THERMOMETERS ARE RED HOT! And other tiny tales of horror from Donald Trump’s dystopia

Paper towel and wet wipe hoarders are 

flushing their stashes — and it’s raising hell with

New York's plumbing. Okay, enough about that.

I ordered a thermometer from Amazon — the kind you stick in your mouth to take your temperature. I haven’t owned a thermometer for about 15 years (I’m not the feverish type) but what with Trump’s Plague threatening to zap every senior citizen in our tracks, it felt like it was time to own a thermometer again.

Ordinarily, I’d just pick one up from the drug store, but the drug store was plumb out. Seems that while cleaning out the toilet paper, the tissues, and the wet wipes, hoarders went for the thermometers, too. Hey, ya never know how much money you can get on the black market for a gross of thermometers.

Well, now I know. 

Briefly — only very briefly, but nevertheless — you could get $99 for just one of the old-fashioned glass kind with the little silver line of mercury inside. Meanwhile, cheap-looking digital jobs were also going for around a hundred bucks. 

No, I’m not talking about the kind that can take somebody’s temperature from across the street while it seizes his global coordinates, facial characteristics, and credit card numbers and forwards them to Attorney General Barr’s Dossier Cloud at Data Central. Just a crappy-looking digital thermometer.

Prices back down to 

98.6 degrees Fahrenheit

I had to scroll through three — or was it five, or was it seven? — pages of thermometers on Amazon before I found one for a somewhat reasonable price. Luckily, that all all has changed. Thank Bezos, I suppose. Either Amazon began policing its sellers, or I was hallucinating, but as of at least March 17th when I tried again, the black market seems to have been driven out of the thermometer business and Amazon is, for the most part, reflecting saner prices. Oh, and the glass thermometers were gone.

But back to St. Patrick’s day. I ordered a thermometer for $15.99 because that was the cheapest one I could find after more scrolling through more pages of thermometers than I cared to do. (There are even cheaper ones available on Amazon as of this writing. ) Amazon promised delivery “between March 24^th and March 27^th. That seems like a pretty wide window for a cheesey thermometer, but hey, thermometers are red hot these days. Oh, and there was a $9.25 shipping charge, which seems kind of steep for an itty-bitty thermometer, but as I said, it’s a red hot market.

Well, March 24^th came and went. So did the 25^th. And it’s getting pretty late on the 26^th. Amazon has until tomorrow but meanwhile, would somebody please feel my forehead?

Donald has a meltdown — and

of course everybody gets fired

This story dates back to 1994. I’m bringing it up here merely to offer you reassuring evidence that Trump is not suffering from some terrible form of schizoid paranoia brought on by late stage dementia. 

On the contrary, he’s been suffering from whatever it is for more than 30 years.

According to a story that appeared in Bloomberg News, it all happened in 1994 when Trump was trying to sell the elegant Plaza Hotel in New York. Like some other major properties our very stable genius of a businessman has owned, he had managed to bankrupt it. He was frantic for a buyer. But not just a buyer. He wanted a buyer who might be willing to let Trump continue managing the business he had  just wrecked, I presume so that he could save face.

Abraham Wallach, described in the Bloomberg story as “Trump’s original fixer” finally found someone who fit that description, a crazy rich Asian family named Kwok. Walter Kwok, one of the Kwok Brothers, came to New York with his wife and kids to look over the property. Naturally he checked into the Plaza. I’ll let Bloomberg reporter Julie Satow pick up the story.

One morning, Wallach arrived to pick up the Kwoks for a day of sightseeing. He nodded to the private security guard who had been hired by the family to stand sentry outside the suite’s entrance, and then knocked on the door. There was no answer, so the security guard also knocked. 

When there was still no answer, the guard called on his walkie-talkie to another guard stationed inside the rooms. He radioed back to say that the family was stuck inside—the door had jammed. Wallach and the guard tried pushing and pulling the ancient door free from its sticky hinges. It refused to budge. As panic set in, Wallach called down to hotel security. Several men arrived with hatchets, which they used to break down the jammed door, after which the traumatized family rushed out in relief. 

Wallach took the shaken guests downstairs for tea. “We’re in the Palm Court, and there’s a violinist playing Viennese waltzes, and I started to talk to them, apologizing profusely,” Wallach told me. “I know what’s coming, so I’m listening to the Strauss waltzes, and I said, ‘I could start to cry right now.’  ” 

Wallach held back tears as he watched his dream of selling the Plaza to the Kwoks evaporate. After he left the Kwoks, Wallach dejectedly walked the few blocks to Trump Tower to relay the bad news. 

Trump "was very calm at first. ‘A door jammed? What do you mean a door jammed?’  ” recalled Wallach. Then, “It was as if a tsunami and an earthquake had hit at the same time. There were loud shrieks from the 26th floor. ‘A door jammed? A door jammed?’  ” 

Trump ran over to the Plaza, “and he started firing people: ‘You’re fired! You’re fired! You’re fired!’ He even fired people who didn’t work at the hotel, who were guests,” Wallach recounted.

There! I’ll bet you feel more reassured about the man in the Oval Office already.

Where’s Fauci?

On March 20^th, this blog noted that Anthony Fauci, the physician and immunologist who keeps upsetting and annoying Donald Trump by telling the truth about the Corona Virus seemed to have disappeared. Then I had to append an asterisk with a line saying that he had reappeared. 

Well, now you can probably take odds he’s going to disappear again, according to some reports. No doubt that’s because he’s what a way-off-the-right-wing website called American Thinker endearingly calls“A Deep-State Hillary Clinton-loving stooge.” Or in other words, somebody in the Trump Administration who can and will actually tell the truth. No wonder they hate him.