Are you wary about your Thanksgiving Dinner guests suing your for contributing to obesity in them or any other unpleasant side effects of an opulent meal? Well, here is a liability waiver you might want to have them sign it right at the door. You never know…

In response to recent minimum wage hike discussions, US Congressman Bill Sali introduced the Obesity Reduction and Health Promotion Act. The bill proposes to reduce gravity by 10%, thus reducing the weight of all Americans.

As a freshman Congressman, the likely passage of this measure has taught me a new principle: The force of Congress can be brought to bear and justified to suspend those natural laws which would otherwise control important matters. The well-intentioned desire of Congress to help the poor apparently will not be restrained by the rules and principles of the free market that otherwise do restrain American businesses and workers. Apparently, Congress can change the rules that would otherwise affect the affairs of mankind.

So, Mr. Speaker, I have asked my staff to draft a measure I call the Obesity Reduction and Health Promotion Act. Since Congress will apparently not be restrained by the laws and principles that naturally exist, I propose that the force of gravity by the force of Congress be reduced by 10 percent. Mr. Speaker, that will result in immediate weight loss for every American. It will immediately help reduce obesity problems in America. Weight loss will also help to promote the overall health of Americans as we have been vigilantly advised by our health care.

If Congress can defy the laws of the market, why not defy the laws of physics? I think that is a great idea. It will finally rid me of those last ten pounds I have been meaning to lose for quite some time now. After all, we all know two things: (1) the minimum wage really helps poor people, (2) generally, you can lose weight without diet and exercise.

And by that I mean political correctness. Apparently, Sesame Street’s early episodes, now available on DVD, contain a not suitable for children warning, the NY Times reports.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.” Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said. Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.

Please, give me a break!

Apparently it can be used to detect stupidity. Well, sort of. StupidFilter is an open source project to identify “rampant stupidity in written English.” Eventually, the authors hope to create a Firefox and Wordpress plugin. I wonder if they can create one for email, considering some of the ones I get from my students.

Unfortunately, the StupidFilter will not be able to distinguish between ironic and genuine uses of stupidity:

The StupidFilter is blind to irony. Our intent is that one or two instances of “lol” or “ur dum” in several paragraphs of otherwise-cogent text won’t result in a false positive. However, we consider the StupidFilter’s irony-ignorance to be a feature, insofar as even if an allegedly-smart person makes a short, stupid comment, their smartness doesn’t make the comment any less stupid. If your mom had designed the StupidFilter, she might say “If you can’t say anything smart, don’t say anything at all.”

Furthermore, it may be easily defeated:

Won’t people just try to defeat the filter, the way spammers try to get around spam filtering?
We certainly hope they will — that implies they’re no longer generating text statistically likely to be stupid. It’s true that an obvious attack on the StupidFilter would be to salt a short, stupid comment with a long excerpt copy-pasted from, say, Project Gutenberg, but we think it’s reasonable to count on the laziness of the stupidest commenters not to do this.

Meanwhile, I thought of some other filters that could be created: Not-enough-nudity-filter, I-haven’t-studied-the-facts-but-I-like-to make/act in-a-movie-about-it-filter, Cheesy-filter, Bias filter (wait, that would eliminate my blog, too), filter-filter. Maybe you can come up with some more.

Venezuela is slated to vote on profound constitutional reforms in December, among them abolition of presidential term limits.

In addition to abolishing presidential term limits, President Chavez is also proposing to bypass legal controls on the executive during a state of emergency, bring in a maximum six-hour working day, cut the voting age from 18 to 16, and increase presidential control over the central bank.

Could it be that the six-hour work day and lowering of voting age are incentives to get voters to approve the more egregious reforms that will increase presidential power? Of course, they only look good on the surface. Making it illegal for anyone to work more than six hours will surely have a negative effect on the economy. What if I am poor and I need to work more than six hours to make a living? What if I like my work and want to work longer than six hours? Passion is often what drives achievement, production and innovation. Government spending on welfare programs will have to be increased, which means higher taxes. Higher taxes means people have less money to spend and to invest into the economy.

With respect to the voting age, I am inclined to think that 16-year olds will be less able to make informed choices. This is not to imply that older people necessarily make better choices, but one could argue that the younger and more impressionable your voter pool is, the easier you it will be to sell them questionable measures. I suppose we will see whether Venezuelans realize the extent to which these constitutional reforms will move them toward a dictatorship when the outcome of the referendum vote is in. This should remind you of something. One need only look at history to see how many dictatorships arose from the democratic process.