You suck

Okay, Edwards is out.

I don’t regret my support for him. I don’t regret my donation to his campaign. If Edwards’s presence in the campaign and in the debates pushed the national dialogue (for Democrats, that is, for all I can tell the Republicans are still arguing about the size of their wieners) toward the issue of poverty, and how our government is essentially owned by corporations, then it was money well spent, and support well deserved.

I am still mulling over my vote for next Tuesday. As I’ve said before, I’m a muller. Maybe some of my readers only see me as someone who is, um, a tad opinionated, but you don’t grow up a Democrat in Indiana without acquiring an ability to maybe not appreciate, but at least see, different points of view.

In other words, what y’all see is the end result, which I freely admit can be a bit forcefully stated, and not the process, which is usually a pretty slow train coming.

Spooney can attest to this, as he must suffer through my general daily preoccupation, and my frequent inability to be decisive in what most people would consider a normal time frame.

For example, on any given Saturday, after hitting the farmer’s market, we generally stop somewhere for breakfast. So there is a discussion in the car that goes something like this.

Spooney: Where do you want to go for breakfast?

Me: I don’t know. Where do you want to go?

Spooney: We could go to Frank’s. Or the Tally Rand.

Me: (thinking) Hm.

10 minutes go by.

Me: So are you going to turn here for Frank’s?

Spooney: I didn’t know we were going to Frank’s.

Me: You asked me to decide.

Spooney: Yes, AND YOU NEVER ANSWERED ME.

See? I take so long to decide that I forget that part of making a decision is communicating that decision to the interested parties.

So readers, I’m a bit crazed at work right now, but believe me, I really am mulling over a number of things, included that insanely disingenuous State of the Union, Bill Clinton’s shameful Barack Obama = Jesse Jackson volley, the struggle among Republicans in congress to portray the extension of employment benefits and food stamps as DEFINITELY HELPING THE TERRORISTS, and the recent decision by Michael “I’m different than Gonzalez, I swear!” Mukasey that, as the top law enforcement official in the US, the legality of waterboarding is really none of his beeswax.

So, I don’t know, stay tuned, I guess.

David Bowie was wrong

The spiders were from Mercury, not Mars.

Chapter 47: I'll never have that recipe again

Last night, Spooney and I ventured out of the house long enough to take in Everest at The Echo, a club in LA’s Echo Park neighborhood. Every time I drive by Echo Park, that MacArthur Park song pops in my head, because, well, I don’t know why. The parks kinda look similar to me.

It’s a terrible song to have in your head. Especially when it’s the Richard Harris version.

The Richard Harris version of MacArthur Park. Was there ever a bigger WTF? in the history of recorded music, like, ever?

I can’t believe the internets are letting me down by not giving me a video of Harris performing this song. And no, YouTube, Donna Summer is NOT going to suffice.

Here’s some dude lip synching to Harris’s version, followed by some of worst dancing ever committed in go-go boots:

You’re welcome.

Anyway, so…Jesus, where the fuck was I going with this?

Ah yes, Everest. Fronted by Russ Pollard, husband of Watson Twin Chandra. The band recently played Sundance, where they were pronounced “the real deal” by Neil Young, who has signed them to his label, Vapor Records.

They’re fantastic. You can definitely hear some vintage influences, and yet their music sounds totally modern and surprising.

I predict they’re going to be huge. And I’m not the only one.

Plus, on the way into the club, this sexy big black bouncer dude with a total Barry White voice asked me for my ID. He took it, looked at the picture, looked at me, and ran it through his hand-held scanner. When my age popped up on his screen, he looked back at me with a look of mild astonishment. Then, he smiled at me and said “Superb.”

It was a well-timed compliment. Because. Aw, Christ.

Today’s my birthday, okay? And I’m forty fucking seven, which seems like a hair’s breath from 50, and 50 is my total fucking freakout age, okay?

Okay.

But for now, as long as I can still compare favorably to a llama…

I’m cool, right?

Enough, already!

Hey, SoCal, what’s with the whole “weather” thing??

This morning the California Highway Patrol re-opened the 5 just north of LA in the Tejon Pass after it had been shut down for two days due to snow.

Say what?

First of all, to understand how important the 5 is to SoCal, you should know that in the Golden State, which is full of freeways, it’s called the Golden State Freeway, and the 5 is the only interstate so called.

