Advice To The Kid Given The Choice Today Between Jumping In Puddles Or Going To Chuck E Cheese

Listen kid, for what it's worth, this old man says jump in the puddles. I know your mom was upset and issued a rather stern ultimatum in the parking lot, one that seemed unfair--either jump in the parking lot's puddles or continue on to Chuck E Cheese and somebody's birthday party (obviously not your birthday party, because I assume if it were your birthday she'd indulge you a bit and let you do both)--but that's life kid, you can't always do everything. Now I know she said, "The choice is yours," but I'm thinking she was bluffing a bit (although, who knows, maybe she was looking for a way out of going to Chuck E Cheese for another kid's party--God knows she wouldn't have been the first--and if she'd saved the receipt, she could have easily gotten a refund on that nicely wrapped present she carried in one arm while the other coaxed you away from that puddle, and she could have easily left a message, or, better yet, God bless modern technology, texted some reason as to why you and she couldn't make the party). But in the larger scheme of things, she was most correct--the choice is yours: a day (or life) of jumping in puddles or going to Chuck E Cheese. It's only my opinion, but I say take the puddle route over the Chuck E Cheese route. Chuck E Cheese is noisy and the games are all pretty regimented--and costly. Jumping in puddles is really a lot more fun. You can make up your own games and noises. Chuck E Cheese, like cockroaches, will always be there. Puddles come and go, which means their pleasures are more to be treasured. Looking back on it, I'm sure you'll prize the muddy splotches on your legs and clothes over some plastic Chuck E Cheese token and a balloon that'll soon lose its air. One can do much worse than be a jumper of puddles. The choice is yours.

Being A Non-Prince In Cleveland Never Felt So Good

What the hell.

I'm watching and reading all the news about Isaac the next big hurricane. Count on it: Every year just around the time football is revving up, there's a news story showing empty shopping market shelves, cars lined up at gas pumps, people boarding up houses, and always the same middle-aged, tanned, guy-who-stepped-out-of-a-Jimmy-Buffett-song talking about riding the storm out and he survived that big one twelve years ago, and four years ago, and by God and whiskey he's gonna survive this one. And every year as I watch all this in Cleveland, where maybe it gets a little too hot, or maybe a little too cold, or maybe there's too much snow for a couple days, I think, how can those people stand it? How can they live there where every year for two or three months they have to live with the imminent possibility of boarding up, packing up, fleeing, losing it all? Don't they ever consider moving, for the mental health benefits, if nothing else? But for the first time last night--call it wisdom with age, maybe--as I watched and listened to Jimmy Buffett guy, I actually stood--if not walked a mile--in his flip flops for a second or two and thought, does he watch ESPN and read the sports pages, and does he ever consider the fans of Cleveland sports teams (the Indians, who've won maybe five games in the last month, or the Browns, who've won no more than five games in a season for just about a generation, and whose fans--two weeks before this season even starts--are already calling sports talk shows and speculating about who the next coach will be and who should be the number one pick in next year's draft) and think to himself, as he places another big piece of ply board over another window, just like he did last month or last year: God, how can those fans in Cleveland stand it year after year--bungling, no-hope teams filled with cast-offs and suspect prospects and chronically injured never weres? Don't they ever consider moving, for the mental health benefits, if nothing else?

