Friday, July 24, 2013, Bucharest.

TV star kills self.

Nancy Grace, the host of Rumania’s popular TV show, Fem Inquisitoriescu, shot herself while on the air, at 12:26 p.m., Bucharest time. Associates said Ms. Grace was depressed about the relentless parodies of her throughout the world.

It is believed Michelle Obama was the final straw. Three weeks ago, on Saturday Night Live, the U.S. First Lady donned a bulbous blond wig and harshly interrogated a five year-old boy, accusing him of selling his own kidneys, in a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Nancy Grace came to Bulgaria in 2010 because the missing children, so necessary to her television success, are simply more numerous in this eastern European nation. “If the U.S. had as many kidnappings per capita as Bulgaria, I simply wouldn’t have had to make the move,” she said. “I truly wish that had been the case.”

There is a huge but, thankfully, diminishing corps of Wikipedia-haters. Many of them are just schoolmarms at heart. Jeepers, what good is learning if it isn’t difficult and unpleasant. They worked their gray matter blue learning sentence diagramming, statistics — maybe even Latin. And they’ve got the arthritic brains to prove it. Why shouldn’t today’s thirteen year-olds suffer, as well?

“I just don’t think you should depend on the internet for research that you should be getting from books.” “Don’t you think you should go to the trouble to check an actual encyclopedia?” “I know that people can make up just about anything they want and post it on that site.” The complaints go on and on.

It’s true, if you go to the trouble to login and get a password, you can post to just about any entry. If you’re putting up a hoax or just full of bullshit, it will be flagged and removed. Usually pretty quickly. Enough rocket scientists, for instance, surf Wikipedia that claims of interstellar travel powered by nuclear fusion will not last more than an hour. The possibility exists, therefore, that a child somewhere will access Wikipedia during some small window of time, and explain to his ninth-grade class that Magellan beat Johnny Cochran at miniature golf.

How many of us own, or even have access to, an encyclopedia? If so, is it of recent vintage? If you want to know the details of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, where do you go? Okay, that’s silly. But what if you need to know the largest number of people to sing karaoke at one time? If you’re looking for details about any important event over 24 hours old, Wikipedia beats anything else.

A gang of us debated the merits of Wikipedia over plates of Pad Thai the other night. The conversation remained friendly, but it took on a little heat at times. Pearl, who readily admits to Devil’s Advocacy, said a research librarian is a better source. I pressed her on her last dependence on a research librarian and she had nothing to say. Do they still exist? Unless at a highly specialized library, why would they? And I can’t imagine a research librarian working without the internet. I wouldn’t be surprised if they use Wikipedia, too.

I particularly like the profusion of click-throughs in any given entry. If I have the time, I always end up learning a lot more than I came for.

I even invented a game I call Six Degrees of Wikipedia. The object is to take two random things that are likely to be Wikipedia entries. For instance Max Schmeling and Border Collies. Start at either one and, using only internal links, get to the other. You have many, many choices at each entry. (I have not yet succeeded, incidentally, but I did get from Barry Bonds to Vietnam in eight). If you’re bored enough, try the game. Somebody is bound to be good at it.

An awful lot of schools are still putting the kibosh on Wikipedia usage. I’m not suggesting that relying on it for a book report on “The Sound and the Fury” is preferable to reading the book. But to be honest, I gave up on the book and bought the Cliff Notes.

The schools will lighten up, of course. It’s inevitable. There was a time people were persecuted for reading the first bible printed in the vulgate (meaning the language people could actually read — i.e. not Latin). The Wyclif bible.

You could look it up.

You’ve heard the reckless charge: skyrocketing fuel prices means we often fly with less fuel than our pilots are comfortable with. We’re not going to even dignify that with a refutation other than to say that Safety is our Number One Priority at U.S. Airways.

We don’t like the high cost of oil, the stock market doesn’t like it, and you shouldn’t like it either. That’s why we’re restructuring everything we do with you, members of the Envoy Club, in mind.