So what?

Well, freeway names in LA are typically not so much an alternate moniker for the numerical designation as they are an idea, or a concept of where you’re going.

For example, the Ventura Freeway is the 101 N. Except when it’s the 134E.

The Hollywood Freeway is the 101. Except when it’s the 170.

This is a difficult thing for the uninitiated to grasp. That, and the fact that our city planners, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that freeway entrance and exit ramps should cross one another, creating crazy, “anything goes” zones in the middle of each that have been known to elicit yelps of alarm in freeway newbies. Imagine that you’re easing onto an exit ramp, slowing rapidly as you eye that red light a mere 50 yards away. Now imagine that as you’re doing this, a BMW is hurtling toward you from behind, vying for your lane as he accelerates to normal BMW freeway speed, i.e., 85 mph.

But I, as I am wont to do, digress.

So the singularly-nomenclatured 5 freeway was closed for two days, thousands are evacuating in recent burn areas due to the threat of mudslides, cars in Hancock Park are floating, the Sepulveda basin has flooded, water spouts are tearing off roofs in Ventura, the snow line has dropped to 3000 feet, hydroplaning has become the hot new mode of transportation, and if my pond does indeed overflow, my fish will still be able to swim freely in the 3 inches of water standing in my backyard.

Spooney, lover of rain, hail and thunderstorms, is home for all of this, recovering from a recent operation, the details of which I won’t go into. Let’s just say that, apologies to Randy and any others of the fine nursing profession that might be reading this, but I FUCKING HATE HOSPITALS.

You know why? Because they…well, Christ, they’re just so barely holding onto the whole thing, aren’t they?

When they wheeled Spooney away into the OR, I was told to go wait in the first floor lobby, and to tell the front desk that I was family, and the doctor would come to the lobby and talk to me after the operation.

So I go to the lobby, and there’s nobody at the front desk. There continues to be nobody at the front desk for 2 hours. Spooney’s surgery is supposed to last an hour. Finally, the security guard, mumbling something about a shortage of volunteers (the hospital’s front desk is manned by VOLUNTEERS???) takes pity on me and calls up to the nurses’ station. He tells me that Spooney is still in surgery, but I should go to the 2^nd floor “Surgicenter” and wait to talk to the doctor there.

So I go to this “Surgicenter,” and of course there’s no one at that desk either, only an elderly woman dozing in one of the pleather chairs. And what is the point, by the way, of mashing the words “surgery” and “center” together like that? Is the hospital thinking of marketing a 10’ x 12’ waiting room with one television blaring E! and no coffee or water and bad magazines? If not, they should. Because every hospital in the U.S. would buy one.

At this point, I would like to voice my objection to the recent change by all medical waiting rooms everywhere from Good Housekeeping to Parenting as their go-to boring magazine of choice. Please, take pity on me, medical waiting rooms everywhere, because as little as I care about low-cal holiday cookie recipes, I care even less about how to “tame the terrible twos.”

Uh, where was I?

Oh, yeah. So finally this woman shows up the Surgicenter desk, and I tell her why I’m there, and she calls the OR. And guess what? The doctor has left already. The woman delivers this news with a shrug and a shake of the head, and she confides in me that doctors never move so fast as when they are ducking the patient’s family, post-op. I am somewhat disturbed by this admission, as you might imagine, but before I can voice an objection, or ask to see the woman’s ID to prove that she is indeed an official spokesperson and not just some random roving doctor-hater, she announces to me “Here’s what I’m going to do.”

“What?” I say.

“I’m going to call the doctor and tell him to call you. I’m going to call the doctor’s office and tell them that they have to call you and tell you when the doctor is going to call. I’m going to call post-op and find out if your guy is still there, and I’m going to talk to the nurses in recovery and tell them to call you here to let you know when he gets back to his room. Do you have your cell phone on? Good. Give me the number.”

So I say “Wow, great!” and I give her my cell number, and she walks out the door and is NEVER HEARD FROM AGAIN.

Eventually, embarrassed by how completely I was duped by the Surgicenter lady’s ability to mimick the behavior of helpful people, I just say fuck the rules and seek out the secret elevator that takes you to the floors they don’t want you going to without their permission, and I find the room that Spooney is coming back to and I just wait there for him. Nurses walk by and stare at me, and I just wave and go back to the article I’m reading, “Making Time for Family Time-Outs.”

