Tom McMahon

"To the untrained eye, it may look like any ordinary, run-of-the-mill, hot dog-shaped whistle. But, it's not just any whistle...it's the WIENERWHISTLE Toy! The WIENERWHISTLE is a full-blown musical instrument that plays a special tune in four notes. The WIENERWHISTLE has four holes, that's about twice as many as most whistles! There's one to blow into, one at the side, one at the far end, and one on the top. By covering some of the holes in a special way, you can play a bunch of different sounds like the Wiener Jingle! (Restricted to children 3 and up.) "

Inspired by Dean's World 

Christmas Carols for the Mentally Disturbed:

Schizophrenia: Do You Hear What I Hear?
Multple Personalities: We Three Kings Disoriented Are
Narcissistic: Hark! The Herald Angels Sing About Me
Manic: Deck the halls and walls and house and lawn and streets and stores and office and town and cars and busses and trucks and trees and fire hydrants...
Paranoid: Santa Claus is Coming to Town to Get Me
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells  

Presidentelect.org: "When Al Gore lost Tennessee in the 2000 election, many pointed out how unusual it was for a candidate to lose their home state. We were reminded that it had been 28 years since a major candidate had not won the state they were representing. While it had not occurred recently before 2000, it is actually fairly common for a presidential "Favorite Son" to lose favor with the voters of his state. In fact, it has occurred in 29 of the 50 elections since 1804! What is rare is for a candidate to actually win the presidency without also winning their home state. That has occurred only three times since 1804. " 

Charlie Sykes: "You’ve read about the 15 year old Brookfield Central student who got suspended for writing an insulting rap song, but before we get all grownup and indignant, I’d like to remind you of something we used to sing on the school bus. It went like this, to the tune of Battle Hymn of the Republic:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school,
We have tortured every teacher,
We have broken every rule!
We have bound and gagged the principal
And tossed him in the pool
The school is burning down.

Granted this was all pre-Columbine, but it was pretty graphic stuff. Especially the chorus:

Glory, glory, what's it to ya?
Teacher hit me with a ruler,
I hid behind the door with a loaded .44,
And she ain’t gonna teach no more

These days, if a busload of kids sang that song, they’d be surrounded by a SWAT team. Violence! Guns! Threats! Expulsions! News at 10! " 

Alien and Predator Bobble Head Dolls (via Gravity Lens) 

From Ultimutt. Here's an example:

 

A neutron goes into a bar and asks the bartender, "How much for a beer?"
The bartender replies, "For you, no charge."

Two atoms are walking down the street and they run in to each other. One says to the other, "Are you all right?" "No, I lost an electron!" "Are you sure?" "Yeah, I'm positive!" 

Answers the question "How do you keep an Aggie busy on the Internet?" 

Senator John Cornyn: "The current filibusters are unprecedented in the history of our nation and of the Senate. Even the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee acknowledged — indeed, he boasted — that the current blockade of judicial nominees is an "unprecedented" effort. 168-4? Try 0-4. No judicial nominee who has enjoyed the support of a majority of senators has ever been denied an up-or-down vote — until now. I cannot understand how anyone can be proud of this record.

Moreover, what we are witnessing today is far worse than mere obstruction. Senators and outside groups are not just delaying nominees, they are trying to destroy their names and reputations. Estrada, a Honduran immigrant who became an American and worked hard to become one of Washington's top appellate lawyers, was called a "kook" and "scary" on the floor of the Senate.

California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown — whose nomination will be debated tonight — a daughter of sharecroppers and the segregated South, overcame racism to rise to the top of California's legal profession. Yet one senator called her views "despicable." A liberal publication labeled her "a Jim Crow-era judge, in natural blackface," and published a series of racist cartoons against her and other prominent black Republicans. The chairman of the NAACP said that the cartoons were "money well spent." One senator categorically smeared all of President Bush's judicial nominees as "selfish" and "mean."

These nominees are not mean — the process is. If a partisan minority of senators can't persuade the bipartisan majority against a nominee, the losing side should play fair, follow tradition and allow the majority to vote. Most important, all the nominees deserve the respect of all senators. Destroying just one person's reputation is one too many. And four unconstitutional filibusters of judicial nominees are four too many. " 

Only $2.75 for each medal, so they make great stocking stuffers. These are the Official US Mint Medals of the Impeached Presidents from the US Mint Catalog, so accept no substitutes! 

Jim Stingl: "People are always trying to correct Bill Upham. "You mean your grandfather fought in the Civil War," they insist. "It would seem more true if it was my grandfather. But it was my father," the Milwaukee man says right back. When you hear Bill Upham's story, the first thing you do is the math. His father, William Henry Upham Sr., was born in 1841. That was 162 years ago.

The elder Mr. Upham - a Union soldier, successful businessman and for two years the governor of Wisconsin - lost his wife and married a much, much younger woman when he was 75. A year later, Bill showed up. And when William Upham was 80, he begot Frederick. Between the father and his sons, they have lived every second of American history save the country's first 65 years." 

Calendar Updates: "Now you can conveniently add holidays and sport team schedules directly to your Microsoft Outlook calendar. Once downloaded to your computer, you will have every game or event for an entire season added to your calendar. You'll never miss another game! And you won't waste an entire Saturday afternoon entering the entire schedule yourself. "

DateDex is a similar site, but entirely different. 

Welcome to the historic Ronald Reagan Trail, a self guided driving tour that celebrates the hometown values and heritage of our 40th President. 

Hollywood Investigator: "Despite Hollywood's historic liberalism, Ben Stein says the times, they are a changing. "When I came to Hollywood, there were still a lot of diehard Marxists that had gone to City College or Brooklyn College, and grown up in this sort of first-generation Jewish Brooklyn Communist [milieu], and then moved out to Hollywood, and were still avid Communists. I mean real, card-carrying Communists. That's all gone now. Those people are either dead or retired. What you have now, in place of the kind of ethnic and class-based Marxists, are what I call personality-disorder Marxists.

A significant cause of people being anti-American, in Hollywood and in universities, is that they have an infantile personality disorder. They are fixated, and in denial, on entitlement, dissatisfaction, weakness, fear, and envy. And their weakness, fear, and envy compels them to be extremely uncomfortable with people who actually go out in the world and succeed. And also compels them to be extremely fearful -- because fear is part of [being] infantile -- of what I would call mainstream America. They're terrified of America between Beverly Hills and West End Avenue. They think out there are a bunch of racists and Klansmen that are going to kill them.

People who are seriously ill are not going to change. But we are getting an influx of people who come to Hollywood not because they think they're artists, or because they think they're going to lead the demise of the bourgeoisie or intensify the class struggle, but people who know it's a very good way to make a living and wind up on top of the heap. And they have a much more pragmatic attitude about America. They're often not from New York, they're from other parts of America. And they are often Republican. I hear a lot of people saying to me, 'I'm a Republican too,' or 'I'm a great fan of George Bush.' By no means the majority, but plenty of them. Hollywood is changing. As some measure of maturity spreads, we will get a more mature and pro-American group of people. " 

Just so you know, these are Bud Selig's friends speaking:

Charlie Sykes: "Mired in an endless losing streak, riddled with debt, their stadium a boondoggle, their fans betrayed, the Milwaukee Brewers need more than new ownership. They need an exorcism. The announcement that the team’s board of directors was slashing the team’s payroll by another 25% -- bringing the total cut to more than 40% over the last two years -– did not merely add insult to injury for beleaguered and frustrated fans. It added insult to injury to insult in a cascade of broken promises and fumbles. Next year, the Brewers may have the absolute lowest payroll in major league baseball -- about what they would have had if taxpayers had never shelled out $400 million to build the team a new ballpark. And looming over all of this is the Seligs’ betrayal of taxpayers and fans. It’s too late, of course, to get a refund on Miller Park. Repo men don’t do ballparks. Predictably, there will be suggestions to sell the team. But who would want to buy it, while it’s saddled with the massive debt -- and the curse of the House of Selig? This team needs an exorcism. Begone Bud, Wendy, and all ye minions, powers and principalities!"

Mark Belling: "I bought my tickets. The fatcats bought their skyboxes and last I saw no taxpayers were refusing to pay the five-county tax. Now, the Brewers are saying they shouldn’t have to fulfill their half of the deal. That’s garbage. Some will argue that the Brewers are a private business and the team’s owners have a right to make any financial decision they want. That isn’t going to sell. The Seligs repeatedly talked of the Brewers as being a "community asset" during the stadium negotiations. The community has a right to speak about its "asset." In addition, when the Brewers reached out for a half-billion in corporate welfare they entered a political arena that doesn’t provide the same rights of secrecy as held by firms that are supporting themselves. Sell the team, Bud."

Legislators Want to Audit Brewers: "Two state lawmakers, including Assembly Speaker John Gard, said Wednesday that the Legislative Audit Bureau should be given unlimited access to the Milwaukee Brewers' financial records. "The taxpayers of this state have made a multimillion-dollar investment in this baseball team and taken the club's decisions on faith," Gard said. "This week's revelations of a 'fire sale' at the ballclub have shaken this faith, and it is time for us to actually be given a look at the books and review how the team is managing its finances."

