October 31, 2009

Chump Change

My girlfriend, The Magpie, gave me a queen size piece of her mind (what there is of it) on the way out the door. “You’re never going to get a job with all the vituperative invective you spew on the Internet, you chump!”

Slam!

She was letting me know how she felt about a choice little morsel I wrote concerning Yankees press coverage, where I questioned the constant need of boring, tedious New Yorkers for upbeat puff articles that reinforce their need to quote-unquote “feel good about themselves”.

Well, as Steve Martin used to exclaim before he lapsed into senility, “Excuuuse meeee!” The fact of the matter is, if you’re performing you don’t need any scumbag sportswriters to buttress your self-esteem. In point of fact, if things are not going that great, which they aren’t for most people, a feelgood moment is not the ticket. Sometimes a hard dose of reality is the more appropriate prescription.

I am no Cassandra, although nobody listens to me anyway. On the other hand, I am no Mary Poppins either. Basically, I am calling them as I see them, and my record is no worse than these pineapplehead Major League umpires, some of whom are deserving of a white cane, thick eyeglasses and a seeing eye dog. They are calling foul balls that are landing fair, baserunners out when they are safe and caught fly balls that took a bounce. Why should I be held to a higher standard? As the gay guy pushing the baby carriage told the other gay guy, who had asked who was the baby’s father, “Whaddaya think, I got eyes in the back of my head?”

Magpie is pissed off because I dared to impugn the honor of New Yorkers. She has been living here her whole life, and she thinks that these dinks are normal. What can you say about people who are so phony that you can immediately discount nearly everything that comes out of their mouths as a lie; who lie when the truth would do just as well, just to keep in practice; whose every breath is horse manure?

I don’t mean to insult everybody, just all the outer boroughs, all the suburbs and 99% of Manhattan. The rest are OK. Hey, I’m no genius. I could be calling things wrong, like the baseball umpire. I can only call what I see! Me, I don’t have to lie. I can drive you insane and send you running out of the room, screaming, just by telling you the straight truth. I already got too much on my plate. My uncle once advised me, “Write down the story of your life”. Yeah, right! If I wrote with both hands simultaneously 24 hours a day I still couldn’t get all of it out. The public will just have to settle for choice little select morsels that I regurgitate from my mind.

Magpie wants me to be successful so that I can bring in reams of cash, so she can go out for lunch and cocktails, buy more junk and go on vacation, and I want it too. Unfortunately, things are a bit slow lately, so I mostly find myself sucking nips of rum from a pint bottle and playing the harmonica on a park bench. No shame there. A lot of bigger guys than I am are more-or-less doing the same thing (unless they are like Madoff and R. Allen Stanford, who were a year ago proclaiming “It’s good to be the king”, but are now in prison getting into fistfights with auto thieves), except they don’t have the comfort of a harmonica to keep them warm.

Things will pick up. Maybe. Obama is crowing that the $800 billion stimulus package has saved or created 650,000 jobs. I’m not complaining. It’s keeping me afloat, temporarily. I might even get some temporary work for decent money next week if my stars are aligned right. Just in case, I am practicing Christmas music on the harmonica so I can play on the street during the holidays. Who knows?

In the meantime, I don’t regret anything I ever published on the Internet. Sure, a lot of it might offend people as intemperate. No doubt, the authorities in communist China are not letting anything of mine get through to their readers. I have always been anathema to both communists and Republicans (and Democrats). If this was 50 years ago I would be in jail, no doubt about it.

But the Internet is what you make of it. If you are a conformist type of twit you will find a large enough audience of likeminded boring drips, just like in physical reality. I, on the other hand, have always been an animal and I am still one in cyberspace. Nothing has changed, only now it has become magnified.

My concept of reality is what I am actually seeing. But like third base umpire Tim McClellan I am not seeing what whole picture, only what my rather stunted ability is permitting me to see. Sorry! Take it for what it is worth. If you think you can get a better point of view somewhere else, you are free to delete me and go there. No hard feelings.

Four hundred years ago Shakespeare wrote, “To thine own self be true”, and that’s what I am trying to do. If you are true to thine own self, you have no need of dumb, stupid little articles that make you feel good about yourself. I have done a lot of bad things, but they always been an organic result of my circumstances and my personal nature, and I don’t feel ashamed of any of them (well, maybe a couple of them). Je ne regrette rien.

Like Shakespeare, my uncle, Saul Bellow, will be remembered hundreds of years hence, and he had the genius to include me in some of his writings, which turned out to be good for him because I have turned out to be the most interesting of his relations. This is one of the reasons that I have decided to leave behind an unvarnished history of myself and my motivations. Someday in the far future, in the 25th century, artists and writers will refer to my uncle’s stories to get a clear picture of what Americans were like in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and I want to be included. No, I want to be entertaining! If I have to go out on a limb to be remembered as a true twenty-first animal, then I’m glad for the opportunity.

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October 29, 2009

Field of Dreams - Phillies Deconstruct Yanks in Game 1 of World Series

I was happy going into the ALCS, when the Yankees appreciated the challenge presented to them by Anaheim and took their American League rivals seriously. This trepidation was warranted by the fact that the Angels had been making monkeys out of the Yankees all year long. No, for the entire decade since 2002!

Even the fact that the Yanks had the most impressive performance in baseball all year long could not negate the physical reality of the Angels, and the Yanks had good reason to be concerned. As it turns out, they were right to be concerned. Except for the 10-1 blowout in game 4, the series was a real nail-biter, with more twists and turns than an old Alfred Hitchcock suspense movie.

It turned out all right for the Yanks, but just barely. Unfortunately, the New York sports press, in a full court press to sell more raggedy newspapers, triumphantly declared the Yankees to be an irresistible steamroller that would thoroughly flatten the Phillies despite all the evidence to the contrary. This triumphalist approach completely ignored the physical reality of the Phillies batting lineup, the depth of their pitching, the fact that the Phillies were the defending world champs and the great job they had done grinding up their National League rivals all year long, culminating in their lopsided thrashing of the Dodgers in the NLCS, even as the Yankees were hanging on by their fingernails across town against the Angels.

The Yankees are a great team of ballplayers. They are geniuses at playing baseball, but not any more brilliant than anybody else at figuring out the value of the printed word, which is stylistically one of the great marvels of humanity but ultimately just a lot of hot air compared to concrete reality. Anybody who believes anything they see in print is an idiot, particularly when much of that propaganda is generated by their own promotional machinery. These New York sportswriters are paid to blow up their teams like caricature balloons in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in order to sell newspapers. They are paid salaries and given free tickets and VIP treatment to write that rubbish. Unfortunately, the players themselves hang on every word that is written about them. Given enough of this adulatory treatment, they come to believe it themselves.

Here's my prime example: in yesterday's New York Post, a disgraceful rag of obscene deceit if ever one existed, the editorial cartoon on Page Six showed Tony Soprano in his Italian suit and gangster hat, cigarette hanging from his mouth, threatening a quaking, terrified Phillies mascot with a baseball bat. The implicit message was, you are way out of your depth and we are going to bury you.

This schoolyard nonsense communicates a destructive contradiction of reality. Philadelphia is a tough city and the Phillies are a massive wall of muscle and talent, not a freakin Tickle Me Elmo doll that you knock over with a threatening gesture. They demonstrated that last night as Chase Utley, who is a Home Run Derby champion, thoroughly took apart CC Sabathia and Cliff Lee handled the Yankee lineup as though he were giving batting practice to the Mineola Little League All-Stars. It was ridiculous how Lee dissected the Yankees batting order. Every time he struck out a Yankees batter the guy shot him a look of disbelief, like an ape trying to figure out a trick played on him that was beyond his comprehension.

Last night's 6-1 destruction was a real mess, but if it brings the Yankees back to the reality on the ground it will have had a salutary effect. Forget about that nonsense of being freakin gods descended from Olympus to make cheese-eating New Yorkers feel good about their pathetic selves. Get back to the fundamentals of baseball, taking each inning, each play and each pitch seriously. Forget about journalistic puff jobs written by trained apes. Play baseball.

But this catastrophe has a larger meaning for New York at large. Just as the Yanks got sidetracked by flatulent press articles and hot air over the airwaves, New Yorkers have got to forget about the hot air coming from the power structure that has run the place into the ground. Wall Street, the newspapers, the government have decade after decade run society into the ground. These idiots are not fit to manage anything.

Look at James Dolan and the Knicks! The Knicks are on track to be losers for the ninth straight season. They are waiting for freakin Danilo Galardi to get well and save them. This guy can't even stand up straight because of all his back issues. The New York Times is bankrupt. This great social arbiter of New York society is so far in the tank that they had to accept a $250 million loan from Mexico at 14% interest just to be able to make the interest payments on its previous debt, after selling their building on 43rd Street for chump change, only to see that building flipped for three times what they received for it. Real geniuses!

Look at Donald Trump, the great financial maven of television and Hollywood. All his Atlantic City casinos are in bankruptcy protection. Listening to this guy is like believing what you read in The Post, which itself has seen its circulation fall by 20%. Wall Street? Fuggedaboudit! If you decide to take a walk around the financial district you better wear your football helmet in case a billion-dollar banker jumps out the window and lands on you.

New York is in meltdown mode, and a good part of the problem is people's own false sense of invulnerability and perfection which has come from believing nonsense and self-serving promotional propaganda. Get back to the fundamentals. Play baseball!

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October 27, 2009

The Waltz of the Big Patos

The baby that cries loudest is the one that gets fed. That is how the public got stuck with the twin plague of Al Sharpton and Rush Limbaugh, who are the mirror image of each other. The truth always hurts, which is why Sharpton is threatening to sue Limbaugh, who is himself a gross obscene caricature of a human being, for tying him to Tawana Brawley, Crown Heights, the Duke University lacrosse team and any number of incidental obscenities throughout his career as a loudmouth plague. Sharpton, like Jesse Jackson, has made a good living from shaking down corporations, themselves huge thieves, for cash “donations” in the interest of racial harmony. He has achieved a certain level of social respectability due to the incredibly short memory of the public, and the last thing he needs is for people to be reminded of his long, insalubrious history of incontinent rabblerousing.

Limbaugh, of course, needs no introduction. He is a miserable piece of stinking offal, a fascistic, drug-addled piece of garbage whose contribution to the marketplace of ideas has been a history of hateful race baiting rants designed to induce mutual loathing and discord. Nobody in his right mind, or even not in his right mind, could mistake Limbaugh’s vile invective for anything except what it is: a cynical ploy to exploit the seething resentment of witless rubes for commercial profit. End of story. Whatever misgivings he might entertain about selling his soul are quickly resolved by perusal of his bank statement.

Limbaugh and Sharpton are in the same business – two ugly fatmen out to tear society apart for short term gain. Do I blame them? Hell no! They have to make their money somehow, and neither is fit to do honest work. They are America’s contribution to the worldwide fraternity of useless pieces of garbage who are only fit to lie and steal, and they should be recognized as such.

The only way to resolve the Limbaugh-Sharpton feud is for them to engage in a fatman sumo wrestling match on pay-per-view. That would be an appropriate venue for those obese windbags to settle their mutual grievance. They could even make a few bucks from the gate receipts because, let’s be clear, this is all about the money.

Limbaugh has a huge mansion in Palm Beach and Sharpton is living in a condo on Park Avenue. What else would these morons do for a living? Work as engineers? French translators? No, they’re useless pieces of junk, only suitable for low-level employment.

Wait a minute! I’m the dummy. I deluded myself into thinking that if I educated myself and developed useful skills I could make a good living. Boy, was I wrong! I have been taking care of my girlfriend for years, but all she does is pine away for her ex, who ran a ponzi scheme and stole money from immigrant laborers, earning himself a prison sentence and a felony record. That’s her idea, and society’s idea, of a real man.

No wonder the economy is in the shit bucket. The chickens had to eventually come home to roost, and now they are here. But as long as lazy scumbags like Rush Limbaugh dominate the public debate society will never wise up. What do I care? I may be out of a job, but I at least get to work out in the gym 5-6 days a week. A good body is the ultimate status symbol. At least I can look in the mirror without puking. Can Limbaugh or Sharpton say that?

Obama’s solution is to flood the system with liquidity and count on the same masturbators who got us into this mess to get us out of it. Goldman Sachs is benefiting from access to the Fed discount window, where it can obtain interest-free loans by committing worthless mortgage securities, which they obtained for pennies on the dollar, as collateral. Think they’ll ever redeem them? In addition, they are receiving billions of dollars of federal loan guarantees. Obama’s heart may be in the right place, but he is not as smart as he things he is. He is determining policy with the help of the same worthless deadbeats who never worked a day in their lives, like Lawrence Summers, whose main claim to fame is that he is the nephew of a couple of past big shots. Things may stabilize in the short run, but these geniuses are setting the scene for an even bigger crash farther on down the line. Seen in this light, Limbaugh and Sharpton are just a couple of penny-ante Coney Island sideshow freaks.

The undeniable fact is that Sharpton has prospered in the last few years, coincidental with the administration of Mayor Bloomberg, The Big Enchilada. Sharpton used to live in Bed-Stuy, pursued by the IRS and under the weight of a judgment to pay upstate prosecutor Steven Pagannis damages for libel and slander stemming from the Brawley case. Now he resides on Park Avenue and his missus shops at the Versace boutique on Madison Avenue. Without knowing anything, it’s entirely conceivable that Bloomberg, being elected in 2001, made a determination that he needed a sympathetic interlocutor from the Black community and settled upon Sharpton as the most compliant. What the details of such an arrangement might be, I am not in a position to appreciate, but they probably would not preclude a corporate donation to Sharpton’s activist efforts on behalf of the community.

Very few New Yorkers base their convictions on any kind of ideological or empirical foundation of philosophy. Basically, having no philosophical grounding whatsoever, their convictions are predicated on their perceived financial interest. Take Bloomberg. He is a Democrat who then shifted to Republicanism and then abandoned that party. I knew a guy on Wall Street who voted for Bush for the tax cuts and then became a Democrat when Bush fell into disfavor. Now he denies ever having been a Republican. It’s like John Kerry, who was for the resolution before he was against it, or Hillary Clinton, who voted for an Iraq resolution that she knew to be destructive. It may be intellectually stultifying to live in an environment like this, but precious few citizens have the wits to survive any other way. No point in talking to them about it. And they sure don’t have any sense of humor about it.

I have always had the conviction that New York’s official bird should be the seagull, which is an ill-tempered creature that would rather steal the food out of the next bird’s mouth than work for its own dinner. That about sums up the prevailing ethic of the City since historical times, sanctimonious professions of moralistic principle notwithstanding. The exigencies of modern living positively require you to have a short memory, and historical awareness is a social detriment, given the ongoing blunders people commit. The Republicans are counting on gaining seats in next year’s midterm elections. Giuliani, whose former chief of police and nominee for homeland security chief is currently in jail in the aptly-named upstate city of Valhalla, is preparing to run for governor. Paris Hilton is rumored to have had her hymen surgically restored (just kidding). It’s like a science fiction story where people’s minds are constantly set on the “Restart” button because nobody can even bear to be reminded of sins that they committed as recently as yesterday!

This is not to say that Sharpton does not perform many constructive acts. When Giuliani’s police unaccountably riddled a man in the Bronx with 41 bullets, or the time when the police jammed a toilet plunger up a man’s rectum in Brooklyn, Sharpton rightfully focused public attention on these acts of savage brutality. Somebody has to stand up for the people, particularly when you have an insane prick like Giuliani, who is a degenerate totalitarian pervert in drag, running the municipal government and the police. With his cross-dressing, his Hitlerite campaign against degenerate modern art, where he tried to shut down the Brooklyn Museum because he objected to one of its exhibits, and his promotion of the idiot bastard Kerik to the post of Director of National Security, much as Hitler appointed fiendish ghouls like Goebbels and Himmler in Germany, Giuliani actually created the need for Sharpton. The problem is, Sharpton’s mouth, like most New Yorkers’, runs faster than his brain, which has created some really ugly incidents. Anyway, Mayor Bloomberg’s carrot and stick approach, with his charitable donations to Sharpton’s “ministry” being the carrot and his willingness to cut off that funding being the stick, has resulted in a much more statesmanlike comportment on the part of Sharpton.

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October 24, 2009

The New York Times Thanksgiving Day Parade

Hi Folks.
We’re Fred Flaco and Francine Baleine reporting from the Ethical Culture Society on Central Park West to bring you this year’s annual New York Times Thanksgiving Day Parade. Francine, could you describe to our audience some of the spectacular highlights we are going to see today?

Well, most notable will be the giant balloons, of course. They’ve replaced Mickey and Spiderman with representations of such cultural luminaries as Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell. In addition we’ll see actors on flatbed trucks re-enacting famous events in history. And of course, the ever-present marching bands and baton twirlers, as well as popular New York celebrities. Mayor Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton are scheduled to appear.

And might we as well expect Mrs. Clinton’s illustrious consort, the ex-president?

No, he’s doing humanitarian work in Thailand.

I bet!

Now the parade is starting up. The first group to make its way down Central Park West is the Neoconservative Skate Dancers dancing to the music of Barry Manilow singing “Copacabana.” Michael, have you noticed how the dancers have foregone the use of roller blades, and are preferring the little steel clip-on skates with the skate key that haven’t been seen for fifty years?

I think they decided it was more in keeping with their attire. Clip-on skates you can attach right over your brogues, and they don’t clash with your bow tie.

Nevertheless, these boys are fantastic athletes. Look at how David Brooks lifts Thomas Friedman and twirls him around his head like that!

It’s nice to know that Brooks can do more then write lame little book reports and mundane homilies about going to school all the time.

Now, here’s a historical float of Henry Kissinger meeting Indonesia’s president Suharto, informing him that the Bush administration would not protest the Indonesian army’s invasion of East Timor as long as it was done “Quickly and cleanly.”

Naturally, it was neither, and thousands of protesters and ordinary citizens were massacred.

Kissinger himself freely admits that he has made some blunders, but he has stated, “Power was made to be used.”

We still enjoy having him up to lunch at The Times.

Now marching down the avenue are The Forgotten Jews of America. These are public dignitaries who were too busy or distracted, until one day they woke and discovered they were Jewish.

The experience was so traumatic that they decided to form a support group to get themselves through the crisis.

I mean, I don’t know what I would think if I suddenly discovered I was, pardon me, Jewish. Who can you turn to?

Tell me, Francine, what’s the significance of those white feathers they’re waving around.

That’s the symbol for “You Could Have Knocked Me Over With a Feather!” That’s how shocked they were when they found out they were Jewish.

There’s Madeleine Albright. Although Madeleine’s relatives from Prague repeatedly sent her numerous notes telling her she was Jewish, all the notes mysteriously disappeared.

Somebody should investigate the U.S. Postal Service!

The only thing that bothers me is, how intelligent can she really be if she wasn’t bright enough to figure out she’s Jewish?

Let history decide. Now here’s John Kerry waving his feather. Kerry’s a very religious Catholic, but he’s also got enough Jewish blood to get elected prime minister of Israel.

How soon we forget! Here’s former Times restaurant critic Ruth Reischl, who’s famous for wearing disguises to eat in restaurants, like Inspector Clouseau. She’s wearing one of her disguises now, dressed as a duck.

She better not go to Chinatown with that suit on.

And right behind her, on a float, is a representation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd playing the title roles.

With the brisk temperatures we’re experiencing here as a result of this cold front, I think it’s safe to say that Frank is probably shivering a little bit under his fig leaf.

Maureen is a little more sensible with her stylish layered look that she got off the rack at Bolton’s. Her only concession to the story of Adam and Eve is the boa constrictor she has wrapped around her neck for a scarf.

I don’t think that snake’s going to derive much warmth from Maureen.

Next are the ladies from the Political Correctness Brigade. These ladies, Republicans and Democrats alike, have buried their political differences and arrived at a consensus of priggishness and humorless intolerance that they enforce with baseball bats. Or, even worse, they lecture and berate you.

Frankly, I’ll take my chances with the baseball bat.

Now on this float here, we have the New York Times Believe it or Not All-Time Greatest Hits, with Jayson Blair fabricating front page news as Howell Raines practices fly fishing. Then we have Judith Miller in the balcony scene from Cyrano de Bergerac, dressed in a gold lamé straitjacket designed by Gauthier of Paris, swooning on the balcony as Lewis Libby recites her love poetry from below while Dick Cheney feeds him his lines from the bushes.

And there’s Susan Sachs who was acting as The Times’ Baghdad bureau chief, sending e-mails to the wives of correspondents, telling them that the men were messing around with Iraqi women.

Right on, lady. Why do nothing when you can do real damage.

The next float recreates a modern New York Times wedding, where two young men, Romeo and Homeo, Princeton graduates, are joined in holy matrimony by Merle Shuster, the lesbian female rabbi of Fire Island.

They’ll be honeymooning in Greece, I understand. They say they want to study the latest French techniques in rectal insemination so they can start a family.

Now we have the gigantic Saul Bellow balloon. Bellow was a literary giant, but even he couldn’t have imagined being 50 feet tall and flying around over Central Park West.

And behind him, the balloon representing former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik, whom the Times slavishly promoted while he was in office. Kerik, as you know, turned out to be a bottom-feeder of the worst order. He’s now in jail. Can his former mentor, Rudolph Giuliani, be far behind?

Not bloody likely. Here’s the Duke University lacrosse team, whom the Times excoriated in article after article and editorial after editorial as a group of bestial, racist rapists until their accuser came clean and admitted that her whole accusation of rape was a put-up job, and the prosecutor in the case was forced to resign and submit to judicial discipline by the North Carolina bar association. Another typical screw-up for which the Times and its editorial staff was never held accountable. It’s like the Times is not responsible for any of the obscene abuses it commits!

