Charles Murray has the same birthday as Einstein and Hawking, which he proudly pronounced. My wife looked up my birthday and found that I share a birthday with Urban Meyer, Arthur Ashe, Marcel Proust, and Nikola Tesla, whom Einstein pronounced the greatest genius of all time. There was page after page of July 10 babies, but no mention of the one I remembered above all.

She was hot.

Sarah Virginia Wade, OBE (born 10 July 1945) is a British former professional tennis player. She won three Grand Slam singles championships and four Grand Slam doubles championships, and is the only British woman in history to have won titles at all four Grand Slam tournaments. She was ranked as high as No. 2 in the world in singles, and No. 1 in the world in doubles. She won the women’s singles championship at Wimbledon on 1 July 1977, in that tournament’s centenary year, and was the last British tennis player to have won a Grand Slam singles tournament until Andy Murray won the US Open in 2012. She remains the last British female to have won a Grand Slam singles title. After retiring from competitive tennis, she coached for four years[3] and has also worked as a tennis commentator and game analyst for the BBC and Eurosport.

She was hot hot hot.

And a one handed backhand. Beat that, you millennial brats.

Lindsey Graham — Such a touching moment when Lindsey reached out to Melissa Etheridge. She didn’t mean to break his hand. No doubt his campaign would have gotten a big boost without that.

Martin and John are waiting for you in the green room, Lindsey.

George Pataki — Yeah. No Sinatra. Just what passes for him in Albany.

Laugh, clown laugh.

Rick Santorum. Speaking of which, let go the clowns. Learn to laugh at yourself. Best we can do.

Carly Fiorina. She’s a hurricane all right. But one heading out to sea, spent in the Pacific. Still like her for the VP slot aimed at taking out Hillary.

Chris Christie. What else sums him up so well?

John Kasich. One word. Boring. Hillary isn’t. Monstrous and evil but never boring.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C_ksYL26lZE

It’s tough to be a U.S. Marine from the heart of old Confederacy and a liberal squish at the same time.

Thinking Jim Webb won’t be able to reconcile the two.

Oops. Watch those Bernie Sanders hands.

Me and Billy JayCee.

I’ll start with Hillary. This relationship goes way wa-a-a-y back to the sixties. Here they were.

Playing at Revolution at Yale.

Think anything’s really changed? Twin sociopaths determined to win power at any cost. Arkansas trash and Illinois trash on the LSD trip of an aeon. How will it end. Probably with an overdose of power, sex, and perversion.

Of course, you’re free to nominate your own campaign song for Hillary.

John Belushi as Joe Cocker. Way closer than you think.

Well. Bernie Sanders.

Wait till his night comes.

He’s also an imitation. Lenin and Stalin are dead. But he waves his arms around like an old man who isn’t entirely deceased, like all his ideas are. You know. Prop him up with some idiot blonde coeds and a pianist who can play a few bars of classics from the past and he seems like he just might be current. Instead of a completely crazed moron on the ragged edge of death.

Again, feel free to nominate your own.

Clay Aiken. “Invisible.”

Martin O’Malley. Yes he is.

Hi. I’m not really here. Just holding a place for John Edwards. Who said he’d be back as soon as he got an ice cream for his newest wife.

John Edwards here. Remember what I said about two Americas? There’s Hillary’s and there’s yours. Hers is clearly better unless you can find it in your heart to like me.

Feel free.

Tomorrow or sometime, the Republicans. We’ll be just as unsparing.

I’m the go to guy here for supermarket shopping in bad weather. We’ve got one about three miles away, which is convenient though it’s also for old people, and we are old people, but we don’t always want the miniature box of Cheezits, the demi-can of Campbell’s soup, the fat free bacon, the three pack of eggs, the limitation to one stick of butter, or the 3/4 pound roaster chicken. But at least they don’t card us for the giant megapack of Mucinex.

Anyway, we agreed last night when the wind chill was –3 Fahrenheit that what we needed was a tummy warming tuna casserole. I said we should plan ahead and also prepare for a subsequent hamburger stroganoff. (Yes we are gourmands, New Jersey style). So today I headed out for the Incollingo’s market with the following list.

For once, everything went swimmingly, except for the other oldsters who block aisles contemplating which combination of salt-free, fat-free junk food they want to put in their carts. And the weird scruffy looking people with no store badges performing some sort of sweep out the lower shelves ritual while sprawled across the floor with legs akimbo. I used the senior klaxon horn on my cart to clear the way.

Burned right through the list, which, as usual, was in no particular order regarding the organization of the store. But I have one of those extraordinary minds. Kind of like Charlie in Numb3rs, I can reconcile the list with my memory of the store and pick off the items with extraordinary speed and efficiency while navigating a sensible and linear route through the aisles.

