SteveSilver.net

Everybody Loves Hitler

The news today, it seems, was more all-Hitler-all-the-time than The History Channel. For instance:

- Two students on Long Island are in trouble for using quotes from "Mein Kampf" as their senior yearbook captions, something that apparently got past the student yearbook editors. On the shock/offensiveness scale, this ranks somewhere between Brandeis' "rhymes with tigger" incident, and the guy in my high school senior class who, in the senior video, made a horribly tasteless joke about the local kid who had been killed a few months earlier when he stuck his head out the window of a double-decker bus on the way home from a Bar Mitzvah.

- A Wisconsin native, borrowing a page from the famed University of North Dakota hockey booster/Nazi collector Ralph Englestad, has decided to build a shrine to the Fuhrer on his property in rural Wisconsin. Ted Junker, an 87-year-old farmer, claims to be a former German soldier but town officials refer to him as a "mixed-up old man." Someone should introduce him to the Metrodome/swastika guy.

- Also in the Badger State, the Wisconsin State Journal reported this week that self-storage companies are on the rise. In fact, Wisconsin has an estimated 1,000 to 1,200 self-storage companies, according to president of the Wisconsin Self Storage Association, whose name is Peter Hitler.

- And finally, I was at Barnes and Noble yesterday and noticed that someone working in the store had put the copies of Ann Coulter's new book right alongside a new biography of Hitler. I took a cell phone picture and decided, after much temptation, to not run the photo in this week's edition of my newspaper.