1) What will happen to Canadian forces after the end of the Afghan mission?
a) they will turn into pretty butterflies and soar away on wafting breezes
b) they are a mighty fighting force, awesome to behold, and they will go to whatever trouble spots in the world the American government believes they can do the most good!
c) nobody can tell, but we do know one thing: they won’t go back to peacekeeping, because peacekeeping is for wussies and sissies and girly-men and…and…is the fun really going to be over so soon? * MOAN *
2) What is the difference between misfeasance and malfeasance?
a) three quarters of a feasance
b) $100,00 in legal fees
c) aah, that lies somewhere between the difference between a junk bond and a pomegranate and a raven and a writing desk
3) Strict constructionists jurists (in plain English: American judges who rule based on their interpretation of the intent of the framers of the Constitution) would not grant unlimited free speech rights to corporations. Despite this, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court just ruled that corporations have the unlimited free speech right to flood politics with advertising dollars. How do they justify this?
a) by standing on their heads (which is not easy to do in full robeage)
b) awwwwwwwwwww, construction conschmuction!
c) the law…the law, my son, is like an inner tube – flexible when inflated with hot air and generally all wet. If Kafka taught us nothing else, he taught us that!
4) January 20, 2010 was supposed to be a National Day of Strike arranged by one element of the Tea Party Movement. Why didn’t it happen?
a) they drank a little too much tea and had to spend the afternoon in the Porta-Potty
b) they drank a little too much tea and had to spend the afternoon in the line for the Porta-Potty
c) they drank a little too much paranoia and had to spend the afternoon in their darkened rooms until the bad dreams went away
d) Sarah Palin wouldn’t come because they couldn’t afford her $100,000 speaking fee, so the Tea Partiers retired to their rooms to sulk
5) National Day of Strike is an awkward name. What would have been a better choice?
a) National Day of Shrike (if Michele Bachmann spoke)
b) National Day of Offensive Hyperbole
c) Fred
6) What would it take to make John Boehner smile?
a) an event too horrific to contemplate
b) not contemplating it. Sorry. No. That way leads madness. I am so not –
c) …if anybody wants me, I’ll be in my darkened room until the bad dreams go
away
7) How would you best deal with laughing while Web surfing in the middle of a business meeting?
a) invite your boss to watch Funny or Die videos with you
b) claim you’re doing research for your next Power Point presentation (hinting that it will be more entertaining than the Power Point presentation everybody is currently suffering through)
c) mention the arc differential equation in the database calculation subroutine, reminding everybody at the table that they need the tech department more than the tech department needs them, and go back to Web surfing
d) other
8) Russia sold all of its holdings in Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac – $65.6 billion – months before they were seized by American regulators. This was a case of…
a) prudent investing on the part of the Russians.
b) a plot the Russians were trying to concoct with the Chinese to destroy the American housing market by selling off their major investments in it.
c) mistaken identity.
9) Who said he was “a big supporter of waterboarding.”
a) Josef Mengele, German war criminal
b) Yukio Asano, Japanese war criminal
c) Dick Cheney, ?
d) all of the above
10) Now that negotiating with the Taliban to end the Afghan war is official NATO policy, how soon will Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologize for vilifying NDP leader Jack Layton when he suggested that NATO negotiate with the Taliban THREE YEARS AGO?
a) never
b) never
c) not ever
11) If your credit rating is in the 700s, you could:
a) be an armadillo and not even realize it.
b) buy Venezuela.
c) pay for a couple of minutes of the Afghan War or almost an hour of the Iraq War without breaking a sweat.
d) other
12) A recent CBS/New York Times poll found that 70 percent of Americans are in favor of gay men and lesbians serving in the military while only 59 percent of Americans are in favor of homosexuals serving in the military. How can we best understand the 11 point difference?
a) respondents weren’t paying attention to the questions
b) respondents weren’t paying attention to their own answers
c) respondents were messing with the heads of the questioners (and, it worked – seven of the 32 questioners’ heads exploded)
13) Why does tiny Israel attract so much attention when places like Darfur, where people suffer incomparably horrific human rights violations on a huge scale, go relatively unnoticed?
a) there aren’t too many votes from former citizens of Darfur in Canada
b) Darfur doesn’t sit in the middle of the region of the world with the most oil
c) remember the cry “Never again!”? It was written in Cheez Whiz on a very hot day
14) Oh, wait. You were expecting me to blame anti-Semitism, weren’t you?
a) well, obviously!
b) well, duh!
c) you know, you’re not very bright. I like that in a public intellectual…
15) What is the “Mandate to Save America?”
a) the Republican response to the Republican “Contract On America”
b) the Republican response to the popularity of Democratic health care reform (by which they mean they are saving 34,000 Americans a year the burdens of living)
c) a tick on the flea of the hair of the tail that wags the dog
16) What did the Afghan war accomplish?
a) it got Phil Pitts out of the house for the first time in six years, so his parents were happy…ecstatic, really…
b) it made a lot of work for historians. so they were happy…ecstatic really (well, as ecstatic as frumpy academics ever get…)
c) killing scumbags made General Rick Hillier happy…ecstatic, really…and, what more could you ask of a war?
17) What is “Creeping Sharia?”
a) a plant fungus native to the western south-east region of the Amazon and some parts of Brooklyn
b) how your wife, Sharon, enters the bedroom at three in the morning after a night on the town with the girls
c) a humourous oath (example: “Holy Creeping Sharia, Batman, if Mister Freeze could actually offset global warming, he would be a bigger hero than we could ever hope to be!”)
18) Why does nuclear power seem to be making a comeback?
a) the problem of what to do with nuclear waste has been solved! (Isn’t science a marvelous thing?)
b) people rose up en masse and demanded to live near fragile containment domes and outtake pipes spewing radioactive tritium! (Isn’t democracy a wonderful thing?)
c) I’ll tell you this much: it has nothing to do with the $645 million spent lobbying Congress and the White House over the past ten years, because that would just make a mockery of science and democracy!
19) What was your favourite Olympic memory?
a) when Judson McPetrie won the silver for the 1,000 meter break-in, loot and run in the Atlanta summer – oh, wait, you meant at the Vancouver Olympics, didn’t you? Uhh…the mascot?
b) the way Canadian Olympians inspired the world with their humble attitude as they were kicking everybody else’s ass!
c) when Sacheen Littlefeather went to the podium to refuse the gold Martin Brordieu for the downhill hop, skip and luge (take that COC!)
20) Where have all the good people gone?
a) over to the dark side (but, they’ll be okay when the sun rises in 10 hours or so)
b) gone to pumpkins, every one
c) to a Sam Roberts concert, of course