A while back I decided to watch a movie on Netflix using my laptop and because I have tinnitus in my left ear, decided to use my earbuds because the other option was playing the movie loud enough to crack the foundation of my house and letting the rest of my family know what a cheesy movie I was watching.

True Confession: If Jason Statham is in a movie playing yet another version of his “He Appears To Be a Humble Construction Worker/Bee Keeper/Walmart Greeter But He’s Actually A Former SAS/Foreign Legion/WWF Badass” I’ll watch it because Jason Statham never disappoints, possibly because he keeps playing the same guy and I have such low expectations.

But…

As usual, my earbuds were in a tangle that appeared to be the work of unionized gremlins who spent an entire night shift tying bowlines and half-hitches into my earbud cords, so I let out an exasperated sigh and said: “Really?”

And now let’s summarize my situation:

I was going to sit on my couch, in the comfort of my own house, watch a movie that appeared on my laptop through some Scientific Black Magic I will never fully understand and I’d do that because I was too damn lazy to go to the local movie theater, but I was exasperated by having to spend 15 seconds untangling earbud cords.

My next thought was: “When did I become such a goddamn whiner?”

Airlines And Travel

And not long before my Tangled Earbuds Meltdown, I had traveled to Dallas, Texas.

People say “I love to travel” which is not 100% accurate because if they’re like me, they love being in different places, but traveling to get to those places pretty much sucks. Later, I used the trip to complain about airline travel; cramped seating, four pretzels and half-a-Diet Coke for lunch and people with carry-on luggage big enough to conceal a dead body, insisting it will fit in the overhead compartment.

Comedians have been mining this vein for decades.

But apparently you can teach an Old Dog new tricks and after the tangled-earbuds episode, I took a different view.

The Model A’s top speed—a vehicle my mother traveled in as a child—was a blistering 28 miles per hour. So if you put the pedal to the metal, didn’t blow up the engine or stop for bathroom breaks, covering the 505.9 miles between Kansas City and Dallas in a Model A would take a little over 18 hours.

Now take it back one more generation.

My mom’s mom—whose birthdate I do not have in front of me and I’m not going to call my mom to ask because it’s 7:12 AM here in Missouri, 5:12 AM in California and 1962 in my mom’s house—had stories of traveling by horseback and horse-drawn wagons as a child.

So now let’s put my grandmother in a covered wagon leaving Kansas City headed for the Big D to see a Cowboys’ game.

Covered wagons traveled 10-to-20 miles a day, so my grandmother would have spent approximately 25.29 days getting to Dallas and that’s only if the Comanches didn’t decide to shoot an arrow in her ass. (Plus, I gotta assume there would be at least one bathroom break.)  

I may have my Comanche/grandmother timeline off, but you get the point: just a couple generations ago, travel was difficult, dangerous and time-consuming.

My flight to Dallas took about an hour-and-a-half, and I could have watched a movie on Netflix while making that trip, if I managed to get my goddamn earbuds untangled.

Sports Teams

One night I was sitting in the Kauffman Stadium press box watching the Kansas City Royals with one of my favorite people in the world, former big league umpire Steve Palermo.

BTW: Steve was an Italian from Worcester, Massachusetts and Earl Weaver was a Pugnacious Loudmouth from Baltimore, Maryland and both were very funny; wouldn’t you love to hear the soundtrack from the argument they were having in that picture?

Steve was also the umpire that called Yankee Bucky Dent’s home run against the Boston Red Sox fair in 1978 and at one point he was rated the number one umpire in baseball. He was a fun and funny guy. When batting gloves became a thing Steve borrowed one and during a Big League baseball game, did a Michael Jackson moonwalk across the infield—like that funny.

On July 7, 1991 he was eating at a Dallas restaurant after a Texas Rangers game and heard that two waitresses were getting mugged in the parking lot. He went to their rescue and was shot, suffering a bullet wound to the spinal cord, paralyzing him from the waist down; the best umpire in baseball would never work another baseball game.

Doctors said he was unlikely to ever walk again, but Steve fought his way back and walked with the use of a leg brace and a cane and became an umpire supervisor. Apparently, that kind of experience will give you perspective.

One night, when I mentioned the Royals losing big and the game being bad, Steve said look at it this way:

“In this entire country there are 15 big league baseball games being played tonight and we’re lucky enough to be at one of them.”

When you’re fortunate enough to have a Big League baseball team in your town, complaining about them losing a game—or even a lot of games—seems pretty damn whiny.

Steve died in 2017 and I miss him every time I go to Royals game. He was right: I was lucky to sit in the press box of a Big League baseball game and share time with an American Hero even though he’d laugh at me if I called him that to his face.

Good Health

Through the random luck of the genetic lottery, I have eaten pretty much exactly what I wanted to eat all my life, never gotten as much exercise as I should and somehow never had major health problems even though I could have a heart attack and die before I finish writing this senten

OK, that was a joke; other than needing to lose 50 pounds before my doctor’s appointment next week, I’m fi

(That was another joke…never gets old, does it?)

