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."

Went off the grid when I visited my ancestral home, my peeps, if you were wondering where my hard-core sarcasm went for a week.
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​I went to church on Easter. Not because of some sudden revelation, or because I needed to show off a new outfit, or even because I wanted to, because I never want to go to church. But my soon-to-be 91-year-old mom wanted to go, and she can’t go anywhere by herself nowadays.
 
Even she had her doubts about the project, because we couldn’t go to her parish’s Mass. She can’t handle the steps, which are many and steep there, any more. We had to go to another Catholic church, which, even though it is only a few miles away, my mother was suspicious of. “I heard the priest was weird,” she said of its pastor, repeating some piece of scuttlebutt she had picked up on the gossip chain of old Catholic ladies who judge the relative normalcy of priests.
 
“All priests are weird,” I told her. She still shoots me dirty looks when I say things like that, but she is stooped by age and instead of her hard stare piercing my faithless soul as she intended, it more or less bounced off the sidewalk.
 
The church was about two-thirds full, and there was a side room where, if you feared the covid too much to gather together with them, you could watch the Mass on Zoom with a bunch of other people. Everyone was dressed better than I was, because they had planned to be there and I hadn’t. The fact that young Catholic women tend to dress in skirts so short and heels so high on Sunday, that, if they were loitering on an urban boulevard instead of being in a house of God, they could easily be mistaken for prostitutes, was one of the few entertaining facets of that otherwise barren hour.
 
The singing was left to the choir, for fear of the virus, I imagine, and I was grateful for that, for the sound of a bunch of white people singing off-key is not pleasing to me, and I can’t imagine God likes it much either. The choir even belted out a song that was familiar to me, and I went through several rounds of Catholic calisthenics before I figured out that it had been on the soundtrack of one of my favorite movies, O Brother Where Art Thou?
 
The only other difference I noted between my last Easter Mass of about forty years ago and this one, besides the inclusion of a fundamentalist Baptist hymn in the Catholic service, was that the priest now sprayed holy water, which he called “Easter Water,” over the entire congregation. He did this by dipping a sponge on a stick in a bucket of the blessed H2O, walking around the perimeter of the crowd and flicking it at us. He hit me up once while passing to my right. My mother and I were sitting in the back of the church, in the handicapped section, and while finishing up, the priest soaked me again with a surprise shot of the sacred fluid, this time from behind.
 
Guess he figured I needed a second coat.

​The humongo container ship Ever Given has been gumming up the Suez Canal for a few days now, its pilot having had a Jesus-take-the-wheel moment during a howling sandstorm in the Sinai. Jesus promptly ran it into the banks halfway through, following the example of His ancestor Moses, who took 40 years to navigate the desert.
 
It’s screwing up shipping worldwide, but there are more important issues with it than that. Q-Anon adherents immediately laid ownership of the vessel to Hillary Clinton, because the name of the shipping company that owns the boat is Evergreen, which is the Hilster’s Secret Service code name, and its call number is H3RC, which are the former presidential candidate’s initials plus the number 3, which indicates that the ship is 3x as evil as Hillary herself.
 
Well, I’m convinced, and worried. The ship is 1300 feet long, and capable of carrying 20,000 containers. I can hear you whistling and saying to yourself, “That’s a fuck-ton of sex slaves,” and it is.
 
The Ever Given was on its way from China to the Netherlands, where its cargo of sex slaves was to be distributed all over Europe. Possibly there are enough sex slaves on board that every socialist in that continent could have his or her own. Instead of a sex slave, though, all these leftists are getting are anxiety attacks. They’re just hoping the Ever Given is floating again before the ship runs out of rice and Doritos, the favored foods of sex slaves.
 
It’s not liable to affect us liberals in the US, though. You don’t have to go through the Suez Canal to get from China to the US (China has cornered the market on sex slaves, apparently, like they’ve cornered the market on everything else). Most boatloads of sex slaves come to this country through San Francisco. After a brief stay in Nancy Pelosi’s garage, they are transported by dirty white panel trucks driven by volunteer members of Antifa, nationwide, so that every member of the liberal elite can have their own.
 
