There's this memorable lyric from a Bob Dylan song on his classic album Blonde On Blonde. Maybe I remember it so well because it came from his song "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again," which was recorded in Nashville in 1966. It goes, "And I sit here so patiently/Waiting to find out what price/You have to pay to get out of/Going through all these things twice." I have lived through LBJ, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and the Vietnam era. I've seen the golden idol with the feet of clay, Ronald Reagan, say that "Government is the problem," which was arguably the beginning of all our problems. I've seen the hapless Poppy Bush, the lascivious Bill Clinton, and the warmongering Dick Cheney with his malleable puppet, George Bush "The Lesser". But never in my life would I have expected to relive this "love it or leave it" bullshit. I thought we'd put that jingoistic, racist rubbish to bed along with "go back where you came from." But then, I also believed in the evolution of man, a theory sorely tested by the current squatter in the White House. The old "love it or leave it" slogan was the conservative's redneck response to the anti-war protesters of the late sixties. The "go back where you came from" probably dates from the post-reconstruction era and into the Jim Crow South, when cracker assholes forgot that black people were brought here as slaves and had no place from which to go back. Still, I have heard these remarks, aimed at African-Americans, hippies, feminists and others, from cretins dripping with ignorance for all my life. Those who proclaim it or repeat it were on the wrong side of history then, and are on the wrong side of history now. And it will be remembered long after this bulbous, bilious aberration of a human being has been driven from his hideous presidency.
This horror began, as per usual, with Trump's barely literate Twitter feed. After being provoked by a segment on "Fox & Friends," about the four freshman Democrats known as "the Squad," an insipid moniker that should be shed without delay, the Ignoramus in Chief went off on an angry and racist twitter tirade. I'll reprint it here, but to avoid writing sic after every word, the punctuation and misuse of capitalization are all Trump's. "So interesting to see "Progressive" Democratic Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe...now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States...how our government is to be run. Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." The twits on the "Fox & Friends" couch laughed when they read the tweet and said that Trump is "very comedic" but he's "making an important point." Yeah, Trump's a regular laugh riot. He has since learned, or maybe not, that the congresswomen in question were all born in the United States except for Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who came to this country from war-ravaged Somalia and became a naturalized citizen at age seventeen. The common denominator is that these are four women of color and two are Muslims, an accelerant to Trump's racist ideology. I agree with President Caligula on one point; they need to fix the totally broken and crime infested places, which perfectly describes Trump's White House, his corrupt cabinet, and his extended family of shameless grifters.
The "love it or leave it" idiocy emerged during one of Trump's Nazi rallies in Greenville, North Carolina. Broadening his message to include anyone who disagrees with him, Trump echoed Richard Nixon, and after verbally assaulting Rep. Omar by name, the crowd of "Good Germans" went wild, breaking into a chant of "send her back." Hearing from his party members who informed him that this mantra wasn't as mundane as "lock her up," Trump disavowed the chant, then changed directions calling his enraged, aggrieved audience of red hat-wearing Caucasians "great patriots." Even members of the misnamed "Freedom Caucus," thought he went too far. Now that Trump's annoying repetition of "No Collusion. No Obstruction" has been disproven by the halting, mono-syllabic testimony of Special Council Robert Mueller, the bottomless well of prideful stupidity that occupies the Oval Office has ramped up his free-range racism to stoke the animosity and fear of his fellow travelers and running dogs. Trump's latest target for his vile abuse is another African-American congressman, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland.