You don't see the big picture. The Times is ordained by a Higher Authority to suit its own convoluted agenda and is exempt from all the ethical standards they hold everybody else accountable to. It's perfectly within their purview to lie, manage news, withhold information, manipulate reality and whatever else they choose to imagine.

It's good to be the king.

Speaking of royalty, here comes Times editor Jill Abramson, who publicly declared herself to be New York's arbiter of good taste, right before she got her foot run over by that most elegant of cultural symbols, an Italian garbage truck, while she was standing in the gutter waiting for the traffic light to change and yakking on her cell phone.

She has class!

Yeah, her husband sued the garbage truck for "deprivation of consortium".

What's that mean?

Search me.  I guess she couldn't give him a foot job for a couple of months after the collision.

He probably can't stand her anyway. That's Sex In The City for you.

Now comes the float bearing the Times’ publisher, Pinch Sulzberger. It’s a scene from ancient Rome, and Sulzberger is dressed in a toga like a Roman emperor and playing the lyre.

What’s a lyre, Michael?

What's a liar? Funny you should bring that up, because the next float portrays Times editor Bill Keller who, since he has lived his entire career in a world of manipulation and news management, couldn't identify the truth if he ran over it with his Volvo. But back to your question, a lyre is an ancient musical instrument a little like a harmonica with strings. The reason people stopped playing them is that the strings kept getting stuck in their teeth.

And Pinch Sulzberger's all sprayed in gold. What do you thing is the significance of that, Francine?

I’d say he has too much time on his hands. Say, what’s going on at the back of the parade? There seems to be some disturbance.

Right you are! It looks as though the giant cartoon balloons from the Macy’s Parade have got loose and now they’re attacking the cultural balloons from the New York Times parade.

Oh, I can’t look. It’s so awful!

Mickey Mouse is beating up the Saul Bellow balloon and Pluto is biting his leg. All the gas and hot air is escaping from Bellow’s leg and he’s just collapsed and completely blown out. What a way to go!

Now Spiderman flies up to Bernard Kerik and he kicks him in the butt, and he’s opened out a hole in Bernard Kerik's butt and all the gas is escaping. But instead of collapsing in a crumpled heap, Bernard Kerik is flying around over Manhattan, propelled like a rocket by all the hot gas shooting out of his ass!

But what if he crashes and injures someone?

You’re right, and that’s why the fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Intrepid are here, to shoot down Bernard Kerik. They’re tearing him to bits with the machine gun fire!

And with the last gasp of gas escaping from his butt, Bernard Kerik comes to rest, clinging to the outside of the Times Tower. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

And that ends our coverage of the New York Times Thanksgiving Parade. Ta-ta!

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October 23, 2009

Muggers Rate Stolen Cellphones

In our unending quest to promote consumer value, 200motels has solicited the opinions of cell phones’ ultimate end users – the thieves and muggers who steal them. At interviews conducted in crackhouses and shady taverns across New York City, often at great physical jeopardy to our correspondent, we have compiled consumer rating data regarding the desirability of the latest handheld devices.

Interviewed at the Homicide Lounge in Alphabet City on the Lower East Side, Marcel Butkiss, expressed his admiration for the Palm Pre. “It’s the best phone I ever stole”, declared Butkiss. “I really worked the guy over hard. After I concussed him with a pipe and he was lying there, I kicked him a whole lotta times with my steel-tipped boots before I stole his phone. But afterward, the phone still worked perfect, and I sold it for $100”.

A ringing endorsement if we ever heard one, but not to be outdone by that of Ricardo Maricón, who we caught up with enjoying the female companionship offered at Casa Chocha in Woodside. “I got a favorite girl here, Florita. She asked me to get her a phone so that she could call her family back in San Salvador. So I hung around Florian’s Bar on Roosevelt Avenue until I saw this dude calling on his Blackberry. I followed him into the bathroom and, while he was taking a leak I hit him with a toilet seat I had ripped off from its screws. The phone fell into the urinal, but when I fished it out it still worked. When I gave it to Florita, she was so grateful, she gave me a free ride”.

The next endorsement comes from Guido Marinara, formerly of Bay Ridge, who is currently residing at the Bernard Kerik Memorial Correctional Facility on Rikers Island, coincidentally in the cell adjacent to that presently occupied by Kerik himself. “I saw this mutherfucker walking down Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge, talking on an Apple iPhone, which is the most prestigious phone to steal. When I pulled a gun on him he still refused to give up the phone, so I shot him. The freakin iPhone stopped the bullet and the guy was still able to use it to call 911, which is why I am in this shit today. I hate Apple!”

But the greatest endorsement comes from Bernardo Culo, interviewed at Mango’s Bar on Ocean Drive in Miami Beach, where he is currently on vacation. “This old lady was talking on a Nokia 380 over by Lefrak City in Queens. When she got off the phone and put it back in her bag, I hit her with a baseball bat and stole the bag. The phone had all her personal information in it, including her Social Security number. I was able to steal her identity and take out a whole lot of credit cards in her name. The only drawback is, now I have to wear a dress and call myself Edith Schwartz”.

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October 18, 2009

Joe Girardi's School of Baseball - Part III

Joe – First of all, I’d like to congratulate our new pitcher, David Robinson, on his sterling performance against the Twins and last night against the Angels.

Robinson - Thanks, boss. Now can I take off these water wings? It’s not raining anymore.

Joe – When your mother signed the contract letting you play for the Yanks, I promised I’d take care of you.

Robinson – Joe, I’m not a baby anymore, OK? I’m twelve years old!

Joe – We’ll discuss it later. I know you guys are tired from playing 14 innings in the rain and cold, but we have to get ready to board the plane for LA. CC Sabathia won’t be flying with us.

Team – Why’s that?

Joe – The airline says he’ll bring the plane over its weight limit, so we’ve arranged alternate transportation for him.

Jeter – What, a C-130?

Joe – No, better. We got the balloon guy from Colorado to hook up an air line up his backside. We’re going to inflate him and let him float over the jetstream. That way he can carry extra food for himself.

Texeira – Joe, what are we gonna do about Chone Figgins and Erick Aybar? Every time they get on, they steal bases.

Joe – Easy, we’re gonna attach a string to second base. When those guys slide in, Jeter will pull the string and move the base. They’ll never figure it out. Incidentally, I want to congratulate A-Rod for slamming into Napoli at home. That’s how the game should be played, rough.

A-Rod – I learned that from watching Joba Chamberlain at the customer line in McDonald’s.

Joe – Now, I wanna talk about fielding. I’ve designed a new fielder’s glove for Robinson Cano to use at second base. Here it is.

Cano – Joe, that glove is bigger than I am!

Joe – That’s so the ball doesn’t roll under you again.

Cano – How am I supposed to wear that?

Joe – You get inside it and control it with a control panel, like in “Transformers”.

Cano – That’s the stoopidest thing I ever seen!

Joe – No, the stoopidest thing I ever saw is when you let that grounder get by you. You almost blew the game for us. Get inside the glove and shut up, ya dummy!

Damon – Joe, I don’t wanna take batting practice with Burnett. He keeps hitting me in the foot with his pitching.

Joe – You have got a very good point, Johnny. AJ, instead of hitting batters in the foot, can you try to aim a little bit higher? Aim for the head.

Burnett – Will do.

Joe – Now you pitchers should try to emulate Mariano Rivera. He is totally focused on his job of getting guys out. When he is in the dugout between innings, he doesn’t fool around or hang out with the other guys. He just sits there and concentrates, like a kung fu master. Mariano, what’s your secret?

Rivera – No comprendo!

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October 17, 2009

What Do Women Want?

Why are men like…

Taxis?
Because when you need one you can never find one.

Sperm?
Because out of millions, only one is any good.

A computer?
Because when you need it most, it crashes.

A microwave?
Because it only takes 15 seconds to heat up.

A pizza?
Because you make a phone call, and a hot one arrives at your door in 30 min

A broom?Because it's no good without the handle.

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October 12, 2009

Baby Face

Baby Face Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize and the whole world is in an uproar. Grizzled former Polish president Lech Walesa, who is no baby face, denounced the award as premature, complaining, “He hasn’t done anything yet”. Walesa is a hardbitten reactionary who would be happier in the middle ages with Cossacks and ghettos. Contemporary Polish society is hardcore and backward-looking. Polish authorities recently denied an abortion to a woman whose doctor warned that she would go blind if she had the baby. Sure enough, she went blind. The Polish government was forced to pay her an indemnity, which amounted to chump change, when the European Court of Justice ruled in her favor.

In this country, the reactionary Republicans are frothing at the mouth like rabid dogs and chewing the carpet, like Hitler, at Obama’s prize. They are livid with rage. They had a good week last week when Chicago lost the Olympics, happy to ascribe the defeat to Obama, but now they are back to square one over the Nobel Prize. Rush Limbaugh called it a plot by cosmopolite Europeans and effete American liberals to sap this country of its exclusive right to run the world, just as General Jack D. Ripper accused the Russkies of draining our vital fluids in “Dr. Strangelove”. The Wall Street Journal accused Obama of collaborating with the crooks and thieves in the United Nations, conveniently forgetting all the domestic crooks and thieves who looted the American economy and left us in the lurch, which WSJ is in a position to know if anybody does.

Yeah, American exclusivity! Whatever advantage we had in the twentieth century we squandered at our leisure with an insane foreign policy and an insane economic policy. Now Obama is left with a society in shambles that he is trying to hold together with tape and chewing gum even as the Republican attack dogs rip out the seat of his pants with sharp teeth.

What do I care? If I had been on the committee, I probably would have awarded the prize to Yankees manager Joe Girardi for building a monolithic, unbeatable team that is steamrolling its way to uncontested world dominance. Having the Yanks is the greatest aspect of living in New York. All bow in thrall to our smoking hickory!

Never mind that. Whatever you want to call it, the Nobel Peace Prize is a huge public relations windfall for Obama and the Democratic Party, who have a limited window of opportunity to achieve health insurance, banking reform and cap-and-trade before next year’s election, when the reactionary elements of society will probably win enough seats to put the brakes to any additional forward motion. That’s the world we live in – a car that keeps clutching.

