Would She Be Wearing Clear Heels?

I did the 5 People You Want to Have Dinner With thing on Facebook. It’s supposed to be five dead people, but Jessica Alba wound up on my list. I imagine these people are going to be brought back to life, otherwise dinner will not only be boring but gross, so Jessica stays. The list is Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther, and Jessica Alba. Everybody except Ms. Alba is on the list because I want to ask them two questions: What was it like, and what do you think? As I’m thinking about it, the seating chart would be difficult. I feel like a teacher. I want to put Malcolm X and MLK together because they were from the same time and place. But I don’t want to put Malcolm X and Martin Luther together because one is a Muslim, who doesn’t drink, the other is a German who makes his own beer. I don’t want to put Jessica Alba too close to Benjamin Franklin because I’m pretty sure he’d violate her personal space. We’re not really supposed to talk about it, but Dr. King might get a bit touchy too. What’s funny is that Bill Clinton and Thomas Jefferson almost made this list. I guess, going clockwise around the table it would go: me, Alba, X, King, Luther, and Franklin. After everyone was seated, I’d start with the questions. What would Malcolm and Martin think about Obama, and Michael Steele, and Flavor Flav, and Hilary Clinton? Would they be excited? Would they be sad? I’d ask Ben Franklin what he thought about the road this country – his country – had taken, and if I made the right Jessica choice or should I have invited Biel. I’d ask him for stories about Washington, Adams, and Jefferson – the gossipy style stuff. I’d ask Martin Luther if knowing how his theses affected Christianity and if he could go back in time would he take a claw hammer with him. I’m starting to rethink my Jessica Alba choice. I don’t know anything about her except that she’s really, really hot and she makes really, really bad movies. She’s not a psycho like Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears, and she doesn’t have a reputation for being a diva like Jennifer Lopez or Madonna. I don’t know, maybe she’d have some interesting questions for the other guests. Yeah, that doesn’t help me out at all. I’m changing my pick to Mary Magdalene. Dinner just got interesting.

Ramblings About The Republicans

I don’t want to write about politics but we might be witnessing something historic, and I want to know what I thought about it when and if it happened. Is the Republican Party, as we know it, dying? Arlen Specter, the senior senator from Pennsylvania, switched parties and became a Democrat. He left because the Republican Party has become caricatures of themselves, and the final straw was them preparing to attack him, along with two other moderate Republican senators, in their home states for voting with the Democrats on President Obama’s stimulus package. The Democrats were one seat short of a filibuster proof Senate majority, and the Republican’s simple minded, bully boy tactics that stopped working in 2002 gave them that seat. Trying to intimidate a 5th term senator was dumb. What were they hoping to accomplish? Did they even look at the results of his last election? He won the general election by more than he won the primary. The people of Pennsylvania like him. He called their bluff by switching parties, and now he doesn’t have to deal with a Republican primary or a vindictive party. The Democrats aren’t going to run anyone serious against him in their 2010 primary, and the Republicans have painted themselves into a corner. They’re going to have to back a right wing nut, who will get crushed, or run a pale imitation of Specter and look stupid. They just gave Pennsylvania to Obama in 2012. He took office less than fifteen weeks ago. This move was extra dumb because the Democrats did the exact same thing to Massachusetts senator Joe Lieberman in 2006, less than three years ago, and he kept his seat by running as an Independent. How could the Republicans have this guy speak at their convention last fall and not remember that? Even if they do replace all the moderates with dyed in the wool fascists, they still don’t pick up any seats. The best they could hope for is not to lose any more, and they already have. The Republicans are becoming a regional, irrelevant footnote, and they don’t seem to know how to stop the collapse. They’re becoming the party for the shrinking demographic of the angry white guy. In five years will the Republican Party be the 20 million Rush Limbaugh fans and nothing else or will they figure out a way to step into the 21st century?

