Daily Blague

Kathleen woke me up this morning with laughter. She was reading about Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, who gave a speech in the Senate yesterday with a dash of Cajun spice.

The senator went on to describe how the creator of Mr. Bill, the clay figurine whose cry of "Ohh noooo!" was long a staple of "Saturday Night Live," had used the character in public service announcements to warn southern Louisianians of the dangers they would face in an extraordinary storm.

"How can it be," she asked, "that Mr. Bill was better informed than Mr. Bush?"

Good old Mr Bill. How we laughed, those first few seasons of Saturday Night Live. Some of us had been laughing already, at the National Lampoon Radio Hour, which as I recall was broadcast on Sunday nights. There have been NLRH anthologies, but none of them has included John Belushi's beer-chugging "Perfect Master," or the "Mr Chatterbox" bulletins, or the surprise Nichols-May "my son the nurse" routine, or "The Censorless Woman." Not that I'm discontent. As long as I can have "The Indianapolis Academy of the French Accent," I'm cool.

The weather here has been unbelievably pleasant. The skies are cloudy at the moment, but the windows are open. Linda, the head nurse at the Infusion Unit, called the other day. I feared a glitch in my insurance, but she was only asking me if I could come a little earlier this afternoon for my Remicade. No problem! I saw my internist yesterday. What I feared might be a tumor at the base of my spine turned out to be a little skin problem, treatable by Gold Bond Powder and Spectazole. Remember, I couldn't see it myself. But really. What a hypochondriac.

I do have the perfect reading material for the infusion: Thirteen Steps Down, Ruth Rendell's latest. It beats all records for getting deeply creepy in no time. I'm about halfway through, and wondering if the story will end in conflagration.

The management of Ruth's Chris Steak House Inc has relocated permanently from New Orleans to Orlando. The question of just how the business of New Orleans is to continue will soon begin to swell over news of the disaster relief.

Poor Mr Bush is indeed as stuck as Mr Bill ever was. He's paralyzed by the evaporation of political options. If he fires Michael Brown at FEMA, he'll send the wrong message to his conservative base, which would like to see FEMA abolished. Likewise if he takes any responsibility for failing to come to New Orleans's aid in a timely manner. Or if he even admits that there was a federal problem. The option that he's counting on - launching a whitewashing "investigation" that will suppress any evidence against his team - is an illusion, because it will persuade no one who currently believes that there ought to be an investigation.