Chapter 207: Section 1. Marriage of man to certain relatives

No man shall marry his mother, grandmother, daughter, granddaughter, sister, stepmother, grandfather's wife, grandson's wife, wife's mother, wife's grandmother, wife's daughter, wife's granddaughter, brother's daughter, sister's daughter, father's sister or mother's sister.

Chapter 207: Section 2. Marriage of woman to certain relatives

No woman shall marry her father, grandfather, son, grandson, brother, stepfather, grandmother's husband, daughter's husband, granddaughter's husband, husband's grandfather, husband's son, husband's grandson, brother's son, sister's son, father's brother or mother's brother.

Chapter 207: Section 3. Application of Secs. 1 and 2

The prohibition of the two preceding sections shall continue notwithstanding the dissolution, by death or divorce, of the marriage by which the affinity was created, unless the divorce was granted because such marriage was originally unlawful or void.

At first glance, one might wonder why such an explicit list and why they didn't use common titles like "Aunt" and "Uncle". Though, once you delve beneath the surface and load the lists into a spreadsheet to make sure: You're left asking why a man can marry his son's wife and a woman can marry her husband's father, but a similar union is forbidden, the other way around?

Citation

I'm sure that I've hinted about it before, but there was a time that I'd tell receptionists or someone whom I didn't think really needed my name that I was either Peter Fonda, Phillip Michael Thomas or Anwar Sadat depending on my mood. Now as I've gotten older, my son's favorite movie for the past couple of months has been Thomas and the Magic Railroad with Alec Baldwin and Peter Fonda.

Of course there's nothing wrong with the flick, but we have so much Thomas and part of me wishes that he'd occasionally want to see something from one of the disks narrated by George Carlin or Ringo Starr. Carlin's work is pretty straight, so I just long for it to have something different in the background, while Ringo apparently did the first season, when "Mr. Conductor" was called "The Fat Conductor" and according to my daughter, there's a storyline in which one of the engines narrowly escapes "sudden death".

IOW: It's after 1AM and my boy is showing no sign of going to sleep. Right now, he's got a couple of chairs lined-up and he's climbing back and forth from me to the other end, while Mr. Fonda is letting "Lady" loose in the other room.

Oh, and "Baby Elmo" is getting carried along, so he keeps whining and asking for a bottle.

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I'm not going to name him up-top because he would find it via a Google Blogsearch and then I'd be outed, but lately I've taken an inordinate amount of pleasure in teasing a Bubble 2.0 figure on his own blog. I don't know why. I've never met the guy and have nothing against him. In fact there's nothing really wrong with him making a living through writing and webcasting, it's just that something inside of me takes pleasure in publicly questioning the validity of his messages.

Though, now that others have joined-in and the chorus is getting louder, the exercise is beginning to lose some of its appeal.

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Earlier this evening, I flashed over to the website for Craig Ferguson's show because I couldn't remember the name of the musical act and her voice was still in my head. If you haven't heard Nellie McKay, I can certainly suggest that you watch somebody's copyright infringement of her Friday night appearance before it's jerked from YouTube.

Of course, she's that whole jazzy piano, retro sound that has been among my faves for a while and I'd say from this one performance, I'd compare her to Rickie Lee Jones. Though after I submit this post, I'm going to flip through some of her other YouTubes, so I'll have a better idea and I might possibly try to find a legal copy to burn for our car ride tomorrow.

BTW: While you're there, you may notice that CBS uploads portions of Craig's monologue-type things. If you go to his main website, you'll find that they produced a montage of Tom Snyder clips from when he hosted the show and because I missed it the first time, I'll also recommend that you watch Craig's "Show & Tell" from July 30th because as usual, he was hilarious.

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Because a lot of this post has been me repeating myself, I thought I'd point-out that American Express has now uploaded their "Members Project" commercial and another video featuring "Tim from the office next door". Now that I've seen both and have done some side-by-side comparisons, I'm pretty sure that my initial instinct was right and as I posted the other day, he's being played by David Alan Basche, whom I recognized from a crappy sitcom which I mostly watched due to Peter Bonerz's involvement.