Except for me. As a registered Democrat, I’ve been offered one, of course. And, after a long day of stuffing fake ballots into boxes to further the radical leftist agenda, I feel I deserve one. But the girl says no. “We already have a dog,” she points out, and that ends the discussion.
 
I don’t know how anyone can doubt this. It’s only a matter of time before the Big Reckoning, or Cosmic Surge, or the Final Putsch, or whatever you want to call it, happens. Trump is restored to power, and he frees all the sex slaves from Democratic torture chambers.
 
And immediately puts them into cages, for being illegal alien kids.
 
There’s a breadcrumb for you.

The Pope crushed many gay wedding plans last week when he announced that the Church would not start blessing gay weddings.
 
Gay wedding planners had held out extraordinary hope for this Pope. After all, he came out in favor of gay civil unions a while back, and he’s shown extraordinary theological flexibility in the past by letting Jews and atheists into Heaven.
 
A lot of atheists have turned down the Pope’s eternal offer, saying huffily that they prefer to molder in the ground instead, but I’m going, if for no other reason than to see the looks on the faces of all the blessed souls that confidently expected, and have even told me, to go to Hell.
 
But I digress. A lot of gay people are Catholic, although I cannot tell you what for. There are way more gay Catholics than black white supremacists (None. All right, Dave Chappelle, but that was satire) or Jewish Nazis (only Stephen Miller). Probably most of them were hanging on just to have a Catholic wedding, because Catholic weddings are the gayest. The clothes! The incense! The music! The men in dresses! It’s to die for, but, unfortunately, it will have to wait for the next Pope, if not longer.
 
The irony, of course, is that the Church has been a refuge for gay for millennia. Gay might not even have survived the Dark Ages without its cold stone monasteries to huddle in, and to this day, when a devout Catholic family suspects one of its boy children to be on the verge of turning out “that way,” a rush to send him off to the seminary, where he can frolic within other young gay Catholic men, is considered a perfect solution to the problem. This has inevitably led to the Church’s main problem, persistent pederasty, with too many priests holding the Communion wafer high on Sunday with fingers reeking of altar boy ass.
 
The Church has always promoted this idea of a God with an intense interest in human genitals and what their owners are doing with them, a Creator of All Things who spends every minute on His throne, scrutinizing the Earth closely and deciding, “This boner good! That boner bad!” and arranging sanctity or punishment for each erection. This doesn’t seem likely to me. I left the Church when I began to experience my first boyish hard-ons, and realized that I had no choice what to do about them.
 
Yes, I became a rationalist rather than go to Hell for an act I committed two or even three times a day, some days, with nothing more than the bra and panty ads in the Sears catalogue for stimulation. I definitely didn’t want to talk to a priest about that. Whether that was pleasing in the eyes of God I can’t say.

I’ll let you know when I get to Heaven.

America’s latest accused mass/racial murderer, a poorly-groomed white man by the name of Aaron Long, was a long-time churchgoer and apparently a deeply religious man before he made the news by icing eight people in three separate massage parlors last week.
 
Long allegedly killed his victims because he was tormented by the temptation they represented, so they say, even though he was a regular customer at those spas and paid the service charge to be tempted by his victims often. He describes himself as a sex addict, although he sounds like a regular twenty-one-year-old man afflicted only with the priapism that afflicts all men of his age, the vast majority of which relieve it by streaming porn rather than chilling Asian sex workers.
 
The ironic thing is, Jesus actually had advice for Long, for there is a verse from the Sermon on the Mount that says, “If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out.” This is one of Our Savior’s least frequently followed pieces of advice, but it’s there. Apparently the crowd at the Sermon was pretty thug life, so the Savior was trying to make a stern impression on them. Nowhere in the Bible, though, does it say, “If a Korean woman gives you wood, buy a handgun and chill her.” Although there’s plenty of advice on who to kill and when to kill them in the Old Testament, that piece of wisdom is not contained in its pages.
 
Of course, the counsel to yank out your own eyeballs is better suited for those porn-watchers. Long’s target would have to have been an even more personal one, but the words of the Bible are plain. It’s a rare, one might even say a non-existent, event for a good Christian man to shoot off his own pecker to avoid the temptation of plunging it into another prostitute. Capping your own dick is usually reserved for drunk guys exercising their Second Amendment rights. Long could have been a pioneer in this field, and been hailed for solving his issues in a fundamentally Christian manner.
 
