Leaked! -- The REAL Bobby Jindal Speech THEY Didn't Want YOU to Hear

Good evening, and happy Mardi Gras. I'm Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana.

Tonight, we've witnessed a great moment in the history of our republic. In the very chamber where Congress once voted to abolish slavery, our first African-American president stepped forward to address the state of our union.

I was also at one time a skinny kid with a funny name, so I grew up and made everyone call me Bobby. Like the tribal armband tattoo I got in the late '90s, it made sense at the time. I would have kept my real name if I had known it would become such a trendy political asset.

Have Some Human Dignity, For Free

Like a confrontation over a plush Mardi Gras throw coming to blows, Americans like nothing more than doggedly and irrationally pursuing a 'free' item. "Make some noise!" for a free, low thread count t-shirt that will never be worn? Shit, we'd stuff a lit M-80 into our trachea if that would catch the attention of the fluffy mascot with the shirt cannon.

Handling Tools

We're sure this article will get more attention than at our little damp, uninhabited corner of the internet, so we'll keep it brief. But we could not ignore this article from cnn.com, which includes more double entendres than a bad sitcom. They might as well as written an Onion article, and these researchers seem to be aiming straight for the illustrious Ig Nobel Prize. Princeton(!) researchers have proven, scientifically, that upon viewing pictures of women in bikinis, increased activity in the area's of men's brains that correspond to "handling tools" results. Something like that deserves to be quoted for emphasis:

New research shows that, in men, the brain areas associated with handling tools and the intention to perform actions light up when viewing images of women in bikinis.

People have reactions of avoidance toward the homeless and drug addicts, and the opposite for scantily clad women.

We have some good proposals of our own, you know:

• Upon smoking marujuana, is there increased activity in the part of the brain that controls desire for Doritos?
• Why do people not mind the smell of their own farts? Oh, did we just make your mind explode, NIH?
• Scientifically speaking, how bad of pizza will drunk people in the L.E.S. still pay $3 for at 2AM?
• Is there any experimental correlation between female attractiveness and male desire to carry large objects?

If any large governmental funding agencies are willing to fund these groundbreaking research ideas, please deposit the grant money directly into DBB's UBS account.

Did We All Forget How Much Tom Daschle Sucks?

Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination to various Health-related cabinet posts, and some people seem downright wistful about him:

"It really sets us back a step," said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. "Because he was such a talent. I mean he understood Congress, serving in the House and Senate; he certainly had the confidence of the president."

"I was a little stunned. I thought he was going to get confirmed," said Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, the panel that would have voted on Daschle's nomination. "It's regrettable. He's a very good man."

"Tom made a mistake, which he has openly acknowledged," Obama said Tuesday. "He has not excused it, nor do I. But that mistake and this decision cannot diminish the many contributions Tom has made to this country."

We always remembered Daschle as the Senate majority leader that was so afraid of being seen as not sufficiently patriotic or tough on terrorism that he led his party to vote exactly like Republicans. Soon enough, with such spineless submissives like him representing the Democratic crème de la crème, people figured they might as well vote for actual Republicans. They lost the majority, and he lost his seat. Basically, Tom Daschle was Jay Bulworth before his crisis of concience in that inspired, shitty movie from the 90's. He was a bigger tool than Carson Daly and Matt Lauer combined.

And now, like that venereal disease you thought you took care of with an entire tube of Neosporin, he returns years later wearing the most douchey red glasses possible. Listen Tom, you are not Thom Daschle, respectable art curator. You're a scumbag lobbyist for the health care industry who would be one of the last people on Earth to effect real health care reform. You had to drop out of effecting fake-change because, rest assured, more shit than free limo rides would have floated to the surface. Tear down those glasses, get some comped Lasik, and keep popping klonopin every time someone says DeLay. A better takedown than ours was done by Matt Taibbi, an actual political reporter:

When Obama picked Tom Daschle to be the HHS Secretary, I nearly shit my pants. In Washington there are whores and there are whores, and then there is Tom Daschle. Tom Daschle would suck off a corpse for a cheeseburger.

It's February, and we are already pretty tired of fake change we have no better option than to accept. As Bulworth himself once opined, "What are you going to do, vote Republican?" The obvious first choice for health care reformist, Howard Dean, must have turned down the fake-change czar nomination before it was offered to Daschlebbychleb. Either that, or Daschlebbychleb was owed a favor by Obama in some sort of Wire-ish scheme.

