Daytona

I’ve become so inured to vehicular assaults perpetrated by oldies I hardly paused after reading of the septuagenarian who fights “illegal drug use, out of her car” that slammed into an apartment building yesterday in Florida. And then an hour later I had one of those flashes of insight only great minds are capable of: with war in Mesopotamia and the Hindu Kush having left our troops stretched thin, couldn’t we deploy our oldies overseas? Imagine thousands of horrendously bad elderly drivers, off our streets and behind the wheels of armor plated vehicles, rolling in erratic zigzag fashion across the plains of Afghanistan, turning unpridictably to crush suprised Talibani hiding in the weeds or in apartment buildings.

Many oldies are so bored they would happily volunteer for such a mission. There are many more so addled they wouldn’t notice any difference between driving a Buick from the retirement home to the IHOP and driving a Humvee from the barracks to a Taliban encampment. The rest will just have to get used to it.

Comments

  1. Anonymous18/4/07 6:46 PM

    This is a great idea. A draft for oldies! I am not sure you are right, though, about oldies being bored. After all, time moves MUCH faster for them; oldies sitting on park benches, I have observed are seen gripping the rails, as if they were on a speeding train. They are not bored, but only stunned, perhaps. Also, George Bush would seem to a more appropriate Commander in Chief, if he were Chief of Oldies; he might even want to join up himself! What age to you suggest for this designation of oldies? If we make it at age 60 we could send David Letterman.

    ReplyDelete
  2. C. Van Carter18/4/07 7:32 PM

    "I have observed are seen gripping the rails, as if they were on a speeding train"

    Well put. That's from one of your poems, isn't it?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More Brief Reviews of Movies I haven’t Seen

Brokeback Mountain: A love affair between a pair of homosexualist cowboys ends tragically when one is killed by a horse . The actors playing the leads are (supposedly) straight. Includes graphic sex scenes. If you are into this sort of thing stay home and rent the spaghetti western Django Kill...If You Live, Shoot! instead, it's a weird and entertaining film that includes an honest depiction of homosexualist cowboys - an entire gang of them. Memoirs of a Geisha: A trio of Chinese honeys infiltrates Japan by disguising themselves as whores. The potential of the premise squandered, as unlike the homosexualist cowboy film Memoirs of a Geisha is only PG-13. The Producers: A pair of real life homosexualists (Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane) portray heterosexual Broadway musical impresarios. Notice the pattern. Do you understand 'Hollywood logic' works now? King Kong: I’ve decided the old-style stop-motion animation is better than tedious modern CGI effects. The latter mechanical
Read more

Christmas Books

Image
The Illustrious House of Ramires , by Eça de Queirós. A novel about an ineffectual nobleman writing an historical novel about his heroic ancestors. Queirós has been called the Portuguese Flaubert. Large Fees and How to Get Them : a book for the private use of physicians , by Albert V. Harmon, M.D. If you practice early 20th medicine and want large fees, this book is essential reading. If you don’t, there are still lessons in its amusing and unsentimental discussion of various topics, like in the chapter “The Bugbear of Ethics”, where Harmon advises “ethics in its place is a good thing...But there is such a thing as overdoing the ethical proposition”. Histrionics: Three Plays and Over All the Mountain Tops , by Thomas Bernhard. Bernhard once said “I despise actors, indeed I hate them, for they ally themselves at the least sign of danger with the audience and betray the author and completely identify with stupidity and feeble-mindedness. Actors are the destroyers and extermin
Read more