But I Digress ...

I stopped posting to this blog well over a year ago, for one very simple reason. It wasn't fun anymore. For a year, I had written all the satire I could muster up. Some of it was good, some not so good (hey, I've never been a professional funnyman), but it was all pretty clearly tongue-in-cheek. I was shocked and amazed at the number of people who took not only offense, but nasty offense at some of the things I wrote. My last post, which had to do with the World Cup soccer final last year (and the infamous Zidane head-butt), got me branded a "racist" (I believe the word they were looking for was "xenophobe", but the point was made). All this abuse, for nothing but a small sense of accomplishment and a few complimentary comments? No thanks. Well, the whip marks have faded and the bruises have healed, and I'm back. I don't have nearly the time to devote to this as I once did (and I'm through with that whole trolling-for-traffic-on-the-blog-...

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I have never been a soccer fan. Not until today, that is. World Cup final match, Italy vs. France. Two teams kicking the ball all over the place and having practically nothing to show for it after 90 minutes of "action" and 30 minutes of overtime: boring. Italy winning the match on penalty kicks because someone on the French side screwed up: yawn. France's Zinedane Zidane smashing his bald head into the solar plexus of Italian Marco Materazzi, intentionally and for no good reason? Now, that's a tackle that an American sports fan can get into! I'm not proud of my bloodlust, but let's be completely honest here. When it comes to the pageantry of sports, Americans are about as refined in their choices as the Romans were when feeding gladiators to the lions. Football needs no explanation: it's really all about bodies slamming against each other. Basketball these days is about "in-your-face" stuffs and over-the-back flagrant fouls. NASCAR is sitting t...

You don't have to be politically liberal. You don't have to be conservative. Why, you don't even have to be politically MODERATE to know the truth. And the truth, folks, is utterly unassailable. On Saturday evening, April 29th, Stephen Colbert proved that he is the bravest man in America. Colbert (pronounced col-BEAR) hosts an "O'Reilly Factor" send-up on Comedy Central called "The Colbert Report" (pronounced re-PORE). Full disclosure: I don't have cable TV, since I rarely watch TV, because it's just too depressing. But Colbert (who used to be a writer and performer on "The Daily Show") has been getting rave reviews for his program. Last Saturday evening, at the White House Correspondents' dinner, Colbert was the featured speaker. It appears the organizers were anticipating some light political satire a la Mark Russell or Molly Ivins. What they got far exceeded their expectations. Colbert stood at a podium less than ten feet fr...

Ladies and gentlemen, we have been wrong from the very beginning. George W. Bush is proving himself to be, not the dumbest, but the smartest President our country has ever had. But as Maxwell Smart used to say, "If only he had used his powers for niceness, instead of evil ..." While Karl Rove is a very shrewd political mastermind who has guided Dubya to victories over Ann Richards (who, at the time she lost, had the highest popularity rating of any governor in Texas history), Al Gore (by orchestrating the hostile takeover of the Florida vote count) and John Kerry (who, let's be totally honest here, imploded under pressure), Dubya turns out to be the brains of the Dubya Administration after all. (And make no mistake. Dubya IS evil. But that's only my opinion. Let's get back to the hard facts.) It was Dubya who nurtured his own image as a stumbling, bumbling country fool to disarm his enemies. (Does anyone really think that a Yale-educated man whose father was a ...

This just in from MSNBC and the Houston Chronicle : "Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who was touched by a lobbying scandal that ensnared some of his former top aides and cost the Republican his leadership post, won't seek re-election to Congress and intends to resign, Republican officials said today." (There IS a God. And right now, He is pointing at DeLay and laughing ...) In the immortal words of Bucky Katt (from Get Fuzzy ): "You're going DOWN, Poochy!" More on this breaking story as it breaks Tommy Boy, one bone at a time ...

I don't watch "Lost". I sat through a small handful of the first-season episodes with the Wife -- just enough to make me realize where all the former "Twin Peaks" writers were now employed. (Both "Twin Peaks" and "Lost" were ABC productions. Coincidence? I think not ...) But certain things became alarmingly apparent to me faster than they did to anyone on the show ... like this silly obsession with the number 108. It was very early on that I realized the six numbers printed on the side of some hatch somewhere (or some toilet seat -- I have since lost track) added up to 108, which is the frequency with which the "doomsday device" needs to be reset. And the digits in "108" add up to 9. And the "Dharma Project" has something to do with Jenna Elfman's career, but darned if I can figure out what. As any loyal fan of "Lost" knows by now, the six numbers on the fortune cookie that led Locke (the bald guy w...