The Daily Dose/November 17, 2016
By Gaylon Kent
America’s Foremost Humorist

HUT, HUT HIKE: Official Daily Dose fave the Mount Union Purple Raiders football team opens the NCAA Division III football tournament today facing the Hobart Statesmen in Geneva, New York.

Fly In The Ointment: The big surprise is Mount Union will not open the playoffs as champions of the Ohio Athletic Conference (OAC).

Uh, Could You Repeat That, Please: Yeah, we’re surprised, too. After 24 consecutive OAC titles and 112 consecutive regular season wins, our Purple Raiders were defeated by the John Carroll 31-28 Saturday, giving the Blue Streaks their fourth OAC title and first since the Paleozoic Era

Hard Earned And Well Done: John Carroll played a fine game, forcing four Mount Union turnovers, their highest turnover count since the Harding Administration. Not particularly impressed by playing at Mount Union for the conference title, they had the skill and poise to score the winning touchdown with 38 seconds left.

FunFact: The Raiders will play a road playoff game for the first time since the 1996 national semifinals where they beat Wisconsin-Lacrosse 39-21 at Camp Randle Stadium.

Breakdown Segment: The Purple Raiders will visit the Hobart Statesmen, co-champions of a group of misfits known as the Liberty League.  The Statesmen (9-1) are in the playoffs for the 12^th time and their best finishes were quarterfinal losses in 2014 and 2012.

This will be the fourth meeting between Mount Union and Hobart and the Statesmen lead the series. Hobart won the first two meetings, in 1972 and 1973 and Mount Union took the last meeting, 42-7 in the second round of the 2008 playoffs.

Getting To Know You: Hobart College is an all-male liberal arts college in Geneva, New York. Along with the all-female William Smith College, they are known as the Colleges of the Senecas because they are both located on Lake Seneca and while separate schools, they share many things, including websites and can trace their lineage back to the Geneva Academy established in 1797.

Hobart is named for an Episcopalian bishop named John Henry Hobart, and became Hobart College in 1852.

Dry, Technical Matter: Hobart’s teams used to be known as the Deacons. Their lacrosse team has won 15 national championships.

Speaking Of National Championships: Mount Union is looking for their 13^th Division III national football championship, a record.

Jolly Good: As usual, the D-III playoffs sound like the draw for the annual country club tennis tournament, with Coe, Alfred, Olivet and Wesley all qualifying.

For The Record: As they should be, John Carroll is the top seed in their region and are in the same bracket as the evil bastards from Wisconsin-Whitewater. John Carroll opens against Olivet while UW-Wherever opens at Lakeland.

Oh, Jesus H: The Mount Union/Hobart winner will play the winner of the Johns Hopkins/Randolph Macon game.

SPEAKING OF COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYOFFS: The NCAA still refuses to conduct a major division football playoff, with men huddled in a conference room determining who will play in a four-team playoff, a playoff that is only held after we are force fed the Kraft Velveeta and Tostitos Bean Dip bowls, games that probably feature at least one team with a losing record.

Good Luck With That: Choosing the participants this year will be a lot of fun this year three of the four teams currently in the top four have a loss and some may not even qualify for their conference’s title game. Speculating on what might happen is futile, though fun, and it is entirely possible the selection committee may have a fiasco on its hands that would have people longing for the simpler days of the BCS.

Get Your Official Daily Dose Policy Right Here: We say this every hour on the hour this time of year: a 32-team NCAA Division I football playoff could begin Thanksgiving weekend and end on New Year’s Day, the last day anyone really cares about college football. Anyone who things this would become an American classic quicker than you can say “Electoral College” is deluding themselves.

“…SHALL NOT PERISH FROM THE EARTH…UNLESS YOU ELECT DONALD TRUMP…”: Abraham Lincoln delivers one of mankinds seminal speeches, the Gettysburg Address, on this date in 1863, at the dedication of the Soldier’s National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

At just over two minutes, it was one hour and 58 minutes shorter than the opening speech by noted American statesman Edward Everett. What’s funny is that a two hour speech was more or less what people expected to hear at events of this sort back then and his speech was rather well received.

Five handwritten copies of the speech remain, all a bit different, and History is not entirely sure which one, if any, was read at the ceremony.

Another Small Step: Apollo 12 Commander Pete Conrad and Lunar Module Pilot Alan Bean become the third and fourth humans to walk on the moon on this date in 1969. They would make two moon walks and return to Earth on November 24.

Dry, Technical Matter: America is approaching the day when it will have no left alive who walked on the moon. Five of the twelve who walked on the moon are dead and the two youngest are 81. It will be our loss.