I was out of there in 20 minutes. I even got the greatest supermarket cashier of all time, who knew immediately I wanted the cold stuff in one bag and I wanted everything in paper AND plastic. Not only that. I managed to snag a pint of sour cream for the hamburger stroganoff and two cans of Bean with Bacon Campbell’s soup which my wife had told me was no longer available, neither of which products were on her list.

Upon my triumphant return I put away the cold items while my better half put away the pantry items. As I prepared to return upstairs, she said, “Maybe I missed it. Where is the tuna?”

I don’t know how it goes in your house. She looked at my face and started laughing. Then I started laughing. There’s no explanation and no excuse. It’s just funny.

So I’ll be making hamburger stroganoff tonight. And after I return with a solitary mission to Incollingo’s tomorrow, we’ll have tuna casserole.

Happy ending.

Not all pugs are fat. Weenie isn’t.

Life is funny. Downright perverse sometimes. On Facebook, lots of people regard me as a nasty crabby thing. I even got defriended a couple of times last year. But here at home, with the four dogs and a cat, nasty and crabby as some of them can be, I’m the go to guy, the best lap, the one place they never have to explain themselves. Our Scotty doesn’t talk to anyone but me. The deerhound loves his mommy but understands every word I say. The cat has to be on my lap every night. And Eloise, to whom I am intensely allergic, likes nothing better than to be on my hip as close as Elliott.

So she would like you to know that she wishes you all a truly gorgeous and wonderful New Year. [Sneeze sneeze sneeze sneeze]

God bless her.

I am Eloise. I am six. Twice.

And then there’s Rae. Who really is six and owns more of my lap than all of the others combined.

Dog PhDs are smart. They miss the fact that dogs are intelligent. Some of of them Very.

When it starts, fight or die.

Win any way we can.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9bALYBDUGLQ

New Year. Go get’em. Fuck’em.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k-oqgIZGhbU

Here’s what I guarantee you. Right now, my mother and both her parents are sitting bolt upright in their graves. Ohio State vs Notre Dame. According to their collective memory, the Buckeyes have never beaten the Antichrist called the Fighting Irish. All the breaks, all the referee calls, all the penalties always go against Ohio State, increasing exponentially the later into the game you get.

My wife will be watching the game. I will be hiding under the couch.

Run for your life. Correction. Run for your soul.

See ya. Couch time.

Rikki Tikki Tavi.

Sonnet for 2016

I’m a grey.
I’m here with you but only half.
I sleep but not far away
I run and run every single day
But I am still in every way but one
The part that waits for word or hand
When I need the kindness of a man.

I’m a grey.
I’m on the couch, I have a pet or two
Soft and friendly, just like you.
I’m here with you but only half.
The other half with clouds and lights
Way over you.

I am a grey, half at home with you.

Thing about rare birds. They fly away.

Rare birds everywhere, you know. Twice in the last week I’ve seen a great blue heron on our road, once on the shoulder and once on a concrete county bridge. Noticing them makes them fly away.

For about a dozen years we’ve had our own rara avis here at my various blogs, a lovely creature from Hawaii. Now, suddenly, she is gone, taken wing in a fright never intended.

But that’s how it goes with the rare ones. You have to be grateful for the moments you had watching them and appreciating their beauty. When those wings unfold and soar away, it’s too late to convince them you meant no harm.

So you’re just grateful and sorry to have so startled them. God be with you, B.D. We will miss you always and never stop loving you.

Okay. On a question where there is no actual right answer, there is no wrong answer either. Harvey likes the staircase dancing in the Gay Divorcee. By an amazing coincidence we do too.

My namesake grandfather in his elder years used to turn down invitations to dance by declaring that he only danced The Continental. You can see why he would take such a position. The ladies loved him anyway.

Happy New Year, Harvey.

Pot roast on thick sliced Italian bread with mayo. She didn’t make me one. Because all I did was go to McDonalds and get burgers for all the dogs and some nuggets for our gimpy greyhound. I understand. I got myself an egg mcmuffin and FOUR apple pies for her. I understand. Sure I do.

We’ve narrowed down all of Fred Astaire’s dance routines to the two best. Don’t argue. We know best all the way up to this point, where we disagree. My better half (usually) says the one up top is the best because Ginger’s dress weighed 400 pounds or something and as we all know she was always loud about saying she did everything Fred did only backwards and in high heels loaded down with feathers or in this case with a half ton of gold dress.

My pick, on the other hand, is what is widely acknowledged as the best movie dance routine ever, featuring the incomparable Cyd Charisse. No more needs to be said.

So vote in the comments. I know how it will go. Because I can always fix the outcome after the fact, just like they do at NBC.

Cyd Charisse

Speed is compression of time. Why we want it so much.

Just to set the mood.

Tom and Rachel are in love. Don’t you envy them?

Bet you do.

They should be on Broadway.

My mother had a crush on Ezio Pinza.

And there’s always Sinatra.

P.S. So Pat and I had our own thoughts.

Mine:

Hers:

Ours (Amadeus means beloved by God, eh?):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6QAAZ29cvfU

Love is. What we do is up to us. What we don’t is up to God.

My mother. Found her picture. Made my year.

In no particular order and with no particular intent. What I remember. Mainly.

I made a friend on the Internet. No kidding. An Italian married to a Jewish beauty, so now he sounds like Woody Allen at Catholic school.

Harvard won a share of the Ivy League football title. Meanwhile, the rest of the Ivy League was making a laughingstock of itself with political correctness, microaggressions, safe spaces, and other kinds of fear and trembling. Harvard doesn’t need safe spaces. They rule the world regardless.

Got Rush Limbaugh children’s books about American history for two of our grandchildren. My wife’s 45 year old son walked out of the room when he saw what we’d given his son.

Published two books of our own too. One print, one an ebook. (Okay, okay. “The Lounge Conversations” at Amazon. “Why Is There a Boomer Bible?” On Kindle. More to come.)

Commented to my wife about a longtime friendly commenter that “she’s a dirty old woman.” To which my wife responded, “Just like you.” How unfair I thought. Then, when I was searching for one specific pic in my files, I realized how many pictures of naked women I’d collected in just the last year. My wife was right. And wrong too. The year has been full of third wave feminism, rape culture, and other women’s nonsense. I was quietly building a dossier proving that women really, always, want to be naked in public. Starkers if they can get away with it. Performing, protesting, posturing, and ultimately preening with every little bit and nip exposed. But I rarely make lewd jokes.

TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! The most fun I’ve had in seven years of the mummy king. Everybody in establishment Washington hates him, and everything he says and does bumps him up in the polls. Americans have a sense of humor. Reality TV has proven we are a coarse and vulgar people. Why are the stuffed shirts so suddenly astounded that a coarse vulgar candidate would resonate with a populace sick to death of being ruled by oppressive regulations and smarmy, patronizing liars in buttondown shirts?

The greyhound thing. We have a new old boy named Rikki Tikki Tavi. He looks like a deer. Right now he has a cut foot. How we measure time here. We plan on celebrating New Years with him.

We lost our last feral cat this year. Her name was Cassie. Like several of our cats, she bonded with me. (The one who was supposed to be mine, Izzie, bonded with my wife instead. No accounting for these things.) We’ve been looking for a black cat to rescue. No luck so far.

Got defriended a few times on Facebook. People don’t like it when you object to their pronouncements with logic and no use of profanities or obscenities. Which is their definition of ad hominem attack. Completely revolting. Like a wrestler who can’t figure out where to get a hold. The only possible response is to stomp off the mat and hurry to the locker room.

Raebert has spent the whole year being Raebert. Scottish deerhound afflicted with a human size brain. He knows that I know that he understands everything I say. We spend a lot of time staring at each other. He’s spent a lot of time this year developing his moaning and groaning vocabulary. By 2016 he’ll qualify as a humpback whale in good standing.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4VXWf1kD1g0

Anybody know how to make that happen? Do everything you can. Please.

Until that message arrives, all the rest of us can do is put our backs and shoulders behind this song.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VRLxkHGbN_8

Heave, everybody, heave. And make all the calls you can think of.

P.S. Everybody knows I have a dog in this hunt. It’s called, this time, Winter.

“Wrap my coat around ya.” So many wanting to do that.

Sheila. Please let her meet Paul.

Don’t tell Facebook. It’s on Kindle.

You won’t get answers about the end. You won’t even get answers about the beginning. But there was a punk writer movement in Philadelphia. They defeated the Pagans and ruled South Street. They moved invisibly through the city, on motorcycles that could not be heard. They wrote their own Bible, about the elders who had corrupted and fouled their education. They rewrote writing. And then they disappeared into quantum unreality. Don’t tell Facebook there’s a Kindle book. They will punish.

Here are the first two paragraphs of a book that’s got no (well, some) writing in it but mostly an exhaustive criticism of 20th century writing. Who wants to hear that? You maybe. A complete demolition of 20th century fiction writing? Horrors:

The package was wrapped in old burlap and smelled of rotten hay. It was tied up with four knotted-together railroad bandannas that disintegrated under my fingertips when I tried to loosen them. The fabric that had been crumpled inside the faded brown knots still glowed red, like artificially preserved flowers. And inside the burlap bag was the object I had spent almost almost three years looking for — not one but two manuscripts of the fabled Boomer Bible. At times over the many months of my search, I had almost given up hope of ever finding it, and even when I held it in my hands, I almost couldn’t believe it really did exist.

That day, I promised myself I would see it published, even if I never made a nickel out of it, because here was proof that the punks of Punk City had done what the stories said they had. It was all true. A bunch of born losers had tried to write it all down they way they saw it and heard it from the Baby Boomers.

Bandannas of the Shuteye Train. What was left after they were murdered and disposed of in the snow by Philly’s Pagan motorcycle gang in the eighties. Shammadamma.

And then the story began. Shammadamma.