They say more weather is on the way. But I don’t care, ‘cause you know what I saw this morning as I stepped out of my front door?

A freaking rainbow, y’all.

Do you know how many years it’s been since SoCal saw a freaking rainbow? Too many, my friends. Too damn many.

Fool me once, fool me 934 times more

The Center for Public Integrity (yes, we have one, shut up) has determined that senior Bush administration officials lied 935 times about WMD and the non-existent link between Hussein and Al-Qaida.

But they’re really, really sorry.

Just kidding. They’re not sorry at all. In fact genius White House spokesperson Dana Perino, when asked about the study, had two things to say:

1. We didn’t do it!

2. Everybody did it!

I don’t know why I would expect anything more than a response such as 4-year-old might offer when confronted with a broken lamp, but somehow I was thinking we might get a bit more than this:

“I hardly think that the study is worth spending time on. It is so flawed, in terms of taking anything into context or including -- they only looked at members of the administration, rather than looking at members of Congress or people around the world. Because, as you'll remember, we were part of a broad coalition of countries that deposed the dictator based on a collective understanding of the intelligence.”

And then, this little nugget of joy:

"And the other thing that that study fails to do is to say that after realizing that there was no WMD, as we thought as a collective body that there was, that this White House, the president set about to make reforms in the intelligence community to make sure that it doesn't happen again."

Look, Dana, you can’t take the lamp of intelligence, throw it on the floor, hit it with a hammer, jump up and down on it, and then claim to be surprised that it’s broken. Nor can you expect us to feign appreciation at your offer to glue it back together.

Mitt Romney: O.G.

During a campaign stop at a MLK Day parade in Jacksonville Florida, Mitt Romney demonstated that he was not only the “CEO” candidate, but that he could relate to “the people.” NYT:

In his dress shirt and tie, and with his unwavering smile, he walked over and posed for photographs with a group of black youngsters. Putting his arm around a teenage girl, he waved to the cameras and offered, “Who let the dogs out?” He added a tepid “woof woof”…

…Later, Mr. Romney admired a child’s gold necklace and said, “Oh, you’ve got some bling-bling here.”

Romney then Crip-walked up to podium, threw his hands in the air like he just did NOT care, and yelled “Where my bitches at?”

At that point the crowd demanded that the real Mitt Romney please stand up, please stand up, please stand up.

Separated at birth?

Obama - seriously, dude, WTF?

First off, you should tell your campaign manager that expressing an affection for the so-called populism of Ronald Reagan will not endear you to the former Reagan Democrats. Those guys are senior citizens now, and apparently they’re voting for Hillary. At least until McCain becomes the Republican nominee, and then they’re going to stick their fingers in their ears, go “la la la la” every time someone mentions that McCain is a pro-war, pro-nuclear power, anti-choice, anti-gay candidate who has seemingly rewritten the definition of “maverick” to mean “kiss Bush’s ass until ’08,” and then those same voters will leave Hills in the lurch and pull the lever for McCain in November.

Secondly, while I admit that you can be an inspiring speaker, when you try to pull off a move as calculated as this:

Wow. Dude, you’re so wooden that you make Al Gore look like Bill Clinton. And that fake hesitation before you throw Bill Clinton’s name onto the heap of presidents who did not bring sufficient change? You’re not going to win any Academy Award for that bit.

In short, Mr. High Road, you’re not going win any Democratic hearts and minds by talking smack about Bill Clinton. Because you know who loves Bill Clinton?

Most Democratic voters.

You know who hates Ronald Reagan?

Most Democratic voters.

And for the record, Barry, baby, Reagan did not shrink government, he grew it. And I am really disappointed that you didn’t know, or pretended not to know, that. It’s really as simple as this here chart, which you really should ask your campaign manager to get you a copy of:

See? The blue line is what we had to spend. The red line is what we spent.

And finally, I will steal John Edwards’s words to tell you why I am the most disappointed by this whole maneuver:

“When you think about what Ronald Reagan did to the American people, to the middle class to the working people…he was openly – openly – intolerant of unions and the right to organize. He openly fought against the union and the organized labor movement in this country. He openly did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day. The destruction of the environment, you know, eliminating regulation of companies that were polluting and doing extraordinary damage to the environment. I can promise you this: this president will never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change.”

