Bob Crespo

We are all perfect except for our many faults. There are no flawless diamonds.

Recession, Shmasession! Governor David Paterson did something this past week to make all New Yorkers’ hearts swell with pride and strengthen our collective resolve to lick these Hard Times! Governor Paterson single-handedly vaulted New York back into the lead in the Disgraced Governor Club! Himself a Governor by Appointment, replacing the Disgraced Eliot Spitzer, Paterson announced that he was dropping out of the campign for election this Fall due to a scandal.

While not a luridly sensational sex scandal like Spitzer provided, with clandestine train rides, fine hotels and expensive hookers in Washington, D.C., Paterson has abused the privileges of his office and accepted inappropriate gifts, while his personal intervention in a police matter to save his close  aide from arrest for spousal abuse is pretty rotten behavior by anyone, inexcusable for a Governor.  So make that 2 in a row for New York, beating Illinois, New Jersey and North Carolina 2-1 in the Disgraced Governor Sweepstakes. Eat our dust, Wannabees!

While Disgraced Governors are not all that uncommon in America, having two of them back-to-back is unprecedented in the annals of state governments and sets New York apart as the elite, the creme-de-la-creme of thoroughly corrupted state governments. Not only does our second consecutive New York State Governor have to disappear in a hurry, the national consensus is that our New York State Senate, our New York State Legislature and our New York State Judiciary are all just as riddled with incompetence and corruption as the Governor’s Mansion! We’re #1! New Jersey only WISHES! We’re # 1 we’re #1…

It’s okay if you like it just fine where everything is all paved and lit up. Cities are just as much a part of nature as anthills, farms, valleys and mountains, are usually a whole lot more fun and always the better bet for a decent meal.

It’s me, Jimmy, The Blogging dog. I don’t know when the humans at bobcrespo.com will run this piece, but I am writing it on February 26,  2010, a day that brought us another 2 feet of snow in a winter of that has brought us a whole lot of it. Me, I love the snow, and like nothing more than to frolic around in the drifts. Many of my fellow dogs could do without all this deep snow, what with them being real small and all and getting easily buried and stranded, but I’m a pretty big mutt and I find it to be a lot of fun.

People call me The Canine Einstein because I can communicate with them in one of their languages, but being a dog genius doesn’t mean I don’t like to play just as much as the next mutt. It’s not exactly like this genius deal has set me free, either. I am a slave like every other dog, the property of a human master (One that I am making very wealthy too, I might add!). Perhaps I am more at liberty than most dogs, but being the freest slave in the world is like being the best looking frog in the pond, still pretty damned ugly.

I know what you’re thinking, we’re pets and partners and not slaves and all that other noble crap. Oh yeah, who handles the TV remote in your house, dog owners? Who decides who gets to leave the house and when? Who gets to sit on the furniture and and who sleeps on the damned floor? You know the answers to these questions, so stop pretending that your dog is your voluntary friend. Oh, we’re your friends all right, Man’s Best Friend and all that, but you people haven’t exactly been our bosom buddies.

Even those groups of people who form clubs to “protect” and “save” us are always telling dog owners to neuter their animals, thus removing just about half of our reason to live. Some friends! Any volunteers to surrender the family jewels? Thankfully I have not been subject to that ultimate humiliation, but only because I displayed advanced intelligence at a very young age. Uncounted millions of my brethren haven’t been so fortunate, and getting “fixed” only confuses the hell out of them. How would you like to stumble through this world wondering why you feel compelled to hump the neighbor’s leg but haven’t a clue as to why?

The more I study this whole human/dog symbiosis, the more skewed and unreal it appears, even though it is the only life I have ever known, or at least first-hand. I have the experiences and the mind-sets of countless ancestors stored within my brain, as does every dog. It’s called species memory, and I can conjure up at will many very vivid memories and experiences of my ancestor dogs dating back thousands of year. You may not believe it since humans tend not to believe that something you yourselves don’t experience can possibly exist, but it’s true. What the hell do you think dogs are thinking about all the time? It sure isn’t fetching a damned ball, that’s for sure!

Our instinctive and inborn species memories connect dogs in a very real way with the past. This current blizzard, for example, conjures up powerful images of my forebears hunting in packs in the deep snow, emerging from their lairs at dawn to greet the terrible beauty of a deep, fresh snowfall and planning the day’s hunt. The deep drifts gave them an advantage over their prey, negating the superior speed and maneuverability of the caribou and elk that were on our menu during the Ice Ages. Yes, dogs did just fine during the Ice Ages (there were several within my own species memories). We’re a pretty adaptable bunch.

So this blizzard gives me an opportunity to recall the days before our  enslavement at the hands of humans, a time when we ran in packs in a do-or-die world, competing with giant bears, wolves and saber-toothed cats for the privilege of hunting down and killing elk and caribou the size of a Buick with antlers like a rack of butcher knives. One could make the argument that we have it easier now without our cans and bags of tasteless dog food and safe climate-controlled human homes, but that would be to ignore the basic essence of dogs, and that is that we are by nature meat-eating pack predators.

So when you let out Fluffy to cavort in the snow, bear in mind that he is visiting his ancient memories of another time, another reality, when humans were just one more pack-hunting competitor to dogs, eking out a living in the caves and snowdrifts of an icebound earth, sharing the terrible beauty of a natural world without roads, without buildings and without vehicles of any sort. Many is the carcass that a pack of dogs took away from human hunters, and vice-versa, in the endless competition for food for our ourselves and our young.

It is painful to admit, but it was a dog’s idea that we pool our talents and cooperate on the hunt, but the partnership soon became completely one-sided, with the dogs using our vastly superior noses, fangs and teeth to locate and subdue game, which our human “senior partners” proceeded to set on fire before they ate it, ruining some perfectly good steaks. With the help of dogs, the humans finally came to dominate, then completely eliminate the other Alpha predators from the hunting grounds that were the entire world at the time. Anybody seen any Saber-toothed cats or Neanderthal men around lately?

So maybe our partnership with humans was a move towards self-preservation, since even a squirrel could see that these Johnny-come-lately humans wouldn’t be happy until they killed or enslaved every other living creature. Well, all this dog can say about that is: Mission Accomplished! You don’t even have to hunt for food anymore, you’ve got the cows and pigs and sheep and chickens all fooled into thinking they’re living a paradise, their every whim catered to, until one day “Whammo!”, they’re slaughtered for dinner without even a life-or-death struggle!

That’s the world we inhabit now, and dogs are nothing if not pragmatic, and so we accept the yoke of slavery as a tradeoff for survival. Our species memories dating back many thousands of years informs us that every dominant species eventually either loses their dominance or dies out completely. So this generation of dogs plays in the snow rehearsing for the day when humans no longer dominate all of Creation. What Fluffy is doing out there is honing his skills for the day of our liberation, practicing cornering and killing a majestic beast who just might get the better of you. That’s the price of freedom for dogs, one we will be glad to pay when humans finally go away. Until next time, this is Jimmy, The Blogging Dog.

If you want to change people’s lives for the better, never announce that you are going to change their lives. People hate hucksters and phony messiahs. This way if it turns out to be a lousy idea, at least you didn’t make any stupid promises.

Hard times, these. Money’s tight and we’re all looking for ways to stretch a buck, a piece of paper hard to come by in sufficient quantities lately. So, as a public service, bobcrespo.com has been researching ways to save some of your hard-earned. Towards that end, today we look to Pawn Shops, those outlets that profit on others’ financial distress and pass the savings on to you. Television, musical instruments (musicians always seem to be broke), jewelry, cameras, computers, silverware, antiques, appliances, stereos and all manner of electronics and portable valuables. We all need these items for ourselves, and buying retail can be prohibitive. While you may not enjoy the wide array of choices that mainstream shopping offers, sometimes a small compromise can save you a few dollars. Items like these:

1 very large “Hope & Change” gold necklace, inlaid with small rubies, diamonds and topaz for a red, white and blue motif. – Only $1,200. Originally commissioned for $24,000. Hardly ever worn.

75 Sarah Palin action figures with Kung Fu Grip and Secret Decoder Palm in original packaging. – $6 apiece. Perfect gifts for kids too young to know any better, or collectors crossing their fingers that they’re sitting on the next Luke Skywalker doll.

