Colon Cleansing, Ben Stein, & Selecting a Candidate Quiz

I get occasional forwarded e-mail from Harry Cobb, not his real name, but his e-mail persona. We are not very well aligned politically.

About a month ago I receiving both an e-mail from him containing spurious historical rebuttals to objections to Bush's war in Iraq and an offer to flush excess pounds from my colon. (Separate messages, but the pairing was fortuitous.)

How people know more about my colon than I do continues to mystify me, but their message turned out to be just what I needed, although not as they anticipated: The colonic cleansing message proved to be the solution to the persistent problem of replying to Harry's unwanted e-mail.

Now, when Harry sends me a message, actually most of his e-mail is forwarded messages , that I find a waste of my time, I forward the colonic cleansing message to him as a response. I change the subject so it appears that I'm responding to his message he forwarded to me. Harry was a Psych major as an undergraduate so I expect that he'll recognize (and respond) to classical conditioning. (The not so subtle implication that he's a dog is also there, but then he knows I 'm fond of dogs.)

To induce Harry to read, and not automatically delete my e-mail, I try to respond to those worthy of response in a positive fashion. (Psychologist can now weigh in about how my message sending is not classical conditioning, and can send a mixed message. They are welcome to contact me. I'll give them Harry's e-mail account so they can validate their opinions.) All of which brings me to:

Ben Stein

I read Ben Stein on economics. His involvement with "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" is embarrassing to the point of being a failure of reason. Harry forwarded a CBS Sunday Morning Commentary: 12/18/2005 - Christmas by Ben Stein about religion which I felt glibly slid around school prayer, evolution, church state separation, etc. When I got to the part where Billy Graham's daughter explained why God let Katrina happen because among other things we don't have school prayer, I thought Ben Stein was being either extremely funny or in need of help. Being unable to help Ben Stein I opted instead to forward Harry the colonic cleansing missive.

Selecting a Candidate Quiz

On the other, hand, to give credit where credit is due, Harry sent me an 11 question Select a Candidate Quiz from radio station WQAD*. From my own experience I think the quiz is accurate. I was surprised to see that the score for my top two candidates was only near 60. (The value is dependent on the degree of importance selected for each response.)

I thanked Harry for the quiz, but, as is so typical of me, I couldn't resist chastising him for not citing the original quiz at Minesota Public Radio.

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*I looked up WQAD and was surprised to have to dig around their web site a bit to determine that the Quad Cities are Davenport and Bettendorf in Iowa and Moline/East Moline and Rock Islands in Illinois.