First, we’ve merged our Envoy Lounges with Gold’s Gym Lounges in every city we serve that has a Gold’s Gym. Sure, you’re paying for snacks these days, but carrot juice and nine-grain muffins are a better way to get pumped and ready to fly. And don’t sweat the trip to and from the lounge, Envoy Scrip pays 15% of cab fare on all Yellow Cabs with the U.S. Airways Safety is our Number One Priority poster on its roof.

What else? On flights that don’t earn you Envoy Miles, you get Otis Miles. That’s right Frequent Elevator Miles in the tallest buildings in destination cities like Chicago, Detroit, Dayton, and New York City (Yonkers, N.Y., is the home of Otis Elevators). Why did we choose Otis as a partner? Because Otis has the best safety record. When you’re thinking vertical transportation, you can’t beat a team like Otis and U.S.Airways.

Luggage check-in surcharges giving you the blues? It’s totally crazy the way some carriers aren’t willing to look for creative alternatives. That’s why we’ve partnered with Greyhound Bus Lilnes. Send your luggage via Greyhound and it will be waiting for you at the bus station in any destination city in the U.S. Cost? Well it’s a whole lot less than you might think.

As times get tougher and tougher, you can look to U.S. Airways to make air travel easier. And safe? Your Safety is Our Number One Priority at U.S. Airways. It’s so important that we’ve teamed up with Safeway, one of the biggest supermarket chains on the west coast. Travel to San Francisco, ride the cable car to within a few blocks of a Safeway — just be sure you’re packin’ Envoy Scrip, because you can buy fresh produce, dried fruits, even sauces from manufacturers the likes of H.J. Heinz & Co.

Flying isn’t what it was. We’re the first to admit that. But now it can be All it Can Be, because the U.S. Army has chosen us as a certified carrier for soldiers on leave, flying to their families in selected destination cities. That means men and women, in uniform, can travel to the arms of their loved ones.

We have specials for almost everyone at U.S. Airways. But before we partner with any respected U.S. corporation, we always ask ourselves, What Does This Have To Do With Safety? If we can say to our Envoy Club members, Safety is our Number One Priority, we’ve got a deal.

All the best,

Doug Packer, CEO, U.S. Airways

Liberals are howling. So are conservatives. That crazy First Amendment, huh?

Right wingers sneer at the elitist New Yorker for impugning a candidate for the President of the United States. It’s lovely to hear the operatives at Fox News admit Barack and Michele aren’t the flag-burning, Osama-loving, Madrassa-trained terrorists pictured on the cover of that hateful lefty rag.

James Carville, the one liberal pundit left unaghast at the Barry Blitt’s drawing, debated virtuecrat Bill Bennett on CNN last night. Bennett, while allowing the cover was not intended to be taken literally, couldn’t go the extra inch and say it was satire. “It’s too clever by half,” he said repeatedly, as though he’d invented the quip. He went on to invoke Jonathan Swift too many times, by half a dozen.

It’s funny the way unfunny people can be so certain that funny people, long dead, agree with them on what’s funny. Just last week, Bush speechwriter (now Washington Post op-ed writer), Michael Gerson, was going on about how Jonathan Swift would have disapproved of Al Franken’s Playboy Magazine stories.

One commentator (wish I could remember who) said this whole flap will most likely provide some sunlight on the whole Obama’s-an-America-hater lie. Particularly, in my opinion, because it’s forced the conservative talking heads to drop the innuendo and speak the truth. Or shut up about the matter altogether.

And if The New Yorker has to take the place of Obama as the conservative’s whipping boy, fine. The magazine’s held up for 76 years. Even longer than John McCain.

I have difficulty dismissing art I have not actually witnessed. Yet the TV cllp, along with the news story about, Martin Creed’s Work no. 850 leaves little doubt that if you are a connected artist, the museums will buy anything.

For four months, at frequent and regular intervals, sprinters race through the Tate Museum’s sculpture galleries. Why? I can only quote the artist: “If you think about death as being completely still and movement as a sign of life, then the fastest movement possible is the biggest sign of life. So then running fast is like the exact opposite of death: it’s an example of aliveness.”

Is he a character in a sitcom?

