Today’s edi­tion of the New York Times includes a half-​page ad by the National Ital­ian Amer­i­can Foun­da­tion that’s mostly about A. Ken­neth Ciongoli doing his best William Donohoe/Abe Foxman impres­sion. (He’s wor­ried, it seems, that some NBC announcer has slurred Rocco Mediate’s “unsurpassed ethnic heritage” by saying he looks like Tiger Woods’s pool cleaner.) Dumb, but it includes these price­less sen­tences, retyped here for your elec­tronic view­ing pleasure:

[Johnny] Miller seems not to know that in his pro­fes­sional life­time, the pres­i­dents of George­town, Har­vard, Tufts, and Yale uni­ver­si­ties as well as sundry other Amer­i­can insti­tu­tions are cul­tural and ethnic cousins of men named Rocco. In addi­tion, the recent CEOs of IBM, Intel, McDonald’s, Brooks Broth­ers, the New York Stock Exchange, the NASDAQ, the New York Mer­can­tile Exchange, the Philadel­phia Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade have been Ital­ian Amer­i­cans with rel­a­tives named Rocco.