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."

The on-again, off-again Bernie Sanders vs. Donald Trump debate is off, probably permanently, because Trump chickened out. Before that he wanted ten million dollars to participate. Trump insisted the money would not be paid to himself, but to some non-profit organization, likely one to benefit the female sex or, as Trump put it, “some chick charity.”

We all regret that the debate will not take place, but if the Sanders campaign will cough up ten million large for a debate, I want in on it, for I am not afraid to debate Sanders any time, any place, for that sizable a chunk of change. And I promise to do it Trump style.

I can even go one better, because I’ll start off by attacking Bernie’s hairstyle, a move Trump might hesitate to use because of his own frequently criticized do. My highly disciplined hair management regime contrasts favorably with both the Senator’s nursing-home looking fringe and Trump’s lacquered down Hair Club for Billionaire Men comb-over.

After insulting the candidate’s hair (“Why don’t you buy a comb, Senator, instead of just rubbing your head with the pillow when you get up in the morning?”) I’ll give him a humiliating nickname, like “Vegetarian-Looking Old Fart” or “Four-Eyed Communist Bastard,” making sure I add “Senator” in front of it so he knows it’s just a humorous gesture (“Senator Geriatric Peacenik”).

I will not be arguing about any actual issues, like the free college tuition thing or breaking up Wall Street. If Senator Sanders tries to steer the debate in that direction, I will point out that he is a “loser.” If Bernie bristles at that, there’s plenty of ammunition for me to use on him—if he was a winner, he’d be a Senator from a bigger state than Vermont, right? Maple syrup and beautiful fall foliage are nice, but if he really wanted to make a difference, he’d be from a real state like Pennsylvania or Texas. Plus, he’s lost plenty of primaries to She Who Must Not Be Named But Will Likely Be Our Next President Anyway.

If Sanders tries to get the debate back to “programs” or “new Ideas,” a fast dig about my girl being better-looking than his wife (a fact) will rattle him into silence.

When Bernie tries to attack me personally, by pointing out that I have a mixed record with both the IRS and the local police, or that I have never paid up when I’ve been successfully sued, or that I’ve never run for anything, let alone won an election, or even that most people just don’t like me, I will accuse him of dementia and demand he take an Alzheimer’s test on the spot. While he struggles over it, I’ll Tweet to my 88 Twitter followers every time he gets an answer wrong.

I’ll be bringing my birth certificate to the debate, and when he can’t produce his, I’ll accuse him of being born in Belarus. Likewise, I’ll demand he address the rumor that he was the notorious “man on the grassy knoll” that fateful day in Dallas when JFK was shot, even though I started that rumor myself.

I plan to depart the stage in triumph. People will start thinking of me as a viable third-party candidate. I will urge my new-found followers to get me on the ballot in all fifty states. Their job, because I’m not going to lift a finger to do so.
 
The only thing I need, besides a cashier’s check for the ten mil before I open my mouth, is Secret Service protection for just the one day because I have neither chair-breaking Bernie Bros or muscular white supremacists to back me up in case a riot breaks out. And a couple sandwiches—roast beef, lettuce and tomato on rye—real rye, not that supermarket crap—and light mayo. Not gobs of mayo. I hate that.
​
It’s going to be yuuuuge.

When you cast your vote in November, be sure to consider that one of the knowledge-nuggets we Americans are going to get if 2017 starts with Clinton II instead of Surgical Comb-over I is the truth about UFO’s.

That’s because John Podesta, former advisor to President Obama, says his biggest regret about his last government job was not being able to declassify the government files pertaining to the existence of alien visitors and the abilities thereof. He wanted to before, but when he suggested to Obama that the American people were ready for the truth about UFO’s, the President snorted and said “You think they’re going to believe what I’m saying about UFO’s when they don’t even believe in my birth certificate? What the f*ck have you been smoking, John?”

But Podesta’s bound to get a job in the Hillary White House, even if it’s just the Main Man in Black, and the American public will find out what the government has been hiding about flying saucers all these years.