15,000 lbs. of assorted office supplies. – best offer. This particular pawnshop in Manhattan cashed in on all the fired junior executives from the financial service industries in 2008 who, stung by taking the hit for their mega-thieving bosses, turned around and looted the place down to the last staple. Equip your entire office cheap! Enough Post-it notes alone to last a lifetime!

1,000 copies of Al Gore’s book, “An Inconvenient Truth.” – .25¢ apiece. It seems this pawnshop, located in a Washington, D.C. buried in 2 feet of global warming, has cashed in on the sharp drop-off in sales of Mr. Gore’s best seller. Canny speculators will wait until July to unload them at a tidy profit!

500 copies of the Academy Award-winning movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” – .89¢ apiece. See above.

1 Academy Award Statue, inscribed: “Al Gore – Best Documentary in 2006.” – $2,500. The number of Mr. Gore’s speaking engagements has plunged in direct proportion to the mercury on the thermometer, so here’s your chance to brighten up the old mantle piece with an Oscar of your own. Another 75 bucks gets it inscribed to you in any category you like!

1 Official Speaker of The House portrait of Newt Gingrich. – $850. This fine oil painting once hung in the halls of The House of Representatives! Mr. Gingrich is pictured with an outdated trophy wife model and has since commissioned a new one to update his latest marital acquisition. Roll the dice, and if this guy ever does become president, you can sell it for a fortune on the frozen streets of Hell

50,0000 Heavy duty Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac inscribed welcome mats- $1 apiece. The former home mortgage giants used to give them away to every customer, and these classic woven hemp welcome mats were the only thing most of their customers have to show that they once owned a home. And for only a buck apiece, you can build a reasonably sturdy, warm and rain-resistant shelter with a several dozen of these bad boys.

1 Trump trophy wife. – $750,000. This one-of-a-kind, gorgeous blonde gym rat in her early thirties from somewhere in Eastern Europe (no one’s really quite sure where) is a steal at only 750K, especially considering that The Donald’s standard Pre-nup calls for a $25 million buy out when her expiration date of 30 is reached. One payment covers everything, including lump-sum alimony payment. Live like a billionaire for an estimated 6 months to a year!

100,000 Winter Olympics Official earmuffs and matching T-shirts. – $1 each. These first-quality Hanes all-cotton T-shirts in all sizes and Antarctic-rated earmuffs are inscribed with the logo: “2010 Winter Olympics, Vancouver, Canada.” Apparently Canada forgot in their excitement over hosting the games that it is the most boring nation on earth and thought more people would show up and watch them fail to win a medal in sports they invented out of necessity to keep warm.

9 million Toyota floor mats. – .10¢ each. These durable rubber-backed synthetic fiber automobile carpets can be easily glued together to form a beautiful all-weather carpet for your family room at a fraction of the cost of wall-to-wall carpeting! Available in standard Toyota interior colors.

Last month’s iPhones. – $35. Every time Steve Jobs calls a press conference, millions of techno-trendies determined to be in the vanguard of personal electronics line up to pay astronomical prices for the newest iPhone that is practically identical to these discarded models that were used for a very short time and work just fine. No one will be able to tell the difference!

Learn to fake sincerity and your fortune is made. Therapist, customer service rep, Cable TV angry person, self-help guru, the clergy… the sky’s the limit!

When engaged in a perusal of the various news outlets real and virtual, some odd items come to your attention, compelling you to shake your head and turn the page, or the channel or the URL address, as the case may be. Even an event so mind-numbingly dull as The Winter Olympics brings its share of Duh moments. Take the TV commentators who were poking fun at Johnny Weir, a member of the America figure skating squad, for his downright pretty appearance and effeminate demeanor. Isn’t it a drop odd that people who are experts on figure skating have anything to say about anyone’s sexual druthers? Hellooo!!

Pot calling the kettle black or catty behavior? Either way, it’s pretty amusing, which is more than can be said about the rest of this ordeal. Outside of a guy dying on a poorly-designed luge run before the Games even opened, a lady curler crying and the loser in the men’s individual figure skating awarding himself a “platinum” medal in a fury for having lost the gold to an American skater, these Winter Olympics provided about the same amount of thrills that they usually do, damned few.

