Who will win the Presidential election? (Predictions straight from Mme. Galzogorist’s crystal ball.) Plus: foie-not-so-gras and a law to save that wascally wabbit.

Mme. Galzogorist sees all, hears all, knows all, tells all, dings all

It’s been three years since I’ve gone to see Madame Galzogorist, the political fortune-telling seer of the garment district with the partially blown out neon sign.

The last time I spoke with her, Donald Trump has just won an election, and I asked her to predict what his first week in the White House would be like. Her predictions, although incorrect as to most specifics, had a certain qualitative accuracy, especially as they pertained to Rudy Giuliani. 

Also qualitatively, one might argue that Mme. Galzogorist’s Day Six predictions about stinging jellyfish transported to the Rio Grande to deter immigrant swimmers is not so far from The Trumpster’s recent proposal to deter immigration by digging a moat at the border and filling it with alligators and poisonous snakes.

And the next President is.....?

This time I asked Mme. Galzogorist to predict who would run for President on both the Republican and Democratic tickets, and who would win. I should note for the record that Mme. Galzogorist vehemently denies that her name is an anagram of the names of the Gallup, Zogby and Marist polls. 

On the contrary, "Galzogorist is the ancient and revered name of a long and noble familial line of distinguished cutpurses and con artists,” Mme Galzogorist insisted. "We consider ourselves to be the Trumps of the futurism profession."

Whatever. 

Anyway, here’s how the interview went:

CRANK: So first of all, who will the Democratic nominee be?

MME. GALZOGORIST: Elizabeth Warren will be the nominee, with Senator Cory Booker as her Vice-Presidential candidate. You heard it straight from my crystal ball, via my lips.

CRANK: I take it Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate? Even if he’s impeached?

MME. GALZOGORIST: He’ll be running even if he has to do it from behind the walls of Leavenworth Prison. And if he gets thrown into the slammer, don’t stand too close to the walls outside. Once they take away his cell phone, he’ll be tweeting by throwing messages in bottles over the wall.

CRANK: What will Trump do if he’s elected?

 MME. GALZOGORIST: If elected, he will not serve, at least not when it interferes with golf or sitting on his bed in the middle of the night and tweeting. Same as in his first term when he was elected.  

CRANK: And if he’s not elected?

MME: GALZOGORIST: If not elected, he will have such a meltdown you’re not going to believe it.

CRANK: Will he be elected or not?

MME. GALZOGORIST: Situation is murky. Ask again later.

CRANK: Hey, that sounds like what one of those novelty shop crystal ball toys would say.

MME GALZOGORIST: Where do you think I get my information?

New York, we have a

goose liver problem

Since all politics is local, I take you now to New York City where City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, despite the growing problem of homelessness, hopelessly gridlocked streets, high piles of garbage awaiting pickup that all but block some sidewalks on certain days, the underfunded transportation system, and the growing desertification of some shopping streets as more and more retail shops are forced to close thanks to changing lifestyles and high rents….despite all that, Johnson is focused on what really matters.

First and foremost, I’m talking about the plight of rural geese, many of them in France. These geese are force-fed to give them fatty livers so that they’ll yield richer fois gras. Now a proposed New York City local law, Number 1378-A, “prohibits retail food establishments or food service establishments from storing, maintaining, selling, or offering to sell force-fed products or food containing a force-fed product. The bill creates a rebuttable presumption that any item with a label or listed on the menu as ‘foie gras’ is the product of force-feeding. Violators will be subject to a civil penalty between $500 and $2,000 per offense."

I’m guessing that to avoid the problem, the vast International Goose Liver Conspiracy will have to drop “fois gras” from its labels and call its stuff “chopped liver.” 

Or they may have to stop selling goose liver entirely and instead sell pork paté. Nobody force feeds pigs. The poor critters just lead miserable lives, crammed together in foul conditions, until they’re taken to the slaughterhouse where they get beaten or stabbed or stunned to death. 

There! I’m so glad we’ve solved the humanity problem.

Arf arf! Meow! What's up doc?

While we’re on the subject of New York animals, let’s talk about puppies. There are several pet stores in New York that sell them. But a resolution before the City Council, Number 798, would call upon the governor to amend a state law so that it would, among other things, prohibit the sale of dogs, cats, or rabbits by retail pet stores. However, the law would allow the pet stores to “showcase” rescue dogs, cats and rabbits that are up for adoption. 

Questions waiting to be answered:

• How the pet shops will stay in business if they can't sell the pets? 

• A quick perusal of local New York City adoption websites revealed that among the rescue dogs, there is a preponderance of pit bulls and a significant shortage of purebreds and custom-breds. If everybody in New York has to get a pit bull, what happens to the Poodles, Labradoodles, Cockerdoodles, Goldendoodles, and  oodles of other more cuddly and hypoallergenic varieties of dog? In a city where people are living in close quarters and in small spaces where tempers flare, are we sure we want pit bulls to be the predominant pooch?

• Rabbits? Since when has New York City had a rabbit rescue problem? I suspect that somebody on the City Council has been watching too many old Bugs Bunny movies. Gwab that wascally wabbit, but do it vewy, vewy quietly. Ssh! It’s a wescue wabbit! 

Inventor of the Psychic Ding gives two Supreme Court justices a super ding and demands their impeachment

Remember Mme. Galzogorist, the spelling-challenged fortune teller on the gritty Manhattan block where The New York Crank is headquartered? Remember her invention of the “Psychic ding” – a sort of mental curse that brings down psychic pain on less-than-loveable public figures?

Well, lately she’s been going a little bit overboard. It’s so bad that I tried to call the white-coated people from the hospital. I wanted to get her thrown in a locked ward and pumped full of Thorazine until she calms down. But as you’ll learn if you read on, my efforts were thwarted.

This all started when I interviewed Mme. Galzogorist about who might be the winner in the next Presidential race. Unfortunately, the subject matter quickly changed and my control over the situation deteriorated, as you’ll learn from the following transcript:

CRANK: Mme. Galzogorist, who will win the next Presidential election?

MME. G: I see a Democrat in the future. Unless that idiot lunatic Bloomberg rides in on Ralph Nader’s horse and screws up the election results. A thousand psychic dings on his head! May he wake up thinking bugs are crawling around under his skin. No, actually I think he already thinks that. May he wake up thinking toads and cockroaches…

CRANK: Please excuse me for interrupting, but let’s get back on the subject. You mentioned a Democrat. Which one? Hillary? Barak Obama? John Edwards?

MME. G: It doesn’t matter. The Supreme Court will decide that any Democrat who gets elected will be unconstitutional.

CRANK: On what grounds?

MME. G: They don’t need grounds. They’re making it up as they go along. May the brains of Alito and Roberts turn to mush. I’d wish that on Clarence Thomas, too, but he doesn’t seem to have a brain.

CRANK: What are you talking about?

MME. G: Impeachment. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. and Samuel A. Alito, Jr. ought to be impeached for lying under oath. Until then, may an especially tough strain of cooties appear in their dreams to be inhabiting their scalps.

CRANK: What are you talking about?

MME. G: I’m talking stare decicis, the doctrine that you don’t change settled law. Both Roberts and Alito said under oath that they would abide by stare decicis in deciding cases. So far, they’ve overturned every settled cased they’ve considered. Their real abiding principal seems to be stare decicis my bigis behindis.

CRANK: But…

MME. G: Will you shut up and let me finish? We had an almost century-old ruling about prohibiting pricing fixing. They’ve overturned that. So much for free markets. Now manufacturers have another tool for screwing the consumer, thanks to Roberts and Alito, may Alito become increasingly aware that he is getting bald, and Roberts begin to believe that he is turning into Clarence Thomas.

We had a decades-old ruling that “separate-but-equal” segregated schools are not equal. Alito and Roberts overturned that. Welcome back, school segregation! What’s next, the legalization of lynch mobs? May Alito and Roberts have nightmares that they are getting hanged from trees! And may Thomas dream he is getting hanged from a high tech shoe tree.

Then there’s the First Amendment. If school kids express an opinion outside of class that their school principal doesn’t like, the Supreme Court has decided the First Amendment granting freedom of speech is invalid. May Roberts and Alito continually have nightmares that a fuzzy white fungus is growing in their throats and giving them laryngitis. And may the ghosts of their fathers regularly appear to them in dreams, reminding them that their names end in “Junior.” And may the public begin referring to them as, “the two juniors.”

CRANK: But what does this have to do with…?

MME. G: Oh shut your trap, Crank! Frankly, I don’t give Roe v. Wade another six months. May the two juniors both dream they’re in especially difficult labor, and wake up with murderous gas pains.

CRANK: Madame Galzogorist, you’re foaming at the mouth!

MME. G: Damn right I am! These guys are a menace. They don’t even support capitalism! They’ve reigned in the rights of stockholders to control corporate officers and boards that are robbing investors blind of their capital! May Junior and Junior grow to have such fear of pickpockets they will develop severe agoraphobia.

CRANK: So what you’re saying is…

MME. G: What I’m saying is, if you think the last Supreme Court invalidation of an election in which Gore won but lost was an abortion of democracy, wait until you see what these guys do even if the Democrats win by 70 percent! Impeach those liars now. Roberts and Alito. Junior and Junior. Impeach them for swearing falsely under oath to something their behavior almost immediately after appointment indicates was a total fabrication. They perjured themselves, Junior and Junior did. Perjury! Perjury! Perjury!

CRANK: Are you sure you…

MME. G: Of course, they’ll probably declare the impeachment proceedings unconstitutional, plunging the nation into civil unrest. Come to think of it, they probably want to bring back the Civil War, too.

NOTE: The New York Crank did what any alarmed citizen would do. I whipped out my cell phone and called 911. The paramedics arrived and trucked Mme. Galzogorist away to an under-funded city hospital. There she was declared normal and released after a lengthy rant to the staff psychiatrists concerning her fears that the court will declare health insurance unconstitutional. Oh and of course, they found she had no health insurance and billed her MasterCard $250,000 for the hospital visit. Since Mme. Galzorist cannot pay off the bill, she is being charged 25% interest a month. I hear that usury is again constitutional.

Mme. Galzogorist unleashes psychic dings and Gypsy curses against Donald Trump. (I wouldn’t flush even once if I were you, Donald.)

Parisian graffiti (circa 2014) of a different Donald with
related-but-different issues.

I just knew this was bound to happen. 

Madame Galzogorist, the fortune teller who occupied a walk-up space near my office in the seediest block of New York’s Garment District, back in the days when I had an office, has put a monster-sized hex on the Trumpster.

I found out about it when I stopped by her business digs, in search of a prediction about who would win the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, and whether that person would beat Donald Trump in the November elections. 

“Forget it, just forget it, wipe it out of your mind,” Mme. Galzogorist nearly shouted when I posed my questions to her. “I have no answer for you. I have trashed my crystal ball. Ditto the tarot cards and the tea leaves. I’ve had it trying to predict that creep. From now on, when it comes to politics, I deal only in curses.”

“Same as most of America,” I told her.

Hexes, dings and hernias

“No no no, not that kind of curse,” Mme. Galzogorist said. “I’m talking about deep hexes. I’m talking about humongous dings. I’m talking about conjuring doom and gloom onto The Trumpster’s head. I’m talking about about the kind of witchcraft that brings on vomiting and hernias and incurable migranes.”

That sounded slightly scary, so I asked Mme. Galzogirst what specifically she had done.

“Many horrors, many afflictions straight from the bowels of hell!” Mme. Galzgorist said.

“Yes, but for example?” I asked.

“I have cursed Trump’s toilet, so that it will lack the capacity to flush away the crap he deposits into it daily. I have cursed it to overflow ceaselessly, flooding his bathroom, creating a fetid pool of toilet backup around his bedroom slipper and his ankles, and getting soaked up by the cuffs of his pajama every time he sloshes into or out of his bathroom.”

“That’s pretty gross,” I said. “But he can just call the White House maintenance staff to patch things up….”

Stephen Miller 

isn't safe, either

“No! I have also put a hex on anybody whoever cleans up after Donald. That includes not only maids and plumbers, but also everyone from advisors to special assistants. For example, all the hair that once grew out of Stephen Miller’s head? That will now grow out of his nostrils and his ears in thick clumps. It will be difficult to cut. It will be almost impossible to keep up with.”

“I think Miller could fix that with a pair of scissors,” I said. 

“It will soon grow really fast, Mme. Galzorist said. “He can keep chopping away at it, but if Miller ever appears on TV, it will have to be with a pair of scissors up his nose.”

“That sounds terrible,” I said.

“You don’t know the half of it. I have also cursed Trump’s taste buds. It takes a while for that curse to kick in, but when it does, hamburgers will taste like spinach to him. And hamburger buns will taste like kale.”

“You’re so heartless!” I said.

“In fact, everything will taste like spinach or kale to him.”

“You’re impossibly cruel,” I said.

Confidentiality agreements?

You ain't seen nothing yet!

“I’ve also cursed his teeny little weeny,” Mme. Galzogist volunteered. I have filled it with spiritual jello. His woodie days are over. From now on, it’s eternally soft and trembly. Wait until you see the kind of non-disclosure agreements his lawyers are going to be writing the next time he tries to get involved with a woman. They’ll be rolling on the conference room floor. Not that they'll be able to disclose the source of their mirth."

“What else have you cursed?” I asked. 

“His comb over. May it fall out and need to be replaced by a wig, and may the wig blow off very publicly in a gust of hot air. Also, headaches. To punish him for writing off those poor GIs in Iraq who experienced severe concussion brain injuries which Trump dismissed as  ‘headaches,” I’m going to give him the Mother of All Headaches. I’ve got an incantation for that.”

“You know,” I said, “if all these things actually happen, Trump may suspect you of witchcraft.”

“Good,” said Mme. Galzogorist. “Then let him start a witch hunt.”

Mystic evil fortune teller curses John McCain and Bob Novak with powerful psychic ding

It’s been a while – almost a year and a month, in fact – since this blog last paid a visit to Mme. Galzogorist, the fortune-telling seer on one of Manhattan's grittiest commercial blocks. She's the one who has the power to dispense psychic dings. A psychic ding is the kind of curse that causes less-than-loveable people to feel severe mental anguish.

Or to look stupid.

So when I checked out the TV news recently, and heard about John McCain whining about Barack Obama's foreign travels, I figured Mme. Galzogorist had to be behind it.

Right I was. Here’s a transcript of my latest interview with my local fortune teller, mystic, seer, and bad mojo witch.

CRANK: Good to see you again, Mme. Galzogorist.

MME G: Watch where you’re walking. Don’t step on the dog.

CRANK: Certainly. I’ve come to ask you…

MME. G: Or the cat.

CRANK: Let me get right down to it. Did you give John McCain a psychic ding?

MME. G: Well I certainly didn’t give him a psychic dong. That guy has absolutely nothing that could point this nation out of the war, out of the economic mess we're in, or even out of his own tangled verbal underwear.

CRANK: Why are you taking it out on the poor senator?

MME G: Because he’s a whiner. He whined, whined, whined that Barack Obama had never visited Iraq. Waa waa waa! Then Obama goes to Iraq and McCain whines, whines, whines about Obama’s traveling. I also sense rumors that McCain's sore at Obama getting so much press coverage. I mean, what did he expect would happen? McCain asked for it and he got it. Lie down in dog poop, wake up smelly. He has no right to complain. So I dinged him.

CRANK: Did you ding McCain on the economy, too?

MME G: McCain dings himself on the economy every time he opens his mouth. Not to mention looking like an idiot when he tries to explain the history of the surge. His campaign theme song ought to be a takeoff on that 1958 doo-wop song.

Don’t know much about history
Don’t know ‘bout the economy
Don’t know much about a science book
Don’t know much about the French I took…

You can find all the original lyrics and download them for a Republican ring tone just by clicking on this link. Come to think of it, that could be George Bush’s theme song, too. Or the full verbatim text of the Republican platform.

CRANK: So do you think Obama’s going to win the election?

MME. G: Situation is cloudy. Ask again later.

CRANK: Why has Obama slipped in the polls?

MME G: I could give you a smart-aleck answer, such as, “Americans have an infinite capacity for voting against their own self-interest and wishes.” But all I’ll say officially is, “Situation is cloudy. Ask again later.”

CRANK: Did you also ding Bob Novack, the syndicated columnist?

MME G: You mean the guy who outed an active CIA operative, Valerie Plame, endangering the lives of CIA assets? If you’re talking about his hit-and-run of a pedestrian with his sports car in the nation’s capital, and his claim that he simply didn’t notice hitting a guy so hard that the poor victim ended up with casts on his neck and back, nah, I didn’t cause that ding. It was the pedestrian who dinged Novack’s Corvette, by allowing himself to get hit-and-run by Novack. Vroom vroom.

CRANK: How big is the ding?

MME G: I don’t know. But if Novack put the poor hit-and-run victim in the hospital, I imagine the ding is bigger than a dime. Somebody ought to go out and take a picture of the car before the damage disappears like, oh, a few million incriminating White House e-mails. Where are the paparazzi now that we need them?

CRANK: Will you be dinging any more politicians before the November elections. Say, by causing one of them to make a major gaffe?

MME G: Situation is cloudy. Ask again later.

CRANK: Thank you, Mme. Galzogorist.

MME G: Watch out! How many times do I have to tell you – don’t step on the cat!

President Trump’s first week in The White House, according to Mme. Galzogorist

The Crank's favorite fortune teller

predicts exactly what President

Trump will do in the first seven days.

Hold on tight to your shorts.

I recently paid another visit to Mme. Galzogorist, the fortune teller whose predictions have graced this space from time to time. I asked what President Donald Trump is likely to do in the week following his inauguration. 

Mme. Galzogorist tensed up defensively.  

"First of all, I want it known that any predictions I may have made concerning Hillary Clinton becoming the next President were based on faulty inputs,” she said. 

“I can’t help it if all those pollsters called the same nineteen people who are still listed in the phone book, and disturbed them at dinner time, creating misleading replies. ‘Garbage in, garbage out,’ as we say in the fortune-telling profession.”

“But what will Trump do his first week in the office now that we have him?” I asked. 

“Grab a pad and a pen,” she said. And she began to dictate. Here are my notes:

Day One: As promised, President Trump (get used to that title) repeals Obamacare the first day after inauguration. Informed that he must have the approval of Congress and the Senate to do this, he sends armed troops to their homes. The lawmakers are rounded up in their pajamas and skivvies from their beds, where they’ve been sleeping it off following a mad whirl of inaugural balls. They are bussed to the Capitol Building. While standing under the bright floodlights they are permitted to affirm the repeal of Obamacare by blinking.

Things get just a trifle dicey when the elastic on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's boxers breaks under stress and he drops his shorts, but order is rapidly restored.

As promised, Obamacare is replaced with something better — a $42 dollar Starbucks gift card, which can now also be used to help pay medical bills for certain approved services such as open heart surgery, although patients will be responsible for  the balance of their doctor and hospital bills. This will make them “more careful healthcare consumers,” House Majority Leader Paul Ryan says in a joint statement with President Trump.

“This Starbucks Card is much better than Obamacare because even if you don’t get sick, you can still use it to buy a latte,” the President adds.

The gift cards are funded by withdrawals from the savings, checking or IRA accounts of the beneficiaries. As such they are revenue neutral “and don’t cost the taxpayers a red cent,” President Trump says. “Is this a yuuge improvement or what?”

Day two: After a “lengthy and exhausting” 17-minute treaty negotiation by telephone between President Trump and Vladimir Putin, the United States and Russia announce an accord for “peace in our time.” (“And by the way, that’s a phrase my beautiful wife Melania just wrote,” Trump adds. “This just goes to show that you can be a ten and still write a great tweet.”)

Under the terms of the phone-in treaty, the United States will withdraw its NATO troops from all of the former “satellite nations” and expel those nations from NATO. In return, Putin will be permitted to re-install the nuclear missiles in Cuba that were shipped back home during the Kennedy administration. “Nobody can negotiate like I can,” President Trump declares.

