I wanted to write something pithy, something uplifting, something that would make the heart sing its way into the weekend and distract us from the fact that one of our two major political parties has not merely gone slightly mad, but has done so in a way that simply screams out for large doses of psychoactive medicine (Our best chance for electoral victory is if millions of Americans go hungry and thousands more die at the hands of terrorists -- that'll show the bastards for even once speaking favorably of BUSH in an opinion poll).

Couldn't. Sorry.

What I decided to do instead was to point out that this, while mean, is also hilarious. And right.

When Hurricane Gilbert -- Category 5 and winds that could knock a young Dolly Parton on her side -- was on a dead-on collision course with Houston, where I lived at the time, there were three categories of humans:

The survivors, i.e., those smart enough to pack everything up and get ready to haul ass inland as fast as possible;

The 'tweeners, i.e., those for whom either fate or finances made it impossible to leave thusly (or who were smart enough to want to live, but not smart enough to leave), and who thus battened down the hatches and made sure to have enough bottled water and dry goods to last a week; and

The morons, i.e., The Guys Who Proved Darwin Right, which is to say, the ones who thought that a Category 5 with gusts over 200 miles an hour would lead to some sweet waves, and, Dude, I've got my board, Dude, I've got my boat, let's rock!

I regret that Gilbert did not hit Houston, because, first, it scoured the Yucatan, and quite frankly, Texans were in a better position to take that damage than the largely poor inhabitants of that peninsula, and, second, because some filtering of the gene pool is desirable.