Sexty Minutes

CBS is already teasing an upcoming 60 Minutes "exclusive interview" with porn star Stormy Daniels, who is dying to tell someone - anyone! - that she had sex with Donald Trump over a decade before he entered politics.

The interview, which has already taken place but not aired, was conducted by incisive newsman Anderson Cooper. Who, according to unnamed 60 Minutes sources, was felt to be "the only man for the job" owing to the fact that he wouldn't be staring at Stormy's knockers the whole time.

We're not entirely sure why this ancient nonsense is even considered a story outside of the undeniably photogenic quality of the aforementioned knockers. Ms. Daniels doesn't claim that she was mistreated, pressured, or harmed in any way during her alleged dalliance...but is angry that she only received a six figure paycheck for keeping her mouth shut, when she now realizes that she can easily get seven figures for opening her mouth. So to speak.

We don't care about this "story" but we do care about its vile intent: to destroy Donald Trump personally (by putting pressure on his marriage) since he appears to be invulnerable politically.

That's low, even by the mainstream media's Mariana Trench-depth standards.

BATTLIN' BIDEN

Apparently taking umbrage at the notion that Donald Trump may have shamed a porn star by doinking her without a camera crew present, Joe Biden barked to a crowd that if he were back in high school, he'd take Trump behind the gym and "beat the hell out of him."

Apparently Biden trotted out this line because it was so successful when he previously used it - virtually word for word - back in 2016. Which is likely the last time he had (or ever will have) what could conceivably pass for an original thought.

Trump, however, responded with a very measured response on Twitter, combining dignity with a frostbite-cold rebuke of Biden...

Just kidding! That's what we wish Trump had tweeted. Instead, we predictably got this...

"He would go down fast and hard, crying all the way"?! We're starting to think that the money being spent on Trump's gravitas lessons is being wasted.

BONUS: CARE FOR SOME LEFTOVERS?

After putting together the Biden cartoon above, our subconscious (or is it the earwig in our brain?) wouldn't stop spitting out additional punchlines. And these just seemed like too much fun to go unseen...

Infernal Revenue Service

We just finished e-filing our federal taxes for the year, and are now experiencing that indefinable afterglow which is usually felt only by men who dropped their soap in a prison shower. Which we hope won't be our own fate after an audit since we don't actually have much confidence that our tax preparation software is more accurate than feeding our receipts into a meat grinder.

As usual, we found ourselves in the rarified ranks of those who actually have to pay an assload of taxes, which is surprising since our actual income is, as Hillary would say, deplorable.

Not that we're poor, mind you. We've spent a lifetime being thrifty and depositing money into a retirement account which has ripened appreciably over time. But this particular set of circumstances leads to some genuinely weird outcomes at tax time - especially since we took a substantial chunk of money out of the stock market last year to pay for our home remodeling. Oops!

Magically, this single transaction transformed us from being potential food stamp recipients to being members of the most despised group on Earth: the evil rich.

Which brings us to some amusing financial trivia about an average American family we'll call "the Jarlsbergs"...

• Our combined household income (not including the stock sale) from a small business and a pension was actually less than we were required to pay for health insurance last year - even with one person on Medicare!

• After the withdrawal, upon which we had to pay very substantial capital gains taxes, we were also informed that as wealthy bastards we didn't deserve the Obamacare subsidy we'd received last year, so we had to cough up an additional $3500 in taxes to reimburse the government for services we'd never used.

• Based on that same determination, the cost of our Medicare plans went up too. Which came as something as a surprise, since we'd always thought Medicare was sort of a 100% paid for service once one reaches their arthritic golden years. Or at least something for which everyone would pay the same. Ha, ha! The joke's on us!

• Owing to our status as stinking wealth-mongers, we were given zero credit for our charitable donations last year, which included a significant amount of cash and several rooms of furniture. Of course, we didn't make the donations to get tax deductions. We made them to try to buy our way into Heaven.

• Finally, our actual outgoing tax payment to the government was approximately 2500% more than our entire net business earnings for 2017. Yeah, that bolsters the old entrepreneurial spirit!

Of course, our glass is still more than half full; we only owed all those taxes because our stocks grew like Jack's beanstalk on steroids. But we still hate sending our money to a bureaucracy which will only waste it.

On that note, the 1040 form asks us if we'd like to donate $3 to the Presidential Election Fund and gives us only the options of "yes" or "no." We would strongly suggest that next year they add a box saying "Oh, HELL no." It would be the only part of the form we'd actually enjoy filling out.

Getting Into The Weeds

Some people may wonder, "what is the deeper meaning of Earwigs?"

Simply put, the deeper meaning is that we don't want to just post a picture of an "Out to Lunch" sign when the news muse has forsaken us. After all, people make a significant effort to visit this site, frequently wearing their Sunday best and giving extra attention to their personal hygiene. And so we just wouldn't feel right about giving you nothing but an IOU (unlike the government types who have emptied our entitlement "lockboxes" and filled them with chits. Mostly of the bull and horse variety).

Earwigs began many years ago (predating Hope n' Change, Johnny Optimism, or our awareness that "blogs" would someday be a thing) when we acquired access to a motherlode of antiquated clip art on one of those new-fangled shiny CD things and decided to use some of the images as writing prompts.

The process was to select a not-overtly-funny piece of art (we like a challenge) and then try to generate as many punchlines as possible in order to stretch our creative muscles.

But apart from that pragmatic exercise, this is still what passes for fun in our head. We get a happy little shot of dopamine every time an unexpected punchline suddenly pops into existence (we don't write them so much as wait for them). We're hooked on absurdity, and there's no 12-step program.

Although if there were, the steps would probably look a lot like this: