WHY YOU SHOULD WRITE THINGS DOWN: Louis XIV, who was a well-known French person for those of you interested in well-known French persons, did not like water. He didn’t even like branch water, a peculiar aversion in a man whose family name was Bourbon, and because of his aversion to all things aquatic he refused to take more than one bath a year. The royal bath was, like the soul of wit, short and to the point. First, the Masters of the Royal Bath would enter Louis’ presence with a bowl of warm water as the court orchestra played a fanfare composed especially for the occasion by Rameau or Couperin. At the conclusion of the fanfare, Louis would step down from the royal throne and then dip the tip of his considerable nose into the royal bowl. Then he would ask for a towel. The Masters of the Royal Bath, their duty done for the year, would withdraw from Louis’ presence and then go back to their day jobs at the department of motor vehicles, where they could spend their working days not doing much of anything on a more consistent basis. For Louis, the tip of his nose was now very clean, at least for a minute or so, even if the rest of the royal carcass still reeked like week-old dead cat deep-fried in rancid week-old equally dead fish oil, but as most of Europe smelled the same way at the time, no one cared. It was enough for most Frenchmen that Louis was le roi soleil, the Sun King, and every patriotic Gallic heart could burst with malodorous pride knowing that the wonders of Louis’ court rivaled the magnificence of the sun. Whether the sun actually smelled like Louis is a matter of scientific and historical conjecture; in space, no one can tell you stink.

I like water, on the other hand, especially the water at my house. I don’t know how my father managed to swing this particular bit of good luck, but my house sits on top of the sweet water of an otherwise sulfurous aquifer. This is a good thing, I think; I dislike the sulfur water almost as much as good King Louis hated water in general. There’s nothing that will turn a growing boy’s stomach faster than going to a friend’s house and trying to drink grape Kool-Aid that reeks of rotting eggs. The attempt was invariably unsuccessful, resulting in a large purple stain on the front of my tee shirt. My mother would yell at me when I got home, as these stains never come out as well as the detergent commercials would have you believe, and at the end of our summer in the country (we lived in the Vampire State’s eponymous megalopolis at that time) I usually had a great collection of tie-dyed tee shirts. As this was just before the great tie-dyed fashion revolution swept through the youth culture, I take some small measure of pride in knowing that I was a trendsetter, a fashion outlier pointing the way to a glorious future filled with organic vegetables, hippy kitsch, and Grateful Dead concerts. Not every ten-year-old boy can put that on his resume, you know.

To return to the subject, which is either French history or astronomy—I’ve forgotten which at this point—hang on a moment and let me check this out…water. Okay. As I was saying, the water in our well is very nice, or at least I think so, and for years my family and I drank the water without any sort of filtration. We thought nothing of it at the time; the water was clear, it didn’t stink, it was free, and so we guzzled the water down like pitchers of green beer on St. Patrick’s Day. Years later, unfortunately, we discovered the horrifying truth: it was hard water. Very hard water. My brothers and I spent our childhoods wondering why we’d spent our youths passing kidney stones the size of bowling balls and now we knew. We’d spent our idyllic summers pouring liquid gravel down our throats, not that I have some sort of animus against gravel, you understand; my favorite cartoon was The Flintstones, which was as gravel pitting a cartoon as you could hope to find in the Stone Age, when gravel pitting was big business, even if Betty and Wilma never thought of gravel as one of the four major food groups.

But our kidneys were soft and reasonably pliable then, unlike nowadays when age has had its way with them, and so we could handle the constant passing of sand through the waterworks. My plumbing is not as forgiving now. I am referring here to my home’s plumbing, not my own, although I understand how you might think otherwise. In the opinion of a number of professional plumbers I know, whose opinion I value and whose friendship with my late father prevents them from charging me an arm and a leg for simply looking at my plumbing I value even more, I need to do something about my piping now. Apparently, my house need never worry about osteoporosis; there is enough calcium in my pipes to keep vast armies of old ladies standing perpendicular to the floor for a good many years to come.

[Approximately two weeks pass, during which the management served tea and sandwiches to the assembled masses. The All-Girl Geriatric Glockenspiel Jazz Band provided the music.]

