richardcahill.net

Roofies Good, Morning After Pills Bad--God Speaks Out on Rape

10/29/2012

A lot of you wonder how I feel about human life and when it begins. I get a lot of puzzled prayers on it. "Lord," these supplicants say. "do you really mean it when you say some four-cell blastocyst is the same as a real breathing human being like Ted Nugent or Honey Boo-Boo?"

To which I respond, Hell yeah. Life is sacred because I make it that way. All seven billion of you are made in My image, from the coldest Eskimo in Nome to the hottest stripper in Vegas. Every time a sperm sweet-talks its way into an egg another mini-Me starts forming and that's sacred right until the second that life ends, whether that be by getting wiped out by a tsunami, run over by a spoiled teenager in his dad's girlfriend's BMW or dying a quiet, dignified death at an advanced age due to medical malpractice.

Yep, whether you're drunkenly flaming strangers on Huffpo or being chased by hungry crocodiles down the Nile or getting bayoneted because you wandered into the wrong neighborhood in Aleppo, you have My love equally, except for Americans, whom I love a little more because they seem to need that.

And now they've got their BVD's in a lump because they can't figure out whether My will is being done when a child is conceived as a result of rape. Well, natch. My will regulates everything in the universe. People bitch about Obamacare, but those regulations aren't a poop spot from a hummingbird compared to Mine. And you know why? That's right, because I made it that way.

So when you girls get pregnant after you've been raped, just deal. Your violently conceived child may grow up to be a world leader or a famous musician or a reality TV hunk. Of course, he may grow up to be just another rapist. Or all of the above. That's for Me to say.

Not every woman gets raped. I don't need to apologize for that. In fact, ladies, if you think about it, I give you all kinds of signs that My will is about to result in you getting raped. If your new step-dad keeps inviting you outside to help him soundproof his tool shed or says "Take off them tight clothes you're wearing. Might as well throw them in the washer, too," when you are doing laundry together, for example, he might be following My will.

If you accept a blind date with a neighborhood guy whose nickname is "Turk" or "T-Bone," you're taking your chances, obviously.

If you're the only girl cousin in a large family that lives on a mountainside in Kentucky you can probably count on one or more of your men-folk having a hankering to show you his John-boy, if you know what I mean.

If the guy sitting next to you on the subway keeps telling you in a conversational way that he pulled out all his own teeth so the Sex Police couldn't track him and then follows you off at your stop you're probably in My plans as well as his.

If you've got an itch to throw on your tiniest vinyl skirt and head to some downtown bar to cut loose, remember, roofies may be a mysterious, or at least hard-to remember part of My workings. Morning after pills are definitely not.

Or if you're lying there, shamelessly ovulating away, taking a nap by yourself on some summer afternoon with only a thin screen door between you and that neighbor who can't get you out of his mind since he saw you mowing the lawn in a halter top, I might start thinking that you've been neglectin' your begettin' for long enough.

Oh, I hear the complaints. It's not fair, that women shouldn't be able to use birth control pills and get abortions and the like and guys, even rapist guys, should be controlling what you girls do with all of that wonderful reproductive stuff I gave you. Just try to remember, I created everything and put it in its place, and there's a place for all you girls in My world.

It's just not first place.

0 Comments

Why I Could Lead a War with Iran Better Than Romney

10/25/2012

1 Comment

I admit, at first glance the Governor and I seem equally incapable of leading a nation to war. Neither one of us has any military experience. Some of my critics have said that Romney showed greater strategic gifts by ducking service in Vietnam by being a missionary in France than I did by being born too late to be drafted for that conflict, but I maintain it's a draw.

Neither one of us has any résumé in operating any of the machinery of modern war. Fighter planes, aircraft carriers, tanks…both of us would be well-advised to let someone else drive if we found ourselves in one of those things.

I've ridden horses. So has he. I know which end of a bayonet to hold. He probably does, too. It's not that tough to figure out.

Hand to hand combat? Romney, with an assist, once cut off a fellow prep student's hair. Me—limited to a few years I spent as a bouncer at a bar. Sure, I've been in a few more rough spots than the Governor, but I've never tried fighting anyone who was sober.

