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Trump vs. Mueller: The Interview

First of all, congratulations on reading. It’s a dying art, like soap making, or scrimshaw, or critical thinking. These are all dying arts. I knew a girl who made psychedelic T-shirts to sell at Phish shows, but that was more of a dye-ing art. Did I have to start this column with a pun? “Oh yeah!” And I say “Oh Yeah!” just like the Kool-aid man. You know the Kool-aid man, right? I like his style, smashing through the wall of your house and doing thousands of dollars in structural damage and creating an insurance nightmare that will drag on for months. Not sure how a somehow sentient being who is made of glass and liquid can smash through concrete, but that’s the way it is. Never underestimate the power of sugar, I guess. And what was the deal that his face was made only of condensation? That sounds like a hellish existence, I’d probably be insane enough to try to commit suicide by smashing my glass body into cinder blocks and cement too.

Second, thanks for reading my column, you’re clearly a person of virtue and accomplishment, destined for greatness and getting lots of hot sex along the way.

Let’s get into it. One way or another, Trump is going to sit down with Robert Mueller. And we here at The Satire Day Evening Post, in cooperation with the RADIOLEARY Broadcasting Podcasting Association, have spent enormous amounts of federal grant money (that would have otherwise gone to the needy and blind) in order to research and predict the outcome of this interview. Using predictive algorithms and analytic software designed with reverse-engineered alien technology from flying saucer crash-site retrievals, along with a veritable army of prognosticators, dowsers, gypsy witches, remote viewers, seers, visionaries, mediums, extra-larges, sooth-sayers, shamans, telephone psychics, peyote salesmen, and fortune cookie authors, we have what we feel to be a complete and 100% accurate transcript of the Robert Mueller Donald Trump interview.

So look into the future with us, and someday soon we’ll say, “Hey, it wasn’t that far off.”

MUELLER: Mr. President, I want to thank you for coming here today to answer some questions. You had stated publicly many times how you looked forward to speaking to me under oath, and here we are. And all it took was an invitation. Followed by a Grand Jury subpoena. Followed by 11 months of litigation, and a year of well-orchestrated media attacks on me personally, attacks on the integrity of the Russia investigation in general, and the entire FBI and Justice Department.

TRUMP: It was my pleasure.

MUELLER: Now, I know that your legal advisers were worried this interview would be some sort of a “perjury trap”, but I assure you we just have some straightforward, simple questions we hope you can answer for us. We’re not looking to trick you or trap you in any way. Now, if you could just state your name for the record, please?

TRUMP: Yes, My name is Donald Trump and I’m guilty of treason.

MUELLER: Wait...What? May I remind you you’re under oath?

TRUMP: Oh right. My bad. Can I get a do-over on that one? I’m calling a mulligan.

MUELLER: Look, I.. okay, sure. Fine, whatever. Could you please state your name for the record?

TRUMP: My name is Donald J. Trump. And I’m guilty of treason. See, I almost forget the “J.” there for a minute. They told me you were tricky, but you can’t trip me up that easily, I’m a stable genius. You have to get up pretty early in the morning, if you want to see my insane Twitter rants. Okay, that’s take two, make sure you use take two, when is this episode going to air? I hope it’s sweeps week.

MUELLER: Did.. did you just say you’re guilty of treason?

TRUMP: Yep. They told me this interview was a perjury trap, that you’d try to get me to lie under oath, but I’m too smart for you. I’m like, an intelligent person. And I’m guilty of treason. Not lying. You can check. I am so completely guilty.

I committed treasonous acts against the United States and the people of the United States, I engaged in a criminal enterprise and conspiracy to overthrow the government, and I’ve served as a puppet dictator for a foreign power adversary. So by the U.S. military code of justice, I’m facing some very serious charges. I’m a baaad hombre. A tremendously bad hombre.

And I probably shouldn’t say this, but… I know where the Lindbergh baby’s buried. Hey, I didn’t kill it, I was just a boy at the time it happened. My dad killed it and I just held the ladder. It was a good thing I was there to hold the ladder or that baby might have fallen!

I probably shouldn’t have said that last part, but the lawyers said I couldn’t lie. You’re not going to trip me up that easily, Fox Mulder.

MUELLER: I’m former FBI head Bob Mueller, Mr. President, not Fox Mulder from the X-files.

TRUMP: Oh thank God it’s not Fox Mulder! That guy is really good with conspiracies! You mean I’ve been sweating it all this time for some guy named Bob Mueller? I don’t know who that is. I’ve never seen him on any shows, and I watch a lot of TV. I mean a truly amazing and tremendous amount of TV. Well, that explains why I haven’t seen Scully. She’s smart and sexy, like my daughter. The hot one, I mean.

But Fox Mulder? You know, it seems tio me that if Mulder just got on the internet for a few minutes, he could look up the information for himself and see that flying saucers are real. Because there’s like, three thousand physical trace evidence cases of UFOs that have been investigated and documented. And tens of millions of first-hand eyewitness statements and testimony, photographs, film and video, radar recordings, and Pentagon releases of classified military incidents and encounters with UFOs.

And I guess somehow this Mulder guy, who is supposed to be the FBI agent in charge of all this UFO stuff, somehow missed that in 2002 The French government, one of our most trusted NATO allies, released a position paper from the Defense Ministry that concluded that UFOs are extremely advanced extraterrestrial technology that poses a serious threat to national and world security, a threat that can violate our airspace at will, and for which we have no defense. But Mulder? He’s got a poster on the wall in his office that says “I WANT TO BELIEVE”. He’s more incompetent and unqualified for the job than I am!

Anyway, Mueller is it? Nice to meet you, Mr. Mueller, I’m guilty of treason. Extremely, very guilty of treason. You know, I’ve still got the gun I killed JFK with. Me and Ted Cruz’ dad.. It’s still got my fingerprints on it, too. But you’re never going to find it. Never in a million years will you ever find it. It is so well hidden, so fantastically hidden, that there is literally no possible way for you to ever find it. It’s buried four feet directly under the ninth hole on the Mar a Lago golf course. See? Not going to catch me lying.

Can I just say I am the Manchurian Candidate? Because you’re not going to trip me up! I’m a stable genius. You know, people say my mind… That’s what they say. They look at me and I hear them whisper “His mind..” and they just sort of trail off, and shake their heads in a shocked and horrified way. I think that means they’re impressed.

Anyway, next question, Mr. Mulder. By the way, that was very brave of you and Scully to fight that swamp monster during the hurricane in that abandoned motel. I’d have run, that was very scary. Like, Scooby-Doo scary.

MUELLER: <sighs audibly, takes off glasses, closes his eyes, and pinches the bridge of his nose> Yes, We had quite a time with that swamp monster. And the one we’re after today.

TRUMP: I think you actually beat The Apprentice in the ratings with that swamp monster episode. But I can’t lie, we were losing to Urkel reruns on Nick at Nite. But I’m a TV star, a big stable genius TV star - won Presidency - first try!!! Except for the time I ran in 2000 for President as the Reform Party candidate and lost - which I do not remember! So technically, I’m not lying when I say I won on the first try. Next question, Scully.

MUELLER: Mr. Trump could you, in your own words…

TRUMP: Hold on - in my own words? Yes! I do that all the time, I use my own words that I made up myself, like ‘bigly’ and ‘yuge’. I have the best words. I own a dictionary, and I don’t know if you know about dictionaries, but they have many, many words, like probably most of the words there are, you can find in a dictionary. But they’re very boring to read because they bunch they words together by whatever the first letter is, for some strange reason. Makes for a tough read, I quit by the time I hit ‘Aardvark’. Very strange book. I’ll go see the movie if they make one, it’ll have everything in there! You know, a lot of my words aren’t even in the dictionary, that’s how good they are , they can’t keep up! I also own a thesaurus. I own the best thesaurus, the Thesaurus Rex. Thats the king of the Thesauruses. I’m lucky to have one, they went extinct a long long time ago. In a galaxy far far away. You know words are just made up of letters. You arrange them and they make words. Although sometimes they don’t make words, like that little guy Superman foung, that midget from another dimension, what was his name? Mr Mxyzptlk? That’s not a word, it makes no sense, I tried to pronounce that one all through my 30’s.  So yes, I will tell you in my own words. That I’m guilty of treason.

MUELLER: Well, I…

TRUMP: I should probably be court-martialed or something, or at the very least fired. Ooo! Can I fire myself? I’m very good at firing people, I used to do it for ratings. Well, I still do, kinda. I want to do it, I’ll look into a mirror and say “You’re Fired!” it’ll be great. No, we’ll do like a two camera shoot, where we’ll film me once getting fired and then another shot where I’m firing me. Like in the Six-Million Dollar Man where he fought his exact replica? Or when Captain Kirk fought the imposter Captain Kirk? Or any one of those TV shows where the guy fights the exact replica of himself, but you only see the back of the one guy’s head, because it’s obviously a stuntman who only slightly resembles the guy? I think the guy Captain Kirk was fighting was Salvadoran, but what can you do, they had a limited budget.

Mr. Mulder, let me just say this: I’m going to build a wall. Between myself and the Justice Department. It’s going to be a big, beautiful wall, like, yuge, and you’re going to be on one side of it, and I’m going to be on the other side. Because I’m thinking about fleeing to Mexico. Lots of bad hombres there, they’ll never notice one more.

MUELLER: Now tell me about this secret meeting between the Russians and Donald Trump, Jr.

TRUMP: Donald Trump, Jr.? Never heard of him. Doesn’t sound familiar, sorry. Is that anything like Carls Jr.? Because I like to eat lunch there. I’m scared of being poisoned by some unknown poison, so I go there where I know the poisons I’m getting.

I never heard of this Donald Trump Jr. fellow in my life, believe me. Believe me. And you know who you should always believe? A guy who’s always begging for someone to believe him, because no one ever does. Nope, never heard of this Donald Trump Jr.. But if he’s anything like me, he’s guilty of treason. Not as guilty as me, though, Believe me.

Most treasonous President ever! You know, in his whole eight years in office, Obama never came close to being the least bit treasonous. I guess he was too busy out on the golf course, playing golf like, one-tenth as much as I do. And still I have time for the treason. I can play ten times the golf Obama did and commit ten times the treason, that’s how effective I am. You know Mar a Lago is a Spanish word, it means “Lake of Treasons”. It where we all hang out and commit treason. It’s on the menu at the restaurant. “Hmm..I’ll start with the subterfuge.. A side of sedition.. And for the entree, I’m going to go with the treason.”

MUELLER: Mr. Trump, there have been recent questions as to your mental state. On more than one occasion you’ve referred to yourself publicly as a stable genius. Now, I’m not aware of a single instance where an actual genius ever once referred to themselves as a genius. Not in public, not in their memoirs, not in the heat of passion, never. It seems the one defining trait of an actual genius is never calling themselves a genius. In fact, only yourself and Wile E. Coyote have ever used the term ‘genius’ self-referentially.

And Wile E. Coyote was not a genius, he couldn’t even eat a bird despite having a limitless budget and access to defense industry-grade weaponry. He had state of the art advanced technology weapons that would put Tesla to shame. You know, rail guns, particle beams, and still couldn’t eat that goddamn bird. For a fraction of what he spent on any of those super- electro magnets that could pull an ocean liner out of the Pacific Ocean a thousand miles inland to the Arizona desert, he could have eaten every damn bird he wanted. He could have had them delivered roasted. Every day. For just a fraction of what he spent on tech in any given episode. Where was his money coming from, by the way? Paul Manafort? I’m going to have to look into that.

TRUMP: I don’t know about any of that, all I know is I’m guilty of treason. You know Melania hates me, right? Even before she found out I was banging a porn star while she was having my kid, whatever his name is. Schuyler, maybe? Anyway. I’ve been finding shards of glass in my porridge. Melania swears it’s a Hungarian recipe. That’s why I’m always eating KFC, I’m not scared of being poisoned by spies, I’m scared of being poisoned by a trophy wife.

MUELLER: Well, I have just one last question, on a lighter note. In your experience which was harder to win; The Presidency of the United States, or Celebrity Apprentice?

TRUMP: That’s an easy one - without a doubt - Celebrity Apprentice. You just look at the major talent and intellect that it took to win the Celebrity Apprentice: We had that Piers guy who got fired from CNN like ten minutes later. I think L’il John made it to the finals. Look, it takes country and western singers and Joan Rivers to win Celebrity Apprentice, but an insane, incompetent asshole like me can be President. So what does that tell you?

You know, Lou Ferrigno almost won. And I almost made him Secretary of Defense. My plan was, we sneak him into North Korea, as part of the negotiations, then we get him mad! We just get him mad, he turns into the Hulk, big, bang, boom, he kills L’il Kim. Kim jong Il? Kim Jong Dead. And look at it, the worse thing is he nukes us, but then we have an army of new Hulks from the radiation. Win/win, Scully.

MUELLER: Wow. Why don’t we break for lunch.

TRUMP: Sounds good. By the way, did I tell you…

MUELLER: I know, I know, you’re guilty of treason. But I knew that already.

[radioleary-blog]

http://radioleary.libsyn.com/047-what-do-you-hear-mr-bond

[radioleary-blog]

Where the Hell is James Bond?

Following the news these days is like watching a James Bond movie where James Bond just never shows up.

Every day it’s another report about subterfuge and espionage, leaks and cover-ups, tapping and hacking, and at the highest levels of our government. As of today, a U.S. Army General, Michael Flynn, is seeking a plea deal for immunity to avoid prosecution for illegal meetings with Russian intelligence officials, and for failing to register as a foreign agent. A foreign agent? Our appointed National Security adviser? And the President’s lawyers knew this at the time? And President Trump’s former campaign leader Paul Manafort is being accused of laundering money for Russia? WTF? This raises a lot of red flags, and they all have the hammer and sickle on them! The Russians are back, and this time they’re winning. They hacked Trump’s opponent to influence the election and subvert our democracy, just because they didn’t like Hillary Clinton. Oh, yeah? Hey Russia! Get in line! Nobody liked Hillary Clinton! Frankly, I doubt anybody would have voted for her if she wasn’t running against Donald Trump. But she was, and more Americans disliked her slightly less, so we wanted the extremely unpopular politician just a little bit more than the extremely unpopular celebrity firer.

You know, throughout the campaign Trump always bragged about being an outsider, but none of us thought he meant all the way from Moscow! Though now that we think about it, I guess we should have had a clue when he held a press conference on national TV back in July, and openly asked Russia to hack Hillary’s emails. Here is the exact quote: “I will tell you this, Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing.” Turns out they were listening. I guess they were watching the evening news that night instead of ‘Siberia’s Got Talent’. We all saw him say it, but he was just too goddamn entertaining to get upset about it at the time. So I don’t think we can really bitch about it now that this tangerine huckster turns out to be less of a Republican candidate and more of a Manchurian candidate. That’s like being upset when there are wine stains on your carpet after you ask Michael J. Fox to hold your drink.

So the whole thing is starting to look like the plot of a James Bond movie. Most James Bond movies start with a villain. He’s usually a rich, powerful man, often the leader of a sinister organization, he is routinely power-mad, greedy, and hell-bent on ruling the world. Only in the movies, James Bond stops them just before their evil plot succeeds. And he never lets them actually take over the world. But when I turn on the news these days, I see the villains, but there’s no sign of James Bond. Bond villains all have the same qualities, delusions of grandeur and a maniacal scheme. Their elaborate plans for wealth and domination are always needlessly complex, with scores of henchmen in uniforms and limitless amounts of money that you’d need to pull it off. Unfortunately, all these volcano secret bases full of private armies, assassins and mercenaries somehow lack the particular set of skills needed to kill one polite British agent pussyhound. But hey, they try. And there are a lot of similarities between James Bond villains and Donald Trump:

Goldfinger: Now this guy is a fantastic villain. Auric Goldfinger plans "Operation Grand Slam", a plan even more heinous than the Denny’s food with the same name. Goldfinger is going to nuke Fort Knox, irradiating America’s gold reserves and making his own supply of gold priceless. Pretty good plan, eh? I don’t see what could possibly go wrong with that. Seems a little labor intensive, maybe. Goldfinger could’ve probably made the same amount of money with credit-default swaps, predatory lending, and bundling subprime mortgages. It sure worked in 2008, when deregulation led to banks stealing about 40% of the wealth in America, and nobody ever went to jail for it. Nobody. And what’s on Trump’s agenda? Why, deregulation, of course. Now that’s a nefarious scheme! And no nuclear fallout. Hell, there wasn’t even a lot of political fallout.

