Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

​Following their latest display of playoff ineptitude, the history of the Dallas Cowboys football franchise will no longer be permitted to be taught in the Texas public school system.
 
“All printed materials, video discs and paraphernalia featuring the Dallas Cowboys will be removed from public school libraries in Texas forthwith,” said the announcement by the governor’s office. “We cannot afford for the schoolchildren of Texas to be emotionally harmed by learning of the actions of some of their ancestors, particularly the coaches, general managers and players of the Cowboys since 1995.
 
“Children do not need to be humiliated, or to be made to feel inadequate or guilty by learning of misdeeds perpetrated in the past that they had nothing to do with. No child now in our school systems ever gave Tony Romo a contract extension, and there is no need for them to be shamed for living in the same state as the people that did.
 
“Parenting is a tough job, and there’s no need for the state to make it tougher by teaching Dallas Cowboy-critical theory in our public schools. Hard-working moms and dads do not need to be vexed by their children asking them, “Why can’t we move to Kansas City? Or Green Bay?”
 
“From now on, Texas public schools will only teach the proud moments of Texas sporting history. Remember the Alamo! Hook ‘em Horns! Beat ‘em Spurs! Cheat ‘em, Astros!
 
“Maybe not that last one, either.”

After two-plus years of me masking up and vaxxing at every chance, the ‘rona finally showed up on my doorstep.
 
It started with my special girl, who is vaccinated and boosted, having a sore throat on a Sunday. I felt fine. So fine that I went over to a friend’s house. He makes his own beer, and is constantly after me to drink it. This sort of invite is tough to resist, so I went over there and yacked it up with him and a couple other guys over his homemade suds. He mentioned that he had been to a pig roast hosted by a Chinese friend of his the day before. I told that to my girl, who is Jewish, as is Mike.
 
“He is the world’s worst Jew,” my girl said. “Going to a pig roast on Shabbos?”
 
“Judgmental much?” I replied, because personally, I think the world’s worst Jew is Bibi Netanyahu. But we didn’t get into that argument, because her sore throat was worse and I was dispatched to find a Covid test for her. After trips to three different drugstores wearing my newly acquired KN95 mask, which are said to be the best masks even though I think everyone wearing one looks more or less like a duck, I located a couple of home Covid tests. After she took the tests on consecutive days, she announced that she did not have the virus. Her temperature was 99, but that’s normal for her. She’s a hot chick.
 
Along about Thursday, I began to feel a little weird. On Friday I had a cough and a runny nose. I took my temperature and it was 99. That’s a fever for me, because I usually run at about 97.7.
 
I’m a cool guy.
 
The fever went away by the next day and I was left with just the cough and the runny nose. I wouldn’t have bothered with a Covid test at all if I hadn’t been scheduled for a colonoscopy on Wednesday. Those of you who have enjoyed one of those know that you have to drink a gallon of human Drano before the procedure, and I wasn’t about to do that, just to go to the hospital and have them say, “You’re positive for the Omicrud, bra. Go home. Pick up another couple quarts of diarrhea seltzer on your way home, and we’ll try this again in a few weeks.”
 
So, I scrounged up another test. It wasn’t easy. I got it from a guy who would be my stepson-in-law if I was actually married to my girl and her daughter was actually married to him. So, complicated relationship. He had gotten the test from his employer. It was the best test on the market, a battery-powered beauty. It was guaranteed to produce an accurate result in fifteen minutes.
 
Well, it didn’t take nearly that long for the light to flash positive. I was officially the several hundredth millionth victim of the virus worldwide. My girl instantly analyzed the chain of transmission, because placement of blame is important to her. “You got it from Mike and he got it from that pig roast,*” she said.
 
“Maybe it would work that way if it was a Chinese bat roast,” I said. “I got it from you.”
 
“But I was negative.”
 
“You just didn’t do the test right. You’ve got to find the sweet spot in your snot,” I told her.
 
“You got it from Mike,” she said.
 
“You got it from the Door Dash guy.”
 
So that’s the argument that’s kept us amused as we huddle in the house. I’ve never been an anti-masker or an anti-vaxxer, so there’s no need for me to go the hospital and announce to all the people I bad-mouthed Fauci to that, now that I have oxygen tubes running into my nose, I’ve changed my mind. I will never be a candidate for the Herman Cain Award, so there’s no need for me to hop on a ventilator.
 
