Odd thoughts floating around on an overcast Friday morning:

• According to the New York Times, the Russian people are waking up to the realization that in a war soldiers get killed and a sizable number of them in this war are, well, Russian. It’s gotten so bad that Tsar Vlad has ordered all the independent media outlets in the country shut down because they’ve been reporting that inconvenient truth. Even Tricky Dick never tried that during Vietnam, though I’m sure he thought about it. Thought about it and then dismissed it because as bad as the Trickster was, he wasn’t as bad as Putin currently is.
• I must be getting old, I just said something nice about Dick Nixon.
• If Dick Nixon were alive today he’d be a Manchin Democrat.
• Chelsea Football Club is currently owned by Roman Abramovich who is one of Putin’s oligarch allies. Abramovich has put a big ass yacht-load of money into the club and they have responded by winning lots of trophies for their supporters. Those supporters turned a blind eye to where all that money came from. Because of pressure for being a friend of Vlad P, Abramovich says he will sell the club. Estimates hover around a billion pounds as the sale price. He bought the team in 2003 for 140 million pounds. That’s an 860 million pound profit. Um, no. You don’t get to walk away with an 860 million pound profit. British authorities should seize the club the same way they seize the Lamborghinis and manor homes of drug kingpins. Then it should be auctioned off. I got $1000 burning a hole in my bank account I’d spend to own the boys in blue.
• That ought to get Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s attention. He only had one journalist killed (that we know of) before buying Newcastle United Football Club. Maybe he figures he can escape because the team is likely to be relegated.
• Honestly, what the hell is it with Repugnicants? CPAC was bad enough with the cries of Candace Owens about male bears killing their cubs for sex (which isn’t true) and Ben Carson’s nongender worms, but that was tame compared to the shindig down the road at AFPAC where white nationalists cheered the Russian invasion of Ukraine, cheered Tsar Vlad, and cheered Marjorie Taylor Greene who showed up to cheer them up I guess. Of course she immediately denied knowing Nick Fuentes the organizer of the event and world famous pointy headed (so it fits under the hood) white supremist. She and her best gal pal Lauren Boebert then decided the State of the Union Address was a great place to demonstrate that it IS possible for women to be dicks.
• Again, not Dick Nixon.
• So the wife (Cruella) and I have lived in our house for over two years now. Once a month since we moved in we have gotten a bill from Providence Health Care. It’s not addressed to us, but to someone named Daphne Ziggins. Each month we have written, then scrawled, then scrawled with malice, the words NOT AT THIS ADDRESS and sent it back. Nevertheless a new bill keeps showing up each month. We asked around if anyone knew this Daphne Ziggins, but not only had none of our neighbors ever heard of her, the people in the management office had never heard of her either. In exasperation when the latest bill arrived, we opened it up in order to find out who we could call to get them to stop sending it. That’s when we found out that this bill that Providence Health Care has been diligently trying to collect on for over two years is for……$14.51. That’s not a typo, the decimal point is in the correct place. The mailing costs of these bills long ago outstripped the amount wanting to be collected.
• And they wonder why the American medical system is so screwed up.
• And yes, we did Google the name and got the rarest of search results: No results found for “Daphne Ziggins”.
• Television recommendation time. Now that it has finished it’s first season and you can binge all seven episodes in one evening, it’s time you checked out Somebody Somewhere on HBO (or HBO Max if that’s your particular poison). I knew nothing about it, knew none of the actors in it, and ten minutes into the first episode not only was I hooked but I was thinking this might be the best thing HBO has produced since The Sopranos. And no, it’s not at all like The Sopranos although it does take place in Manhattan, but the one in Kansas, not New York. It’s about finding a family, both through blood and through circumstance. You’ll never hear the phrase “choir practice” in the same way again. All the performances are great, Bridget Everett in particular as the lead, but I would be honored to have Doctor Professor Fred Rococo teach me about agronomy while calling me “Toots”.
• My nominee for weirdest political story of the year has to be Van Taylor, the Republican congressman from Texas, dropping out of his re-election bid and admitting to an affair with the widow of an American born recruiter for the Islamic State. This came the day after he was barely forced into a runoff with wingnut crazy Collin County Judge Keith Self. Keep in mind Taylor was considered one of the most conservative members of the Texas house delegation. His re-nomination in a blood red section of a fairly red state should have been a foregone conclusion. But he committed the ultimate sin of the current non Dick Nixon Repugnicant Party: he voted to certify Biden’s 2020 election victory. This just proves the Repugnicants aren’t a conservative party anymore, they are a reactionary party. Hey Repugnicants, go back to Russia if you want to live like that.
• I’ve waited my whole life to write that last sentence.

We’ll head off into the weekend with a terrific version of Peter Gabriel’s Don’t Give Up from episode one of Somebody Somewhere. Remember, as bad as things might get, you have friends, you won’t be beaten

Shapiro Out