The I-Man's Blog: Stuff This

I have a lot to be thankful about, and I am.  As many of you know – on second thought, as all of you know – I have prostate cancer and I’m dealing with it holistically. 

The course of treatment is going very well and I’m thankful for that.  I have the best family anybody could possibly wish for and I’m thankful for that. Deirdre’s knowledge, attention to detail and commitment to me are the reasons my disease is in check.  So, I don’t want to seem negative at this cheerful time of year.  Doubtless I will appear to be negative, though, when I explain to you that what I’m not all that thankful for is…Thanksgiving.

And why?  Because the time-honored traditional Thanksgiving table, in addition to being an excessive repast of, basically, cancer-causing agents, is also an entrée to something just short of “parricide;” the formal term for the killing of one’s close relatives. 

Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah and the like all throw utterly dysfunctional people together who spend the rest of the year avoiding contact because each one knows something about the next – some habit, some tic – that makes them crazy, murderous, or both.  Maybe it’s a gas-passing aunt.  Uncle Barton who sucks his teeth.  Some third cousin loser on his ninth can of beer belching candied yam fumes in your face as he hits you up for a loan.  Or worse, some third cousin loser on his ninth can of beer belching candied yam fumes in your face who hasn’t repaid the last loan you gave him that he now distinctly remembers as having been a “gift.”

And another reason to loathe tradition:  Both Thanksgiving and Christmas have to have parades.  New York’s annual Macy’s parade is America’s biggest, most extravagant and unending.  Unless you have some kind of connection to a person or organization actively participating in a parade, there is absolutely no reason to watch one.  Parades are for music masochists who try to convince themselves that they are actually enjoying listening to off key high school bands assault the streets with way too much brass.  And, in the case of the Macy’s parade, freeze to death while they’re at it. Giant cartoon character balloons terrify children and indelibly imprint in their memories.  Or worse.  For example, in one infamous episode, a balloon got whipped by a wind gust, tore down a light standard and caved in the head of a curbside viewer who very nearly watched her last Macy’s Thanksgiving parade ever.  I forget which character delivered the blow that put her in a month-long coma.  Cat in the Hat, I think.

 The only good thing I can recall about a Macy’s parade happened in 2008 when another out-of-control balloon sideswiped the broadcast booth during NBC’s cringingly vacuous live coverage…momentarily, and mercifully, silencing Al Roker and Matt Lauer.  Just not nearly long enough.  Two more reasons I hate Thanksgiving:  Al Roker and Matt Lauer.  I’ll get around to my thoughts regarding the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree later. 

In the meantime, I have no desire to spend time in the kitchen, this holiday season or any other, watching somebody use their bare hands to stick stale breadcrumbs up a dead turkey’s butt.  Which I’m then expected to eat?  No “Thanks.”



The I-Man's Blog: Cruise This

I have not been on a cruise.  I shall not be on a cruise.  Among the myriad reasons why I will never be on a cruise is the episode that befell 4,500 people in the middle of a Carnival Cruise Lines voyage aboard some mega ship named The Splendor, which, as it turns out, was anything but “splendid.” 

The dopey boat’s engine room inexplicably caught on fire…knocking out everything from its motive power to its toilets.  And so it sat, dead in the water, stinking up the Pacific off the Mexican Riviera.  “The Mexican Riviera?”  What the hell is “The Mexican Rivera?”  Someplace, I guess, where the drug cartels are only decapitating around 5 people a day instead of 50.  Besides, haven't the waters off Mexico suffered enough recently?  Apparently not.

Anyway, people who go on cruises mystify me.  What’s the appeal, you just don’t stand enough chance of getting norovirus or some other non-bacterial outbreak of gut-wrenching gastroenteritis at home so you want to jump on board a floating “food poison prison” and guarantee it? 

Given the recent, and continuing, history of the cruise industry it seems to me that that’s pretty much what the whole enterprise entails:  Being trapped in a portajohn next to a food stand serving rancid chimichangas at a street fair packed with fat drunks throwing up on each other 24-hundred miles from home…listening to a 56-year-old Elvis impersonator, who failed in Vegas, take a meat cleaver to “Heartbreak Hotel” – and getting to pay a couple of grand for “5 days/4 nights” of, basically, waterborne rat vomit.  Dear god. 