After Cummings' criticism of the inhumane treatment of immigrants at the border, Trump lashed out on another Twitter bender. Again, the bad grammar is Trump's. "Rep. Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting & screaming...about conditions at the Southern Border...The Border is clean, efficient and well run...Cumming (sic) District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess...No human would ever want to live there." "The Democrats always play the Race Card, when...they have done so little for our Nation's great African American people." Then he called Cummings, the son of a South Carolina sharecropper "a racist." A psychologist would refer to this sort of noxious ranting as 'projection." The Baltimore Sun editorial board responded in an article titled "Better to have a few rats than to be one," and referred to Trump's tweets as "undiluted racism and hate." If there were any question before, there's no doubt now that a very sick man is running the government, along with his lapdog, "Moscow" Mitch McConnell, and his legion of ass-kissers. Robert Mueller claimed the Office of Legal Council's opinion forbade him from indicting a sitting president. But the O.L.C.'s opinions are just suggestions, as stated in their 1973 decision; The O.L.C. reserves the right to "reconsider and modify or disavow that determination." But these are very perilous times. If no man is supposed to be above the law in this land, it's time to disavow that archaic decision and show the proper justice to Trump that he so richly deserves.
We had become embarrassingly close to addiction with food delivery services until we stepped back from the brink and realized the consequences, not just monetarily, but socially as well. There was a time in the not so distant past when you had a choice of food delivered to your door: Chinese or pizza. No more. Now, the finest restaurants in town will pack it up and zip it right out to you, and your only task is the occasional fifteen seconds in the microwave. You don't even need dinnerware anymore. You can eat it right out of the sectional plastic tray. The food delivery business has popped up like mushrooms in a cow pasture, or maybe Uber. Of course, it's not just food anymore. Need toothpaste and Dr. Scholl's insoles? Push a few buttons and someone will rush it right over. Don't feel like Krogering? There's an app for that. Where they once made it so inconvenient that you had to drive over there and have someone load up your groceries, they deliver now. In fact, if you hurry, Kroger is having a sale for your July 4th festivities. Nathan's Skinless Beef Franks are $2.99 a pack, their famous mustard potato salad is $3.99 for three pounds, and American flags have been marked down from .49 cents to .44 cents. The beer is regularly priced, but it eliminates what used to be a rite of passage for young males, the beer run. If beer is too pedestrian, they'll bring you a nice Sauvignon Blanc for $19.99. This is a dream come true for agoraphobics. Now there really is no need to leave the house.
Like any addiction
to things like video games or fantasy football, there are
plenty of enticements to draw you in, like free delivery and daily specials. For a hefty deposit, you can get free delivery in perpetuity. It's especially fun to track your order. The restaurant will inform you when your driver arrives and leaves the store. On some services, a little car will pop up on the screen and you can follow it directly from the eatery to your driveway. Our first experience was with Meals in Motion which contains some of our favorites but is limited in their number of restaurants. We quickly signed up for Uber Eats, Bite Squad, and Door Dash. We tried Postmates, but they wanted some ridiculous amount of money in advance to put on your credit card, so they got deleted. Grubhub has yet to arrive on my block. The rest operate in pretty much the same way: choose a restaurant, give them your credit card, pull up the menu, press a few buttons and some nice person will drive your food over- tip included, even if you feel like a bag of Krystals. There's no waiting for a table, no dealing with a harried server, no wondering why the next table got served when they came in after you, and no deciphering the difference between fifteen and twenty percent.
As in any new service, you learn some things by trial and error. For instance, in a restaurant, if they overcook your cheeseburger, you can send it back. Delivery offers that same option, but it will take an additional hour to correct it and by then you've decided that you're hungry enough to go ahead and eat the overcooked burger. It's the same with the occasional menu mistake. There's no mistaking beef tacos when that's what you ordered online, but when they arrive beefless, what are you going to do? The restaurant will give you a credit but that doesn't make up for a spoiled meal. If you order something from a favorite restaurant, say, a beef chimichanga, it's not quite the same as when they bring it fresh from the kitchen. We didn't realize how deeply we were descending into the hedonistic lifestyle until the night we had a hankering for some ice cream. We live within short driving distance from two Baskin-Robbins ice cream shops and one of them is a drive-thru, but they were on the list of stores that delivered. We ordered a variety of scoops in a cup, but it took a while. I kept checking my phone for updates while our cream-cravings intensified. When it finally arrived, the check not only included the cost of the ice cream, but a healthy tax, a pre-arranged tip for the driver, and a five dollar delivery charge that was supposed to be free.The guilt over our obscene laziness was palpable. We could have gone Krogering and have a couple of gallons sent over for the same price.
