Pretty funny roundup of the best newspaper errors of the year.

While delivering papers the other day, I ordered out of curiosity a McRib sandwich at McDonald’s. It was pretty awful. The best parts were tasteless. The rest was a sort of gummy mush of palate-punishing muck. I actually felt a little ill for a while after I ate it.

No wonder.

Got an email purporting to be from Intuit rejecting our latest payroll. We don’t use Intuit payroll, so of course the whole thing was made up. But some of the word choices were hard to hate:

• Finances would be gone away from below account # ending in 9777 on Fri, 11 Jan 2013 06:02:13 +0100
• amount to be seceded: 8777 USD
• Paychecks would be procrastinated to your personnel accounts on: Fri, 11 Jan 2013 06:02:13 +0100

I will have more to say about this next week, after I get my payroll procrastinated.

Huckabee and Hannity both attacked Obama for having two few women in key advisory positions. It’s debatable whether this criticism is justified, but I happened to hear Crystal Ball make the same point on MSNBC, and she was fairly persuasive.

Of course, Crystal Ball, a liberal, would have been all over a Republican administration with the same defect. So for her to go after a Democrat on these grounds shows a certain amount of intellectual honesty and a nonpartisan commitment to larger principles.

What are the odds that either Huckabee or Hannity would have criticized a Republican administration for appointing too few women? I will let you know as soon as I get my new contract to play center field for the New York Yankees. I’m holding out for $125 million.

Over at Rockin’ on the Right Side, Tom Balek is not only a liar and a racist, he’s a coward, too.

Balek was among those taking cheap shots at Hillary Clinton for claiming that an injury kept her from testifying to Congress about Benghazi. Now that her hospital stay has made it patently clear that she was telling the absolute truth, you’d think people like Balek would apologize for taking cheap shots.

But no. Not only has he failed to say a word, he deleted my comment saying that I was awaiting his apology.

As it happens, MSNBC was discussing precisely this topic the other day, and one of the guests — I forget her name — said both parties take cheap shots such as the ones many on the right, including Charles Krauthammer and John Bolton, took at Clinton.

Salon’s Joan Walsh disagreed sharply. Who on the left with the prominence of Bolton or Krauthammer, she asked, has ever accused a top Republican of faking illness? The other guest said, lamely, that somebody once tweeted something about George W. Bush.

I think Walsh is right on the money on this. I can’t think of an example of this from the left, and if one did come up, I imagine the offender would be hounded until he or she apologized and/or was fired.

Why is this? I don’t think either party has any particular claim on good manners. I certainly haven’t seen it in my years of dealing with politicians in both parties. But I suspect that some on the right fall victim to that right-wing media trap where everybody on the left is a no-good crook and any tactics are fair game. When a clown like Balek gets his hands on red meat, he’s too weak to resist. And too much of a wimp to do the honorable thing and apologize for falling for it.

The latest press release on Montana lottery winners contained this oh-too-true error:

The Montana Lottery was created by referendum in 1986. In 25 years, it has paid more than $435 million in prizes and returned more than $197 to the State of Montana.

Spam in recent months has taken an uglier turn. Instead of all those “dearly beloved” Nigerian emails I used to get, which made me sound like the most trustworthy guy on the planet, spam more often these days takes a hectoring tone: my electronic payment has been rejected; a complaint has been filed against my business; the IRS wants to collect back taxes, and so on. It’s enough to make a fellow lose faith in the scammers of the world.

But one that arrived about a dozen times last week had a certain charm. Here’s one version:

The Better Business Bureau has been recorded the above said reclamation from one of your users with reference to their business relations with you. The detailed description of the consumer’s anxiety are available at the link below. Please give attention to this matter and notify us about your opinion as soon as possible.

We graciously ask you to open the APPEAL REPORT to respond on this appeal.

We awaits to your prompt rebound.

Faithfully yours
Alexis Butler
Dispute Councilor
Better Business Bureau

The others are all slight variations, with the same basic wording but odd word changes. In one version, the customer’s “anxiety” becomes “disturbance.” In others, it becomes “trouble” or “concern” or “worry.” Instead of being “graciously” asked, in some emails I am asked “politely” or “pleasantly” or “kindly” or “amiably.” It must have Amateur Translators Week.

But I must be off. They awaits to my prompt rebound.

With no more papers to grade or Herman Melville lectures to deliver, the Outpost editor cranks out a lonely column.

In addition to the insanely busy schedule I had this fall,  I just haven’t felt much incentive to do talk radio blogging lately. There’s just nothing there.

Mike Huckabee is the biggest disappointment. Before he got a radio show, my take on him was pretty simple: a nice guy who has shown nothing to make me think he would be a good president. Now it’s this: not all that nice a guy who has shown nothing to make me think he would be a good radio host.

Really, has the man ever in his life had even one thought that didn’t absolutely conform with conventional Republican thinking? At least Limbaugh will say crazy stuff at times, which makes his show a tad unpredictable. Hannity never has an unconventional (perhaps the adjective is superfluous?) thought, but at least he likes to argue with liberals on occasion.

Huckabee has nothing. He’s boring, predictable and saccharine. On the rare occasions when he accidentally books an interesting guest, he is so determined to hold everything to a single segment that he never gets even six inches below the surface.

He is no better when he veers away from politics. He interviewed a band member of Chicago recently, and the entire interview consisted solely of variations on a single question: Did you know that I think you guys are great?

So it’s a grim world in talk radio land. Glenn Beck is just too far out there to listen to anymore. Michael Smerconish is still a model of fairness, but I can’t warm to the guy. The intolerable Michael Savage has finally been replaced by Jerry Doyle, a move that had to be an improvement. Doyle, to his credit, will take on Republicans as willingly as he takes on Democrats, but his standard libertarian rhetoric wears thin fast. Yesterday, he did a whole segment whose sole point seemed to be that people with food allergies are whiners, fakers and losers. And that was a “Best of Jerry Doyle” segment.

NPR’s three hours of Thursday afternoon jazz is sounding better all of the time.

Bumper sticker of the day: “My other wife is a Mormon.”