TRAMP, TRAMP, TRAMP, THE GIRLS ARE MARCHING: While rushing into a Wal-Mart early this morning, a maddened horde of bargain hunting shoppers nearly trampled a Florida woman to death as they swept into the store for the annual Black Friday sales. The victim, a heavy smoker who did not move out of the way quickly enough out of the way of the stampede, will recover from her injuries shortly, according to a spokesman for the local hospital. This is the sort of thing one must expect on Black Friday; after the mass ingestion of carbohydrates on Thanksgiving Day, millions of Americans must go to malls, supermarkets, swap meets, and other hubs of commercial activity today in order to exercise both themselves and the economy, this being good both for their individual health in particular and that of the economy as a whole. Many people have decried the growing trend towards trampling on Black Friday, reminding us all in their jeremiads about the meaning of the day before and how this aggressive attitude is not at all in the spirit of the holiday, but this, I think, is an outworn attitude, much like the demand for some form of religiosity in Christmas, and one completely at odds with the ongoing needs and mores of a modern 21st century commercial society.

In my humble opinion, not enough women are trampled going into Wal-Mart; the management should encourage mass trampling, with door prizes and possibly cash bounties given to the most energetic tramplers. Such trampling will encourage the weak-willed to stay at home and do their shopping online, while the stores cater to those shoppers best adapted to today’s Darwinian economic existence. And trampling could prove a cash bonanza in these recessionary times. What with the widespread popularity of professional wrestling, for instance, it is easy to see the commercial and broadcast possibilities in professional trampling. Reality show producers will jump at the chance to take an in-depth look into the private lives of women tramplers, giving an evermore voyeuristic public a close up look into the lifes and loves of women who will knock you on your fat ass in a heartbeat just to get the last fifty pound box of laundry detergent in the store. The giant megastore chains like Wal-Mart could organize entire leagues of professional trampling teams, with a Super Bowl of trampling held every year. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that millions of Americans would tune in to see tag team trampling in the aisles of their local supermarket. I know I would, but then again, I am easily entertained.

TWITTERING MY LIFE AWAY: I am all a-twitter these days, now that I am on Twitter. I am not sure whether or not if this is a good thing, but I tend to doubt it. Twitter was a nice verb, but now that it is a noun, there might be consequences, most of them unintended and several of them likely to cost me and hundreds of other taxpayers just like me a good-sized chunk of money, as does everything else does nowadays. And what, you may ask, is Twitter and why am I on it? This is a very good question and one for which I wish I had an equally good answer. A friend invited me on and so I went; as with the inestimable Sir John Falstaff, company, villainous company hath been the spoil of me. Twitter, for those of you are not nearly as much of a twit as I appear to be, is a instant messaging service now sweeping the Internet in 140 characters or less. It is, in short, email for those people whose attention span is only slightly shorter than a gnat’s, a classification that includes most, if not all, teenagers, white supremacists, and socioeconomically deprived dyslexic dwarves. There may be less to Twitter than meets the eye, but, frankly, I don’t see how that is possible. Even in a medium that prizes lack of depth, Twitter’s insubstantiality is positively mind-boggling. You could float Noah and the Ark on the slender puddle of piss on this Twittering rock and still have enough room left over for the three men in the tub, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, the owl and the pussycat, and the USS Nimitz to navigate about without fear of colliding with one another. There are many people you could blame for this horrific state of affairs: the Jews, the Illuminati, the Jesuits, the Masons, the Mafia, the international Communist conspiracy, and mildly socialistic mayonnaise makers all come immediately to mind, but I prefer to blame Barney the Dinosaur and his mindless slave army of preliterate munchkins. I realize that there is no rhyme or reason to my assigning the blame for Twitter on America’s vast cohort of annoying runny-nosed tots, but if it’s rhyme and reason that you want then I suggest you go look up the collected works of Alexander Pope and get the stuff there; you ain’t getting no rhyme or reason in this neck of the woods, bubba, that’s for damn sure.

