The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

In today’s newspaper there was a groundbreaking study showing ‘beautiful’ people have significant advantages over ‘ugly’ people.  Better jobs, better chances for advancement, better salaries.  Likelier to be happy, likelier to get bank loans with lower interest rates, likelier to marry a highly educated and equally attractive spouse.  I double-checked to make certain it wasn’t a study funded by the Plastic Surgeons of America.  Needless to say they’ll be inundated soon by unemployed college grads so wattle-neck deep in student loans already that another debt won’t matter much.  A little liposuction might mean an extra 6 figures over a lifetime, so say the experts.

It came as a shock to me too that attractive folks have a leg up on us toads.  Explains everything from TV commercials to beauty contests to presidential primaries.  And here I thought brains and talent were my downfall all these years of unemployment, low wages and marginal socialization.  If I’d only know …. A nip there, a tuck here, some botox occasionally, I might have had a chance.  I coulda been a contender, not some chump sent packing to Palookaville’s South End.  But back then our fearless researchers hadn’t defined beauty yet, which I had sadly been informed at an impressionable age, was in the eye of the beholder, not a scale or a matrix or a scientific formulation.

The study even calculated that beautiful people will make $230,000 more over a lifetime than those with ‘below average’ looks.  I wish I hadn’t done it, but I took out a calculator and ran a study of my own, put my lifetime earnings up against the neighbors’, graphed out the disparities and concluded — scientifically — how really ugly I must be to make so radically much less.  And … that’s assuming most of them are extremely good looking.  If they’re not, I’m going to need a helluva lot more than some plastic surgery.

Even down here in the bucolic nettle fields of the pastoral South End, our laid back, porch-rocking, garden hoeing pace is definitely picking up speed.  More and more satellites are whizzing through all that space junk overhead to bring us faster weather reports, more TV channels, instant text messaging and close-up photos of the rocker on the porch from Google Earth we don’t have so much time to sit in anymore.  Our attention spans now aren’t long enough to make it through the Stanwoodopolis Weekly Gazette so we check Yahoo headlines on the computer that rockets in on DSL.  If you’re younger than 30, you never looked at a newspaper in your whole life.  Why bother, you can get the only news you’re really interested in on Facebook, what your ‘friends’ are doing, news enough, I guess, these days.

Our old shack has its share of 21st century gizmoes.  Microwave oven, digital telephone answering machine, ma’s nano-pod, two computers (his and hers) and all the peripherals right down to a podcast microphone.  We got lazerized CD players, DVD players, a remote controlled TV antenna, digital alarm clocks, electric guitars.  We look like the Jetsons without the robot maid.  And that’s on back order from Amazon….

This is all the stuff advertised as Time-Saving Devices back when.  Help do your chores more efficiently.  Give you leisure time galore.  Free you to live your dream.  Be your True Self, not a slave to the menial tasking days.  Right…
Maybe I’m too old and too cynical.  Maybe Facebook updating IS your true self.  Maybe bad TV IS the dream.  Maybe what we wanted all along was something to keep us busy, keep us constantly entertained, keep us from sitting too long on the rocker contemplating the front yard that needs mowing.  The world is smaller and definitely accelerating.  The question I got, rocking to an older rhythm, is what the hell was the point of saving time if everything got speeded up so fast all our free time is gone?  Well, I could waste more time on this, but I have to hurry up and update this blogsite.

Another woman has come forward to accuse our President of sexual harassment, no little thing when you call out the most powerful bully on the planet. Trump, no great legal mind, offered up his best defense: he wouldn’t jump someone who looked like her. And besides, he never laid eyes on her, much less hands or lips.

Plenty good enough for half of the voters, I’m betting. They already cast a verdict even after 16 or so other women had accused the playboy king of the same impropriety. The same folks, I’m betting, who wanted Clinton impeached for his infidelities. What’s good for the goose apparently doesn’t apply to the gander. One guy is a predator, the other, well, just the perks of a billionaire thug. No, I don’t get it either….

Obviously a lot of guys think the #MeToo Movement is about them, just a green light for the usual. Kavanaugh was confirmed, justice served like the same warm dish Anita Hill received. Nothing much changed other than louder outrage. Boys will be boys and rapists get away with murder. Trump defends himself by calling his victim ugly. Yeah, something’s ugly all right.

