"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.