I’m sitting on hold with the doofuses – doofi? – at iPower, because the Moist Board is down. I downloaded the whole database as a DMP file, and I think iPower converted the online database to the same thing, which is something unreadable by the old board. 

I tried to get everything done last night, but hit some technical snafus. I went skiing today with the fam, so I’ve been incommunicado. The kids and their mother are all at a play – Amelia Bedilia or something – so I’m getting it all straightened out even as we speak.

All the files have been transferred, but it’s now a question of getting the new Moist Board in sync with the database.

More info as it all develops…

Some of you who read this blog may not be regulars at Stallion Cornell’s Moist Board, but if you click on the link provided, it may take you six months to actually see the long-running Internet home for malcontents and troublemakers. So I’m announcing that my brother-in-law is generously providing server space to accommodate the deathly slow Moist Board, along with this blog and various other effluvia. The transfer will begin tonight, and hopefully be concluded fairly quickly.

Just so you know. I thought I’d mention it here because it doesn’t take nearly as long to load blog pages.

My wife and I went to a Who concert a little over a year ago, It was loud. Very loud. Very loud indeed, with an exceeding loudness. Mrs. Cornell would try screaming at me to say something during the show, and I couldn’t hear a blessed word she said.

But loud is good.

Half of The Who is dead. Drummer Keith Moon died in ’79, I think. (Their new drummer is Zak Starkey, Ringo Starr’s son.) Bassist John Entwistle died just a few years ago. So now it’s just singer Roger Daltrey and Guitarist/Singer/Songwriter Pete Townshend. Daltrey looked a bit like he’d been reconstructed, but he sounded great. Pete Townshend was just amazing. No guitar smashing, though. Would have liked to have seen some guitar smashing.

My biggest disappointment was that they didn’t play a single track from Quadrophenia, which is my favorite Who album. Not one. Not even “Love Reign O’er Me.” I would have liked to hear “Real Me” and “5:15,” too. Alas, it was not to be. I also kept screaming “Squeeze Box! SQUEEEEEZE BOX!” but they paid no heed. No boxes were squeezed.

Their entire encore was a Tommy medley, though. The visuals were amazing. They had five moving screens behind them. During “Pinball Wizard,” a large pinball floated through all the major landmarks of the world.

They also played a bunch of new stuff. I’ve got the new CD, so I was appreciative, but I was in the distinct minority. You could feel the energy in the room just collapse when they’d launch into something unfamiliar. They played “My Generation,” and the place exploded, but then they segued from “My Generation” into a new track, and everyone sat down. (How they can still sing “I hope I die before I get old” with a straight face is beyond me.)

We had really cheap seats. We watched the opening act – The Pretenders, who sucked – from the upper bowl of the Delta Center, and right before The Who came on, we decided to go find better seats. We zipped past an old lady usher and found the only unsold block of seats near the floor. I kept expecting someone to show up and take our seats from us, but no one ever did. I felt like a rebel. A cheap rebel, but a rebel, nonetheless.

To sum up: a fun, loud show. (And I still want to be a rock star. I’ve sent in my application, but I have yet to hear back.)

I bring all this to your attention because my nephew left on an LDS mission to Buenos Aires last month. Before he left, we had a long, involved conversation about music.

He’s twenty years younger than me. And we like all the same bands. The Who, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Springsteen, Zeppelin, Queen, and Genesis were at the top of his list. I’ve never much liked Zeppelin and, while I respect Queen and Genesis, I’ve never really gotten into them.

But the fact remains – his bands are my bands. And there aren’t any new bands.

There really haven’t been any new bands for a very long time.

Maybe Coldplay, but I’m not convinced that Coldplay is still going to have fans in twenty years when my nephew’s nephew goes on his mission. People still talk about U2, but U2 is an 80s band that has survived. Where are the 21st Century bands? Are there are any worth mentioning?

Part of the problem, too, is that I’m old and I wouldn’t care about a new band even if there were any. I’ve got tickets to go see The Police when they come to Utah, but I’m excited by the fact that they’re going to play nothing but retro crap. If a hot new band appeared on the horizon, I’d savagely ignore them.