A few years ago I complained about all the babies people were having. In my neighborhood you couldn’t walk a block without getting trampled by baby carriages. Families were not having just one kid, they were having multiple litters, the women calculating that one kid alone was not enough to lock the guy into a lifetime of indentured servility. Now, even if the guy tries to make a break for it (and, believe me, the women, knowing that they have the men’s scrotums locked in a vise, are not seeing any reason to make life soft for them), he’s still contractually on the hook for a lifetime of alimony and child support. You do the math…

OK, so now the little darlings have grown up to small children. Instead of dodging baby carriages, which have at least got fixed trajectories, you have to navigate your way through rampaging little piglets careening out of control all over the sidewalk, like pint-sized Multiple Interballistic Re-Entry Vehicles, while the mother yaks on her phone or, pharmacologically enhanced on prescription mood elevators, plots her next coup for social aggrandizement. It takes a nimble bit of choreography for the pedestrian to avoid colliding with these elementary particles, because the last thing you want is to have to engage in social discourse with these urchins or their mothers, due to the thinly veiled hysteria that is a fundamental aspect of modern parenting. I can think of two separate instances of adults who were incarcerated for long sentences for coming into star crossed contact with other people’s offspring, owing to communal hysteria, deluded social workers and voracious prosecutors, only to have their sentences overturned when the charges were determined to be entirely specious. Unfortunately, there are enough real cases of unhealthy adult interest in children to lend currency to the aggressive incontinence of overbearing parents. Better to just refrain from any contact with children at all costs.

I’m not Chairman Mao. They can have as many kids as they want, but at least have the decency to move to the outer boroughs or the suburbs, where the whole mess can thrive, anaesthetized, like inconscient vegetables in a carrot patch. The whole point of sacrificing creature comforts and living in confined spaces in Manhattan is to steer clear of freakin family values and screaming brats. All my life I have been blessed by not having to be exposed to the middle class, which I have always loathed like the plague, and rightly so. Unfortunately, my present girlfriend, Magpie, is rather more indulgent of the whole wretched process. She has married girlfriends and a family. Sometimes I am dragged into the whole miasma of having to endure these nasty little scenarios of family bliss. One family told her, “Your boyfriend has to behave himself around the baby”, as though I was a child molester. The kid was still in its infancy stage, where it could not even speak yet, but they were fearful that my presence would somehow spiritually corrupt it through osmosis.

Wait a minute! Whatever happened to the standard that children had to behave themselves around adults, and not the other way around? That is ultimately my complaint, the infantilism of society. I believe that they were just using the kid as a pretext to stop me from saying things that they themselves, as infantile adults, could not internalize. Just as AIDS provided an ulterior pretext for clamping the lid on the sexual revolution and plunging society back into a dark age of its habitual rut of Puritanism, now the new baby boom is providing a cultural lockdown of adult intercourse. Social relations have been reduced to the level of infant formula because, ultimately, that is where the retarded adults feel most comfortable.

When I was a kid there was a cartoon character named Baby Huey, a 350 lb. yellow duckling dressed in a diaper who constantly destroyed his whole environment due to the combined factors of his enormous girth and his infantile brain. I hate to engage in pop psychology, which is the domain of culturally deprived imbeciles like freakin Doctor Phil, but traveling around the world as a child with my peripatetic mother, I never saw a gigantic, destructive moron like Baby Huey portrayed in the comic strips of any of the countries where I lived. In England I read “Beano”, which was filled with Formula 1 adventures and kids who outsmarted their adults. In France, I read “Pilote”, which was filled with stories of intrigue in exotic overseas locales and Indian fighters in America’s Far-West, but I never encountered the kind of overweening dominance that I read in American comics, where the combination of simplistic moralism combined with irresistible force to wreak havoc on the physical world. It might be a bit of a stretch, but given the events of the last 50 years, with knucklehead American policy makers behaving with reckless abandon and destructiveness in Asia, Africa and Latin America, oblivious to the destructive nature of the chaos they inflicted, could be the natural manifestation of an idiotic, gigantic baby duck who destroys houses and cars by sitting on them out of addlebrained, puerilistic imbecility, as though a whole nation of humans had become imprinted on a creature motivated by profound idiocy. You could say that fat, stupid Rush Limbaugh, with his penchant for socially destructive behavior, bouncing around in his studio chair and screaming outrage and destructive invective against any kind of civilized innovation, totally incontinent and mindless from his longstanding addiction to Oxycontin, is the living, human manifestation of the Baby Huey Syndrome.

And this reality of Rush Limbaugh, the idiot George Bush, the Elmer Fudd Show of Dick Cheney with his Looney Toons shotgun, the Freedom Fries comedy of Bush’s defense secretary, Rumsfeld, ultimately provoked such revulsion in the Nobel selection committee that it pushed them headlong into the arms of Barack Obama. Whatever else you can say about Obama, he is deliberate, reflective and he places a great amount of emphasis on responsible behavior, qualities that are as science fiction to Republicans, who are visceral stooges. Maybe the aesthetic Norwegians who compose the Nobel committee awarded him the prize just out of relief that the world’s most potent economic power and predominant military machine is no longer being directed by a cabal of infantile twits.

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October 06, 2009

David Letterman and The Comedian's Code of Ethics

I don’t much like David Letterman’s comedy act, but I certainly don’t have anything against the guy personally. He is a performing artist, not a public official or even a businessperson, and he is not required to adhere to any professional code of ethics.

Now, there’s a concept for you – a code of ethics for comedians! Here are my proposals for:

“A Comedian’s Code of Ethics”

1. Don’t Step on Your Own Lines
2. Don’t Be Boring
3. Don’t Turn Off the Audience With Mean-Spirited or Nasty Diatribes
4. Don’t Use Your Comedy Act to Resolve Personal Issues
5. Don’t Moralize
6. It’s OK To Have Fun At Another Person’s Expense As Long As It’s Funny
7. No Jokes About Other People’s Religion. It’s OK to make fun of your own people
8. Don’t Piss Off the Club Owner
9. Never Apologize
10. Ignore Any Idiotic Ethics Codes For Comedians

Basically, the only rule of ethics Letterman violated is No. 2, “Don’t Be Boring”. Otherwise, he’s doing a fine job, depending who you talk to.

