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Between my liberal friends who (sorry!) seem to have no cognitive function left when it comes to politics, and my conservative friends who are grasping at every straw to prove that Hillary is either an invalid who has no business walking around, or is a robot (my personal favorite), I am just really sick and tired of the whole goddamn show.

I’m going to vote for Trump.  If you’re not, you’re a fucking idiot.  If you are, well, whatever.  We’re probably all fucking idiots, too.  At least Trump doesn’t look like he’s on his last legs, straining to get past the finish line before his body gives out.  Hillary will probably stroke out on Election Night.

Point of fact, I’ll bet Trump is actually pretty damn healthy, for a 70 year old.  He’s got a young wife.  He’s got to keep up with her somehow.  He’s sort of like a profane Teddy Roosevelt on Viagra.  If TR had had access to Viagra. Or needed it.

Hillary’s just got Bill.  And Huma.  She’s kind of like a sad female Woodrow Wilson.

God help us all.  God help the United States of America.

Hillary Clinton does not have pneumonia.  Unless it’s pneumonia brought on by some other ailment.  Like premature old age brought on by a dissipated lifestyle and plain old meanness.

Folks have long commented on her Chairman Mao-esque tent/burkha clothing.*  Some have postulated that she wears it to cover up medical equipment (possibly a colostomy bag, but possibly other devices), and they’ve done so ever since she had to take a LONG potty break during one of the primary debates.  And yes, I know, they said the ladies’ room was farther away, but damn, my wife can potty so fast it breaks the meme about women taking ages in the can.  And she’s not that far behind Hillary, age-wise.

This isn’t the first time she’s had fainting spells or trouble getting up stairs or whatever.  You can google that stuff all day long.

Both Hillary and Trump are old enough that the McCain standard should apply.  Full disclosure of medical records for all Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates, including Johnson/Weld and the immaterial Greens, needs to happen now.  Anything less is an insult to the body politic.

When you’re running for the highest office in the land, where your finger is on the nuclear button and you may be expected to take that 3AM phone call, HIPAA should go out the window. Your personal health should not be kept a secret from the American public.

Remember, Woodrow Wilson had a stroke in October 1919, and his wife Edith ran the country for the rest of his term while lying to Americans about his status.  Who will play that role in a Clinton administration?  Huma?

God (and the 25th Amendment) help us.

________________

* Of course, some have also postulated that she’s wearing an exosuit, or that she’s possibly a robot in disguise.

Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day.

“[T]he only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky-falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame-the Falling Man-became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew’s photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.

“That we have known who the Falling Man is all along.”

—“The Falling Man”, by Tom Junod

This would have been my Dad’s 91st birthday.

Here’s to you, Dad.

There was a post in one of my groups on FB of a video showing some little girl who was pissed off at her dad because he kept leaving the toilet seat up.

Can we just be honest for once about the whole toilet seat thing?  I’m sure this goes back to the times of unlighted, unheated outhouses where you used the Sears catalog for paper.  And not even back to the early days of outhouses — I’m talking about outhouses that might have been retrofitted with the more modern type of two-piece commode seat rather than just being a hole you hovered over.

But this is the 21st century.  The number of homes still relying on outhouses instead of indoor plumbing is probably small enough to count with my fingers and toes.  (OK, hyperbole; I don’t live in the holler, or in the ‘stans.  But I live in a city with modern plumbing.)

So why can’t women simply look at the damn toilet before they sit down?  I mean, all three of ours here are kind of hard to miss, unless you’re just in a daze.  It’s not like you can’t see them before you sit.  And FFS, ladies (and men, for that matter), don’t you close the lid when you drop the seat?  If the lid isn’t closed, isn’t that a kind of a subtle hint that MAYBE you ought to look and see if the seat is down?  I mean, what are you gonna do?  Sit on the lid and pee?*

In fairness, I do put the seat down.  And not because I don’t want to hear shit from my wife; I do so because I don’t want the cats to use the john as a swimming pool or a water feature.  But because women think this is such a BIG FUCKING DEAL, let’s think about some things that we men rarely complain about, even though sometimes we yearn wistfully for the days when we were single and didn’t have to deal with this utter crap.

