Dec. 17, 2003:

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told Fox News Channel analyst Morton Kondracke yesterday she suspects President Bush knows the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and is simply waiting for the most politically expedient moment to announce his capture.

The Presidential Prayer Team is currently urging us to:

"Pray for the President as he seeks wisdom on how to legally codify the definition of marriage. Pray that it will be according to Biblical principles. With any forces insisting on variant definitions of marriage, pray that God's Word and His standards will be honored by our government."

I am told that this is true.

Any good religious person believes prayer should be balanced by action.
So here, in support of the Prayer Team's admirable goals, is a proposed Constitutional Amendment codifying marriage entirely on biblical principles:

A. Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5)

B. Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines, in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21)

C. A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If  the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21)

D. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen 24:3; Num 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Neh10:30)

E. Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9)

F. If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother's widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe, and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law. (Gen. 38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10)

G. In lieu of marriage, if there are no acceptable men in your town, it is required that you get your dad drunk and have sex with him (even if he had previously
offered you up as a sex toy to men young and old), tag-teaming with any sisters you may have. Of course, this rule applies only if you are female. (Gen 19:31-36)

In the end, it is really simple. The thing to hold on to is that nobody who works for him and knows him well believes that George W. Bush is qualified to be the President of the United States.

From Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty. It was on March 6, 2001, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill concluded that George W. Bush was not qualified to be the President of the United States:

Bush has no plans to back a constitutional amendment banning, say, marrying purely for citizenship, no-fault divorce, Las Vegas chapels, My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance, Married by America, Who Wants to Mary a Millionaire, or any of the multitude of other things which can cheapen or weaken the institution of marriage. Nor will Bush back constitutional amendments against adultery, fornication, witchcraft, working on Sunday, wearing garments made of interwoven linen and wool, letting women be uncovered, women having authority over men, or any of the multitude of other biblical laws which are no longer followed by the state. Also, I am willing to bet he has no plans to make an intellectual argument as to why gay marriage should be banned and how it fits in with the freedom-enhancing Constitution.

As Joe Klein said, "He said he was a war president, but apparently the war he wants to fight is a culture war"

It's not just that he got the job based partly on his family name. You could say the same thing about FDR, JFK, Bush Sr, and Al Gore, and it doesn't especially bother me about any of them. It's more that I just can't figure out how he managed to become a consensus party choice for president after a mere single term as governor of Texas.

The Ziobrowski study notes that the politicians' timing of transactions is uncanny. Most stocks bought by senators had shown little movement before the purchase. But after the stock was bought, it outperformed the market by 28.6 per cent on average in the following calender year.

Returns on sell transactions are equally intriguing. Stocks sold by senators performed in line with the market the year following the sale.

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?"
- Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

February 23, 2004

20> Cost of a PC: $1,000 Cost of an online account: $20/month Yearly earnings of a TopFive contributor: jack shit

19> The Pauly Shore Fan Club may be small, but it sure is scrappy.

18> Never go skinny-dipping immediately after writing your TopFive submissions. Not to avoid cramping; to comply with your neighbors' restraining order.

17> College admissions directors rarely appreciate the magnitude of scoring a TopFive hat trick.

16> Sleeping your way into the Hall of Fame is much more tolerable if you have narcolepsy.

15> Pat Sajak could kick that geek Alex Trebek's ass in a New York minute.

14> Bill Muse has the uncanny ability to reach across space and time, read your mind, and steal your #1 entry before you can think of it. Before you even know the topic, actually.

13> Al Gore was far funnier as a candidate than he ever would have been as president.

12> When yo'ure (out of) funny ideas, jamming a fork !into an electrical:outlet can activate the-brain's humor cortex; and punctuation center?

11> You can make fun of Clinton getting a hummer, but you can't make fun of Bush for [REST OF ITEM DETAINED INDEFINITELY AT GUANTANAMO IN THE NAME OF NATIONAL SECURITY].

10> Spraying your e-mail submissions with Obsession dramatically increases your chances for a list spot.

9> Making no money by spending all our time doing this turned out to be a damned good way to avoid losing a bundle on tech stocks.

8> Stopping at five is hard, except when it comes to lighting farts.

7> With contributors from Canada, Australia, Germany, Japan, France, the UK and all across the U.S., TopFive has discovered the one true international language: boner jokes.

6> The small fork goes on the lef-- no wait, the right... oh crap!

5> We would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those meddling kids!

4> Lists including a reference to Girl Scout Scientologists for gun control inspire very creative suggestions of self-love from our open-minded readers.

