Tuesday, October 11, 2016

The trouble with having grapes sour

is how they turn backers so dour.

The lawyers line up

to fill up their cup;

while judges do nothing but glower.

The End of the GOP

The GOP's come to an end;

they haven't a single good friend.

Their candidate winks

as probity sinks;

to Democrats it's a godsend.

A doyen in Beverly Hills

Studies show nearly 40% of patients in their 60s take more than five medications.

More health-care providers are adopting an approach known as de-prescribing to help adults in the U.S. and elsewhere reduce excessive use of prescription drugs and over-the-counter medications and supplements.

from the Wall Street Journal

A doyen in Beverly Hills

daily took dozens of pills.

She said "I may prattle

and sound like a rattle;

at my age there's no other thrills!"

Monday, October 10, 2016

When rich persons offer to let

Saudi Arabia’s officials are meeting investors this week to gauge appetite for the country’s first international bond, a potential multibillion-dollar issue aimed at strengthening the kingdom’s finances strained by low oil prices.

from the Wall Street Journal

When rich persons offer to let

you in on a thing that's 'sure bet',

a large grain of salt

will certainly halt

investments you'll come to regret.

The Peter Pitofsky Gag

Long years ago, when I still had a passport to Cloud Cuckoo Land, I was hired to clown at Disneyland. The one in Anaheim.

The pay was good, and so for once I was able to send a plenteous amount back to the wife & kiddies; a source of pride for me and some satisfaction to the little woman, who usually had to make do with the sad leavings of a mud show clown's salary.

My roommate while there was the one and only Peter Pitofsky. A comic nonpareil who is a combination of Harpo Marx, Buster Keaton, Rasputin, and Scheherazade.

There were thirty clowns that season at Disneyland, and the cry echoed far and wide in clown alley that "No one can work with Peter Pitofsky -- he's too crazy!" And true it was, this master merrymaker improvised almost every performance he gave. One never knew if he would spend twenty minutes silently and heroically tangled up in a microphone cord or do a dead-on riff on Sylvester Stallone. His genius was untrammeled by any consideration of the Fourth Wall or gravity or the dimensions of space and time. And so no one wanted to work with him -- it was, all claimed, like trying to perform with a tornado.

Ever ready to challenge the status quo, I took up the gauntlet and told Peter we could work up a peachy keen carpenter gag. He was touched by my desire to embrace his wild and wanton ways, and we scheduled a run-through at the Disney rehearsal hall for 7 p.m. that night, after the day's funny business was done.

He never showed up. But that was part and parcel of his genius; time has no meaning for him. Since we roomed together, he could not escape my repeated attempts to chain him down to an appointment. Finally, after numerous futile attempts to get him to commit to something diurnal, I simply got the props together one evening and we rehearsed in our living room. The clatter and thumps caused consternation throughout the building; the landlord was about to call in the SWAT team, when we at last finished and went to bed -- having birthed the Mother of all Carpenter Gags in just under 35 minutes.

To attempt a description of this two-by-four and hammers epic is futile. I mapped out the basic premise; we would bring in some boards and some tools, fumble with a pair of saw horses, and end by losing our pants and pelting each other with white goo. The rest was up to Peter.

We premiered at the Main Street Pavilion on a Sunday, when several of the regular clown acts were off at church or nursing hangovers.

We were a succes d'estime. All the clowns working that day ditched their regular assignments to view our maiden voyage into madness. They laughed immoderately throughout. But the regular customers, a cosmopolitan mob of tourists gathered from Tokyo, Oslo, Burbank, and Soweto, sat on their hands.

I can't really blame them, either. After the first smack of a board Peter was holding sent me tumbling, things, to say the least, got out of hand. For reasons that no one can explain, least of all Peter himself, my partner pulled out an iron and attempted to iron not only the boards, but the tools, the saw horses, and my workman's blouse. It was not plugged in, thank goodness, but the audience didn't know that, and my indignant howls of pain when Peter slid the iron over me were met by puzzled and concerned silence from the civilians. The professionals, as I say, were rolling around like tumbleweeds.

And so it went. Peter did a break dance routine, scattering mallets and chisels about (luckily all made of foam rubber). He spotted a likely looking blonde in the audience and abandoned me to my fate to play footsie with her.
In a word, he was being Peter.
I managed to pull him back onstage for the blow off, but that, too, was nothing like we had planned it. Or I had planned it, I should say. By now Peter had forgotten I existed, being egged on by the roars of the other professional clowns to new heights of anarchy. Instead of dropping his pants, he began eating the white goo -- which was made of glycerin and shaving soap. Bowing to the inevitable, I started eating it with him. I managed two mouthfuls before rushing from the stage to gag up bubbles, but Peter manfully stuck it out for another quart or two, then did a back flip, and went back to the blonde in the audience before I managed to totter out and drag him away -- to the raucous accolades of our peers, but only dumbfounded silence from the regular crowd.