And then I flick from The Weather Channel to E!, turn from the front page to the gossip page, and I consider the naked truth about being a globetrotting, whore mongering prince in this day and age. Time was, and was and was, the naked truth about being a globetrotting, whore mongering prince was, no lie, about as good as it could get. For decades, centuries, millennia, princes have had the run of the world's pleasures. Whatever and whomever they wanted to indulge, plunder, pinch, imbibe, was theirs, usually not even for the asking. Royal privilege. And as for word of any indiscretions getting out and round the kingdom, forget it. The four magical, royal words--Off with his head--sufficed to keep a lid on things, so to speak. But now? Oh Lord, randy Prince Harry must be cursing his fate, and thousands and thousands of lascivious ancestors, that his royal playtime comes not just in the world of fiendish paparazzi and cable TV--his poor mother knew all that--but in a world where everybody carries a camera/video recorder. Should we be shocked that a charming prince is rompingly exercising his birthright's pleasures in his royal birthday suit (sorry, but all the crown jewel jokes have been taken) with naked commoners in history's latest Sin City? Hardly. I mean, come on, for a prince like Harry, those not cognizant of history (royals debauching themselves on a royal level) are condemned not to get any. Given the photos available, we might be shocked only at his modesty. But does the guy get a break? Does the world just shrug its common shoulders and say, princes will be princes? Not in this day and age, Harry. Sorry.

And so, today I'm recalculating my dreams. Out is the one about being the Prince of New Orleans, celebrating another Super Bowl victory in the buff with a dozen or score of my drunkest friends. In is the one where it's less than 85 degrees the next time I have to mow the lawn, the Browns and Indians finish .500, and Prince finally puts out another decent album.

What the hell, Cleveland, you're all right.

Unlocking

I don't know about you (well, I do know that presently you have way too much time on your hands), but few things in life give me more pleasure than bringing together two of my friends, who previously had not known each other, and seeing them hit it off and become friends themselves. Santa himself can't know such joy. Anyway.

I've known Leopold for more than thirty years. He's a good guy. We met in high school, in the late 1970s, when our hair grew aggressively. In early 1987, when we were young professionals and our hair was a bit more kempt and less dense, we watched the Cleveland Browns play the Denver Broncos in the AFC Championship game. The infamous Drive game, when John Elway drove his Broncos 98 yards in a couple minutes to tie the game and went on to win it in overtime, thus depriving the Browns of their, to date, best chance at reaching a Super Bowl. Any true Clevelander over the age of 28 knows exactly where he or she watched that game. For Leopold, he quite rightly dates his life to pre-Drive and post-Drive. Next time I saw him was two weeks later, when we got together to fulfill our man duties and watch the Super Bowl, as painful as it was that day--even the Broncos' blow-out loss didn't salve too many wounds. Leopold looked awful--in two weeks time he had lost all his once thick mane of hair but for two wispy clumps of dried out, colorless locks, one above his left ear, the other in the back of his head down by his neck.

"It's just fallen out in clumps," Leopold explained to my dumbfounded face, as I fridged the beer and he uncapped two-week-old chip dip, "ever since that night. Elway probably hadn't even dried himself off from that post-game shower before the first handful dropped off my head." By the Pro Bowl the next week, Leopold was completely bald, as he still is, nearly 26 years later. Two marriages come and gone since then, the Browns themselves gone and come back, with nary a Super Bowl even sniffed for 20 years, and Leopold is still bald. Enough time has passed that Leopold's shiny pate doesn't stand out at high school reunions, but the pain is still there. Or really, the pine.

"Phantom lock pine," Leopold explained to me, in strict confidence, a few years ago, when I caught him in the middle of a round of golf taking off his cap and running his hand through sweaty hair that wasn't there at all. "It's constant. The yearning to sweep hair off my forehead, tangle and untangle a few strands idly when I'm at work, and, oh, the best, most painful, to do that double-handed, simultaneous quick flick of the hair from off the sideburns to behind the ears. You know that feeling you get when you realize you should have gotten a haircut two weeks ago? Constant. I constantly feel like I need a haircut, but I had a permanent haircut years ago! I need a straitjacket. You cannot believe the strength and willpower it takes for me in public to resist the urge to play and tousle and tease my hair that isn't there, that hasn't been there in decades!"

He was in pain, obviously. "Why don't you--"

"Eighty-five dollars an hour. I did go see someone, a psychiatrist specializing in follicle issues. I was the first male client she had seen in six years. Her advice? Wear a hat and take up smoking. She laughingly dismissed my claim that Phantom Lock Pine was a very real and incapacitating disorder."