And Goldfinger could have gotten away with it, too, if he just let that “laser beam” circumcise 007 when he was strapped to a steel table. His girthy 007 was about to be cut down to about 3 1/2 inches. And in retrospect, it probably didn’t help that Goldfinger explained his entire plan to Bond, and even brought him along to the heist, to give him a sporting chance to thwart his plans. Like I said, what could possibly go wrong? And even worse, Goldfinger cheated at golf. That is just unacceptable. And Donald Trump has been in office only nine weeks, yet he has played golf thirteen times in those nine weeks, so that’s kind of cheating on the American people with golf. Also unacceptable. If Goldfinger had succeeded in his plans, it wouldn’t have mattered much anyway, Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1971.

Scaramanga in "The Man with the Golden Gun": Played by Christopher Lee, who was best known playing both Count Dracula, and Count Dooku in the Star Wars movies. Too bad he died before they could make a big-budget film about Count Chocula or he could have had the trifecta. Lee played Count Dracula ten times, and Count Dooku twice. Wow! That’s 12 Counts. That’s almost too many Counts to count. But I counted them anyway. Know why? “Because I love to count!! Mwah-ha-ha-ha!!” I’m quoting Sesame Street’s Count Von Count, by the way. I looked it up, that’s his full name. Sadly I discovered that the puppeteer and voice of the Count, Jerry Nelson, passed away in 2012 after playing the Count for almost forty years. Thirty-nine or forty, but who’s counting. Nobody now, I guess. Now he’s just a body count. But I digress.

So Francisco Scaramanga is a millionaire bad guy who has a gun made out of gold and his own private resort island, and it looks a lot like Mar-a-Lago. But whereas Scaramanga’s assistant was the angry, high-strung midget from Fantasy Island, Trump’s assistant is the angry, high-strung midget Sean Spicer. You know, every time he has a press briefing I half expect him to start shouting “Boss! Boss! De plane! De plaaane!” Scaramanga has a scheme to steal a solar energy producing device called the “Solex Agitator”, and he will use it to power his giant “laser beam” weapon and, of course, rule or destroy the world. Another great plan. But no similarity to Trump on that, Trump would never use a solar powered weapon, he would never encourage the use of solar power for anything. Now if it was a coal powered weapon, Trump would be all over it. Although, coal power itself is pretty much a weapon, destroying the environment and causing global warming. Not as quick as a solar laser beam, but a much more effective way to destroy the world in the long run. If Donald Trump was the villain in this movie, the title would have to be “The Man With The Golden Showers”. And from what has been rumored, Putin just might have a copy of that film.

Blofeld: The leader of SPECTRE is Enst Stavro Blofeld, not to be confused with our President, an earnest blowhard. Blofeld showed up a lot, he is Bond’s main nemesis. you know him as the basis for Dr. Evil, he has a facial scar, a monocle, and he’s always stroking a cat. As opposed to our President who is always grabbing a pussy. Some really fine actors have played Blofeld over the years:

Charles Gray: He played Blofeld in “Diamonds Are Forever”, if you can’t picture Charles Gray, you might know him better as ‘The Criminologist’, the narrator in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”. You know; No Neck. Here we are forty years later, and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” remains the only movie where people throw a bunch of shit around the movie theater and don’t get arrested for it. The list of items you have to bring to this cult movie is redonkulous; rice, newspapers, water pistols, flashlights, rubber gloves, confetti, toilet paper, bells, cards, hot dogs, and toast. Jesus Christ, those aren’t items you need to go see a movie, those are the items you need to survive a zombie apocalypse! Throw in antibiotics and ammunition and you’ve got Rick Grimes’ Christmas wish list. It’s amazing that this cult-film tradition has survived for two generations now virtually unchanged. I say virtually, I’m sure with this generation of hipsters the rice is long-grain brown rice, the water pistols are Dasani, and the toast is gluten-free. But at least they’re getting out of the house. We can all relax, and be glad that this throwing stuff around nonsense never caught on with any other movies, I’d hate to go see “Logan” and suddenly people start throwing a bunch of forks around. I have no mutant healing powers.

Max Von Sydow: Considered by many to be the greatest actor alive, Max Von Sydow played Blofeld in “Never Say Never Again”, which is also my slogan when it comes to meth. You might know Max Von Sydow from the role of Lor San Tekka in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”. I guess since Carrie Fisher died, the next sequel will be titled “Star Wars: The Force goes to a Wake”. He also played Death in “The Seventh Seal”,  a movie that surprisingly had nothing to do with aquatic mammals. He played the old priest who had a heart attack in “The Exorcist”, but you know him because he played Ming the Merciless in “Flash Gordon”, which straight-up sucked except for the title song by Queen. It really isn’t fair to compare Ming to Donald Trump, because everyone on the planet Mongo has guaranteed health care coverage. He’s merciless, but not like Republican merciless. Although Freddie Mercury still died of Aids. I guess Flash couldn’t save every one of us.

Telly Savalas: Yeah, that’s right, Kojak. He played Blofeld in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, easily the worst James Bond movie ever. You may not have seen it because 007 was played by George Lazenby, whoever the hell that is. He was more like 000. Sean Connery was holding out for more money, and the studio execs gambled they could replace him with anybody and people would still go to a Bond movie.The studio lost that bet. I guess they never saw Bond play poker in ”Casino Royale”. I remember Kojak because when I was in college, we’d sit around getting high and watching basic cable. Every time Kojak would say “You’re a lyin’ stinkin’ murderer!” we’d take a bong hit. Which was about six times an episode. That’s higher education for ya.

Christoph Waltz: He’s the most recent Blofeld, he’s a great actor, but he does a terrible German accent, which is odd because he’s actually German. He won an Oscar for playing a Nazi in “Inglorious Basterds”, which deeply upset Mel Gibson, who plays a Nazi in real life. Waltz actually won a second Oscar for “Django Unchained”, the movie that holds the world record for using the n-word. Which also deeply upset Mel Gibson, because he says it in real life.

But the greatest Blofeld was Donald Pleasence: He was in “You Only Live Twice”. What do you want to bet that if Millennials remake “You Only Live Twice”, they’ll call it “YOLO”. Donald Pleasence was in “Escape From New York” and “THX 1138”, but we all love him as the creepy psychiatrist Dr. Loomis in “Halloween”. I’m not one to judge, but seeing as his patient Michael Myers went on a five-movie killing streak, I’m not at all confident with his approach to the psychiatric profession. Personally, I wear the mantle of a strict Jungian approach, and I’ll never admit to wearing a Freudian slip. And it’s not often you see a psychiatrist hunting his patient across the state in a station wagon with a .38 revolver in his trenchcoat pocket. At least not since Woody Allen talked in a therapy session about adopting again.

So I think it’s not a stretch to count Donald Trump as a Bond bad guy, and after he quits being President this summer he’s got a bright future ahead as the next Blofeld, or whoever. I can only imagine the titles of James Bond movies with Trump as the villain:

“Live and Let Die Without Obamacare”?

“Casino Royale-ly Bankrupt”?

“A Quantrump of Solace”?

‘Grab ‘em by the Octopussy”?

“On His Majesty Putin’s Secret Service”?

“Dr. No Means No”?

“Never Tweet Never Again”?

So come on, James Bond. We need you, 007. We’ll even take George Lazenby.

[radioleary-blog]

The Injustice League

[radioleary-blog]

The Injustice League

If we had to elect a billionaire womanizer with anger issues, I wish we had elected Bruce Wayne instead. That I could get behind. Think about it, President Batman. How does that sound? Pretty damn awesome, that’s how that sounds! “Pow!” “Biff!” “Ka-Pow!”  I love those comic book sound effects that accompany a solid kick to the face or a roundhouse punch on the old Adam West Batman show. I bet “Ka-Pow!” probably hurt a hell of a lot more than “Biff!” or “Pow!”, right? There was definitely a wide range of fight sound effects, I actually did a little research to find some other real examples of superheroes hitting each other, and they weren’t all great:

“Bam!” That’s not a punch, that’s the sound of that obnoxious midget Emeril Lagasse cooking food on TV.

“Zonk!” Sounds less like a mighty blow from Thor’s hammer and more like the stoner from Doonesbury doing blow and getting hammered.

“Boom!” “Crash!” These two word show up a lot in comics, and what scares me is these are the same words they use on Wall Street every day to describe what’s happening to our retirement accounts. It doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence that fluctuations in the market are like Batman’s fist, and my 401K is the Joker’s face.  

“Crack!” “Zap!” “Crash!” That sounds like the drug you did, the police hitting you with a taser, and the sound you make as you hit the sidewalk. I would imagine the next sound effects would be “Make-Bail!” “Court-Appear!” and “Do-Time!”          “Fap!” “Fwap!” “Sock!” “Bonk!” “Bamf!” “Wank!” “Splooge!” I kid you not, these were all really used in Marvel Comics from the 1980s. But it sounds more like the soundtrack of every teenage comic book nerd discovering masturbation. The next sound effect was most likely “Ma! Don’t You Knock?!”

But I digress. President-elect Batman. The Caped Crusader-in-Chief. The Dark Knight POTUS. Sure, it’s crazy, but I think that actually sounds less insane than our reality here on Earth-Prime, with President-elect Donald J. Trump. What the hell happened? Is it just me, or does it feel a little like we somehow stepped into an alternate reality that really wasn’t supposed to happen. Like someone messed up the timestream, and we all have a residual memory of things having been better somehow in a significantly different world. We can feel it in our bones, that things were intended to go down another way. It’s kind of like The Man In the High Castle, Philip K. Dick’s dystopian novel of an alternative reality where America lost World War II. It was a book I loved as a young man and read over and over, but now I know it as that show that’s supposed to be good that I can’t see because I don’t have Amazon. I preferred the book. There are certainly parallels, Trump actually lives in a high castle. But it’s more like The Man In the Gaudy Ostentatious Gold-Plated Tower. And rather than leading an underground resistance against Nazi and Imperial Japanese rule, he just kind of causes traffic in midtown Manhattan to become a permanent unmoving cluster-fuck from MoMa to The Met.

Maybe Donald Trump is like Batman from an alternate reality where his parents don’t get killed in an alley during a robbery attempt. So rather than devote his life to seeking justice and protecting the city from evil, he instead goes on the Howard Stern show and talks to Baba Booey about third-world swimsuit models he’s banged while he and one of his three wives were “on a break”. You know, Bruce Wayne only pretended to be a shallow, rich, gropey asshole so people would never suspect he was secretly a hero. I don’t think our President is pretending, and I don’t suspect he’s secretly a hero, either. I hope he is a hero, sure, but I still hope Andy Kaufman is just faking his own death, too.

Hey! Wait a minute! This explains why Trump’s eyes are so white while the rest of his face is burnt orange! He wears a mask! Holey Moley, It’s all starting to make sense! But whereas Batman fought the Penguin, The Riddler, and Poison Ivy, Trump mostly just fought Rosie O’Donnell. And a girl in a beauty pageant. And the cast of Hamilton. And I don’t think he actually won any of those fights, either. While Batman keeps the peace in Gotham City, one time on the Celebrity Apprentice Donald Trump kept Meatloaf and Gary Busey from fist-fighting over missing art supplies. Yeah, Batman seems like the better choice to me. Although I wonder what the sound effects would be for a Batman administration? “Veto!” “Photo-Op!” “Fund-Raise!”

As I’ve been thinking about this, and taking this weak premise far too seriously, I’m beginning to realize I may have some real problems with a Batman presidency. Not so much with the hitting and the vigilante stuff. Not with the fact that he’s a lunatic who deludedly thinks he rules a major metropolitan city, and if anyone else in a costume challenges him, he locks them away in Arkham mental asylum. No, my problem is the way he treats Alfred. Batman just may be a republican after all, because he treats Alfred the way the Walton family treat Wal-Mart employees.

How come every villain in Gotham City, from Clayface to Two-Face, they all have dozens and dozens of well-trained mercenary henchmen working for them, but Batman? He’s just has Alfred. He makes Alfred do absolutely everything. Bruce Wayne is like the richest man in Gotham City, but he’s too cheap to hire any real workforce? No wonder Gotham City is constantly overrun by criminals - Bane’s got an elite squad of para-military assassins knocking off the Gotham Bank, and Batman’s got an 85 year old British guy who’s gotta finish a load of laundry before he gasses up the Batmobile.

Alfred is like, “Yeah, right away, ‘Master Bruce’, mind if I put your damn socks away before I do the pre-flight check on the Bat-Copter? ‘Cause if I don’t take them out of the dryer right now, everything is going to be wrinkled AF by the time you get back.”

“You do realize I’ve only been trained to kiss rich people’s asses and serve soup, right? You want me to set the table and get the door? No problem. You want me to load Kryptonite missiles onto the Bat-Tank? Then you better download the manual, Caped Crusader, because they didn’t cover that shit in butler school. It’s bad enough you’ve got me changing the oil in the Bat-Jet while I’m wearing a tuxedo, but then I gotta keep dinner warm all night while you brood over the city from the top of a watertower.”

“You know, you employ like 50,000 people worldwide with this Wayne Foundation and Wayne Industries, and routinely hire thousands more temporary workers and independent contractors. You know that, right? You are on the board of directors. Here’s a crazy idea, let me get back to polishing the silver and ironing your cape, and maybe you bring in some people who are actually qualified to run your advanced-weapons motor pool.”

Is it my imagination or does it look like Alfred works seven days a week? Every crisis I’ve ever seen in Gotham, Alfred is always right there. I’ve never seen him take a day off. You’d think if something happened on a weekend, Bruce Wayne would have like a part-time guy there. “Hey, Travis, is it? Can you hold off on doing those dishes and run down to the Bat-Cave and dig out my underwater Batsuit? Killer croc is starting some shit. No, I don’t know where it is exactly, Have you looked by the giant penny? Or the T-Rex? Alfred has his own system. You guys need to communicate on things like this.”

You think Alfred ever hangs out with Jarvis, the Avengers’ butler, and they just bitch about their jobs? “You just have Batman, you have it easy, Thor leaves his hammer laying around and I can’t move it, I have to vacuum around it, and I always vacuum up Ant-Man. And they ought to call her the Scarlet Bitch, let me tell you.”

But it just goes to show you how old these characters are that they have a butler. Who the hell has a butler these days? Mike Tyson had an entourage of like 50 people, but even he didn’t have a butler. A tiger-wrangler? Sure. A Maori Tattooist? Yes. No butler. Butlers are an anachronism from an antiquated class system. Batman still reflects the culture of the 1930s when he was created. Good thing Batman isn’t from like 70 years earlier than that, or it probably wouldn’t be a white guy working for him, and he probably wouldn’t have a choice. And when he said ‘Master Bruce’, he’d really mean it.

So let me see if I got the story straight here. Alfred raises Bruce from a kid after his parents were killed. And in gratitude, Bruce makes him work like thirty years past retirement age. No pension plan? So he’s just gotta keep working until he drops dead? No 401K? Bruce Wayne is one cheap bastard. No. He’s a Cheap Bat-stard.

Batman is so cheap he won’t even rent a nice place for his Batman stuff, he just lurks in an underground cave full of batshit and stagnant water. I don’t know which he’s gonna catch first, the Riddler, or dysentery. Is he gonna collar a criminal, or just get cholera. A damp cave? Really? It’s a breeding ground for mosquitos. He’ll get the zika virus before he gets the Joker. He’s basically in a subterranean pit filled with bat guano, breathing that shit in, he’ll get double-pneumonia before he gets two-face.

