Comic Relief

[Gary Sisco]

Comic relief, in a way. Actually, I'm amazed with the apparent inability of Americans to use judgment and reason in these things. They seem to have an off/on brainset that has no in between. Anyway, I find these things hysterically funny and would find them funnier still if I didn't know how much they cost in confiscated wages and if they didn't reveal how, well, fearful they seem to be in their daily lives. One time the police here blew up a kid's rental clarinet that he'd forgotten after sitting on a bench on Burlington's main shopping street. Hey, you can't be too careful. Of course, his parents were left holding the tab for a clarinet....

The real bobbleheads, I'm afraid, are in charge of "security." They much more remind me of Monty Pythons "men that go 'hut'" than anything I can actually take seriously, having lived in places where one's physical security was in fact in question. Had we behaved like this, we'd all be dead.


Bobblehead doll sends 350 workers fleeing
Updated: 7:59 a.m. ET May 26, 2007
TUMWATER, Wash. - Talk about a blunder. A bomb technician discovered that a suspicious package that forced more than 300 workers to evacuate a state building contained a bobblehead doll awarded to public officials for perceived errors.

The package, sent by an intern at KOMO-TV in Seattle, was addressed to Department of Corrections Secretary Harold Clarke at the department’s headquarters in this town near Olympia.

It didn’t have a return address and the mailing label was handwritten. It also had stains on the outside, which could have indicated that the item inside had leaked, said Washington State Patrol Sgt. Ted DeHart.

“It had the classic indicators of a suspicious package,” DeHart said.

The building’s 350 employees were evacuated for about 45 minutes Friday after the package was found in the mailroom.

A bomb technician from the State Patrol who opened the box found a “Schrammie,” which television commentator Ken Schram hands out to public officials he thinks have done wrong.

It's a first
“To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time that the bomb squad was called in when we sent a ‘Schrammie,”’ said Jimm Brown, a KOMO spokesman.

Brown said Schram sent the doll to Clarke because he was upset about the announcement earlier this year that the state had released 83 felons from jails early.

***************

I don't know about you all but somehow I just can't imagine that Al Q is very concerned with life in Tumwater, Washington.

At this point, a coordinated campaign of bobbleheads in boxes could paralyze the American economy.