Anyway, despite a lifetime of bad habits I’m relatively healthy, so it seems completely unfair when some kid who never did anything wrong gets cancer or goes blind or is born with some undeserved defect that they’ll deal with all their lives. And when those people face those problems with dignity and hope, I feel like a jerk for whining about any of my problems including full-length mirrors that reveal where eating anything you want for six decades will get you.

If God or whoever is in charge (assuming there’s anyone in charge, which as Life goes along seems increasingly unlikely) did not strike you with a Health-Problem Lightning Bolt, you have a lot to be thankful for, including the ability to use your hands and untangle earbuds.

The Strong, Silent Type

My father’s generation was criticized for going off, fighting WW2, saving Democracy and then coming home and failing to talk about it.

That generation smothered their feelings with too many cigarettes, too much alcohol and dreams of a home in the suburbs where their best friends weren’t dying on a daily basis and their kids’ biggest problem was deciding whether to be a fan of Roy Rogers or Hopalong Cassidy.

BTW: I was a Roy Rogers fan because he had it all—a horse named Trigger, a dog named Bullet, he could play the guitar and sing, had a hot girlfriend named Dale and the uncanny ability to catch the Bad Guy’s getaway car while riding a Golden Palomino (fortunately, there always seemed to be a horse-friendly shortcut).

Plus Hopalong appeared to be about 72-years-old and while I could buy Trigger catching a 1949 Plymouth Special Deluxe on a straightaway, the bad guys getting their asses kicked by a Social Security recipient was just too much.

So where were we?

Oh, yeah…my dad’s generation being told it was unhealthy to bottle up their feelings because it could result in taking up woodworking as an excuse to go to the garage and get away from their families who were prone to asking what they did in the war and the answer was shooting as many strangers in the head as possible, which they really didn’t want to think about.

So those men were criticized for being the Strong, Silent Type and my generation learned its lesson: we’re the Weak, Loud Type.

We have been encouraged to talk non-stop about our feelings and the result is a whole bunch of Baby Boomers that complain and whine about every little thing that goes wrong or makes us unhappy. (Some of us even start blogs.)

Now that we’ve been encouraged to let our feelings out, I kinda wish we’d shut the fuck up and buy some woodworking equipment and my first project would be making a rack for holding my earbuds.

Maybe that would keep the goddamn things untangled.

This is another one of those essays from the early days of this blog and I’ve updated and edited it and added new jokes and stories, so if you read it back when it was first posted, it’s still worth reading again. And face it, at our age (like the image in my mirror, my readership now skews “older”) we can’t remember stuff that happened last week, which is one of the few good things about getting older because I’m currently re-watching all those great movies from the 1970s and totally forgot One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was a feel-good date movie about a pedophile who gets a lobotomy.

(Hope I didn’t ruin that movie for you, but you’ve had 50 years to watch it and if you haven’t got that done by now, I think that’s on you, not me.)

Anyway…

I originally wrote this so people would have something to read while killing time and waiting for the Super Bowl to start and not much has changed over the years (except the jokes) so here we go again and we’ll start with…

Super Bowl I

In reality there was no Super Bowl I because back then it was called the “AFL-NFL World Championship Game” because people had yet to realized what a pain in the ass it was going to be to repeat “AFL-NFL World Championship Game” over and over.

They didn’t start calling it the Super Bowl until Super Bowl III and I’m guessing using Roman Numerals seemed like a cute idea until they played enough of them, because today’s game is Super Bowl LX and unless your name is Spartacus you might have to look that up to see what number it is in English.  

2026 Update:

In a brief fit of affection and laziness I had my sons’ birthdays tattooed on my right arm, but did it in Roman Numerals because I thought that looked cool and when one of my sons asked me if I did it so I could remember their birthdays, I admitted he was right, but then said joke’s on you: I can’t remember what the Roman Numerals stand for.

The first Not-Yet-The-Super-Bowl took place on January 15th, 1967 and I dimly remember watching it on a Black & White TV and here’s a picture that illustrates just how Big A Deal it was; rows and rows of empty seats.

According to Wikipedia, the halftime show was trumpeter Al Hirt and a couple of marching bands which was pretty standard halftime fare back then and I’m guessing nobody but the parents of the marching band members watched their performance, while the rest of us went to the bathroom or made sandwiches because listening to a bunch of kids stomp the living shit out of By the Time I get to Phoenix isn’t all that entertaining.

(Actually, I have no idea what songs the marching bands played that day, but whatever tune a marching band decides to fuck up, it always comes out sounding like it’s being played by the Hitler Youth Marching Kazoo Band on their way to a Beer Hall Putsch and if you don’t get those historical references, once again I think it’s pretty much your fault not mine.)