Instead, he went on a killing spree against sex workers, which has been done so often it’s a cliché, at least here in the USA. He was excused by a local sheriff captain named Jay Baker as “being at the end of his rope,” and “having a bad day,” which resulted in Baker getting nearly as famous as Cooper all of a sudden.
 
We’ve all had bad days. Some of us are being audited by the IRS, some of us are getting our screenplay rejected once again, some of us are finding out our wives have been having sex with their bosses. Very few of us say to ourselves, when encountering a run of bad fortune, “The only thing that might possibly make this day shine for me is to kill every woman that’s ever yanked me off.”
 
Baker, meanwhile, has been fired from his job as spokesman for the Sheriff. Currently, he couldn’t get a job as a spokesman for a poultry farm.
 
So, there’s no happy ending for him, either.

I thought I couldn't re-publish this column this year, because the Girl Scouts didn't appear in front of supermarkets in February, as they usually do, victims of the pandemic like everybody else, when all of a sudden they there were last week, in the middle of March, selling their sweets as if nothing was amiss, little carb-peddling harbingers of economic recovery.

The girl and I had already bought a crate of the cookies online, of course, but I happily peeled away another five bucks so I could supplement it, and also that I could get out of writing something fresh today with a clean conscience.

I had just purchased a year's supply of Girl Scout Cookies when Illinois lawmaker Bob Morris announced that he was refusing to honor the Girl Scouts of America on their 100th anniversary because of the organization's ties to Planned Parenthood. 

Although the Girls Scouts claimed they had nothing to do with Planned Parenthood, and vice-versa, I called Bob Morris's office just to be on the safe side. The man who answered refused to be identified, but his advice was brisk and businesslike.

"How many boxes did you buy?" he asked.

They were four dollars a box, but you could get five for twenty dollars, so naturally I took advantage of the deal. What should I do?

"Burn them like they were Qurans," he said immediately.

But I like the cookies. 

"Sure, and you probably like eleven-year old girls with socialist, lesbian, abortionist agendas. You're a left-wing child molester. Turn yourself in to the police, and don't call this office again unless you're serious."

But I am serious. What's wrong with my cookies?

"They're artifacts of Planned Parenthood, that's what's wrong with them. What shape are your cookies?"

They're round.

"Don't you see the connection? They're round. So's the pill. So are condoms. So are Nuvarings. So are cervical caps."

So are a lot of other cookies.

"A lot of other cookies don't contain progestogen."

Do Girl Scout Cookies have progestogen in them?

"We're investigating. And we expect to find that they do. And when we do, you know what that makes them, don't you?

No.

"MORNING AFTER COOKIES, that's what!"

Wow. And I bought them from my boss's daughters. They're Republicans. 

"It's sad that Republicans should be so misinformed. Tell your friend to take his girls out of the Girl Scouts immediately. Besides Planned Parenthood cookies, the Girl Scouts also offer a Merit Badge in self-esteem. Tell him to put his daughters in a politically correct girl organization, like the American Heritage Girls."

The American Heritage Girls? Who are they? Sounds like a collection of Colonial costumed dolls.

"They're like the Girl Scouts, only they don't have any self-esteem, like any truly patriotic American female shouldn't."

But my boss's kids like the Girl Scouts. All their friends are in the Girl Scouts. I've never heard of the American Heritage Girls, so my guess is that there are not many troops around. My boss doesn't want to drive a hundred miles for troop meetings. And his girls love selling the cookies. What kind of cookies do the American Heritage Girls sell?

"The American Heritage Girls don't sell cookies. They sell guns."

Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson is under fire after he said during an interview that he may have felt threatened in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot if Black Lives Matter protesters and members of Antifa had been the ones storming the Capitol. “Even though those thousands of people that were marching to the Capitol were trying to pressure people like me to vote the way they wanted me to vote, I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned,” Johnson said during an interview.
 
If the Senator had publicly admitted taking mescaline regularly while sitting in his Senate chambers, the result for his personal reputation could not have been worse. Johnson himself admitted that he “might get in trouble,” for serving up this steaming plate of racist comfort food on a local radio show in his home state of Wisconsin.
 
