Sunday, January 31, 2021

Space Lasers of the Lost Ark and Other Nightmarish Visions Caused by Psychedelic Current Events


 A laser-launching space ship captain watching out for Marjorie Taylor Greene

 Sorry that I’ve been missing from this blog for more than a week. I’ve been tripping. A friend revealed that these days you can zonk out merely by soaking newspapers in water, then blotting up the weird news and sucking on it.

“Current events will trip you into the stratosphere,” said my old hippy friend, who I hadn’t seen since 1968.

I tried it, and here are some of the visions I’ve been tripping out on since. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Congresswoman and quintessential mean girl, who evidently knows where all the best magic mushrooms are buried, as evidenced by her declaration that California forest fires are caused by “Jewish lasers” in outer space, stands up in Congress and repeats her charges. She has barely finished when a giant green beam penetrates a window of the Capitol and slices her in half.

The unfortunately consequence of this is that now there are two Marjorie Taylor Greene Congresswomen talking about Jewish space lasers. 

The Donald Trump Combination Death Machine and Corn Popper Arrives. One of Donald Trump’s final vindictive acts was to alter Federal regulations so that capital prisoners may now — or at least until President Biden reverses the order — be executed by hanging, the gas chamber, a firing squad, or the electric chair. In a horrible vision that woke me in the middle of the night screaming, Donald Trump was sentenced to death by electrocution. But that’s not the part that woke me up and made me scream. 

It seems that after they led Trump to the chair, strapped him down and blindfolded him, somebody filled his mouth with unpopped popping corn. And when they threw the switch…

Well, the popping noise alone was horrible. A geyser of fresh popcorn shot out of Donald Trump’s head into baskets that had been placed on the floor around the electric chair. When the execution was over, everybody scooped up a bucket of the stuff and went to the movies. And damn if I didn’t end up watching Freddy Kreuger doing his chain saw massacres again. That’s when I started screaming.

The My Pillow Guy becomes the plaintiff in a class action suit after it’s discovered that his pillows contain lightweight, easily-inhaled microchips that after one night’s sleep not only record our every movement but also record our conversations and relay them to a powerful computer buried deep in a Colorado mountain. There, Donald Trump’s agents sort through what we’ve said and transmit any anti-Trump utterance to the Proud Boys.

The plot is unmasked after the Proud Boys fatally beat up a little old lady who in her sleep muttered “Screw Trump and the daughter he rode in on!” An inhaled microchip records the beating and six Proud boys are tried, sentenced, and end up contributing ten thousand dollars worth of popcorn to the national economy. Weeks later, the My Pillow Guy ends up on television selling popcorn-filled pillows.

A mad scientist steals frozen embryos and then surreptitiously injects them into the noses of Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, and Steve Scalise. Within a few months, it becomes plainly and tragically evident that all these lawmakers are now pregnant ectopically, and that if they do not have abortions their noses will explode. But when they seek an abortive procedure, a fuddy-duddy sheriff shuts down the abortion clinic they are visiting and arrests everybody for “attempted murder.”

“I don’t know what they were snorting, but these pre-verts aren’t going to kill innocent babies just because their noses are stuffy,” says the sheriff.

Fortunately for Cruz, Hawley et al, the case is rushed through the legal system to the Supreme Court which rules that “these pregnancies are not natural” and that therefore the abortions are not really abortions but “corrective surgical procedures” that may, in fact, proceed. 

Three weeks after that, Cruz, Hawley, Rubio, Graham and Scalise are again seen in Washington, with remarkably tiny noses. They bristle when Nancy Pelosi says, “I see you boys have had some work done.”

A month after that  a woman with an ectopic pregnancy of the nose is refused permission for an abortion by the Supreme Court, which rules that the “not natural” condition it previously ruled on was pregnancy of men, not pregnancy of the nose


Friday, January 22, 2021

It ain’t over ‘till it’s over — and it ain’t over.

                                     Marilyn Monroe rendered in wax. 
 

“Who do I have to blow to get out of this movie?” — Attributed to Marilyn Monroe on the set of The Misfits, her final film.

 

And so, the Raiders of the Lost Republic, who crashed into the Capitol Building a few weeks ago in search of legislators to kill, are getting arrested. Some of them.

 

The only President of the United States who regularly put on makeup each day before he stepped out of his living quarters has fled to Florida.


There's a sane, humane President with government experience in the White House at last. 

 

So, all’s right with the world, right?

 

Don’t you believe it. Not for a second. 

 

We woke up from the nightmare, but the nightmare is still there, behind us, close enough to be blowing in our ears and breathing down our necks. If we have any sense at all, our hearts are beating hard, our bedclothes are soaked with perspiration, and we’re likelier to be hyperventilating than celebrating.

 

True, by getting Trump out of the White House, while keeping him off most of the social media, America has thrown a rock at a snake, and temporarily pinned him under it. Celebrate that. But do not let down your guard. 

 

He may wriggle out. Or somebody may lift the rock and free him. He may slither away, his skin a bit scraped, his odious excuse for a soul now more enraged than ever. 


