"Best Vice President Ever" B/W "Old Kellyanne Conway Joke (Who?)."

1. BBC presenter refers to Trump as "President Chump".

2. Chump today saying that Mike Pence is "a great guy and a great vice president. In fact he's one of the best vice presidents ever."

Yeah, Overcomber, and I'm sure you did a thoroughgoing analytical study, deep in research, before you came to that conclusion. I'm sure you doggedly and exhaustively read studies and biographies of all the vice presidents that came before Pence to form this scholarly opinion.

3. I found this note sitting unnoticed in a digital "Notes" file on my wife's iPhone and it was too satirically tight and manifestly on the ball and in general too fucking brilliant not to publish:

"Kellyanne Conway. I don't mean to be unkind but her face kooks like vomit.

Royal Trux cover."

[I said "kooks" when I meant "looks" although "kooks" is not without relevance when discussing this woman, who, however, is nowhere to be seen on the world stage these days. Why don't we see her curled up with her feet on the couch in the Oval Office any more? Has she actually literally been swept under a rug like the cluster of desiccated faeces she so exactly resembles?

Also, the "Royal Trux cover" in question is the one to Sweet Sixteen, a terrific album with what Pitchfork calls a "disgusting" cover. It is a toilet full of puke that seems to be forming a face –– the revolting face –– could we but have known it all those years ago –– of Kellyanne Conway!]

"The Bald President."

In the last week I've taken out two films from the Los Feliz library, The Interview and Wag The Dog. Being very apropos with reality. The former film is sadly a silly fucking shambles, unlike the other excellent Franco  Rogen apocalypse vehicle This Is The End.

I was on the phone to my brother a few days ago, recommending it improbably enough to him. Imagine his enthusiasm. Yeah. You can't. And I said, "Your favourite actor, JONAH HILL is in it."
     And he said, "Who?"
     I said, Jonah Hill. From your favourite film, The Wizard of Wall Street."
     He said, "The Wolf of Wall Street. Yes I saw the film but I found it morally dubious."
     "I thought you loved that film."
     "I do not."
      "I was sure it was you."
      This is like my father pretending he doesn't know who Dog the Bounty Hunter is.

Meanwhile Wag The Dog really is a masterpiece. Believe I saw it at the cinema at the time, but I'd forgotten everything about it.

MY POINT:

In the DVD extra featurette, which had some interesting interviews in it, Budd Schulberg recalled remarking to Elia Kazan that because of the advent of television,  Eisenhower  would be the last bald President, because bald men didn't look like proper celebrities.

"Well we've got one now," I responded to M. Schulberg on the TV screen. "We got one now, indeed we have. I mean President Trump. I'm referring to Donald 'John' Trump, AKA 'Bald Johnny.' It's a fact: PRESIDENT TRUMP IS BALD! And all that ethereal scrub, brush and humus he scrapes across his buck naked pate is so much fluff and dandruff –– shadows and dust –– a transient cobweb on the night air!"

"I Feel Comforted."

I feel comforted by the President on the knotty topic of NORTH KOREA.

Apparently standing next to a vintage Model T Ford, Overcomber Don said "You don't know exactly who you're dealing with."

Do you not.

The President also said, "We're going to see what happens."

Great sustenance of comfort from these inspiring remarks.

Yes, we are going to see out of mild remote curiosity whether North Korea fires a barrage of nuclear missiles at the west coast of America. We are going to see "what happens" in terms of being destroyed by a nuclear holocaust.

Yours,

A Los Angelean

"MOACB."

Dan Rather was on Don Lemon last night, with David Axelrod. They were talking about the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb that was dropped on Afghanistan, by which crafty Overcomber seeks to distract his base, those daytime diner attendees in Kaintuck, Ohio, Oklahoma, Alabammy, Virginny &c. 

(A dingy diner somewhere in the Red State zone is where the BBC people always go to corral some Justified-style intellectuals to talk about how vigorously they support the President.)

They were referring to the bomb by its acronym, MOAB, which had cleverly also been translated to mean "Mother Of All Bombs." Then Dan Rather coughed and tweaked his bowtie and in his self-important manner remarked, "Strictly it should be called The Mother of All Conventional Bombs. There is also the Hydrogen Bomb." 

"Then the acronym would be MOACB."

"Yes."

"I.E not so catchy."

"No. But accurate.  Courage."

