TV News LIES

Those firm rubber mallets come closest, so far -- the ones over there, with the wooden handles and the black, hard rubber heads.  The bamboo cutting boards aren't bad, but they're brittle and splinter too easily under heavy loads.

Pounds per square inch of pressure, deflection energies, angles of attack -- all these have to be taken into consideration, and a lot more.

See, like many Americans, and an increasing number of observers eyeing our system from other countries, I'm looking for something -- anything -- to make the political pain in my head stop.  However, I would like to leave something like a smoldering tree stump inside my shirt collar, where my old head used to be -- you know, something that might yet grow back in the transformative Spring, after the numbing kindness of Fall, after the hibernation and healing of Winter.  It has been a simmering, killing cruelty, this inflamed, and inflammatory, Summer political season.

This space is usually filled, I know, with a torrent of disgust and effluvia based on the disgusting torrent of effluvia erupting daily in the U.S. and in the world at large.

However, today we will focus on something less than our usual 12-million-calorie bounty of an engorged, buffet-table cornucopia with strap-on bib.  We will instead take a light meal, and a little water.  And an electric hot pot, or some Sterno.  (Think Ramen.  More on that in a sec.)

It's taken us all longer that it should have to arrive at the obvious:  Trump was never running, Trump never wanted the job, and we've all been conned in a fashion no one ever thought possible.

It would be like learning the whole point of NASA's moon missions was to test out if the place really was made of cheese, and, if so, to keep it from the Russians, at least until we had global dairy prices locked down.

In pool, having the cue ball leave the table -- jumping a bumper or plunging down a pocket-hole -- is a scratch.  Most people play as if it's not a big deal, that it's just the end of your turn.  You don't get to keep shooting.

However, in most forms of a game of 8-ball, if you scratch while shooting the 8, and pocket that 8-ball -- well, that's an instant loss.  Game over.

And that thought gives me no rest.  White American votes (for the most part) are the cue ball on this green-felt-topped, slate table-top game of politics, and The Trumpster is the 8-ball if ever there was one.

No matter how many toys, gadgets, and gizmos we create, we're still batting zero in social evolution.  Mostly.  (We can talk about one exception, later on.)

Considering the number of apologies we've received from the banksters who nearly collapsed the world economy with their charlatan scams and bottomless greed.  My count still stands at Precisely None, in both the Forced and Unforced categories.

There are still some things in life worse than working for a living.  That's not immediately clear, when the alarm clock has triggered its doomsday, crash-dive klaxon, just when, in your dream, you were headed toward a bulkhead in your pina-colada-submarine... while doing underwater calisthenics with bulked-up dolphins in swim caps.

Another of the things worse than working?  Staying up too late, watching Olympic athletes, and getting too little sleep, finding in the morning that someone has swapped out your brain with moldy linguini and damp sawdust.  This was probably when you dreamed about synchronized snowball fights, and got up in the night, groggy, and turned the A/C blizzard down from arctic eternity to moderately crunchy eyebrows.