The truth is out there, and hopefully we’ll find out benevolent aliens are on the verge of swooping in and giving us all eternal life and free energy, once we’ve proved we deserve it by voting Democratic. With all of the world’s social and economic problems solved by the ET’s, not to mention polar bears and coral reefs saved because the aliens show us how to turn down the planetary thermostat a notch, mankind will embark on an era of endless peace, prosperity and tranquility as we prepare to become members of the United Galactic Planets Full of Nice Beings.

Haw! Just kidding. It won’t be like that at all. For one thing, if those aliens don’t bring Jesus with them, there’s going to be hell to pay, as the Bible-believing citizens of the world will promptly recognize the ET’s as a bunch of Antichrists. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, as mentioned in the Bible, plus the breaking of the Internet, which isn’t, as all seriously Christian souls start arguing among themselves about what time is ordained for them to set their alarm clocks for the Rapture.

Plus, people will try and kill them. The aliens, not the Christians. That’s what humans do when they encounter new creatures and America, as one of the most heavily personally armed nations on Earth where there’s not a for-real current insurgency, is bound to be in the forefront of standing its ground against extraterrestrial trespassers. The ETs can try to come in peace all they want, but they’d better not land near anybody making shine or grazing cattle on government land. Or Oakland.

And it’s highly unlikely that the aliens are going to come all this way without bring some weaponry of their own. Advanced beings are not going to make a quiptillion light-year trip only to slap their huge brainy foreheads and say “Damn! I left my AR-15 propped up against a tree on that last planet!” when they arrive. They’ll be packing alien heat, weapons so advanced that they not only kill you, but turn you into a mindless obedient sex zombie before you hit the ground, capable only of uttering the words “Probe me. Oh, God, probe me hard,” over and over again.

So we’re talking world-wide shootout, and humanity will run out of ammo first, because the aliens will have the capability to make bullets out of sunlight.

After the war the aliens will probably be saying to themselves “Hey, there’s just a bottomless sea of pricks down there. Forget the live-forever pills. But as long as we’re here, we might as well enslave them,” and our descendants will be picking crops, nannying alien babies and scrubbing alien toilets, which are nine feet high and filled with feces that attack you, for every generation until the sun burns out.
​
That’s what you’re getting with Clinton, sheeple. So wake up and vote Trump. We need a Wall in Space.

Facebook is in deep trouble with American conservatives because of its alleged censoring of right-wing leaning stories in its Trending feed, as much as a web site used by 1.6 billion people, most of whom are not Americans, and an owner worth between 3 and 5 Donald Trumps put together can be in deep trouble.

Which is to say, not much. Even though Mark Zuckerberg is going to meet with leading conservatives, purportedly to do a little booty-smooching, what are they going to do to him if they don't get their way? Wear ties with frowny face emojis stamped all over them? Unfriend him? Even if he goes away pouting because conservatives refuse to “Like” him, he can probably get himself back in a cheery mood by buying a couple new islands.

And nobody I know gets their news from Facebook. They get their cat videos and pictures of other people's food from Facebook. The web site is go-to for both of those.

But Zuckerman did not get to be a quadzillionaire by not giving people what they want, and there likely are conservatives on Facebook, who can probably be described as “people who need help from their grandchildren every time they want to use Facebook,” and he knows there's no sense alienating any of his billion and a half plus customers, so there's no doubt Facebook's Trending feed has already been tweaked so that it is a bubbling stream of conservative thought.

So I logged into my Facebook page at this moment (7:51 Pacific time, May 20th, 2016) and right now am going to let both of my readers know whether the Trending news stories are perceptively more conservative.

Right away you can tell they are trying. The first one comes from Washington, DC itself, where a LGBT rights bill was defeated by conservatives, because they think LGBTers aren't “human” and therefore don't deserve “rights.” Liberals, who want to start another giant government bureaucracy to give rights away like they are food stamps or pictures of missing children, are booing the vote and shouting “Shame!”

It's accompanied by a C-Span video of this actually happening, so this is “news,” although not particularly interesting or unpredictable news. It's not the kind of news that conservative really like to watch, which would be footage of Hillary Clinton wearing a hijab and actually leading the attack in Benghazi. So Zuckerman may be trying here, but I think he's missed the mark.

