The Scout Report

Is That A Gun in Your Pocket, Or Are You Just Glad to See Me?

"Sekurrity!" squealed Jeté. She had just been read an article in the New York Times by Kristen Shaughnessy on NY1, from which she gleaned (after watching it several times) that Woolrich—inventors of loden fabric (the coarse, oily wool of mountain sheep)—was softening its image by introducing the Woolrich Elite Series, featuring the Elite Concealed Carry Chino. As the company boasts, "This pant is ideal for situations where discretion is important." Jeté, confused by "discretion" (a word she thought she had made up), now thought she was the victim of industrial espionage. After all, she is The Scout Report's stylist, the one who created the company's signature fashion strategy—sturdy, covert, and moisture-wicking. "I don't think it's a co-inky-dink that this company is using the same details my seamstresses use—secret pocket for handgun, comfy elastic waistband to accommodate holster, and other hidden pockets for knives and whatnot," Jeté lamented. TSR has lawyered up. 

 

Revealing digression. In 2007, TSR Board of Directors voted to issue a TASER C2 to each employee after learning that many of them spend a great deal of time alone in underground garages in the middle of the night. While it's true Tasers are not handguns, they build confidence in beginners as they don't require any skill. "Tasering 101" is the introductory course in TSR's Defense Without Consequence (DWC) curriculum. Staff members who master the TASER C2 advance to the next level and learn "How Not to Shoot Your Eye Out" with the Official Red Ryder, Carbine-Action, 200-Shot Range Model Air Rifle, taught sans ironie by Dick "Dead Eye" Cheney.

Controlled tangent. TSR has had a group membership in the NRA for decades. As a matter of fact, it was TSR's Chief of Protocol Enforcement and Defenestration, Mrs. James Peregrine Leger-Demain IV, who convinced the lock-and-load lobby to invite her ersatz fiancé Charlton Heston (above) to be its spokes-fossil. Hessie, as Mrs. IV fondly called him, never "conceal-carried" his gladness to see her. Everyone at TSR misses just how glad he could get.

 

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."

 

 

The Long and the Short of It: 6.15.07

"They got little hands and little eyes, And they walk around tellin' great big lies, Don't want no short people 'round here."—"Short People," misunderstood 1978 song by Randy Newman.

Zut alors! Americans are getting shorter, according to Paul Krugman in his op-ed column, "America Comes Up Short," today in the New York Times.

The data show that Americans, who in the words of a recent paper by the economic historian John Komlos and Benjamin Lauderdale in Social Science Quarterly, were “tallest in the world between colonial times and the middle of the 20th century,” have now “become shorter (and fatter) than Western and Northern Europeans. In fact, the U.S. population is currently at the bottom end of the height distribution in advanced industrial countries.”...The Dutch are now the world’s tallest people, almost three inches taller, on average, than non-Hispanic American whites. The U.S. ended up in 20th place, below Poland, Portugal and Hungary, but ahead of Britain.

Revealing digression. It gets worse. The study finds that rich Americans are shorter than rich Western Europeans. This revelation has caused an increase in the free-floating anxiety that is the default mood permeating The Scout Report offices. The refrigerator is stocked with serotonin jello shots, which, when consumed collectively, temper the  "morning terror, to say nothing of abstract furies and desultory lusts for strangers." Currently, the TSR intern is researching the definition of "rich." Meanwhile, as a diversion, the rest of the editors are compiling a list of short Americans whom we love. So far, Leslie "Brother Boy" Jordan (4-feet-11), Verne "Mini-Me" Troyer (2-feet-11), and Danny "Throw Momma From the Train" DeVito (5-feet-0). We invite our readers to submit their favorites, but Tolkien dwarfs are not eligible.

Jarring juxtaposition. Following Krugman's commentary today is one by David Brooks, which has the potential to render the Komlos-Lauderdale study irrelevant. (TSR assumes that the irony of pairing these two editorials is lost on the Times.) In "The National Pastime," Brooks laments what he believes is the inevitability of a genetically engineered human race and cites the proliferation of online gene pools as ominous evidence.

At this very moment thousands of people are surfing the Web looking for genetic material so their children will be nothing like me. They are looking through files at sperm bank sites with Jetson-like names such as Xytex, which have become the new eBays for offspring...They allow you to browse through page after page of donor profiles, comparing weight, noses, personality and what one site calls “tannability.”...When given this kind of freedom of choice, people seem to want to produce athletic Aryans with a passion for housekeeping. There is tremendous market demand for DNA from blue-eyed, blond-haired, 6-foot-2 finely sculpted hunks who roast their own coffee...In any case, a Harris poll suggested that more than 40 percent of Americans would use genetic engineering to upgrade their children mentally and physically.

    Granted, the Xytex Web site is a little creepy and did frighten the already rattled TSR staff, with its "Creating Families Through Innovation" tagline and tinkly rendition of the first few bars of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." On the other hand, won't the ability to predetermine height solve this slowly developing, but no less insidious, anthropometric crisis. If not, could human shrinkage be the new global warming? Consider the havoc a race of shorter humans could reek on the fashion and design industries in, oh, say, a thousand years.
    Meanwhile, while TSR sees the gene pool roiling with possibility, Brooks frets that if nature triumphs over nurture, "You could have two lesbian bikers giving birth to Mitt Romney." We have no idea what that means, so it's back to the kitchen for another serotonin jello shot.