Tiger Woods on Broadway

You can hear Tiger's song in the new production of "Finian's Rainbow" a great show from 1947 which features one of the wittiest lyrics ever. It's sung by the Leprechaun who begins with "As I become more and more a mortal" and continues:
When I'm not hear the girl I love, I love the girl I'm near,
When I can't fondle the hand that I'm fond of I fondle the hand at hand,
When I'm not near the face that I fancy I fancy the face I face.
And so on and so on including the line, "as long as they have a bosom,I woos 'em
I promise to stop kicking poor Tiger because it's too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel. If want Tiger jokes tune into Jay Leno, he'll be telling them for years.

My Andy Rooney observations

I went to the post office this week. Did you ever notice that when the lines get long the clerks close the windows and disappear into the back? It's very frustrating. I live in the west so I get annoyed at the TV when the Weather Channel person stands in front of the west and gestures to the rest of the country even if there's nothing going on. I guess he or she is too stuck on themselves to just move out of the picture. I like honey, especially on biscuits, but no matter how hard I try, or how careful I am, I always get my fingers sticky. If I had a valet he could put the honey on my biscuit and get his fingers sticky. Alas I don't have a valet and never have.

He loved not wisely but too often

Tiger Woods is our contemporary Othello with the tabloid media as his Iago and his wife being strangled by gossip and humiliation. Now he gets the rap that his big mistake was marriage in the first place. He can't win either way. He's in a sand trap in the middle of a lake. He was forced into the role as Othello when his real calling was in Romeo and Juliet where he gets to cry plaintively "Oh I am Fortune's Fool!" Well, he still has his fortune.

Style, the decline of.

I went down to the Mirage on the Las Vegas strip yesterday to celebrate their 20th Anniversary and what did I find; a host of scruffy people shuffling around the casino floors looking like an army of Russian serfs storming the Winter Palace. The really dismaying part was that they were predominantly young people. These are the people who should be dressing smartly and acting smartly. Instead, they came off as if "they'd never sat on chairs before" in Basil Fawlty's critical opinion of some hotel guests of his. I know it's asking a lot in the age of grunge to clean up but that's how you move up in class, get a better job, better service, better looking girls. As Leo Gorcey, the spokeman of the Bowry Boys, would say, "I'm regurgitated".

A GI Jive for the 21st Century

One of my favorite songs of WWII was Johnny Mercer's "GI Jive" which he claims to have written at a stoplight at Hollywood and Vine. "Chuck all your junk back in the trunk, fall on your bunk, clunk!" It would be a little difficult to pen such a jaunty ditty today. "Drink lemonade, sit in the shade, fall on a grenade..you're daid!" Are there any songs from Iraq or Afghanastan? Maybe on the other side: "Praise Allah and pass the ammunition" and "Comin' in on a bomb and a prayer". Just like the devil the enemy has all the good tunes.

Why I'd like Obama to make a Christmas album

There are two reasons: 1. We are at war and the best Christmas songs were written during WWII. I'm dreaming of a white christmas, I'll be home for Christmas, Have yourself a merry little christmas. All express the poignance of troops far away and a home front longing for them to come back. At a restaurant last week I saw the hostess, a small, poor, innocent young woman staring into space and singing along softly with "Winter Wonderland". She was from the Phillipines, a place that war came to with a vengeance. 2. We need a unifying voice like Bing Crosby was in WWII. The most heard voice in the world it was claimed. Even the Germans called him "Der Bingle". Of course no such recording session will take place and we will go on fighting and dying just as before. I will be left to crack cynical jokes like I did yesterday at an Indian restaurant. A roving musician was singing "Silver Bells" and I told the hostess that it was an old Indian Christmas carol. She smiled.

Tiger, tiger not too bright in the middle of the night

Tiger Woods is stuck in the rough for a good long time. The tree he bashed into played the same part that the iceberg did for the Titanic. It just waited and waited till they met. However, as Jay Leno pointed out, Tiger lives the life any guy would envy. He plays golf year round, he has millions of dollars, a lovely wife and kids and lots of girls on the side. He is an easy target for one liners. I got off a feeble one myself this week. I said, 'He may not be on the links but he just set a new intercourse record". As Larry Flynt said many years ago, "I'll make the whole world a tabloid". And so he did.