We were not allowed to do the gag again. Which was fine with me. There are times even today when I still detect a soupcon of Old Spice shaving soap after enjoying a good meal.

Since those halcyon days Peter has gone on to travel the world with his solo menagerie of insanity. The last I heard from him, he was on the beach at Waikiki in something called CabaRAE. Reading some of his reviews from that venue, it is easy to see that the critics are as thoroughly intrigued and baffled by him as was that crowd at Disneyland; plaudits rain down on him, but in rather ambiguous terms. But then, all genius is an enigma to us mere mortals.

My Savings Account

I'm saving for a rainy day/but precip sure has come to stay/the kids need braces, taxes mount/the heating bill I now must count/my credit cards demand attention/and I am nearly at demention/Instead of saving in a bank/I think I'll go and climb Mont Blanc.

‘Birth of a Nation’ Flops Badly, Opening in Sixth Place at Box Office

When history writes of great flops,
"The Birth of a Nation" is tops.
A movie so foul
it'd poison an owl;
it ought to be met with wet mops.

Samsung to Halt Galaxy Note 7 Production Temporarily

When using a Samsung cell phone

make sure that your ear's made of stone.

Cuz otherwise you

might just barbecue

your head like it was a t-bone.

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Sunday Morning Breakfast

Amidst the hurly-burly and hubble-bubble of the modern American Lebensstil, there is nothing quite so satisfying, so quenching to the existential stomach, as Sunday breakfast.

This was my homey thought as I peeled back the white butcher paper from a flitch of bacon and began laying them, like railroad ties, in my frying pan this morning.

The menu was simple and classic: bacon and eggs, with toast slathered in apple butter. Not for this true blue patriot the intricate and decadent repasts of the hoity-toity elite, such as Swedish pancakes with lingonberry sauce, or eggs Benedict. No, I hankered for nothing more than the homespun basics that have given Americans pleasure, sustenance, and towering blood pressure for generations past.

Carefully monitoring the sputtering bacon slices, I noticed for the first time that my stove top was speckled with grease, giving it a leprous appearance.

"I'll have to get out the holystone and swab things down presently" I muttered to myself, in a brilliant imitation of W.C. Fields giving one of his inimitable asides. It is a thousand pities that there was no one else there to enjoy my bon mot, as my apartment walls never respond to the japes and jests I often throw out at random.

Once the bacon had attained its proper condition of carbonized brittleness, I cracked two eggs into the fry pan, using the one-handed method often demonstrated by French chefs in the movies. Casually lifting out the larger pieces of egg shell and flipping them into the sink, I sprinkled the eggs with Lawry's Seasoning Salt and put the lid on, simultaneously turning off the heat (or so I thought--actually I turned the dial all the way up to High).

I then set the bread in the toaster, poured myself a glass of milk, and was about to go shave when the loud crackle of incendiary eggs, accompanied by a cloud of black greasy smoke, led me back to my fry pan, where my breakfast lay in ruins. I removed the pan from the stove with a deft hand and a few mawkish curses, and made one of those quick executive decisions for which I am known from Baraboo to Bimini -- I would sprinkle a few drops of red wine vinegar over the mess to redeem it from the dustbin.

My thought, based on sound culinary principles, was that the vinegar would deglaze things and allow me to lift my repast out of the fry pan as easy as kiss my hand.

Alas, the crisped remains of my breakfast remained glued steadfastly to the pan until I chiseled them out with a wooden spoon and a large spatula.

By now the toast had popped up and turned as cold and dry as a bill collector's heart.

Still and all, I determined to eat my simple breakfast on a TV tray as I listened to something intellectual and soothing on Public Radio. Ever health-conscious, I added a few cherry tomatoes to my plate by way of giving it some freshness and tang.
But the radio station gave out nothing but some soporific nonsense about two tin horns named, I think Clefton and Schlump, running for some insignificant public office -- so I turned it off.

And then my TV tray collapsed on me, sending the cherry tomatoes rolling around my apartment like marbles. I stepped on two of them in my bare feet before getting them back on my plate.

So I had a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast, instead. Still a good, solid American meal in my humble estimation.

And then I did go and shave -- thinking all the while how easily I might dig the blade in a bit deeper across my throat and end the whole farce once and for all.

But I decided to keep soldiering on instead. After all, there was that grilled cheese sandwich I was planning for my Sunday dinner . . .