Jim Hodgson | Trying my best to enjoy life. Updates every weekday!

Hermitar!

By jim | Published: February 8, 2010

An associate of mine, who shall remain nameless because I let slip to her some sensitive hermitage-related details, successfully talked me into leaving my lair and viewing a film on Saturday night. I figured I was going to be the recipient of some hermit-related chiding, so I decided to head that off at the pass.

I drove to her apartment building and hunkered down in the lobby to wait for her to emerge wearing a trench coat, fedora, and huge dark sunglasses. I thought the concierge might have a thing or two to say about me lurking and having every appearance of a charlatan, but he merely regarded me briefly and went back to concierge-ing.

It would have been even more appropriate to appear swaddled entirely in animal skins and smeared with the ashes of a wood fire, but I didn’t think of that until too late, and anyway it was too cold to be prancing around barefoot.

It’s tough to find a casual shoe that matches animal skins.

Finally my associate came down and discovered me lurking in my hermit-away-from-hermitage getup, and then sat on me and hugged me and we were away.

You don't know me, you never saw me, I wasn't here, medium popcorn please.

The upshot of all this is that I finally saw Avatar in 3D this weekend. I’m glad I saw it before it left the big screen. I might have had some trouble making sure that not one of the Na’vi has nipples on my home TV. But no, they are completely nipple-free, which destroys one of my criteria for a good movie. Namely, naked girls.

James Cameron has wisely forced everyone to wear nerdy black spectacles when watching the movie, so that your subconscious nerd feels glad to be seeing scantily clad alien babes rather than full nude alien babes. It’s a swindle, people!

The movie does have a lot of flying creatures swooping around, which I am willing to accept as a stand-in for a car chase, and a lot of rounds of ammunition get fired off, so those two criteria are certainly met.

However, it also has a lot of the Papyrus font in the titles and subtitles, which rubs me slightly the wrong way, like getting a warm hug from someone who burps loudly at the end.

Still, it was good to see the film, and good to get out of the house, though I forced my associate to promise not to tell anyone I said that. I also drank a huge soda and ate popcorn, though I can still only chew with one side of my teeth thanks to my recent dental nightmare.

I was glad to get to use the soda cup filling robots in the theater as well. You use a touch screen to select the flavor of your future fatness, then press a huge button and the machine pees a finger-thick torrent of the stuff directly into your cup. It is marvelous. I bet kids love it.

All things considered, I had a great time and enjoyed the movie.

I assume there will be an “Empire Strikes Back” style sequel to come in the next few years, and I look forward to it as well.

I’ll go the animal skins and wood ash route for that one.

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A Tool to Deceive and Slather

By jim | Published: February 5, 2010

I have been wondering aloud lately when its going to stop being so rainy in hopes that the weather will take heed and knock it off. Sometimes I shape my thoughts into a prayer in case there are weather gods listening. So far it has not had any effect.

I realize I am not being scientific when I anthropomorphize the weather any more than I am being a good writer when I add “ize” to any word I find laying about, but when you have chosen the life of a hermit as I have sometimes objects around you become your friends. Having said that, it’s true too that my hermit membership is under close scrutiny by the Hermit League these days for a few reasons.

First, because I’ve situated my hermit lair inside the largest metropolitan area in my region, second because I go outside often to ride bikes and to run or to hang out with friends, and lastly and most importantly because I have failed to pay my dues.

Still, it’s easy sometimes to feel that the weather is against me. I just checked the radar for my region and I saw this:

Luckily my exercise plans for today were in the pre-dawn hours inside the cycling training cave. I was somewhat disappointed to learn that it was an easy paced day today, but it turned into a lot of technique building work which I desperately need. I have all the cycling finesse of a blowtorch-wielding sado-dentist.

Now I’m at my desk and ready to get cracking on my work for the day, but I am fighting a lot of distractions. First of all, I am starting a tradition I’m calling High Culture Fridays where I take a break from work on each Friday to go to the High Museum to absorb some culture. I have a tiny but growing art collection at my house, limited somewhat though it is by wall space in my hermit lair as well as by my finances.

It seems that at least one enterprising artist has solved both of these problems by inventing a piece of artwork that continually sells itself on eBay. This way it not only conserves space by not being around your house for very long, but you also might make more on it than you bought it for a week ago. The current listing for the device isn’t very forthcoming with info, but you can at least see that it’s not cheap.

