Photo Still Lives: A plate of succulents with dead bird. Rocks; Sunflowers; and Potted Chives. Chairs and a red pail in the sunlight. Birdseed and foul green water.

Trump Will Deny Immigrant Visas to Those Who Can’t Pay for Health Care (NYT)

He's defending us taxpayers (though we don't know what HE pays)

from sickly interlopers who our healthcare costs will raise.

Just like banks won't lend unless you already have cash,

you need to have insurance that pays millions for whiplash

in order to come stay with us -- and why should you do that

if you're well-connected back at home, a real fat cat?

I'm afraid the next step taken will be to deport

Americans who tell their clinic they're a little short!

@shearm  @mirjordan

No Soliciting

I bought a charming old house with steep gables and a brickwork fireplace that was a miracle of intricate design. It even had hand painted individual tiles in front of it; each tile representing a different scene from Holland, like windmills and tulips. I moved in during the afternoon on a hot summer day and treated myself to a glass of lemonade, made from lemons from my own tree in the backyard. 
Just above the doorbell next to the front door was fastened a brass plaque, still shiny, that read "No Soliciting."  I liked that -- it made me feel classy.
As I sipped my lemonade that first day in my new home the doorbell rang. I answered it -- to find a salesman peddling rosewater!
"Very handy item to have around" he said, grinning. "They use a lot of it in the Middle East for their cuisine."
"Can't you read the sign?" I asked him crossly, pointing at the brass plaque. "No soliciting. Now go away." 
He didn't put up a fuss; just pretended to tip a hat to me and walked down the steps and slid quietly away.
I had barely sat down when the bell rang again.
This time it was a lady selling oaken buckets. 
"I make them myself" she said cheerfully, ignoring my stern features. They looked pretty sturdy. She had beads of sweat across her upper lip.
"Those must be awful heavy to carry around" I said.
"That they are" she admitted. She eyed the glass of lemonade I was holding with longing. I nearly invited her in, but then remembered the sacred brass plaque that I was in duty bound to honor.
"I'm sorry" I told her. "But you can't be selling things around here. You could get in trouble. Good luck to you, somewhere else." And I closed the door in her weary face. 
I decided to make a tuna fish sandwich to go with my lemonade, and when I came out of the kitchen there was a tall thin man, dressed in a dark blue pinstripe suit, putting a glossy black leather briefcase on the coffee table.
"This beats everything!" I said to him angrily. "You didn't even bother to ring the doorbell? What are YOU selling -- rudeness?"
He looked at me, startled. His pince nez fell off his nose and dangled by his side on a wide black ribbon. Who wears those kind of glasses anymore? This was an outrage! 
"What the blazes are you doing in my house?" he asked me.
"Your house?" I replied. "This is MY house, buddy. And you'd better get out before I call the cops!"
He seemed to puff up like a toad on the stove.
"What? What?" he repeated, glowering like a lighthouse. "I shall call the police this very instant myself!" He strode over to an alcove under the stairs and dialed on an old black rotary phone. I hadn't really noticed it there before. This was getting weird.
"Hello, Joe?" he said into the receiver. "This is Ross. Yes, I'm fine, thanks. But I've got some kind of crank in my living room who claims he lives here. Can you come down and get him out? I'm at 125 Barker Street. Okay, thanks." He came over to me with a smug expression. "That was Joe, the chief of police. An old friend. He'll settle your hash -- you squatter!"
We glared at each other in silence until Joe arrived. He was out of uniform.
"I was on my way to the river for some fishing" he explained as he shook the intruder's hand and gave me a cold look. "Now what's this all about?"
I interrupted pince nez as he started to dither, to explain I had just bought the house, had all the papers in the desk in the dining room, and that this crazy person had barged right in to say it was his house. "So, chief, I'd appreciate it if you'd take him down to the laughing academy where he belongs." 
Joe rubbed his chin, looking back and forth between the two of us.
"Well" he finally said, "I've known Ross here for a long time. He sells insurance and we've both been members of the Rotary Club together for years and years. You, on the other hand, I have never seen before . . ."
I didn't bother to reply, just went into the dining room and brought back the papers showing the house was mine and that I was making mortgage payments to the local bank for it. 
"Who sold you this place?" asked Joe the chief.
"Truax Realty" I said. "Judy Truax herself showed me the place and helped me get the mortgage."
"Well, I've known Judy for years, just like Ross here. Sound as a dollar, she is. I can't understand how such a thing can happen . . . "
"Poppycock!" said pince nez loudly. "Joe, you just escort this bindlestiff out of here and lock him up. Give him the rubber hose treatment for all I care. He's a lunatic!"
Suddenly Joe the chief exploded at the both of us.
"Shaddup, you two mugs!" he yelled, his face turning crimson. "I'm sick and tired of trying to sort out these domestic disputes. You two are going to have to learn to live together  -- and do it right now, dammit. Or I'll put both of yez in jail and throw away the key!"
He shook his finger in both our faces, spittle leaking out of his compressed lips, and then left -- giving the door such a slam I thought it would break the hinges. 
"Adamant, isn't he?" said pince nez in a low voice.
"Indubitably" I replied softly. 

I wasn't about to give up my house, and Ross, the guy with the antique eyeglasses, wouldn't leave either. So we made the best of it. I slept in the master bedroom and let Ross sleep in the guestroom. Turns out we both liked bran flakes for breakfast, so there was no contention there. And since he went to his office every morning at eight and didn't come back until five-thirty, I had the house all to myself most of the day. In the evenings he taught me to play backgammon and I told him stories of Burma in the old days, when I logged teak wood in the swamps around Thandwe and made a fortune in just a few years. I'd been retired ever since, living off the interest, and collecting horsehair buttons as a hobby.
 We actually scrapped along pretty well together for some time. Then one day Joe the police chief called me while Ross was at the office.
"Bad news, I'm afraid" he said right off the bat. "Seems that Judy Truax has been scamming customers right and left for years. She never had the right to sell any of those old houses, like the one you thought you bought, and she was in cahoots with the bank to write out phony mortgage documents and collect nice fat fees from victims like you. I'm sorry to say that the house still belongs to Ross, not you. You have no right to be there." 
"Okay" I gulped. "I'll pack my bags and tell Ross about it when he gets home at five-thirty."
"Sorry to be the bearer of such lousy news -- if you need a place to bunk for a few night you can come down to the jail. The food's not too bad and I'll turn the thermostat up a little" said the chief. He wasn't such a bad guy, after all.
"Thanks" I said, choking back tears. "I'll think about it." By then I'd lost most of my money due to the capital gains tariff. 
When Ross got home I told him everything, then shook his hand and told him it had been a real pleasure to get to know him. He wouldn't let go of my hand, but instead drew me into an embrace.
"You know the old Spanish proverb -- mi casa es su casa?" he asked me. "Well, that's the way it'll be around here. My house is your house for as long as you like." 
I couldn't speak for a while. We were both crying like babies. 
"Okay, Ross" I finally managed. "If you want me to keep beating you at backgammon I'll stick around." 
But it was Ross who left first. He died the next year from stomach cancer. Those bran flakes didn't do him any good after all. In his will he left me the house, free and clear. As well as his three pair of pince nez. What a guy . . . 
After the funeral I unscrewed the "No Soliciting" plaque and put it in a drawer. I figured things would be kinda lonely without Ross around anymore, and maybe that rose water guy might come back to show me how to cook with the stuff. 

The Permafrost Horror

The Russians asked us in at the beginning of the year. They'd heard about our success in Alaska, duct tapping the permafrost to keep it from melting and flooding the forests and cities. So naturally they wanted us to come over to Siberia to do the same thing. On a much larger scale, of course. Their own duct tape wasn't worth crap. Although they wouldn't admit it, they knew that our American duct tape was top quality and would last a hundred years under any conditions. That's because we didn't stint on the zinc powder or adhesive when manufacturing it. I know -- I've got a cousin who runs a duct tape plant in White Plains. He told me all about it.

