Big Mike: It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad....

The Loved One was reclining on the living room sofa, gazing out the window at the lush Kentucky greenery as we chatted. One cat was nestled in the crook of her arm, another in the crook of her leg. She should have been as relaxed as the government regulations that have led to our current economic mess.

We were, in fact, talking about the economy, in addition to the wars, the environment and the overall state of the union - all of which, we agree, had been criminally mismanaged by George W. Bush and his consiglieres.

I'm glad we agree on such basic issues. I can't imagine sharing bathroom space, dinner dishes and the living room sofa with someone whose political views are as dissimilar as, say, those of Mary Matalin and James Carville. I recall when this horrifying two-headed gargoyle first made news, back in the early 90s. They were celebrated for their purported all-consuming love that overcame any differences they might have had regarding such trivialities as capital punishment, abortion, lending a hand to those in need and killing brown people for the sake of inexpensive gasoline. In fact, there were even a movie and a TV program based on their laugh-a-minute media personae.

So, despite the two of us singing to each other's choir, The Loved One seemed tense, almost bubbling over with ire.

"Didja hear that report on NPR this week?" she asked.

"No, which?"

"The one about the American woman in Iraq."

"Tell me all."

The Loved One raised herself up on her elbows. "It makes me so mad, I could..., I could...," she fumed. She paused for a moment to find the right words.

"Go on," I said.

"Well, she worked for Halliburton."

"Yeah, Dick Cheney's old outfit."

"The things I could do to Dick Cheney...," she spluttered.

"Uh huh."

"She went outside the barracks for a drink with four other Halliburton people, all men. One of them handed her a beer. She took a few sips and she was unconscious, just like that."

"They roofied her?"

"Yeah. Then they raped her, front and back. They manhandled her breasts so badly that they're deformed now. She woke up and one of the guys was still there, sleeping. She tried to get them prosecuted but guess what - private contractors in Iraq can't be prosecuted for crimes they commit there.

"It makes me so mad! She's there trying to protect the people of Iraq but who protects her - from her own people?"

"My god."

"Here's what I want to do," The Loved One said through narrowed eyes. "I'd like to sneak into Dick Cheney's house in disguise and torture him. You know how he doesn't think torture is all that bad, right? Only I'd do to him what those guys did to that woman and I'd make sure he was awake for it all. I'd want him to feel it all!"

Normally, The Loved One is the picture of compassion and sensitivity (except when we argue; but, I admit, I can enrage even a lamb at times.) For this brief moment, though, she was the emotional sibling of my next door neighbor Captain Billy, who regularly rages about Mexicans, Democrats, Arabs and other miscreants who, in his view, ought to be slaughtered.

The whole world seems to be mad. Kim Jong Il is waving his primitive little nukes around like a four-year-old displaying his penis. The Taliban is blowing up innocents in Pakistan. The Jews and the Palestinians, natch, are still at it. al Qaeda's probably cooking up some kind of perverse birthday cake for us at this very minute. And pasty, jowly, bilious white men like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly are shrieking at us every day on radio and TV, whipping the anencephalic dopes of this nation (of whom there are a scary many) into action.

You think the recent killings at a Marine recruitment center, a doctor's church in Omaha and the National Holocaust Museum are flukes? I'm afraid they're trumpet blasts for opposing cavalries. I'm afraid, period. When I say the whole world seems to be mad, I mean both angry and insane.

The world occasionally has a nervous breakdown. We may be headed for the padded room right now. And when my normally placid mate suddenly has a taste for blood, I wonder if the world has come unhinged already.

Big Mike: The Good, The Bad, And The Repulsive

Ah, back in good old Louisville, where the magnolias are deep green, the grass awns wave blue in the breeze, and my nasal passages are packed with concrete, thanks to all the Ohio Valley allergens fighting to get a crack at me.

My four-day sojourn in Chicago brought about the usual love-hate reaction. The bad: the crush of traffic, the brusque - almost hostile - manner of passersby and check-out clerks, and the phallic prominence of Donald Trump's new monument to himself on the site of the old Sun-Times building. As I understand it, the condominiums of his Trump International Hotel and Tower are largely empty and he's being sued by his creditors. Come to think of it, maybe this isn't such a bad thing - it's always a pleasure to see a confidence man get his comeuppance. Still, that soulless 1300-foot sex toy on the Chicago River has marred a mostly magnificent skyline.

As for the good, well, there are my pals Sophia and Danny and their two kids, Arianna and Matty, with whom The Loved One and I stayed, Benny Jay and Milo, of course, Chinatown and Ricobene's pizza joint on 26th Street, and Wrigley Field - which I always drive circles around when I visit. The ballpark looks gorgeous, even with the commercialization of the bleacher entrance (good god, the Cubs have essentially sold naming rights to a doorway - what's next, the Michelob Pale Ale Urinals? The Vagisil Medicated Anti-Itch Ladies Room?)

I love Chicago and I hate it. I suppose that puts me in the good company of some 2,896,016 people (according to the latest official census.) A dozen or so of those citizens were gathered at the access road away from McCormick Place Monday afternoon as The Loved One and I drove past, giving us a remarkable send-off. I mean, I assume they were Chicagoans but, then again, given the reason for their jarring presence, they might well have been from distant points on the American map (as well as the American psyche.)

The Loved One had just attended a convention of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists at the Lakeside Center. Now that she's drawing pretty pictures for reproductive technology products for her new employer, she has to rub shoulders with medicos who specialize in women's plumbing.

Our plan was to begin the long drive back to Kentucky as soon as her Monday convention session was finished. The Prius was packed with all our luggage, as well as a sizable Ricobene's pizza - much of which we demolished by the time we got to Indianapolis. The sun shone, the temperature hovered around 70, the Cubs were in the midst of a four-game winning streak - what could tarnish the mood?

How about a seemingly endless string of enormous, full-color placards of human fetuses in various states of destruction? There were images of half skulls, bloody limbs, gooey guts, and all the rest of the emotional pornography that anti-abortionists wallow in. The dubiously self-described "right-to-lifers" had chosen this spot to attempt to shock us into agreeing with their selective love-of-humanity philosophy, figuring, I'm sure, that at least some of the conventioneering doctors have performed an abortion or two.

Fair enough. I love being an American and support the right of anyone to carry a placard, even if it compares Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler or posits that George W. Bush and his boys engineered the 9/11 attacks. Lunatics have as much right to shout from the rooftops as I do. Only I don't shout from rooftops nor do I much care to tote a picture of a fetus's severed arm.

So rather than drink in that last glorious glimpse of the Loop, Navy Pier and the Ferris wheel, the blue lake, and the lovably pretentious neo-Grecian architecture of the Field Museum, we were forced to peer at some religious fundamentalists' macabre messaging.

The jerks.

Big Mike: The Greatest Feeling Ever

The usual suspects, plus some new ones, are screaming bloody murder over Barack Obama's invitation to address Notre Dame's graduating class next month. You'd be excused for thinking he'd submerged a crucifix in urine for all the outcry it has aroused.

Obama is wishy-washy about abortion, a stance not good enough for the extremists among the right and the Catholic church. They want our elected leaders to equate abortion with the Holocaust and the genocide of Indians in the Americas, something Obama won't do. Of course, there are probably quite a few who are a lot less agitated about the latter two issues than the first.

I'll make one pronouncement about this whole tempest before I go on to the meat of the post. I'm all for people hollering their fool heads off about Obama's invitation. I hope they protest, stage prayer-ins, and wave placards as passionately as if an ND quarterback had been jobbed out of the Heisman. That's the strength of the United States - our freedom to tell the President to his face that he's full of shit.

I only wonder if these same right-to-lifers were as outraged when Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush spoke at Notre Dame commencements months after their elections, considering their giddy infatuation with capital punishment, a practice the Church considers as evil as abortion. I think I know the answer already.

Anyway, I was raised Roman Catholic. My parents sent me to St. Giles elementary school and then Fenwick High School, both in Oak Park. My parents and I attended church every Sunday at St. Giles.

The mass lasted an hour, which to my seven-year-old brain was the equivalent of the Holocene Epoch. I spent that near-eternity resisting the urge to giggle, enduring one or more waves of nausea induced by a nearby worshipper's excessive perfume or body odor, kicking my legs, staring at the pew back in front of me, and waiting for the blessed end of the ordeal.