Dale Hofmann: "Bud Selig did us all a tremendous favor 33 years ago by bringing the Brewers to Milwaukee, and he can do us an even bigger one now by helping to find someone else to buy the team. He's a big enough man for the job and clearly wired enough to know where to shop for prospects. Only the Seligs can salvage the fiscal, competitive and public relations shipwreck that the Brewers have become, and they can do it by giving somebody else a chance. Nothing less is going to work." 

 

Mysteries of History: "In March 1995, a Florida antique dealer named Duane Weber lay dying of polycystic kidney disease in a Pensacola hospital. He called his wife, Jo, to his bed and whispered: "I'm Dan Cooper." Jo, who had learned in 17 years of marriage not to pry too deeply into Duane's past, had no idea what her secretive husband meant. Frustrated, he blurted out: "Oh, let it die with me!" Duane died 11 days later. Jo sold his van two months after his death. The new owner discovered a wallet hidden in the overhead console. It contained a U.S. Navy "bad conduct discharge" in Duane's name and a Social Security card and prison-release form from the Missouri State Penitentiary, in the name of "John C. Collins." Duane had told Jo that he had served time for burglary under the name John Collins. Still, says Jo, a real-estate agent in Pace, Fla., Duane rarely spoke of his past. "His life started with me, and that was it," she says.

In April 1996, Jo discussed Duane's criminal and military past with a friend. She also mentioned that just before he died, Duane had revealed the cause of an old knee injury. "I got it jumping out of a plane," Jo recalls him saying. "Did you ever think he might be D.B. Cooper?" the friend asked. " 

"His presidential bids came in 1944, 1948, 1952, 1964, 1968, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1992. Given his repeated and hopeless efforts for the presidency, Harold Stassen provided limitless fodder for television jokesters. Whether it was the Jack Parr Show, That Was the Week That Was, Laugh In, or Saturday Night Live, you could count on a barrage of Stassen jokes every four years. Yet many Americans were not old enough to remember that Stassen had had a credible and creditable career. At age 31 he was elected governor of Minnesota, the youngest candidate ever to win an American governorship. He won 60 percent of the vote, ousting the incumbent of the Farmer-Labor Party. He went on to win two more terms but resigned as governor to enter the Navy for World War II service.

Stassen's career saw some important accomplishments other than running for president. He was one of eight Americans to sign the U.N. Charter (after leading a failed effort to convince his fellow-Americans to drop plans for a veto in the Security Council). He was president of an ivy league school, the University of Pennsylvania. He was a successful attorney practicing international law. Yet almost every four years, Stassen would announce his presidential candidacy and hit the campaign trail. Did he expect to win? After 1948, no. But he did find that even weak presidential candidates had a chance to get their ideas before the people (participating in candidate forums and debates, for example).

Many observers pointed out that Stassen had an under-developed sense of humor, and the perpetual hopeful did not always enjoy the jokes about his candidacy. He did crack one good joke, however, in 1996, when he offered to serve as Bob Dole's vice-presidential candidate. Stassen explained that his own age of 89 would deflect attention from Dole's." 

Famous Fans of Paul Lynde. Harry Truman?!?!? 

Their kid's site includes cartoons, games, and a teacher's page. Fun! 

The Atlantic: "Students perform mock trials, engage in formal debates, and write stories, letters, poems, skits, and essays, [are] expected to spell correctly, and know English grammar, as well as the times tables and basic mathematical algorithms. In a class that we watched, the teacher was rapidly firing square root questions. The square root of 81 is? Students called on to answer rose from their chairs and gave the answer, loud and clear, standing tall. (An education in public speaking as well as math.) In other classes, students memorize poems and speeches. Fifth-graders must know the elements of the periodic table; sixth-graders can explain the process of DNA replication.

Compare the education children get in too many urban school systems. In the Thernstroms' words: "The days are too short, the year is too short, instructional time is wasted, the classrooms are chaotic, the academic expectations are woefully low, basic skills are not taught, intellectually sophisticated and stimulating material is not offered, tests are viewed as antithetical to education, and equity and excellence are seen as incompatible."
(via Joanne Jacobs) 

"The New York Times described him as, "the slim, alert man with the big horn-rimmed glasses, the large eyes, and the elfin grin which splits his face wide and lights it like a ball park at night." Time Magazine said "his smile gleams as brightly as the lens of his eyeglasses, and whatever else may happen, he is never speechless." Groucho Marx simply called him "the second-wittiest man on the air."