I see Leopold about two or three times a year now. At first I was self-conscious, but finally he said, "Go ahead, do what you have to with your hair--you've got a little cowlicky thing going on on the right--I kind of enjoy the vicarious thing." Poor guy.

Then there's Graciola. I met her a year and a half ago. She works the nightshift at a Speedway gas station cum convenience store. We struck up a friendship over our mutual love of Brisk lemonade. One time I stared too awkwardly at her ever-moving hands and fingers as we waited for my debit card to be authorized. "I'm sorry," she said, clearly embarrassed. "I've got this thing about wielding clippers." My debit card cleared and I hastily took my lemonade and Hershey's Milk Chocolate bar with Almonds and drove off. Two nights later, she was waiting for me. She was on break, she had bought me some lemonade, we sat on the sidewalk out near the ice freezer and the propane tanks. She told me her sad story. As near as she could tell, she said it all started in childhood. She always played with dolls in her backyard, and was always hearing it from her mother to pick them up afterward. One day, as she ate her breakfast--Fruit Loops, she's pretty sure--she looked out the window just as the landscaper was mowing the back lawn. A doll, Molly Malarkey, lay face down in some pachysandra, with its red hair spilling over onto the lawn. The landscaper, who it turned out was colorblind, red-green deficiency, didn't see a thing and mowed off Molly's red hair. "Ever since then, I've had this love-hate thing with hair, with the cutting of hair. All I want to do is cut hair, but I have a tremendous, physical aversion to hair, which explains this," she said, and pointed to her own butch-cropped pale brown hair. "I lasted fifteen whole minutes at the beautician academy. Now I'm nothing but an air barber," she said, and quickly clipped her fingers away at the night.

Well, four months after that night, after many calming, delicate conversations--separate--with the two of them, I finally managed to get Leopold and Graciola to meet. What seemed like a disaster the first five minutes, has transformed into a great friendship, the depths of which I know not nor care not; I'm just happy these two forlorn souls have met. Last night, as I plunked down my Brisk and Hershey's on the counter and asked Graciola how it was going (it in the general sense, not necessarily the Leopold sense), she just grinned and said, "Like this," and showed me her phone with the latest text from Leopold: "Big presentation later this week. Think u can take a bit off the top n sides?" I looked up and Graciola smiled, and her hands were peacefully hanging at her sides.

Enough With The Negative Advertising: 10 Things That Take The Perfect Amount Of Time

Holy George McGovern! It's not even Labor Day and we've all had enough of the negative advertising, haven't we? It's bad enough that people running for high office engage in the kind of nasty, distorted mudslinging of one another that directly goes against all their platitudes about a "better America," but now it seems that the negativity is infectious. I ran across this de facto ad on Buzzfeed, one of my favorite sites for finding out all the stupid, must-read crap floating around the internet. Samsung, in an effort to tout the speed of its latest computer, has concocted a list of ten things that "we" wish took less than ten seconds. I flatter Samsung with the word "concoct"; all they did was round up the usual suspects--do we really need somebody else telling us the DMV is a time-killer? It took me about seventeen seconds to scroll through the list; seventeen seconds I'll never get back. So let's get iconoclastically positive here and make a different, more ebullient list.

