THE DAILY BLADE: What Happens After Bill & Hill Turn Out The Lights
Writing about the “effort to humanize Hillary,” The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reports that the presidential hopeful came frighteningly close to revealing Too Much Information:
Sen. Hillary Clinton was campaigning in a Hy-Vee grocery here Tuesday, on day two of her effort to display warmth and fuzziness, when she divulged some startling news: She was dispatching across Iowa "people who have known me, who can talk about what I do when the lights are off."
As luck would have it, Bill Clinton was campaigning with his wife in the Hy-Vee, and he was asked what he and the senator do in their, um, downtime.
"Sometimes we're just sleeping," the former president answered, "because we're so tired."
Translation: “I do not have sex with that woman, my wife.”
Is This One Of Those Jobs That “Americans Won’t Do?”: Part IV
Karen Franco, a 45-year-old who lives in Silver Spring, MD, is a professional nitpicker who “spends a good part of her week searching for live lice in hair and their tiny eggs, called nits,” reports The Washington Post:
Armed with a fine-toothed metal comb, wooden barbecue skewers (to part the hair and clean the comb), magnifying glass, head lamp and scissors, she answers up to seven calls a week from parents desperate to rid their households of the parasites. …
Franco, a part-time art teacher, stumbled into debugging 10 years ago when lice invaded her oldest daughter's third-grade class. Dissatisfied with the school's lice control measures, Franco and eight other parents got permission to screen all the children. They found lice or nits on about a third of them, including her daughter.
"That day was horrifying," she says. Her 2-year-old had lice as well. "From that point on, somebody had to step up, and we needed to deal with it correctly. It became a personal mission." Franco turned herself into the go-to person for lice advice in her school and community. …
Today, Franco gets $50 an hour for her fine-toothed combing. She says she has seen everything from one tiny nit on a scalp to cases "where the entire head is a moving mass of bugs."
While hers might seem an unpopular profession, some major cities are, well, fairly crawling with professional nitpickers. Hair Fairies is dedicated to outing lice in Los Angeles, its home town; the business also has salons in San Francisco, New York and Chicago.
Each year, as many as 12 million children nationwide may become infested with lice infestations, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Editorial Note: To read previous posts in the “Is This One Of Those Jobs …” series, click here, here and here.
PETA: Pathetic, Enfeebled, Timid, Assinine
On December 20th, the Muslim festival Eid al-Adha, PETA submitted shareholder resolutions to fast-food chain Chipotle and to grocery store chain Supervalu asking that they favor suppliers who kill chickens humanely – while hundreds of thousands of sheep, goats, calves and other animals were being wrestled to the ground and having their throats slit in streets, back alleys and garages worldwide. On December 20th, the Home Page of the PETA Web site featured an “undercover investigation” about “horrific abuse to mother pigs and their piglets at a supplier to the largest pig-killing company in the world, Smithfield Foods” but not a word about a “Holiday Horror” that occurs every year. Christians and celebrities are safe targets, but going after Muslims just might get an animal rights activist killed.
Some Seasonal Songs Are Like Fruitcake: Nobody Likes Them
According to focus group data gathered by market research firms, Edison Media Research and Pinnacle Media Worldwide for the 366 radio stations nationwide that exclusively broadcast Christmas music during the holiday season, people’s favorite songs include such standards as Bing Crosby's "White Christmas"; Nat King Cole's "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)"; and Burl Ives's "A Holly Jolly Christmas."
The Stiletto loves all the traditional hymns and carols (“Silent Night”; “O Come All Ye Faithful”; and “Oh Holy Night” are her three faves), as well as the standards. But the holiday song she loved most as a kid (well, even now) is “The Christmas Song” by Alvin And The Chipmunks” (audio file).
Among the most-hated seasonal songs: Barbra Streisand's "Jingle Bells?" (you won’t get any arguments from The Stiletto); the Jackson 5's "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town"; and Elmo & Patsy's "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer." The most deeply detested holiday tune of all time: those dogs barking "Jingle Bells" (in The Stiletto’s opinion, they sound way better than Streisand).
Which brings The Stiletto to one of her pet peeves: By what stretch of the imagination is “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono a Christmas song? Has anyone ever read the lyrics? It’s a sour, sarcastic song and these 366 radio stations should play it anytime they’d like during the year – except during the holiday season.
Stocking Stuffer: A Christmas Miracle
As The Stiletto and her family are celebrating a Christmas miracle of their own this year, the rescue of Frederick Dominguez, and his three children, Christopher, 18, Alexis, 15, and Joshua, 12, who were lost for three days in a heavy forested area in northern CA is especially heartwarming.
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