Legged Forces? Ha!

OK, I have a weird sense of humor. I'm not going to tell you I don't giggle during funerals. How could death not be funny? I guffaw at expressions like "hand soap" and "light bulb." Have you ever used elbow soap? No? Are your elbows filthy? What's the opposite of a light bulb? A dark bulb? A heavy bulb? How many Deadheads does it take to change a heavy bulb, man? These things occur to me the instant I hear the words, no matter how often I hear them. I laugh without warning or explanation, and then people around me slowly back away.

So I set forth topics here with considerable trepidation. I worry that the things I find hilarious may be only mildly humorous to my readers. Or worse, I think I might make some crack about some subject, and everyone might recoil in horror, and my friends might have me locked up for my own protection and emergency psychiatric care.

That might happen for example if I wrote this column about Andrea Dworkin and my thoughts on how gay pornography can only do violence to women by excluding them, and how "f*** you" is really a very nice thing to say to someone: "F*** you." "Why thank you very much, I'd enjoy that immensely. And you get f***ed, too." "Thank YOU. You are ever so gracious!"

But this week we aren't going there. We are going to the land of sure-fire universal humor. We are talking about the likes of monkeys riding Labradors, ducks wearing Groucho Marx glasses, and squirrels water-skiing. We are talking about GW Bush's iPod playlist.

What a gift this is! For those of you who were living in a bomb shelter all last week, an aide of our president has revealed GWs iPod playlist, according to a New York Times story. Mr. Blake Gottesman, Bush's personal aide, actually downloaded the songs on the list to Bush's iPod, because Mr. Bush is so busy freeing the world, but we are all certain that the list reflects Bush's tastes, or at least his tastes as understood by someone extremely close to him. So what we have here, boys and girls, is nothing short of the George Bush Rosetta Stone!

Sure, the New York Times didn't publish the whole list. They only teased us with a dozen or so titles and a general description of the rest. But that general description came through the filter of the New York Times, the most respected newspaper in the world of the 90s. If that doesn't make it golden information, it's at least really shiny information.

So what do we know about George Bush now that we didn't know before? Well, for one, he likes "My Sharona," a song about an old perv hot for a much younger girl. So Bush is a letch. We know that the list is heavy on boomer rock and short on R&B, AKA "colored music." Based on secondary sources, we are fairly confident that there is no Elton John, although we are still awaiting confirmation. There is evidently only one female artist on the list.

We are sure of this: if George weren't president he'd be an all-the-time cowboy-hat-wearing crying-in-his-milk ex-alcoholic I'll-buy-your-beer but I'm-on-the-wagon-myself kind of letch. Just like he acts!

Our final conclusion: George Bush is an ex-alcoholic, racist, mostly sexist, homophobic, wannabe pedophile. This information will be very valuable to foreign governments seeking to know how George Bush will react in a crisis. He'd react like anybody you've seen on the Jerry Springer show, only in slow motion.

Now, looking at that assessment, consider this: The US Justice Department and the Bush Administration, through things like the PATRIOT Act, wants to know what YOU read and what music YOU listen to. After their agents have found that out, what would their assessments of YOU look like?