I’m tempted to buy it, but I’d need the price to come down a bit.

Or I could just raise money by auctioning off the rights to scribe someone’s name on my ass.

What a state our economy has gotten into these days! One might even call it beautiful and yet tragic, like a pretty girl with a huge misspelled tattoo on her chest.

See? I am responsible! Take that, DAD!

Take care out there and have a great weekend, my friends!

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A Man, A Tooth, A Canal, Dentistry!

By jim | Published: February 4, 2010

I am lucky, I think, to have so far enjoyed a relatively pain-free existence. I’m talking about physical pain here, not the emotional pain that a man feels when when a new ding appears in his car’s paint, or when he’s forced to spend his new bike fund on dental work.

It’s true I’ve had my nose broken by someone else’s head, and one of my fingers has been cut off and sewn back on, but nothing horribly painful has happened. To date, no buildings have collapsed on me such as they have upon the Haitians.

If I were set upon by such a calamity, however, I can only hope that Clinton’s Bush would be standing by to assist (I’m poking fun at our former Presidents, but donate to their Haiti relief effort if you can).

Still I feel I do know what pain feels like. As a bike racer and marathoner, albeit of a certain “huskyness” shall we say, pain is kind of something I do for fun.

The last time I stepped into my dentist’s office, I was prepared to endure rather a lot of pain, but I was surprised to find that the whole process was painless and even sort of interesting academically. It’s not often one lies in a chair looking up at another human being who is wearing a plastic mask flecked with chips of one’s own teeth. After that experience I left feeling good about the whole thing and sort of impressed with how dentistry has come along since I was a kid.

So yesterday I went to my dentist’s place of business expecting sort of a hassle, but not any real pain. When I got there, however, I was told that my dentist was out on maternity leave and that a replacement would be working on me in her stead. I looked down the hall, and he was seated with his back to me at a full pipe organ in a red-lit room with large stained glass windows.

He played some very ominous chords, hunching over the organ, and then threw his head back and laughed as a terrific bolt of lightning illuminated the windows. Then my ex girlfriend joined him on the piano bench and they made out passionately and stabbed pins into a tiny doll that looked like me.

“She never loved you!” he screamed.

Then he purchased my apartment building from my landlord and had me evicted, throwing my bikes and golf clubs onto the sidewalk, where he urinated on them.

Once he returned from that, he sat in a rolly chair and wheeled over to me. I was lying on my back, listening to the opening heartbeats of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. I couldn’t wait to get the gas party started.

The dentist was clanking around with various implements and pulling on rubber gloves, but he didn’t seem to be turning on any gas-related machines. I didn’t want to be rude, but I decided I’d better make it plain that gas would be totally fine with me. So, I mentioned politely that if it were an option, he could bring it on.

He laughed uncomfortably and said no, there would be no gas today.

What the fuck, please? No gas today?

I was upset, but I decided to not be a pussy about it. After all, I’m not a dentist, what do I know? Maybe it’s not so bad.

He started by attaching some sort of metal clamp to my mouth which had a latex rubber frisbee stuck to it. That hurt like hell pretty much right off the bat, and I said as much. He removed the weird frisbee and needled me (ouch) in the roof of the mouth, numbing things more. Then he replaced it.

The new numbness didn’t stop the rest of my hour and a half at the dentist from being very painful indeed. At first I made noises whenever it hurt to make it clear that whatever was going on wasn’t pleasant, but after a while it became clear that these cries did nothing, so I just breathed deeply and tried to get through it.

He explained that he was having to poke tools and implements deep into my jaw, past where he had numbed, and that’s why it was hurting. He even joked about it. I kid you not; on one occasion when he jabbed something and I jerked and inhaled sharply he said “Felt that one, huh?”.

Now, again, I am not a dentist, but I have to wonder why it was not possible to numb that area in addition to the areas already numbed.

Pain aside, I think he tried every tool they have on me. There was even one point where a blowtorch was used to heat up a metal probe which was then jabbed at my tooth. This is not a fabrication. There was a blowtorch.

After an eternity of painful tooth jabbing, there was a second eternity. Then a third and fourth eternities were brought in from elsewhere in the building just to make sure. A fifth eternity arrived by courier, and that’s when it really started to take a long time.

After a final flourish where my dentist leaped up onto my prone body as though he were riding a surf board and brandished a flaming blowtorch in either hand, it was over. He leaped off me and bounded down the hall, presumably to debase me publicly on the internet.

