I was having one before you said that.

Was NightLine always as hokely as it is? I sort of wish that I had started seeing it just a few months earlier, because by the time I started, Ted Kopalong was already in "what? I thought my contract ran out in April" mode, and had mostly turned over the show to temporary fill-ins, one of them I believe being Terrence Moran, who is also one of the permanaent fill-ins there now. Unless it was some other white man wearing a suit who doesn't have a funny accent or mustache. Moran is not really notable for his anything. Whoever that was would be there most days with a segment like "what's happening to all the Howard Johnsons'?," much to the delight of... Howard Johnson, if he's still alive or ever was. T. Koppel would only appear to interview Tom Brokaw about Peter Jennings being dead or to throw to a clip of himself wearing a safari jacket in a helicopter flying over New Orleans. Obviously, unusual scenarios; I never got to see what he did when it was a full, mostly dull time job. I assume one doesn't get to be called "distinguished journalist" by talking about how much one loves clam chowder, but now I may never know.

That leaf says it all.

I went to a few Howard Johnson places and didn't even know they sold clam chowder. I remember liking the buffet at one and being disappointed that there was no buffet at another. Generally I approve of any situation where I can have as much fried meat as I want without similarly multiplying the quantities and prices of less-good tasting mandatory side dishes I didn't want to begin with. So nothing happened to the good Howard Johnsons'; I only burned down the ones without buffets.

Today (or last Tuesday, when I thought I'd have this prepared by Wednesday) the question was regarding the humanenity of executing prisoners by lethally injecting various things into them: Are those cruel and unusual punishments? I say that they are not, because, regardless of cruelty, those have been going on for almost twenty-nine years, and so are fairly common and regarded as usual. Ehhh, and I am not in jail, so perhaps I do not have the right perspective, but it seems to me that once you have decided to kill someone as a form of retribution, that person's physical well-being is not your concern. I don't mean that it need not ever to be, I mean that it is not and I don't believe you if you say it is. Inviting doctors to readminister numbing agents to a dying injectee who seens to be fidgeting doesn't make you look like a nice person if the injecting was your idea. The doctors refused, by the way, citing ethics conflicts. Good for them. Beside that, they're busy. Let those ethical physicians get back to charging for surgery to replace the damaged liver caused by the scalpels and tennis rackets they accidentally left in the patients during the first surgeries.

Only one who overcomes Mt. Ordeals can go strongly against the darkness!

And then, after the doctors, I was shown scenes of people protesting, just in general. I welcome you to get mad at the concept of death as penalty, but do not do so for the first time over a stab rapist who is afraid it might hurt a bit. Fight uppercase punishment because killing people is a nasty thing to do to anyone. Fight it because so many persons are imprisoned based on confessions obtained through suspicious means, and jury decisions made without knowledge of crucial withheld evidence (or jury decisions made by idiot groupthinking juries). Fight it because sending a man to prison for twenty-five years and then killing him as part of that sentence makes no sense if killing him was the plan from the start, and there was no way he could change that by proving himself as a decent human. What's crueller than that? "I'm going to put you in this box for more time than you've lived up to this point, and then I am going to take you out of this box and kill you regardless of anything that can ever happen in the world ever again." And these people are worried he's going to feel pain from the chemicals? What about that big ol' sharp syringe needle? Those totally kill. Could we get someone in here to rub a cotton ball over the insertion point, please?! I wonder if Stanley "Toki" Williams was buried with a flower-printed band-aid on his right arm.

I do not have reason to think the subject of the report here confessed falsely or tried to prove himself as a decent human during his sentence, but I mean in general. Also, I do not think the protestors were protesting for the first time, but Nightline certainly didn't show any death penalty protestors yesterday. I wish it had, though, because then I would not feel obligated to provide these disclaimants.

