Pun Salad

… before I get old:

• Happy Birthday to Mr. Clint Eastwood, turning the big Eight-Oh today. From the Big Hollywood comments:

  I know what you're thinking. "Did he turn 80 or only 79?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this cake has almost two full 44-packs of Magnum Birthday Candles, the most powerful candles in the world, and you would have to blow so hard to put 'em out your head came clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

  Also, stay off his lawn.

• There's P. J. O'Rourke content over at the Weekly Standard, in which Peej modestly proposes a new feature that might help the dying newspaper sector, the pre-obituary: "official notices that certain people aren’t dead yet accompanied by brief summaries of their lives indicating why we wish they were." One missed opportunity is Paul Newman:

  Paul Newman (1925-2008) was not, in and of himself, a bad person. But he deserved to be damned to his face for lending charm to the smirk of liberalism. And after he’d become an immortal only a heartless writer would have pointed out that for an entire generation of young people, Paul Newman is, mainly, a salad dressing.

  Ouch. And I forgive P. J. for slagging The Who, still 50% alive.

• George F. Will dismisses President Obama's proposal for government spending reform as "frugality theater":

  Obama's Reduce Unnecessary Spending Act confirms the axiom that the titles of bills, like the titles of Marx brothers movies ("Duck Soup," "Horse Feathers"), are utterly uninformative. The act would aggravate a distortion of the Constitution that has grown for seven decades, enlarging presidential power by allowing presidents to treat spending bills as cafeterias from which they can take what they like and reject the rest.

  Will notes that the proposal (a) might be unconstitutional; (b) would almost certainly be ineffective; (c) and would encourage Congressional irresponsibility. "Other than that, though, it's fine!"

  At Cato, David Boaz adds on his own commentary:

  But Will doesn’t take the cheap shot of dubbing the bill the RUSe Act. He left that for us. A ruse is “a wily subterfuge” or “a deceptive maneuver” — a perfect description for this misleading bill offered in response to growing public concern over federal spending.

• One more Memorial Day link? Don't miss this fine poem at GraniteGrok by Derek MacMillen Kittredge, about greeting returning troops at Pease.