Where then would I find the hubris to claim I would be able to invade Iran more capably than a guy who gets daily security briefings from the State Department?

Because I know where it is.

I don't think it's a landlocked country that borders Syria, as Romney does. I know that there are no landlocked countries that border Syria. Romney may be thinking of Azer-something, which is a country that lies north of Iran and is landlocked. I apologize for calling it Azer-something. Sometimes I call it Azer-hoodle, or Azer-thingy. Like the name of the fellow that leads Iran, Ahmeda-hopple, the name of the country starts with an A followed by a disconsolate jumble of vowels and soft consonants that my mind refuses to learn to pronounce. So I call it Azer-et cetera when called upon to discuss it, just like I call the leader of Iran "five feet even of beady eyes and scruffy beard," or the "midget, bad-haired loony of the Middle East" when I need to comment on him.

Romney may well know how to pronounce these names, so I acknowledge he has that advantage over me, but you have to admit I'm way out front in the geography field because the Governor apparently does not know where Iraq is, either. I know that it lies between Syria and Iran, meaning they don't border each other. Romney wants us to leave 20,000 troops in Iraq. As your military leader, I would make sure I left troops where I could find them again.

He may be mixing Iran up with any of a whole heap of countries that were formed when the Soviet Union was dissolved whose names end in "stan" and are all landlocked countries. That's a rule of geography—if you used to belong to the Soviet Union and your country's name ends in "stan," you have no beachfront property.

Iran has lots of beachfront along the Persian Gulf, which is named after what Iran used to be called. Romney may be confused because Persian can be a type of carpet, too, and also a kind of cat. US warships patrol the Persian Gulf on a regular basis, just to keep an eye on the Iranian Navy, which would not exist if Iran were a landlocked country. Maybe that's why Romney thinks our Navy is perilously tiny—he's not counting those ships in the Persian Gulf because he doesn't know it's there.

Landlocked countries almost never have navies or gulfs named after them. There is no Swiss Navy or Gulf of Switzerland, for example. You cannot sail directly from the Cayman Islands to Switzerland even though your money can.

I understand Romney's background as a quarter-billionaire makes it easy for him to forget where he's left his stuff—he may not remember where one of his particular homes or Cadillacs or trust funds is at any given time, but troops and ships aren't his stuff. They're our stuff.

As your leader, I might not know any better than Romney how to use it, or whether I should, but I guarantee I would at least know where it was.

1 Comment

A Man And His Foo-Foo Dog

10/23/2012

2 Comments

I like dogs, but I haven't owned one by myself since my remote childhood. I like going places and doing things without hauling dog food around and finding canine relief stations.

This is not to say that my relations with man's best friend have become distant. Many women have dogs. I have not taken a serious survey regarding this, but it's my guess that most women without immediate dependent children or roommates acquire a dog. Some are satisfied with a cat or two, but dogs are their pet of choice. I have in recent years, been step-dad to a Corgi, two wiener dogs, and two cats grown so enormous that they resembled fake furred footstools with eyes. Nowadays it's a Chihuahua.

I hear you snickering. Nothing funnier than a big bald burly guy walking a dainty little dog. I used to laugh at them, too. I saw one the other day. He was even bigger and burlier than me, an even match in the baldness field and his dog was even daintier. Instead of laughing, I nearly shouted out the window of my car "Dude, I live your life!"

A Chihuahua will do anything for you that any other dog will do and do it neater and more compactly. He will bark at intruders or anybody else that comes near the home. Once you let the intruder in, because he is the Chinese restaurant delivery man, the beast will want to bite him. If the dog squirms loose while you are fumbling for the tip, he will launch an attack, which usually consists of a quick nip at the pants leg of the interloper. Nobody sues you for that.

He will pee on the rug at least once a month. You may not regard this as a necessity, but he does, and manufacturers of carpet cleaning and deodorizing products do too.

He is always hungry. Why? Because his food tastes terrible. I know this because my Significant Other once inexplicably left a bowl of dog kibble on the counter instead of placing it on the floor, so it resembled an available snack food to any hungry absent-minded person passing by. After a moment's mild retching I was okay, but I feel compassion for the dog any time I see him patiently chomping it up.

