things i find strange

Jon Stewart (and others like him) does not, and I cannot imagine ever would, refer to himself as a journalist ("I tell dumb jokes for a living"), but Bill O'Reilly (and others like him) does (and quite vehemently).

Humans have about the same number of genes as do fish and mice, and even less than plants do. (But what I find even stranger than this...)

(is that...) George W. Bush and Al Gore are the same species ('never mind that they were up for the same job.)

(and likewise...) Albert Einstein and, well take your pick -- hmmm -- for example, Alberto Gonzalez, are genetically so very similar. Human beings and chimpanzees share 98.9% of the same genes, so even though most chimps seem to be so much cooler (I've never actually met one, but all those PBS shows...) than some human beings do, and I'm sure are (think Ann Coulter vs. a really nice chimp -- or Ann Coulter vs. all but the very meanest and most narcissistic chimps), the fact that Einstein and Gonzalez, et al., are all homosapiens dictates that they would have to have... (seriously?) Also with the same tiny genetic variability are: Eleanor Roosevelt and Rudy Giuliani; Kafka and Danielle Steele; Thurgood Marshall and Dick Cheney; Gandhi and my neighbor who has a sign on his door that reads, "Forget 9-1-1, I dial .357."

Part of the actual, traditional conservative worldview and ideology is supposedly a mistrust of government, and even though very few so-called-conservatives today actually advocate limited government in most areas, almost all of these self-professed conservatives use that doctrine as an explanation for any government action or program that actually helps anyone -- except of course for big-business, the richest 1% of Americans, etc. -- 'no surprise there -- that's been happening for a long time. But neo-conservatism takes it to a level that defies not only logic, but sanity as well. But what I find to be really strange is that all these people who say they don't trust government to, for example, provide health care coverage (but they trust the insurance industry?? but I digress...), trust the government to mete out the death penalty -- "I don't trust you to pay for the doctors' bills of people who have nothing to lose because they currently do not have any medical coverage, but I will entrust you with the power to kill my fellow citizens -- and me, should I happen to have a run of bad luck and get convicted of something I did not do" -- ???

Tonka is marketing a walker in the shape of a miniature truck with the slogan "Because face it: Boys are built different." Apparently, the same geniuses who used an adjective where an adverb is needed -- in a nationally televised ad -- also think ten-month-old boys toddle "different" than do ten-month-old girls, and that their skeletal, muscular, and nervous systems are different, as well.

Probably a good 10% of gifts I'm given have something to do with Maya Angelou, and at least 10% of the shelf space for poetry at most chain-bookstores is filled with Maya Angelou's, umm, "poetry." She may be a very good person, but poet? I just get cranky when even most independent or used bookstores dedicate two or three shelves to poetry, and what's on those shelves except for all the usual suspects. Thanks, I already have Shakespeare's sonnets and as much as I adore her, I don't need to read another tabloid, er um, I mean biography of Sylvia Plath. (Which, by the way -- Bravo to booksellers like Clay Banes , and his bookstore, Pegasus.)