NP: A Perfect Circle, Mer de Noms

Score one for serendipity. We've got this "online food court" deal at work now, that mentioned a local Thai restaurant as an option. First off, I tried using this a week or so ago, and my order never went through. Second, I think the deal is for tomorrow. Anyway, it got me thinking I wanted me some pad thai now, dammit.

So I grab the menu, and notice Mee Krob on the list of appetizers. Mee Krob, as any good South Park fan knows, is a derivation of "meecrob," the word Cartman explains is grosser than "shit" in the episode where they say the latter 162 times, awakening the Knights of Standards and Practices.

Why is this relevant? It just so happens that this week, Slate's Timothy Noah riffs on Harry Frankfurt's immortal essay On Bullshit. And then Kevin Drum riffs on that. The discussion in the comments is pretty amusing, yielding this point of clarification:

I like that. It's very symmetric. The bullshitter doesn't care one way or the other whether he's telling the truth, and the bullshittee doesn't care one way or the other whether he's hearing the truth. Nice.

There's something both very elegant and disturbing in talking about political discourse and how it relates to various definitions or interpretations of bullshit, at the very least. Then again, it also reminds me of Mel Brooks trying to collect unemployment in History Of The World, Part One.