Yeah. I always win. I’m not bald. I’m crazy.
Here’s what’s missing on the jacket.
Flying Skull Squadron
All right. What are we up to? Just for fun’s sake there’s the New Avengers, which as far as my wife is concerned beats Emma Peel by a mile.
Because she thinks Purdey is a slag at AbFab.
Got this image from Jeffrey Malashock. He thought it was hilarious, not knowing that I had written this novel all the way back in 1999.
The passion, the degradation…
Yes, back in the days of Shuteye Town 1999, I was the premier writer of women’s romantic fiction. This is a title I’m especially proud of.
The timeless erotica, the perversion, the Rosalie Ryder does Maureen Dowd of it all…(Click for bigger.)
Wait till you read the hot hot hot text. (Pardon what is called Greeking, where the words of one novel might be variable compared to the real pay dirt of female erotica.)
Chapter One
Arma virumque her long skirts and voluptuous yet maidenly form cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque the candles which her younger sister had lit hours before venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec the lush scent of the wisteria outside olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque still not married and contemplating the prospect of being a spinster cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto since her virtuous but dull suitor Thomas had fallen off his horse. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit sighed heavily, causing her firm young bosom to heave.
Arma virumque cano handsome stranger, dirty, disheveled, smelling strongly of maleness and travel. Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto ever since the war had begun. Dux femina facta troops and bandits and mysterious things in the night. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Aunt Prunella looked on disapprovingly as arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque the stranger looked directly at her and a strange heat grew in her belly venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
“How dare you speak to me in that way, sir?” she protested.
Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille his arms went round her but she pushed him away and ran back to the house through the rose garden, her breath coming in quick short gasps. terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta and nothing happening for quite a while. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.Arma virumque cano and nothing continues to happen for a while Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et some cooking and sewing haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque more candle lighting cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris difficulty sleeping iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec rumors of historical events and name dropping in some nearby town olim meminisse iuvabit.
“Wake up!” It was his voice and she came bolt awake, still half in a dream she realized had involved him. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma his arms around her but she pushed him away and virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa more nothing going on but some name dropping and more historical events ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec a famous person shows up and thinks she’s smart and fascinating for a woman olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae more trouble sleeping qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris disturbing rumors about the handsome stranger iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque candles and sewing and cooking and bosom heavings, trouble sleeping, name dropping, horse hooves et cetera Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma around her and this time she did not, could not have resisted because it was page sixty, and she knew it was impossible to hold out past page sixty. She wanted him, had wanted him ever since the moment she first laid eyes on his handsome face and the virile shape of his lean, male body inside those leathern breeches.
“Oh my darling dear,” he breathed, “I’ve wanted you ever since I first saw your beautiful face and the womanly heaving shape of your, er, maidenly form in that dress that’s cut down to here, if you know what I mean.”
And then they didn’t speak. There was only the questing of their hands, their lips, their hundreds of other nonsexual body parts, and finally their things that stiffened or peaked or protuberated or moistened, and they were joined together, as man to woman, and they rose and fell together, as deeply and naturally as the ocean or as two dogs in the street, except that the smell of tallow candles and leathern breeches made it somehow sweeter, more refined, less dirty and disgusting than it is in real life, and they sighed the words of love in the proper dialect in each other’s ear, and kept on joining and rejoining and rejoining some more until dawn, when both of them were exhausted with love, but still not speaking because of the plot complication.
Virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Well, those few paragraphs of Greeking (aka Latining) are about what they imagine when they run into a genuine Don Juan with a yellow carp on his head. Mind blowing. For paragraph after paragraph. After paragraph.
Crepe Myrtle in our front yard. Had one of these as a kid. Source of the quarter staffs I used to play Robin Hood as a kid. Now I like the blooms and not the pruning saw.
And a blast from the past. We used to have a mighty willow tree. Which had to be cut down before it fell and stove in the roof.
Yeah, it was old, but it gave us all our gorgeous woodpeckers. It was dying. Had to go.
Guess what though. All that was old is green again. There’s no way to kill a willow tree. THEY COME BACK.
The Phoenix of trees. (Yeah click on all these pics for bigger.)
Why even the worst moments should not deplete us of hope.
It’s called Dead Scotty
She spends a lot of time milling around. And getting her from the breezeway through the garage to the dog room to the out of doors frequently requires a lot of dancing and ducking and blocking and skedaddling, which is a great trick indeed. But the thing she does that gets our closest attention is “Dead Scotty.”