That was signaled by the glorious moment wherein the priest would announce, "The mass is ended, go in peace," to which the proscribed response was, "Thanks be to god." Sometimes I'd be sitting within yards of my school chum Albert DiPrima. The two of us after a while started responding Thanks be to god in loud voices of dramatic relief, after which we'd giggle surreptitiously to each other. One day, though, we must have gone too far because I received a sharp rap on top of my cranium from my father's knuckle and Albert's father led him out of church by the ear.

After mass, we'd come home, Dad and I would strip out of our jackets and ties and Ma would shed her girdle and begin frying up bacon and eggs. My brother Joey would join us for breakfast. He'd reached the age allowing him to skip mass, a passage I anticipated as deliciously as receiving my first drivers license.

We'd sit around the kitchen table as Ma served up the grub, my father busy buttering four slices of homemade bread, one of which I'd invariably snatch away from him, which - now that I look back on it - must have been his plan all along. Those breakfasts were among the fondest of my childhood memories mainly because the torture of church was over at least for another week.

I never could figure out this religion business. The nuns at St. Giles taught me in catechism class that my first duty as a Catholic was to love god. Hmm, love god - what the hell did that mean?

I'd seen pictures of Michelangelo's fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel portraying god and various other hallucinations. So I adopted that image of the old bird. I was still left with the question, How do I love him? I tried hard to make it happen when I went to bed at night and said my prayers. I didn't exactly know which prayers to say so I silently repeated the mantra, I love you god, I love you god, all the while imagining I was kissing the cheeks of Michelangelo's deity.

One day, the St. Giles principal, Sister James Mary (don't ask me why she'd adopted a male saint's name - suffice it to say that catholics are just whacked when it comes to sex), visited our catechism class and informed us that loving god was the greatest feeling we'd ever experience. This was at odds with my own empirical observations based on my tentative forays into more immediate gratifications under the covers.

That moment completed a process that had begun a few years earlier when Sister Jerome (another gender-ambiguous nun - it's a wonder I'm not even more sexually fucked up than I am) ordered us never to watch or listen to the Beatles because, well, just because.

I knew that Sr. Jerome had to be wrong because the Beatles with their long hair and Beatle boots and cool suits were, well, cool. And if Sr. Jerome was wrong about the Beatles, what else could she be wrong about?

So, by the time I was 12, I'd quit the party, er, the church. Thank Michelangelo's deity I did, otherwise I might be one of those blowhards hollering about Barack Obama's invitation to speak to the Notre Dame graduates.

Letter From Milo: Fake Tits

Every once in a while my brother-in-law sends me porn in an email. It's usually a bit of fluff that someone sends him and he forwards it to me. Now, I'm not saying my brother-in-law is a pervert - you'd have to ask my sister about that - but he does enjoy a bit of porn on occasion.

The porn he sends me is actually pretty tame stuff. It usually has a humorous bent to it. For example, this past holiday season he forwarded me an attachment that had a Christmas card from the then-President. The subject line of the email read, "Greetings from George and Laura's Bush." The picture was of President and Mrs. Bush, full frontal naked, smiling and waving from one of the doorways of the White House.

It was obviously a Photoshop job and not very well done. I looked at it for a few moments before deleting it. The computer I use is accessible to my wife and children and I don't like leaving anything on it that would offend their tender sensibilities. They have a low enough opinion of me anyway without adding porn freak to their list of grievances.

In my youth I was as intrigued by the nude female form as any sex-deprived young hetero male. In those days opportunities for seeing naked women were rare. Along with my equally horny young friends, we made every effort to satisfy our sexual curiousity. As teenagers, we snuck into burlesque houses in the dying days of the art form (see my earlier post about the Follies Theater on State Street.) We hoarded magazines like Playboy, according them the same respect and awe that a baseball nerd reserves for a Honus Wagner collector card.

A few years later, when social mores loosened, I saw "Deep Throat" starring Linda Lovelace at the Tivoli Theater in Gary, Indiana. A couple of years later I saw "The Devil in Miss Jones," starring the great Georgina Spelvin at a theater in San Francisco.

When home theater technology became available I rented a couple of VHS tapes at the local video store (pre-Blockbuster days) but found them, on the whole, pretty boring. By that time I had experienced a bit of the real thing and, like most sportsman, I preferred to participate rather than watch from the sidelines.