I got up and the dental tech guy and I sort of looked at one another. I felt tired, drained.

He shook his head sadly and gave me an apologetic look. “I tried to help,” he said.

As if in a daze, I walked down the short hallway to the desk where the pretty girls sit. They were somber, looking at me with sad eyes. I said my goodbyes and started to leave, but they stopped me.

I have to come back next Wednesday.

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Don’t let it go to your Head Cheney

By jim | Published: February 3, 2010

The Snuggie has become a very important cultural item in recent months, and as you already know I was quite happy to receive one for Christmas. However, like any good hermit, I have been lounging about my underground lair in animal skins for years. To my mind, these are sort of like an old school Snuggie.

In fact I consider the only difference between my lounging pelts and the Snuggie to be that the Snuggie was a gift, and I had to subdue the former owners of the pelts in armed combat.

That said, in a few short moments I am going to cast off my lounging pelts and Snuggie, extinguish my Meerschaum pipe, clothe myself, and head down to my dentist’s office for some intoxicating gas and head drilling. It seems that the root canal I received a while back has gone rogue and threatens to turn my entire skull against me with the fearsome resolve and political might of a thousand 1970’s Dick Cheneys.

Moments after this photo was taken, Cheney ate the two men in the background.

I expressed a great deal of concern over these matters to my dental hygienist. Apparently I looked so sad that it made him nervous. He patted me on the shoulder.

“You ok?” He asked. “You gonna cry?”

As if I would cry over teeth! No… I was depressed over the expense! I think it also could have been my brief exposure to daytime television while I was in the chair. There was a judge show on. It was one of the stupidest things I have ever seen, and I have read my poetry.

Here’s a haiku I have composed for my cute upstairs neighbor:
O Upstairs Cutie,
You see me in tight bike clothes
I look a huge douche

You can tell regular prose from poetry because the author presses return (or “enter” for those of you born too recently) too often, and you see words like “O” instead of “Oh” and “O’er” instead of “Over” and “Lass” instead of “Be-otch”.

Compounding matters a bit is the fact that I have a meeting to attend later in the day and I need to appear to be friendly and competent. Normally I achieve this through carrying a clipboard at all times and tap dancing during my presentations, but that may prove difficult today depending on the effects of whatever sedatives I am compelled to ingest while the dentist impeaches my head Cheney.

WMDs? More like WM DEEZ, son! -Actual Dick Cheney Quote (not actual Dick Cheney quote)

So, it should be an interesting day. I hope you are enjoying yours as well!

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Raised by Wolves, an open letter to a pretty girl on the sidewalk

By jim | Published: February 2, 2010

Dear pretty girl on the sidewalk,

I am sorry for scaring you; I will say that to begin with. I think it’s your responsibility to look where you’re going when you are traipsing blithely out of a boutique, but I was raised to be considerate toward women so I feel responsible.

First of all, you must understand that I am an animal. I lack whatever higher brain functions differentiate homo sapiens from abject beasthood, though I do boast opposable thumbs. I was raised by wolves.

Actually that’s not true, I was adopted and raised by two loving and devoted parents of considerable culture and intelligence. I could not have asked for better. But sometimes I feel like I was raised by wolves. I don’t seem to be able to do things the regular way all the time.

You traipsed in front of me on the sidewalk after dark, swinging your arms widely, and I was in the middle of my tempo run, and I had to gallop to a stop to avoid tackling you, making a lot of stomping noises in the process. You screamed and looked very scared. Sorry about that.

Also I may have glared at you. My bad!

It’s easy to forget that when you are of a certain height and weight and general size you can be physically imposing to some. A glare that might be merely impetuous on the face of a man of a slighter build could seem to be menacing on the face of a larger man.

Actually I am interested to know what it’s like to be willowy and pretty like you, maybe just for a day. If it means I have to scream and cover my mouth all wide-eyed when unexpected things happen, maybe it’s not that great, but you know… the grass is always greener.

Also, and I don’t mean this by way of excuse, when I’m running like that I sort of enter a red haze. I can’t see all that well. I have to turn my iPod up pretty much as far as it will go in order to be able to discern it from the noise of blood and lymphatic fluid burbling and farting around my innards. In short, on occasions like this, if I turned up Van Halen any louder I’m reasonably certain that my liquified brain would squirt forth from my tear ducts. So, maybe I wasn’t paying attention as much as I could have been.

