News You Can Bruise for 2002 August 4

Sumana read me a funny quote from Spin Cycle today. Let me set the scene. Then-President Clinton is about to go white-water rafting. The president's handlers are in a tizzy because of the associations this will bring up with the Whitewater scandal. Press secretary Mike McCurry feeds the president a snappy line to use.

Inevitably, a reporter in a passing raft shouted at the president: "What do you think of Whitewater now?" Clinton flashed a thumbs-up. "It's better when you have a paddle," he said, reading from the McCurry script. The quote made the next day's New York Times.

This paragraph gave me the Goon Show-like image of a reporter on a raft dogging Clinton throughout his presidency, always floating by at the crucial moment to shout out some pointed question. Probably the raft would be fixed with wheels so he could row it through a press conference. The Secret Service starts to worry. He's seen at the National Press Club, sipping a scotch and soda, entertaining a Post reporter in his raft. Eventually he's transferred to the foreign affairs desk and covers international crises from his raft. His tragic demise (not sure how; stray shell punctures raft?). Write up, sell film rights. $35K? Intimate political comedy, slight farce; doesn't have to be a blockbuster.

I spent the day cleaning my room. Since I was moving around all my furniture anyway, I decided to rearrange it. I'm now sitting about four feet from where I used to sit. I rotated my bed ninety degrees from its old position! Not even Fox would dare to air such extreme content, but I swear to you, my readers, that it is the truth.

What happens on The West Wing if Bartlet loses the coming presidential election to the Republican challenger, Gov. Ritchie? Does the show end? Do they bring in a new cast and become a show about the Ritchie administration? Does it become a show about the post-White House jobs of the various characters we already know, a la Saved By The Bell: The College Years? I go for the second option. Of course, we know that Bartlet won't actually lose (unless the show is going to end), which raises the Disturbing Question: how fair is this election, really?

You know that weblog that recreates Julius Ceasar's Gallic Wars in weblog form? Of course you do. Yesterday I thought it would be funny to do the Satyricon in weblog form. It would read like a whiny LiveJournal. After that set-up I should have a sample entry to set you rolling in the aisles, but... I don't. Sorry. Also, the dinner with Trimalchio is way too long to be represented by a weblog entry, and that's the funniest part, so I doubt it would work.

In other classics news, I read Juvenal's Satires, a copy of which Sumana found me for cheap. Very funny. I kept thinking "I hope he writes some more of these soon," and then reeling as the horrible truth hit me. If this were the 18th or even the 19th century, you could title or subtitle a book "The New Satires" (like Mary Shelley's "The New Prometheus") and it would be an acceptable title or subtitle. People would accept that you were doing a sort of "the adventure continues" thing. But even those days are gone.