Now THAT’S a sentiment I can get behind.

Cultural icon dead

Founder of the Wham-O toy company Richard Knerr died Monday in his Los Angeles area home. He was 82. Wham-O's most famous and best selling toy was the Frisbee, which was introduced in 1957.

According to the wishes of the deceased, Knerr's remains will be tossed onto the roof of his house, and friends and relatives will have to borrow a ladder, maybe from a neighbor, in order to get it down.

Voter, please!

Is America ready for a black president?

You know, I’ve been thinking about this for awhile, and I think they are.

Not that I’m endorsing Obama in the Democratic primary, you understand. I still think Edwards’s views about what the problems are, and how to fix them, most closely match my own.

And not that I think this country has finally given up its legacy of racism. Far from it. I think it will take many, many generations before our nation’s children will have that bred out of them. It will take many gradually less racist generations of parents before we can produce a generation of children who will enter adult life without that overwhelming fear of the other that makes mean our souls and blinds us to what people truly are and can be. Racism is like a rope that connects us to the very beginnings of our nation, and it seems we are incapable of cutting it, we can only slowly wear it away, year after agonizing year.

But even in times and places of deep and persistent racism, there have always been those black people who were allowed by white America to play by a different set of rules.

I remember once when I was but a young thing, I hooked up with a cute boy on the ski slopes of upstate New York. He invited me back to his family’s lodge for dinner, and it was during that meal that I was treated to one of the most unabashed displays of racist attitudes that I have ever witnessed in my life. I mean, when it came to epithet frequency alone, those east coast upper-middle-class WASPs could have given even the most ignorant of my hick Nebraska relatives a run for his money.

And then, immediately after dinner, they settled down to watch the broadcast premier of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. “Don’t you love Michael Jackson?” the matriarch asked me, breathlessly. “We love Michael Jackson!”

And you know what? They really did love Michael Jackson. And not because he had, even at that early date, begun bleaching his skin white, either. To them, Michael Jackson was not black. He was Michael Jackson.

Similarly, if he had been so inclined, I’m sure that especially during the height of his tv popularity, Bill Cosby would’ve been welcome to become the first black man to have the sun set on him within the city limits of certain all-white towns in Indiana. One need only witness the still-pervasive popularity of garish, oversized, fugly-ass sweaters among middle-aged white men to understand the degree to which Cosby was accepted as one of their own.

Even O.J. Simpson, because of his image and his popularity, was given a pass by the LAPD to beat his wife again and again and again. To be clear, it isn’t just money that allows a black man to live by different rules. I’m sure that 50 Cent, if he had beaten his pretty blonde white wife in Brentwood, California, would have gone directly TO JAIL.

So does Barack Obama qualify in the eyes of certain white voters as “not black”? Not to get all Joe Biden on y’all, but does his poise, his speech, his intelligence, his wardrobe, and most importantly, his fame, mean that he is, as certain relatives of mine would put it, “different”?

He’d better hope so.

And if he becomes the Democratic nominee, we, sadly, had better hope so too.

The blogs of others.

Sorry I've been busy today. Plus, no Golden Globes telecast to parody.

But check out Larry's great post about how he's voting for John Edwards over at his blog, Revision 99. I'm afraid I couldn't resist a rather lengthy comment refuting the points of an earlier right-wing idiot commenter, so if you're keen to see me foam at the mouth of bit, go there.

And yet, I still wish he were president

I remember back in ’04, when so many of my friends could not get motivated to get out and vote for John Kerry, saying that he was barely better than W.

“Oh come on,” I’d say, “he may be kind of full of himself in that rich boy kind of way, but his policies are very different.”

“He’s a dick,” they would argue.

And I would be forced to admit that he was kind of a dick. Like that’s so rare among politicians.

Well, today I have been forced to reassess my opinion of Kerry.

He’s a complete dick.

Because today, Kerry endorsed Obama at a rally in South Carolina.

What’s so dickish about that, you say?

Helloooooooo! Way to be loyal to your former running mate FROM SOUTH CAROLINA, dude, who by the way stayed loyal to YOU and your piece-of-shit campaign through all of its

the-voters-love-a-guy-who-windsurfs visuals

and its

no-need-to-rebut-the-swiftboat-veterans miscalculations

and its

I-was-for-it-before-I-was-against-it idiocies.

