ISSUE 41: Week of Early/Mid May '99 ..."in springtime, a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of . . . WIT MEMO!!"THE WITZELSUCHT MEMORANDUM "Where Top-Hat, Red-Carpet Service is Practially A Motto"
SUPREME COURT DECLARES: AMERICAN CULTURE A-OKAY!!
IN what's been widely misinterpreted as yet another unoriginal,
predictable- as-free-kittens lament over the ballyhooed apathy, cynicism,
and overall duh-duh-DUMB state of the 
American
booboisee, especially AMERICAN YOUTH, Supreme Court Justice
STEPHEN BREYER -who more closely resembles SIMPSONS Springfield
Nuclear Power Plant owner MR. BURNS ("to his friends he's Montgomery,
but to you he's Mr. Burns") than anyone else on earth -- delivered
a
speech
in which he actually HEAPED INCREDIBLE PRAISE on the American populace,
going out of his way to laud our wit, intelligence, and intellect.
The wise justice left NO DOUBT that, contrary to common commentator
carping, we've got our PRIORITIES STRAIGHT!
In an advance text of his May 4th "law day" speech to the Tulsa,
Okla., Bar Association, Breyer opined:
"It does not bother me when I read that the public is less aware of the names of Supreme Court justices than of the Three Stooges."
A-friggin'-men!! We couldn't have said it any better ourselves.
We just HOPE that culture-disparaging poo-bahs like values vicar
WILLIAM
BENNETT and scary-beard Supreme Court wannabe ROBERT BORK were
paying attention! And while you're At It, Mr. Justice Breyer, do
you think you could use the influence of your high office to persuade THE
FAMILY CHANNEL (and, for that matter, TBS) to restore The
Stooges' timeslot in their evening lineup? Thanx!!
(For the record, the names of The Three Stooges were Moses, Jerome,
and Sam Horwitz, Larry Fineberg, Joe Besser, and Joe DeRita).
OUTRAGE!!! NEW D.C. ADMINSTRATION SPELLS HARDSHIP FOR CITIZENS!!
WE told everyone to write in MARION BARRY for Mayor (WIT MEMO 26) . . . but you-all elected bowtied beancounter ANTHONY WILLIAMS . . . and now the CHICKENS HAVE COME HOME TO ROOST. His vaunted promises of "improved" city services have devolved into favors for fat cats who take our hard-earned dollars back to gated enclaves in Middleburg and Potomac and unleashed a regime of ruthless "efficiency" that's starting to inflict REAL HARDSHIP on the average citizens who're actually trying to make a go of it here in the DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA (DC Motto: "There's trees, alright"), resulting in a DISASTER OF THE MOST HORRIFIC PROPORTIONS.
Whaddawe talkin' about? To wit: After we're-not-saying-how-many years, they've finally got around to DISCONNECTING WIT MEMO's FREE HBO!!!
WE'RE not sure WHY we were getting that premium channel gratis, but we DO know we weren't alone. Plenty of DC cable customers found themselves viewing HBO they never ordered; it's been an open secret for years. How come? Word around the campfire is that it was to cut down on repair calls: why complain about ghostly channel 4 reception and risk disconnection of hush-hush channel 3? At one point they DID try to bill WIT MEMO, but we very carefully pointed out that we'd never, ever subscribed to HBO, and dared them to TURN IT OFF rather them try to dun us for it. That was YEARS ago, and we'd begun to think that, with legendary DC-gov't promptitude, they'd NEVER get around to it.
But now there's a new Mayor, a new administration, and, apparently,
a new insistence on doing things "by the book," no matter how many little
people get squashed in the process. And make no mistake, WIT
MEMO is hurtin' BIG TIME without the HBO we'd come to
think of as rightfully ours! Ok, ok, so the movies
mostly SUCKED (two words: Titanic), but we'd grown QUITE
FOND of HBO's original programming, most notably 
the incomparable
"LARRY SANDERS" . . .
the incredible Jersey mob family series
"THE
SOPRANOS" (which rendered "Analyze This" irrelevant before its release)
. . . the nothing-like-it, brilliant
skit comedy "MR. SHOW" with BOB
& DAVID . . . not to mention
CHRIS ROCK, DENNIS MILLER,
championship
boxing, hell, we even liked "SEX AND THE CITY." (But not
"ARLI$$." DEFINITELY not "ARLI$$.")
So what now? Mebbe if we sign up and pay for a few months (just in time for the new SOPRANOS) and then tell 'em we don't want it anymore, it'll be another five years or so before they actually get around to turning it off. OR, we could follow the advice of WIT MEMO reader AL H. in gorgeous Western PA, who writes in with the obvious solution: JUST PONY UP. Like everyone else.
But that's not the point. WIT MEMO shouldn't have to pay. Getting HBO all those years for free has created an expectation, a contract, an ENTITLEMENT, if you weeeel, to free HBO in perpetuity. And why not? In this town, everyone's got a scam, everyone's padding an expense account, barreling pork, Socking It to someone else. Fleas get close to the Big Dogs and money falls out of the sky. So why not WIT MEMO? Why not us? As MORRISSEY once said, "England owes me a living!" SO PLEASE, write, call, visit, fax and email your Mayor, your Councilman, your Delegate, your Shadow Senator today and demand, GIVE WIT MEMO FREE HBO!! And make that "free basic cable also" while you're at it.
