Every seems to enjoy these posts from Scott Turner of Rocky Sulilvan's in Red Hook. My thanks to Scott for letting me post them here:
Greetings Pub Quiz Winter's End Prognosticators…
By now you've heard the big news. No, not President Obama's stimulus package and the Republicans' sore-loser obstructionism. Not the Steelers' big Super Bowl win. Not even Captain Sully's curing cancer, eliminating war and ushering in the New Golden Age of Peace and Enlightenment.
The big news is this:
Charles G. Hogg, or as he's rechristened once a year, Staten Island Chuck, went after Mayor Bloomberg at yesterday's Groundhog Day event.
New York City has a psychopathic need to one-up everyone else. To that end, every second day of February the city yanks a groundhog out of a box constructed out of Currier & Ives cozy. It's not enough to let Punxutawney, PA have the limelight once a year. Just like New York had to one-up Boston on the marathon thing, Telluride and Cannes on the film festival thing, and New Jersey on the Nets thing — er, maybe not that last one.
Yesterday, there were glitches in the groundhog photo op. Chuck
wouldn't come out for his closeup. The mayor resorted to his usual
tactic — shameless bribery — to coerce Chuck into doing what he
wanted by repeatedly dangling a yummy corncob in front of Chuck.
"Christine Quinn always falls for this…"
This was supposed to make Chuck comply with the mayor's agenda. Hey, it worked on the City Council members who voted for Bloomberg's monarchistic term-limits bill. How hard could a groundhog be?
Hard,
it turns out. Chuck kept grabbing the corncob and retreating back into
his prop home. Finally, Bloomberg's taunting got Chuck got so fed up
he bit the mayor. But good, too.
Biting the hand that just cut 15% from the Staten Island Zoo's budget
His Highness finally got his paws on Chuck, and disdainfully held
him at arm's length. Bloomberg looked as comfortable with Chuck as he
does the average New Yorker.
"Don't I own someone who can hold this thing for me?"
Because Bloomberg is an inherently funny man, his remarks on The Bite Heard 'Round Barrett Park ranged from "given the heightened response against terrorism, and clearly in this
case a terrorist rodent who could very well have been trained by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, I'm not at liberty to say any more than that" to "if the district attorney wants to press charges, I leave
it to the Staten Island District Attorney to do so."
Oh…and to further trump Punxutawney Phil,
who emerged to sunny weather, a shadow, and the prognostication of six
more weeks of winter, the mayoral-biting — er, weather-predicting
ceremony on Staten Island insisted that spring will arrive early this
year.
Mayor Bloomberg usually gets it wrong, be it the disastrous Atlantic Yards,
his teach-for-tests school system or a bullied groundhog's weather
forecast. His Honor's usual cowardice forces others to get it wrong
for him — yesterday's fall guy was Chuck.
I'm looking out the windows here at Pub Quiz Actual to see what the mayor's early spring looks like, and as usual, Bloomberg's lack of awareness doesn't disappoint:
