DEBATE

I watched tonight and was struck by one thing. John McCain is really short. This doesn't matter whatsoever. He' s a tougher son of a bitch than I could ever be. If I were at the Hanoi Hilton I'd be looking for the pillow concierge, so don't get me wrong. I'm not saying this to say it matters. It's just what I kept noticing. His height is listed as 5' 7". I've read both that Obama is 6' even and 6' 1". Obama looks much taller. I don't know if that's because he's standing next to McCain or if it is because he is so scrawny. Vern Troyer is still pissed that he was closed out of the debate and I agree it would have helped McCain had he been included.

Anyway, it got me wondering, so I did a little research and according to www.heightsite.com there were only three U.S. presidents shorter than John McCain. James Madison, Benjamin Harrison and Martin Van Buren. Madison was the shortest at 5' 4". The same site claims the four tallest U.S. presidents were Thomas Jefferson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Abraham Lincoln and William Jefferson Clinton. If you were to look at tallest U.S. presidents without a constant erection it would be Thomas Jefferson, Lyndon B. Johnson and Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln being the tallest at 6' 4".

Does it matter in getting elected? According to a strange wikipedia article, in elections where we knew the candidates heights, 25 times the taller candidate won, but 18 times the shorter candidate won. 3 of those 18 times though, the taller candidate won the popular vote but lost in the electoral college. So who knows.

Here's the full list. And again, yes, of COURSE I know it doesn't matter. What really matters this election year is that Sarah Palin has a nice ass.


5ft4 James Madison

5ft6 Benjamin Harrison, Martin Van Buren

5ft7 John Quincy Adams, John Adams, William McKinley

5ft8 Ulysses S. Grant, William H. Harrison, James Polk, Zachary Taylor

5ft8.5 Rutherford Hayes

5ft9 Millard Fillmore, Harry S. Truman

5ft9.5 Jimmy Carter

5ft10 Calvin Coolidge, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Theodore Roosevelt

5ft10.5 Dwight D. Eisenhower

5ft11 George W. Bush, Grover Cleveland, Herbert Hoover, Woodrow Wilson

5ft11.5 Richard Nixon

6ft James Buchanan, Gerald R. Ford, James Garfield, Warren Harding, John F. Kennedy, James Monroe, William H. Taft, John Tyler

6ft1 Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan

6ft2 Chester Arthur, George Bush, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Washington

6ft2.5 Bill Clinton, Thomas Jefferson

6ft3Lyndon B. Johnson

6ft4Abraham Lincoln

PALIN VS. BIDEN TONIGHT

Sure, this promises to be entertaining. Biden who's known for using a thousand words when ten would suffice vs. Palin who can't seem to find the right words ever. When I first saw Palin give her speech at the RNC I was actually a bit impressed. Then we learned how full of shit she is, like the Bridge To Nowhere for example. And her very limited interviews since have proven she's way over her head. Many of her answers to relatively simple questions have been incoherent.

But...

what bugs me is so many people treating her with kid gloves and acting like media should 'back off'. The McCain camp has been limiting her exposure to interviews by design because they know she can't keep up. For so many Americans to act like 'it's only the vice-presidency; it's a do-nothing job anyway' is absurd.

Do they realize she'd be that cliched heartbeat away from the presidency, and under a man who'd be the oldest elected and who has a history of cancer?

Also, consider this. We've had 43 presidents including our current president. 9 times the vice-president has had to step up and assume the presidency. 43 presidents. 9 times. That's huge! Four of the nine was due to illness (Harrison died of pneumonia in 1842 making John Tyler president, Taylor in 1850 bringing in Fillmore, Harding of a heart attack in 1923 ushering in Calvin Coolidge and Roosevelt's death bringing in Truman). You could argue we have much better medicine now. But 4 more of those 9 were due to assassination. Lincoln to Andrew Johnson, Garfield to Arthur, McKinley to Teddy Roosevelt, and Kennedy to Johnson. That's almost 10 percent of the administrations. That's huge. The last one of the 9 was when Nixon resigned by the way.

So my point is let's not discount the serious nature of tonight's debate and certainly not the importance of asking how qualified these two really are to assume the presidency. History has taught us it happens all the time.

QUICK UPDATE

I'm going out of town for several days so I won't be posting anything here for a week or so. Thought this would be a good time to get some folks caught up on things. If you've followed this blog from the start then you already know all this, but I keep getting more and more questions from people I meet who want to know what happened and when/if we're coming back.

Again, Bill Doyle and I decided we didn't want to stay with the CBS owned 97.1 property in Detroit when our contract was running out last year. It still amazes me how many people remain mad at the company thinking we were fired. Nothing could be further from the truth. They offered us a multi-year contract to stay (even after the format went sports) to do a non-sports morning drive show. We did that for the last 9 and a half weeks of our time there until they realized we were NOT going to re-up with them and they took us off the air after our December 7th show because local management didn't want to allow us after nearly a decade of service and good ratings to say goodbye to our listeners. It is sad and typical of the industry. So again, no, we were never 'fired'. We chose to leave and they wanted us to stay.

