Kansas City News Blog

By CHRIS PACKHAM

· Here is an example of a well-written lede in the AP news style: Jesus, John McCain, quit going around acting like such a senile old corpse already. I am the best at the impartial standards of journalism, WHERE IS THE PULITZER PRIZE PATROL WITH MY BALLOON BOUQUET? Yesterday, in a Spanish radio interview, McCain confused the prime minister of Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, with some kind of a generic leftist Latin American dictator, as opposed to the leader of a NATO country, and maybe even temporarily thought Spain was in South America.

Look, I'm the first person to admit that I'm prone to exaggeration. But I swear to god that according to the transcript, this is exactly what happened. McCain's actually doing an offensive Steppin Fetchit-grade impersonation of an Alzheimer's patient, and that is not a disease to make fun of, you guys, how many Make-a-Wish children have we lost to amyloid plaque? It's like actually seeing a baton-twirling fat cop eating a greasy box of doughnuts or a harpoon-carrying Eskimo eating a greasy box of whale blubber. STOP WITH THE STEREOTYPES. I never want to see another "rogue cop who delivers his own brand of justice." Or a wise old black convict who seems unfriendly at first but gradually comes to realize that you are an innocent man. While we're at it, no more archetypes, either, because that makes me think of dead mythologist Joseph Campbell, who the dorks inform me is singlehandedly responsible for fucking Star Wars.

After the jump, a continuation of Back to Basics Week. Click here, or on this map of Spain:

· What with the ongoing collapse of deregulated financial markets into a singularity that will suck all the world's money into an infinitely tiny ball, it's probably weird to spend any time whatsoever thinking about the weird, gross working relationship between Bunyonesque Maximayor Markculean Funkpendulous and his spouse, Gloria Squitiro, but there you go. I am no expert about economics, but I know that the invisible hand of the free market smells like poopy chicken cloaca this morning. This has been Chris Packham with the Chicken Cloaca Market Report.

Mike Hendricks starts out talking about the Funkhouser-Squitiro codependence in this column, but like a lot of other columnists at The Kansas City Star, absolutely can't resist switching the subject to working at home all day. Avid birdwatching enthusiast C.W. Gusewelle already waxed Keilloresque on that boring subject in a column I couldn't find this morning after about 90 seconds of searching, but I did accidentally find this one about how spymaster Gusewelle once outwitted the KGB, which concludes with a statement about how much smarter the generation that uses the words "whippersnappers" and "contraptions" is than the whippersnappers in journalism who go around everywhere with their leaky laptop contraptions.

Although Hendricks' column is disguised as glib advice for the mayor about working from a home office, he actually just wants you, the stinky regular shlub, to know about his rad modern home-office lifestyle and how awesome his life is without a commute to the Star. By contrast, I'm a working man. The field of nanomicroscopy is not advanced enough to measure the size of my paycheck. I'm covered with the honest dirt and the stinky sweat of a man who has to show up at the office every morning at 9:00 a.m., or I get written up by the shift supervisor. And while there's nothing more boring than a columnist with nothing to write about except his home life, it was maybe slightly injudicious to do it the day before 65 of his co-workers at The Star were similarly told to quit coming to the office.

· My tendency is to avoid mistake-intolerant occupations such as mathematics and testicular cancer research and approach life with the carefree joie de vivre of computational slop. There are people way smarter than me working on both mathematics and testicular oncology, producing market-ready products and services such as saving testicles from cancer and Billy Bass novelty trophy fish. Therefore, I can stay curled up in my own ball of ignorance like a baby bunny fetus curled up with its 18 adorable fetal brethren inside the mommy bunny's womb.

The margin of error afforded to statisticians is a four-lane blacktop highway to Semi-Inquartile Range City compared withthe wiggle room we allow testicle doctors, who have to unwind with bourbon shots and hydrocodone tabs after a long day of cutting on testicles while suppressing the urge to shield their own groins with their hands in reflexive empathy. All statisticians have to do to maintain their fancy, mortarboard-wearing air of professionalism is tell you exactly how wrong they might be after tendering their results, i.e., "Margin of sampling error plus or minus three points." So to all of my friends who send me the Gallup Daily Tracking Poll every single day, yeah, sure, I'm happy broader trends point to a collapse of Gov. Sarah Palin's favorables and a rise in her unfavorables, and also Sen. Barack Obama's recovery in the national numbers, but remember that those numbers are being compiled by guys who probably get to work at home all day while drinking beer and playing Bookworm, like Mike Hendricks.