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And finally; About once a month, I turn on the local country station and for some reason, the last couple of times, a novelty ballad has played during my short drive and though you may want to go back and wash your mind out with the Nellie McKay video or her newest Amazon Sampler afterward, the Good-Ole-Boy in me still gets a kick from the words to Billy Currington's song.

Usually when I'm making a mid-evening run to the grocery store, I quickly flip through my radio presets for something to hear.

Sometimes, I'll land on Alice Cooper's show (brought to you by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America); Sometimes it's Dr. Drew and because it's only a two minute drive to anywhere, I occasionally land on a syndicated program called "The Tom Leykis Show" which is sort of a chauvinistic, male-centric advice program. (Sample quote from this evening: "When you look at Victoria Beckham, don't think that all girls in England look like her. For every Victoria Beckham, there's a hundred fat girls with bad teeth")

For years, whenever I've heard Tom Leykis, I'd wonder if he really was Jay Thomas doing a show under a different name because the voice sounds very similar to me. Not to mention the fact that the Leykis program is distributed by CBS Radio and is broadcast from the Paramount lot, which is where, I believe they did Mr Thomas' last couple of television shows.

Tonight, I took a couple of minutes to look-up Mr. Leykis and found on his Wikipedia page that he's quite likely a real person, who has been in radio since the '70s. After I was fully satisfied about the person to whom I've been listening, I flipped over to read Jay Thomas' entry and though I knew he still has as good of a film career as he's ever had, I also discovered that he's on Sirius Satellite Radio and he moonlights as a licensed real estate broker, working with a Coldwell Banker office in Santa Barbara.

( More, Completely Useless Information about Similar Subjects after the Jump )

Earlier tonight, one of the Seinfeld episodes which ran on my local station was the one about the missing library book. Every time I see the following scene, I remember seeing some commentary from Mr Seinfeld somewhere, where he admitted that they had no idea of how funny this exchange would play and it was all he could do to keep his act together, as it transpired.

As I watched it this evening, I thought about making a poll asking for your votes on the funniest single scenes from the sitcom format, but without putting more than an hour's worth of study into the question and by restricting myself to the very narrow criteria: Lucy in the candy factory was pretty much the closest competition, I could think of at the time.

If anybody else would like to make any suggestions, I'm wide open and would gladly accept any nominations. Though unless something else springs to mind, the following could be the funniest single scene in the history of the situation comedy.



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The three guys from thirtysomething still do acting gigs, but for the most part, I think most people would consider them directors.



Currently, Ken Olin is hard at work directly episodes of Brothers & Sisters. Peter Horton has a producer's credit and he directs a lot of Grey's Anatomy. While Timothy Busfield had a producer's credit and directed much of Without a Trace, before he switched to directing episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, where he also has a co-starring role as the show within a show's director.

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In 1996, there was a short-lived situation comedy centered on a seafood restaurant in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

For anyone who may not be aware, Gloucester is a small fishing city which might better be known as the headquarters of Gorton's and as the home port for the "Andrea Gail", the real-life boat victimized by The Perfect Storm.



Townies was a Carsey-Werner production which aired for one season on ABC.

The program starred Molly Ringwald and because most of the action took place in her family's business, she received top-billing and was by all accounts, the star of the show.

Lauren Graham played her newly-married, lifelong best friend; Jenna Elfman played the "friendly" girl from their high school class, who like the other two, also waited tables in the restaurant and they all dreamed of something a little better to varying degrees.

Ron Livingston and the incomparable Conchata Ferrell co-starred, while Eric McCormack had a recurring role.

ETA: After making this post, I found that the Carsey-Werner website has three enlargable cast photos available.

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And finally; Last week, creactivity embedded a hilarious clip from Ellen and due almost entirely to the contribution of the viewer on the telephone, it has to rank as some of the funniest found humor that we've seen in a long, long time.