IT'S GREAT TO BE A FLORIDA GATOR

As I was reading the paper this morning and enjoying my cheese toast, MJ read me a headline from the Times-Union, “Handcuffed Runaway Tries to Drown Police Dog”. Yeah, it grabbed my attention too. A suspect slipped off one of his handcuffs, overpowered his female police captor, evaded helicopters, and waded out into a lake. Being the world class law enforcement organization that they are – or at least big Rin Tin Tin fans – they sent a dog into the water after him. Dogs aren’t dolphins. They dog paddle. They swim well enough not to drown if they fall out of a boat. Some swim well enough to fetch a ball, but perps aren’t balls. Was the dispatch sergeant a cat? That’s the most reasonable explanation I can come up with for how a dog was sent into the water after a guy who’d already kicked a human cop in the chest. They caught the wannabe Mike Vick in the lake later with a marine patrol, but that doesn’t answer the question of why a dog was sent in the first place. Maybe they don’t have an animal marine unit – or would it be a marine animal unit? If they get one, they need to start with alligators – American crocodiles, more precisely. Alligators are lazy and basically wait for food to crawl into their mouths. American crocs hunt. This makes sense for a whole bunch of reasons. First, they’re naturally bullet proof. You have to shoot a gator with something bigger than a .38 if you even want to get its attention. Second, they have 60+ year life expectancies. You won’t have to replace them all the time. Third, they’re endangered so if we start farm raising them it will be good for conservation. Fourth, while they can and will eat almost anything, they can go a full two years without eating. These things have been in their present state for more than 300 million years. They were here 150 million years before the dinosaurs. They’re built to last. They’re low maintenance. Fifth, they could be named after Florida Gator greats: Steve Spurrier, Wilbur Marshall, Emmitt Smith, Danny Weurful, Tim Tebow. Finally, there’s the fear factor. My uncle, who was a cop, used to show up to crime scenes and sit in his car while his officers questioned people. There was a rule: if the sergeant gets out of the car, somebody has to go to jail. The gator rule would be the opposite: if the gator gets in the water, NOBODY goes to jail. That’s not only environmentally friendly – nothing goes to waste – it’s also fiscally responsible. Guess who doesn’t have to feed, clothe, and house a convict. Go Gators.

The Only Downside Is The 2 Pounds of Ligustrum We Inhale

Two days in a row now the family has gone on a bike ride through the neighborhood. MJ has decided that she needs to get back in shape after a two year hiatus from exercise. It started for her a couple of weeks ago when she added pushups to her morning routine – not the tasty ice cream treat, that’s for summer. She moved from lady pushups to real pushups a couple of days ago and she can now do thirteen. She’s ripped. We added a bike ride yesterday when we couldn’t muster the mental energy to get to the beach, but still wanted to do something outside. I put LMJ on my handlebars and we ride through Riverside. I fasten her shoes to the bike with her Velcro laces. Not really, she has a DMV approved seat with seatbelts and a reflector and everything. Yesterday’s ride was easier because there wasn’t any traffic on the road. I suppose everyone was at church. We went today at the height of rush hour, but there are enough side streets and sidewalks so it’s not too dangerous. We rode what is basically my five mile running route, down along the river, through Memorial Park, up Riverside Avenue and the North Bank River Walk to the Times-Union helipad, where we watch a train cross the St. John’s if we’re lucky. The engineers are nice enough to honk the horn when we wave at them. MJ is getting used to movement again, and her thighs are protesting a little bit. No pain, no gain. I’m really glad she’s exercising. She needs to recover the muscle mass she’s lost and exercise is the best way to fight off osteoporosis. I’m always up for a bike ride because I dropped $100 on LMJ’s bike seat about nine months ago and we’ve used it fewer than ten times. LMJ wasn’t down with the bike seat at first, but now she likes the wind in her face and bumps in the road. She’s a trooper and so is her mom.

Don't Worry About It.

I was watching one of the Fast and Furious movies last night. It was late and nothing else was on. It was so bad it was good. It was one of those movies where everyone involved was just there for a paycheck, even though no one in the movie was a star. The biggest “name” was Vin Diesel. He was a star for about twenty minutes five years ago. The writers didn’t care. The script wasn’t even a first draft. It was just some drunken ramblings on a cocktail napkin. The movie starts out with Vin Diesel looking at some skid marks of the crash that killed his girlfriend. He sniffs some of the rubber on the asphalt and identifies it as nitro methane, and apparently only one guy in Los Angeles uses it. I was sitting at my computer so I looked up nitro methane. It’s the base for drag racing fuel. This was my mistake because now I was going to have to watch the whole movie to see just how stupid it would get. Of course Vin Diesel decides he has to get revenge for his girlfriend’s murder, even though “girlfriend” is used loosely. He hadn’t seen her in three years. She stayed in L.A. while he became a truck pirate in Central America – I kid you not. His piracy has him pretty high on the F.B.I. list, even though their jurisdiction doesn’t extend to Central America, so he needs to keep a low profile. He does this by driving up to his old house in South Central Los Angeles in a bright yellow muscle car with three fourths of the chrome engine sticking out of the hood. He pulls into the garage, of his last known address, and starts tinkering with his car – in the middle of the night, with the light on, and the garage door open. His sister, who still lives at this house, shows up with a couple bags of groceries and drops the cliché, “You can’t be here. The Feds are looking for you!” He responds with the deadpan, “Don’t worry about it.” That was the end of that plot point. I watched another half hour, no Feds, no nothing. I glossed over the fact that the biggest truck pirate in Central America still has his sister living in the ghetto. I ignored the notion of a drug cartel looking for drug mules by throwing a block party/drag racing tournament. The only Fed we encounter is the other main character who’s undercover and isn’t after Vin. I now know the secret to avoiding federal prosecution, “Don’t worry about it.” I got offended and went to bed.

