In Ye Old Garbage Can, Part II

Once again, I'm going to rip off this Blog's polished, hand crafted, Corinthian leather finish, and expose the dark, festering, underbelly of bad ideas, half posts, and things I just got bored with.

Mid October, as the Presidential Election Season was reaching critical mass and John McCain was floundering more than a Disney's The Little Mermaid convention, I was going to comment about McCain's repeated attempts to juice up his campaign in a post tentatively entitled "McCain to Jumpstart Campaign 'Sometime Tomorrow'":

(Reuters) Phoenix AZ - John McCain announced from his couch today that he will begin a jumpstart of his campaign sometime tomorrow.

"My friends, I think that the vast majority of you are sick and tired of the lies coming out of that other campaign. We are beginning a massive overhaul of our message, probably sometime tomorrow, maybe after we watch [The] Simpsons reruns."

The McCain campaign has languished in recent weeks. According to national polls, McCain is behind Obama by as much as 10 points. Anonymous staff persons have pointed to a lack of enthusiasm within the campaign hierarchy and a lack of enthusiasm within the

And that's when I gave up. Who know what I could have written next. "GOP"? "Party"? "Enthusiasm"? The world may never know, and frankly I can't remember where I was going with this.

I think I decided that it wasn't funny enough, so opted to go for something a little more Faustian later in the month.

In late November, I started cobbling together a list of potential cabinet nominees for the newly elected candidate. I opined that "[with] the ongoing housing, financial, energy, weak dollar, auto industry, and overall economic crises, President-elect Obama believes that the country needs someone with a level head who can project confidence in the market and reassure investors."

My nominee for Treasury Secretary was, therefore, Walter Cronkite.

The post had potential, but I got bogged down in the minutiae of cabinet posts, trying to determine if U.S. Trade Representative and EPA Administrator were merely cabinet level posts and should be excluded from the farce.

And, frankly, there's nothing funny about the Secretary of the Interior since Gale Norton.

I tried to start and put a positive spin on City depopulation in April 2007:

So the P-G had an editorial on the recent announcement from those fact-ists over at the Census Bureau that the Pittsburgh Region is continuing to hemorage population. Related commentary can be found here, here, and here, where all the authors miss one key point: depopulation is awesome.

Now what these population pimps will tell you is that the size of the region means a larger share of the tax burden will be borne by fewer people, or it is indicative of the relative health of the region, or

Or something. If nothing else, a loss of population means that there will be fewer and fewer people in the City that know how to spell "hemorrhage" correctly.

An interesting headline that probably had potential: "Cooper Ravenstahl Abducted". It probably would have devolved into some sort of Lindbergh Baby parody, which, in retrospect, would have been in really bad taste. Forgive me for even bringing this up.

And finally, a few weeks ago I nearly posted a Housekeeping item:

So as you can see, the City of Pittsburgh BBI (Bureau of Blog Inspection) finally approved our permit to add a third column onto this site. We're very happy now, as we have more storage for all the miscellany that we've collected over the years and also a second bathroom, which is very convenient for when guests come over.

Of course, we figure that while we're at it, we might as well go a little cleaning, especially on that Blogroll over to the right there, which has been collecting more and more dead links over the last year. That being said, we're putting out a general call for (a) blogs that you folks recommend and (b) attention whores.

I suppose that all of that could have been posted, but for some reason I decided that it was too self-promoting. I don't know what I was thinking: we are still looking for blogs you folks recommend. And whores.

Ah! Catharsis!

rm -i oldjunk