From the comments:
Harold Bloom says: Bravo for your mention of Thomas Hardy's Die Hard. For curious readers, I also recommend the following: Jane Austen's Total Recall
Charles Dickens's The Hunt for Red October
and of course, Oscar Wilde's seminal The Important of Being Earnest Saves Christmas.
Well, here it is, Day 6 of the Activia 14 Day Challenge, and I don't feel as much like Jamie Lee Curtis as I expected to, although the pooping has been great! 
My new little pals, the Bifidus Regularis Gram-positive anaerobic bacteria, sure do reduce oro-fecal gut transit time, as advertised. I picture them wearing tiny little hardhats and carrying tiny little lunch pails on their way to punch in for work inside my intestines while I eat my Activia yogurt. Oh! And speaking of intestinal microbiota, the Cordish Company has come down against any light-rail plan that includes a route through the taxpayer-subsidized Power & Light Prefabricated Corporate Entertainment District in the heart of downtown Kansas City, insisting that patrons pay Cordish to park their cars in Cordish-owned lots if they want to drink beer out of plastic cups. Which they totally do! Besides, like really long buses all connected together and gliding on rails, trains would disgorge black people in dress-code-violating white T-shirts faster than the district's security detail can hustle them back out to the street. MAX riders have probably noticed not only the total lack of bus stops in the Power & Light District but also the circuitous route the MAX line takes around the district on its way through downtown.
So there's that. Sen. John McCain is attempting to appeal to the demographics of the Ice Road Truckers and the Democratic women who are actually Republicans by picking Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee without vetting her for ethics problems or Diablo Cody plot lines. Watching McCain's campaign surrogates try to sell her foreign policy expertise to reporters has been like watching puppies get clubbed, only more fun and without triggering any unhelpful feelings of sympathy. All of this is on top of a hurricane-truncated convention week. After the jump, a recap of McCain's holiday weekend, plus: Build your own Palin family. Click here, or on the 2008 Republican national ticket:
The McCain campaign shakes its malfunctioning hamburger phone, announces "eggo is preggo." Over the weirdest Labor Day weekend in the whole history of not knowing much about the labor movement, the Internet extruded some colorful Alaskan baby rumors regarding almost miraculously unvetted Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's daughter, Bristol, who was named for beloved pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY), manufacturer of Plavix® oral antiplatelet agent. Specifically, rumors that then-15-year-old Bristol Palin was actually the mother of Gov. Palin's fifth child, Trig Palin, named for a branch of mathematics that deals with triangles, and that Sarah Palin, whose name is a clever phonetic transposition of "parasailin'," hid her daughter's pregnancy and falsely claimed that she was herself pregnant.
This whole bullshit narrative is derived from a bunch of circumstantial evidence, such as assertions that Bristol was removed from school during a period that coincided with the last five months of Trig's gestation and that Sarah Palin was never noticeably pregnant during the relevant months. But it's pretty irrefutable that the Palins pick some crazy names for their children.
The Palins and the McCain camp wisely decided to quash the rumors once and for all by, uh, announcing that 17-year-old Bristol Palin is actually pregnant right now and will marry the father of her child — whose name, I'll mention without commentary, is "Levi" — and then they blamed everything on Barack Obama, because, y'know, belt and suspenders, you can never be too careful.
Also: Points to the McCain campaign for revealing Bristol's pregnancy on "Labor" day. HAHAHA! This would be a lot more zingy and vaudevillian with a siren-whistle sound effect, but unfortunately, I don't know the HTML tags for that. Lending credence to reports that Palin was totally unvetted by the McCain campaign prior to the Friday announcement is this report that Palin's spokesman didn't know about the pregnancy when he was asked about it by a reporter last Friday. Finally, Andrea Mitchell reported Sunday evening that the McCain campaign had suddenly decided to send lawyers to Alaska for belated veep vetting.
BUILD YOUR OWN PALIN FAMILY:
First, you'll need to be really, really fertile. Produce five or six kids. Then, match each baby with a name from the following list:
Bolt
Brick
Brace
Coil
Flex
Grid
Grip
Hex
Joint
Rasp
Ratchet
Shear
Snap
Stick
Torque
Tread
Trowel
Trip
Note that while all of these names were suggested by terms from the Ace Hardware Web site, somehow "Brad" sounded too normal and not very Palinish.
Dude, if you don’t listen to CJ, you will probably get thumped. She told you to go check out “Elephants in the Room” on City Pages. I did and I do not even fear CJ. I even pre-handled your lame ass baby bashing. So rather than repeat, I shall provide a link:
(the) Trevor goes to MN
Also, you may want to check this one, which assuming it is true, provides an eye witness, from your sister paper, to Sarah’s pregnancy:
(the) Trevor reads about Babygate
Anyway, with your convention surge being as limp as an un-Viagra-ed Rafael Palmeiro at a strip club, you had better get to defining some issues before you guys lose Mondale style rather than Gore / Kerry style.
Posted at: September 2, 2008 8:54 AM