Never seen a Maine Coon cat? Now you have. His name is Cosmo. He’s 16.

Had an exchange with an internet friend. He saw this picture of my hellion tabby named Elliott lying beside his best friend.

Two killers. They always claimed self defense. And won. Winning’s what they do.

But Cosmo is getting older, and Elliott is, if still winning outside, taking his lumps. They’re both cool, tough, manly guys. But I feel the need for this song on behalf of both of them. Guys are as entitled as gals to the rejuvenation sweepstakes.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ivIT0TQ4vRM

Watched and wept when they put the needle in Izzie.

She was willful, destructive, and loving. Hmmm. Loved her deerhounds too.

And now there is Iris.

Exactly the same mix of wild, willful, and loving as her forebear. But Snow White.

You figure it out. Wait for the book. Titled Sighthounds and Other Strangers. It will change your life.

Have you seen me racing to get everything in print before I die? You could help. If you could get over not realizing I am Poe and Proust and Bierce and Waugh. Assholes every one.

What do you want? I’m sorry. I made a joke. To my wife.

All it has cost me is your friendship. My wife has become my editor and publisher and IT go to person. What has it cost you? A spot on the crew of a great adventure. But maybe you were always looking for an excuse not to go on a dangerous adventure. Up to you, my friend. I’m still here if you ever need me. Ernest Shackleton was a sonofabitch too. But he never stopped caring for his crew.

Ambrose. Who could stand,to be in the same room with him? Surely not I, said Ambrose.

Ka-Ching. Did they save Kristol for last? Stay tuned and see.

I will kill them all.

She curls up and purrs like mad till she claws me half to death.

The lyric that sticks in my head. “I refuse to let you go.”

She loves me. She loves me not.

Ouchie.

He whipped Liston. It begins.

So many have hated him. Especially conservatives. Traitor, coward, black Muslim trash. I was there for him from the very beginning. And I am here for him now.

He had two careers. In his early years you couldn’t hit him. He just danced, out of reach of your gloves. Then he came in and struck like a cobra, a flurry of left and rights no one could withstand. Why he stayed so pretty. Here’s the last fight he fought before they stripped his title. Against a fearsome puncher named Cleveland Williams. Who never landed a single punch.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7zRPLJbqRM8

Then the three year suspension. When I saw him speak at Harvard. He was right. He was pretty. Not a bad angle. Beautiful suit. He was not intimidated by the venue. This guy who graduated last in his class at a Louisville high school. He charmed us with a speech he’d written by hand delivered from memory. You could see the twinkle in his eye from the back row, where I was sitting. Then he rushed back into the fray, two no-name fights and then Madison Square Garden against Joe Frazier. He lost. We were crushed. Too soon, too quick we rationalized. What nobody realized at the time was the signal of Ali’s second career. Frazier knocked Ali out in the 15th round of that fight. Knocked him out. Ali admitted as much. Lights out. Then he jumped up and finished the round. The second phase had begun.

If you look at the Cleveland Williams fight, Ali the boxer never ever gets hit. What no one had ever figured was that Ali could endure more punishment in the ring than any heavyweight ever.

How can anyone be Sugar Ray Robinson and Rocky Marciano AT THE SAME TIME? But he was exactly that.

The popular narrative we all subscribed to at the time was that Ali spontaneously adopted the rope-a-dope strategy when he realized just how devastating Foreman’s body punches were. Norman Mailer wrote a book about this fight, describing the terrible sound of those punches.

Norman Mailer: The Fight.

New evidence suggests Ali planned the rope-a-dope strategy from the beginning. He ordered his sparring partners to beat and beat and beat his body on the ropes. Coward? Champion.

Then came Ali’s second career. Heavier, a bit slower, he was living on borrowed time, as we now know. The rubber match of the Ali-Frazier contest was in Manila. Ali by all accounts was a beaten fighter at the end of the 13th, after three rounds of Frazier’s body shots, slumped on his stool and out of gas. Then this happened.

From nowhere, the Ali of old. Afterwards, Frazier in his darkened hotel room said “Lawdy, Lawdy, what a great champion he is.”

The Ali I remember and revere. And always always will.

Going to be a big one. Close to 500 pages. The first proof book has arrived. Changes to come. Somebody in comments said nothing I’ve done matters because it’s self published. Which is wrong. What matters is if anyone reads it. I already sold a hundred thousand copies of The Boomer Bible. Don’t need more than that. But I want you to read the rest of the story. So please do. Buy them all. They’ll probably be worth something someday. I’m Poe right before he died. At Amazon.com.

A Never Say Die guy

We called him Gross Bob. Member of our class at the Cornell Business School. He had livid raised red scars on his face. He was happy to tell you the story. Got pulled over by the state police in Florida on a party night. They didn’t like his off-handed answers, his obvious disdain for their authority. So they beat the crap out of him with their nightsticks. He said he got in a couple of licks too.

He was smart. Good student. But he hadn’t given up partying. So one night a handful of us went to Trumansburg after hours, to a place with a bad rep but a late closing time. You know. Being at Cornell in the middle of nowhere makes you a risk taker unless you’re an Ithaca drone. So we drank, played pool, drank some more. You know the place. Dark, dirty, wide bar with muddy mirror and a lot of resentful locals who don’t like the uptown outsiders on principle.

Which is why, as Gross Bob was starting on his umpteenth scotch, some local got in his face. Which was a mistake. Bob looked like he might be kind of soft, with that middle bulge and all. But it’s the same kind of build heavyweight fighters from the fifties had, and he decked the guy in two seconds flat. Then the others joined in, and Bob was laying them out like a scene in the movies. The action moved back toward the bar and the bartender brought out his baseball bat. So Bob hoisted the guy he was in the process of punching out and hurled him over the bar, into the bartender, and thereby shattered the muddy mirror.

Which kind of brought everything to a halt. The bloody faced bartender was on the phone to the cops. The little Cornellians were ready to flee. Honestly. They wanted to leave Gross Bob behind. I told them we couldn’t do that. So we gathered up Bob and sped off into the night before the police arrived.

The next day, Gross Bob had a cheery grin. “That was some fun last night, right?”

Yeah. It was. Why so many lesser folk are roaring behind Trump. The Gross Bob of 2016. Time to smash the mirror behind the bar. Don’t you think?

Shidooby.

A sage you think I am. Am I a 1930s Time reporter, who backwards everything wrote. Luce was I and Henry my name. Welles not I was was a mortal enemy after Kane Citizen.

What I do know is that we could have had it all.

Torch singer I was not of all time.

Guess I’m not the kindest of fellows.

The beat goes on.

I was unceremoniously dumped from Sarah Skwire’s website after I had concluded a discussion about Rush Limbaugh vs. NeoDarwinian Evolution with a word to my conversant about a Limbaugh he quoted only in transcripts, not in fact:

“Jason Organ . Again. Did you listen to the broadcast? No. He was enjoying himself tremendously. You don’t get that because I’d bet a dollar you have never listened to his show once. Let’s get to it. He is way smarter, better educated, and more talented than his detractors admit. He has an uncanny talent for talking off the cuff in an intricately organized yet spontaneous way for three hours a day, an ability only two other radio hosts in my experience are capable of. He never needs to take callers but does so, and is unfailingly polite to them. His persona is a kind of self-deprecating humor manifested in obviously over the top assertions of his infallibility. He is sincere about his beliefs. The written transcripts do not do justice to his ability to speak in long sentences that are in fact diagrammable. He makes fun of liberals and their orthodoxies but unlike Howard Stern does not use four letter words. He does not make racist statements. He makes fun of hard lefty feminists because they are hard lefties, not because they are women. He does not make anti-gay statements. He mostly leaves religion alone because he is not particularly religious. He does not do tirades about abortion. He confines himself to the hypocrisies and doublespeak of outfits like Planned Parenthood, as revealed by their political machinations and dirty dealings with their opponents.

“He is way smarter than the so-called journalists who sneer at him based on audio clips taken out of context. He does not appear on TV or at celebrity media events.

“He does not do celebrity guests, or guests of any kind, because he doesn’t need to. He has been on top of the radio market for 27 years because he has a talent even Don Imus (who had a legion of sidekicks) described as “unbelievable.”

“And I often disagree with him. But he is the father of the opposing media voice that gave rise to the new media. That’s the origin of the term “ditto heads.” In the early days, callers always started with stammering expressions of gratitude that a conservative voice was finally on the air. He soon put an end to it. He said. Don’t waste your valuable air time with such statements. Just say “ditto.” The callers came in with dittoes from every state and town but they didn’t always agree. That wasn’t the point. They had questions, points of opposition, and those were the things discussed.”

Just thought you should read this before you come back at me with more badly transcribed typing so of his on-air remarks. If you think you know who he is, you’ve been informed by media propaganda, not experience. I’m sure you can appreciate the importance,of the difference.

So Sarah Skwire branded me “uncivil” and unfriended me.

What did I say? Probably the name Limbaugh.

Nothing so certain and ruthless as a woman who knows nothing but her own bents.

Bless you, Sarah.

It’s all gone. At this point Harvard and Yale are only competing to see who can be the more ignorant, arrogant, certain, uneducated, intolerant, laughable, totalitarian, and mediocre. Here’s my contribution to the Class of 2016 at my own alma mater. Long may you rot in hell. I know there are Yalies who feel the same way about Old Eli.

Lyrics to “Faux Harvard”

Faux Harvard! we join in thy PC throng,
And with CURSES surrender our powers
By these idiot poses, aimed at killing the past,
To the Age that will finish all that was ours.
O Relic and Crime of our ancestors’ earth
That hast long kept your memories warm
First flow’r of their sickness, scourge of the serfs!
Dumb rising thro’ change and minds stillborn.

Farewell! Be thy destinies backward and blight!
To OUR children the will not to live,
With freedom to rage, and and to sob and to spite,
And to Ignorance and Certainty shrive.
Let not moss-covered mentors yet abide,
As the world gone psychotic makes the Yard a sty.
Be the herald of Night, and the grim suicide
Of the dullards who know nothing except how to die.