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

So the Brits are deciding to save the family jewels. Good for them.

Iris and Raven on Day One in February.

Creativity. People ask how it works. It’s not that magical. Somebody says something that kicks your brain in a different direction. Then you do the work. The old one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration equation. Except substitute listening for inspiration to make it correct. Not too impressive from that angle, right?

Supposedly they’re sisters, but it’s increasingly hard to believe. And harder to explain without automatic punning. In personality they are night and day. Raven, the black one, shows every sign of being a true feral, afraid of people just because. Iris, the impossibly white one, is a cuddle bunny now after six months of reluctance to be touched. Now she leaps up onto the couch and purrs like a Bugatti with no muffler. At the change of seasons this year we had a renewed mouse outbreak. Iris killed it, literally, in about a week. Her peak was three in one day. She’s Clint Eastwood with a loving purr.

Raven lives mostly by herself. She positions herself in our bay windows front and back of the house and watches the birds. She no longer runs at the sight of you but a single pat is all she will allow. My wife has made more progress with her than I have. She’s unferalizing herself. Very slowly.

The two of them have a complicated relationship with each other, sometimes chummy but more frequently competitive. They chase each other upstairs and downstairs, wrestle like they mean it, and use all their cat brains to ambush each other.

Happened again today. Raven was in the bathroom. Iris was in the hall, squinched up for a surprise attack when Raven emerged. Only it was the ambusher who got ambushed. Raven rocketed out of the bathroom, bashed Iris in the face and disappeared downstairs. Which is when my wife said, “And the White Queen gets taken.”

Aha! Eureka! All those creative interjections. And like all creative people in this day and age I knew I could make myself cool by doing a post about cat chess by pinching pics that were obviously already on the Internet. So I searched.

What I envisioned, what I believed I would find was a cat populated version of this.

You know. A great big chess board with black and white cats enacting the game.

Didn’t find that. The best you get is this.

If this were about our past ferals Mickey and Cassie, it would be great. But not for Iris and Raven.

So then you try cat chess black and white. Which gets you only this.

Yeah. We see the black and white theme. Cats? Not so much.

So then you think, okay, I’m not specific enough. Cat chess Black Queen White Queen.

Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought, right before I thought Oops! The missus won’t like having inspired this, right?

So you keep looking.

Better. But I dunno.

Uh, where were we when we started?

So then I’m thinking, cats don’t play chess. Queens don’t play chess. They just knock stuff over and attack things. They don’t care about no damn board full of tidy squares.

I go where I like.

I do what I do. Like it or lump it.

Can’t improve on that. Cats 100, Creativity 0.

Millionaires just hate billionaires.

Yes, the woman who wrote a series of goofy children’s books while on the dole in the U.K. has an ax to grind with The Donald.

“British Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling unloaded on presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump in an essay posted to her website this week, calling the candidate a ‘fascist’ who possesses ‘the temperament of an unstable nightclub bouncer.”

We’re supposed to believe her because some clothheads think the Harry Potter books amount to some kind of social satire. Like, she really really hates Margaret Thatcher, who wanted to reduce the number of freeloaders living on the dole. Get tough on the lower classes and they’ll man up or some such thing Rowling really hates. Her not so subtle avatar for Thatcher is Dolores Umbridge.

You know. Disciplinarians are mean, mean, mean.

Except that Dolores Umbridge is actually more a symbol of the socialist welfare state than a stand-in for Thatcher.

And it’s all crap, even in her own terms. The Potter story has nothing to do with politics. She has nothing whatever to say about politics. Rowling’s books are harmless children’s fare, mostly. She is harmless as a spokesperson for anything. Yet another woman who can’t think. Why children’s books are children’s books. Written by children who haven’t ever gotten over their mommy and daddy issues and have to keep inflicting them on the rest of us.

Dolores uses magic but insists that her students don’t. Gun control, anyone? She is not the voice of liberty and individual responsibility. Harry Potter is. Harry is more Thatcherite than most in Britain are today. Though we’ll see, won’t we, if the state succeeds in snuffing out the Brexists?

It’s not politics that’s driving Rowling’s antipathy to Thatcher. It’s the domineering mother figure. Just as her male nightmare, the phantom Voldemort, the abusive father who might still return, is the exemplification of her other terror: the absent abusive father who might yet return.

So Rowling hated her parents. Fine. Her response is to conflate them into a conception called the Dementor. Who steals the life from children.

There’s fictional life and there’s real life. In fictional life, Rowling wants to set the kids free from their oppressive abusive parents. In real life, she aspires to be the Dementor-in-Chief. Taking control of the state and everybody’s lives until there are no lives left worth living.

Good thing we can dismiss it all as a children’s yarn, eh?