On the other hand…

They did have two guys flying around in rocket packs—they probably got the idea from the James Bond movie Thunderball—and then the two guys went and had a couple martinis, shaken not stirred and said some sexist stuff to a cheerleader, which was the best we could do until show business became much more sophisticated and showed us Prince’s guitar having an orgasm and 50% of Janet Jackson’s boobs.

Here’s a video about that and I mean the rocket packs, not Janet Jackson’s right breast, although now that I think about it, that Janet Jackson video would probably be much more interesting.

Nevertheless…

In Not-Yet-The-Super-Bowl 1, the Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10 and the most memorable thing about the game is Chiefs defensive back Fred “The Hammer” Williamson bragging that he was going to use his “Hammer” (a forearm blow to the head, which tells you just how serious the NFL took concussions in those days) to take fuck up the Packer receivers.

Back then you could not only intentionally hit receivers in the head, you could brag about it first.

But the Hammer was knocked out in the fourth quarter when he got hit in the head by Packer running back Donny Anderson’s knee and then for good measure, someone fell on Fred’s arm and broke it.

According to the internet Fred is still alive and I’ve got no more smart-ass remarks to make because I’m pretty sure The Hammer could still kick my ass even though he’s 87 years old. True story: Heavyweight Champ Jack Dempsey was born in 1895 and sometime in the late 1960s (or early 70s) two guys tried to mug him and Jack knocked them both out.

So imagine the story those guys had to tell in jail: “Yeah, the two of us jumped this senior citizen, but…”

It never ceases to amaze me when someone has a few too many and then decides to get in a professional athlete’s face and then quickly finds out why the guy is a professional athlete.

Super Bowl III

This was the first Super Bowl I really cared about (that’s an ‘i’ not a Roman Numeral) because it was my generation (Joe Namath, long hair and white, low-top shoes) versus the older generation (Johnny Unitas, crew cut and black, high-tops) which might be an over-simplification, but let’s face it, over-simplifying is what I’ve done for a living since 1976 and it’s worked out pretty well so far.

Also, QB Earl Morrall actually started the game for the Colts, but got pulled after throwing three interceptions which reminds me of a Johnny Unitas story told by one of his receivers, Raymond Berry; assuming I remember all this correctly, but it’s good story either way because somebody told it about Unitas, even if it wasn’t Raymond.

If Unitas threw a ball letter-high out in front of a receiver it meant the receiver had a clear field in front of him and could run for extra yardage, but if Unitas threw the ball low that meant the receiver needed to get down because some defensive back was about to rip his head off.

That’s back when men were men and couldn’t remember all their kids’ names after a football game.

In 1979, after the NFL changed the rules to protect quarterbacks, Pittsburgh Steeler linebacker Jack Lambert said the NFL should just get it over with and have the quarterbacks wear dresses.

Jesus, if this guy was after me I’d go into Witless Protection and to illustrate my point about drunks losing their minds and challenging professional athletes, here’s Jack with a normal-sized human being.

These days you can get penalized for giving a quarterback a hard look because losing quarterbacks to injury costs everybody money, but they still let the linemen butt heads, so feel free to knock the crap out of Charlie Cross and if you don’t know who that is (he’s the Seahawks left tackle and I had to look that up) I think I’ve made my point.

Super Bowl IV

The Vikings lost to the Chiefs, but more importantly I lost a $20 bet with the manager of the place I worked—Sam’s Stagecoach Inn—which was a pretty big deal at the time ($20, not Sam’s Stagecoach Inn) because as I recall my weekly paycheck was something like $47 for a 40-hour week which is what I worked my last two years of high school, which seems insane now, but that meant I could own a car and go on dates and make out with cheerleaders at drive-in movies and back then I probably would have signed up for Gladiator Death Matches to make that possible.

Just googled it and a 1970 dollar is now worth $8.35, which means I lost $167 to a guy who didn’t need it and looking back, my manager didn’t seem all that upset about taking my money.

Super Bowl X: “The Barney Bowl”

The Steelers and Cowboys were playing and I went over to my friend Phil’s house to watch the game and his dad Barney came into the den and informed us that he and Phil’s mom were going to church and that’s what we should be doing instead of popping beers before noon, laying around on his couch and watching a football game.

2026 Update:

That last line made me wonder about “beers before noon” so I looked it up and Super Bowl X started at 11:14 AM California time, which was before they decided to show us five-and-a-half hours of pregame commercials like they’ll do today and Super Bowl LX is scheduled to start at approximately 6:30 PM Eastern Standard Time on the Twelfth of Never.

Anyway…

Barney—who was one of those Greatest Generation guys who helped save America by being a tank commander in WW2—was freaking awesome and I liked him a lot, but he wasn’t going to talk me or Phil into abandoning the Super Bowl to go to church, despite the steady religious harangue he kept up throughout the entire pregame show, which at that time was only 90 minutes, but still seemed way too long in 1976.