And these poor slobs – our 45-hundred “cruisers” – actually wound up having to be rescued by a United States Navy Nuclear Aircraft Carrier to keep from starving to death…after the brie, and 5,000 calorie cuts of Filet Mignon, all went south because the “Splendor’s” refrigerators conked out when the generators seized. 

Sounds great. Where do I sign up?   No thanks.  I’ll be busy that week shoving sheetrock screws in my nostrils.

The I-Man's Blog: Pelosi Out, Boehner In

BoehnerDon’t worry.  In two years we get to vote these bastards out.  Of course, not a great deal gets done in this manner, but, if you are familiar with my thinking, this is “just the way it is.” Happens every couple of years and it has happened again: We have just exchanged one set of crooks for another set of crooks.

So, Republicans make gains in the Senate and will take control of the House.  Wonderful.  The only visible change will be the absence of a woman at the Speaker’s rostrum who appears to be mummified, and the debut there of a man who appears to have been dipped in emulsified Cheez-Its. Nancy Pelosi, out; John Boehner, in. 

You thought Ms. Pelosi was a long day?  They’ll have to come up with a new method of telling time to measure Boehner’s capacity to wear you out.  And it already started with that horrifying display of blubbering the other night when Boehner was addressing his supporters at the Grand Hyatt in Washington. How many people in that room do you think were saying to themselves, as Boehner went all “Mike Schmidt” on them, “and I actually voted for this pansy?”  That was gruesome.  Talk about needing to “man up.”  Jesus.  The guy is going to be second in line for the Oval Office, for godssake…  And he’s crying?  Explain to me what message that sends to Bin Laden. 

And every last one of these new people is swearing that they won’t be joining the Washington culture club.  Incorruptible.  “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”  But there, waiting for “Mr. Smith,” is Trent Lott.  Washington’s answer to Don Vito Corleone. He’s already said – already – that he’s salivating at the thought of co-opting these doofusses within seconds of them landing on Capitol Hill.  How’s that work?  There’s a knock on “Aqua Buddha” Rand Paul’s Senate office door…he opens it…and there stands the equivalent of Luca Brasi saying, “We need to talk.” 

The bottom line isn’t complicated: The faces are changing.  But not their two-faced nature.  And the chances of anything actually improving, sadly, are just about zero. 

So, when fugly Frank Luntz or some other pollster approaches you two years down the road and asks whether you’re “better off today than you were in 2010,” you can feel confident in replying, “Yes,” if your previous address was Mogadishu.

The I-Man's Blog: Penis, at f/5.6

I never really thought a great deal about how attractively my penis might photograph.  But now, I find myself thinking about things like “penis lighting” and “penis background,” “penis angle” and “context,” and so on. 

Annie LiebovitzI’m also wondering who might be the best penis photographer to consider for such a very personal project – a Diane Arbus type, with her ability to look beyond the superficial?  A Richard Avedon sort, with his show-every-hair-follicle approach to portraiture?  Annie Liebovitz, maybe, with her vivid and distinctive style and the added attribute that, unlike the others mentioned, she’s not dead yet?  Maybe a landscape master, a devotee of Ansel Adams to properly capture the sweep and grandeur of my very own “spectacular natural monument?”

This recent, but expanding idea of snapping a picture of one’s own penis and then firing it off to a woman you’d like to date – often whom you barely, if at all, know – is puzzling.  But, since a lot of  “owners-and-operators” of penises seem to be doing it, I don’t want to just dismiss the idea out of hand. 

Just days ago, news came out about a department supervisor at Atlanta’s New Birth Missionary Baptist Church showing a cell phone picture of his “Little Deacon” to a fellow church employee, a woman, who didn’t exactly swoon at the proposition. That’s Bishop Eddie Long’s church. He wasn’t the penis presenter in this instance, but, what the heck kind of church is New Birth Missionary?  What’s “the mission,” for crying out loud?  How about making “the mission” keeping your pants zipped for five minutes?   