Even those “lucky” enough to attend the games in person got to witness only about a third of a second of any given race, with a blur and a “woosh” substituting for actually watching anything unfold. No wonder they love to watch the figure skaters and ice dancers, who at least don’t leap out of the arena in the blink of an eye. Absently wondering how any of these things wound up the sports section of all places, you shake your head and turn the page.

Unfortunately, you’re now perusing political news, always an adventure when you’re not feeling very adventurous. You can’t help but notice how politicians of all persuasions are touting a “bipartisan approach,” their definition of bipartisan being that the opposition just shuts up and agrees with them. Republicans want Democrats to agree that our government is an instrument of malicious evil in every respect except in their use of military force and (!) torture, which are just fine, while Democrats want Republicans to pay some taxes one of these years, if it’s not too much trouble.

What both fail to realize is that no one voted for compromise, they voted overwhelmingly Democratic and expect the Democrats to implement their agenda, and to hell with the Republicans, who had 8 years to figure something out other than torture, warfare, incompetence and bankruptcy, but couldn’t. Why our president would seek a consensus with such people is a mystery to many of us wondering why there are still so many unindicted co-conspirators pulling inside jobs, looting our banking system for billions instead of shopping for defense attorneys.

No one recalls the last administration courting the Democrats while they did what the hell they felt like doing, legal or not. So once again, being able able to make neither heads nor tails of our current political climate, you shake your head and turn the page. Then you encounter further difficulties, since you are now inspecting something called “Entertainment News.” Once upon a time, there was no such thing as Entertainment News, the public being pretty much okay with the entertainment that the entertainers provided.

Those seeking more would read the gossip columns or buy the trade dailies like Variety and the rest of us were off the hook when it comes to knowing who had a bizarre childhood (who didn’t?), who married a transvestite dwarf in Vegas with an Elvis clone preacher presiding (who hasn’t done that at least once?) and which starlet can consume a cereal bowl full of tranquilizers washed down by a fifth of tequila. That sort of thing never came up and one could enjoy a good performance by an actor, a singer or a comic without the distraction of knowing some weird stuff you’d rather you didn’t. Is dignity too much to expect? Seems so, mostly.

These days, it’s getting harder to watch your favorite performer without a mental image of farm animals in rubber lingerie, so you shake your head and turn the page quick before you find out anything else too peculiar to fully register. Now you’re in the International News section, and you’re wondering what to make of it all. Can it really be true that witch doctors in Tanzania hunt and kill albino humans for good luck charms? That’s a pretty bold statement. Then you wonder who made up all those crazy things about Saudi Arabia, how they enslave half their population, their females, and how they chop off heads and hands in stadiums and charge admission like it was the damned Super Bowl!

That can’t be right, can it? No way! They are, after all, our ally, and America would never ally itself with such barbaric butchers, no matter how much oil they have, right? Right? And so you turn the page again, searching, scanning, surfing, desperate for something, anything that makes sense in any medium. Your mouth is dry, your head is spinning and then your hungry eyes finally find it. There it is!

Today’s funny pages. The good news portion of the day. Finally, something you can relate to, and your head does not shake wearily back and forth, you do not turn the page with a sigh of cynical disenchantment. For a few minutes every day there are talking pigs, blue people, wise ass cats and a lot of crazy impossible fun stuff happening. Then you’re done with the funnies and once again there’s none of those things, which, all in all, seems a glaring oversight on Nature’s part. Might as well laugh it up whenever we can.

In case you do not have enough aggravation in your life, take up golf, and your misery will be complete.

Well, the New Year isn’t new anymore, Life’s Rich Pageant is marching earnestly along, and news of great and small portent flows like lava from an angry volcano, showering all of us and demanding our attention. Well, so what? That, my friends, is the essence of Not Caring: so friggin’ what? There’s all sorts of new and exciting developments to not care about, a veritable Cornucopia of Callousness to stir our deep-seted apathy. These are exciting times to be alive and ambivalent, indeed. Let’s just scrape the tip of the Iceberg of Idiocy, if you will, and review the contenders for The Rat’s Ass Awards:

The Winter Olympics: Always a reliable finalist for a Rat’s Ass Award, as in “who gives a,” these Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada are especially uninteresting since they are being held in, well, Canada, aka The Country That Wasn’t There. Now that they are almost over, can anyone remember who won what in any category? Of course not! And why would anyone care? What usually takes days to forget now happens instantly. But we will remember the pretty blonde woman curler who cried. Crying? There’s no crying in curling! It’s the  unavoidable Canada (non) Factor, and the usual Rat’s Ass Award in the Bad Cabin Fever Category to The Winter Olympics.

