Today's Hoot
Dave Barry:

There's just over a year to go before the 2004 presidential election, and everybody in the nation is extremely excited. Except of course the public...

So what does the public care about right now? Telemarketers. The public hates them. It hates them even more than it hates France, low-flow toilets or ''customer service.''

We know this because recently the Federal Trade Commission, implementing the most popular federal concept since the Elvis stamp, created the National Do Not Call Registry.
...
And how has the telemarketing industry responded to this tidal wave of public hostility? It has issued this statement: ''Gosh, if these people really don't want us to call them, then there's no point in our calling them! We'd only be making them hate us more, and that's just plain stupid! We'll try to come up with a less offensive way to do business.''

No, wait, that's what the telemarketers would say in Bizarro World, where everything is backward, and Superman is bad, and telemarketers contain human DNA.

And lately, a large number of the telemarketing calls we get around here obviously come from India. Things must really be bad there if it is a desireable job to get up in the middle of the night to try to sell crap over the telephone to grumpy people like me.

Dave is also bumping Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19. While this isn't the biggest knee slapper I ever heard, there is some inherent amusement:

Bung hole – Victuals on a ship were stored in wooden casks. The stopper in the barrel is called the bung, and the hole is called the bung hole. That’s all. It sounds a lot worse, doesn’t it?

On TLAP Day – When dinner is served you’ll make quite an impression when you say, “Well, me hearties, let’s see what crawled out of the bung hole.” That statement will be instantly followed by the sound of people putting down their utensils and pushing themselves away from the table. Great! More for you!

But did they really need a disclaimer on the same page that pirates "were bad people?"

UPDATE: Prof. Bunyip points out a downside for TLAP Day, according to taste.