* Family’s always trying, isn’t it?
* The more I see and hear of him, the more I am convinced that Joe Biden is going to be the Charles Barkley to Obama’s MJ: don’t dare get between him and a microphone, and you’re going to be cringing waiting for him to drop a clanger, but the potential entertainment value is through the roof. It ought to be an interesting week.
* I still despise him and think he’s a jackass, but Kobe Bryant gets a pass this week. What he did overnight Saturday was incredible to watch – as was Dwayne Wade’s effort. Seriously, when you can bring Dwayne Wade off the bench, you should be unloading whoop ass by the case. But anybody who thought a bunch of NBA stars couldn’t come together, play as a team, subvert 12 egos for one goal – well, these guys looked like a million damn dollars and a bunch of them are talking about wanting to come back in 2012. Lock and load and find some cover.
* There was zippy fog in the city yesterday. My plan had been to use the effects of the fog to offset the effects of the company, and yet? No fog. I am bitter and I want a refund. That lunkhead Austrian robot from the future has a LOT to answer for this year.
* “John McCain was a POW!” is the new “Did you know Jerome Bettis is from Detroit?”
* Whatever you may have thought of Margaret Thatcher in the past, this may be the saddest thing I’ve ever read:
Thatcher’s condition has deteriorated so much that she forgets that her husband, Denis Thatcher, died in 2003, her daughter said in a memoir that is to be published next month and was serialized over the weekend in the Mail on Sunday newspaper.
“I had to keep giving her the bad news over and over again,” Carol Thatcher wrote. “Every time it finally sank in that she had lost her husband of more than 50 years, she’d look at me sadly and say ‘Oh’ as I struggled to compose myself. ‘Were we all there?’ she’d ask softly.”
* I didn’t post that much about the Olympics this year. Every time they come round, I tend to think about where I was four years ago and what was happening with my life. And while I’m remembering 2004 (housesitting, early days at the last job, still disoriented from the move), I’m thinking just as much of 1988, when the Olympics didn’t start until school was back in and I was starting my junior year…and having the kind of start to the year that normally gets listed in history books as “The Gathering Storm” or something like that.
* Leona Lewis is all right but no Robert Plant. But Jimmy Page is still the Death Star. Every hair-metal swill ever made collapses prostrate in fear before the opening chords of “Whole Lotta Love.”
* Coffee makes everything better. However, the girl behind the counter looks at you funny if you reply to “Room for cream?” with “No, but room for whiskey would be great.”
* My Buddy Vince Says [redacted for NDA]
Finis.