Years later, when the great Internet explosion occurred, I was pretty much bored with the whole concept of watching other people copulate. I generally paid no mind to the filmed shenanigans of bored housewives, mustachioed UPS drivers, horny cheerleaders, naughty nurses, pizza delivery boys, errant nuns, French maids and doctors with unorthodox bedside manners.

One thing I did notice, however, was the proliferation of fake tits. It seemed that all the ladies in these films were as inflated as Michelin tires, their breasts grotesquely large and sometimes misshapen. They seemed to defy all known laws of physics and gravity.

Fake tits weren't restricted to porn stars. The popped up everywhere. From Hollywood and Vine to Main Street USA, fake tits became as common as coffee shops. I read an article in a legitimate newspaper that trumpeted the fact that some parents were buying breast implants for their daughters as high school graduation presents. Every once in awhile my dear wife, who works in an industry with a preponderence of women, will tell me that so-and-so just got a boob job. She will say this as casually as if mentioning what were were having for dinner that evening.

"Why would she do that?' I asked. "I thought she looked pretty good."

"Well, she's had three kids."

"So?"

"Maybe she wants to look better. Improve her self-esteem."

"How old is she?"

"I don't know, 50 maybe."

"Jesus, who's she trying to fool."

"I guess she just wants to feel better about herself."

"If she want to feel better she should get a dog. Dogs always make you feel good."

"I swear, sometimes you sound like a complete idiot."

"I love you too, babe."

Maybe I'm being a boob about this, but I hate fake tits. I hate the mindset behind them, the pathetic attempts by some women to re-engineer their bodies in the hopes that their lives will magically change for the better. That's a lot to expect from bags of saline solution or petroleum byproducts.

Maybe I'm a dumbass, but why are fake tits considered sexy and false teeth are not? Why are fake tits deemed an asset while a prosthetic leg is considered unfortunate? Why are fake tits considered good for self-esteem while a glass eye is basically good for nothing.

I guess I'll never figure it out. Ah, well, whoever said, Vanity, thy name is woman, might have been on to something. Wait a minute, the doorbell just rang. I hope it's FedEx. I recently ordered a Swedish Dick Extender on the Internet and it due to arrive at any time. Gotta run.

Letter From Milo: A Well Earned Rest

I went to a memorial service this past Tuesday for a dear friend who passed away at the biblical age of 101. His name was Morris "Morrie" Rosengard and he was the oldest man I ever knew.

How in the hell does someone live to be 101? I've read articles and seen news stories about people who have lived for more than a century and when asked about the secrets to their longevity they always say something like, Never had a drink in my life. Don't smoke. Went to bed early. Didn't eat red meat. Went to church twice a day.

That wasn't Morrie, not even close. Morrie liked to drink, smoke cigars, and eat red meat. For all I know he had impure thoughts, too. His favorite vice, however, was gambling - cards, horses, sports, casino games - he loved them all. That's how I met him, at a poker game, more than 30 years ago. His nephew, Bruce Diksas, was hosting the game. Bruce had been telling me stories about Morrie for years. I had expected to meet a colorful character and I was not disappointed.

Morrie was a pharmacist by trade. For years he had a drugstore in Bridgeport. Rumor had it that as well as filling prescriptions, Morrie ran a 24-hour, high stakes poker game out of the back room of his store. That may or may not be true, but it was true to his character.

Morrie was a wonderful man, but he was no angel. Some of the people he associated with were not candidates for sainthood either. He was friendly with people whose names you'd regularly see in the newspapers, and I'm not talking about the society pages. He knew "connected" people, bona fide members of the Chicago Outfit, guys who made their livings the hard way and often took long vacations at government expense.

Once, at a wedding, a short, stocky man came up to Morrie and chatted with him respectfully for a few minutes. When the man left, Morrie leaned over to Bruce and whispered, "That's the meanest man I ever met in my life." Coming from Morrie, who had rubbed shoulders with some of the toughest, most brutal men in Chicago, that was high praise indeed.

As a matter of fact, in the 1960s, Morrie had some legal problems of his own. But they were just bumps in the road. He took them in stride, just like everything else in his life. Not much fazed Morrie.

