RAINOUTS AND GINA DINAPOLI: Well, in the You can teach some old dogs new tricks department, you will be happy to know that the committee that oversees the annual homage to the power of Gina DiNapoli’s breasts, an event whose history you can read more about here, cancelled this year’s parade due to the threat of rain. The threat was very real; every computerized weather map you can think of had vast seas of green Doppler effect soaking their way effortlessly over our happy little burg, doppling away like they hadn’t a care in the world except to head north and west into Massachusetts and a hearty breakfast of whatever it is they eat up there for breakfast. Seeing the green dopple advancing northwards towards us like a horde of drunks on St. Patrick’s Day stumbling headlong for the nearest men’s room sobered the minds of the organizing committee no end, as well it should, and so they cancelled the parade and the attendant celebrations, much to the relief of everyone involved in the festivities. No one wanted a repeat of last year’s debacle.

Yes, it was only last year when the organizing committee, as game a crew of well-meaning octogenarians and octogenarian wannabes as you could ever hope to find anywhere this side of the river Styx, decided, in a meteorological situation eerily like the one faced today, that hope, a positive attitude, and municipal pride would win out over a fast moving low pressure system coming in from the Great Lakes and that the parade would therefore move forward, an act that literally and figuratively defines parades, now that I give the matter some thought. A parade that moved backward wouldn’t really be a parade, except in one of the world’s more bizarre locations, such as Boston, Washington, and the slough of urban despond that lies directly across the river from our happy little burg, where such things are commonplace, either for political and social reasons, as in the former cases, or because of the incessant gunfire in the latter.

I am not sure what method the organizing committee used to determine that rain was not going to be a problem last year. One suspects that they disliked the whole idea of checking the matter on the Internet—too newfangled, too full of dirty pictures, and too hard to operate without one of the grandkids nearby. No, I think they went with the tried and true methods of weather forecasting: they looked out the window, they looked in the newspaper, and then they sacrificed a chicken to the weather goddess of their choice; our happy little burg is a very inclusive community when it comes to religion and we hold no prejudices against believing theists, whether they are mono, poly, or a, just so long as they are not Red Sox fans—we must draw the line somewhere, you know; and upon slicing open the sacrificial chicken, an augur who also doubles as a balpeen hammer and triples as a designated hitter for the Kansas City Royals examined the chicken’s gizzard to determine that the United States Weather Service had no clue what it was talking about: there would be no rain at all on the great day. Rejoicing at the good news, the organizing committee rejoiced at the beneficence of the Lord(s) and then proceeded to eat, like Mr. Leopold Bloom, with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls, in this case, the fowl just sacrificed on the altar of meteorology.

Suffice it to say that this method of weather divination, which the Romans also used to divine the workings of Mount Vesuvius, worked about as well for the organizing committee as it did for the Romans in Pompeii. The parade organizers had to get everyone ready to march in a drizzle that steadily became a driving rain before graduating to a monsoon before the vanguard reached the middle of Main Street. As you might imagine, and which the organizing committee clearly did not, municipal pride may lead our patriotic citizenry to do many a great thing hereabouts, but standing in the rain getting wet for no good purpose is not one of them. By the time the vanguard of local solons up for re-election reached the end of the route, there was no one on the street for them to wave and practice their most sincere insincere smiles on except squirrels who, shockingly in this day and age, cannot vote in municipal elections here in the Vampire State, and the wet and deeply annoyed, whose voting patterns are inconsistent at best but in general do not favor incumbents of any party.

The reaction to the organizing committee’s decision was swift and none too happy. After the parade the denizens of our happy little burg wander up and down Main Street, the street becoming a pedestrian mall for a few hours, buying food from various vendors, many of which are church groups raising funds for the coming fiscal year, and stuffing themselves silly while music plays and the kids amuse themselves by spraying one another with shaving cream. This is a heartwarming sight, for reasons I am not quite sure I understand at this point, and one that did not occur last year. I could live with that, but the various vendors involved could not, and they let the organizing committee know that the purpose of having and advertising a rain date was so everyone could wait to the rain date if it rained, which, as I’ve mentioned, it did, in buckets, bushels, and bottles, not to mention cats, dogs, and wombats, leaving the vendors stuck with thousands of dollars worth of food and no one to sell it to. The vendors were not happy about this situation and let the organizing committee know that they were not happy. The organizing committee promised to do a better job for the next parade, impressed, no doubt, by Sister Maria Josefina’s threat to stuff several hundred pounds of frozen empanadas up the committee’s collective backsides if they ever did this to the Comite Hispanidad of Our Lady of Fatima Church ever again. There are few things in the world designed to put the fear of the Lord into the souls of the unrighteous faster as one very angry Puerto Rican nun, even if she is older than the beard of Moses, although I must admit, I would pay good money to see Sister Maria Josefina make good on that threat, but then I am easily amused.

