The Scout Report

Bin Laden's Lair Receives LEED Certification

According to the U.S. Green Building Council's Web site, "LEED is flexible enough to apply to all building types." And to prove the assertion and further advance its mission of global domination, the Council has added a new building type, inspired by the understated manse from which slippery evil-doer Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden (March 10, 1957 – May 2, 2011) was recently evicted. The following images represent the credits earned to date. TSR's chief of protocol enforcement and defenestration, Mrs. James Peregrine Leger-Demain IV was quick to observe, "I swear to Allah, did you see the video? The place practically certifies itself. I don't know why those high-minded green people don't give points for benign neglect. In the end, Grey Gardens was the greenest house around."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Revealing digression. "They say you shouldn't say nothin' about the dead unless it's good. He's dead. Good." Thank you, Moms Mabley, for always being relevant and spot on.

 

 

Bad Things Happen When You Read

Yes, The Scout Report (TSR) has risen like a reluctant phoenix from a second-hand smokey pyre of apathy and ennui. This rearing of the head may only last a couple of posts, but the TSR Board aims to reveal and jar in fits and starts. What woke the board from its Raymond Chandler-esque big sleep was the announcement that Alan Gribben, the (bobble) head of Auburn University's English Department, had edited NewSouth Books' edition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, replacing the “n-word” with “slave,” “injun” with “indian," and "half-breed" with "half-blood." (We don't get that last one.) TSR board members read the official version from the Cliffs Notes Library of Long-Winded Literature in its entirety and have no problem with Mr. Twain's word choice. We often takes issue with the number of words an author strings together, but never the choice (except maybe Finnegans Wake, which Dr. Hervey Cleckley, in The Mask of Sanity, called, "a 628-page collection of erudite gibberish indistinguishable to most people from the familiar word salad produced by hebephrenic patients on the back wards of any state hospital"). But we digress.

Twain was particular about word choice. In 1888, he wrote that the difference between the right word and the almost right one was "the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."

High-mindedness notwithstanding, Professor Gribben has too much time on his hands. We suggest a better use might be teaching college students that "Me and Jennifer are going to the mall" is not proper grammar. Now that's offensive! While he's at it though, he might change "Miss Watson" to "Ms. Watson." Obviously, the author was promoting sexist stereotypes, which he emphasized by referring to her as "a tolerable slim old maid." Bless her heart.

Revealing digression. Everyone judges books by their covers. Why else would so much effort go into designing them? Book stores are a disorienting riot of colorful typography, and there is anecdotal evidence of customers having seizures. Perhaps books should also be judged by their titles. If titles were accurate clues to content, we wouldn't have to read the flaps, and Professor Gribben could move on to dumbing down something else. The blog Better Book Titles gives us those clues. Get the gist in a few seconds. Live better lives reading blogs.

 

 

Controlled tangent. TSR's chief of protocol enforcement and defenestration, Mrs. James Peregrine Leger-Demain IV (Mrs. IV), issued this statement, "My family is alarmed that this dust-up will resurrect that specious theory that my ancestor, Nelson Herbert Walker Prescott VIII, a.k.a. Nelly, was the model for Miss Watson, Sambo's dour personification of religious rectitude. The very idea that Cousin Nelly and Sambo [as Twain was known to intimates] took a rowing class one summer means anything other than they enjoyed a school-boy romp is preposterous."

 

 

Periodic Table Masthead

           

Documentary Series: "History's Most Intriguing Ironies"

Scarlett Billows Productions (SBP), the parent company of The Scout Report (TSR), feels the need to diversify in order to generate a profit for its shareholders. Okay, if not a profit, then the appearance of revenue of some sort, even if it's fiat currency from a zombie bank, which pretty much describes all currency these days. As irony—a.k.a. the derivative off of which TSR has been dining for years—would have it, the shareholders in question are also members of TSR's editorial board. Not since Mrs. James Peregrine Leger-Demain, IV, TSR's chief of protocol enforcement and downsizing, made a few Benjamins selling defenestration kits to Wall Streeters in October 2008 has the board earned anything but scorn.

So, here we are. Scarlett Billows, acting unilaterally as always from the SBP bunker (upper left), has turned to film-making to keep TSR in mutton and mead, because if facile pilferer James Cameron can make a fortune, why can't she? Well, she can and will. Cherry Blossoms: the Double Agents of WWII is the first documentary in SBP's original, non-Cameronian series, History's Most Intriguing Ironies. The Texas Board of Education has already expressed interest in adding Cherry Blossoms to its history curriculum.