3> Febreze is a godsend, since Chris White smells like bad guacamole.

2> Write online submissions *first*; masturbate to online images *second*, as it saps your energy.

and Topfive.com's Number 1 Lesson We've Learned in 10 Years of Doing This...

Al Sharpton is visiting a primary school and he visits one of the classes.  They are in the middle of a discussion related to words and their meanings.

The teacher asks the Rev. Sharpton if he would like to lead the discussion of the word "tragedy."
So the illustrious leader asks the class for an example of a  "tragedy."

One little boy stands up and offers: "If my best friend, who lives on a  farm, is  playing in the field and a runaway tractor comes along and knocks him dead, that would be a tragedy."

"No," says the Great Al Sharpton," that would be an accident."

A little girl raises her hand: "If a school bus carrying 50 children drove over a cliff, killing everyone inside, that would be a tragedy."

"I'm afraid not," explains the exalted spiritual leader. "That's what we would call a great loss."

The room goes silent. No other children volunteer. Rev. Sharpton searches the room. "Isn't there someone here who can give me an example of a tragedy?"

Finally at the back of the room a small boy raises his hand.

In a quiet voice he says: "If a plane carrying the Rev. Sharpton were struck by a missile and blown to smithereens, that would be a tragedy."

"Fantastic!" exclaims Sharpton, "That's right. And can you tell me why that would be tragedy?"

"Well," says the boy, "because it sure as hell wouldn't be a great loss and it probably wouldn't be an accident either." 

It's been raining in LA, so it's a good time to catch up on recent videos.

Loved it. Charlotte Rampling is brilliant as Sarah Morton, the seemingly bitter, desiccated author of crime novels. Her performance is all about control and nuance, wordlessly communicating volumes through body movements, facial expressions, and gestures. Ludivine Sagnier is Julie, the free-spirited daughter of Morton's publisher; the two wind up sharing his house in the Luberon. Sagnier is Rampling's polar opposite, never having an impulse or craving she is unwilling to follow, brazen and uninhibited. The dynamic between the two drives this sexy, mysterious film toward an unexpected conclusion. A must-see.

A silly movie that gives it two main protagonists - Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson - ample room to mug, crack jokes, and carry on with their usual shtick. There is plenty of low-brow humor, especially a continuing litany of penis-size jokes. The main redeeming element of the film, though, is a spate of wonderful cameos. Three in particular are almost worth the price of a rental - Heather Graham as a weight-obsessed bar pick-up, Woody Harrelson as a Yankee Stadium security guard/Germanic cross-dressing homosexual, and John C. Reilly as a repressed monk who ends up with a saffron-robe wedgie.

--Neal Vitale

It was interesting to read that you were recently at the Waltham movie theater and would have preferred to see The Fog of War. I was there with my family this past weekend seeing that movie.

It was to fulfill a history assignment for my son Eric, a junior at Weston High School. Earlier, his biology teacher had required the class members to rent the movie Gattaca.

My wife noticed that our kids were the only audience members under 40. In spite of the old saying, I personally think the movie shows that hindsight is far from 20-20. McNamara notes that he nearly came to blows with a Vietnamese scholar in 1995 when he proposed that the Vietnamese could have gotten everything they wanted without the devastating loss of life had they followed a different strategy. The revelation from Castro that not only were nuclear weapons already in place at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but Castro had called upon the Soviets to use them was new to me.

Unlike in Vernon Florida and Gates of Heaven, two favorites of mine, Errol Morris not only speaks, but his voice can be heard in the film.

And don't miss his chakra rating system ... <g>

From my friend Charlie, currently at MIT getting his PhD in artificial intelligence. It was MIT related and you have a better connection than I do so I thought you might get something more out of it. Enjoy.

It's notable that Rae found the movie, The Graduate, contemporary with the play, Rosencrantz (etc), which both came out in 1967. However the movie of Rosencrantz, didn't appear until 1990. I still enjoyed her insight.

"Even though I have been demoted to bit player in her life,..." echoes of Rosencrantz (etc.)?!

What do you think of this idea? Swallowing anger, is an anti-diet. It increases the appetite for other calories. If we can lose the anger, the desire for other calories would decrease as well?

My favorite Thoreau quote -- " man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." It's interesting that in our Puritan ethic we describe as work the act of letting something go.

Amount of water it would take, per day, to support 4.7 billion people at the UN daily minimum: 2.5 billion gallons

Amount of water used, per day, to irrigate the world's golf courses: 2.5 billion gallons