300 Minus One, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #299 | @MDWorld

November 5, 2012 Mike Gold 6 Comments

Tomorrow is Election Day, and I’ve said all I have to say on the matter other than “go out an vote or shut the hell up.”

I’ve been writing this “Brainiac On Banjo” wave for nearly six years. This betrays an almost unprecedented attention span for your addle-pated correspondent, so I’m going to eschew most of my usual violently offensive political screes this week and instead share some more personal, homespun experiences of late.

I Don’t Long For Your Touch

There was at least one winner from Hurricane Sandy: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who praised both FEMA (a government agency) and Barack Obama (a government leader). When being interviewed on Fox “News” he was given ample opportunity to squeeze his praise of the black socialist back into the tube, and Christie replied – in anger – “If you think right now that I give a damn about presidential politics, you don’t know me.” GOP shill Steve Doocey looked like the Republican’s Great White Hope just kicked him in the balls.

That was a feeling that required a bit of imagination on Doocey’s part.

The government came through. Blow me, Reagan.

By the way, Adriane and I came through okay. Power was down about 14 hours. We dodged another bullet.

Ice Road Puckers

Adriane and I were watching the first KHL game aired on our cable teevee, in lieu of the real thing. All red-blooded Americans are used to rooting for “our” team and we have a pecking order of favorites in the NHL. With the KHL, no such luck. The choices were the home team, the Dinamo Minsk (Belarus), and the visiting Barys Astana (Kazakhstan). We had to choose one.

Well, Wayne Gretzky is Belarusian, and I know Leonard and Phil Chess were as well. That provided sufficient reason, but a quick Google revealed many other famous Belarusians: Isaac Asimov, Kirk Douglas, Scarlett Johansson, Marc Chagall, Louis B. Mayer, Isser Harel, David Sarnoff, and Irving Berlin. Kazakhstan didn’t offer a single name that I knew to have an impact on my life, so we rooted for the home team.

As it turned out, Minsk beat Astana in the last seconds of overtime. And they’re in first place! As they say in my hometown, “Don’t back no losers.” As for the NHL… nationalize it!

Rat’s All, Folks!

I have a question for New Yorkers and the otherwise well-advised: does the persistent inhalation of rat urine have a negative impact on one’s health? I’d ask Mayor Mike Bloomberg, but he’s busy blaming health issues on super-sized sodas.

Apple – My Eye!

Am I the only Apple cultist who believes the $329 price point on the iPad Mini made the folks at Amazon very, very happy? Of course, it sold out in 35 hours.

Fools R Us

There’s a bar-band up in Boston called The Fools. They’re hard rocking and have an ass-kicking sense of humor, and they’ve been around for 37 years. If you’re tired of “rock and roll” that is so whiny it turns your butter into large curd cottage cheese and so humorless and so sanctimonious you think you’re listening to madrigals, you should give them a listen. We (I use the plural in my more schizophrenic moments, which generally are limited to waking hours) play the hell out of ‘em on Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind.

The Sky Is Fawning!

I’m writing this before I will have seen Skyfall, the 50th anniversary James Bond movie. Thus far I’ve read about 298 great reviews, and everybody I know who went to one of the British screenings talked about it in terms generally reserved for beatific events. So I’m looking forward to it… but I’ve been looking forward to each and every James Bond movie for the past 50 years. Less than half were worth the wait, but about six or seven of them made up for all the rest.

I’m reminded of a statement Warren Zevon made when he was told his cancer was terminal. Zevon said he just wished he could live long enough to see the next James Bond movie. He did. You probably have to have the Y chromosome to fully appreciate that. Men like James Bond as much as we like The Three Stooges, and many women think that’s because while we’d like to be James Bond, we are, in fact, Larry Fine. This is not true.

We think that James Bond personifies a level of coolness we can never reach and probably wouldn’t want to even if we could. If James Bond were our fantasy ideal, the sales of gray suits would have saved our economy.

Sue. Sí?

299 columns and not a single lawsuit. Amazing.

Don’t worry. I’ll get pissy next week. I’ll probably say something real sweet about the election. Thanks for hanging in here. Without you, I’d be just a zen question.

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com , every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week (check the website above for times) and available On Demand at the same place. That same venue offers us the weekly Great American Popcast, co-hosted with Mike Raub. Gold also joins Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.