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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!" |
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Monday, February 23, 2004Dave Chapelle and the space shuttleI saw a headline on Yahoo! about astronauts leaving the space shuttle unmanned while performing a space walk and thought it would be ripe for a skit on "Chapelle's Show" where some black guys in space suits come in and burglarize the shuttle while they're gone. For those who don't know, Chapelle is black and does the boldest racial humor on television right now, so it's okay that I said that. (Who's seen the WacArnold's sketch?) Shootin' stuff Maureen Dowd wrote an article a couple weeks ago meditating on the hunting trip that Dick Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia recently took together. The article wasn't that great, but her description gave me pause. Apparently, at shooting clubs like the one Cheney and Scalia patronized, the birds are flushed out for you and you just sit in a blind and blast them out of the sky. If that's true, then that is vintage Cheney: "Screw the hunt. Let's skip to the part where we kill the animals." See, I can understand the thrill of hunting. The actual putting a bullet between the eyes or in the chest of a buck, not so much. But tracking an animal through the woods, or hunting with a dog, when you do that you're tapping into essential and in some cases primitive behavior, and there's a value in that. In the woods, stealthily stalking your prey, you can erase the thousands of years that lay between you and your ancient ancestors and come as close as is possible (outside of a mushroom trip, say) for contemporary humans to access the mental states and sharpened senses of our forebearers. Then you whip out your machine gun and clear out the brush, crushing beer cans against your head. I remember one of the reasons I loved playing Capture the Flag so much up at my camp in Maine was feeling, running top speed through the woods, wind whooshing through my ears, as though I were an Indian brave on the prowl. All the tapping into primal mental states or sharpening your hunting skills, that's not what appeals to Dick Cheney, apparently. He likes watching the birds plummet from the sky stuffed with buckshot. If it's just target practice, if there's no skill or effort involved in flushing out the quail, why not just shoot skeet? It must be tough for Cheney when he's "hunting" and fishing.* How does he extend the fueling lines out to his position so he can refill his hump with oil? Cheney does about one mile to the gallon, so he can't venture far without accessing a remote fueling station. Maybe unmanned drones are specially equipped to perform operations on Cheney akin to the mid-air fuelings they do for B-52 bombers. *This consists of Cheney dropping a barrel of industrial slag into the river and collecting the carcasses. .: posted by hornswaggler 10:57 AM| |
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