So, I'm at the gym this morning, worked out with Nic Cage, then climbed on the old Precor and while I was working up a sweat, watching the "news" on Fox, I had a sudden epiphany.


That's where he's hiding! Right under our noses.

But think on this a moment: they exhibit the same sort of megalomaniacal, supremely arrogant behavior; you just know Santino reeks of patchouli and onions, just like Osama. You've never seen them in the same place at the same time...

Coincidence, or something more sinister?

And a special thanks to my most Southern Sistergirl, Miss Pearlie Mae, for this one.

President George W. Bush was scheduled to visit the Methodist Church outside Washington as part of his last campaign. Karl Rove made a visit to the Bishop and said to him, "We've been getting a lot of bad publicity among Methodists because of Bush's position on stem cell research, the War, and such. I'll gladly make a contribution to the church of $100,000 if during your sermon, you'd say the President is a saint."

The Bishop thinks it over for a few moments and says, "The Church is in desperate need of funds. I will do it."

Bush pompously shows up that following Sunday, looking especially smug, sneering for his photo ops, while strutting his way, cowboy-style, into the church.

As the sermon starts, the Bishop begins his homily:

"George Bush is a petty, self-absorbed hypocrite as well as a nitwit. He is a liar, a cheat, probably still a drunk, and a low-intelligence sneaky weasel. He has lied about his military record, and then had the gall to put himself in uniform on a military jet, landing on a carrier, and then posing before a banner stating 'Mission Accomplished.' He invaded a country for oil and money, all the while lying to the American people about the war, with nary a care for the thousands of lives it has taken and continues to take. He is the worst example of a Methodist I've ever personally known or known of. But compared to Dick Cheney, George Bush is a saint."

Or, maybe, should I drop a dime on my brother?

I try so hard in this blog not to talk about my real life, my personal life, except in the most broad strokes. I don't use real names, for the most part. I have a personal journal, kept in ink, kept for myself, and I've journaled for more than 30 years.

So this exercise is more for the joy of writing, and of being read, than for soul searching and deep thoughts.

It's just that at this particular time in my life, things are such that I have very little to say to amuse you, my imaginary readers. I am consumed with
a problem involving my brother, Biggus Dickus, his wife, Incontinentia Buttocks, the family estate, and questions of control of money, honesty, theft, and general skullduggery.

These are the BIG questions, are they not? More so, I think, than the other big questions, you know, life, the universe and everything?

I am not the sort of person who goes to court. I do not desire to see my name in the papers. I have no burning lust for fame (well, maybe a little smouldering lust). As jaundiced as I am, as jaded about the human condition, I want to believe that my own brother isn't screwing me over something as meaningless as money. And yet. All signs point to that very thing.

My mother's silver has gone missing from the family home. Biggus Dickus and his wife were very la-di-dah about that. As of course, they would be, since it was left to me. Or will be left, or would have been left, since Mummy isn't exactly dead, yet.

Last week I had to pay a bill that Biggus Dickus was refusing to pay, related to Mummy's care...from the hurricanes of 2004. He refused to pay, he refused to talk to the lawyer representing the agency that was seeking payment, he refused to listen to me when I told him to just pay the damned bill, he refused to listen to logic, or my psychoanalysis of his behavior. (Biggus Dickus may be a therapist, and by his accounts, a good one, but I spent 10 years on the couch and came away a better person and one with an understanding of pyschology.) I paid it out of my own, limited means.

He's never acknowledged that I pulled our family name and reputation out of a fire of his own making. I am dragging my feet about calling him out on this. I do not want/need this kind of drama, but I am being forced down an unpleasant path.

Or I can bend over and take a royal ass reaming by my own brother and pretend that it isn't happening, never happened, couldn't happen between us.

Or.

I can let out my inner bitch, she who is held in such tight control so that I can live among men. I can, I say, let her out, and go to court and have Biggus Dickus removed as my co-trustee for cause, thereby causing an irreparable rift between me and my only brother. As you can see, this is quite a dilemma, since we love each other so much and so well.