There's an additional reason that we've scaled back on dinner delivery and it's the same reason we never use self-checkout in a grocery store or any other discount store chain. We figured for every self-checkout lane, a cashier or sacker will lose a job, and although there's no stopping automation, we can do our part until it replaces the entire workforce. The same goes for restaurants. Eating at home is easy but it doesn't quite match going to an actual restaurant, sitting down at a table, and enjoying a meal. Since I'm not trying to promote any individual restaurant, let's pretend you have a particular favorite, and for the sake of argument we'll call it "Patrick's." It's a down-home meat-and-three restaurant. Their food is good and reasonably priced, the atmosphere is convivial, and they have an Elvis wall right in the same spot where I used to play gigs when it was a nightclub in a previous incarnation. Delivery is great, but then we wouldn't get to see our favorite host, Ben Sumner, or the best server in town, Jo Jo Chetter, whom we have followed from her days at Kudzu's and who can enthrall you with tales of Ireland. Delivery services create new jobs for drivers and profits for restaurants, but before the next time you order in, remember the cooks, servers, busboys, and cashiers who depend on you putting on your pants and making a personal appearance.
There's a Chinese expression that goes "May you live in interesting times." I always thought it was a toast or an expression of goodwill until I looked up its origins (or "oringes"). I discovered it's called the "Chinese Curse," and its not a bon mot at all but a wish for misfortune towards another. The significance being that uninteresting times are peaceful and uneventful. So perhaps the Chinese were prescient when it comes to our current state of instability, but no one should have to live like this. It's difficult knowing your country's chief executive is a schizoid, delusional megalomaniac when every day, every day, brings a fresh new outrage. I'm not a morning person but my wife is, so we have a ritual when I wake up asking "What new horror happened today?" We can't escape from watching the news like it's a poor man's "Game of Thrones" miniseries. It's exhausting keeping up with the unpredictable conduct of this vile man when your rage and disgust have already been sapped. Some claim they've become numb to the president's abhorrent behavior. I have simply become drained by the daily onslaught of his boasts, his warped opinions, his disdain for the rule of law, and his endless mantra of "No collusion. No obstruction."
During Trump's on-camera meltdown in last Thursday's press pool spray, he unleashed a tsunami of lies. One account had him telling at least twenty-one lies about the Russia investigation. Trump's endless repetition of falsehoods point to his misguided fascination with "The Big Lie," as espoused by Germany in the thirties. It used to be verboten for a credible journalist to compare the evils of any American citizen to Hitler, but those unwritten rules are no longer viable in the age of Steven Miller and Steve Bannon. In a 1990 Vanity Fair interview, Trump's first wife, Ivana, said that her husband often read a book of Hitler's collected speeches, "My New Order," which he kept in a cabinet by his bed. I'm surprised that he reads anything at all, but in reading Hitler's verbiage, he might have come across this quote, "Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it and eventually they will believe it." Or, perhaps he came across this aphorism from Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, "A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth." But let's get real, Trump doesn't read. The most likely explanation is that he learned the technique from his late attorney, Roy Cohn, who was once described as, "The...most evil, twisted, vicious bastard ever to snort coke ar Studio 54." Trump tweeted, "I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected." He later deleted his Freudian slip.
In a single week in the post-Mueller Report Trumpworld, he threatened Mexico with a pyramid scheme of tariffs if they did not stop the influx of wretched immigrants fleeing violence from Central American "shithole countries." Trump mansplained, "It's about stopping drugs as well as illegals," to which Mexican President Lopez Obrador replied, "Social problems don't get resolved with...coercive measures." After Trump's tariff announcement the stock market dropped like an anvil. Even Republican firebrands were incensed. Doddering Iowa Senator "Chuck" Grassley said, "This is a misuse of presidential authority." The old pig castrator and Iowa's junior Senator Joni Ernst said, "Progress to get this trade agreement (USMCA, the acronym for the rebranded NAFTA), across the finish line will be stifled." After threatening Mexico, Trump issued an "emergency declaration," allegedly caused by Iran, in order to sell billions of dollars worth of arms to Saudi Arabia while bypassing Congress. He then taunted Iran saying, "If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran." Then it was reported that while Trump was in a Japanese harbor, a White House directive to move the USS John McCain from the fragile president's view was received by the Navy. Since it is cumbersome to put a destroyer in reverse, the Navy ended up obscuring the ship's name with a canvas tarp and then denying the entire incident.
