home again

I've been gone forever, or at least a few months, and I was hoping that everybody missed me, but when i opened the mailbox, I wasn't sure anybody had. That's life. Anyway, i was in a hospital having a doctor insert a new hip made of shiny metal. After that, you just want to lie around and drink chocolate milkshakes and watch television.

And then you get bored and change your mind, and you discover that you really want to get back to aggravating people, or wondering what people had been doing while you were having your own peculiar kind of vacation. I read a lot on that vacation. The words I liked best were printed in The New York Post. They came out of the mouth of a lawyer who was representing a young man accused of killing his girlfriend. (The young man's girlfriend, not the lawyer's.) This lawyer rushed to the jail after his client had been segregated because "shoelace marks were found on his neck." (Not the lawyer's neck, the client's neck.) The lawyer,John Salsberg, summed up his client's condition thus: "The transition from being free to being incarcerated is very difficult for him."

That's all i can think of now. Aren't you glad that sometime somebody doesn't just go on and on and on?

Limp Balloons

I'm self conscious about writing this (even though I'm more of an every two weeks blogger than an every ten minutes blogger.) Because today, this lady in the New York Times (Alessandra Stanley by name) was offering an opinion of Twitterers, which is the name of a gaggle of journalists who are computer addicts. Apparently, they are anxious to share every moment with their readers, no matter how pointless their messages. "Heading upstairs to the studio" was one message (in total) cited by Ms. Stanley, who surmises that the Twitterers are so eager to be immortalized in print that they will probably be sending messages "until the last follower falls into a coma."

Well, in the words of Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana, "Americans can do anything." He said it over and over in a speech following the President's speech the other night. "Americans can do anything. Americans can do anything." Yeah, that's why we've got cops.

And speaking of cops, I wish they could do something about the Giant Penis, which keeps appearing in print, pictures and all, paid for by a company that wants to sell Big Blue pills. For a while, I thought it was gone. But it's come around again. The Giant Penis. I had hoped to be free of it, and so had my friend Ursie. We believed if we told the world that we were female, and did not care about the girth of anybody's penis, we would surely be scratched from penis brochures, and kicked off the Penis Length Train. But no, it's hufffa chuffing right along.

Today, a brochure arrived, filled with satisfied customers. There's the gent from France who "gained 3.5 inches in penis length." There's the man from Amsterdam who gets "erections on command," and "they're as hard as wood." There are guys from Liverpool and London and Dublin and Berlin and Paris, all singing the praises of the "True Blue" pill.

But peril is just around the corner. Because, isn't it likely that a penis which "increases in girth with each use", will soon be as large as the Hindenberg? And cover the entire face and body of its owner? On the other hand, that's the owner's problem. My own problem is to convince you that this blog isn't simply a piece of trash, but contains some wonderful information that I have just gleaned from the Thorndike-Barnhart dictionary. It's about blimps. A blimp, says Thorndike-Barnhart, is "a small, nonrigid balloon...Apparently, from B limp,designation for 'limp balloon' in early experiments."

Don't say I never tried to teach you anything.

Bernie and Some Other Guys

If you're tired of talking about the wickedness of CEO's, don't bother with this tirade. I can't stop myself. I'm fascinated about what's going on, except for the possibility that I (whose savings have evaporated) will have to go to debtor's prison and eat cat food.

Every CEO or ex-CEO has something to teach us. Richard Fuld, one of the big shots who ran Lehman Brothers (into the ground, as it happened) sold his thirteen million dollar estate in Florida for $100. To his wife. Now if anybody has to pay back anybody else (creditors, cleaning ladies, the United States government) it won't be Mr. Fuld. Wasn't that smart?

And Stanley O'Neal, one of the gods of Merrill Lynch, probably didn't want his wife to feel left out, so he gave her his $4.5 million dollar mansion in Westchester.

Then the newspapers revealed that the wife of Bernie Madoff (presumptive leader of the pack) had trotted out to some bank or brokerage outfit and removed five and a half million dollars her very own self. That was back on November 25th, 2008. She withdrew another ten million on December 10th. Better to paint the apartment, or buy a new Jag than turn over your cash to the Feds, right?

The Madoffs are celebrities now. A company is selling Bernie Madoff dolls along with hammers, so buyers can batter the poor dollies to pieces, I guess.

When eight of the financial executives (sitting like birds on a branch in front of Congress) were obliged to listen to people who were not friends of said financial executives, the executives did not seem happy. Especially irritating to them must have been one Harry Markopolous, a fraud investigator who testified that he had spent the last nine years trying to make the SEC accept the fact that Bernie Madoff wasn't just a nice guy. "I'm saying," said Mr. Markobolous, "that if you flew the entire SEC staff to Boston, and sat them in Fenway Park for an afternoon, they could not find first base."

A lot of people who had lost a lot of money were hoping that the executives were going to get a good tongue lashing, but Barney Frank, Chairman of the Home Financial Services Committee, stared at the gazillionaires strung out in front of him, and decided not to get nasty. "We have no option, if we are to get credit flowing in this country," said he, "other than to work with the existing institutions." The existing institutions stared right back at him, and some of them even confessed they had been naughty boys, because they had, among them, spent 165 billion dollars of tax-payers' money.

The Morgan Stanley chief, John Mack, said he was sorry. And Vikram Pandit, the Citigroup chief, said he was going to cut his salary to one dollar a year, and give up the idea of buying a new private jet.

