Gunning for Newt, Bill and Betty Crocker

Today we break the usual long-winded mold and announce the first sporadic Square Pegs List, a compendium of comments, overreactions and complaints about items that don’t fit anywhere else.

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Sara Lee will be thrilled: It has come to our attention that a Kansas City, Kan., businesswoman has founded a group called the Burned Out Business Women’s Assn. (BOBWA) that meets once a month to vent and banter. No pantyhose allowed. No networking either. “I just want women to have a realistic view of themselves,” founder Marcia Hines told a local newspaper. “Women’s magazines show a cream cheese dessert on the cover and have articles on how to lose 20 pounds in three weeks. And models look good, but they work out three or four hours a day. I can’t do that; I’m trying to earn a buck.”

Hines plans to market a bumper sticker: “Betty Crocker Is Dead.”

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Newt won’t be too happy either: We have apparently failed to show the proper respect for incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and thus have received some angry mail from gloating Republicans. Besides displaying an unhealthy degree of adoration for Gingrich, they also reveal a very unpatriotic disdain for their commander in chief.

Now we realize that President Clinton is on the “Out” list at the moment, but we were heartened to receive a copy of “Dreams of Bill” (Citadel Press), a compilation of dreams about the President by ordinary Americans, edited by Julia and Bruce Miller. Bill Clinton plays a starring role in the subconscious of a startling number of Americans, such as Jill Draper, a 36-year-old Missouri mom:

I was invited to go on one of the (campaign trail) bus tours, but instead of a bus, they traveled in an airplane that taxied down the interstates. At one point, Bill approached me and asked if I wanted to go upstairs, he had something to tell me. When we got upstairs, he said, “You want to know a secret?” I said, “Sure.” He said, “When I raise all those rich people’s taxes? It’s really going to make them mad.”

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What would Dan Quayle say?: Speaking of Newt, is it just us, or is anyone else out there more than mildly amused at the extraordinarily un-family values-ish past of the Speaker-to-Be? We’re partial to the widely reported story of how his first wife threw him out of her hospital room the day after she underwent surgery for uterine cancer in 1980 because he wanted to talk about their divorce settlement! Even his former minister questions the sincerity of Newt’s conservative “ideals”: “He sees what will help him,” the minister recently told a newspaper reporter, “whether he believes it or not, he uses it.”

What can we say--except Amen to that, Reverend.

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Of Mice and Mozzarella: One of our passions, we admit somewhat sheepishly, is perusing the monthly “Restaurant Closures” feature of The Times, which lists eateries closed by the county Department of Health Services for various code infractions. We look for the greasy spoon ethnic restaurants our husband likes to patronize, taking special care to circle them in red ink and post in a prominent place in the kitchen. Plumbing failures don’t faze us. It’s other pesky sanitary problems that really gross us out. But every once in a while, we actually get a laugh. Is it just us, or is there something richly ironic about last Tuesday’s list, which featured the temporary closure of a local Chuck E Cheese’s pizza restaurant for . . . vermin infestation?

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Don’t Worry--Jesse Helms is on the Case: In the interest of bipartisanship--and we are not, we insist, kissing up to Newt--we note that some dreamers of Bill did experience nightmares, such as Genevra Leo, a 25-year-old hairdresser from Orange:

I was going to my mother’s to house-sit for the weekend. After I got to her home, I sat down to watch some movies I rented. I fell asleep and when I awoke, I noticed I had been stabbed repeatedly. When the police arrived, they suggested I go to the hospital, but I refused, because my friend was coming to pick me up to go to Ben and Jerry’s to get ice cream.

The police let me go with her and she didn’t seem to care that I had multiple stab wounds. She dropped me off at home where I called my gram. I told her I had been stabbed, and she said to me, “I warned you about him.” I asked, “Who?” She replied, “Bill Clinton. He’s been going around stabbing people who have relatives in Arkansas.”

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Next time, he can tune up our toenails: We note with dismay allegations of sexual discrimination by a group of men who worked for Jenny Craig Inc. in the Boston area. And we certainly hope this is not some cagey tie-in with the movie “Disclosure.” But we take this opportunity to emphasize our own lack of gender bias in business dealings. When we arrived for a manicure appointment at a nail salon last week, we were pleasantly surprised to see that our nails were to be painted by the first male manicurist we have encountered. We would fault him for just one thing: the grease under his nails, but since, as he explained, he had been working on his transmission that morning, we certainly understood.

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Bad reaction to popcorn?: Allegations of movie-inspired blood sucking have begun in the wake of the release of the movie “Interview With the Vampire.” In San Francisco last week, a man was arrested for stabbing his girlfriend then drinking her blood. “I was influenced by the movie,” the suspect said. “I enjoyed the movie. But I cannot sit here and blame the movie.”

Just to be on the safe side, we’d like to suggest this man never be allowed to rent the movie “Alive.”

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That explains why no one understood the health care plan: We leave you with a final dream of Bill. It belongs to Wendy Vorce, a 40-year-old gardener in Oregon:

I’m an observer at an outdoor party. A waitress asks the President if he’d like a drink. “Yes,” he says. “A kangaroo, and make it orange.”