The Tedder P. Schoenhopfer Policy Exchange

It’s that time to post some classic “jerks getting put in their place by Miss Manners.” Actually this latest one is just about a jerk:

Dear Miss Manners: On the envelope of the Christmas card I sent to my cousin (whom I rarely see), I omitted “Dr.” in front of his name. I instead addressed him as Mr.

I didn’t intend to offend him. I just meant to send him good wishes for Christmas. Yesterday, I received from him a note that greatly offended me. He sent the same thing to my mother, who is 82 years old and a wonderful person and who cares for him very much.

Enclosed were a copy of his doctor of philosophy degree, with “Doctor” and the year circled, and one of an envelope made out to him as “Dr.” He wrote “Please note it is standard to use Ph.d. at the end or Dr. in front but not Mr. on the name of a person with a doctorate. You are the only ones that use Mr. Thank you.”

I am extremely offended. I feel like writing him back and asking for my Christmas card back.

Miss Manners actually just tells the writer to suck it up b/c the guy is obviously a dumbie. The best ones are where the letter-writer is the dumbie, like the ultimate of all time, The Matchmaker’s Blind Spot.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22344454

Here’s a quick blurb from the article:

The thieves used a hydraulic car jack to pry their way past the pull-down metal gate that protects the museum’s front entrance. Then, they smashed through two glass doors, probably using a crow bar, to get to the paintings on the second floor, police said.

“This is a highly professional job, done by people who knew exactly what they were doing,” said the lead Sao Paulo police investigator on the case, Marcos Gomes de Moura.

It seems like in “real life” conversations, everyone feels free to bash Hillary Clinton and still seem polite, but that freedom does not extend to bashing the other candidates. Really it’s just Obama, since the other candidates at this point don’t seem viable. So this is what blogs are for!

My big thing about Obama is that he’s false. He says he’s going to talk straight etc. and then ducks votes and equivocates just as much as the other candidates. What issue has he taken a strong stand on? None — don’t people see that? I’ve come to accept that candidates have to be vague and avoid answering tough questions — that’s how to win — I don’t like it but I now accept it. But it seems ultra-hypocritical to accuse other people of doing it and act holier-than-thou about it when you’re doing it too. Here’s an article about his strategy since deciding to be a candidate.

If you want to argue, argue! I think this family is mainly Clinton but not sure.

On October 11th the National Enquirer broke a story claiming that Edwards had carried on an 18 month-long affair with a “staffer” (actually she only made little hand-held documentaries which the campaign never used.) Edwards denied the claim, but now the Enquirer has hit back saying that the mistress is pregnant with Jon Edwards’ child!

Suddenly, one day after the pregnancy story broke, one of Edwards’ most trusted staff members came out claiming that HE was the father! However, neither the staffer or the mistress will take a polygraph to settle the matter and clear Edwards’ name.

There’s a lot of other circumstantial evidence supporting the Edwards-affair claim. Although the report did come from the National Enquirer, keep in mind that they have broken high-profile political sex scandals in the past (Gary Hart, Gennifer Flowers, etc.)

If the allegations are true, the affair could probably be a campaign-killer in and of itself, but the real scandal would be that Edwards was cheating on his DYING wife, who heroically decided to spend her remaining years working in the service of his presidential ambitions.

So if the allegations ARE true, I think that Edwards will rightfully become a national disgrace.

Two baby pandas wrestling. Enjoy.

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Jon, happy birthday to you!

Here’s a guy who “took the plunge and upgraded from Windows Vista to Windows XP”–and reports his findings.

http://dotnet.org.za/codingsanity/archive/2007/12/14/review-windows-xp.aspx

I was at Auntie Sue’s and tried to fix Kyle’s computer by wiping the hard drive and reinstalling Windows, using Windows 98,which is the only way Jon or I know how to do that — but we don’t have the registration number for the Windows 98 CD. Does anybody have a number? It’s not cheating, because we have the real Windows XP CD to reinstall in the next step.

I’ve been acquiring old editions of the Illustrated London News from 1842 through 1875, for research purposes — I am in a small research group interested in antique chess sets. But there are so many fascinating articles and news items that it’s hard not to read everything. For the most interesting items, I take a photo and I might post some of them here. If these types of things aren’t interesting, then just skip them.

From the Illustrated London News (henceforth ILN) of August 21, 1852, comes this strange story of a mysterious death. The punchline is at the end.

This might be one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BTJ_n9Oqs0&eurl=http://coedmagazine.com/page/2/

Here´s a fun article about how chimpanzees apparently are better than humans at short-term pattern recognition with numbers. For the experiment, 9 numbers would quickly flash on the screen in a certain order in boxes, and the subjects had to touch the boxes in the correct numerical sequence. The humans and chimps performed this the same, but the chimps faster. Then they did it with 5 numbers flashing in a much shorter time, and the chimps were successful 80% of the time while the humans only 40%.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071203/ap_on_sc/chimp_memory_1