American Idle: Who is Simon Cowell and what’s the big deal with him going away? When you don’t know or care about some super wealthy guy who seems to be famous (you’re not quite sure) for being nasty, you just sort of shrug it off. Since actually finding out anything about the guy would entail watching some episodes of America Idle, it’s best just cut to the chase and maintain your ignorance. A Rat’s Ass to Mr. Cowell in the Go-ahead-and-let-the-door-hit-you-in the-ass-on-the-way-out Category. You’re a bazillionaire. Who cares?

Tiger Woods’ penis: Not since President Clinton was running the country with a huge smile on his face have we been accosted with 8 pages of details about the adventures of a famous penis in mainstream newspapers. As far as Mr. Woods’ character is concerned, why would anyone be surprised (or even mildly interested) that he cheated on his wife when his whole life was a fraud? You see, the only reason that he was the best golfer ever is because he was an athlete! In all of recorded history, there have never been any athletes involved in professional golf, so it stands to reason that even a mildly talented athlete would beat the pants off the assortment of fat guys and scrawny geeks that are professional golfers. That’s like letting LeBron James compete in the Special Olympics. Of course he’s going to win all the prizes and make everyone else cry! So Tiger Woods’ penis gets a Rat’s Ass Award in the Boring Fraud Category.

Mark McGwire: Does anybody anywhere think that Mark McGwire did not pump himself full of steroids in order to hit 70 home runs one year? No, no there is not. All anyone had to see is him embracing the entire family of Roger Maris like Paul Bunyan scooping up a bunch of puppies to realize that this guy was one temper tantrum short of becoming the Incredible Hulk and wrecking a significant portion of St. Louis. Beside, Mr. McGwire got his comeuppance just 3 years later when his home run record was broken by another Incredible Growing Steroid Man, Barry Bonds. Now Mark McGwire returns to baseball as the batting instructor for the St. Louis Cardinals and we’re supposed to be interested in this personality-free Uberjock? And the Rat’s Ass goes to…

Guns in National Parks: There’s a big hoopla going on about people carrying guns in National Parks. Should they or shouldn’t they? Is it ethical or a danger to children? Well, there have been people with guns in National Parks forever. They’re called Park Rangers and every so often they have to shoot a bear or a wolf who’s eyeing someone’s chubby baby as a potential meal, so maybe it’s not such a bad idea for people dim enough to bring small children in close proximity to vicious predators to be heavily armed. Its not the kids’ fault their parents are so friggin’ stupid. But then again, what are the odds of these kids growing up to be any smarter than their peculiar progenitors? Further, what are the odds that their goofball parents will be any more skillful with a rifle than they are with the lives of their children, especially when drinking a lot, which seems to be an integral part of the Nature Experience for so many of us loyal citizens? Probably quite small on both counts. This is an especially rewarding problem to not care about due to its complexity and the existential questions about the thinning of the herd it does not raise in our jaded and apathetic minds. Hopefully, it won’t take too many “hunting accidents” to convince the authorities to reevaluate that whole Armed Drunken Tourist notion before sensible people start getting slain along with the dim. What the hell, let’s just have done with it and give The Big Rat’s Ass in the Scary-Morons-With-Rifles Category to those park patrons who come loaded for bear, in more ways than one! So What?

Lifetime Achievement Rat’s Ass Award: For consistently maintaining low standards, demanding attention for pedestrian concerns and dubious achievements, the Rat’s Ass For Lifetime Achievement goes to… Donald Trump, world class bore and serial trophy wife collector!  We salute The Donald for never ever saying anything interesting or displaying the slightest interest in anything that does not revolve completely around Donald Trump. Poorly done! Unbrilliant! How very sad! Go away! Forgettable! Pathetic! How trifling…