Cheers! Jeers! from (gasp!) KS!

From the Great OKAY STATE OF KS...

Some Late Night Kansas Snark!

NEWS FLASH! - Kansas' worst air disaster occurred when a small two-seater Cessna 150 plane, piloted by two University of Kansas students, crashed into a cemetery earlier today.

Search and Rescue workers in Lawrence have recovered 300 bodies so far and expect the number to climb as digging continues into the evening.

Okay, not so funny.  Kansas is, as you all know, the butt of many jokes, most of which involve Toto or Dorothy.  But this is a serious place, let me tell you.  For example, we've got a lot of septic systems, and as anyone who has ever had one can tell you, septic systems are very serious indeed.  

But we got other stuff!  We do!  Really!  Things are here!  We've got amber waves of grain!  And other stuff!

So follow me around the bend to There's Moreville and this impromptu, holy-crap I've got to do Cheers! & Jeers! lame-ass counterfeit edition of our glorious master's Koufax-award-winning blog-column right [Swoosh!!] RIGHT! [Swoosh!!] Ri... [Swooosh!!] [Swooosh!!] [Swooosh!!]

Crap.  

Just follow me over the fold, okay?  Right now!

Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, March 8, 2007, exactly one day before the return of our Bill.  Come home, Bill!  (And you better have brought presents for all of us.)

I would also like to add: holy crap!  How do you do this so many days in the week??

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Crap.  Wrong one.

Disclaimer:  This impromptu, holy-crap I've got to do Cheers! & Jeers! lame-ass counterfeit edition of our glorious master's Koufax-award-winning blog-column is in no way affiliated with Bill in Portland Maine, Bill's friends, Bill's family, Bill's pets, anyone who has ever seen Bill, anyone who can even pronounce the word "Bill," or anything else bigger than a proton.  I made it all up, and am currently composing a letter begging Bill's understanding and all-tanned-and-rested forgiveness.

So! Hey hey hey and Cheers! to you all!  I hope you are all having good days, and that something warm and soft is within reach.  You're going to need it.  I also hope that you will be nice to me.  I have never done this before, and the phrase "mighty big shoes for such tiny feet" keeps rolling through my head.

I could do a muse-y sort of Cheers and Jeers, but that would not be in keeping with the example set by our Lord and Thigh Master.  So let me try a cheap attempt at immitation.  As I say: be kind.  I bruise easily.

First, some Kansas trivia, because C&J don't often come from these parts:

•  The first European to walk the Kansas prairie was none other than Francisco de Coronado, in 1541.  True!  Of course, he was looking for the fabled city of Quivira, which wasn't here -- and, as it turns out, it wasn't anywhere.  Prairie, there was.  And buffalo.  And indigenous Americans who were none too happy to meet a tin-capped anemic white guy with strange four-legged beasts pulling boxes that sat on round things that rolled.  So they ran him off.  Unfortunately, a buttload of other anemic white guys followed.
•  Kansas's chief agricultural export is cattle, "and calves."  This makes me sad, the little calves getting exported.  They come here, live little calves, and are "exported" in shrink-wrapped styrofoam containers.  That's enough to put me off my feed.
•  Kansas entered the union as a territory in 1854 as a "Free" territory, meaning we were free to choose to prohibit keeping other humans in bondage (not the good kind, so stop it, ya nasties).  Instead we've decided to not pay people very much for working here.  Sort of the same, but without the "slave" part, which I deem a big difference.
•  Kansas is home to the sad saga of the eponymous "Bleeding Kansas," where the first skirmishes of the Civil War were fought.  Missouri (or "Missourah," as Those Across The Border call it) was a Slave state, and those Missourahians were seriously interested in encouraging the good people of Kansas to vote for slavery.  So they shot us a lot, and burned things.  This was an early, pre-civil-war attempt at persuasion.  We were not persuaded.  
•  John Brown comes from here.  And Fred Phelps.  I have nothing more to add to this, except perhaps a "wha??"  We Kansans pride ourselves on our internal inconsistencies.  Makes us excitin'.
•  The Republican party was organized out of opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act; it allowed the new territories to decide whether they would be slave or free, and there was a big block of abolitionists wanting both to be free from slavery -- those broke off to form the Republican party.  Republicans actually on the right side of an issue?  Go figure.
•  Also interesting: during the border wars, when it came time to vote, Missourahians came over here to vote.  In one locale, of the 600 votes cast, only 20 were properly from people who actually lived here.  I think this is where Atwater learned his trade.
•  Kansas is technically flatter than a pancake.  I have, however, seen at least two young women wearing tight t-shirts eblazoned with the phrase, "Not everything is flat in Kansas!"  Sigh.  They were right...
•  Kansas is home to the largest ball of twine.  Whoo-hoo!  At 17,980 pounds, it's almost as big as my cat.
•  As I mention above, Kansas is home to the butt-end of Wizard of Oz jokes.  I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but it was fiction -- except for the tornado, dogs, farms, pigs, dust, storm cellars, and cranky people on bicycles.  I know: I am a cranky person on a bicycle.  But I did not steal Toto.  (And psst: the Munchkins are real.  But don't tell anyone.)
•  Kansas recently had a visit from the Big Dog hisself, and he (as usual) rocked the house.  Being a delegate I was supposed to be there, but I was at a stupid conference.  Work sucks.
•  Lawrence, Kansas (near where I live) is home to the world-renown Free State Brewery, which I am fairly sure has a really good stable of brews.  (I don't know for sure: I have only been drinking it steadily for a few years.  I need more data.)  It is the oldest (legal) brewery in Kansas, and for some strange reason is really popular with the KU students.  I can't figure that out.  Beer?  Students?  Hmmm.
•  Kansas contains the little community in which I live, Vinland, a little hamlet that dates to about 1850 (about as early as the anemic white people settled anywhere in Kansas), home to the oldest continually-operating lending library West of the Mississippi -- or so they say.  Martha Kelly, the librarian, is 100 years old.  Not quite as old as the library, but almost.  She's bent over like a... well, something that's really bent over (metaphorizer on the fritz today), requires two canes for mobility, but she's there every Sunday afternoon, rain or shine.
•  Above all, though, Kansas does have one really really astronishing thing: a colleague with HIBs.  Let's see New York go better than that.