The Internet and music distribution channels have fragmented music to the point where it’s next to impossible for a new band to get noticed. It’s very hard to tell what’s a hit nowadays anyway. Top 40 radio doesn’t really exist, and all the rap/hip hop/pop-tart Britneyesque crap out there is just interchangeable noise.

Maybe I’ve just become my parents. Except they loathed popular music back in the day. Dad’s the right age to be an Elvis fan, and Mom’s the perfect Beatles demographic. But Dad hates Elvis. And Mom wouldn’t know a Beatles record if it goo goo ga joobed right there in her living room. They bristled at every attempt by my siblings and me to “educate” them about the latest pop fads of the day.

But my 11-year-old daughter has made no such attempts. She likes The Beatles. And show tunes. And none of her friends have tried to introduce her to any new stuff. It makes me think there really isn’t any new stuff. I haven’t been able to say “Turn that crap down,” because my daughter listens to the same crap I did.

My generation, baby.

Did you know that Ann Coulter and Al Pacino are brothers?

I didn’t know it until my wife told me. She’d read it in a magazine on an airplane. So I Googled it and saw that everyone essentially already knew this, and nobody bothered to mention it overtly. I couldn’t understand why.

Then I woke up.

Turns out Ann Coulter and Al Pacino are not related at all, and since Ann Coulter is, in fact, a woman, she’s not anyone’s brother. But somehow, in my dream, all of this made perfect sense.

That’s what’s so nifty about dreams. It’s not the strange things that happen; it’s the fact that nothing seems strange at the time. Individual dreams only last a maximum of about thirty seconds, so there’s no time for exposition. You can be driving down a road made of orange peels and have a dandelion growing out of your nose, but the thing that catches your attention is that someone stole the Diet Coke from your cupholder. Then you wake up and it takes a few minutes to sort it all out.

I only remember the dreams that get interrupted, like last night’s Coulter/Pacino incident. On occasion, I have fleeting memories of other dreams, but they dissolve if I try to bring them into focus. On my mission in Scotland, one of my companions kept a dream journal where he’d write down what he’d been dreaming immediately upon waking up. Then, before we’d begun our scripture study, we’d have a five-minute dream report. I’d try to remember something, but usually it was just broad strokes, like “I was flying” or something.

His were always much more specific, with funky details.

I’ll never forget the morning when he described how he’d walked into the loo only to find Bill Cosby smoking a cigar in his bathtub. When my companion told him to get out, he grumbled a bit and then stood up and left, leaving a tub filled with wet dog chow.

You can’t make that stuff up. At least, not consciously.

_____________________

The Cornells are not American Idol freaks, but we’re watching it off and on, particularly to cheer on the Utah folks. David Archuleta was back on his game last night, and it’s going to take an awfully big upset to keep him from winning this thing.

What’s interesting to me these past two weeks is how Beatles songs don’t really lend themselves to a singing competition. None of the Beatles would have won American Idol in their heydey, because while they were unique and distinctive, none of them were particularly showy vocalists. (Maybe Paul could have won it, but John? I doubt it. And certainly not George. Ringo? Ha.) Watching Idol wannabes sing “Yesterday” and “Blackbird” underscored just how understated Paul’s original vocals were.

It’s the songs themselves that are the stars, not the singers. Or maybe it’s that the singers are inseparably intertwined with the songs, making it impossible for anyone else to do them justice.

Michael Whatsisname’s butchering of “A Day In The Life” is the perfect example. That song is indelibly Lennon with a smattering of McCartney in the bridge. Vocally, the melody is deceptively simple, and the original arrangement throughout the majority of it is pedestrian. It’s the weird Beatlesy edges and unexpected transitions that make it unique, and none of them work in a cookie cutter, straight rock rendition thereof. It just comes across as scattered when it’s ripped out of its context.

