Momar and Mahmoud rock Manhattan - A Blitzkrieg Bop through the Big Apple, featuring Hasselhoff and Winehouse

My eyes rested on two items today that Google News decided to categorize together for me.

One was David Hasselhoff's continuing struggle with the bottle. David claims this latest ride to the emergency room for alcohol poisoning was an 'ear infection' affecting his equilibrium. Sure, 'Michael' - tell it to K.I.T.T. It was his fifth such trip (emphasis on the fifth).

The other item was Mahmoud ImADickYaHeard's reaffirmation of (and pride in) his frequent remarks labeling the Holocaust a fabrication concocted by the Jews to steal his land. Well, not exactly - to steal the land of his friends. Er, not quite. (After all, I don't see him offering to drive the Palestinian people to the airport or help to paint their spare bedroom over the weekend.) Alright, to steal the land of people he despises a little less than the Jews. Or maybe just another grab at the spotlight and to look righteous and defiant (scoring points with the hardliners).

These are two ginormous goof balls whose ridiculous antics affect the world in different ways, to be sure. 'Mitch Buchannon' is mainly screwing up his immediate family and perhaps 'fans' who should know better. Maybe producers who should know better. ImADickYaHeard, on the other hand, is attempting to play on the pain and suffering of the disenfranchised, perpetrating a meta-lie (lying about people lying). Now to be clear, I'm no Israel apologist - they don't have a monopoly on right (or wrong). Ultimately, for any sort of real solution, the Israelis and Palestinians will both need to compromise. Sadly, that day may never come and it's dicks like ImADickYaHeard that'll help ensure it won't.

What do drunkard and dickweed have in common (besides being jack asses of greater or lesser magnitude)? Seemingly not much (though I hear through the grapevine that ImADickYaHeard is a closet Baywatch fan).

They do have a vaguely German connection in that Hasselhoff's 'music' is inexplicably popular in that country and ImADickYaHeard's worldview would have been favorably viewed by that country's leaders back in the 30s (though his race would most certainly not have been). But that's an unfair (and nonsensical) comparison based on a stereotype of the kind Iran's head bonehead would no doubt approve.

So it goes back to them both being goof balls. Fodder for the rest of us to have a bit of fun.

For instance, perhaps The Knight Rider could team up with Amy Winehouse, record a duet album of boozy classics (Tiny Bubbles, Tubthumping, One Bourbon One Scotch One Beer, Too Drunk To Fuck, Gin and Juice). Maybe go on tour? I think the New York Booze Cruise people are calling!

Speaking of duets, I think ImADickYaHeard should team up with Momar "Crazy Legs" GitOffMe. Mahmoud and Momar are both in New York toward the end of this week to catch some of the fall runway shows (and perhaps swing by the UN, if there's time). Two wild and (literally) crazy guys. Momar could give the hirsuted one some fashion tips ahead of their arrival.

Swinging batshit loony dictators out and about, doing the town! (Whatcha mean CBGB closed down!?! Momar, you promised! The Ramones! Blitzkrieg Bop! Johnny and Joey are dead? Next thing you'll tell me the Dictators have broken up! Well, there's always Scores!)

Or - and I'm just trying to tie this post up here somehow - we could book them on the Hasselhoff/Winehouse New York Booze Cruise.

We're talking wine(house and the liquid variety), women (Momar's Famed Female Body Guards) and song (David and Amy live!).

And after all the fun and games, we'll arrange for a nice long rest for them off the side of the boat into the East River (you too, Hasselhoff - let's see Mr. Baywatch swim with an anchor locked tight around your leg).

Sleep tight, boys.

Momar better blues

One of my fellow travelers at work tuned me into this vanity fair blurb on everyone's favorite goofball dictator, Momar Qaddafi. Qaddafi is a very weird melding of Calvin Klein, MC Hammer, Dr. No., Saddam Hussein, Lil' Kill Jong Il and Richard Branson. He's definitely not on Mr. Blackwell's Best Dressed List. But he has a certain style, a certain je ne sais qua.

He's got everything you'd want in a tin-horn, cult-of-personality middle eastern megalomaniac strongman, though he comes across more like he'd been filtered through maybe a Tarantino sensibility circa Kill Bill:

• An all-girl icy-hot security force - calling Robert Palmer, he's addicted to love, yepper
• A name that is spelled in twenty different ways regularly to "confuse" his enemies - got it
• Outfits to make Elton John blush in embarrassment - in spades
• A straight-outta-Shaft 70s 'fro - that's a far out affirmative, man
  
• The permanent rank of Colonel, though he rules over all his Generals - yes sir! He is, after all, a man of the people, not some out of touch Flag Officer.
  

Hey Maummer-man, picture it: Colonel Gaddafi's Banghazi Fried Lamb Kabobs. Finger choppin' good. Come on, Muammar, I'll help you get it off the ground, but I wouldn't be surprised if you're already two steps ahead of me. With 64-oz Momar Malts (souvenir cups!). Don't forget the sporks!

I feel as though I know Kadafi personally since I spent a couple years in my early twenties studying his moves intently for a living, mainly with the goal of helping to kill him, as it turned out. Well, not kill him, at least that wasn't the plan as I knew it. Annoy him, was more like it. Demonstrating "freedom of the seas" by moving to the edge of where international waters and airspace ended and Libya's sovereignty began.

The rub was that Momar claimed as his all the air and water 50 miles north of the internationally recognized demarcation. And he didn't like unwelcome neighbors crawling through what he thought was his front yard.

Day after day, I'd sit in the tactical analysis plot, a tiny smoke-filled room (I was probably sucking down a pack a day of the second hand variety) walled off in the center island of the aircraft carrier Eisenhower as we ambled across the Mediterranean Sea. It was 1983 and I was just a 20 year old intelligence analyst with delusions of rebellion, listening to Nina Hagen and the Ramones on the tape deck as I poured over information from a number of sources, classified and not.