Whether Johnson passed the afternoon of the Capitol riot in complete tranquility, confident that a bunch of armed, agitated drunks would not mistake him for Chuck Schumer and hang him accidentally, is known only to those who were hustled off to hide with him in the Senate basement. Perhaps he had a plan to save himself, if he had been confronted by the mob, even though that plan was probably to say, “You don’t want me. Mitt Romney is hiding in the closet over there.”
 
The mainstream media would have you believe that smearing your shit over the halls and walls of one of your country’s most iconic structures is not an act of surpassing patriotism and that spearing police officers does not show an abundance of respect for law enforcement, as long as you have a Blue Lives Matter flag attached to your deadly weapon. Luckily, we have Ron Johnson to set us straight on this matter. White people on a riotous rampage because their candidate lost the election are nothing to be afraid of because of their noble intentions, whereas black people protesting racial injustice need to be beaten and tear-gassed as soon as they assemble, because their real object is to murder elderly white people like Senator Johnson in their sleep.  
 
Antifa's are the scary enemies of America, not Q-Anonies with their Walmart tasers and their adorable little pipe bombs. Their passionate desire to make this country a place where white people can do no wrong again is as pure as the snows that blanket Wisconsin in the winter, whereas calls for racial equality are just dog-whistles for letting minorities date your daughters and sit in your hunting blinds.
 
And, believe it or not, Johnson’s acknowledgement of his own curdling racism was just the second-dumbest statement from a public figure last week. Fox brisket-brain Tucker Carlson picked a fight with all the women of the US armed forces. That’s about 200,000 lethally-trained females who would like nothing better than to bitch-slap Carlson, who had better stay out of places like Applebee’s, where these women can afford to eat, for the foreseeable future. But if he does get the mauling he deserves, I just hope it’s the biggest, blackest, most transgendered serviceperson that exists that breaks through Tucker’s security cordon and gives it to him.
 
As the philosopher Bugs Bunny would say of either of these guys, “What a maroon.”

Pastor Stewart-Allen Clark of Missouri's Malden First General Baptist Church said in his Sunday sermon that women should look to maintain their figures and lose weight in order to keep their husband's attention. He also used a photo of former first Lady Melania Trump as an example of what women should aspire to--News Item.
 
To say that Padre Clark got a little off-topic in his sermon the other day would the be understatement of the year in Malden, a bustling town of 4,000 or so located in the Missouri Bootheel, which sounds like a place you would rather risk hitchhiking out of carrying a severed human head in a gym bag rather than be stuck in overnight.
 
This man of the cloth apparently looked out before him on a Sunday, at the faithful women of his congregation, made portly with the products of the many bake sales they had held to pay his salary, and no doubt rendered additionally plump in appearance by their winter outwear, and decided he had had enough. Maybe someone burped, or the pews were making loud creaking noises as the faithful shifted their weight. Anyway, the Rev started in on the fluffy females in his flock, advising them to start going to gyms and cutting out the calories in order to become trophy wives for their husbands, or at least “participation trophy” wives, as he so sensitively put it, and cited the example of Melania Trump.
 
Now, not all women can look like Melania, simply because they cannot afford the plastic surgery involved, or just don’t care to have their faces botoxed into immobility. And she is an excellent example of a woman whose looks are vastly superior to her husband’s, a fox married to a warthog. What inspired the pastor to drag Melania into his recriminations against his flock cannot be known. Perhaps he had recently committed the sin of Onan while contemplating her famous nude pics. Maybe his own partner in matrimony had fluffed out, over the pandemic and the Missouri winter, and he was lashing out secondhandedly at that long-suffering woman by attacking the big gals gathered under his steeple.
 
The first thing you notice about Stewart-Allen Clark, though, besides that the hyphen in his name seems to be in the wrong place, is that he’s a bit of a pork chop himself. It is highly doubtful that the Christian men of Malden all sport six-pack abs and tight, muscular buttocks. No, they, like the cleric himself, likely look like they have finished off a plate of loaded nachos or two in their time. The quest for physical perfection is one they want their wives alone to undertake.
 