I don't know who or what alerted me to the story of the 81 year-old Pennsylvania resident's recent visit from the Secret Service. It could've been Yahoo! News, it may have come from a random blog or perhaps it came from one of my lj-friends, I'm not certain and I apologize if I'm supposed to be crediting somebody, but I'm not able to recall.

Anyway, the elderly fellow wrote a letter to his local paper about Saddam's execution and because he said "they hanged the wrong man", without saying whom he meant, the Secret Service showed-up on his door. This reminded me of old episode from the first season of One Day at a Time, so I thought I'd share.

In the television program, Ann Romano had written a letter to the president of the phone company and she ended it with a quote from "For whom the bell tolls". Unfortunately, President Ford was scheduled to visit Indianapolis and his motorcade was to pass by her apartment building and because her letter had somehow gotten misdirected, the Secret Service showed-up and locked the place down until the President was out of the area.

What made me think of this tonight is that I made a snarky "fill-in-the-blank" suggestion on another site; "The State of our Union is..." and I thought better than to say "fine" because we're pretty much united in opposition to the administration, all because of a guy from Bethlehem, who apparently doesn't live under a star.

Excerpted from the Associated Press;

A Walt Disney World employee dressed as the character "Tigger" was accused of hitting a child while posing for a photo, a spokeswoman for the theme park said Saturday.

Jerry Monaco of New Hampshire videotaped his son, Jerry Jr., posing with the costumed character at Disney-MGM Studios on Friday and recorded the confrontation, according to a statement from the Orange County Sheriff's Office.

The father said Fedelem intentionally hit his son "on or about the head," said sheriff's spokesman Carlos M. Padilla. "The tape only shows a fraction of what happened. Now it's up to us to find out what led up to that."

In 2004 a Walt Disney World employee dressed as Tigger was accused of touching the breast of a 13-year-old girl while she posed with him for a photo. A jury found the man not guilty.

Related: Fathers Assault "Telly" and "Cookie Monster" at Sesame Place (from 2003)

I posted the following offtopic comment to a gossip blog's post about Donald Trump's war on Rosie O'Donnell. At the beginning of the comment thread, someone suggested Rosie invite Trump's ex to guest host The View and the focus of the original post was a YouTubed teaser for Entertainment Tonight. Hopefully these bits of added info will help explain some of my references.

Speaking of "ET" and Ivana... A million years ago, Leeza Gibbons and John Tesh had an afternoon talk show which was broadcast live. The show "borrowed" heavily from Regis' format and it started with a host chat segment.

One day Ivana was scheduled to be a guest, I believe she was planning to promote a book and I know that it was after Donny had dumped her for a younger model. Anyway, Ivana was running late and got to the studio during the opening segment, so Gibbons and Tesh had to fill time while she was getting made-up.

It was during this time-wasting banter that Leeza said something along the lines of "Ivana is everywoman" and Tesh almost fell off his chair laughing. He obviously couldn't believe what she had said and wasn't making any secret of it, plus he repeatedly pointed-out the utter ridiculousness of such a claim, live on the air.

When they came back from a commercial, the hosts said that Ivana had left without coming on stage and if memory serves; "John & Leeza from Hollywood" soon went into showing only reruns, perhaps as quickly as the very next day and the show completely disappeared within a couple of weeks.

Hopefully Donny will shut-up after The Apprentice premieres on Sunday, opposite a new Desperate Housewives.
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Note: I actually didn't remember the show's name and had to get it from IMDB. Though, it does seem that it aired on NBC.

I ran across this wire story about some of the assorted laws that'll be taking effect on the first. A lot of it is the usual stuff; Seven states are raising their minimum wage; Alaska and South Carolina are going against bullying and a few states are lowering taxes.

One that leapt out at me is that Illinois is making it a crime to advertise or conduct a musical performance, if it's not absolutely clear that you're not the real thing and just a tribute band. The way the law is written, there is an exception if you own or have been assigned the trademark, or if at least one member is from the group that had previously released a sound recording under that name and if they have the right to use that name. Otherwise, it will be illegal to claim a "false, deceptive, or misleading affiliation, connection, or association between the performing group and the recording group" and it's punishable by up to a $50,000 fine.

