Tummy + Cake = 'Tomacheache

Have you ever noticed how inappropriate music during the closing credits of the West Wing is for all but about two episodes? Three at the outside? The Shah of Islamibakistan has been assassinated and international peace hangs by a peeled scab in the balance! Fire up the flutes trills! The entire 152nd Division of the Navy is about to be swallowed up by a giant vortex in the Caspian Sea, and a sailor has just had a touching final satellite phone conversation with his blind, crippled daughter with Alzheimer's! Administer a hot injection of tubas, stat! The President's been shot, the secret service agent that the Press Secretary's in love with has been shot, HE was guarding the President's daughter, who has been kidnapped, and to top it off militants have blown up a cabin in Montana, which just happened to be stuffed to the rafters with a baby kittens that hadn't even opened their eyes yet! For god's sake, somebody, I need a tinkly glockenspiel! It's a cliffhanger, people! More jaunty brass! SOMEBODY GET ME A TINKLY GLOCKENSPIEL!

In other news, the Merriam-Webster dictionary maintains the hollow charade of denying that "twatwaddle" and "saucebox" don't tie for word of the year honors every year by asserting that the 2007 Word of the Year is "w00t." This is, on the one hand, a travesty. But on the other, an opportunity for me to pull this old chestnut, composed October 13th, 2006, out of the closet. (He's pulling chestnuts out of the closet now.)

You fuckers are going to be so embarrassed when the history books of the future contain passages like:

"In the first decade of the third millennium CE, the phrase 'woot woot,' thought to be an ebonically derived onomatopoeic device meant to evoke a train whistle, i.e., a sound signifying the celebration of an arrival, gained cultural currency. White girls in the Eastern and Midwestern portions of the contiguous United States began using the phrase ironically, not realizing that it was actually derived from the phrase 'w00t,' a celebratory interpolation from the argot of online SRPG (Strategic Role Playing Game) 'gamerz' and 'l33ts' (elites) -- popular examples included Everquest and World of Warcraft -- who use the phrase as a contraction for the weightier, 'we owned the other team,' when they bested their opponents in fantastical battle or came upon treasure in their nerdly pursuits. Everybody hated it when girls said that shit. And I mean everybody. It was a dark hour indeed in the history of American linguistics.

Wait a second -- I totally thought that was funny a year ago. Man, I'm getting old.