This is a time-honored tradition among human males. Who among us has not listened to an intoxicated, overweight friend with a bad complexion sneer at the alleged physical flaws of the contestants in a wet t-shirt contest or a Miss Universe pageant, as few as they may be, especially comparatively?

What this has to do with God or Jesus is not readily apparent. There were no fat people in the Bible. I mean, if there were, God would probably have fat-shamed them, as He was constantly concerned about even more pointless things, like people having tattoos or not being virgins when they were married, to the point of ordering them stoned to death. People in the Bible were usually starving, except for the Romans, and those guys had bulimia parties to keep their weight down.
 
So, Clark has probably ascertained the will of God, but unfortunately fell afoul of the Baptist powers-that-be, as he has been ordered to forsake his pulpit and contemplate offending the women that fill his collection plates.
 
Or, as the Baptist honchos probably put it, “Good time to wander in the wilderness, bro.” 

While the pandemic still boils, the US struggles to put the lid on it with vaccines, and the halls of Congress are filled with the shouts of politicians trying to decide how much money we need to borrow from our future selves to prop up our current economy, Republicans have decided that the most important problem of the day is that the author of “Green Eggs and Ham,” has been canceled. Fox News followed the story for an entire day and  blamed it directly on the current President, saying bluntly, “Biden Cancels Dr. Seuss.”
 
Oh, yeah, and “Mr. Potato Head” was canceled, too. I’m old enough to remember when Mr. Potato Head was just a random assortment of feet, lips and ears. You had to provide your own actual potato to make Mr. Potato Head, and you could stick his features on him randomly. You could put his lips on top of his head, his eyes on each side, and give him four or five plastic feet, in essence creating Mr. Potato Alien Monster. You could then take your grubby child hands and walk him across the floor in various imaginary scenarios in which he was trying to conquer the Earth in the name of the Potato Planet, opposed only by your assortment of plastic soldiers, losing interest in the game just in time for your mom to take Mr. Potato Head back and mash him into your dinner.
 
When Mr. Potato Head was transformed by the addition of a plastic potato with pre-punched holes in it for the placement of his features, I was far too old to play Potato Head any more. For which I am grateful.
 
But Mr. Potato Head has been canceled, Republicans complain, because he is no longer Mr. Potato Head, happily joined in hetero conjugality with Mrs. Potato Head. He/she is now just Potato Head, which Republicans worry that kids will use to make Transgendered Potato Head, who will promptly try to use their bathrooms.
 
The same for Dr. Seuss, who has not been canceled at all, no matter how much Tucker Carlson has bemoaned it on his show, let alone by Joe Biden. Biden has better things to do, working hard fixing things that the ex-Caucasian-in-Chief has destroyed, like the United States, at an age so advanced that, if I reach it one day, I just fantasize my doctor will still let me drink beer. Biden just didn’t mention Seuss on National Reading Day. Do you remember what Trump did to celebrate National Reading Day? Me, neither, but I bet reading wasn’t it. 
 
Seuss’s descendants are in the enviable position of never having to work at all, thanks to having an ancestor whose books generate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for them, a thing my ancestors never bothered to do. I am still bitter about that. It was they that decided not to let six of the good Doctor’s books be published anymore. These six tomes contained white supremacist imagery, these woke benefactors decided, and they could get by with the money they made off the rest of the Seuss canon. They canceled themselves.
 
Now, Seuss was born in 1904, and every white US person born in 1904 was raised as a white supremacist. This is a fact. Some of them got over it, but most of them didn’t. Seuss made the wise decision to be dead instead of living to 117, so whether he did or not is now between him and God.
 
Who, for all we know, may be an all-powerful Potato Head. He acts like it, sometimes.

One of the things you never cared about before is now something you can read about on the Internet every month now—the name of its full moon. Last month, for example, was the Snow Moon, which made sense, especially if you’re from Texas.
 
These names have usually been assigned by Native Americans. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. There’s a Sturgeon Moon, for example. Knowledge of the Sturgeon Moon has never been shared beneficially.  “Hey, you know it’s the Sturgeon Moon tonight?” has never been successfully used as a pick-up line in a singles bar, for example.
 