He supplements his diet by foraging. He is small and quick enough so that when we are walking, his attempts to nab food on the ground are usually successful. Often I don't see these items except for a blurred microsecond, but I have noticed that the dog seems to regard the number of ants on a garbage item as a human gourmet might regard Michelin stars…the more, the better.

He greases my social interactions with strangers. Walking a Chihuahua makes people with whom you have no desire to converse want to talk to you much more than walking a pit bull. I try to make my answers as creative as possible. The dog wears SERVICE DOG printed on his collar, because otherwise he wouldn't be allowed into my condo complex.

"What service does he perform?" I get asked.

"Any part of you that you might think is too small he makes you feel better about," I reply briskly. Often that does not discourage them. "What kind of dog is he?" they blunder on.

I may be wrong, but I think that there is no more Chihuahua-looking Chihuahua than my Chihuahua. "He's a Mexican mountain dog," I say sweetly. "Born to herd llamas in the Sierra Nevada." If they apparently don't know that llamas live in Peru or just look doubtful, or make the mistake of insisting on further clarification, I switch to one-word answers. "Spoiled," I tell them, or "Brown."

So the next time you see a burly bald guy walking a frisky little beast of the Chihuahua persuasion, you can laugh. I understand. But on the off chance it is me, I don’t recommend you walk over and ask me the dog's name.

Or I'll be introducing you to Cujo.

2 Comments

Why I Won't Vote For Romney, Even Though I'm A White Guy

10/18/2012

1 Comment

Afghan Republican whomping on binders full of women

People ask me why I won't vote for Romney this year. "Richard," they say, "you're a white, heterosexual guy. You pay income tax. Why don't you want a smaller government, millions of jobs and a country led by a man who has binders full of women?"
Then they get specific. "Why aren't you worried about the gigantic deficit we're passing on to our grandchildren?"

I do worry about it. I also worry that the Republicans are going to run it up more, since that's what they always blithely do whenever they get the chance. And I worry about stuff our grandchildren might have to deal with that the Republicans ignore, like global warming. Another Wall Street collapse vs. Wall Street becoming a coral reef—which one do you think is going to do those grandkids more harm?

"And Romney will finally get tough on China," they add. I don't believe it. Plus I don't think China is going to pay attention to anyone trying to get tough on them, unless it's Walmart. When Sam throws down on them, then they'll know they're being toughed-on.

But mostly, I'm not voting for Mitt because of the company he keeps. Consider this roster of Romney supporters:

There's Jon Hubbard of Arkansas, who argues that slavery benefited the slaves because their descendants ended up in America. Putting this in personal terms, if I were kidnapped by aliens and forced to work in some interstellar coal mine and eventually some of my descendants grew up to pilot flying saucers and conquer the remainder of the galaxy, or invent new musical forms that became popular throughout the universe (of course, many would still have to work the coal mine) I could see it being beneficial to them. But not to me. Apparently, I don't have the foresight to be a Republican.

Or Bob Kingsbury, of New Hampshire, who claims attending kindergarten causes kids to become sociopaths. I resent him because I thought my lifetime of deviant behavior was my own idea, not a product of my educational background.

Or Stacey Campfield, of Tennessee, who offers the theory that if homosexuality is forbidden to be mentioned in Tennessee public schools, fewer Tennesseans will grow up to be gay. I think it will just seem that way because gays will leave Tennessee as soon as they are old enough to crawl, walk or bicycle across the state line.

Or the Republican members of the Kentucky State Legislature, who are upset because high school students there are being tested on their knowledge of evolution and not also of the Biblical account of creation, just so they can pass some namby-pamby national science standard.

To the right of those august gentleman stands Jack Wu, who actually attends the Westboro Baptist Church, who would regard the above advocates as complete candyasses, because he believes that only the Bible should be taught in schools and Darwin utterly forbidden.

This, of course, is the position of Muslim loonies re education. Except that they favor the Quran, a book which resembles the Bible in its embrace of ancient strictures but lacks the charm of the Old Testament's cobbled-together legends, which brings me to the congruence of belief between my personal favorite Republican, Charlie Fuqua, also of Arkansas, who thinks that snotty kids ought to be shot, to the Taliban, which actually shoots snotty kids.

