The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I just e-mailed a friend who had gone up to Fairbanks, Alaska to see his grandkids and kids. Just said hello basically and how’s the weather? Within a few minutes I got a new feed on my Yahoo news advertising great deals on Fairbanks hotels. Now … I suppose this could just be a cosmic coincidence, a shot in a trillion that maybe I was hoping to take a vacation jaunt up into the north country in winter, catch a little of that minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit and enter the Iditarod with my husky sled dogs.

But … I’m betting my friends at Yahoo are monitoring my every word in hopes of monetizing one or more of them into sponsored ads. I’m growing accustomed to online shopping opening me up to every Amazon algorithmic advertisement based on my curiosities, but I like to think e-mail is more like sending a letter than it is posting on Facebook. Sure, they’re probably like the NSA, CIA and FBI, just collecting metadata, not really reading or listening to actual content. And like our friend Mark Zuckerberg sez, whaddaya got to hide anyway? We should all be open books, transparency is in society’s best interest.

Well, Mark’s best interest anyway. Love ya, Marky! You adorable rich rascal you. Mmmmwaah. You killed that lying press with a billion posts of faux news, you cute little bugger. And now we got a reality TV host as CEO of America, muchas gracias. I noticed, though, that you filed suit in Kauai to keep your estate there private, even built a rock wall to help you hide behind. What gives, little buddy? Whatcha hiding? Whatcha scared of from the peeping masses?

Well, if things get too hot in Kauai, I got some great deals in Fairbanks to help you chill out. Least I could do. Send me your e-mail and I’ll pass them on. Say hi to the mizzus, Mark. And keep yer head down.

In Sweden there’s a town that just designated one hour for sex at lunch. Seems their childbirth rate is a bit low and maybe morale too so the mayor declared that lunch be turned over to libidinous activity. Good exercise, he added. And, if sexual shenanigans needed any further endorsement, substituting that for lunch should bring the city’s citizens’ weights right down as well. Exercise and diet together, probably cut down on heart attacks by half.

Some wag on the city council wondered what about those who didn’t want to have sex at lunch or maybe didn’t have anyone to have sex with. The mayor was undeterred, suggesting those lonely workers could take a walk instead, something easier to mandate than, say, setting up sex clubs for those sad bereft souls wandering pitifully in the snowy parks while their peers were boffing under quilts in their warm beds.

While this is just a small experiment in social engineering for one town in a northern latitude, it isn’t hard to imagine it spreading like a herpes virus to other industrialized countries. The Japanese tried stretching and exercise breaks but the Swedes may have hit on something much much better for morale in this cubicle infested world most employees feel trapped in. Sure easy to imagine the Danes and the French jumping on the bandwagon, probably a stretch for us tight ass Americans though, especially now that the unions are pretty much gutted. More likely employers in the U.S. would opt for mandatory masturbation. That, or keep the bag lunch as the better option.

These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry.

So sang Paul Simon on The Boy in the Bubble.

These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby , don’t cry
Don’t cry.

Aw, who’s crying now? Trump’s apologists are all over the jungle these days trying to mop up the mess he left accusing the prior president of wiretapping Trump Tower. Kellyanne Conway, as always the most entertaining of the surrogates designated for bidet overflows, suggested what he meant was that this is the day of wiretapping microwaves, everybody knows that now and that was only one of many possibilities. TV sets, I-phones, dishwashers, baby monitors, talking toilets, who could possibly say for sure which smartass device was doing the surveillance bidding for that lowlife Obama?

She sure didn’t know, but she was not, she insisted with some petulance, Inspector Gadget. Next question? I know what you’re thinking: she’s the mole burrowed in the Trump administration clandestinely working for Saturday Night Live. Deep Comedy. Staccato signals of constant misinformation tailormade for another hilarious sketch.

There is a boy in the bubble, all right, so deeply out of touch with reality it probably should scare the bejabbers out of us, but … what about those poor folks who pinned their hopes to this guy,
It’s a turn-around jump shot
It’s everybody jump start
It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
The boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart?

Me, I feel sorry for the baboon.

A friend’s son, newly graduated from college, mentioned to me the other day that I should consider ‘monetizing’ this blog. Apparently he confused me with a blogger who has an audience of more than a handful of layabouts on the South End. Shortly after the Election of 2016 I listened to a Southern California dude who had put out faux news stories impugning Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. He claimed he had tried to plant fake stories about Trump too, but, he said, the folks on the Donkey side of the political aisle weren’t nearly as gullible as the Trumpists. He felt bad, he said, that stories like his had cost Clinton the election — he had even voted for her — but that’s the way the ball bounces.

The interviewer asked if he would continue to print faux news stories and he said he was considering desisting, but … geez, he was making 6 figures and he had a mortgage and a family to support. It was going to be a hard call. “How did you find me, anyway?” he wanted to know.

Let’s see, on one side, honesty and integrity; on the other, outrageous lies and money, the more outlandish, the more money. Call me cynical and tell me to go play by myself, but I’m betting our friend holds his nose and keeps printing what sells. Me, I’m accustomed to poverty. Plus, we don’t have a mortgage. And we don’t have any outstanding loans and, well, we never did. So maybe it’s easier for me than this lowlife Southern California creep to walk away from dirty money.

And oh, if you were wondering about the headline of today’s blog, it’s just a trial balloon. I mean, how will I really know if I would turn down 6 figures if I don’t actually make 6 figures? This is called research and development. So … thank you for your help. I sure couldn’t do it without you loyal readers. And here’s a sneak preview of tomorrow’s headline: Trump Fails Urine Test! Again!

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These are dark days in the Funhouse. I know, I keep saying I’ll leave politics alone for awhile, maybe bring the firewood in from the back 40 or even tend to my so-called career. But honest to God and Abe Lincoln, how do you ignore the tweetstorm from our Comb-over-in-Chief when every day he drops a Breitbomb on the lying press? Yesterday he called Obama the lowest of the low for ordering a wiretap on his people in the Trump Tower. Proof? He don’t need no stinking proof?

Proof was so Then. We’re working on an entirely different political paradigm here. The media are the liars, not the liar himself. In a better, more orderly universe, we might expect the Congress, even his own party, to call a lie a lie. But the agenda these folks have in mind for transforming government to their own small privatized vision gives them the courage to maintain a distant but incredibly loud silence on these matters. If they can just get the EPA shrunk down to size, if they can get those corporate tax breaks enacted, if they can push back on the culture wars soon enough, well, what’s a white lie or two?

Profiles in courage, this is not. Of course when half the country, their voting base, believes the most outlandish garbage dished up by Fox or Breitbart, why should they take a stand for truth, justice or the American Way? This is Profile in Cynicism that takes our collective breath away. If the time comes when this self-absorbed bully in the White House is dragged away kicking and screaming, maybe we should take a good hard look at the folks who turned their gaze away when he was at his most outlandish. I get it that the voters are in an intemperate mood. I get it that they no longer trust politicians to look after their interests. I get it that a tough talking TV reality host might seem just the antidote to their problems. But c’mon, this is no game show. And the only thing so far that’s been drained from the swamp is my atrophied sense of humor.