Ten Things That Take The Perfect Amount Of Time

1. Eating a banana: From the sensuous peeling, to the not-at-all-challenging biting and practically-melts-in-your-mouth chewing, is there a more satisfying (and salubrious) mutli-dimensional experience that takes less time than re-booting a frozen Samsung computer than this?
2. Watching a perfect tee shot: Granted, this one comes with qualification. It might take you, as it does me, several frustrating (i.e. sliced, hooked, topped, popped, whiffed, etc.) attempts, but when all the wrong things about your swing somehow harmonically converge to offset one another and you hit the sweet spot and that pale, dimpled nemesis flies high and long and straight and takes a good bounce down the fairway, you feel a little bit like Him/Herself sitting back on that grand Seventh Day and taking in the view, and saying, "Hmmm, not bad." Any longer would border on hubris, any shorter would be not enough.
3. Writing a "back in 5 minutes" post-it: Given the short duration of your absence and the need to inform your audience/customers of your absence, this is perfect. If you're going to be away less time, it's a waste of time to write the post-it; if you're going to be away longer, you got some 'splaining to do.
4. A sneeze: Not the allergen-induced onslaught of rapid ah-choos, nor the three-day phlegm fest of the common cold, but the out of nowhere, here and gone one-off bone-rattling sneeze. When executed to perfection--the instant brain-alert that makes you instantly realize, oh no, everything in life's on hold for the next few seconds, to that glorious intake of breath before lift-off ("ah") to that cathartic, ultimate experience of living in the moment expulsion ("choo") and the quick recovery time of receiving God's blessing--the sneeze is about as close to perfect timing as possible.
5. Napping: Be it a five minute power nod off or a luxurious two-hour asylum snooze, any nap is perfect.
6. Watching a Road Runner cartoon: How long are these things, five, six minutes? An hour? Who knows, but they're perfect. Any longer and your nerves would start to fray and you'd be cursing Road Runner's smugness and Wile E.'s stupidity. Your suspension of disbelief that allows you to believe the rock Wile E. just painted black could grant passage to Road Runner but stop Wile E. dead in his tracks would disintegrate. Your annoyance at the shoddy craftsmanship of the Acme Co. would have you flinging various catalogs at Wile E. You might end up hearing Beep Beep in your head for eternity. But any shorter, and you'd miss the complete arc of the existential story. The transformation of your emotions from glee at Road Runner's insouciance to sympathy for Wile E.'s tortured existence. You'd miss the musing upon the anvil's place in human history that always occurs. You'd stop identifying with Wile E.'s amazing recovery from certain death to attempt another scheme. Come to think of it, the exact duration of a Road Runner cartoon might be the perfect time frame for just about anything in life: X will only take as long as a Road Runner cartoon? I'll endure.
7. "ABC" by the Jackson 5: Pop perfection.
8. Cooking spaghetti: I am certainly no culinary master; food is merely functional, tasty at best. If it takes more time to make it than consume it, I'm skeptical. Spaghetti, given this credo, is perfect (sauce out of a jar, naturally; no simmering, stirring, pinching things into it for hours).
9. Proclaiming, "Ah, go to Hell!": Conversations, dialogues, debates, arguments--all of them can go on much too long, with a whole array of negative consequences. But with one simple--and quick--"Ah, go to Hell" (the "Ah" is essential, and can be accompanied with a rather limp-wristed, dismissive wave of the hand), the stake is decisively driven. The long-time assumed aphorism that the first one to raise his or her voice in an argument loses begs for revision in these crasser, more combative times. I say, the first one to proclaim AGTH wins, no questions asked. (Now's not the time to wax philosophic about the contrasting perfect words Heaven and Hell --Hell with its one-syllable stab, its bombastic and culminating double L; Heaven with its two-syllable elongation, its mighty V; the same Heh- beginning.) In fact, I say whichever candidate is the first to ditch all those despicable negative ads and resorts to a short (and cheap, austere), eight second ad showing five seconds of the opponent's highfalutin' gibberish followed by a quick cut to the candidate simply proclaiming, "Ah go to Hell!" would win in a landslide.
10. Reading my blog posts: What the hell, like Wile E. Coyote, a man can keep on concocting and hoping.