I’d like to think we’re becoming a better, kinder, more sensitive society, I really would. I’d like to think we learn from our lessons, that we can empathize with the victims of injustice, that our folks who claim to be religious might actually be religious. I’d like to believe we’d elect a President we could admire, who would be a role model for all us citizens, maybe show is a Better Light, a more enlightened Path.

Course, I’d like to believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy too, but they haven’t come visiting since I was a kid. Too ugly for me anyway. Plus I never met them before, how would they know if I was naughty or nice?

The other day I bought a bag of Frito-Lay potato chips and as is my wont from my early reading days as an 8 year old studying cereal boxes, I read the packaging.  These potatoes, I was informed in a tidy paragraph written by public relations specialists who had no doubt conducted extensive customer surveys, were FARM-RAISED.  Imagine!  I’m guessing grown right in the ground.  Tractors, fields, insecticides, migrant labor:  farm raised.  BOLD TYPE.  Major advertising feature.  The oils used were ‘natural’ too and this was worth trumpeting.
Holy cow manure, Batman, what’s the NEXT big thing in the food biz?  Cheetos raised hydroponically?  Personally I’m not sure consumers are really ready for food grown in the wild.  Bugs, fungus, bacteria, all that creepy stuff a farmer is ill-equipped to handle outside a laboratory or a petri dish.  We can grow meat without legs now, protein on a rope, and rumor has it the burger chains are nearing a breakthrough on cloning buns, with or without sesame seeds, directly on to the meat patty grown in secret underground hermetically sealed bunkers of Monsanto and Dow Chemical.  You think they’re going to stick a filthy leaf of lettuce or a listeria riddled tomato on their antiseptically pure chemoWhopper?  Get real.  Not….

This whole Slow Food movement just flies in the face of 21st century culinary logic.  We invented TV dinners so we’d have the time to watch more TV instead of wasting countless hours messing with the cooking of raw potentially contaminated food.  These purveyors of old school eating call themselves environmentalists, but what about the damage from a bazillion cookbooks printed on paper from slaughtered trees?  Next thing you know, they’ll advocate recipes for bark.  A backlash is coming, count on that, the next step beyond vegetarianism.  Stop eating plants.  Stop the killing of carrots.  It’s not only cruel, it’s filthy with germs and dirt.  So Frito-Lay, nice try.  But I’m afraid the world isn’t ready — we’ve turned the corner on 19th century farm products.  Work on synthetic broccoli that tastes like Snickers if you want to stay profitable.  Hook the kids and you own the future.  Next time you need marketing advice, call me first.  Save yourself some embarrassment.

The acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan stepped down this morning, apparently to spend more time with his family. A lot of Trump folks seem to crave family time these past couple of years, but this one is a bit more interesting, given that reports of his withdrawal for the nomination were the result of investigations into a couple of family disturbances many years ago. Police reports indicate a squabble in an affluent section of Seattle that ultimately led to a backyard brawl. Patrick seems to have lost the bout, nose bloodied, hand bleeding, after what his now ex-wife claims was precipitated by his punching her in the stomach. Seattle, a tough town, all right. She grabbed the kids and lit out for sunny Florida. Couple years later her boy beat her with a baseball bat. Family life, I guess, isn’t what it’s cracked up to be by the folks exiting the Trump White House.

Now that he was officially nominated as Sec. of Defense, the FBI began to do the background checks. Lots of ghosts in that family closet so Mr. Shanahan decided maybe to drop out. Good timing, Mr. Secretary. You just sent 1000 troops over to Iran, what you called a defensive maneuver, and now you want to throw in the towel. Sure, the country’s in good hands, Trump and Bolton taking turns at the wheel and all, but geez, maybe you might’ve seen this coming. Obviously you need some martial arts training. That, or the mizzus was teaching you a lesson you needed learning. It is called Defense Secretary.

Of course, there’s always the slim possibility that Trump decided to dump his latest Cabinet Crew. I know, doesn’t seem likely, given his loyalty to those who serve. No doubt whatsoever that he has someone lined up to take Shanahan’s place in these perilous times. It’s what makes him the greatest Commander-in-Chief of the last couple years, and I mean that as a Yuge compliment.