In addition, the songs that do fit the kind of singalong meme that Idol embodies are the early Beatles moptop tunes, which, to be honest, are thoroughly mediocre as standalone songs. So we had Ramiele singing “I Should Have Known Better,” and she was eviscerated by the judges for a dippy arrangement that they failed to notice was lifted note-for-note from the original recording. Chikizie’s weird ballad/hoedown version of “I’ve Just Seen a Face” had a variation on the same problem – he was trying to gussy up a tune that wasn’t very interesting to begin with.

It’s also worthy of note that almost all the songs chosen on both Beatles nights were McCartney tunes, with just a couple of Lennons and a single Harrison – although, admittedly, “Here Comes the Sun” is one of the best Beatles melodies written by any of the Fab Four. Pop culture hails John as the supreme talent of the Beatles, but I think that has a lot to do with the strength of his personality and the fact that he died a tragic rock star’s death. When you stack up the actual songs, you discover that most of the really great ones are McCartney’s.

You can try to argue this, but if you search your feelings, you know it to be true.

That’s not to denigrate John, who’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” transformed the Beatles from a really fun boy band to the indelible icons they have become. But notice that none of the Idols chose to sing “Strawberry Fields Forever.” As a song, it’s unwieldy and difficult and strange. Whereas “Yesterday” has been covered more often than any other song on the face of the earth.

That’s why David Archuleta could take a song like “The Long and Winding Road” and make it something magnificent, but no one tried to do anything with “I Am the Walrus.” I guess it’s too harsh to say one song is better than the other, but clearly, one stands on its own as a song, independent of its singer, and the other is forever locked in time with John Lennon and the Magical Mystery Tour. They’re just two very different things. And only the McCartney things work for a show like American Idol.

I saw Casablanca for the first time last night.

It’s one of those movies that, as a theatre guy, I’m supposed to have already seen. But I’ve never really wanted to see it, and now that I no longer pretend to be artsy, I’ve felt no obligation to watch it. I’ve also never seen Citizen Kane. It’s supposedly the best movie ever made, yet I don’t know anyone personally who loves it. I think it’s one of those things that highbrow people are compelled to appreciate, so no one wants to admit that they’ve either not seen it or have seen it and didn’t care much about it.

Casablanca, though, is different. People love Casablanca. Even my wife, who maes no attempt to appear artsy, had good things to say about it. So last night, while we folded the laundry, we cranked up Bogart’s classic and watched it after the kids went to sleep.

Did I like it?

Well, it was interesting in the same sense that going to a fine museum is interesting, but I can’t say that the flick really did anything for me.

In the first place, it’s very hard to overlook that everyone is smoking all the time. That’s consistent with most films of the ‘40s, but all I could think about was how Humphrey Bogart must have reeked. Even in the love scenes, Humphrey is chugging away like a wood-burning stove. It’s distracting and unpleasant. Bogart is undeniably charismatic, but he also looks 327 years old, especially in the flashback scenes where he’s supposed to be young and in love.

And Bergman? I just don’t get it. First off, she’s not that pretty. She’s not ugly, certainly, but everyone in the film is so gaga over a fairly plain-looking woman that I just didn’t understand the appeal. And why would you fall head over heels for a chick who cries a lot and not much else? There’s a sort of distinguished elegance to her, but the stilted formality of her line delivery became tedious very quickly.

And what to make of the plot? It’s actually quite thrilling to think that this movie was made during World War II, several years before anyone was sure whether the Allies or the Axis were going to win. Now, in hindsight, it feels creaky and labored. It’s indisputably a fine example of filmmaking of its time, but the whole thing feels frozen in amber. There’s no immediacy to it, no life.

Sam was good, though. Although it’s jarring, in our politically correct culture, to hear Ingrid Bergman refer to him as a “boy,” despite the fact that he’s probably twenty years older than she is. Racist anachronisms abound in old movies.

Compare Casablanca to another old classic I saw recently – Arsenic and Old Lace. I had seen the play done well at the Utah Shakespearean Festival years ago, and I’d always wanted to see the Cary Grant version.

I was startled by how dark the film was.

The premise is black comedy to begin with – two unassuming old ladies who murder unsuspecting travelers and bury them in their basement – but I assumed they’d have brightened the thing up to make it an appropriate 1940s feel good comedy about happy people with happy problems.