Let’s consider the curatorial imperative for displaying Work no. 850. Novelty? Modest. Relevance? Nonexistent. Marketability? Great, apparently. TV, print, radio and, of course, blog coverage proves that.

The title Work no. 850 implies at least 849 other ideas. I would guess they might be, at best, random, given this example: “Creed has built up a reputation for playful and often challenging work. He famously won the Turner Prize 2001 with an exhibited piece called Work # 227: The lights going on and off, which centered around an empty gallery with the lights flashing on and off.”

The following, I hope, are the worst ideas: “The new work extends Creed’s investigation into physical experience and everyday life and relates to his other works exploring basic human activity such as Work No. 503 (2006), which depicted vomiting and Work No. 600 (2006), which depicted defecating.”

The writer used the insufficient word “depicting” twice in the preceeding. What is the depiction? Visual. Audible. Olfactory?

Conservative pundits, naturally, will lambaste Work no. 850, and the Tate, and anybody else who dares to foist this art on the public. The trouble is — and I’m thinking of you, O’Reilly — they never mention art except to sneer at it.

And now I’m sneering, too. You should see me.

My friend Dan Kavert, an artist, recently saw the Dale Chihuly show at the De Young Museum. Chihuly is a wildly popular glassmaker. I haven’t seen the show, but I have liked photos of his work. Dan was not terribly impressed. But he described his visit in terms that would be instructive to the curator at the Tate. Here it is, rendered into a film clip:

Dan walks at his usual slow and deliberate pace into the Chihuly exhibit. The glassworks are set off with elaborate lighting on a shiny dark floor. Dan never varies his pace. He merely looks left and right, and up and down, taking it in with a minimum of expression. He exits the gallery into a room containing the museum’s permanent collection. There, mixed in with all manner of sculpture, paintings, and drawings, are two glassworks by other artists. Dan’s manner is transformed, energized. He stops, investigates one, glances at another, hurries to look at it, then goes back and forth between the two.

It’s an excellent piece of art criticism. Entirely visual. I’d much rather watch that on the news.

One last bit from the article:

Stephen Deuchar, Director of Tate Britain said the gallery was ‘simply delighted’ with the new work.

“Martin Creed has responded to the historic Duveen gallery spaces with a compelling, simple and lyrical project,” he said. “In lifting an everyday activity out of its usual context and dropping it into the central galleries of Tate Britain, it upsets any preconceived ideas of how to move appropriately through an art space.”

Spoiler alert: Creed’s Work no. 851 is a metal construction placed at the Tate’s entryway. Its two-story letters spell GOTCHA!

China has banned the serving of dog meat at Beijing restaurants that cater to spectators at the Olympics. I don’t care one way or the other, I just wanted an opportunity to pun.

Puns usually annoy me — except for my own. They’re like farts in that regard.

By the way, I used to tell everybody I ate dog while in the Philippines. It may or may not be true. Our outfit was in the field and we came upon some people cooking some kind of meat on a spit. That’s all I know for certain. It could have been goat, piglet, or any smallish mammal. Somehow the memory morphed into a story at some bull session.

Forgive me if I lied. Forgive me if I did eat dog. Forgive me for my pun. It’s my birthday.

1. Based on a real story.
2. Inspired by true events.
3. A retelling of actual occurrences.
4. Congruent to the spirit of what happened.
5. How it was as seen from how it is now.
6. Chill, dude — we take liberties, okay?

At Peets recently, I crutched my way out of the bathroom and was slowed for a moment by having to sidestep between a twentysomething woman at a small table and the wall. Poor interior design. But as I worked my way past, I noticed that on her computer screen, centered, in caps, was the word FRED. The format of the page was clearly that of a screenplay. I wanted to dally long enough to read what FRED had to say about exploding milk trucks, Prague intellectuals, diabetics who work in M&M factories, whatever. It even occurred to me to offer my services as an actual FRED. But I can’t imagine she would want to share screenwriting credits — not at this early stage, anyhow.

