Kinda Funny

Check out Stephen Colbert's interview with representative Darlene Hooley from Oregon's 5th district as part of The Colbert Report's series "Better Know a District." Maybe I was just in the mood for it, but I thought it was hilarious.

From a slate.com article by Nick Schulz sub-titled "Why the auto-flushing toilet must die" (it's good to know I'm not the only one):

To understand why hands-free toilet technology stinks, you must first understand three things that any well-designed loo should permit you to do. 1) Clean the pool. You must be able to flush the toilet easily before sitting down, in case any detritus remains from a previous, inconsiderate visitor. 2) Clean the pool, again. You must be able to flush more than once after you are done. Some of us are more prolific than others, and courteous patrons will want to ensure that Point 1 is unnecessary for whomever follows. 3) Issue a courtesy flush. If you plan to settle down with the sports page, you should flush immediately after dropping the kids at the pool. There's no need to let the kids linger any longer than absolutely necessary. This is for the benefit of other visitors. Remarkably, the automatic-flush toilet makes all three of these tasks more difficult.

From YouTube, video of a goofy, dancing stormtrooper (it runs a little long):

From an article in The Onion:

Detroit, a former industrial metropolis in southeastern Michigan with a population of just under 1 million, was sold at auction Tuesday to bulk scrap dealers and smelting foundries across the United States. "This is what's best for Detroit," Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick said. "We must act now, while we can still get a little something for it." Once dismantled and processed, Detroit is expected to yield nearly 14 million tons of steel, 2.85 million tons of aluminum, and approximately 837,000 tons of copper.

From an article in The Onion:

President Bush, already facing the lowest approval ratings in history, is coming under fire from former supporters over what they call his "ineffectual and incompetent" use of prayer for national guidance and assistance. "Every time the president is criticized, he insists that the nation is in his prayers," said the Family Research Council's Bob Jensen. "That may be, but it's becoming more and more clear that these prayers are either too infrequent, too brief, or not strongly worded enough to be effective." Despite assurances from the president that he "prays every day" for the nation's interests both at home and abroad, the mounting crises of recent months-escalating gas prices, the botched Dubai port security deal, ethics scandals, and the rising death toll in Iraq-have left many unimpressed with the effectiveness of his devotion. While newly released portions of White House prayer logs show that Bush's praying has actually gone up in recent months, critics are seeking to subpoena the documents in their entirety to determine the strength of those prayers. The harshest criticisms continue to come from members of the president's conservative base, who insist that the proper devotional words must be used in prayer. "There is a real possibility that the president misrepresented the number of times he invokes Jesus' power each day in accordance with the strict guidelines of scripture," said Henry Holbrook, senior fellow at the Intercession Institute, a leading conservative prayer tank. "Is he clasping his hands together tightly enough? Is he using the proper forms of the pronouns 'thine' and 'thou'? What about the verb 'hast'?"

A joke (a good one IMHO) of course, but there is some meat there...an illustration of how the non-religious look at those of us who pray as silly...and I can almost understand it if (since?) prayer so often seems so ineffectual?