Do you think that “squorth” has a future as a verb, as a replacement for “squirt forth”?

Anyway I am sorry I scared you. I hope you won’t think badly of me or of runners in general.

Your friend,
Jim Hodgson
(raised by wolves)

P.S. It’s not always Van Halen.

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Starting my Religious Cult… Join Today!

By jim | Published: February 1, 2010

I have always wanted to be the leader of a religious cult. Not because I have visions, or because God speaks to me — no. It’s just because I want to tell people what to do. So I went looking around over the weekend for some information on what to look out for when just starting out in cult leadership.

Naturally, I turned first to that indisputable planet of knowledge: Wikipedia. It says that David Koresh, cult leader of the Branch Davidians, used his powers to first announce that he was going to marry one of the cult members of his choosing in keeping with his strict views on monogamy, and then a few years later announced that everyone should be monogamous except him. He was allowed to have all the action he wanted.

Now that’s what I call cult leadership. In my mind, getting women to agree to no-strings-attached sex is the ultimate symbol that a cult leader has arrived. If you haven’t achieved it yet as a cult leader, then either your teachings are weak or you lack resolve.

But being the leader of such an organization is not without pitfalls. According to my research, the most important thing that a conscientious leader must avoid is looking silly. After all, there is a fine line between gathering the trappings of divinity around one’s self and wearing a bathrobe with a little tinsel stapled to it. One makes you look regal, and the other… does not.

In fact this applies to any public figure, but there are those who are so relevant that they flaunt this rule. Just off the top of my head I can think of three people who are free to wear whatever ridiculous outfit they want at any time with no fear of looking silly. They are Prince, the Pope, and Lady Gaga.

Hear no evil, See no evil, Wear no evil.

Even today, cults and political extremist groups find themselves looking silly all the time. Of course, racism and bigotry are no laughing matters, but it’s hard not to laugh along with Wyatt Cenac’s interviews from The Daily Show of people effusing on national television that it is their God-given American right to keep gay people who love each other from being married.

In fact there is one religious cult who has made a career out of hating gays. People know them. They’re kind of a big deal. They often participate in public demonstrations of hate, or hate-offs, and last week the target was Twitter’s offices in San Francisco. I am reluctant to say the name of their organization or link to them because they don’t deserve whatever meager traffic my blog might send their way, but anyone who Googles around a bit can find out who it was.

Now it seems to me that if you hate old people, you probably shouldn’t spend a lot of time in Florida. If you dislike Australian twenty-somethings you should never go to London, and if you hate gays you shouldn’t be hanging about in San Francisco.

Still, hatemongers have a lot of hate to… um… monger, and I guess that’s how these guys found themselves outside Twitter’s offices with hate signs, which I’m told are formally known as Placards of Displeasure. The only problem was that the cultists trying at all costs to not look silly were met there by a group of silly people trying to look like a cult.

Rookie mistake, cultists!

This image is absurd enough, but I want to know what the lady in the red wife beater has against burgers. Not to be rude, but she doesn’t look like she has any particular aversions to food of any kind.

It's the way that I move, the things that I do, oh oh oh!

Wait a minute, are burgers gay? Is someone trying to gay marry a burger? I don’t get it.

Moving on, you can bet your sweet hindsides that my cult will never ever be caught accidentally looking like a bunch of fools. Toward this end, I will continue to personally do foolish things so that I can always claim I meant to look like a retard should a serious endeavor fall short.

Now the only thing I need is a name. I want it to be something that conveys seriousness and warmth, so the word “hot” should be in there I think, but I also want potential followers to know that I will cradle them lovingly and carry them along, like a bag or a tote of some kind.

So, who wants to join my new cult, Hot Sack of Jim?

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Goodbye Jersey Shore, a sad Situation

By jim | Published: January 29, 2010

I have been watching the Jersey Shore over the last few weeks, and I must say it’s been a roller coaster ride of thrills and excitement. I’ve developed emotional investment in the people on the show, which might represent a depth of character that they themselves can’t manage, but whatever. It’s not like I have to hang out with them in person.

Having said that, by far my favorite character is “The Situation”.

Among other names, at first he considered calling himself "The Dealio"

I’m not sure why, but I think it’s because he seems to have an approach to women that could be called dogged persistence. He’s not afraid to power through every number he gets, even when the rate of success is pretty low. He may even have picked some of them at random from the phone book on the off chance that a single girl will answer.

