“I wanna thank you for meeting with me in this super-secret high-level meeting in the White House, okay. I brought you here… I am really good at bringing people and stuff together, by the way… I brought you here so we could make the Marx Brothers great again, okay? We are going to make a new Marx Brothers’ movie. It’s going to be great… really tremendous.”
“Wotta you sayin’, boss? The Marx Brothers is dead. How you gonna make a movie with dead guys? You gonna dig ’em all up and do a Frankenstein number on ’em, or what?”
“No, no… We will play the roles ourselves. I’ll be Groucho, you know… the really smart one… the one with an amazing mind. I really am very smart you know. Everyone says so.”
“And who am I gonna play?”
“Elon, you get to be Chico. You know, the fast-talking Wop guy. You think of the greatest plans. They are really great, you know.”
“Okay, boss, I got one already.”
“Really? What is it?”
“I think we gotta do an executive order.”
“Executive order? What’s that?”
“It’s a order you give like Obama did, you know? You take a pen and phone and say something in writing that everybody’s gotta do, and then, because it’s an executive order and you signed your name to it, you gotta execute somebody.”
“Ooh! I like the sound of that. We’ll call the movie Horsefeather Soup. It’ll be tremendous. The most tremendous thing people have ever seen.”
“Yeah, and the executive order will say we are banning Mexicans that come from places like Panama, Honduras, and Guatemala. That kind of Mexican has to be sent back to where they came from. You know, just the ones where they might want to vote for Democrats. And we can say we are doing extreme vetting so we are keeping America safe from terrorists. And WOKE Mexicans.”
“Ooh! Yeah! Extreme vetting, rhymes with bed-wetting. Tremendous. But what if people say I’m being racist again?”
“We say we intend to protect Americans from those really bad people you keep talking about, you know? We’ll claim that nobody who’s innocent will get hurt. And the good thing is, the immigration people will just know that anybody who is a Mexican is a bad person. No matter where they’re from. We’ll get everybody that way.”
“Good one, Elon, I mean… Chico.”
In the Homeland Security camps after the executive order. (Possibly people waiting to be executed.)
“Wait a minute, boss, who do I get to be in this movie?”
“Hogsweat, you get to be Harpo, okay?”
“My name is Hegseth, boss.”
“Oh, yeah, sorry, Heegsop.”
“HEGSETH!”
“Okay, Harpo doesn’t talk, so shut up, Hogsbreath! Here, take this bicycle horn and, when you go on George Stefenopolis’s show and he doesn’t let you talk either, just honk it at him. It will be really great.”
“And me, boss?”
“Oh, Vivek. I almost forgot about you. What’s the name of that other brother? Dumbo? You get to be that one.”
“Hey boss, we gotta get goin’ on this executive order crap. Somebody needs to get executed in the worst way.”
“Oh, yeah! The worst way to execute is the best way. I feel the need to tweet a truth about it. This new Marx Brothers’ movie will be the best, just the best. It will be so bestest that America will get tired of bestiness.”
Trump, Hegseth, and Elon ready for Woke Mexicans, and protesters.
#3. To know about Filipino culture, you have to understand what Jollibee is all about. Jollibee is the Filipino MacDonald’s. Of course, it is cheaper… and better tasting. There are a few of them around the country here. California has more than Texas. They are like a giant Filipino magnet. You go there to find the Filipino community in any American city. But other people love the food too. You have to sort the Filipinos from the Hispanics and white folks that are not too proud to eat cheap and delicious.
Catch a Falling Star 
Special Snowflakes
When conservative cultural warriors, Twitter Trolls, or dyspeptic gasbags like Rush Limbaugh call you a “Special Snowflake”, I have discovered, to my chagrin, that they don’t mean it as a compliment. In their self-centered, egotistical world you have to be as emotionally tough and able to “take it” as they believe (somewhat erroneously to my way of thinking) they themselves are. They have no time for political correctness, safe spaces, or, apparently, manners polite enough not to get you killed on the mean streets where they never go. Being a retired school teacher who was once in charge of fragile young psyches trying to negotiate a cruel Darwinian world, I think I disagree with them.
Have you ever tried to draw a snowflake? Believe me, it is difficult. Snowflakes are hexagonal star-shapes with enough lace and filigrees in them to make it a nightmare to draw it with painfully arthritic hands. The one above took me an hour with ruler and compass and colored pencils, and it still doesn’t look as good as a first grader can create with scissors and folded paper. Much better to use a computer program to spit them out with mathematical precision and fractal beauty. That’s how all the tiny ones in the background were created. But even a computer can’t recreate the fragile, complicated beauty of real snowflakes.
You see how the fragile crystalline structures will break in spots, melt in spots, attach to others, and get warped or misshapen? That is the reason no two snowflakes are alike, even though they all come from the same basic mathematically precise patterns generated by ice crystals. Life changes each one in a different way.
And that, of course, is the reason this essay is really about people rather than mere physical artifacts of cold weather. Our fragilities and frailties are earned, and they make us who we are. I have a squinky eye like Popeye from playing baseball and getting hit by a pitch. I have a big toe that won’t bend from playing football. They both represent mistakes that I learned from the hard way.
As a teacher, I learned that bipolar disorder and anxiety disorders are very real things. I lost a job once to one of those. And I spent a long night talking someone out of suicide one horrible December. Forgive me, I had to take fifteen minutes just there to cry again. I guess I am just a “special snowflake”. But the point is, those things are real. People really are destroyed by them sometimes. And they deserve any effort I can make to protect them or help them make it through the night.
But people are like snowflakes. They are all complex. They are all beautiful in some way. They are all different. No two are exactly the same.
And I really think boorish bastards have no right to insist that we need to take safe spaces and sanctuaries away from them. Every snowflake has worth. Winter snow leaves moisture for seedlings to get their start every spring. If you are a farmer, you should know this and appreciate snowflakes. And snowflakes can be fascinating. Even goofy ones like me.
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