Yes, our kidneys were indeed soft and pliable in those days, and our minds were both keen and sharp, if that’s not actually redundant, and capable of retaining one’s thoughts for more than a few short days. But with age we put away childish things, as the Scriptures tell us, although the truth of the matter is that time does most of the putting away for us and doesn’t even ask for a tip, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your financial situation. For example, I put this piece aside for a while so that I could compose a vicious hatchet job mocking the intellectual basis of the former junior Senator from Illinois’ misadministration, and then I had breakfast, I think, or I did something else before finally coming back to this piece, whereupon I found that the piece’s animating idea (all pieces have them, strange as it may seem) no longer animates, and had indeed gone the way of all flesh. In short, I have no clue where this thing was going, but I still have all that water stuff in the beginning and I don’t feel like going back and rewriting the beginning to go with a new end. I realize that I am being incredibly lazy; I should rewrite the thing, but I’m not going to. I blame the current administration for my lack of good old-fashioned American elbow grease; I realize that it’s unfair, but taking the blame for stuff like this is their job, not that you would know it listening to them sometimes.

RULES FOR RADICALS, OR HOW NOT TO MAKE A KNISH: In Hemingway’s short story, ‘God rest you merry gentlemen,’ two Kansas City emergency room doctors make fun of a colleague named Wilcox as they wait for an emergency to happen on Christmas Day. Doctor Wilcox, as Hemingway makes clear, is not the best doctor in either Kansas City (there are two of them, for those of you new to American geography, a category you’ll be happy to know includes most American schoolchildren); in a short flashback, one of his medical school professors tells Wilcox that he has done his best to keep Wilcox from becoming a physician at all, but having failed to prevent this, the professor tells his erstwhile student to buy a medical book, The Young Doctor’s Friend and Guide, and urges him to use it. Doctor Wilcox, no doubt mindful of his professional inadequacies, does buy the book and uses it frequently, with, one imagines, no small degree of success. Doctor Wilcox’s troubles, and the subject of his colleagues’ jokes, arrived the night before, when the good doctor is faced with an emergency not listed in his book. For those of you interested in what happens next and the details of the emergency, I suggest you find a copy of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway and read the story for yourselves.

I bring up this very lengthy literary prefacing in order to talk about current problems in American foreign policy (that was a considerable leap, wasn’t it? You thought this was about Hemingway, didn’t you?) The root of this administration’s current foreign policy dilemma is this: like Doctor Wilcox, the former junior Senator from Illinois gets most of his practical professional knowledge from a book, and while Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals may help the oppressed speak truth to power or to Fox News, which I think are the same thing and I know Valerie Jarrett thinks so, too, the book says very little about how to deal with the vast hordes of icky foreigners who infest the Earth’s surface. So here are those rules, with some comments and cream cheese on the side.

1.) Power is not only what you have but what people think you have.

Perception is very important. The trouble here is that the opposite is also true. Before the First World War, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II spent millions of marks building the Imperial High Seas Fleet, making it one of the world’s most powerful combat fleets. And then, when the war broke out, the Kaiser would not let the High Seas Fleet fight for fear that Britain’s Royal Navy would sink his expensive ships. So, after all the millions spent on building the fleet, and with the exception of a few minor raids and one major naval attack (the Battle of Jutland), the Imperial High Seas Fleet spent the war tied up at dockside, gathering rust and barnacles, while the Royal Navy’s blockade slowly choked the life out of the German war economy. In the end, Germany lost the war anyway and the Kaiser didn’t have to worry about the British sinking his ships; before the war officially ended, the Germans scuttled the fleet themselves. If people don’t think you have the nerve to use your power, then it doesn’t really matter how much power you have, does it?

2.) Never go outside the experience of your people.

Well, it’s a little late to worry about this one, isn’t it? The former junior Senator and his merry crew of Chicagoans already occupy the White House, where they are now fully prepared, like the youth of Mr. Wilde’s aphorism, to give the nation the full benefit of their inexperience.

3.) Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.