The second item is #NationalSendANude Day, which was yesterday. Many people failed to observe this holiday in the proper spirit, me included, not because I am against putting myself nude on the Internet, or anywhere, but because I lack the Photoshop skills to paste a black rectangle, a la Kardashian, over my genitals in the pic, which I would want to do because I don't want my full Monty to be retweeted to underage people for legal reasons. This principle is part of my lifelong and intermittently successful campaign to avoid jail time.

Certainly conservatives don't want to go to jail, and many of them don't, despite being indicted at far higher rates than the population as a whole.* So I would say Zuckerman hit the mark with putting #NationalSendANude Day in Trending.

The third item Trending is that the web site PornHub.com (I'm not linking to PornHub here, because I'm fairly confident both of my readers already have it bookmarked) is launching a fitness program called BangFit, which claims you can sex your way to physical fitness. I suspect satire here. Most exercise experts say getting in shape requires at least thirty minutes of cardio at least three times a week, and most couples have sex for three minutes at a time three times a month, after which the male goes out and brags to his friends about how good he is at it and the female goes out and complains to her friends at excruciating length about how bad he is at it, especially compared to other men she has had sex with that she has had the good sense not to tell him about. Complaining is not cardio. PornHub is branching out from posting free porn to posting free humor, which means they're competing with me and they have millions more dollars to try and be funnier with. Screw them.

But I digress. Satire is never a conservative thing. Conservatives lack the satirical gene. Conservatives try to joke about Harry Reid and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, without realizing that most of us don't even know who these people are. It's absolutely vital that your audience know who the hell you are making fun of. If a conservative comic gets tired of telling ethnic or gay jokes and tries to slip in a Debbie Wasserman Schultz joke, only the other conservatives in the audience will laugh. Other people will just think “Who is that? I think I've heard of her. Does she breed Shar-peis or something?”

So Zuckerman is pulling a fast one here. Just when he pretends to be kowtowing to the high priests of right-wing thought, he's posting stuff that he thinks they won't understand.

I'm letting him know here, conservatives don't like to be made fun of. 

Trust me on that.

*Weren't aware of this "fact?" That's because I just made it up to suit my argument. I learned how from following the current election campaign. Praise the Donald!

Science marches on, and it takes no prisoners. Apparently we’re all being hit by bullets from space all the time in the form of cosmic rays, and now they’ve discovered ones that are high-caliber enough to mess us up:

In 2012 it (Ice Cube, a cosmic ray detector buried at the South Pole) detected a whopper of a neutrino (nicknamed Big Bird; all these events are named after Sesame Street characters to make it easier to keep track of them). The energy in that single neutrino was staggering beyond staggering: It contained 1000 trillion times as much energy as a photon of visible light. If that neutrino had hit someone they would have felt it. A blow from a single subatomic particle. Egads.

FromPhil Plait’s “Bad Astronomy” column in Slate.

Egads indeed, but now that we know we’re being pummeled by invisible tiny uppercuts from outer space at all times (kind of like a Chinese water torture from God) it explains a hell of a lot about human behavior, particularly mine. The series of horrible personal and financial decisions that form the map of my life were heretofore thought to be the result of poor judgement, or drinking, or both. Now I realize that all along it’s been being bombarded by bruiser neutrinos named after Sesame Street characters that has kept me from scaling the lofty peaks of success.

My decision to become a widely ignored writer instead of a successful solar energy salesman, or an Uber driver, or a social media star or otherwise to make some cutting-edge career choice was something I laid to the reality that it’s much easier to pretend you’re writing while suffering from a seismic hangover than to pretend you’re selling, driving or starring in anything. Now I realize that alcohol had nothing to do with it—Bert and Ernie from outer space were zipping through my defenseless neurons the whole time, fuzzing up my brain and drying out my throat.

