In other news …
!?!?!?
Jeffrey Denny
Sometimes saying “everyone is saying” is not just an excuse for repeating stupid things.
For instance, everyone on my list of approved Medicare providers is saying this:
Stop starting your day with the newspaper!!!
My doctors say it’s killing me. Even faster than my life of hard livin’, especially my former addiction to Nutter Butter Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies™.
Reading the paper with my usual morning mug of Peet’s General Khan Blend® dark roast isn’t helping. Brewed properly, it’s so brutally, cruelly powerful the first sip makes you want to slaughter 40 million people in a 13th century Mongol conquest, and luvin’ it.
Off the record, on deep background, not for attribution, I get one of those real actual factual newspapers that’s flung in my shrubs every morning. Not by a cheery kid on a bike making a few bucks before school, but a grumpy guy in a busted pickup who apparently hates shrubs.
On the bright side, my newspaper features real actual factual trained and experienced professional journalists doing real actual factual professional journalism.
It’s not quite as real-actual-factual as the MAGA Patriot-Prevaricator in its various truthful crowd-pleasing forms. But they have a harder job fighting liberal White-hating, cancel-culturing, soft-on-crime, pedophile-coddling Democrat Socialism and “the end of America, the end of Liberty,” as shadow Supreme Court Justice Virginia “Ginni” Thomas put so well.
Yet from what I understand from reading the paper, reading the paper on paper — actual murdered trees — makes me a climate criminal.
Liberal Deep State jack-booted thugs will soon rappel from their EV black helicopters to lecture and guilt me.
I’ll stand my ground — my Constitutional right — with the most powerful weapon I have: I never had kids. Which obviously has left me an empty husk of a man, but 10,000x more “green” than anyone who spawns.
The Climate Fascist Militia will tip their bucket helmets, apologize like they mean it, and thank me for both the teaching moment and for ratting out a neighbor who uses a methane-emitting gas range to sear delicious dry-aged Porterhouse steaks.
Similarly, reading the paper often starts my day with a wicked smile, not unlike the Grinch traumatizing Whoville.
Just the other day, for instance:
Top story
Toppling Putin’s war to conquer Ukraine from the banner headlines was the Will Smith-Chris Rock slap heard ‘round the world.
It was The Day the Earth Stood Still. The Churchillian if not the beginning of the End of Days, then the end of the beginning.
Even Atlas couldn’t shrug.
Smith should be stripped of his Oscar for Best Actor only to be given the Academy Award for Best Heckling of a Comedian.
If The Rock had said the same thing as Chris Rock did, Smith might’ve just muttered the usual, “Go home and work on your material.” Heckling, like comedy, is all in the delivery.
Alas, standup comedy used to be just LOL. Now open-mike night at your local Chortles will devolve into WWF Superstars of Wrestling. You know some Hollywood agent is already pitching the reality show to HBO Max.
If he weren’t still alive, Jerry Seinfeld would be rolling in his grave.
Most penetrating glimpse into the obvious
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz “alienated close allies and longtime friends who accused him of abandoning his principles” by co-conspiring with Trump to steal the election.
Best inferred Groucho Marx reference
Senator Cruz didn’t say but implied, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”
Most satisfying crime story
Headline: “Pickleball player faces felony for drawing on court.”
The Denver resident, 71, an unelected but anointed local “mayor of pickleball,” spent 10 hours in jail and faced possibly three years in prison.
His crime? Using a Sharpie to draw pickleball court marks on the floor of a local public gym.
He’s in more trouble, and has already done more time, than many of the J6 Trump violent rioters who invaded and trashed the U.S. Capitol to overturn the election and overthrow our government for their unelected but anointed leader.
As a lifelong tennis player who despises newly invented and faddish alternatives — especially a cultish “sport” cutely named after a brined condiment where players are having fun and laugh and cheer and get exercise and invade tennis courts and irritate tennis players — I think prison for pickleball is about right.
While a Democrat who’s soft on crime, I say, don’t do the pickleball crime if you can’t do the pickleball time.
Best “dog-bites-man” story
Horace Greeley, not a Dickens villain but the legendary 19th century newspaper publisher, famously said, “News is this: If a dog bites a man that’s nothing; but if a man bites a dog, that’s news.”
This day’s top not news was, “Trump probably broke law, judge finds.”
Helpful advice
I love advice columnists who dispense wisdom to people so desperate they write to advice columnists in the remote chance their letters get answered, when the best answer usually is, “Why are you writing to an advice columnist when you clearly need therapy?”
But free advice is worth every penny. Like this, gleaned from the news this particular day:
Question: How do you know if your man is lying?
Answer: He says, “I have no idea what a burner phone is.” When confronted with evidence, he angrily declares the accusations are “absurd and baseless.”
He also bragged to the entire world he hit a hole-in-one. And says over and over again, like he doth protesteth too mucheth, that he didn’t lose, he won, but there was fraud and his victory was stolen.
Tomorrow’s paper beckons.
Like a mug of Peet’s General Genghis Khan Blend® dark roast.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.
