Current Events Watch

“My very eager mother just served us nine pizzas.” That’s how I learned how to remember the planets in the solar system. “A red Indian thought he might eat tobacco in church.” Politically incorrect, perhaps, but that’s how I learned to spell the big word for math. “Found on road dead.” I had a Ford truck once. It had some problems, ‘nuf said.

I do like little memory tricks like that, though. They can sometimes make you seem smarter than you actually be. Are. For example, did you know that 11 x 214 is 2,354? The 11 thing is one of my favorite memory tricks, no calculator needed. If you can’t figure it out, let me know. And yes, 214 was just a random number. Pick a number, any number.

“I’m a dinner jacket”: Ahmadinejad. Okay, so you have to drop a syllable, and make a couple of adjustments in pronunciation, but it still works as an effective memory tool to remember the Iranian president’s last name. Thanks, Whoopi. She mentioned on The View that that’s how she remembered his name: “I’m a dinner jacket.” (Yes, I watch The View.) It certainly stuck with me. His name just rolls off of my tongue now. I thought it might come in handy at dinner parties and such, although, unfortunately, I’ve found that he’s not often the topic of party conversation. Dang it, there’s seldom an opportunity to show off my prowess for namedropping of international leaders. I even come prepared with a way to remember his first name: My mood. “My mood: I’m a dinner jacket.” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Note to self: Alert the Whoop about that one. She no doubt attends more dinner parties than I do, maybe it would come in handy. I like to help out when I can.

So My Mood I’m A Dinner Jacket spoke today at Columbia University, amidst much controversy! Should he have been invited? Should he have been allowed to speak? Posters, demonstrations, all other things aside … my answer is “yes.” That question probably won’t come up in any future dinner party conversation, either, so I’ll just say so here, without even being asked for my opinion.

It’s that simple. Yes, he should have his chance to speak. Look, he was invited by Columbia president Lee Bollinger to speak on campus. Bollinger is a lawyer and a big First Amendment, freedom of speech proponent, so I understand and appreciate where he was coming from in inviting Ahmadinejad to speak. It isn’t like some Irianian madman, with or without requisite dinner jacket, stormed onto campus, demanded a podium, and forced the students at gunpoint to take their seats and pay attention (he’s smart enough to know that he’s not in Iran at the moment.) He had an invitation, and in a way, I admire him for RSVPing and showing up.

Bollinger made it clear from his introduction that he was no fan, however.

He said, “Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,� adding, “You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.�

Okay, that’s clear enough. And it does take balls to say something like that to your own invitee’s face. So why is everyone up Bollinger’s ass just because he’s giving this guy a forum in which to speak? Sometimes it might be a good idea to actually listen to what these people in the world have to say, how they respond to questions, without a media filter, nutcase or not. If I was a student at Columbia, I would have wanted to be there. Yeah, I think the guy is a weirdo. The Holocaust is a myth? Come on, how can anyone be so stupid? Of course, well-deserved ridicule is in order there. Okay, he’s not playing with a full deck. That’s pretty obvious.

The nuclear thing? Well, I’m not happy about that per se, but maybe they are actually just developing their nuclear program for energy, no weapon in mind whatsoever. Hey, we’ve got lots of nuclear energy plants here. No one made us stop. Of course, even if they do decide to sneak in some sort of bomb thing under the wire, well, we’ve got the nuclear bombs here, too, so we could teach them a lesson. It’s okay for us, just not for them. Not with a madman running the country. Whoops, we’ve got that, too. Never mind.

Then there’s his crazy questioning of the 9/11 attacks, and who is actually to blame. Well, I do question that, myself. Time to put on my dinner jacket. And so he’s not a big fan of Israel, neither am I. Maybe I should just move to Iran. No, wait. They have no homosexuals there, I wouldn’t fit in at all!

In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country,” Ahmadinejad said to howls and boos among the Columbia University audience.

“In Iran we do not have this phenomenon, I don’t know who has told you that we have it,” he said.

Ahmadinejad was challenged during his appearance on Amnesty International figures that suggested that 200 people had been executed in Iran so far this year, among them homosexuals.

All right, I know he’s a crazy dude. I don’t like him or his politics, or the way he runs his country, but he does have the right to speak, particularly in front of a group of college kids who are smart enough to call him on some of his outrageous policies, and put him on the spot, make him accountable. And like I said, he was invited, after all. Sometimes it’s best to hear the words straight from the idiot’s mouth. I really don’t understand the controversy. Good Lord, we’re forced to listen to the idiot running this country every day, and he wasn’t even invited.

Doesn’t really matter, Ahmadinejad’s days are probably numbered anyway. George Bush no doubt has another troop surge in the works, this time swapping out the “Q” for an “N“.

mahmoud ahmadinejad, iran, iranian president, george bush, columbia university