They didn’t.

At one point, Cary Grant’s character is tied up and shown the instruments that are going to be used to torture him in the most gruesome way possible. And while the torture never actually happens, it’s remarkable that they let the character be so violently descriptive.

There is some softening from the stage version. Cary Grant rejoices about being the “son of a sea cook” instead of a “bastard,” which his character announces in the play – and the old ladies are dragged off to the sanitarium before they can kill one final time like they do in the play. (Which yields one of the play’s best exchanges: The victim says “I can’t remember my last glass of elderberry wine,” to which one of the old ladies says “Here it is!”)

Unlike Casablanca, this movie feels almost contemporary. Certainly Cary Grant has more life to him than Bogart does, and nobody on earth wears clothes better than Cary Grant. It’s just not the frothy romantic comedy that one would usually associate with Cary Grant. Maybe that’s why I liked it so much.

I still haven’t seen Citizen Kane, though.

I saw Casablanca for the first time last night.

It’s one of those movies that, as a theatre guy, I’m supposed to have already seen. But I’ve never really wanted to see it, and now that I no longer pretend to be artsy, I’ve felt no obligation to watch it. I’ve also never seen Citizen Kane. It’s supposedly the best movie ever made, yet I don’t know anyone personally who loves it. I think it’s one of those things that highbrow people are compelled to appreciate, so no one wants to admit that they’ve either not seen it or have seen it and didn’t care much about it.

Casablanca, though, is different. People love Casablanca. Even my wife, who maes no attempt to appear artsy, had good things to say about it. So last night, while we folded the laundry, we cranked up Bogart’s classic and watched it after the kids went to sleep.

Did I like it?

Well, it was interesting in the same sense that going to a fine museum is interesting, but I can’t say that the flick really did anything for me.

In the first place, it’s very hard to overlook that everyone is smoking all the time. That’s consistent with most films of the ‘40s, but all I could think about was how Humphrey Bogart must have reeked. Even in the love scenes, Humphrey is chugging away like a wood-burning stove. It’s distracting and unpleasant. Bogart is undeniably charismatic, but he also looks 327 years old, especially in the flashback scenes where he’s supposed to be young and in love.

And Bergman? I just don’t get it. First off, she’s not that pretty. She’s not ugly, certainly, but everyone in the film is so gaga over a fairly plain-looking woman that I just didn’t understand the appeal. And why would you fall head over heels for a chick who cries a lot and not much else? There’s a sort of distinguished elegance to her, but the stilted formality of her line delivery became tedious very quickly.

And what to make of the plot? It’s actually quite thrilling to think that this movie was made during World War II, several years before anyone was sure whether the Allies or the Axis were going to win. Now, in hindsight, it feels creaky and labored. It’s indisputably a fine example of filmmaking of its time, but the whole thing feels frozen in amber. There’s no immediacy to it, no life.

Sam was good, though. Although it’s jarring, in our politically correct culture, to hear Ingrid Bergman refer to him as a “boy,” despite the fact that he’s probably twenty years older than she is. Racist anachronisms abound in old movies.

Compare Casablanca to another old classic I saw recently – Arsenic and Old Lace. I had seen the play done well at the Utah Shakespearean Festival years ago, and I’d always wanted to see the Cary Grant version.

I was startled by how dark the film was.
The premise is black comedy to begin with – two unassuming old ladies who murder unsuspecting travelers and bury them in their basement – but I assumed they’d have brightened the thing up to make it an appropriate 1940s feel good comedy about happy people with happy problems.

They didn’t.

At one point, Cary Grant’s character is tied up and shown the instruments that are going to be used to torture him in the most gruesome way possible. And while the torture never actually happens, it’s remarkable that they let the character be so violently descriptive.

There is some softening from the stage version. Cary Grant rejoices about being the “son of a sea cook” instead of a “bastard,” which his character announces in the play – and the old ladies are dragged off to the sanitarium before they can kill one final time like they do in the play. (Which yields one of the play’s best exchanges: The victim says “I can’t remember my last glass of elderberry wine,” to which one of the old ladies says “Here it is!”)