He seemed to take a sort of spokesman role for the other members of the house as well, whether they wanted him to or not. The Situation knows that effective leadership can not be burdened with things like consensus or the will of the people. A leadership role must be assumed or usurped — and then made into a mockery of itself.

He also avoided a lot of the legal drama that comes with involving one’s self in a physical altercation. The Situation doesn’t have time for fighting. Though one of the female cast members did knock him in the face, he never threw any blows himself despite serious provocation. He declined to walk her back to the hotel room in Atlantic City because he was busy chatting up a comely lass. Despite the fact that the cast member in question was a grown woman and could presumably walk herself anywhere, she saw his reluctance to leave the club as cause for violence.

In short, he embodies the “Lover not a fighter” ideal… which is why I was so upset to learn that The Situation made out with Snooki on the last regular episode of the show.

I call the "Situation" brewing in this hot tub "Mistake Soup"

Snooki, as you may recall, has been described as a cross between a goblin and another goblin, which is not a very nice way of talking about someone, especially since she was dealt her fair share of blows during the course of the show. She got hit once by a drunken man, and a second time by a large charging girl.

In the words of Dj Pauly D, “Someone needs to teach her how to fight, or duck”.

The world comes at you fast, I think we can all agree. We all need to learn to either fight or duck, but most importantly, we need to learn to never settle. Or at least not to do it when there is a camera crew around. Come on, The Situation… that’s rookie stuff!

And so, on a sad note we say goodbye to our Italian-American friends from the Jersey Shore, but the legal ramifications and tanning-bed-induced skin cancer live on.

That, plus whatever skin rashes and shame one contracts from romantic contact with a goblin.

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The only way to win is not to pay… for dental care

By jim | Published: January 28, 2010

I woke up this morning at 4:18 AM with a toothache. Soon after, wary thanks to my last toothache a few months ago, my wallet also began to throb with the pain of impending large unforseen expenditure.

No wonder dentists all have such nice bikes. As soon as you reach an age where you can start making some real money, your teeth all explode into an aurora borealis of pain.

So currently the pain management center in my brain has two emergencies to worry about what with my shoulder-based attack on a tree from Tuesday night and now this tooth fiasco.

I’m not a doctor, but is all that medical training they’re required to go through really necessary? I think you can just put a digital camera up to your ear and take a photo of the insides and get a fair idea of what your brain is working on. So, that’s what I did.

Who needs a medulla oblongata when you can have Dabney Coleman?

As you can see here, the tiny version of NORAD that makes up the control center of my brain is currently dealing with the pain threats in red text, in addition to the smaller standing concerns listed in green. I’ve also been thinking about cycling hottie Liz Hatch and television hottie Christina Hendricks lately it seems.

In fact I’m concerned for cycling hottie Liz Hatch because her twitter indicates as I type this that her legs and ass are looking “puffy”. This is not good. If there’s anything the world needs it is more cycling women, not less. How are we going to get more girls on bikes with you telling everyone it makes your legs and ass puffy, Liz? Come on!

It’s true, she’s saying that the condition was caused by being off the bike, not on it, but I still think its a bit of a marketing blunder for female cycling as a whole.

Now that I think of it I am without any good ideas on how to market cycling to women. I broached the subject of finding a bike for a previous girlfriend of mine and she impressed upon me that should we find one for her, she didn’t intend to ride it in the road, only on sidewalks or in the park. That’s like buying a private plane and only ever using it to taxi around a runway.

So, I gave up the bike-for-girlfriend idea altogether, and a few months later she gave up on the girlfriend-for-Jim idea. Such is life.

If only I could convince my tooth to give up on the incessant-hurting idea without spending money on the fee-for-dentist idea, life would be that much better!

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The Cycling Burrito… from HELL

By jim | Published: January 27, 2010

I very much enjoy riding bikes, as anyone who reads my incoherent ravings surely knows, which is why I found myself putting on nearly every piece of warm cycling-related clothing I own last night despite the temperature. It was 42 degrees out, and dropping.

When I’m wearing my tight spandex cycling clothing, I refer to myself as the multicolored sausage, but the whole experience felt a bit more like a cycling burrito… from Hell!

Artist's conception. Not actual images of Hell or Burrito.

There are many layers of hell, an idea which has its roots in religious thought, not least of which being Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. First, you need cold weather. This is the tortilla of our hellish burrito, in which all other ingredients will be wrapped, or, to use more biblical-sounding language, swaddled.