An Oldster Re-Fashions A Youngster's Song

Well, the toe bone is connected to Epsom Salts
And the foot bone is connected to ongoing litigation involving Medicare, the insurance industry, and Payday Loans, Inc.
And the ankle bone is connected to God only knows what.
The shin bone is connected to the slings and arrows of absurd misfortune
And the knee bone is connected to Dial-A-Prayer
While the thigh bone is connected to a heating pad.
The hip bone is connected to Mother Nature's storm center
And the tail bone is connected to this EZ Lift Chair.
The back bone is connected to Edvard Munch's psyche
And the breast bone is connected to the hopes of Ponce de Leon.
The shoulder bone is connected to Advil
All the arm elbow wrist hand and finger bones seem to be connected to someone else's nervous system
And the neck bone is connected to Meyerwitz, Meyerwitz, and Pane and Sons.
The jaw bone is connected to Ensure
The nose bone is connected to a sink of dirty dishes at the moment
The ear bone has been disconnected
And the head bone is looking to connect with a soft pillow.

Or Was It Just A Mirage?

On the average, I would safely surmise, any sentient human over the age of, say, twelve, questions his or her sanity seventeen times a day. Anything below ten, well, you're well on your way. And so it should come as no surprise that less than 24 hours ago I experienced a particularly biting such questioning. Unlike most of these daily self-examinations, though, this one wasn't so fleeting; it's obviously stayed with me some time, and has grown from the usual minuscule pop quiz to a full-blown essay question. Allow me to impinge upon your time to act as my grader.

Monday, while driving the same backroads I usually take to work, I saw a yard sign. Now although it's not quite election season, when lawns everywhere will be dotted and clotted with red and blue signs, lawn signs this time of year are not infrequent sights. Just two weeks ago on one little half mile stretch of road, I counted at least half a dozen garage sale signs. Throw in the flood of For Sale signs, and one more hand-written sign shouldn't cause any concern, let alone a red alert sanity check. But this one was different. I swear on my stack of Bob Dylan CDs, LPs, and cassettes, this particular sign read: Wanted: Men Who Love To Sing, with a phone number below. What the hell is that, I wondered, practically ramming the curb and ricocheting off a USA Mail truck parked on the bend just beyond said house. The notion of a yard sign advertising for singing males intrigued me all day, and I even told Co-Workers about it--which might have been a fatal mistake.

For two whole days I pondered the significance of a yard sign calling for singing-loving men. I was thrilled, though a bit surprised, that in this day of internet access to communities of the most obscure and nicheiest interests, somebody would go the ancient fashioned route to trawl for like-minded fanatics. Could such a sign really pull in interested people located as it was on a not too heavily traveled street, where at most passersby only caught a fleeting glimpse of it? And really, the more I pondered the whole thing, what was the motive behind the sign, the actual motive among the myriad ones my mind kept coming up with: was it just a hopeful plea from some frustrated ex-glee club guy? a weird cult? some kind of cryptic message decipherable only by the erudite in-the-know? an invitation to a gay slumber party? a lonely woman looking for a suitable serenader? Cher looking for back-up singers? the Mormon Tabernacle Choir setting up a satellite Cleveland operation? My mind reeled.

I tossed and turned all Monday night, wondering whether I should take the grand step from being a lazy make-it-up-as-you-go-along blogger to being a full participatory journalist. Damn the fact that I can't sing; by the time they found that out I'd be deep within the fortress of the singing-loving-males club. I'd have a story. I looked ahead to this very blog post with relish--I'd have quite a story to tell. So I used my off day Tuesday preparing myself. I figured I'd get the phone number on my way to work Wednesday--yesterday--make the call, find out the real facts, and regale you all with what I'd discovered about such a strange sign. All day Tuesday I practiced various possible approaches to the phone call. Should I start with a one-man imitation of the Three Stooges' famous "hello, Hello, HELLO!"? Or maybe, more impressively, (singing) "ARE YOU LOOKING FOR A BASSO? or maybe a tenor? in a pinch, or maybe with a pinch, I could even do castrato!"?  Should I take a no nonsense approach and demand immediately, "Look, I don't have time to play around. When do we hit the road, and do I get my own dressing room?" Or do I assume the sign was indeed a cryptic message to some sleeper cell of spies and just say, "Aunt Emma is in the henhouse. Would you like to knit yourself a sweater?" and see if within twelve hours I don't find myself on Cyprus running guns and saving damsels? Good God I barely slept Tuesday night.

