{"id":247,"date":"2012-11-07T09:12:01","date_gmt":"2012-11-07T17:12:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/?p=247"},"modified":"2012-11-07T09:12:01","modified_gmt":"2012-11-07T17:12:01","slug":"big-bird-breathes-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/big-bird-breathes-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Bird Breathes Again"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Four years ago on Election Night I was in the First Class Lounge of British Airways at LAX waiting to fly to Barcelona to see <em>Spamalot<\/em>.\u00a0 There was a tall, rather drunk man standing on a table, waving a champagne glass and cheering very loudly.<\/p>\n<p>It was me.<\/p>\n<p>So though I can\u2019t vote don\u2019t mean I can\u2019t feel, and I feel we all just dodged a bullet.\u00a0\u00a0 Big Bird can breathe easily again.\u00a0 Ethel Mormon has left the building.\u00a0 Fortunately for us all, Romney was born with a silver foot in his mouth.\u00a0\u00a0 Finally, just when he seemed to have the prize in his improbable grasp, his God let him down.\u00a0 He brought a mighty wind and a tempest to remind us what Obama was good at: governing.\u00a0 Global Warming, that hype to prevent businessmen freely polluting the planet, had struck again in a devastating way.\u00a0 \u201cGood job Brownie\u201d echoed through our minds as we watched the Candidate pathetically fake a food drive, handing bewildered people cans of Spam to donate to New Jersey so they could shake his pampered hand for the cameras.<\/p>\n<p>This year I was not quite so rowdy at the bi-partisan Election Night Party held at Caf\u00e9 Cordiale.\u00a0 (And, by the way, expecting politicians to be bi-partisan is like asking Hugh Heffner to be bisexual. ) \u00a0My wife was extremely anxious.\u00a0 She had heard me muttering darkly about learning Chinese and moving to Tokyo.\u00a0 On TV the vast red states like tectonic plates seemed to be forcing the country apart, threatening a new continental divide.\u00a0 There was a lot of paranoid talk of election rigging.\u00a0 We should have taken heart from Rachel Maddow, who, as we were leaving, announced that the Romney camp was not taking phone calls.\u00a0 That silence presaged the end: they <em>knew<\/em>.\u00a0 A loud cheer from the bar announced the barely believable news that the nightmare was over.\u00a0 This Book of Mormon was closed, and over at my table the British <em>were<\/em> coming, with relief and joy.\u00a0 So we spent the evening happily listening to <strong><em>Bern<\/em><\/strong>, the fabulous twelve piece soul band, with three great singers, led by the incomparable Bernie Dressler, the lead drummer of <strong><em>The Dicktones.\u00a0 <\/em><\/strong>They rocked the night away.<\/p>\n<p>So thank you America, on behalf of the rest of the world.\u00a0 It\u2019s a nicer country to live in today.\u00a0 And, mercifully, it\u2019s all over.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Four years ago on Election Night I was in the First Class Lounge of British Airways at LAX waiting to fly to Barcelona to see Spamalot.\u00a0 There was a tall, rather drunk man standing on a table, waving a champagne glass and cheering very loudly. It was me. So though I can\u2019t vote don\u2019t mean [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":248,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions\/248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}