I was in my 20s when I met Morrie and he was already close to 80. He was born in 1908, the last year the Cubs won the World Series. He lived through World War I. He saw Ty Cobb play baseball. He roared through the Roaring 20s and survived the Great Depression. He served his country honorably in World War II. The US Army was in dire need of pharmacists, men trained and experienced in the phamacological arts. When I asked Morrie what he did during the war, he replied, "I passed out rubbers at Pizmo Beach, California."

Morrie lived through VE Day and VJ Day. He lived through the Korean War, the War in Vietnam and the wars of George Bush. He was born when Teddy Roosevelt was president and lived long enough to see Barack Obama inaugurated. He was around when horses were the main means of transportation and when Neil Armstrong took a stroll on the moon. He had, literally, seen it all.

I made it a point to call Morrie on his birthdays. I had a nice chat with him on his 100th birthday. When I called him on his 101st, his wife sadly informed me that Morrie was in the hospital. He had fallen down the day before and broken both of his legs. When I asked how he was doing, she said, "He knows what he's up against."

Morrie was a gambler, someone who knew the odds and understood probabilities. He knew what was coming. But even the most cold-blooded, experienced gambler sometimes relies on luck. Maybe, just maybe, he might spike an ace on the river. Unfortunately, Morrie's long run of good luck had finally run out. There was no miracle ace.

I was honored when Morrie's family asked me to make some comments at his memorial. Here is a transcript of my remarks.

I guess everybody here knows that Morrie enjoyed a friendly game of cards on occasion. I also understand he was very fond of horses, although I don't know for a fact that he ever sat on a horse. I met Morrie more than 30 years ago at a poker game. He was introduced to me by his nephew, Bruce Diksas, who was hosting the game.

Bruce told me a lot about Morrie over the years. I felt like I knew him before I ever met him. When I did finally meet Morrie, I was impressed. He was smart, friendly, a good conversationalist, and a real gentleman. I've considered him a friend ever since.

I didn't see Morrie as often as I liked. Usually it was just a few times a year, at card games, the race track or small gatherings. But every time I ran into him, he brought a smile to my face. Some people are like that, they just have a natural magnetism that draws people to them.

Anyway, I want to get back to our friendly games of cards. Despite being more than twice as old as most of the players, Morrie was usually the first to arrive and the last to leave. And when he left, he usually left with more money than he came with. I should know, a lot of that money was mine.

Now, some people will say that Morrie lived a good life, a long life, an interesting life. I agree. He had a good run. But as far as I'm concerned he left us too early, because now I'll never be able to win my money back.

I'd give almost anything to sit down at a card table with Morrie again, and watch him sip his scotch, smoke his cigars, laugh at a good story, or tell one himself. He was wonderful company and I'll miss him dearly. It was an honor and a pleasure to know him. Rest in peace, old friend, you deserve it.

Big Mike: I'm A Lucky Guy

The Great Gun Battle continued at Dick's Pizza last night. Oh, okay, I'm being overdramatic, as usual. Whenever there's an opportunity for me to be alarmist, panicky, hyperbolic - you name it - I'll take it. Ask The Loved One. Heck, even my nephew, Jittery Jimmy, had to reel me in the last time he was down here to visit. We were standing in the backyard and I heard a woodpecker.

"Quiet!" I commanded. "Listen to that! It's a woodpecker. Isn't that amazing!"

"Uncle Mike," Jittery Jimmy said, firmly, "it's not amazing."

So no shots were fired nor were harsh words even exchanged. But I like the sound of The Great Gun Battle so there it is. Last week, I recounted a log-rolling chat between Printer Bob and All-American Allen about guns. My point was, it's hard for us Chicagoans to understand how the rest of the country feels about firearms. The gun is as dear to many people in this great land as pizza or the Cubs are to me.

I felt self-satisfied for recreating their discussion fairly. I thought I'd acquitted myself well, not portraying them as loons or wild-eyed survivalists. I even closed the post with All-American Allen saying, with a hint of pride, that he'd never shot a human being and hoped he'd never have to.

Man, I thought, aren't I magnanimous?

The answer, I learned last night, is not so much.

Weatherman Loren and his pop, Bandleader Leo, came in to watch the Kentucky men's basketball team play a first-round game in the NIT. During an early timeout, Loren ambled by and patted me on the back.

"I read you're post about guns," he said.