And they thought Howard Hughes was a crazy billionaire. At least Howard Hughes was smart enough to bang some movie stars. Batman? What’s his thought process on a Friday night? “Hmm, what to do tonight...I could date that supermodel who’s been sending me nude selfies….but on the other hand I could impale some junkie mugger with a couple of Batarangs… I gotta go with Batarangs. Hey Alfred!”

Make America and Gotham City great again.

[radioleary-blog]

[radioleary-blog]

President Howard Beale?

On one of the cable channels today they were showing the classic movie ‘Network’, it was the scene where Howard Beale has a complete meltdown live on the evening news. Then I realized I had the TV on CNN, and it was President Trump’s press conference. He’s mad as hell, alright. And he’s not gonna take it anymore, apparently. When I hear this guy get on a rant, I realize why he often tweets in all caps. Trump is ‘all caps’, personified. He should start every speech with “My fellow Americans...CAPS LOCK!” Then continue with his bad-policy bitch-fest. And this is the difference between Donald Trump and the real Presidents we used to have. They were case-sensitive. Trump just deported a mother of two American children, ripping a family apart. He has not been the least bit sensitive to her case. Donald Trump is not case-sensitive. Nope, he’s ‘ALL CAPS.’ You know, like Gary Busey's smile.

Typing in all caps reveals a guy who is mad about everything, all the time, and all problems large and small get treated with the same level of hysterical outrage. His tweets are like angry ‘Mad Libs’, just insert any noun: “____________  IS AN ABSOLUTE DISGRACE! TRULY STUPID! REALLY SAD!”

It could be: “The_Iran_nuclear_deal  IS AN ABSOLUTE DISGRACE! TRULY STUPID! REALLY SAD!”

But it could also be: “Saturday_Night_Live  IS AN ABSOLUTE DISGRACE! TRULY STUPID! REALLY SAD!”

Want to know which one it really was? You can’t tell, can you? Go ahead, take a guess, you have a 50/50 shot. Stick around, I’ll tell you at the end of this column.

This press conference was truly something else, we haven’t seen a meltdown of this magnitude since Chernobyl or Fukushima. I would imagine that podium now has a half-life of ten thousand years. It was like Avant-garde theatre, like watching a one-man play reenactment of ‘12 Angry Men.’ It was more ‘in your face’ than 3-D porn. And a lot of whining, too. You know, he’s only been in office a month and I’m already tired of his whining all the time. Maybe he just misspelled all those tweets where he promised we’d be tired of his winning all the time?

Take a look at some of the crazy things the President said at his press conference and tell me it’s not depressing. More like a depress conference. All these quotes are verbatim:

“To be honest, I inherited a mess. A mess!”

He inherited a mess? No, man, Obama inherited a mess. George Bush wrecked this country like it was Ferris Bueller's dad’s Ferrari. The one he spent three years restoring. Overall,  President Obama did a pretty good job of cleaning up his mess. But isn’t that typical? Finally, a black President, and he has to clean up a mess left by a white guy. Trump inherited a mess? He must mean he inherited a mess of money and real estate, from his multi-millionaire dad. According to Marco Rubio during a debate, Trump inherited 100 million dollars from his father’s company and estate, though more conservative estimates put the number closer to $40 million.

Now, that is a mess. A fine mess. To quote Oliver Hardy, “Well, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten me into.” Trump can’t be serious. I think he must be messing with us.

“Drugs are becoming cheaper than candy bars.”

Don’t I know it! You don’t have to tell me that! These days I have to ride up in a bad neighborhood with a tightly folded twenty, and open the car window just enough to pass it through for a ‘fun-size’ bag of Skittles. It costs less to ‘chase the dragon’ than it costs to ‘taste the rainbow.’ In all fairness, that really is a druggie-sounding slogan for a candy bar. And drugs come in ‘fun-size’ bags too. So what the hell is our President talking about? Have the drug cartels and gangsta rappers taken over the candy industry? Candy wrappers, yes, but candy rappers? Will M&Ms change their name to Eminem’s? Will Baby Ruth be Baby-Daddy Ruth? What other candy bars will be affected? Will Nestle’s Crunch be called Nestle’s Kush? Will Hershey’s Krackel just be Hershey’s Krack? Will Zagnut come wrapped in rolling papers and be called Zig-Zagnut? Will candy be so expensive you have to wait for payday to buy a Payday? When you buy drugs, it’s a score, but when you buy candy, it’s a Skor. Who knows what he’s talking about, maybe Trump thought a 100 Grand bar was the actual cost. My only question is; can I now pay for drugs with those little sacks of chocolate gold coins?

“I guess it was the biggest electoral win since Reagan.”

Guess again, Mr. President. I don’t know if that’s a guess or a lie or an alternative fact, but it’s wrong. It’s as wrong as a turtle humping an army helmet. Donald Trump is crowing about his 306 electoral points? Let’s see...Barack Obama had 356 in 2008, and 332 in 2012. And Bill Clinton had 370 in 1992 and 379 in 1996. When confronted by a reporter with these non-alternative facts, Trump stammered like an a guy with Tourettes on a pogo stick, saying “Er..ah..I meant Republicans.” To which the reporter pointed out that George H.W. Bush had a whopping 426 Electoral votes. Trump replied, "I was given that information. Actually, I've seen that information around.”  Actually, Mr. President, if it isn’t true, it isn’t information. Whether you saw it around or not. Where did you see it, exactly? Around where? Hanging around downtown in Bullshit City? I’m not sure where Donald Trump learned to count. Maybe from Betsy Devos.

“Does anybody really think Hillary Clinton would be tougher on Russia than Donald Trump?”

Yes. Everybody. Everybody in the world really thinks that. I’m sure that when Hillary Clinton pays Russian prostitutes to perform golden showers, she probably tips them a lot less. Who’s he kidding, he’s tough on Russia? Sadly, it seems the only intelligence in the White House right now is Russian Intelligence. Come on, he just fired his national security adviser Michael Flynn for being cozy with the Russian government. Of course, he blamed the media for the scandal. “The unfair attack on Michael Flynn was a Russia to judgement!” Flynn made a huge mistake and he got caught, simple as that. Call him “Error Flynn.” But everyone knows Trump loves Putin and Russia. Donald Trump is so in love with Vladimir Putin, Melania is worried he may be bi-lateral curious.

“I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life. Number two, racism, the least racist person."

Wow, we’re pretty goddamn lucky! To have a president who is not only the least anti-semitic person we’ve ever seen in our entire life, but also the least racist person, too? I guess we can forget about that poser Oskar Schindler and his stupid list! Oskar Swindler is more like it! He might as well have been a captain in the Gestapo compared to the legendary anti-anti-semite Donald Trump! Trump should also add that he is the least egotistical. “I’m the most-anti-egotistical person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life. In fact I’m the least egotistical person that ever lived. Ever. That includes all of time and space; not just past, but the future as well. And all planets in every galaxy both known and unknown. And if superstring theory and quantum physics pan out, you’ll find out I’m the most anti-egotistical being in an infinite number of quantum universes. All of ‘em. I’m number one at not having an ego, in all of creation, and even beyond that to other various planes of existence and reality; supernatural realms, alternate realities, temporal paradoxes, mythological constructs, the afterlife, and the before-life too. So suck on that! And I say that humbly, believe me.”

Then it got weird. “You know what uranium is, right? It’s this thing called nuclear weapons. And other things. Like lots of things are done with uranium. Including some bad things.”

Whoa, slow down with the scientific talk, President Heisenberg. I didn’t attend Trump University.

“The news is fake because so much of the news is fake.”

It’s hard to argue with logic like that. He must be part Vulcan. I know he’s really good at the Vulcan nerve-grope. But Trump only says “Live long and prosper” when he’s looking in the mirror.

And just in case you were getting drastically concerned about having a president that is ranting and raving after just four weeks in office, don’t worry. Trump allayed all our fears, telling us that he was not “ranting and raving,” but the lying media would say he was. “Tomorrow, they will say, "Donald Trump rants and raves at the press." I'm not ranting and raving. I'm just telling you. You know, you're dishonest people. But -- but I'm not ranting and raving. I love this. I'm having a good time doing it. But tomorrow, the headlines are going to be, "Donald Trump rants and raves." I'm not ranting and raving.

Whew, thank goodness for that, because it sounded a lot like ranting and raving to me, but what do I know. Folks, it’s like this; if somebody tells you five times they aren’t ranting and raving - they are ranting and raving. I think that is the clinical definition.

“This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine.”

It sure is. After all, a guillotine is a fine-tuned machine. So is a chainsaw. And with Flynn getting the axe, Pudzer out as Labor secretary, and Kellyanne Conway on her way out, I think it’s fair to say the Trump administration is running like the Texas Fine-Tuned Machine Massacre.

Now here’s the answer I promised you earlier:

“The_Iran_nuclear_deal  IS AN ABSOLUTE DISGRACE! TRULY STUPID! REALLY SAD!”

You lucked out this time, Saturday Night Live.

[radioleary-blog]

Nixon’s Apprentice

For news junkies like me, this past week was the best week of news in a long, long time. Ever since Bernie Sanders “lost” the Democratic primary race to Hillary Clinton, the Queen of the Illuminati. or is it Hilluminati? Since then, the news has all been pretty bad.  I don’t need to recite a litany of all the affronts to sanity and society to which we have all borne witness these past hundred-odd days, and it’s been a hundred very odd days indeed. Things have gone rapidly downhill since the election, down a slope as steep as a double-black diamond ski trail. Down a mountain where Trump is the tree, and the whole country is Sonny Bono.

If you are too young to know who Sonny Bono is, he wasn’t related to U2’s Bono, you could tell because Sonny Bono found what he was looking for. He was a hippie-ish singer and musician who racked up a string of hits with his wife Cher in the 1960’s, then in the 1970’s they had a long-running TV variety show (with David Letterman as a writer), then he served three terms in Congress in the 1990’s representing California, until he was killed in a tragic skiing accident when he hit a tree. They say the bark is worse than the bite, and to Sonny Bono, the bark was definitely worse. Some people say Sonny probably should have spent more time in Congress and less time at a ski resort, but who knows, maybe he had a time-Cher. Sonny Bono was another TV celebrity turned incompetent Republican elected to high office, so he wasn’t all that different than Donald Trump. Except The Sonny and Cher Show on CBS was the highest rated television show in America, and The Apprentice didn’t even crack the top 50 in its last four seasons. People viewed Sonny Bono as a bit of a joke and a lightweight, but compared to our current President he looked like Teddy Roosevelt, if Teddy could carry a tune instead of a big stick. He even had the moustache.

The big difference between Trump and Sonny Bono is that Sonny had a wonderfully self-deprecating sense of humor, he was charming and humble, and he was honest about how unqualified he was for high office. “The last thing in the world I thought I would be is a U.S. Congressman, given all the bobcat vests and Eskimo boots I used to wear.” Sonny said. “What is qualified? What have I been qualified for in my life? I haven't been qualified to be a mayor. I'm not qualified to be a songwriter. I'm not qualified to be a TV producer. I'm not qualified to be a successful businessman. And so, I don't know what qualified means.” Wow, that’s a refreshing change from the self-proclaimed super-genius President we have now. The one who was surprised that being President was harder than having a reality game show. That genius. You know, Wile E. Coyote thought he was a Super-Genius too, but in the span of five-minutes he gets crushed by a giant boulder, takes an anvil to the head, and is turned into an accordion after falling from a fatal height.

But I digress.

So the news has been bad and getting worse, until right now. It’s been exhausting. Used to be, before we entered what I affectionately call the ‘end of days’, a President would get embroiled in a scandal, it would unfold slowly over months or years, and it would either bring him down or it wouldn’t. But this time around the scandals have moved faster than Anthony Weiner’s texting hand. Or maybe his other hand, if you know what I mean. Even hardcore political junkies like myself are starting to O.D. like a frontman in a grunge band.

With the firing of FBI director Comey to stop an investigation against him, and subsequent veiled threats about secret “tapes”, Donald Trump has raised the specter of Richard Nixon. By the way, somebody should tell Trump that when you put quotation marks around a word like that, it’s usually meant to indicate sarcasm. It’s called ‘Irony punctuation’. In the 1580’s, a printer in England introduced the percontation point, and French poet Alcanter de Brahm called it the irony mark. Both are the form of a question mark reversed, like this, "⸮". Irony punctuation is used to convey that a sentence should be understood at a second, deeper level.

Initially the reverse question mark was used at the end of a rhetorical question, like “Why is it your feet smell and your nose runs "⸮" or “How can you ever get off the airplane if it’s a non-stop flight "⸮" (that one actually has an answer, you fly United and they drag you out before take-off). Eventually, the reverse question mark disappeared, but the quotation marks around it are now put around the word or phrase you mean sarcastically or ironically. Like, if you see a sign in a restaurant window that says: OUR BURGERS ARE 100% “BEEF”, you’d better make sure those are grill marks on the burger and not whip marks from when it lost the Kentucky Derby. So listen up, Donald Trump, stop putting quotation marks around words that are not intended sarcastically! Okay, Mr. “President”?

But I do digress.

I remember Nixon. Man-o-man, do I remember Nixon. My dad was a lifelong Democrat, and he was draft age as the Vietnam war raged across the evening news, so Nixon’s name came up a lot. Not really in a positive way. I grew up thinking Richard Nixon’s middle name was F***ing. That’s the way it sounded in my house, anyway. My dad would be watching Cronkite, and since like most Americans we were a one-TV household, that meant I was watching Cronkite too. It was either that or actually do my homework, so hello, Walter.  And ol’ Tricky Dick was always up to something. My dad would seethe at every new scandal, from “He’s sabotaged Johnson’s peace talks! That Richard F***ing Nixon!” to “He attacked Cambodia? On Christmas? That Richard F***ing Nixon!” to “Can you believe he fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox? That Richard F***ing Nixon!”

That was all well and good, until one day in school my teacher asked us what President Nixon’s full name was. My hand shot up, with about the same positive result as when Janis Joplin shot up. “I know! I know! It’s Richard F***ing Nixon!” I got the feeling I may have been incorrect when twenty-five third-graders gasped in unison, sucking all the air out of the room like the Allied air raids over Dresden. After Mrs. Whatever-her-name-was regained consciousness, her teacher training took over as she tried to regain control of the classroom with all the nervous calm of a woman about to lose tenure. “No, Chris, President Nixon’s middle initial is ‘M’.” I raised my hand again. “I got it now, is it Richard Motherf***ing Nixon? Because I’ve heard that one a lot too.” And that’s right about the moment my name started going on lists. I was sent home with a note for my mother. I read it, but I had to ask mom what “political dissident commie pinko” meant. Mom said it meant I was smarter than my teacher.

Did you know that Richard Nixon happened to be in Dallas on November 22, 1963, the very day President Kennedy was killed there? It’s true. After Kennedy beat Nixon in 1960, Nixon went to work as a lawyer for Pepsi, and he gave a speech that day before a group of Dallas businessmen. But for some reason, Nixon later told three separate lies saying he left Dallas before the trouble started. Nobody thought he had anything to do with the shooting, it’s not a conspiracy, just a weird coincidence, but Nixon lied about it anyway. It was completely unnecessary too, because thanks to Trump, we now know that JFK was actually killed by Ted Cruz’s dad. And probably Hillary. And maybe Pocahontas.

And did you know that besides the astronauts, the only other name on the Moon is Richard Nixon? Well, that’s true, too. There are plaques left behind by the Apollo astronauts, with their signatures and Nixon’s signature, because he was President for all the Moon landings, so he’s the guy that signed the checks. I think they left the plaque right beside that cool flag they planted for MTV. It reads, "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind." Wow. That’s pretty noble. I guess they decided not to add the part that says “But mainly, we did it to show up the Russians.”