Unlike Casablanca, this movie feels almost contemporary. Certainly Cary Grant has more life to him than Bogart does, and nobody on earth wears clothes better than Cary Grant. It’s just not the frothy romantic comedy that one would usually associate with Cary Grant. Maybe that’s why I liked it so much.

I still haven’t seen Citizen Kane, though.

A St. Patrick’s Day tidbit you may not know:

I don’t know if it’s the case anymore, but for quite some time, David Letterman’s personal assistant was a Latter-day Saint. And right around every St. Patrick’s Day, word would go out around the congregations in Manhattan that Letterman tickets were available for the March 17th taping. It seems that Dave prefers an all-Mormon audience on St. Patrick’s Day to ensure that nobody in the house is drunk.

________________

Barack Obama’s pastor is starting to generate mainstream media attention, and what’s startling is that his incendiary statements have been ignored until now. He’s essentially a Christian Farrakhan who, on the Sunday after 9/11, preached a sermon calling for God to damn America instead of bless it. He has repeatedly claimed that the government created the AIDS virus, pushed crack cocaine to destroy the black community, and essentially engages in surreptitious genocide against African-Americans.

Obama’s response has been tepid.

While he does repudiate the specific statements that are brought to his attention, he insists he was nor present when any of them were made. He calls the pastor “a crazy uncle” and tries to pretend that he’s peripheral to his life. And until the Rush Limbaughs of the world beat the drums on this, most of the media was more than willing to give him a pass.

Folks, after the spiritual evisceration of Mitt Romney, this just isn’t going to fly with me.

Romney, as you recall, was forced to answer for any kind of lunacy that any Mormon in history might have perpetuated. He had to essentially apologize for polygamy and the Church’s history on race repeatedly, and his magnificent “Faith in America” speech was dissected from every possible angle to ensure that Mitt’s faith was palatable enough for mainstream Americans.

Contrast that with Obama, who has made Reverend Jeremiah Wright the center of his spiritual life for over twenty years. Mitt, you recall, had to apologize for statements made by people in the 19th Century. Obama’s relationship with this guy is personal; it’s voluntary, and it’s extensive. For him to say he didn’t know the extent of his America hatred means he’s either disingenuous or stupid. Neither is an attractive trait in a president. My love affair with Obama is coming to an end.

I still can’t vote for McCain, though. Perhaps it’s time to flush my vote down the turlet and give it to the Libertarians.

________________

The divorce is final, and Heather Mills just carved about $50 million dollars out of Paul McCartney’s flesh. Yet she’s whining on the steps of the courthouse that it’s not enough. Paul is worth over a billion dollars, after all, and what’s going to become of their poor little girl, with only $70,000 a month on which to survive?

Gross.

Rich old dudes need to remember that they’re still old dudes, and young fillies wouldn’t love them if they were broke. As Paul consoles himself with his hundreds of millions, he should find somebody his own age – and make her sign a prenuptial agreement.

As for me, I think I’ll stay married, thank you very much.

Reading some comments about Myron Felgewater’s reign of terror brought a smile to my face, even as I recalled some of the more rancid moments of my tenure under his boot. I’ve heard it said that comedy is just tragedy plus time, and that’s exactly how I feel about the Felgewater years.

There’s one other moment, though, that deserves special consideration, especially during this wacky political season.

It was when Myron Felgewater ran for mayor.

As background, you need to understand that Myron Felgewater would ask questions to which he already knew the answer, or at least he thought he knew the answer. The purpose of his requests for advice was to seek reinforcement for what he had already decided. If you gave that reinforcement, you were a genius. If you in any way disagreed, you were an imbecile. This was especially true if you were a competent professional in Felgewater’s industry, an industry Felgewater prided himself on knowing nothing about.

I spent a good deal of time cringing as Felgewater would brazenly unveil his incompetence in meetings with competent professionals. He’d do this in every setting imaginable. Favorite phrases were “It’s not rocket science,” or “It’s a no-brainer.” (With Myron, everything was, by definition, a no-brainer.) For example, he hated doctors, because, according to Myron, none of them knew anything. To him, the only thing that was rocket science was, well, rocket science, and even there, he thought he probably understood it better than those egghead science geeks did.