Okay, enough of that.  Suffice it to say, Kansas rocks does not suck!  Yay!  

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By the numbers:
1... 2... 3... 4...

They go on, but I thought that was enough.
(Seriously:)

•  Days to the return of Bill, with a Rum and Coke version of wit and snark: 1
•  Days since I had a full night's rest: 32,467
•  Days to Spring Freakin' Break: 1
•  Number of students who actually know the readings when they come to class: i
•  Days out of 7 that I love my job, though I work 60 hours a week and get paid for, umm, 6: 7

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Midweek Rupture index: OW!  (Translations in comments, please?   I don't know: Google served it up for me.)

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I have my retirement already planned.

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Cheers that Scooter Libby is still guilty, and although he won't say anything about a pardon, Bush is "sad "about it.  Bush is also an unmitigated ass, among other sub-human attributes.  Just sayin'.

Jeers that "Freedom" in Iraq continues "on the march."  With explosions.  We persist as a nation careening out of control, leaving the bodies of young Americans and all manner of Iraqis behind.  Eventually it will stop.  I think.

Cheers to International Women's Day, because, well, without international women there would be no international boobies.

Cheers to Johannes Kepler, who on this date in 1618 invented the Third Law of Planetary Motion.  Without that, we'd be stuck in the same place all the time.  And without that, Newton wouldn't have figured out how the universe works.  (At that time, the solar system was pretty much "the universe."  They were a simple people.  And myopic.)  Also on this date, the Fillmore East opened in New York.  Without the Fillmore East we'd have no Allman Brothers Band at the Fillmore East, and the universe would be a far emptier place.

Cheers to NASA for deciding that yes, they really do have to fire Lisa Nowak.  I mean, for cryin' out loud, wouldja look at her?  If she's got the right stuff, I don't want it, and I don't think NASA does, either.

WTF? for the fact that Brittany Spears is "struggling" in rehab, and that Naomi Campbell is cleaning floors.  Why is this "news"?  (I suppose I should also mention the 24/7 video coverage of the casket of Anna Nicole Smith.  Sheesh.)

Cheers that Ann Coulter is becoming radioactive -- even to Republicans.  I am expecting chickens to fall from the sky soon.  

Jeers to the "war on terra."  Pakistan is reporting the capture of the 4,675th "Second in Command."  He was the defense minister of Afghanistan when the Taliban were yukking it up with their buds and drinking tea.  It was good to see the Taliban go, not least because their demise helped bring a resurgence of interest in the national sport of Pakistan, Buzkashi, an awesome way to pass the time: I mean, fighting on horseback for the privilege of dragging a goat carcass to your end of a patch of dirt seems so much more manly than sitting around in long dresses sipping tea.  (And no, I am not being culturally insensitive; I'm going for the cheap laugh.)

Jeers to the Seminoles, my peeps.  They recently bought the Hard Rock Cafes.  The particular Seminole I descend from (my family says it was Osceola -- really a Creek, but fought with the 'Noles in the wars) died in prison.  You've come a long way, babies: instead of being under the thumb of the man, you have become the man.  Now you too can start represssing.  (Actually, I'm not sure how to come down on this issue.  It just seems, at first blush, to be sort of screwy.)

Cheers and good luck! suckas to the Senate Judiciary Committee: tomorrow they will vote on whether to issue subpoenas to five DoJ officials.  The DoJ is more politicized than it was under Nixon.  I figure Gonzalez is going to treat any subpoenas from Congress the same way he treats, well, subpoenas from Congress.  He will ignore them, Congress will stamp it's tiny feets, and then the nation will get back to normal, obsessing over the whereabouts of Anna Nicole Smith's corpse.

Cheers to the Great State of Vermont for voting to impeach Bush and Cheney.  They say big things come in small packages.  (Or do they?  Did I just make that up?)  If the US Congress won't do it, maybe the little people out in the hinterlands will.  (Note to Vermonters: I am not calling you "little people," and I am not saying that you are in the hinterlands.  Really.)

Cheers and cool! to Six Packs for Soldiers.  Brilliant!  I mean, those are the folks who are getting shot at and blown up upon; the least we can do is send them a brewski or two.

Cheers to being in good company.  Apparently the Earth, our home, is missing a large chunk of crust.  I often have trouble getting loaves out of the pan, and make breads that have large chunks of missing crust.  I eat them anyway.  And they are good.  I wonder how mantle tastes?

Cheers and good luck to Andy.  Really.  That sucks.

And of course, cheers to the imminent return of Bill.  We can't wait.  As good as the other subs have been, look what I did.  The place is a mess.

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And just one more...

Cheers to this place, filled with the laughter and moaning cries of a complex swath of progressive humanity, and boobies.  This is a magical place, a really magical place.  There are times when the real world intrudes on it, but in the main it's a delightful interlude from the unrelenting bad news from the outside world.

So!  Welcome to the kiddie pool, where sharks are highly frowned upon.  I hope you will find the water just to your liking (if there are any warm spots, blame schwede -- he was here a minute ago).  As we come to the end of our adventures in subbing for Bill, I am really proud of the job we've done.  But we do miss us our Bill.

So, floor's open: what're you cheering and jeering about today?