Odds and Ends

Now that this tumultuous year is drawing to a close it's time to lie back, relax and decompress from the political shenanigans that have been so momentous and so fabulously entertaining. The satisfying outcome of the Presidential marathon does not totally erase the shock of seeing everyone's financial value decrease by 30%. But that's "on paper" unless you've panicked, so the future still holds some hope.

But enough of the trivial stuff. I'm talking about the major news stories that will be with us forever. For instance, how about that baby born with a foot in its brain? Yes indeed. Neonatal x-rays revealed a mass in the tiny cerebrum, so after its birth surgeons plowed right in and withdrew a fully formed foot, and a few other well-developed appendages. I repeat. This kid had a foot in his brain. Doctors suggested that it could be the remains of an unformed fetus that somehow disintegrated in the womb during gestation, but the doctor on call speculated that such remains rarely lodged in the brain of the twin. Really? Then what else would you call this? Granted, in mythology, the Goddess of Wisdom wise Minerva supposedly grew out of Zeus's head. And I guess this is the Season of Miracles.

I wouldn't be making light of this if the poor baby was not on the road to a full recovery. But the image (and AOL actually produced the photos) is very hard for me to get my head around. And speaking of heads, AOL also reportd this week about a boy whose head was nearly decapitated (sorry for the redundancy), in a car accident, but was successfully reattached. Elvis may be dead, but Frankenstein apparently lives on.

This is not to mention AOL's picture of the year, of the weird turtle-like creature that emerged and died on a Long Island beach, whose genus has yet to be identified. However, the character of AOL seems to be redefining as the Cyber National Enquirer. It almost embarrasses me to still subscribe to it, albeit only for the e-mail advantages. Otherwise it's the meeting place of American morons, as evidenced by the fact that John McCain would always savage Barack Obama in its presidential polling.

And then there's the baseball season, which I've barely mentioned this year despite my usual fanatical involvement. Weirdness abounded in the ballparks. Let's not forget that Tampa Bay won the pennant, and that the last game of the World Series took three days to complete and barely registered a blip on the national consciousness during our hectic pre-election build-up. And how terrible have the World Series become this decade? There hasn't beena good one since 2002 or a competitive one since 2003. They've become the snooze-a-thons that the Super Bowls used to be, though the latter have actually produced some very exciting contests, including the lovely helmet-catch win of the Giants this last February.

The tedium have something to do with the Yankees, love 'em or hate 'em, falling out of the play-off mix this year, so there was no one interesting for whom to root. Of course now the Yankees have gone bananas trying to correct that condition, with their ginormous contracts to Sabathia, Burnett and Texeira. Amazingly, their payroll next year will be less than in 2008. And they still won't win in the end. Not until Arod leaves the team, around 2016.

Oddest post-election factoid I just discovered: Gayle Quinnell, the Crazy Minnesota Lady who called Obama an "Arab," now supports the guy. This after Joe the Plumber started to diss his sponsor, John McCain. Wonder if McCain still reveres Joe as his role model?

I should put in a word here for what I thought was the coolest innovation of the year--the hologram that invaded CNN studios on Election Night. It gave me the chills of observing something truly of the futuristic variety; my younger self would have been blown away to think that I'd see what Luke did in "A New Hope" when Princess Leia popped out of R2D2's brain. It was cooler even than a foot.

Silly Season

It's become nearly axiomatic that this year the interplay of comedy and politics has been more influential than ever in history. And this includes the anti-Grover Cleveland paternity scandal song "Ma, ma where's my Pa? Gone to the White House ha ha ha". Only frequenters to saloons heard that ditty, though, and every one and his grandma saw all the viral videos of Sarah and Tina and Crazy Minnesota Lady. It's no surprise that this year's most influential TV program was SNL, as its ratings resurgence during the campaign witnessed.

But who'd a thunk that SNL would, in these last weeks of the year, be totally eclipsed by the greatest, grandest onslaught of political humor emerging, almost diabolically, from the flummoxed politicoes themselves? And what image has become more appropriately an iconic summary of Bush's folly in Iraq than his being targeted by a pair of boots? Now it would have been a disaster if Bush had not ducked out of the way, but showing his one real asset--his physical coordination, as he did in his great Yankee Stadium pitch--he managed to keep the incident in the vein of amusement. That he was ignorant of the profound insult implicit in the act rather adds to the merriment, as though he were Margaret Dumont.

Political commentators as well as the late-night regulars have had a rollicking time with the shoe fetish, and it threatens to become more than iconic, even a meme representing general disgust (as in "I hate him but I'm not gonna throw my shoes at him.") That Bush's presidency can be sandwiched between the image of him in front of the "Mission Accompllished" banner and W eluding the footgear says something that historians will certainly laugh at, through their tears.

That indelible image has dimmed our memory of Sarah Palin ghoulishly chattering while a turkey was being slaughtered behind her. For a week around Thanksgiving that was the picture the comics loved, although to be fair, how many of them didn't eat a turkey offed the same way, without even a comrade having been pardoned? But Sarah's profile was not likely to be overshadowed for long, so she trumps out her future son-in-law's mother as an oxycotin fiend.

Sarah's certainly the gift that keeps on giving forever. Now that her conservative supporters have leapt to the compassion side of unwed pregnancy, I wonder if they'll back off a bit on the drug paranoia. Fat chance. But the pundits, especially at the Huffington Post, love that Sarah can now be caught palin' around with a drug trafficker. And there's more in store from her kith and kin, I'm sure.

But they now have competition from from Rod Fucking Blagojevich, whose name it took me two days to master, though it jumped gracefully from Rachel Maddow's lips (well, she called him "F-word"). I finally found a mnemonic device, which was blog-Goya-Vitch. I remembered Goya because I had just a just DVRed a movie called "Goya's Ghost" (and for your sake, don't). Long story short, this Blago guy is a comedy dream, sort of a love child between JFK and Moe of the Three Stooges. And just as insane as that gene combination would have produced. Though in (somewhat ironic) defense of Blago, he did nothing that most other politicians wouldn't do--he just could not filter it out of official conversations. Though he did call the President-elect a Motherfucker. And threaten to extort a children's hospital. And blow up the Sear's Tower if his wife didn't get a manicure. Excuse me, a fucking manicure.

And Eliot Spitzer quit just cause he got a little extra nookie? But speaking of Eliot, comic foil of the Spring, his replacement David Patterson has also reappeared in the comedy club. Specifically, to bring us full circle, in his tasteless parody on SNL, spoofing his legal blindness (and whiny voice). Sure it was tasteless but so spot on that it made Tina Fey's Sarah Palin seem amateurish. Fred Armisen, who only does a passable Obama, was so remarkable that they kept on bringing him on for a running gag as cruel as the W.C. Fields blind man in the china shop.

I felt as though the hilarity of the spoof may be starting to signal the end of the political correctness dicta of modern comedy. We elected a black man so we're off the hook racially for a while. But it's the politicians themselves who keep on raising (or is it lowering) the bar and inviting our contempt. And it's no wonder that Leno got those five prime-time hours.