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German Communist Party hands out inappropriate pens to schoolchildren

Oops:

BERLIN - To sweeten their first day at primary school German children are normally given a cardboard cone filled with sweets, but schoolchildren in Essen this year opened their cones to find pens which project erotic images.

They’re communists, so of course they shop at discount stores.

In a press release the German Communist Party stated that it had purchased the pens from a discount store, which had said the pens lit up at the push of a button.

“The German Communist Party deeply regrets what has happened and is outraged that this kind of thing, which borders on pornography, can be purchased in normal shops,” it said, adding that its lawyers were now investigating whether the vendors could be prosecuted.

The WSJ drinking game

Every time you read the name Adam Smith in one of the newspaper’s articles, you take a shot.  So far today I’ve taken one shot.

Morning in Petoskey

It is morning in Petoskey, and thunderheads are marching across the sky, from left to right, like an army off to war; with no weapons but the rain, they are only slightly dangerous, as they might foil my plans to walk to the store to get a newspaper.

The Myth of Sisyphus

“It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

“The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.” - Albert Camus