Schadenfreude

May Day started as number of pre-Christian celebrations including Beltane, the Walpurgis Night that were eventually Christianized along with most of Europe.

Today, however, it’s usually recognized as an International Workers day – a sort of Labor Day commemorating the fight for the eight hour work day. In many countries (notably, not the US or Canada) May Day is an official holiday.

This is somewhat ironic, since the day in question, May 1, was chosen in honor of the Haymarket affair in Chicago in 1886. But since US foreign policy in the 1950s (through the late 80s) was just to do the exact opposite of what the Soviet Union did, congress designated May 1 as the creepy, Orwellian, “Loyalty Day” in 1958 since May Day was observed by the Soviets.

So if you like your 8 hour work day, be sure to thank the people in the labor movement for the social and economic achievements that they fought so hard to give you.

A friend pointed me to this letter sent to the Arkansas Democrat Gazette and was posted here. It’s the first one on the page, titled “Daylight exacerbates warning.” Go ahead, read it and come back. I’ll wait.

Please tell me that there isn’t someone who actually thinks that daylight savings time has an effect on the actual amount of daylight in a given day. It gets even more frightening if you Google this Connie M. Meskimen from Hot Springs. It seems that she’s a lawyer. Idiot.

Update - 04/26.07
It is a joke, thankfully.

Cheney has once again dragged out the dead, bloated corpse of the supposed Saddam / al-Qiaida connection as the justification du jour for why we invited Iraq. I guess that I shouldn’t be too surprised considering that they’ve lied about everything else. But this is pretty craven, even for him. I mean that this is something that the whole rest of the world has known to be a lie for years now. Did he just run out of justifications so he had to prop up long dead ones like the guy in a “Weekend at Bernie's” movie?

Maybe the little maggot’s next recycled reason for the invasion will be that “He was a bad man” again. Well duh! He was a bad guy back when we were helping him murder Kurds and Iranians so I’m really not sure what all the urgency was about. Oh year, I forgot – oil and corporate profits.

Jib Jab has created a new cartoon that's pretty funny, but only becase it's completely true. Check it out at http://www.jibjab.com/what_we_call_the_news.