Immediately, at least three nearby heads turned our way. One of them asked Loren what it was all about. He tried to be kind but as he hemmed and hawed through his explanation, it became clear he felt I'd wronged the good folk of Kentuckiana.

"Well," Loren finally said, turning toward me, "I gotta tell you. It read pretty much like you were telling us what a bunch of hillbilly rednecks we are."

I was crushed. I'd meant nothing of the kind. Loren said he understood that but still....

"Lemme put it this way," he continued, "if we were 60 miles south of here, youd'a got your ass kicked."

I felt lucky indeed. Even luckier as the night wore on. I chatted at length with All-American Allen, as Republican as a man can be. He feels about Barack Obama pretty much what I felt about George W. Bush - this is one lousy president. No matter. Rather than tear each other's throats out, All-American Allen and I made our respective cases without a hint of mayhem. Hell, our talk was so civil most people today wouldn't even consider it a political discussion.

All-American Allen is about my age but - damn him - he's tall, good-looking, strong, and trim. His imposing stature was on my mind as we tentatively waded into our conversation. All-American Allen appears capable of lifting even this pasta-stuffed bovine and hurtling me through a plate glass window.

Had I been sitting on a barstool next to a Goliath like All-American Allen 60 miles south of Dick's Pizza, I might have bit my tongue. The Bourbon Trail is about 60 miles south of these precincts. It's a gorgeous landscape with rolling hills, broad vistas, and the occasional passing Ford F-150 pickup in whose loadbed compartment is stored who knows what variety of ordnance. Even if a fellow from the Bourbon Trail lacked the sinew to heave me through the nearest window, it's a good bet he might use me for target practice.

So now I have a bond with All-American Allen. We're not going to convince each other of anything but we came away from our chat at least respecting each other. And I neither flew through a plate glass window nor took a round of buckshot in the ass.

Big Mike's Dee Brown Update

I met a man two weeks ago at Dick's who claimed to be former NBA all-star and 1991 Slam Dunk Champion Dee Brown. When the man and his partner, a woman named Natasha, departed, the citizenry in Dick's seemed skeptical he was who he said he was. I was as dubious as anyone. I did a little digging and found that the two were the real thing. Natasha is Brown's business associate and the two are in town to open a Louisville location for his The EDGE basketball training facility.

Letter From Milo: The Big Meltdown (Plus, another installment of Randolph Street - The Eds.)

Folks, it's getting pretty ugly. The vultures are circling. The hyenas are cackling with joy. Worms are getting fat. The Neptune Society has put in a huge order for firewood and propane. And it's all about the economy.

People who previously didn't know Dow Jones from Shinola have become experts in the stock market's fluctuations. Bankers have become objects of loathing. Bernie Madoff is America's new archvillain (worse than Hue Hollins in Benny Jay's opinion.) Detroit's Big Three, after arrogantly ignoring reality for years, are on the brink of collapse. Healthcare has...

continued below Randolph Street

Randolph Street

Richard Pegue (1943-2009)

Benny Jay wrote Saturday about attending the legendary Chicago radio deejay's memorial service. Jon Randolph shot this picture in May, 1998. The shot was used on the cover of the memorial service program.

Letter From Milo, cont'd

...become unaffordable for many of our countrymen. Unemployment figures are growing at a staggering rate. Retail sales are down. New home construction and the sales of existing homes are at their lowest rates in decades.

That's just the economic news.  I'll save global warming, rising sea levels, famine, drought, wars, pestilence, ethnic hatreds, religious intolerance, political instability, and nuclear proliferation for another post.

And guess what, folks. It's going to get worse before it gets better.

There isn't a reliable pundit who says the economy is going to turn around soon. Of course, these authorities never saw The Big Meltdown coming either, so we should take their predictions with a certain amount of skepticism.

It's inescapable. Everywhere I go, the economy has replaced everything else - sports, politics, the weather, movies, etc. - as the number one topic of conversation. Everyone has horror stories. Everyone knows people who've lost jobs, watched their retirement funds disappear, have to sell their homes, default on their loans, or declare bankruptcy.

I was at a potluck dinner the other evening with several friends, all witty, accomplished people who work in the arts, communications, advertising. Normally the dinner table conversation would have been stimulating. But this time it was nothing but gloom and doom.

