Stephen shed some light on the situation in Syria and what our response should be. His main motivation seems to be that he really wants to be able to have a cool graphic to show. So far all he has is Cris-ish in Syri-eh. He was looking for a bold, decisive, dare I say it (?) kick -butt response from Barack Obama but didn't get the adrenaline rush like George W. Bush used to provide. Who can forget "homicidal dictator," "weapons of mass destruction," "axis of evil," "50 tons of mustard gas in a turkey farm," "mobile biological weapons labs," "significant quantities of uranium," "nuclear bomb," "the smoking gun," and "mushroom cloud?" Stephen put it all in context with his summation of all those catch phrases from so many speeches by George W. Bush with this simple sentencebend. "God, I love being lied to by a professional."
Stephen demonstrated what a powerful and earth-shaking speech sounds like. It included Liberty Toast and ended with a short visit from Steve Coll. They discussed what the objective should be if there would be some military action in Syria. As you might expect, it's complicated. I'm sure there will be more developments. Meanwhile, you can go to the UN Refugee Agency to learn more about the more than a million Syrian refugees and donate to help with this humanitarian crisis.
No one has said it yet, but I'm going out on a limb and telling you that this year's greatest Holiday Gift will be something that is featured in a commercial on Fox News. (Did you see what I did there? I used a very subtle reference to Holiday in the same sentence with Fox which is sure to get their tidy whities in a bunch.) It's Perfect Polly. It is, according to Stephen, all the fun of a cuckoo clock without the hassle of finding out what time it is. It looks so real, partly because it head goes from side to side when you breach its "motion activated" perimeter. Its tail even moves back and forth. It's a parakeet that requires no cleaning and no feeding.
Forget those expensive televisions with all their cable TV contract requirements. Get a Perfect Polly and keep those grand kids entertained for hours.
You don't remember any Chia Pets moving their heads, do you. (W-o-w! Note to self: Develop the most perfect gift for next year. It's the Perfect Chia Pet. Its hair grows and its head moves, plus you can program it to say Woof, Meow, Moo, Quack or Aflac. I will get my development team right on that. Nobody else use my idea, please. I thought of it first.)
Anyway, Stephen was thrilled to have a Perfect Polly right there at his desk. He loved the poem from the commercial so much that he made one of his own.
"Your Golden Years are still fantastic,
Even if your only friend is made of plastic."
For our viewing pleasure, Stephen had Perfect Polly and Imperfect Polly, but then came to realize he didn't need any bird other than Perfect Polly. His plan was to let Imperfect Polly fly away to freedom but there was a flaw in that plan when he could not tell Perfect and Imperfect apart. From Stephen's perspective, Imperfect died just before she was allowed to fly away, most likely from grief.
"Look at me. I'm a monster. A monster." Stephen was distraught over the death of the Imperfect Polly and turned his sadness and frustration onto Perfect Polly. He didn't harm the hunk of resin. And by the way, I have this uncanny idea that Stephen actually was talking to the wrong bird the whole time he had both up on his desk in cages. He did start to get a little bit carried away though.
Finally we got to the weather portion of the show. Gary England was the chief meteorologist for KWTV-DT in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. If only you had tuned in a few days ago, you could have seen him forecast the weather. But now he has retired from that job and moved on to handle corporate relations and weather development for Griffin Communications. But the two men did not talk about that. They talked about tornadoes and how you can tell if it's going to be a bad tornado. Hint: Gary England takes off his suit jacket. Most interesting was the fact that Tornado Alley is not a stable weather pattern. It slowly moves to other areas. While it might be northern Texas, Oklahoma and southern Kansas now, in a few years, maybe a decade, Tornado Alley could be centered over Kansas Missouri and Illinois. It migrates. Stephen renamed it Tornado Worm instead of Tornado Alley.
Gary England talked about the biggest tornado that occurred on May 31 of this year. It was 2.6 miles wide with winds of about 300 mph. That prompted Stephen to ask a very good question. "Why do people live in Oklahoma?" Well, it's not all the time that there are tornadoes so not to worry. But I don't think we are going to see the The Colbert Report moving to Oklahoma any time soon.
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