Use any of these words to colorfully describe our
villainous Imbecile in Chief
As I write this, there are only eight days remaining before Donald Trump is officially out of the White House (presumably) and the place can get quickly fumigated and sterilized before Joe and Jill Biden sleep there.
If I were the Bidens, I would also get rid of the mattress in the Presidential bedroom. I’ve heard rumors that Trump can be a bed wetter even when he’s wide awake. Or maybe especially when he’s wide awake.
Pre-inaguration, the TV and cable news channels, and the newspapers, and the Internet are all but exploding with Trump-related controversies.
To impeach or not to impeach, that is the question. Unless the question is whether Mike Pence and what’s left of Trump’s corrupt cabinet sufficiently stiffen their spines to declare him incompetent and remove him from office. Unless it’s about intercepts of the Crazy Right’s plans to not only disrupt Washington on Inauguration Day, but also to invade the capitol buildings of all 50 states. (Given how poorly their takeover of Congress did, how do they expect a nationwide, multi-front invasion to work out?) Unless it’s…
O bother! Insanity doesn’t have to be political. It can also be fun. Which is why I now offer for your delectation a taste of the kinds of miscellaneous stupidities that will likely confront you a bit more prominently in the news once Trump is out of our faces….
A tempest in a Rebok. Well, actually, it’s a pair of Reboks. Unless they’re Keds. Yes, they look suspiciously like the canvas Keds I wore when I was a kid. And that was a long, long time ago. So long ago that Harry S. Truman was President.
See, the sneakers in question were on Vice-President Elect Kamala Harris’s feet, and she was posing for a photograph, and the photograph got used on the cover of Vogue. The resulting fallout might have come from a nuclear explosion.
How dare they use a photograph like that, critics fumed. It was precisely the kind of fuming that gushed from the Republican outrage machine when Barak Obama had the temerity — the temerity mind you! — to be seen wearing a a tan suit while President.
I’d blame the huff over Harris on the Covid-19 plague, which has caused some people to be locked up inside four walls for way too long, with far too little to do. I would blame the plague, that is, were it not for the Great Tan Suit Kerfluffle of 2014.
Are you as convinced as I am that some people wake up each morning and the first thing they reach for is their electrical Outrage Stimulator, which should be use to gently massage the…okay, enough I’m going to stop going there before I get into trouble. Instead, let’s go to Paris for the latest contretemps over…
Bug Brother! That’s what the Parisian press is calling it. Turns out that, according to the respectable French journal Le Monde, everybody’s bugging Paris with high tech equipment installed on Parisian rooftops. Les Americans? Mais bien sûr we’re doing it. And right from our embassy roof. But rival journal Le Figaro seems to be implying, everybody else is doing it, too — sometimes even from deluxe hotel rooms. A perfect case of whataboutism gone wild.
So what’s a poor Parisian to do when everybody’s guilty?
One guy in Paris began hammering a subway wall with his head. I mean, I know this falls into the category of “You can’t make this stuff up,” but that’s precisely why I’m telling you about it here. Sometimes authentic crazy is absolutely the best crazy.
Seems this all started during a contretemps over la liberté, and more specifically, over what the head-banger perceived as his freedom not to wear a mask on the Paris metro, despite local regs that in effect say, no mask, no entry and no ride. Remember, this guy isn’t some American MAGA. He's a genuine French fou-fou.
It happened at the St. Lazare subway station. When the cops approached this guy to enforce the rules, he not only began hammering the wall with his head, but also shouted out some insults and threats so clear and specific that you don’t need a handbook of obscure French slang to translate them.
Specifically, he calls the cops “dirty bastards” and a “bunch of fascists.” He also threatened, “I’m going to cut your throats. You and your children.” And according to the Parisian cops, the head banging was a deliberate attempt to injure himself so that he could accuse the cops of violence.
He was sentenced to six months in prison. Think you’ll miss him? Don’t worry. There’s a new self-defeating nincompoop born every minute.
How to lose a fortune as a high tech idiot. It’s simple. Believe in and buy Bitcoin, the new craze for the kind of fools who used to buy and hide gold so that, come The Ultimate Catastrophe when their bucks and bank accounts would be useless, they’d be able to shop for…who knows? And furthermore, the tax man can't find out that they have the a gazillion bucks worth of bitcoin.
Bitcoin isn’t entirely stupid. The technology behind it makes possession and trade in the stuff hard to hack. Which is precisely the problem. Or at least one of the problems. (The other is that because Bitcoin can fluctuate substantially, you never can be sure whether tomorrow your bitcoins will make you a millionaire, a billionaire, or a pathetic loser.)
Anyway, it seems that one numnuts received 7002 Bitcoins for making an animated video. That’s not chickenfeed. As I write this, one Bitcoin sells for 33,868 dollars and 30 cents. Which makes the jerk in question worth, at least on paper, over $237,000,000. By the time you read this, it might be wya more. Or way less.
Problem is, about ten years ago the guy lost his “key,” — which functions essentially like a very difficult password. Now he can’t touch his money. And there’s no Bitcoin Central that he can dial up, or key up on the Internet and say, “Hey I forgot my password. If I answer two secret questions about my grandmother’s favorite sex toy and my pet’s maiden name, will you e-mail me a new one?”
Instead, you get ten opportunities to try to guess your password. If you don’t get it by the tenth try, you are screwed for life. I don’t know who gets your Bitcoin, but you don’t, and you can never get it again. The poor guy has tried eight times. Should he try again? Or leave it alone so that on paper he’s 237 times a millionaire even if he can’t afford a Coke?
See, if Trump were gone, we could all spend our time gossiping about stupid stuff like this. Wouldn’t it be heaven?
1 comment:
re Kamala's shoes: They are Converse All-Stars, and she has worn them throughout the campaign.
I'm not quite as old as you (I was born mid-Eisenhower), but I was initially confused when I kept hearing about her "Chuck's". Kid these days [giggle].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Taylor_All-Stars
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