I think I might not have all the facts on this issue, but where am I expected to get these facts if not an official branch of the ABC news tree, "where more Americans get their news than from any other source?" People generally take "news" to mean "facts," but maybe they allow themselves to be decieved by assuming they are being told facts from organizations only contractually obligated to provide "news," which are only a plural form of an adjective meaning "recent." Non-factual information can also be recent. What? I have just been handed a bulleting stating that non-factual information cannot be recent. Well, how about that. And this just in: no one ever gets handed bulletins.

Even that slogan is of questionable validity. While ABC claims "more americans get their news" from ABC, NBC has been known to profess "more Americans watch" their respective information beer funnelbongs. Both networks make boasts to the same effect, but phrase them differently so both are correct, yet entirely contradictory in their intended implications.

I'll leave the ''disk'' inside the camera, if you don't mind.

Orrr. The other report was about overhyped US Olympic figurehead Cody Milor. For some reason, despite any country in the world being able to send their own best skiiers, an American not beating them all is scandalous.

I think we were all doomed the moment your shirt came off.

If you're referring to math or calligraphy I won't bother.

The giant lunch bag controls and focuses Duggan's rage.

the other guy in the ring is Ted Danson.

That's pretty pathetic to lose an athletic competition to a team of disembodied heads.

That was so entirely not my intention to have happened when I started typing this.

I remember a few years ago I saw some giant obnoxious poster titled "Launching Apollo" with this ultimate pretensious photograph of some profile guy on a sled wearing snorkle-goggles, and I guess his name was Apollo. Oh no. And then there were lots of small letters saying stuff about how since he was competing in six events he would probably win six gold medallions. It's stupid to think he will just because that's the best possible thing he could have done. I'm supposed to think he will be great just because he is named after a god? Alcedes, the red robot from Xardion, is named after what demigod Heracles was called, admittedly (appropriately), before he did anything great, and is even more pathetic. Its name isn't even spelled properly. It should be Alcides. Robots are dumb. And robots like Alcedes are cowards, too.

I do not take orders from you, Alcedes!
You can't win a medal that way until 2008, stupid coward robot. Or rather, you can't ever win a medal. It is beyond your means.

Alcedes Alcedes Alcedes. I let you live this time, but don't think this is over. In short time your fate will be sealed, Alcedes. I'm not finished with you.

Thinking there is any great power inherent in "Apollo" is as logical as placing a baby between chocolate and a graham cracker and trying to eat it just because you named it Marshmallow. I can tell you from experience that does not work very well.

But the report wasn't on Apollo. It was about Bloaty Mildner. You say he did not win any medals? I say good for him. You, twit media, built him up as a god (and he was not even named after one). You payed him money to be in advertisements and magazine photographs. All he did was ski better than the other Americans you saw him in the preliminary context of, and sign the ridiculous money contracts you came up with. If he told you he was not especially concerned with winning, and actually turned out to not be especially concerned with winning, he is not the failure. How many skiiers are there who didn't win in a certain competition, anyway? All but three (or all but one, from most persons' perspectives). Boaty Milton is one of them.

It wasn't Nightline, but the local news I caught the sports end of (much as one catches whooping cough or cholera or bulimia) had something about the Amelican hockey team which I have paraphrased as "is there a silver lining in bronze for a team who dreamed of gold?" First of all, whoever came up with that should have to drink an entire unfrozen hockey rink as punishment. And second, what's that even supposed to mean? Who went to Tostito saying "you know, I'm really aiming for number two here." ?


Who that's not a complete goon, I mean. Even Slim Goodbode Miller wasn't out on The Slopes hitting rocks on purpose.

I know he was competing for a final possible medal on Saturday, but I can't get on the internet every day, and you've possibly figured out that if by the time I do get on the internet I haven't forgotten which information I wanted to check with credible sources, it ends up contradicting everything I'd spent the previous days typing, so get thee quiet.

My original comment for the above picture was "Snow White looks pretty good for a 90-year-old," but then I saw that it was actually Sasha Cohen, who we know is a master of disguise from her work on D'Ali G Show, and so it is less impressive.

"Skating for gold" sounds less stupid as a niche beggar's daily routine than a newspaper headline.

Skating for gold.

It sounds stupidest of all as a web page ending, I have discovered.