Point/Counterpoint: We must submit to the TSA vs. the TSA doesn’t do jack

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now known everywhere as the Underwear Bomber

Unless you are Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s elderly grandmother, chances are you have already heard about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to detonate explosives on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as it approached Detroit on Christmas day. First of all, in order to save time and space, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab will henceforth be referred to as the Underwear Bomber. Second of all, in order to save American lives, a man with a GED will henceforth put his finger in your anus every time you fly on a plane. Does that sound like a demeaning invasion of your privacy? Well, do you want to live? Okay, then, let me just get a fresh latex sheath and…we’re in. Enjoy your flight!

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The situation on the ground…

…as near I can determine it from the guy yelling into his cell phone next to me:

First of all, Cherry Creek Brewery has a mac and cheese that’s light years ahead of ours, and it is off the hook. Visualize this: macaroni, cheddar and cream tossed with roasted garlic, then finished with truffle oil. Truffle oil! Fourteen ninety-five. No, I am not fucking with you. I’m not. Seriously. Fuck you, it’s fourteen ninety-five. What does ours cost? That’s because it’s shit.

Second of all, Moxie has totally opened my eyes on pricing. We can grow our check average up and our food costs down by eliminating menu items in the ten to fourteen dollar range. Ten ninety-five, $11.95, $12.95 and $13.95. Those are all in the ten to fourteen dollar range, and we should eliminate them. What you do is, burgers and salads are all under ten dollars, and then entrees start at $14.95 and go up to twenty dollars, and above that you’ve got your proteins. That’s it. I totally caught him on something, though. I was like, Mox, you’ve got all the salads down below ten dollars, and then nothing in the ten to fourteen dollar range, but the seafood salad is $13.95. He tells us all this and then he brings out the seafood salad, and it’s $13.95, and I totally called him out on it. Everybody laughed. I’m just saying.

The other thing I don’t agree with is the three-manager system. Moxie says any operation that does less than five million a year can get by on two front of house managers and a KM. I think it’s more like three-five. I mean, College Park is doing four and there’s no way we could get by on three managers there. Not with one of them’s Darlene, at least. Darlene is not going to do it with one other manager. She’s fine; I’m just saying she can’t handle it herself with only two other people. Let’s not talk about Darlene.

I’m on the runway. It’s a CJ-247. Fourteen C. The Outdoor Expo goes until Thursday, and we need to finalize our agenda for while I’m there. We need to identify all of the actions we need to accomplish. I will now say the word “yes” approximately fifteen times in a row, with the exact same inflection every time. Also, I weigh approximately 280 pounds. I’m not morbidly obese; I’m definitely more than six feet tall, and it seems like I was physically fit at one time—I probably played line—but I’m definitely having difficulty fitting in one coach class airplane seat. It’s possible that it’s because I can’t close my legs sufficiently to keep them parallel to each other. A sixty degree angle is pretty much the minimum. It goes without saying that this arm rest is mine. Later, when I fall asleep, my hand will drift toward your genitals, and you will have to cross your legs and hit it with your knee to wake me up. Also, I can only assume, based on what I did this morning, that I have very little aftershave left.

Christmas derails Combat! blog

As one might easily have predicted, the Nondenominational Holiday Retail Season has consumed me today, as I rush about buying bleeping trinkets for my loved ones so that they might forget the cavalier disdain I have expressed for their affections since March 1981. It’s not working, but man, is it time-consuming. In the meantime, please enjoy this photograph of a thirty foot-tall Santa burning uncontrollably, presumably to the long-term consternation of innumerable children, and also for the entertainment of that housing project in the background. If we need to make a new American flag—and I assume that, once the SEC secedes, we will—I nominate Santa Fail. If my nominating privileges are revoked due to laziness, I understand.

To the airport! Oh, Jesus!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvjGIkl2yDY&feature=player_embedded

Combat! blog is traveling today, so that we may celebrate Christmas at our ancestral homeland. If you’re like me, air travel makes you want to Kill All, combining as it does the worst elements of a movie theater, a roller coaster and a locker room. It’s at such stressful times that we would do well to remember the reason for the season: the image of Jesus in a piece of raisin toast. Enjoy.

War on Christmas drags into insoluble quagmire

I'm not saying his parents would have preferred another girl, but he did get stuck with the Kalashnikov.

It’s been approximately four years since Fox News declared that the media and our socio-political overlords had declared War on Christmas, and I’m frankly a little frustrated with progress on the ground. The end of December is still the most expensive time of year to fly anywhere, and the mall is even more choked with wandering zombies dripping Cinnabon on their velour sweatsuits than usual. It’s starting to look like we’ve made no progress against Christmas at all—and at the expense of billions of dollars and thousands of lives. Okay, maybe not thousands, but even one more life lost in this war of choice is too many, and frankly kind of embarrassing. We’re America, dammit. We beat the Nazis in four years, and if we can’t do away with one more cultural product of German barbarians in that time, well, maybe we need to reconsider our own preeminence. Perhaps we should withdraw from the War on Christmas entirely and leave it to the Chinese.

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