So at some point, Myron decides that it’s time for him to spread his wings and inflict himself on the community at large, and he files for office to run for mayor of the small, bedroom community in which he lived. So, knowing I have a political background, he, for some unfathomable reason, comes into my office to seek my advice.

Here’s how it all unfolded.

“I’m running for mayor!” he said breathlessly.

“Congratulations,” I said. “I hope you win.” I meant it, too. If he had won, we might finally have been rid of him.

“So what do I do?” he asked.

I paused for a moment before asking, “What do you mean?”

“I mean what am I supposed to do to run for mayor?”

I blinked a few times and said “Well, get out and meet the voters!”

“What?” he asked. “Like, door-to-door?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s a small enough town that you could probably shake every voter’s hand before Election Day.”

“People hate that in this town,” he insisted. He started to get very hot under the collar very quickly. “Nobody wants to be bothered in their home. In fact, they’d appreciate a candidate who was considerate enough to leave them alone.”

“Well, Solomon Burke is knocking doors,” I countered. “He’s out there running hard.”

“Yeah, and he’s turning everyone off. I’m not going to do it.”

“Uhhhh, okay,” I said. He’d made up his mind, so I didn’t press it.

“What about lawn signs?” he asked.

“What about them?” I said.

“Solomon Burke has, like, a million of them out there.”

“Yes, he does,” I said. “You’re going to have to work pretty hard to catch up.”

“But I’m not going to do lawn signs,” he said. “They’re ugly. They clutter up everything. And they cost too much money, which my wife won’t allow me to spend.”

“You’re not going to do any?” I asked incredulously.

“Nope. I’ve put up some flyers at Albertsons instead.”

And that he had. On the community billboard. Cheap, Xeroxed copies of a self-made “Myron Felgewater for Mayor” logo. Right next to the ads for one free guitar lesson and the “Have you seen this dog?” flyers.

“So,” I summarized, “you’re not going to knock doors, and you’re not doing lawn signs.”

“That’s right.”

“Well,” I said, gathering up the courage to ask a transparently obvious question, “how do you intend to let people know you’re running for mayor?”

“Public forums,” he said, looking at me like I was too dumb to see the genius of his non-campaign. “I do great at the public forums. But the ones we’ve had so far have been so podunk and stupid. They’re a real waste of time. At the last one, all the guy wanted to know was ‘why are you running for mayor?’ He kept asking that over and over.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I didn’t have an answer for him,” he said. “It’s just a stupid question.”

“It is?”

“Of course it is!” he snapped. “This is a tiny, backwater, stupid little town! Why would anyone want to be mayor?!”

“Ummm,” I said, buying time to, once again, cite the bone-chillingly obvious without mocking him overtly. Then I said, “You and I probably agree there.”

“Thank you,” he said, feeling reinforced.

“The difference, of course…” – and those of you with brains can see where I was going with this – “…is that you are, in fact, running for mayor, and I’m not.”

“So?”

Seriously. He still didn’t get it. I had to actually ask the question.

“So, if you think this is a stupid town and that the mayor’s office is worthless, why ARE you running for mayor?”

It took awhile for me to convince him, at least for the sake of argument, that it was a question worth answering. As we talked in circles, it came out that the reason he was running was he was being charitable, and that the yokels who infested this beknighted town might benefit from the majesty of a Felgewater’s wisdom. He fully expected to coast to victory on the basis of his name alone.

Eventually, he put about five or six real lawn signs, moaning about how expensive they were and belittling Solomon Burke for being foolish enough to think they mattered.

In the end, they didn’t matter. There were three candidates in the race. The top two would face each other in a primary, and Myron consoled himself with an unwavering assurance that he could at least beat the other, non-Solomon Burke guy, because “nobody knew who he was.” Turns out about 24% of the town knew he was, because that’s who voted for him. Whereas Solomon Burke won handily, with well over 70% of the vote. The number two guy opted out of a primary and backed Burke.

