All Hail The Snuggie!

It has been an awfully long month and ten or so days. I have been in the basement for the entire time waiting for Tom Brady to come out and do something stupid. That did not happen...yet. I was waiting for Matt Leinart to get caught on some fools Blackberry Storm video in another hot tub with seventeen year old SoCal co-eds with the wrong end of a beer bong shoved down his throat. That hasn't happened as far as I know. Instead his team the Arizona Cardinals inexplicably are in a conference championship game led by a the biggest Jesus freak in NFL history. Tom Brady, for his defense, is still trying to rehab from a knee surgery that his family vet completed some months ago after a feigned injury in the first game of the year. We will find out when he is trying to get into the Hall of Fame that he actually got injured in his S&M chamber.

We are now getting ready to actually put a new President in the White House. The end of one of the worst segments in American history might actually be over. I have been increasingly convinced that the last years was an absolute nightmare of epic proportions and I have little hope that anything will happen to break the spell...at least in the next two to three years. To watch one of the great companies of the last twenty five years, Circuit City, all of the sudden implode and thus causing 35,000 additional jobs to be lost. Whose counting...aren't we now up to three million or so lost jobs? Watching Circuit City blow up like Lindsey Lohan after a three day coke binge was sad. Watching the Farewell (and Good Riddance) President Asterisk tour wind down with impeccably staged and banal speeches was re-traumatizing. I did not need to see that. I was better off watching re-runs of the Cosby Show on some distant channel. I don't frankly know which is worse...watching President Asterisk state with absolutely no sense of guilt or shame or empathy or anything resembles humanity that he may or may not have made mistakes and that some people say that he made the wrong choices or watching his Vice President nod off during the thirteen minutes of his speech the other night in the White House. Was he nodding off when he shot someone on a hunting trip? In my wildest dreams I hope to see both of them wearing Snuggies getting on the helicopter out of town so they can meet the Mother Ship that will take them to the alien hot bed of Texas. Of course I could dream. Meanwhile President Oprah will now take the reigns of one of the biggest messes that any President has probably ever taken on. I wonder if it's too late to turn down the job offer. He's pissed enough already about having to maybe give up his Blackberry (He shouldn't. I wouldn't.) That might be a deal breaker right there. I can hear him saying the following: "It's OK that the economy is in the worst shape in seventy years and we are hated the world over and we have been locked into wars with no end and Jim Rice made it into the baseball Hall of Fame, but if I can't keep my Blackberry Curve then I am not taking the job. Take this job and shove it." He gets sworn in on Tuesday. It's not too late. If he doesn't get sworn in then what happens? Does the Sham-Wow guy get it? What about the person who thought that the Snuggie would make an excellent gift for...Halloween when you want to dress up for the next Star Trek convention or be beamed up.

So we are a few weeks from the Super Bowl. We have the Ravens and the Steelers in one game which will resemble a fifty car pile-up on a foggy interstate in California and the Cardinals and the Eagles that will resemble a carnival ride in Berlin. I am somewhat surprised that the Ravens are in the conference final after somehow taking advantage of one of the biggest choke jobs in history as the Titans found every way to blow the game with turn overs, penalties, and paying off the referees to ignore the play clock on a key third down play. I do not expect the Steelers to blow it as big as the Titans, but it is possible. There is precedence of the Steelers tanking a conference championship game that they should win. Maybe Big Ben's post motor cycle accident syndrome we hit him and he'll choke and throw like three picks while the Unibrow wearing Joe Flacco manages the game (circa Trent Dilfer) and Ed Reed runs a pick back for a TD. It could happen, but I sort of doubt it. The Cardinals are an interesting story. They get destroyed late in the season by the Eagles and in the snow to the Evil Empire. Everyone (except me) picked the Falcons to beat them. What do they do? They shock Carolina (which was over-rated anyways) in Charlotte and end up hosting the Eagles. Kurt Warner is on his way to his own Snuggie ad when his career is over. I see it happening. What I am hoping for is that he gets beamed up to purgatory during the game allowing for a hung over Matt Leinart to enter the game. That would be classic. However, I won't be watching because I am preparing for the alien invasion.

Hide The Trigger

The Iranian military launched an elaborate test of long range missiles today that was seen all over the world. An Iranian military talking head (whose name is similar to a lunch meet) stated that "our finger is always on the trigger....we have hundreds even thousands of missiles ready to be fired against predetermined targets." Good times. One of the missiles that was tested can carry a one megaton warhead. The missiles that were tested have a range of over 1,200 miles, which is enough to reach most Middle Eastern US targets and the entire state of Israel. Good times. The Iranians stated that they launched this test in response to Israeli military exercises that resembled test runs on an air strike of Iranian nuclear facilities as well as the US Navy's "secret" test of shooting down Iranian missiles. Good times.

I suspect that the Iranians do not know who exactly they are dealing with. Don't they know that President Asterisk is looking for any reason to launch a military strike on them? President Asterisk has illegally invaded and occupied sovereign countries for far less than shooting long range missiles. I mean he did all this because the country's pot bellied leader wanted to kill his dad. That was back in 1991 when everybody wanted to kill his dad and President Asterisk was still snorting coke off of hookers breasts in a stripper bar somewhere in East Texas. So to run tests of long range missiles that can carry nukes 1,200 or so miles away is similar to knocking off half the family. Then to say things like: "Our finger is always on the trigger" only makes things more fun. Don't they know that President Asterisk also always his finger on the trigger also? He's had the itch for pushing the button as bad as he has the urge to drink mojitos in the Oval Office (of course I suspect that it's much more than just an urge).

The leaders of both Iran and the US have the collective mentality of a nine year old spoiled child with alcoholic parents. They are both a complete mess. They are both egocentric, irrational, lack judgment, lack insight, have poor anger controls, impulsive, and hopelessly intellectually challenged. They listen to no one in their inner circle. They do not tolerate anyone who tells them "no" or tells them to do something different than what they have planned. Their approval ratings in their home countries is lower than 35% (though I suspect the Iranian approval rating is completely anecdotal because anyone saying anything negative about the government is probably shot on sight). They are practically brothers. Brothers in arms.

So as Iran rattles sabres and tells everyone that "their finger is always on the trigger" and the US runs non-secret secret test runs of missile defense tactics we in the rational world are left wondering if these two "world leaders" have had a nap recently or somehow got into dad's stash of porn and seven year old beer. The world is a far less safer place to live with these two snipping at each others toes. There is a reason why we do not let nine year old boys drive cars, drink booze, vote, go to strip clubs, and go to war. That's because when you let nine year olds run nuclear states they don't know how to conduct themselves. They become dangerous, concrete, and myopic. This is a nasty combination. I am hoping that cooler heads within the governments of Iran and the US will keep their prospective leaders distracted with pretty objects, girls in bikinis, dancing pirate bears, or tear gas (it's so easy to distract nine year old boys) so that somebody trusted can hide the trigger long enough for someone else to be in charge. At least in the US that will be in another six months...

...unless John McCain is in charge, which will be like having a temperamental egocentric fourteen year old with a fetish for botox and sleeping pills running a nuclear state.

Good times.