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GOP WAR ROOM, OXFORD, MS, 7:30PM, CDT

HANDLER: Okay, let’s go through it one more time, Senator. When you come out onto the podium, what do you do?

McCain: I shake hands.

HANDLER: Right, right. But what do you NOT do?

McCain: I don’t make eye contact with him?

HANDLER: Good! Very good. Remember that. Never look at him. Pretend like he’s not even there. Pretend like he’s a nobody, like he doesn’t even exist.

McCain: Okay, no eye contact. Just for then, or for the whole thing?

HANDLER: My God, it’s like you want to lose this thing. Obama doesn’t exist for you. It’s just you, Lehrer, and the American people. But don’t look at the camera, either. Pretend Lehrer is the American people. Look at him, but try not to blink so much that he thinks you’re lying out your ass.

McCain: I don’t think I can do that.

HANDLER: Okay, leave that. Leave that for now, it’s not important. The important thing is to pretend like the other guy is so beyond contempt that you can’t even begin to fathom why people want to hear what he has to say.

McCain: I don’t understand. He’s the democratic nominee! People are interested in his views and what he has to say!

HANDLER: What did you just say?

McCain: People want to hear what he has to say?

HANDLER: No, the other thing..

McCain: He’s the democratic nominee?

HANDLER: No, the other thing!

McCain: I don’t understand.

HANDLER: That’s it! I don’t understand! That’s good; that’s very good.

McCain: I don’t understand.

HANDLER: Yes sir, I’m aware of that. But why don’t we use that phrase: “He doesn’t understand.” My God. This could be it. This could be the “There you go again!” of our time!

McCain: I don’t understand.

HANDLER: For fuck sake, sir, focus!

– I felt like I only got 40 winks last night.

– You know “40 winks” is considered a good night’s sleep, right?

– Not by me, it isn’t. “40 winks” sounds like something I could do on the sofa during a commercial. I need a lot more winks than that to have a good night’s sleep.

– That’s odd; I always thought of “40 winks” as rather a lot. Like you’d only get that many if you were in a coma or something.

– That is odd.

– How many winks do you think should equal a good night’s sleep?

– 600.

– 600? Who are you, Rip Van Winkle?

– 600 winks. Anything less and I’m groggy all morning.

– Far out. Me, I only need 12 winks to feel sharp.

– Why do they call them “winks,” anyway?

– That’s a good question. I don’t know. Maybe they called them “blinks” and then it transmogrified somehow.

– It’s possible.

– Even if they didn’t call them blinks, maybe we should.

– Why?

– Well, maybe we could agree on how many blinks constituted a good night’s sleep. That way we’d be on the same page.

– Should we be on the same page? Is that something we should strive for?

– I don’t know; it’s hard to tell. I’m kind of tired.

– Why? How many winks did you get last night?

Do you tire of fishing dead toads out of your pool day after day?

Do you fear that your pet might fall in one day while you are busy elsewhere and drown? Your pet, I mean?

Perhaps neighborhood toddlers climb your backyard fence from time to time to gaze into the pool’s enticing but deadly waters.

Well, fret no more! McNeely’s Amazing Toad Ramp could well be the answer to your various nightmares!

Merely clamp McNeely’s Amazing Toad Ramp onto one of the poles of the ladder in the deep end of your pool, and kiss unwanted dead toads, dogs, frogs, hogs, hamsters, and children goodbye!

The secret lies in the gentle-angled, non-skid surface that rises out of the dark waters and curves neatly to the dry pool edge. With McNeely’s Amazing Toad Ramp ratcheted firmly in place, toads and frogs now might conceivably drift into a position where they could grab the rough coating with their nimble froggy hands and haul themselves out of the chlorinated water– before the various chemicals degrade their nervous systems to the point that they seize up and float lifelessly into the skimmer! Boisterous puppies, cavorting perilously close to the pool edge and falling in while their master is inside drinking beer or shitting, perhaps, could extricate themselves from certain watery death merely by keeping their cool and swimming to McNeely’s Amazing Toad Ramp before they drowned from panicky exhaustion! And the same goes for toddlers, except for the froggy hands part!

You owe it to yourself to audition McNeely’s Amazing Toad Ramp. More than that, you owe it to all the little creatures around you which would otherwise die unspeakably horrible deaths if you don’t. Best of all, it’s guaranteed!*

McNeely’s Amazing Toad Ramp is only $49.95 (ratchets, non-skid surfacing, and surface sold separately).

“I mean, it’s not really a form of art, though, is it? It’s a series of thoughts that don’t follow one another elegantly. It’s not what I meant to do.”

“You still like the novel, don’t you?”

“I do. I like the form of a novel. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Things happen. Feelings are evoked in a chain the author made. I like the idea of dictating a specific order of thought or feeling to the reader.”

“Is that right?”

“Fuck you. You know what’s funny? The best novels dictate the order, but not the actual thoughts or precise feelings. The best novels leave that up to the reader. That’s art.”

“But if the novel is an art form, and haiku and free verse are art forms, why can’t the weblog be a form of art?

“Seriously? There’s no reason it couldn’t. They just aren’t. There’re lots of different kinds of weblogs, and some of them are written by profound people with a lot on their minds. And their weblogs can have art in them, but the weblog itself is just a log. At best, it declares that time passes. That’s what it does at best.