One day it will be true. She’s 11 after all. But she gets us at least once or twice every day. Sometimes you have to wake her up in the morning. When you see her you think “Oh no.” Then she scrambles to her feet for the dance routine of the day.
Afternoons, we bring her upstairs to visit, and she hangs with Raebert and shrugs off the cats. Then you look over and see her and think, “oh no.”
She’s got Devil’s eyes. They laugh when you disturb her corpselike pose.
Scotties. Devil’s eyes. Laughing at you and the universe.
You cannot escape.
I remember. They called two straight personal fouls against Alan Page. 30 yards. He got them all back in the next two plays. Back when the NFL was a league of men fighting men. Now a judge. Ohio. Hey. We always win.
Do you remember? I do. There was Mean Joe Greene. And Alan Page and Carl Ellers. People who used to be known as football players.
What do we have now? The Hall of Fame Game. Vikings vs Steelers. Don’t they look cute? Their Twitter accounts are as fashionable as their wardrobes. And the incredibly stupid choreography they perform after a tackle, a sack, or a touchdown. Children are always children, regardless of race, creed, or country of origin.
Told my wife I’m just about done with the NFL.
I remember Bud Grant. He didn’t let his players wear gloves. It was always cold in Minnesota before they closed the city in a dome. Done.
Done. Done. Done. Oh Yeah. The running back who’s had half a dozen kids by half a dozen women. How cool is that?
Media Buzz. Half ass kissing and half ass covering (pun intended).
Wow. Wow. WOW!!! Didn’t want to watch but my wife made me. More than I ever wanted to know about Megyn Kelly’s digestive system. She almost couldn’t go on, but Howie Kurtz was too much a gentleman to ask if she was on her period.
In fact, they were very gentlemanly to themselves as a network. The approach of attacking candidates’ vulnerabilities was asserted quite assertively as a good and useful thing. Let’s do everything we can to make them look bad because the New York Times and the Washington Post won’t be doing that on overdrive until November 2016. Oh. That’s right. What we really wanted was for Fox News to get good reviews from the NYT and WAPO.
LET’s see, Megyn. The country is looking for a new president. Immigration. ISIS. Domestic terrorism. A budding race war. Catastrophic debt. An economy mired in the sludge of leftist regulation and phony climate change paranoia. So what’s the most important question to ask the biggest figure on the stage? “Uh, you called a woman a fat pig.”
Thank you, Ms. Media Talent of this new and odious century.
So now Fox News becomes the big coverup machine. Megyn gets ten minutes to explain why she and “the other two” did exactly what the alphabet networks would have done. Hector and embarrass the Republican candidates and re-upped the War on Women meme and the false controversies about how much white men oppose abortion. Then she got another three minutes to act all girly girl, complete with hand and hair histrionics, to tell us about what seems to have a bowel problem on the day of the show.
I kid you not.
I was pretty much done with Fox after that, but then by accident I heard part of Fox News Sunday on the radio. Charles Lane, in his urbane way, repeated the Erick Erickson slander, cementing it into the record. Laura Ingraham pointed out that Trump is saying things people want to hear. Chris Wallace questioned whether any of these Trumpsters are actually Republicans (huh?). Laura, probably hormonal at this time of the month, walked off the set to look after her thug Russian children, and George Will, finally asked about Trump, settled into his primmest grandma mode and let loose.
Can’t quote him word for word but it went something like this. “Donald Trump @&$?$&@? Trump %#^+¥£€ The Donald >€%#£€¥^*!”
No real cuss words, mind. Just the sanitized and oh so clever Princeton kind.
I’m thinking Fox has made a big business bet. Get some respect from the dying MSM and look for a ratings hike. Move left and steal audience from the alphabet news outlets.
The upside is obvious. So is the downside. Become what you used to loathe and despise, and you will lose the ones who once believed in you.
MY idea of Fair and Balanced. Megyn. Just saying.
Yeah. There’s going to be a precision bombing exercise at Fox News on August 6th. Silly people being low key for the sake of being not so bad candidates. Why?
What really happened 70 years ago.
Thursday, they’re telling us, August 6. Ten years ago on that date it was Harry’s 60th birthday. He offered two Psongs.
Now it’s his 70th. He offers one more.
PSONG 70
You passed beyond me. I was cold.