And you want to know why I'm not blogging much these days. Mmmph.

This is going to be a clusterfuck of a year, I can just feel it in my bones.

The RLA got a spider bite last week, and with diligence and a course of antibiotics has kept the necrotizing whatever at bay. He only has a small swelling and a little crimson spot on his drawing hand. But it was a nail biter.

My mother is drifting deeper and deeper into the waters of Lethe. Now and then she pulls a name or a complete sentence out of the ether and that makes it even worse. Yesterday she blurted out the real name of my brother, Biggus Dickus.

I have a confession to make. I am completely unable to focus today. I know that there is a pile of work in front of me, and yet, I cannot make myself attend to it. I've been looking at Today's Kitten, reading the recap of Project Runway (and don't get me started about Nicky Hilton and Santino—a perfect match of stupidity and arrogance if ever there was one), idly filing papers, and rummaging in the break room for bacon.

Not as random as it would seem, the rummaging for bacon thing. There is a week-long training session going on next door, and the breakfast leftovers have made their appearance in the break room. There were sticky pecan rolls, too, if you must know, but I was able to muster enough self-control not to eat those. Bacon, on the other hand, is a primal force against which I am no match.

Last night, on the train home, I sat in front of a gentle-looking soul with an acoustic guitar. He strummed and plucked quietly and well. Unfortunately, I couldn't hear him, because the asshole in front of me was shrieking into his cell phone the whole trip. The irony? The asshole was holding a copy of The New Times, with its headline: If Silence is a Virtue, Miami is Going to Hell.

Also, a special shout-out to Kathleen and Muv:

HOOK 'EM HORNS

I referred to the POTUS today as Du(m)bya (the m is silent) and my boss got very upset. Don't call him that, he said, it is a term used by his fans. You may call him the boy idiot, or the war criminal, or the shrub, or bubble boy, or... well he went on in that vein for a while, and then he summed up his opinion of our imperial majesty.

It was extemporaneous and brilliant. I had him write it down for me, and I give it to you.
As President, George Bush is ...

... more out of touch with real Americans than his father

... more guilty of launching illegal, covert, foreign acts than Ronald Reagan

... more insular and paranoid than Richard Nixon; more destructive of basic constitutional liberties than Richard Nixon

... more silent in the face of the hate-filled, demonization of political opponents than Eisenhower

... more incompetent than Herbert Hoover

... more beholden to Big Business than Calvin Coolidge

... more corrupt than Warren Harding

... more boneheaded than William Howard Taft

... more stiffnecked and rigidly Conservative to the overall degradation of the common good than William McKinley

In short, he is the worst Republican President of the past 100 years and, quite likely, the worst President in the history of the United States (with apologies to Millard Fillmore and James Buchanan).

I've been remiss in my blogging, in my off-line private journaling, in my correspondence, in my workout schedule, in my housework, in my banking, in pretty damn near everything in which I could possibly be remiss.

I have made up a short list of, not exactly resolutions, but things I want to be able to say, this time next year, that I have accomplished.

Podcasting. RJ and I have a library of sound files from our days in radio comedy, and I intend to put them on-line.

Skinning. Once and for all, I want to learn how to skin this site and make it work correctly.

Sales. Time to put some of my quilts and other hand-mades for sale, and on-line.

Finish. Anything, really, but specifically three or four quilts that are in various stages of completion, or non-completion.

Fit into the jeans I bought yesterday. They are way, way, way too small, and I don't buy clothes that don't fit, but they were also way, way, way too cool, and have given me an incentive.

Yesterday, or maybe the day before, the Miami Herald ran a big ass story about "The December Dillema". That dillema, apparently, is what to do about Christmas and Chanukkah in mixed families. I'm not going to touch that issue with your ten foot pole, but I am going to address their solution.


First of all, matzoh is not associated with Channukah in any way, shape or form. Second of all, it doesn't look like a happy Bavarian cottage, it looks like a freakin' graveyard. Third of all, what the fuck is wrong with just being Jewish, and having Jewish traditions, like Channukah gelt, and spinning the stupid dreidle, and lighting the menorah? And eating fried food? Huh? What is so wrong with that, that we have to coopt the traditions of another religion that coopted their traditions from the pagans who went before (i.e.: the Christmas tree)?