If Charlie lived in Afghanistan, he'd be hiding a bomb under his robes right now, ready to toss it at school full of children for trying to teach girls to read.

I'm not saying if Mitt was in Afghanistan, he'd embrace all the principles of the Taliban. He wouldn't. He seems far too nice a guy for that.

But he'd still want to be their leader.

Click to set custom HTML

1 Comment

Bible Advocates Death Penalty for Rotten Kids, Candidate Says

10/16/2012

0 Comments

Child safety seat as envisioned by Fuqua

Charlie Fuqua, Republican candidate for the Arkansas Legislature, has written a book in which he calls for the death penalty for rebellious children.

Whether he is sincere or merely woke up one morning and said to himself "I want to write something that makes the Westboro Baptist Church look like squishy middle-of-the-roaders" is up to the voters to decide. Personally, I think he is angling for the support of Arkansans who wish their kids were dead. This is not an inconsiderable part of the electorate. Most parents want to kill their children at one time or another. For example, almost all moms and dads who have taken a young child on a long car or airplane trip have experienced the urge to drop that child off at the nearest gas chamber before going home. An older child usually gives its parents many more opportunities to dream wistfully of their offspring's demise as it grows to adulthood, by wrecking the family sedan, impregnating its second cousin and demolishing their plans for financial independence by wanting to go to college, to give just a few for instances. More than one set-upon parent has noticed that the peace of the household would be so much less frequently shattered if Junior found the peace of the grave.

My own father on several occasions expressed a desire to terminate my juvenile existence in spite of the fact that I was a comparatively well-behaved child, maintaining good grades in school, starting to work at the age of four delivering newspapers and attending church on a regular basis because I was dragged there and forced to endure it. Those occasions usually revolved around my leaving Dad's carpenter's tools to rust in the back yard and those instruments were the ones he would wave at me while threatening to send me to another (hypothetically warm) plane of existence. So Charlie might have gotten his vote.

I don't want to be accused of exaggerating Mr. Fuqua's proposals here, nor do I want to imply that Fuqua hates children because he was tormented by his peers while growing up because his surname is so easy to comically mispronounce, although that might well have been the case. Fuqua does not envision a future where if a fresh grave suddenly appeared in a rural or suburban back yard, a not-so grieving parent could easily dismiss his neighbor's concerns about it by saying "Sassed me," or "Peed ahind the refrigerator." No, a parent would have to have some sort of judicial permission before throttling their child. Fuqua takes his guidance from the Bible, in whose Old Testament pages he claims the practice originated. The child in question would have to be taken to the "gates of the city," where his case would be considered by the city's "elders." This intriguing passage from Scripture not only reveals the biblical patriarchs' attitudes towards bad kids, but also that fact that Bible people, despite being tormented regularly by plagues and famines, could nonetheless afford to live in gated communities. Possibly this is because they were allowed to kill their kids. Indeed, the OT is full of stories about offspring being killed, whether under the orders of God or merely freelance.

We would have to do things differently here, as most of our cities don't have gates. Most of them just have freeway off ramps and you are not going to find any elders there, just homeless psychopaths looking for rides, money or murder victims. All of our elders that have managed to escape being imprisoned in nursing homes are busy flaming each other on Facebook, so I don't know if they have any interest in solving other people's domestic problems.

So Charlie Fuqua's proposal may just prove to be one of those shining, idealistic notions that capture our imaginations with their promise of a better future but eventually turn out to be unworkable, like free love or Internet Explorer.

Charlie also advocates the forcible expulsion of all Muslims from our shores. This is a man who seems incapable of timid ideas. One can only hope the voters of Arkansas agree.

0 Comments

"Spiritual but Not Religious" Pisses Some Off

10/10/2012

2 Comments

I hadn't seen the term "spiritual but not religious" since I quit computer dating going on two years ago, having found the perfect woman for me on the Internet. While I was cyber-dating, it was featured on nearly every profile I clicked on. Perhaps many women just don't want to admit that they are out-and-out atheists or merry agnostics, at least in public, but the "S but not R" box was the one most of them chose. The second most common was "Christian," the third "Catholic." The rarest were girls who picked a specific Protestant denomination, like "Presbyterian."

