“Part Deux of The Last Annual conTIMplating 2016 Presidential Voting Guide” or “Boy, Do We Have Issues”

So last week I waxed eloquent upon the upcoming presidential election, which is increasingly becoming a toss-up, as in “I’m about to toss-up my breakfast.”   If you missed last week and wish to avoid being totally lost, you may peruse it here.  Said post, as designed, sparked a short conversation with my first-time-voting progenic offspring regarding the purported leading and distressingly fingernails-on-a-chalkboard candidates seeking the aforementioned public office.

“All I know,” said Thing 2, “is that one wants to build a wall and the other really wants to be president,” which honestly sums up their campaigns rather nicely for someone who doesn’t pay attention and frankly didn’t see the need to care until we went to see Cabaret wherein the characters do little more than eat and drink and have sex willy-nilly until they end up in concentration camps.  I do love a rollicking, feel-good musical. Continue reading

I Saw Dead People

121

A couple of weeks ago I found myself in Paris with some time to kill and instead of purchasing Nintendo stock like I should have been doing, I decided to fritter away my time at a sidewalk cafe eating batter-fried foods.  I found finding French fritters a frustrating fiasco however, and so I elected instead to head to the local cemeteries, as I have been dying to get into them for some time and take selfish selfies with the post-mortem celebrities interned therein.

The first cemetery I went to was the more renowned Père Lachaise (pictured above), which is a French term for ‘two matching Lachaise’.  Père Lachaise is chocked full of superstar corpses, many of which are tied to French history and culture.  Thanks to my public school upbringing, I was familiar with exactly none of them as they were named neither Napoleon nor Gérard Depardieu.  There were some names I recognized however, and I put together a quick Wander Around and Stumble Upon strategy to miss almost all of them and take up as much time as possible making U-turns and backtracking.

Like most Ugly Americans, the first grave site I visited was that of Continue reading

Hillary Dillary Dock

FBI director James Comey made an announcement last week that actually had nothing to do with the fact that his last name would be a great slang term for Donald Trump’s hairstyle.

“What is that?”
“It’s a Comey.”
“I wish I had a Comey.”

Instead he made the shocking and yet entirely expected recommendation that there be no prosecution of Hillary. You recognize the name, I’m sure. Hillary has become a single name icon not unlike Madonna or Cher, partly because nobody is sure whether to say ‘Rodham’ anymore or not. When someone mentions ‘Hillary’ you no longer think Duff or Swank. There is truly only one Hillary.

Anyway… Continue reading

O. Didn’t Start the Fire (Remix)

If you’re like me, you have recently been the victim of election results and the resultant celebratory and/or petulant result punditry that has so many people looking up the word ‘petulant’ these days. The bottom line is that the country has turned more red than an embarrassed Lenin with measles, and the egocentric pundits keep trying to wrap their giant heads around the question of why as they lie awake at night tossing and turning on their freakishly enormous pillows.

I am admittedly no political expert, but I have a theory as to the cause of the country’s sudden erythema which, at the risk of Continue reading

Uninformed Because of Holiday Distractions? This May Help…

Here we are in mid-December—the time of year when, amidst our holiday bustle, we begin to pause and somberly reflect on why this is the only time of the year anybody ever uses the word ‘bustle.’  It is also the time of year when we don’t really pay much attention to what is going on in the world in terms of history-making and/or altering news stories because we here in the West are so reverently focused on the birth of the Christ child and all the frantic patriotic consumerism it affords.

Combine that with 93% of all US network coverage being about either Lindsay Lohan or a make-believe crisis wherein Democrats and Republicans are making an hubristic grab for money and power by pretending to be Thelma and Louise, and it creates The Perfect Storm of Notorious movie-title metaphors. Continue reading