The Whippersnapper Incident

Clowns are infiltrating the city. I've seen them.
They're not even trying to hide it. I saw two of them standing on the northwest corner of Macarthur Park yesterday, at the intersection of Sixth and Park View, in all of their clownish, oversized shoe splendor. Then I saw another one sitting outside a dentist office.
Freaking clowns!
Congratulations are in order for our new President, Barack Obama, for winning and accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. The award given to him when in office for just eight months seems to be a direct rebuke to George W. Bush and the Republican Party and it's greedy corporate ways, as Obama is viewed as a new hope for the United States and the world, bringing back some of the respect, and call for national leadership that was so arrogantly dribbled away during the last eight years.
The Republicans, for the most part, and their media outlets, the Fox Propaganda Network and Rush Limbaugh are outraged that he has been awarded the prestigious prize, many stating that he has done nothing to earn it, and that he should not accept it. But of course he should, although many of Obama's accomplishments remain to be completed in the future, he has certainly taken the country in a new direction, which the Nobel committee certainly has recognized in it's choice. Now he only needs to end those two pesky military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, close Gitmo, create effective climate change policy, pass health care reform, and save the economy to prove that he has indeed earned it.
I think the Republicans are miffed because they've only had one of their presidents receive the Nobel Prize, to the Democrats three (Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and Obama), and their Theodore Roosevelt was probably much more progressive than Obama.
This says a lot about the Republican Party.
Congratulations are also in order for NASA, who succeeded in crashing the LCROSS space crafts into a crater on the moon (see, Back To The Moon). At approximately four thirty one yesterday morning a Centaur upper stage rocket (about the size of a bus) slammed into a crater near the southern polar region of the moon, to be followed about four minutes later by the Shepherding Spacecraft (about the size of a subcompact car), which during those last four minutes was busy analyzing the debris plume created by the Centaur, and radioing that data back to Earth, in the hopes of finding traces of good old water. Water, being prohibitively expensive to haul up in to space, would be great to have on the moon already if we ever want to have manned bases there someday.
The media have had a field day in the last couple of days with stories about "bombing the moon," and were rather disappointed with the slim visual results supplied by the Shepherding Spacecraft's cameras before its own demise, and the lack of entertainment value provided. Perhaps the next time we should have the Pentagon have a try and slam a 100 megaton nuclear weapon up there and really bomb it. It would constitute the best use of such a device, and could most likely be seen back on Earth with the naked eye (why is the eye always naked?). Maybe on the 4th of July.
More locally, yesterday morning, beginning at nine, my esteemed case managers, Erin and Paul, along with our lovely residence manager, Tianna, arranged a going away party for Joe, my neighbor just two doors down for the last six and a half years. Joe was moving on.
Tianna was making scrambled eggs as I walked in, and we discussed the Nobel Prize that our President had just won. Ray came down, Hardy was there, and when free food is involved you can guarantee that Robert will show up. Erin (come to think of it, an hour late for work. How will she ever survive a real job?) soon arrived with two boxes of assorted donuts. Paul arrived (also an hour late), as did Joe (who had moved out already), and breakfast was served. Eggs, a polish sausage, coffee, and donuts. Erin called out for us to take only one donut apiece at first, so when Robert thought no one was looking, grabbed an extra one he surreptitiously placed in an empty camera carrying case he had with him. I sat with Paul, Joe and Erin at a table, the others sat nearby. Erin had brought with her a MacDonalds cup of coffee, and someone made off with Paul's bottle of Arizona tea.
"Where's my iced tea?" he asked.
A search was made with no results. I have to say that I never actually saw him with the tea, but am fairly certain he had not hallucinated bringing the bottle in, but had no idea why anyone would take it.
For some reason unfathomable to me, my lovely case manager thought I was giving her a hard time.
"Erin," I told her, "they didn't install the new TV. You assured me they would install it yesterday..."
"I assured you," she vehemently replied, "that they were scheduled to install it yesterday."
And:
"I sent you an Email of 'The Lottery," Erin."
"It wasn't in my Email."
"Really? Because I sent it."
"I didn't get it."
"I sent it though..."
On and on. Aren't we adorable.
And I mistakingly ate the last half of her donut.
Patricia, Erin's lovely mother called her daughter on her Iphone, and Erin hurriedly got up, looked at me and pointed to her donut, then walked off to talk to her mom. I thought she meant that she wanted me to eat it, knowing how she is attempting to eat less crap. So I thought I was doing her a favor, really, and should be praised for my unselfish sacrifice by consuming all of those dreaded calories. What thanks did I get?
"Where's me donut?" she asked some fifteen minutes later upon returning.
"Your donut? I thought you wanted me to eat it," I told her.
"No, seriously... where's my donut?"
"I ate it! I thought you wanted me to."
"You're teasing me. Where is it?"
"I ate it I told you."
"When did I tell you to eat my donut?"
"I thought that's what you meant when you pointed to it before taking off for a half hour to talk on the phone."
"I had to leave. That was my mother. She loves me."
I gave her a donut that Joe had been saving, and who told her she could have.
"No! That's Joe's donut!"
"He said you could have it."
"I don't care."
I tore it in half and gave it to her. She eventually ate it.
She really wanted that donut.
"And by the way... what's your mother doing calling you during working hours..."
"Oh, you're just a little whippersnapper this morning, aren't you?"
"Whippersnapper!? No you're the whippersnapper..."
"No you are."
"No, you are."
"You are. It's getting close to your birthday, that's why you're acting up."
"You're the whippersnapper..."
"No you are..."
On and on.
No one has ever called me a whippersnapper before. No one.
This would not be the end of the outrages hurled at me that day by Erin. She later called me "demonic" for giving her a Jack In The Box taco at movie day (the 1963 version of The Haunting, which was freaking interrupted by the freaking maintenance man finally mounting the freaking TV).
No good deed goes unpunished.