It's Time to Go All Obama On Your Ass...

I never meant to get political on this blog, but I've had it.....

"Socialism," "Pals Around With Terrorists," "Not Ready....Yet (though my Miss Alaska, been governor 2 years and already under ethics investigation is)," and "Not Right For America" is veiled racism. A way to vote against the black guy and not feel sorry about it. I can't take it anymore.

I tried to think about why one would NOT vote for Barack Obama. A friend of mine says "Oh, he gives a good speech and makes you feel good." Uh....have you seen the stock market. Have you seen us spend $1.4 trillion on war and bailout of greedy bankers and insurance fiends? I kinda would like to feel good. Who's paying for that? The homeless, hungry guy who has $3.14 in is coffee cup? Oh my god, it's syrofoam, he HATES America and his planet.....

So here are, in my mind, the only reason you would NOT vote for Barack Obama...

Reasons to vote against Obama:
1. You like to be depressed.
2. Your daddy was REEEEAAALLLLLY Repulican
3. You think a 72-year-old ventriloquist is a good choice
4. You think being hot is more important than being smart
5. 4 more years? Really! It's working!
6. You still think JFK sucked
7. Obama + Biden is less than McCain plus Palin minus the distance between ... Wasilla and Russia.
8. You REEEEALLLY think Tina Fey is hot but HATE 30 Rock
9. Obama's middle name is Hussein and that must be bad, not as bad is Osama -- which rhymes with Obama -- and the guy who actually killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11
10. $150,000 for ONE hockey mom is okay but 1,500 tax breaks for 100 of them is unacceptable.
11. You are from "real America" where you have two reasons to vote this year -- that chick is hot and that guy is black!
12. Optimism isn't your thing - former Mavericks who chose to be non-Mavericks by bowing to the right wing like Muslims bow to Allah...oh sorry, you love the Baby Jesus -- like old people bow to Bingo cards IS your thing.

The Ghoul Pool: I Pick Dead People!

I'm going up to visit my brother in central New Hampshire this weekend. I know what you're thinking. Fall foliage, crisp clean air, a chance to see my beautiful sister-in-law and niece?

It's not like that. Oh the leaves will be dropping, but it's the falling celebrities I'm interested in.

Yes, I am in a dead pool. We predict which famous people will die in the coming year. We call it The Ghoul Pool

Oh, please. Spare me your feigned reaction. Cuz I know you're thinking "Who's got Nancy Reagan?" And, yes, Harry Morgan is still alive.

See - you're intrigued.

How does it work? It's pretty simple.

It's a draft, like a sports draft. We have about 15 or 18 people participate... (The world is full of sick bastards like me!) We pick one person at a time for 75 rounds. Yes, 75 rounds. That's a lot of (potential) corpses. This way no two people can have Abe Vigoda. Not that any two people have ever "had" Abe Vigoda while he was alive.

I mean, really, he was rumored dead in 1982. That was .... carry the one... 26 years ago!!!

Scoring is simple. A person in their 90s scores you 10 points, in their 80s fetches 20 points, all the way down to single digits if you're truly demented will score you a full 100 points. Any person who lives to be 100 no longer nets any points. Kind of a reward for finishing the marathon if you will.

It's not as easy as picking a bunch of 90 year-olds and compiling 10 points at a time. One thing we've learned - old people are freakin' feisty. Remember when Hume Cronyn lost his wife Jessica Tandy? That bugger held on for years. He wouldn't let go. We thought he might date Madonna before passing on, that spry old bastard.

And of course there is Nancy Reagan. She refuses to Just Say Go. The woman holds on for years, breaks her pelvis and waits A WEEK to go to the hospital! Nancy, baby, Ronnie is waiting for you. Or maybe he's found another wife by now.

There are, of course, several different approaches to trying to win, or merely entertain during what we call The Ghoul Pool. They include:

1. Pick fat guys. Louie Anderson, John Candy, Chris Farley are prime examples of celebrities ripe for early doom, and big points. In fact Chris Farley ... moment of silence, God rest his big fat soul... allowed me to win the Ghoul Pool crown late one year by sending me 70 points, like manna from heaven.

2. Slash and burn. Slash. Keith Richards. Kate Moss. Fill in troubled drug-addicted rock star/model/actor. Thank God for Dr. Drew doing celebrity interventions. He's but Garry Busse back on top of the Ghoul Pool prospect list.

3. Be obscure. Find the guy who invented the Monkeys in a Barrell toy. Pick the lesser known Baldwin brother. Hell, find a Baldwin sister! Reveal that the woman who wrote "This Little Light of Mine" is 89 and is heading towards her own little light.

Of course, this can be taken to a non-competitive extremes. Two years ago, I picked 75 midgets and dwarves (there is a difference, dwarves have 'normal' sized heads on little tiny bodies, midgets are just all around small.). Yes, there are 75 Little People to be drafted. But they are funny in name (and voice) only. They die at the same slow pace as their larger counterparts I'm afraid.....sigh.....

