Attention, Trumpflakes:

I believe the eloquently crafted chant you're struggling to summon from the bowels of your collective sheep-herd memory is "Lock her up."

LINK: From the White House, Kellyanne urged Fox viewers to buy Ivanka's clothing line (and broke fed law)

Note: Ivanka Trump shoes are made in China

Hey! Whiny, petulant, willfully ignorant, morally repulsive, pointless man-boy! Yeah you! Pay attention!

1. People stopped buying Ivanka Trump shoes and Nordstrom started phasing them out long before you were elected president.
2. Ivanka Trump shoes are poorly made and they fall apart and lots of people returned them, which you as a so-called "businessman" should recognize as a textbook example of the third-grade business term "loss."
3. They're made in China, just like your suits and ties and Make America A Global Embarrassment red hats.
4. You campaigned hard on a platform of bullheaded nationalism and isolationist American job growth.
5. China is not America.
6. Your daughter's shoes are made in China.
7. They're made in China.
8. They're made in China.
9. They're made in China.
10. They're made in China.

JAPES!

Today -- as you well know -- is the federally recognized and wantonly celebrated Day of 120 Points, which honors my royal trouncing of my hapless but honorable friend Albert, who to this day remains a loyal and awesome friend. With a loyal and awesome husband. And a loyal and awesome guest room. But sadly no cat.

Anyway, back to me.

I am now the long-retired Words With Friends Lucky Lexicon Laureate, so don't spend any time looking for NofoJake on the WWF app. But since you brought up the subject ...

NofoJake is the handle (or whatever it's called) on my Twitter account that I keep trying to remember to update with endlessly clever wordplay and withering ridicule of prominent political figures within the artistically strangling confines of 140 characters. Follow me and I'll follow you!

I'm trying really hard not to call her Betsy DeVoid

Using schools to "advance God's kingdom" missionary Betsy DeVos -- who 20 days ago went unblinkingly on record as advocating putting guns in schools filled with children in order to protect them from grizzly bears -- has an alarming and well-documented history of borderline hostility toward public schools -- going so far as to call them a "dead end" -- and toward teacher salaries, secularism, fundamental education standards and even universal federal protections for students with disabilities.

And despite her manifest lack of experience, knowledge and qualification to oversee and influence and shape our nation's entire public education system for the next four years -- starting with the fact that she's never been educated in a public school -- Betsy DeVos was laughably softballed through perfunctory confirmation hearings last month -- before which she had not even completed an ethics review -- and was today confirmed as our nation's Secretary of Education.

Because we as a nation cannot afford to have our children be more educated than our president.

Read all the gory details here

[Confidential to Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos: "Perfunctory" means "performed hastily and superficially as mere routine duty."]

Super Bowl glory

Five years ago I actually headlined the halftime show at the Super Bowl. Well, technically I just led my team to confetti-covered victory at the Super Bowl. Well, technically I just had seats over the dugout with Gisele Bundchen at the Super Bowl. Well, technically I just sold commemorative popcorn at the Super Bowl.

OK, fine. I was just in Indianapolis the weekend of the Super Bowl. But I was visiting my gracious and hospitable friend Bill and we had a great time touring the Super Bowl village and riding the Super Bowl shuttle with Madonna and shopping at the Super Bowl store that had a convenient mortgage department right inside the door to help us buy commemorative shirts and other merchandise.

But I didn't need a mortgage or commemorative shirts or merchandise because I had my $12 all-purpose sportsing shirt. And that's all I needed to inflate my footballs.

#DontPoint

Judging by the profligate avalanche of exclamation points in my Facebook feed tonight, it is fully evident that OMG Lady Gaga, OMG the Patriots won and OMG the Falcons lost.

Duly noted.

I'm proud to have such a diversity of enthusiastic friends with a diverse range of passions, but with Congress' recent motions to gut the Environmental Punctuation Agency, global exclamation point deforestation on the scale I've seen tonight -- especially in the new-growth forests of exclamation points that are really little more than ambitious periods -- is posing a devastating threat to our future expressions of enthusiasm, mockery, disbelief, hostility and, in some cases, show tunes.

If we don't enact voluntary rationing and preservation measures today, we'll condemn our future generations to having no option but to make sad, confusing little exclamations like these:

Trump sucks,
Hello, Dolly(
Go, Cubs, Go ...
Jake is awesome;
He's got a gun*
Don't make me stop this car?

The list grows more heartbreaking by the day.

I'm in no way trying to censor you. And I wholly encourage you to continue being excited that you won a new cow, WTFing your heart out when yoga class gets moved to Studio B where the cucumber water is never room temperature, curling up in a ball and yelling Adele lyrics at your cat because you're always alone on Valentine's Day, and -- as if you could even stop yourself -- OMGing over every blog post I write.

But please. Enthusiasticate responsibly. Punctuate judiciously. And when you must, use just one exclamation point at a time.

Yes. Just one. You can do it. Don't make me stop this car?

The Gronk in a loincloth

We're watching the Super Bowl on a 30-minute delay, but here are my opinions about the first-half commercials, not that anyone needs them but it's my blog and I am burning with essential psychographic insight:

• The Airbnb diversity commercial is as awesome as all of Facebook had promised it would be. But it didn't include the company name and I don't know the logo and the commercial content isn't related to the product so without being told beforehand I wouldn't have known what all that awesomeness was for.
• Christopher Walken reciting boy-band lyrics will inspire me to buy-buy-buy pretty much anything.
• Same with Jeffrey Tambor shushing stainy people.
• A car is a car is a car to me so all the many awesome car commercials I've seen have been totally awesome but I have no idea what brands they were each tied to.
• I'm the same bewildered consumer when it comes to wireless carriers. But Daddy's dead. Suddenly funny.
• The Gronk in a loincloth. The Gronk in a loincloth. The Gronk in a loincloth.
• DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES. If you get caught between me and the theater on opening day, you WILL be trampled. But if you promise to be quiet and show the profound reverence and worship that is due to all things Pirates of the Caribbean, you are welcome to join me.
• I'm not kidding about the silence.
• The Gronk in a loincloth. The Gronk in a loincloth. The Gronk in a loincloth.

Follies: I am the dancing queen, young and sweet, only forty-eight

We're deep into rehearsals for another big splashy singy dancy Follies revue, and I thought it would be nice to take a "Dancing Queen" rehearsal pic to capture our progress. Unfortunately, three of my friends totally photobombed me. Rude.

Learn more and get your Follies tickets already.

Rude Defending a Staircase

I'm too tired to wait up for SNL and I really just want to go downstairs to bed but there's a vicious hydra guarding the staircase. And I'm very scared.

What is our country coming to?

"What is our country coming to"?

Aren't you the president? Shouldn't you know how our government works? Checks and balances? The Constitution?

Seriously?

Flashback Friday: Dilation Edition

There are very few things more acutely painful than having your eyes dilated. Aside from stepping outside in the snow afterward, where every ray of the sun glints off every facet of every crystal of every snowflake straight into your already tightly painful eyes and right through to your nervous system where they not-later-on-at-all conspire to make you flail and curse blindly at the very winter wonderland you're walking in.

But you do get a complimentary roll of cheap brown plastic that's supposed to function as dark sunglasses until the screamingly painful swollen nursing breasts that used to be your eyeballs finally sink back into your skull. And when you get home, they -- the cheap roll-up sunglasses, not the circus-freak eye breasts -- make for endlessly funny pictures, as long as your cat is cooperative and sits still.

So the important takeaways from this vital PSA are:
1) Get your eyes dilated only in the summer and only at midnight.
2) But make sure your ophthalmologist isn't a vampire first.
3) Ophthalmologist is difficult but -- once you learn it -- eternally fun to spell.
4) Practice it once now: ophthalmologist!
5) Breasts is the polite, mature way to say boobs.
6) Lightly sedate your cat the moment you get home but only to the point that she'll sit cooperatively still.
7) Make sure the pictures you take are funny, which by their nature they're guaranteed to be but I'm just including this takeaway to help make sure I get to 10.
8) Also make sure those pictures successfully travel to each new camera phone you buy so you don't have to search and scroll in vain on your current one only to collapse in heartbreaking defeat when you need them to merrily illustrate a Facebook memory in 2017.
9) Do you think I can make this list go all the way to 10?
10) Yep.

MEOW = ME + OW

IN WHICH OUR PROTAGONIST GETS ALL EMOTIONAL

Abandon all hope ye who enter here. You've been warned.

So my favorite place to sit -- which is a sadly rare option -- at a vocal rehearsal is right behind the piano, especially if it's being played by a spectacularly talented and indulgently loud pianist. The back of a piano is pretty much a mattress-sized speaker that can hit you with a wall of glorious sound when it's being played by a heavy-handed virtuoso and you're sitting eagerly a few feet away drinking it all in. And I've been hogging all the goosebumpy magic from my perch in that now not-so-secret prime real estate this week at Follies rehearsals.

And if you're in Follies and you're reading this and you ever -- EVER! -- take my spot I will give you the biggest paper cut you've ever had. Right on your page-turning finger. Plus I will personally bring to life your paralyzing nightmare that it's opening night and the curtain rises and the music starts and the spotlight hits you and everyone's watching and you realize you forgot to put on your costume and you never learned the words or the choreography to your big solo. Which you probably stole from me anyway. SO DON'T TEST ME.

Anyway, on to my next emotional happy place.

Everyone knows that "Circle of Life" shines high in the pantheon of lush, gorgeous, emotionally manipulative musical-theater power anthems. If you've ever seen the Broadway production of The Lion King you know damn well that before the song even hits its first chorus every last drop of unflinching delight in you has bubbled to the surface and you've all but clapped your hands in joyous childlike glee. And if you deny it, just remember I know how to inflict wicked paper cuts.

Anyway.

I've enjoyed the repeated privilege of singing "Circle of Life" surrounded by armies of shamelessly like-minded singers who are not above belting the loud parts a little too loud just because. And you know who you are. And I will never rat you out as long as you come sing next to me.

Anyway. Get back to your story, Jake. Come on. Focus.

So the first time I sang "Circle of Life" was in the Follies of 1999. Rehearsals started that January and the show opened the first weekend of March. I actually co-choreographed the show with one of my endlessly creative and talented friends, and she crafted "Circle of Life" with layers of stirring possibility and blossoming organic movement and triumphant fruition that finished in a thundering final drumbeat with me actually hoisting a beaming child to my shoulder. And it unfailingly filled the sumptuously rococo 2,000-seat Paramount Theater with all the unflinching delight and joyous childlike glee I accused you of having three paragraphs ago.

But every night the song -- that moment -- meant much more to me. Emotionally more. Deliriously more. Catching-an-uncontrollable-sob-in-my-throat more.

My dad's mom had had a massive stroke years before and had been living ever since trapped in whatever her post-stroke world embodied in a Denver nursing home with a breathtaking view that I like to think she was still able to enjoy. She died January 25, 1999, and all of us were able to make it to Denver to give her a peaceful farewell. And afterward I headed back to Iowa and back to Follies.

The morning we opened, my sister went to her eight-month doctor checkup in Detroit in preparation for the pending birth of my nephew. And she learned that she was dangerously low on amniotic fluid and she needed to deliver the baby then and there. My nephew was born very soon afterward on March 5, 1999. I called my sister late that afternoon before I headed to the theater and heard him breathe and gurgle and sigh for the first time as he lay on her chest.

And that night, as the opening chants of "Circle of Life" started building and the gorgeous harmonies in the orchestra and chorus started blooming and "From the day we arrive on this planet" started verbalizing the eternal, universal cycle of life and death and life, the realization gradually washed over me that my family had solemnly liberated one life and joyously welcomed another as I was creating this show and relishing in my enjoyment of this glorious song that celebrated the very process my family and I had just experienced.

And my resigned sorrow and transcendent joy together brought me to a place of emotional and spiritual and physical apotheosis that night on the stage surrounded by my talented friends as we beamed with shared pride all the way to the top balcony. And then I got to experience it again the next night. And every time I've sung the song thereafter.

We're singing "Circle of Life" in Follies again this year. And while I'm eagerly looking forward to experiencing that welcomely familiar flood of emotion again on stage surrounded by my talented and sometimes unrepentantly too loud friends as we share the joy of singing the song over a full orchestra to an audience of 2,000 friends, loved ones and strangers, for now I'm content relishing the simple joy of singing it from my happy place right behind the piano.

Fascism Forever Club

Remember how I said I was going to wait and let Neil Gorsuch's SCOTUS hearing help fully inform my opinion of him and his fitness to embody equitable jurisprudence?

That trying-to-be-impartial sentiment has now revealed itself to be an immutable alternative fact.

Neil Gorsuch and the Fascism Forever Club

It's not like he was just being a high-school douchebag looking for adolescent shock value; he was attending an elite prep school where presumably he was an intelligent, informed douchebag expressing sociopolitical conclusions he drew from his presumably elite, high-quality education.

It's not like he started his Fascism Forever Club just to joke around with like-minded douchebags; he founded what was by all accounts a formally recognized student group that was listed in his yearbook biography and he remained president of the club the entire four years he attended the school.

It's not like fascism is a ridiculous sociopolitical fad like the tea party; it's a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry and commerce, and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism. And its bloody and brutal doctrines were well-documented in his parents' lifetime during the 1922-43 fascist reign of terror carried out across Italy by Benito Mussolini.

It's not like he took these ideas with him to work in an uninfluential job after graduation; he took them to law school where they undoubtedly informed and biased his entire approach to law, public policy and the Constitution.

It's not like he's just a sociopathic abortion of a human being; he's about to be softballed through Republican-controlled confirmation hearings and ascend effortlessly to the United States Supreme Court.

And at only 49 years of age, he will be a key player in the social and moral devastation of our country for generations to come.

Isn't it rich?

"I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things, Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice."

--United States President Donald Trump, February 1, 2017.

“I think there’s contributions — I think he wants to highlight the contributions that he has made. And I think through a lot of the actions and statements that he’s going to make, I think the contributions of Frederick Douglass will become more and more.”
--White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, February 1, 2017.

Vanilla crime roulade

Here's everyone I love the most gathered après-Outback for birthday dessert at my sister's house, minus by brother-in-law who wisely leans away every time he sees me reach for my phone to capture a meaningful selfie moment. It's zero-to-sixty self-preservation instincts like his that have time and again snatched him from the gaping, indiscriminate maw of my unquenchable Facebook narcissism, shielded him from the emasculating humiliation of being photographically recorded as one of my beloved family members, and kept him securely and anonymously ensconced in the federal witness protection program, where nobody knows his name is Steve. I mean Kellyanne.

The desserts my sister made -- thank you for asking -- are -- or at this point were -- a traditional Norwegian raspberry-meringue-vanilla cream (or crime, if you believe autocorrect) roulade that is so hyper-rich it doesn't pay any taxes but is so hyper-delicious it makes you erupt in spontaneous cascades of uncontainable yummy sounds with a beguiling Norwegian accent and a chocolate cake prepared curiously with a can of Coke stirred into the batter and frosted under a layer of icing curiously prepared with readily visible chunks of insufficiently melted butter in it. The Coke cake -- as we call it -- is an age-old family recipe that dates back to when I didn't really like it but didn't dare tell anyone and risk not getting any at all when I was a kid. The butter-chunk icing is a family tradition my sister started tonight.

But our day is complete, we have collectively eradicated every last crumb of mysteriously delicious brown bread from our friendly neighborhood Outback, Mom has safely and joyously made it to 76 with the help of loving good wishes from family and friends near and far, we've exhausted every possible trombone reference despite not knowing a single accurate phrase of the lyrics, and I am rolling carefully into bed so as not to exacerbate my brown bread bloat.

Next up on the family birthday calendar: Me! ME ME ME! And nobody will sleep that day until I get my fill of vanilla crime roulade.

SCOTUS hope

Aside from the expected and tediously toe-the-line hard-right bona fides regarding big-business interests, pro-life absolutists and religious "liberty" whiners that he has amassed in his short 49 years, I don't totally loathe the political extremes of Trump SCOTUS nominee Neil Gorsuch the way I did those of Antonin Scalia. Don't get me wrong; I'm not going to gay-marry Gorsuch -- and, to be fair, my initial research has revealed only cursory instead of virulent LGBT hostility on his part -- but I'm going to give myself some time to hear more of what he has to say before I condemn the Republican softballing of his confirmation hearings and resign myself to the inevitability of his SCOTUS appointment.

I'm concerned about Gorsuch's penchant for concentrating power in the high courts, which are immune from elections, and his textualist approach to the Constitution, which in my estimation cloaks easily biased historical speculation under an impossible-to-substantiate assertion of historical objectivism. But again, these are just more of his predictable hardline bona fides -- and he is on record as having cried over the death of hardline patron saint Scalia -- so none of this is terribly surprising.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I've done slightly more than a little bit of research on Gorsuch since his nomination was announced today and while he's cookie-cutter predictable as a republican SCOTUS nominee, he's still not among the intellectual and moral trainwrecks Trump's barfed up with his appalling federal nominations like Betsy DeVos and Jeff Sessions and -- holy fucking shit -- Steve Bannon.

So I'll try to be as impartial as possible in wherever our Gorsuch discovery process takes us in the coming days. Which I never thought I'd say about ANY Trump nomination.

Besides, Donald Trump shouldn't be making SCOTUS nominations in the last few months of his presidency anyway.

76th of Mom's

Happy 76th birthday to my tirelessly, fiercely awesome mom who -- not to make this about me after only ten words -- has made it her personal mission to coordinate doctors, dole out ever-changing (seriously -- they change pretty much every week) prescriptions, endure hours of medically related on-hold music, battle insurance companies, dig deep into online drug-interaction research, and sometimes just pour orange juice and fold laundry for her eternally grateful -- though sometimes exhaustedly unable to show it -- big ol' bipolar son, who undeniably couldn't survive this train ride without her. 

When she's not enjoying that little hobby, she's a devoted grandmother to the -- and I swear I'm being empirically objective here -- smartest, awesomeist, above-averageist, talentedist children ever to exchange inappropriate texts with their compulsively corrupting uncle who once again managed to make this tribute about himself. She and my dad are also emotional and moral and eternally inspiring community pillars who waste no time securing donated coats or shoes or furniture or shelter or food for sometimes complete strangers who desperately need it. In that vein, she also sometimes brings unnecessary butter to my sister's house, buys my dad an ever-expanding library of V-neck sweaters in a gradient palette of dark dad colors, dotingly acquiesces to our relentlessly bellicose cat's increasingly finicky tastes in wet food, blankets and inconvenient places to vomit, and occasionally indulges herself in post-season vests from the Talbots clearance rack. She loves her family unconditionally and we love her unconditionally back, even though she dances with her wrists out and puts onion salt in everything she cooks.

Next year she'll be a 40-year cancer survivor, and I'm posting this picture from her everyone-had-to-wear-pink 30-year survivor celebration not because we all look young and attractive in it -- but now that you mention it, I guess we do -- but because it radiates the profound joy she brings to her family, her community and everyone she comes in contact with. Except the cat, who demands that her tuna be prepared only with the white sauce from the pink can, which is laboriously difficult to find.

Mein Coif

Scars and haircuts

One month ago right now I'd just completed my signature black-out-and-fall-Timber!-and-crack-the-tile-floor-with-my-head-and-lacerate-my-face-with-my-shattered-glasses-and-bite-mostly-through-my-lip-and-get-a-concussion-that-hurt-like-hell trick and I was finally back awake and reasonably coherent as the emergency room doctor sewed up my face with anesthesia that totally didn't work. But I was a big boy and I whimpered only 37 times. Before I lost count.

Anyway! I sure can prattle on and on and never get to the point sometimes. OK, all the time. Like right now. I mean really. How tedious.

Anyway again! I've had stitches and protective stitches glue and scabs and oozy gross stuff all over my face and in my beard since my visit to the anesthesia-resistant emergency room sewing circle and since I looked like a moldy desiccated cat anyway I kinda stopped caring that my gooey beard was scraggling down over my neck and my hair was blossoming into a luxurious, full-bodied thneed.

But! As of this week my beard goo has finally disappeared and nearby children have stopped spraying me with Zombie-B-Gone and since it's actually been one month to the day I finally went and got a haircut and a beard trim and five new shirts at Target but don't tell my mom that last part because she keeps saying I'm finally handsome again and if she found out I'd gone recreational shopping it would totally harsh her buzz as the kids say. Or the drug addicts. Whatever.

Whew! So I finally got to the point and I feel human again and my mom says I look handsome and I'm kinda hoping when everything is totally healed I still end up with a badass scar on my cheek so when I'm in the nursing home and little schoolchildren come visit me through their scary-old-people-need-love-and-poorly-drawn-crayon-art program and they ask me about my battle scar I can regale them with the epic tale of that one time I passed out from standing up too fast to change the laundry.