Still, I felt a stab of jealousy in my corpus callosum (that’s the connection between the right brain, where movie ideas come from, and the left brain, where movie grosses are calculated). This young woman has a chance, somewhere between .01% and .0001% of having her screenplay made. My screenplay, “Russian Music”, has made the rounds and has .00000% chance. Worse, having looked at it once more, I can see why it has no chance. You can understand my angst.

The next screenplay I write will be “Bitter Old Man”. TED, a retired advertising copywriter (I know what you’re thinking, it’s an autobiopic. Stop it!) wears thick glasses and skulks about coffee shops, stealing movie ideas from young writers at work. He manages to crib scenes from twenty or thirty different kids, puts them together and, surprisingly, they make a funny and coherent whole. Unfortunately, it turns out to be the story of TED’s entire, miserable life. A life spent telling lies that hurt people, cheating old people in a variety of scams, and finally ending up as an advertising executive.

So TED’s got a screenplay everybody loves about a life that humiliates him. A young woman lifts a copy from Kinkos, submits it under her name, and it gets greenlit.

Nick Nolte takes the role and does wonderful things with it. TED has second thoughts. He claims authorship, wins out and finally owns up to his petty and craven existence.

It has a happy ending because really, really, really, it’s all fantasy and has nothing to do with me. Or very little. Well, just enough that I felt more comfortable writing a happy ending for it.

Of course, it hasn’t been written yet. Unless that girl in Peets has finished it.

I thought I’d have a lot to say about Bingo tonight, but the game just wasn’t as exciting as usual. What was worthy, however, was the quality and depth of the bullshit afterwards.

Panhandlers was the topic:

Steve: I saw one time on Sixty Minutes about this guy who made $500 a day. He panhandled in the area of L.A. where all the rich guys worked. Guys in suits coming in and out of their office buildings dropping a fiver or sometimes a twenty.

Howard: These gypsies in France. I tell you the streetcar was thick with gypsy girls about eight years old. I had about ten of them hanging on me. I don’t know how I escaped with my wallet, but they got my Swiss Army Knife.

Right, Howard, I’ll bet they’re opening guys’ chests with that knife and taking out the pacemakers. Watch out Cheney.

John: This guy in Seattle. One of those Goths. He worked down at the waterfront and I don’t know how much he got a day, but I’ll tell you it was more than $500. Last I heard he bought a horse ranch somewhere. Idaho, I think.

Walter: Worst part of the depression — 1933 — this one man made so much as a beggar he used to drive off in his ‘39 Packard. Of course he parked it two blocks away.

And six years.

Now I, your blogkeeper, saw this man, he was a middle-eastern looking guy at an airport, who was hitting up people for passports and bags of fertilizer and small handguns. And he ended up on the same flight to Chicago with me and just as we thought we were landing and the Sears Tower came into view, he took what looked like some mints out of his pocket and he swallowed them. Then we landed and I thought nothing more about it until I was watching a TV program about Dubai, and it turns out he owns the whole city/state/country — whatever it is.

Also, I bingoed once and walked out of the dining hall $1 richer.

It’s 9:52 p.m. For the past five minutes fireworks have been bursting accelerando until the last and loudest bombs come at about a five per-second clip. Finally, silence. The crowd takes it in for a few seconds then the-show’s-over-folks sinks in and they begin applauding, cheering, hooting, and setting off firecrackers of their own.

What — or who — are they cheering for?

No, no, I don’t mean anything unpatriotic. Not even underpatriotic. I’m as patriotic as the next American consumer. What I mean is who is the recipient of the cheers? In a boxing match, it’s the man who makes blood come out of the other man’s head. At a concert it’s the rocker holding his guitar aloft. At NASCAR it’s that Viagra/Mentos/Geico/Cheetos/Verizon billboard-on-wheels rolling into the winners circle. Or the driver inside it.

But at a fireworks show? Why applaud a geek with a laptop?

There was a time a middle-aged man had to strike a match, hold it to a fuse, struggle to his feet, then quickly hustle clear, his belly bobbing above Sansabelt slacks. Younger men could do it better, but they recognized what it meant to the older men. It was a reenactment, for them, of setting a trip-wire to a jerry-rigged mine made from a hand-grenade, then ducking out of the path before the bad guys on whatever foreign battlefield came marching through. Patriotic muscles may sag but they never say uncle.