So Barney and Phil’s mom went out to the garage, we heard the garage door go up, the car leave and the garage door come back down.

A few minutes later—probably working up his courage to face the well-deserved barrage of ridicule he was about to receive—Barney came back into the den with a look on his face which should be right next to the word “sheepish” in the Mirriam-Webster dictionary.

We laughed our asses off.

After all his sermonizing, Barney blew off church to watch the Super Bowl with us, because, let’s face it, football is way more entertaining than church and if they want better church attendance they should let a pack of altar boys try to sack the priest during his homily. The Steelers beat the Cowboys 21-17 (I had to look that up) but I’ll never forget the look on Barney’s face coming back through the door.

Super Bowl XIV

These days a free trip to the Super Bowl is considered a lifetime dream come true, greeted with shrieks and hugs and plans to abandon the kids in a homeless shelter for the weekend, but don’t feel bad if you never get to go to one, because I went to just one Super Bowl and it pretty much sucked.

A friend of mine was covering the game which was being held in the Rose Bowl and he offered me a couple tickets like it was no Big Deal and back then it really wasn’t.

I brought along a date and went to my friend’s hotel to pick up the tickets and on the way out of the hotel, was offered what seemed like a huge amount of money for the tickets, which I turned down because it seemed like a “dick move” * (* patent pending) to profit off a friend’s generosity. Future events would prove that wasn’t even close to the worst thing I’d ever do in my life and if I’d known that, I might have cashed in on those tickets.

Moving on…

We decided to take a bus the hotel had hired to deliver people to the Rose Bowl because it seemed way easier than driving and finding parking, so after a long ride, the yellow school bus we arrived in, dropped us off right outside the Rose Bowl.

I said let’s find our seats and then I’ll go get something from the snack bar, but it turned out our “seats” were just painted numbers on benches and the numbers were so close together the crowd would have had to been made up of anorexic fashion models to fit in the assigned spaces. Plus, those tunnels you see about halfway up the Rose Bowl are small and claustrophobic and were so packed with people, a trip to the snack bar was going to take close to an hour, so we stayed in our “seats” the entire time.

I do not remember it, but the internet informs me the halftime show was Up With People which the internet also informs me, turned out to be a cult, so I guess it could have been worse:

“And now for your halftime entertainment…The Manson Family!”

Absolutely no memory of whatever song the Up with People group castrated for our entertainment, but here’s a video and I’m about halfway up the stands. The video’s over 12 minutes long, but it will only take about 17 seconds before you realize Charles Manson’s Greatest Hits might have been preferable.

The highlight of the game was realizing Julie Newmar—Catwoman on the Batman TV series—was sitting a few seats, or in this case, numbers, away.

The Steelers beat the Rams 31-19 and upon leaving the game we realized the yellow school bus that dropped us off was now parked with dozens and dozens of other yellow school buses and some of the buses were already leaving, so it was a race to find the right bus before we got stranded in Pasadena and were forced to get a ride back to LA with the Up With People dancers and wind up in a cult against our will because who would want to look like that big a dork voluntarily?

We got lucky and found our bus, but it was full on the way to the game and about half-full driving back, so if someone went missing in 1980 you might want to check the Up With People roster.

To top it all off, my friend the sportswriter told me I was an idiot for turning down the money for the tickets and we would have been welcome to watch the game in his hotel room and spend some of that Super Bowl Loot on room service.

Live and earn.  

So if you’re thinking how awesome it would be to win a trip to the Super Bowl, trust me, you’re having a way better experience at home, unless you happen to live with a former Up With People performer who wants to relive his or her glory days by performing some of their Greatest Halftime Show hits.

Just remembered: this time I won a $20 Super Bowl bet with Paul Conrad—the L.A. Times political cartoonist—but Paul never paid off even though I mentioned it every time I saw him for the next 30 years. Paul died in 2010 and I think he did it to avoid giving me my $20.

Super Bowl XIV through LVIII

As should be apparent by now, most of my Super Bowl memories are haphazard and hazy because the game itself has become overshadowed by events surrounding the game.

For example:

I remember Janet Jackson’s breast, but have no idea which teams played in that particular Super Bowl and if you can name those teams without looking them up you’re a better man and/or woman than I am, which fits the “damning with faint praise” cliché to a T.

Today I’ll do my best to enjoy the creative commercials and often underwhelming game and whoever wins, be OK with it as long as the halftime show star—Bad Bunny—doesn’t have a wardrobe malfunction.

And with my Super Bowl gambling track record, this time I’m not betting $20 with anybody.

Compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler and the same people who had no problem calling Barack Obama a Socialist and Renee Good a Domestic Terrorist and Alex Pretti an assassin will tell you to quit exaggerating.

However:

Both Trump and Hitler tried to seize power by force, claimed they’d return their countries to greatness, blamed outsiders for everyone’s problems, made claims on other countries’ territory, grabbed people off the street and shipped them off without trial, entered homes without warrants, used violence against people who disagree with them, believed in telling the Big Lie and had reeeaaally shitty haircuts.

And now Trump has suggested that the Republicans “nationalize” the election process and take it over, so we’re entering some pretty terrifying territory and if you aren’t alarmed you probably don’t understand the situation.

I could go on and often do, but what’s been happening in Minneapolis was enough to inspire me to draw the above cartoon and here’s hoping what’s been happening in Minneapolis is enough to inspire newspapers to print it.

After the Renee Good and Alex Pretti fuck-ups, you’d think ICE would cool its jets, but recently the Associated Press ran a story about Alberto Castaneda Mondragon—a Mexican immigrant—who was brought to a Minneapolis hospital by federal immigration officers and they did that because Alberto had broken bones in his face and a fractured skull.

When the intensive care nurses wanted to know what happened, the ICE agents claimed Alberto had tried to flee and “purposefully run headfirst into a brick wall” while wearing handcuffs.

But the hospital staff determined that could not possibly account for Alberto’s extensive injuries and one of the nurses said the story was “laughable, if there was something to laugh about.”

Turns out, Minneapolis hospital staff members have been getting sideways with ICE officers who have restrained patients against hospital rules, hung around the hospitals pressing patients and staff for proof of citizenship, come up with unlikely stories for detainee injuries and generally speaking, acted like dicks.

Alberto had eight skull fractures and five areas of bleeding in his brain, which makes it sound like he ran headfirst into a wall, then got up and did it again seven more times. Since that didn’t seem likely, the Associated Press asked a pathologist to look at Alberto’s injuries and see what she thought and what she thought is it’s pretty hard to get fractures on both sides of your skull by running into a wall just once.

So it seemed to me if ICE is going to keep telling Fairy Tales they need to hire someone better at telling them.

Apparently thinking “Hey, we haven’t had a scandal yet this week!” ICE agents in Minneapolis drew their guns and arrested some activists following them and before we go any further and/or farther let me express the opinion that following a bunch of over-caffeinated, jacked-up knuckleheads who just can’t wait to use their guns seems like a good way to wind up in a bad situation.

Nevertheless…

A worse idea is those over-caffeinated, jacked-up knuckleheads drawing their guns unnecessarily, which escalates a bad situation into a possibly deadly one and we’ve already seen the results when that happens.

There are good law enforcement officers and I’m under the impression good cops spend a lot of time trying to deescalate situations and keep everyone calm, while bad cops like to throw their weight around and pull their guns and let everyone know they’re in charge.

“Badge heavy” is a derogatory term for cops who can’t resist demonstrating their authority and if you forget that term, “assholes” also works.

Anyway…

The activists are theoretically observing the ICE officers—not interfering—and those officers clearly need observing, but they don’t like that either and ICE officers threatened Associated Press reporters with pepper spray.

Turns out, shooting White protesters polled badly and the Trump Administration is pulling 700 ICE officers from Minnesota and God help whatever community they’re going to terrorize next.

In a change of topic; last year the Trump administration made it sound like they would release the Epstein files, then backtracked, so Congress decided to act (which was a pretty big shock for anyone familiar with Congress) and passed the ridiculously named Epstein Transparency Act, which required the Justice Department to release all the Epstein files by December, 19^th, 2025.

No surprise, the Justice Department missed the deadline.

Apparently the DOJ panicked and recently published three million pages of poorly redacted files and photos and turns out, the Department of Justice sucks at editing.

Which became apparent when the New York Times found more than 40 “unredacted” images showing nude bodies and the faces those bodies were attached to, and some of the people appeared to be “young.”

One of the Epstein victims said she had been naïve in thinking the government would protect the victims and now they’ve been victimized a second time by the government’s carelessness.

Today’s Lesson

Google “Does history repeat itself?” and the AI robot quibbles and dithers so it is becoming more like humans all the time, but does eventually concede:

“History appears to repeat itself when lessons from past failures are ignored, causing people to make similar mistakes.”

As I pointed out in a previous post: Hitler did not start out by suggesting Death Camps and World Wars, the German people got there step-by-step and if you Google “What was Hitler’s first act of aggression?” this time the AI robot says Adolf remilitarized the Rhineland—a violation of the Treaty of Versailles—and German troops marched into a demilitarized zone bordering France and the West didn’t do jackshit. If ignoring treaties and sending troops to areas that don’t need or want them sounds familiar, face it, it’s Deja Vu all over again.

If you don’t like what’s happening; speak out, protest and most importantly vote…while you still can.

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/

So we get hit by that snowstorm that’s fucking up approximately 47% of the United States and at the same time Netflix makes every James Bond movie available (all 27 of them) and because it’s too cold to go outside unless your first name is Nanook and your last name is Ofthenorth, I watch all five Daniel Craig/ James Bond movies in order.

