Here are some samples. The first four are saturated with sardonicism; the last is a somewhat more serious (and dry) piece.

The Tennessean can always be counted on for mind-expanding news stories. While The Wall Street Journal wastes its pages analyzing the banking crisis in Japan or the effect of the Presidential crisis on the Dow, our local paper seeks to give us the information edge over the rest of the world by celebrating weather predictions based on woolly worms, corn shucks, and spider webs.

Monday’s paper tells the story of Helen Lane, a bedridden, uneducated, senile old bat who became known as the "Lady from Crab Orchard" forty years ago when she predicted a cold winter based on the number of fogs in August. Speaking recently of the primacy of woolly worms in forecasting, she said, "they’ve taught me a lot more than Doppler ever will."

Well of course they have, Helen. Reading Doppler radar requires a bit more intellectual rigor than does wandering aimlessly behind one’s cabin picking up bugs and triumphantly determining their color. You wouldn’t recognize Doppler radar if it surrounded you in a padded cell.

This story wouldn’t be so bad if Ms. Lane hadn’t contaminated the planet with children; she’s liable to croak any day now. Unfortunately, her daughter, whose picture reminds me of how irritated abject stupidity makes me, is poised to assume the throne the lunacy in Crab Orchard. We can only hope that on one of her worthless wanderings in the woods, a wild animal finds her and makes a meal out of her. I predict eternal sunshine if that happens.

Clinton Lien: Police Officer/Orgy Enthusiast

I’ve got to smile. I’ve got to laugh. When I catch my breath, I’ve got to proclaim that our police force has the collective compassion of the Gulag and the collective competence of a Barney Fife fantasy force.

We read in today’s Tennessean of a brothel in downtown Nashville, in which probable AIDS infected swingers get together, pay forty dollars, and service each other, following the example of our president. This must be stopped. This can't stand. Somebody call the cops!

Wait a minute. That won’t be necessary. There’s already a cop here, managing Nashville’s number one non-stop orgy: Metro Police officer Clinton Lien (an ironic name, isn’t it?). A visit to Officer Lien’s club is a ticket to groping, oral sex, and outright intercourse. Just see to it that you don’t make an illegal lane change on the way down there. You might get ticketed, which would be a distraction during your sex-fest.

The paper reports that Metro plans a criminal investigation. Presumably, this means that an entire team of horny officers will spend a few weeks observing the sex to determine if it’s actually happening. Meanwhile, we’re assured, Officer Lien’s gun and badge will be taken away. Darn the luck. That whole cop act must really turn on some of Officer Lien’s female patrons.

This is, at once, comical and unsettling. Each evening, most of us hear the stories of assault, rape, and murder on our local news. Officer Lien, of course, can’t hear the newscast; it’s drowned out by Sade’s Sweetest Taboo down at the Nashville Social Club Elite. And we wonder why so many of those rapes and murders go unsolved.

As Bill Clinton prepares to shamefully slither out of the White House, Americans have Al Gore to look forward to. This is rather like removing a dead, smelly possum from one’s garage and replacing it with a dead, maggot infested skunk. Al Gore has little to offer Americans, aside from the use of his ashes as fertilizer when he dies. Undoubtedly, terrorists worldwide savor the prospect of America’s further descent into strategic irrelevance.

We simply can’t afford this. Democracy is fine, but common sense, and the Constitution, must prevail in this case. Al Gore is no less a pea brain than Bill Clinton. He is corrupt, incapable of managing America’s role in the perilous world order, and a Kaczynskiesque environmental alarmist. To add insult to injury, he has the personality and charm of rotten roofing. There is no use for him. Americans were dumb enough to elect the Clinton-Gore ticket; now Congress must be wise enough to impeach it.

Impeachment exists to sterilize the republic when it has been contaminated by human waste. Just as it would be futile to remove only half of the cow dung from a barn in an effort to clean it, so will it be a waste of everyone’s time if Al Gore is permitted to live in and pollute the White House.

Here in Tennessee, we are currently being besieged with the slogan, "there’s no lower class than Tennessee trash." Well, some of our trash has escaped to Washington. It’s time to retrieve it, and toss it into the dumpster of history alongside the trash from Arkansas.

As Americans, we all must feel proud that the millennium closes with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the toppling of Soviet communism. As Nashvillians, we should be no less enthusiastic that the single filthiest institution in our city has been toppled: H.G. Hills.

If the analogy seems a bit overblown, get over it. Progress, technology, and forward thinking got us beyond communism. Simplicity, an ignorance of technology, and backward thinking allowed us to tolerate H.G. Hills far longer than we should have. In an age where Kroger provides for rapid checkout via their cutting edge automated lanes, customers a H.G. Hills frequently had to cover their ears as confused, unhygienic checkout clerks screamed, "Hey, Moose! I need a price check on SPAM!"

