You're gonna get yours too, reruns of Who's the Boss?

There are three things about me that everyone who knows me already knows: 1) like everyone else, I breathe air and drink water; 2) unlike everyone else, I do not put my pants on one leg at a time; and 3) I have a deep mistrust of American daytime television programming, especially, but not exclusively, public television.

Seriously, take one look at Mr. Rogers sexy hair stylings and tell me the man didn't have some kind of freakish agenda. He wanted your children*! He would stop at nothing to get them*! All his songs and puppets and sweaters were part of an elaborate plan to reprogram them*!

*(to be better people when they grow up)

Network daytime programming is no better. Live with Regis and Kathie Lee/Kelly is obviously a not-so-subtle play on the term "Life with Regis and Kathie Lee/Kelly," as in "life sentence," as in being forced to watch these people drone on endlessly, day after day, about fruit and manicures and diarrhea or whatever it is they talk about. (I've never actually seen more than six minutes of an episode.)

So I was gratified to find out that Michelle Obama repaid some of the horror inflicted on the American public by daytime television, by going on The View yesterday and holding those five women - and a guest or two - hostage. Just look at her terrorizing those "women" with her frightening fists of feminine fury:


Bully for you, Michelle. No one likes you anyway, so why not just terrorist fist jab them into submission? Bravo.

You're next, Big Bird, you pretentious fuck.

Note: the foregoing commentary on daytime television is presented without inclusion of Oscar the Grouch, who may be the lone trustworthy voice gracing the American airwaves during regular business hours. Also, Big Bird, please bear in mind that threats made against presidential candidates are investigated by the Secret Service pending felony charges. Stick that in your big, yellow beak and light yourself on fire.

A slice of my yesterday life, while people in New Hampshire were deciding the fate of the world...

Me: sitting in Bryant Park, eating a Caesar salad from Mrs. Lovett's (tastes like real Caesar!), watching t-shirt clad ice skaters navigate the melty ice in 63-degree January heat (thank you again, Al Gore, for inventing global warming!), singing the Peter part of Peter, Paul, and Mary's "Lemon Tree," and rubbing a small, plush Lollipop the Bear action figure (yeah, I said plush action figure, what) complete with eco-friendly mini-machine gun and its own Vespa Scooter with a skull and crossbones emblazoned on the side.

You: A potato.

I love you, potato. Don't play hard-to-get. Don't play your starchy tuber games with my heart. Come, and let's dance in the afternoon drizzle and eat bonbons and go see your apartment on the Upper West Side. And damn you for making this into a missed connection from craigslist.

-Smokey Robinson

P.S. I bet you thought I was going to comment on Hillary beating down the black man in New Iowa yesternight, didn't you? Nope. I ain't got nothing to say on the subject. This is like the early goings of a game of Hollywood Squares, when the contestants are still feeling each other out, and when Whoopi Goldberg in the center square is still totally up-for-grabs.

P.P.S. Speaking of which, Whoopi = black AND a woman!! Is that not the dream hybrid Democratic candidate!?!? CLINTOBAMA! CLINTOBAMA! REPUBLICANS SHALL WILT BEFORE THEE! HALLELUJAH! QUICK, someone get me some Tylenol - my brain hurts from all the good ideas. And get me a potato too, because I'm lonely.

P.P.P.S. Whoever did it, by the way, thanks for the shoutout in the 181st Street subway station yesterday.



I assume "BAB" is short for "BABE" or "BABY," or that perhaps that's as far as you got before the cops got there with their cold, hard anti-expressive handcuffs. I'll take Graffiti FOR THE WIN! And a potato, to keep me company during the lonely nights!

Why you shouldn't make New Year's resolutions that you will blog every day of 2008...