Day three: In an effort to “put America back to work again,” President Trump announces a series of “shovel-ready” projects and sends Congress a bill for funding them. These projects include repair work to the facades of ten “critical, key, major, beautiful” skyscrapers in New York, all of which by coincidence happen to have the name “Trump” on them in gold letters.

Further, Congress funds 175 new jobs for golf course groundskeepers, all of whom“initially will work on Trump golf courses until we find others that are as good.” 

Trump takes a tax-deduction under another new program that gives tax breaks to job creators who pay their workers with money from the United States Treasury.

Day four: Hillary Clinton is arrested under orders from Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani and sent to prison for “Life plus 100 years” on charges to come concerning her e-mail server. 

When Clinton’s lawyers go to the Supreme Court for an immediate stay, claiming that she cannot be imprisoned without specific charges on which a jury finds her guilty, newly appointed U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Rudolph Giuliani sides with Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani. 

“Everybody knows she’s guilty, so why bother with a trial?” Giuliani chuckles. “It would only cost the taxpayers money we don’t want to waste.”

Day Five: President Trump defends his appointment of Giuliani to more than one Federal job at the same time (supported by voice vote of the Republican Congress and Senate) because, “appointing one person to multiple jobs will cut salary and overhead costs, and gives us more productive, more efficient government officials who have less time to be corrupt.”

Day Six: In a ceremony near Del Rio, Texas, President Trump and ICE Director Rudolph Giuliani wade knee-deep into the Rio Grande River and, with a pair of golden shovels, ceremonially “break water” for the new wall between the United States and Mexico. 

To quickly construct such a long barrier over water, the new Trump Administration has solved a difficult engineering problem by designing the wall to float on pontoons. 

When the Administration is alerted to concerns that desperate immigrants will then simply swim under the wall, teams of formerly-unemployed workers are hired to trap stinging jellyfish from the Gulf of Mexico, and transport them to the Rio Grande wall. Here  other newly-employed workers shovel the jellyfish off the wall into the water at regular intervals.

“That’s what I mean by shovel-ready jobs,” the President declares.

The appearance of a Hispanic-looking day-workers with blotchy sting marks on their arms, most of them carrying signs that say, “Will work for food,” outside 7-11 stores around the country gets brushed off by the White House as “a coincidence.”

Day Seven: President Trump publicly shreds the recently-signed treaty with Iran that limits their development of nuclear weapons. But Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei says the treaty didn't concern him anyway because, following Trump's election, he  put in an order for 50 nuclear warheads from North Korea. North Korea  jests, “we just might drop off a few in the United States on the way over.” 

Meanwhile distraught and concerned Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany makes a surprise visit to the White House to plead for the restoration of NATO in Western Europe. Trump says the U.S. withdrawal is non-negotiable, but as a gesture of friendship, he invites Chancellor Merkel to the Oval Office for tea and a photo-op. When they stand for what photographers assume will be pictures of them shaking hands, Trump grabs Merkel’s crotch and kisses her on the lips.

Mme. Galzogorist, famed political fortune teller, reveals top news headlines of 2010

I work in a gritty New York garment center neighborhood.

It’s peopled by bicycle messengers attempting to mow down pedestrians on the sidewalk, the world’s greasiest non-affiliated fried chicken joint, a shop that features cigarettes and an extremely busy lotto machine, a liquor store with a plastic shield between its salespeople and its customers, a massage parlor, and lots of wholesale garment outfits, some of which seem to be pitching their sales toward a retail store somewhere that must be called The Hooker Supply House.

But my favorite retail business on the block is the political fortune teller, Mme. Galzogorist.

Recently, I climbed a steep flight to her walkup high-tech Situation Center (see photograph above) and asked her to predict the top 10 headlines of the coming year.

“Murky vibrations in my crystal ball prevent me from giving you all 10,” she said, “especially since all you have in your hand is half a sawbuck and a George. But for that kind of money, I’ll give you six. A buck each.”

She had a deal. Here’s are the headlines she predicts we’ll be seeing before the end of the year.

