When last we checked in with Rep. Humus B. Kyddenme, he was pitching a House bill to include all known creation stories in the state-mandated public-school curriculum; to his chagrin, the bill never emerged from committee.

For next year, he has a new idea. Noting that population growth has been consistent along America's coastlines, and that the demand for housing has kept property values sky-high in those areas, Kyddenme has decided that landlocked Oklahoma can't compete unless it has a serious shoreline.

Bricktown Beach, despite its name, will not actually be located in Bricktown; the massive artificial ocean, about 185 square miles, will be created by flooding the northeastern quarter of Oklahoma County, roughly everything east of Sooner Road and north of NE 36th Street. (The famed Round Barn in Arcadia, which would otherwise be sunk, will be trucked up Old 66 to a new location west of Chandler.) Tides will be created by wind turbines placed at regular intervals along Pottawatomie Road; as a bonus, they will generate electricity for 3,000 homes in Lincoln County. Kyddenme hasn't given a cost estimate, but he insists that the revenue from the hotels, casinos and restaurants located along the shore will easily cover the expense of digging a two-thousand-foot-deep hole thirteen and a half miles square. As for the 30,000 or so displaced residents, Kyddenme says there's no problem: "Who do you think is gonna buy all those beach houses?" It's no more implausible, he says, than building artificial islands in the middle of the Arkansas River.

According to this thing, I am more popular than McGehee, but not as sexy.

I need hardly point out that Jeff Goldstein beats us both.

(Via the inordinately-lovely Miss Cellania.)

At least, so far it is:

Again: this is a joke.

Glickman is probably even now kicking himself for not thinking of it first.

(Someone submitted this to Fark not suspecting that it was, in fact, a joke.)

Rachel points to (and probably laughs at) this shoe size-to-penis size conversion chart. Normally I am unnerved when women point and laugh, but this compilation of, um, "data" is highly risible.

Just try to say that fast three times.

Normally I'd save this search-engine item for Monday's roundup, but time is apparently of the essence:

The Borg are coming to assimilate us on March 10th:  Yeah, yeah, resistance is futile, yadda, yadda. Just give me Seven of Nine's coordinates.

It's two, two, two movies in one!

(Seen at Brad Sucks.)

News Item: Zimbabwe has been elected to head the UN's Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) despite strong objections from Western diplomats. They had said Zimbabwe was unsuitable because of its human rights record and economic problems. It is suffering food shortages and rampant inflation. But Zimbabwe has dismissed such criticism, calling it an insult.

Columbia University announced today that Dr. Sanjaya Shekar Malakar of Seattle, Washington will be named Professor of Ethnomusicology within Columbia's Department of Music, a position originally created for the distinguished Dr. Willard Rhodes, who died in 1992. Dr. Malakar's multi-ethnic background and long record of persistence in the face of hardship should serve him well in his post at Columbia.

Alleged News Item: Controversial documentary filmmaker Michael Moore is accusing Apple Inc. and AT&T of using the iPhone to distract attention from his new movie Sicko, which opens in US theaters on the same day the hyped phone goes on sale. "This is an appalling display of greed and jealousy," said Moore after a recent screening of his new movie. "Apple and AT&T obviously don’t care about fixing America's healthcare system. They only care about how many iPhones they’re going to sell."

Asked why he chose to attack Steve Jobs of Apple rather than, for instance, Bruce Willis of Live Free or Die Hard, opening at the same time, Moore replied, "What, are you nuts? John McClane would beat the living shit out of me and I'm fresh out of airline tickets to Cuba."

They always were a trifle indiscriminate about the species they assimilated, and this is the unfortunate result.

Clutch your nuts and fear for your life.

Now here's a question I can't possibly resist:

At the very least, it should include my battlefield commission during my Army days; the actress (not yet a legend) who joined me for lunch one day in Hollywood and stayed for a week and a half; the work of fan fiction in which I play a minor operative of Karl Rove's; the incident that got my real-estate license suspended indefinitely; the time I caught (so to speak) a fly ball with the side of my head (only minor injuries); and, of course, meeting Morgan Fairchild.

Not all of these, incidentally, are false.

Apparently the missionary position is not feasible in a zero-gravity environment.

[Insert "Venus observa" joke here]

So you don't have to agonize over this yourself: in order to reach Ragnar in three days from its original location in the pilot episode, Galactica must maintain acceleration of 27g.

That's our g, not Ragnar's.

Back in the Pleistocene era, I had one of Mattel's Intellivision consoles with the infamous disc controllers. The discs had good motion but just didn't compare to real joysticks, and in a week or so I'd scored a couple of plastic joystick tops that epoxied to the discs, killing the system's presumed resale value but adding serious win to my gameplay.

And one day, feeling full of myself, I connected the gamebox to the Betamax, fired up Activision's Pitfall!, and twisted and twirled and jumped all the way to the final screen. For a couple of years I showed the tape to anyone who was interested and rather a lot of people who weren't.

I had, of course, no idea that Pitfall Harry himself was something of a bad egg, or I would never have worked so closely with him.

Steve Lackmeyer reports on a smoldering Bricktown issue:

The solution is simple: don't ever have a fire on Sheridan Avenue. Make sure that all fires are on side streets only, and require the fire engines to take the long way round.

This problem solved, City Council is now working with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman to come up with a way to keep the rain off the Festival of the Arts in April.

And the most advanced, too:

(From Gareth J. M. Saunders by way of Miss Cellania.)

eBay item: "You are bidding on a framed genuine FAKE birth certificate of Barack Hussein Obama. Did I say that his middle name is Hussein? I did? Okay. Here is the fun part. Because it is apparently against the rules to use the middle name of HUSSEIN, the winning bidder will have the opportunity to choose a new middle name to replace HUSSEIN. It will be inserted in the FAKE certificate. We can begin using the name, and then we won't have to worry about being arrested by the DemocRAT PC police for using the actual real name HUSSEIN."

Top Ten likewise-unacceptable middle names for Barack [           ] Obama:

10. Koresh
    
9. Diane
   
8. Jacob Jingleheimer
   
7. Amadeus
   
6. Tuvok
   
5. Ringling
   
4. Anakin
   
3. Medici
   
2. Kuhn
   
1. Insein
   

(Swiped from Fausta by way of E. M. Zanotti.)

Ray Davies, in his guise as a Muswell Hillbilly, came up with this gem: "Take me back to those black hills / That I have never seen."

The Kinks didn't sell a lot of records with this premise, but people have followed in Davies' footsteps just the same:

Really? None of it?

This calls to mind Mary McCarthy's dismissal of Lillian Hellman: "Every word she writes is a lie, including a, an, and the."

Apparently Ms Seltzer was unclear on the concept:

So if I started such a thing, I'd have to leave the following out:

Oh, wait. Not all of those are fake. Still, if you see something like this under the name of, oh, G. Pruitt, be suspicious.

Unity Mitford, fourth of the six Mitford sisters, was born in London but apparently conceived in a small Ontario town called Swastika. Her fondness for Adolf Hitler was legendary, and at nineteen she traveled to Nuremburg, met the Führer of her dreams, and became a member of his entourage. It is true that when Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, she shot herself in the head, though not efficiently (she survived with brain damage for more than eight years); however, this isn't:

In fact, German nationalists had been using the swastika before Hitler; some participants in the 1920 Kapp Putsch wore the symbol.

But Mark Steyn muses on what might have been:

If not necessarily funnier.