There’s a line. There’s always a line. Push it too close to people’s feet and they’ll cross it. As I just did.

Two things. Obama’s approval rating is over 50 percent. The worst president in the whole history of the republic and more than half of you approve of him. The only president who actively hates his country and never does his job without sneering at every worthwhile citizen from the 14th tee.

Thing two. Everyone knows the MSM is corrupt but they still buy the lies. Trump tells us we’re at war. Which we are. And you disapprove. You think he’s Hitler.

Fuck you.

I’m done.

From now on, I post only about pet peeves. Which happen to include 300 million of you. No political correctness. When they shut me down, as they will, be advised not to approach my bunker. You don’t want to meet the Naked Ape that is me. He’s your nightmare. Old, white, Celtic, accomplished, highly educated, full of wrath against all of you who are willing to see the greatest nation in the history of nations flushed away by your narcissistic tantrums and moral failures. You have no idea (no, you don’t) just how much disgust I feel for you. But I’m the,product of what you call white privilege. Which means…

Where I am.

Okay, so I’m driving along in Pennsville on the way home from an expedition to Delaware, and sick of talk radio, I switch over to WMMR, home of the original progressive DJ Pierre Robert, who never goes home anymore but sits at the microphone reassuring old Boomers with Classic Rock.

Where was I? Driving home from Pennsville. Pierre starts one of what he calls his Workforce Blocks, meaning they’re meant for people who actually work for a living, plus musicians and writers. Led Zep. Chili Peppers. And then I hear this.

Good God Almighty. I LIVED through the sixties, every pretentious, bloody, snotty, drug-infected POS moment of them. I heard Simon and Garfunkel in girls’ dorms till I thought my ears would bleed. All my life, till today, ask me what Sound of Silence was about and I’d tell you a hippy moonbeam chick was so stoned she thought she could hear the sound of silence. Which for the rest of us meant the sound of her not talking for once.

This is a magnificent performance. We all know that heavy metal vocalists do their obligatory ballad to prove they can and aren’t just rapists who didn’t get drunk enough to do it yet. They growl and roar in their hits and simper in their love songs. Yadda yadda yadda.

But here we have both voices and more in between. He begins in what is obviously an homage, not a mockery, of Art Garfunkel, but then he transforms the song, turning it into an emotional recapitulation of Ravel’s Bolero, which repeats and repeats, growing more insistent in every frame, until we experience the full-throated grief that must lie at the heart of every heavy metal head. The roaring is an attempt to defeat the silence. And it concludes, fittingly and humbly, with a diminuendo played by those same husky guitars. Kettle drum? Good God Almighty.

I’m crossing my fingers, just hoping they don’t dump us to a commercial after the song ends. The song ends. They dump us to three or five commercials. But the Pierre, bless his heart, returns and tells us who we’d been listening to.

Disturbed.

Why I’m sharing it with you. So you don’t have to drive with crossed fingers. Thank you, Pierre.

Pierre. Robert.

Oops. Forgot, like a lot of other people (though I really didn’t) the number one original voice of progressive rock, an adenoidal nerd who could play the hottest music of the sixties all night long and never let a drop of stardust befoul his plain black suit. WMMR in Philadelphia. Your host of the century? Michael Tearson.

All of which is a long way of saying, the antique radio station called WMMR made me feel twenty again for a quarter hour today.

Three time world champion of F1 racing. Doesn’t happen that often.

He’s the greatest F1 racing driver alive. Here’s his best lap at Winnipeg or somewhere, in Canada.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NvtHO1AIRqo

My wife thinks I’m jealous or something. I would have been. If I were the jealous type. Which I kind of am. So I waited for him outside his hotel and tracked his sorry ass down. For the 45 seconds it took for him to leave me in the dust. My wife has just about forgiven me.

Only two things I ever wanted to be. A writer or a race car driver. From the age of six. Ask twice in your prayers, get one answer. Saith the Lord.

Marco Rubio, President 2020.

Bret Stephens, Vice President 2020

Married June 12, 2018

When we can finally get back to the Republican Party we all want, here is our dream ticket. Two babes in the woods for the Democrats to feast on.

Or should we say lambs?

Of course, by the next time around they’ll both be mutton.

Yeah. Everything you think will be all right will be all right. Because you think you think you know how you think things will work out.

My wife is watching the early qualifications. Very interesting. I’ll have more to say when I’m fully awake.

This is the kind of Grand Prix that brings out the best in the drivers AND the Brit announcers. There’s an upcoming race and absolutely nothing else to do.

Um. Um. Working on it. Lewis Hamilton is determined. Unless he’s just bored. All the European hotties are determined unless they’re just bored. Thinking they’re all determined.

Oh well. I’ll write about the event this weekend. I’m determined to deliver true Grand Prix value. Unless… You know.

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.