* * * * * * * * * * 

The voice on the street today when it turned out that the MOACB had killed thirty-six people was: "You would think with the –– the ginormity of the weapons... Thirty-six people. Somebody could do that with a truck."

"Donald Trump is The PResident?!"

There are moments still when I turn on the TV after a few hours of blissful not-thinking and then there's the "President" talking about this or that –– dead babies and disaster –– and I'll have a sudden "uncanny" moment and think, "Donald Trump is the President?!"

* * * * * * * * * *

Dunno what I expect is going to happen when Overcomberr Don gives a press conference. Did you see him yesterday with der Herr from NATO? "NATO was once worthless and ineffective and frankly a friend to terrorism, but now it's not and I give it my approval."

Drumpk [sic] "doubles down" on all his quaint and eccentric conceits. He's like Vic Mackey on The Shield. Do you remember, Vic would reel from skirmish to skirmish only making things worse each time, stacking up debts, enemies and problems down the line, but still wriggling out of every scrape somehow like a greazed pig.

Dunno what I expect. Is Drumpk finally going to break down when the lie becomes too complex and elaborate and intricate and even he's lost its thread and go: "All right, Putin's got a mound of dirt, the first-class skinny on me it's all too embarrassing, I lied about being a clean freak, I actually really like 'water sports' with high-octane hooktitutes, I resign, I resign! effective immediately and I would also like to admit to the world that my entire cabinet not to mention my family are a crowd of clown school graduates and petty criminals preticularly my wife, I mean my daughter, IVANKA! Also the people who voted for me are banished to the 'former Soviet Bloc' since they like the white trash lifestyle so much. Let them get prison tattoos and indulge in tractor-pulls with knuckledraggers from Siberia. Also I vote that we bring back Obama from his rocky Elba exile and institute him as King."

Speaking of the people who voted for him, I said to my wife yesterday I said, "Talk about terrorists. They're the terrorists! We're at their mercy, they're holding the country hostage with their lowbrow misreadings of the basic tenets of reality."

There was no punchline to that.

"Hard Times Come Again No More." / "More Usage."

Watching TV and there again is Jeff Zeleny of CNN and again the awful thought, "I like what he's doing with his hair."

What am I coming to when I'm looking enviously at this hairstyle?
Last night I was also admiring Don Lemon's spectacles.

I remember being in The Angel, Soho, in the late Nineties, and I had had a haircut and I was complaining about my hair but actually I remember I felt pretty good about it. I felt great relief that the haircut had paid off. I was going to enjoy the night's drinking.

My hair at the time was fine, doing fine, but the talk turned somehow (typical of the time) to relative looming hair loss and the phenomenon of the "island" of hair where hair is lost but some hair remains resiliently at the front. Jonny Ames-Lewis was there. He had a whole house of prematurely balding men, and each of them was losing his hair in a different style. It was like a scientific study. They all listened to Bert Jansch and The Incredible String Band.

Then Iain Robinson piped up, in a signature piece of rhetoric we used to call "The Pathetic Moment," and said, "I remember my island. I miss the days when I had an island."

We howled with laughter, and now that empty banshee wailing is recalled to me anew as I stare at Jeff Zeleny and think, "I admire what he's done with what he has."

Poor indictment.

Bad (sick).

**********

Everybody seems to be using the word "frankly" this week. Sean Spicer kept saying it when he was apologizing after he forgot all about the occurrence of the Holocaust in front of the whole universe. 

Now Trump said it when he was talking about Putin in his patented four-year-old idiom:

Frankly Putin is backing a person that's truly an evil person and I think it's very bad for Russia, I think it's very bad for Mankind, it's very bad for this world cause you see the same kids with no arms, no legs, no face... this is an animal.

It was like the last words of Dutch Schultz. Christiane Amanpour called this language "florid" incidentally.  And she was saying "frankly" too.

"On Abusage."

Two terms being used at the moment by a lot of TV pundits. My complaints.

1. "Nuclear Option."  Wish they'd stop describing the decision to allow the majority vote for Gorsuch to be sufficient as the "nuclear option" when we are perilously close to actual nuclear war.

2. "Bad Actor."  My wife is particularly annoyed by the term "bad actor" for enemy states and agents.  "They're not actors!" she says.

**********

Elsewhere...