The current administration does this quite a lot, actually. Except for the Queen, God bless her, and the odd dictator—Castro and Gaddafi come immediately to mind—most of the world’s rulers did not rule their countries in the late 1970’s, the last time the United States attempted an experiment in on the job chief executive training. One trusts that the former junior Senator will learn not to shoot himself in the foot any more than is absolutely necessary, but until he does, he will confuse and confound the enemies of this our Great Republic, who are used to a very different style of American foreign policy. What we have here is a matter of two learning curves: can the administration learn what it is doing before the nation’s enemies conclude that the foreign policy of the United States of America looks more than a little like Gertrude Stein’s description of Oakland: there’s no there there. If the latter scenario occurs first, the nation is in for a rough patch for the next few years.

4.) Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.

This is a very admirable concept, to be sure, but one that suffers in actual practice, since the major rule in our enemies’ book of rules is this: we get to stay on top, no matter what. The next time we see the mullahs in Iran shooting down demonstrators in the streets we should remember that these guys are living up to their book of rules.

5.) Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

Yes, it is. I can see crowds of ACORN and Code Pink activists laughing Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-il out of office right now, those crazy guys. Ridicule is just that strong. I mean, hey, it worked like a charm in Tiananmen Square, didn’t it?

6.) A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

Very true, but I don’t think that threatening not to pick up Russia’s garbage is really going to work. The White House staff may long for the days whey they could do this sort of thing in Chicago, but I don’t think Vladimir Putin cares very much one way or the other. He’s already got people to pick up his garbage.

7.) A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

I blame George W. Bush for this.

8.) Keep the pressure on with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

The administration does not believe in keeping the pressure on the nation’s enemies at all, unless they’re Republicans, and the administration is not interested in the events of the period, unless it helps them pass their health care program. This poses something of a problem for the foreign policy people, whose choices in dealing with those who wish the Republic ill are no longer carrots and sticks, but carrots and more carrots, with the enemy getting a choice of sliced, diced, or julienned.

9.) The threat is usually more terrifying than the reality.

I don’t think the Israelis are going to accept this argument. The operative word here is usually. Usually is a wonderful word with a fine family and a nice house in the suburbs, but it is a word that smacks of conventional wisdom, which is wisdom only as long as everyone accepts the convention. Religious fanatics don’t accept other people’s conventions; they don’t have to, what with their personal hotline to the Almighty, and if it is the will of Allah that the State of Israel disappear in a radioactive mushroom cloud then that’s what’s going to happen. For the people telling the Israelis to calm down, one need only point out that the Jews have heard this sort of rhetoric before within the memory of people still living and the result was disastrous for everyone involved.

10.) The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure on the opposition.

Is there opposition to the United States? If there is, it is clearly the fault of the preceding administration.

11.) If you push a negative hard enough and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.

In many countries, if you push a negative hard enough and deep enough, the government will shoot you for your troubles. And since the CIA will be CYAing for the near future, the people in these countries who might help us push a negative won’t.

12.) The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

True, but what if no one wants your constructive alternative? In 2000, Clinton had a constructive alternative and Arafat launched the Intifada anyway. Go figure.

13.) Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

And Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are not Sarah Palin. In the first place, she has better legs than they do, and second, they have large internal security establishments (the only thing that changed about the old KGB was its acronym—it’s the FSB now) dedicated to keeping them in their jobs. And third, they can use all these same rules against the United States and probably with greater effect, since they don’t have to worry about critics in the media or in the government undermining the message. Or, as George C. Scott says in Patton just as he blasts the Afrika Korps to bits at the battle of El Guettar, “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!” This does not bode well for the future, I think.

AT RANDOM: Hi there. No, I don’t have anything new to say and it’s not even the usual writer’s block; it’s just me being lazy again. It is hard to be satirical, you see, when the times are satirical. The former junior Senator from Illinois is blaming all of his woes on the mess his predecessor left, as if Mr. Bush had just decided to leave the Oval Office and go golfing, leaving all of his work for the former junior Senator to do. As I remember it, the former junior Senator desperately wanted Mr. Bush’s job; he spent the better part of his senatorial term actually trying to get Mr. Bush’s job, as opposed to doing whatever it is Senators actually do in Washington, if anything; and it seems a bit unbecoming to me at this point that, having succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, he finds that his current office is not all he hoped it would be. Ah well, there are more tears spilled over answered prayers than over unanswered ones, as someone much smarter than I am once pointed out. It may have been Mayor Daley, the real one, not the one who rules the Second City now, a man who routinely sent those members of the Cook County Democratic Committee he deemed too dumb to be city aldermen to the Illinois statehouse or to Congress, in order to limit the damage they could do. That the former junior Senator never held a municipal office in Chicago tells us more about the man than his legions of fanatic followers would want us to know, I think.

