Unlike my esteemed colleague ChillBearLatrigue, I spend very little time agonizing over a theme for my Smokies posts.  It’s not that I don’t expend an inordinate amount of effort picking and choosing amongst all the penetrating wit and ribald hilarity on offer every week here at Wordsmoker.  But a growing body of research in cognitive science suggests that most of you have already skipped ahead to find out whether your comments and articles  – and those of fellow Wordsmokers with whom you are presently engaged in co-dependent relationships – have won anything.  We enable this practice by bolding the names of the winners, so who are we to complain?  Rather than continue the charade that you care about anything I might have to say at this point concerning world peace or my sex life, please allow me to present the following Smokie awards:

From time to time we at Wordsmoker Central highlight comments that bring a special glee to our otherwise bleak and loveless lives.   Sometimes the comments are by someone other than NefariousNewt, but usually not.  Newt’s blog can be found here.  Here he is on Sarah Palin, from Belltolls’ post earlier this week:

Barbara Walters is so brave.  She went to Alaska and interviewed the Palins and somehow didn’t get pregnant, shot anything or get raped.  At least not on camera.  Barbara Walters promises to ask the hard questions and get the answers.  Here is the reader digest version for those of you who didn’t stay up to watch this.  I am still not sure who would win in a staring contest between them though.

Rejections are like snowflakes: plentiful, and no two exactly alike. (Except the ones that are printed out on cards and duplicated!) I have certainly seen my share of them. From the blunt (“No thanks!”) to the apologetic (“We’re not accepting any new submissions right now!”) to the let’s-just-be-friends complimentary backhand (“This is well-written, but it’s not what we’re looking for right now!”) to the whimsically sublime (I once received my own cover letter back with a brief and illegible note scrawled in the margin – to the tune of “No” – like a corpse dumped off on my doorstep with its own genitals stuffed in its mouth.) I have seen them all.

Recently, our esteemed editor posted about apocalypse harbinger, lipstick-smeared syntaxulatrix, and Machiavellian outrage merchandiser Sarah Palin, who seems at the moment to be sliding from public prominence into some sort of shadowy PAC-rat purgatory, her Google-enabled grimace relegated to haunting the margins of any website who happens to mention her.

By now, most of us have probably seen soon-to-be ex-governor of Alaska Sarah Palin’s grand mal resignation news conference. You know, the one she gave in her waders while “fishing” up there on the shores of some doomed estuary in the Last Frontier State. It was weird, right?

Others have noted the bizarre nature of her remarks. And believe me, I’m not about to tread on that hallowed ground. What I would like to discuss, however,  is how visually weird–in terms of atmospherics, art direction, backdrop, mise en scène, or what have you–that press conference was.

On July 3 2009, when Sarah Palin announced her resignation, she followed a few guidelines that now typify most of her political moves. Notice how they all work synergistically to get her what she craves: attention.

Hooray for the First Amendment! Yes, it’s little things like that that allow Wordsmoker’s GLORIOUS New York SERVER to publish articles asking pertinent questions like “WHO WRITES SARAH PALIN’S RIDICULOUS BRAINFUCKING SPEECHES IS IT HER FUCKING GRANDSON TRIPPY OR TUFTY OR TURGID OR WHATEVER THE FUCK THE BUCKET OF SNOWBILLY CHROMOSOMES IS CALLED? OR DOES SHE JUST NOTE DOWN WHATEVER MESSAGES BRISTOL GETS ON HER OUIJA BOARD FROM A DEAD FRENCH AIRMAN CALLED MAURICE?”

Sometimes you just have to go with your gut, or even other body parts, like when you’re at Saratoga or Thistledown or Santa Anita and you basically have this very hot, tingly, but not unpleasant feeling like millions of fire ants are nesting in your perineum.

And what your fire-breathing perineum is telling you is that for some reason you just know for certain that it’s a fantastic idea to place $50,000 to win on a three-year old filly named “Tuff Pig Engine” who’s got about 5000 mgs of (entirely legal) furosemide coursing through her veins and whose eyes say that she’s about to have a psychotic break any minute.

And your perineum — !!!SURPRISE!!! — wins big. And so you take some of the cash and immediately call Fists of Fury Escort Service and treat your lucky perineum to an eight-hour very intensive perineal massage.

Which is one of the reasons why I’m worried that Sarah Palin is the Antichrist. It’s just this feeling I have.

Wasilla, Alaska: Embattled, murderous idiotbot Sarah Palin resigned as governor of Alaska today over something that happened to her snowmobile I think. It’s not clear what the reason is, and I’ve watched her speech twice now. Something to do with basketball giving you cancer of the tie, or the Arctic circle being from the future where General MacArthur still lives.

To be honest, it’s hard to decipher what she’s on about, or on, so the most pressing question is this -- did Trig Palin write this speech for her?

Fuck-brained, relentless breeders the “Palin Family” got another little bundle of joy today as “Bristol” Palin squeezed out yet another mouth-breathing oxygen-stealer in the form of poor little “Tripp” Palin, who weighed in at seven pounds, four ounces, no chances. Yes. “Tripp”. Pity the child named after a walking accident. Feel sorrow for the jokes the poor little boy will endure throughout his long adolescence, his short adulthood, and his untimely death at the hands of a snowmobile with an erratic starter motor. Yes. I feel his pain.

By Aaron Altman

If the recent fawning over Caroline Kennedy as a replacement to Hillary Clinton tells us anything, it’s that it’s all about the branding, baby.