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It's that time of year again -- time to check the Lake Superior State University's annual list of "banished words." Or, perhaps, a "back to twerk" column.
Welcome back to our annual year-end awards column!
We hereby interrupt our live coverage of Pope Francis leading Midnight Mass this Christmas Eve, because we've got some breaking news from the Pentagon. We apologize for pre-empting our traditional Christmas Eve programming, and promise we will continue our coverage after the newsbreak, on a slight time delay so our viewers won't miss a single minute of the Pope.
For others, joining in the mirth has now come to mean celebrating the season of Festivus, a made-up holiday from a made-up television show. And even the Flying Spaghetti Monster adherents are getting in on the fun this year.
So sit back, break into the bags of candy a night early, turn down all the lights and fire up the pumpkins, because we've got the short and long of both Democratic and Republican nightmares for your terrified pleasure. Enjoy!
It's that time of year again, so gather 'round, kiddies, for our spine-tingling and bone-chilling tales of political horror!
A paean, my dictionary informs me, is "an exultant song of praise or thanksgiving." The reason I'm offering up such praise today is that it is officially National Punctuation Day. [Who knew punctuation had its own day? Andy Warhol would likely have been amused, one suspects.] But just to warn everyone up front, we're veering off from political discussions today in order to have a punctuation discussion instead. I almost titled this article "A Pedantic Punctuation Paean," but you're going to have to look that word up yourself to see why I thought it was a bit too much. But if an article on punctuation sounds unbelievably boring to you... well, there's always kitten videos a-plenty out there to watch on the internet, right?
The politico-media empire which writes the rules of the Washington "What Serious People Are Saying" game have apparently decided that the government shutdown is now melodramatically going to happen. Cue ominous organ music blast (dum Dum DUM!). The key word in that opening sentence is "melodramatically," because our government can now be seen as nothing more than a continuing soap opera. Call it "As The Boehner Turns," or perhaps more appropriately "The Boehner And The Restless."
So the question is now: what will the big 2013 Silly Season issue be? Predicting such things is almost impossible, admittedly, due to the silliness factor itself -- if these things followed some sort of logical process, then we wouldn't call it Silly Season, would we? But that doesn't mean we can't have our own kind of silly fun guessing what it'll be, right? After setting the stage a bit, I'll offer up my own silly prediction at the end, and then we can all see who can manage to out-silly it in the comments.
[The Scene: A warm Philadelphia evening, 226 years ago. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention -- after a long and miserably-hot day of respectful debate (and quite a lot of just plain bickering) over the text of Article I, Section 10 of the proposed draft of the new United States Constitution -- take up the final item on the agenda. We join the Founding Fathers as they (somewhat-wearily) begin discussion of the final subject of the day. Since the debate was conducted behind closed doors, this re-creation uses no names for the participants, to protect their anonymity.]