When I was looking for the exact wording of this legislation, I read through a press release from Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich listing some of the other new laws taking effect. Unfortunately his release didn't mention the pox on cover bands, but it did include a paragraph that says it will become a crime to falsely identify oneself as a decorated war hero and there's another law going into effect to protect against "unscrupulous mortgage 'rescue' firms", who fraudulently take over a person's property.

So, I gather there's a problem with people not being what they claim in Illinois, or at least it looks that way from here.

After reading that Comedy Central is going to migrate an animated series from a mobile phone service to their network, I decided to take a look at the show. On the promotional site for Amp'd Mobile's Lil' Bush: Resident of the United States, there appears to be two five minute videos available for our viewing pleasure, the most recent and the series premiere.

After watching both episodes, I clicked on a promo blip which started with words on the screen that referenced The Simpsons and The Late Show with David Letterman, as being on he Executive Producer's resumé. And, because the person doing the voice for Lil' Bush sounded familiar and because Dave owns Craig Ferguson, I jumped over to IMDB to look-up the actor's name.

If it is the fellow from the Bush sketches on The Late, Late Show, I don't know that I found the right person because whomever I found, he obviously updates his own information. Otherwise, when you search for Chris Parson, how else would they know that he "considers Chaplin's 'City Lights' to be the very best film he has ever seen" and "his favorite song is Henry Mancini's 'Moon River'"?

This just flashed onto my Yahoo! and I thought it worth clipping;

On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was 536,870,911. If the first vampire came into existence that day and bit one person a month, there would have been two vampires by Feb. 1, 1600. A month later there would have been four, and so on. In just two-and-a-half years the original human population would all have become vampires with nobody left to feed on.

"Attention associates! We have a Code Adam. There's a lost little boy wearing a cowboy outfit and a brown shirt."
Once the announcement had been made, Walmart employees started flowing from everywhere. They came from the back and out from behind their specialty counters, then they all literally started fanning throughout the store. The lost kid was found in less than two minutes, so they canceled the alert. All in all, this left me wondering if it's a "Code Adam" because "A" is the first letter of the alphabet, so it's the most important thing or was it named after the Walsh kid, who was abducted from a Sears store?

According to his website, the young lady on the right is the eighteen year old daughter of former Chattanooga Mayor and current Senatorial candidate Bob Corker from Tennessee. Her name is Julia and yesterday, the Wonkette posted a couple of racy pics from her Facebook. Last night, as I was contemplating a comment and wishing that I could use my Paris Hilton icon on the Wonkette site, I read through a lot of her father's site and discovered the above three-quarter length, campaign picture.

This marks only the latest Facebook entry to be publicly disclosed by one of the Gawker sites and the blogosphere in general. If you follow their link, you'd see that they recently revealed a photo from Senator Bill Frist's middle son's collection and that they suspect it could be tied to a "cease and desist" order from the networking site. Obviously they are contesting the order because Miss Corker's images are post-letter and they've even tried to do a little investigation into the relationship with privacy and the founder of Facebook. Also, I'm supportive of Gawker's position for the reason cited by editor Nick Douglas in the comments to the letter; If you go to Ohio State, your Facebook can be viewed by more than 50,000 people, so it can't really be considered private. Of course, I also don't have access to Facebook because I don't have an university email, so I may be basing some of my beliefs in my own prejudice.

The easy thing that may first spring to mind, when you look at the ganked photos from the children of Senator Frist and the man who hopes to succeed him is that the children of Tennessee politicians are a wild bunch. This could even be further evidenced by the publicity which surrounded the time that Al Gore III was clocked doing 97mph in a 55 zone. But, I think it goes more to show that though the children of politicians and celebrities should be extra aware of the public face of the internet; I'm sure many people remember when the blogosphere outed the daughter of noted homophobe Alan Keyes and though they had to publicly work through the thing, she seems no worse for wear and according to her current blog, she's even getting a few speaking engagements from the deal. As a recent New York Times article discussed, pretty much everyone should be conscious of exactly what they're putting online, how it might be viewed in the future or under different circumstances and be fully aware of the permanence of the 'net.