I don't know if it was just me, but the whole dream of having Hillary Clinton as President made me long for the heady days of the James Buchanan administration, when the House of Representatives was like four votes shy of enacting legislation that would have banned any estrogen-bearing beings from White House jobs higher than "cook" and "laundress." You can bet that the Bachelor (read: gay) President most certainly would have signed that bill into law, believe me. And then, poof, no Civil War, because banning women from the Casa Blanca (hey, I just got that!) is an idea that EVERYONE, North or South, slaveholders or do-it-yourselfers, could get behind. Stupid James Buchanan, ruining everything for everyone. I mean, I know it's 2008 and all, but does anyone in America really want the White House at the whim of a woman's delicate hormonal cycle, and I don't care if she IS post-menopausal?

No, said America, according to Iowa, the Greatest State. No, we do not. Emphatically. Even if you are married to the sexiest former President since Matty Van Buren.

Sorry, Hill. I hope your holidays were nice anyway.

Mine were. Except for a bad case of Wii arm which I got from playing 21 consecutive, extremely irate innings of Wii Sports baseball during which I managed roughly 5 hits - including the errors when little exclamation points (which I assume are stand-ins for actual swearing) appeared above the heads of the fielders on the other team, or as I like to call them, "the bad guys." Seriously, the lesson here is not to make New Year's resolutions that you will blog every day because you will only set yourself up for failure a mere one days later - or at least, don't make those kind of resolutions if you have a Nintendo Wii in the basement of your suburban home in the suburbs with a baseball game that is just BEGGING to be made an example of.

I'm tired now, so I need to get back to drinking my scary colored Passion tea from Starbucks which I got as a Secret Satan gift at the Copse's annual holiday bash and pineapple-upside-down cake party. We're not like you. We don't have a plain old holiday party - not since Dole decided to eliminate cash bonuses in favor of CANNED bonuses, anyway. We all bake pineapple-upside-down cake (sometimes with rum) and get totally sick eating it all in one sitting. And we give Secret Satan gifts. I got tea from Starbucks because caffeine is as precious around here as a gold-plated rooster statue.

Seriously, this tea is BLOOD PURPLE.

You may not think of blood as purple, but cut yourself open and you'll see it is exactly the same color as my cup of tea. And also, you just got an infection. You totally should have sterilized that knife before you gouged into your own flesh, dummy.



I'm pretty sure making the tea this color was someone's idea of a funny, funny joke, like having a woman president. I strongly suspect my good buddy Alex "Dashing through the snow in a one-horse-open sleigh-Rod" Rodriguez, though his pranks usually involve wheels of smoked Gouda cheese and his genitalia hanging in the breeze for all of New York to see.

Happy fucking whatever.

Here come da Judge Reinhold

Sorry, Barack Obama - if that IS your real name. But just because you landed Oprah as one of your backers does not mean you'll land me. I don't even read the books she recommends in her book club - at least, not since the one and only time I took a recommendation from Oprah and read She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb, after which I briefly became illiterate and blind. It was only thanks to Michael Chabon that I managed to recover. (Thanks, Mikey. Much love. W00t. -Smokey R.)

Anyway, just because the big O says so, it don't mean I'm gonna vote for BO.

Ew. B.O.

And just because Hillary "Dennis Rodman" Clinton has Fabio in her camp, it don't mean I'm gonna vote for her neither. Fabio's political endorsements used to carry a lot more weight with me back before he started doing the ads for I Can't Believe It's Not Butter's chest oil division. Seriously, you just can't respect a man who doesn't even use real oil to oil up his fabulous pectoral muscles - or at least, I can't. Or, at least, if that man's name isn't Mr. T, Chuck Norris, or Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow, I can't.

Besides, Fabio is totally a B.O. guy at heart. You can completely tell he's just faking it with Hillary for the sex.

Sean Penn can rave about Dennis Kucinich all he wants, but Dennis Kucinich rhymes with spinach, and we can't have a president in this country who rhymes with a vegetable. That's just unacceptable. Not that I'd listen to Sean Penn anyway. Not only was this man stupid enough to MARRY MADONNA he was also stupid enough to DIVORCE MADONNA. That would be like divorcing Leonardo da Vinci, or divorcing Nostradamus, or performing oral sex on a doped-up Rush Limbaugh for anything under 30 of your American dollars. I think we can all agree those things are ridiculous, even if I'm not sure how.