By the time you read this, the Trump three-day family excursion to England will be over, so we have to wait to see what shameful conduct occurs. Before leaving, Emperor Trump interfered with British politics, endorsing doppelganger Boris Johnson as the next Prime Minister; insulted Princess Meghan Markle in the Rupert Murdoch owned tabloid The Sun saying, "I didn't know she was a nasty woman," then denying it until it was learned a recording existed; and claimed Europe is destroying its culture by admitting so many immigrants. There are protests planned all over England and Ireland to Trump's official visit. He will be met by the image of a giant penis mowed into property owned by an enterprising landscaper on the approach to Stansted Airport, and the familiar giant inflated Trump baby blimp soaring above the city. London Mayor Sadiq Khan claimed Trump was, "one of the most egregious examples of a growing global threat," and compared his language to "fascists of the twentieth century." Trump retorted in a tweet saying Khan was "a stone cold loser." The mayor is not attending the state banquet hosted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Here's hoping the menu will include a well-done steak and plenty of ketchup.
Fans of the quiz show Jeopardy! already know that there's something special happening on the venerable old program. A thirty-five year old professional sports gambler from Las Vegas is shattering records during a twenty-two game streak that has earned him almost $1.7 million. The contestant, James Holzhauer, is on track to surpass the earnings of previous Jeopardy! phenom, Ken Jennings, who earned $2.5 million in seventy-four consecutive games in 2004. As a devotee of the show, he's the best I've ever seen and I've been watching since college. That's pre-Trebek for those with sentimental attachments to Art Fleming. What makes Holzhauer stand out from anybody else on a hot streak is his bold style. First of all, I never heard anyone even admit to being a professional sports gambler except that guy Robert De Niro played in Casino, and it ended badly for him. Holzhauer plays Jeopardy! like a poker player. "My approach isn't complicated," he explained, "Get some money, hit the Daily Doubles, bet big, and hope I run hot." So if he calmly bets $38 thousand on a single trivia question, Holzhauer says, "It's only money." Seemingly fearless, Holzhauer goes for the highest value questions first and pushes imaginary poker chips with an "all in" gesture every chance he gets. He's been correct 97% of the time. His aggressive betting on the show's "Final Jeopardy!" question has served him well. He's answered twenty-one out of twenty-two questions. I'm telling you, this guy is the Tiger Woods of Jeopardy!
Doing my due diligent googling, I landed on a site called "The Jeopardy! Fan," which had lots of stats. Consider this: Holzhauer won $131,127 in one game, beating the previous record of $77 thousand. Out of the top ten highest earning games in Jeopardy!'s thirty-five years in its current iteration, Holzhauer holds all ten. On April 17, all forty-one questions he buzzed in on were answered correctly. In Jeopardy! parlance, that's a perfect game, or like I like to call it, pitching a Sandy Koufax. After admitting to growing up watching Jeopardy! and promising his grandmother that he would be a contestant one day, Holzhauer said he likes to go to the children's section of the library to prepare. Children's books are "Chock-full of infographics, pictures and all kind of stuff to keep the reader engaged." He has already donated a portion of his winnings to the Las Vegas Library District along with the Ronald McDonald House and the Las Vegas Natural History Museum. Holzhauer's streak has improved Jeopardy!'s ratings by ten percent with over ten million viewers per day, making it the third highest viewed syndicated television program, just behind Judge Judy and Wheel of Fortune.