If you live in North America or anywhere nearby; I’m not sure what that would cover exactly-Iceland, maybe, or Poughkeepsie?-then you’ve seen the newest TV ads for Macs. It features the dynamic duo of Mac commercials, the cool with-it kind of guy who represents the cool with-itness of Macs, assuming with-itness even counts as a word, versus the staid, plodding, definitely not with-it guy who represents PCs. The Windows guy, who looks an awful lot like me, which I find increasingly annoying the more I think about it, reassures the Mac that Windows 7 will not have the problems that Windows Vista had and that Mac should trust him this time. The ad then goes into flashback mode, with my PC doppelganger promising that each Windows operating system going back to Windows 2 would fix all the problems that the previous operating system had ("trust me”). I will leave the pros and cons of whether or not the consuming public should actually trust Microsoft to another day. I find the commercial fascinating, to tell you the truth, especially in the current political climate. Today in this our Great Republic, the Democratic Party is proposing a health care plan of Brobdingnagian proportions and Rube Goldbergesque complexity that will torpedo the American economy, and the former junior Senator from Illinois and his minions in the Congress are telling an increasingly suspicious citizenry to trust them, this time will be different. Based on the welfare state’s track record to date, this will require an Olympic gold-winning leap of faith. The end result, with or without the leap of faith or the gold medal, will still be the same. If you choose to stand in front of a moving train, the train will hit you, usually with unpleasant results. This will be true no matter how many times you choose to stand in front of the train. Ask William Huskisson, if you don’t believe me.

It is November now and the World Series is still going on. I wish that someone would think of a better system of determining the championship of baseball before the Colorado Rockies make it back to the Series. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I like being able to tell the difference between the World Series and the Stanley Cup playoffs. It's not terribly ecumenical, I know, but it's just how I feel about it.

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.

TAUTOLOGY RUN RAMPANT: Americans are stupid. I know this because Bill Maher tells me so and if Bill Maher tells me so then it must be true. Why are Americans stupid? I don’t know, but Bill Maher is a wealthy man and reached this happy state by telling Americans how stupid they were and if Americans are willing to pay Bill Maher good money for telling them how stupid they are, then Americans really must be stupid, as otherwise all those stupid Americans would be ignoring Bill Maher entirely and he would have to do something else for a living, like peddling hot dogs on the streets of New York or selling life insurance to jihadis and their families.

UPDATE: Something new tomorrow, folks, I promise.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: All right, I lied. I am trying to get this thing typed and just as soon as it is, I will post it. I promise, sideways, sort of.

There will be a new post up before the end of the week, folks. My apologies, and yes, I know you're tired of my apologizing for this sort of thing, but it isn't lack of ideas or even sloth this time around; the piece is fighting me every inch of the way. I know I should just drop the thing now and move on to other things; I have a couple of good ideas in line waiting for me to write them up; but at this point it's become one of those guy things: I'm going to finish this if it kills me first. I will be back at the grindstone tonight in an effort to move this thing along. Until then, watch some television and contemplate how much better your life is going to be once the same government that cannot deliver the mail properly is delivering medical care for all and sundry.

MISS CALIFORNIA, OR THE PERILS OF PAULINE, A TOUCHING MELODRAMA WITH LIONS, ELKS, AND THE KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS: Continuing our theme about meaningless kerfuffles, I should point out at the beginning of this screed, in the interests of full disclosure, that no member of my family has ever entered a beauty pageant. There are many reasons for this, a case of the congenital fuglies being one of the more prominent reasons, from which we can also extrapolate a certain lack of familial interest in the proceedings. There are simply more interesting things to waste good TV watching time on than half-naked animate Barbie dolls parading across a stage. In short, beauty pageants are simply dull, especially in the age of pay per view television, where the interested male can find equally attractive young ladies doing what comes naturally and unnaturally at all hours of the day and night.

