Working with my Hands, & Watching the Biden/Fetterman Brain Trust (posted 6/19/23

I hope everybody had a great weekend and Father’s Day!   If you didn’t see it, yesterday I posted my tribute to my dad from a few years back.  If your father is still with us, I hope you got to spend some time with him yesterday.

I spent a good chunk of this last week making and repairing wooden window screens, and glazing some old windows.  I’ve mentioned before what a great pleasure it has been to be able to combine mental work with physical work throughout my life, and this summer is turning out to be a prime example.

I’m reading a lot, and writing these columns, and trying to get a few other writing projects off the ground, and that is engaging work.  But working with my hands brings a different kind of satisfaction.  I can almost feel the shades of generations of manual-laboring Simpsons looking over my shoulder as I tear down and rebuild wooden screens, or build new ones.

That work is doubly enjoyable because I get to do it in my old garage, which I’ve turned into an air-conditioned and reasonably well-organized workshop.  I know: I couldn’t sound more like an old, straight, retired guy if I tried.  And I am more than okay with that!

The window glazing is something I’d really recommend, if you have an old house and are looking for a quasi-zen, gratifying task.  I’ve got three old, two-story rental houses – built in 1886, 1922 and 1930 – containing around 50 windows needing some amount of attention.

Glazing involves two satisfying stages: removing old, brittle or failing putty, and then putting in a pristine layer of new stuff.  Does it help that I’m still basically a child at heart, and glazing putty is basically Play-Doh for adults?

It definitely does.

Plus, in a world where too many are pursuing pointless grievance study degrees and wallowing in gobbledygook theories – about policing, energy, infrastructure, the military, immigration, etc. – that will not work in a million years, it’s so refreshing to work with humble tools and materials that do the job they’re made for.

For example, when you work with any kind of pipe or metal fittings, there is always a male end and a female end, and they fit together perfectly.  When you’re doing wiring, you’ve got plugs and outlets that are male and female, and they work.  Meanwhile, you’re paying $60K a year for your college kids to learn that male and female don’t really exist, or are interchangeable, or something. 

(Our society needs a lot less Noam Chomsky and Nikole Hannah-Jones, and a lot more Mike Rowe, is what I’m saying.)  

A glazing tip is a tiny piece of metal with a point at one end, two tabs that form a vertical ledge just behind that point, and two flat metal fins behind that.  You place the tip flat on the window glass, put the edge of your multipurpose scraping tool against those two tabs, and you push the pointed tip into the wooden window frame, wiggling it in until the two tabs are touching the wood, and the fins are holding the edge of the window against the frame. 

Then you work the putty in your hands, and start pushing it into the groove where the glass meets the wooden frame, one putty-knife-width at a time.  Once you’ve got one window-edge filled in, you take the putty knife at one end of the edge, press it down at a 45-degree angle, and slide it along the bead of new putty. 

The result is a clean, fresh line of putty along the window frame, and a long snake of excess putty that you retrieve to use on the next edge.  Plus: aesthetic bliss. 

Okay, that’s a lot of babbling about something that probably doesn’t seem that important.  But I’m not so sure about that.

I have nothing against therapy, and I think that some anti-depressants have their usefulness at times.  But for me, a lot of the stresses of life can be addressed by walking in some woods, listening to some classical music, reading a good book, and making some wooden screens and glazing windows. 

Okay, time for a quick whip around the news from this week:

Remember when Biden campaigned from his basement, and he was clearly a doddering old man who wasn’t in any shape to be president?

Well those are looking like the good old days now, aren’t they?

I’m sure you’ve seen clips of Biden’s speech in Connecticut.  His bizarre closing – “God save the queen, man!” – has gotten the most attention.  And for good reason.  Because what the hell?

But I saw another moment that is just as weird.  He was making his anti-gun pitch – because second amendment, schmecond amendment – when he pulled this bit of fantasy out of Corn Pop-ville:

“In most cities, down in Philadelphia and New York… areas I know well… like up here… you’d see a truck pull up… pull to the curb… and selling weapons, selling guns, selling AR-15s, selling weapons.  Well, guess what?  You do that now, you go to jail!”