"Moe lost his job."

"Damn."

"Yeah, and his wife got cut down to three days a week at her office."

"Damn, that's tough."

"They might have to sell their house."

"Did you hear about Curly, down the street?"

"What happened?"

"Lost his job, too."

"Jesus."

"Lost his health insurance, too, and then had a stroke worrying about it."

"Good lord! Is Shemp still working?"

"Yes. The world still needs good divorce and bankruptcy lawyers."

I'm beginning to wonder if Karl Marx wasn't right after all. There seems to be something inherently wrong with the system, some sort of dormant bug that's come alive and threatens to undermine the rotten foundations of capitalism.

"I'm just a hack writer, bright enough to know when there's a problem, not smart enough to provide a solution. That's why I'm so glad there's an intelligent man like Barack Obama in the White House. After eight years of Bush ineptitude, of pandering to America's worst instincts, the money men and the merciless corporate machines, the special interest pigs, and the rigid minds of the military bureaucracy, maybe now someone will stop and consider the plight of the rest of us. We can only hope.

In the meantime, I'm stocking up on canned food, bottled water, and I'm digging a bunker in my backyard. See you in 2014.

Milo's Smoking Update

In my first post for this blog, I promised never to lie to the American people. Well, it's been over a week since I started my latest quit-smoking campaign and, yes, I've cheated a few times. But I'm not giving up. I still see a light at the end of the smoke-filled tunnel. I'll keep you informed.

Big Mike: Wise, Wise Man?

Here's what a geek I am. Because I've been hearing so many loudmouths bitch and moan about how the economic stimulus package is "full of pork" and "loaded with earmarks" and so on, I decided to read the actual bill.

Dubbed the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009," it's 407 pages of the most brain-numbingly boring legal- and political-speak you've ever laid your eyes upon. No, let me amend that - it's the most boring thing I've ever laid my eyes upon. You are too smart to waste precious hours of your life studying the document.

That's right, I read the god-damned thing! Where did it get me? Well, now I know that none of those loudmouths know what in the hell they're talking about. Of course, I already knew that so I guess I'm back where I started. I suppose I can now argue with confidence against them. I have the facts. They don't. Then again, the facts never seem to make a bit of difference to them.

Why do I do things like this? Here's another example. When the steroid scandal hit baseball, I boned up on everything I could about performance enhancing drugs. I learned how prevalent their use is, what the health benefits and risks are, and how they might or might not actually improve a hitter's or pitcher's game. I then wrote a 5000-word treatise on the subject. All the while I was saying to myself, Just wait till I dazzle them all with my brilliance!

Naturally, when it came time to pit my research against the uninformed ramblings of the loudmouthed set, I may as well have been speaking Amharic.

We like to view ourselves as a rational, intelligent species. We call ourselves Homo Sapiens Sapiens - wise, wise man. It's as if we're insecure about our wisdom: Hey, we're smart! You hear me? We're smart!

We must be smart. We've created an Internet which provides us access to the most diverse, minutely-studied array of pornography imaginable. We've invented television and CDs and DVDs, which bring us the artistry of Howie Mandell, Madonna, and "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" directly into our homes. Perhaps our most spectacular and life-changing invention has been the automobile, whose evolution has resulted in that most sublime and aesthetically pleasing artifact known as The Hummer.

So yeah, we're smart. And I'm a smart ass but I like to think of myself as plain old smart as well. Sadly, though, we seem to have a need to be willfully not-smart too. I remember watching the first debate between George W. Bush and John Kerry during the 2004 election. No matter what you think about the respective candidates' positions, you have to agree that the incumbent Bush appeared embarrassingly uninformed and unable to articulate complex ideas. I felt a sense of shame and humiliation that the rest of the world saw the leader of the United States as, well, a dope. I wondered who could possibly vote for a man so lacking in intellectual assets. Oops - who's the real dope here? It turned out that a majority of Americans actually liked Bush's folksy befuddlement and were turned off by Kerry's intellectualism.

How about this? Years ago, I watched the mondo film "The Faces of Death" with my old pal Submarine Tony. Part of a series that was wildly popular in the 80s, it was purportedly a compilation of gruesome, real-life scenes of people being given one-way tickets out of this mortal coil. From the very start, I could tell that the producers' plan was to show a single, blurry, rough-cut clip of a real death and surround it with dozens of staged incidents.

