Monday, April 01, 2013

The Oppenheimer Report 4/1/13


 
Happy April Fools Day! Did you play a practical joke on somebody? I dressed up like a giant squirrel and chased Jasper around the house. She was not amused. Seems like the big joke is on all the folks in the eastern half of the continent who are still struggling in winter’s stubborn grasp. Last year around this time I was sunbathing, but this morning I woke up to a mini blizzard. Gosh I love the Great White North!

 Of course yesterday was Easter Sunday, and to celebrate we had Hasenpfeffer for dinner. I’m kidding, but someday, when I am having a “slow news” week, perhaps I will reprise my story of the notorious “bunny lab” I experienced in boarding school. I have two amusing recollections of Easters past. First, when my sister and I were very young, my mom had us color some hard-boiled eggs and then she hid them around the house so we could have an Easter egg hunt. Mom hid thirteen eggs, but my sister and I only found twelve. The trouble was, Mom couldn’t remember where she’d hidden the last one. About a month later it became readily apparent, when the living room began to smell like a rotting corpse. Mom had hidden that thirteenth egg on top of a lampshade in the living room, inches away from a hot light bulb. It took a while to get the stench of that rotten egg out of our living room, and that was my last egg hunt. Creative genius that I am, I always preferred the coloring part to the hunting part anyhow. I remember a similar hunt that used to happen after a Seder supper at Passover: the hunt for the afikoman. The head of the household would hide a piece of matzo wrapped in a napkin and the children ran around tearing up the furniture to find it. In our household, the prize for discovering the afikoman was “gelt,” - not the real deal, but foil-wrapped chocolate coins. I think this was supposed to liven up the ceremony, but it was too little too late for this Jew. There is simply no excuse to serve gefilte fish.

 My second Easter memory was that it was a tradition on Easter Sunday for my father to take the family to the Buffalo Club for a fancy brunch. The Buffalo Club is a venerable, formerly male members-only, club in downtown Buffalo. I liked going there because the food was good and because it is a beautiful club. Unfortunately, for special occasions, the Buffalo Club featured their own special brand of entertainment known as The Travelling Musicians. As I recall they were a trio of mediocre, older musicians who travelled from room to room in the club with their instruments, serenading the guests while they ate. They were quite loud and annoying close up, and I don’t know about you, but I am not a big fan of in-your-face live music while I am trying to eat or make conversation. I’m pretty sure there was an accordion in the mix, and that was a deal breaker for me. I felt a little like I would were I to be “surprised” at a Chucky Cheese with a loud, multi-employee Happy Birthday serenade, accompanied by a cheap cupcake and a sparkler. For me, the funniest part about these guys was the bassist. He was a very small guy, and he didn’t look like he was in the best shape. After schlepping his bass fiddle around from room to room for a few hours, he’d be perspiring and visibly winded. By the time The Travelling Musicians reached our table, it looked very much like the bassist was going to vapor lock. My very prim and proper father was insistent on proper table manners at the club, but he would still laugh whenever I pointed this out. One year, to my pleasant surprise, the Buffalo Club broke from tradition, perhaps while the little bassist recovered from open heart surgery, and hired as their Easter entertainment The Pointless Brothers, a very good Buffalo bluegrass band. While they were in my opinion much better and far more entertaining musicians than The Travelling Musicians, they dressed as if they were extras from Deliverance, and to my knowledge were never invited back.       

 North Korea has been doing some sabre rattling this past week, spewing a lot of incendiary rhetoric about incinerating the Western enemy. Certainly we have heard this all before, and while most experts slough this off as Kim Jung Il’s son and successor just flexing his flabby, doughy, little muscles to garner support from his starving and destitute subjects, it is nevertheless unnerving to hear. That little ball of shmaltz seems even more unbalanced than his dad was, and while his shenanigans may simply be diplomatic posturing, he does have some powerful weapons at his disposal. What if someone calls this little Korean Michelin Man’s bluff and lobs a grenade at him, triggering some kind of escalating conflict? If we could only figure out a way to infuse some of our rich western culture into the mainstream of North Korean society, I think our troubles would be over. Hijack their televisions, and pipe in some Jersey Shore, and Real Housewives of Newark. I firmly believe Snookie, the Khardashians, and Honey Booboo are our secret weapons. The Chinese may be manipulating their currency to dump their products on western markets; the North Koreans may be parading their dubiously effective nuclear arsenals in front of the international stage, but communism is no match for mind-altering insipience of reality television. Gotta go, we’re having bunny leftovers for dinner tonight. 
 
   -Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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