I'll Be Right There!

Cough, cough, water? Ice? That’s what I hear when LMJ wants some water, and she always wants ice in it. She usually waits for me to sit down or start doing something else when she is overcome with thirst. She’s not even two yet and she’s already a drama queen. She and her mother are becoming quite the tag team. I wish I knew how to move up the social ladder in my own house, but we seem to be on some type of caste system and I’m stuck. Oh well, maybe in another life. I don’t mind the servitude caste, but I don’t see how it can lead to anything other than my premature death. LMJ understands that certain jobs are mine, and she thinks it’s her responsibility to make sure I get those jobs done. She takes off her diaper as she’s getting ready for her bath, comes and finds me, puts it in my hand, and waits for me to correctly dispose of it. If I’m busy doing something important, like commenting on why Brock Lesnar is a legitimate UFC champion despite his professional wrestling roots, she will interrupt me and lead me by the hand to the trash can like I'm stupid. I’ve been here damn near twenty years. How in the name of all that’s holy did she get promoted to supervisor before me? She’s two. What’s it going to be like when she’s four, eight, sixteen? When she’s sixteen I’m going to be fifty-two. More importantly her mom is going to be fifty-seven. They are both going to become more demanding as we all get older. What if we have another girl? Then there will be three of them. The only hope that I have is to divide and conquer. If I can get them competing with each other for my limited attention, then maybe they’ll both get sick of my incompetence and let me get back to my beer drinking and television watching. Bill Cosby advanced this theory about thirty years ago. I don’t know how it worked out for him, but I know that my dad, who was in a similar situation as me, just calls that wishful thinking. I should probably accept my lot and be happy to make them happy. What if we get a cat? I have to take some pills now.

You Kids Today, You Don't Understand

This was a very old week for me. I had aspirations of being a professional basketball player or football player when I was a kid, as most American boys do. They weren’t serious. I never spent extra time working on my game or in the weight room. If a guy with a whistle wasn’t screaming at me, I wasn’t doing it. I was always going to get in gear tomorrow. Tomorrow arrived on June 24, 1992. That was the day Shaquille O’Neal went number 1 to the Orlando Magic. That was the day it sank in that pro sports wasn’t going to happen for me. Shaq was the first guy I was aware of to go pro who was younger than me. That created a connection for me with him. He was some kind of life cycle benchmark for me. That was seventeen years ago. Shaq went on to be one of the best six or seven basketball players ever, and about three years ago he got old. The NBA playoffs started this week, and for the first time since his rookie season Shaq won’t be a part of them. He’s probably going to retire after next season – his contract is up – and then he’ll be the first hall-of-famer younger than me to retire. I don’t have the same connection to Chuck Liddell. He’s a fighter, for those who don’t know, or he was until he got knocked out for the third time in his last five fights this past Saturday. He was MMA’s first star. He was Mike Tyson – in the ring, not out. Tyson has tattoos on his face. The Iceman has tattoos on his head. For about eight years if you stepped into the cage against Liddell, he put you to sleep. Now, like Shaq and me, he’s old. He can’t do what he used to do. He’s Willie Mays stumbling around the outfield for the Mets, and I’m the New York Giants fan who watched him do magic for a decade, and I’m annoyed that kids don’t know how great he was. I’m turning into an old man. I’m calling adults kids. I don’t start sentences with “BACK IN MY DAY!!!” but I feel the sentiment. How the hell did this happen?