If I seem enthusiastic about Jeopardy!, it's because it's a family thing. When the old homestead still stood, instead of the McMansion that now stands, I would drop in on my parents to watch the show. My father was the best player among us by far. Currently, every weekday at 3:55, my ninety-seven year old mother can expect a call from me about Final Jeopardy! The thing that separates me from my smart family members is that I was once chosen to be a contestant. In 2003, the Jeopardy! bus came to Memphis and their representatives set up shop in Peabody Place. Initially, you were given a ten question quiz on a variety of subjects and out of a thousand people, about fifty scored high enough to be invited back for a fifty-question quiz. Out of that group, the high scorers returned to play a mock game, buzzer and all. Although I felt anxious and nauseous going in, a surprising calm came over me when it came to playing the game. When I exited waving that golden ticket to my wife, I was euphoric. I was assured by a Jeopardy! producer that they would be calling me with a date for my appearance. Thanks to my Kudzu's pub-quiz team-member and former Jeopardy! champ, Ilene Markell, I was given reams of material to study and strengthen my weaknesses, like Shakespeare, science, math, pop culture, mythology, European history, anagrams, national parks, the Revolutionary War, British monarchs, and those darned before and after questions, among others. I was going to meet Alex Trebek. Then something happened.
On July 22, what the National Weather Service called the "Mid-South Derecho of 2003," but locals called Hurricane Elvis, roared through Memphis with straight-line winds surpassing one hundred miles per hour, flattening trees and power lines and leaving over three-hundred thousand LG&W customers in the dark. We tried to tough it out, but after a week of extreme heat and the constant ear-piercing din of a neighbor's faulty generator, we packed up the dogs and moved to an animal friendly motel on Sycamore View Drive. What we thought would be a short inconvenience turned into fifteen days. We were among the last households to have power restored. If Jeopardy! had called, they would have heard that "temporarily out-of-service" message. When the call never came, I could only surmise that they phoned during the aftermath of Hurricane Elvis while we were living it up at the Day's Inn. I called the Jeopardy! office to explain but was told I had to retake the test. I said that I still knew the same stuff that I did during the audition but was instructed to either come to Los Angeles to try out or take the online test. I've been a miserable failure at the online tests. I never learned to type, which is a necessary component. For all the traumatic testing, the elation of securing an invitation, and the deflating, deafening sound of the phone not ringing, all I got was a lousy key-chain. I treasure it, though. The number of contestants that have been mowed down by James Holzhauer has softened the blow. I could have been like that character in "Cheers" who blows Final Jeopardy! and has to live with the shame. As for Holzhauer's streak, we'll have to wait until May 20th, after the teacher's tournament, to see if the professional gambler can surpass Ken Jennings as the greatest Jeopardy! champion ever. I'll take odds that he does it.
There's this memorable lyric from a Bob Dylan song on his classic album Blonde On Blonde. Maybe I remember it so well because it came from his song "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again," which was recorded in Nashville in 1966. It goes, "And I sit here so patiently/Waiting to find out what price/You have to pay to get out of/Going through all these things twice." I have lived through LBJ, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and the Vietnam era. I've seen the golden idol with the feet of clay, Ronald Reagan, say that "Government is the problem," which was arguably the beginning of all our problems. I've seen the hapless Poppy Bush, the lascivious Bill Clinton, and the warmongering Dick Cheney with his malleable puppet, George Bush "The Lesser". But never in my life would I have expected to relive this "love it or leave it" bullshit. I thought we'd put that jingoistic, racist rubbish to bed along with "go back where you came from." But then, I also believed in the evolution of man, a theory sorely tested by the current squatter in the White House. The old "love it or leave it" slogan was the conservative's redneck response to the anti-war protesters of the late sixties. The "go back where you came from" probably dates from the post-reconstruction era and into the Jim Crow South, when cracker assholes forgot that black people were brought here as slaves and had no place from which to go back. Still, I have heard these remarks, aimed at African-Americans, hippies, feminists and others, from cretins dripping with ignorance for all my life. Those who proclaim it or repeat it were on the wrong side of history then, and are on the wrong side of history now. And it will be remembered long after this bulbous, bilious aberration of a human being has been driven from his hideous presidency.