Last year, I picked voice actors. All the surviving voices of the Smurfs. The voice of the Furby doll. The voice of Clarisse, that little vamp reindeer that sent all the blood rushing to Rudolphs.....uh, nose. The funny thing about voice actors? The one thing they cannot announce is their own death. So I officially have zero points.

4. Rap Stars. A most popular category. Unfortunately, the mostly New England white people selecting these "stars" usually don't have the 4-1-1 on the hip hop generation. We've just heard of the East Coast/West Coast feud just now. Someone even once mispronounced "Flava Flav." I kid you not. Of course, I did yield the youngest ever Ghoul Pool hit with Tupac (or as we called him when he was shot in the groin, One Pac).

5. Wish picks. Gilbert Gottfried. Donald Trump. W. Kathy Griffin. We pick them cuz it makes us feel better to think of a world without the people we dislike. It almost never yields points, but thinking about a world without Lindsay Lohan just feels so nice.

So we will all head up to North Conway, NH for some Halloween season revelry. Minus the costumes, candy corn, and cheap plastic costumes. We instead will bob for corpses, hand out poisoned apples to unfortunate celebrities, and we will all laugh the annual chuckle when someone picks Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

Ah, I love the smell of embalming fluid in the fall.....

Choose a Side - I Mean Two Sides

So I went out in Greenwich with two friends last night to have a few adult beverages. For those of you who aren't from Connecticut, Greenwich is a wealthy place where everyone acts like Thurston Howell III, including the women. It might be the people watching capitol of the world. We were out for four hours and I never saw anyone's jaws move the whole night. I thought the whole place had TMJ. It was amazing.

But I digress. The first people I watched was a couple just inside the front door of our first stop. Actually it was Barcelona, the tapas restaurant -- the appetizers, not the nipples -- that I mentioned a few blogs ago.

This couple was unremarkable other than the man looked like....oh, I'd say....what you'd picture Jimmy Buffett's dad might be. In a town of Warren Buffetts, we found a Jimmy Buffett. Anyway, Mr. and Mrs. Jimmy were immediately noticeable because they were "those people."

They were "The Same Side of the Table People." You know, the couple that is eating together and they want the world to know that they cannot have as much as a table between them. They turn their noses up at the notion of sitting in a mere chair in order to sit together on the "bench" side of the table. You'll also notice throughout the meal that they constantly whisper to each other, they often feed each other morsels of food, and their hands disappear under the table for extended periods of time. (No, I will not continue that thought or otherwise speculate on the hand-to-hand combat that might be occurring under the table. Ew.)

Same Side of the Table People, or SSTPeeps, through their defiant choice of togetherness, are essentially telling all others they are simpletons in the world of affection expression. It's not nearly enough to enjoy a pricey meal together, especially with the economy in the potty. It's not nearly enough to present your date with a single rose during the appetizers. And, a dessert with a candle in it for a birthday or anniversary. Pffffft! We need no such amateurish nonsense. We are hopelessly and madly in love and must do everything side by side.

But I think the opposite is true. They are attention whores who need to stand out for whatever reason. Inadquacies. Mommy issues. They are Cubs fans. Who knows.

They make everyone uncomfortable due to their stubborn insistence on being different. Other patrons don't know what to make of them. Waiters don't know how to serve them. And nobody knows what to do with the empty chair. It looks like it's waiting for a bad Jewish wedding reception to break out. Or maybe a good Jewish reception. As a Gentile, I cannot distinguish such things.

So what happens when SSTPeeps leave the establishment. Everyone relaxes a little bit, just from knowing the crazy people have left. Maybe there's a slight buzz in the restaurant as people say things such as "thank God they found each other" or "holy cow, that guy looks like Jimmy Buffett."

And the rest of us are just happy we can have a piece of cheesecake with a candle in it on our special day without being judged by romantic snobs. I mean really -- would Thurston and Lovey sit on the same side of the table? Not on an island, not in a restaurant. Neither should we.

Three-Legged Race: Come Back Here, You Bastard!

As you know from a previous blog entry, I like cats. (One reader things that makes me a bit, shall we say, gay. Did I mention this reader is a visor-wearer! The irony!)

But this story is more a tale of compassion. At least it starts this way.

One night I park in front of my condo unit just around dusk. I may have had a frosty adult beverage. Or 12. And I see this cat limp into the bushes. Assuming it's not an hallucination, I try to peer in and see if the cat needs any help, in case it's bleeding or drunk. Oh wait, that's me. But to no avail, and I go inside.

About a week later, when leaving to go somewhere else (oh perhaps to have a frosty beverage. Or 15), I see the cat across the parking lot. I instantly know why he's slowly hobbling. The little bugger has three legs. Two front, one back. My first thought was "I wonder if this cat has 6.75 lives." Actually, I first thought, "What's 9 lives times three-quarters." Then about ten minutes later, carry the one, oh -- my cell phone has a calculator! - I wondered if the cat has 6.75 lives.