What, you couldn’t wait until Edwards was out before you endorsed his opponent? Did you think the Obama people were sitting next to their phones, biting their nails and waiting for you to call and bless them with your special campaign mojo?

Dick.

Hey, Mr. High Road!

It's the easiest thing in the world to send out an attack dog to make moronic and inaccurate and emotionally charged points about your opponent, and then once the damage has been done, to claim that the dog was not speaking for your campaign.





All your supporters claim that you're different. That you've got integrity. That you'll change politics as we know it.

You might want to think about setting out to prove that.

The Kristol ball - updated!

Holy fucking shit, I am just so fucking happy that the NYTimes has installed William Kristol on their op-ed page in time for the ‘08 election.

I’m not being sarcastic!

I figure I can go and read Kristol’s columns, and then just like George in “The Opposite” episode of Seinfeld, know that we should, as a nation, do exactly the opposite of what Kristol thinks we should do.

If you’re unfamiliar with the unfailing wrongitude of Kristol, check out this awesome Tom Tomorrow cartoon, which, as usual, sums up the matter quite nicely in just a few frames.

So what choice bit of bizarro-world wisdom did Kristol have for us yesterday as he contemplated the possibility of a liberal Democrat winning in November?

“We don’t want to increase the scope of the nanny state, we don’t want to undo the good done by the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, and we really don’t want to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in Iraq.”

See what I mean? That old “jaws of victory” chestnut! You can’t make up shit like that.

It’s an interesting strategy that BushCo and his hard-core cronies like Madame Kristol have attempted to foist onto the American public: that if you never define the goals of the game, and never leave the field of play, then you can claim yourself to be on the cusp of victory ad infinitum.

Or at least until a Democrat takes office in January of 2009, at which point Nostradamus Kristol and the like will no doubt begin chronicling the many ways in which we are losing in Iraq.

Regarding his invocation of the “nanny state”…it’s touching, isn’t it, when the filthy rich, who can afford whatever trifles their cold, mean little hearts desire, explain to the hoi polloi that healthcare, equal education, and workplace protections are the legislative equivalent of having the hired help wipe your bum for you?

Not that I doubt Kristol as an expert on hired help, I’m sure he’s had his bummed wiped for him plenty of times, I just think that it’s one thing to deny a crust of bread to a starving man, and quite another to tell that man that such mean sustenance is actually Beluga caviar.

And don’t get me started on the “good” done by Roberts and Alito, who, most recently, could not see their way to clear to outlawing a method of prisoner execution so unreliable and possibly tortuous that the American Veterinary Association refuses to use it on animals.

So I think you can all plainly see that, if we are to succeed as a nation, we must elect a president that will care for the people, appoint actual human beings to the Supreme Court, and get the fuck out of Iraq.

How you interpret the above direction, is up to you.

UPDATE:

This week's cover of The Weekly Standard, a magazine edited by none other than William Kristol:

Like I said, you can't make this shit up.

How low can you go?

Okay, folks, it’s officially now THE COLD THAT WOULD NOT DIE.

If it weren’t for VH-1’s America’s Next Top Model marathon and TiVo, I don’t know how I would’ve made it through last week without joining Britney in her San Fernando Valley Fortress of Insaneitude.

Several nights ago, for instance, as I was contemplating suicide via a toxic cocktail of TheraFlu, Ricola, and Black Russians, suddenly there was Tiffany from ANTM Cycle 4, donning a “Cancer the Crab” get-up for a Zodiacal calendar shoot.

The judges proclaimed her “fierce.”

Spooney and I proclaimed her “unintentionally hilarious.”

I nearly wet myself, I laughed so hard. And then I hacked up a lung.

But I stall. You can sense I’m stalling, can’t you?

RE: Iowa.

Speaking of unintentionally hilarious, the Republicans elected Huckabee, who is so not ready for prime time, but is otherwise pretty much the white trash version of George Bush III. While Governor of Arkansas, he vowed to “take this nation back for Christ.” The sermons from his days as a Baptist minister would no doubt reveal other disturbing aspirations, but he has arranged for all records of those to be destroyed. Sound familiar?