I am sure that all of the young ladies involved in the beauty pageant of your choice are perfectly wonderful human beings and a credit to their families and their sponsoring organization; I do, however, find a desire to be Miss Pig’s Knuckle a bit odd, but if this makes some young woman happy, then who am I to criticize; but however idiosyncratic the contestants may be in their private lives, in front of the television cameras they exhibit all the color, dash, and personality of a half-empty bowl of slightly melted raspberry Jell-O. In addition to the young ladies’ lack of any discernible personality, the viewer must also suffer through their relentless physical sameness. Mr. Hefner’s blonde California girl aesthetic has become so pervasive throughout our culture that even the African-American contestants in these pageants are spiritual blondes. Such relentless physical sameness has, almost by definition, more to do with modern surgical skill than with genetic coincidence, and so it comes as no great surprise to me to learn that at least some of these would-be California girls, including Miss California herself, carry enough silica on their chests to start their own beach.

Beauty pageants generate their own special set of scandals, which usually center on just how much of the All-American Girl is the original equipment and how much her surgeon imported from overseas or from the All-American Girl’s backside. Such controversies tend to be as vapid as the contests themselves, unless you’re talking about Latin American beauty contests, where the intrigue is positively Machiavellian in its intensity and where the interested viewer can, if he is lucky, hope to see the adherents of one criollo beauty going after the acolytes of another with guns, knives, and clubs hand-carved from hunks of frozen flan if need be. But this controversy wasn’t about any of the run of the mill pageant controversies. No, it wasn’t.

Mr. Perez Hilton, a gay man and a well-known blogger of celebrity gossip, was one of the judges at this year’s Miss USA contest, and in this capacity he asked Ms. Carrie Prejean, this year’s Miss California and a stunning example of the eponymous aesthetic mentioned above, whether or not she supported gay marriage, a touchy subject in California these days since the public voted down a proposition authorizing gay marriage back in November. This is not the sort of question one usually hears at a beauty pageant; the political philosophy espoused at most beauty pageants, as Sandra Bullock pointed out some years ago, does not extend much further than a desire for world peace, said desire being expressed as innocuously as possible in order to avoid annoying offending the sensibilities of anyone in the audience who might enjoy warmongering for fun and profit. One must wonder why Mr. Hilton chose this particular venue to ask his question, but it is a free country and Mr. Hilton has as much right to ask whatever question he chooses as anyone else has. In response, Ms. Prejean said, sorry, no offense, but no, she did not. Miss Prejean lost the pageant, largely, it seems, on Mr. Hilton’s blackballing her, and then Mr. Hilton then went online, ranting that Ms. Prejean was a “dumb bitch.” He later apologized for the slur, but the apology was too little, too late: with his words, a star was born.

I have to admit that I find this barely recognizable blip on the radar of our Great Republic’s history absolutely fascinating, for reasons I’m not sure I fathom. I think it’s because of the absolute hysteria amongst the liberal cognoscenti on either coast. The idea that this dumb blonde might actually have an opinion of her own seems to offend them no end. Having created what, to their eyes, can only be a monstrous Galatea, the outraged Pygmalions of the left have been busily trying to draw a mustache on their creation; no sooner had Ms. Prejean signed to become the spokeswoman for a conservative Christian group than somewhat saucy pictures of her turned up on the Internet, the pictures’ arrival coming complete with the usual charges of hypocrisy. You know, a telegraphed punch is almost always less effective than a surprise punch, and the left telegraphed this punch from a mile away; I don’t know anyone here in the vast right wing conspiracy who didn’t figure that the moonbats were going to find mud to hit Ms. Prejean with sooner rather than later, even if they had to make the stuff up themselves. If we learned anything at all from the late presidential campaign, it is that the left in this country has the best interests of the people at heart, spending just about every waking moment of their day thinking of new ways to help the poor and oppressed better their lots, and as a result of all this beneficence the left will not suffer impertinence from the helots; it smacks too much of ingratitude. As for the charge of hypocrisy, well, that depends on your definition of what is the more hypocritical act, doesn’t it: doing something stupid when you are young, learning from your mistake, and not doing it again, or betraying something you believe in deeply so that you may profit from the betrayal? There seems to be no end of people who think that the first scenario is a sheer pit of horrors, requiring a lifetime supply of sackcloth and ashes, while the latter is no big deal.