I accept that in mixed faith families, there may be some issues, but, hey. A tree is for Christmas, and not for Channukah. There is NO SUCH FUCKING THING as a Channukah bush, OK? Calling it that makes it no less a Christmas tree. And a Christmas tree, no matter how much my girlfriends try to convince me otherwise, is a symbol of Christmas and of Christ's birth, and not just a house-sized air freshener.

And you know what? I'm OK with that. I respect that. I honor that. I may feel like a stranger in a strange land this time of year, with most of my neighbors decorating the outside of their homes with lights, and the non-stop Christmas music in public places, and the never-ending barrage of all things Christmas, but. But I am a minority. Not in the minority, as in, most people enjoy this and I do not, but A minority. I am a Jew, and this season is not about me or my beliefs, it is a holiday, no matter how secularized it has become, of major significance to Christians. I may even go so far as to say that my recognition of Christmas is more religious than most of my Christian friends. As an outsider, it is easier for me to focus on the meaning of the holiday than of its commercialism.

The RLA grew up in a Jewish ghetto, and has no appreciation for Christmas. He is even, dare I say, a teensy bit offended when invited to share the holiday with our Christian friends. I, on the other hand, having grown up as the only Jew in a one-Jew town, understand that this is an offer of love. Christians, by and large, feel as though their Jewish friends are missing out on something special by not "having Christmas", and so throughout my childhood and into adulthood, I have been invited to tree-trimming parties, to Christmas dinners, and Christmas morning breakfasts. (As an aside, there is nothing I love better than a slice of fried ham with red-eye gravy on Christmas morning, made from the left overs of the Christmas Eve ham. Oh, I am such a bad Jew.)

What the RLA doesn't see is the love that those invitations hold. It is a manifestation of peace on earth, goodwill to men. It isn't a subtle, or not-so-subtle attempt to convert us. It is an acceptance of who we are, and an offer to share with us, what is so special to them. And that, my friends, is true love.

But I digress. I was bitching about a Matzohbread house. That, dear readers, is a cop out. That is not embracing the differences and the "true meaning" of either holiday. That is a piece of shit and not to be tolerated by Christian or Jew. I don't want my Christian friends making potato latkes and calling it hay in the manger cakes, or lighting a menorah and saying that it represents the Christ child, the three Magi, Joseph and Mary and however many goats, horses and sheep are required to make up the number 8.

I want Christians to be Christians, and Jews to be Jews, and Muslims to be Muslims, and Hindis to be Hindis. I am all for a belief in something bigger than us in the universe, but I don't think that a mishmash of pantheism is good for anybody.

Separate, but equal. Share the holiday, but don't force it. I'll invite you to my house for potato latkes and applesauce and chocolate gelt, if you'll make me a slice of fried ham with red-eye gravy. I'll teach you the dreidle song, and you can skip the Twelve Days of Christmas because I already know it. I'm happy to wish you a Merry Christmas, and not a generic Happy Holiday, because it isn't a threat to who I am or what I believe to acknowledge and honor your beliefs.

And, that, in the end, is what this season is all about. Merry Christmas. Happy Channukah. Blessed Kwanzaa. Whatever the hell you say about Tet.

This is it. I've had it. I'm mad as hell, and you know the rest.

First this, and then this.
I loved Daniel Franco . I want a Daniel Franco suit. I would wear his designs in a NY minute. That asshat Santino is an asshat. A petty, drama queen, talented, ruthless, batshit insane egotistical asshat. But let me tell you how I really feel about her.

As for Niner? Well, the Florida Marlins can just take their balls and move wherever the hell they want. I wash my hands of them. Back to the Metsies for me, girls.

Feh.

Oh, and a Bush joke, because, well, because they are so easy and they make me so happy.

Ralph Nader, Al Gore and George W. Bush go to a fitness spa for some fun.