The point is this: it takes a certain kind of celebrity to get my attention. It takes a person with gravitas, with class, with three - count 'em, three - Beverly Hills Cop movies under his belt. It takes a person who can play a close talker on Seinfeld, and who can star in a classic '80s parent-child switcheroo movie with Fred Savage and somehow manage to be less convincing as the parent than as the child. It takes Judge Reinhold, who this week announced his support of Bill Richardson, for whom I shall now gratefully and gladly cast my vote, even though ol' Billy Dickboy (that's what I used to call him) broke my heart when he stood me up for a date at a beach bar on Fiji in 2003 and never called to explain.


Bill Richardson, Bill Richardson, thou has cleft my heart in twain,
Thank you, Judge Reinhold, for restoring it to wholeness again.

Bananas, Matzoh, and the American Way

After a hard day of canning fruit at Dole and a hard night of typesetting my eventually forthcoming novel on my authentic, 15th-century Gutenberg press, I ended up sitting in a diner downtown last night with Sarah, who claims that I never write about her. But then again, Sarah also claims that bananas are hard to digest, which is obviously ridiculous, so you really can't completely trust everything Sarah says.

Seriously, how could bananas be hard to digest? They're yellow!

I think I might have to ask the other Matt Hooban - the one in England. He seems to know an awful lot about bananas. Maybe a little too much, even.

But this post isn't about Sarah anyway, and it isn't about bananas either, even though I am currently devouring one in what Sarah would consider an act of self-immolation, but that I consider an act of complete yumminess. It's about the Democratic debate, which was playing on television in the background in the diner, I guess because there were no sports on.

Okay, did I miss a memo? How was there a debate last night if the writers (or the Broadway stagehands, or whatever they're calling themselves this week) were on strike? Did my letter to Jesus, like so many of my letters to other world leaders and imaginary fairy tale characters, work? Is the strike settled? Are the lights back on on Broadway? Who framed Roger Rabbit?

I suppose we may never know the answer to any of these questions, except the last one. It was a toon disguised as Christopher Lloyd, which brings me right back to the Democratic debate, and this very alarming video still of John Edwards, that clearly shows he is drunk.

Now, let's get real, America. Is this really the kind of person you want on a stage in Nevada attacking his fellow Democrats, in defiance of the still-striking writers/Broadway stagehands?

I didn't think so.

They talked a lot about the war in Iraq, but here's the thing they didn't talk about - the thing that no politician ever talks about when it comes to America's armed forces and military policy: we have bad camouflage. You can totally see it. Here's just a for instance:


How many soldiers can you see in the above picture? If you said six, that's because their camouflage is NOT WORKING! *

I was in Grand Central Station in New York City yesterday and I saw three soldiers lounging around in their "mass transit camo" against the ticket windows along the 42nd Street side of the main concourse. I saw three of them! And while it's entirely possible that there was an unseen force of hundreds looming elsewhere in better disguises, it still doesn't change the fact that those three soldiers, just like the six in the photo above, have been compromised.

Think about this: if we were to invest a greater portion of our defense budget into developing camouflage that actually worked, then all the politicians could say, "yes, we pulled our troops out of Iraq. Go look." And then all of us would feel all bad for accusing them of lying because we wouldn't be able to see any troops in Iraq anymore, even if they were still there.

Come to think of it, we could probably get by with a much smaller army too, like 20 people. I'm pretty sure that 20 people in working camouflage could achieve roughly the same level of success in Iraq that the 130,000 visible soldiers in their crappy "desert camo" have achieved. Hop to it, candidates! Pick up the banana and run with it. And if you're ever in that diner I was in last night, order the matzoh ball soup, which is an act of complete yumminess that no one - not even the Democrats - can debate.

And speaking of matzoh ball soup, what's up with Barry Bonds getting indicted?


* If you said "less than six," then your eyes are not working, and there was no need to read the rest of this post. If you said "more than six," then YOU ARE A LIAR.