Lightning Rod Gets The Zot

The Poet's Eye ^ | Lightning Rod

[Lrod]

A character like Christine O'Donnell presents a unique problem for a humorist. Few elaborations are called for since the caricature is self-embodied. All that is needed is a dead-pan Jack Benny look. You know, the one where he just stares blankly at the audience without saying a word and eventually someone titters and before you know it the whole place is in hysterics? Her very existence as a major party candidate for US Senate is the kind of comedy which arrives ready-written and would only be spoiled by embellishment. I mean, what can you add to rabidantimasturbationtarianism, rats with fully-functioning human brains and her famous Witches of Eastwick campaign ad that looks like it was produced by Tim Burton? I had fully intended to leave Ms. O'Donnell to the other comedians and the pundits who were wearing her out on cable TV. But then came the most recent revelation that she has claimed that her father was Bozo the Clown. Here I had to break my silence, not in the name of humor, but in the cause of veracity. This is a subject I happen to know something about.

Long ago, for one magic season, I was related by marriage to Bozo the Clown. I'm not making this up. My father was a semi-notorious lothario in the television and advertising business. Sometime after he turned 50, he married the 17 year-old daughter of one of his professional colleagues, Larry Harmon, the guy who owned the franchise to Bozo, the Most Famous Clown in the World. He was Bozo Primero, not one of the many FauxZos who were franchised in every major media market. I was much closer to the power center of the Bozo world than Ms. O'Donnell ever dreamed of being. It gave me an intimate glimpse into the backstage life of clowns. I knew little of the inside workings of the clown business in those days. Like a naive child, I had assumed that, you know, Bozo was Bozo. It never occurred to me that there was a school, like a Bozo boot-camp, where imposters went to learn how to walk like a Bozo and talk like a Bozo and draw the red rictus of a smile on their faces with greasepaint. It was like learning a dirty family secret and it was a big disappointment. When you go to see Bozo, you want it to really be Bozo, not some guy dressed up in a Bozo costume.

I hadn't thought about my brief inclusion in greasepaint royalty for years until Ms. O'D surfaced with her claims of actually being a blood relative of Bozo the Clown. The marriage between my father and Princess Bozo, which was chronologically challenged to begin with, barely outlasted the honeymoon. They had about as much in common as Christine would have in common with the 99 other US Senators. Suddenly the whole subject bubbled from my subconscious and made me wonder about franchises and politicians and the authenticity of clowns.

Since John Quincy Adams carried forth his father's political legacy, American politicians have campaigned on the richness of their family's past public service. Roosevelt and Kennedy and Bush all represent minor dynasties and it is entirely in keeping with this tradition for Ms. O'D to claim descent from Bozo. Clowning is as present in the current of American politics as populism, liberalism or conservatism. But in light of Ms. O'D's penchant for resume enhancement, she fibbed about her college career and has downplayed her wiccan studies, her claims to clownly ancestry are also suspect. While she seems like a natural and can certainly get a laugh and works well in the side-shows, one has to wonder if she is really ready for the Big Top, the center ring.

The US Senate is the Big League of Buffoonery. Even pros like Colbert have trouble hanging there. It's a tough room. Notice that Al Franken, even with all his years of practical comic experience, has been keeping mum in deference to the mime-masters of the Senate. These clowns can juggle, ride unicycles, do pratfalls and get shot from cannons, all with the perfect dead-pan of their painted-on media faces. They are consummate clowns adept with all the tricks, the seltzer bottle, the pie-in-the-face, the filibuster. I don't want to get all Stephen King on you but these aren't nice clowns. Ms. O'D should think twice before she alienates her witch constituency, she may need some strong juju to avoid the dunking stool. They'll make her the senator-punk-clown. Every troupe of clowns has one, the smallest clown, bottom of the pecking order, the one who all the other clowns slap and when there is no smaller clown for her to slap, she turns to the audience with her out-turned palms and pitiful Emmett Kelly frown and says, "I am you."

Two of the greatest Senatorial Clowns, Lloyd Bentson and Dan Quayle, in their famous vice-presidential debate in 1988 demonstrated the type of cut-throat comedy these jokers are capable of. When Quayle set the joke up by comparing his inexperience to the inexperience of Jack Kennedy, Bentson spiked it with this punch-line, "Senator," he said, "I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy."

The Poet's Eye would like to say to Christine O'Donnell in this same spirit, "Ms. O'Donnell, you say your father is Bozo. Well, I knew Bozo. Bozo was briefly my step-grand-father-in-law. Christine, your father was no Bozo."

Yes I’m stuck in the middle with you, and I’m wondering what it is I should do. It’s so hard to keep this smile from my face. Losing control yeah I'm all over the place.

Clowns to the left of me! Jokers to the right! Here I am stuck in the middle with you. ---Joe Egan and Gerry Rafferty

Visit The Poet's Eye

[Darksheare]

[Monkey Face]

My favorite mountains were Timp and the one just behind BYU. I’ve been gone so long I have no idea what the names are. All I recall are around Payson...Mt. Nebo and Sugar Loaf.

And I can tell you truly: I MISS “my” mountains!!

I know of no other place in this country where the mountains are so close to the valley floor and yet rise to such awesome heights all at once. *homesick*

I lived in Salt Lake as a teen, but I don’t think I appreciated the mountains there. I mean, they were just “there.”

