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Random thoughts

Oh, my God, I’ve had more random thoughts:

Man, how I adore Sarah Huckabee Sanders: After Donald Trump’s recent embarrassment at the United Nations, where several world leaders laughed at his pronouncements of grand success in the White House, Sanders came out the next day to say they were laughing out of respect.

No, this is respect according to the late interesting mobster Henry Hill: “One day (the neighborhood kids) carried my mother’s groceries home. You know why they did that? Out of respect.”

And then there’s this from People Magazine’s website: “After he was laughed at on the world stage in an embarrassing moment on Tuesday, President Donald Trump is now claiming that his boasts to the United Nations General Assembly about his accomplishments in office were ‘meant to get some laughter’.”

Hmmmmmmm. Then maybe he should have named Louie CK his ambassador to the UN instead of Nikki Haley. Or maybe not because this is what Haley said after the laughter had (sort of) subsided. This from the political website The Hill:

“U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley suggested Wednesday that world leaders laughed at President Trump’s speech the day before because they respect and enjoy his honesty, arguing that negative media coverage of the president has hurt America’s standing in the world.”

Yes, honesty sure is funny.

“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help you God?”

“I do.”

“Ahhh, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”

In “The Giant Claw,” a really bad monster movie from 1957, the hero is on an airplane and he’s SMOKING. Oh, that is soooooo 1957.

He’s also fairly well-dressed.

In other words, he might be smoking, but he isn’t wearing ripped jeans – preripped so the jeans company can charge you extra, as if there’s a ripping charge, which I guess there is – so he looks reasonably sane except for the cigarette.

Oh, yeah, kids we smoked on planes. And in court. And in city council meetings. We smoked everywhere, and we didn’t realize how stupid it was because, after all, professional athletes endorsed cigarettes. Even my idol, Willie Mays. He ENDORSED them but I don’t think Willie was stupid enough to SMOKE ’em. Back then, ballplayers didn’t make all that much money and usually had winter jobs to make ends meet so, yep, Willie took the bread to say, “Hey, smoke these,” but I have a feeling he was thinking, “Hey, smoke these (and die, nitwit.)”

So, 13’s Mom is running for Congress in Virginia and before you wonder, 13 is a character from the medical drama “House.” Anyway, if I lived in 13’s Mom’s district, I would vote for her just because she’s 13’s Mom and I don’t even know what party she represents but I don’t care because SHE’S 13’S MOM.

I told my daughter once that she was lucky to have been born before “House” was a TV show because if she’d been born after it was on the air, her name wouldn’t be Sara, it would be Remy and that was 13’s real character name, but House (Hugh Laurie of “Blackadder” fame”)always called her 13 and now her Mom is running for Congress.

I just looked up 13’s Mom and she’s a Democrat – Leslie Cockburn – running for the first time.

Here’s some information about her from the New York Times:

“Watching her on the campaign trail – hosting fish fries, riding parade floats and talking tariffs with her district’s fellow cattle farmers — you’d never know she once traveled the world as a glamorous, pioneering war correspondent.

“‘I fought long and hard for the privilege of being shot at,'” she quipped about when she was the first female foreign correspondent for a major network in the late ’70s.

“You’d never know she once interviewed Moammar Khadafy for NBC Nightly News, profiled Pablo Escobar for Vanity Fair and palled around with Mick Jagger.

“And you’d certainly never know that her daughter is movie star Olivia Wilde, an activist actor who regularly tweets out her mom’s events and progress.”

So, if you live in her district in Virginia, vote for her – she’s 13’s lucky Mom.

Here’s a great opening to a novel, this from “The Cutting Season” by Attica Locke (found at the Wadleigh in Milford):

“It was during the Thompson-Delacroix wedding, Caren’s first week on the job, that a cottonmouth, measuring the length of a Cadillac, fell some twenty feet from a live oak on the front lawn, landing like a coil of rope in the lap of the bride’s future mother-in-law. It only briefly stopped the ceremony, this being Louisiana after all.”

When I was a kid, Ann Venturini, the mom of my best friend, Paul, (who went on to play organ for the Soul Survivors on “Expressway to your Heart”) told me about the prejudice against Italian Americans.

Recently, I don’t know why, I looked it up and this is from Wikipedia:

“After the American Civil War, during the labor shortage as the South converted to free labor, planters in southern states recruited Italians to come to the United States to work mainly in agriculture and as laborers. Many soon found themselves the victims of prejudice, economic exploitation, and sometimes violence. Italian stereotypes abounded during this period as a means of justifying this maltreatment of the immigrants. The plight of the Italian immigrant agricultural workers in Mississippi was so serious that the Italian embassy became involved in investigating their mistreatment. Later waves of Italian immigrants inherited these same virulent forms of discrimination and stereotyping which, by then, had become ingrained in the American consciousness.”

The more things change, yadda, yadda, yadda.

And now, everyone sing along:

“I like to be in America, OK by me in America. …”

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