Sauerkraut!

Tinkers to Evers to Chance.

Whilst traipsing through some promising links I came upon a marvelous column by George Will, conservative writer and baseball fan who has been whiffing a lot lately. Well, George may not have hit this one out of the park, but he did send a shot down the alley in right-center and is rounding second heading for a sure stand-up triple. (See my comments on the art of baseball announcers below.)

But I digress. Mr Will served up a gem about the narcissism of the First-Pantload and Pantload-ess in their recent sacrificial speeches to the IOC this past week:

Both Obamas gave heartfelt speeches about ... themselves. Although the working of the committee's mind is murky, it could reasonably have rejected Chicago's bid for the 2016 games on aesthetic grounds -- unless narcissism has suddenly become an Olympic sport.

At this point, George serves one up into my wheel house:

In 2008, Obama carried the three congressional districts that contain Northern California's Silicon Valley with 73.1, 69.6 and 68.4 percent of the vote. Surely the Valley could continue its service to him by designing software for his speechwriters' computers that would delete those personal pronouns, replacing them with the word "sauerkraut" to underscore the antic nature of their excessive appearances.

And -- this will be trickier -- the software should delete the most egregious cliches sprinkled around by the tin-eared employees in the White House speechwriting shop.

Now, gentle readers, this is how ol' Voyska earns his bones, writing software. So I thought I'd craft a routine -- a function -- that could be plugged into such software and yield a similar result:

  #include "stdafx.h"

  /*******************************************
  * Stop the madness!
  *******************************************/
  CString TrimCrap(int nWho, const CString strBuffer)
  {
      CString strWorkBuffer = strBuffer;

      if (nType == POTUS)
      {
        strWorkBuffer.Replace(" I ", " the Narcissistic Pantload");
        strWorkBuffer.Replace(" me ", " the Clueless OJT President ");
        strWorkBuffer.Replace(" my ", " the Won's ");
     }
     else if (nType == FLOTUS)
     {
        strWorkBuffer.Replace(" I ", " the Sacrificing Narcissistic   Pantsuitload");
        strWorkBuffer.Replace(" me ", " the Bride of Frankenstein ");
        strWorkBuffer.Replace(" my ", " the $500-sneaker-wearing squeeze's ");
     }
     return strWorkBuffer
  }
 
..well, it may have some bugs in it - I just dashed it out. But you get the idea. If there are some of you out there who are developers and remember the old "ebonics.exe" app that was floating around over a decade ago, maybe we could develop something like that. You know, a simple app that reads one of The Won's speeches and converts into something like "The Narcissistic Pantload says it's all Bush's fault!"

The anecdote about baseball announcers? Well, when I was a kid in the fifties, I used to watch the weekly televised baseball game and one of the announcers was the lovable and homey ace of the old St Louis Cardinal Gas House Gang pitching staff, Dizzy Dean. He was from the Ozarks and brought his homespun phrases to the announcers booth where they tended to distort the actual event s on the field to the extent one was left thanking the Gods of Baseball for television. An example: Mantle up, one down, no on one, and Mick lines one to right. This call trips off the tongue of Ol' Diz:

"Hah pop fly hung out there ins right field, Mantle's around first and slud into second with a stand-up double!"

Somwhere's, the Gods are smiling!