And Myron?

Admittedly, he did better than I thought he would. He polled 137 total votes, which, coincidentally, was about the number of Felgewaters who lived in the town. (There were probably more, but I doubt Myron even won a majority of his immediate circle of friends.)

In his post-mortems, he insisted that he’d only run so that Burke wouldn’t be “coronated,” because “everyone knew he was going to win, anyway.” This despite the fact that Burke had relentlessly annoyed the town’s citizens by knocking on their doors and putting up lawn sign clutter. He also complained about the conspiracies that kept him from learning about the “good” public forums to which he wasn’t invited. (The newspaper was in on that one.) Actually, I think he probably wasn’t invited to several events, but that was because he and I were the only two people,other than his stingy wife, who knew he was running for mayor.

I shouldn’t gloat. I ran for office about five years later and lost. But I came in third out of five, and I lost by a 6-vote margin and gathered more votes than the bottom two candidates combined. (That sounds impressive, but there were only about 200 total votes cast, as I lost in a political convention among county delegates. So I lost by about 3%.) But throughout the whole campaign, I kept thinking about Myron Felgewater. I could survive losing, but not Felgewaterian humiliation.

In the end, I shouldn’t have worried. Nobody who runs for office will ever have to be that badly embarrassed, as long as they do two things:

1) Have a reason for running, and
2) Actually campaign.

So Mrs. Cornell and I are watching The Office on DVD every night, and I realize that one of the reasons I like the show so much is that it seems to defy plausibility, but it doesn’t. It is, in many ways, frighteningly accurate. I’ve had a boss that’s every bit as awful as Michael Scott, if not more so, and I’m willing to bet that quite a lot of you out there have, too.

I want to give details, but I also don’t want him to sue me. (I think he’s too stupid to Google himself the way Richard Dutcher did, but someone else may bring this post to his attention, and he’s vengeful enough that he’d likely go out of his way to make my life miserable.) So I will change his name to Myron Felgewater, and I will try to be as oblique as possible.

Myron became the CEO of a multimillion-dollar company just prior to his 30th birthday, despite having no academic or professional background of any significance. (Directly prior to being a CEO, Myron was a collection agent for a credit card company.) The fact that the Felgewater family owns the company, I think, somehow figured into the equation, although one can never be sure.

Like Michael Scott, Myron is completely oblivious to how he is perceived by those who work for him, many of whom refer to him as “Lettuce” or “Hair.” (As in “He’s as dumb as a sack of lettuce,” or, “He’s about as bright as a box of hair.”) He would cheerfully wander the halls whistling like a bozo, and everyone wondered what, exactly, it was that he did all day. I didn’t, though – I knew his primary purpose was to make sure that everyone was at their desks at 8:00 AM and stayed until at least 5:00 PM. One salesman who worked for the company and spent most of his time out on sales calls was fired because, in Myron’s words, “he was never at his desk.”

Given that mindset, it wasn’t startling that the company lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on an annual basis.

He got irritable if I lingered in the office past five, because he always wanted to be the last person to leave so he could look important. But since he had nothing to do, he would twiddle his thumbs and make cheerful moaning noises in the office down the hall, just to let me know he was still there and wasn’t happy about it. I would often leave to let him drive his company car about five blocks to his house, and then I’d come back to work late, so I wouldn’t have to worry about him barging into my office to announce his latest paranoid conspiracy theory, most of which involved invasions by the Chinese as a precursor to the Second Coming. (Seriously.)

Everyone was out to get him. The press; the government, and, especially, the gays. Homosexuals terrified Myron, and at one point, he asked me what we could do to avoid hiring them. I reminded him, as gently as possible, that it would be illegal to do that.

“We wouldn’t have to tell them that was why we didn’t hire them,” he replied.

Brilliant.

I asked him what he intended to do about the homosexuals who already worked for him. He looked like I had hit him in the head with a two-by-four. “There aren’t any homosexuals who work here,” he insisted, much the same way Mahmoud Ahmidinijad promised that Iran is a gay-free zone.