What Cheer, Netop?

For those keeping track, I finished Baen's Galaxy: The Best Of My Years this morning and launched into The Best Of Crank! during lunch, so that little project's coming right along. I don't want to influence the results of the poll, but I think it is safe to note that the second piece in the Galaxy book, an essay by Isaac Asimov titled "Is There Hope For The Future", contains a series of predictions for what the world might look like at the beginning of the 21st century, the first of which is: "World population will stand at 7,000,000,000, but all over the world, heroic and successful measures will be holding the line, and every effort will be made to lower the birth rate to the point where the population will decline toward an ultimate goal of perhaps no more than 1,000,000,000." This prediction is actually one of the most accurate in the essay.

Conventional liberal wisdom four years ago:

The two eldest members, Justice Stevens, 80 and Chief Justice Rehnquist, 75, are expected to retire over the next four years. Court-watchers have predicted that Chief Justice Rehnquist will retire if George W. Bush, Jr. is elected president in November.

And in 2002 speculation continued:

For Rehnquist and O'Connor, the story is different. Both have signaled, although subtly, that they were each waiting for a Republican administration to resign. Rehnquist—who is 78—famously told Charlie Rose last year that "traditionally, Republican appointees have tended to retire during Republican administrations." Now while this comment could portend nothing more than the observation that "traditionally, Republican appointees tend to wear burgundy loafers" might have, folks in the Supreme Court tea-leaf racket have tended to interpret this as his promise to depart the court when the conditions for replacement with a like-minded conservative were best.

Justice O'Connor, who is 72, has similarly been making noises that rhyme with "retire" for some time, although the also famous election-night 2000 suggestion that she'd step down if Bush gained office was made by O'Connor's husband, John, not her. The other piece of O'Connor gossip, since the days of Bush v. Gore, has been that she would rethink retiring if the chief justice's stripes were offered to her.

And this was supposedly written in 2003:

Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Sandra O'Connor both expressed a desire to retire and be replaced by a conservative judge within the 2000 to 2004 timeframe prior to the time when they presided over the case of Bush vs. Gore.

At a party on the night of the election Justice O'Connor expressed dismay when she heard the news that Florida was initially called for Al Gore.  Her comments that night were "This is terrible!"

I figured that someone would have retired by now. It's good to be wrong about some things.

(I should note that the Slate piece I quoted above [the second quotation] ends up being very skeptical that any of the Justices would retire any time soon.)

This is something my father told me about when I was a kid, and for some reason I've always remembered it. But recently I tried to verify it on the web and was unable to. However, I talked to my father again last week and asked him about it and he confirmed that I didn't make it up, so here it is.

According to my father, at one point, some years after he sold Kentucky Fried Chicken, Colonel Sanders was interviewed on some teevee show. In this interview, he revealed that he disapproved of the way KFC's new owners were managing the restaurants and called one of the new products "nothing but a damn greasy doughball".

Not long after that, he was committed to a rest home.

With a bit of luck, now if someone else tries to find information about this (by, say, searching for "damn greasy doughball" on Google) they will at least be able to determine that someone else remembered the interview.

HISTORICAL NOTE ENDS.

Someone who is, as far as I can tell, a complete stranger sent me and a bunch of other people (I think we have a mutual friend who himself occasionally sends messages to all of us) a nice little piece of flong.

I probably should have just deleted it, but instead I replied to all.

( What I wrote )