Didn't matter to me. I never contacted any women who proclaimed a religious affiliation, no matter how attractive they looked in their pictures, even if in those pictures they were wearing barely more than a crucifix. You're going to find enough things to argue about with someone you are dating eventually anyway—why start with a fundamental disagreement?

What about Spiritual but not Religious guys, you ask? I don't know any. I wasn't looking for one. I'm not sure they exist. There are religious guys, even really spiritual ones, like the Dalai Lama and St. Francis, but spiritual guys who don't already have a religion tend to start their own.

But you Spiritual but not Religious girls have been put on notice. You have acquired an intellectual opponent. Alan Miller at CNN is ticked off at all of you. He proclaims your beliefs "wishy-washy," and "a cop out."

I assure you I never judged you Spiritual ladies so harshly. To me, when you clicked the "spiritual but not religious" selection on the drop down menu, that meant you like burning candles. And maybe doing yoga. That was no deal-breaker as far as I was concerned, as long as you didn't light the candles during televised sporting events that I had money on, or make me do the yoga.

Beaches and sunsets always gave you numinous feelings. I had no problem with that, either. I never went to the beach expecting to see something evolving anyway. That you thought we ought to have one vegetarian meal a week was okay by me, too, as long as it was pizza.

When you actually mentioned your God, He seemed pretty agreeable. He wasn't some hirsute Smiter who demanded that you shun homosexuals or pulled pork sandwiches. He was more like the vague Higher Power that alcoholics have, only He was okay with your drinking.

I especially liked that.

Alan is not so easy to please. He demands that girls you pick an allegiance to any book of hoary legends and follow the worship instructions therein, or else admit you are walking on a beach that consists of mere rocks and sand rotating away from the light of the nearest star in an unfeeling universe only accidentally and temporarily favorable to your existence. If you refuse, he has nothing but sneers for your intellectual dishonesty.

I hope his friends chip together and buy him an "I Never Want to Have Sex" bumper sticker, because he needs one.

But maybe I underestimate Alan; maybe he has found a wonderful partner who understands and respects his need to detest the ninety percent of humanity who just bumble along with only a nodding acquaintance with either religious or rational absolutes, and just hope everything comes out okay in the end.

After all, I have, and only after we had been together for some time did I discover that her religious beliefs consist of an overlying agnosticism intertwined with occasional, deeply felt moments of Orthodox Judaism.

Thank God that wasn't on the drop-down menu.

2 Comments

Romney Haunted by Ghosts of Elections Past, Present, Future

10/8/2012

0 Comments

The election is almost upon us, and Mitt Romney lies asleep in another hotel bed. An empty quart of chocolate milk is lying on its side on the end table next to the candidate. A few drops of the carton's remaining contents are dribbling onto the floor. Suddenly, the windows rattle, and the GHOST OF TOM DELAY appears. The GHOST is wearing a prison jumpsuit.

MITT ROMNEY: Tom DeLay! Convicted felon and former Speaker of the House! What are you doing here?

GHOST OF DELAY: I came to warn you, Romney. Tonight you will be visited by three ghosts. Actually, four. The first two are a team act. Pay heed to their advice lest you end up like me! (Vanishes)

MITT ROMNEY: Hey! Where'd you go? (Suspiciously) Is anybody taping this? (Suddenly, the hotel room's bay windows burst open. The GHOSTS of RONALD REAGAN and RICHARD NIXON appear.

GHOST OF REAGAN: We are the Ghosts of Elections Past. This election will be a close one, Mitt.

GHOST OF NIXON: Remember the votes you can really count on. Obama can fix the economy and kill all the terrorists out there, but there's one thing he can't change.

GHOST OF REAGAN: He's black.

GHOST OF NIXON: Remember "state's rights?" And "benign neglect?"

GHOST OF REAGAN: And all those stories I used to tell about "welfare queens?"

MITT ROMNEY: But I've already been lying about welfare reform! And what about my birth certificate crack?

GHOST OF REAGAN: A nice start, Mitt.