And so it was yesterday that I turned onto the street with uncontained excitement. Pen and pad by my side, I slowed the car as I approached the bend. I figured it would take me three seconds to stop, copy the phone number, and be on my way quickly--just in case the Feds had been alerted and were eyeballing any passerby taking a too keen interest in the sign. But. What the hell? Really, where the hell? The sign was gone. Previous to Monday, the last time I had been on the road was last Thursday (community "Home Days" or some such nonsense over the weekend had changed my route)--so the sign couldn't have been up for more than three or four days. Why was it gone? Surely in such a short time with such a crude form of advertising, the person(s) so desperately in need of singing-loving males couldn't have reached his or her or their quota. Had the neighbors revolted, upset that so many cars were doing driveway turn-arounds and lingering on the street, sussing the sign and finding pen and paper to copy the phone number? Had some especially sharp and no-doubt-soon-to-be-promoted cop been alerted by the cryptic message on the sign and had thus busted up whatever shenanigans had been going on inside? Or, God forbid, had that poor person just looking for a little male-singing companionship despaired after a couple of days of no phone calls and given it all up? Once again, the mind reeled.

And reeled and reeled. Or could it all, please no, been nothing? Not real, but imagined somehow in my obviously-now-fer-piece-around-the-bend mind? Was it a mirage? I've never seen a desert; I've never experienced a mirage. Is there a verb form? To mirage? Is this another heinous effect of global warming? That people in areas such as the Great Lakes will now be suffering desert-like mirages? Isn't a mirage basically a good thing--seeing an oasis in the desert where there isn't one? Don't you just mirage things you want, desire? To what has my mind eddied that I'm miraging a sign seeking singing-loving males? What's next, seeing a skywriting plane spelling out in white wisps, "Need an anvil? Call Carl at ... "? Just how comfortable is a straitjacket?

One Bucket Warming, Rep. Ryan: Passing The Hunh? Test

Any casual reader of this little nook on the internet knows that I would much rather be writing whimsical (at my best) gibberish (at my most) than getting all political, but residing (and suffering) as I do in the very county where supposedly more presidential election advertising dollars are being spent than any other place in America, I have the right to be a quasi pundit at least once a month for the next three. Besides, if the vice presidency of the United States doesn't call for a little whimsical gibberish, what does? As one whose relationship with the "mainstream media" (has "stream" ever been used more aptly?) is akin to a rubbernecker on the freeway, I say unequivocally that very little piques my gawking attention more than the quadrennial fuss over a presidential candidate's "choice of a running mate." I mean, just the thrill of hearing and reading the use of the verb "vet" so many times in two or three days is like Christmas in August. Woe to him or her not thoroughly vetted--poor Thomas Eagleton is waiting with your hair shirt.

And so it has been with glee over the past 48 hours that I have read and listened to all the early returns on Mitt Romney's "tabbing" of Paul Ryan to "join his team." Ah, sly Mitt, though, announcing his choice on a Saturday morning, which has forced the second-line wags to weigh in first, thus allowing the main-line nabobs (hence my two cents here, Monday, rather than then, Saturday) to digest the immediate reaction before thundering forward with the duly considered truth. Everybody's got an angle, everybody's got a theory, not only about why Ryan but about what Ryan means and will mean. Hogwash, I say. Or, more to the point, Sacrifice Bunt. I don't know who said it first, but it's true and it applies here: the sacrifice bunt is the only play in baseball that, when successful, both sides cheer. Which translates into, big deal, let's wait some more and see whose Big Deal it really is--can Romney drive in the run from second, or will Obama pitch his way out of a jam? Who knows? I've read conservatives love the pick and so do liberals, so so what?