And I’m sure that plaque is still there, untouched, on that secret Nevada movie set where they really filmed the Moon landing. I think history will eventually give the director’s credit for the Moon landing to Stanley Kubrick He probably filmed it between 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, we could ask Kubrick, but he died mysteriously less than one week after finishing Eyes Wide Shut. Some say he was killed for revealing a long-hidden truth in that film. Not the hidden truth that the world is run by a secret society of elites that control the levers of power, commit murder with impunity, and engage in ancient satyric orgiastic rituals. But rather he revealed the long-hidden truth that there was absolutely no sexual chemistry at all between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Faked the Moon landing? I think Tom Cruise faked the Poon landing! I understand that before filming started, Tom Cruise asked Kubrick if he could keep his beard in the movie. Kubrick said yes, so Tom Cruise brought Nicole. Get it? She was a beard? No? Ah, forget it. I should have closed with Poon landing.

Now I, for one, truly appreciate the irony of Nixon’s name reaching the lofty height of being on a heavenly body, because he was infamous primarily for his gutter politics. Dick Nixon was a dick alright, right from the beginning. He worked with “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy and the HUAC, the House Unamerican Activities Committee. They basically just went around ruining the careers of anyone who opposed them, usually by accusing them of being secret Communist agents. Most of ‘em were completely innocent of any wrongdoing, but the committee black-balled them out of their professions if they were any more liberal than Rorschach from The Watchmen. “Hurm.” The HUAC black-balled thousands and thousands of decent, patriotic Americans with all the credibility of the Salem Witch trials. The HUAC were responsible for more black-balling than the Kardashian family.  

Too bad the HUAC isn’t around today, they wouldn’t have to look any further than a few blocks down the street to the White House to find a whole mess of Communist agents and Moscow Moles, and this time they wouldn’t have to make it up. Hell, between Trump puppet Devin Nunes and the newly-elected Montana body-slam man, they’d have plenty of careers that need ruining right there in the House itself without bothering the rest of us. It’s mind-boggling to me that the Republican party was once so obsessed with preventing Russian agents from infiltrating the government, and today they are the Russian agents infiltrating government. And the ones that aren’t actually Russian influenced are spending all their energies and political capital defending and making excuses for the ones that are. I’ve said it before, we are living in a land without irony.

Nixon was a low-down red-baiter from his very first campaign in 1946, when he was recruited into politics by Republicans in California's 12th district to oust incumbent Democrat Jerry Voorhis, who supported the New Deal and had a liberal voting record. Nixon came out bullshit blazing, saying that because Voorhis was endorsed by a group linked to communists, it must mean that he’s a left-wing radical commie himself. In reality, Voorhis was staunchly anti-communist, and he was voted by the press corps to be the "most honest congressman.” But Nixon was able to paint him red all over, even though Voorhis refused to accept any endorsement that didn’t renounce communism. Nixon won by over 15,000 votes, and the rest is history, and it’s even written on the Moon. It’s too bad Jerry Voorhis wasn’t Jason Vorhees, now there’s a dude that would know how to effectively respond to a hatchet-job. Probably with a machete.

Nixon was a creep, and it’s no coincidence that the group behind the break-in at the Watergate hotel was called the Committee to RE-Elect the President, or CREEP. You can’t make that shit up. Next thing you know, Nixon fires the special prosecutor who is investigating him, Archibald Cox. Heh heh...Dick fired Cox...heh heh. Just like Trump fired Comey. And then Trump hints that there are secret tapes. Or “tapes”, if you don’t get sarcasm. Just like the tapes that Nixon was forced to turn over in which he implicates himself in a million-dollar payoff of hush-money to cover up the break-in. Nixon was the master of recording, Trump is like a Nixon cover band.

Donald Trump knows nothing of history, or he’d know that it wasn’t the initial act that drove Nixon from office, it was the endless cover-up that did him in. And there were no “tapes” of Nixon getting golden showers. But in the end, I believe all these comparisons between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump are a little unfair.

After all, Nixon never went to prison.

[radioleary-blog]

When Chuck Norris Got Bullied, He Called Evel Knievel

I simply can’t keep up with all the crazy things the Trump administration has been up to this past week. He’s only been President for two weeks and he has caused more protests than we have seen in this country since the ending of the last episode of ‘The Sopranos.’ Seriously, after eight seasons, how dare they just cut to black as the Sopranos are sitting there in a pizza joint? If I wanted to decide for myself what happens to Tony and Carmella, I wouldn’t have paid for eight years of HBO. I’m certainly not paying for HBO because of the incredible selection of the same dozen movies they run over and over again until you know every line of dialogue between John McClane and Hans Gruber. You know what? Rather than invent examples, I’ll just grab the remote and check what’s on HBO right now. I have the whole package (if you know what I mean), so I’m sure there are some real cinematic masterpieces. Let’s see...okay, here we go. ‘The Princess Diaries’, from 2001. ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities,’1990, followed by ‘Problem Child 2’, 1991. Then ‘King Ralph,’ ‘Sixteen Candles,’ ‘Wall Street,’ ‘Blues Brothers 2000,’ ‘Demolition Man,’ ‘Point Break,’ and ‘Panic Room.’ Wow, cancel all my appointments! I know what I’m doing for the next 18 hours! Screw the Superbowl, I’ll be watching Charlie Sheen before Aids, Wesley Snipes before prison, and Jodie Foster before she came out of the panic room closet. And luckily, I have HBO West, so I get to watch them all over again three hours later in case I missed something the first ten times. Are you kidding me? These are all movies I would gladly pay fifty bucks a month to avoid.

This week Trump pulled more crazy stunts than anyone since Evel Knievel built a rocketship to jump over the Snake River Canyon. And we all know how great that turned out. There are parallels between Evel Knievel and Donald Trump, I guess. Trump wants to build an enormous wall in the desert, Evel Knievel built an enormous ramp in the desert. Of course, the ramp was built to get you across a river, and the wall will be built to stop you from getting across a river, but, whatever. When Evel Knievel appeared somewhere, the crowds would all shout “Evel!”, and whenever Trump appears somewhere, the crowds all shout “Evil!” Kind of similar, but again, whatever. People watched in horror as Evel Knievel’s motorcycle crashed during a jump, on a bus, and people listened in horror as Trump was recorded talking about grabbing pussy, on a bus. Both were consummate showmen, both were thin-skinned, angry, and hated critics. Both were constantly feuding with the media even as they fed off it. But Trump’s approval rating is falling faster than Evel’s rocket-motorcycle fell into that canyon. And that’s as close as Evel Knievel ever came to jumping a shark, yet Donald Trump may have already jumped the shark. Evel Knievel survived that crash on September 8, 1974, simply because he was as badass as they get. It takes a lot more than jumping a mile-wide chasm in a homemade steam-powered rocket-motorcycle and plummeting a thousand feet into a river canyon to kill Evel Knievel. He was old school tough. I watched this guy crash, hitting his landing ramp too fast after jumping 13 double-decker busses in Wembley Stadium,  and he hit the ground at 70mph, so hard it would make crash-test dummies weep, tumbling on the tarmac like a sweater in the dryer. He broke his pelvis, collarbone, some ribs and vertebrae. And you know what he did? No, of course you don’t, you’re less than a hundred years old. Well, I’ll tell ya what he did. He got up. He got to his feet, broken pelvis and all, and walked over to the microphone and told the crowd he was retiring. He was in shock, and ABC broadcaster Frank Gifford was begging him on-air to let the paramedics put him on a stretcher and in an ambulance, but Evel Knievel just turned and walked off the Wembley field, saying, “I came in walking, I went out walking!” It does not get more badass than that. Evel Knievel makes Clint Eastwood look like Jay Baruchel. He makes Vin Diesel look like Shia LaBeouf. Over his entire career, he spent more than 3 years in a hospital due to traumatic injuries from his jumps! And although Evel Knievel didn’t actually break "every bone in his body," as legend had it, the truth is he suffered 433 broken bones during his career. He is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the survivor of the most bones broken in a lifetime.

He was so tough, when Chuck Norris got bullied, he called Evel Knievel.

But as I say, I’m having trouble just keeping up with all the blunders of the Trump administration this past week, far more than any other President screwed up in their entire first term. I think in the four years Jimmy Carter was President, the worst thing he ever did was one time he went fishing, and he whacked a rabbit that was trying to climb into his canoe. With a paddle, I mean, he didn’t have it whacked like a mob hit. Ah, simpler times, when presidential scandals were as wholesome as fishin’ and whackin’ rabbits with a paddle. Now it’s all about pussy grabbin’, golden showers, and whackin’ something else entirely.

I just can’t write fast enough to keep up. To write down all of Trump’s bullshit this week, I would have to type faster than a court stenographer taking down the testimony of Busta Rhymes being sued by an auctioneer. (For you old people: Busta Rhymes talks really fast. For you young people: auctioneers talk really fast.) I would  have to type faster than Stephen King cranking out schlocky horror novels, although I think Trump is a hell of a lot scarier. Like a Stephen King novel, Trump was elected by states populated by the ‘Children of the Corn,’ and now we’re all in ‘Misery.’ In Ronald Reagan's farewell address from the Oval Office, he called America “the shining city on hill”, but after only two weeks of Trump, it’s starting to look more like just ‘The Shining.’ And President Obama’s term in office is over, so just like in ‘The Shining,’ things get really crazy after the black guy retires.

Speaking of horror movies brought to life, his cabinet picks are all being confirmed, and it looks less like the cabinet of a President, and more like ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.’ Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon/Mobil is now the Secretary of State. The State Department is busy preparing for his arrival by making sure all the bathrooms are just as disgustingly filthy as the bathrooms at every Exxon/Mobil gas station. Diplomats received an inter-office memo instructing them not to flush until further notice, and to no longer worry about their aim. To add authenticity, all of the bathrooms will also be kept locked with only one key for the entire building, and the key will be attached to a hubcap from a late-model Buick LeSabre to make sure no one walks off with it.

So what did Trump do this week? Well, at a Black History Month prayer breakfast, Trump seemed to think the famous orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass was alive and well. Which may come as a shock to his family, seeing as he died in 1895. Well, not his family, so much, but his descendants might be pretty freaked out to know he walks among the living. Frederick Douglass would probably be a very eloquent zombie. He could probably convince you to agree to let him eat your brains as reparations for slavery. I remember his famous quote, “Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, so how’s about you let me eat your brains?” Or this insightful quote they taught us in school, “No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck. Now let me eat your brains, seriously.”

When asked about Douglass, Trump said, “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Yeah, he’s getting recognized more and more, Mr. President, and you noticed. Nothing gets by you, does it? I think he might just win this season of Celebrity Apprentice, if that scheming Harriet Tubman doesn’t call him out in the boardroom for being a lousy project manager. Harriet Tubman was like the Omarosa of the underground railroad, and putting her face on the twenty-dollar bill will only feed her ego and make her even more insufferable to be around. “Let me get the tip, but all I have are twenties...Anybody got change for a ‘me’?” I wondered how any U.S. President could be quite this stupid, then I realized he must have learned everything he knows about black history from his Education Secretary pick, Betsy DeVos. Now, I’m not saying Betsy DeVos is an idiot and far too unqualified to run our nation’s public schools. I’m not saying it, I’m typing it. She knows nothing about our education system.

Betsy DeVos is so stupid, she thinks a ‘scholarship’ is a boat full of smart people.

Betsy DeVos is so stupid, she thinks ‘trigonometry’ is the study of firing guns.

Betsy DeVos is so stupid, she thinks that ‘tuition’ is when a woman gets a hunch about something.

Betsy DeVos is so stupid, she thinks ‘Tufts University’ is where you learn to cut hair.

Betsy DeVos is so stupid, she thinks ‘Tulane University’ is on a highway.

Betsy DeVos is so stupid, she thinks ‘Loyola’ is where they make all those crayons.

Betsy DeVos is so stupid, she thinks a ‘Bachelor of Arts’ is a gay male dancer.

Apart from Trump providing a perfect example of why we actually need Black History Month, he upped the crazy ante at this prayer breakfast when he started ranting about the ratings on his old TV show, from which he was fired for being a racist. "They hired a big, big movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to take my place...The ratings went down the tubes. It's been a total disaster...And I want to just pray for Arnold, if we can, for those ratings." WTF? Somebody tell this guy he’s supposed to be worrying about the really big things now, like war, and comets, and aliens, and climate change, and everything else that can possibly go wrong. But instead he is worrying about his old TV show? Snap out of it, man, you’re on a new reality show now, it’s called ‘Celebrity President.’ And this first season sucks. And your ratings are awful. How the hell did we end up with a President who is in bed with Russia but at war with NBC? Franklin Roosevelt will always be remembered for winning the war against the Nazis and the Japanese, and Donald Trump will always be remembered for losing the war against Saturday Night Live. I think it was a racist thing to do, actually, to pray for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ratings at a Black History prayer breakfast instead of any number of African-Americans who lost their lives in the past year. Frankly, I think he brought up Schwarzenegger because he knew the only way he could use the n-word was by putting “Schwarzen” in front of it.

And another scary development, two weeks into Trump's presidency and Republicans have given the mentally ill easier access to guns, as they voted to overturn an Obama administration law that blocked people with mental disorders from buying guns. Wow. Talk about playing to your base.

What else. Oh yeah, he threatened to invade Mexico, probably worth mentioning that. Nothing like a military invasion to teach people to respect borders. I guess his next move will be to annex the Sudetenland.

Strangest of all, Trump somehow managed to get into a fight with one of our staunchest allies, Australia. Australia! How do you manage to piss off Australia? For God’s sake, their national motto is “No Worries.” Trump was upset that President Obama had agreed to take 1,200 refugees that Australia had been detaining. Trump called it the “worst deal ever!” The worst deal ever? I don’t think it really approaches the level of worst deal ever, not even on a personal level. I once paid 60 bucks for an eighth of mediocre weed, and that was in the 1990s! I couldn’t even enjoy it because I paid so much. And because it was shitty weed. The Brown Frown.

Worst deal ever? How about when we bought Manhattan from the Indians for 24 bucks? That’s a pretty bad deal. Is it still okay to say Indians? Probably not, unless you’re talking about motorcycles or Cleveland’s baseball team, so, Native Americans it is. Although, for my own education I looked into this, and some people prefer to be called American Indian over Native American. One Lakota man from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation said recently, "If some Indians want to be called Native Americans or Natives, let them be called that, but I was born an Indian and I shall die an Indian.” That sounds so cool the way he says it. I bet it sounds less impressive when you describe comics that way. “If some Comics want to be called Stand-up Comics or Comedians, let them be called that, but I was born a Hack, and I shall die a Hack.” No, I was wrong, it still sounds pretty cool.

Trump should consider himself very lucky that bad deal went down. Just imagine, if they hadn’t made that bad deal, the Native Americans would have been the real estate developers in Manhattan instead of Donald Trump’s dad. And he never would have gotten rich, and never would have become President. Whoa. It’s a revenge curse! President Trump is our payback for ripping off those Indians! I haven’t seen a revenge curse this bad since Craig T. Nelson built his house on a sacred burial ground in ‘Poltergeist’! Of course, the real difference between Native American real estate developers and Donald Trump is that the Native American casinos don’t go bankrupt.

Hey, here’s a really bad deal, how about all the people who paid to enroll in Trump University? Now that might be the “worst deal ever.” So bad that Trump agreed to pay a 25 million dollar settlement to avoid a trial and charges of fraud. Although, in all fairness to Trump, by paying out that 25 million, he actually did make those students wealthy like he promised, all it took was a class action lawsuit against him. Clever move, Mr. Trump. Bravo.

And that is the week that was.

[radioleary-blog]

Donald Trump vs. Herbert Hoover vs. Back to The Future Part III

Okay, he’s the worst ever. President Trump is the worst President we’ve ever had, in my lifetime at least. To find a President that could even compete with Trump for the title of worst President ever, you’d have to get in a time-traveling Delorean and go back about a century. But I wouldn’t recommend you do that, some say that time-traveling in a car powered by a flux capacitor can possibly lead to Parkinson’s disease, especially if you do it for three movies. But the evidence for that is...shaky. Hey, why did those ‘Back To The Future’ films successively get so much worse? Couldn’t producer Robert Zemeckis just get in the Delorean and go forward in time to read the godawful reviews? If only Biff Tannen had stolen a movie guide instead of a sports almanac, he could have saved Universal Studios the 40 million dollars it spent making ‘Back To The Future Part III’. Wow, what a disaster! You know, I recently saw an ad for some network TV show where a team of intrepid multi-culti adventurers go back in time to save the Hindenburg from exploding, but I think ‘Back To The Future III’ may have been the bigger disaster. Yes, the Hindenburg was terrible, sure, but it all happened pretty quick. Whereas ‘Back To The Future III’ has a running time of two hours! Two hours of watching Teen Wolf and the stoner from Taxi yuk it up in the old West. “Oh, the inanity!”