Never knowing enough to quit when I’m behind…

It’s still really cold outside, so next I watch all seven Sean Connery James Bond movies and then decide to watch the one with George Lazenby, On Her Majesty’s Secret Shit List.

Just in case you think you’ve made some bad career decisions and need cheering up:

Lazenby—a male model who at this point in his life had made exactly one movie—decides he doesn’t want to be the new James Bond because his manager convinces George that movies about secret agents are pretty much played out and Lazenby’s manager says that in 1969.

But they keep making James Bond movies for the next 52 years (and even though Bond died in the last movie, they’re still not done making them) which is right up there with the Decca Records executive who didn’t sign the Beatles in 1962 because he was 100% sure guitar groups were on their way out.

Anyway…

I’ve got 14 James Bond movies to go, but I’m currently making base camp and acclimating for my final assault on this cinematic Mount Everest, which makes me wonder if anyone gets halfway up Everest, looks around and says fuck this, it’s way higher than I thought and I’m heading back to Kathmandu to sleep in a warm bed.

This BTW is the line of people waiting to summit Everest, which looks miserable and confirms my opinion that I’d rather be sitting in the Kathmandu Denny’s eating a Grand Slam breakfast.

Having said all that…

I saw a bunch of these James Bond movies for the first time when I was a kid, but now that I’m an adult (OK—adult-ish) and there are a few things I’ve noticed this time around and we’ll start with a big one…

James Bond Is the World’s Shittiest Secret Agent

What part of “secret” agent has James Bond confused?

Bond…James Bond…tells everybody and anybody his real name and about half the time whatever villain he’s dealing with will say, “The famous James Bond!” or “We’ve been expecting you, Mr. Bond!” and offer him a cocktail:

“Martini…shaken not stirred isn’t it?”

James also likes to draw attention to himself by driving hot cars, looking like a million bucks in a tuxedo, while breaking the bank at Monte Carlo with some smoking hot babe on his arm.

Movie spy James Bond:

Real spy Aldrich Ames:

Real life secret agents tend to be analysts, bureaucrats and paper-pushers who wear Florsheim shoes, clip-on ties, pocket protectors, work late on weekends, have peptic ulcers that are fucking killing them because they’re so goddamn scared they’re going to get caught and we don’t know a thing about them until they show up in Russia and admit they’ve just stolen the Colonel’s Secret Recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken.

And once they get to Russia, they find out the Russians don’t like them all that much either.

James Bond Is A Square

Hey, don’t take my word for it: in the opening credits for all six Sean Connery James Bond movies, when they play that cool James Bond theme song (which I want played when they wheel me in for my funeral) and you appear to be looking down a gun barrel at James…

He’s wearing a fedora.

So instead of looking like a super cool secret agent, James Bond looks like an insurance agent with a license to sell and frankly, the only person I can currently think of who looked good in a fedora was Michael Jackson and we all know how that turned out.

In one scene James tells someone they’re making a mistake, “like listening to the Beatles without earmuffs” which means James Bond was in total agreement with that cool hipster music critic, William F. Buckley, Jr.

Which reminds me of a story David Bowie told about Mick Jagger when—early in Mick’s career—a heckler yelled “get a haircut” at Mick and Mick responded with all the disdain he could muster:

“And look like you?”

James Bond is also one of those pedantic booze nerds who wear the rest of us out because they can’t resist showing off and telling everybody about what they’re drinking—“I prefer the ‘55 Mountain Dew over the ‘54”—and here’s what I have to say about that:

I was having lunch with a bunch of friends and someone started up that pedantic booze nerd bullshit, so I went to the bar and asked the bartender for a shot of their cheapest whisky and a shot of their most expensive whiskey, took both shots back to the table and—you guessed it—nobody could tell which was which.

They should have asked my son who once described the difference perfectly:

“The good stuff hurts less.”

SPECTRE Henchman Is the World’s Worst Job

James is constantly getting sideways with SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) and speaking of World Domination, AI—that awesome new innovation that’s going to change our lives—got the SPECTRE title wrong when I asked for it and also misspelled “ECecutive.”

World domination, my aSs.

Anyway…

No idea what kind of dental plan or retirement benefits SPECTRE offers their henchmen, but few of them seem to live long enough to cash in because Ernst Stavro Blow Me is constantly saying “This organization does not tolerate failure!” right before incinerating them or feeding them to some sharks or shoving them into a piranha-filled pond and I’m gonna call bullshit right here.

Because Ernst Stavro has done nothing but fail; none of his plans work out.

James always escapes whatever overly elaborate death trap Ernst set up to execute Bond and if SPECTRE has a board of directors they’d be up Ernst’s ass about expenses: “You spent how much on secret lair inside a volcano?”

After a while word would get around and no self-respecting henchman would work for SPECTRE because they’re expected to wear dorky uniforms and die for Ernst while he turns chicken and escapes out the back.

