Bing! Bang! Boom! You’re dead! He’s dead! She’s dead! Everybody’s dead! (But it’s worth it for the great swag I got from the NRA!)

            I mean, isn’t this cool stuff worth a few measly lives?

 

News from all over!

 

•In France, a 25 year old Brit who had been living in France got to die in France near his home there, when a hunter “mistook him for a boar.” The English guy was chopping wood in front of his house when the hunter’s bullet whacked him. Hey, I totally get it. A guy with an axe chopping logs looks exactly like a tusked pig with four legs digging for truffles. No need to explain any further.

 

•Near Metairie, LA, at a place called the Jefferson Gun Outlet, some dude with a gun entered, which seems logical to me. But then, according to news reports, the dude started squeezing the trigger, and it would seem that he was shooting at live people, not targets. Whereupon, the armed staff and customers began shooting back at the dude. Holy flying bullets, Batman! In the end, two men and a woman were dead, two of them customers. Well, three of them customers if you count the dude who allegedly started shooting first. 

 

•Back to France, somewhere else in France where — whee! — a shooter nailed another Englishman. Well, a Welshman, but even so. See, the Welshman was riding his bicycle on a popular route in the French Alps, when the hunter nailed him. And you’ll never guess what this Frenchmen said. You ready for it?

 

Right! You’re right! He said that when he plugged the biking Welshman, he thought he was shooting a boar. Whoever the guy is in France who’s been training boars to chop wood and ride ten speeds, he must be a genius.

 

•Back to the USA,  stats last year revealed that 92 people were killed unintentionally by kids as of October,  2020. 

 

•Of course, that’s a piffle compared to the total number of gun-related deaths in the USA in 2018. (39,740 of them.) I have been unable to determine how many of those people killed by guns were mistaken for boars. Or how many were riding bicycles.

 

Which brings me to a letter from the NRA. It popped up in my e-mail this week. It’s way too long to quote in full. Take my word that most of it seems intended to convince you that mild-mannered Joe Biden is secretly Satan incarnate, complete with horns, a tail, and claws that have specially evolved to grab guns from Second Amendment true believers. But here are some of the juicy bits, in italics:

Dear Crank,

 

No matter what kind of firearm you own, Joe Biden’s anti-gun agenda is aimed squarely at YOU.

 

Who? Moi?

 

Joe Biden has said flat-out that he wants to LICENSE you, REGISTER your guns, punish you with huge gun and ammo TAXES, and RATION the number of firearms you’re allowed to buy.

 

Well, no wonder people are taking umbrage! All those SCREAMING CAPITAL LETTERS! They turn the NRA into a howling ringer for Kimberly Guilfoyle!

 

Besides, what’s the point of standing next to a nuclear reactor until my DNA mutates, and then growing 25 arms, if I can’t have a gun in each arm? See what I mean?

 

Crank, Joe Biden is coming for the guns in your gun safe right now.

 

Well, NRA, they’re sure as hell not going to get any guns from my safe. I leave all my weaponry out on the coffee table so the kids can play with them. Not to mention that they're handier there for shooting wild boar from the living room window whenever the boars bike by.

 

And hey, the NRA's letter told me that if I start my membership before a deadline, I’ll get my "CHOICE" of an NRA pocketknife with a handle made out of exactly the same kind of wood they make gun stocks from. Wow, wow, wow!

Or if the wood-handled pocket knife doesn’t float my boat, I can choose instead  a "3-in-1 Rechargeable NRA flashlight," an NRA Insignia Cap, or an NRA “Camo Duffel Bag,” possibly so I can go unseen to the next insurrection in Washington.

 

I’m sold, NRA. But you’ll have to excuse me now. A friend just called and told me that any minute, a whole bunch of boars wearing bicycle jerseys are going to come pedaling past my window. So lock and load!

  

Where are they now? A peek into the future of the former Trump administration.

                                    "I see the future and it tickles."

 The following is an excerpt from a soon-to-be-founded magazine, Popular Politics, July 2025 edition, that we’ve obtained through astral projection. The New York Crank makes no warranty as to the reliability of that magazine’s reporting.

 

Melania Trump is working as a chambermaid in a run down tourist hotel in Slovenia after a well-publicized attempt to become an interior decorator didn’t pan out. She is rumored to be working with a ghostwriter on a book entitled Never Sign A Pre-Nup.

 

Donald Trump will be eligible for parole in another 32 months. He has occasionally been seen exchanging ideas in the exercise yard with Bernie Madoff.

 

Steve Miller is working as a transvestite dominatrix in a Virginia bordello.

 

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephanie Grisham, Kayleigh McEnanany, and Kellyanne Conway  are partners in a struggling PR firm located in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. (Yes, there really is a Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.)

 

Kimberley Guilfoyle is a traveling carnival barker.

 

Steve Bannon runs a resort and fat farm for the well-to-do in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. He is often seen jogging on Route 7, followed by a slow-moving truck equipped with an oxygen tank and a defibrillator. 

 

Peter Navarro is now a country and western singer, known for his yodeling.

 

Donald Jr. and Eric Trump work as decoys at a paintball firing range. Junior was recently detained by police for six hours when they mistook him for a stolen Jackson Pollock painting.

 

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have sold their real estate holdings to raise money for what they predict will be a blockbuster movie entitled, “War and Peace: The Musical!” College friends of Jared’s wrote the book and the lyrics, including one called “Everybody here has the hots for Natasha,:The prettiest girl who ever climbed the Steppes,” as well as the theme song: “War and Peace.” Somebody was kind enough to slip us the lyrics:

War and Peace

Will it never cease?

First there’s peace

And then there’s war

And then we have some 

Peace some more

And then again another war

And then...

And then...

And then... 

And then there’s peace.” 

In addition to co-producing the film with Jared, Ivanka plans to direct the movie herself and will also star as Natasha.

 

Louis DeJoy is still Postmaster General of the United States. There’s some stuff you just can’t make up.

 

Modest proposals concerning statues, the weather, Tom Friedman, and Wyoming — plus an honorable mention for the Texas power grid

License plate recently seen in New York City. On a Beamer, of course. It has nothing to do with anything else here. Just sayin'.

A modestly proposed solution to the statue problem: You know the statue problem. Although I’m not aware of any statue census, I’m willing to bet that half the statuary (museums excluded) in the United States are either of Confederate generals or people who in some way were racist. And the list keeps expanding. And every time you tear a statue down, there’s a roar of bleating and protest. 

So I have a thought. Instead of tearing down Confederate statues, erect statues of Satan next to each of them. Hey, you have your statues, Satanists have their statues, everybody’s got a hero to worship, and we can all go home. 

What’s that? People are going to get tired of looking at all the Satan statues next to all the Robert E. Lee statues? Tell you what. Here and there, put up a statue of Priapus instead. 

 The Crank’s Theory of Planetary Instability. It's freezing and snowing in Texas, where with the juice turned off (more about that further on) it’s colder than in parts of Alaska.

How can that be?

I’m not willing to say the magic words “climate change” and leave it at that. I have a theory that if near the Arctic Circle summer temperatures now can reach a scorching 99 degrees, while Texas feels and looks like Alaska, something else is going on. Nope, not a secret plot. An unintended consequence of….

Effing fracking! 

Wait a damn second! Don’t turn your back and snicker! Listen up! Just suppose that all those repeated underground explosions knocked the earth off its axis. Remember, it’s not just a little bang here and a little bang there. It’s a bunch of big booming bangs, week after week, year after year, place after place down below.

So the shaken earth rotates in some crazy manner and the next thing you know, Texas is at a latitude where Alaska used to be, and Alaska’s where the Equator used to be. I don’t know about you, but some people may be buying beachfront property in Nome.

Why oh why Wyoming?  When is the world (or at least The New York Times) going to do something about Tom Friedman of The New York Times? From as far back as I can remember reading him, he’s been saying things that, while not obnoxious, and not fearsomely objectionable, are just the slightest bit off-kilter.

 

Examples? Quite a few years ago, before a certain Israeli Prime Minister fell into a pit of corruption, Friedman was more or less regularly addressing his columns to “Bibi.” As if Benjamin Netanyahu woke up every morning and looked for Friedman’s column in the Times before he even went to pee. Some time after that, Friedman wrote a book called “The World Is Flat,” (which meant, I think, that people communicate faster these days — which Friedman evidently thoughtwas a huge discovery) and he seemed to use the phrase in every last damn self-promotional column until I wanted to vomit.

Now Friedman’s making pronouncements about cancer that ain’t necessarily so. Specifically? 

“The fact that one of our two national parties would stick with a leader who dispatched a mob to ransack the Capitol in hopes of overturning our last election is an acute national problem — a cancer, in fact. And like any cancer, the required treatment is going to be painful for the patient,” he writes. 

Oh yeah, Mister Know-It-All? Well, I happen to have a form of cancer called Leukemia, and the treatment thus far consists of painlessly swallowing two pills a day. I’m not saying that many cancer patients aren’t in pain. I’m just saying that once again, you’ve made a pompous universal declaration that is four-tenths bonafide baloney. Nor would your proposals to “cure” this cancer be particularly “painful” to me. In fact, I’d be delighted by your proposed act that would get rid of the Senate filibuster, grant the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico statehood, and “forbids voter suppression.”

While I find all three prospect pleasurable, not painful, I confess it’s a neat trick if you can do it. But about Wyoming….

Friedman correctly states that D.C. and Puerto Rico each have more U.S. citizens than Wyoming. Sheesh! So does Brooklyn.  So does Queens. Should they each be their own state?

I have a better idea. Eliminate Wyoming’s statehood. Now there’s a proposal that’ll cause some real pain. Give part of Wyoming to Colorado, part to Montana, and part to Idaho. That’ll bring the population of those states closer into line with those of California and New York, which also only have two Senators each. Or rewrite the U.S. Constitution. I imagine that would cause some pain, too.

And speaking of Texas…Well, I did mention Texas a bit earlier when I was talking about Wobbly Fracked Earth Climate Change. But also, Texas is the state that refused to have anything to do with the other two major power systems in the United States because Free Enterprise. As for tight Texas government regulation of the utilities…what? You mean socialism?

So you had a bunch of utility companies that didn’t do what it takes to protect the Texas power supply from nature because, hell, nature’s probably some kind of socialism, too. And now most Texans are freezing their butts off, while others are paying dearly to stay warm.

According to the Washington Post, “the temporary train wreck of that [Texas electrical] market Monday and Tuesday has seen the wholesale price of electricity in Houston go from $22 a megawatt-hour to about $9,000.”

Now I’m going to do some back-of-the-envelope figuring here. That about a 409 times increase in prices, wholesale. Let’s assume retail follows suit. So if you typically pay, say, sixty bucks a month to keep your lights, and your heat, and your electric refrigerator, and your phone recharger on in Texas, you’re now going to have to pay over $24,500. Now there’s an electric bill that’s as BIG as Texas!

The good news is, that a heck of a lot of Texans will probably pay a lot less than that because they don’t have any electricity to pay for.

A name by any other name would smell as nomenclatural

Who’s the pearl of a genius who thought up this name?

As I sit writing this, the Senate of the United States (I assume this since I’m not watching at the moment) is effectively deliberating how to label the events of January 6^th. They will listen to evidence. Then they will decide whether by telling his followers to march on the Capitol,  “take back America” and “fight like hell” for Donald Trump’s right to overturn a legitimate election, Trump should be labeled as having a) incited a riot or b) merely exercised his First Amendment rights to free speech.

 

Right, and all those rioting people bent on lynching legislators and other acts of violence merely transmogrified out of dandruff and horse hairs floating in the Washington Monument reflecting pool.

 

But no further comment from me on that today. Not that you need any. Instead, let me  delve into a few other exercises in the fine art of abusing nomenclature.

 

“Aunt Jemima” was clearly a racist brand name. But the new name’s just dumb. Whether because racist intention or more likely mere stupidity, the image of “Aunt Jemima” the overweight house slave in the kitchen that appeared on a leading brand of pancake flour and syrup, perpetrated an awful racial stereotype. Such stereotyping has no place in American commerce. 