From my viewpoint in steerage the boat seems completely rudderless. The Commander is now starting his campaign run and given his notorious lack of attention span, this should suck up all his available time when he’s not rerunning Fox and Friends. Some of my cohorts were heartened back in the good old days of this Administration when the Donald hired on generals to run the country for him. Adults in the room, my colleagues sighed in great relief. They, like most of his picks for Cabinet, are long gone now from the sandbox, most of them followed by taunts of ‘Loser!’ from the boy who hired them in the first place. I’m sure, and I’m sure you are too, his next pick to run the military will be a thoughtful one.

The truth is out there somewhere. At least that’s what the X-files folks would have you believe. Me, I’m not so sure anymore. Every day I hear the Leader of the Free World dropping another Whopper we don’t even bother fact-checking, just accept it for what it is, the ravings of a either a madman or the guy who figured out what us People want to hear. If he put the Tooth Fairy up for nomination for Secretary of the Defense tomorrow, well, why not? Good story for a few hours before the next jewel drops in the news cycle that looks more like Entertainment Tonight than Meet the Press.

Trouble is, maybe here in the Yew Ess Aye we’ve become inured to this steady stream of prevarications, but out there in the rest of the world, not so much. When our President claims the Iranians shot down our drone plane over international waters … and the Iranians claim they shot it down over their own territory, who ya gonna believe? Them … or the guy who rarely utters anything but bullshit? I mean, you’d like to give the man the benefit of the doubt, wouldn’t you? But he’s cried wolf so damn many times and we’ve all come running over and over again.

Now I’m as much for war as the next fellow. Especially if his name is Bolton. Any excuse, any contrived provocation, any chance whatsoever to smack those mullahs in Iran, you bet, let’s start the shooting. That drone cost in the neighborhood of 200 million dollars. Sure, we could spend the money for those on curing cancer, but we need to keep America safe, very safe. Comfort yourself with that knowledge when the grim diagnosis comes in from your oncologist. You won’t die at the hands of a crazed Iranian.

Now that Trump and his team of Tooth Fairies have eliminated the threat from Kim Jung Un over there on the Korean Peninsula, checkmated Putin in Ukraine, armwrestled Xi to an economic capitulation, routed the Taliban in Afghanistan, handled that Venezuela issue, solved the Israeli/Palestine conundrum and strong-armed the Saudis into leaving Yemen alone, why not turn our attention to another easy fix?

Iraq was a piece of cake, Syria too, so why should Iran be very much harder? If the rest of our allies, the ones we keep poking with a sharp stick, won’t join in the fun, well, we can go it alone. Oil will still sail through Hormuz. Sure, Tehran will be rubble but peace will finally come to the Middle East. The World will thank us. Another wolf has been dispatched. Are we a great country or what?

Fox and Friends —you got to love these folks, don’tcha? — could hardly believe their war general had scrambled retaliatory jets to make a bloody point to those infidel Iranians after they’d shot down a drone. They were yugely disappointed. Weak, it just made Donald look, well, no other way to characterize it, the kind of guy who would grab himself by the pussy, pardon my Bronx. He needed to make a Point, he needed to spill some blood, he needed to look manly, but no, he’d called back those bombers 10 minutes before they were due to deliver some whup-ass. Weak, just plain Obamaesque. They were sorely disappointed in their Commander-in-Chief.

Now, there is some dispute as to exactly where that drone was shot down. The evil Iranians claim it was over their territory but Fox and Friends know anything they say is probably a bald-faced lie. Not like their Favorite Viewer, not like the President known for fact checking his boasts. The malevolent Iranians claimed to have support for their claim and would show it to the United Nations. Our side, the White Hats, don’t need to provide corroboration. We know they wouldn’t fudge this. Not our way . Not the way of the Man-in-Charge. Fox and Friends know who’s telling the truth and they don’t need no stinking proof. Hannity, always restrained, told Iran (he must think they’re regular fans) Trump would ‘bomb the crap out of them.’ Tough talk from a tough talking head. Jeez….

