A Russian man went to the hospital, coughing up blood and complaining of chest pains. Upon entering surgery, doctors removed a 2-inch fir tree that had been growing in his lungs.

Using highly delicate tools, doctors also removed a microscopic assortment of gold rings, French hens, turtle doves, a number of tiny milkmaids and an even tinier partridge.  

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates just doesn't seem like a good fit for the Obama cabinet.  He's a Republican, he'a a holdover from the Bush administration, and he pays his taxes.  

The makers of Dove Soap have announced a contest in which users are asked to create and submit ads for the new Dove Cream Oil Body Wash due to hit stores next month.

Winners will have their commercials shown during the Academy Awards.  Winners will also be expected to do the taxes and pay for groceries for the company's marketing employees.

Unilever takes top position in soap market when they realize bigger people use more soap

DEMS PREPARE AMENDMENT TO BAR FORMER CHEERLEADERS FROM OFFICE

WASHINGTON, D.C. When the 110th U.S. Congress convenes in January the Democratic Party will hold a majority in both houses for the first time in twelve years, and party leaders say they will use their new power to seek a Constitutional amendment that would bar former cheerleaders from holding federal offices.

Pelosi:  "Look--I never really wanted to be cheerleader anyway."

"If you look at the track record of former cheerleaders as politicians, you've got George W. Bush and Trent Lott," said incoming Speakerette of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.). "We would have done better to select leaders who were in the marching band, or maybe on the yearbook staff."

Bush:  "Our rich white guys can beat their rich white guys!"

President Bush was a cheerleader at Phillips Academy Andover, a tony prep school in Massachusetts. Lott, the Republican Party's current Senate Minority Whip, was a cheerleader at the University of Mississippi shortly after whipping of minorities was outlawed there.

"Back your team, quack like a duck, don't sit back like you don't give a  . . . "

Presidential spokesman Tony Snow brushed off Pelosi's threat as "sour grapes". "Take a look at Nancy Pelosi and what you will see is a woman who tried out for cheerleader, didn't make it and has been bitter ever since," he said. "She may have been student council president, but that's sloppy seconds compared to being a cheerleader."

Snow:  "Little Miss Student Council--for all we know she can't even do a cartwheel."

In order for an amendment to be added to the Constitution, two-thirds of both houses of Congress must vote in favor of the proposed change and three-fourths of the states must then ratify it. If approved by voters on the season finale of "American Idol", the amendment becomes the law of the land.

"You call that an amendment?  You should stick to playing the accordion at weddings."

Pelosi denied that she was motivated by jealousy and outlined for reporters the importance of her position. "Come January, I will be the first female Speaker of the House. If the President dies, the Vice President takes over. If the Vice President dies, I take over. And do you know what happens if the Speaker dies?"

Thomas:  "I was there when they signed the Constitution."

The room was silent until Helen Thomas, the doyenne of the White House Press Corps, reached back into her voluminous knowledge of the Constitution for the answer. "If the speaker dies," Thomas replied confidently, "you go to Radio Shack and buy a new one."

Copyright 2006, Con Chapman

Bush dove in every night trying to get into the Capital Building.

RAPPERS DEMAND HIP-HOP POET LAUREATE

WASHINGTON, D.C.  A convoy of Cadillac Escalades and stretch limousines descended on the nation's capital yesterday as rappers from across the country protested the appointment of Donald Hall, a reclusive white man, to the position of Poet Laureate of the United States.

The Escalade can be tastefully accessorized.

"For seventy years we have watched as a succession of white guys who get books published are named poet laureate," said BigE 100, a disk jockey and rapper from Cleveland.  "It's time that Congress recognized the poetry of the streets, not just the poetry of the suites."

Donald Hall: "C'mon outta yo momma's house!"

Hall lives in rural New Hampshire in the house where his mother and grandmother were born.  While expressing sympathy for the rapper's cause, he declined to step down from the position of laureate, which pays $35,000 a year plus a $5,000 travel allowance as well as an "all you can eat" lunch pass at the Library of Congress cafeteria.  Reached at his home, Eagle Pond Farm, Hall responded formally from his front porch with a rhymed couplet:

My appointment, if ill-deserved, had nothing to do with race.

Now shut the hell up and get out of my face.

Rita Dove:  "While Louise is gone, I'm in charge."