I live halfway up Russian Hill in San Francisco. The back end of my apartment faces north and has a view of the north bay that killers would kill for. But Crissy Field, where the fireworks are launched, is not line-of-sight. Worse, tonight the fog is such that the show was just brightly colored bruises in the sky. But the night carried the cheering from near and far — the top of Russian Hill, Fisherman’s Wharf and Chinatown, too (I don’t speak Chinese, but I can hear it).

A lot of us can’t get our fill. That’s why all the local news stations will rebroadcast the glowing fog. Some people will Tivo it. Others having recorded it at Crissy Field, after watching the show live on a domino-sized minicam screen at the time, will rerun it for their wives and kids on a laptop in the Prius during the stop-and-go drive home.

The urge to cheer, like the urge to laugh out loud, diminishes in small company. But it doesn’t mean you don’t love your country — or the man or woman who mans or womans the keyboard that sets the fireworks aglow. It probably only means you’re tired.

I say cheer your ass off for the Fourth of July — even if you don’t know what it is you’re cheering. It burns way more calories than wearing a flag pin.

A recent Gallup poll showed that Cindy McCain was viewed twice as favorably as Michelle Obama — a finding that shocked me.

To be fair to Mrs. McCain — who seemed to me a parody of even the most dutiful Republican wives — I checked her out on Wikipedia. To my surprise I found much to admire that offset the seamier parts of her background. If you want the goods, (drug addiction, questionable bookkeeping) take a look. All in all, my impression is favorable. In fact, she used the silver spoon she was born with to help feed the poor. I’m glad I checked.

For contrast, I used the same source to find out more about Michelle Obama. Hers is an amazing story of hard work and talent. The only negative I could see was her now-famous sound bite, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.”

What can the public possibly be seeing that would predispose them to favor Cindy McCain? Both women are attractive, but Michelle displays a personality. Could that be it? No, we’ve gone beyond requiring candidates wives to walk silently, five steps to their husband’s rear.

Frankly, the reason can be none other than race. Michelle is a black woman and makes no bones about it.

An awful lot has been made about anti-woman bias in the campaign, much of it no doubt true. But the constant in America is racism.

1. Start a synchronized wheelchair team.
2. Remake “Perry Mason” TV series.
3. Take it to the chop shop.
4. Install wheelchair alarm, park it in I.C.U, and give it a jostle.
5. Travel the states that allow electrocution and execute people.
6. Take into theater, hook up to a microwave, make and sell popcorn during the movie.

Bluetooths have been jumping off the shelves over the weekend. Tomorrow, July 1st, California drivers will be fined if they are caught using a handset phone. Purchasers of stock in the Bluetooth company will forever have another July holiday to celebrate.

I don’t know what any particular model costs, but my friend Dan, who purchased one on Sunday, told me the good ones were upwards of $80.

Bluetooth, of course, has become a generic term, having become, in just months, the Kleenex of cell phone headsets. Dan says you really need to spend the money. Cheap ones allow ambient sounds to drown out the conversation.

With rising fuel prices, it strikes me as odd that so many people want the convenience of something that will actually increase their per mile costs. For most of us, a minute’s worth of calling costs a few cents, just as a minute’s worth of driving does. Many commuters will doubtless spend their entire drive time on the phone. For salesmen, this might make sense. More most of the phone-addicted public, it will not.

At highway speeds, a thirty mile per gallon car burns two gallons, or nine dollars an hour. A dollar every six and a half minutes. If you’re on the phone those minutes — even at a penny a minute — you’ve upped your costs nearly 7%.

Why do I care? I don’t. I don’t drive. I hardly use my cell phone. I just like to rub it in. If I had the energy to figure out some way to include driving while eating snack foods into this equation, I’d do it. You know, the rising costs of corn, etc, etc.