I remember my one and only experience in an H.G. Hills—the one in Green Hills. I was on my way to a cookout, and needed a bag of charcoal and a twelve pack of Bud. Oh, one more detail: I was in a hurry, unlike any of the other dinosaurs shopping there that day. After ignoring the goofy wave directed at me by a pear-shaped, drooling, half-witted guard, I entered the store, pausing to suppress the urge to vomit, immediately induced by the smell of rotten food. It was all right that I was temporarily stopped squarely in the middle of the store, though, for no one else was moving, either. There was the nearly blind wrinkled woman struggling to find that special coupon, probably for Geritol. Nearby, a tall sickly man was leaning slightly to the side, as though he had paused to relieve himself.

Already realizing my mistake, I made a B-line for the charcoal isle, navigating myself around a broken bottle of vinegar and a splattered, partially black tomato. I found a bag of immodestly priced Match Light, and proceeded to the beer isle. It took me a moment to realize that I was leaving a trail behind me thanks to a small hole in the bag. When I complained to an ugly clerk biding time straightening a hopelessly cluttered shelf, I was met with a blank look. I managed to find one intact bag, but had less luck finding any Budweiser on the near-empty shelf. Come to think of it, H.G. Hills had no business selling beer, anyway. Their penurious selection could only satisfy a non-drinker, which is what every fossil who shopped there on a regular basis should have been.

Those of us who didn’t shop there on a regular basis weren’t immune from the H.G. Hills virus. Ashley Caldwell, who had no business nauseating the entire city by showing her ugly face on television, routinely stained our cozy entertainment rooms.

Ahhh. But soon it will all be a thing of the past. Technology can overcome even the most egregious of cultural cancers. And so we bid farewell to expired canned food, dirty floors, rotten fruit and vegetables, and inbred clerks. We’ll all smile a little more now.

An interesting divide has begun to define itself recently, between those who actively pursue the Clinton-Lewinsky matter, whether to vindicate, prosecute, or exploit, and those who chimerically wish that it would simply disappear. Both camps have their conservative and liberal representatives; those doing the pursuing have reduced political discourse to the level of professional wrestling. It is those who would rather forget about the matter entirely who interest the most, for theirs is yet another longing for what might be called the "good old days."

The passing of retired Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell reminds us of the good old days. In a different political climate, Powell’s death would precipitate, among other things, yet another dreary disquisition on the politics and history of the Supreme Court. Powell was somewhat of an ideological enigma: he gently but emphatically refused to endorse the principle of racial quotas, while allowing for race to be considered in university admissions. In 1977, he voted to uphold a law giving state aid to parochial schools in Ohio; in 1985, he voted to strike down aid laws in New York City and Grand Rapids Michigan. In voting for and affirming the Roe decision, Justice Powell evinced a belief in the specious "right to privacy," unless it extended to homosexuals, as evidenced by his concurrence in Bowers vs. Hardwick, which ruled that homosexual activity wasn’t Constitutionally protected. Clearly, in the wake of Justice Powell’s death, there will be no shrines erected by liberal or conservative think tanks.

David Brooks wrote recently in The Weekly Standard that many who despise Bill Clinton "despise tawdriness even more, and they’re willing to blame anybody who airs it." And there’s the rub: Justice Powell’s life delights not because of a single opinion that he wrote, but rather because his was a life of virtue.

It would be hard to imagine Justice Powell deigning to answer a question about the President’s sex life. Powell, a Democrat, was also a gentleman. Once upon a time, the two weren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. Gentlemen didn’t always agree about the merits of federalism or Constitutional restraint, but they could agree on one thing: those doing the deciding for the rest of us should be men (or women) of character.

Ten years ago, during an interview on C-Span, Justice Powell told of how he had enlisted in the Air Force at age thirty-five, abandoning his well-established law practice. The incredulous C-Span host stopped him, and asked with proper obeisance what in the world had possessed him to give up such a career to join the military. His look was one of mild surprise: it was Adolph Hitler, he explained. Powell talked it over with his wife, and decided that his skills as an attorney might serve him well as a combat intelligence officer. He didn’t smile or bite his lower lip as he said this; when the interviewer began lavishing him with praise for his service, he gracefully and humbly brushed it aside, saying simply that he had an opportunity to serve.

Sadly, in our nation’s capital, opportunities to serve have morphed into opportunities to be served. Gone are the days when citizens of character like Henry Clay embarked on perilous treks to Washington for a chance to fulfill their inclination toward civic virtue. Peril for many of our civil servants today can be defined as the contemplation of not winning reelection. For Democrats, peril is the thought of being linked to Bill Clinton, the antithesis of virtue.

If Bill Clinton is singularly responsible for the demoralization of the American presidency, then the moral drifting of Americans is collectively responsible for Bill Clinton. He was elected twice, and despite the shame he has bestowed upon the country, he refuses to go away. Americans are actually undecided about whether or not he should. Perhaps a little moral perspective, prompted by the death of a statesman, will relieve us of our grogginess and ambiguity over the deserved fate of our President. Surely, Justice Powell would have wanted it that way.