Got this from Polly and it was too funny not to share:

Capital One just announced they have signed Maurice Clarett as their spokesman.

His job will be to stand in front of the OSU Stadium with a gun and ask people “What’s in your wallet?”

Oh, I mean, that poor misguided young man.

(reposted by Gus because Blogger hiccuped and ate it)

A funny thing from yesterday: yesterday’s Dispatch had a wonderful letter to the editor casitgating Columbus-local Schoedinger Funeral Homes for some ill-chosen remarks. I couldn’t believe what I was reading — stuff like that doesn’t happen in real life — so I went to look for the original article, and yeah, it’s not exactly the kind of thing you want to say in print:

With solid schools, a thriving economy and loads of services, including the promise of wireless Internet, Dublin is a great place to live.

As a place to die, however, it lags.

Dublin joins Whitehall as the only Franklin County suburbs without a funeral home.

“We’ve always thought that was kind of odd,” said Susan Jones, vice president of the Central Ohio Funeral Directors Association.

Rutherford opened a chapel in Powell 10 years ago that serves many Dublin residents. And Schoedinger’s chapel in Upper Arlington, along with Hilliard’s Tidd Funeral Home, also serve many from Dublin.

On Monday, Schoedinger introduced plans to Dublin City Council to build a funeral home on an 8.8-acre site in Dublin’s south end.

It’s a longtime company goal, said Michael Schoedinger, executive vice president of Schoedinger Funeral Service and Crematory.

“We’ve known that Dublin is a great growing community and our company has always been about community,” he said.

But the cold reality of mortuary science dictates where and when a funeral business expands.

“There just aren’t enough deaths in Dublin,” he said. “We hope in the near future that that will change.”

Heh. (emphasis added, of course, and there’s more to the article after that; link is from the Dispatch archives, which are registration-required)

Could MY baby angel possibly be a bully?

So I got the dreaded phone call from the daycare today.

Turns out Carl’s been hitting his “friends”, not just a little, not just once or twice, and not just with his hands, but occasionally with toys. So I asked, hoping for the best, “Is it just when he’s frustrated or about a toy or something?” She was kind, but direct, “No, sometimes he just hits them when he wants them to go away.”

WHAT! Could he have inherited my horrible temper? Too much TV? Too much daycare? And we can’t even blame it on the baby yet!!!

Worst one was today I gather from her description and the timing of her call. Seems hard toy + friend’s head = big trouble for him, and for us. She held his arm back just as he fired up to give this poor kid another whack.

So any advice or reassurance is very welcome.
Gus and I will certainly be needing it!

– Valerie

I don’t know how your Valentine’s Day went, but I got filet mignon from my sweetheart.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.

EDIT TO ADD: Brak, for context.

OK, so yes, it is teh funny to gawk at the Ohio GOP gubernatorial primary these days. A frequent lunchtime topic of conversation at my office is just how much more painful it could be to watch Ken Blackwell and Jim Petro try to outdo one another. The spectacle is something we should probably be greatful for, because for the moment, it’s taken away some of the attention on just how pathetically inept the Ohio Democratic primaries are about to become.

Three candidates in the gubernatorial primary? Nope; after an embarrassing round of “we’re not really trying to make this endorsement process difficult for anyone” (see, for instance, ODP Chair Chris Redfern actually calling a blogger to reassure her that they’re not trying to make Fingerhut drop out of the race), lo and behold, Fingerhut’s out. (Not that I think he had much of a chance in the primary, anyway, but come on, it’s a primary.)

Then there’s the now-contested race between Paul Hackett and longtime Congressman Sherrod Brown for the chance (chance!) to run against Mike DeWine in November — Hackett declared first, Brown later only when he sensed some vulnerability in DeWine’s seat. Only now there’s pressure on Hackett to drop out of the Senate race and go back to Cincinnati to run against Jean Schmidt again, leaving the field clear for Brown — which is suddenly trumpeted as “Hackett definitely out” from some quarters. (No definite response from the Hackett campaign yet.)

Oy. Bickering over who should go to which race in order to make it “easy” for the party’s preferred candidates kind of, I don’t know, defeats the purpose of the primary, yes? Save it for November, guys.

(Chris‘s on-the-money post on the subject is what spurred all of this tonight, so start there and work your way through the links. Worthwhile reading.)

UPDATE: Hell, I hadn’t even finished the last post edit and he dropped out.

I’ve kind of stayed out of the whole “Mohammed cartoons” thing because it seems like it’s too big to get around (on the one hand, if the group reacting to the photos were here in the States, I’d probably dismiss them out of hand as crackpots and crybabies — but because it seems like it’s now at least a couple of sovereign nations doing the “crying”, it’s harder for me to be so glib.)

But then I see things like this:

and it’s harder to be quite so undecided. (The photo is an AP photo from Nairobi, Kenya; the link is here.)

Found this at the Volokh Conspiracy, where I also saw this story about similar reaction to an editorial cartoon published in the Akron Beacon-Journal which (I thought, anyway) very clearly pokes fun at the way in which news organizations are dodging coverage of the issue rather than the Islamic religion itself. You can read for yourself, but the gist is that Muslim groups in Akron are condemning the paper for even that.

…

Not wanting to leave a poor taste in everyone’s mouths after that, I’ll relate a story from yesterday’s Mass at St. Francis. I don’t know how it came about, but a couple of guys from Turkey — Muslims — were hosting a special feast in the church basement after Mass. One of them made his invitation pitch from the pulpit at the end of Mass, and from what I could gather (his accent was pretty thick), it was a celebration in rememberance of Noah and the flood, a story present in both Christian and Muslim traditions. After the flood, Noah and his family had to mix together all of the meager food they had on the Ark and made some kind of pudding with it in order to share and celebrate being saved, and apparently the tradition now is that you cook this pudding up and share it with friends and neighbors, Christian and Muslim alike.

Anyway, so this guy got up and gave his spiel in heavily accented English, and when it was all done, the whole church applauded. I don’t know exactly why (it’s not like everyone who gets up to make an announcement gets applause), but it was nice to see.

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (AP) — Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and wounded a companion during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, spraying the fellow hunter in the face and chest with shotgun pellets.

Harry Whittington, a millionaire attorney from Austin, was in stable condition in the intensive care unit of a Corpus Christi hospital Sunday, said Yvonne Wheeler, spokeswoman for the Christus Spohn Health System.

The accident occurred Saturday at a ranch in south Texas where the vice president and several companions were hunting quail. It was not reported publicly by the vice president’s office for nearly 24 hours, and then only after it was reported locally by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times on its Web site Sunday.

Katharine Armstrong, the ranch’s owner, said Sunday that Cheney was using a 28-guage shotgun and that Whittington was about 30 yards away when he was hit in the cheek, neck and chest.

Each of the hunters was wearing a bright orange vest at the time, Armstrong told reporters at the ranch about 60 miles southwest of Corpus Christi. She said Whittington was “alert and doing fine.”

[more]

Since I didn’t see the news tonight, found first at boingboing, where the first question was, “Are lawyers in season right now?”