Letterman hasn’t done anything wrong. He had a consensual relationship with an adult woman. That ain’t a hanging offense. He got shaken down by a nasty prick, whom he had arrested. He went on TV and let the audience know what to expect. But he is still getting dragged down.

The other comedians, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien, went easy on him. I probably would have gone a lot farther, not out of malice but to try to wring out more laughs. When it comes to making fun of people, I adhere to the Take No Prisoners school of comedy. Basically, I would have brought in rubber sex dolls, Roman Polanski, Michelle Phillips, whatever…

Letterman should have let it go after his first announcement. After that he should have gone forward and let the tabloids do whatever they wanted. By continually referring to it on his own show and turning it into a soap opera, he is continually breathing new life into it. One Letterman Show reaches more people than all the newspapers combined.

Going forward, he should ignore it and let the criminal justice system grind the guy up. Pretty soon people will get tired of reading about it and it will die under the weight of its own tediousness. But if he keeps referring to it on his own show, he will destroy his own career.

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October 04, 2009

Rosemary's Baby Strikes Back

                                                                       Roman Polansky and Jack Nicholson on the set of "Chinatown"

Exposing Roman Polanski to the wrath of the U.S. criminal justice system would be the equivalent of a death sentence for the 75 year-old film director. The American public doesn’t believe in the existence of art. For them it’s all a function of commerce, which brings it down to their level and makes it comprehensible to them.

Now they have him in their bear trap, and to quote Frank Zappa, “Now that I’ve got you I’m never gonna let you go, baby!”

Polanski was convicted of “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor”, which is not the same as rape. The distinction is that in the case of the victim, Samantha Gailey, she was actually delivered by her mother into the tender embrace of Jack Nicholson and Polanski during a social visit to Nicholson’s house, and somehow things got a little bit wild (big surprise!). What if she had been eighteen instead of thirteen? She still could have pressed charges, saying Polanski plied her with Quaaludes and champagne and forced himself on her, only in that case he really could have gotten hit with a rape charge. Actually, he got off easy because her mother had engineered the whole encounter. ">“You have to see my daughter! She’s beautiful. You can use her in your movies”.

That’s Beverly Hills for you. I spent part of my youth there, attending Beverly Vista School and Beverly Hills High School. Those kids are not innocent. They know what’s up, and they laugh at moral values as they are understood in flyover country. The high school kids had drugs, guns, counterfeit money, you name it. They had luxury cars and big rolls of cash.

Sex in Beverly Hills? Look at Monica Lewinski, who is nowhere out of the ordinary. Let's not forget Paris Hilton, who was as wild a teenager as they come and only cleaned up her act when threatened with incarceration. Mackenzie Phillips, carried on with her own father, John Phillips, for ten years, and now that her career has dried up, she is using the story to get attention. Can a book deal be far behind?

This Roman Polanski business is more reminiscent of Michael Jackson than anything else. The profit motive cannot be ignored. First you get the criminal conviction, then follows the big payoff in the form of a lawsuit in civil court. Gailey sued Polanski , and they settled for $750,000, which is a mere bagatelle compared to the Jackson payouts. In any event, Polanski never paid because he was already in France.

He should have stayed there. After successfully evading the American criminal justice system for 30 years, Polanski developed a sense of invulnerability. He didn’t read the papers, which are full of the Swiss caving in to the Americans in order to avoid having their banks declared off-limits. Polanski is a juicy morsel thrown to the U.S. Government to get back on their good side. Where the Swiss are concerned, everything is about money.

Everybody knows that the criminal justice system is not above a little hysterical witch-hunting when the occasion arises. I can think of two separate cases, one in New Jersey and one in California, where multiple citizens were sentenced to long prison terms and had their lives ruined because of insane persecution by elements of the community, aided by deluded social workers and voracious prosecutors, only to have their sentences overturned when it turned out that the child molestation charges proved to be entirely specious.

I’m not going to go out on a limb by standing up for Polanski. He’s a great artist, who will go down in history long after his detractors are ground to dust, and if he gets deported to the States and sent up, I will send him a salami with a file in it. Even though he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams working in America, the U.S. has been bad luck for him on a personal basis. His wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson gang. Then he got nailed on this bullshit charge, and that’s what it is – bullshit. Everybody knows he’s no child molester. Rather, it seems to me like he is the patsy in the old badger game.

He succeeded professionally in Hollywood, but some people are not compatible with American life. Polanski is a French Jew, and he is a natural pigeon for the unwashed masses in flyover country to vent their spleen. If he gets sent to jail in this country, between the guards and the other inmates I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for his chances. Nothing in Polansky's life has prepared him for a stretch in Vacaville or Soledad prison.

Just so the reader does not think I am crazy or full of baloney, here is an item from Associated Press dated Oct. 22, 2009:

Swiss alerted US to Polanski Trip

Swiss officials tipped off the US and set in motion the arrest last month of Roman Polanski, the film director, a top Swiss official confirmed yesterday. According to e-mails obtained by Associated Press, the Swiss justice ministry sent a fax to the US Office of International Affairs on September 22 stating Mr. Polanski, wanted in a decades-old child sex case, was travelling to Zurich. Swiss officials wanted to know if the US would be submitting a request for his arrest. "The Americans immediately confirmed that was the case," the justice ministry official said.

It's obvious that the Swiss, nervous about having their banks declared off limits in an entirely different context, decided to throw Polanski to the wolves in order to placate the Americans!

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