By CHRIS PACKHAM
There's probably no quicker way to impress a woman than to casually mention your thriving scrap-metal-selling business, followed by, "Now let me get you another Bud Lite Lime... lovely lady." 
My new policy of addressing every woman who crosses my path as "lovely lady," in the impossibly smooth Source Awards announcer voice that I practice while I'm showering, has not yet resulted in the sexy dividends you might imagine.
Across the country, stripping public infrastructure and selling it for two or three bucks a pound has become a lucrative industry that — attention, prospective employers — involves way more work than I'm ever going to do in my entire life. Scrap-metal thieves, I salute you. And it's not just laziness, people; it's my sexy, powerful genes. To paraphrase Darth Vader, "The biological imperative to conserve energy is strong in this one."
In America's Philadelphia, as seen in Tom Hanks' Philadelphia and Michael Paré's The Philadelphia Experiment, thieves have stolen so many manhole covers, which can net $5 to $10 from scrap-metal dealers, that the problem made the front page of The New York Times. According to the New York Times Eyewitness News of Kansas City — KCTV Channel 5 — area thieves are now targeting fire hydrants. How is it possible for a scrap metal dealer to accept an obviously stolen fire hydrant without doing an elaborate Sgt. Schultz impression? I guess it's lucky for MoDot that it's so difficult to balance a 200-pound, trench-spanning steel plate on top of a stolen grocery cart.
After the jump, the end of a Kansas City gambling institution, and a bold new direction for political rhetoric. Click here, or on this photo of me, offering you a night of romance, lovely lady:
Gimme $50 on Three Beggin' Strips Before the Wire: Great. Just great. The Woodlands dog track is closing. Now where will I go to lose my youngest daughter's insulin money every month? Plus, with the general ongoing collapse of the para-mutuel industry, what will happen to those razor-thin dog breeds selected for their speed and aerodynamics? I've always thought it would be cool to own a concave dog that becomes nearly invisible when you look at it from the right angle, like a moebius strip. At least until the novelty wears off and I slide it under the door at Animal Control. Along with New York's shiny new ban of off-track betting, America is losing many of its historically sleazy, tobacco-stained venues for human desperation. But here's my main "take away" point from Dan Margolies' article: I am an idiot. Because if I'd known before today that the Woodlands had been resorting to such marketing gimmicks as CAMEL RACES, Daily Briefs would have been your daily camel-race betting resource from day one.
You stay classy, McCain for President 2008: Once you've actually come out and questioned your opponent's commitment to going back in time and killing Hitler, there's really nowhere else to take your presidential campaign. You've reached the theorized rhetorical omega point, the singularity beyond which time and political smears collapse. After Sen. Barack Obama's speech at the Holocaust Museum in Israel, the McCain campaign issued a press release titled "Obama on Genocide." Like the title of "Rectal Prolapse in a Free-Ranging Mountain Gorilla," a report about a mountain gorilla suffering from a rectal prolapse, the title of the McCain campaign's press release pretty much sums it up: Obama is weak on genocide; totally do not vote for him.
Pivoting to Hollywood's long-term neglect of Hitler-assassination-based science-fiction movies, someone should just go ahead and shoot a film about going back in time and killing Hitler before he can plan the Holocaust. Let's get it out of the way, already — it's a plot that hovers ineffectually around the periphery of pop-culture, but nobody ever actually does anything about it. Not even on the shitty-except-for-one-show Sci-Fi Channel, and after its production of Mansquito, a movie about a man who transforms into a mansquito, I pretty much thought the network would green-light anything. Well, I've got two words for schlock director Rob Cohen: Brendan Fraser. Who wouldn't want to skip the theatrical release and just wait for the DVD of a film in which Brendan Fraser plays — whatever, a space marine or a time cop or something, who travels back to Berlin in 1939 and assassinates Adolf Hitler? The very fact that Marty McFly and Doc Brown never even had a conversation about the possibility is testament to the fact that Hollywood has been dancing around this plot long enough.
wow; what happened to this place?
last time i was here, it was full of high-strung individuals, all high on their near-clever repartee. including, i recall, one obnoxious gentleman who refered to himself in the near-third party...
hell, even the snack-cakes are all gone.
i'm outta here.
Posted at: July 23, 2008 3:55 PM