More Official Daily Dose Policy: Regular readers of this crap know we are on record as saying it is a shame we have not put men on Mars yet. Had we wanted to, we could have done this in the 1980’s. Now we can’t even put anyone in space anymore.

Oh, Why Bother: Today marks the 16,078 day since man has walked on the moon.

Thought For The Day: America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow.– Gene Cernan, commander, Apollo 17 and last human to set foot on the moon.

Answer To The Last Trivia Question: There was not a trivia question last time, silly.

Today’s Stumper: Abraham Lincoln was ill when he delivered the Gettysburg Address. What illness was he coming down with?  – Answer next time!

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Rise of the Libertarians…Or not.

The Daily Dose/November 17, 2016
By Gaylon Kent
America’s Foremost Humorist

RISE OF THE LIBERTARIANS…SORT OF: On the plus side, Libertarians shattered previous election highs in this past election, both nationally and locally. Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson tripled his national vote total, and Libertarian candidates for Congress showed similar gains.

Fly In The Ointment: On the downside, the gains weren’t substantial enough to make much of a difference.

Taking everything into consideration – almost universal dissatisfaction with our government, the two worst major party candidates ever, et al – and it would not have been completely surprising to see Libertarians get ten, perhaps 15 percent of the vote…Perhaps one or two would have been elected to Congress.

Scoreboard, Baby: But it didn’t happen. Not even close, really. This wasn’t too surprising and we speak from some experience in this matter.

Gaylon…Vote Early, Vote Often: We were the Colorado Libertarian nominee for the United States Senate in 2014 and a nominee for the House of Representatives this year. Having been out there hustling votes for a couple of campaigns, it’s not surprising at all.

Quote That Sucker: One of the things we hear frequently on the campaign trail is “You know, Gaylon, I like what you stand for, too bad you have no chance to win”.

Well, heck, if you think I have no chance, then I have no chance. On the other hand, if you do think I have a chance, and you tell ten people who think we have a chance then, hell, we have ourselves a groundswell.

That never happened, though. The problem, I’ve decided, is us humans stick with the familiar even when it is not serving us well and the two-party system is nothing if not familiar. America has been a two-party country since before the Revolution. The only thing that’s changed are the names of the parties. We’ve gone from Federalists and Democratic-Republicans to Democratic-Republicans and Whigs to Whigs and Democrats to Democrats and Republicans.

Running The Numbers: Gaylon For Congress this year did do better than Gaylon For US Senate did two years ago. In 2014 we got 2.6 percent of the vote and our 52,864 votes were a record for a third-party candidate in a Colorado US Senate election. This year we got five percent of the vote – though the actual vote total didn’t break any records – almost twice as many as two years ago, and about average for Libertarian House candidates this year.

We weren’t a factor, though. We were hoping the margin between the major party candidates would have been close enough for the other loser to blame us for stealing their votes, but the Republican incumbent easily won reelection.

GREAT MOMENTS IN FORMING A COUNTRY: The United States and Panama – officially recognized as a country only a few exciting days earlier – sign a treaty allowing the US to build a canal across Panama.

Dry, Technical Diplomatic Matter: Hilariously, no Panamanians signed the treaty. Secretary of State John Hay signed for the United States, and a Frenchman known as Philippe-Jean Bunau-Varilla signed for Panama despite the fact he had not been in Panama for 17 years.

Bunau-Varilla was the French Diplomatic Representative in Panama, a title he purchased from a group of zany Panamanian rebels. He was no more entitled to sign a treaty on behalf of Panamanians than Santa Claus was.

For most of 1903 Panama had been part of Colombia, but the rascals in the Colombian Senate rejected a treaty that would have given the US a perpetual lease to build a canal in present-day Panama.  US President T. Roosevelt would have none of this, of course, and in November Panama was recognized as an independent nation, with the US Navy on the scene to prevent pesky Colombian interference.

IT ALL STARTED WITH A MOUSE: Steamboat Willie, the first synchronized sound cartoon, premieres in New York City on this date in 1928. Directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, Steamboat Willie had been produced over the summer at a cost of about $5,000, about $70,000 in today’s money.

So This Is Where That Phrase Came From: In Jonestown, Guyana, Jim Jones and members of his People’s Temple drink Kool-Aid laced with poison in a mass murder-suicide on this date in 1978. 918 Americans died.

It was the single largest deliberate loss of American civilian life until the 9/11 attacks. Jones himself died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Thought For The Day: One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world.– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harvard Divinity School address, 7/15/1838

Answer To The Last Trivia Question: After the Democratic-Republican Party won the presidency in 1800 (Thomas Jefferson), the next party to win the presidency was the Democratic Party in 1828 (Andrew Jackson).

