Daily Briefs: Great Balls of Corn; Old People Unite
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By CHRIS PACKHAM
Victory for the old people. OW! My hip! I’ve heard funnier things on geriatric radio show A Prairie Home Dialysis Companion, but some prissy olds, offended by a very, very slightly off-color joke, have convinced the Kansas City T-Bones to back off their marginally kind of funny Michael Vick Night at Community America Ballpark. So, um, way to strike a blow for the convicted dog abusers? I guess?
It was only about a 2.4 on the Richter scale of hilarity. You couldn’t feel it, but the scientists said it happened somewhere deep in the earth’s crust. However, as a community, I feel very strongly that we should be free to rally around the idea that Michael Vick is an asshole. Because what else is going to bring us together as a people and cross the aisle and bridge the divide and heal the wounds? Muslim terror agent Barry Obama? I think I heard somewhere that he doesn’t even wear an American flag on his lapel. HAHA! The old people will never see this because they think e-mail is the internet.
You mess with the bull, Valerie Plame Wilson, and you’ll get the [REDACTED]: Valerie Plame Wilson, a CIA agent exposed by the Bush administration, spoke Friday at the University of Kansas about a lawsuit she’s filed on First Amendment grounds over what she calls the unnecessary censorship of her memoir by the CIA. If she could just wait until next January, President Barry Obama would declassify her whole life history, right before bringing us together as a nation and fixing the economy, but slightly after curing Iraq and bringing home our troops. Because, hey, priorities.
Rain on the Corncrow, Blood on the Corn: Back in the 1980s, the American farm was dying out, for some reason. I did a lot of huffing as a teenager, and the details get blurred in my head, but I believe Willie Nelson’s hippie Farm Aid concerts were the only thing standing between family farms and getting foreclosed by some banks. And there was a whole genre of Hollywood Farm Films about hard-working farmers trying to work the land while keeping the fat-cat bankers from foreclosing. In my memory, the farmer was always played by Tom Berenger, his wife was played by Sissy Spacek, and the fat-cat banker was played by Charles Durning. Those movies sucked real hard. Also, John Cougar Mellencamp was mixed up in there, too. HUFFING!
In my probably self-created history of farms, what happened next was that Archer-Daniels Midland, the George Washington Carver of corn, figured out over a thousand different ways to use corn, and now everything we use on a day-to-day basis, including sweetener, electricity, pet food, corn on the cob, the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, and the space shuttle are made entirely from corn. This saved the corporate farms. Then somebody figured out how to make ethanol from corn, and the market for corn skyrocketed on an ethanol-burning rocket made out of corn. The Agriculture Department is reporting that American farmers are planning to plant 90.5 million acres of corn this year — the most since World War II. Computer-generated Orville Redenbacher reminds you to eat corn three times daily, and drinking Coke totally counts toward that quota.
KEYWORDS: Zach Galiafianakis, Michael Cera, Between Two Ferns, fake talk show, Superbad, “tickle my thigh”:
