Is This Thing On? by annie newman

Our Pal, Futility Mike

On this day of Hope and Change, let us ask you to change over to our friend Mike Little's insanely humorous blog, http://www.futility.typepad.com.

Mike, a staid journalist by day, is one of the funniest and most depressing people in the world. He lives in Washington, DC, where, were it not for his good wife, he probably would have been locked up weeks ago, to keep him from standing on the sidelines of the inaugural parade, wagging his penis in the general direction of Dr. Jill Biden.

He doesn't have any particular lust for Dr. B, or for that matter for the First Lady or the Prez or the Veep. It's just the kind of thing he would do. And he voted Democrat and everything. He's just a hell-raiser.

So go on over and see what Futility Mike is up to.

After Inauguration, No More Laffs? A Re-Mix

After we posted this a few days ago, we realized that it could have been improved in so many ways, from using the correct font, to cleaning up the spelling errors, to uh, actually being funny. So we mixed it up a bit and this entry is now something like a whole new entry. Really. 

Some people--the New York Times in particular--are a little concerned about what happens after George W. Bush goes home.

No, not the eternal question of Will he really leave the White House? What guarantee do we have? Or even Has anyone even told Dick Cheney about this?

The big worry is, what will we laugh at now?

For as many years as anyone's been counting, Presidents have been funny. 

Maybe it started with Vaughn Meader and the JFK comedy album. Lots of people don't remember this deeply funny tribute to a man who was inaugurated with, if possible, even more idealistic hope than President Obama, but it rocks. Check it out at YouTube. 

We have to thank our friend La Skolnique for this reference. And also for the joke, made when she was 3 years old, that goes like this:

La Skolnique's Dad, Le Pere Skolnique: What little girl has the best Daddy in the whole world?

La S.: Caroline Kennedy!

LBJ was funny because he came from Texas.  And his wife was named Lady Bird.  And he showed his appendectomy scar to reporters. So that might have been more "horrifying" than "funny", but at least it brought the man down to earth. Did it ever.

Richard Nixon was funny for the same reason that watching a cat trap a mouse is funny.  The cat takes itself so damn seriously. The mouse is blithe, unconcerned. Okay, the "kill" is not so funny, and neither was Watergate. But everything before and after was pretty cool.

Gerald Ford? We're still collapsing in mirth. The falling down. The dumbness. The pardon.

And Jimmy Carter was from the south. Always funny. He also had extremely humorous teeth. We'll see how funny teeth can be if Joe Biden does anything to attract attention to himself.

Reagan...even his best pals made fun of Reagan, and he joined in, because he was a sociable and humorous man. (You pretty much had to be, to get along with Jack Warner back in the day). Of course the opposition made fun of him too. Everyone was pretty happy, except the people who were dying of AIDS.

Poppy Bush was preppy and his wife looked like a human with Mad Cow disease.   

Now, with the Clintons you also got a two for one. Because even if you saw Hilary as an important trailblazer, there were still her hairstyles. And Bubba? Unlike FDR and JFK, WJC was dumb enough to to get involved with the girl under the desk. FDR just flirted with them. JFK didn't know their last names.

And then there was W. Don't make us talk about that.

Now we have Barack Obama, about whom no one can speak without getting a little verklempt. And even when those lumps in the throat go away...which they have to, someday, right?...he's just cool and competent and intelligent and strong and sweet and wonderful and has a terrifically good build.

So, no, not much funny. Not even from the Chicago in-laws who, back in the seventies, probably would have had a Norman Lear sitcom of their own.

But here's something I figured out. And JC, if you're reading this, you can have it free for nuthin'.

 

We're not saying the resemblance is a bad thing. But it certainly does exist.

The Presidents and a New One

Left to right: Oh, Come on, you know who they are.

There are all kinds of ways to decode this.

For example, are Clinton and Carter wearing red ties because they're the good guys (in my history book, they certainly are.) In which case why is Obama wearing a (gulp) blue tie?

Or were all the Dems supposed to wear red ties and the Reps to to wear blue ties, just as a kind of a gentle joke sort of thing, and Obama didn't get the memo? Which would be completely understandable, by the way, because he's the only one of these guys who has anything to do outside of standing around waiting for photo ops, and he's pretty darn busy.

Why do Poppy and W. look so much more youthful then Bill and Jim? Jim in particular has shrunk so much with age, Obama might have stepped on him by accident if they had stood next to each other. Perhaps it is true that the Most Important Job in the World ages a President. In which case, it's obvious that Bush 41 and 43 did not consider it to be all that important. Poppy could probably still throw a touch football with the best of them.

Damn it, why are they all smiling?? Why? Why? We took a look at our stock portfolio this morning and, believe us, there is nothing to be smiling about. Even if Bill did just tell the one about the Intern and the Leader of the Free World. (After which Poppy told the one about who Dick Cheney had had, in that exact same chair, and W. giggled, and Jimmy sank to his ancient knees in prayer.)

Could they all be smiling because each man knows his own legacy is secure and smells like roses, while W., who knows damn well that his smells like fertilizer (and doesn't know what "legacy" means anyway, except if it's when you have to let a fellow's younger brother into the frat because the fellow was a member in good standing, no matter how much of a damned outsider the brother is) is merely smiling in relief because it's finally over?

There's a space between Jim and Bill. Is that where Reagan should have been? No, really, are they doing some kind of thing like when we set a place of Elijah at the Passover table and he'll be there but we won't be able to see him? Because, if so, sheesh. 

We realize that in certain circles, the ones with the "Palin 2012" bumper stickers, Reagan is considered a sort of demi-god who was too good for this earth--the way we think of JFK, and Elvis. But really. As one who lived through it. Sheesh.

Could it be that Jim has a kind of stinky Old Guy thing going on? We hope not. Granted the man must be about 112 by this time, but he was one of our earliest heroes and every passing year has only made him more heroic to us.

We cast our first vote for Jimmy Carter, and we watched as he became one of the most unpopular presidents ever (until W. came along and we all realized how unpopular a president could be). We watched him go home to Plains in something like disgrace and we watched as Reagan's shallow, shallow charm made everyone dislike Jim even more. 

But Jimmy has spent the 29 years since then building homes for the homeless. Whereas Bush 41 has been playing touch football, Bill has been pimping his wife (it might not be all that bad, but he hasn't done anything for humanity, has he?), and Bush 43 went into retirement on or about January 23, 2000.

We wish we could find a pic of Obama sitting down and talking things over with Jimmy. Those other guys can go grab a sandwich somewhere.

Love in the Basement

One character to whom we wish to introduce you is our house. Known to us as The Old Newman Place, it is a 1932 four-square bungalow, apparently built from a Sears kit by a crew of loafers who were sitting around the corner tavern waiting for the New Deal to kick in, when the person who owned this 1/3 acre told them it was free beer for them as would lend a hand, and he didn't mean the needled stuff, neither.

(If this passage made sense to you, you were probably wondering what good it did anyone to sit around a tavern before Repeal, anyway. You're such a smarty!)

Anyway, the boys pitched right in, and we think many a fine craftsman learned a profession on this job. As in, the electricians learned plumbing, the plumbers learned floor-installation, and the flooring men learned wallpaper hanging. We should point out that no one learned any of this well.

Time went on and we have owned this house since since 2005. We actually got a mortgage in 2005, although we were broke, in school, and subsisted on a small and undependable hand-out from our brother. This, in its essence, is the germ of today's Financial Crisis. 

Anyway, we live here with our Beautiful Daughter, our Cat and our Young Roommate. We refer to her as a Roommate although she does not contribute to the upkeep of this house in any way. She pays for her own food (a slight cost), beverages (not at all slight) and cell phone bill (roughly equal to the gross national product of Peru).

Every third week she unloads the dishwasher and puts everything back in the wrong place, an action which must be greeted with fawning approval or else we will lose the right to ask her to do it again. (Not that she will, but we like being able to ask.)

Our Roommate keeps company with a nice young man who looks forward to working in his father's construction company. This ambition has the dual benefits of preventing him from taking any further education (he doesn't know when he'll be called to a full-time job) and keeping him under his parents' thumb, unable to do anything of which they disapprove. They are the sort of people who disapprove as a way of life, although they call it Religion.

Our Roommate has been working part-time at Walmart for two years and is already up to 25 cents more than the minimum wage. She works 45 hours per week, which is called part-time with overtime. In this way, she is protected from having to take time off to go to the doctor, as she has no benefits whatsoever.

In this happy situation, it is obvious that the two needed to become engaged, and so they did, on a $300 ring and a sixpack of Mike's Hard lemonade. And they have been miserable ever since.

Since they live in our basement, we have ear-witnessed every moment of the romance: the recriminations, the second thoughts, the throwing of the ring in the ring-giver's face, the piling out of the basement and into the cars and the speeding off madly in every direction, the reconciliatory pizza, the creaking bedsprings, the having the ring re-sized because it cracked when it hit the basement's concrete wall.

Does Love always go this way? Or is it Love in a Basement which makes it go wrong?

We are actually happy to be living on the celibate (and airy) second floor of the Old Newman Place.