Just make sure it's wrapped

Many Things

By Jim Flanagan

(Updated: Wednesday, April 30, 2008, 5:02 PM)

Cute bumper stickers

"Monica Lewinski's ex-boyfriend's wife for president"

"Give blood, play hockey"

A taste of satire

Jonathon Swift was an Irish satirical writer in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. When the Brits occupied Ireland, he suggested that maybe they should boil Irish babies as food for the British troops.

That led me to innovate a method to reduce homicide by applying the rules of hunting. If you kill it, you have to eat it.

Art Hoppe, one of my favorite columnists in the San Francisco Chronicle in days of old, also used satire in his columns. One was the eternal question of what we do with the poor. Midway in his column he would bring in an expert. In this case, it was a cryologist. The solution? When you don't need the poor, freeze 'em. When you need them, then you thaw them out. That column stirred up fuss much like Obama's recent comments about the poor.

Advice to men

When you give a present to a lady, please wrap it. Your male buddy may not care if you do not wrap something you give him, but the lady definitely does.

Prison health care

The state is under pressure to do something to improve a failing health care system in prisons. The Governor's proposal is to issue bonds for $7 billion . That's with nine zeros after the $7. Of that sum $2.5 billion is for long term care facilities outside prison walls. My take is that if we are releasing non-violent prisoners, why not the ones who need long-term care? The long-term care prison patients would seem to be as harmless as the other 22,000 inmates the governor proposes releasing. Keep in mind that these bonds are in addition to the $7.4 billion in bonds the voters approved a year ago to pay for prison and jail construction.