Spanish insight

We had dinner the other night with a geologist from Spain who just moved to town to oversee his country's local gas and oil interests. At one point, the conversation turned to how different our respective hometowns are from Santa Cruz. As I was giving my two cents, the geologist stopped munching on his suckling pig and stared off into the distance with a sincere look of confusion.
"Philadelphia," he said. "How is Philadelphia? You don't hear much about Philadelphia. It's kind of like the Paraguay of the United States."
Not a bad analogy, I thought. But where does that leave Cincinnati? French Guyana?

A humble apology...

from his Holiness Pat Robertson. The Bush friend and founder of the Christian Coalition, you see, got quite a bit of flack for asking the C.I.A. to "take out" popularly elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez -- a man Donald Rumsfeld recently accused of manipulating Bolivian elections.
The host of the "700 Club" was kind enough to sprinkle some cute equivocation into his contrition.

''I didn't say 'assassination.' I said our special forces should 'take him out,''' he explained to an Associated Press reporter. '''Take him out' could be a number of things including kidnapping.''
Duh.