But let’s not just talk about me, much as I enjoy that subject. The whole history of human intercourse-ups can be viewed in an entirely new light, now that we realize all of our ancestors, along with ourselves, have had Cookie Monster neutrinos from black holes burrowing through our otherwise capable gray matter since we dropped out of the trees. From the architect who designed the walls of Jericho to the emperor who presided over the fall of Rome to the skipper who steered the Titanic into the iceberg, every lapse of judgement in history could be ascribed to high-energy neutrinos twerking in the lapser’s gray matter.
 
Even as I write this, every person on Earth who got up resolving to make today the day they got their act together is getting whammed by neutrinos named Kermit, Beaker and the Swedish Chef. That’s why, in spite of their best intentions, they left their lunch on the counter, the door unlocked, accidentally parked in their boss’s parking space and spent the rest of the day frantically trying to recover files they unintentionally erased. It’s a wonder anyone has enough self-regard left at quitting time to drag him or herself into a bar. And it's all the fault of powerful Muppet neutrinos.

And it’s not just humans these subatomic bullies are roughing up. You know who just made your dog poop on the rug? Fozzie Bear.  

The question is, how high-energy do these neutrinos get? Can science tell us? Do we have to add neutrinos to the list of threats to Earth from outer space, along with comets, asteroids, gamma-ray bursts and uncomfortably close supernovas?  Is there a killer quark out there capable of ending life on Earth?
​
Could be. Apocalypse, your name is Miss Piggy. 

The Republican Party of the South has found a new nonexistent problem to be up in arms about, and that is people of uncertain sexuality peeing next to them. Having solved voter fraud that didn’t happen and kept Planned Parenthood from selling baby parts, which they weren’t, Republican politicians, particularly in the South, are turning their attention to the equally imaginary problem of relieving themselves in the same room as transgendered people. Laws have been passed, in North Carolina and  Mississippi, that people have to use the bathroom designated for the gender marked on their birth certificate.

This was not in response to the vast numbers of transgenders flashing their surgically altered junk at our children in public restrooms below the Mason-Dixon line. Critics of the law have pointed out that people have been using the restroom of their choice since the first public hole in the ground was dug, and that they suspect the motive of bathroom law's writers was merely to pick on a tiny minority, trans people, because picking on a larger minority, gay people, wasn't going so well.

Possibly there are all kinds of rampaging trans perverts making tinkle in the stalls next to us, but we men, at least, are not aware of it, because we all follow the Unwritten Laws of the Men’s Room, one of which is you never look at anybody else while doing your business there. Up to a certain age (late teens-early twenties) a male may be inclined to look at the male parts of other males urinating next to him, but by the time he reaches twenty-five or so, he has looked enough to know where he falls on the manhood scale, and has either embraced it or resigned himself to it. After that, he doesn’t bother.

There’s no talking to strangers in there, either. And you don’t use the urinal right next to any other guy, unless you have no choice. Everybody knows the rules. They may be quite different in the ladies’ room, for all I know. For one thing, the girls always take a companion to help them urinate, whereas for men, bleeding one's lizard is traditionally a solitary pursuit. But the man rules mean if some trans person is peeing in the same room with us, we are just about obligated not to notice. About the only way to get us to notice would be to force a person who has shaved his entire body, compressed his genitals enough so he looks good in a tube dress, tossed on a push-up bra and some high heels, then yanked down his panty hose and stood to pee with the rest of the men’s room crowd in obedience to the new law.

That’s when the other guys going potty might give in to the natural human inclination to threaten and occasionally kill people with whom they feel uncomfortable. We don’t want to turn our restrooms into places of unrest. That moment of utter peace that comes with voiding, particularly if it is a much-needed emptying that we have scrambled around half a stadium to enjoy, especially if we have to put our forearm on the wall tiles during the process and rest our head on it to keep from swaying back and forth because we are drunk, is not one we want marred by gender-centric brawling.

The Restroom Guardians say they are only following the teachings of the Bible, as usual, even though in the days of the Bible everybody wore dresses and used the same bathroom, i.e., the whole planet. God made us all different, they note, probably just to give us an excuse to kick the crap out of each other, so let’s get down to business. If that means standing next to Caitlyn Jenner when Caitlyn takes a wee-wee, that’s just what we law-abiders will have to do.
​​
We’re not going to look, though.

