Gosh.
I’ve been thinking.
Should I be comfortable with people my own age?
I’ve been noticing things.
It’s not the flashes of forgetfulness, although my reading glasses disappear more often these days and retrieving last names is no longer done instantly.
No, that’s not it.
It’s not the car keys which desert me from time to time because I always know where my car is parked.
No, it’s not that.
Although the torso is more-so these days, that’s not the issue causing my discomfort. (All right ... sometimes!)
No … it’s what has got me thinking about Joe.
Joe Biden. Our president.
Who has been nicknamed by some “Sleepy Joe.”
Or “Slow Joe.”
And sometimes referred to as “No Mojo Joe.”
Used lately as a dartboard by newspaper columnists and TV pundits voicing concern over his age; low popularity polls; noticeable slips, trips and pauses pauses while speaking, walking or stepping up; Biden is now battling a barrage of criticism as a poster “child” for ageism in his job performance despite giving his country more than four decades of public service.
It’s not surprising young voters are fed up with “old” pols and a government of gerontocracy. After all, President Biden will be in his 80s at the end of his first term in office.
But if I were Joe, I’d be honked off for a lot of reasons, especially the constant flow of geriatric commercials pitched daily on popular cable news channels inundating us with the downside of old age … which consistently bracket news segments!
Political news junkies who switch daily from CNN to MSNBC to FOX News must be checking their blood pressure and oxygen levels every time a trim President Biden is shown stumbling over a word, tripping over his dog, or dipping to mount a stair step.
Ads starring the elderly are pitching supplements boosting brain health; big Pharma miracles; mesothelioma mayhem; pill promotions; ad nauseam Medicare supplement commercials pitched by old sports stars; powerful stimulants raising what has become difficult to deploy in old age; and the parade of ads urging children of the “elderly” to find the right “home” for mom and dad.
It’s enough to make one run for an oxygenator!
So you go, Joe.
We voted for you to do your thing, not just our thing.
Ivana tell you…
For years, Donald Trump’s first wife, Ivana, who died at the bottom of her New York staircase Thursday, was the fodder of the celeb part of my “brokerage house of information” column decades ago.
Her divorce from Donald Trump made national headlines; a litany of agony including news of a facelift to look like actress/social maven Catherine Oxenberg, in an attempt to look like her husband’s paramour before he dallied with his eventual mistress, Marla Maples, his second wife and mother of his fourth child.
The divorce — and two more marriages to playboy husbands with an inordinate amount of vowels in their Italian last names — was more fodder.
Then came whispered stories of a lonely woman who tippled a bit too much. Reports she worried about her children and was glad Trump’s tenure in office was over so they could move on did not come as a surprise. Her children loved her. Such a sad ending.
It’s in the stars!
Actor William “Star Trek” Shatner is a stunner.
The actor who has traversed the universe via a TV script was asked his reaction to the Webb telescope images from distant outer space released this week:
“Well, they are the result of human beings in search of pure knowledge,” he said.
Then the man known as Capt. Kirk added: “So why don’t we know what drives us to kill and maim? The more you know the less you know, I guess.”
In 2021, Shatner told the press he ”was in grief at what had been done to the Earth,” after exiting the “Blue Origin” space capsule’s flight to and from the brink of outer space.
“We were on the brink of terrible things,” he said, referring to the devastation of climate change on Earth by the human race.
The more you know the less you know, I guess.
Sneedlings…
Blimey!! Penny Mordaunt, 49, Great Britain’s minister of state for trade policy — who is in line to possibly succeed Prime Minister Boris Johnson, briefly spent time early in her career as a magician’s assistant. … Congrats to veteran journalist James O’Shea, former editor of the L.A. Times and former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, on his appointment as chairman of the Middle East Broadcasting Network’s board of directors. And that should bring his coverage of the world full circle. … Saturday birthdays: NFL legend Barry Sanders, 54: actor Will Ferrell, 55, and actress Phoebe Cates, 59. Sunday birthdays: retired German Chancellor Angela Merkel, 68; actor David Hasselhoff, 70; actor Donald Sutherland, 87, and retired Cook County Circuit Judge Edward H. Marsalek, 98.
