Mere anarchy

This has been a terrible year for all kinds of reasons, including the almost daily reports that another culture hero has died -- most recently James "The Amazing" Randi.  So it's comforting to know that Tom Lehrer is 92 and presumably getting ready to celebrate Hanukkah in Santa Monica.  He has outlived all the people his songs castigated (Hubert Humphrey, Wernher von Braun, George Murphy) and now he has made of them a gift:  All Lehrer lyrics are now freed from the bonds of copyright!  This could be the beginning of the end of all LAW AND ORDER, or the birth of a satirical Renaissance.  Whatever, you can go to Tom Lehrer.org and hear Daniel Radcliffe sing "The Elements" while you decide.

Unless the Twitter account @GOP has been hacked by The Onion or Andy Borowitz, the following is an Official List of Trump's second term priorities:

*Establish Permanent Manned Presence On the Moon

*Send the 1st Manned Mission to Mars

*Build World's Greatest Infrastructure System

*Establish National High-Speed Wireless Internet Network

I know who wrote this.  Look at all the capitalized words.  I still want whatever drugs he's on.

I'm old enough to remember John Cleese thanking the morality police for their condemnation (sight unseen, of course) of Monty Python's Life of Brian.  The extra publicity at least doubled the film's takings on first release.  It remains to be seen if Trump calling Sacha Baron Cohen "a creep" will do the same for Borat:  Subsequent Moviefilm, but it can't hurt.  If Giuliani had any credibility left -- remember, I said if -- he couldn't recover now even if Hunter Biden's "laptop" turned up with video of Joe Biden taking aim on the grassy knoll in Dallas.  Not when "tucking in my shirt" has supplanted Mark Sanford's "hiking the Appalachian Trail" as a sniggering euphemism.  Just when you think it can't get worse Giuliani blundered into an anti-Trump rally in Manhattan.  (He was at Trump Tower visiting some Russian oligarchs and delivering freshly laundered money.  Allegedly.)

From Fifth Avenue, soon to become Barack Obama Boulevard, you can't see this Times Square billboard which has galvanized Princess, Slumlord-in-Law and their attorneys.  That's an actual Kushner quote, though the can of Goya beans has been airbrushed out of his wife's hands.  "False, malicious and defamatory," they splutter, to which The Lincoln Project  -- yes, it's theirs -- happily point out that these two are no longer private citizens, unfortunately, and will have to roll with the punches.  And as with the two films referenced above, thanks for calling more attention to it.  They never learn.  

As for daddy, he was in New Hampshire boasting to the "Live Mask Free and Die" voters about his two Nobel Peace Prizes, for Serbia-Kosovo and "something else."  Then he said he meant nominations, and uttered a sentence in impeccable Trumpish:  "I don't know, you know, I don't know."  If you think of it as another language it often makes sense.  Like:  "I take full responsibility. It's not my fault that it came here.  It's China's fault."  All you need to know is responsibility = praise.

There's a new pathogen in town and it killed six wild swans in the Netherlands.  Farmers are being told to keep their poultry indoors.  Just what we needed, another avian flu.