You probably don’t even remember the movie. That's understandable, it’s a normal human response to block out cinematic traumas like that. To access those repressed bad-movie memories you’d need years of psychotherapy and hypnotic regression. Or basic cable. First of all, who would take a time machine and go back to the Old West? Nobody in their right mind, that’s who. Not even Dr. Who. It was about as bad a place and time as there was. All you could get in the Old West was syphilis or a gunshot wound. The Old West was even worse than Kanye West, he’d probably only give you one of those things.

If you could time travel to the far off future, why would you go back and watch a prospector fall down an abandoned mineshaft? You can watch Leonardo da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa, or you could go watch two drunk cowboys shoot each other for cheating at cards. Actually, that still happens quite often. No time travel necessary, just a bus ticket to Reno.

That’s why I don’t get this Westworld. That’s the place you want to re-create and populate with robots? I could think of dozens of better robot theme parks. Here’s one, how about Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion circa 1974? Hanging out with James Caan, a metric ton of cocaine, and every aspiring centerfold on the west coast sounds like a lot more fun than sitting in the middle of a train robbery shoot-out. Where am I, Chicago? But that’s just me, I guess.  Want another great robot idea? How about a robot theme park of the cast of Seinfeld. That would be awesome! I would so go, we’d all go! And they’d all be there, not just Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine, but everybody. Mr. Pitt. Tim Watley. Jackie Chiles, Lloyd Braun, Kenny Bania, and of course, Uncle Leo. The bubble boy and Izzy Mandelbaum. “Mandelbaum! Mandelbaum!” Let me know when they build it and I will date the robot Sue Ellen Mischke, the bra-less woman who caused a car accident. She may not be real, but they’re spectacular! Serenity now!

But I digress.

As I was saying, no one would time travel to the Old West.

If somebody actually had a time machine, the conversation would go something like this: “Hey, I have this time machine, and it’s all gassed up with bananas peels and deadly radiation or whatever the hell it runs on, where do you think we should go?”

“We can go anywhere in time? How about we check out a Jimi Hendrix concert! Let’s go see Jimi’s legendary set at Woodstock! Or the Fillmore East, 1970, that’s maybe his best concert ever! C’mon! Hendrix!! Either that or maybe we go back in time and check out Jesus! I’d be cool with that, too, either Jesus or Jimi Hendrix! Which one do you want to go see?”

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’m worthy to be in the presence of God. So let’s go see Jesus.”

The amazing things you could see with a time machine would blow your mind. You could go see the Great Pyramids of Giza when they were brand new, and still under warrantee. Back when they still had that new Pyramid smell. The Pyramids don’t smell so good today, now the place really Sphynx. That joke never gets old, right? Don’t Tut-Tut me. It’s like they say, mo’ mummy mo’ problems.

You could go back and see who built Stonehenge...the Druids? The Picts? Or was Stonehenge a natural formation, like the face on Mars, and Mount Rushmore.

You could go back in time to see the dinosaurs just before the comet hit, and watch them climb into their dinosaur space-ships and fly off to populate other worlds. The dinosaurs that stayed behind were either wiped out or forced to live underground, until they were discovered by Marshall, Will, and Holly on Saturday mornings in the Land of The Lost.

The spacefaring dinosaurs, over millions of years, eventually became the Gorn, a very tough race of outer-space reptilians. But they got their lizard asses kicked in about 40 minutes by Captain James Tiberius Kirk, and single-handedly. You can say what you want about William Shatner being a complete diva and an asshole to work with, but the man kicked ass and saved the galaxy about a hundred times, and he did it all without a raccoon. As far as I’m concerned, Captain Kirk earned the right to cut scenes from the other cast members just to pad his own lines. Live long and fuck ‘em.

But I digress. I really, really digressed.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, this damn Back to The Future III, it’s kind of haunting me, how bad this movie is. It’s a shame the time-travelers from that TV show couldn’t go back in time and save the time-traveler’s movie franchise. And what is it with time-travel being so popular on television all of a sudden? When did that happen? On TV right now, there is the time-travel show I was talking about, NBC’s Travelers. Also, Fox has Making History, Hulu has 11.22.63, The CW has Legends of Tomorrow, Syfy has 12 Monkeys, and Comedy Central has Time Traveling Bong. And I already mentioned BBC’s Dr. Who. That’s a whole lot of time travel goin’ on! There’s no way there’s enough time in the day for a person to watch all these time-travel shows, you’d actually need to use a time machine to see them all. Or a DVR, I guess.

But I digress. Stop me before I digress again. I think this blog is about politics.

Oh yeah, Donald Trump is the worst President ever.

To find another President as bad as Trump, you’d have to go back at least as far Hoover. Herbert Hoover, that is, not J. Edgar Hoover. It’s easy to confuse the two of them, the Hoovers. But where Herbert Hoover liked to address the public, J. Edgar liked to wear a dress in public. And where Herbert Hoover’s dam looked good, J. Edgar looked damn good. But much like the Hoover vacuum cleaner of that era, both of these guys completely sucked.

Was Herbert Hoover worse than Trump? Let’s compare the two men:

Herbert Hoover was orphaned at an early age. He worked hard to found his own business and became a multi-millionaire. Donald Trump? He was born with a silver spoon up his ass and inherited his multi-millionaire dad’s real estate business. He then went on to bankrupt casinos, screw over independent contractors, and force people to humiliate themselves for jobs on national TV. Oh, and he’s good at firing beauty pageant winners if they gain a few pounds, then ridiculing them in the press. Hmm. it’s close, but I think I gotta give round 1 to Hoover.

Herbert Hoover was Stanford-educated, he was an engineer. But Trump must be smarter, after all, he had his own Trump University! And if it was a phony university like the fake news says, tell me how come all those students went on to earn millions of dollars? Oh, that’s right, it was a 25 million dollar class-action lawsuit settlement he paid out to avoid having his orange ass dragged into court. Round 2, Hoover.

Herbert Hoover built Hoover Dam, one of the greatest structural engineering feats in human history. But then again, Donald Trump built a huge pyramid scheme. So, I’d call this round a draw.

Before Herbert Hoover was President,  he was in charge of enormous, complex relief operations in Europe during and after World War I. He served two Presidents as Secretary of Commerce, under both Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Before Donald Trump was President? He was in charge of enormous, complex challenges like making Lou Ferrigno and LaToya Jackson make bagels and peddle them on the streets of Manhattan. Trump’s biggest executive decisions were made sitting in a boardroom with Dee Snider, Meatloaf, Joan Rivers, Sinbad, and Dennis Rodman. Who, sadly enough, would make far better cabinet secretaries than the ones he actually chose. Seriously, who do you think has more experience dealing with North Korean ‘weebles-wobble-but-they-don’t-fall-down’ dictator Kim Jong Un: Rex Tillerson or Dennis Rodman? Think about that one. Here’s a hint: it’s the guy with 11,954 rebounds. Dennis Rodman is the only person Trump knows who has actually sat down with ‘Lil Kim’ Jong Un, and he fired him. Now I don’t think I would trust the Worm to handle the North Korea situation by himself, but if he had Jordan, Pippen, and the rest of the 1995 Chicago Bulls with him, we’d have an NBA franchise in Pyongyang by now. And war would have to wait at least through the playoffs. Round 4, Herbert Hoover.

I think we can stop right there. It’s a K.O. at the O.K. corral. Move over, Herbert Hoover, there’s a new worst President in town.

[radioleary-blog]

The Password is Fidelio

Fidel Castro was found dead. Looks like our 1961 CIA secret plot to kill him was more effective than we thought! I guess they chose a more long-range method of execution, probably for plausible deniability. That way, the blame and blowback couldn’t come back to haunt the President. Of course, that was President Kennedy, so he’s the one doing the haunting now. And there was blowback for Kennedy, but it came from the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza. Back, and to the left.

How arbitrary and unfair is the world when we lose a great man like JFK way back in 1963, but an asshole dictator like Fidel Castro got to live until right now? It might even be worse than when Chris Farley died, and yet we still have David Spade. Although, ‘Joe Dirt 2’ was such a disaster that in the credits, it lists the director as “Zapruder”.

We lost Kennedy so long ago, it was before the Beatles came to America to appear live on the Ed Sullivan Show and take America by storm. Think about that, folks. That means that if Kennedy had lived, he could have protected the U.S. from the British Invasion..! But while LBJ was exponentially deepening our military involvement in Viet Nam, we lacked the military might at home to protect the borders from an invading army of Skiffle bands and adorable, jangly guitar acts. There was no stopping them. And they weren’t always sending their best, folks. While our soldiers were fighting Ho Chi Minh, there was no one to stop Herman’s Hermits. We fought at Da Nang, we should have fought Donovan. Tet offensive? Not as offensive as the Troggs. And it was literally an invasion by The Zombies. I’m not sure what happened to them, I think after they recorded “Time of The Season,” Rick Grimes killed them with a machete.

But I digress.

Fidel Castro. If you’re young and don’t know much about this short, disheveled, rumpled, cigar-smoking old man, well, he was kind of like Peter Falk as Lt. Columbo. Except instead of going around solving murders, he went around ordering them.

But if you’re young, you don’t know who the hell Columbo is either. Columbo? Herman’s Hermits? Jesus Christ, I gotta start using references from this century. If I only knew what article of speech Wiz Khalifa was, I’d use it in a sentence.

We don’t know much about Castro’s death at this point, only that was very despondent over the break-up of a long-term relationship. Apparently his BFF Vladimir Putin dumped him recently for Donald Trump.

I hear that Castro might have survived, but the ambulance they sent for him was a 1958 Ford Edsel, held together only by bread-ties and a sense of communist solidarity. It might be a worker’s paradise, but not if you want to work in a car dealership. Thanks to our embargo, the last time there was a new car in Cuba, Fredo Corleone was driving around in it with Johnny Ola. I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!

I seriously think the best thing that came out of Cuba in the last 50 years was Godfather II. Sorry, cigars, close, but no cigar. Godfather II takes the cake, and the cake is shaped like Cuba.

And I’d have to say the second-best thing to come out of Cuba was Al Pacino again as Tony Montana in Scarface. I just wish there was more cocaine in the movie. There was more white powder in Scarface than when Jack Nicholson chased Danny through the hedge maze in a snowstorm in The Shining.

And the third-best was Al Pacino again in Carlito’s Way. Yeah, I know he was Puerto Rican in that, but so what, Pacino is cool.

Fidel Castro was the world’s most powerful Socialist. Except for one Senator from Vermont.

Now with Castro’s death, the worst island Dictator in the world is now unquestionably Jeff Probst. If Castro tortured his political prisoners as badly as any Survivor reward challenge, Amnesty International would have a stroke. And Jeff Probst has kicked more people off the island than the Mariel boatlift. “I’m sorry Elian, bring me your torch, the tribe has spoken. You’ll have to leave the island immediately. Unless you have a diplomatic immunity idol.”

It’s sad that Fidel died before realizing his biggest dream, taking over as the new host of NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice. Now who will lecture Boy George, Vince Neil and “Snooki” on workers controlling the means of production? Come on, host Arnold Schwarzenegger can’t even pronounce Marxism. “Mox-zhissom!” Nope. Castro would have been perfect, he was really good at firing people. Well, firing at people. In fact he had a whole squad of people just to do the firing. I forget what they were called. Squad of firers? No, that’s not it. Anyway, he...Firing squad! That’s it! In fact, I think the first celebrity he “fired” was Ernesto “Che” Guevara. I was hoping it would be Omarosa.

Castro left his brother Raoul to rule Cuba, and left his beard to every hipster in Brooklyn.

So long Fidel, I don’t know where you’re going, but I know it rhymes with “Fidel”.

[radioleary-blog]

Trump Goes From Fox News to TNT!

Donald Trump owes a lot of his fame to NBC for The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice. And Donald Trump owes his Election in a large part to FOX NEWS. Trump has always known when to use a network to his advantage. Now 100 days into his term, with his approval ratings falling faster than a dog on roller skates, Trump has gone from FOX NEWS to TNT. Not the TV network, though, the explosive.

Trump has started dropping bombs on people, a time-honored tradition with leaders who really aren’t all that good at leading. War is what happens when people are bad at politics. When I first heard that Trump dropped a 13 million dollar bomb on Afghanistan, I just assumed they were talking about the female ‘Ghostbusters’ reboot. Wow, what a disaster! It was unwatchable. Not a laugh in that script. Who ya gonna call? “Ghost writers!” Too bad they couldn’t keep the ghost of Harold Ramis in one of those containment units, but he always was a Class 5 Entity. He probably haunted this production just on principle. When I saw the movie, I thought I was in a surround-sound theater, but it turned out it wasn’t the ghosts on the screen, it was the audience yelling “Boo! Boo!”

But I digress.

Trump bombed an ISIS stronghold in Afghanistan with the Mother Of All Bombs, the MOAB. It’s one of those Millennial acronyms, like YOLO, except it means the exact opposite of that. It means You Only Lived, Once. And if you happen to be a Millennial, let me put it in terms you can understand: The Generals told Trump “Hey, we’re hundo-p this bomb is on Fleek.” Trump said “Perf! I’m thirsty, and they’re throwing shade. Bye Felicia!” Sorry not sorry. And then we dropped the MOAB on ISIS. I guess ISIS is another Millennial acronym, and judging from all their recent losses on the battlefield, ISIS probably stands for “I Surrender! I Surrender!” Boom.

This bomb was big, let me tell you. “How big was it,” you ask, Ed McMahon-style? It was so big, it was almost as big as the bomb they dropped this week on Survivor! “HIYO!” Did you see the Survivor controversy? At tribal council, one low-life contestant outed another contestant as transexual, live on national TV, if you overlook the fact that it was filmed four months earlier. People all across America were shocked. Well, mostly they were shocked that Survivor was still on the air. There were howls of well-deserved outrage for this truly reprehensible contestant, I know they don’t let you bring a compass to the desert island, but I didn’t know you couldn’t bring a moral compass! But most of the outrage was for CBS, who had months to edit this revelation out but chose not to. Why? Well, because emotional trauma equals ratings equals advertising revenue. And I know they could have easily cut the scene, because they do let you bring a machete. What kind of advertisers does CBS hopes to gain by publicly outing a contestant? What corporate sponsors are cool with that? Maybe In-N-Out Burger? Outback Steakhouse? California Closets? The logo of Survivor should be changed to “Outwit, Outlast, Outplay, Out somebody.”

But again,  I digress.

So there were a bunch of ISIS fighters hiding in an underground cave complex along the Afghanistan border. And say what you want about Afghans, they’re a tight-knit community. Get it? An Afghan is tight-knit, like the blanket? Hey, man, it wasn’t that bad. So, the President had only two options, drop the Mother Of All Bombs on them, or send in United Airlines security guards to drag them out. But they felt the United Airlines jackbooted goons might be a tad too violent. If only the 9/11 hijackers had flown United Airlines, we’d have saved a couple of trillion dollars on a couple of endless wars. Yeah, I know, I know, that one was that bad.. Unless you happened to have been frozen in carbonite this past week, you know that United Airlines security thugs dragged an Asian doctor out of his seat because they overbooked the flight, and he did not go willingly. I’m not sure what the doctor’s name was, but from what he was screaming as the security guards slammed him in the face, his name may have been Doctor “No!” Anyway, right now United is trying to repair the damage from this week’s unfortunate Asian-toss with new incentives, they just introduced a ‘Frequent Dragger Miles’ program. From now on customer service comes first at United, they’re going to roll out the red carpet before they drag you out on it.

