those press conferences

As a kid I was an avid reader of the comic page, especially fascinating to me are those strips like The Boarding House that seemed old even then and that wacky precursor of underground comic strips Smokey Stover.  We got the Tribune every morning,  My grandfather used to read a rag called The Herald American  which even at an early age seemed lowbrow to me.  I was aware of the Daily News, it seemed kind of racy and alluring but I didn't read it much.  My favorite newspaper, when I came of age to buy my own, was the Sun-Times, primarily because of its tabloid format.

It's hard to read that poem by Taupin without hearing the music of the song.  I don't see how it could ever stand alone, but you can kind of tell that it was meant to be the words of a song.  I think Bernie must have had some kind of ur-music in his head when he wrote it, waiting on Elton's refining it.

I got my census form and filled it out on the computer using that 12 digit code.  I thought it was passing strange that they wanted more than White of my ethnicity, you know where my people came from in Europe.  I wrote in Czech because I am more that than anything else and it has a clearer definition than Bohemian, but I have to wonder what difference did that make.  How is the government going to do something differently with that information than they would do if I had put down Italian?  And then yesterday I got another thing in the mail with a 12 digit code. Well maybe for some reason it hadn't taken.  I entered the 12 digit code but then it told me it couldn't use that code and I am thinking probably because I had already used it, but then there was an option to go on without the code and I took that to see where it went and it seems like it went through with the same name, address, etc.  So maybe I am registered twice.  Well more power to the great state of Illinois.


It seems logical that the swamp lies in some depression from the surrounding land.  Surveying the world from outside his front door, does Beagles get any impression that he is living in a bowl? 

The southern states wanted their slaves to be counted for their representation, but taxes those days were levied by that state rather than individually so they didn't want slaves to be counted as a factor in how much taxes the state had to pay the feds.  It was 3/5 not 2/5.

Trump would like you to think he is running this corona thing, but he is not.  He has no power to put shelter in place on the states, and there is no reason to believe that the states, acting in accord to the health of their constituents rather than Trump's stock market numbers, would relinquish shelter before its time regardless of presidential bluster.  Fauci and that woman who always dresses to the nines are the only brains in the task force and they had to tell Trump that Easter was a stupid idea.  Surprisingly he listened to them.  But he never listens to anybody for long and I expect him to blow up about it somewhere down the line.  But even the most lickspittle of his toadies have enough sense to see that unsheltering early would lead to more deaths, perhaps even their own. 

I've watched almost all of those press conferences (I know, I'm sick) and Pence is the well-dressed polite maitre de, the toadies are the clowns tripping over their oversized shoes to praise Trump more than the guys next to them, Fauci and Ms Fashion Plate are the brains and Trump is one of those balloon guys you see outside gas stations when they are having big sales, some say the biggest sale there has ever been in the world.