​PAUL RYAN: (entering a secret chamber in the basement of the Capitol and addressing JEB BUSH, MITT ROMNEY and JOHN KASICH) I’ve just come back from my meeting with Donald Trump and I have great news for all of you. Trump is willing to release all of his delegates at the Republican convention!

JEB BUSH: Yay! That means I can be President!

JOHN KASICH: Or me!

MITT ROMNEY: Or me!

PAUL RYAN: (Severely) Or me. There’s a catch, though—in order to get Trump to release his delegates, we have to have a National Donald Trump Appreciation Day.

JOHN KASICH: I don’t see a problem with that. Already Hillary Clinton appreciates him. She’s so excited about running against him I hear she has to change her granny panties three times a day.

JEB BUSH: That’s pretty disrespectful of women, John.

JOHN KASICH: If I’m going to replace the guy, I have to adopt at least some of his positions. Listen to me. Great piece of ass. Disgusting breast feeders. Bimbos. You know I’m sounding like a winner now, right?

JEB BUSH: (ignoring KASICH) I don’t see a problem with that. It would be like St. Patrick’s Day, I’m thinking. Except with orange hair instead of green hats, and everybody forgets about it the next day.

PAUL RYAN: He’s asking for a little more than that. I mean, obviously the details have to be worked out, but the first one is nobody else in the US can Tweet anything during DT Appreciation Day.

MITT ROMNEY: Impossible. People can’t live without Twitter.

PAUL RYAN: They can re-Tweet anything he posts, so there’s a little breathing room there. Second, Trump gets to carry the nuclear “football” all day.

JEB BUSH: Impossible. That’s solely the President’s job. I mean, my brother let me touch it a few times…

MITT ROMNEY: (sotto voce) Fondle it, you mean.

JEB BUSH: But he never gave me the launch codes.

PAUL RYAN: Fortunately, he doesn’t want the launch codes. He just wants to hold it on his lap while Megyn Fox interviews him, which I think is reasonable. The unexpected thing is, Trump doesn’t want Trump Appreciation Day to be all about him. He wants all rich guys over 65 with hot foreign wives who wouldn’t lay one hooker-looking manicured fingernail on them if they weren’t wallowing in greenbacks to be able to buy anything they want without paying sales tax all day. I mean, your jewelry, yacht and private jet sales are really going to take off during DTA Day, so a genuine boost for the economy there to help it recover from the way Obama's ruined it.

JEB BUSH: I think that’s a small price to pay for Bush III.

MITT ROMNEY: The nation’s first Mormon President will proclaim it. Once a year.

JOHN KASICH: Schlonged. Pig.

PAUL RYAN: There’s another problem. The candidate wants Donald Trump Day to occur more than once a year.

MITT ROMNEY: Unprecedented. Nothing happens more than once a year. At least that’s what Anne tells me, when I want to have sex with her.

JEB BUSH: Under the new, improved, Bush Administration we’re not going to go off our rockers in the Middle East again, promise, but we will be happy to honor Donald Trump spring and fall. Or winter and summer. Or the day before Christmas and after 4th of July. Whatever.

PAUL RYAN: Donald actually had a tighter schedule in mind.

MITT ROMNEY: What? Monthly?

PAUL RYAN: He’s actually thinking Donald Trump Appreciation Day should be held every Monday that’s not already a holiday. When there’s already a holiday, he’s willing to bump it to Tuesday.

JEB BUSH: (Holding his fingers in front of his face as if he was looking through binoculars) I could see a certain political scion with glasses and a Hispanic wife presiding over a Monday-less America.

MITT ROMNEY: Me first, loser.

JEB BUSH: You were the first loser!

PAUL RYAN: Actually, I was the one with the conference with The Donald, so I was the first one to agree to his terms. Start thinking about President Ryan, bitches.

MITT ROMNEY: (snarling) You ungrateful whelp! (He assaults Ryan. Jeb Bush jumps in, too. Shouts of “Watch the glasses” from Bush and “Watch the hair” from Romney ring out as Ryan attempts to put both of them into Altar Boy Submission Holds).

JOHN KASICH: Pre-nup. Fat menstruating animal. Hey, this is fun.

Science poobah Neil deGrasse Tyson has said he is open to the idea that our entire universe is a simulation, which means that all human wrangling, not to mention every star and bit of stardust out there in the cosmos, is only as real as the video games you can download for your cell phone.

A lot of people are uncomfortable with this idea, but it is the job of science to seek after truth, and tell it to us even if it makes us uncomfortable. We civilians cannot direct the path of scientific inquiry. I personally would like scientists to discover that drinking beer makes you immortal, but all the scientists I have implored to research the drink more, live longer theory have ignored my suggestions, even though I always volunteer to participate in any field trials they may come up with.

The idea that that all our thoughts, dreams, desires, loved ones, homes and gift cards are merely programs on some uber-computer outside of our universe can be unnerving, but it explains one thing for sure—why God is such a dick.

Because God is playing this video game, and if He is like the average video game player in this simulated existence, He is an awkward teenage boy, bulging with insecurities and unfulfilled sexual desires. He is playing "Earth" while being nagged to do His homework by His mom and being lightly bullied on uber-Facebook by his frenemies.

The simulation theory explains why He doesn’t listen to our prayers, because teenage boys don’t listen to anyone but other teenage boys. It also explains why He has a predilection for appearing to virgins, because more sexually experienced females make Him nervous.

Shaking us with earthquakes and blowing our homes into matchsticks doesn’t matter to Him, because He knows we’re not real. If He’s playing online with other teenage boy-Gods, they make snarky comments to each other as conflagration after conflagration wipes out goodly portions of humanity. When Hiroshima went up, the conversation probably went something like this:

Did you see that mushroom cloud, bitches?

That was soooo badass, dude.

That’s why America is my chosen nation, bro. They really know how to kick tail.

If the universe as a simulation theory is correct, we’ve been going all wrong in our approach to God throughout the entire history of religion. Addressing Him as the Almighty and All-Powerful just strikes Him as sarcasm—He knows it's not true. He knows He's not getting His learner’s permit unless He gets at least a C in algebra, and He's raging at all the girls in the high school class above Him that pretend He doesn’t exist.

It would be better to pray to Him with advice that will help Him get through his emotionally troubled teenage years, advice like “It gets better, God” and “If you’ve been watching porn, oh Lord, don’t forget to erase your browser history.”

And forget praying for world peace. Chances are, it’s just not written into the program. 
​

Well, there you have it. This election cycle is officially the most loathsome ever, as the Koch Brothers, petroleum magnates who want to frack the Grand Tetons down to the size of a really scary roller coaster, and are willing to spend a billion bucks or so to buy high office for any politician that will let them, are keeping their hands in their pockets for 2016, and have even muttered that Hillary Clinton might be an acceptable President.

It is highly doubtful that Hillary will really let the Koch boys do what they want, which is to find the most unspoiled wilderness in America and crisscross it with leaky pipelines, so the resignation of the brothers to her election is merely disgust expressed by them at the merchandise available.

It started out so promisingly for them, too—the Republican field was amply filled with candidates who were eager to sell themselves for Koch bucks—Jeb “Don’t Call Me Bush” Bush, Marco "I Should Have Run Next Time, When People Wouldn't Realize I was Such a Lightweight” Rubio, Scott “The Time to Quit is Now” Walker and Chris “I Should Have Run Last Time, Before People Realized I Was Such a Dick” Christie.

Now even Ted “Lucifer Incarnate” Cruz and his prematurely anointed running mate Carly “If You Need Somebody That Can Seem Even More Insincere and Robotic Than Hillary I’m Your Girl” Fiorina, and  John “Nobody Actually Votes for Me" Kasich are gone. 

All those guys, and many more, were eager to fill their campaign chests with Koch bucks and more than willing to spend them arguing that America’s biggest problems are Planned Parenthood and the fact that some billionaires pay so much in taxes they can only afford one private island.

We all know what happened to them. The man who would be America’s first orange President blew them all out of the running by promising to rid us of Mexican rapists by building the biggest wall since China’s (which, by the way, is also raping us) along the border, and solving all of our international problems by waterboarding anybody that screws with him.

You may think The Donald is a breath of fresh air, but so was Hurricane Sandy. The Koch brothers are not going to put a billion behind the ski-mogul-haired mogul. 

And for sure the Kochs are not going to be feeling the Bern anytime in this plane of existence.

So it looks like we’re going to get Clinton II, unopposed at least by America’s biggest buyers of candidates, and it will probably be okay. It would take a real meteorological event of feces for it to turn out worse than Bush II. It’s just not going to be as much fun having Hillary as President as it is having a cool black guy as President and, let’s face it, Obama is cool. Even if you hate him you have to admit that. If you're not willing to do even that, it really is because you’re a racist, so quit swearing you're not one.

Hillary will be our first Grandmother President, if she doesn’t get indicted, but she’s not the kind of grandmother everybody wants to have, the kind that bakes cookies all day and lets you stay up as late as you want when you spend the night at her house. She’s the kind of grandmother that looks over your report card critically and won’t let you play video games until you’ve done your homework.

So it’s not going to be as much fun, for you, me, or the Koch brothers. But it will probably work.

I want this to be the last thing I write about the 2016 elections but it probably won't be--the GOP convention promises to be an exercise in public idiocy that will reverberate through the ages, and I probably won't be able to suffer through it silently.

​But I would rather.

World Naked Gardening Day is coming up on May 7th, and I hope you are all ready for it. The girl and I have been planning for it for months. “Don’t forget you have to be back here for World Naked Gardening Day," she told me as I was making plans to travel back to Pennsylvania, my native state, to visit my people there, and where I currently sit, typing this.

“I won’t,” I assured her, and I haven’t—I’ll be back in San Diego by the 4th. Hopefully I'll get the same nice new plane back there as I did when I came out. The new in-flight entertainment screen was great--there were games you could play for free on it, and I played trivia and poker all the way here, which showed me, contrary to my previous opinion of myself, that I know nothing about anything and cannot play poker.

But I'll be back on my adopted home turf and ready for WNGD. I’ll be ready for the traffic and the crowded shopping venues, especially at Home Depot, as Southern Californians, for whom World Naked Gardening Day is nearly as important as Arbor Day, flock to buy the fertilizer, trowels and hedge clippers that will complement their naked selves best on May 7th.

Ironically, it was here in Pennsylvania that my most intense gardening, although not naked, experiences occurred. My family of nine lived off our land—that and my dad’s job as a line foreman for the Philadelphia Electric Company—and all summer radishes, cucumbers, squash and other vegetables we kids had absolutely no use for sprouted in our garden.

We grew one produce item me and my siblings would eat enthusiastically--tomatoes—and the beginning of August, when the tomatoes were being plucked thick and fast, my mother would celebrate by buying a swine’s worth of bacon and we would eat nothing but bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches until the first day of school.

But nudity and tilling the soil did not mix. We were serious Catholics, and while Catholics have many holidays, or as the Church so jovially calls them, Holy Days, that are unknown to other denominations, World Naked Gardening Day was not among them. In fact, Catholics back then had added an 11th Commandment to the original roster, and that commandment was:

Thou shalt not see anybody else naked, nor shalt anyone see you naked.

We followed this rule because we knew the alternative was an eternity in Hell, even as, at one point, there were eight of us living in a house with two bedrooms and one bath, which made Hell look a little more tolerable. I don’t know how old I was when I realized most people don’t go into the bathroom or the closet to change their clothes. Sometime between when I started shaving and my honeymoon night is as close as I can come to pinning it down.

It’s rainy and miserable here in Philly, as it so often is here until at least the middle of June, when it gets rainy and hot, so I don’t know if World Naked Gardening Day is ever going to catch on here. And when I get back home to celebrate, there’s not all that much to do—after a failed attempt to plant our condo yard in Korean Grass some years back, we had every inch of it covered in easy-to-cultivate river rock, so the only gardening chore I really have to do on World Naked Gardening Day is spraying weed killer on anything that dares spring up between the stones.

That’s easy enough to do in the dark.