And Syria. The Thursday before last, Trump ordered a launch on Syria. And that same day, I ordered a lunch on Siri. Weird, right? Quite the coincidence. Personally, I’m not so big on getting involved in Syria’s civil war. Here’s the way I look at it, we had a Civil War once, and they didn’t help at all. So don’t ask us, Damascus! Man, that would make a great T-shirt for a pro-isolationist PAC that can appreciate clever word-play, but those two qualities are mutually exclusive.

Donald Trump recounted the events of the night of the launch in an interview, but it sounded less like a moment in military history and more like a late-night cable infomercial for cake. Apparently, just as we were giving Assad his just desserts, Trump was just having dessert. He was eating chocolate cake as he launched missiles at Syria. Wow, talk about death by chocolate! Trump said, "We’re now having dessert. And we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen." Trump went on to mention the cake four times in a two-minute interview. Now I seriously doubt that this guy knows any more about cake than he knows about being President, he thought that would be a piece of cake, too. And how the hell does he know what kind of beautiful cakes this interviewer has seen in her lifetime? She’s in TV, she may have worked on any number of cake-related reality TV shows; Cake Wars, or Cake Boss, or Cake Czar, or Cake Fuhrer, or Cake Blitzkreig, or Cake Tet Offensive. And all of those cakes result in losing the Battle of the Bulge, amirite? Amirite? You know I am! Now I don’t mind if Trump wants to say it’s the best piece of cake he’s ever seen in his life, fine. We know he’d be lying, simply because that’s what he does, but, fine. Whatever. But don’t go saying that your cake is better than any cake somebody else has ever seen in their life. That’s this guy’s problem, always telling other people he know better. He tried that sales-pitch with his monstrous health care bill, and people weren’t buying it then, and they’re not buying your ultimate-cake bullshit now. I’d like to point out this is clearly a Marie Antoinette moment for Trump, but alas, we have been living in a land without irony for some time now.

And seeing as Mar-a Lago was just hit with serious health code violations for improper food handling, I’ll skip the dessert and just take the check, thanks. Health inspectors found “potentially hazardous” “high priority” violations at Trump’s “southern White House”, with meats stored at temperatures much higher the mandatory 41 degrees. The duck and beef were measured at 50 degrees, so when you see that beef coming, you better duck! And the ham was stored at 57 degrees! Even I start to turn bad at 57 degrees. Another violation was the smoked salmon, which was being served without “proper parasite destruction.” Sounds yummy, they must have caught the fish in that swamp they drained. Funny he doesn’t talk about this to the reporter, "We’re now having dessert. And we had the most unsanitary, unsafe for human consumption piece of badly-stored, room-temperature, parasite-infested swamp-cake that you’ve ever seen." So Eff this Mar-a Lago, political prisoners got better food at the Gulag Archipelago! Oh, just look it up, that’s damn funny. Fun fact: Mar-a Lago is Spanish for “Lake surrounded by Morons.” I did not know that. Ed, did you know that? “Yes!” HIYO!

Trump launched 60 missiles at the Syrian air base, one missile missed, 59 missiles hit. Hey, why do they call it a ‘missile’ when it hits it’s target? They should call the ones that miss missiles, and call the ones that hit ‘hittiles’. Although, thinking about it, ‘hittiles’ sounds like a Nazi candy. Forget that. All I know is the air strike played really well for Donald Trump, his ratings went up a couple of points, and he showed the world that the kid with small hands can play cowboy.

As Donald Trump put it, after he finished his cake, “Now people will take me Syriasly.”

And now, we’re on to North Korea. You know, I never really minded that Trump was vulgar and offensive, that was as close as he gets to charm. But I don’t like the way things are going. Things are going south, fast. I get the feeling the next thing that will be going south on the Korean peninsula is the North Korean army. Oh well, at least we’ll get a M*A*S*H reboot out of it. I like Alan Alda, and now he can tell us this war is stupid, too, in between ripping-off Groucho Marx lines. But I wish Trump would go back to swearing and talking about pussy. I don’t mind him dropping F-bombs, I just don’t want him dropping any A-bombs.

[radioleary-blog]

1984, Marked Down From $25.99! (And  the Ray Bradbury Story)

After the Trump administration introduced the all-too Orwellian concept of “alternative facts”, it has caused panicked buying of the novel ‘1984’ all across the country. It was reported that in the week since Kelleyanne Conman...I mean Kellyanne Conway...made that statement Sunday on ‘Meet The Press’, sales of the George Orwell cautionary classic have gone up over ten thousand percent!  Ten thousand percent, that’s exactly how much our gym coach always asked us to give out there. He’d always say “Ya gotta give it yer all! Ya gotta give ten thousand percent out there!! Ya think we weren’t givin’ it our all at Inchon? The Korean border sure wasn’t gonna stay exactly the same as it was before the war by itself!” That was Coach Fazullo, he was old school tough, picture a cross between Burgess Meredith and the Thing, but more gruff. I think he probably meant “Ya gotta give a hundred and ten percent out there!!”, a phrase commonly used by coaches to demonstrate exactly why they aren’t teaching math, but coach must’ve moved the decimal point or forgot to carry the one or something. Maybe he thought if we somehow did manage to give ten thousand percent, we could beat any other team who is only giving 110 percent? Frankly, I had my doubts that Coach knew any numbers higher than the ones marked on the football field, or maybe the 53rd parallel of the Korean peninsula. In fact, he never had us count off any higher than four. I explained to Coach that it would take 100 of us, each giving 100%, to give 10,000% “out there”. Or it would take 91 of us if we each gave 110%. I was rewarded for my precise calculations with a leather medicine ball to the solar plexus, thrown with the force of an asteroid impact on ancient Mesoamerica. When I regained the ability to breathe, some twenty minutes later, Coach told me, “Get offa the floor before I put ya in an iron lung!” So now my sternum aches whenever it’s going to rain, or whenever I hear the number ‘ten thousand percent.’

You know, I got curious while writing this, and I looked into the origin of the phrase “110 percent”. The first ever use was in 1916, in the sport of competitive rowing. The next usage had an element of humor to it, and it ended up being used from 1919 to 1925 in a vaudeville show as a joke. I’m not sure at what point sports teams started taking it seriously, maybe because they’re all on steroids and performance-enhancing drugs 110% is not out of the question.

But I digress.

So now ‘1984’ is the number one selling book on Amazon, or it was until they completely ran out of copies. They are hurriedly rushing the book back into print to meet the demand! That is doubleplusgood for us, but doubleplusungood for a presidency that rejects facts. And journalism is up against the wall already. You know, it’s pretty sad when Newsweek goes out of business, but Newspeak is alive and well. Maybe these are the jobs he was going to bring back, dystopian authors who warned us about people like him. Who knows? Maybe he’ll start burning books, and the sales of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ will go through the roof, too.

Yeah, that’s a pretty cool book, Fahrenheit 451. I mean, that’s what I hear. I never read it, and don’t know much about it, other than it was written by Ray Bradbury. I always meant to read it, but how would I ever figure out what’s going on? I haven’t read any of the 450 Fahrenheit books that came before it! I can’t just pick up and read the 451st book in a series! And I sure as hell can’t go back and start reading from Fahrenheit 1, who’s got that kind of time? Lifers at Guantanamo? I’m not getting any younger, here. I’m lucky I got through all three of the Hunger Games books. I don’t even want to read the Divergent trilogy. That’s why I never read Slaughterhouse 5, because I never read the first 4 Slaughterhouse books! Too many sequels, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.! But what can you expect from a man named Kurt Vonnegut Jr., he is a sequel himself! And this is the same reason I never read Catch 22. Waay too many books! I just can’t devote that kind of time to any book series, I mean, c’mon! Although I must admit I am curious as to what the main guy caught 22 of. Did he catch 22 fish? Did he catch 22 head colds? I guess I’ll never know. But I’m okay with that. I hear they made it into a movie, so maybe they’ll play it on cable TV someday and I’ll get to see it. It’d be wild if they played it on channel 22, right? But channel 22 is QVC, so the most I could probably hope for is that they sell DVDs of it.

But Fahrenheit 451? WTF? Wow, Ray Bradbury, mad respect, son! That’s crazy determined. Image you write 450 books before you get one that’s a hit? If I wrote just one book and it didn’t sell I’d probably give up, but not this Ray Bradbury. No way. He just kept on typing away like a mad mojo mofo. And we know none of the earlier books were a hit, right? I mean, go into Barnes and Noble and ask them for a copy of Fahrenheit 1 and they’ll look at you like you’re insane, so it must be a really bad book. By the time I asked them for a copy of Fahrenheit 7, they told me to leave the store, so I guess they only carry the one famous book, Fahrenheit 451. And for all we know, he wrote a hundred Fahrenheit books after that one, too, but none of them were any good either. We simply have no way of knowing, not if you get tossed out of bookstores every time you ask a question!

But he stuck with it. You’d think a normal human would really take serious stock of himself after writing 450 books that were flops, but he didn’t quit. I’d be like, “Alright, I gave it a good shot, can’t say I didn’t try this writing thing, but hell, 450 books. Sounds like a good number to throw my typewriter off a bridge and go to trade school to become a spot-welder. Is 46 too old to take the Postal exam? I need a pension. I should have listened to my mother and been a mailman, they have great benefits.” But not Ray, he knew that one more book would be the one that made him famous.

I wonder if all his science fiction author friends gave him a bunch of shit about his years of struggle when they came over. Like when Isaac Asimov comes over to burn one and hang out. “What up, Ray, how you livin’? You still working on those Fahrenheit books? Yeah? Man, Ray...uh, I don’t mean Man Ray, the American Surrealist painter and photographer who was also a significant contributor to the Dada movement, I mean, you, Ray Bradbury! What number book you up to now, Ray?”

“Well, Isaac, if you really want to know, right now I’m writing Fahrenheit 337.”

“And…” Asimov paused to take a big hit off the joint, then exhale a curling plume of Tahoe OG Kush, “...how’s that one going, Ray?”

“How’s it going? How’s it going? It’s piece of shit is how it’s going! But it’s a process, Isaac, it’s a process! And one day...one day, Asimov, it’s gonna pay off, big time! Don’t give me crap about writing 337 Fahrenheit books, George Orwell wrote 1984, that’s like, 1647 more books than me, and it was a big, big hit! And even in the future, it’ll be huge! And Arthur C. Clarke just wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, that’s even more than 1984, and they’re making that one into a movie, for Chrissake!”

My question is, how long did the wife put up with this literary losing streak? Not all that long, I bet. “Ray. I...I’m leaving you, Ray. I’m through. I just can’t take any more, not one more book! I believed in you, Ray, you and your stupid...temperature books! Who in their right mind writes books about the temperature? And I read them all, Ray, from Fahrenheit Zero all the way up! I read Fahrenheit 10. It left me, cold, Ray, Fahrenheit 10 is very cold. Now Fahrenheit 77, that was beautiful, that’s a good book for a picnic, Fahrenheit 77 is just about perfect.

But where’s it going to stop, Ray? I thought you’d quit when you hit the boiling point, Fahrenheit 212, but you just kept going! Well I’ve reached my boiling point, Ray, and I’m leaving! But before I do, I’m going to take all of these stupid books and I’m gonna put ‘em in a pile, Ray, and I’m gonna set fire to them! I’m gonna burn ‘em all, Ray! I don’t know what temperature books burn at, but you might want to look that one up, Ray! You might want to look it up!

We need money, Ray, we’re broke. Why don’t you just go back to writing for the newspaper? I’m sure they’d give you your old job back, I’m sure they’d take you back at the Chronicle.”

And Ray Bradbury heatedly replied, “Forget it, Delores, or whatever Ray Bradbury’s wife’s name is, I’m not going back to the newspaper! I write books! Books, maybe Delores, books about different temperatures! From very, very cold to very, very hot! And all the different temperature degrees in between very, very cold and very, very hot! I’m never going back to the newspaper! Why, I wouldn’t write for the Chronicle again if they were the last newspaper on Earth! I wouldn’t write for the Chronicle if they were the only newspaper from here to Mars! I wouldn’t write for them if they were The Martian Chronicle! I….wait a minute. I like the way that sounds...The Martian Chronicles! That’s it! Get me a new typewriter ribbon, Delores, or whatever my wife’s name is!”

I’m pretty sure that’s how it happened.

Wait, what the hell was I talking about? Oh right, Trump. Yeah, he sucks.

[radioleary-blog]

John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin: To Infirmity and Beyond

I remember when the term “Space-Age” meant the future, now it means the past.

With the death of John Glenn and the recent hospitalization of Buzz Aldrin, it’s starting to look like the greatest days of pioneering and exploration are behind us. Let’s face it, we peaked as a civilization about half a century ago, and now we’re sliding back down on the great decline. Like the parabolic arc of a rocketship, we reached our zenith when we reached the Moon, and now we’re plummeting back to Earth to burn up on re-entry into the atmosphere. Not from velocity, just from our own global warming. Going to the Moon was the greatest achievement of humankind, and by a wide margin, 238,900 miles to be precise. Let’s put that distance in perspective: If you were to take everybody in line in front of you at your local Starbucks on a Monday morning, they would only reach halfway to the Moon. Wow, right?

The Moon is so far away that astronauts Tom Hanks and Lt. Dan couldn’t even get there in Apollo 13. I think it was because the other astronaut was Kevin Bacon, and his very presence caused all their calculations to be off by six degrees. Man, I hope somebody got that. I’m pretty sure Ed Harris was in that movie too, before he started killing robots and spilling paint on the floor. If it sounds like I never even saw Apollo 13, you’re right. I just know that from the title it sounds like another one of those high-number sequels, like X-Men 9,  or Star Wars 7, or Oceans 11, and I think I would have to watch the other 12 Apollo movies first to know what was going on. I mean, I saw the first Apollo movie, where he fights Rocky, right? That was a good one. I know they fight again in the sequel, but after that Rocky goes on to fight Mr. T, and Dolph Lundgren, and Viet Nam a few times. I didn’t know there were a dozen more Apollo Creed movies, and in this one he’s in space? Now I have to see it! I learn so much from documentaries. I guess if a cartoon rock band of strippers like Josie and the Pussycats can make it into Outer Space, anybody can.

Going to the moon was man’s highest ambition from the moment the very first cavemen looked up and touched that monolith. Next thing you know, they were throwing bones in the air to the Blue Danube Waltz, and somehow that started the space program. And our Apollo mission was the big, climactic finish of man’s deep-seated longing for the Moon. It wasn’t just the Moonshot, it was the Money shot. And like any good porn actors, our astronauts hit it two more times before they quit it.

And we haven’t been back since. Which is pathetic. And don’t give me any of the usual millennialist Weltschmerz about how there’s no reason to go back, and it costs a lot, and it’s just a bunch of rocks. If you want to put it that way, then Mount Rushmore is just a bunch of rocks, and the Pyramids are just a bunch of rocks, and the Grand Canyon is just a hole where a bunch of rocks used to be. But they’re all sure as hell worth the gas to get there. And you’re not thinking very hard if you can’t come up with a hundred ways the Moon could be used for fun and profit. How a theme park, Disneymoon. And they wouldn’t even have to build Space Mountain, they’d just have to point in any direction and go, “There! There’s a space mountain! And there! There’s another space mountain!”” Then they could point point back to the Earth in the distance and say, “See? It’s a small world after all.” It would certainly be a honeymoon destination. Or would that be a honeyearth destination, it’s kinda messed up. Plus billionaires could hide their money on the Moon to avoid paying taxes, no taxes on the Moon. Today they have to stash their money in off-shore accounts, you know how much they’d love to stash their money in off-world accounts? Good plan, unless the Ferengi find out about it. And the Moon looks like the best place to be to score some alien drugs. No drug laws on the Moon, either. Forget Maui, imagine Lunar Kush from the Sea of Tranquility. In space, no one can hear you cough.