Getting a Cellphone Abroad is Something You Should Do

As much as going to another country is a chance to experience another culture, it is often a chance to travel technologically back in time. This was a time, prior to this decade, when entire Seinfeld episodes could be written around the comical adventures that ensue when direct communication was not available. Cell phones did not exist, and any hypothetical meeting up between two separate entities involved meticulous planning and unparalleled trust. The exact place and time of meeting had to be specified hours in advance and several contingency plans had to be discussed. Now of course, when you get off the subway hoping to meet your friend in the village the convenience of technology allows you to get a comforting text message along the lines of "sup brah still in brooklyn c u n 30 sorry". If you are traveling abroad and hope to have the same stress-free, informal meet-ups that you are used to, you need to get your cellphone to work abroad.

Pintxos and Friends

Few things are as narcissistic as blogging about how many hits your blog has been getting lately; nothing we're able to do is more pretentious than hosting a dinner party highlighting the cuisine of a region whose existence most guests are not aware. The centerpiece was these flag-evoking anchovy pintxos we were informed about here. To differ, we added spicy pimenton ahumado to our mayo and unfortunately over-roasted the peppers, making them harder to cut. FYI, we were able to find boquerones in NYC at Westside.
Since the phrase "Vegetarian Spanish Food" may have as well been created for a George Carlin bit about oxymorons, we had to freestyle for these inclusivity-themed pintxos. We incorporated an ancient secret of Spanish cooking -- using a shitload of olive oil -- to sauté two packages of oyster mushrooms with half an onion, roasted red pepper scraps, and thyme leaves. This was topped with a slice of brie and freshly ground smoked peppercorns. The brie was ommitted on two of these per plate so that vegans would have two less reasons to passively whine -- these were consistently the last two eaten before a new plate was brought out.
For the people who were too squeamish to let their palette wander like a butterfly in an open meadow we made these self-explanatory Castilian pintxos. More notably, we were actually able to bring with us from Spain our favorite olive, Campo Real. They are perplexedly sold nowhere in the United States that we are aware of; please turn the lights on for us if you know where to find the switch. They have a fresh, herbed, non-salty flavor for which there is no substitute.
The reason for the existence of the party was the purchase of a frozen octopus from the corner fish market. At 24$ we needed help eating this, and at the precipice of offending the uninvited the only reasonable choice was to invite everyone that we could think of. We wanted to see if we could recreate the pulpo a la gallega of our dreams -- contrary to the assurances of Bittman we were not. While certainly tasty, it was rubberier than the restaurant prepared version that hooked us in the first place. However, the Area 51-esque scenarios we encountered in cooking such a creature more than validated the attempt.
Like the fabled lost episode of your favorite TV show, message board denizens of Pintxos and Friends fan sites often say that the tastiest pintxos were the ones never brought out. This would be the bacalao pintxos we prepared from this recipe. While that sauce is very lacking in the flavor category, placing a piece of bacalao on the baguette slice and topping it with a pickled hot pepper made an irresistible combination. So irresistible that the possibility of our tipsy Friends eating too fast and choking to death on fish bones caused our inner risk-assessor to keep them hidden. However, based on the reports of sober souls with lifelong experience in navigating cod skeletons -- the few trusted with the task of tasting -- they measured up.

Fun With Google Analytics, Vol. 1

Much like Rakim rapping about how good he is at rapping, we are going to get a little meta-indulgent here and blog about blogging. We got our Jan 14th post about La Penya a mention on the pre-eminent basketball blog, TrueHoop, by wining, dining, and bribing. Of course, that is super-secret internet speak for sending a polite email. As you can see, the bump in traffic made all of our other posts look insignificant by comparison. We're definitely swimming in advertising revenue now at the DBB headquarters. In the blogosphere, it is a good thing when your individual country details look like CDC disease outbreak scenarios.

Perusing our worldwide acclaim led us to pinpoint another one of Google's well known Chinese government-placating policies. Hovering your mouse over individual countries on the map overlay will show how many hits in the last month you have gotten from that country. Conveniently, the country over which your mouse hovers is highlighted in yellow to further visually distinguish it. For instance, when we hovered our mouse over Taiwan it showed that we had recieved 2 visits from there. However, as you can see, more than just Taiwan was highlighted when we did this, a subtle reminder from Google as to just how far they believe Taiwanese autonomy extends.