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Dear Political Gods,

Please, please, please let Jim Bunning run for reelection in 2010. And please let somebody make it into a reality show. 

Amen.

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ALSO: Fun Fact of the Day

The Capybara is the largest living rodent in the world. Its common name, derived from Kapiÿva in the Guarani language, means “master of the grasses” while its scientific name, hydrochaeris, is Greek for “water hog”.

Capybaras have heavy, barrel-shaped bodies and short heads with reddish-brown fur on the upper part of their body that turns yellowish-brown underneath. Adult capybaras may grow to 4.3 ft and weigh up to 140 lbs. The Capybara has slightly webbed feet, no tail, and 20 teeth.  Once believed to be extinct, it’s closest known relatives are agouti, chincillas, guinea pigs and Rush Limbaugh.

According to our friends over at FishbowlLA, there’s a bit of an internet fracas brewing between Mattel and a coalition of worked-up mommybloggers over the company’s decision to “magically transform” girl-hero Dora the Explorer into, well, something of a slut. 

The mommymob fears that the new, skankified Dora will influence their daughters to develop body image issues, eschew books in favor of makeup and spread their legs for every two-bit SpongeBob on the block, which is probably true since I grew up playing with stuffed animals only to become an unrepentant furry.

Anyhow, the Concerned Women for Chaste Cartoon Characters (CWCCC) is sending around a petition demanding that Mattel suspend Dora in her pre-pubescent glory, forever. Sign up here.

Not that there’s been a particular uptick in idiocy lately, but I thought now would be as good a time as any to pay tribute to some of the news-making idiots who perform the grand public service of making us all feel better about ourselves.

We’ll kick things off with 15-year old douchebucket McKay Hatch, who is apparently trying to eliminate any chance he may have of ever getting to third base by founding the ‘No-Cussing Club’ two years ago at his Pasadena middle school and has now managed to convince local legislators to proclaim this week ‘No Cussing Week’ for all of Los Angeles County. Captain Awesome here is the author of ”The No Cussing Club: How I Fought Peer Pressure and How You Can Too,” and says that naughty words “just make me feel really offended and stuff. It just doesn’t make me feel good.” Well, um, fuck that.

And lest we forget that dolls can make us feel almost as sad as dirty words do, let’s honor West Virginia Delegate Jeff Eldridge, who has introduced legislation to ban the sale of Barbie dolls in the state.  Eldridge says the dolls influence girls to place too much importance on physical beauty, a notion clearly supported by all of the smoking hot women coming out of West Virginia these days. He also expresses concern for girls’ healthy development, and no doubt the Barbie ban will do more for their well-being than, say, addressing deficiencies in health care, fair pay or domestic violence prevention that led the National Women’s Law Center to give West Virginia a resounding F on its most recent Women’s Health Report Card.

Finally, we have Andy Rooney. What can you say about Andy Rooney except that the poor old man has gone completely ’round the bend and needs to be put out to pasture, or sent to the the big tee vee network in the sky? On Sunday, Rooney tackled the pressing and divisive issue of how months are spelled: 

And this? This is just wrong:

The tired theme that women aren’t funny gets some new life in today’s Guardian, with Germaine Greer trying her hand at the famously explosive topic. Greer’s strategy seems to be to mitigate the objections of ladybloggers and assorted other wimminfolk by following each absurd assertion (“Women are about as funny as a botched colostomy”) with some half-hearted apologia (“But that’s only because they don’t want to be!”).

“Women famously cannot learn jokes,” Greer writes. “If they try, they invariably bugger up the punchline. The male teller of jokes is driving towards his reward, the laughter of his mates. The woman who messes up the same joke does so because her concentration is not sharpened by that need. She is not less intelligent, simply less concerned.”

Oh Germiane, you caught me. Try as I might to tell a good chuckler, my lady brain invariably gets distracted by more pressing issues, like hairstyles and sewing notions.

Wait, though. Greer then backpedals a bit and asserts that women actually can deliver jokes, we just can’t think them up:

“Given an opportunity to perform a finished comedy routine, a female comedian will make you laugh as hard as any man. Put her in an improvisation situation along with male comedians, and she is likely to be left speechless.”

Where the logic of Greer’s argument falls apart is when she moves from moderately fact-based Assertion One, “There are more funny men in entertainment than there are funny women” to unsupported, overreaching Assertion Two, “Men are naturally funnier than women.”

I think that if it is true, at least on average, that a woman is less likely than a man to get a laugh, it’s because boys are raised to attract attention, while girls are brought up to deflect it. All jokes, gags and innuendos basically say the same thing: Look at me. And on the whole, men are more comfortable in the spotlight, possibly because they don’t have an entire entertainment industry firing mortars at their self-worth from the time they pick up a crayon.

I wish there were more funny women. There certainly are a few. It isn’t easy being a woman who’s more piss and vinegar than sugar and spice in a society that still values doe-eyed deference far more than we’d like to admit, and given the choice, I’d much rather laugh than drink, cry and cut myself.

I just hope I won’t be laughing alone.