Bill Cullen was one of the busiest and most popular personalities in the history of television. He appeared as a regular in more different television series than any other performer, and in a field where careers are sometimes measured in months, he was employed almost continuously for more than forty years, often with multiple series on the air at the same time. We hope you enjoy this site dedicated to the remarkable career of Bill Cullen." 

Scotch And Soda Coin Trick: A Mexican coin changes into a quarter in the spectators hand. Or check out the Two Headed Nickel 

Conventional wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, in practice we often observe other strategies, including:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Saying things like "This is the way we always have ridden this horse."
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
5. Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
6. Increasing the standards to ride dead horses.
7. Appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse.
8. Creating a training session to increase our riding ability.
9. Comparing the state of dead horses in today's environment.
10. Change the threshold of "dead" declaring that "This horse is not dead."
11. Hire contractors to ride the dead horse.
12. Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed.
13. Declaring that "No horse is too dead to beat."
14. Providing additional funding to increase the horse's performance.
15. Do a Study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper.
16. Purchase a product to make dead horses run faster.
17. Declare the horse is "better, faster and cheaper" dead.
18. Form a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
19. Revisit the performance requirements for horses.
20. Say this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.
21. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.
22. Develop an incentive awards program to encourage the dead horse to perform at acceptable levels. 

Matt's Guide To The Weather Channel. I honestly don't know what to say. 

Mark Steyn: "Europe is dying. As I’ve pointed out here before, it can’t square rising welfare costs, a collapsed birthrate and a manpower dependent on the world’s least skilled, least assimilable immigrants. In 20 years’ time, as those Dutch Muslim teenagers are entering the voting booths, European countries, unlike parts of Nigeria, will not be living under Sharia, but they will be reaching their accommodations with their radicalised Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the ‘tolerance’ of pluralist societies.

How happy what’s left of the ethnic Dutch or French or Danes will be about this remains to be seen. But the idea of a childless Europe rivalling America militarily or economically is laughable. Sometime this century there will be 500 million Americans, and what’s left in Europe will either be very old or very Muslim. " 

2004 Electoral College Analysis Update: Once again, President Elect goes out on a limb and predicts how every state might vote in 2004 - no toss-ups here! President Elect is a homepage for information on the election of U.S. Presidents and the electoral college. There you'll find election results, history, electoral college debate, and more. 

From Nostalgia Central. These things that only happen in movies include:

The ventilation system of any building is the perfect hiding place. Nobody will ever think of looking for you in there and you can travel to any other part of the building undetected.

All bombs are fitted with electronic timing devices with large red digital displays so you know exactly when they are going to explode.

Should you wish to pass yourself off as a German officer, it will not be necessary to learn to speak German. Simply speaking English with a German accent will do. 

Congratulations to the Discount Blogger for being named the Political Site of the Day! 

Andrew Cline: "The conventional wisdom that liberals love Dean because they sense that he is as furious at Bush as they are is right. They want a candidate who views the 2004 election as a war of Us against Them, of the Righteous vs. the Evildoers. But also important is that Dean allows the liberals to cleanse themselves of the taint of Bill Clinton. By voting for Dean, they can vote anti-Clinton and anti-Bush at the same time.

Dean is everything the Left hoped Bill Clinton would be in 1992, and nothing Clinton turned out to be. He holds the promise of being a president who is dependably liberal and uncompromising in his principles.

Dean is plain-spoken and honest. Clinton was obtuse and slimy. Dean was a wealthy urban kid who, laden with liberal guilt, voluntarily moved down the social ladder to maintain his principles. Clinton was a poor, rural kid who sold his soul to the highest bidder for eight years in the White House.

To the political Left, Clinton was the tall, dashing lover who swept them off their feet only to break their hearts and leave them vowing never to go out with such a creep again. Dean is the nice guy with sensible shoes who has them believing in love again." 

Cpl Charles McMahon along with LCpl Darwin Judge was the last Killed In Action serviceman in the Vietnam War. Cpl McMahon grew up in Woburn, Massachutes He completed Marine Corps Boot Camp and Marine Security Guard School before shipping to Saigon, R. Vietnam as a Marine Security Guard to the American Embassy. He and LCpl Judge were killed together within the first two weeks of joining the detachment. Cpl McMahon and LCpl Judge was killed by a rocket attack from Five NVA Divisions defending the Defense Attaché Building on Tahn Sahn Knut airbase.  