Today’s Stumper: The Trivia feature will return.

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The Day In Trump, solid On This Date Action

The Daily Dose/November 17, 2016
By Gaylon Kent
America’s Foremost Humorist

THE DAY IN TRUMP: We elected him despite everything we knew about him. Our favorite disqualifier was Trump University being nothing more than a boiler room operation designed to bilk people out of their money. There were dozens of others, of course, and I’m sure you have your fave.

Trump was a misfit of a private citizen, an embarrassment as a candidate and – since past performance is the best indicator of future performance – will probably be an embarrassment as president.

OTOH: It is possible, not particularly likely, but possible, that Trump will be OK, though. Maybe he does want good things for our country. Or maybe he just wants to draw more attention to himself. It’s his only real talent and he does it splendidly.

OTOH II: Maybe he will realize the very best way to draw attention to himself is to really make America great again. To produce an America that once again is looked up to and respected by the rest of the world, instead of presiding over an America that currently is not doing itself or the planet any particular good.

Don’t Even Start: Hillary Clinton would not have been any better. She could care less about anything other than consolidating wealth and power in her and her family. Her transition would be doing nothing more than laying the groundwork for doing that as president.

One Can Hope: Maybe – maybe – a GOP president and a GOP controlled Congress will team up for some groundbreaking tax reform. Trump, after all, is a businessman and he knows an economy anchored in low taxes, free markets and minimal regulation is the only way to produce a long term, flourishing economy.

Economy 101: Lower taxes means you and I will more money to spend. It will give businesses more money to meet our growing demands. They will be able to expand and hire more people and pay them better wages. Revenue lost by the Treasury because of the tax cuts will be made by having more people in the workforce making more money. If it’s not made up, tough noogies. Our government will have to get by with less.

GREAT MOMENTS IN CHANGING NATIONAL CAPITALS: The United States Congress meets “in the city of Washington, in the territory of Columbia” for the first time on this date in 1800. For the first ten years of its existence, the Congress had met in Philadelphia.

Congressmen didn’t work any harder then than they do now. Neither the Senate nor the House could muster a quorum, so only business transacted that day was adjournment until the following day.

Dry, Technical Matter: Congress that year consisted of 32 Senators and 106 Representatives and both houses had Federalist majorities. The Federalists, however, were on their way to History’s scrap heap. They would lose their majority in the House and the presidency the Democratic-Republican Party later that year, and would stop being a factor in American politics by 1816.

FunFact: Though Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were the two presidential candidates in 1800, Jefferson actually ended up beating his running mate, Aaron Burr, in a contingent election in the House of Representatives. Adams lost both the electoral and popular votes by a wide margin, but back then ballots cast by electors didn’t differentiate between president and vice president and Jefferson and Burr both received 73 electoral votes. Jefferson won on the 36^th ballot cast by the House.

Tibet…You Remember Tibet, Right?: Lhamo Dondrub, 15, is named the 14^th Dali Lhama on this date in 1950. He replaces the 13^th Dalai Lama, who had died in 1933.

This Has To Be Better Than The Electoral College, Right?: Selections of Dalai Lamas are long, involved affairs, involving search parties, visions and signs. Events led assorted Tibetan Buddhists to Dondrub when he was still a toddler and he was selected the reincarnation of the 13^th Dalai Lama in 1937, when he was two-years-old. In 1939 he was publicly recognized as the 14^th Dalai Lama and was given full temporal authority in 1950.

The Dalai Lama was forced to flee Tibet in 1959 and he, and other Tibetans, have lived as refugees ever since.

He’s Such A Kidder: Speaking to a group of Associated Press (AP) managing editors, President Richard Nixon, then knee-deep in the Watergate cover-up, says he is not a crook on this date in 1973. Nixon was such a non-crook that he resigned the presidency the following August, of course, and had been spending most of his recent time sparring with Congress about the turning over tapes of White House conversations he’d had recorded.

Thought For The Day: I almost never think of my calendar years. I’m forever hiking across the same plateau with no end in sight. – Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

Answer To The Last Trivia Question: Nate Thurmond has the most rebounds in an NBA by someone not named Wilt Chamberlain or Bill Russell, 42, on November 9, 1965.

Today’s Stumper: After the Democratic-Republican Party won the presidency in 1800, what was the next party to win the presidency?  – Answer next time!

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The Day in Trump; Oh say can you sit.

