Wild Boars Reaching New England -- Popcorn by The Colonel #42

State officials are scrambling to deal with an invasion of roaming behemoths that rototill fields, 
dig up lawns, decimate wetlands, kill livestock, spread diseases, and attack humans.

Just kidding. If only our state's problems were so easy and delicious to solve, we'd still screw the whole thing up.

The dark truth is that state officials wish something like this would happen to distract the public from truly unpleasant budget choices being made.

The “pharmacist era” of journalism is over; no more authority figures giving you what experts have decided you need to know. We’re now in the “drug dealer” era of news -- you may not entirely know or trust your source, but it gives you a rush and you’ll probably be back.

And now, more anodyne fare:

***After Google, the second most used search engine on the Internet is YouTube’s.

***Get-out-the-vote groups blur the line between “voter contact” and “voter interaction.” The latter is more effective.

***A lot of Web users go onto Facebook and never come off. God have mercy on them.

*** “There is no such thing as investigative tweeting.” --Jim Geraghty

*** “Fisking” is blogosphere slang for point-by-point criticism of a statement, article, or essay. It takes its name from Robert Fisk, a British journalist whose 2001 dispatches from the Middle East U.S. bloggers reposted and dismantled.

*** In 2011, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was still cool. Somewhere between 2011 and 2013, it became pathetic, an occasion where the permanent political class in D.C. dresses up and has a prom to make fun of itself. Wasn't it lame? The Hollywood crowd envies the D.C. crowd its power, and the D.C. crowd envies the Hollywood crowd its glamour.

*** Glamour has a glamorous definition (“an elusive, mysteriously exciting, and often illusory attractiveness that stirs the imagination and appeals to a taste for the unconventional, the unexpected, the colorful, or the exotic”) but a less glamorous etymology (“Scots glamour, glamer, alteration of English grammar”). But hold your horses, up goes the glamour quotient when you read the next part: “from the popular association of erudition with occult practices.”

*** Which reminds one: Wesleyan needs a good old Inquisition to weed out witches and warlocks with all their erudite occultism (or is it occult erudition?). Sign the petition when the nice Burn the Witches people come to your door. (Now that’s voter interaction.) Sign a fake name if you’re a gutless coward (“Charles Chaplin”; "Ed McYone"), but don’t decline altogether, or they’ll write down your address as a potential “de Coven house.”

*** “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.” Why not? Is it assumed it’ll be the Roman one?

*** “Scots” is not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic, what the Scots call “Gallic.” Scots, like Modern English, is descended from Middle English, on the list of Germanic languages; Gallic is over on the Celtic list.

*** Zen interlude: "The alphabet of silence is made up of silent letters."

*** Life in the margins of error: The Colonel thought the recent HBO movie “Phil Spector” was going to star Al Pacino as Phil Spector and Helen Mirren as Ronnie Spector. Da do ron ron!