 

Hollywood Calling: "Now for the first time ever you can have a real celebrity call you or a friend for just $19.95. They can also deliver a brief customized message written by you for $29.95. Whether it's for a special occasion or just for the fun of it, there's no better way to impress a client, a sweetheart or a friend than to have a celebrity call. "

Even though these are all B-List celebrities it seems there's something for everybody here. A savvy manager could use this to recognize employees with an award that's a little different than the usual plaque. (via Bernie DeKoven's Fun Findings) 

My Best Bets TV is a terrific site for TV listings: You tell it what kind of shows you like, and it recommends shows for you. It uses a statistical approach called Bayesian Choice Modeling. Good Stuff. 

When klonks, boinks, and schloops hit you from all sides, it’s not just “what’s up” that’ll keep you guessing, doc! It’s the ultimate WB sound effects album, with fun dialogue by your favorite Looney Tunes characters and all the great sounds that have become synonymous with legendary WB animation throughout the decades. The Crash! Bang! Boom! DVD-Audio features more than 100 carefully selected sound-effects treasures from Warner. Bros.’ vast collection, along with the Academy Award-nominated Chuck Jones short “Now Hear This” and the original audio cartoon “Duck Dodgers In The 21st Century.” But th-th-th-that’s not all folks! There’s also a bonus audio interview with legendary sound effects guru Treg Brown and a photo gallery with lobby cards, artist drawings from the vaults, and more! 

The You-Should-Read-It-Every-Day Dean's World: "One of the things that studying something like this will do for you is open your eyes to the way scientific research works--in more ways than one. First off, you discover that many physicians are in the bad habit of making blanket statements of fact that are really only opinions. Bad ones do that a lot. It's not that they're stupid, because it takes a hell of a lot to get through med school. But they're still just people, with all the flaws, quirks, and limitations that humans always have. Patients are partly to blame, too, since we so often expect doctors to be Gods who know everything.

Another thing you learn is how science really works. All scientific research is full of deep equivocations--at least the good research is. What some everyday people call "weaseling," the scientist views as honesty, uncertainty, and fundamental humility. It's incredibly rare that you can make unequivocal statements in science. Indeed, when you're dealing with research, an unequivocal statement is usually a big red flag.

The funny part is, textbooks make a lot more unequivocal statements than real research ever does. It's reminds me of something a very good, fairly old doctor named Schnellbacher once told me. He graduated med school in the early 1960s. At the time he was in med school, a very old doctor who'd graduated some decades before that--he'd probably graduated in the 1930s--said that about 50% of what he'd learned in medical school turned out to be wrong in the next few decades. He also predicted that, for his students, about 50% of what they learned would probably turn out to be wrong within the next few decades--but you couldn't tell which 50% it was so you'd better learn all of it, and then be ready to relearn for the rest of your life!" 

 

A List of Famous People Born Today, and a List of Famous People Who Died Today. 

Ben Stein: "The fact of Hollywood's being very largely Jewish is not exactly news. The news is that Hollywood is rapidly becoming ethnically far more diverse than it was only a couple of decades ago, when I first arrived here. It is certainly true that there have always been goyim in Hollywood. But there are more gentiles in the Industry now, and there has formed a whole new route to Hollywood. No longer do young men and women work their way up solely by being mailroom clerks or nephews of producers or offspring of men in the linen-supply business.

The standard route to Hollywood now is through Harvard and Yale. Sitcom writers and producers, movie scriptwriters and producers now come from the Ivy League far more than from the streets of Brooklyn. Most of the writing staff of the powerhouse Seinfeld is from the Harvard Lampoon. So are many of the writers on Married...with Children, Friends and other stalwarts of the box. The route from Harvard Square to Hollywood is now hallowed by success and money. In fact, the agencies now beg and plead for Harvard Lampoon grads the way they once cried for the writers of The Jack Benny Radio Program. " 

Now you can take the hassle of opening jars out of your hands with the all-new Black & Decker Lids Off Automatic Jar Opener! It’s the easy new way to open jars fast! With the touch of a button, the new Lids Off™ Automatic Jar Opener loosens lids in seconds. No more hitting. No more prying. Opening jars doesn’t get any easier. $39.95 (As Seen on TV!) 

In 1979, the leading producer of kitcars in the USA was Bradley Automotive in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This was in large part due to a combination of an agressive ad campaign, which was seen in every automotive and do-it-yourself magazine in the country, and the high quality of their products. Over 6,000 kits ( a huge number by specialty car standards ) were sold throughout the 70's. The GT was designed to fit on a standard VW Bug chassis . It was available in a variety of Gelcoat colors. The body was a one-piece, reinforced unit with a targa style roof that bolted to the main unit.

The Bradley GT of yesteryear was pretty much like the Howard Dean campaign of today: A sporty exterior (Meetup.com, all the internet hype) on top of a VW beetle chassis (raise taxes, appeasement everywhere).