SAVING AMERICA FROM THE HEALTH CARE DISASTER: You know, I used to spend a lot of time worrying about the former junior Senator from Illinois’ plans for nationalizing the country’s health care system, but yesterday’s events have more or less taken that burden off my mind. Yesterday, as you may have heard, the United States tossed the Poles and the Czechs under the former junior Senator’s monster-wheeled bus in order to curry favor with Russia’s head thug. Given that this administration seems intent on not merely continuing but expanding the Bush Administration’s feckless policy vis-à-vis Russia and the Iranians, and given the outstanding success that appeasement policies had in the late and unlamented twentieth century, I am pretty sure that all the money that would have been spent on a first class health care debacle will go to pay for our war with Iran instead. And you folks thought that all you had to worry about was health care and the mushrooming deficit. Jeez, how dumb was that, guys?

POST NUMBER 800, IF YOU CAN BELIEVE IT: I don’t, as a rule, watch political speeches; if I must pay attention to such things, I prefer to read them in the paper, where the arguments the bloviating pol is making must stand or fall on their merits without the assistance of all the tricks of the rhetorical trade. But I did see the former junior Senator for Illinois’ speech about health care the other day. It was not a terribly interesting speech—just the usual lame rubbish that would insult the intelligence of a dyslexic duck if dyslexic ducks cared about human health care one way or the other—but what I found truly fascinating was Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s attempt to conduct an aerobics class while the ex-Senator was trying to give his speech and how no one in the mainstream media bothered to report her obstreperous behavior.

No, everyone concentrated on that congressman who yelled, “You lie,” when the former distinguished gentleman from Illinois did, in fact, lay a whopper on the listening public, but mum’s the word about Nancy’s gymnastics class, even though at one point our leader unsuccessfully tried to talk right through one particularly vigorous set of squat thrusts. While I think that it is a good thing that Ms. Pelosi wants to keep the legislative branch slim, trim, and in good health for the legislative battles ahead, and as much as I think some of the people’s tribunes could stand a good workout every now and again, there is a time and a place for everything and I think it behooves Ms. Pelosi to restrict her congressional exercise regimen to the odd morning in the Congressional gym. She is not Jack LaLanne, after all, and I think that such floor exercises are unseemly on national television and only aggravate 1.) the viewing public, who know that the guest of honor is pissing on their legs and telling them it’s raining, and think that solonic aerobics is a damn poor way of distracting their attention, however entertaining watching John Murtha exercise something other than his pork barrel may be, 2.) television executives, who, no matter how much they may love the current Administration, hate losing advertising revenue even more, and 3.) the Vice President of the United States, who looked like he wanted to bludgeon Ms. Pelosi to within an inch of her life with a gavel if she insisted on performing her impression of Jack-in-the-Congress one more time.

It’s just my opinion, of course, but I think the Veep may be on to something there. I’m pretty sure he could get some excellent ratings on Fox or CNN or even MSNBC if he bopped the Speaker over the head with the Speaker’s gavel (the Speaker, for those of you who don’t already know this, gets an actual gavel to do her job with, whereas the Vice President gets the end off an old shaving brush to call his house to order, on the purely specious grounds that the Senate is a more rarified crew of nitwits than the House of Representatives is and therefore it doesn’t take as much noise to get their attention). If he proved reasonably proficient at it, the E Network or MTV might even offer him a reality show in which the Vice President traveled from one end of this our Great Republic whacking deserving political figures over the head. There is no end to the stream of political cockroaches he could stamp on here in the Vampire State, something that would keep the show on the air and flush with ratings for years to come.