OH . . . and another thing . . . if it's "District"
Cablevision -- and if we're supposed to be supporting DC BUSINESSES
-- then how come we send our hard-earned cable payments to an address
in BALTIMORE?!?!? Like the WIT
MEMO Mother used to say, "the rich get richer, and the poor
get children."
DEADLY TWISTERS: WASHINGTONPOST.COM BLOWS!!!
BOO ON the WASHINGTON POST -and their award-winning-according-to-them website washingtonpost.com- for whetting our appetite over the prospect of dramatic tornado pix with the May 5th link "PHOTOS: TORNADOES IN THE HEARTLAND" . . . and then letting us down by including only ONE measly tornado shot amid 15 grisly and depressing images of the horrible aftermath of the deadly May 3 spate of twisters in Oklahoma and Kansas, some graphically depicting real human injury and suffering. It was like turning on a cable movie for the guide's promise of "SSC" (strong sexual content) only to be confronted with a rape scene. Get ONE thing clear, Ms. Graham or whatever 25-year-old cybertwerps you're probably underpaying to keep the site running, we've absolutely NO desire to view battered bodies or file-foto generic strewn rubble shots. What we want are dramatic and awe-inspiring images of TORNADOES, TORNADOES and more TORNADOES, what the folks at BEER FRAME ( the 'zine of Inconspicuous Consumption) brilliantly dubbed "weather porn" after they found themselves fast-forwarding tornado videos past the scenes of destruction to see only the actual twisters themselves. If the tornadoes are the sex, then the wreckage shots are the post-coital cigarette, snuggling, and/or awkward silence, and only a SICKO wants to see that! SO unless you can actually come up with a gen-yoo-wine photo of a TREE WITH A STRAW DRIVEN THROUGH IT, just stick to the tornadoes and leave those nasty suffering pix for the next installment of "Faces of Death."
Meanwhile, KUDOs to MSNBC's JOHN HOCKENBERRY for actually airing some videos of the monstrous tornadoes on his May 5 show, mostly during his chat with a pair of trying-not-to-be-giddy STUDENT STORM CHASERS from the University of Oklahoma.
PS: If YOU'RE looking for tornadoes -and who isn't?-
DON'T
try a web search for "weather porn" . . . you'll just get the usual
five
billion smut sites which, for some reason, have elected to include
the word "weather" in their meta-tags. Go figure.
WIT MEMO AT THE MOVIES --- IT'S A WRAP!
WE
wish nothing but boffo box-office success for the producers of the new
flick "THE MUMMY," but we're afraid we're wasting our time.
Why? Because the mummy just isn't scary (no disrepect
intended to BORIS KARLOFF's performance in the 1932 original), and
the mummy movies have just never been any good.
Oh, sure, the mummy has long been accorded a place in the hallowed Halloween pantheon of man-sized movie monsters, right up there with DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, and THE WOLFMAN, but, he never really belonged, he was always the bastard stepchild of the monster world. You see, each of those other monsters boasts a primal, deeply psychological appeal totaling lacking from the mummy.
DRACULA speaks to the fear of the night that has haunted
humans since we lived in 
caves,
and with his smoldering sexuality, exotic accent, and stately
presence (the cape and all) he was the erotic force of the unknown
darkness come to steal our women . . . and satisfy them as we
fear we never could. The WOLFMAN is atavistic carnality
lurking beneath civilization's fragile veneer, and the Freudian
dread of hurting the ones we love. And FRANKENSTEIN is
nothing less than the awful consequence of humankind's foolhardy desire
to Play God and master the forces of nature.
But the Mummy? Some stiff in a bunch of rags
who guarded a tomb. And, like bees who won't bother
you if you don't bother them, the Mummy represented no threat
to the average Joe. While we ALL had reason to fear the OTHER
monsters, the Mummy's bad intentions were limited to only
a
few specific victims, and you had nothing to fear so long as
you didn't happen to be a titled, pith helmeted, British despoiler of
sacred tombs. Why, the Mummy would stagger RIGHT BY
YOU to get at Lord Highbottom or whatever his name was!
And that's ANOTHER reason why the Mummy was laughable as
a monster: he could barely walk! Old ladies with walkers could outrun
him . . . what was up with that?!? As HOMER SIMPSON
once astutely observed after viewing a mummy during a museum visit, "I'd
rather have HIM chasing me than THE WOLFMAN!" Right
you are!
NOW THAT ISN'T MAHVELOUS
As a longtime fan of funnyman BILL KRISTOL -(who's now writing for "THE STANDARD," the conservative mag that specializes in longwinded debates over who's "neo" and who's "paleo", as if anyone GIVES a flying fuck)- we were shocked last Sunday when he criticized globetrotting miracle worker JESSE JACKSON for winning freedom for the three American POWs!! "His behavior is outrageous" he said of Jackson on ABC's "This Week."
Well we're not ready to give up on Bill just yet. No matter what
anyone else says, we just LOVED "Mr. Saturday Night"!!
COMING SOON: A WIT
MEMO EXCLUSIVE: Advice from THE
WORLD'S GREATEST WRITER! -and- SCREW
THE MILLENIUM!!