Something New

I have a new blog! If you like Deadpan Inc. and can also read, you might enjoy The Continuing Adventures of Sheldon Ashbury. Check it out, and if you enjoy it, tell all your friends on MySpace.

Here's another largely unseen episode from the archives, but don't forget to visit the new blog!

Republican Logic

This isn't new, but looking through my stats I noticed most of you missed this episode. So with election day coming soon, I thought it would be a good time to re-post it. Enjoy.



Seriously, when has the risk of slipping into a higher tax bracket ever kept anyone from trying to get rich? Certainly didn't under Reagan when the top tax rate was 50%, or under Nixon when it was 70%, or under Eisenhower when it was 91%. Ask any tea party person if we were better off in the 50's, and I'll bet they'd say "You betcha!"

If the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire, the top rate jumps from 35% all the way up to 39.5%. At that rate, I guess the wealthy will say, "Screw it, why even try?"

Stupid Edison

Boy, it's been awhile since my last post. Busy, busy, busy. I'm not sure if the following is all that funny, but it is something that really bugs me. Wires on poles. In the 21st Century? Seriously?



Every few years my electric company, ComEd, comes down our street with crews to trim the trees under the electric lines, carving them into Y shapes to make room for the wires. It looks ridiculous. And the branches still knock down the wires when it storms. How can we force them to invest in a more reliable, less visually-polluting, infrastructure?

Am I starting to sound a little like Andy Rooney? I am not a curmudgeon. I'm not.

Foreign Accent Syndrome

Yeah, I know, it's been a while. But I've been really, really busy. New episodes of Breaking Bad are airing!

This was a half-baked idea I had bouncing around in my head for a long time and kind of forgot about it, and then I saw the story of the British woman suddenly talking with a Chinese accent and it came back to me. Enjoy.



Update: I found video of the lady in the news story. She's not talking in a Chinese accent any more; now it's sort of generic European.

Touchless Soap Dispenser

This seems to be a totally different subject, but it could be considered a sequel to last week's health care reform episode, which for some reason is getting 10x the normal number of YouTube views.



Don't get me wrong. I'm not a socialist, at least not all the time. Free-market capitalism is great for some things. If it weren't for free-market capitalism, we'd all still be toting around Commodore SX64s. Here's what that looks like:

I used to use a box like that to program multimedia shows. (I'm really old.) That open bay is for a second $400 170 KB floppy drive, which was handy for making back-up floppies. But I digress.

I'm glad capitalism drives so much innovation and creativity, most of the time. But when it comes to my health insurance, I'm not sure a corporate entity whose primary objective is maximizing ROI for the investment community has my best interests at heart. There it seems all the innovation and creativity goes into finding new ways to screw us.

Here's one of those nifty soap dispensers. Only thirty bucks (batteries not included). Note the handy built-in tray for catching the inevitable dribbles due to lack of hand/motion-sensor coordination.

The Health Care Reform Puppy

I'm just going to throw this out there and see what people think. I have a feeling it might be a little divisive. Please feel free to leave a comment--just try to avoid the worst obscenities and death threats. There are kids here.

The Fattest Woman

I started writing this about the woman who wants to eat her way over to over a thousand pounds, and I was going to have them talk about the consequences for her if she fails, the function for society that "the fattest man" and the "the fattest woman" serve in helping us feel better about our not-so-fat-after-all bodies, and what not. But then the idea took an entirely different turn for the better, I think. Enjoy.