I'm gonna come right out and say it. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is a puke. I'm not usually this disrespectful toward Republican luminaries (OK, OK. Maybe I am.) but this little worm deserves some special singling out for upping the ante in in lying, GOP smarm. He makes John Boehner look like a fucking diplomat.
Interestingly enough, he's also a walking, talking PSA for passing federal anti-bullying legislation. Which, of course, Ted's wing of the Republican party vehemently opposes since, to their feeble little minds, there's nothing more clean-cut, good old American fun than picking on the vulnerable. But I can't help but wonder if Ted would have made the same sketchy choices if he hadn't been scarred so by cruel teenage hazing.
Ted looks for all the world like a high school sophomore debate team nerd who never grew out of it. He is full to overflowing of that age's arrogance and unbreakable confidence that he knows more than anyone in the room, the one he's currently in or any other.
I can pretty easily imagine how it went for pimply-faced little Teddy. Picture it with me as he got repeatedly athletic-taped to locker room benches or was hip checked into the hallway lockers to send his decks of 3x5 index cards flying halfway back to his homeroom or had his lunch tray tipped over into his lap. After his cookie had been stolen, of course.
Most of those kids grow out of their early-teen social awkwardness and ostracization. They go off to good colleges where they excel in math or science or economics to points that they're accepted into top tier grad school programs which ensure their entries into jobs that grads of those programs get. Somehow though, Ted missed that memo. Instead of taking the hints of getting repeatedly taped to locker room benches or having his file cards scattered all over the 2nd floor hallways of his high school, he dug in his heels and decided that, by God, he was going to show those mean seniors a thing or two.
He never grew out of all that shit which made him so goddamned unpopular back in high school. Not him. He now gives every appearance of having groomed and cultivated and elevated that unsavory skill set to the point where nobody does it better. As I wrote, he makes Boehner look angelic by comparison and, even if the Senate's minority leader hadn't prematurely entered his dotage, Mitch McConnell wouldn't stand a chance against the junior senator from Texas. I even read somewhere that the Republicans are rolling Paul Ryan out of semi-seclusion to try to calm the waters which Ted has whipped into a lather of political whitecaps. Now there's a comforting prospect.
Ted has had some luck on his side, too. He's parlayed geography (Texas. Rick Perry's still the guv down there, right?) and a timeline (which finds the country more fragmented than at any time since Fort Sumter came under fire) into a disgusting celebrity. He's jumped all over a very strange time and place and ridden it to the head of the column made up of people who actually put value on his essentially valueless shtick. And I have a feeling that Ted sees himself on a mission from God.
Which was all well and good for Jake and Elwood Blues to be spouting in an SNL spinoff back in the '70s. But Ted Cruz has nowhere near as smart a supporting cast as Aretha Franklin and Cab Calloway. Maybe I'll wake up some Sunday morning and not have to see this little cockroach's smirking face leering out at me from the TV nor hear his pathetic, empty soundbites. Pretty please??
Sunday, October 13, 2013
Saturday, October 12, 2013
summer about over? or is the jury still out?
My poorly-chosen profession has led me to say that summer's over on Memorial Day. I used to say that it was over on the 4th of July but the always increasing pace of activity in a college bookstore doesn't seem to give me even that much of a break anymore. Or, maybe it's my always increasing stupidity that makes the pace seem so much more frantic. I thought for awhile that it was an international conspiracy against me but, when I bring that theory up in casual conversation, people's eyes glaze over so quickly that I've kind of let that one slide.
There's strong evidence that we've moved into the fall season. We started our fall semester at my beloved North Hennepin Community College. Tons of the books we spent the past three months hauling into the store and piling up on the shelves have now found their way back out the front door in the hands of eager young scholars, most of those presumably having passed by our cash registers. We could argue about the wisdom of starting any fall semester before Labor Day but most everybody's doing it so there doesn't seem to be any going back on the concept.
And Miz Susan's summer break seems to be over. At any rate, she's gone back to getting her brains beat out at her beloved Linwood/Monroe Arts Plus Upper Campus. Again, we could argue over why the Upper Campus is actually down the hill from the Lower Campus but the geniuses who work at 360 Colborne (which is even farther down the hill than the Upper Campus) have got that one set in stone.
The State Fair definitely seems to be over. That's usually a pretty good sign that summer is, too. Snelling Avenue traffic levels have returned to their usual merely stupid instead of four to six lanes' worth of parking lot. Plus, the obnoxiously inane behavior of local TV station weather reporters has subsided now that these fools are again chained up in their studios where they belong.
Miz Susan and I managed to sneak in a trip to the Fair on the Sunday before Labor Day. We even ran into a handful of people we knew which turns out not to have been all that big a surprise. We were among 165,000-plus saps who turned out for Day 11 of the Great Minnesota Get-Together and Cheese Curds Massacre. Statistically, it would have been nearly impossible not to have known a few other people out there. For the record, I didn't get to eat nearly as much food that's bad for me as I'd hoped I would. I guess that's what next year is for.
And then (a few days after I started this piece), low temps overnight were down into the upper 40s. And into the lower 40s up Grand Forks and Roseau way. And, of course, near freezing for International Falls. Show offs.