[Monkey Face]

Nothing can explian this thread! It is UNIQUE! And alive!

[Monkey Face]

Hey! You missed the 666 but you got the first 000! I’m still having problems with loading pages. *sigh* It’s almost as if the computer just went on a Sit-In.

[tubebender]

Can I buy FReeper sized models?

[Tax-chick]

Pat and James wanted to go swimming, so we went to Monroe. Then to Walmart. Then to the shower.

Now it’s time for a small restorative.

[Dead Corpse]

Bigger bungees, use a papasan chair... Maybe a nice Philly cheese steak sandwich for bait.

I could see it happening. ;-)

[Dead Corpse]

Looks back, I got the 777 as well. ;-)

[Monkey Face]

:o])

I took the last of my newfound Walmart card and a small portion of the car repair fund and got an HPprinter/scanner/copier at Walmart...on sale for $49. Since my scanner died in the middle of a project, and my printer is slowly dying, I figured it was for a good cause. Especially since I have so many photos to scan for the genealogical projects.

And I will soon have a small Restorative, just because! (Something about me ALWAYS needs restoring!)

May I offer you a Snyder’s Honey Mustard and Onion pretzel chip/piece/bunch? A FRiend of mine introduced them to me in April. BAD habit!

(PS: In my mailbox this morning, there was a copy of “GAMES” I did the happy dance all the way to the car!)

[Monkey Face]

Lucky you!

[Dead Corpse]

Yes. I did... ;-)

[Tax-chick]

I got the byos some Cheddar Cheez bits last week. They disappeared while I was changing a diaper ... WHOOOOSH. I’m glad the magazine came - that means we should get whatever we ordered fairly soon. Good deal on the scanner. I wonder if mine was that cheap ...

I need to go pick up pizza for the boys and byos. I’m making DP take me out to dinner, and Frank insists he wants “peetz!”

[Monkey Face]

:o])

[Monkey Face]

I’ve never seen a scanner as cheap as this. The selling point for me was that it’s an HP.

My ex-friend paid almost $200 for a “simple” scanner, so this seems like a bonus. Especially since my scanner died not so long ago and the printer seems to be getting slower. With all the photos I need to scan, this is what I need when I need it.

My ex-friend’s kids always called it “feetza.” Sometimes, it smelled like that!!

And good for you and DP going out! You deserve it!

[NicknamedBob]

"So — what are you saying? That we owe our continued spacefaring existence to heavy metal?"

To two heavy metals in particular. A large quantity of gold that we traded for the materials and construction of Habitats A and B, and the U-know-what that we used to fuel our Gas-Cooled Nuclear Reactor/Rocket Engines.

Both of these, and several other exotic elements, were harvested out of sea-water using a process we have not described in very much detail. Some people cannot be trusted with certain information regarding these materials and their acquisition, if you know what I mean.

[Darksheare]

I liked the Thorium thermal generator secondaries on sublevel C.
Most of the thermophile critters like them too.
*Shoo! Shoo!*

[NicknamedBob]

I suppose I should explain this.

We've tried to keep a low profile, aided by NASA, which usually explains away the occasional sonic boom and such.

You see, with all these shuttles, (we used over six hundred to launch this unbelievably complex space habitat from near Eniwetok Atoll way back when), we have the ability to traverse Hohmann orbits back and forth to Earth pretty much at will.

And we've been doing that. It's hard to maintain a large ecology like this without the occasional supplement. At the top of our needs list are new varieties of food crops and animal breeds. We also have materials and supplies that we send down to Earth for a clandestine trade that NASA again helps us to keep under wraps.

Normally, our vessels return using their vast specific impulse advantage to go directly into orbit, and thence on to the asteroid belt. It's a long lonely journey, but we use it to bring up our new pilot trainees to full qualification.

During the trip, they can study and do practice drills. It's good training.

So what happened?

Well, depending on the time of day for our return launch, we may choose carbon dioxide as the reaction fuel source rather than distilled water. The con trail of CO₂ is more subtle than that of H₂O.

Due to a combination of events, we ended up doing a delayed launch with water instead of carbon dioxide, and it made a really noticeable trail.

And I would like to emphasize the fact that the pilot was only fourteen years old had nothing to do with any awkwardness involved in this launch. He was fully certified according to our pilot standards, which may not be as rigorous as those of Earth, but we have different needs up here.

We're anticipating that this whole thing will blow over shortly, and we will be glad to welcome this flight, its pilot, and especially its cargo back aboard the Flying Castle in a few months.

[HKMk23]

...exotic elements, were harvested out of sea-water using a process we have not described in very much detail.

Perhaps we should simply call the process "neoalchemy" and be done with it. It seems a fitting tip of the hat to the ancients who had sort of the right idea, but at entirely the wrong level.

[Darksheare]

I hope the cookies in the cargo manifest will be there.

[NicknamedBob]

No, it’s not alchemy. It’s just ordinary chemistry.

All kinds of things are dissolved in seawater. The more rare elements are more widely dispersed, but they are out there in quantity.

Enough Uranium, for instance, is dissolved in Earth’s oceans to fuel all the nuclear reactors we would need to use, for about five thousand years.

Yeah, that’s right. The so-called energy crisis is a political fabrication.

Now the technique to harvest the material is tricky, and proprietary. Anyone can do it, but doing it quickly and efficiently is an art.