Not kosher

What happens when you try to order a kosher meal on an Arab airline.

Not to excuse the airline, but really now, is Air Emirates the first choice of Jewish travelers? I'm thinking that our hero might have been surprised by what happened, but he wasn't necessarily disappointed.

Tobacco and me

Sgt. Mom over at SSDB tells us why she doesn't smoke.

I had a very similar experience. Some neighbor kids and I grabbed some of whatever would burn down by our favorite illicit place to play - down by the river at a place where the riverbank was higher than we were. I had some ordinary paper, some nondescript dry weeds and a lump of coal and rolled them up into an approximation of a cigarette. I'd heard of charcoal filters, after all - surely the coal would take some of the edge off, right?

Ye gads! - one toke was all it took. Imagine getting shotgunned by a locomotive tailpipe and you have an idea of what I felt like. I never was tempted to smoke from that point onward.

Nobody who was around me much chewed tobacco, so I wasn't in any danger of picking up that habit. But one buddy was around it, and his father decided to give him some aversion therapy. The old man made him take a big lump of the stuff and then locking him in the car on a hot day with nowhere to spit. He swallowed some, and he wasn't even through barfing yet before he decided never again.

It's been awhile since I've been around anyone who chews indoors, and I don't miss it one bit. My favorites were the ones who used to spit into any trash can they saw. Once you threw something out, you definitely didn't want it back.

Someone I know had a boss who chewed, and one day he managed to spill his cup across her computer keyboard. IMO this is about enough to gag a buzzard off a gut wagon from 50 paces. But it was the only keyboard they had, so they cleaned it up the best that they could and she used it as much as possible. It didn't last long after that, though, and neither did she.

I've heard Acidman and others talk about how they put on weight when they quit smoking. So what would happen if a non-smoker started wearing nicotine patches? Or started drinking nicotinis?

One last thing - you might check out "Thank You For Smoking", by Christopher Buckley. He's a riot.

A kid after my own heart

I understand that I used to dostuff like this too. I'm a little smoother and subtler now, I think.

I propose an email writing campaign to Big Arm Woman insisting on a picture of Miss Katie. bigarm_at_doorstopkitty_dot_com

My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé

I knew a young lady who was a real bottom-fisher for a while - there was no telling what she'd bring home to her long-suffering parents. She would have been perfect for this new TV show.

Stolen from Mac Thomason.

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Through a Rapist’s Eyes

What they're looking for and how to deter or stop them.

Via DebWire.

New Year's flying fridges warning

Oh, just read it.

There must be a punch line here somewhere

Surely those secular Canadians won't be tolerating Islamic sharia law.

Stolen from Vicki, who isn't the least bit fat no matter how many online recipes she reads.

Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor?

This burning question is addressed here.

And if you don't have any idea what this is about, it serves you right.

First sighted at Charles Murtaugh's.

Oh, that kind of crash

Few things are quite as annoying as having a bug in your car. But it's even worse when it's under the hood.

Stolen from Terablogger.

And people wonder how kids get attitude problems.

They tell you there's no Santa Claus. They tell you there's no Easter Bunny. And then along comes this guy selling you Sea-Monkeys and X-Ray specs. The only thing that could make it worse would be if, like Woody Allen, you were breast fed from falsies. (Follow that link - there's lots of great stuff there. Trust me...).

Sea-Monkeys link stolen from Combustible Boy at Max Power.

Not safe for work, or for play either

That Elizabeth post below reminded me of another woman associated with physical contests.

Being on the road so much, I have often found myself talking to hotel front desk people in the dead of the night. About anything is likely to come up. One time a few years ago I was in Evansville, IN when a young lady told me about her aunt or cousin or whatever. When she said the woman's name was "Bunny Glamazon", I thought she was pulling my leg, but I busted butt to Google her.

She was for real. Ah, it looks like she's upgraded her website since then. She bills herself as 6'3", 220 lbs, and if you'd like a "session" of, say, "semi-competitive wrestling" she's available for $400/hour. Or if you are small perhaps you can costar in productions like "Bunny Conquers Japan" (from her site:It's here. Bunny is back from Japan and in this video shot in Japan, she TOTALLY Dominates a tiny 5' 2" 87 pound male and 4' 10" 85 pound female couple.)

No, I've never met the lady, and I swear that that's really how I heard about her. Maybe some local blogger like Dave Worley will investigate further.

Candle on the windbag

Do you remember her?

Standing only 5-foot-4, the dainty figure seemed out of place among the absurdly muscled men who made up pro wrestling's usual cast of characters. That it belonged to a beautiful woman made it all the more surprising. The manager's name was Elizabeth Hulette, a 24-year-old Kentuckian and former competitor for the title of county-fair queen. But few wrestling fans would ever know any of that; they would know Hulette simply as a character called ''Miss Elizabeth.''

Yes, for a few years there that bull session/soap opera/freak show known as professional wrestling was a guilty pleasure of mine, and Elizabeth was a common and welcome sight. It wasn't like today for sure - women were scarce, and there certainly weren't any women wrestlers like today. There were some, like the Fabulous Moolah, but they didn't get TV coverage. And trust me - Moolah definitely wasn't Playboy material like Joanie Laurer (Chyna) and Rena Mero (Sable).

Why bring this up? Well, partly because I followed the "Making the dumbest sh** interesting" link from Glenn Reynolds to Oxblog, where I found the link that led me to Miss Elizabeth.

Her obituary, that is. She died in April. Wow, I feel old now...

Oh nothing, I just liked the line

Power Line: "Female genital mutilation was not much of a problem in Minnesota before Somalis settled here in the 1980's and 1990's."

Wimp!

"I decided to invite an arch-liberal and an arch-conservative to meet in this column and constructively discuss their differences, with me as moderator. I wanted the liberal to be Al Franken, the author of the best-selling Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and the conservative to be Ann Coulter, author of the best-selling Traitor: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. Ann agreed right away. But Al begged off, saying he was too 'busy,' even for a worthy cause like helping combat the plague of name-calling. What a milksoppy, pantywaist, jellyfish, weasel-out wuss he turned out to be."

Pink slips greet returning soldiers

When U.S. Army Maj. Joe Cherry left his federal job at the National Labor Relations Board in Chicago because he was called up to fight the war in Iraq he received an unexpected going-away present. The major wouldn't have to worry whether his government job would be there when he returned - the federal government made that decision for him, firing him on the spot.

Cherry is not alone. In the last five years 5,690 veterans have lost their jobs in both the private and public sectors while activated to serve a tour of duty, according to a U.S. Department of Labor report presented to Congress this year. Those numbers are expected to increase because, of the 300,000 deployed reservists, as many as 25,000 veterans are expected to return home in 2005 to reintegrate themselves back into civilian life after a tour of duty in the global war against terrorism. Of those 300,000, about 20,000 work for the federal government.

This is a crock, and begs for more publicity so it can be fixed before most of the troops come back.