So once the contracts were signed and the bond was paid I rounded up the boys and we took ship to the Kamchatka Peninsula. Once there, we offloaded out giant duct tape spools onto the winch trucks and headed out into the tall timber. We had to hire plenty of local help -- it was part of the contract. The problems started when my team boss, Big Rudy, couldn't tell the difference between Russian laborers and grizzly bears. They kinda looked the same, and they sure smelled the same. They even ate the same kind of disgusting grub -- berries and bark and half-rotted road kill. So Big Rudy started bringing grizzly bears into the camp as workers. I had to get on Big Rudy's case about it.
"Look" I told him, "all you gotta do is get them talking -- the humans will jabber away in Russian, and the bears will just growl at you. It's simple."
"That's what you think" retorted Big Rudy. "To me that Russian jabber sounds just like a grizzly growl. Besides, the bears work harder than the humans, and they don't ask for any pay. They just take the empty spools for their cubs to play with."
He had me there -- we were already dealing with some serious cost overruns; so I let Big Rudy have his way and pretty soon we had a pack of bears doing all the grunt work. Like he said, we didn't have to pay them, just let them take the empty spools back to their caves for their cubs. When the Russian authorities came poking their noses into our labor situation the bears simply ate them, fur hats, bones, and all. As far as I'm concerned, it was a win-win situation.

Maybe you don't know how we use duct tape to shore up the melting permafrost. It's not hard, not really rocket science. You just unspool long swaths of duct tape over crevasses or around crumbling stream banks where the permafrost is melting fastest. This holds the water in, or back, and since it all freezes again at night, soon the whole melting process is reversed. Some egghead at M.I.T. figured it out a few years ago, and since then American duct tape companies like mine have been shaking the money tree -- there's an unbelievable amount of money available for global warming quick fixes like ours. I kept sixty men on the payroll, full-time, without batting an eye. 

But this Siberian permafrost job wasn't all skittles and beer. After the bears showed up, we kept encountering cryogenically preserved woolly mammoths and saber tooth tigers that would suddenly come back to life and begin trampling and clawing the men. The bears they left alone, but my crew seemed to bring out the worst in them. Even Big Rudy, who could knock down a megatherium with one blow, was hard put to keep the creatures from grinding him to a pulp or biting off a hand. We finally had to issue each man a rifle. This really slowed down the work, and I started hearing word from Moscow that they might pull our contract and give it to some Swedish outfit.

I decided I'd better nip this in the bud, so I left Big Rudy in charge and flew out to Moscow for a powwow with the head honchos. We got things straightened out after a few days and a dozen bottles of vodka. But when I got back to camp, everything was in shambles. The spool trucks were tipped over; the tents were ripped to shreds; and I could no longer tell the men from the bears. Everyone was bent over on all fours, growling and groveling, snuffling for grubs and decayed mammoth meat. No one noticed me. All the rifles lay on the ground, muddy and rusted. 
"Boys!" I cried, 'don't ya know me?"
A creature that looked something like Big Rudy shambled up to me, sniffed my shirt, and growled some slurred words that sounded like "We go back woods. You go away or be like us." 
I fled in terror, taking the only truck that still worked.
I made it to Yelizovo before I ran out of gas and collapsed in a fevered coma. I was nursed back to health by a Koryak woman. When I was in my right mind again I married her and we now run a tourist hostel for visitors wanting to visit the nearby volcanoes. I try not to think about the bear-men I left behind -- but some nights, when the dry arctic wind moans down from the dark piney woods, I think I hear them marching on all fours, coming to slaughter us  and let the permafrost flood the land . . . 

