"Carlin's jokes constantly breached the accepted boundaries of comedy and language, particularly with his routine on the "Seven Words" — all of which are taboo on broadcast TV and radio to this day.
When he uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance.
When the words were later played on a New York radio station, they resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling upholding the government's authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language during hours when children might be listening.
"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," he told The Associated Press earlier this year." - Joe Blair via Bookmarklet
"These are the same guys who helped to engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11," the presumed nominee told reporters aboard his campaign plane. "This is the same kind of fear-mongering that got us into Iraq ... and it's exactly that failed foreign policy I want to reverse." - Joe Blair
"Why do some songs mercilessly stick in our heads and repeat themselves over and over? What makes these hooks so hooky? And how does a songwriter will a song forth from the ether? Nightmarish stories of musical hallucinations, songs that transcend language, and the triumphant return of the Elvis of Afghanistan." (podcast with both streaming and downloadable versions) - Joe Blair
"Two congressmen, both longtime critics of Beijing's record on human rights, said the compromised computers contained information about political dissidents from around the world. One of the lawmakers said he'd been discouraged from disclosing the computer attacks by other U.S. officials." - Joe Blair
"Once the new sexual generation of males and queens have emerged, all the other wasps die off and the nest will never be used again; so it is always safe to remove an old one and dissect it. Unless, of course, you happen to live in New Zealand, where the European wasps, accidentally transported to the southern hemisphere many years ago, are confused by the lack of clear seasons. Instead of stopping for winter, they continue colony-building for two, three or perhaps even more years, creating huge nests the size of saloon cars with scores of thousands of workers. Let's hope global warming doesn't encourage them to act like that here." - Joe Blair
"Making sex a taboo topic keeps children from finding reliable information outside of the classroom. This early negative perception of sex is almost impossible to escape from." - Joe Blair
"It's amazing to see such striking differences on opposite ends of Saturn's poles," said Bob Brown, team leader of the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer at the University of Arizona. "At the south pole we have what appears to be a hurricane with a giant eye, and at the north pole of Saturn we have this geometric feature, which is completely different." - Joe Blair
""When it comes to Iraq, it appears that money is no object for President Bush," said the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va. "Yet when it comes to important priorities here at home, he turns into Ebeneezer Scrooge."" - Joe Blair
Wow! And you weren't even playing against me. If I had actually picked up the game invite, I would have drastically improved your odds at this. - Shellee
No, you'd still kick my butt cos I'm sure this win was a fluke. - Joe Blair