I’ve had far worse colds. As soon as my free test from Uncle Joe arrives, I expect it to be negative. I’ll be over the ‘cron. Not going to Disneyland, though.
 
It’s warmer in Mexico.
 
*Mike feels fine.

​Scrolling along my Facebook feed a lot the past couple, as I’ve got a light fever and a minor cough and don’t feel like working. I get to merely worry about having a breakthrough case of the ‘rona, though, because you can't find a test around here any easier than Ted Cruz can find his spine.
 
Somehow Facebook has me pegged as a good Christian Republican. The Big Algorithm is constantly giving me ads that invite me to give my credit card numbers to the Slushy Money Against Critical Race Theory Fund, and to buy “patriotic” clothing that has various combinations of eagles, machine guns and flags on it. I get offers to “introduce prisoners to Jesus,” despite the fact that I don’t know any prisoners or Jesus.
 
I get invited to participate in surveys where the questions might be a tad loaded. Surveys with questions like “Do you think Joe Biden is a good President, for a pedophile?”
 
But I just stopped scrolling and stared when I saw an ad that said, “Will you read a daily verse with God?”
 
Yes. Oh, hell yeah. And I mean a verse of anything. As long as the Alpha and the Omega was sitting on my couch with me, from Amazing Grace to “Back That Ass Up.” Taylor Swift to T.S. Elliot. Gangsta rap to country western. Well, not country western. Well, okay. Thy will be done. Garth Brooks here we come.
 
So, I went to page two, which was a bunch of survey questions about whether I had kids, a job I was happy with, whether I had a relationship, and how often I wanted to l hear from the Almighty. I started answering them eagerly, until I had a bonus revelation, which was Shouldn’t God already know this shit?
 
That’s when I lost hope that God would actually come and get cozy over a little literature with me. God would already know that I had a kid. He would also know if that child was a wildly successful object of pride to me or if he was already known to the local cops as “Narcan Boy.” He would also know if I was in a relationship, or relationships, or if I belonged to a worldwide pansexual tribe that worshipped Miley Cyrus. He would know if I enjoyed my work or if I was planning to open fire at everyone on the loading dock come Monday.
 
Unlike God, algorithms know nothing until you start telling them. So, I quit filling out the survey. If God wants to find me, He can find me on His own. I’m usually at my local brewhouse on the weekends.
 
I’m the guy with eagles on his cargo pants.

One year ago today, a bunch of white people wearing gear they had purchased from Donald Trump R Us Store broke into the US Capitol and did their best to shoot Nancy Pelosi and hang Mike Pence. That they didn’t succeed was probably due to the fact that they were drunk and high.
 
And dumb. And poorly organized. And Trump didn’t lead them to the Capitol steps like he promised he would, because then they might have succeeded in overthrowing the government, and a nation of 335 million people armed with the choicest of nuclear weapons would currently be being led by Vladimir Putin.
 
But Trump did not do that, because it would have been somewhat dangerous, and keeping his pale, fat, spotted hiney safe has always been the Dumpster’s number one priority. Instead, he went back to the White House and cheered his peeps on, enjoying the spectacle so much that, according to witnesses, he would rewind and replay the highlights over and over, like a football refereeing crew trying to figure out if a receiver had both feet back in bounds after the catch.
 
He was ignoring pleas from people he was actually willing to be seen in public with, like Hannity and his kids, to put a stop to Congress being ransacked, he was loving it so much. And when he was finally persuaded to make a video telling his army of scum to quit shitting all over the USA, it took him three tries before he could actually tell them to leave the Capitol.
 
Those first two attempts have been viewed by my sources. Here’s what Trump was saying:
 
“Okay, guys, enough’s enough. Just amscray, okay? Remember, I’m still the President…LOOK AT THE ONE WITH THE BUFFALO HORNS…Yeah, I’m talking to you, bud. I mean, if you want to pull down a couple more statues on the way out, that’s freedom, right? Hang Mike Pence? That does have a ring to it (mumbles ‘Hang Mike Pence,’ a few times to himself. Has any other President had his Vice-President hung? I mean, that’s history, right? Tell me that’s not a beautiful piece of history….”
 
Off-camera, someone is yelling “cut!”
 
