I was showing somebody my John McCain painting the other night ...

Which was great.  She was highly appreciative. Although you should have seen her face when I told her the only beer I had was Pabst.

"Blue Ribbon!" I cried no avail.  But that's another story.  This is the Senator ...

Fast forward to a moment ago when, somehow, I wandered across a U-Tube clip of Keith Olbermann talking about David Letterman's recent retirement announcement.  Which, you're thinking, has nothing to do with John McCain.

Which is the kind of wrong thinking that drives people like you, dear reader, like lemmings to The Year of Magical Painting.  Even after I stopped writing it you people kept coming.  So I had to start it back up again.  Which, let me promise you, pisses me off.

I think we're getting a little off message, don't you?
Possibly.  But what's the point of any of this shit anyway?
Fair question.  But tell me again about Keith Olbermann.
You're fucking with me, aren't you?
How so?
With the clear reference to George asking Lenny to tell him about the rabbits one last time.
I don't know how to answer that.
No surprise, Persephone.  What's Xerxes up to?
He's gone, man.  Forget about him.  Tell me about Olbermann.
Okay, but only because I wanted to talk about it in the first place.
Perfectly reasonable.
Thank you.
No, thank you.

So.  It should be noted up front that Olbermann is, most of the time, a pantload.  Some might call him a pantload's pantload -- the gist of the concept being that only a genuine pantload can recognize the true genius in Olbermann's pantloading, if that's even a verb.

But the opposite side of the coin is that when he's on his game he can be a wonderful television presence.  Top end talking head.  That's why, presumably, he keeps his job, or gets new jobs after he loses his old ones, despite his generally annoying nature.

Thus this -- Olbermann at what one might call the top of his game on Letterman's retirement ...



Which leads, inexorably, to this -- which is a hoot ...



Somewhere, post-Lehman, somebody wrote on one of my paintings "Sarah Palin was, like Lehman, the first big mistake."