Controlled tangent. On December 11, 1941, someone chopped down four Japanese cherry trees in Washington in retaliation for the Japanese attack against the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The U.S. government responded quickly and effectively to prevent more hatchet jobs by temporarily renaming them "Oriental" cherry trees, successfully fooling everyone under the age of seven.

The Best and Worst from the past few months: 4.10.10

TSR is not bound by the rigid Gregorian calendar with its sordid papal roots. Its addlepated staff reports on humankind's idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies as they are discovered, less they forget. Plus, the avalanche of weirdness makes producing an annual review overwhelming. Today we begin with WORST O.C.D. HYGIENE PROMOTION. The World Health Organization (WHO) issued a guide to proper hand-washing (left) that makes memorizing the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales seem like good use of a high-school student's time. Actually, these instructions were prepared for surgeons who missed that day in medical school when hygiene was discussed. And yet, we've seen the same poster in restaurants and office restrooms. Seriously, it's a 12-step program, and TSR's editorial board doesn't do droghtes.

WORST HOLLYWOOD SWAG goes to Patty's "Royal Dandie" Miniature Pet Pig. The bonsai swine were offered to Golden Globe nominees and presenters at a "swag suite." Even though you might be able to get a couple of pounds of bacon from them, do you really want to spend the time curing it? (Paris Hilton had to buy her "Princess Piglette" [sic], because she was neither a nominee nor a presenter nor a ticket-holder nor an after-party invitee.)

Revealing digression. What happens when owners tire of their tiny, even-toed ungulates (right), and we know they will? Do they toss Babe in a canyon from their speeding Priuses. There's a hideous precedent. Burmese pythons, one of the world's largest snakes, have been dumped in the Everglades by owners after they get big enough to prefer children to mice. Now there are zillions of them. Piglets wouldn't do that, or so we've been told, but they might get mean like raccoons if they had to live off the land. Something to think about.

And we wrap up this installation with the BEST PULL-QUOTE of 2009 from Rex Reed in The New York Observer:

Public Service Announcement: Swine! What's in a Name?

The Scout Report 's editorial board, in its first-ever Public Service Announcement (PSA), would like to apologize to the even-toed ungulates of the family Suidae for the persecution they've endured at the hands of an hysterical, upright-walking, tabloid-devouring, prehensile-thumb-endowed public. First of all, "swine" is a derogatory term, and, until the family Suidae reclaims it as a politically empowering identifier of its own, TSR will refer to it as the S-word. Now that the ground(hog) rules are established, let's move on to the source of this so-called Pandemic-in-Gestation (PIG).

According to every not-yet-discredited scientific entity, including the acronyms CDC, WHO, and FDA, one cannot get the S-Word Flu from a member of the family Suidae. Each has issued similar statements, under-reported in the mainstream media (MSM) per usual: "[S-Word] influenza viruses are not spread by food. You cannot get [S-Word] influenza from eating pork or pork products."

Controlled tangent. As unambiguous as the edicts above seem, TSR believes that they have not reached the citizens of Main Street, so the board has decided to lift its ban on PSAs and issue a more detailed list of what does not transmit the S-Word Flu. You cannot get S-Word Flu from watching Babe, rumbling with HOG's, matriculating as an Arkansas Razorb ack, or being drafted as a Washington Redskins offensive lineman (or even being a Hogette). Ladies, you will not acquire the virus from carrying a "silk purse made out of a sow's ear." Parents, your ostensibly talented progeny are safe and sound behind the walls o f the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, so calm down. You couldn't retrieve them anyway. 

Revealing digression. Mrs. James Peregrine Leger-Demain IV, TSR's chief of protocol and defenestration, has proposed  that the acronyms listed above rename the current medical pan-panic something with more literary flair, thus sparing the porcine population further persecution. As precedent, Mrs. IV cites Lady Windermere Syndrome. Two doctors, probably   gay, after attending a performance of the Oscar Wilde comedy, Lady Windermere’s Fan: A Play About a Good Woman, hypothesized that fastidious behavior in Victorian women, typified by Lady Windermere, may have prevented them from expectorating frequently enough to clear their airways of infected secretions, and that this predisposed them to the development of bronchiectasis. They published their theory in the cardio- pulmonary journal Chest, proposed the name change, and the rest is thoracic history. Mrs. IV, no stranger to the irreversible dilation of her bronchial family tree, has focused her philanthropic work on renaming medical unpleasantries, because victims feel better about succumbing to illnesses with pretty names. And with that, we have answered the question, "What's in a Name?"

Stay tuned...Tomorrow, TSR's inhouse medical examiner—Myasthenia Gravis, RN—will help readers pick the right Pandemic Protection Mask for them and their families.