There’s an interesting story surrounding the name, Bluetooth. I’ve forgotten what it is. It has something to do with the texture of the device, or some such attribute. I know it’s not a lot of help to have somebody promise to tell you a story, then not deliver, but I figure if you’re out driving around you can Bluetooth a friend and ask. (There, I’ve used it as a verb). Somebody will know and be happy to spend 28 cents worth of phone time to tell you the story.

Okay, that’s it, my phone’s ringing.

Nope, it’s just the TV.

1. He wants a more powerful hearing aid.
2. To run drilling platforms in the Everglades.
3. That Energizer Bunny’s got to go down.
4. Hook it up to Ahmedinejad’s nipples.

In a way, I guess I’m lucky the ice is gone. Paulette — or Mrs. Santa to the world — left me. She did it for the reasons Mrs. Santas one, two, three, and four left me: women don’t like living on top of ice.

Actually, my house is toasty warm and, for that, I share a lot of the blame of global devastation. But I made little boys and girls happy for centuries. In addition, since I moved toy production to China, my carbon footprint is way far to the south. That might count for something. But the move is too little, too late for my lovely. And I am letting go with love. Because that’s who I am.

I don’t have any regrets because Paulette, who was my first what you’d call trophy wife (very hot — think Charo in the 50s) lowered her eyes and admitted I was the “Best fuck. Period.” She said her favorite memories are the times we did it in the elves-evator (sure, it’s a bad pun, but that’s what they called it — and for good reason: it wasn’t much bigger than a dumb-waiter). Paulette says I won’t have any trouble finding another wife. But as much time as I’m spending in Hangchow, the next Mrs. Santa will be from the Fuquan Province. It’s in my toy contract.

One thing about Christmas Eve is that in about one in a hundred of the households you’ve got a very attractive single mother sitting up late. I usually just go about my business and I’m in and out in ten one-millionths of a second. But that one-in-a-hundred adds up to quite a few million very fine ladies — and Santa pretty much has a choice.

I’m not fat, either, and chicks is exactly why. When I spend a couple minutes with any serious candidates for Mrs. Santahood, I pull out the padding and show off my middle. Not all ripped abs, but not the flab I had when I was 400. Years — not pounds. I never weighed over 350.

I hope all this sits well with the good women of Fuquan. Maybe they like the old ideal. You know, the Emperor is fat. That means wealthy. But remember, I’m checking out every lady on earth. And if I have to have one from somewhere else, it’s not that hard to break a contract. Plenty of good lawyers in Beijing that would love a sleigh-ride to the mountains.

I’m sorry. I keep going on. It’s always me me me with me. Well, that’s what you get. Bad news first, right? The good news is you become the First Lady of the Whole World. And for more than eight years. I’ve had five wives over five centuries. You get to live to be as old as you want — as long as I still love you. But the average is a hundred years. How can you beat that?

Well, the ice is gone. Boo hoo hoo. My castle in China is ready for stuccoing and I’m moving in in August. Hear that, ladies? And it’s on top of one of those mountains that are so steep you think you dreamed them. And it’s got air-conditioning. And fireplaces in every room, so you can have a fire in the hot-ass summertime if you want.

I’m not doing any serious looking until very late, December 24th. So keep it in mind when you’re deciding on a bedtime and whether or not you want to wear a nightie.

I’m looking for number six, and you’re looking to send your kids to college.

Pigeons love me. And I try to return the favor. A nice sunny day, five guys in wheelchairs, some with cookies and muffins. Me with crackers and crumbs, but the pigeons come to me. Four are gray, one is white.

The door to the VA Communal Living Center (it’s really a nursing home) slides open and Gordon whizzes by in his red electric wheelchair. The pigeons turn as one and hustle to his side. I think Gordon’s been generous in the past. The birds remind me of the Secret Service running alongside a limo. But Gordon continues full speed down the crosswalk, ignoring them. They give up the chase and return. To me. Not Tom, who tosses chunks of raisin oatmeal cookies onto the walk. Not Peter, who throws something breadlike over my way. A lure, but not alluring. The pigeons stay by me.

I like the iridescent reds and greens of their neckfeathers, their robotic rhythms, and most of all their doglike devotion. They’re nice animals and they like people.