Apple ने iPhone 11 का उत्पादन बढ़ाया

एक आश्चर्यजनक कदम में जिसने आपूर्तिकर्ताओं को तंग इन्वेंट्री नियंत्रण और शिपिंग दक्षता के लिए परेशान किया है, Apple ने हाल ही में अपने आपूर्तिकर्ताओं से अपने सभी मॉडलों में iPhone 11 के उत्पादन को बढ़ावा देने का अनुरोध किया है - कंपनी ने इस वर्ष अतिरिक्त आठ मिलियन अधिक इकाइयों का लक्ष्य रखा है । इसमें लगभग दस प्रतिशत की वृद्धि होती है। टेक मीडिया ने सप्ताह के अंत में इस आक्रामक विपणन निर्णय की घोषणा की, यह अनुमान लगाते हुए कि Apple ने मध्यम स्तर और निम्न स्तर के iPhones पर ध्यान केंद्रित करने का निर्णय लिया है, अन्यथा एक अन्यथा एशियाई बाजार में मजबूत बिक्री के लिए यह सबसे अच्छा दांव है। Apple द्वारा इस तरह का ऑर्डर प्लेसमेंट पहले नहीं देखा गया है, और अटकलें तेज है कि कंपनी उच्च गुणवत्ता, अधिक महंगी, मॉडल जो इसकी रोटी और मक्खन रही है, पर ध्यान केंद्रित करने के बजाय बुनियादी ऐप आईफ़ोन के साथ बाजार में बाढ़ लाने का इरादा रखती है। अतीत। Apple द्वारा बिक्री पर iPhone 11 सबसे महंगा मॉडल है, और मर्चेंडाइजिंग विशेषज्ञों का कहना है कि iPhone 11 प्रो मैक्स की बिक्री में अनुमानित नुकसान की भरपाई करने के लिए ऑर्डर बढ़ने की उम्मीद है, जो सिर्फ एक हजार डॉलर (एक मिलियन भारतीय रुपये) में सूचीबद्ध है ), और पिछले छह महीनों के दौरान अभाव बिक्री दिखाई है। भारत में प्रमुख मर्चेंट एसोसिएशनों ने चिंता व्यक्त की है कि सस्ते आईफ़ोन की आमद उनके मुनाफे को नाटकीय रूप से काट देगी।

A Huge Iceberg Split From Antarctica. (They Just Grew Apart.) [NYT] @KendraWrites

"What color are icebergs?" my son asked me one evening.
"Green, I think" I told him. He nodded and wrote it down; he was doing his homework at the kitchen table.
Two days later I was called to my son's school for an appointment with the principle -- Mr. Abernathy. I wasn't too concerned about it when I went into his office; my boy is pretty levelheaded and doesn't get into much trouble.
"Sit down, please" said Mr. Abernathy, a man with rusty brown hair and a mole on his chin.
"What can I do you for?" I asked him jocularly. But he didn't smile back.
"You told your son that icebergs are green, is that right?" he asked me.
"Yeah" I said. "I read that in some novel somewhere or other. Why, is that a problem?"
"Yes it is" he told me. "A serious one."
"How so?" I asked.
Mr. Abernathy got up from his desk and pulled down a map of Antarctica, on which a little white speck off the coast was circled heavily in black. 
"This is the Great Loose Tooth Iceberg, recently calved from the East Coast of Antarctica. It's bigger than the island of Maui. Does it look at all green to you?"
"Not particularly" I said, feeling a hot blush creeping up my neck. "I guess you'd call it off-white."
"Certainly not green" he replied grimly. He pulled on the map to snap it back up and then sat at his desk again. I noticed he kept a long chain of tangled paperclips on it. 
Not understanding what this was all about, I sat mumchance. Finally Mr. Abernathy cleared his throat and spoke.
"With the current global crisis, calling icebergs green is totally inappropriate. It teaches impressionable children that icebergs are harmless, possibly charming, fairy tale things to be made fun of or passed over lightly. This kind of anti-climatism is no longer tolerated at this school. Do I make myself clear?"
I could only gape at him.
"What in the Sam Hill are you talking about?" I finally said. "You make it sound like my boy committed a hate crime or something."
"A crime against the climate" said Mr. Abernathy, his chin mole quivering with outrage. 
I'd had enough of this idiocy. I stood up.
"Fine" I said. "I'll just take my son out of your school and put him someplace else."
"Sit down, sir" said Mr. Abernathy harshly while pushing a red button on his desk. "You will never see your son again. He will be reassigned to another family unit where he will hopefully unlearn all the anti-climactic poison you have been feeding him all these years." I sat down, aghast. What was happening here? My throat went dry with consternation. 
Two burly men, dressed in Sherwood green sports jackets and brown neckties, entered the room and lifted me bodily from my chair. I clawed desperately at them and finally managed to poke one in the eye with my thumb. He let go, and I swung around to the other goon to slash at him with my car keys. Then I was out the door, running down the hallway, looking for my son's classroom. 
When I found it I crashed through the door to confront his teacher, Ms. Larkins. 
She was so beautiful when startled that I asked her to marry me.
"Of course, Anthony" she said. "I've been waiting for you to ask me for years." 
"They're coming to take me away now" I told her. "We don't have much time. Do you mind a civil ceremony?"
"Not at all, darling" she replied softly. 
So we were married by the hall monitor. I only had time to give her a single tender kiss before the goons were on me, dragging me away.
"Take care of my little boy!" I cried to her.
"Which one is he?" she screamed after me. But I never got the chance to tell her. The goons knocked me unconscious.
When I awoke I was sitting in a hotel lobby. Wearing a big white apron and a chef's toque. 
"Oh, there you are" said a tall thin man, who was obviously the concierge. "The colonel wants his iceberg lettuce salad immediately."
"Roquefort or thousand island?" I replied stupidly, my head still reeling.
"Just oil and vinegar, as you very well know" replied the concierge tartly.
Then it hit me . . . iceberg lettuce is green. And I began to laugh.
This was all part of the initiation ceremony for the Freemasons. The Grand Lodge had accepted me! I gave the concierge the secret handshake, he helped me to my feet, and we walked arm-in-arm into the beautiful Swedish Rite hall, where Ms. Larkin and my son were waiting for me, dressed in their ceremonial sashes . . . 