The sign of the end of summer which I've liked the most (other than surviving 8,000 community college students looking for my head on a pole because of textbook prices) was seeing Orion for the first time since late last winter. He was off in the southeast at 5:15 this morning, just starting his march up and across the sky. Come midwinter, he'll tower over the night sky but, for now, he's mine alone in the wee small hours.
The sign of winter's approach I like the least is the idiot on the bike I saw today. He was practicing for his stupid winter bicycling behavior by riding with his right hand on the handle bars, texting madly with his left hand and cutting a trail of delicate sine waves eastward up Marshall. He made the right-hand turn onto Fairview, straying no more than 10-12" from the curb as he wobbled around the corner. I'll admit that I advised him that he was a stupid fuck as I went past him toward Selby. He'll do just fine after the streets ice over and darkness falls at 3:45. If it's not snowing, in which case dusk will come at about 2.
And now in mid-October (I started writing this weeks ago), temperatures are back down into the low-50s in the morning but we've had a string of 80+ and 70+ temps over the past couple of weeks. Miz Susan has imsisted that I keep cutting the lawn on a weekly basis when all I really want to do is lay around and channel surf hoping to find a postseason baseball game to ward off the great barren winter of football/hockey/basketball. So far, so good.
I know that the ice and snow and my snow emergency email blasts are waiting in the wings. I'd be fooling myself to think otherwise. But there's still a ray of hope. In our neighborhood, summer's not really over until the Dairy Queen on Snelling closes down shortly before Thanksgiving to make way for the Christmas tree lot. And from that point, it's only four months til DQ opens up again in time to catch the drunks staggering out of O'Gara's on St. Paddy's Day.
I'm predicting a short winter.
There's strong evidence that we've moved into the fall season. We started our fall semester at my beloved North Hennepin Community College. Tons of the books we spent the past three months hauling into the store and piling up on the shelves have now found their way back out the front door in the hands of eager young scholars, most of those presumably having passed by our cash registers. We could argue about the wisdom of starting any fall semester before Labor Day but most everybody's doing it so there doesn't seem to be any going back on the concept.
And Miz Susan's summer break seems to be over. At any rate, she's gone back to getting her brains beat out at her beloved Linwood/Monroe Arts Plus Upper Campus. Again, we could argue over why the Upper Campus is actually down the hill from the Lower Campus but the geniuses who work at 360 Colborne (which is even farther down the hill than the Upper Campus) have got that one set in stone.
The State Fair definitely seems to be over. That's usually a pretty good sign that summer is, too. Snelling Avenue traffic levels have returned to their usual merely stupid instead of four to six lanes' worth of parking lot. Plus, the obnoxiously inane behavior of local TV station weather reporters has subsided now that these fools are again chained up in their studios where they belong.
Miz Susan and I managed to sneak in a trip to the Fair on the Sunday before Labor Day. We even ran into a handful of people we knew which turns out not to have been all that big a surprise. We were among 165,000-plus saps who turned out for Day 11 of the Great Minnesota Get-Together and Cheese Curds Massacre. Statistically, it would have been nearly impossible not to have known a few other people out there. For the record, I didn't get to eat nearly as much food that's bad for me as I'd hoped I would. I guess that's what next year is for.
And then (a few days after I started this piece), low temps overnight were down into the upper 40s. And into the lower 40s up Grand Forks and Roseau way. And, of course, near freezing for International Falls. Show offs.
The sign of the end of summer which I've liked the most (other than surviving 8,000 community college students looking for my head on a pole because of textbook prices) was seeing Orion for the first time since late last winter. He was off in the southeast at 5:15 this morning, just starting his march up and across the sky. Come midwinter, he'll tower over the night sky but, for now, he's mine alone in the wee small hours.
The sign of winter's approach I like the least is the idiot on the bike I saw today. He was practicing for his stupid winter bicycling behavior by riding with his right hand on the handle bars, texting madly with his left hand and cutting a trail of delicate sine waves eastward up Marshall. He made the right-hand turn onto Fairview, straying no more than 10-12" from the curb as he wobbled around the corner. I'll admit that I advised him that he was a stupid fuck as I went past him toward Selby. He'll do just fine after the streets ice over and darkness falls at 3:45. If it's not snowing, in which case dusk will come at about 2.
And now in mid-October (I started writing this weeks ago), temperatures are back down into the low-50s in the morning but we've had a string of 80+ and 70+ temps over the past couple of weeks. Miz Susan has imsisted that I keep cutting the lawn on a weekly basis when all I really want to do is lay around and channel surf hoping to find a postseason baseball game to ward off the great barren winter of football/hockey/basketball. So far, so good.
I know that the ice and snow and my snow emergency email blasts are waiting in the wings. I'd be fooling myself to think otherwise. But there's still a ray of hope. In our neighborhood, summer's not really over until the Dairy Queen on Snelling closes down shortly before Thanksgiving to make way for the Christmas tree lot. And from that point, it's only four months til DQ opens up again in time to catch the drunks staggering out of O'Gara's on St. Paddy's Day.
I'm predicting a short winter.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)