Sarah Palin declares latest
US Supreme Court decision
is "clearly unconstitutional"

Ungandan judge, revealed to
be closet gay, sentences self
to death under new law

Joe Lieberman “repents” and introduces bill favoring Public Option after disgruntled health insurance companies cut his campaign contributions

RNC Chief Michael Steele promises he and Republicans will stop being square and instead “get groovy”

Palin clarifies her view of foreign policy:
“Yes, you can see Russia on a clear day
from my porch—but you need a telescope”

Obama declares that ending war in Iraq, like the Public Option, was "not something I campaigned on.”

That's all for now. I'm off to a Mexico vacation for sun, cerveza and tequilla. See you some time in January.

Who will win the Clinton-Trump debate? I asked my favorite learned futurist.

Her guess is as good as yours. Maybe better.

If you’re new, or even relatively new to this space, you’ve probably never heard of Madame Galzogorist, the fortune teller to the shmateh trade.

She inhabited a shabby room in an old loft building, one flight up in New York’s Garment District. A victim of painted signs that were misspelled (“Readings: $5 Speical,”) and of electrical signs that malfunctioned (see above) she nevertheless provided deep insights into the political unknown. For a nine year old example (my God, have I been at this blog that long?) go here.

Recently, I decided to check in with her about the first Clinton-Trump debate. Here’s a transcript of the interview:

Crank: Good afternoon, Mme. Galzogorist. I wonder if you’d give me a reading? I'd like to know the outcome of the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Mme. G: Did you bring money? My prices have gone up. Ten bucks, minimum.

Crank: I happen to have a ten dollar bill here….

Mme. G: That’s all you brought me? Cheapskate! Well, you always were. Now, what was it you wanted again?

Crank: Results of the first Clinton-Trump debate?

Mme. G: Let me look into my crystal ball here. Ah yes, I see. Buy corn futures. Short term. Buy one day, sell the next. Fast in and out.

Crank: I wanted political results. You’re giving me investment advice.

Mme. G: All opinions stated are merely and exclusively opinions, and may not be construed as advice. Nothing said here is meant either as an inducement to buy or an inducement to sell. Your results may vary. Past performance is no indication of future results. If you have been to an area where certain fungal infection are common…

Crank: But what about the debate?

Mme G:  I’m trying to tell you. Buy corn futures. This debate is likely to generate the biggest televised event since the McCarthy-Army hearings of 1950-whatever. Huge audiences. All with their fat asses plunked down on a couch, munching away on empty calories. Many munching on microwave popcorn. Some on pre-popped bags full of the stuff. It’s going to drive corn prices through the roof a Trump tower.

Crank: Yes, but the debate results?

Mme. G: The results will be an increase in corn prices on the commodity market. Perhaps more of a blip than a bubble, but an opportunity for the agile investor willing and financially able to take a certain degree of carefully-considered risk. Also, potato chips and corn chips. Who’s big in chips? The Pepsi-Cola Company? They own Dorritos, right? And people will need to wash down all that salty stuff with something wet and sweet and bubbly. Buy Pepsi-Cola. Either the stock, or short-term calls.

Crank: But who will be ahead after the debate?

Mme. G: Chief Executive Officers of snack food and beverage companies. Watch for them to collect humongous end-of-year bonuses. They will fall on their knees, thanking God for Hillary and The Donald. Networks trying to build their audience bases will also benefit. The American people? Not so much. Anybody who has half a brain and who has wrung most of the alcohol out of it is already intimately familiar with the character, vision or lack thereof, and suitability or lack thereof of both the candidates. The rest is all a circus. Speaking of circuses, there may be an opportunity for appliance makers to sell home cotton candy machines here. Spun sugar, that’s what America yearns for. That, and a rich diet of intellectual treacle.

Crank: Okay, let’s get to the really big question. Who’s going to win the next Presidential election?

Mme. G: For that you’d need to cross my palm with many, many. many fifty dollar bills. Many, many, many.

Crank: I’m a little short on fifties right now.

Mme. G: So what’s new? Come back when you’ve got more money.