Author: Dick

No it just means I occasionally am a careless person. But what is positive about blogs as opposed to newspapers, is you can correct your error as if it never happened.

“Say what?”

“Nope. I didn’t say that.”

“But it’s on the Internet.”

“Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.”

I refer to my little joke about the fortune cookie. It works now. It probably didn’t work so well because I originally omitted a space between the “ok” and “e.” It just made for an awkward read. Sorry. What are you going to do, fire me? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Eeeeh. Sorry, inside joke.

Okay, it’s now as it should be. That doesn’t particularly mean that it is funny. But, well, I stumble, you decide!

Av. Julius
Nyerere
Maputo
3236
Mzbqe.
My good sir: Perhaps I shall introduce myself for I am John Doe, one of 16 sons of former Liberia President Samuel K. Doe. In the photograph that accompanies this message, one may view me as third from the left rear. I fled with brothers when trouble came down and we eventually gathered in Tunisa. Later I most regrettably robbed the national treasury of Tunisia and had to run first to Rwanda and later to Mozambique, where I stay in this hotel in Maputo. My days of running are over as the police have placed me under house arrest. I truly wish I could see my brother Ernie K. Doe, now a upstanding resident of Botswana. For I fear I shall never see the light of freedom again and Ernie K. Doe has not long to live. I feel I must explain why.

Ernie K. Doe settled in Botswana with his wife, Tiffany and her mother. Ernie K. Doe had problems almost from the beginning with his mother-in-law. Sin should be her name. He even made a record about it, or so I have heard. Tiffany and her mother stole all the household items from my brother, Ernie’s home, then left for South Africa. Tiffany’s mother came back however and set my brother’s home on fire, with my brother Ernie K. Doe escaping within three inches of his life.

Years later, Ernie K. Doe contracted a terminal disease which was made worse by the heartbreak caused from the death of his favorite donkey, Jean Claude. Ernie K. Doe is now shunned by his community. I failed to mention he is also confined to a wheelchair and as well is blind.

I managed to smuggle some $4.5 million in US dollars out of Monrovia when we fled. I was the trusted keeper of this fortune for my family. However, I have been cursed with an unfortunate disease of which I bet my money on practically anything. I lost my final $1 million, betting that I could drive my Range Rover over a wide river in eastern Africa. I am unhappy to report that the Range Rover sank like a rock and I was very wet. I was also very broke. That led my my robbing the Tunisian treasury and my current unfortunate circumstance. But I do have $3.8 million in US currency hidden away in an account named to D.H. Lawrence in the Traveler’s Bank of Barbados.

I will never see the money and neither will my favorite brother Ernie K. Doe and his dead donkey. But I wish for my remaining 14 brothers to divide the handsome sum of $1 million and for your assistance in ensuring my brothers receive the money will award you the remaining $2.8 million in US currency. To do this you must receive the documents that list the particulars of my bank account along with the addresses of the remaining Doe brothers.

Should you elect to kindly help this poor and humble prisoner, you would require a meeting with a man named “Abraham” who dresses like a tribal princess. Abraham will then take you to see “Farouk,” who lives behind a Wal-Mart in Kearney, Nebraska, in the USA. From there you will drive in six automobiles to a cabin in Long Island, also in the USA, where you will receive the particulars of my account.

The hopes of the Doe legacy and family are riding on your valiant efforts. Please take my money for your troubles and return my message as soon as it is possible for you to do so.

Courage,
John Doe

Taking objects out of my pockets has always been sort of an obsession with me. I guess that happens when you are also obsessed with pockets. I love cargo pants, shorts, anything with pockets — hot pockets, corner pockets, pockets of resistance. Oh my.

But sometimes I forget and something I left in my pocket will go through the laundry and will become mostly useless from the tides of Cheer. I found — almost a week after doing my laundry — that one of my cargo shorts pockets contained a fortune. That is fortune as in fortune cookie, not a fortune as in Donald Trump. I pocketed that fortune after cracking a fortune cookie open a week or so ago at my local Vietnamese restaurant. Well, I guess technically it is Vietnamese-Chinese restaurant. The point is I kept that fortune for some reason or other. After my shorts went through the laundry, however, I was left with a very strange and cryptic message on the small piece of paper:

“o ne ok e y as”

I thought, hmm, that’s weird. O ne ok e y as. It sounds like maybe it’s a Spanish or American Indian phrase. What could that mean? You will meet a tall, dark stranger? Or maybe you will meet a tall, dark stranger with a bottle of gin? Perhaps it means you will meet a tall, dark stranger with the rest of the letters you are missing because washing your shorts obviously washed away the other letters.