2 We had not spoken, I was cold.
3 Grey ladies came to make you old,
4 And I was angry you grew old.
5 But that was never what we do or did,
6 We never cared for what they did.
7 Our hatred and our love were not their ken,
8 Only seething awful fire of kin.
9 You died on me, last punch at love.
10 But die you couldn’t really, frightful love.
11 God eternal, beyond my sin.
12 My god, the truth, beyond my ken.
13 I hated you, you hated me.
14 You walked away, and I did too.
I told my wife I could write a Psong in a minute flat. Not a big deal. It’s always bottled up inside. It just needs letting out now and again.
There’s the job market. Which is a lot like a beaver — say, a Brown graduate — who discovers that he has to defend his dam against all comers, which is pretty much the way of nature. Only the government doesn’t want beaver dams anymore. At which point he becomes a federal bureaucrat. Or… he becomes thinner, smarter, and more opportunistic.
What do you do in the latter case? You become a predator. And a killer. But small and clever.
Now you’re a jumped up weasel. Interestingly enough, these exist in varying forms on four different continents. Won’t torture you with the Tasmanian Devil. You can do that for yourself. Incredibly brave idiot mammals who will do anything to win. (Think Crimson Tide.) Because they never give up. Same thing said about both beavers and jumped up weasels. Thinking yet? Little like us maybe? The way we used to be? Before we got so fat and lazy and stoned and stupid? Hardworking, relentless, and courageous. We’re us but nature still shows us what’s underneath our flaccid pretensions.
Hard-wired, folks. Try this. The mongoose are nothing compared to the honey badgers. Nothing. Who can take the balls off a hyena at no minute’s notice? Meet Stoffel, the smartest mammal you’ve ever met. And the meanest. (Think Fight Club.)
Which makes the Ann Arbor team the wimps we always knew they were. Kidding. There are no more wolverines in Michigan, but the ones we have left are still North American. Therefore nicer than the tiny monsters from Africa. (You didn’t watch the PBS honey badger piece yet, did you? Give yourself a break. DO IT! You’ll laugh your ass off, I promise.) Why in the hell hasn’t Stan Lee created a female superhero Honey Badger character? Chauvinism, I suspect. Not really. Just a want of knowledge and imagination. Honey Badger would completely kill Wolverine of the X-Men tales.
But wolverines are cool too. They’re not even scared of bears. 30 lbs isn’t big.
Think about civilization. It’s programmed in. Most mammals are conscious. Probably most life forms are conscious.
Even Michigan Wolverines. Hopefully, Ohio State Buckeyes don’t suffer from the same frailty.
Life consists of beavers and honey badgers. Capitalism consists of arbitrating between cooperation and aggression. Beavers are ambitious if not aggressive and even honey badgers are cooperative to a point. Life is like that. Capitalism is both these things. No conflict. Just a stretching synergy.
What part of this don’t you get? Maybe this part.
Sredni Vashtar. Do one thing for me. Save my country from Brown. And Harvard.
If the end is near, you want to gulp scotch with this one. She’s got some eyes on her.
Edna said I was neglecting the seasoned set by picking Miss Fisher. Guess she was right. I’d been looking for people who are closely associated with a fictional character. When I look older for an End of World companion I find a fertile field. Top of the list, this one.
Helen Mirren is the ace of aces among women. Quite beautiful without being pretty.
She is closely associated with a fictional character, Jane Tennison. Over quite a few years we watched her, totally undolled up, survive a constant stream of male chauvinist attacks and yet solve the crime. Along the way, of course, she fell into loneliness, isolation, promiscuity and alcoholism — the point at which she started receiving acting awards.
Now she’s a Dame of the British Empire. Why? Because of all her great acting? NO! Because she’s the jolliest competitor in the sport of Getting to Be a Dame. Quite simply, there is no British actress, however well Shakespeared or Redgraved by the Thespian establishment, who has been more eager to throw off her clothes and and show off her boobs and bush than Dame Helen Mirren. Even into late middle age.
This is the safest for work. The movie was called The Cook, The Thief, The Lover, and the Most Tits and Trim Ever Displayed at Cannes by a Woman Over Forty.
She’s done some great acting too. Like there was the Jane Tennison stuff. she stewed, stormed, fretted, and fought her own base instincts to just tear off that blouse, rip down those panties, and be her younger, freer self.
That’s more like it, Detective Chief Superintendant.
Seek, and find, the truth, wherever it lies.
There it is. At least for now. But what of later’ when I’m 64?
Oops. My son shouldn’t have seen that. But he’s not really my son, except in the movie. Actually, he’s my current main squeeze.
So. If there are only days left till the, you know, EOTW, the very best bet is probably Helen Mirren.