So hurrah that the Quaker Oats Company, the maker of the product, finally got its guano together and changed the name.

 

But what marketing genius came up with "Pearl Milling Company" as the replacement? It's racism-free  — except that they mention on the new label that it's still "Aunt Jemima," just in case you're not sure. And it's also personality-free.

How about Quaker pancake flour? Or if that sullies either the company’s image or the Society of Friends, how about anything else? Dan’s Dandy Pancake Flour. Pancake Pete’s Fluffy Flour. Power Flour for Pancakes. Or even — what the hell!— steal or license a brand name from Wylie Coyote and make it Acme Pancake Flour. At least I can remember that.

 

What’s sad is, if the brand with a now totally forgettable mouthful of a name flops after all these years, some right-wing yoyos are going to blame it on “cancel culture” having forced the name change. And that will aid and abet, not neutralize, the advocates of racism. 

 

But speaking of cancel culture…

 

Sorry, Abe, and George, and Tom and Jim and Diane. You’re cancelled! 

Alas, I regret to say that members of my own progressive crowd have  gone off the deep end without their water wings.

 

A report out of San Francisco tells me that forty-four schools throughout the city will be renamed, by order of the local school board, because they are named after historical figures who “engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting social progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

 

Holy cow! You mean San Francisco had schools named after Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee? Or was there an Attila the Hun School, a Simon Legree Vocational High School of Slave Abuse, a Jeffrey Dahmer Mass Murder Preparatory School, and an Adolph Hitler High?

 

Nope. The San Francisco school board is now horrified that its schools are named after Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Senator Diane Feinstein, among others.

 

Abe Lincoln? Well, yeah, because he backed policies that harmed Native American Tribes. And George Washington owned slaves. And Diane Feinstein — get this — “has been accused (accused!) of ordering a Confederate flag to be replaced after it was torn down, when she was Mayor of San Francisco back in the 1980s.”

 

The Roosevelt Middle School will also be renamed, even though the school board isn’t certain which Roosevelt the school was named for, Teddy or Franklin. (Or maybe Eleanor?) Paul Revere is about to ride off into San Francisco-imposed oblivion. And on and on goes the purge.

 

Listen, it’s one thing to avoid naming schools or monuments after traitors to the United States such as Jefferson Davis, who betrayed his country to preserve human slavery. Or to eschew monuments to rabble rousers, race baiters and thugs. But there’s no such thing as a perfect human being. Was Lincoln wrong to allow conquest of Native American lands, if he did so? 

You bet he was. Damn wrong. But he also kept the union together and ended the abomination of slavery, and in the end that has to count for something worth memorializing, one supposes. 

 

What did Paul Revere do wrong? I duno. According to history.com, he had kind of a spotty military record. He commanded American soldiers against some British forces in Maine, but his forces “failed to attack in time” and British reinforcements arrived, forcing an American retreat. Revere was charged with cowardice and insubordination and booted out of the militia. (But he was acquitted in 1782. So go figure.)

 

“It’s not just symbolic. It’s a moral message,” said Mark Sanchez, a member of the school board. 

 

But perhaps that’s exactly the problem.

 

Flat out, clear cut, deliberate evil should deservedly get purged from places of honor. Morality, on the other hand, is a a fluid and tricky concept. There are some things we can all agree are immoral, like murder, or rape, or deliberate genocide. But there are other things where someone with a liberal turn-of-mind might allow for shades of gray.

 

It’s only a few decades ago that being gay was immoral. There were people who were raised thinking masturbation was immoral. Or failing to attend church.

 

Your immorality may be my right to self-expression. Is San Francisco’s own Margo St. James, recently deceased, (and called "San Francisco's Joan of Arc") a saint who started a movement to protect and liberate sex workers? Or is “sex work” by definition immoral and its organizers like St. James worthy of nothing but opprobrium? 

 

It's a long, hard slog if you search for high achievers who are perfectly moral by everybody's standards. With few exceptions the only morally perfect people are nonentities. And after a while the exceptions will run out. Sadly, it's likely that after that, some of the exceptions will be discovered to have had some unexceptional flaws. I can’t imagine what they might be — anything from cheating on exams, to hidden cases of child abuse, to nose picking.

