Hornswaggler | The culture, the humor, a bit of the sports, not so much the politics, and the workplace distraction
Hornswaggle is an alternate spelling of
hornswoggle, an archaic word that means to bamboozle or hoodwink. I take my
pronunciation from the late Harvey Korman in "Blazing Saddles" --
"I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers,
bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits,
vipers, snipers, conmen, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers,
buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train
robbers, bank robbers, ass kickers, shit kickers and Methodists!"
Espn.com still is passing over the Allen Iverson story, even though the Philadelphia Inquirer's latest report indicates a warrant is about to be issued for Iverson's arrest. Whatever. So things are rapidly going from bad to worse for A.I., whose intelligence is clearly artificial. (ba dum bum) Made by K-Mart, in fact. (tss) Not Kenyon Martin, but the store that carries Martha Stewart's line of clothing, the same Stewart who is ... okay that's enough (free associating). This whole thing goes to show you should not force your way into a person's home with a firearm and make terrorist threats. And if you do do that, and subsequently you wish to get away with it, don't greet strangers on the street afterward with a phrase -- in this case "cat daddy" -- that you're known habitually to use.
How to make light of the situation? Maybe the Sixers won't be affected by all this. Maybe Coach Larry Brown, in a bizarre attempt to bolster camaraderie with his star guard, was the driver of the Mercedes. That's it! He was wearing a skull cap, Jay-Z booming, exhorting Iverson, "Yo Answer, let's do this." No, that's not funny.
I've read some more of conservative pundit Ann Coulter's new book and I think the word that best describes it is "irresponsible." I'll tear some holes in it when I get a chance. I might have to buy the book in order to do so. But Lord knows perforating this woman's incredibly, awfully skewed logic is not a difficult task. I just checked out the review of her book in Salon, in which Charles Taylor says: "Getting mad at Coulter is exactly the reaction she sets out to provoke. Debating her on her 'ideas' does about as much good as kicking a retarded puppy." That's a pretty good line. Anyway, if you want to spelunk the sub-human caverns of Coulter's brain, you can check them out here. One of her complaints about liberals in her latest article? "Liberals have made themselves incapable of feeling hate for the enemy." And liberals "simply do not have an implacable desire to kill those who cheered the slaughter of thousands of American citizens." According to this last gem, I ought to want to personally strangle any Arabic citizen who cheered the events of Sept. 11. I dunno. I kind of take a wider view than that. Perhaps these people are impoverished, poorly educated, if educated at all, and victims of state propaganda. Regardless, they didn't kill anyone. All they did was express their equivalent of our 1st Amendment rights to free expression. She goes on to say, "If you can rise above [the hatred], if you can move on from that, you weren't angry in the first place." Isn't rising above hatred and intolerance a good thing? Something that is preached (if not practiced) by every major religion?