I must also admit that I do not understand why Mr. Hilton is so upset. Mr. Hilton asked a straight question and he got a straight answer. If he did not want a straight answer, he shouldn’t have asked the question, but that point is now moot. He did ask, and she did answer, and Mr. Hilton first used his power as a judge and then his access to the Internet and the media to conjure a conservative heroine out of the most improbable soil. Thank you, Mr. Hilton, we couldn’t have done it without you.

25 THINGS YOU DO NOT KNOW ABOUT ME:

This stupid meme is winging its way around the blogosphere again and I, unfortunately, did not step out of the way fast enough to avoid getting hit with it. So here it is, and I will not tag anyone else with this, in the hopes that the meme will die a slow and agonizing death if we all just simply ignore the damn thing.


1. I am a figment of Nikolai Gogol's imagination.

2. I wear a tie to work, thank you very much. Standards must be maintained, I think, or civilization as we know it will collapse into a heap of noisome sludge, if we're not halfway there already.

3. I was born in New York City in 1958. So were lots of other people. People had a bad habit of being born in New York City in 1958; it was a fairly widespread thing then, sort of like smoking or cracking your knuckles.

4. My father passed away in 2004. Pope John Paul II passed away eight months later. Both of them are probably making a habit of being dead at this point.

5. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Communist Party. I was, however, a Democrat once, but I got over it.

6. I do not develop my own film.

7. I do not eat fish, eggs, or liver. It is not a religious thing; I just hate fish, eggs, and liver. I dont like asparagus, either. And yes, I think anchovies on pizza are just plain revolting.

8. I find thinking about my bald spot intensely irritating, a condition akin to psychic eczema.

9. I love children, especially other people's children, and I love them best when the evil little bastards stay the hell out of my sight.

10. I am not interested in my personality.

11. I'm not terribly interested in your personality, either.

12. I have a bachelors and a masters degree, thereby proving beyond a reasonable doubt that I am educated way beyond my intelligence.

13. I know the difference between discreet and discrete, unlike some ignoramuses I could name.

14. I am very fond of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. As they are but tasty balls of fat and sugar, I can’t have them anymore, which irritates the hell out of me.

15. I think the idea of having gay men judge a beauty contest is more than a little strange. After all, you wouldn’t ask a lactose intolerant person what their favorite brand of ice cream was, would you?

16. I have never owned a Leica rangefinder camera and the chances of my owning a Leica are minimal to the point of nonexistence, given that I would have to mortgage my house to get my hands on one. Still, it’s nice to dream, isnt it?

17. I did not vote for Barack Obama in 2008, and no, I will not vote for him in 2012. Knowing that you can ignore yet another election cycle ahead of time is always a good thing.

18. I am a Republican (no, I am not kidding).

19. I drink more Diet Pepsi Wild Cherry soda than I really ought to.

20. I own my own scarf. Scarves are necessary equipment for the serious photographer. The lady who sold me my digital camera told me that the camera wouldn’t work correctly if I didn’t buy the scarf as well.

21. I have an unreasoning fear of heights. I also have an unreasoning fear of being eaten by an alligator, which, I realize, is a bit foolish, given that there are no alligators in this portion of the United States. Even the sewers here in our happy little burg are alligator free. The sewers are, however, full of rats, given the cheese company’s propensity for flushing curds and whey down the municipal drain without so much as a tuffet or a spider nearby.

22. I think that prisoners on Death Row should have their own reality show.

23. I used to have a thick NYC accent when I was a kid. Said accent was beaten out of me here in our happy little burg, so now I sound as bland as everyone else here.

24. I think that there isn’t enough sex and violence on television.

25. I do not go to horror movies. If I want to be frightened, I read my school tax bill. What the hell are these kids learning that I have to cough up $3K for them to learn it?

