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I recently heard that there were about three billion websites now operating around the world, but instead of saying like a sensible person "That’s enough" I’ve decided that means there’s always room for one more, and here it is. I took its title from a sports column we used to have in New York which lives in the memory of all its old readers. It featured characters like Al Weill, the fight manager with the wonderful built (sic), Professor Ilitch of the Prosperity Institute with his Secret Play for beating the horses, available to the public for a reasonable price, Phainting Phil Scott, the English heavyweight, and other such individuals often found in the vicinity of Madison Square Garden or Belmont Racetrack.
Not to mislead, I don’t intend to write sports or introduce unusual characters found on my travels, but instead to deal in a general way with issues that bother me, and now and then to retail a joke or a story or a verse that will be a appreciated by a cultivated audience such as I hope to attract. How will I know they’re cultivated? Because I attracted them.
The benchmarks that will find me on a search engine are Catholic, ex-cop, law and order guy, tackles issues with originality and humor too. That’s me. The judges are you.
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“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.” William Shakespeare, Sonnet 66, yr. 1609. A well-known line by the master of one-liners. William wrote poetic ones, not like the comedy ones we get today. But he did them too, when dealing with Falstaff and Pistol and other disorderly characters. Bill and Henny Youngman would have understood each other. “Brevity is the soul of wit”; both of them subscribed to that .
The GM question seems to have taken over the presidential campaign for the time being, but a lot of extraneous items seem to surface -- and sink -- every week that goes by. The latest was a fascinating story of how Mitt Romney was mean to -- or maybe he wasn’t, -- a schoolmate fifty years ago. This was matched by Obama’s own fond reminiscences of pot smoking and hanging out almost as long ago himself.
It’s all kind of like watching kids at the beach taking turns trying to duck each other as the surf comes rolling in. The good thing about the kids, though, is that eventually they get tired of this. Politicians never do. They may run out of material on the two presidential nominees though. The Democrats’ VP nominee, Biden, has already been exposed to the limit, leaving no more dirt to be found out about him.
The next chance for defaming a candidate will come when the Republicans unveil their choice for Vice President. The mud will fly even if the chosen one has spent his life in a monastery in the Caucasian Mountains. “Investigative reporters” will be climbing all over those mountains interviewing even the indigenous goats for inside info on the bad habits of the prospective candidate. It will be broadly hinted that a cell was exactly the right place for him to inhabit prior to his emergence and a quick return to another cell would be the best outcome of the whole sequence of events.
That’s the way things are. If the media isn’t on your side, then they will stop at nothing to capsize your campaign. “Nothing” means such things as tracking down grand jury members to get information they are forbidden to disclose while the jury sits. It now turns out that this was done in the Watergate case by the irreproachable reporters who broke the story and swore all their inside information came from the so-called “Deep Throat”, a source their editor never completely believed in although he used “DP’s” so-called disclosures fully. None of the Pulitzer Prizes and other rewards dished out to the superspies has been rescinded as of this date.
Reverting to the gay-marriage question with which I began this piece, it has occurred to me that our President seems at first glance to share Shakespeare’s sentiments about marriage, but I think I come closer to the true meaning of his marriage ideas if I suggest that the marriage of minds isn’t really what we’re talking about when discussing the question of gay,,,ah, marriage. |
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