Further to the Dead Presidents
As a late addendum to Nate's list of presidential nuggets of interest, I submit this week's Shouts & Murmurs piece from the New Yorker, which got me to laugh. Yoni Brenner:
For additional dead presidents commentary, you can refer to Jay-Z, who is out for them to represent him.
On a rainy night in 1793, the Van Buren family ox slipped in the mud, fracturing its foreleg. Realizing that the ox was no longer any good to anyone, Abe Van Buren loaded his flintlock and took aim, when, all of a sudden, his ten-year-old son, Martin, leaped in front of the ox and cried, “If you shoot this ox, Father, you would do as well to shoot me! For this unfortunate beast is no less God’s creation than I.” And so his father shot him. Then he turned to Martin’s identical twin and said, “From now on, you’re Martin.” And that is how Phil Van Buren became President of the United States.It kind of goes from there. Yoni Brenner made me laugh out loud with one of these in the past, too. I applaud the occasional ability of Shouts & Murmurs to actually be funny.
For additional dead presidents commentary, you can refer to Jay-Z, who is out for them to represent him.
5 Comments:
I too-quickly read that as "Yogi Berra", and thought to myself as I reached the end of the citation, "Wow, I didn't realize he did anything other than one-liners and baseball."
(Now is when one of you explains to me, with a crushing knowledge of baseball history, why that's not funny.)
It is peculiar how, over the past several years, dead presidents have outperformed live presidents in terms of materially assisting their constituents.
Don, I think "one-liners and baseball" is in fact a pretty accurate summation of Yogi Berra's oeuvre. Personally I too-fast read the author as "Yul Brynner" and I can't really come up with a joke for that beyond, "Wow, I didn't realize he did anything other than Westworld and, uh, mostly I just confuse his name with Bruce Jenner's, so what's he done other than Microsoft Decathlon? And I guess the real Olympics?"
If you don't get the guy's name right, he's never going to leave a comment here.
Do we need to change the slogan back to "Don't Be Cynical," Jack?
Who's being cynical? No one's being cynical.
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