But people do not like pigeons.

When I was a kid I’ve been with guys who would hit the gas to nail a pigeon. “Flying rats”, they’d all laugh. I’ve never been in a car when one was actually hit, but when you see a dead pigeon in the street, you know it was a deliberate kill. They’re too quick otherwise.

I guess flying rats, when first uttered, was clever enough. But it’s lived on, not just as cliche, but as approved public health doctrine. Once something becomes the conventional wisdom, it’s hard to undo.

But what’s the big problem? Is their clucking too unmusical? Does the flutter of wingbeats muss hair? I can see how ascending and descending flocks can startle toddlers, but the toddlers warm up and run to touch them. It’s the parents who say “dirty, dirty, dirty.” Is pigeon shit more offensive than any other shit?

I did a cartoon that I can’t reproduce here — I have no photoshop on this computer, nor a scanner. It shows a park with a monumental statue of a pigeon on which people are defecating. I just want to add that if it sounds gross, it’s not. You have to understand that it’s not pigeon-bashing when I do it. Plus, I drew it funny. Take my word.

It’s a shame I never interviewed Tim Russert when I had the chance. And I had some great satellite photos of Laura Bush having sex with a big, hairy man on a Biloxi, Mississippi rooftop that I didn’t publish (tip to the First Lady, don’t do it missionary style if you don’t want the world to see your face).

It’s a shame Wisconsin, Iowa, South Dakota, Oregon, and Michigan don’t line up west to east because WISDOM would be a great acronym to have jumping out at you from the map. Too bad it’s foggy tonight in San Francisco, but not foggy in Cleveland, which is a place that could really use the romance.

It’s a shame duck tape doesn’t come in animal textures, like duck-feathers, so when people write duck tape they wouldn’t seem so fucking ignorant. And wouldn’t it be a pleasant change if the Lincoln Memorial were put on a barge for a tour of the world so that every person on earth who finds him or herself in the middle of a civil war could see there is hope. And what about this him/her pronoun controversy? Wouldn’t it be nice if the animal kingdom was entirely asexual so that the little old la… well, the little old caretakers of pronouns would have one less thing to hector us about?

Isn’t it a shame that videogames are played in only two, or at most, three dimensions because everybody knows videogames are a great teacher of almost anything and could probably show us how to understand six, seven, and even eight dimensions. By the way, it’s a shame we have to die with dignity when it would be so much more satisfying to die in the arms of a prosititue, the way Nelson Rockefeller did.

It’s a shame you can change your carbon footprint by altering your lifestyle, but try to change a fingerprint. Of course, if you’re not committing a crime this sort of thing shouldn’t be an issue, should it?

And the worse thing of all is to use the death of a beloved newsman as a jumping-off-point for an ain’t-it-a-shame ramble. But percoset can do that.

“I’m not a bigot,” says Paula C. Snead, owner of Turlock-T’s, “I’m just trying to figure out a way to make the greatest number of citizens happy.” Ms. Snead, an opponent of gay marriage, is standing outside her apparel shop, soliciting signatures for the Similar-Sex Amendment she hopes to put on the California ballot this November.

“A man and a man — that’s just too close. I’d even say it’s kind of identical. But if a man was to get together with a transsexual, say of a man-to-woman kind, that’s more like there’s some difference and you might not call it gay. Compromise is my middle name.”

She was passing out flyers that detailed acceptable sexual arrangements: male with hermaphrodite, female with hermaphrodite, male with male whose testicles have not descended, male with castrato, female with female-to-male transsexual, full-breasted female with flat-chested female, and female with Dodge pickup truck.

“If Mary Cheney — our Vice-President’s daughter — can marry her 550 horsepower Dodge Ram Pickup, I guess I can live with quite a lot,” says Ms. Snead. “I wouldn’t choose to have a vehicle as the lawful father of my child like Mary Cheney did, but, like I say, e pluribus unum.”

If the Similar-Sex Marriage Amendment passes, Cali8fornia will again lead the way in sexual toleerance, surpassing even Washington D.C. where couples like James Carville and Mary Matalin live unmolested.