[That's me on the right in June '84, along with a hundred of my 'friends'. I'm one of the sailors in the 'I' spelling out IKE - miserably hungover from too much English hard cider the night before, waiting for that clown Reagan to fly over us and 'read' what ship we were while on his way to Normandy to celebrate the 40th anniversary of D-Day. Thinking back, maybe they always did that when Reagan was around - perhaps that was the only way he could tell which ship he was looking at. But that's another story for another time.]

The dirty little secret of the intelligence community was that, at least back then and I can only speak for our little world, about 80% of the best stuff came off the wire from AP/UPI and Reuters and not from some exotic top secret piece of military technology. We'd stamp a bogus classification on the data when briefing to the higher ups in order to give it "credibility" and change a few words here and there but otherwise it was straight off the same news wire that the rest of the world was reading.

A lot of that time was focused on Libya, at least until Beirut literally blew up. Our fighter jets flew their "freedom of the seas" patrols deep within what our man Muammer thought was his private fishing hole, extending nearly half way to Sicily. Momar was fucking with his neighbor Chad (I think they were sweet for the same girl - Ba. dump), funneling money to rebels in that country. It seems our hair-brain in chief Buckaroo Bonzo Reagan didn't much like that, even while he was dispatching Ollie North to collect sacks of cash from Iran bound for the contra rebels in Nicaragua, hypocrisy in full bloom.

So we'd be told to 'buzz Quadafi's tower' and Khadafi'd be all "I'm going to destroy your ship!" should we be so stupid as to cross his "line of death".

Good times.

Meanwhile, back on the boat, we'd attempt to sift through all the info flowing in, trying to pinpoint where the Colonel's submarines were, the location of his MIG fighter jets, and the status and movement of his surface to air weapons.

I like to say we did the "Foxtrot" together: he would send his rusted, creaky, leaky, barely sea-worthy Russian hand-me-down Foxtrot diesel submarines out of their Libyan ports into parts unknown, presumably to hunt for The Great Satan. We'd lose them sometimes and suddenly they'd pop up in Yugoslavia or maybe just disappear for good, down to the floor of the Mediterranean. When I first saw that bad Kelsey Grammer submarine movie, Down Periscope, I thought of Muammer's Foxtrots.

Ahh, Momar - I miss ya, buddy. Good times, indeed. Remember, I was just playin' with ya! I was outa that biz by the time Ronnie and his minions got rough in 1987. But he's long gone and you're still Coloneling around, as stylish as ever (even more so - who are you wearing these days? Nicky Hilton?)

If you want to read about our exploits in 1983, check out this Time Magazine article.

John Bender is Dead - he's spilled his last can of paint in the garage

John Hughes wrote, directed and otherwise made a bunch of movies in the 80s that pretty much defined adolescence in that decade.

They rang true for me as well, though I ostensibly played my adolescence out a decade before that. Of course, I claim a certain prepubescent Dorian Gray sensibility to this day and may even be suffering from DG Syndrome (if I'd known, I'd have had it treated).

Like many, 16 Candles and Breakfast Club are my two favorites Hughes flicks. Though it isn't as well known, I also really loved 'Some Kind of Wonderful': Mary Stuart Masterson, wailing on her drum set, pining for the post-Mask/pre-Pulp Fiction Eric Stoltz who only has eyes for Lea Thompson. And 'Pretty in Pink' - classic. Hughes also wrote Lampoon's 'Vacation' and 'Uncle Buck' (great stuff) but also afflicted us with 'Home Alone' and the 'Flubber' remake (let's not talk about those in the eulogies, okay?). Still, it was the middle-class suburban teen comic joy and crises of a particular time and place that he put an indelible stamp on.

All-in-all, there aren't many writer/directors who defined a genre more than John Hughes. Just as Hitchcock owned mystery and suspense, Hughes was 80s teen angst.

School's out. The 80s are now truly over. And to underscore that, Grandpa Steve Tyler broke his shoulder falling off the stage, presumably trying to get up out of his rocker to sing. Sorry, Steve: if I'm old, you're old.

But let's get down to what the media really want to know: How would Michael Jackson have felt hearing about John Hughes death? Perhaps Larry King will have Germaine on to give us a take on MJ's favorite John Hughes movie.

Boy, it was a bag-o-laughs watchin' the boys and gals in Congress do the final preen, howl, mumble and let-go-my-ego tango prior to the Sotomayor vote. Both sides of the aisle outdid themselves in hot air, purple prose and piles of steaming horseshit. Watching CSPAN this evening (and then some of the highlights on the Daily Show) was truly entertaining. That's where my head is at.

Bringing my thought process (process?) full circle, I wonder if Sotomayor could fairly and impartially judge a John Hughes movie contest? Or would her viciously racist and radical latino-only agenda come to the fore and compel her to keep writing in La Bamba even though didn't have a hand in that? I'm sure some variant of that is on the minds of the right wing bozos bouncing around Congress. Actually, that's probably too reasonable for most of that ilk.

We all know what a melting pot of humanity a Hughes film festival would attract, given the rainbow of diversity threading through that jumbo DVD box set (if by rainbow, I mean white, Anglo-Saxon upper middle class suburban Chicago teenagers). Some were tall, though. And some short. At least shorter than the taller ones.

Hughes was about as white bread (and white bred) as they come. Which makes him compadres with most of the Supremes (Thomas included, let's be frank now - I'm sure he's rockin' Barry Manalow and Perry Como on the iPod, occasionally getting 'ethnic' by slipping in some Bee Gees).

Will Sonia be able to deal with movie night at the courthouse? I think she needs to come clean here.