After a stimulating, healthy lunch, all three decide to visit the men's room. There they find a strange-looking gent sitting at the entrance who says, "Welcome to the gentlemen's room. Be sure to check out our newest feature: a mirror that, if you look into it and say something truthful, you will be rewarded with your wish. But, be warned, for if you say something false, you will be sucked into the mirror to live in a void of nothingness for all eternity!"

The men quickly enter, and upon finding the mirror, Ralph Nader steps up and says, "I think I'm the most truthful of us three" and he suddenly finds the keys to a brand new Bentley in his hands.

Al Gore steps up and says "I think I'm the most ambitious of us three" and in an instant he was surrounded by a pile of money to fund his next Presidential Campaign.

Excited over the possibility of having a wish come true, George W. Bush looks into the mirror and says, "I think...", and is promptly sucked into the mirror.

Back in the day, when the family still owned the store, all of us grandchildren were expected to be the sort of walking advertising you just can't buy. We were all clotheshorses, and we came from a family of clotheshorses, and the family business was clothing. There were tailors and ladies dressmakers and milliners up in the branches of our family tree, and that was that. There was no questioning the edict. We were to dress well whenever we appeared in public.
This was particularly difficult for me, because I used to ride my bike twenty miles a day after school, and longer on the weekends, and it was cutoffs and tank tops on my bike. Daddy hated me to come to the store dressed like that, and, thirsty or not, it was in through the back door, and back out. No witnesses.

And then, too, it was the 60s, and I was in the first incarnation of my hippydippy dress: granny boots, maxi skirts, ponchos, crocheted things. Whenever I appeared like that, my mother and father would look at me and announce with scorn, that I was wearing a (what sounded to me like) lopsedeckle, which, they assured me, was Yiddish for "shapeless horse blanket."

Of course, my mother also swore to me that "keebebe und katchka feeder" meant pot roast. It does not. It means horse shit and duck feet, or something like that. But she always said that was what was for dinner on nights she made pot roast (which I thoroughly disliked) so, pot roast it was.

Anyway, I have been thinking a lot lately about lopsedeckles, and how the current trend towards sweater coats seems to epitomize the image. They only look good on Uma Thurman, or Gwynneth Paltrow or any other excessively willowy thing. On short, plump secretaries, they look like, well, like a horse blanket. Especially when they are made of some lumpy acrylic yarn, and they either need to be washed or have been over-(machine)-washed and dried, been sat on for hours and gotten miserably stretched out over the ass.

While I'm on the subject of acrylic, this fake fur thing has got to stop, and now. Real fur does not get matted, or nappy, doesn't look grimy and lasts and lasts and lasts. Fake fur cuffs and collars get ratty looking after the first wash, and go down hill from there.

But I digress. Because I've been thinking about the infamous lopsedeckles of my youth, and I wanted to write about them for you, I hopped on board the internets and did a quick search of Yiddish terms. Even allowing for the spelling variations (Yiddish being basically an onomatopeoic language) there is no lopesedeckle.

There is, however, this:

"Leibtzudekel - Sleeveless shirt (like bib) with fringes, worn by orthodox Jews"

That has to be it, yeah? But there must have been some sort of slang usage, because, well, because my mother and father never would have condemned me for looking like an orthodox yeshiva boy, would they?

Miss JoJo graduated from puppy school last night, and although she was smart enough to carry her biscuit back to her place in line before she ate it, she was hardly the valedictorian. True to herself, though, she was voted Friendliest Dog, or, as I like to call her, Miss Congeniality.

What a hoot.
In other bubbles of non-information that are rumbling around in my head, today is my cousin's birthday. He's a still photographer for major motion pictures, and thanks to him, I am three degrees of Kevin Bacon. This is good bar conversation fodder.

The Bob has signed a contract with XM Radio to host a show starting in March 06. This means I now have to get xm radio in my car or house or some damn place.