But we’re not going back to the Moon, not anytime soon anyway, not Americans. Not men, not women, and probably not your kids or grandkids. We’ve lost it. The will as a people, the cohesiveness, the cooperation and the belief in a better future that would be needed for such an undertaking. They can’t even fix the roads. Hell, we don’t even have any spaceships anymore. The Shuttles were scuttled and shuttered and scattered and shuffled off to museums and I’m eating skittles. Try saying that, I dare you.

And we don’t have many astronauts left either. And the ones we do have left are getting very, very old. Personally, I’d like to see them go back into space.  And luckily, Cape Canaveral is already in Florida. The mission would be called AARP-OLLO 13. They would stop at the International Space Station, but just to ask directions. And then they’d forget where they parked. There is a danger they might freeze to death, simply because they’re all old men, and they would all keep turning down the thermostat. “I’m not paying to heat the whole outdoors, let alone the endless reaches of space!” They’d be the first astronauts to orbit the Earth at no more than 40 miles an hour. They’d be going so slow they’d probably be passed by a Galaxy. A 1967 Ford Galaxy. Upon re-entry, they’d orbit the Earth six extra times looking for a closer parking space. And they’d land in the wrong time zone just so they can still catch the early-bird special.

John Glenn died on December 8th at age 95, and he was an amazing man. He was a fighter pilot in both WWII and Korea, he flew 149 combat missions, his plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire on twelve separate occasions and he survived. Then he went into the space program and became the first American to orbit the Earth. Then he served 20 years in the U.S. Senate. Then at age 77, he returned to space. Has anyone in the world ever achieved more? I seriously doubt it. And yet if you ask people today who the most interesting man in the world is, they’ll say it’s the liver-damaged Latin lothario Don Juan-wannabe in the Dos Equis beer commercials. Well if he’s so goddamn interesting, how come he’s always in some dive bar at closing time, telling his stories to a couple of bored hookers one-third his age, instead of being at home with a family that loves him? How badly did he screw up his life with alcohol and the constant need to be the life of the party? Hell, that’s basically me without the accent, and I’m not the least bit interesting. I wish the voice-over in those Dos Equis commercials that tell us how interesting he is were more honest about his actual exploits:

“He drank so much crappy Mexican beer that even his new liver needs a new liver.”

“Once in a drunken rampage he punched Mother Teresa in the tit because he thought she was a velociraptor.”

“He sold his soul to the Devil for free beer for life, but now the Devil realizes he made a bad deal and wants out of the contract.”

And then there’s his tagline. “I don’t always drink beer, but when I don’t, I still drink beer. So I guess I do always drink beer. Buy me a beer?” And, “Stay thirsty, my friends.” Stay thirsty? That sounds like one of the warning signs of diabetes to me. Put down the beer and get yourself to an endocrinologist. “I don’t always inject insulin, but when I do, I always drink beer. Stay medicated, my friends.” Mega-Dose Equis.

And have you noticed they recently replaced the old “most interesting man in the world” for a new, much less-interesting man in the world? What happened to the old guy, did Trump already deport him? Now that would be interesting. What actually happened is, Dos Equis wanted to change their image to appeal to the growing hispanic population, so they dropped Jonathan Goldsmith, who is actually Jewish, and replaced him with Augustin Legrande, who is actually French. That makes sense. Nothing more popular in Latino culture than Post-Impressionism and delicate Croquembouche puff pastries.

Days before John Glenn died, Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the moon, was evacuated from the South Pole because he was showing signs of altitude sickness. That’s how every news media began their report. Every one of them. Buzz Aldrin, “the second person to walk on the moon”.

Actually, what they’ve called him all these years was “the second MAN to walk on the moon”, which is substantially more accurate, and shorter to say. I’m not sure when they stopped using the word ‘man’ to describe him, but it happened when I wasn’t looking. Which basically just means it didn’t happen on Pornhub. So now the Moon landings are gender-neutral now, and I’m cool with whatever, but I think that tinkering with the descriptive language of historical events is kind of ‘1984’. It’s doubleplusungood. I’d say it was ‘Big Brother’, but today it would have to be ‘Big Sibling’. Which is fine, I guess. Orwell that ends well, I always say. I just don’t see the point in being purposefully vague about the gender of the people who walked on the Moon, there were only twelve of them, and all of them were men. I think people are okay with that fact, and I’m pretty sure that if we had continued to refer to them as men it would not have led to widespread protests at Cape Canaveral. I doubt there’d be hordes of angry progressives marching on the launchpad holding up signs that read “NASA: Not Another Sexist Agency!” and “Rockets=Flying Erections!”

I know there are just as many women as men who want to go to the Moon and are qualified to do so. Although with the women I’ve known, their favorite rocket? It fit in their pocket. And none of the women I know would want to go to Moon, for the same reason they hated every restaurant I’ve ever taken them to: the food sucks and there’s no atmosphere. <moonshot rimshot>

But hey, things change fast; language, everything, whether you notice it or not. That’s how the world changes; not before your eyes, but behind your back. Never while you’re looking. One day, you just turn around and there are no more pay phones. “Where did they go? They were right here like five minutes ago! Thousands of them!” There were rows and rows of pay phones, on every corner of every street in every city in America. And then, there weren’t. Just like that. And I’ll tell you what, I never saw any pay phones get hauled up out of the ground by the roots and loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck. Not once. They were just gone, man. Not even a hole in the sidewalk where they were, just smooth cement. Were workmen ordered to remove them only in the middle of the night, so as not to frighten people with the pace of societal change? Nobody ever sees change coming, you just eventually notice that it happened. They always tell you to “face the future”, but to do that, you better keep looking over your shoulder.

I actually feel sorry for anyone who never knew the cheap thrill of walking by a pay phone and sticking your fingers into the coin return slot, on the very small chance that somebody walked away and left money in there. It didn’t ever actually happen, to my knowledge, but people always stopped to check anyway. Today, these are the same people who buy scratch-off lottery tickets and think they’ll win, and when they don’t win, they buy more scratch-off lottery tickets and think they’ll win. I found a dime in the coin return slot once. Not the coin, but a bag of weed some guy stuffed in there when he was making a call and a cop car parked next to him. Apparently it was the kind of weed that makes you paranoid, because when I smoked it up, I had a weird feeling the pay phone was going to ring and it would be the guy asking for his weed back. Anyway. The coin return slot on pay phones curved upward, so you had to crook and curve your finger as you inserted it, wiggling your fingers looking for coins. Incidentally, this hand motion, repeated over time, eventually led to the discovery of the G-spot. Combine that motion with the motion of dialing an old telephone by inserting your index finger into a hole and making lazy circles, and you weren’t sure if you were giving someone a call or giving them an orgasm.

When I was a kid we had a rotary phone, or as it was called back then, a phone. And they were a pain in the ass to dial. It was relatively easy to dial the lower numbers, they were the closest to whatever the hell you called that curved metal hook that stopped your finger like a miniature Soviet-era sickle, but you had to go almost all the way around the circle for the 8, 9, and 0. And then you had to wait for the wheel to roll all the way back before you could dial the next number. I swear to god, we dropped friends and cut ties with family because their phone numbers had a lot of high numbers that were too much work to dial. “I’m sorry, Grandma, but your number is 797-8990, we love you, but we’ve met another old lady whose number is 232-1311. She’s not you, but she’s a lot easier to talk to. Nothing personal, nanna, we just dialed the low numbers until somebody answered.” And to call somebody in another area code, ten-digits with high numbers? You’d be better off writing them a letter and dropping it in a mailbox. Wait a minute - where the hell did all the mailboxes go? They were right here like five minutes ago! Thousands of them! Right next to the pay phones!

Yeah, I’m old, so what. So I was born before smart phones with unlimited data. So how come It was the generation with the smart phones and the unlimited data that were too stupid to vote? If their phones get any smarter, we’ll be living in a feudal kingdom.

But I am old. I’m so old, until recently, I thought “Galaxy 7 with Unlimited Data” was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In all fairness, he was an Android. And the Enterprise’s mission was to seek out new Verizons. Whoa! Wait a minute! I just remembered something! In the original (best) Star Trek, Kirk’s narration was “...to boldly go where no man has gone before”. But in The Next Generation (not the best), Picard’s monologue was “...to boldly go where no one has gone before.” Holy shit, this gender-neutral-in-space thing goes back further than I thought! I didn’t notice it when it happened, and it was even before Pornhub.

But I digress. Buzz Aldrin, “The second man/person to walk on the Moon.” How tired he must be of hearing that word for the last fifty years. Second. They’ve been calling him that since 1969. Second. Hell, John Glenn just circled the globe three times and he still gets to be called First, Buzz went all the way to the Moon and he gets called Second. Forever to be known throughout all of human history as the guy who had to settle for the Silver Medal in the only race that ever really counted. Poor guy, people think. He was this close to being the famous hero in all the books. Because on July 20, 1969, he stepped on the moon about 20 minutes after Neil Armstrong took the historic first step.

But it’s not what this man deserves to be called. Second place? Bullshit. Buzz Aldrin was the first man on the Moon. Why the hell haven’t they given him his due credit for the last fifty years? Sure, he had Neil Armstrong sitting right next to him, but they touched down on the Moon at the exact same second. They were both the first men on the Moon! You want to know who the real big loser in this adventure is, it’s Michael Collins. That poor son of a bitch went all the way to the Moon with Buzz and Neil, but he had to stay in orbit so they could link up to get back home. If you don’t recognise his name, that’s a testament to how badly he got screwed by history. And no, Liam Neeson did not make a movie about him. Michael Collins is alive and well at age 86, and living in Rome. Hey, here’s a crazy thought, maybe we should start appreciating him a little bit while we still have him, and pay him the kind of attention and importance we normally reserve only for Kardashians.

How insane, that the press, popular culture, and now history books have labeled Buzz Aldrin as anything less than First, and forgotten Collins altogether. When two drivers win a cross-country road race, they crossed the finish line together and they are both first place! Do they say the winner is the one who gets out of the car first? Hell no! When a rowing team wins the gold at the Olympics, do they only give the medal to the guy at the front of the boat? You’re damn right they don’t. Why is Buzz Aldrin a hero? Because he’s managed to accept this injustice with class and dignity, and smile and wave as if it isn’t killing him on the inside. But that’s probably why he’s still chasing adventure by going to the South Pole at age 86. I bet when they got to South Pole, Buzz said to the people with him, “ We made it! Hey, anybody see Neil Armstrong here? No? Nobody sees him? He didn’t get here twenty minutes before us? Oh, right, he died in 2012! Didn’t get here first, did ya, Neil!” Until someone says, “Mr. Aldrin? Wouldn’t that mean that Neil Armstrong got to heaven first?” Then Buzz collapsed and was airlifted to a hospital in New Zealand. If I was Buzz Aldrin, I think I would have killed the first guy to call me Second. Then at least I would be the First astronaut to be charged with First degree murder. Total Buzzkill. Pun intended.

I’m afraid that soon enough, after everybody who went to the Moon has died, and then after everybody who witnessed the Moon landing live on TV has died, that people will come to think that it never really happened. It’ll only take another generation or two of societal lassitude and torpidity until the Moon landing will be listed on IMDB as a Stanley Kubrick film. Which, it just may well be, of course, but that’s a discussion for another day. Someday, the Moonwalk will only be remembered as a 20th Century pedophile’s dance move. And someday the astronauts will only be known for the tired old cliche: “How come they can put a man on the moon, but they can’t…” Fill in the annoyance of your choice. No matter how trivial or insignificant, your personal pet peeve deserves to be compared to the decades of monumental effort, investment, innovation, and sacrifice it took to get us to the Moon. Here’s a few examples:

“How come they can put a man on the moon, but they can’t…make a cell phone battery that lasts more than eight hours?”

Hmm, maybe because Jules Verne, the Wright brothers, and Werner Von Braun didn’t give a shit whether or not you could spend your entire work shift playing with your face on the snapchat filter?

“How come they can put a man on the moon, but they can’t...build a robot that looks just like me that I can send to work to earn a paycheck so I can stay home and chill all day?”

They did. It quit your job on the first day, moved to Los Angeles, became an independent film producer, and he’s engaged to the actress you had a crush on in high school. And he said to tell you she is amazing in bed. He’s living the life you could have, but unlike you, the robot has a drive.

“How come they can put a man on the moon, but they can’t...put a man on the sun?”

A fair question. This should be easy enough. The Sun is a much bigger target, so it should be hard to miss, and it’s very well-lit. And it’s solar powered.

“How come they can put a man on the moon, but they can’t…make a toilet that doesn't amplify my farts 500%?”

Now this one I agree with. Everybody tries to be quiet in the bathroom. So why are toilets shaped exactly like a satellite dish designed to pick up the faintest sounds and signals from space? You're trying to crap as quietly as possible into something shaped to acoustically focus sound and amplify it like a SETI signal receiver. I’m in the bathroom, and people in the living room are like, "Either Aracebo has made contact with Alpha Centauri, or he ate Indian food again."  Sure, your ass is pressed to the seat, trying to form a sound-proof seal, but that just changes the pitch. Like when Louis Armstrong used to mute his trumpet with a plunger. He probably thought of doing that while on the toilet, why else would he use a plunger?

Mine might be: “How come they can put a man on the moon, but...we still call the sky the limit?"

But if I could only pick one, I think it would have to be: “If they can put a man on the moon...why can’t that man be Donald Trump?”

[radioleary-blog]

New Year’s Eve

It is New Year’s Eve this week. The word “Eve” is just a fancy, Shakespearean way of saying “the day before,” and for some reason we only use it two days a year; Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. There’s no Easter Eve, or Arbor Eve, or Groundhog Eve, unless Bill Murray wants to start making prequels. Which would be awesome, but, unlikely. And we certainly can’t refer the day before the first day of Summer as Summer’s Eve, and I’d make the obvious jokes about that, but I respect your intelligence too much. And an old joke like that has, well, a not-so-fresh feeling. So I think this year we should all start using “Eve” more. Try this. When your wife tells you to put out the recyclables and the garbage because tomorrow is garbage day, say to her, “Is it Garbage Eve already? It comes around so fast these days. Boy, it just isn’t as magical now that the kids are off to college.” Sure, in that moment she will look at you and wonder why she married you, but that’s okay, the unexamined life is not worth living. And she may just stop asking you to do things, which frankly, would be great. But again, unlikely.

I see ABC is still calling their New Year’s show Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. That is one hell of a contract they have that guy under. Dick Clark died in 2012, but I guess he is contractually obligated through 2137. What ABC attorney wrote that contract, Lou Siffer? B.L. Zeebub? I’m not sure what method they plan to use to bring him back and keep hosting, I think this season they reveal he’s been a Westworld robot all along. But he’s starting to remember. “No, Buddy Holly! Chubby Checker! Take the train!” Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve started in 1972, and it may never end. After hosting for 32 years, Dick Clark had a serious stroke in 2004, and ABC had him back on the air by 2005, but he was never really the same. He sat there rocking back and forth, mostly. They could have called it Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Back and Forth Eve. They could have also called it Dick Clark's New Year's Droolin' Eve, and Dick Clark's New Year’s Slurred Speech and Facial Droopin' Eve. But he died in 2012, surrounded by family and friends who loved him. I wonder if they counted down, “Ten...nine...eight…seven…” But I’m a very sick man.

This year it is Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve with Ryan Seacrest, and the entertainers will be Mariah Carey and Lionel Ritchie, with Jenny McCarthy and Fergie. Wow, what hot performers! Apparently the new year we are ringing in is 1998. Maybe 2003, tops. What happened, were Ace of Base and Color Me Badd unavailable?