So bothered did I become over what the cookie forturne meant that I actually called the restaurant to see if they had any idea what it said. I talked to someone named Duck at the eatery. I’m not sure how you spell his name. I’m not sure he could spell his name, at least in English. That line of inquiry did not go well.

Finally I sat down with a pen and paper and tried various word combinations. I was never really good at doing Jumble or other word puzzles but I nonetheless put my nose to the grindstone (Which is why my nose hurts. Don’t ever put a stone on your nose, much less a grindstone). Maybe I’m wrong, but I think I finally figured it out. It is the only phrase that makes sense out of why I would still have this fortune on me. This is what I determined as the cryptic message from that Vietnamese dinner more than a week ago:

“Fortune cookie my ass!”

Judge John Roberts making nerve gas as a chemistry student at La Lumiere School in Indiana.

It will take nothing short of a miracle to liven up the Senate confirmation hearings for John Roberts. So far the senators seem content to ask Roberts questions of law. Boring dude. What I would not give to see two distinct occurrences in these important hearings for the man who could be chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for the next 30 or so years.

1)I wish someone, anyone, on the panel would hypnotize Roberts and make him act like a chicken.

2)I would like to see one of the senators get down to the question everybody’s been wanting to ask but is afraid to ask. “Judge Roberts, are you gay?” (Not that there’s anything wrong with it, as Seinfeld would say)

God, wouldn’t the mood of America just go completely on the upswing if Roberts flew out of that seat, tucked his hands under his armpits and boisterously clucked and crowed like a rooster fleeing Col. Sanders? I know I’d certainly be in a better mood provided someone taped it for me so I can play it over and over and over. It would be even better if the future CJ squawked out the tune to some song, say Johann Strauss’ “The Blue Danube.”

And it truly isn’t anyone’s business whether Roberts is gay or not. I think asking someone point blank if they are gay is rather rude under most circumstances. That’s why some senator should do it. My reasoning is this: I don’t care if Roberts is gay, straight or has an affection for Freedom Fries. I just want something to happen during these hearings to convince me when I see it on television that I am not actually watching “Night of the Living Dead.” Holy humdrum Batman, these confirmation hearings are a drag.

I hate to be cynical. Well, that’s not true, but it will take some bombshell that will blast Arlen Specter out of his shorts (which is something I truly do not want to see)for Roberts not to be confirmed. Then no one really knows except the new justice how he might rule on cases until they actually come before him. I take him at his word that he doesn’t even know.

So we might as well have a little fun at his expense. We can start a new constitutionally-mandated hazing ritual for new chief justices. The Senate should do something, for Pete’s sake, before millions succumb to boredom.

Bush arrives on USS Iwo Jima where he played guitar and sang chanties for the sailors.
If you listen to what some of the GOP leaders and their mothers have been saying lately with regard to the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, you would have sworn that some mischievous old hippies were around putting LSD in the Republicans’ bottled water.

An example of the perplexing statements came straight from the lips of our own illustrious leader President GW:

“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

Of course, Brownie was removed from his job as head of FEMA and resigned today. I wonder what kind of acid the president was on the day he told “Brownie” that. Or even that day on the Mississippi Gulf Coast when he stood there fantasizing about sitting on the porch swing with Sen. Trent Lott:

“Out of the rubble of Trent Lott’s house — he’s lost his entire house — there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.”

Oh wow, man, that spider web looks like a tunnel into the center of the earth! Did you see it Trent? Wow!

Then the president reminisced in New Orleans about visiting that city in his younger days “to enjoy myself — occasionally too much.” Ah, Mr. President, I also got torn down a time or two in New Orleans when I was younger. But I’m not leading the nation and trying to inspire people who have lost the better part of their city.

It wasn’t just the president talking like he had dropped acid, however. Even GW’s mom, Babs, must have downed a tab or two.

“What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality,” Barbara Bush said about storm evacuees in a radio interview from the Astrodome in Houston, Texas. “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this — is working very well for them,” she said.

U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert no doubt was hallucinating when he told an interviewer that he thought New Orleans should be a candidate for a bulldozer. And Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, perhaps pulled a magic mushroom from a cow patty before he made a statement to some evacuees last weekend at a Houston shelter, reported in this dispatch by the “Houston Chronicle:”

“While on the tour with top administration officials from Washington, including U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao and U.S. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, DeLay stopped to chat with three young boys resting on cots. The congressman likened their stay to being at camp and asked, ‘Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?’

“They nodded yes, but looked perplexed.”

Maybe the pressure is just getting to all these people is the reason they are making often insensitive, nonsensical and, at times, absurd remarks.

Or maybe they are just really, really stoned.