Considering the shitty working conditions, this should be the SPECTRE Henchman theme song:

The SPECTRE Contractors Are Unbelievable

When you watch James Bond films you’re expected to buy into some pretty unbelievable things like Q (the MI6 quartermaster) giving James the exact gadgets he’s going to need in that particular movie or women falling all over themselves to bang an aging narcissist (Sean Connery was 52 when he made his last Bond movie) but the thing I find even less believable are the SPECTRE contractors.

True story that I’ve told before:

I go to see my mom once a year on her birthday and one year she was having her bathroom remodeled and when I showed up the next year, the bathroom still wasn’t finished because one contractor would go out of business and another contractor wouldn’t show up on time or they’d be waiting for materials being shipped from the Kathmandu Home Depot, so no way the SPECTRE contactors are building missile silos inside volcanos or underground railroads or piranha-filled ponds and getting those projects done on time or staying within the SPECTRE budget.

And it’s highly-unlikely that some guy laying volcano-lair concrete all day wouldn’t go home and say: “Honey, you cannot believe what we’re building on that island!”

So you couldn’t let the contractors go home at night and spill the beans and you’d have to kill them after they were done building your underwater laboratory and once again, word would get around and no contractor would want to work for you.

So they’d get illegal aliens to do it.

And finally…

James Bond Is Kind of a Creep

James has pretty much the same seduction game plan as Harvey Weinstein and has no problem forcing women to do what he wants them to do, because in his world if you just keep kissing a girl she’ll eventually give in and in Goldfinger he pretty much rapes Pussy Galore. (As young men eventually learn to their dismay, Pussy Galore is a totally fictional character.)

Just to prove he hasn’t learned any lessons or matured one bit, in a subsequent movie James also blackmails a girl into having sex with him and it turns out James owns a mink mitten he uses to rub her back and apparently James travels around with that mitten in his luggage, right next to his glow-in-the-dark anal beads and blow up sex doll which he brings along just in case he can’t force any women to have sex with him.

Almost forgot…

He also pretends to be a masseuse so he can rub on Kim Basinger and when Kim finds out he isn’t a masseuse, she thinks it’s funny. In real life, Kim would get a lawyer and sue James for sexual assault and then she’d go on The View and Joy Behar would sympathize and tell Kim men are dicks and let’s face it, Joy isn’t totally wrong about that.

Today’s Lesson

Don’t become an evil villain henchman—those jobs suck—if you’re having some contractor build something for you, assume it will take twice as long and cost twice as much as he estimates, only buy the expensive booze for the first shot, after that you won’t be able to tell the difference and don’t try to watch 27 James Bond movies in a row.

Take a break, relax.

And wait for the next big snowstorm.

So the other day I wake up and it’s 17 below outside (with wind chill) and while some people (generally speaking, people who are someplace warmer) don’t count wind chill, when it’s that cold I want credit for every degree I’m suffering.

To be totally honest—almost always a bad idea—I had to look this up and it turns out: the wind makes it feel colder because humans give off body heat, which means we’re walking around in our own cocoon of warmer air, but the wind blows that warmer air away and if you’re like me, when it physically hurts to be outside, you fire up the Irish coffee and watch as many James Bond flics as possible.

And that’s because Netflix just made all 27 James Bond movies available and since this winter storm started (and I’m not making this up) I’ve watched 13 of them.

A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, which—generally speaking, has jackshit to do with me—unless a man’s gotta wrap himself in a blanket, sit on his couch, drink coffee with a generous amount of whiskey in it, while watching James Bond movies non-stop and not go outside until mid-June.

If it was up to me, we still would not have visited the North or South Pole and the only way I’d go to either of them is if the North Pole was in Waikiki and the South Pole was in Key West.

I grew up in California, but wound up in the Midwest and while there are places that are colder in the winter and hotter in the summer, for all-around shitty weather on both ends of the temperature/wind chill/humidity spectrum, you just can’t beat Kansas City, although St. Louis is no day at the beach either…unless the beach is somewhere deep in the Amazon rainforest and you visit in August.

Anyway…

This weather topic comes up because last week I drew a cartoon about our crappy weather, but then ICE started shooting protesters, so I wrote and drew about that instead and decided to do my weather whining in a separate post.

And here it is:

If you watch science fiction movies you already know scientists have a hard time persuading the rest of us dumbbells not to do moronic stuff like drill for oil next to a live volcano or bring back the dinosaurs and put them in a petting zoo or appoint RFK Jr. to be the head of Health and Inhuman Services.

Clearly, scientists suck at marketing which is why they failed to convince us to stop doing the shit we’re doing when they warned us about “global warming.” And that’s because we think what happens to us personally is what really matters.

If we met Adolf Hitler at a cocktail party and he complimented our outfit and let us pet his German Shepherd “Blondi” and then let us pet his girlfriend “Blondi” and got off a good joke about invading Russia in the wintertime and someone later told us “Y’know, Hitler’s an insane antisemitic megalomaniac intent on world domination” we’d probably respond:

“Well he was nice to me when I met him.”