The next issue is why we haven't been on air since. Under our old CBS contract there was one of these onerous non-compete clauses which states that if we leave, for a period of 12 months after the end of our contract, we legally aren't allowed to accept an on-air job with another company's radio station in the Detroit market. Basically it is designed to ruin your career in a particular market by hoping the fan base will move on and forget all about you so that CBS doesn't have to compete against you. CBS made it clear they would invoke that clause, so while we entertained calls from places like Dallas, Chicago and others, Bill and I decided to tough it out with no income for one year so that we could return to Detroit. We always wanted to stay, just with a better company. Keep in mind our CBS contract technically ended on Dec. 31st of '07, meaning we cannot legally be on the air till January of '09 which is about 14/15 weeks away now. Even though they took us off the air after Dec. 7th they filled in the time with re-runs till the end of the year while they continued trying to call us about staying, so in other words that 12 month clock didn't start ticking till midnight of Dec. 31st/Jan. 1.

We'll see in January if the CBS plan worked and it rendered us forgettable and killed our careers. I hope not, because we sure haven't forgotten about all you guys!

Don't mean to bore all who already knew this. Like I said, I just get asked about it all the time and I wanted to once again clear it up. I realize people get busy and have much more happening in their lives than the goings on of one radio show.

Talk to you soon.

MIKE THOMPSON

the cartoonist of the Free Press together with some other very talented folks came up with this gem. An homage to Kwame as he leaves office. If this doesn't make you laugh out loud it will at least make you smile. Check it out. http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080918/BLOG2401/80917007

OLD BITCH IN THE PARKING LOT

I had my kids out the other day. It was me, my 3 year old son and 20 month old girl. I had just parked my Explorer outside a discount store. Non-compete clauses invoked by CBS equals frequent visits to discount stores. It was raining, so I was glad I found a good spot not too far from the doors. I had just gotten out of the car and had Jack's door open, was about to unbuckle him, when the entire car lurched with a loud BANG.

A car had been backing out of a space and ran right into my back bumper. This was no tap.

The car starts driving away. I close my son's door and run alongside then in front of the car, yelling for it to stop. Wouldn't you know it. 85 year old looking woman driver. Once she stops I walk to her window where she's already got her excuse ready. It's important to point out that she KNEW she hit me and was driving off anyway. She knew she hit me because before I could say anything she says, "Oh, the back window is broke and doesn't roll down anymore so I didn't see ya - "

I cut her off with something about it not mattering; that she hit my car and was running away.
I would submit if you have to lower a glass window to see, perhaps you shouldn't be driving.
At this point her eyes narrowed and she dropped her I'm-just-a-poor-sweet-old-grandma-so-you-have-to-feel-sorry-for-me bullshit.

"And you're gonna make a big stink about it!?" she says to me. I hadn't even looked at my car yet, but the point was she knew she hit me and she was going to leave the scene!

I tell her damn right I'm going to, that I'm going to call the cops since she was taking off. I then went to look at my car and she got out to survey it with me. I could not believe, with how hard our car rocked, that there was no visible damage. It was one of those things where the bumpers just lined up perfectly and took it just right. So she sees no damage then says to me, "And what are you going to show them?"

I knew exactly what she was getting at. It was more in her body language than what she'd said. "So if I call a cop out here what are you saying? That you're going to lie and say you never hit me?"

This old, twisted bitch says, "Exactly."

At this point, with my kids out of earshot still tucked in the car, I called her a few choice words, and she gets in her car and arrogantly starts to drive off. Now the rain is coming down hard. I had her plate number. I could have called. Maybe I should have called. But it's raining, I have a 3 year old and a 20 month old who would get crankier by the minute as we'd sit around and wait. And I can imagine in the end nothing would have been done about this old bat. We are seeing more an more movement towards bigger easier to read road signs and wider traffic lanes all to accommodate people who should instead be dealt with harshly. I suppose what bothered me most about all this is many of us have this image of the poor doddering old driver who doesn't even know the havoc they're causing and can only see their independence slipping away. But here was a woman who was probably a bitch when she was 25, still a bitch whe she was 45, still at 65 and even now when she was 85, and who couldn't physically handle driving any longer but was mentally still with it enough to know right from wrong. And chose wrong over right.

HURRICANES FROM SPACE

As hurricane Ike gets ready to arbitrarily raise gasoline prices, or do whatever the hell it is going to do, click on this link and check out some very cool images courtesy NASA. Spectacular shots of hurricanes from outer space in amazing detail. It's cool shit.
Here's the link. http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/09/hurricanes_as_seen_from_orbit.html

"DETROIT, YOU HAVE SET ME UP FOR A COMEBACK."

Did I just hear that right? Oh man, I think this thug's street name should be Narcissus he's so freakin' in love with himself. Tonight's goodbye speech was actually a campaign speech. Unbelievable. How about him going on the attack that this was all politics and going after Jennifer Granholm as if she just had it out for him. What else was she supposed to do when City Council petitions her for a hearing? Ignore it? Said no? That would have been complete dereliction of duty. Then he goes on to list his administration's wonderful accomplishments and wraps it up with saying 'you have set me up or a comeback'. He wants to run again someday. Mind boggling.