We're about two years from the next presidential primary and I don't know how many of these are trial balloons, how much could be called groundwork, or if the political writers are simply getting bored. We're already seeing asides that Mr Bush could benefit from a Democratic House, they are still in the whisper phase, but in this one instance, it leads right into the sentence; "I don't know whether any hope remains to save the House GOP."

There isn't a lot the President can do, as E.J. Dionne detailed in a recent column; Conservative activists are suggesting that Mr Bush take a hard right turn to solidify his base and in an effort to boost his poll numbers, but though he's down a little with the right, his numbers are still decent and his real problem is with moderate independents. A recent Pew survey shows that his support has dropped from 48% to 22% among members of this group, since January of last year.

Obviously, the more moderate members of his party, many of whom are in highly contested races are praying and braying that the President doesn't do anything to alienate these swing voters. For, while Tip O'Neill used to say that "all politics are local", we must also keep in mind those incessant bumper-stickers the boomers plastered onto their Volvos, as many of them abandoned their beliefs to become yuppies; "Think globally, act locally". If the political strategists keep this mantra in the back of their minds, they should be able to reshape the current congressional election into a referendum on Mr Bush. I'm sure moderate Republicans have also been coming to this conclusion and they really wouldn't want the President to muck them up.

So, I'm going to say that political writers are probably bored and they're really looking forward to the next election, so that's why we're getting analysis of Hillary Clinton's marriage, with articles which contains gems like the following;

Since the start of 2005, the Clintons have been together about 14 days a month on average, according to aides who reviewed the couple's schedules. Sometimes it is a full day of relaxing at home in Chappaqua; sometimes it is meeting up late at night. At their busiest, they saw each other on a single day, Valentine's Day, in February 2005 — a month when each was traveling a great deal. Last August, they saw each other at some point on 24 out of 31 days. Out of the last 73 weekends, they spent 51 together. The aides declined to provide the Clintons' private schedule.

And, we're learning that Al Gore owns a "ton of Google" stock, so he could seed his own bid for the nomination and we get what I'm sure was supposed to be a hype piece for his movie, but is mostly a lot of words about the potential of his candidacy and how moderate Democrats think he may be able to stop Hillary.

Of course like the political writers, I'm also sort of bored with this cycle and things won't really heat up until closer to the election and then, they may not get hot until the Presidential fields form. So after reading about Mr Gore, I followed a link to an unrelated story.

It seems that since 2002, the average price of an alcoholic drink in a New York bar has gone from $6.92 to $8.83, but people are still only tipping a dollar and the bartenders aren't happy. If you apply the same rate of inflation to tips that has occurred with drinks, the average tip should be up to $1.28. I haven't been to many bars since moving to New Mexico, but when I've lived in places with a wider variety and a more active scene; I'd say that I'd usually pay $3.50 for a call brand and I'd always leave the 50¢ as the tip, plus I'd make a show of adding an occasional dollar to the jar.

Back in college, there was one place where I'd always start my nights and they'd do highballs with house liquor for $1.25. When another place matched them on price and because they really didn't have any ambiance, it was mostly a place to get a cheap start on drinking, they tried dropping the price to an even dollar. But, according to a barmaid that I'd sometimes take home, tips dropped off considerably because people were reluctant to leave a 100% tip and no one carried change. So, the help forced management to up the price to where it had been for years. To make up for the drop in business, they boosted the cover to their disco upstairs.

If I'm reading correctly, opening a small to medium-sized Sears Dealer or Associate Store requires an initial investment between $42k and $103k, plus three to six months in operating reserves. Prospective owners are required to have at least $10,000 in cash, along with a positive net worth. While to do a Dunkin Donuts, which could possibly be sold only by territories, you'd be required to have at least $650k in liquid assets and a net worth of at least $1.2 million. To open or buy a single brand, single location Baskin-Robbins licensed by the same parent, prospective owners would need to have at least $125k on hand and a $350k net worth.