The position of Poet Laureate or Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress has existed since 1937.  During that time, only two black poets have held the position; Gwendolyn Brooks from 1985 to 1986, and Rita Dove from 1993 to 1995.  Dove also served as substitute poet laureate during the summers of 1999 and 2000, when Louise Gluck took a summer job as a lifeguard at the Breadloaf Writers Conference in Vermont.

Gluck:  "I got too much sun today."

Sound E-Fex, a Boston-based rapper, dismissed the tenure of Brooks and Dove as a "blackwash" that did nothing to undermine the group's claim that rap is underrepresented in the nation's archival collection of poetry.  He responded with a poem of his own:

I never read a book by Gwendolyn Brooks,

nor fell in love with Rita Dove.

Josephine Jacobsen, laureate in her day

wasn't even born in the U-S-A.

Jacobsen, who held the position from 1971 to 1973, was born on the shores of Lake Ontario in Canada while her parents were on vacation.

Jacobsen:  "I was born on the beach?  Yuck!"

As is often the case, violence erupted when a dispute between two rapper's "posses" escalated into gunfire.  "I had a hold on Louise Bogan's 'Collected Poems' and Sound E-Fex tried to renew it," said Wordz Up, a St. Louis rapper.  "Ain't nobody gonna disrespect me and Louise like dat."

RELIGIOUS LEADERS TO RESOLVE DIFFERENCES BY ONE POTATO-TWO POTATO MATCH

NEW YORK. The heads of the world's principal religions have agreed to establish an international pecking order by a sudden-death game of "One Potato, Two Potato" to be held at United Nations Headquarters during half-time of the NFL's Super Bowl game in January.

"Touchdown!"

"It's time for Islam to put up or shut up," said Pope Benedict XVI, the titular head of the Roman Catholic Church who started a firestorm with a quote from a Byzantine Emperor who said "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find only sensitive foreplay with camels."

Dinner and a movie first.

Before the Pope reaches the Ultimate Faith Finals he must first make it past The Archbishop of Canterbury in the Christianity Division Championship Game. "The road to the UN runs through Canterbury Cathedral, Jack," said Rowan Williams, the incumbent Archbishop, "and that ain't just talkin' smack." Home-field advantage for the playoffs will be determined by the regular-season records of the two dominant Christian sects, with a "wild card" slot open for small-market teams such as Mormonism.

Home field advantage.

Tenzin, the 14th Dalai Lama and current head of Tibetan Buddhism, is the odds-on favorite to advance to the finals from the league's Eastern Division. "The Dalai Lama is a cagey veteran," said Sean Thompson, an NFL Today reporter who covers regular season one potato-two potato games. "One time he pitched a shutout by asking 'What is the sound of one kid playing one-potato?' right before a match started--it blew everybody away."

"Take the points on the road, but don't bet against the Dalai."

Since there is no official elected head of the Jewish faith New York comedian Jackie Mason will square off against Muslim cleric Omar Bakri in the Mideast Regional Semis.

"Do I know potatoes?  Like a ratzelech, my friend!"

"What's the worst that could happen?" Mason asked with a characteristic shrug of the shoulders. "A fatwa for a couple of wisecracks? It's not like I'm a cartoonist or something."

"This is how you start."

The contest was suggested by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a U.S. Army General who as Secretary of State under President George W. Bush was viewed as a "dove" who preferred diplomacy to military action. "We can't act as playground monitor for the entire world," Powell said in a telephone interview. "If we do, we'll end up having to stay after recess to pick up the balls and bats and jump ropes every day."

Copyright 2006, Con Chapman

TO BRING YOUTH BACK TO CHURCH, VATICAN APPROVES RAP, PUNK MASSES

VATICAN CITY.  The announcement by Pope Benedict XVI that he will allow the return of the Latin Mass has Vatican insiders buzzing about a bigger change in the works; the approval of liturgies that will incorporate elements of hip-hop and "punk" music in an effort to fill church pews with more teens and young adults.

"All the action be happenin' on the street, not beneath the steeple," said Cardinal Francis Arinze of Nigeria as he consulted an Italian-Hip Hop pocket dictionary.  "Benny X6 be down wid' dat."

Rap is a spoken word musical form that resembles Gregorian chant, and as such is expected to meet with approval among parishioners.  When asked if she would attend a Mass that included rapping, 90 year-old Mary Margaret Schoenen, a life-long communicant at St. Brigid's Parish in South Boston, Massachusetts nodded her head yes.  "I could use a spot of tea, thank you," she explained.

