Fair To Maudlin

 You know the drill by now. We didn't want anything to do with the news, which is why we're posting this instead...

...and because the journalistic importance of "padding" can hardly be overstated, here are some random bits and pieces of Wednesday-ish stuff:

• Ladybug the pitbull (Penny's second-in-command) is recovering splendidly from her recent leg surgery, and is actually ahead of the curve. She has no discomfort at all and our biggest therapeutic duty will be keeping her from running around like a Tasmanian devil for the next couple of months.

• We just received another letter from the Social Security Administration saying that Mrs. J's monthly payment is being withheld (again) because she has overdue Medicare premium payments on the books. We already wasted a couple of hours of our life on this last month and established that we are in fact paying the premiums directly from her Social Security benefit and paying the premium by check, so have been double-paying for quite a while and they actually owe us a refund of hundreds of dollars. We haven't called them to complain again yet, because experience tells us there will be no satisfactory conclusion anyway.

• Speaking of governmental incompetence, we've still found no way for Daughter J to get a Texas driver's license until mid-August (the DMV only allows you in by appointment and, thanks to Covid, appointments take about six months)...meaning she can't work until then. Are illegal aliens waiting this long to be given a driver's license? We wouldn't bet on it.

• We're hearing a lot of BS about the difficulty of obtaining photo IDs for certain segments of society and wonder why no one has taken action on the obvious solution we suggested back in 2014:

Just Another Mish-Mash Monday

Discerning readers (and if you're here, that's you) may be aware of a subtle shift in the tenor of the Stilton's Place blog following the events of last (alleged) election day. We no longer really provide in depth coverage and analysis of current events, but rather just get within spitting distance of the news. And we mean that literally - we just get near enough to news stories to vigorously hock up big, wet mucousy phlegm wads and spit it right on them.  Because that's all the "news" deserves these days.

Let's look at the gob-covered stories listed above...

• In Washington, a black man, theoretically deranged from repeated football concussions and exposure to the rantings of Nation of Islam founder Louis Farrakhan, rammed his car into two policemen (killing one) and a concrete barrier before waving a knife around and getting shot deader than a mackerel. This is a horrible story...but it's not a big one. A crazy lone wolf did a horrible thing and now he's dead. Yet politicians and the "news" media are more or less calling this "insurrection two" (ignoring the fact that there was no "insurrection one") and citing it as evidence that our nation's capital needs to remain a guarded military outpost. Unlike, oh, our southern border.

• Hunter "Foot Job" Biden has just released his autobiography, which is titled "Beautiful Things" because "Child Molesting, Crack Smoking, and Bribery" didn't test as well with publishers (although it will likely still be the name of the eventual movie). Not to put too fine a point on it, but Hunter Biden is human scum, due at least in part to the fact that his father more or less abandoned him (after Hunter's mother and sister were killed in a car accident that the boy and his brother, Beau, survived) to devote himself to politics full time. Not that anything good ever came out of it, other than giving Joe the chance to sniff a lot of women's hair...and likely worse.

• Major League Baseball is moving its All-Star Game out of Atlanta, Georgia because the state wants to ensure legitimate elections by requiring voter ID. Which, apparently, no black person in Georgia has or is able to figure out how to acquire. Of course, the MLB itself requires people to produce ID to pick up their "will call" baseball tickets. But hey, who are we to criticize them for loathing black people? 

• Do we really need to say anything at all about what an offensive idiot AOC is? She apparently wants U.S. taxpayers to cough up "reparations" to illegal aliens because...well...we don't know why and we don't effing care. Meanwhile, small children are being dropped over the border wall (recent video shows a 3-year-old and 5-year-old girl being dropped from a 14-foot high wall to thud heavily onto American soil). Theoretically, that's the sort of thing that Kamala Harris should be looking into, but she's apparently too busy laughing hysterically and supervising the remodeling of her vice-presidential quarters. Not that she plans to stay in them long.

• The George Floyd trial continues to drag along, setting the stage for a fresh round of rioting and outrage no matter what verdict comes in. Adding to the merriment, Cher recently tweeted that if she'd been present at Floyd's final encounter with the police, she could have saved his life. Which, appropriately, got her spanked by the Left for presenting herself as a Great White Savior for black people incapable of determining their own fates.  Cher is sticking to her metaphorical guns, although she hasn't yet clarified just how she would have saved George Floyd after climbing into her time machine. Presumably she might have told him not to try passing any counterfeit money that day. Or advise him to simply get in the back of a police cruiser when asked to. Or maybe she would have suggested that he not take a potentially-lethal dose of drugs. But we do know what she wouldn't have done: just STFU.

Okay, end of rant for today. But seriously, we're holding the "news" at arm's length until further notice. Which fortunately still leaves one hand free for pinching our nose.

April Fooled Day

This year, we've given up working on April Fool's Day (when we're writing this) for Lent. Which is why we're revisiting this semi-classic post from 2015...

FROM THE VAULT: APRIL FOOL'S DAY EDITION 2015

On an unbelievably busy news day, no story is bigger than the shocking resignation of Barack Hussein Obama and his subsequent hasty helicopter escape from the roof of the White House.

Early morning television viewers were surprised to find their programs interrupted for an emergency announcement, during which the ashen-faced and possibly drug-fueled president spoke in rambling, frequently cryptic sentence fragments about "the sweet, sweet call to prayer," "dog-flavored shave ice," the merits of Titleist golf balls and, most puzzlingly, his declaration that "Mike is done pretending to be Michelle." He then told America to go (and we paraphrase here) fornicate itself, and capped his brief resignation with "Allahu Akbar - I'm out of here, suckers!"

In a scene reminiscent of America's departure from Vietnam, Obama scrambled aboard a George Soros-owned helicopter hovering just above the White House roof.  Newly appointed President Biden celebrated his unexpected promotion by rushing onto the White House balcony in his pajamas and firing a shotgun into the sky, before being tackled and disappearing under a pile of Secret Service agents. Sadly, the shotgun blast was thought to have done only minor damage to Mr. Obama's helicopter.

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL - Also in today's news:

• John Kerry triumphantly announced that his negotiations with Iran have been successful and will be officially ratified in a ceremony in which "I'll kneel on a beach while wearing a traditional Iranian document-signing orange jumpsuit."

• A council of Native Americans judged Elizabeth Warren to be guilty of violating tribal law by failing to use "every part of the buffalo." In point of fact, she was using only one part of the buffalo and not, as nature intended, for the purpose of making more buffaloes.

• Pressed for more details about his injury, Harry Reid admitted that "the band that snapped" as he was working out with it was, as many suspected, The Village People.

• A crowd-funded Kickstarter campaign intended to pay for a monument to honor race martyr and cigar liberator Michael Brown fell short of its stated goal today, raising a final tally of only $375. The Ferguson highway department says the funds will be sufficient to create a commemorative speed bump.

• The Supreme Court issued a 5-4 ruling confirming that, despite the controversial and somewhat confusing language in the 17,000 page Obamacare bill, the government will give full "breast exam" reimbursements for every crispy dollar bill men spend in topless clubs.

Oh, relax - it's April Fool's Day