Comet 2I/Borisov

On Dec. 7, the extrasolar comet now known as 2I/Borisov will make its closest approach to the sun.  (from the NYT)

BEFORE

I tripped on the sidewalk in front of my son's house and broke my ankle, so they put me in the hospital first and then in a private rehabilitation center for a week before allowing me to go back to my son's house. That's why I missed all the initial hullabaloo about the comet crashing into the earth in December. They only let you read USA Today in the rehab center, and that rag wouldn't know a news story if it hit them in the face with a sack of nickels. When I found out about the comet I immediately talked to my son.

"This thing really gonna hit the earth?" I asked him at breakfast.

"Looks like it" he said glumly. "Please pass the yogurt."

I'd seen all the movies about this sort of thing, so I quietly packed my suitcase with plenty of warm clothing and my old Boy Scout hatchet. Then I bought two dozen cans of sardines and stewed tomatoes down at the Dollar Tree Store. There didn't seem to be a run on basic supplies yet, so I got a couple rolls of toilet paper as well. Then began my watchful waiting. People didn't seem too upset or hysterical about it. I had a few old friends come over to visit me, shake hands, and say how pleasant it had been to know me -- to which I replied 'Ditto.' My son kept going to work each day and to play with his dog in the evenings.

"Why aren't people going crazy about this terrible thing?" I asked him one day at dinner.

"We're all pretty much burned out with our jobs and the stress of social media" he told me. "It'll be a relief to become extinct in a blinding flash. Is there any more of that colcannon left?" 

When the big day arrived I stayed in bed, with my best Sunday suit on, and said a long prayer. My son decided to go in to work as if nothing was going to happen. I must have dozed off, because I was awakened by a loud rumbling that shook the house so bad I was rolled right out of my bed onto the floor. I squeezed my eyes tight shut for the end, but all that happened was I became aware of a strong scent of peppermint and the faint sound of "woo-woo" repeated over and over again -- for all the world like the silly exclamation Hugh Herbert used to make in the old Warner Brothers movies. 

AFTER

When I picked myself up off the floor I looked out the casement window, but couldn't see anything much beyond gray mist. So I went up the stairs into the kitchen and out the back door. The smell of peppermint was much stronger, but not unpleasant. My son's dog came up to smell my leg, then coughed up a small bag of sunflower seeds. The mist lifted to reveal things pretty much the way they had always been. But there were some differences. Sparrows were running around in endless circles on the driveway. The lawn was all dandelions -- the yellow so blindingly bright it hurt my eyes. I went to the front of the house and found the carcass of a dead narwhal in the street, covered with bumper stickers that read "My child is an honor student at Tuttle School." Then I saw the mail lady coming down the street like nothing had happened. I decided two could play at this game, so I greeted her nonchalantly when she gave me a handful of junk mail.