Anyway, among the latest “persons of note” to compose a picture of his penis and hit “send” is  – allegedly – Brett Favre.  Snapped a photo of “Little Brett” and sent it to Jenn Sterger, a former Maxim model and, at the time, a sideline reporter for the New York Jets.  I confess I don’t understand the whole “dong photo” deal.  I can tell you, without any fear of contradiction, that there are no photos of  “Little Donny” out there anywhere – in the blogosphere or any place else.   

I spoke about this whole phenomenon the other day on the Imus program, wondering aloud if anybody actually believes that a graceful strategy for making an overture to a woman – is to send her a picture of your penis?  As I also said, remarkably, the answer to some degree must be, “yes.”  Because there’s so much “sexting” of penises going on that some people must actually be receptive to the idea: “Oh look!  Brett Favre, the football player, emailed me a picture of his penis.  I sure hope he calls me and marries me and eventually impregnates me by means of that very same photogenic organ.” 

What the hell is going on here?  Does Brett, or whomever, think that Jenn, or whomever, is going to take that photograph – frame it – and put it on display atop the parlor piano alongside pictures of the family?  “There’s mom.  That’s dad.  Grandma Kate.  Uncle Ike.  Cousin Judy. Brett Farve’s penis. And my nephew, Joey.”   Or maybe tape it up on the refrigerator with your six-year-old’s crayola stick-figure renderings and butterfly representations.  How nice.  We’ve got a winged bug, someone who looks like Karen Carpenter, and...“That photo that appears to be a Jimmy Dean ‘Skinless Turkey Sausage Link’ hanging out of a blackberry thicket?  That’s Brett Favre’s junk.”   Great.

My brother Fred and I once did a book of photography that featured pretty pictures of the desert southwest, “Two Brothers Four Corners.”  I think that’s sufficient.  I really can’t envision a book entitled, “Two Brothers Two Penises.”  Not only inappropriate, but given our sometimes “aggressive” personalities, it could be misconstrued.

The I-Man's Blog: "I'm Not a Witch"

And too bad. Because Halloween’s the 31st.  I don’t know about you, but I’d say Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell renounced the Occult a little too early. 

 The latest Fox News “state poll” out this week shows Ms. O’Donnell has failed to pick up a single point on her Democrat opponent, Chris Coons, and is going to get clobbered.  If she’d maintained the witch thing a few days longer, maybe she could at least have locked up the October demon vote.  But, “political correctness” got in the way, she went wobbly, bailed on her “banshee base” and got talked into doing that humiliating  “I’m not a witch but I am on Quaaludes” TV ad in which she appeared to be in a Middle-earth, Hogwarts, Cheech and Chong, “chasing the dragon” Smack trance.  It didn’t help. 

Actually, she did what I am often accused of doing:  Going whichever way the wind happens to be blowing at any given moment.  I dispute that.

In fact, I believe Ms. O’Donnell should have stuck with her “inner fiend.”  We’ve never had a witch run for congress, Nancy Pelosi notwithstanding, and god knows the country could stand some genuine wizardry given where things are.  “Hope and change,” so far, sucks.  Could  “Hex and Hoodoo” be any worse?  I doubt it. 

And now they’re “debating.”  Christine and Mr. Coons.  Jesus.  How can that possibly end well?  Chris Coons went to Amherst, got a B.A. in chemistry and political science, earned a Truman Scholarship, a J.D. from Yale Law and a Master’s in ethics from Yale Divinity.  Christine appears to have gone nowhere beyond the online “College of the Sacred Mists of Yore” and basically makes Sarah Palin look like a cross between Margaret Thatcher and Socrates.  So “representational argument” of any sort may not be her long suit.

All of which makes you wonder, really, how in god’s name did she manage to beat congressman and former governor Mike Castle in the primary in the first place?  Unless, of course, she is a witch.

So here’s my bottom line:  As a New York resident, I agree with the folks who are lamenting the fact that they never seem to get their very own self-aggrandizing, non-masturbating, delusional, pathologically peculiar and utterly offensive politician to vote against in their home states.   …Wait a minute:  We’ve got Chuck Schumer.  Never mind.