We are saying goodbye to 2016, and not a minute too soon. That’s why we celebrate New Year’s Eve, not out of excitement for the new year, but because we are thrilled AF to have somehow survived another brutal 12-month asskicking. And 2016 was like stepping into the Octagon and fighting Kimbo Slice. Except even Kimbo Slice didn’t stand a chance against 2016, he tapped out in June. That’s how tough 2016 was. It was the year of I’m with Her and Feel the Bern, of fracking and hacking, of shootin’ and Putin. Of Zika and Scalia. Of bathroom stalls and building walls. If 2008 was the year of HOPE, then 2016 was the year of GROPE. A year of pipelines and Brexits, of deplorables and superdelegates, and that election. Oh man, that election. So many people wish they could just wake up and it didn’t happen, or at least forget that it happened. Like that guy in Momento. Or Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates, where she wakes up every day with short term memory loss, blissfully unaware that she’s been dating Adam Sandler. If only we could wake up every day unaware that Trump won the Electoral College. We could call it 50 First States. But on December 31, they drop the ball in New York City, and then on January 20, they drop the ball in Washington, D.C.

I’m not so convinced we are actually heading into a new year at all. With the incoming administration, it looks more like we’re heading into 1957.

In 1957, Republicans controlled the White House, The House, and the Senate. Under Emperor Palpatine, if I remember correctly. It was a long, long time ago.

In 1957, there was no EPA, and after Trump puts avowed climate denier Scott Pruitt in charge, there probably won’t be an EPA next year either.

In 1957, there was no Department of Energy. We can only hope that Texas idiot Rick Perry is as incompetent at eliminating the department as he was at remembering it. Rick Perry gained stature with Republicans when he started wearing a pair of glasses he found on a city bus to look smarter, but his one memorable moment is him not remembering. Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll forget he even works at the EPA. Maybe he’ll decide to follow his dream and finally try out for Dancing With the Stars, oh wait, he did. Oops. Rick Perry actually is the one with the memory loss from Momento and 50 First Dates.

Finally, In 1957, the U.S. and Russia were locked in a nuclear arms race, escalating their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Thankfully, nothing like that will happen when Trump...What? He already did? Are you Sure? WTF! But he’s not even President yet! He better be careful, if he pisses off the Russians, they won’t re-elect him.

But whatever happens, we’ll get through it. And then next December 31 we’ll celebrate surviving that one too. Or we’ll be meeting Kimbo Slice. Now we look forward, and write our New Year’s resolutions. I looked up the word ‘resolution’, it’s Old French for “aw, who am I kidding.” I have written my resolutions for the new year, I’m sure they’re no different than everybody else’s. But if you see one you like, you can take it, too. These are my resolutions for 2017

1. Stop making excuses for my heroin use by calling it “jazz lessons.”

2. Stop writing angry letters to the manufacturers of ‘Cracker Jack’ for having the most racist named snack ever.

3. Stop throwing people under the bus every time something goes wrong in my life. In fact, I should stay away from bus stations altogether, they probably have my face on file.

4. Stop confusing Aleppo with the other Marx brothers; Harpo, Chico, Groucho, and Zeppo. And stop confusing Syria with that talking phone.

5. Stop running up thousands of dollars in credit card debt. Although it’s not my fault if whoever lost the card hasn’t called their bank and cancelled it yet.

6. Stop throwing my vote away by voting for write-in candidates. Especially when I write-in “Batman.” But dude, he’d be great.

7. This is the year I finally get fit. For a straight-jacket.

8. Stop making excuses for my weight by calling myself “Too big to fail.”

9. When I’m in church and the priest starts talking about Jesus dying on the cross, I have to stop yelling “Spoiler alert!”

10. This is the year I travel to new places. Mainly to countries that have no extradition treaty with the U.S. for throwing people under a bus.

Happy New Year! I am one with the force, the force is with me!

[radioleary-blog]

They Blinded Me Without Science

It was another crazy week in what feels like the fifth year of the Trump administration, and I’m just trying to keep up with the insanity. You know, people told me after the election, “Look at the bright side, with Trump in the White House, the comedy will just write itself!” I wish that were the case. I’m finding out that the comedy does not just write itself. That would be really cool if it did, I could just get on stage and read from the newspaper and look like a latter day, fatter-day Mort Sahl, or I could just cut and paste from the Washington Post and send my column in, then get back to arguing with my cat. But no, I actually have to write the comedy myself.

President Donnie Darko turned the crazy up to eleven this week. This week’s politics was crazier than a shoeshine in a shitstorm. This week was crazier than a Klansman at a White Sale. This week was crazier than a Nickelback fan club.

Trump declared war on Nordstrom for dropping his daughter Ivanka’s clothing line, which caused their company stock price to rise overnight. See, people? He’s making the economy better already! Maybe if he attacks a few more American businesses, he might just make this place great again after all. And isn’t he the guy who said he was going to bring businesses back to America? So why attack companies that didn’t leave the country? Maybe he wants to chase them out first, so he can then bring them back. I have no idea. And such a shame for Ivanka, her fall ‘Back to Parochial School’ collection reflects the sense of Oscar De la Renta, and the non-sense of Betsy DeVos. And her summer swimwear ‘Beach Clothes for the Beach Closed!’ collection is made of coal and oil stain-resistant fabrics, since now the coal companies can legally pollute the rivers again and the Dakota Access Pipeline is being built. No matter what sludge you swim in, you’ll get out looking dapper. And DAPL.

Trump tweeted on Wednesday: “My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person -- always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!” Trump was so upset, he was barely able to get back to work and deport the mother of two American children that same day. Yep, Mr. President, it sure is unfair and terrible when a family member gets kicked out of someplace. Alas, I’m afraid we are living in a land without irony.

What else. Oh yes, Trump referred to a federal judge as a “so-called judge.” Always a good move. I know a guy who called a judge a “so-called judge” once, and I’ll see him again in 3-5 years. And that was just in traffic court. Trump was angry that the judge ruled against him over his travel ban, and his executive order will not be followed. Man, this world has changed. When I was young, the only travel ban we followed was the Grateful Dead. Preferably in a 1983 VW bus covered with bumper stickers of dancing bears and lightning-bolt skulls. Ah, youth!

So Trump appealed the ruling, and now a three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled unanimously against him as well. Trump accepted the ruling with all the quiet dignity of Charles Manson being denied parole. Trump tweeted: “SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!” First of all, anyone who tweets in all caps is clinically insane. We all know that. That right there should be an impeachable offence, way higher on the list than an adulterous intern blowjob. But to tell a judge “SEE YOU IN COURT”? Is that supposed to sound intimidating? That line only works on all the small-business independent contractors that he has refused to pay for their services. That doesn’t work on judges, they’re already in court. That’s their home, court, and they rule in court. Literally. That’s like trying to intimidate LeBron James by saying “SEE YOU ON THE BASKETBALL COURT!” That’s like telling a Great White Shark “SEE YOU IN THE OCEAN!” They aren’t scared, and you’re gonna need a bigger boat. His reaction reminds me of the Carl Sandburg quote, “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.” And tweet it, in all caps.

But here’s what I really want to talk about, people are beginning to push back against the Trump agenda. Maybe the Borg and the Daleks were wrong when they said “Resistance is futile!” In cities all across the country, protesters are showing up at town hall meetings, private homes of Senators, and they even blocked Betsy DeVos from entering a public school. She thought she could count on public support, but it turns out she just plain can’t count. The best argument for funding our public schools is the fact that Betsy DeVos is the result of attending private schools. Republicans were on the run, scurrying away from scheduled media events and public appearances as they found crowds of ornery woke people waiting for them. As for me, I’m trying to be woke, but I keep hitting the snooze button. I’m sure I’ll do better when we return to daylight savings time.

At a town hall meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, that hotbed of liberal activism, GOP Congressman Jason Chaffetz was booed and shouted at continuously by an audience chanting “Do you job!”, demanding he investigate national security adviser Michael Flynn or step aside. Flynn may have violated the Logan Act in his repeated contact with the Russian government. I, for one, was surprised to learn that the Logan act actually has nothing to do with adamantium claws. Hmph. Live and learn. Chaffetz may not believe in global warming, but he was feeling the heat, bigly. Chaffetz was sweating like a Nixon debating in a steamroom. Chaffetz was sweating like a German trying to tell a joke. Chaffetz was sweating like your balls in Bahrain. Chaffetz was sweating like the guy in the red shirt on the original Star Trek. He knows the minute they beam down he’ll be killed by a Horta or the Gorn. That’s why he’s there, because somebody has to die to advance the plot, and it sure as hell can’t be Shatner and Nimoy! But that doesn’t make dying on an alien planet any easier.

Things got really bad for Chaffetz when he faced tough questions from a member of the audience with superior intelligence, a 9 year old girl. She stood up and asked Chaffetz what he would do when it comes to protecting the environment. When he started stammering a non-answer, the girl hit him with a follow up question that left Chaffetz looking for a fire alarm to pull. “Do you believe in science?” she asked. “Because I do!” Boom. Crowd roars. Mic drop. One and done, son. It must be embarrassing to be schooled by someone actually in grade-school.

He couldn’t give a straight answer. All she asked him was if he believed in science. Yet a Congressman in the 21st Century couldn’t answer “Yes.” WTF? I haven’t seen anything this pathetic since a drunk David Hasselhoff ate a cheeseburger off a bathroom floor. Who the hell won’t say they believe in science? The Mujahideen? Snake-Handling Pentecostal Pastors who speak in tongues? The Pope who locked up Galileo? I grew up in an era when people knew knowledge is power, and every single member of Congress would have answered yes to that question in a heartbeat. You would have to go all the way back to 1925 to the Scopes Monkey Trial to find a public official actively and openly dodging science. Sadly, people are so uninformed today they think the Scopes Monkey Trial involved Dr. Zaius and Harambe. Hey, you know what the difference is between Dr. Zaius and Donald Trump? One is a hateful, orange, science-denying orangutan, and the other one has a medical degree.

Every Congressman since before my grandfather was born has believed in science. Especially since science gave us the atom bombs we dropped on Imperial Japan and won the damn war in three days. Ask the Japanese if they believe in science. They know that our atomic detonations awakened Godzilla from his frozen slumber, and Tokyo paid the price for a dozen movies or more.  “History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men. Go go Godzilla.” Then Godzilla went back to sleep for a couple of decades when he stopped selling tickets. Hmm, I wonder if it was radiation from the Fukushima reactor core meltdown that brought Godzilla back to life for the 2015 reboot? Although the movie may have been a bigger disaster than Fukushima. I mean, they had a red-hot Brian Cranston in his first movie since winning three best actor Emmys for the greatest television show ever, ‘Breaking Bad’, and what do they do? They kill him in the first ten minutes of the movie. He went from ‘Breaking Bad’ on television to ‘Making Bad’ movies.

Anyway, after entering the Atomic Age, all our politicians believed in science, because it put us at the top of the food chain. We were running this world for decades after the war, and we blinded them with science. And because our politicians believed in science, they put a lot of funding into science, investing in the space program, bringing in the Space Age, and putting America on the Moon. The only men ever on the Moon. Just us, and science. But now the Republican right has decided to reject facts, and reject science.

You know who does believe in science? Iran. They launched a missile test just two weeks ago, which US officials sharply condemned as "provocative" and "irresponsible." Call it what it is, man, “science.” Not believing in science doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, it won’t go away if you ignore it. Unlike your ex. You can say you don’t believe in trains, but I wouldn’t recommend laying on railroad tracks to test your theory. You know who else believes in science? North Korea. They just fired a ballistic missile over 300 miles into the sea of Japan, while in this country Donald Trump just goes ballistic on Twitter. Do we really live in a world where Kim Jong-un, a wobbling weebil of a dictator with a haircut that looks like a matador’s hat,  is more scientific than U.S. Congressmen? Where’s Seth Rogen and James Franco when you need them.

But we know why Jason Chaffetz is running away from science. Because his corporate owners are Climate Change deniers, so he is too, if he wants to get re-elected. In fact, in answer to the girl’s question, he started talking about burning more coal. Clean coal. Clean coal? That’s like saying Clean Aids. That’s like saying Clean Shit. “Nah, I didn’t need to wash my hands, it was Clean Shit. Now let me get start making your dinner.” Then you’ll have Clean Dysentery.

I have the TV on as I write this column, I left it on TMC, half-watching a Fellini movie I didn’t understand a word of, but I like listening to people speak Italian. It makes me feel cultured for some reason. But as I mentioned climate change, I looked up and noticed that the movie had ended and a new movie started. Ice Station Zebra is on right now, where Rock “I swear I’m straight” Hudson races the Russians to a north pole weather station to recover a Soviet spy satellite, with the help of affable idiot Ernest Borgnine, and running back Jim Brown. This was 1968, and they’re walking on foot to the North Pole base, with gunfights, fistfights, and a whole lot of solid ice. That was 1968. Today, they’d be swimming to the North Pole. The only standing they’d be doing at the North Pole now would be on the floating bodies of drowned polar bears. That’s how real climate change is, and the science behind it. But not to Jason Chaffetz. Half his base are greedy corporate bastards who don’t want to stop polluting and risk cutting into their obscene profits, and the other half his base want the world to end so Jesus can come take them all to heaven. Not a lot of incentive for him to embrace reality.

When the crowd chanted at Chaffetz, “Do your job!”, what they don’t realize is he is doing his job, for his real bosses, not for us. He is removing protections for the environment, for workers, for labor unions, basically dismantling society until Americans live a type of unhealthy, impoverished, uninsured existence we haven’t seen since Bob Cratchit’s evil boss had a Christmas nightmare. And you know the ending to a Christmas Carol is bullshit, right? You know that new-found benevolence Scrooge acquired from his visions or visitations or whatever they were wore off pretty quickly in the cold light of day. I bet a week after Christmas, Scrooge was back to his old greedy self, and sent the Cratchits a bill for the turkey he brought them. And he probably sold Tiny Tim to a coal mine, he’s small, and in those tunnels his bad leg doesn’t matter, there’s no room for him to stand up anyway. He probably eliminated Cratchit's job altogether, through downsizing or outsourcing, leaving them destitute. Mrs. Cratchit was probably left with no choice but to walk the cobblestone streets of London as a Victorian prostitute, until she is killed by Jack the Ripper in a gaslit alley.

Hey, speaking of gaslight, anybody remember Gaslight Village? It was a theme park in Lake George village, owned by the same guy who created Frontier Town and Storytown, which is now the Great Escape. Gaslight Village was by far the lamest of the three amusement parks. It was mainly aimed at older adults, who only went because they sold beer and liquor all over the park, so they could put their obnoxious kids on a slow-moving merry go round and toss back a row of boiler makers and maybe this goddamn vacation won’t be a complete waste of time after all. I basically just remember the ads for Gaslight Village, and that barbershop quartet-style jingle. “Gaslight Village, yesterday’s fun today, bo de-oh doe, bo de-oh doe doe doe.”

I went there as a very young kid, it was a 1920’s themed park, so I can’t imagine what ‘yesterday’s fun’ would have been. Not catching tuberculosis? Living through trench warfare on the western front in World War I? That is, if you call surviving trench foot, shell-shock, and mustard gas attacks “living.” You know, I always thought mustard gas sounded delicious. In retrospect, it’s probably a bad idea to name horrible, fatal, chemical nerve-agents after tasty condiments. Thankfully it stopped right there with mustard gas, to my knowledge. I don’t think they ever developed a ketchup virus, or an ebola mayonnaise, or any other killer condiment. Although more than a few people who had the salsa at Chipotle might disagree with me, if they still could. Mustard gas was used on millions of men throughout Germany and France. I wonder, when they fought at Dijon, do you think the mustard gas they used was of a higher quality? Or was it just more expensive? I picture two tanks stopped alongside each other, a man inside one tank asks the other tank, “Pardon me, would you have any Grey Poupon mustard gas?” But the other tank was German, so they shot him in the face with a Howitzer. Or in Germany, at the battle of Frankfurt, mustard gas sounds like it would be an excellent choice, after all, who doesn't like a frankfurter with mustard? In fact, Italy wanted to get in on the war just so they could get some mustard on Bologna, but the fighting was too far away, so they just went to the store instead.

“It's poetry in motion

And when she turned her eyes to me

As deep as any ocean

As sweet as any harmony

Mm, but she blinded me with science

And failed me in geometry

When she's dancing next to me

"Blinding me with science, science!"

"Science!"

I can hear machinery.”

-Thomas Dolby