Next, our Cycling Burrito from Hell (henceforth CBFH) needs the meat, which in this case would be cycling. Like meat, cycling is pretty great no matter what. It can me super awesome, or underwhelming, but most of the time I’d rather have it than not. I spent the meat of my evening with my friends Chris and Jason, swearing and falling off my mountain bike as the swaddling temperature dipped toward freezing and below.

Unknown to me previously, the city is crisscrossed with an underground network of mountain bike trails. Seemingly every patch of woods in town, no matter how small, has a trail scratched into it. Some follow the city’s drainage ditches and have the unmistakable odor of sewage. Some are meant to be walking and jogging trails, and some had the telltale footprints of recent urban outdoorsman passage, but due to the recent never-ending torrents of rain we’ve had, they were all muddy.

I wrecked trying to ride through an exceptionally muddy section, falling over with my lower body in freezing muddy water and delivering a solid hit to a nearby tree with my shoulder. At times like that, I wonder to myself “Am I enjoying this?”.

I did not realize it at the time, but I was experiencing the second and third most important CBFH layers, pain and humility.

Anyone considering riding a mountain bike on the in-town trails in Atlanta should be shown a photo of me cold, muddy, and pissed. If they still want to ride, they should be cracked on the shoulder with a frying pan to simulate my wreck.

If they still want to go after all that, they should be dressed warmly, wished good luck, and sent on their way lest their dementia spread.

After a hearty sample of the Cycling Burrito from Hell they’re about to chow down on, they may think twice next time.

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Obama and his Giant Teleprompters

By jim | Published: January 26, 2010

Even though I work as a marketer, I dislike advertising. I could not be happier about being rescued from the clutches of commercial radio by MP3s because it means I don’t have to listen to the ridiculous ads. I get to listen to what I want to hear whenever I want to hear it. For instance, lately I only listen to Nickelback’s latest hit twice an hour instead of twenty times.

What a great liberty it is to finally have some ability as a consumer to control who can blab at me and who can’t!

I also can’t stand regular network TV for the same reasons. Whenever there’s a commercial break and the sponsors jack up the volume to make sure I hear their incisive jingle about panty liners, I start scanning the room for a blunt instrument with which to bludgeon the television, or a window to leap out of.

Still, every now and then when I find myself outside the warm and cozy recesses of Hodgson Compound during the morning hours, I tune in to my local radio station’s morning show. Such was the case this morning as I drove back from my 6am cycling workout. They were discussing the latest minor scandal of the executive office.

Apparently our president, Barack Obama, gave a speech at an elementary school in Virginia and brought in the whole ensemble, including a podium and teleprompters.

The next one of you who raises his hand is going to be shot dead by the man behind me. Got that? Good.

It seems that there are those who consider his use of the teleprompters excessive, even decrying his oratory abilities on the evidence that he needs such a crutch to give a speech to children. I think those people must have forgotten what it’s like to be a kid.

I try to think back to how I would have reacted when I was but a wee lad to the President visiting my school. This is fairly easy, since I mature emotionally in reverse dog years, or one year for every seven. So, I wonder: would I want Obama to come to my school as he did with all the trappings and trimmings, or would I want him to do it all informal-like and sit in a chair?

As far as I remember, the thing I most wanted when I was a kid was to be is older and bigger, and one of the things I hated most is being treated like a kid. If anything, I would want the President to bring in even more equipment, just like he might for the speeches the he might give to my parents. It couldn’t hurt to toss in some FBI guys in tactical gear with automatic machine guns prowling around as well.

Actually, scratch the FBI guys. Let’s make them Marines or Navy SEALs. Yeah. Hell yeah!

Nothing against you, FBI. You are awesome too, but for sheer coolness of gear the Marines and SEALs have you beat.

I remember Bush caught a lot of crap for the whole Mission Accomplished speech on the aircraft carrier thing, and I agree that it seemed a little hollow. His mistake was pulling that stunt for cynical skeptical adults. What he should have done is staged it in front of a sea of squirming kids, maybe shooting an automatic weapon in either hand as a nearby battleship fired a full broadside. Now that’s a speech I can get behind!

Hell, I don’t know. I’m not a political genius, but I do know that there’s plenty of time for being treated like a kid when you are one, and maybe not enough time for getting to see how the big boys do things before you’re too cynical to be awed by it.

I say well done, Mr President!

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