My apologies, one and all, for the lack of posts for the past week or so. The lack of posting is not due to one of my reoccurring bouts of writer’s block nor is for a lack of ideas, time to write, nor for any one of the usual excuses I use to avoid going anywhere near pencil and paper. No, what we have here is a hellacious cold that does not want to give up its grippe on my respiratory system despite my hitting this puppy with vitamin C, fluids, and even chicken soup. As you might imagine, I am not having fun here in my corner of our happy little burg; in fact, I’ve spent a good portion of the past week wishing that I was dead, and that a large number of other people, preferably relatives, Red Sox fans, and triumphalist Democrats, were as well. Misery, as the old saw has it, just loves company.

WITH APOLOGIES TO MR. LETTERMAN FOR COPPING HIS FORMAT:

Okay, here are my TOP ten reasons (I have loads of others, but this will do for the time being) for I will not be voting for Barack Obama:

1. I thought Jesus was the Messiah. That’s what the nuns told me, anyway, and I’m not going to argue with a bunch of old ladies who can knock me on my ass without breaking a sweat. The moonbats want to fight the nuns, let them; it’ll only prove to everyone just how loony they really are.

2. I voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976. Doesn’t that count?

3. Senator Obama is Gertrude Stein’s remark about Oakland, California made politically incarnate: no matter from what angle you choose to look at the junior Senator from Illinois and his record, there’s no there there.

4. When times get hard, I cling to my religion and my guns and dislike people who don’t look like me. I know this is so because The One said so. Of course, that I am not particularly religious, which annoys the heck out of my mother, who now thinks that I am basically eight years of parochial school tuition flushed down the toilet, and I don’t own a gun. I don’t even have firecrackers. It’s not that I have anything against guns per se, it’s just that I would prefer not to blow my own foot off, which is the sort of thing that would actually happen to me if I kept a firearm in the house. Machines, as a rule, don’t seem to like me, and so I limit my mechanical purchases to things I know won’t try to nail me to the wall if given half a chance. And I do dislike lots of people who don’t look like me; I don’t need thin people wandering around reminding me that I could stand to lose a few pounds.

5. Senator Obama wants to turn this country into a European social democracy like Belgium or France, countries where, and I hesitate to say this in a forum where there are women and children present, the population is so corrupt and debased in their personal morals that they are known, well-known, in fact, for putting mayonnaise on their French fries. Is this the kind of America you want?

6. Spreading the wealth doesn’t actually mean spreading the wealth to poor people, it means giving the money to the government, which will spend most of the cash on administrative costs and the salaries of civil servants such as myself. It’s still trickle down economics, boys and girls, only with Senator Obama’s method a lot of the trickle will stick to the funnel.

7. I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but just in case you haven’t noticed, the change The One is promising is the New Deal all over again. You do have to wonder about what constitutes new thinking in the Democratic Party when their best and brightest proudly proclaims that he will be leading the nation back to 1933. Those guys never do tire of running against Herbert Hoover, do they?

8. The media love him. I think this is because most of those guys are like movie critics; they’ve seen so many movies that they know how the movie’s going to end before the opening credits finish rolling. So Obama is something new and different, and they want something new and different now. Of course, six months into his presidency these very same people will be slashing and burning President Obama’s administration with the same relish that they now lavish on President Bush, but they’ll be counting on TVADD (television induced attention deficit disorder) to keep anyone from remembering just how much they shilled for the man in the campaign.

9. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not, as far as I know, speak English. Neither does Kim Jong Il or Osama bin Laden. The power of oratory is largely lost on people who have no idea what you’re saying. So they will have to rely on the transcripts of The One’s speeches translated into Farsi, Arabic, and Korean. I might be wrong about this, but I get the impression that a good deal of the audacity of hope is going to get lost in translation. This is not a good thing, I think, if what you’re selling is the sizzle and not the steak. I don’t know what the Farsi/Arabic/Korean equivalent of Where’s the beef is, but I suspect that we’re all going to have four years to find out.

10. The junior Senator has labored in the political vineyards of Cook County for some twenty years now and the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois has not seen fit to indict him for anything. Clearly, Senator Obama has not been trying. In addition to this, Senator Obama has never held a political office in Chicago’s municipal government. This, I think, is very telling, as Washington is a place where the Cook County Democratic machine sends people who are too dumb to be on the Chicago City Council. If Mayor Daley doesn’t think The One is bright enough to be an alderman, why should the rest of us elect him president? Inquiring minds want to know.