• Never, ever criticize a woman for not rinsing her sink after she brushes her teeth, even after you went to the trouble to fix the drain so it worked and didn’t just leave a pool of water sitting there draining for a quarter of an hour.
• Or for loading the dishwasher full of crusted-over dishes and expecting the 30-minute “quick wash” cycle to clean them. (“We bought it because it said ‘no scrubbing needed’!” “Yeah, but that’s on the full wash that takes three hours, uses a bazillion kilowatts of electricity, and half the water in the county reservoir.” “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”** “Sadly, I do — I read the manual.”)
• Or for insisting on using paper plates instead of our perfectly good Nautica tableware that we got for our wedding because then we don’t waste water to wash them. (Ignoring that manufacturing paper plates uses a ton of water and creates a horrendous amount of toxic waste that someone has to deal with, plus creates air pollution from transport to the store and then to your home, and then after you throw them away they fill up landfills and don’t really decompose.  Unintended consequences are a bitch.)
• Or for using the “touch-up” brush on the toilets for weeks while ignoring the build-up under the rim that can only be removed with a jackhammer and muriatic acid when she complains about it, or when I finally realize how bad it is and do it myself.
• Or (and this is a personal favorite — her father warned me before we got married about this) for not turning lights off when she leaves a room, even if she’s not planning to go back there.  “You left the lights on over the vanity.”  “You were still in the bedroom.”  “Yeah, but I wasn’t going back to the vanity, I was dressed and following you out, and you were the last one back there.”  “So?  You were still in the bedroom.”  “Honey, that’s 240 watts of electricity just burning away for nothing.”  “So?  You were still in the bedroom.”

Should I go on? 🙂

_______________

* Well, maybe some of you will, if you’re that bleary-eyed at 1, 3, and 5 in the morning.  But that’s on you.  Literally.

** The last refuge of my wife.  God love her.  Note, however, this statement is usually just a translation of “Fuck you.”

From orbit.  It’s the only way to be sure.

Anyway, from 1840 yesterday through 0407 this morning, we received the following in our helpdesk mailbox.  Most of it from China.

And this is just a small sampling of the total amount of spam — from all folders, this is just one that I monitor — I’ve thrown away this morning after the long weekend.  I am convinced that the Russians, bad as they are, would never have done this to us.  I don’t understand why we and they don’t make common cause and simply wipe China off the face of the earth.  Pretty soon they’re going to crowd out the honest hackers, and then where would we be?

I saw a post yesterday arguing that the kerfuffle over the weekend regarding Colin Kaepernick and his asshole position on the National Anthem and the American flag was just more distraction — what else was going on in the news that this was running cover for? More Hillary emails? More Iranian perfidy? Who knows.*

I’ll admit that Mr. Kaepernick has every right to sit for the National Anthem and claim it’s because of some vaguely-defined brand of oppression that for him the flag seems to represent.

But you don’t get to do that in a vacuum when you’re a celebrity. And when the vast majority of the country believes you’re full of beans, they’re going to tell you about it, regardless of how self-important you are. And that’s going to hit the news, big time, because you’re an overpaid jackass who makes his money playing a game.

As far as what else was going on while this little screaming match played out, anyone with half a brain who can read a newspaper past page A1 could probably figure that out for themselves: Obama is still an incompetent disgrace, Hillary is still a crook, and Trump is still a boor. So it goes.

And so, Mr. Kaepernick: Phhhbbbbbbbbbbbt!

Now, back to real news.

_____________

* Although admittedly, Donald Trump ought to be running that clip non-stop till it wears out.  It’s a great indictment of Democrat politics that have been running this country for years.

Good speech by Trump last night (six words I never believed I would be stringing together).

He smacked down Obama (and by extension, Hillary) for ignoring Louisiana.

He really came down hard on Hillary’s lies and poor decisions (Benghazi, etc.).

He slams NAFTA.  I think it’s a mistake to do so, but it apparently jazzes folks on the right.  He’s also against TPP, and I agree with that.

He calls out soi-disant “sanctuary” cities, something that should have been done a long time ago.  I’m only sorry that he didn’t state clearly that such cities would lose every dollar of federal financing they currently get if they continue to defy the law on immigration.

And he really hammers the press; nothing new there, I just like seeing him do it.

He pleads with African-Americans to take their blinders off and see that the Democrats only take them for granted.

I think he’s starting to listen to his advisors.  In particular, I think this speech has Kellyanne Conway’s fingerprints all over it.  And that’s a good thing.

Laugh if you want, Libertarians, but this is the guy you ought to be backing.  The Libertarians’ gun-controller slate can’t match this and won’t win in any case.  I’ve already stated my position for my pivot; I’m still going to be holding my nose, but the stench is not quite as bad as it was.

Yesterday was the ex-girlfriend’s 60th birthday.  Too bad she wasn’t around for it.

I think I would have moped around all day and gotten little accomplished if I hadn’t been busy right out of the gate.  Worked half a day, then took off and went downtown for meetings at the large Gothic limestone building with the tall central tower just outside the Mile Square.  Those all went quite well, ending up with the usual monthly dinner meeting of the full board.

I had thought about visiting her grave, since it’s down on the near South side and not far from downtown at all, but since I couldn’t leave till noon and our lunch meeting started at 12:30, that didn’t happen.  I thought about that briefly and decided her birthday wasn’t really the right day to do that.  Her death occurred close enough to the big statewide meeting that I take off for in May that I can leave early on one of the afternoons and do that.

It’s odd that I’ve never actually gone through a mourning process for her.  She was the most important thing in my life for a long time before my wife came along.  In fact, I knew her for just about 15 years before I met my wife, and she died about 15 years after I got married.  Odd bookends for a relationship.

But even at her funeral, I wasn’t able to express any emotion.  It just wasn’t there.  She had been sick for so long, and stuck in a nursing home for so long — and had refused to talk to me for nearly two years anyway — that I think all I could do was accept that she was actually gone instead of just virtually gone.  (I believe to this day that she refused to talk to me because she didn’t want me to mourn.  She knew she was going to die, the only thing that hadn’t been determined was the date.)

For crying out loud, my cat died a week after her birthday last year, and I was broken up for days over that.  On the other hand, my cat died in my arms at the vet.  “Put to sleep” as they say.

…

OK, I’m back.  Sorry, I’m still a little choked up about that.

Anyway, I will always miss her, but I can’t mourn her.  Unless that’s what I’m doing and don’t realize it.  There’s no question that she had crap quality of life and going to sleep that night and not waking up was probably a lot better than the alternative.  Because of the way she went, and because she wouldn’t talk to me beforehand, she’ll always be alive in my heart.  That box we carried up the hill and put in a hole that we filled in?  She wasn’t there.  That was just a husk.  Her soul is beyond pain now, in that undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

Fly free, my love.  Fly free.

(I am supremely lucky to have an understanding wife, who was also her friend.)

She sang for you last night, she heard you were calling
Her name in tears a thousand times.
Your spirit was floating, your spirit was searching
On a cloud of dreams.

A moonbeam shines bright in the city of angels
Guiding the dreamers back to life,
And they’ll do the same every tomorrow
Till the pain subsides.

Don’t be scared now,
Close your eyes,
She holds guard tonight.
Go on forward,
No remorse,
Life will take its course.

She danced with you last night so you would remember
All you have shared, the lifetime.
The angels were watching and death will be waiting
Until the time is right.

Don’t be scared now,
Close your eyes,
She holds guard tonight.
Go on forward,
No remorse,
Life will take its course.

Hold on to memories,
See what lies ahead.
Life will go on and we are one
With every step you take.

“The Last Dance”, Within Temptation