In the Trump era we don’t really trust government. We don’t trust the lying media, we sure don’t trust Democrats. We don’t believe the FBI or the CIA or the Mueller Report. But if the government says the Iranians shot down that drone over international waters, well, sir, they must be telling the truth. This once. Finally. Who knows, maybe they’ve turned over a new leaf.

John Bolton, our esteemed National Security Advisor, is a bit on the hawkish side. Probably never met a Middle Eastern conflict he didn’t like and one more would be just fine. That last war in Iraq went so darn well he’s spoiling for one next door. We’ve pulled out of the treaty with those nasty lying Muslims that Obama put together to keep them from developing nuclear weapons and now we’re tightening the screws on exports of oil, the thinking being that when the suffering of the populace reaches 11 on the pain scale, they’ll overthrow the mullahs. Worked well in Syria.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this: I don’t think Trump wants to go to war. He talks a tough talk, but he walks like a guy who’s never had to step into an alley without his attorney to do his punching. He campaigned by mocking George Bush’s brother for his war, his idiot war. He just declared his candidacy for 2020. And somehow I just don’t see One More Endless War as his campaign slogan. Fox and Friends might disagree with me on this one. Wouldn’t be the first time. That’s why they make the big bucks and I write this little blog.

Maybe you can be forgiven for wanting to stay in bed late with the covers pulled over your head and probably the pillow too. PSO, Political Saturation Overload, a previously undiagnosed malaise that now is approaching epidemic proportions. Take today. Trump tells an interviewer he would gladly accept opposition research from foreign countries despite the fact we’ve spent the last two years investigating Russian influence on his election, ended up with no real proof of collusion, and now he claims he’d gladly work with Norway if they offered up some dirt useful to his re-election. Slow learner? Or someone above the law?

Kellyanne Conway was cited by the government watchdog Office of Special Counsel for violations of the Hatch Act which prohibits such activities as promoting Ivanka’s products or criticizing political opponents running for office next election. Trump claims it’s a ‘free speech thing’ and refuses to fire her. Or obviously ask that she cease and desist.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders resigned, probably because her boss no longer needs a position for press secretary, choosing instead to handle that function by Tweet and interviews with Fox News. She will be sorely missed … but not by very many. The fact that press meetings had virtually ended might have played a small role. Or that Arkansas is in dire need of a gubernatorial candidate who can lie with a straight face while at the same time scowling like Trump receiving his latest poll numbers might make the resignation palatable for her.

Maybe you pulled a second pillow over your ears when the Israelis named their new settlement in Golan after your candidate for Mt. Rushmore, a fitting tribute by Bibi to the man who gave him an American embassy in Jerusalem and offered up his son-in-law as official peace negotiator. Obviously we’re in good hands with real estate developers solving complex geo-political issues. Trump Heights indeed.

If that weren’t enough to keep the snooze button worn out every morning, add the latest Iranian drumbeat to war. It’s comforting to know that the guy who hasn’t got time to read reports, listen to advisors or otherwise avail himself of pertinent information is the same yahoo who will decide what to do in the Straits of Hormuz based on ‘undeniable proof’ the Iranians attacked a couple of tankers. One day it was undeniable they had had mines attached on their hulls by Red Guard scuba divers, next day that ground to air missiles had been fired at drones and hit the boats. I know I don’t need much further corroboration. Until tomorrow when the story changes once more. And I even bet Trump and Kushner have undeniable information on where the Iraqis hid those weapons of mass destruction.

Stay in bed, buddy. To sleep, perchance to dream. The nightmare is what’s waiting when you get up….

Yesterday Donald Trump advised that he is considering declaring a national emergency for what appears to be chunks of sky falling on uninhabited regions of the United States. ‘If we do not act now,’ the President warned, ‘very huge sections of the stratosphere will hurtle down and destroy our cities. No president before or after me has ever been confronted by an emergency of this magnitude.’

National Guard were diverted from wall building on the southern border to various undisclosed locations to begin the immediate construction of domed shelters in case the sky begins to fall on populated regions of the country. Democrats demanded proof of ‘sky debris’, but the Senate rejected the request, citing grave national emergency and the need for immediate response. ‘Look,’ Sen. McConnell told reporters at a hastily announced press conference, ‘we need to set aside our partisan differences and let the President do his job. Which is protecting the American People. All this talk of impeachment needs to stop immediately.’

