Talking Points
With your host, Tom Scheve

Whenever I hear about someone dying in a hot-air balloon accident, it saddens me to think that in this day and age, we are still losing friends and loved ones who ask nothing more than to safely travel from point A to point B in the comfort of modern wicker that has been molded into the form of an un-steerable flight device propelled by a giant blowtorch blasting a rubber balloon. Why did you have to snatch them from us, Lord?

2004 was decreed to be the Year of the Blogger. I’m spearheading the movement to make 2005 the Year of the Extremely Filthy Private Diarist.

Ways to protect yourself from identity theft:

• Next time a friend asks to borrow your identity over the weekend, firmly say “no.”
• Assume a false identity so if someone steals it, you still have your own.
• Never tell the restaurant hostess your real name.
• Change all PIN #’s to birth date, which you disclose to nobody.
• Adopt the practice of using fake screen names when trying to start an affair in a chat room.
• Lay in wait behind tree until somebody shows up at your house to steal your identity and then jump out and steal their identity first.

Inter-species scat consumption in my back yard is on the rise. Human-dog mouth-contact is on the decline.

It’s unbecoming to beg for your life on videotape, unless it works.

There was a recent police sweep through Asheville High School. They locked the kids in their classrooms for two hours and ran drug dogs by the lockers and through the parking lot. They didn’t find a single thing. What’s up with kids these days?

I’ve had a lot of bad first days on the job, but imagine the new Director of Homeland Security’s first day. Not only do you have to meet everybody and remember names and find the honeys and figure out where you can smoke cigarettes and take naps, but sometime around lunch, the person training you goes, “OK, basically, you’re responsible for protecting all 50 states,” and you’re wondering, “What about Guam?” but you don’t want to make a bad impression by asking. Also, “So, who am I in cahoots with? The Masons? Aliens? No? Oh, I was just messing around. Where do I take smoke breaks?” I would get started by concentrating all available resources in the front yard of my house and then just working outward.