So I launched into a scathing critique of the movie. I pointed out all the camera tricks and verbal suggestions, the breathless dramatic buildups and the shallow payoffs. I figured Submarine Tony would be thankful I'd opened his eyes. Instead, after listening to me for 20 minutes he said, "Would you shut the hell up? You're ruining the whole thing."

Another example. When Carl Sagan's book, "The Demon-Haunted World," came out in the mid-90s, I ran around excitedly telling everyone I knew what a great and valuable message it contained. Sagan wrote the book as a response to the exploding trends of pseudoscience. He deftly carved up fortune-tellers, UFO buffs, conspiracy theorists, New Agers, homeopaths, channelers, faith healers, and the like.

I was working at Barnes and Noble in Evanston at the time. One of my co-workers was Don the Egyptian, a tall fellow whom I'd figured to be fairly savvy. After I gushed about the book to him, he shrugged and said he wasn't interested in it. "I want my world to be demon-haunted," he said. "It's more interesting."

I wrote a note to myself: People want to be fooled.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only guy in the world who thinks the way I do. I also wonder where it gets me. Now and again I think, Wouldn't I be better off watching "Deal Or No Deal"? Instead, I read H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Then I think, Who would I rather hang out with? Howie Mandell or Carl Sagan? Sagan's been dead a dozen years now. I'd still prefer his company.

Big Mike: Dumb Cubs, Dumb Bush

Took a ride up to Bloomington again yesterday. The Loved One signed the lease on her sublet (the place she'll be staying in Mondays through Fridays.) So the Bloomington job is a done deal. There's no way out for Studs Diamond now.

Before this, I'd held out hope that maybe, just maybe, TLO would change her mind about the Bloomington job, that she'd re-start her efforts to find gainful employment somewhere around Louisville.

Ain't gonna happen.

Ah well, there's always the Cubs. Hungry Jim Hendry peddled Felix Pie to his (Hendry's) old pal, Andy MacPhail in Baltimore. If you've paid any attention to these screeds you know that Felix Pie is yet another in a long, long, long line of highly touted position players to come up through the Cubs farm system and flop on the big league stage.

The boys over at Goat Riders of the Apocalypse relate a story that the Cubs' Latin American region scouts discovered Pie as a teenager in the Dominican Republic. Apparently, he was such a superior athlete with jaw-dropping physical skills that the Cubs inked him in the snap of a finger. Only he'd never played baseball before. The scouts and the front office figured, We'll teach him how to play baseball.

This decision, I remind you, emanates from an organization that is notoriously inept at the arts of teaching baseball skills and developing players. This is the organization that, except for a blip here and there (most notably during the Dallas Green and John Holland regimes) hasn't been any good at producing position players since the 1930s.

Nineteen thirties. One, nine, three, oh. As in Oh my god.

Suddenly, a hundred years without a World Series championship doesn't seem too outlandish a thought, does it?

Speaking of outlandish thoughts, the Bush gang has vacated the White House this week. It hit me just last night. Sort of like when someone wins the Nobel Prize or the Oscar, they often say, It didn't hit me until days/weeks/months later. So it is with me and the end of Dubya's reign.

The former president (man, that sound good!) met with the press one last time before he lammed to Texas. This is the same press he and his plug-uglies had stonewalled, scammed, manipulated, lied to, bullied and otherwise treated like yard fudge for the last eight years. He told them he really respected them. It's like the man who beats his girlfriend and then tells her she's the prettiest thing he's ever seen.

Anyway, the ex-prez gifted us with one last Bushism, sort of a punctuation mark for his era. He said a lot of the wags and critics "misunderestimated" him. This coinage, I remind you, from the most powerful human being in the world.

Well, it turns out that misunderestimated wasn't the last Dub flub. His gang had one more exclamation point for us. That came when Georgie-boy's hand-picked Chief Justice of the Supreme Court tripped over his own brain while giving the oath of office to Barack Obama. The John Roberts gaff will forever be the unintentional definitive statement of the Bush people: We weren't very good at all at what we did. Not a one of us.

The US citizenry has no one to blame but themselves. Sort of like the successive brain trusts that have run the Cubs since 1909.