"Punk" rock, the hard-edged, power-chord driven music of young white rebels, will be a harder sell.  "We did a test drive last Sunday and there are still some kinks to work out," said Father Francis Murphy of St. Columbkill's Parish in Brighton, Massachusetts.  "When the faithful approached the altar for Communion, one of the altar boys dove into them like they were a mosh pit."

Boston rapper Sound E-Fex and his sidekick Backwurdz said they were working on a full-scale requiem mass for a fellow gang member who was killed in a drive-by shooting as he sat on his stoop in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston.  "Re-quiem aeternam homey, looks like you won't be rollin' wid us no more boy," Sound E-Fex says tentatively as Backwurdz writes the words down in a spiral notebook.

Pope Benedict's initiative is just one of many steps he is taking to recast the Roman Catholic Church in a more stylish mode following his ascension to the throne most recently occupied by Pope John Paul II, the former Karol Józef Wojtlya of Wadowice, Poland. 

"What you have to understand is that a Kraut like Benedict looks down his nose at a Polack like JPII," said veteran reporter Giovanni Morelli of L'Osservatore Romano, Vatican City's newspaper of record.  "First thing he did when he moved in was open up the windows to get rid of the smell of kielbasa."

Copyright 2006, Con Chapman

When I turn on my TV on week(end) nights I want to see people like Michael Rapaport (sp, I really don't care though) and Seth Macfarlane clinch onto the very last threads of their careers.  I want to see the Simpson's 30th season.  I want to see shows that have premises based solely on being one season in length (i.e. 24, Prison Break).  However I'm sure many people will disagree with me, but to me Family Guy has hit its peak already and is already on it's way down faster than Dane Cook.  I'm sorry I just don't find either funny anymore.  In all fairness Family Guy dove quite sooner than Dane Cook did.

But that's not why I'm here, I'm here to tell you about the objections to reliabilism and many other important theories in contemporary epistemology...why?  Because they're forcing me to read it, so if you choose to continue with this, you will be forced as well!  Who am I kidding?  I couldn't do that to any one of you....I could just eat you all up.  Either that means I'm infatuated with your cuteness or I'm a canabal, either way I'm going to see your genitals.

I don't know if many of you know this, but I'm not one to let something go.  Like if someone says something to me that'll throw my mind into a pickle or just piss me off, I like to dwell on it for as long as I can maintain a healthy psychological standing while running it over and over and over and oaver and overand over and over and over and over.  See what happens?  I start putting a's in my over's.  But anyway, when someone says something stupid to me, and I don't react (like most of the ball-less people of the world) in time and then I like to think up at least 150 different scenarios (give or take 148) and what I would say in return.  But since not long ago, I've lost my ability to be a decent civilian, I no longer like to maintain my composure and I like to return the favor immediately.  What this all comes down to is that I've become a bad employee.  Customers have never liked me, but now it seems I have distanced myself even further and no longer like to let them feel superior.

I don't know what it is about me, but no customer believes a fucking word I say.  I have been in situations where I will tell someone something, say for example I tell a stereotypical old white man that we don't have something.  He will immediately ask whatever employee is closest as well.  People have sked my managers over me (which is ok) but also people who are way under me on the ladder, like people who have worked there not even a year (I've been there for a solid 7, which is not something I can be proud of).

I don't like old people.

A short story about how I was once nice to an old man:
A couple weeks ago at work, there was a middle aged ruffian looking man standing at the counter being waited on by another employee.  An old man walked up to the same counter to pay for something, I rang him up, he pulled out his money and a few folded $5 bills fell out, I took the money he handed me and gave him his change.  Now, I thought this old man noticed he dropped some money and bent over to pick it up, but he didn't notice, but the ruffian did.  As the old man left, the ruffian started to move slowly over and then I saw him reach out a leg.  So then I walked around the counter to find this ruffians left foot way out to the side (he looked very uncomfortable) and all I could see was the corner of some bills under his boot.  I asked him if the old man had dropped that and he replied with what, and I said "that money under your foot, is that what that old man dropped?"  And the burley ruffian replied with a noise of some sort and I ran the money out to the old man, who seemed less than apathetic to get his money back.

I don't like old people.

-Andy