No. 336: "Three for All"
Planned
Parenthood, the Museum of Natural History, CNN--what's the
connection?
Send
your answer by 5 p.m. ET Sunday to [email protected] .
Wednesday's
Question (No. 335)--"Wall Nuts":
In Germany yesterday for the 10 th anniversary of the fall of
the Berlin Wall, former President Bush reminisced about some bad advice he
received a decade ago: "In my view, that would have been an open provocation,
tantamount to sticking our fingers in the eyes of the Soviet military." Who
advised him to do what?
"Dan
Quayle, who is stupid, advised Bush to do something stupid to the Russians,
because, you see, Quayle is not very smart, in fact Quayle is
stupid."-- Wellesley Wild
"George W. advised his father to 'Get tough on that Russian guy. General
something. Wears that funny looking hat.' "-- Greg Narver
"Whatever it was, it couldn't have been worse than sending Billy Joel to play
Moscow."-- Daniel Radosh ( Al Petrosky had a similar answer.)
"Barb
wanted to flash her black sports bra as she went through Checkpoint
Charlie."-- Sean Fitzpatrick
"An
Oktoberfestively drunk Henry Kissinger egged him on to use the stiff corpse of
Lenin to chip off a hunk of wall."-- Beth Sherman
Click
for more answers.
Randy's Wrap-Up
It's sad to see a great
institution reduced to a tattered geriatric remnant of its former self. But
enough about me. Let's consider President Bush's nostalgic invocation of the
Soviet military. It seems like only yesterday that Gen. Zhukov rallied the
indomitable men and women of that mighty force to stop the German army outside
the gates of Moscow and left them to die by the thousands in the snow. The good
times, they're over so quickly. Today, alas, what comes to mind is a couple of
bad baritones from the Red Army Chorus, drunk on antifreeze, trying to convince
some Iraqi guy that their music stands are made of plutonium and worth a few
bucks. It's sad, really. Like The New Yorker . Or Cher's original face.
Or the "Drifters" on tour, singing the Volga Boatman at halftime during a
Chicago Bulls game. Of course, the shape I'm in, by tomorrow morning I'll have
forgotten the entire episode.
Not Naomi Wolf's Fault
Answer
"Some of our leaders on
Capitol Hill suggested that I come over here to the Berlin Wall and dance on
the wall," said President Bush. "Without wearing underwear," he did not add.
"As if I ever wear underwear!" he then went on not to conclude.
Dan Dickinson's
True-Life Baptist Adventures Extra
Did you know the preachers wear waders?
The minister who baptized me wore waders while I
got real wet. "You're gonna stay down there a while [glub-glubby] 'cause you're
a SINNER!"
In 1958, I was summarily
dismissed as a troublemaker for asking seditiously, "What's with all those
footballs, basketballs, tetherballs, and volleyballs, why do we have to play
'duck-duck-goose' every day?"
Tech Talk Extra
Recent problems with the
Slate
mail server have meant that many responses arrived too late
to appear in the quiz. These were, without a doubt, the funniest answers each
of you has ever written, and they would certainly have run on the first page.
It may be some comfort to you, as it is for me, that this is something we can,
with a clear conscience, blame entirely on others.
Common
Denominator
Moe.
