The penultimate part of my stream-of-consciousness romp through the past year on Rumproast takes us from the suspense of the eve of the first Presidential Debate to the glorious GOP recriminations and infighting of the end of November. Part 5—December—will follow tomorrow (Sunday).
...qr at least it’s safe to say that formal attire and buzzing, hive-like sound effects were optional. All I wanted to do was see what I was looking at.
Today, it turns out that even replacement eyes are hard to come by. I was driven to my eye and ear center this morning, presumably for the unveiling of a prosthetic eye that was being hand-painted for me by a local ocularist. Instead, I was thrown out of my doctor’s office for not already having acquired a fake eye at a cost of $3,000 out-of-pocket. No-one had ever told me that buying a prosthetic peeper was my job, and that I would be subjected to howls of derisive laughter for not doing the job no one ever assigned me.
Now, I’m a blind guy with one eye and a “your ad here” sign in the other socket and all I have for the moment is the marvelous magical Residents who must have bought their eyes in bulk. Feast your orbs!
The world is on fire
Your body doesn’t burn
Kill yourself before receiving
Something out of all this breathing Don’t you ever learn
“Don’t you ever learn?” is a song about temptation, easy solutions and stupid decisions. Playing it just the other day reminded me yet again that the first 56 years of my life were a long pleasant boulevard through time, lined on either curbside by things that had fallen out of my pockets over the years. Wandering this street at my leisure after living it in real time has yielded many treasures comparable to finding money wedged between two cobblestones or a brand new Portofino cigar still in its tube. I plan to spend a lot of time here from now on, and I intend to equip myself with a pair of high-capacity swag bags to hold all the tips and trinkets and memorabilia that I encounter in my travels. ETW, this is my last self-serving tribute to Todd—at least for today. Some other day, I may feel an urgent need to write my long-delayed master’s thesis on “International Feel,” the kick-ass bookend tune from A Wizard, A True Star.
I don’t know why Adam Ant’s signature video, “Goody Two-Shoes” and the happy-happy stomp dance made me think of Sarah Palin, except to note that nothing else makes think of her at all anymore.
Certainly, there had to be some significance in Adam Ant’s retro-couture Napoleonic settings and costumes, apart from the lightning-fast assumption that Adam was going to usher in the second coming of Paul Revere and the Raiders, featuring Mark Lindsay.
Whether or not Adam was singing about Sarah Palin in 1982, it goes without saying that whatever about her was ever truly unique, one-of-a-kind, name-brand or timeless, has wound up where it was always destined to be—somewhere between Clark Kent’s costume closet and Al Capone’s Vault.
You don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do? Nothing to see here. Move along.
Who knew that two years ago I’d shoot myself in the head, go blind, rack up a two-million dollar hospital bill, suffer the non-fatal effects of cold-turkey withdrawal from cigarettes and alcohol, die a half-dozen or so non-clinical forms of clinical death, and resurrect myself months later in a world where Sarah Palin wasn’t even running for magistrate of the sanitation division, and the GOP had just placed all of its mismatched irreplaceable sulphur-stenched eggs in Mitt Romney’s spectacularly ill-woven basket.
What can I tell you? Time flies when you’re dead.
Here’s what else I can tell you: God bless the Pips for taking up the gauntlet of being fired by Gladys Knight with a stunning medley of And The Pips top 40 hits, entirely driven by toasty harmonies and occasional woo-woo! sounds, and unencumbered by the usual, predictable, elevator-worthy one-mike stand. This was a memorable moment from Richard Pryor’s summer TV variety series in the late 1970s.
Given the fact that I don’t remember 90% of what happened last week, the fact that I thought to include it in this post is testimony to Pryor’s uneraseable presence in American minds.
Part 3 of my roundup, after the fold, spans the “Good grief, is Mitt really relying on the Breitbartlets to win this thing for him?!” of early July to the plaintive “Are we there yet?” whimper of the end of September.
Part 4 will follow before the Inauguration, shoulder injury and acts of the FSM willing. Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here.
Part 2 of my roundup, after the fold, takes us from the primary fever of April to the batshit insanity of the end of June. Part 1 is here and Part 3 is here.
Two things that never appeared previously in the Superman Comics Universe:
• Fashionably color-dampened Superman without his bulging red underpants.
• Stylishly-bearded Cluck Bent answers Bruce Campbell’s immortal book title, If Chins Could Kill.
Sad to say, that’s all I know about The Man Of Steel franchise that debuts its first $1.95 burger platter later this year. For all intents and purposes, it looks like The Man Of Steel will more nearly resemble That Guy From Last Night or audition-losing talent who weren’t selected for the Brawny paper towel wrapper. If Jor-El sucks as badly in this film as he did during ten years of hyperventilating fatherhood in the TV series Smallville, the next Superman film will be the last one ever…starring Michael Richards.
I like this post from Adele Stan on Alternet about as much as I like anything that highlights the disarray into which the House Republicans appear to have fallen, but the bit that jumps out at me is the titillating concept considered by conservative thinker, Norman J. Ornstein, that the replacement for John Boehner needn’t necessarily come from the House itself.
