Simian Psycho

The world is apparently all atwitter with Felix Baumgartner. He is supposedly a daredevil and set some new world record. Whoopie-do. He jumped and then he fell and then he landed. But I suppose it was somewhat difficult, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt. He had better luck than Icarus. Stephen said on his show, "Icarus had a parachute, right?" Sadly, Stephen, I think not.

It's a crazy, mixed-up world we live in and some people think it should be mixed up even more! That's right, the folks over at SPLC, Southern Poverty Law Center, want to Mix It Up at Lunch. Instead of sitting with the same kids, day after day, some are promoting sitting with someone different on October 30. Who would come up with something as drastic as this? No one has done studies as far as I have been able to find out (in that I thought about it for a while) about what this will do to the space-time continuum. Different kids have different weights. They take up different amounts of space. Changing where they sit would have profound effects all over the world.

But back to what Stephen was saying about this. While sitting with someone else for lunch might seem like a fine thing to do, the American Family Association see this as, well maybe not the end of the world, but as something bad, bad, bad. I remember school lunch. We did not have much time to eat. It was pretty much stand in line, get our food, stuff our mouths and get on to our next class. But, hey, what do I know? What does Stephen know? What does the Southern Poverty Law Center know?

Lucky audience members last night got a free t-shirt. Stephen talked about his previous segments about Monkey on the Lam. It seems now that a monkey who is on the lam in St. Petersburg has bitten an elderly woman and so now it becomes Monkey on the Gram. And the t-shirts? Well, they said 'Stop the Simian Psycho." Unfortunately, that was not the nickname that the media came up with and so, a bunch of useless t-shirts. And the lucky audience members? They happened to be in the right place at the right time when Stephen threw the t-shirts out into the audience. Oh how I wish I had been there.

Stephen's guest was Evan Thomas. He had a new book. Who doesn't nowadays? "Ike's Bluff - President Eishenhower's Secret Battle to Save the World," is the title (and not the first chapter) of this book. Stephen had a beef with Ike. I won't mention it here because it's not that important. But the two men did discuss some of the accomplishments and character flaws/attributes of Ike. He knew how horrible war was and wanted to avoid that. Military spending wen down instead of up under him. He believed in infrastructure. He was a moderate Republican. Stephen mentioned that his audience was young and so asked Evan Thomas to explain to those young audience members just what exactly a moderate Republican was. Unfortunately they ran out of time, and so we will never know.