Well, in the not really news department, Senator Specter of Pennsylvania has officially left the Republican Party and joined the Democratic Party, an act somewhat akin to a man marrying his long-time mistress after his long-suffering wife finally divorces him. I hope the change makes the good Senator happy, although I suspect it will negatively impact his newsworthiness. As a Republican In Name Only, the news media could always go to him for a sound bite criticizing the positions of the party he ostensibly belonged to, which sound bite would then be bandied about on the Sunday morning pundit parades as evidence of dissension in the Republican ranks. Now, I fear, Senator Specter is just one more Democratic pol spouting the nonsense one usually expects to hear from Democratic pols and so the media will have to go to someone else for their news of Republican dissension. They’ll find someone to take over Sen. Specter’s role as Republican nonconformist soon enough, I think.

GOVERNMENT CARS: I haven’t been keeping up with the news recently; some things are just too depressing for words and I’ve been trying to shift from my usual diet of negativity to something with fewer carbohydrates and more good cholesterol; so I’ve been missing things as they go zipping by, and one of the things that I’ve apparently missed is the United States government guaranteeing the warranties of the Big Three automakers. This was news to me, and apparently it was news to me about three weeks after it was news to everyone else here in this our Great Republic. Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should point out that my car is nine years old and that I finished making payments on it four or five years ago, so I am pretty sure that the warranty on my car ran out a while ago and that President Obama’s guarantee does not effect me in any way, which means that I am now officially easy meat for Lennie, my trusty and extremely expensive auto mechanic and a man whose kids my car has put through college at least twice. Having said that, I would think that people whose cars are still under warranty would start to worry right about now. At first glance, the idea that the full faith and credit of the United States government backs your car warranty should ease the fears of anyone with a warrantied car, but should reflection set in, and reflection almost always sets in like your brother in law from New Jersey parking his fat ass in your favorite chair after Thanksgiving dinner, troubles innumerable begin to spring up. I hesitate to point this out, a grammatical construction I’ve never really understood, since what usually follows after you say that you hesitate to point this out is the very thing you say you are hesitating to point out, but the same government that says it will guarantee your warranty is the same government that cannot successfully run a railroad, deliver your mail, or patrol its own borders. This, you’ll pardon me for saying so, does not inspire confidence in the long-term security of your warranty. So if you do have a government-backed auto warranty, you might want to start thinking about trading your car in for a Japanese or German car. If you are ecologically minded and concerned that getting a new foreign car may add to your carbon imprint, then now is a good time to think about buying a bicycle, or maybe a horse, although parking for the latter may be a bit hard to come by these days. And remember, if the government wants to guarantee the warranty on your horse, you might as well shoot it right now; five will get you ten the horse will be lame by the end of the year. And don’t forget to recycle the shoes.

GAZA: I know next to nothing about the Middle East, but since no one else lets ignorance of the region get in the way of having a strong opinion about what goes on there, I think I will share my opinion as well. Vis-à-vis Israel’s current military operations against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, I think that when you are a 97 pound weakling and you make a point of going up to the strongest kid on the beach and kicking him in the shins over and over again, and you keep on kicking him in the shins over and over again even after he warns you multiple times to stop, then you shouldn’t be all that surprised when he starts kicking your dumb ass from one end of the beach to the other.

FEY/PALIN 2008: Now, before I start I should admit that I’ve got the standard nerd’s hots for Tina Fey, or I would, if I were thirty years younger. I think she’s the funniest woman writing since Veronica Geng died, and with Geng, if you didn’t live here in the northeastern part of this our Great Republic, a lot of her stuff would just go right by you. You don’t get that sort of disconnect with Fey. So I was really looking forward to the season premiere of SNL; from the first moment I saw Sarah Palin (my first reaction was that the GOP nominated Tina Fey’s older sister) I knew that I would have to watch the season opener. I just knew.

And it did not disappoint. The show’s opening was five minutes of the smartest comedy I’ve seen in a long time (the rest of the show was just so—so) and I laughed like nobody’s business. One of the smartest of the lines was that one where Amy Poehler’s faux Sen. Clinton states that diplomacy must be the basis of any successful foreign policy and Fey’s faux Palin says, “And I can see Russia from my house!” I loved that line, but now that a couple days have gone by, I can see how I might not think that line was so funny if I were a Georgian or a Kazakh or a Ukrainian. Those folks actually can see Russia from their houses and they don’t like what they see. It’s all a matter of perspective, I guess; obnoxious neighbors are always funny when you don't actually have to live next door to them.