"Turned out to be a nice day for this time of year" I told her. "Hope they move that dead narwhal soon."

"Yeah, I don't think this good weather will hold too much longer" she replied. "There's a dead rhino on your neighbor's roof down the street. That'll be hard to get down." She gave me a smile as she continued on her way. Rhino? What rhino? I walked down half a block and sure enough there was a white rhino on Ted Schaeffer's roof -- it was almost split in half. 

My watch had stopped at exactly 2:15, and when I went back in the house I noticed that none of the clocks, on the microwave or on the wall in the hallway, were working. They all read 2:15. That must have been when the comet struck. Where exactly did it strike, I wondered to myself. I turned on the TV, but Oprah was on every single channel, talking about the benefits of cooking with grape seed oil, so I turned it off and sat quietly in a chair until my son came home.

"We survived!" I greeted him. He didn't look particularly happy.

"I know" he replied. "And I got laid off today. Shit!" 

Crazy Henry Writes a Cookbook.

"Putting peanut butter and grape jelly on a clump of uncooked ramen noodles does NOT make for good food!" I said heatedly to Crazy Henry, when he kept pushing this concoction on me for lunch one day last year. We were at his place, supposedly to pack up his turtleneck sweaters to take down to the Goodwill Store. He has about thirty of them. He needed my help because, as he freely admitted, he couldn't trust himself to do it alone -- he loved those turtlenecks too much. But once he started growing a beard they just got too difficult to pull on in the morning. His beard bristled out as stiff as porcupine quills.

I thought it a very poor return on my willingness to help him get rid of the turtlenecks to offer me such an outlandish meal. So Crazy Henry made himself an uncooked ramen with pbj and ate it in front of me with such relish that I grudgingly asked for a bite, just to see how bad it really was. And it wasn't half bad, at that. So he made me one, too. The combination of brittle, tasteless noodles and thick cloying peanut butter with grape jelly was strangely satisfying -- so I asked for a second one, with a glass of milk.

"With crazy recipes like that, you oughta write a cookbook" I said to him jokingly. And that was all the encouragement he needed. With a sparkle and a twinkle, or a sprinkle, in his eye, he forgot all about the turtlenecks and showed me dozens of index cards on which he had written down his strange and uncouth recipes over the years. Most of them he had never actually made -- like his raisins steeped in anchovy butter. They came to him in dreams at night, he said. So he wrote them down and threw them in his nightstand drawer, usually forgetting about them in the morning. But now that I had praised his ramen pbj, one of his latest dreams, he understood at long last his true calling. He would write "The Turtleneck Cookbook."
"See, I'll be photographed wearing a different turtleneck for each recipe I demonstrate!" he told me happily.
"So we're not packing them up to take to the Goodwill?" was my only response. I'd seen these sudden frenzies come upon Crazy Henry before. They petered out in a matter of days -- sometimes in just a few hours.

But this time Crazy Henry fooled me completely. He went to his Aunt Smedley, who was the city mayor at the time (before she got kicked out of office for running an influence peddling racket in the Ukraine) to ask for help; she, in turn, got him something called a Young Entrepreneur Grant -- which enabled Crazy Henry to hire a professional photographer and a ghost writer for his cookbook, which was snapped up by the first publisher he offered it to. But they did change the name of it. Instead of "The Turtleneck Cookbook" it became "Bad Food Today!" And was a runaway success. In fact the book did so well that Crazy Henry opened up a Bad Food Academy in Scranton, Pennsylvania (the city offered him an old abandoned shoe factory, rent and tax free.) He taught classes there for about six months, having his profile written up for the New Yorker and letting Sixty Minutes do a segment on him. 

I was pleased with his success, of course. And I didn't try to butter him up, now that he was rich and famous, either. "I never thought you could pull it off" I told him frankly. "And I still think you're going to mess things up one way or another -- you always do."