But maybe you need an old guy too. This is getting complicated.
If you haven’t seen her, you don’t know what you’re missing.
She wasn’t meaning to be critical, because she really liked the post about Captain Hastings and the End of the World, but she had an obvious question: What about the women?
I floundered for a long time by my reckoning, tossing out three names in 20 seconds, and then as the clock was ticking ominously toward the half minute mark I came up with the answer.
Miss Fisher. She’s like a female Hastings with a brain. Not to mention a sex drive. She’s like this rich Australian flapper detective trollop. Meaning no offense. Her wardrobe is perfect. She has an Hispano Suiza that would look nice in bed with Hastings’s Lagonda, and she carries a golden revolver in her garter. What more do you need? Oh, right. Champagne every day, if not every hour, and she has her own Hastings, a police inspector who is traditional and handsome, but not at all stupid, because attracted as he is to Miss Fisher, he is not suicidal. Which is where the End of the World comes in. Why the hell not ravish Miss Fisher?
Think about that as you enjoy these photos. Make up your own captions after this first one.
This portrait of Miss Fisher from her wilder days was the maguffin in one of her mysteries. She liked making her police inspector blush at the sight of it.
You know, I’m thinking Hastings could handle it. He may be dumb as a fence post, but he’s a man’s man and Miss Fisher likes that.
Thus, our End of the World couple.
Since we pretty much are at the end of the world, it might be time to decide what roles we want to play in the last few deals of the cards.
Hercule Poirot was Agatha Christies’s most eccentric creation. The anti-Holmes if you will. A plump Belgian with a Mr. Potato Head mustache and a sidekick who made Holmes’s Watson look like a nuclear physicist. Captain Hastings.
But Hastings had his points. Invariably good natured, so well born that he never took offense at the Belgian’s condescension, and, here’s the key point, actually better dressed. Poirot was always overdressed. Hastings had that just threw-on these Savile Row rags look that made all the difference. Tie a bit askew, but everything else a triumph of English tailoring. And he had the hero thing down to a tee if you could only get his attention long enough.
He was the forerunner of Nero Wolfe’s Archie Goodwin. Just as much an action man but not (nearly) as clever. Both in love with clothes, cars, and fine dining. Archie had a better feel for the ladies though. Hastings somehow knew the ladies would find him.
Where were we? Time to figure out how to ride out the apocalyptic storm. How better than to be an idealized version of a character beloved throughout what remains of the civilized world?
P. G. Wodehouse. …One I’ve written about before. I read the first definitive biography of him a few years back, and what’s clear about him — as for so many other humorists — is that his life was in many ways sad, even though he lived to great old age, produced about a hundred novels, and umpty-gazillion short stories. He was a man of baffling contradictions and therefore a more useful source of insight about the U.K. than most of the “serious” writers in his country who were contemporaries or came later. He seems to us locked permanently in the England between the two world wars, a fantasy realm of country estates, two-seat roadsters, gentlemen’s clubs, and aristocratic aunts with lorgnettes and no knowledge whatever of everyday English life. Yet he is the source cited by Evelyn Waugh, the deadliest satirist of his age, as the master of dialogue from whom Waugh learned how to eviscerate pretension and hypocrisy in the most maliciously brilliant novels of the twentieth century. In person, Waugh was witty and mean; Wodehouse was everywhere described as dull. Wodehouse was afraid of assertive women, indifferent to sex, not because he was gay, it seems, but because his personality was formed by distant, even cold, family relations, and then frozen for good in adolescence by his happier experience in boarding schools when he finally escaped from home. Then he managed to get himself exiled forever from Britain by being a “good sport” on the radio when he was interned by Germans in the early days of World War II. He never went home again. He never complained. Because that’s the way Brits are. No matter what they do to you, you have to petend to have the emotional range of a cricket bat.
Yes. yes! Let’s be dull, preternaturally cheerful, well dressed, almost deliberately obtuse, and faintly absurd. I give you the Cary Grant version of Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster. Dumb as Dirt and quickest to pick up a check.
Always ready with the Lagonda.
The right hat for every occasion.
Well dressed as any Poofster.
Gravely up for the end of the world without the slightest notion of what it entails.
Does it get any better than that? I want to be that man. Most women want someone to be that man. He orders champagne with ultimate sangfroid right before Obama makes everything go away. Perfect.
Rocky Marciano. The only undefeated heavyweight.