I have yet another new addiction now that ANTM is over for the season, (NIK WUZ ROBBED!!) and that is Project Runway. I somehow missed it last year, so I don't understand why I'm supposed to hate Daniel so much. Since he seems to be a neurotic mess with sloppy hair and meticulous tailoring skills, I, of course, love him and want him to win. And, seriously, what's up with the bitch who won't share her closest space?

Look, I know I have a problem with internet surfing in that I do way, way, way too much of it. I follow random link to random link all over the information superhighway, and usually end up on some one-lane dirt road to nowhere because I took an off ramp after seeing an interesting billboard...

Very often I bookmark those lost little dead ends. Sometimes I link to them. Sometimes they go to the mental graveyard that such detritus deserves.

And then, once in a while, I find something truly wonderful. And that is why I need your help, dear readers. Because I found a truly wonderful site and didn't bookmark it. Although I have a shoe addiction, when it comes to purses, I tend to schlep the same one ratty leather bag around until even I realize that it is a disgrace. And the site I stumbled over was a purse designer.

More acurately, it was a pair of purse designers. I think they were English. I think that they both had names that started with an H and that their company and thus their site was both of their names. They had reasonably priced goods that were stylish and trendy. There was a hobo bag in particular that made my shriveled little heart go pitterpat. I think it was in a metallic burgundy leather.

Now, I can write a search string like nobody, and I found a 1983 article on AIDS from Rolling Stone and a source for a copy and the author's name and another article citing the first one, all within five minutes of my boss requesting it thus: "Sometime in the early 80s there was a story about AIDS in Rolling Stone. It may have been a cover story. I think they used the phrase gay plague."

Yet, no matter how I search, no matter what string I put together, I cannot find this website again. I have searched for photos of metallic leather hobo purses. I have ransacked the lists of British designers. I have gone through Google like Sherman through Georgia. Nada. Nothing. Zilch. Goose eggs.

I'm asking for help* here. Please?

* I erase my histories and caches with obsessive regularity, so don't suggest that. Plus, I stumbled across this a month ago or more. I've checked all the links on Manolo's Shoe Blog, and the purse blogs. I'm just stumped.

I was in fourth grade when John F. Kennedy was assasinated. We had come in from lunch, and I was staring out the window at the Catholic School across the street and saw someone come out and lower the flag to half-staff. I asked Mrs. McSweeney who had died, because we had learned flag etiquette and knew that was what the lowering signified.

She didn't know, yet. It was announced across the school intercom shortly thereafter. I remember sitting on the floor watching his funeral on our black and white tv. I guess my mother kept me home, or, good Southern Democratic town that it was, school was suspended for the occasion.
I was sitting on a hotel bed in Kingston, New York, right off the NY State thruway, when Howard Cosell broke into the Miami Dolphins game to tell us all that John Lennon had been shot. I called The Coolest Person in the World, and we cried together.

Howard Cosell? That's who broke the news to me that my idol was gone? How much did that suck. And the Dolphins were winning? Losing? Winning, I think. I think it was an important game, maybe one that determined if they went to the Superbowl that year. I don't remember anything about the game, just that I'd come down out of the top of the Catskills where I was holed up, to Kingston, so that I could see the game on cable. All I remember is Howard Cosell and the horrible, horrible news.

Yesterday, there was a photo of some old geezers in their uniforms, the handful of survivors of Pearl Harbor. It was buried in the Herald, somewhere in section A, but not on the front page. Not even a banner over the title, like they do for the first day of Kwanzaa. The most horrible throwing of the gauntlet of war of the last generation, and it doesn't even get a nod.

Today, there's a little something on the wires about it being the 25th anniversary of John's death at the hands of "a deranged fan". Huh. Yeah. Sort of obvious, isn't it? I mean, a normal fan isn't going to kill the person they adore, are they? But it has become part of the myth, part of his name: Mark David Chapman, a deranged fan.

And back in November, on the 23rd, to be precise, there was no mention in the Herald at all of what anniversary of a national nightmare we were recognizing.

Time heals all wounds, they tell us. But I think that sometimes, we need to pick at the scabs, and never let the hurt heal altogether.


