While teleconferencing at work, I jotted down a list of actually-used platitudes and business speak. I think if you take all the “real” words out of the conversation, you can still tell pretty much what’s going on:

Left holding the bag
Dealt a bad hand
Coming on board (many times)
Troubled spots
Didn’t let the ball drop
Coming on board (many times)
Break bread
Swimming upstream
Full-court press
The bad guys have our money in their pockets — we’re going to go after it
Coming on board (many times)
. . .

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Matt is proud to announce the birth of 1999 Chevrolet Prizm.  Prizm has his father’s headlights and power locks, his father’s automatic transmission, parking brake, glove compartment, and rear-window defroster, and also his father’s air conditioning and AM/FM stereo.  A mutant gene resulted in power windows and a CD player.  The mother declined to identify herself or her contributions, but may have had something to do with Prizm’s 62,000-mile odometer reading.

After a month’s hard labor on Matt’s part, the birth attendants decided to extract Prizm surgically through the checking account.  Fortunately, there were no complications, except for a continued checking-account discharge . . .

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At work, we just got done with a 134-minute teleconference meeting where absolutely nothing was decided. I mean no one decision could be said to have been made, per se.

It’s times like these, which is pretty much every workday, when I like to read a daily helping of meta-Marmaduke, where Joe Mathlete explains today’s Marmaduke cartoon (in 500 words or less).

I’ve always joked that every Marmaduke cartoon, throughout histroy, could be paraphrased with the same 6 words: “That is a really big dog.” But Mr. Mathlete proves that there is much more going on in those single-panels . . .

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Go Democrats!

And now to more important things: YouTube & Hamsters

From the Wall Street Journal:

Coming to Your TV — Homemade Hamster Videos?

Web sites like YouTube have vaulted into the vanguard of Internet entertainment by providing a medium for people to post videos of practically any imaginable activity, from bizarre pet antics to teenagers riding shopping carts into walls.

Now some of the country’s largest telecom operators, including Comcast Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc., are trying to determine if there’s a business in putting such videos on television.

On Monday, Comcast launched a trial version of ziddio.com, . . .

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I hope everyone who can vote is voting today. And I hope you vote for the good guys. I’m swinging wildly between optimism and pessimism from minute to minute, to the point that I may soon need a hamburger / some drugs to calm me down. Time to go to Burger King.

• U.S. Cops Sue Over Drug-Spiked Burgers

Meanwhile, here’s a good news / bad news round-up for election day:

• Republicans closing gap as U.S. votes.” 
• Democrats concerned about races they thought they had in the bag.”
• In better news from Virginia, Jim Webb . . .

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