Mostly quiet on the Trump Front this morning…which is good. I'm thrilled at his slow, steady descent and at the increasing number of his supporters who have to be thinking, "Well, I love what he says he wants to do for this country but I'm increasingly uncomfy with the lawlessness and/or craziness." Still, I don't like how often I have to discuss this guy, even with myself. "Trump Fatigue" is a term we're hearing more and more, though so far not as often as any phrase about throwing someone under a bus. A full day off from any of that would be nice. I also think the Sunday News Programs should emulate Chick-Fil-A and close down on Sundays.
On Fridays, I always think Trump will do something especially outrageous if Bill Maher's show is off. I don't mean intentionally; just that Maher's luck runs bad that way. Big things happen when he isn't there to comment on them. Anyway, he's doing a show tonight so maybe not much will happen today except a lot of people on his team denying they said what they said yesterday and, of course, Rudy Giuliani saying something any competent lawyer would tell his client not to say.
Halloween — a holiday I will abolish just as soon as I'm powerful enough to do that, which I soon will be — is looming ahead. My new problem with Halloween is that as I get older, it seems to be followed by about three days of Thanksgiving prep and then everything's All-Christmas, All-the-Time until about January 15.
I used to have a friend who was born on December 25 — no, it was not Jesus Christ — and I felt sorry for him because his birthday kinda got lost under the Big Name Holiday. Also, of course, he had half as many opportunities for presents as someone like me who was smart enough to be born in March. Now, I feel sorry for anyone born in November or December.
And speaking of birthdays: Had he lived, tomorrow would have been my father's 109th…sort of. Like many Jewish kids of his era, my father had no birth certificate. Way back when, it was not uncommon for Jewish families to bribe someone to destroy those certificates, the better to keep the kid from getting drafted when he'd later be needed to help support the family. My father was reasonably sure he was born in October and only a tad less sure it was in 1910.
Because we needed a date on which to give him a tie and a cake with candles on it, he arbitrarily picked October 19 as his birthday. And I don't know how this worked but he got it onto his Drivers License, passport, government I.D. (for his job) and everywhere else even though it was a made-up, educated guess of a birth date.
When he died in 1991, I got access to many documents he had and had never studied all that closely. A few of them gave me enough info to do some research and I tracked down a government record that said he'd been born on October 25, 1910 — not that far off. I assume that's right but it doesn't really matter now, does it? The only reason it might is if I was the kind of person who only thought about his father on Dad's birthday and I think of him every day — with nothing but fond, positive memories…