“Okay, okay. This time for sure. I want to start off by saying how beautiful you people are. Love the clothes. Love the flags. Don’t they wiggle nice when you try and stick Capitol cops with the poles? Yay, yay, pepper spray. Look, I appreciate all the love you guys are pouring out, but let’s close it out, shall we? Nancy Pelosi’s probably run out of panties to crap in. Have any of you ripped the clothes off that Occasionally Cortez babe yet? Let’s get that on a Go-Pro before you’re finished. Personally, I don’t go for chicks with glasses, but some of you patriots might. So, I’m not saying stop yet, but we’ve got to wrap it up soonish, okay?”
 
Off-camera, someone is yelling “Oh for fuck’s sake, cut.”
 
All right, I might have made that up. When the Supremes let us see the real tapes, though, they might be even more fascinating.
 
I’m making popcorn.

As the coronavirus bulges over the land in the form of the Omicrud variant, wreaking havoc, particularly in hospitals and in the airline industry, vaccinated people are getting pretty fed up with the unvaxxed, who still insist on embracing the virus like it was an ugly second cousin who just won the lottery.
 
Most antivaxxers, at least the male ones, who, as is usual in nature, tend to be the more flamboyant, like to display themselves with firearms, threaten government officials, or drive to DC with a carload of explosives, don’t strike us regular Americans as fraidy-cats. Batshit loonies who could really, really benefit from a daily Seroquel, yes, but physical cowards, no.
 
You wouldn’t for example, call Christopher Key, self-proclaimed chief of the Vaccine Police, a chickenshit, mostly because he is usually photographed with multiple automatic weapons and a flamethrower. Christopher just the other day announced plans to arrest the governor of Louisiana, but he’s postponed that so he could go on a nationwide tour to threaten government officials and other people he regards as equally dangerous, like Walmart pharmacists.
 
Key claims that the virus is a bioweapon, which is typical of an antivaxxer, although there are a vast and florid garden of claims tended by antivaxxers that offer other explanations for the danger of vaccination. It’s microchipped, say some. It messes with your DNA, or your RNA say others, and by others, I mean people who don’t know any more about microchips, DNA or RNA than they do about traditional Kurdish folk songs.
 
A young woman I met at a beer joint the other day (all right, she was the beer-tender) said her boyfriend, who is in the American armed forces, said he was going to refuse the shot because it was just a way for the government to control his life. He got the shot after she told him, “Honey, you’re a US Marine. How could the government possibly control your life any more than it already does?”
 
So, some of them can be reasoned with. Others not, and I think we need to consider the possibility that those people are just afraid of needles. Trypanophobia is a real thing, and while a woman suffering from an irrational fear of needles will simply tell you, “I don’t like needles and don’t put one in me,” a man cannot admit to anything so unmanly. A man will say “Mind-controlling bioweapon that will turn my sperm into dead curlicues that I might shed on my kids every other weekend when I see them. Let's go Brandon!”
 
Just to get out of a jab in the arm. Pussies is the preferred term for what they are. Let’s start calling them that, and watch them line up. 

​As we fester into a New Year, carrying all the baggage of last year’s profound idiocies, with the promise of yet another year of fresh mindlessness to come, there comes a time to reflect upon what the past year taught us, what we gained and lost, personally and as a nation.
 
But I’m not going to do that here, as, honestly, I don’t have the patience or the long-term memory for it. Instead, let’s point the finger at book banning, one of the last truly stupid ideas of 2021 that will inevitably leak into the first semester of 2022.
 
Not that book-banning is new. It’s a time-honored tradition of attempting to stomp out ideas one doesn’t like by forbidding others from hearing about them. It’s just gained fresh adherents lately, the most vigorous of which is Bob Standridge, Republican of Oklahoma, who has introduced legislation that would allow any parent to object to any book on their child’s school library shelf and, after 30 days, collect $10,000 dollars a day from that school library if that book remained there.
 
To say that there are holes in this idea is like saying there are rats in a restaurant dumpster. They are that obvious. For starters, even Elon Musk would be annoyed at having to shell out 10 large a day for hundreds of forbidden books, and while he could afford it, most school districts aren’t in Musk’s financial class. For second, there’s nothing to keep concerned parents like myself from not objecting to books on slavery or diversity or LGBTQism, but objecting instead to the presence of the works of Joel Osteen, or the Kid’s Guide to Fighting Socialism, or My First Book About Jesus on my kid’s school library shelves, and collecting my ten grand a day while sitting on the porch smoking medical marijuana.
 