“I started one as a sort of idea file. I thought it would be nice to put my ideas in one place, where I knew I could get at them. It was always with an eye toward the day when I could use those ideas in a novel, maybe in a conversation in a novel.

“But that day hasn’t come yet, and I’m starting to think that blogging has put that day farther into the future than it was before. So I can only speak from personal experience, but, if anything, blogging has been an anti-art form for me.”

“Are you trying to depress me?”

“Of course.”

“What are you in for?”

“I’m a grifter. They caught me grifting.”

“Really.”

“Yep.”

“What is grifting, anyway?”

“What is grifting?”

“Yeah, I’ve always wondered that.”

“Well, it’s when you pull a scam on somebody. Like a guy thinks you paid him forty bucks for a tank of gas, but you didn’t. Like you got the gas, and you paid him the money, but when he goes to tote up the night’s receipts, he’s forty short.”

“That sounds like what I do. Maybe I’m a grifter.”

“What are you in for?”

“I killed a guy for fifteen dollars and a case of beer.”

“Well, did he know you took his fifteen dollars?”

“He sure did. I said ‘give me all your shit and I won’t fuck you up’ before I wasted him.”

“See, that’s not grifting, per se, if the guy knew you were taking his shit. That’s more like robbery.”

“And murder, because I lied when I said I wasn’t gonna kill him.”

“Right. Robbery and murder. That’s probably what they charged you with, right?”

“Right. You got charged with grifting?”

“No, with petty theft.”

“So why are you a grifter? It sounds like you’re a thief.”

“It’s a kind of thievery. Grifting. Did you see the movie? The Grifters? With Olympia Dukakis and Robert Downey, Jr?”

“I thought it was Anjelica Huston and John Cusack in that.”

“Whatever.”

“No.”

“They grifted a lot in that movie. Rent it when you get out, it’s good.”

“Maybe I will,” Frank said. He took another bite of cornbread. “Maybe I’m a kind of murderer. There’s probably different kinds of murderers, right? Did you ever see a movie where they called the murderers something else?”

“You might could be a terrorist. Like in Speed with Keanu Reeves and that girl from the lawyer movie.”

“Sandra Bullock?”

“Right. Did you kill the guy for anything besides the money and the beer?”

“You mean like, was he fucking my woman? No.”

“No, not like that. I mean was he a Jew or a Muslim or something? Did he take your people’s land?”

“My people don’t have any land, they’re from the project on 28th Street. They’re not Jews or Muslims or any shit either, they can eat anything they want.”

Joe thought about it and said “I guess you can’t be a terrorist then.”

Frank looked out the window and said “Maybe I can be any damn thing I want.”

“Maybe,” Joe said, but he secretly doubted it. The cornbread was good. One of them thought the black-eyed peas were dry, but who thought that doesn’t matter.

Dear God,

while we commend You for acting on our petition in a timely manner, this act is not quite what we were looking for. Frankly, we expected more from You in the portents department. A giant explosion, the largest ever witnessed, was a good idea, and we like the way You’re thinking. But x-rays? Something only our machines can see? What the hell?

No, what we had in mind was something that happens in the sky that’s visibly bright enough and lasts long enough to allow everyone to see it and contemplate it. Something you can yell inside to the kids about, and they can get outside in time to see. A tenth of a second x-ray spike, albeit ‘brighter’ than the moon, is simply unacceptable.

Don’t get us wrong; the fact that the event was harmless was a huge plus. Awesome but harmless is good.

But in light of the explosion’s inherent subtlety, we are resubmitting our petition. This time, let’s not fuck around with x-rays and gamma rays and tenths of seconds and what-not, please.

Thank you,

the teeming masses

Santa Rosa, CA (AC)— The late Charles Schulz’s comic strip “Peanuts” has been placed on a two week online delay by United Feature Syndicate due to contractual obligations, said syndicate spokesman Tad Bowman.

“Even apart from the contractual reasons, it just makes sense to reward the newspaper reader with an up-to-date ‘Classic Peanuts,’” stated Bowman. “The newspaper reader has spent his or her fifty cents to buy this right. Online readers, in contrast, have been viewing these 5 to 54 year-old strips literally for free, in effect being subsidized by those who buy newspapers that run comic strips drawn by those who are long dead. No longer.”

“It’s about time,” stated Marigold Evans, subscriber to northern California’s Sacramento Bee. “I can’t tell you how annoying it is to bring up the latest classic antics of the Peanuts gang at the office, only to find out that others are reading the same strip for nothing on the internet. It’s a disgrace.”

“Delaying the online version of the strip seems very reasonable to me,” said Viki Monsanto of Chicago. “The net people want to have their cake and eat it, too, and that’s just not right.”

Added Franklin Gautier of Pass Christian, Mississippi, “When I’m talking about a funny joke I read in ‘Classic Peanuts,’ I want to know that the people I talk to paid to see it like me. Like, remember last week [when] Snoopy and Woodstock were dancing a happy dance, and then stopped to say ‘I hate cats,’ and then started dancing again? That was cool.”

Others interviewed, however, expressed different opinions. “Peanuts?” said Albert Haversham of North Brunswick, Iowa, “that’s the one with the dog and parrot and the round-bodied guy, right? Or am I thinking of ‘Ziggy?’”

“Classic Peanuts,” as the strip is now called five years after the death of creator Charles Schulz, appears in some 2,400 newspapers around the world. The Peanuts empire still accounts for $1.2 billion in annual sales worldwide, though most reasonable people are at a loss to explain why.