefer. But he does have a flair for cheerful titles and so we have borrowed a few of Kinkade’s evocative and upbeat titles and given them to some of Kiefer’s best known works.
We think you’ll agree that when you imagine, say, a pipe-smoking lighthouse keeper strolling through one of Kiefer’s scorched landscapes trailed by a little girl wearing open galoshes and a cocker spaniel puppy, the world no longer seems to be such a depressing, lonely, and savage place.
Here are three of Kiefer’s best known paintings — “Twilight of the West,” “Melancholia,” and “Brunhilde’s Grave” — furnished with new, better titles taken from popular Thomas Kinkade artworks:
Original: “Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.” – Henry David Thoreau
Improved: “Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it and take the money you would have paid him and buy yourself something fancy.”
Lexington Steele (actor)
Lexington Steele (2000)
Birthdate: November 28, 1969 (age 38 )
Birth location: New Jersey, U.S.
Birth name: Clifton Todd Britt
Height: 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m)
Eye color: Brown
Hair color: Bald
Orientation: Straight
Ethnicity: African American
Stage Name(s): The Impaler, Lex Steele
Original: “If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.” – Anatole France
Improved: “If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it’s probably because they heard it on talk radio.”
The Haitian Senate has voted to dismiss Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis (Morgan Freeman) following widespread rioting earlier this week over soaring food prices. A special session of the upper chamber backed a motion calling on President Rene Preval (Denzel Washington) to appoint a new cabinet. The vote came shortly after Mr. Preval (Washington) announced an emergency plan to reduce the price of rice by more than 15%.
In the capital, Port-au-Prince, the scene of deadly food riots earlier, a UN peacekeeper from Nigeria (Derek Luke) was killed. A UN spokeswoman in Haiti (Jennifer Garner) said the soldier (Luke) was shot dead Saturday afternoon, but that UN troops (under the command of Jeroen Krabbé) had not returned fire.
At least five people (Jamie Fox, Lil Bow Wow, Chris Tucker, Nick Cannon, Ruby Dee) died in the riots over food prices earlier this week.
Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world. Most Haitians earn no more than $2 a day, and they have struggled to feed themselves as the prices of rice, beans and fruit have risen by 50% in the last year. Earlier this month, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon (Chow Yun Fat) warned that the food crisis threatened the Caribbean nation’s fragile security.
President Preval (Washington) appointed Mr. Alexis (Freeman) as prime minister of a six-party coalition government in May 2006. He had survived a no-confidence vote in February over his handling of the economy.
Reflecting widespread public anger at the rising cost of basic foodstuffs in the country, 16 of Haiti’s 27 senators (including Michael Clark Duncan and Jada Pinkett-Smith) said they had no confidence in Mr. Alexis’s (Freeman’s) government and instructed the president to appoint a replacement. “Now it’s my turn to play,” Mr. Preval (Washington) said when he was told by journalists of the vote against his ally, according to the Reuters news agency.
On Thursday, opposition senators (led by Queen Latifah) warned the president that his proposals would “not solve the immediate problems of the population” and were “too little, too late”. “It is obvious that the majority of the people don’t believe any more in the capacity of your government to take courageous measures to ease the misery that the population is facing daily,” they wrote.
Saturday’s vote of no-confidence came shortly after Mr. Preval (Washington) announced a 15.7% reduction in the price of a 23kg (50lb) bag of rice from $51 to $43.
After meeting food importers (among them John Amos) at the National Palace in Port-au-Prince, the president said $3 of the price cut would be paid by the private sector and the rest funded by money from international donors. “The situation is difficult everywhere around the world, everyone has to make a sacrifice,” he told a news conference. “We are not going to lower taxes on food,” he added, reiterating the government could not afford to cut revenues because it would not have enough money to pay for longer term projects to create jobs and boost agriculture.
Mr. Preval (Washington) made a national address on Wednesday saying the riots over food price increases earlier this week were “not going to solve the problem”.
This is topical humor for Tuesday, April 15th.
Today is tax day and nothing gets the topical humorist’s mental juices flowing more than those two universal certainties: death and taxes (with the possible exception of airline food.) We had our pick of the wits when it came to sounding off on the second subject, so we thought we’d give our pal Morey Amsterdam a shot.
Some people probably go out to dinner to celebrate filing their tax returns. Speaking of restaurants, Morey tell us that “a cannibal is a person who walks into a restaurant and orders a waiter.” A lot of folks probably would rather have dinner with a cannibal than an IRS agent (that one’s ours.)
Folks in Beverly Hills are so rich that they probably pay a lot in taxes. Or maybe they got so rich because they don’t! Either way, Morey says that Beverly Hills is so exclusive that “even the police have an unlisted number.” Hey, he would know!
Unfortunately, that was all the Human Joke Machine had for us on the subject of taxes. So we rang up Joey Bishop for a final capper. Joey took off like Secretariat with this beaut about doctors, who some of us have to see after we have a heart attack caused by our tax bill. “My doctor is wonderful,” says Joe. “Once, in 1955, when I couldn’t afford an operation, he touched up the X-rays.”
No wonder the Rat Pack liked hanging out with this guy!