And then repeat Adolf’s knee-slapper about invading Russia in the wintertime, which is what I feel like I’ve done every time I step outside.

Clearly, scientists screwed up when they warned us about “global warming” because that label allowed anyone who ever felt cold to say, “global warming, my freezing ass.”

So unlike the rest of us, having learned their lesson, the scientists have now started calling it “climate change” and just in case you were wondering (and I was), here’s how “climate change/global warming” can make it colder where you are:

Step 1: The arctic is warming up faster than the rest of the planet…

Step 2: Which reduces the difference in temperatures between the arctic and the mid-latitudes…

Step 3: And weakens the jet stream, a band of fast-moving air that keeps cold polar air up by Santa’s workshop where it belongs…

Step 4: The weakened jet stream is now more flexible and erratic, much like a Democrat trying to keep his job in Donald Trump’s Washington…

Step 5: And that allows the cold polar air to move south and forces me to wear two pair of gloves to shovel my driveway, which I did this past Sunday.

The cartoon you just looked at (which for some unknown reason never got posted anywhere) pokes fun of our tendency to think whatever happens to us personally is what’s important and fuck all the people we don’t know or care about (we also have the same policy when it comes to some of the people we know all too well) so bottom line:

If I’m cold there is no global warming.

Which is a lot like saying I’ve never been in one, so earthquakes don’t exist.

P.S. I’ve been in an earthquake (the El Centro Earthquake of 1979) and those things are freaky and once I figured out what it was—I was on the fifth floor of the San Diego Union office building at the time—my next thought was: “How long is this shit going to last?”

P.P.S. And if you’re wondering how long this weird weather shit it going to last, the answer is: until we start listening to the scientists.

And now to fill out this comparatively short essay…

Remember the Government Shutdown?

As you might remember, not so long ago the Democrats were getting criticized for refusing to vote for legislation to keep the government open, but since the Republicans needed some Democratic votes, that gave the Democrats leverage and they wanted to use that leverage to pass a renewal of the Obamacare subsidies that helped poor people pay for medical insurance.

But…

The Republicans argued that the Democrats should vote to keep the government open and they’d deal with the medical insurance subsidies later; cross their hearts, hope to die, stick a thousand needles in their eye.

Not being convinced of the Republicans’ sincerity…

The Democrats said if we vote to keep the government open, we’ll lose our leverage and then you Republicans will find reasons not to vote for future healthcare insurance subsidies, but then some Democrats panicked and voted the way the Republicans wanted them to.

THREE GUESSES WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THAT:

The House has voted to extend the subsidies, but the Republican-controlled Senate isn’t so hot about the idea and progress has stalled.

And if you’re a cynic (AKA: “well-informed”) you’ll find it easy to believe that politicians will vote for something that they know will ultimately fail because then they can claim “Well, I did the right thing” while knowing they can avoid the consequences of their vote. (Early in my newspaper career, that was explained to me by a veteran reporter who covered the California legislature.)

And just to make sure the situation remains chaotic and confusing (which would be a great name for Bjork album) Donald Trump has offered an alternate plan which would “send money directly to the American people.”

And you can look for that money about the same time you get your $2,000 tariff revenue check (another unfulfilled Trump promise) but don’t count on that either because it turns out Trump’s also promised to use the tariff revenue to:

• Reduce the deficits created by his tax cuts.

• Reduce the national debt (the deficit is what we overspend in one year; the national debt is all those deficits added up).

• Fund a nutrition program for low-income mothers and children.

• Aid farmers.

• Increase defense spending.

And…

• Give each and every one of us a magical unicorn that will grant us three wishes and if you’re reading this and thinking “Wait, that didn’t happen” you’re right, but only because Donald Trump didn’t think of it.

Unfortunately, the United States hasn’t collected enough tariff revenue to cover the tariff rebate checks, much less all the other imaginary benefits Trump’s talked about.

And while we’re in the broken-promise neighborhood, don’t forget Trump also promised letting Elon Musk and DOGE take a chainsaw to the federal government would reduce its cost and could result in rebate or dividend checks and we haven’t seen those checks either.

So lots of promises and very little action which describes about 73% of the dates I ever went on when I was single.

Today’s Lesson

In world where you can’t count on much, it’s good to know the Republicans will pretty much consistently fuck poor people when given the chance and generally speaking you shouldn’t believe them when they tell you something different.

Don’t forget the story of the frog and scorpion:

The scorpion wants the frog to carry him across the river and the frog says no way, you’re kind of a dick and you’ll sting me and the scorpion says I wouldn’t do that because then we’d both drown and the frog says OK, but halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog anyway and as they both sink, the frog says why would you do that, now we’ll both die and the scorpion says:

“What did you expect, I voted for Donald Trump three times.”

I hope today’s post leaves you shaken and stirred.

Stay warm, everybody.

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