So the cat, who surprisingly did not limp in a circle, plops down on its side. Maybe it fell over. Who knows. The animal seems approachable. I let if sniff my finger. Then I wonder where that finger has been. I pet the cat on the top of the head, slowly, the whole time looking for the Great Nub of Wonder. Did the cat get run over? Woodchipper? Can you fit a cat with a fake leg?

I didn't see any stump, so my guess is it was born three-legged. Maybe it was one of those hyrbrid breeds gone wrong, like with dogs when they mate a Lhasa Apso with a Shih Tzu and end up with a Lhasa Shihtz.

Then I made a critical cat mistake. I pet her behind the ears. Tripod leaps up and, I swear to God, sprints away. Straight god damn beeline across the lot. I'm thinking "This stupid friggin cat is sympathy limping, probably for food. Or maybe for catnip, like homeless Viet Nam vets who just want to score some weed."

So I do the only thing I can think to do. I chase after the cat. I'm not sure why, but I pretty much think I've been shown up by an animal that takes the small yellow carrier to the vets office. A feline Special Olympian. A special needs cat.

Of course I didn't catch it -- it had one more leg than me. Duh!

So I'm standing 25 feet from my car and feel like a complete tool, having chased a crippled cat for some unknown reason. So I do what a cat does when it falls or fails to land a jump. I kinda shrug my shoulders and strut away as if that's what I meant to do. Fortunately the mailboxes were close by so I did get to check the mail. What's on top? A pet store circular advertising a "slicker set" for your pet. A rain hat, a rain coat, and four little boots.

Drown, you triangular pest, I think. Get your own damn rubbers.

The Skinny -- More People You Can't Trust

I was in a men's store yesterday shopping for a new suit and something wasn't right, besides the outrageous sum they charge for a suit these days. I was not comfortable in the store, and it had nothing to do with the humiliating moment when they measure your waist and you think "Okay, maybe light beer IS a good idea."

It was the salesman. I didn't trust him. Now that's not unusual, I know. But I tried to figure out why I didn't trust him. It wasn't his blotchy skin. It wasn't the unusual way he talked - kind of a jaw-wired-shut-meets-drunk-Yoda thing. It wasn't the 1977 tie he was wearing (they should at least let him borrow one of their $80 ties. Yes, $80!! I think all my ties combined didn't cost that much. Of course you would guess that if you saw them)

Then I figured it out. This man was abnormally thin.

Much like the visor-wearing man, you should never trust The Abnormally Thin Male.

What do I mean by abnormally thin? Simple. He is at least 30 years old, yet his waist size is under 30. It's the 30-30 rule. By the time you hit true adulthood at age 30 (you probably have either a child or a mortgage and your wife has made you put away your sports, concert, or Star Wars memorabilia in favor of a tastefully designed guest bedroom for the in-laws).

Think about the abnormally thin men you might know (hopefully you don't)....

The IT guy at your company. That strange friend you husband's brother brings around (the one who doesn't drink anything and you heard speak - once). Marc Anthony. I mean, would you leave your kids with Marc Anthony for even an hour?

The Abnormally Thin Male usually can also be identified by:

* Shifty eyes
* A poor attempt at facial hair
* Some sort of skin issue
* Belts that don't work with those litle boy pants. Usually the belt is too thick, the wrong color, or came with the Boy Scout uniform 25 years ago
* The social skills of a broom

It is important to note the 30 year old aspect of the Abnormally Thin Male rule. I have a friend. We'll call him Bean, since that what we call him anyway. (He was 6 foot 2 and thinner than Paris Hilton in high school, like a bean pole...) Bean was unusually skinny throughout high school and college. After college, I did my part to save him. Mostly through beer and unnecessary calories. Now I'm happy to report he has filled out and for a period of about 2.72 days, I think he actually weighed more than me. I saved him from Abnormally Thin Malehood.

The Abnormally Thin Male is not to be confused with the Crazy Triathalon Male - the guy who gets up at 5 a.m. to run 10 miles with the dog and goes to places like Newport, RI for weekend races to improve themselves. I don't much trust those people, but I think it's because I can't possibly outrun them, outswim them, or outpedal them. (Oh, if i had just one testicle!)

You are allowed to be fit and thin. But remember the 30-30 rule. Drop under that critical number and suddenly you'll want to grow a mustache that looks like burnt crabgrass on your upper lip. Or you skin will start to itch. Don't say I didn't warn you, marathon boy!

So back to Abnormally Thin Suit Boy. There was some confusion about a sale I thought they were running that I heard about on the radio ("That was last week," said tight-jawed Yoda boy). But, he assured me, the great sale price on my suit ($199) was because I was a "preferred customer" of some sort. "Oh," I told him. "I thought it was $199 because the sales tag said it was $199. That would be the price for anyone."

He mumbled something, scratched his skin and I think grabbed a bagel crumb from his mustache (surely he ate only half the bagel) before hurriedly ringing me up and shipping me out the door.

So I won't be returning to that store. I will search for a men's store where my waist size will be appreciated and recognized for the accomplishment in beer-drinking that it is.