Unverified reports of cloud chunks striking the suburbs of St. Louis reached the Capitol this morning as Fox News demanded Nancy Pelosi’s resignation for diverting attention from this existential crisis over ‘a hissy fit’. The White House directed Homeland Security to create a dedicated Sky Watch Department to be the watchdog for what it termed extraterrestrial menace. The President is rumored to be considering Sen. Lindsay Graham to head the newly formed agency, but Congress has stalemated over funding.

This morning the President, in a hastily called press conference, urged all Americans to stay calm. ‘We are very very extremely lucky we have me as Commander-in-Chief, not that know nothing Biden who couldn’t find an umbrella in a hailstorm, a very dim bulb I know for a fact, low IQ, probably has an aide dress him, cheap suit, a sad excuse for a suit really, if you know what I mean and I do. If the sky were falling on his watch, believe me, you’d dig a hole in the backyard and bury yourself. I know I would. The guy’s a total loser. A disaster of a human being. But I’m taking care of this personally. We’re not wasting time talking to fake scientists. If the sky is breaking up, who cares right now why? We need to get protection, not run around looking for reasons why it’s happening.

‘So I’m directing new manufacturing plants to be built across the country, a million jobs, good jobs, more jobs than have ever been created in the history of mankind. One hundred factories to produce helmets. Sky proof helmets, American made helmets. Not the kind like the NFL uses where these unpatriotic knee-takers take a hit in the head and end up with concussions and brain injuries. Not that anyone cares what happens to traitors who won’t stand during the National Anthem, believe me, nobody could care less than me. I’d have them locked up. Lock em up! Lock em up! They shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a football. Unless they play without a helmet, maybe then we’d let them play.’

When reached later for comment, newly appointed Sky Watch Director Graham told reporters from the fake news media he had not heard yet from the President, but White House staff had informed him Homeland Security had assurances from Trump himself that the situation was almost defused. ‘It’s a great relief,’ the Senator stated. ‘Another crisis handled almost before it started. Look up, all of you, the sky is still there. The clouds are still there. Is this a great President or what?’

The other day I bought a bag of Frito-Lay potato chips and as is my wont from my early reading days as an 8 year old studying cereal boxes, I read the packaging. These potatoes, I was informed in a tidy paragraph written by public relations specialists who had no doubt conducted extensive customer surveys, were FARM-RAISED. Imagine! I’m guessing grown right in the ground. Tractors, fields, insecticides, migrant labor: farm raised. BOLD TYPE. Major advertising feature. The oils used were ‘natural’ too and this was worth trumpeting.

Holy cow manure, Batman, what’s the NEXT big thing in the food biz? Cheetos raised hydroponically? Personally I’m not sure consumers are really ready for food grown in the wild. Bugs, fungus, bacteria, all that creepy stuff a farmer is ill-equipped to handle outside a laboratory or a petri dish. We can grow meat without legs now, protein on a rope, and rumor has it the burger chains are nearing a breakthrough on cloning buns, with or without sesame seeds, directly on to the meat patty grown in secret underground hermetically sealed bunkers of Monsanto and Dow Chemical. You think they’re going to stick a filthy leaf of lettuce or a listeria riddled tomato on their antiseptically pure chemoWhopper? Get real. Not….

This whole Slow Food movement just flies in the face of 21st century culinary logic. We invented TV dinners so we’d have the time to watch more TV instead of wasting countless hours messing with the cooking of raw potentially contaminated food. These purveyors of old school eating call themselves environmentalists, but what about the damage from a bazillion cookbooks printed on paper from slaughtered trees? Next thing you know, they’ll advocate recipes for bark. A backlash is coming, count on that, the next step beyond vegetarianism. Stop eating plants. Stop the killing of carrots. It’s not only cruel, it’s filthy with germs and dirt. So Frito-Lay, nice try. But I’m afraid the world isn’t ready — we’ve turned the corner on 19th century farm products. Work on synthetic broccoli that tastes like Snickers if you want to stay profitable. Hook the kids and you own the future. Next time you need marketing advice, call me first. Save yourself some embarrassment.