The Daily Dose/November 14, 2016
By Gaylon Kent
America’s Foremost Humorist

THE DAY IN TRUMP: President-elect Donald Trump showed his willingness to heal wounds caused by his childish, insulting and fractious campaign by naming far-right hero Steven Bannon as a senior strategist. Bannon ran Trump’s presidential campaign from the time he became CEO in August, right through until Election Day.

The Destruction Of America Continues: Bannon’s resume for service in the Trump Administration is strong. His three marriages have yielded three divorces and in 1996 faced misdemeanor domestic violence, battery and dissuading a witness charges, however the charges were dismissed when his then-wife didn’t show up to court.

A Ringing Endorsement: No less an authority on trying to ruin American, former KKK imperial wizard David Duke, called the choice “excellent”.

Once More, With Feeling: President-elect Donald Trump. Keep practicing, because President Trump is right around the corner.

OH, SAY, CAN YOU SIT: Tampa Bay Buccaneers wide receiver Mike Evans become the latest professional athlete to protest everything that needs to be protested in this country by sitting during the national anthem before Sunday’s game against the Chicago Bears.

Get Your Official Daily Dose Policy Right Here: We don’t particularly care whether athletes sit, stand or kneel during the national anthem. We hope they don’t scratch themselves or wipe their ass, but one of the reasons we served was to defend everyone’s right to express themselves as they see fit. You want to burn a flag or sit during the national anthem, knock yourself out.

By The By: There’s no shortage of things to protest in this country and completely lost our minds and protested, too, this election season by running for Congress, though we only received five percent of the vote.

Now Hear This: We personally do not sit or kneel during the national anthem. We have a high level of respect for our national anthem and we issue a hand salute whenever we hear it played. That doesn’t mean we expect everyone else to feel the same way, though.

Well, That Was Effective: Evans would later apologize for exercising his right to free speech and announced he would fall back into line by standing for further national anthems. His statement included an apology to those currently in the service and to veterans, though as a general rule no American saying what’s on their mind owes anyone an apology.

ON THIS DATE: 168 Spaniards, led by Francisco Pizarro, defeat nearly 8,000 Incas in what is now Peru on this date in 1532.

The Spaniards and the Incas had gotten off to a bad start. At first meeting the Incas had offered a golden chalice of a favored ceremonial beverage. Pizarro was so moved by this gesture he poured the beverage on the ground and Incan Emperor Atahualpa was similarly unimpressed with a letter from King Charles V of Spain.

The pair met again on November 16. When Atahualpa refused to pay tribute to Charles V or to convert to Christianity, the Spaniards attacked.

Great Moments In Arming For Battle: Though hopelessly out numbered, the Spaniards task made easier by the fact the Incas had shown up for battle armed only with knives for hunting llamas.

Get Out Your History Books: Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics establishes NBA records for most rebounds in a half (32) and a game (49) on this date in 1957. Russell broke the single-game rebounding record of 39 set by Neil Johnston of Philadelphia in 1954.

Oh Yeah: The Celtics moved to 11-0 on the season with a 111-89 win over the Philadelphia Warriors. They had won their first NBA title the previous season, but would lose to the NBA title to the St Louis Hawks this season.

Dry, Technical Matter: Russell’s record for most rebounds in a half still stands, he would extend his own single-game record with 51 rebounds in a February, 1960 game. Wilt Chamberlain would break that record in November of 1960 with 55 rebounds in a game against Boston. This record still stands.

3…2…1…Blastoff: The Soviet Union sends Venera 3 into space on this date in 1965.

And while the United States would win the race to first put men on the moon, Venera 3 reflected great credit on the Motherland by becoming the first spacecraft to land on another planet when it crashed into the surface of Venus the following March.

Is This Mic On?: Humans send an interstellar radio message to star cluster 25,000 light-years away on this date in 1972.

Known as the Aricebo Message, because it was sent from the Aricebo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, the message will take 25,000 years to reach star cluster M13.

Packing List Enclosed: Instead of sending useful things like rock music and pictures of babes, the message consisted of crap most of us don’t even understand, like DNA codes and atomic numbers of assorted elements.

Fly In The Ointment: And though group was smart enough to send a message to stars a long ways away, they weren’t bright enough to send the message to where the stars would be 25,000 years from now. They were sent to the cluster’s location when the message was sent, though in fairness to organizers the difference isn’t all that great and will still result in the message more or less hitting the target.

Thought For The Day: Time fleeing with a speed nothing can alter!. – Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Answer To The Last Trivia Question: The Beatles biggest selling single on the British chart was She Loves You, which sold 1.9 million copies in 1963.

Today’s Stumper: Who has the most rebounds in an NBA game by someone not named Wilt Chamberlain or Bill Russell?  – Answer next time!

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