All in all, par for the Republican course.

On the Democratic side, in Iowa Hillary Clinton saw her “nothing radical or innovative about me!” strategy come to fruition when the only group of voters she succeeded in capturing were those over 65!

Think about it. Scary bitch Hillary, the woman who was, according to the vast right wing conspiracy, the Lady Macbeth behind every one of Bill’s crazy liberal America-killing initiatives, is now the queen of the Democratic Bible Belt AARP set. To which I can only say, “be careful what you wish for, Hils.”

Regarding my favorite candidate, I am hopeful that the media doesn’t finish him before he’s finished. And if you haven’t seen or heard Edwards’s Iowa concession speech, you really should watch it.

He’s the only one who is talking about what is really wrong with this country, which is that we are completely controlled by corporate interests. In everything from Iraq, to poverty, to bad schools, to criminally inadequate health care, it is all owing to corporations ruling our government.

No, it’s not a snappy new message about hope and compromise and working together. It’s about basic Democratic politics. It’s about the reason why we are Democrats instead of Republicans. Call it old school, if you will. But maybe it’s time we rock it old school up in this foundering, lost old mug of a country of ours.

And if you doubt the direction in which the last seven years have taken us, courtesy our Oilman- and VP Oilman-in-chief, let me remind you that in December of 2000, when five members of the Supreme Court betrayed everything that they were entrusted to stand up for, the average gas price per gallon in the US was $1.65.

It seems like a dream now, doesn’t it?

And so it goes in New Hampshire, where independent voters likely to vote Republican are expressing an interest in either McCain or Huckabee, because they’re the “sane” ones.

Wow. With standards that low, they should start a limbo contest.

Another serious post about John Edwards, dammit

James Denton, actor & personal friend of yours truly, has written a very nice bit of opinion in Salon about why he’s endorsing John Edwards:

Why John Edwards? That's a complicated question. Especially for a Southern Baptist, card-carrying NRA member from the rural South. Like so many Americans, I am simply fed up. Fed up with our government's seeming disregard for the environment and the economically challenged. Fed up with our debilitating dependence on foreign oil. Fed up with the Republican Party (with whom I voted most of my life prior to this administration) preaching that it is the party of the moral high ground when its leadership proves otherwise.

James is not bullshitting about being a Republican for most of life. And the man do love him some guns. So the fact that he has done such an about-face, politically, is not only a testament to his compassion and honesty, but also the most damning anecdote on the failures of the Republican Party that I personally know of. Believe me, when I first met JD, he would’ve rather stuck needles in his valuable baby blues than be accused of even dressing to the left.

By the way, JD is very busy off working for Edwards in Iowa right now, and not likely to read this post, so I believe that tempers the “sucking up to famous people” factor of the above paragraph. Right?

I met Edwards, and I listened to him speak, at a fundraiser at JD’s house a couple of months ago, and I’ve been mulling it ever since. I was reluctant to commit to a candidate that I thought might be perceived by the press as a calculated replay of the Clinton strategy. I was mindful of my disappointment of his performance against Cheney in the ’04 debates, and his unfortunate willingness to go along with massively dunderheaded Kerry campaign ideas, such as the cringe-inducing moment we he tried to make Mary Cheney’s gayness a election issue. Sure, he’s being bold now, I thought, bolder than anyone else about issues that I care about, and yet, will he continue to be bold when he actually has something to lose?

I can’t answer that last question. But I can’t deny that when Edwards speaks, I believe him. He is right when he tells Americans that they must sacrifice to achieve improvement. He is right to fix his campaign message on what is absolutely the most important issue in this country right now: poverty - because poverty is the hub around which a host of evils revolve. And when he says that "it is time for Americans to be patriotic about something other than war," I think that this country might finally be ready to hear that, and believe it.

Joint's too small

Yes, I'm still sick, but I managed to squeeze out two semi-lame posts for the vacationing Grant Miller.

Like he needs more people linking to him.

Spooney basically gave the idea for the Scott Baio post, but I didn't credit him, because I'm a bitch.

A coworker was quizzing me today about my cold, and he speculated that I might have the walking pneumonia.

I said "Yes, I do, but so far I've managed to escape the boogie woogie flu."

He was all "Huh?" I had to explain that it was a song reference that people as old as I am would probably have gotten.