Can' t a Man Have a Biscuit?How To Make Todd Henderson Happier

The Todd Henderson contretemps (link; cf. link, link, link, etc.)  is really beginning to take on all the characteristics of a 500-car pile-up in the tule fog on Interstate Five.  I doubt I can add anything directly useful at this point (and I've quit trying to read it all) but I do have one suggestion on how Todd make himself happier: increase his charitable giving.  Aside from any intrinsic merit, a program of charitable giving would offer the instrumental satisfaction of taking money away from those roughnecks down at the Internal Revenue Service.  It would also give him a chance to show how redistributional dollars really should be spent.  And who knows, it might just possibly give him some personal satisfaction: make him feel plugged into his community, give him a generally better sense of self-worth.  Tithing: yes, I recommend tithing.   And none of this "Chicago Lyric Opera" or "historical society" stuff.  Think Salvation Army, or Little Sisters of the Poor.  A stint with a ladle at the soup kitchen might  help as well.

Afterthought:  In Bertrand Russell's Nightmares of Eminent People, there is a story about how Stalin dreams he dies and goes to Hell where Quakers feed him cocoa and read  him tracts.  Just sayin'.

Don't Give to Haiti; Give to Non-Haiti

As a general practice, Chez Buce does not give to disaster appeals. We figure that new incoming resources at a time of crisis arrive by necessity at the most inconvenient time when they are most difficult to process, and that relief of high-visibility disasters is most likely to be skewed at the expense of the less glamorous and more drab. We do cut some checks for charity, of course, but we try to do it in the most boring way.

But Mrs. hit upon a worthwhile idea: wouldn't this be the ideal time to make a gift to a provider that has nothing to do with Haiti--a provider, that is to say, of a sort most likely to have been hurt by the skew of resources in the direction of the the TV cameras?

So here it is, folks, the first-ever Underbelly appeal for the relief of the non-telegenic. No photos will be shopped, no bells rung, whistles blown. And in particular, don't send it here, sweetums: find the earnest, unglamorous and indispensable charity near you and far from the hot lights; pile it on and be ashamed of yourself for being such a cheapskate.