First, I cleaned up that quote a lot, mostly through slur removal.  Second, this is just getting sad. 

Does anyone believe that in most cities – even in the most dysfunctional, Dem-run hellhole cities – you’d see a truck pull up to a curb and start selling guns right out in the open? 

Is there no honest reporter in the room, to initiate this scenario:

Reporter:  When you said “you’d see a truck pull to the curb” and start selling guns, is it possible that that truck was playing happy music from bullhorns on the roof?  And neighbor kids would come running, and point to the pictures of frozen treats painted on the side of the truck?

Biden: Yeah, man! This guy knows what I’m talkin’ bout!  Those gun runners are bad dudes, jack!

Reporter:  That wasn’t the illegal-gun-selling truck, Mr. President.  That was the ice cream man.

Biden: C’mon man.  You lying dog-faced–  What about the ladder on the roof, to strap all the guns to?

Reporter: That was a roofing truck, Mr. President.

Biden:  Oh yeah?  Well what about the globe painted on the side, showing all the countries that they sell guns in?

Reporter:  That was a Sherwin Williams paint truck.

Biden:  What about the folding door that would slide open so that you could step up and go inside and buy a bushel-basket full of AR-15s?

Reporter: That was a city bus.  And nobody carries guns in a bushel basket, because it’s not 1910.

Biden:  Well guess what?  Anybody selling guns out of any of those trucks today is going to go to jail!

Reporter: That’s always happened.  No one can park an ice cream truck or a school bus on the curb and sell guns–  Who are you looking at?  Why are you shaking hands with empty air?

Biden:  The queen just got here.  Can’t you see her?  Give me a break, man.  AHHH!  Sandbag!

And… scene.

The next day, the Biden tragi-comic road show moved to Philly, probably because he needed to find someone who could make his mis-firing synapses look normal by comparison.

And since Ozzy Osbourne was unavailable, John Fetterman put on his most formal hoodie and shorts, and did a joint press conference.  I don’t have the heart – or the linguistic ability – to try to provide a transcript of his disjointed sentence fragments here. 

But at one point I’m pretty sure that he called Biden a collapsed bridge.  He also coined the terms “delegedation” and “infructure,” before introducing Dem rep Brendan Boyle as,“my friend, Congressman Boyle Bile.” 

But never mind that.  Watch with the sound off, and you can tell that everything is going swimmingly.  Biden alternates between a vacant expression and a big smile that is totally unconnected from anything Fetterman is saying.  Or trying to say.

Four local pols are behind them, and they all struggle manfully to make themselves invisible.  One stares at a point in the middle distance, one stares at Biden’s shoes, and the poor governor tries to stand stock still and maintain a poker face.  But he can’t help himself from looking intermittently perplexed.

The best part is when Fetterman discussed another collapsed bridge: “That that bridge was rebuilt less than a year… well well in front… of time.”  At the end of that “sentence” the gov gives a small tentative nod, almost as if he was able to figure it out. 

That’s a US Senator.  Standing next to the America President. 

I know.  Some of that riveting, window glazing talk is sounding pretty good right about now, isn’t it?

Well, I can’t send you off into a Monday with that grim tableau as a last thought. 

So how about we re-visit the best comedy routine since Norm MacDonald passed, delivered by cute little guy Rachel Maddow, explaining why MSNBC would not carry Trump’s post-arraignment speech live:

“As we have said before in these circumstances, there is a cost to us as a news organization to knowingly broadcast untrue things.  We are here to bring you the news.  It hurts our ability to do that if we live broadcast what we fully expect in advance to be a litany of lies and false accusations, no matter who says them.”

Got that? 

That’s why you’ve never seen Andy McCabe, Peter Strozk, KJP, James Clapper, John Brennan, Jim Comey or Michael Avenatti on MSNBC.  And why you never heard word one about Russian collusion. 

In fact, it explains why MSNBC has just run a test pattern, 24/7 since 2016. 

Biden delenda est!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Boyle Bile, 2024!