     It seems like it is considered unAmerican and in bad taste at the moment to suggest that this tussle over Syria is all artifice, a collaboration between Putin and Trump, so I shan't say it. I am keeping my suspicions of a deeper conspiracy to myself for now, but be warned I am well-versed in the JFK case.
      A few people say the words "Wag The Dog" sotto voce with a wink. However, isn't it interesting that Trump still hasn't said a word against Putin. Somebody recently asked him about it point blank and Trump flatly ignored the question. He had his arms crossed, almost wrapped around his head, so awkward and uncomfortable was he.

"Barron Trump's IQ."

At the bottom of some fatuous website or another I was reading with great avidity ("Can Anyone Explain What the Teufel Happened in DC Comics' Convergence?"), I came across a link to an enticing piece, that promised me: "You Won't Believe Barron Trump's IQ!"

Why, I thought. Because it's so high?

"No –– because it's so shockingly fucking low."

Same thing exists online everywhere about Melania's IQ. "You'll be amazed by Melania Trump's IQ!"

IT'S A FUCKING FRACTION IS WHY!
IT'S A FUCKING MINUS NUMBER IS WHY!
IT'S FUCKING –π IS WHY!

I refuse to click on these websites because I assume that at best I am not going to get quality journalism but I am going to be roundly annoyed by the piece, and at worst I am going to get some sophisticated "trojan horse" malware from "bad actors" in the "former Soviet Union".

It's like when you are credulously seduced by one picture of a sexy-looking woman online and are drawn in to some online "slideshow" of fatuous factoids. You dully whir through thirty images. The picture of the woman never even turns up. A hard lesson learned. Whole minutes of a life lost forever, irrevocable.

There ought to be a word in Portuguese for this awful feeling.

People love to read surprising information about seemingly dumb people actually being smart. Iggy Pop is a classic example. How often have I read about his world record-breaking IQ –– and still he strikes me as moronic.

My readers might have other examples of this phenomenon, and I invite them to send them in to the usual address.

There should be webpages about seemingly clever people who are actually stupid as dirt. 

Like me for example.

"The President Opposes Killing Babies." Or, "Shocking Gas."

                                       

The Fake (Bad Sick) President didn't seem to have been following the news for the last, what, four years, because the use of forbidden chemical agents in Syria was apparently shocking transformative revelatory news to him. (You might even say it was his personal road to Damascus! Ahaha ha. My jokes are wasted on you, all right.) Maybe he was too busy fuming over Alec Baldwin's impersonation of him on SNL –– or Schwarzenneger's viewing figures –– or chastising the cast of Hamilton. Maybe he spent the last four years appraising Kim Kardashian's rump. Maybe he was consumed with the national existential question, "What does Bret Michaels hide beneath that scarf on his head? It ain't hair!"  

In true Krump style he managed to fudge the gravity of the moment, focusing with awful bathos on the gas with his trademark hyperbole. As though chemical weapons weren't horrific of themselves  until Trump had rephrased them in his signature style –– a "bad (sick) gas!" It wasn't enough that it was a nerve agent, this one "is so lethal people were shocked to hear what gas it was."

Are there certain nerve gases that the President was blasé about and he thought were entirely okay to use on babies, children and the women?

You wonder if somebody –– possibly Invokana, who speaks with that wonderful soft reasonable voice about how she is complicit –– and probably not Melanoma –– gently took Overcomber Don to one side and said, "Killing babies is wrong, Mr. President. You need to be seen visibly affirming this factoid."

The President, we must confess, was in a muddle.

"It's wrong to kill women, children and babies? Why? They make no money for the polis ––  they only consume it. Babies don't pay rent."

"Waal that's what they're saying. It is what it is. That's what are research seems to suggest."

"I hate to be pressured into this."

"Polls show it's overwhelmingly the opinion."

"I don't like doing what people want. I like to do the opposite. It's my canny signature style."

 "It's a self-truth held self-evident. Killing babies is wrong. It's a thing."

"Gah! Durn. Okay."

* * * * * * * *

While I was writing this my cereal got soggy.

Fuckin' Trump!

"Why Bannon Had To Go."

                               

In a sane universe, there are a hundred reasons for why Steve Bannon ought to go. And by "go" I mean, from the planet Earth. I mean: why he should be shuffled off the edge of the universe into a wormhole and / or the fiery bowels of an inner Gehenna.

But this not being a sane universe, mad my masters, the reason Steve was escorted from the Oval Office in his Barbour jacket remains mysterious. Let us see.

It ain't cause he's a self-confessed Hitler enthusiast.
It ain't because he eats children for lunch (although not breakfast).
It ain't because he was caught standing over a corpse holding a blood–stained knife.

It's actually because his crippling battle with adult acne, psoriasis and rosacea was becoming distracting for all in the Oval Office, not to mention "the folks on the Hill."

He has been sent away for an undetermined amount of time to be with a round the clock dermatologist.

Steve has dropsy.
He has lumbago.
He has a club foot.
Steve is a hunchback.

Steve has "distemper".
He has mange.
He has vigorous necrotic fasciitis.
He has chronic gingivitis.
Steve has adult pet dandruff.

His dandruff was causing allergies in the Oval Office. He was getting up people's noses and putting them out of joint. I mean that his "pet dander" was quite literally going up people's nostrils!!

He was considered too disgusting even for the Oval Office. Maybe Jared Kushner, that Adonis (nearly wrote "adenoid"), was sick of standing near him. He didn't want him leering at Invokana anymore.

That's the President's job!

"How to Draw the Vice President." Or, "He Hasn't Got Bette Davis Eyes."

Trump's rheumy eyes. They're so squinty and bunched up they are barely visible. They give him a most inhuman appearance. I know he can't help how he looks but goodness you sometimes think these people get the faces they deserve. It's like The Picture of Dorian Gray in reverse –– all the awful things they do are visited "in real time" on their physogs.

Kellyanne Conway (who?) looks like she spent fifteen years in THE PIT OF HELL fighting a demon.

Bannon looks like he has scabies and the Black Death not to mention a vitamin deficiency. 

Sean Spicer looks like a Dick Tracy villain. 

Here is how to go about drawing MIKE PENCE. 

Trump and Spicer and Mike Pence all have eyes that are sort of hooded by being downturned at their outside edges. They're like fleshy blinkers, or exterior cataracts. Maybe this is why their politics are the way they are! They have awful right wing tunnel vision. 

"Bad (sick) guys!"

If you want to draw them they all have the same odd shortcoming that makes them look sad and slightly insane. Like the stereotypical image of the crazy person in maximum denial of the common facts of reality. Like people on the verge of tears because they are so happy and autistically deluded:

Their faces are grinning so manically that they are "literally" squeezing their own eyeballs out using their cheek muscles!

From this useful starting point you can draw most of the Trump Oval Office. Not that handsome bastard Kushner –– for him you'll have to look at my article "How to Draw Malkmus" and then affix a Mike Pence haircut to Malkmus's head. But you can drawn Old Krump himself:

And you can draw Sean Spicer. Also: they all also have a notable underbite. Were they chosen for office for this reason? Is there a form of weird anti-eugenics afoot? 

I chose to forge ahead and draw Mike Pence from this basis but you can draw anyone –– as long as they have outwardly turned eyes:

Now doesn't my effort look just like old Mike "Wouldn't Give One" Pence?

Now as a bonus here's a picture I accidentally took of our living room rug:

"The Weekend With the President."

This has got nothing to do with Trump, but on the weekend the President plays golf and plays with his tie and makes fart noises with his stupid lips and shows his confidential dockets freely to random gawkers at Mar a Lago, so there's nothing to say over the weekend unless Devin Nunes performs some grandstanding stunt and this week it seems like his grandstanding stunt is to bury his head in the turf in his garden, far away from his critics on "the Hill".*

I've been watching Unit One with Mads Mikkelsen, a Danish cop show from the Oughts. The head of the homicide department on the show is called Ingrid Dahl, and I have fallen into a light crush on her.

I was watching her with a dreamy expression, unable to fathom quite why I was so enchanted. "Bloody hell," I thought to myself, "my tastes become more middle-class by the day."

Also, my Mum called today and said that Didcot had been voted the most average town in Britain.
Showing some of that hometown pride I responded, "That's a poor show for the country. If Didcot is the average, I'd hate to see the worst places."

You probably need to know Didcot to find that interesting or amusing.

_________________________________________________________

* After writing this I learnt that Trump had all but declared war on North Korea and China over the weekend. My remarks about Ingrid Dahl and Dicot remain of paramount relevance however.

Plus there's not a lot of humour to be found in the prospect of global nuclear war.

"Kushner and the Jicks."

Jared Kushner and Steve Malkmus. Have they ever been seen in the same room at the same time?

(Why would they?)

I'm trying to say that they look alike.