Oops, I did it again

D'oh.

I read Maureen Dowd. Again. WHY do I always do that?

When I was a kid, I had a hallucination that I read a hilarious Family Circus cartoon. God, it must have been great. Because every single day, I read Family Circus without fail, thinking that THIS WAS THE DAY it would be hilarious again. And? It wasn't. It painfully, stupidly wasn't. It was the dotted line following Billy around the room, or somebody breaking a vase and blaming it "Not Me!" Har har har. And once again, there were at least 30 seconds of my life that I would never get back.

It's not just me. It's a phenomenon. As the cute drug dealer in the movie Go says, "It's just sitting there on the page, waiting to suck," and I just. Kept. Looking. Eventually I stopped, and never read Family Circus again (except for the sublime and legendary Dysfunctional Family Circus before the lawyers shut it down. Who knew Bil Keane had no sense of humor? Other than everyone who ever read Family Circus?)

What I'm trying to say is, Maureen Dowd is like Family Circus. She's just sitting on the Times op-ed page, waiting to suck. And I fall for it every time, because somewhere in my past, I read a column that was brilliant. Right? Didn't I? I'm sure I did. Anyway, I always read it and I always end up rolling my eyes and wishing I'd just stuck with Paul Krugman.

Actually, on the scale of suck, Wednesday wasn't so bad. Not anything earth-shattering, just the totally unnecessary use of the word Brobdingnagian (to describe finger-wagging? Huh?). And Maureen passing off Art Buchwald's old Marvin K. Mooney joke, which was really funny...when he made it, about 35 years ago. She even acknowledged that it was his, and repeated it, laming it up in her own special way. Sigh.

If there's a dysfunctional parody of Maureen Dowd out there, I'm all over it. Just point the way. With Brobdingnagian finger-wagging.