On the other hand, there seem to be a number of citizens who have nothing to be sorry for, and are actually enjoying the recession. They weren't rich to begin with, so they don't feel any more poor than they ever felt, and now they can hop around the city picking up bargains. There are people out there stacking up treasures bought at 80% off. I read about one woman who bought ten pairs of Manolo shoes. I think it was Manolos, but even if it wasn't, I know it was 80% off.

Me? I'm thinking of going to Bergdorf Goodman tomorrow.

There Is a Time...

When I was a child, I longed to be rich,but we were poor. My father went to look for work with holes in his pants, while I sat on the front stoop and planned a future. I would have a limousine with a chauffeur. I would buy a house on the Riviera (wherever that was), and a house in the mountains and a house at the beach. I would adopt four thousand babies that nobody wanted, and we would all drink champagne (whatever that was) on their birthdays, and my jewels would weigh me down to the point where I had to give several of them away.

For some reason, it didn't work out, but now that I'm grown up, and reading about the problems of rich people, I realize I've been fortunate.

Take the case of Bernard Madoff who cost his friends so much money nobody has yet counted it all. He admitted to running a 50 billion dollar Ponzi scam, but he's unhappy because he's being forced to stay in his luxurious apartment with his wife. He can't even go out and take a walk. According to the New York Post, "Bernie Madoff is whining to anyone who'll listen that he's being held captive in his penthouse...'I'm a prisoner in my own house!' Madoff fumed. 'I can't go anywhere. I'm stuck here all day!'" If some run of the mill arrested person can't make bail, he is sent directly to a holding cell, and maybe after that to a jail where he can meet other inmates and exercise in the yard every day. Not Bernie. For the time being, he has to stay home.

There are other kinds of suffering rich people, like the ones who are interested in politics, but got caught not paying their taxes, so they can't be in the President's cabinet, and sing the Star Spangled Banner at parties.

And what about rich people like those three automobile magnates who flew to Washington to beg for billions of taxpayers' money? They flew in three separate private planes. Those poor souls were the subject of derision, and rich guys don't like that.

And what about John Thain, the sweetheart of Merrill Lynch, who spent so much fixing up his office that he probably could have bought a four storey building with the cash? Mr. Thain, who only wanted an office he could be proud of, is being persecuted by irritable questions. From government officials.

And what about that other guy who admitted it was probably an awful thing to take a huge bonus while the company he worked for was going down the drain. Awful. But, he said, "I'm not giving it back." He is probably suffering from being declared irresponsible and greedy-- President Obama called Wall Street bankers "shameful for handing themselves nearly $20 billion dollars in bonuses as the economy was deteriorating"-- and for all I know, that bonus guy could get thrown out of his country club.

It's almost biblical. "There will be time for them to make profits, and there will be time for them to get bonuses. Now is not that time," said President Obama, about people known as Wall Street fat cats.

The way I see it, there is a time to steal, and a time to go to prison. If you're caught. There is also, according to the newspapers, a time for a lot of big shots to be eating lunch at McDonald's.

Thoughts on an Inauguration

I could have gone to Washington, D.C. to the big inauguration, but my helicopter broke. It's in pieces on the kitchen floor.

I could have taken a train to Washington, D.C., but all the trains were full.

I could have danced and sung and waved a flag in Washington.D.C., but then I heard there were going to be two million people all mashed together singing and dancing and waving flags, and what if they knocked me down and stepped on me and stuck flag sticks in my eyes?

I'm careful about stuff like that because once I was standing in an open truck with Frank Sinatra in Hoboken where he was born and everybody liked him. So there was a big crowd of admirers, and most of them were trying to reach up over the panel at the back of the truck and touch him, and the ones that leaped high enough were yanking buttons off his shirt, and shoving pieces of paper at him to sign, and they were screaming, and I thought, I am going to be dragged off this truck, and trampled on, and killed.

Fortunately, because of my extreme carefulness (it consisted of hanging on to Frank's coat and whimpering) nothing bad happened.

Anyhow, President Obama managed to get himself inaugurated, and i hope he didn't notice that I never showed up.

Right now, it's freezing in New York city but that's okay because I'm wearing mittens and a hat with ear muffs while I make the bed. Hot or cold, the world moves on, and a good thing is that President Obama seems eager to move with it.

California is war, and Dood is better than Good

Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to freeze I go, in New York City, my home town. In California, from which I have foolishly returned, they're eating lemons off the trees and wearing fur-trimmed shorts. Due to the fact that I haven't got a job, I am going to crawl under my blanket and not come out until April, or until the landlady gets testy.

In case you wondered why you -- my brave readers of whom there are already six or seven-- haven't had access to my blog for a month, it's because 1: I haven't written it. 2: I'm erratic and 3: California is dangerous. I kept falling down there. On one day, I managed to stumble over an angry vacuum cleaner, and also a ferocious driveway that was made of steel. Not really steel. Brick, I guess. Then there was a dog that tried to kill me with love. She was fond but foolish, and she stood on her long hind legs, and threw her long front legs around the shoulders of anyone who came close. Why, she's only a puppy, everyone said, but she was one strong puppy. And her wish was to slobber all over your face. The problem wasn't so much the slobbering, it was that while she was trying to kiss you, she was knocking you down.

And then, last Monday, my brother, the Nobel Prize winner, took me out for my birthday, and I was complaining about my broken foot, and he was not impressed. "At our age," he said, "most people are dead."

But enough of tragedy. I'm switching to comedy. How about this? My niece's three year old daughter, Lexie (the same one who said, "I have a idea") came through again. Somebody was talking about the excellence of cookies, and Lexie nodded her wise little head. "Yes," she said. "Tookies are dood." So I'm wishing you all a dood New Year.