Mullings An American Cyber Column By Rich Galen

US & Int'l Papers

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Let's Take a Breath

Wednesday July 19, 2006

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Sometimes you just want to pull the covers up over your head and go back to sleep. Let's take a look at some non-threatening things which have caught my attention recently.

Headlines We Live For. From the space.com website a few days before the Shuttle Discovery returned to Florida:

NASA Clears Discovery's Left Wing for Landing, Rest of Shuttle to Follow

HOUSTON - Shuttle managers cleared the Discovery orbiter's left wing for landing Saturday, with the rest of the orbiter expected to follow after a late-night analysis by engineers and flight controllers.

Apparently, NASA changed its mind and decided to have the left wing land at approximately the same time as the rest of the vehicle.

From craigslist.com, this listing from a budding entrepreneur:

I am offering a one of a kind ad chance. Post your ad on my wheelchair for six months. I am not a shut-in. I go to bars at least twice a week out to lunch every day and the movies once a week. I have tried to sell this ad on ebay without much luck so I'm posting it here to see what people offer.

Not much luck on eBay, huh? Maybe you're aiming too high. Let's think this through�

Ok. I've got it. You should start by charging people to write short "in search ofs" on leg casts with a Sharpie and work your way up to a plasma screen mounted to the back of your wheelchair showing ads in full motion video.

Remember that business last week about how the only thing I know about Cricket is a thing called a Leg Before Wicket foul? A number of you wrote to tell me that if I really knew what I was talking about I would call it an "LBW."

Oh, yeah? Well get a load of this from the Bloomberg.com website:

England Sets Pakistan 380 Target to Win Opening Cricket Test

England declared its second innings on 296-8 on the final morning of the opening Test, setting Pakistan 380 to win at Lord's in London. Salman Butt was dismissed with the first ball of the run chase.
Pakistan's best run chase was 12 years ago when it scored 315-9 against Australia in Karachi after being set 314. The highest fourth-innings total to win a Test at Lord's was the West Indies' 344-1 chasing 342 in 1984. Pakistan, which lost Butt leg-before-wicket to Hoggard, will have a maximum 80 overs today.

I know. It reads like a random series of words but Pakistan lost Butt leg-before-wicket, not LBW.

And why don't we just see if we can't get though the rest of this without any sophomoric jokes about "Pakistan lost Butt."

Every year at this time the Department of English & Comparative Literature at San Jose State University announces the winners of its annual "Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest" in which people submit the worst opening paragraph they can concoct.

The contest is named for Edward George Bulwer-Lytton who, in his 1830 book, Paul Clifford made literary history when he wrote: "It was a dark and stormy night �"

This year's winner was Jim Guigli, who wrote:

"Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean."

I forgot, again, that the deadline was approaching so my entry didn't get to San Jose in time. Here it is:

Stan stood on the rear bumper, having finished loading the SUV making certain that every square centimeter of space was filled. "It's not for nothing," he said to his wife sitting patiently behind the steering wheel, "that I've always been called 'Pack It' Stan."
Just then, his wife started the engine and put the vehicle in gear causing Stan to overbalance, his foot stuck in the bumper, scraping the skin off his backside.
The next day the headline read: "Pack It" Stan Lost Butt.

I coulda been a contender.

On the Secret Decoder Ring Page today: The full list of winners in the bad writing contest; the definitive definition of a leg-before-wicket foul; two unretouched Mullfotos showing how hot I have been over the past two weeks and a Catchy Caption of the Day you'll want to see.

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