Both Bozo the Clown (Larry Harmon) and Jesse Helms died this week. 

Some more-flattering Helms quotes may be seen in a 2001 New York Times article by Kevin Sack.   Less-flattering quotes here.  My opinion of the gentleman may be seen in this cartoon (”One Trick Pony”).

The extremely unusual is going on. And not all of it is Canadian.

• Example One: Hockey Night in Canada, the theme song of the weekly broadcast (entitled, as you may imagine, ‘Hockey Night in Canada’) from Canada’s public broadcaster is no longer licensed by said public broadcaster.

Ordinarily, these copyright-kinda things blow over, but this won’t; too many Canadians associate the song with the sport. Problematically — and probably why television network CTV bought the song’s rights in perpetuity — two generations of Canadians associate the song with CBC’s television and radio hockey broadcasts.
Is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation going to take this lying down? Probably.

• Example two: Lynda Carter — the 1970s Amazon ‘Wonder Woman‘ to her friends — was canoeing on the Potomac when she sighted a floating body and had the presence of mind to enlist the aid of nearby fishermen in contacting authorities.

Ms Carter mentioned she didn’t have a cellphone, but doesn’t the invisible canoe have a powerful invisible communications system?

• Example three: Apple Inc. has taken their expensive iPhone and have

a) made it twice as fast, and

b) made it affordable(!).

No kidding. Check it out!

Fifty years go by like nothing . . . and so it is with the famed peace sign, whose 50th anniversary was recently observed.

. . .

Filipino Good Friday re-enactors have been admonished by local health officials to get tetanus inoculations before

a) flagellating themselves, and
b) having nails hammered into their hands and feet while tied to crosses.
They also recommend that the whips utilized be hygienic and “well-maintained.” Good advice all around.

. . .

Take Pork Off Your Fork?

Almost 10 per cent of packaged pork chops and ground pork purchased by researchers in four Canadian provinces were infected with MRSA — Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus — a ’super’ bacterium once primarily seen in hospitals.

The good news? MRSA doesn’t survive cooking. Providing pork is properly cooked (no pink within) and properly handled prior to cooking (wash your hands after touching any raw meat — especially pork and chicken — or use an alcohol-based hand-sanitizer), eating your chops and porkburgers shouldn’t kill you.

Better news? Pork roasts purchased by the researchers were uninfected.

. . .

Happy Easter, y’all.

You may recall an earlier note here about Merrie Englande’s descent into a full surveillance state. The wise among you likely felt that a true 1984-esque situation couldn’t come about unless steps were taken to accomplish some means of identifying all those people on all those closed-circuit televisions. But geez . . . how do you get people to co-operate with the implementation of a government Orwellian-Revelation-of-St-John police state?

Enter the ‘National Identity Scheme: Options Analysis - Outcome‘, which you may download here, if you’ve a mind to. Offered solutions, according to the unknown drafter(s) of this UK government report, include “[v]arious forms of coercion . . . “.

Note that the document is annotated . . . though you’re free to come to your own [thoughtcrime] conclusions.

I imagine you’re aware that the year changed. Famously, this is noted by whack-jobs in New York City looking in abject glee at a big lighted ball crawling down a pole in Times Square. As they’ve been doing it for a century (judging by Dick Clark, alone), much of North America is content to watch along with ‘em. I don’t see the attraction, but there must be something thrilling about it all — throw me a note or comment if you have a reasonable explanation for all the hoo-haw.

Speaking of comments, WiseandFoolish gets about 150 or so spam ‘comments’ daily. Happily, I typically don’t have to deal with them; Akismet, a life-saving WordPress plug-in, just shovels the digital feces into a ‘Caught Spam’ section, which can be viewed (if necessary) and trashed in a second. Highly recommended.

After poring over W&F’s 2007 logs, I’ve come to the realization that no-one’s reading this. I’m not completely convinced of this, but I do suspect most — if not all — of this site’s ‘hits’ are spambots. There are advantages to this . . . I could run a contest, for instance, and keep the prize. ‘Bots have been known to enter contests, however, and I don’t want to have to ship a prize to a dark alley in China’s Hunan province.

I think instead over the next few months I’ll scan and post some of my published work from the 1980s and ’90s.

That’ll fix ‘em.

Excess money? A remedy for that could be a whack of movies from United Artists. The United Artists 90th Anniversary Prestige Collection provides you with enough entertainment to last you into your dotage.

. . .

We Get Spam

A mister ‘Alfonzo Rosa’ entitles his sales pitch, “You won’t need to furtively put socks into your trunks anymore!”

Oh, goody!

. . .

Dan Fogelberg died of prostate cancer today.  He was 56.  I remember him through songs of haunting melody: Run for the Roses and Longer among them.

Quick-thinking Florida school officials, seeing a 10-year-old student actually cutting her lunch with a steak knife,
called police, who naturally arrested and charged the child with felony possession of a weapon on school property.

Whackjobs & Englishmen

Currently no-one’s certain why a gentleman last Sunday sought entry into a London restaurant’s kitchen to play with knives, but he managed to slice his wrist and hack off his . . . member . . . in the process. Police pepper-sprayed him while he was further ventilating himself in a dining area. He is currently in hospital sans penis, though Wise & Foolish has some concern about his reaction to hospital food.

. . .

Music legend (two Grammys) and legendary wife-whacker (. . .) Ike Turner is dead at 76.  Tina’s response came from her representative, informing entertainment site TMZ.com that “She has not had any contact with him in 35 years. No further comment will be made.”

Inhaling pig brains may be bad for you . . . at least at Quality Pork in Minnesota.

. . .

Winona Ryder does something unspeakable to a puppet (probably NSFW) here . . . indicating an interesting career direction.

. . .

Out of South Korea comes news that a quarry worker was killed by his LG cell phone.

- - -

WiseAndFoolish recommends that folks always be nice to their cell phones.

- - -

The battery in the victim’s "rigorously tested" phone is believed to have exploded, sending telephonic shrapnel through the 33-year-old’s heart and lungs.

This appears to mirror the experience of a Chinese welder, whose Nokia cell phone’s battery exploded, puncturing his heart with a resultantly broken rib.  The 22-year-old died after being taken to hospital.