Pun Salad

Pun Salad is three years old today. Hope you're having as much fun reading as I am writing.

Our web logs continually show that many, many people come here looking for Cathy Poulin. Hence, we are today declaring Cathy to be the unofficial (and, more important, unpaid) mascot of Pun Salad.

For the uninitiated: Cathy appears often in TV ads for Bob's Discount Furniture in New England, New Jersey, and New York, usually as Bob's even-more-annoying sidekick. (Although Cathy is a very nice person in real life, not annoying at all.) I can't find an actual ad, but here's an engaging parody. The actress has Cathy's timing and hand gestures down pat:

Video removed at some time since 2008. Sigh. But I found one with Real Cathy:

She's not very annoying there. Or maybe I've just grown accustomed.

Google also, by the way, has Pun Salad on the first page for hold me like you did by the lake on naboo so long ago when there was nothin but our love no politics no plotting no war.

"Naboo." Heh.

William F. Buckley, Jr. has passed away. As I think he said from time to time: herewith, a few thoughts:

He was a major shaper of my political thinking. I devoured The Unmaking of a Mayor, the story of his 1965 campaign for NYC Mayor. From him, I learned you could be smart, witty, and still be a conservative.

Although I never got the "smart" and "witty" parts as well as he did.

Soon after that, in 1967 or so, I started reading National Review, as I have done with only minor breaks since. And so I got introduced to folks like Frank Meyer, Russel Kirk, James Burnham, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell, and on and on.

It's widely known that Mr. Buckley made conservatism "respectable", by trashing the John Birch wing. (He also made Ayn Rand and her followers steamin' mad by publishing Whittaker Chambers' negative review of Atlas Shrugged.)

It's safe to say (as I did about Milton Friedman) that William F. Buckley, Jr. played an important role in making the country freer, safer, and more prosperous than it would have been otherwise. And for that, we owe him much gratitude.