GHOST OF NIXON: But keep that dog whistle handy. Especially if unemployment drops again. Don't forget you have homos to hate, too. In some ways, you have it better than we did. Don't screw it up. (The GHOSTS vanish the same way they came, but they are quickly replaced by the GHOST OF GEORGE MCGOVERN)

GHOST OF MCGOVERN: I am the Ghost of Elections Present! Come with me! (Romney takes the Ghost's hand and they float over a suburban landscape, finally shooting in through the window of an industrial plant across the river. Inside, SHELDON ADELSEN and the KOCH BROTHERS are busy shoveling stacks of hundreds into a glowing furnace marked "ROMNEY FOR PRESIDENT")

GHOST OF MCGOVERN: I once had armies of idealistic do-gooders ringing doorbells for my Presidential campaign, just as your opponent does now, Romney. These are your only allies against them. All Adelsen wants in return is to beat his upcoming rap for human trafficking and the Koch brothers merely want to frack for oil under the Washington Monument. Don't worry about the Koch brothers tearing up the reflecting pool—they're going to put up a fake Monument while they dig into the shale. It'll look just about as convincing as one of those phony pine tree cell phone towers. Small price to pay for being POTUS, right? (The GHOST OF MCGOVERN disappears. His place is taken by the GHOST OF MICHAEL DUKAKIS.

MITT ROMNEY: You must be the Ghost of Elections Future! (The GHOST OF DUKAKIS merely nods. With his index finger, he opens a portal into the future. We see PRESIDENT HILARY CLINTON talking with PRESIDENT-ELECT MICHELLE OBAMA)

PRESIDENT CLINTON: It's been a good run, Ms. President, and I wish you all the luck during the eight years of your Administration. Don't forget, Chelsea gets to be Secretary of State so she can build a résumé for her campaign in '32.

PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA: Then Malia and Sasha's turn! They can't decide which one of them will be President of the US and which one will be President of Kenya! And I promise to get the 28th Amendment passed during my Administration, so that no white male can ever legally become President again!

MITT ROMNEY: It can't be! (The GHOST carves another portal in time. Through it we see a gravestone with WILLARD M. ROMNEY etched on it. It is an unimportant stone in a neglected graveyard)

MITT ROMNEY: But I always wanted to be buried next to my money. In Switzerland!

GHOST OF DUKAKIS: There's no money left, Romney. After you were convicted of tax evasion and they eliminated the loophole for carried interest, this is all your family could afford.

MITT ROMNEY: But this awful future! How can it be prevented?

GHOST OF DUKAKIS: You must win, Romney! At any cost necessary!

MITT ROMNEY: (Suddenly suspicious) Michael Dukakis...how can you be a ghost? Aren't you still alive?

GHOST OF DUKAKIS: So's Tom DeLay, you idiot.

0 Comments

Feathery Dinosaurs Don't Tickle Bible Nuts

10/3/2012

2 Comments

In a development completely unimportant in both theology and science, fundamental Christians have expressed their opposition to feathered dinosaurs.

A little background here: Creationistas, who believe the Bible to be literally true, have always had tough going with the dinosaurs. The explanation they've offered for these beasts having once ruled the Earth and then abruptly gone out of business is that dinosaurs co-existed with Adam and Eve, somehow refraining from not devouring them like a couple of slow-moving meat pies, until all the dinos were killed in Noah's Flood, which accounts for all those huge bones being buried in petrified mud.

This is a nice story. Not as nice as the story of Noah, though, who as you recall was said to have collected two of every species on Earth to ride out the Flood with him on his Ark and repopulate the planet after it had gone through the spin cycle of God's divine fury. Even elementary school children have trouble with Noah (Every kind? Even bugs?) while more sophisticated critics wonder how the Middle East-based patriarch managed to collect two jaguars, for example, and how did he get those jaguars get back to South America when things dried out?

It's no use arguing with fundamentalists about this, or anything else. If you employ all the reason, logic and research at your disposal to prove to the satisfaction of yourself and any witnesses present that the Old Testament is just a bunch of entertaining if somewhat grisly Jewish folk tales, all Bible-believers will say to you when you have completed this feat of ratiocination is "I'll pray for you." This means "Shut up."

Even fundamentalists don't believe the Bible to be literally true when it comes to Noah, though, because the Bible says he collected a pair of every kind of creature and he obviously left out all the dinosaurs. I'm not saying this wasn't a wise choice on his part. Those big boys take up a lot of cubits.

