The Scout Report

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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: