My baby is the clear choice for president this November. My baby won't use a lot of big words to try to confuse you. He doesn't know any words yet. But he has a good heart. My baby won't cut and run in Iraq. He can't even crawl yet. You'll know where my baby stands on any given issue: wherever I left him, because, as previously mentioned, he can't crawl away . . .

-- priceless. Never was it clearer that in this race, qualifications disqualify.

A contest, of sorts: 1. What did the grass say to the cow? 2. What did the beef say to the chef? 3. What did the 2008 Olympics say to the air quality of the city of Beijing? 4. What did Elian Gonzalez say to his putative adoptive father? 5. What did Lazarus say to Jesus?

While I don’t think it has acquired the viral oomph of “Dick in a Box,” the following outtakes from the “original” Japanese version of “The Office” are essential viewing for printculture types always on the look-out for high-carb fusions of popular culture and East-West discourse.

The last week of classes—time of regrets and relief. I tried to steer my last session toward a gentle landing, but there’s always a bit of a bump as it’s suddenly over. Now I can no longer say “… which we’ll make sure to talk about later” or “Good point, can we hold that for a while?” As usual, I ended the class thinking that I’d talked too much (it gets easier as the years go on—much easier, in fact, than listening) and that I’d left things ...

Somewhere, sometime, fifty or sixty years from now, someone could do worse than write an academic paper or even a dissertation on race and comedy in George W. Bush's America. Such a paper would bring together the following people and events: Sarah Silverman, Sasha Baron Cohen, and Dave Chapelle on the one hand, and Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic rant and Michael Richards' racist one on the other.

I should start with a confession: I originally wanted to call this piece “Is Maureen Dowd Necessary?” –and that was pretty much the whole idea. I typed up some initial notes and then went looking around the internets for an image of Ms. Dowd, whereupon I found not one but three existing articles with that title (a reprint of a New York piece in The Age, Slate, and one by Wonkette), along with “Yes, Maureen Dowd is Necessary” (oh snap!) on Salo...

Actor Gary Sinise is making a plea to the public to help fund efforts to cure Human Dickface Syndrome, from which he has suffered since the age of four.

It occurred to me a few days ago – right as I was waking up for some reason I can’t understand – that there must be “Your computer’s so slow...” jokes of the “Your momma’s so fat...” variety. And of course, I thought, they’d be on the web, because, you know, where else?

While some have presented a fairly damning version of the story, one in which the Vice President and Harry “Funeralgate” Whittington were drunk and not only delayed but distorted the public disclosure of their already legendary hunting accident, it now seems that echoes of “the shot heard round the world” will become increasingly faint, except in the realm of comedy. Woody Allen famously said that the difference between tragedy and comedy is t...

In a paper on fast food and obesity in America, a student of mine described McDonald's as hocking "portions that would make a caveman sick." I circled the word caveman and punctuated it with a question mark, and this was enough to make the caveman not appear in the final version of the paper. Which is a little unfortunate, actually. While she later told me what she was going for, that, according to her, portion sizes are not based on any measu...

On Monday I finished the first draft conference of the semester with my students. Conferences entail meeting with each of my 24 students one-on-one for half an hour over the course of three days to discuss the draft of the first essay. Before meeting with them, I read their drafts, make margin comments, and write about a page, single-spaced, of end comments. I’ve gotten much better over the years, so that I don’t have to stay up in...