So what because we're talking vice president here, maybe the most powerful so what on the planet, but still, at its most fundamental, so what. To me, and I bet most people not getting paid to ruminate, pontificate, and fulminate, the choice of a vice presidential running mate begins and ends with the Hunh? Test. Hunh? in all its wonderful various intonations and connotations (and no doubt, for some, Sarah Palin expanded the range of possible intonations of Hunh? to include breathier ones--Uh Hunh, you can be my Commander-in-Chief any day!). The first part of the two-part Hunh? Test is the immediate Who He/She? part. If that part takes more than a nano-second or two, prepare your concession speech, Mr. Nominee. The second part of the Hunh? Test is more visceral and sadder (and oxymoronic)--can I see this person as my President in the event of an unforeseen tragedy (cue dire music for the "a mere heartbeat away" line)? Now I know that's a loaded question in this time of severe partisanship where the thought of four more years of Obama or at least four years of Romney sends either one half of the country or the other running to the borders screaming Armageddon and the Death of the Constitution, but really, it can be tolerated. President Dole? President Bentsen? President Kemp? President Biden? I will survive. I'll get back to you on President Quayle, President Edwards, and President Palin. But President Ryan? Well, I've never been a Tom Clancy fan, but yes, President Ryan, I can breathe. My first, and thus far only, real reaction to Ryan is that his voice sounds a little too male-cheerleader nagging for me, but really, for the sake of the Union, I can get over that.

So, congratulations Mr. Ryan, you've passed the Hunh? Test. Now what? Well, as history shows, not much, besides a whirlwind, hoarse-inducing (what will that nagging voice sound like come November 6?) few months. On November 7 you'll either become (but for that errant heartbeat, or lack thereof) the most irrelevant person in the country next to Patrick Duffy's (yes, I checked, he's still alive) pr guy, or you'll be the instant frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2016. Because, really, all this nattering nonsense of the last few days and a few more to come notwithstanding, who really cares? Show me eight people, beyond immediate family and friends, who have actually cast (and let's take a moment to hail that great verb--like casting a lonely, worm-wriggling fishing line, in hopes that it might bring in some daily sustenance) their presidential vote based on the vice president, and I'll show you eight people who couldn't spell the term Electrical Collage, let alone define it. Name me one influential vice president in history (okay, fine conspiracy fans, the Johnsons, maybe) other than Darth Dick Cheney (or Duck as his hunting buddies call him). I'll be waiting for your answer until Sasha and Malia are answering to the call of "Grandma!" And please, spare me the usual talk this time every four years of a "shared Presidency." If your ego is big enough to think you should be President, big enough to actually run for President, and big enough to actually be nominated for President, sharing isn't in your lexicon. The semiotics of that picture above are enough to tell you all you need to know about the reality of the kind of sharing that would take place between Romney and Ryan--you wear the jacket, I'll wear the tie. Hey buddy, start practicing that grim look that hides the thought, Who died?, for all the foreign non-major funerals you'll be attending.

Well, there was one influential vice president in history, John Nance Garner IV. Who he? Hunh? FDR's vice president from 1933-1941. He was the one who said the vice presidency was "not worth a bucket of warm piss." Which in turn made him the only vice president who said anything meaningful enough to be bowdlerized, the more familiar saying being "bucket of warm spit." I give Garner moxie points, but not poetic ones. I actually prefer the spit imagery. Less powerful, more inconsequential. Apt. I ain't going to do the math here, but it seems to me "vice presidential nominee" might be a near-exact anagram of "perceived expediency."

So, Mr. Ryan, have fun, and enjoy the ride for the next few months. Come November 7 you're either looking at four maybe eight years of frustrating boredom with mercury rising saliva all the while thinking nothing but 2020, or you'll be crowned The Next One, in which case, see Giuliani, Edwards, Palin, et al. Fun, hunh?