 

The problem with naming schools only after morally perfect people is that it’s a perfect way to begin naming schools after mediocrities. 

 

Not that I’d have anything against a Hermione J. Nebbish High School. Or a Morton J. Schlub Middle School.  

 

Right, Mr., uh….what’s the name of that guy on the San Francisco School Board again?

“Vax THIS!” or, You Can’t Be Too Vulnernable to COVID-19. Or Too Stupid.

 Image lifted from my favorite photography website, PeopleOfWalmart.com

And so the insanity continues. Back on January 15^th, I posted here about the infuriating difficulties I faced, as an immune-compromised 81-year-old, trying to get a COVID 19 immunization in New York. This despite the fact that I’m in a high priority group.

 

It’s now February 7^th, and although I make almost daily attempts to get on a vaccine reservation list somewhere in New York, still no luck. Yes, a few of my peers have gotten their shots in out-of-the-way locations. But no matter how eligible you might be, catching an immunization in New York City is like going fishing with an un-baited hook and hoping a fish will accidently collide with it and somehow get stuck to the sharp part.

 

I’ve written to Governor Cuomo, explaining my plight. Almost immediately I got an auto-reply telling me my letter would be read with great interest by members of his staff. But thus far, no live human  from the Governor’s staff has been in touch to signal someone with a heartbeat is aware of the problem and working to help senior citizens get immunized before the virus kills us off. Or perhaps the computer “forgot” to pass my letter along. 

 

But I did land on the governor’s junk mail list. Now I receive almost daily e-mails from Cuomo telling me what a great, superb, super-duper job he’s doing handling the pandemic. 

 

In other words, “Screw you, Crank — and all the senior citizens you rode in with.”

 

On top of that, every time the pool of eligible vaccine candidates creeps even a millimeter towards shrinking toward a manageable size, somebody expands the crowd. Here in New York City, they’ve now added taxi drivers as a category to compete for the horribly limited supply of vaccine with us old, frail, and therefore highly vulenerable types.

 

To vax? Or anti-vax? That is the question. While vulernable people futilely searching for vaccines tremble in fear, the New York Times this Sunday morning ran an article about anti-vaxxers, whose numbers in California evidently include people presumably educated enough to know better, in affluent communities like Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. Some random quotes from the Times piece (and please forgive the weird line spacing and undulating paragraph widths, courtesy of Google's buggy new "improvements" to Blogger):

But in the past two years, and in the months of the coronavirus pandemic, there has been an uptick in confrontational and threatening tactics.

They assaulted a lawmaker in Sacramento and threw menstrual blood onto legislators in the Senate chambers at the State Capitol in 2019, and last spring helped pressure the chief health officer in Orange County to resign by publicly revealing the official’s home address. Last month, two weeks before the stadium vaccination protest, a group of women threatened lawmakers at a budget hearing at the Capitol, telling senators that they were “not taking your shot” and that they “didn’t buy guns for nothing.”

“I think the thing that’s most concerning is that they’re escalating,” said State Senator Richard Pan, a pediatrician and Democrat who wrote vaccination legislation. Mr. Pan was struck in the back in 2019 by an anti-vaccine activist and was the likely target of the blood-throwing incident in the Senate chambers that year.

“This movement not only puts out mis- or disinformation about vaccines or lies about vaccines, which in itself can be harmful, but they are also aggressively bullying, threatening and intimidating people who are trying to share accurate information about vaccines,” he said.

Why is it that the most appropriate quote that comes to mind comes from Bubba Gump? “Stupid is as stupid does.”

Best bon mot of the week also comes from the New York Times. “America’s political and media classes today could turn a bologna sandwich into a culture war issue.”

Unfortunately, aphorisms about transmogrifying fatty meats into tangible action don’t always work. A grand jury might indict a ham sandwich, but no New York grand jury has yet to indict Donald Trump for the financial crimes he is alleged to have committed.

Well, I guess that if government was populated entirely by people with brilliant minds, we wouldn’t have had Donald Trump in the White House in the first place.

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

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!

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

 

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

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 sites? The 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 10^th 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.

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?