But even if we’ve actually managed to silence him and send him into eternal and silent Florida exile, there are more where he came from.

 

Ted Cruz, anybody? You’ll find him in the kitchen, probably, slathering oleaginous lubricant on his fangs and forked tongue. Care for some Josh Hawley? Or a few more years of Lauren Boebert, or Marjorie Taylor Green? Perhaps you’d enjoy House Republican leaders Steve Scalise and Kevin (“Weathervane”) McCarthy? And all the Republicans who signed on to an amicus brief to overthrow the results of the Presidential election? And Senators so squishy on their allegiance to the truth and the U.S. Constitution that they could squeeze through a keyhole, like Lindsey Graham?

 

Or how about the laid-back and conscienceless Mowcow Mitch McConnell, who likes to bend law and custom to suit his needs. One day he’s staunchly defending the filibuster so that Democrats can get little or nothing done for America’s suffering people. The next, he’s tossing Senate customs in the dumpster (as when he withheld and held up judicial nominations during the Obama Administration, most notably among many that of Merrick Garland, on grounds that he later revoked when the shoe was on the other foot.)

 

So no, it isn’t over. Greed is eternal. The obscene lust for power for the sake of power is eternal. Corruption is eternal. The swamp, one thing — perhaps the only thing — that Donald Trump tagged accurately, is eternal. And for the moment, or perhaps for all of our lifetimes, swamp creatures cluster and mate around the Republican party.

 

So be careful where, and for how long you sleep. The majority of Republicans will play Joe Biden’s comity card when it suits them. But they will reshuffle the deck and come at their fellow Americans fangs out when they care to, as well. And those fangs are venomous.


This is a movie you can’t easily get out of. Nor its second run. Nor its third, fourth, fifth or five-hundredth.

 

Stay awake!

Tuesday, January 19, 2021

USA TO TRUMP: You're fired! (And good riddance.)


 

There will be no further comment from me on Inauguration Day.

Friday, January 15, 2021

In New York City we’re being urged to get an inoculation against COVID-19. What inoculation?

Another body gets loaded onto a refrigerator truck used as a morgue outside a New York City hospital. They say they're giving out COVID-19 inoculations now. Lotsa luck getting one.
 

I’ve been trying for three days to get an appointment for a COVID-19 inoculation. I’m beginning to think I have a better chance of buying a winning Mega-Millions lottery ticket.

 

My own doctors are at Weill-Cornell Medical Center, part of New York Presbyterian hospital. Weill-Cornell has a vast campus of hospital skyscrapers on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. New York Presbyterian has hospitals and sites in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan, and in lower Manhattan, and in the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. 


So where do they have their inoculation sites to help their patients from three of the city’s five boroughs?

 

One cheesy, out-of-the-way

inoculation site for 

a vast hospital system


Inoculation sitesThe plural? Hah! There’s only one site. They’ve stuck in in an armory in the distant reaches of Upper Manhattan, an inconvenience to anyone who doesn’t live in the neighborhood, or along a couple of West Side subway lines. I live near Midtown on the East Side of Manhattan. I’d need to take a cross town bus, and then a long, long subway ride, and then a bit of a hike to get to the armory.

 

But okay. I need that shot. I’m in a double high-risk category. In the first place I’m over 65 — way over 65. I’m 81 years old. And second, I’m immuno-compromised. I’m suffering from chronic lymphatic leukemia. So you’d think it would be easy.

 

Sorry. You can’t get an appointment at the armory. None available. Period. Never mind that it could be a two hour trip on public transportation (most New Yorkers don’t own cars) to get to the one out-of-the-way site the hospital is offering. There’s no way to get the shot without an appointment, and after three days of trying, I’ve concluded there’s no way to get an appointment.

 

How about at the city’s Bellevue Hospital, which is only a few blocks from where I live? Same bad news. No appointments available. And ditto a couple of other sites I’ve tried.

 

Fill out some forms.

Then fill out some forms. And then

fill out some forms.


Incidentally, each time I go to a site I have to fill out a questionnaire before I can ask for an appointment. My name. My date of birth. My address. Certain questions about my medical history. Questions about my ethnicity. (No, I don’t know why they need to know my ethnicity before they can give me a shot either.) Then, the site tells me there are no appointments. It does so either by saying so, or by leaving me staring at an image of a beating heart for an hour until I give up, or by crashing.


How long can you watch this stupid beating heart before you realize you're never getting a response?

 

Want to try another site? You go through the same infuriating rigamarole again. You want to go back to Columbia-Presbyterian to try again? Or to make a second, third, or seventeenth try at any other site? You have to fill out the forms all over again.

 

So a few questions: 

 

Why do the hospitals of Columbia-Presbyterian, that were permitted to merge into a vast, conglomerated hospital system, feel that a single, out-of-the-way armory in the outer reaches of upper Manhattan is sufficient for administering shots that could be a matter of life and death for many of its patients around the city? 

 

Have they grown so big that they’ve become too unwieldy to function with any efficiency in a pandemic?

 

What’s that, Columbia-Presbyterian? You feel you don’t have the space elsewhere? How about that vast lobby in the multi-gazillion dollar skyscraper building at 1305 York Avenue, donated by one of New York’s least-loved billionaires, David H. Koch? What’s that? Koch’s humongous lobby can’t be sullied by the hoi-polloi standing around in line for their shots? 

 

Okay, I understand. So how about emptying out one of the huge underground parking garages you have in your Weill-Cornell Medical Center? Oh, I know it’ll inconvenience the doctors. But what you’re saying by not making some of that garage space available is that it’s more important to make sure the doctors can drive to work instead of taking public transportation than it is to save lives.

 

A callback system? Hah!


And why, New York Presbyterian, can’t a poor desperate patient leave his or her name and contact information with you and have you get back to them with an appointment, in the order the request was made? Especially when the alternative is to spend futile hours, day after day, trying to somehow, somewhere, land an appointment for a COVID-19 shot.

 

Ditto you, Bellevue Hospital. And you, New York City Department of Health on Worth Street in Lower Manhattan, where it’s also impossible to get an appointment as of this writing. And you, the Ryan Center on 10th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. And on and on.

 

Cuomo and DeBlasio—

take a bow for incompetence


The fault for this ongoing SNAFU needs to be shared by New York’s Govenor Cuomo, and the city’s Mayor DeBlasio, and the administrators of all the public and private not-for-profit hospitals in the city. There appears to be no strategic planning. No attempt to take appointments more two or three weeks in advance. No attempt to make a record of who attempts to apply and then get back to them. 

 

In short Cuomo, and DeBlasio, and the hospitals are as incompetent and as screwed up as the Trump Administration’s famously failed vaccine team and the Trump PPE team. Maybe Jared Kushner has a future as a New York hospital administrator. Or on Governor Cuomo's staff. It seems to me he’d fit right in.

 

Sadly, the consequence of this incompetence is going to be vulnerable people who not only can’t get a shot, but who may contract COVID and die of it before they can even get an appointment for an innoculation.

Tuesday, January 12, 2021

A partial guide to peripheral stupidity in the waning times of Trump

                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?

Thursday, January 07, 2021

It’s time to move Donald Trump from the White House to some other house. But what about some of his enablers? Is it also time to disbar Giuliani?

          Move Trump and his enablers from the White House to the....

Rudolph Giuliani, Donald Trump Jr., Lara Trump and Eric Trump were among the rabble rousers who joined Donald Trump in inciting the treasonous insurrection that on Wednesday made headlines around the world. 


A mob invaded the Capitol, smashed windows, broke down doors, and trashed office, threatening legislators while interrupting the business of Congress.

 

“We’re coming for you,” Trump Junior said, reportedly referring to Republican members of Congress who don’t back pro-Trump efforts. Later, Junior told his supporters to call off the violence. That’s a bit like a mad bomber changing his mind several seconds after he’s lighted the fuse.

 

They all deserve to face a jury. But meanwhile, the New York Bar Association may be able to do something very quickly about Giuliani.

 

It was Giuliani who, prior to the mob’s terrorist attack on Congress, called for “trial by combat.” What could that possibly have been, if not a call to violence and sedition?

 

Disbar him.

 

It doesn’t take an act of Congress. It doesn’t take a presidential order. It doesn’t take any government action. All it takes is the members of the New York Bar Association.

 

Lawyers of New York? Where do you stand?


 UPDATE (January 11)— Turns out there's more to disbarring Giuliani than I thought, but somebody at the New York Bar Association either reads this blog or arrived at the same conclusion anyway.

Saturday, January 02, 2021

14 newspaper headlines I’d like to see in 2021 but most probably won’t

Guaranteed authentic charicature

Trump Forcefully Escorted 

From White House in Strait Jacket


Vengeful Elephant Herd

Tramples Don and Eric

During African Safari


Lindsay Graham Resigns Senate Seat

To Join Remote Tibetan Monastery

Meanwhile Mitch McConnell sends for monastery brochure


Trump Rests Peacefully 

In Hospital After

Eighteen Massive 

Thorazine Injections 


Doctors Remove Kimberly Guilfoyle’s

Vocal Chords In Emergency Surgery


“Covfefe” Was Code Signal To

Trump’s Russian Handlers

Classified CIA Report Reveals


Self-Pardon Tossed by Court

After Trump Misspells “Pardon”

“The U.S. Constitution says nothing about “paradonnes,” Judge declares


1,000 Vials of Spoiled Vaccine Discovered 

In Trump’s Fridge, Next to Expired Hamburgers


Ivanka Reveals She Leaked

White House Secrets to The Press

"I didn’t think they’d print it," she says


Assay of Trump Tower Gold Toilet 

Reveals It’s Actually Iron Pyrites


Former Wharton Classmate Reveals He Got

Paid to Take Final Exams for Donald Trump

"I feel lucky I wasn't stiffed," he says.


National Arts Commission Declares Border Wall 

An “Eyesore” And Orders It Torn Down


Javanka Splitsville?

Friends Refuse to Say Until They

Get Their Covid Vaccinations


Melania: “As Best I Can Remember

Donald Was Terrible in Bed”