The perks of finally having a rich friend who was generous were great. I freely admit that. Crazy Henry bought me a fly fishing rod that took some guy out in Montana two years to make --  out of Chinese bamboo, shellac from Myanmar, and cashmere thread smuggled out of Bhutan. I broke it on my second cast. When I told Crazy Henry I'd broken the darn thing he straightaway went and bought me a set of antique polo mallets to put in a big vase and display in my living room. That's what I call thoughtful. 

Just as Crazy Henry was getting ready to put out a second cookbook -- "More Bad Food" -- the other skillet dropped, so to speak. He found out about some crazy medical condition called Pickwickian Syndrome. The condition moved him so much that he publicly dedicated all future profits from "Bad Food Today!" and "More Bad Food" to finding a cure for Pickwickian Syndrome. But he didn't set it up as a tax write off, which he could have done, and so it came to pass that he never made another nickel from his cookbooks. And when Pickwickian Syndrome was proven to be a hoax to scam good-hearted donors, like Crazy Henry, he was laughed out of Scranton and dropped by the media like a hot potato.

I offered to sell the antique polo mallets he had given me, if he needed the money, but he just shook his head sadly and said thanks, but no thanks. Then I saw that old sprinkle in his eye again, as he asked "Do you know what happens when you cook a pot of barley and mung beans for too long?"
"No" I said breathlessly. "What happens?"
"I dunno" he replied. "Let's go find out!" 

Verses from Stories in Today's New York Times -- Democrats’ Plans to Tax Wealth Would Reshape U.S. Economy -- Global Trade Is Deteriorating Fast, Sapping the World’s Economy -- India Isn’t Letting a Single Onion Leave the Country.

It's time to share the wealth, you guys;

it's time to spread the jam --

so ev'rybody gets enough

 to roast a leg of lamb.

Ms. Warren and old Bernie

will squeeze blood from plutocrats,

and make 'em sorry that they ever

wore white silken spats!

When I get mine -- you betcha! --

I will dance a blithe gavotte,

and fish for carp the live-long day

upon my spacious yacht!

@arappeport  @thomaskaplan

************************************

"Buddy, can you spare a dime?" the World Bank soon will ask.

Vaults are shrinking, hollowed out just like a vacuum flask.

Economies around the globe are tanking right and left;

inflation and the stock market are playing at grand theft.

The reason for this trouble is that leaders, more or less,

think that they can make more money from a printing press.

They'll soon find out the hard way that disaster always stems

from treating their taxpayers like complacent ATMs.

@petersgoodman

**********************************************

No onions for the Afghans and no onions for Dubai;

tis enough to make a doughty Pashtun start to cry.

India is hoarding all her bulbs, and not one slice

is getting out of country for glum Pakistan to dice.

 Her neighbors are complaining, but she doesn't care a peel;

domestic onion prices must come down  -- and that's the deal!

But don't be disconcerted, Mr. Modi, if a fleet

comes demanding onions -- not the radish or the beet.

Wars are fought for lesser things, so pray do reassess  --

and curry eating peoples will your name forever bless!

@gettleman  

Verses from Stories in Today's Washington Post -- RNC solicited money for Trump’s reelection with forms that look a lot like the official census -- Ivanka Trump’s 3-year-old son dressed up as a Star Wars Stormtrooper. Mark Hamill was not pleased.. -- A study says full speed ahead on processed and red meat consumption. Nutrition scientists say not so fast.

When raising money for their party, members scruple not

to use all sneaky means around (until, that is, they're caught.)

Republicans and Democrats (as well as other groups)

will ding you for your last red cent (and even use shock troops.)

And don't forget the poll tax may come back at any time;

Dark money irregardless, politicians crave your dime.

@bellwak  @britsham

************************************

 Actors, with their swelling heads;

writers with their ego;

artists by and large don't show

intelligence, amigo.

The spotlight never grows the wit

of poet or of starlet;

in fact the opposite is true --

it shows their inner varlet.

@nina_zafar

*******************************************

You never know, with studies,

who is right and who is wrong.

Is summer sausage good for you,

or is it a swan song?

Depends on who you're asking;

and the axe they have to grind.

They're talking at cross purposes,

and I could lose my mind!

The best bet with these eggheads

is ignoring all their studies,

and eating anything you want --

including muddy buddies!

@lreiley

"Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?"