There are the other moons that the Net obsesses over, too, and they’re not going away—Super Moons, where the full moon occurs when the Moon is closest to the Earth and supposedly bigger to the naked eye. You can’t really tell the difference, though, no matter how long you stare at a Super Moon, unless you’ve taken peyote. There are Blue Moons, when you have more than one full moon in the month, and Blood Moons, beloved of apocalypse fans everywhere, and supposedly predictive of the end of Earth. Blood Moons are lunar eclipses, which occur at least twice a year, indicating that the end of the world is a more gradual process than many doomsday aficionados care to admit.
 
We need to modernize these moon monikers to make them relevant in this age. A few suggestions:
 
January--The Hangover Moon. Also known as I Can’t Look at Myself in the Mirror Moon, this moon rises as the cornucopia of indulgence over the holidays ends.
 
February—Since many Americans now live in the Sun Belt, where snow is rare, the Snow Moon will now be called the Tax Refund Moon.
 
March—Titled the Worm Moon by the Native Americans, it is the yickiest moon. Now to be known as the Daylight Savings Moon.
 
April—Once the Pink Moon, it will now be the Warm Enough to Wear Shorts Sometimes Moon.
 
May—The Flower Moon is replaced by the Your Mom Moon, after the month’s most significant day.
 
June—The Strawberry Moon will now be the Gay Pride Moon. Sometimes also called the Student Loan Moon, as recent grads embark on a lifetime of debt.
 
July—This season of picnicking will be shone over by the Bean Dip Moon.
 
August—The Back to School Moon, as the kids go back to the classroom, which they will this year, hopefully.
 
September—The Halloween Superstores Are Open Moon replaces the Harvest Moon, because nobody you know harvests but they all need a month to get psyched up for Halloween.
 
October—The Buy Candy Moon.
 
November—Originally called by Native American tribes the Big Beaver Moon. We’re just going to keep this one.
 
December—The Credit Card Debt Moon.

The Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual event where right-wing religious kooks gather to bemoan the existence of gender-neutral bathrooms and South America, among other things, and which attracts its fair share of Republican presidential hopefuls, including loser candidate Donald Trump this year, was held over this past weekend, and was trolled to the max by one Tommy Zegan, a sometime artist and American expatriate who hangs his hat in Rosarito, Baja, Mexico.
 
Zegan, who has publicly admitted to a lack of personal enthusiasm for Trump in the past, has not yet owned up to the fact that the statue is intended as a massive insult to the ex-Caucasian-in-Chief, mostly because he wants to sell it, I suspect. A hundred large is his asking price, and until he gets it, he’s going to portray himself as a loyal Trumpster. But right now, I guarantee you, he is sipping a Negra Modelo somewhere and privately cracking up.
 
Let’s take a look at the golden statue, which was hauled into CPAC amid murmurs of “beautiful” and “magnificent,” by the tasteless racists present. The feet of the idol are clad in flip-flops. Flip-flops are the preferred footgear in Rosarito, it’s true, and I can attest to that because I have worn them there many times, but when have you ever seen Trump's feet in them? Never. You can’t golf in flops, or lead an insurrection against Congress wearing them, if you expect to golf well or having your act of treason taken seriously.
 
Next, the fact that the statue is not wearing pants is a dead giveaway to its satirical intent. Trump without his pants on is a gruesome sight, according to available witnesses (think Stormy). It must have been sorely tempting to Zegan, instead of putting the Stars and Stripes on Trump's boxers, to put a pattern of little mushrooms on them instead, but he must have realized that even the dunderheads at CPAC might get an inkling they were having their legs pulled if he did that.
 
But the most brutal touch is THE WAND! Is that the magical wand Trump used to banish the coronavirus? Or the one he tried to conjure up the 11,000 extra votes in Georgia he needed to win the state?  Or turn Michael Cohen into a toad? Or rinse his sperm out of E. Jean Carroll's skirt? Or do any of the other millions of foul deeds the vindicative old shitbird would no doubt do if he actually had a working magic wand?
 
The statue is finished in gold, natch, because that is Trump’s preferred color, although he is not actually gold himself. He’s more the color of a tamale, a dark burnt orange with crispy edges.
 
There are tons of tamales in Rosarito. Zegan should have made his statue out of them.