Thursday, September 02, 2004

A Trip to Zell Hell Zell Miller would be perfectly cast as one of the menacing mountain men in Deliverance II: The Sequel. I can just see him playing the one who tells the Atlanta suburbanites whose weekend river adventure has just turned into a nightmare, "You ain't a-goin' no damn wheres," as he brandishes his sawed-off shotgun. But Miller would probably prefer portraying the other mountain man, who does the nasty with Ned Beatty in canine position -- especially if he could get back at the Democrats by having Alec Baldwin cast in the Beatty role. 1:12:54 PM

Who's Your Baghdaddy? While Zell Miller was foaming at the mouth last night in Madison Square Garden, out at Flushing Meadows, Roger Federer, the world's top-ranked male tennis player, was withstanding a surprisingly stiff challenge from his second-round U.S. Open opponent, the unknown Marcos Baghdatis. Baghdatis is not, as one might assume from his name, a native of Iraq's capital city, but rather a Greek Cypriot. That divided island brings to my mind two things: Lawrence Durrell's great book, "Bitter Lemons," and Lyndon Johnson's not-so-thinly-veiled threat to the Greek ambassador in 1967 when informed that Washington's plan for settling the Cyprus dispute was unacceptable to the Greek parliament and contrary to its constitution: "Fuck your parliament and your constitution.  America is an elephant.  Cyprus is a flea.  Greece is a flea.  If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant's trunk, whacked good . . . ." During the Olympics, protestors in the streets of Athens demonstrated against the Iraq war.  My Greek isn't fluent enough to translate what they were chanting, but it must have been some Bush equivalent of "Hey, hey, LBJ!  How many boys did you kill today?" 10:36:56 AM