The news that many dinosaurs were apparently feathered has been out for a while, too. Even some paleontologists admit disappointment at the transformation of these creatures from silent reptilian brutes that could gobble a human up like an appetizer meatball to chirping, feathery monsters that could crunch Chris Christie in half faster than your dog can snap up an accidentally dropped buffalo wing.

The source for this article actually confesses that “Dinosaurs used to be cool, feathers came in, and now it’s like, they’re going to ruffle their plumage when they come after me, and that is not scary.”

Well good for you, missy, but personally, if some thirty-foot tall monster with teeth the size of maximum permissible carry-on luggage bags came lumbering after us, I would not be pausing to check if it was molting. I would be busy seeing if I could run faster than you. Your cavalier attitude toward feathery menaces tells me you have not experienced, as I have in a previously documented incident, an attack upon your person by a murderous creature of the poultry persuasion.

The creationists don't like the feathered dinosaurs because it makes the evolution of birds from these prehistoric monsters seem likely. Evolution is anathema to this school of thought, which holds that Jehovah popped all the creatures of the Earth into existence from the raw snot of Creation on one of its seven days.

So if you observe a Christian of the fundamentalist persuasion sitting in a Chic-fil-A eating a dry, pickle-flavored sandwich and crunching down some wood-chip tasting waffle fries in order to express the homophobia required of him by the Bible, my advice is not to tell him he's really eating dinosaur.

Unless you want him to pray for you.

2 Comments

Mitt Wants to Quit

10/1/2012

1 Comment

In a luxurious but bland hotel room in the flat Midwest or sweaty suburban Florida, far from the cooling breezes of La Jolla, MITT ROMNEY is wearily pulling off his calfskin loafers after a long day of campaigning. ANN ROMNEY is already prone on the vast bed, wearing eyeshades. MITT ROMNEY looks at his reflection in the mirror across the room, running a hand through the gelled perfection of his hair. Suddenly he sits upright, as if struck by sudden thought, and believing his wife asleep, begins to roll down the airplane window of his soul to his image in the mirror.

MITT ROMNEY (sotto voce) Ann, I want to quit. (ANN ROMNEY doesn't stir. In a louder voice) I'm sick of the whole thing.

(He stands and begins pacing)

MITT ROMNEY: I thought it would be a snap. Like being President of Bain. People stood in line to kiss my behind. If I screwed up, a bunch of brainy subordinates would fix things and then give me credit for it. Now it's nothing but finger-pointing and yelling when I make a little slip-up. And if I lose, all those brainy subordinates can't wait to write a book about it.

(Gets up, goes to the ice bucket. In it is a crystal decanter of chocolate milk.)

MITT ROMNEY: And at Bain, I could fire the VP any time I wanted to. Not this little prick. I swear, Ann, he really wants me to lose. Last time we had lunch, I caught him writing RYAN—2016 on one of the napkins with those diner crayons they give to kids. He's already trying to one-up his rivals. I hear every time Chris Christie starts looking a little tighter around the jowls, Ryan sends him an ice-cream cake.

(Pulls the decanter out of the ice bucket and pours himself a shot)

MITT ROMNEY: And what are we running for? To save the middle class? Ann, WE DON'T KNOW ANYBODY IN THE MIDDLE CLASS! Sure, we drive past their little McMansions sometimes, and watch them in their yards, trying to save a few bucks off the 200 grand a year they scrape by on by doing their own yard work, but we don't actually know any of them. And why would we want to? When I said I don't worry about poor people I meant it.

(Downs the shot of chocolate milk. Shudders as the cold diary treat hits his stomach.)

MITT ROMNEY: Why do I need to be President? I've got a hundred million dollar IRA to cash in, six houses and a secret island in the Caymans to go along with my bank account there. And even if Obama takes God off the money, that won't stop me from collecting plenty of it. I ask you, dear Ann, why do we bother?

(ANN ROMNEY takes off her eyeshades and looks at him evenly)

ANN ROMNEY: So I can rip out that awful vegetable garden and put a decent paddock on the White House lawn.

MITT ROMNEY: Right. Well, I've just been staying up so I could put a call in to Shel Adelsen anyway. What time is it in Macau?