What everybody’s missing. Nobody wants a woman president, let alone Hillary. That’s not who we are. Everybody knows about women. Can’t stop talking, making trouble just because, and always with a chip on their shoulder that somehow hurts women more than men. The ones who are good are rarer than hen’s teeth, and they usually know better than wanting to be in charge of a bunch of Chatty-Cathy’s.
Nobody wants a minority president anymore. Had it with identity politics. Don’t care if you can change your accent in every venue, Barack. So so tiresome. Don’t care if you can speak Spanish, Jeb. Don’t like Spanish. Especially out of the First Mouth.
What we want is a goddamn man in the Oval Office. Someone who says what he means and means what he says, no wimpy appeasing aside.
Trump’s just a flare. Showing how it’s done. Don’t get scared by the press. Don’t back down. don’t apologize. Let loose that left hook when the opening comes.
So far, all the 37 Republican candidates are sissy boys, anxious to say what the mass media insist they say. “We would never depart from the orthodox Democrat standpoint: open the borders, black lives matter more than anyone else’s, abortion’s just not that controversial even if it’s a huge moneymaking proposition for organizations paid for by congress, and this income inequality thing is outrageous: “My Georgetown caterer with all those foxy Spictarts makes more gross income than I do. Outrageous.”
But WSJ and NR are foaming at the mouth that anyone would justify Trump’s comments about McCain. Really? I said worse about McCain years ago. He’s a bad bad man.
They’re all wimps. Crybabies. Crawling little worms who think Republicans win by offending no one. Here are the ones I challenge to a debate on the merits: Goldberg, Williamson, Cook, and Nordlinger. I know they’re the smartest of the staff writers. But they haven’t crossed sabers with me when I’m mad.
Bruisers are what we need. Trump is a sad sack but a hard hitter, scrappy in the corners. Christie is a true slugger but vulnerable to both the left hook and right cross. Hillary is the guy who buys all the fights before they are fought. Ever seen Danny Kaye’s Fighting Milkman?
Cruz is Ali, the most gifted natural talent in the game. But all the promoters have decided to fix the fight against him. When Cruz declined to comment on Trump, WAPO’s Jennifer Ruben declared, to her shame, that it was an act of cowardice. Ali punched everyone out. Liston called him a coward until he felt the fury of the seventh round.
Tired of all the court jesters. All too close to the court, all too much in jest for my taste. The country is dying. National Review will go on. Will the United States? Do they even care? Not as long as they keep getting their appearance and speaking fees.
My challenge stands. I can outwrite your top four. Not to defend Trump. But to demonstrate that you have no idea what’s going on outside your NR bubble.
It’s time to punch our way past the twits into contention.
Rand’s heroine of Atlas Shrugged wasn’t a pro-choice, weed smoking alternative rock atheist. She was a railroad executive. Name of Dagny Taggart.
Things her acolytes don’t actually get about her. She was a philosopher. Her fictional creations were people who knew what work was. The hero of Atlas Shrugged was Dagny Taggart, who didn’t care about objectivist philosophy as much as keeping a troubled railroad running. Her first two lovers were the same. Hank Reardon invented a new metal alloy, which the government took from him and called Miracle Metal and Francisco the ore baron who spoke for ten pages about the meaning of the US dollar. Cool. Rand also creamed her jeans over an an architect named Howard Roarke in The Fountainhead. Clearly she loved the doers more than the ideologues and was seeking to preserve and promote their freedom to create.
The acolytes love the philosophy part and never seem to get the hard hard work part. They want to do what they want to do, whenever they want to do it, because they are Ayn’s heirs.
You see, the kindest interpretation of Rand’s atheism is that she just put the whole question of God aside, regarding it as corrupted by collectivist doctrines like Soviet Communism. Fair enough. That was her entire cultural and historical experience as a person born into Stalinist Russia.
As an escapee from that soul destroying system and its educational propaganda, she concentrated on the freeing properties of capitalism, people interacting for personal gain, as an antidote to the death represented by totalitarian government.
None of this makes her a theologian. She was a victim of a vicious system. It certainly doesn’t make her an articulate spokesman for atheism. Raised in a rigid system, she became rigid. Raised in a totalitarian culture, she became ruthless and vicious in her personal dealings. The biographies confirm this.
She could brook no criticism. We all have the weaknesses of our strengths and the strengths of our weaknesses. We can learn from her without being acolyte slaves.
Hence my defense. What she believed in above everything else was the virtue of work and dedication and what rewards it should bring you. John Galt was just a fairy tale that stood her in place of a God she’d been disabled from believing in.