Nothing except the fact that my kid is thirty and lives in Australia, that is. But I’d consider adopting. Fairly easy to feed a kid on ten k a day.
 
Other parents have other agendas. Many good Christian parents consider the Harry Potter books to be Satanic and would wipe the shelves clean of all of them, from the first, Harry Potter the Magic Kid, to the last, Harry Potter and the Mind-Numbing Redundancy of Harry Potter.
 
There would be no books left at the school library at all, except maybe the dictionary. It would all be completely unnecessary because—news flash here--your dumbass kid is not reading any books at all.
 
It’s a post-literate age, and all your kid will ever know about The Color Purple is that that’s the color his ass turns when he falls off his skateboard. When he hears that Heather Has Two Mommies, he’ll search for it on PornHub. If he spots a title like Puberty is Gross, But Also Really Awesome,* maybe he’ll throw his cum sock in the hamper.
 
That’s all you can really expect out of your kids anyway, no matter how many books you toss righteously out of your school library. They have a low opinion of you like all kids have of their parents, and in your case, probably deservedly so. I wouldn’t mention the books you want banned at the dinner table, either.
 
They’ll just go look them up on their phones. Trust me on that.
 
*Real kid’s book title. Did not make that one up.

In as bizarre a talking point as any conceived this year, which means a level of bizarre that maybe even the James Webb Space Telescope couldn’t see from Earth, conservative snack Candace Owens, last featured here when she advocated an invasion of Australia, says the Former Guy should be forgiven for getting vaxxed and boosted because he’s “too old to understand the Internet.”
 
This was an attempt by Owens to get Trump back in good graces with the anti-vax droolers that make up a significant part of his base, even though Trump likes to take credit for inventing the vaccine. Sometimes he makes it sound like he donned a lab coat for it himself. Even Nixon didn’t take credit for the moon landing as if he tightened every bolt on Apollo 11 personally.
 
Bit of a weak point if you ask me—the guy is too old to type a search term in Google, but we’ll all only be safe if we give him back the nuclear football? Owens, the right-wing sweet thing, isn’t trying to say that, naturally. What she is saying is the former Caucasian-in-Chief doesn’t have the tech savvy to burrow past all the normal health, mainstream media and even the regular conservative web sites that blare headlines about the vaccines being safe and effective on the Net, and focus in on that one YouTube video featuring a retired chiropractor standing in front of a chart he drew in his garage that shows the vaccines ripping up your DNA like a possum going through your recycle bin.
 
The too-old-to-understand excuse is uncannily effective for almost everything Trump has ever done. Violated his oath of office? Print was too small for him to read it. Sent a band of yowling yokels to get all stabby and hangy at the Capitol? He put a stop to that as soon as he took a 3 ½ hour Ensure break. Can’t understand that he lost the election? Hey, old folks get confused. Fed the Constitution to that trash-can possum? Too many words in it.
 
Pushing women into closets and groping them? That was flowery romance, back in his day. Telling a porn star he just screwed she reminded him of his daughter? Well, better small talk than saying “My wife is a sex-worker, too,” right? Hanging out backstage at Miss Universe in his bathrobe? Old guys like nothing more than being comfortable.
 
I’m not as old as Trump, but I’m pressing on the doorbell of senior citizenship, and not just once and running away like a UPS guy, but repeatedly, so I’m all in on the Candace version of elder responsibility. Everything vile I’ve ever done is lost in the mists of old age, and any reality denying I want to do in the future must be benignly ignored.
 
Except I understand quite a bit about the Internet. Hope that doesn’t hold me back. 

Joe’s popularity is down has been the headline for months, it seems. There’s a whole litany of reasons out there. He stuck to Trump’s agreement with the Taliban to give away Afghanistan, which, let’s face it, nobody wanted anymore, anyway. Inflation, which Republicans claim is secretly pumped into the economy from a giant tank behind the White House bowling alley. And Covid, covid, covid, which continues to kill the unvaccinated, who are unvaccinated because they hate Joe Biden.
 
Getting publicly kicked in the balls by Joe Manchin didn’t help, either. And if you say "supply chain" one more time, Biden will send Jen Psaki out to your house to make you feel stupid in person.
 
So, Biden’s got to turn things around, and if he wants some useless, sardonic advice on doing that, he can always read these words. The counsel here is get flashy. Follow the example of your predecessor. What does Hunter do, anyway? Tell him to put down his paintbrush and start working in the White House. Fire the FBI director, whoever he is. Pass some state secrets to the Russians when you go eyeball-to-eyeball with Putin. Above all, proclaim all those crappy polls are “fake news.”
 