Now, to give some background—there was an interesting footnote that occurred right after the elections, when TX Rep. Louie Gohmert suggested Newt Gingrich be the Speaker of the House, again. Because there’s no reason why we shouldn’t party like it’s some time prior to 1999, I guess. He wasn’t entirely off base though, in that there really is no Constitutional reason why the Speaker of the House has to be a member of the House. The problem, though, is in getting enough members of the House to go along with you as to which outsider you want to fulfill that office.
I think getting House Republicans to move together on someone like Jon Huntsman or Mitch Daniels would be a pretty hard sell, no? Wouldn’t that be like, first they have to admit there is a problem? And then they would move on to acknowledging there’s an answer outside themselves? I don’t see them taking those steps. The folks who have the knives out for Boehner would, in actuality, probably be the least likely people to say, “Hey, let’s get a somewhat reality-based deal-maker up in here to whip our asses into a deal we don’t like!” They would be more likely to want Eric Cantor or someone who they feel listens to the “true conservative” side of things.
This is why, if there was a kind of coup (hopefully a non-armed coup—unlike the Freedomworks situation recently described), I would guess the lucky candidate would be a Tea Party kind of GOP-er. Except I don’t think all the GOP would get behind that. And no Dem would. Which leaves us with Boehner—the default-mode.
The simpler problem is math. The fault in GOP leadership has nothing to do with Boehner’s character or flaws or anything else about him—it’s the numbers. No matter who is in charge, that person would still be dealing with the Louie Gohmerts, Paul Brouns, and Michele Bachmann’s that make John Boehner’s job the thankless thing it is.
I could be proven wrong. But if the GOP majority chose anyone but Boehner, it wouldn’t be an outsider, and certainly not anyone you could, however laughably, call a moderate (a RINO), or even reasonable (an appeaser). And it would probably make zero difference in how any vote turned out going forward (probably still disappointing and clusterfuck-ish). The debt ceiling and the fiscal cliff have, in a late echo of the Mayan pseudo-prophecy, coincided. A pretty serious tone for the next two years of wrangling is about to be set. If the GOP is about to do whatever they will with a weak Speaker—the die is already basically cast.
And FWIW, can anyone see a knight in shining armor seriously riding in on his white horse and piercing the RW “bubble” with his trusty lance? It strikes me as fairy-tale stuff.
Just about every outlet runs a recap of the year at this point in the calendar, so I figured I’d join ‘em.
After the fold and in the subsequent parts you’ll find a whizz through the highlights and lowlights of the year I’ve chosen to cherrypick from the pages of Rumproast, along with some nominees for Headline of the Month. All this is obviously open to debate and I’m sure there are plenty of folks who’ll disagree with my choices in what is of necessity a very sketchy and superficial skim of 2012’s themes. If so, feel free to pipe up in the comments.
“Thus to all Kenyans!” shrieks a diminutive Peter Parker wannabe in a picture Business Insider is calling “The Best Ever”.
Fair enough: it’s a damn cute spider-kid, and an even cuter POTUS. But I grow weary of seeing Barack Obama constantly being threatened by web-shooters and children in brightly colored pajamas.
First, he was a crooner in his brothers’ choral group. Then, he was Daniel Boone’s frontier BFF when he lost the audition for Mr. Spock to Leonard Nimoy. Finally, he ended up playing Johnny Carson’s late night talk-show mohel in a historical demonstration of puberty rituals. It doesn’t matter how much worse the Brazilian wax version of this is. You’re better off getting yanked than bladed.
No, it’s actually just a stinger scene from Trey Stone and Matt Parker’s X-rated comedy classic Orgazmo. In it, Parker’s character Elder Young is mistaken by porn film producer Maxxx Orbison for that famous hunka-hunka burning love memorialized by Elvis Presley (or was that William F. Burroughs?). In the same dangerous moment of misinterpretation Young’s junior missionary partner Ben Chepleski (Dian Bachar) is errantly ascribed the cheerful disposition and dual-purpose plumbing gear you’d expect from a fishnet-stockinged Robin.
Enjoy! If you get time and the opportunity, please treat yourself to three other South Park movies—Cannibal, The Musical; Team America: World Police; and South Park—Bigger, Longer, And Uncut.
Sitar-king Shankar—a musician who inspired the Beatles—died yesterday following heart-valve repairs. Here he is in a recent concert clip, still pickin’ and grinnin’ those magic strings.
Another shiny nugget from my golden Ohio youth. This is “Runnin’ Down the Road” by Arlo Guthrie, a frantically hopeful song about getting one’s life in gear. It could be heard shrieking from the windows of my mother’s ‘72 Monte Carlo on Friday and Saturday nights when I screamed past the “Center Of The World” sign on Route 5 at 120 MPH on my way home, sometime after 3 AM.
This one’s my music theme for the day as I run down the road with my fellow Rowdy Roasters.
"[W]e wholeheartedly endorse the excellent Rumproast blog" -- Jim Newell, Wonkette
"Mind you, don’t let yourself be trapped dialoging with these guys: truth is their enemy; pyschological warfare and misinformation dissemination is their profession." -- TeaParty.org