How many of her followers are accomplished at running railroads, innovating in technology, and excelling in acts of creative commercial art? Thinking mostly none. But we can light up a cigarette in her honor.
God bless the child. She was lost but she is found.
What do you think?
Being an angry bitch is the best way to get Maher type ratings.
Sorry. He’s a corrupt politician. That’s all he is. Nobody who is a real war hero runs on that label. Unless he’s a conquering general, which is another kettle of fish. McCain is no conquering general. He’s a relic of the worst chapter in a lost war.
Nor is he a hero. He did his duty, which was brave and admirable. But not heroic. It’s what the military expects. Duty. MacArthur laid it out in his famous speech. Duty, Honor, Country. McCain managed one out of three. He told his captors everything he knew, which takes away Honor and Country. But he refused to be withdrawn from captivity because his captors knew his dad was an admiral. Which gives him half the Honor points back. Hero? I think not.
Yeah. My dad once brought one of these P-47s home with more than 300 bullet holes. He died in ’99. Never was a fan of the war hero from Arizona.
McCain flew about 60 fewer combat missions than my dad did. Who never thought of himself as a hero. He shipped out with six other pilots in WWII and was the only one who came home.
Senator McCain faced nothing like the certain death my grandfather faced as a captain of infantry in the Rainbow Division in the trenches. Here’s what he saw…
At the Argonne Forest…
Nice forest, eh?
At Chateau Thierry…
More nice French scenery
At Belleau Wood…
I think the definition of heroes is up for grabs, frankly.
People called him “Cap” but he never said a word out loud about what he experienced in France as the Americans won the bloodiest infantry war ever fought.
What war was like before Bill Maher made the world safe for shrilly obscene denial.
Don’t get excited. He’s only Cornell.
Cornell needs a rethink. And so does Tom Zampino. Sorry, Tom. I know you mean well.
Don’t get excited. He’s only Ivy League Jerk.
Sad, really. He’s short. Ugly. And only Cornell. How could it be worse? Bill Maher. Man of no character, no interest, no intelligence, no nothing. He’s just a drab. Invite him here. Tell him the Harvard guy is waiting. I’ll fucking kill him. Tell him.
But he won’t come. Cornellians are all cowards.
Nicole. Nasty piece of work.
I had her number ten years ago. Sad to say, nobody else did.
The View did what George W couldn’t but should have. Fire her sorry ass.
She saya I’m not photogenic. Well who is at my age?
It’s fun taking pictures of yourself late at night in the coolest sunglasses on earth. Women want you to look good while doing it. Nothing is ever enough for them.
Serena and Novak.
The women soccer players are complaining about not getting equal pay with the men. Never mind the fact that the women’s World Cup earns about $6 million in ad revenue to the men’s $1 billion plus.
Wimbledon seems to be an exception. Men and women, as I understand it, are making about the same in prize money. In which case I’d suggest the women need to play best out of five sets too. You know. The men, who play much better tennis over all, have to play 40 percent more for the same prize. Is that fair?
No. Serena Williams wouldn’t win a set against the top fifty men. She looks like she could go five sets, though. No?
The Muffster. She never lost a race. How cool is that?
He’s on my newsfeed and he’s from Philly. I don’t need anything more. Here’s the plight of Anthony Denaro.
I’d never take to the social network to ask for help. Neither would you. Until you’re stranded and in real trouble. Which I suddenly am.
Maybe you can relate to this. Successful career, family, and high hopes for the future.
Then, one day, one leg is stiff and numb. You ignore it for a time. Then a doctor tells you you have Multiple Sclerosis, not the TV Martin Sheen kind that goes away at the commercial or when the plot requires, but the kind that relentlessly drags you toward a wheelchair and loss of eye focus and eventual paralysis.
I’ve had an awful prognosis since my first diagnosis. But there is some hope. If I can get back north, there’s a spinal injection that offers me a 20 to 40 percent hope of improvement or even cure.
But I don’t have $28,000. Funny. It’s not the amount of money needed to make a movie. Just the amount of money needed to give me a chance to survive.
So. I’m not Martin Sheen. I’m Anthony Denaro. I have a life, a girlfriend, a mind to share with all of you. And all I need is $28,000. And bit by bit I am dying. You probably can’t save me. But maybe, just maybe, you might.
If you want to contribute, do a search for GOFUNDME.com and Anthony Denaro. If you have bright ideas about how to raise $28K, please describe them in the comments here. The clock is ticking.
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