OCTOBER GAVE WAY TO NOVEMBER and the presidential polls were
right! So was Mr. John Radima, the West Kenyan witchdoctor who on
November 1 scattered the prescribed number of bones, shells, and
stones at his shoeless feet and pronounced Senator Barack H. Obama
the likely winner of the 2008 presidential race in faraway America.
Senator Obama’s election three days later was almost anticlimactic,
at least in West Kenya and certainly in the newsrooms of America’s
mainstream moron media. In Kogelo, Kenya, home of Senator Obama’s
father, the victory set off a vast slaughter of bulls, chickens,
and goats. Said Mr. Abongo Malik Obama, the president-elect’s
oldest half-brother, “We are Africans, so our plan is to slaughter
a bull….” In Hollywood and Manhattan, the celebrations were more
restrained, though MSNBC’s Mr. Chris Matthews presumably spent the
immediate post-election hours under the thumbs, fingers, and feet
of his chiropractor in hopes of ameliorating Mr. Matthews’s
famously tingling leg. On The Charlie Rose Show, the
mesmerized likes of Messrs. Tom Brokaw and Evan Thomas murmured,
“There is much about this man that we don’t know.” So perhaps the
witchdoctor Radima will be transported to Manhattan to jiggle his
bones, shells, and stones before the assembled and inform them of
what the fabled junior senator from Illinois is like. In the
president-elect’s first press conference he made vague stabs at
humor, calling himself a “mutt” and joking that the frail
87-year-old Mrs. Nancy Reagan held “séances” in the White House.
Actually it was First Lady Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton who
“channeled” Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House. Mrs. Reagan
merely conferred with an astrologer. No bones, shells, or stones
were used.
THIS IS GOING TO BE A TRULY WEIRD presidency,
made all the weirder by the presence of the gaffe-prone Senator Joe
Biden but a heartbeat away from the Prophet Obama. During the
election, Republicans objected when Senator Biden’s freshly
released medical records contained no brain scans. What was there
to scan? Had the critics not heard the airhead’s flumdiddle? Though
I am no West Kenyan witchdoctor, let me make a bone-free
vaticination. The election of this novice to the presidency will
prove to be as reckless as the election in 1992 of a recognized
draft-dodging, ithyphallic, perpetual adolescent. The only
remaining question is, will he be as amusing?
ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF JURISPRUDENCE, former District of
Columbia administrative law judge Mr. Roy L. Pearson continued to
pursue a lower court’s award of $54 million to him for his lost
pants. The pants were lost by his dry cleaner, Mr. Jin Nam Chung,
proprietor of the now-defunct Custom Cleaners. Yet Mr. Pearson’s
anticipated $54 million payday was scotched by a D.C. Superior
Court judge who apparently found merit in the testimony of Mr.
Chung’s lawyer, who asseverated under oath that “My clients have
his [the Hon. Pearson’s] pants, and they’re ready to be picked up.”
Instead, the intrepid ex-judge Pearson has taken his case to the
District of Columbia’s Court of Appeals, where he appeared in still
another pair of pants to demand his $54 million. Doubtless there
will be updates as this case makes its way ever upward in the
judicial system. American health care providers may have found a
new way to treat obesity in light of an October 22 report published
in Proceedings B, an otherwise rather dispiriting
publication of the Royal Society in England. According to the
surprisingly upbeat report, the bartailed godwit, a migratory bird
heretofore of interest mainly to birdwatchers, loses as much as
half its body weight during its autumnal flight from Alaska to New
Zealand. The flight can take up to eight days, but when the birds
arrive in New Zealand they are fit and ready to molt. And there is
more news on the bird-watching front. An intense 20-year-old
birder, Mr. Steve Davey from the felicitously named Egg Harbor, New
Jersey, during an August birding expedition apparently came too
close to several baby ducks crossing a street and pancaked them all
in his SUV. Precisely how many ducklings went down was impossible
to ascertain, but in October the young enthusiast was fined $1,000,
a levy that can be reduced pending his performance of community
service at the local animal shelter. Presumably, Mr. Davey and his
SUV will be kept away from the shelter’s aviary.
THE AUTHORITATIVE AUDIT BUREAU of Circulations announced more
glum news for the country’s major metropolitan dailies. During the
six-month period ending in September circulation figures again
dropped. Yet not all newspapers are in decline. From faraway
Chennai, India, comes word that the circulation of the
Musalman remains robust, thus suggesting a new business
plan for such failing broadsheets as the New York Times.
The 81-year-old Musalman is among the oldest Urdu
newspapers in the world and it is handwritten! According to
publisher Mr. Syed Arifullah, the Musalman’s 23,000 copies
are greedily consumed by readers because “It is easier to read, and
the lettering is more graceful.” Unsurprisingly, Mr. Arifullah is
an Obama man. There is no word yet if Miss Michelle Allen of
Middletown, Ohio, will again don her cow costume, complete with
udders, and disport al fresco in the neighborhood to the
delight of children and the annoyance of humorless property owners,
some of whom objected to Miss Allen’s lifelike urination on their
front porches. Miss Allen, an abuser of alcohol, was jugged for a
month in September and upon her October release she was allowed to
take her bovine couture with her. As long suspected by
AmSpec editors, the fitness-obsessed Madonna does not
leave much to be desired—if you follow my drift. According to her
estranged husband, Mr. Guy Ritchie, making love to her “was like
cuddling a piece of gristle.” And while on the subject of
ourselves, the AmSpec editors have discovered a terrorist
group that has our approval, the Typo Eradication Advancement
League (TEAL). TEAL’s idealistic members spent last spring and much
of this past summer, until being apprehended by the authorities,
eliminating grammatical errors from public signs, particularly
signs created by ignoramuses for our national parks. Using markers
and correction fluid they eliminated misplaced apostrophes,
spelling mistakes, and other blunders, though at Grand Canyon
National Park they left uncorrected “emense.” That was the work of
the semi-literate Mary Elizabeth Jane Coulter, an architect who
created many landmarks in the Grand Canyon in the 1930s before
being sent to remedial education. Perhaps the stalwarts of TEAL
will be released into the Blogosphere.
BRITISH ATHEISTS ARE BECOMING at once more militant yet somehow
tentative. The British Humanist Association has decided to
advertise for atheism on London buses. Unfortunately, their slogan
merely proclaims, “There’s probably no God.” Probably?
What mealy-mouthed dithering is that? In Paris, there was sadness
among postmodernists after it was reported that no photographers
were present when a 26-year-old passenger was removed from France’s
high-speed train after it arrived in Paris. The unfortunate
passenger’s arm had become stuck in a vacuum toilet after he
attempted to retrieve his cell phone from its nether regions. He
was carried from the station on a stretcher with the toilet still
fastened about his arm. Think of the meaning French philosophers
might divine from that! The wretch suffered no bodily harm, but
that picture of him betoileted on his back could become the most
popular art in the Pompidou Museum. The Mona Lisa could be
forgotten, the Louvre dynamited.