Golf, golf, golf. Piss your wife off so that she won’t touch you in public. Absentmindedly leave her behind when you’re getting in and out of limos and airplanes. Or just dump her and start carrying on publicly with some celebrity, preferably one that nobody is quite sure why she is famous, anyway, like Chrissy Teigen.
 
Brag about getting “love letters” from fat, murderous international maniacs. Call antifas “very fine people.” Send Mexico an invoice for not building a wall. Plant one of your famous hair kisses on the top of Ilhan Omar’s hijab.
 
Tweet, tweet, tweet. Call Manchin a “climate-destroying bunghole.” Call Mitch McConnell “a turtle-faced skinbag of Kentucky swill.” Accuse anybody that criticizes you of treason.
 
Speaking of Kentucky, where were the paper towels when you visited that disaster area? People are cleaning up whole destroyed trailer parks with napkins they swiped from McDonalds because you didn’t toss them a single roll of Bounty.
 
Some things you can never do. They may doom your Presidency. You can’t ask the Supreme Court to keep your tax returns secret, because you already released them. You can’t claim your Inauguration was the biggest one ever, because it was manifestly the smallest. You can’t proclaim “I alone can fix it,” and then never fix a goddam thing, because you’ve already tried to fix stuff, like roads and bridges.
 
But you can resolve to do something jaw-droppingly boneheaded nearly every single day.
 
Apparently, it’s what the American people want.

Dr. Mehmet Oz has announced he will run  for the Senate as a Republican from the state of Pennsylvania, despite living in New Jersey. Over here, we proudly note that Oz came to our attention back in 2013, when he was giving aesthetic advice on the appearance of your shit. Here's the counsel the entire Senate can look forward to, should this cheerful quack win the election-News Item


He (Dr. Oz) also suggests how often we should move our bowels and what they ought to look like when we do (at least every other day, brown with a hint of gold, shaped like an S, he says and "it should hit the water like a diver from Acapulco."


From "The Operator," a profile of Dr. Mehmet Oz, heart surgeon and star of "The Dr. Oz Show," published in The New Yorker, 2/4/2013.

Frankly, for me, this medical revelation opens a whole new field in which I fear my accomplishments may be inadequate. I was already self-conscious about my many attributes which I feel are substandard by American ideals; the money in my IRA, the quality of my automobile, the diminutive size of my gun collection, the number of friends I have on Facebook. For Dr. Oz, an Ivy-league educated heart surgeon, a scion of Oprah and popularly known as "America's Doctor" to have opened the lid, so to speak, on fecal aesthetics promised a possible death knell for my remaining fragments of self-esteem.

Nonetheless, as working journalist, full disclosure on my part is a necessity. Immediately after my most recent accomplishment in the field in question, I consulted the contents of my Kohler and was initially pleased. They were indisputably brown. I failed, however, to notice any flecks of gold, and resolved to add a couple shots of Goldschlagger, a liqueur which features actual gold leaf swirling in the bottle and is currently popular only with frat boys and young women psyching themselves up for wet t-shirt contests, to my daily intake of alcoholic beverages. That should make the product shine at the upper end of the Oz spectrum, I calculated.

However, I quickly noted other failings that defied correction. Nothing before my eyes resembled an "S" and I lacked any hygienic means of editing. Other letters were represented, and I was particularly proud of what appeared to be a capital "E," but I am not sure Dr. Oz would approve.

The Acapulco rubric I must admit I failed to understand. To "hit the water like a diver from Acapulco," that is to say, from a great height, wearing a pair of small, tight diving underwear, accompanied by cheers and the scuttling of frightened crabs, is nothing I ever envisioned for my specimens, and rather than chastising myself for my own inadequacies in this area, I wondered what sort of plumbing fixture Dr. Oz personally uses and how he manages to pull a crowd for his events.

You'll note Dr. Oz does not offer his followers extra credit for the appearance of corn. This cost me valuable points.

The doctor entirely omits the subject of odor, for which we can all be grateful. I am sure he would set a high bar on this aspect, describing the ideal stool (his own) as smelling richly of cinnamon, or possibly of cumin, with just a few background notes of basil and coriander.

The word "stink" would not be applicable.
​