PS: CBGBs is safe until next year. They got a year's extension on the lease. At least I don't have to go into mourning over that.

I've been saving this story for a while. The other day, the RLA and I were coming home around dusk, and we pulled up to our gate, put the car in park, and the RLA got out to unlock the gate. It's not that we're Luddites, but we rely on a lot of old-fashioned technology: manual can openers, a gate troll instead of an electric gate, a chain-link fence to keep the dogs in the yard instead of zapping them with electroshock... like that. So, the RLA gets out to unlock the gate, and as he does, a big-ass SUV (a Cadillac, I think) driven by a guy with a blue light in his ear goes whizzing past at a much-too-rapid-for -a-one-lane-road clip... almost clipping the side mirror off our car.
Well, it's a small neighborhood, and we know everybody in it, and what they drive, so we knew that this guy was probably lost. And he was, evidenced by his hitting the end of the street, making a u-turn and coming back up the one-lane road, still at a clip, and still almost removing my side mirror.

Well, the RLA lost it, and yelled at the driver that he was a jerk, and that we live here, and he doesn't and we're unlocking our gate, and he can just wait a second, because the RLA is NOT moving the car.

The Cadillac SUV screeched to a halt. The middle-aged driver threw it in reverse and stopped next to us. He reached under his seat (I'm thinking... oh, fucking great. A gun. Now we're in for it.) but only to roll down the window.

He proceded to yell at the RLA and called HIM a jerk and a few other names before coming to the crescendo of his response:

"You," he shouted at us, "are like a spaz!"

Well, that just set us back on our heels. Was blue light man saying that the RLA is a spaz, or was he saying that the RLA is merely spaz-like?

We debated this for several minutes, with me offering the opinion that maybe the word like was just an interjection, as in; "it's, like, you know", even though there was no audible comma or pause. We also opined that the driver was like a Borg, in that he had a piece of electronics embedded in his ear and it was lit up with a blue light. We never did get a definitive answer from the SUV driver, because once we started parsing out his sentence, he seemed to loose interest in us entirely.

But this phrase has crept into our vocabulary, so that everything is now "like". It's like a bridge. You know, it's sort of bridge-like, in that it spans a body of water, but maybe it's not totally a bridge.

I'm like hungry. I could eat, but I'm not ravenous, so I'm hungryish. I'm close to hungry, but I'm not exactly hungry, so I'm only like hungry.

We have been entertaining ourselves and our friends with this for like a month. It may not be a real month, or a whole month. Maybe it has been longer than a month, in which case it is only like a month, not exactly a month, but sort of a month. Similar in time to an exact month and yet, not.

This entry is like done.

I had lunch with the RLA today. He met me after his class and we went to a nice little bistro in the courtyard of the tower across the way. We were unable to have any sort of conversation over our burgers, however, because behind me was a woman having lunch with her friend, and her conversation was conducted at such a pitch and such a volume that all else was drowned out.

I'm sure that her friend felt exactly the way I did, because there were little bits of twisted napkin shreds on her side of the table when they finally left.

The non-stop talking woman was on about her boyfriend Frank, Frank's ex-wife, Frank's kids and how they sleep in the same bed as him, even when he's at her house on the nights that he has custody of the two kids, how the kids are brats and it's all the fault of the ex-wife, how the ex-wife has a skanky boyfriend who smokes a) in front of the kids and b) in her -- the ex-wife's-- house. I heard all about it. I heard all about how unattractive the ex is, how much the speaker spent on her Christmas tree decorations, because it's her first Christmas (ever? alone? in her own space? she didn't elaborate) and she needed all the ornaments she bought. I heard about how the ex works at her parent's beauty shop. Or maybe it was body shop.

I heard way, way, way too much. And did I mention that she NEVER SHUT UP. Not for a sip of water, not for a breath, not to shovel food in her mouth, not to let her friend even murmmur uh-huh, or really? or oh, that's too bad.

In conclusion, I would just like to say, with all my heart and all my soul, and I feel certain that I speak for everyone within a twenty foot radius of you today at lunch:

SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Thank you. I'm done now.