Pat Hickey - Short on Brains, But a Terrific Dancer: A Portrait in Pencil by B. Kliban

In the mid-1970's, I was employed as a model for celebrated cartoonist B. Kliban. He said, " I can't give you any money, but I can make this moment immortal. Enjoy.'

Thus, I have this pencil sketched time capsule of my chiselled good looks in youth.

As always, click on my post title for more on the quiet genius of the later part of the last century - B. Kliban. It was like finding a photograph for me.

John McCain Leads with Straight Talk - That is the Knockout Punch!

John McCain engages people with the truth. Nothing so engages people as hearing a political candidate credit an opponent for his personal succees in the Presidential Race. The graceless in-fighting in my birthright Party - The Democratic Party - In Captivity - requires their candidates to lard up their lame positions with Oprah or Barbara Streisand or the Hemp Happy HBO Twerp Maher and then toss envelopes of dirt over the transoms of media shills.

Gov. Huckabee is a solid man. John McCain is Presidential.

This morning's news presented the American people with another example of Senator John McCain's forthright understanding of himself and the reality of the campaign.

MIAMI - John McCain said Saturday that Mike Huckabee's rise in Republican presidential polls was due to his performance in debates.

"I attribute Governor Huckabee's recent success to the fact that debates matter," McCain said. "People pay attention to debates."

The GOP presidential candidates have flip-flopped repeatedly in the polls, with no clear front-runner emerging for any length of time.

In the latest national survey by The Associated Press and Ipsos, former Arkansas Gov. Huckabee has emerged from nowhere into second place in the Republican presidential race. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani remains the front-runner with McCain, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson following.

For the first time in recent political history, Republicans don't have a designated successor for the presidency, leaving the GOP bid wide open, McCain said.

"There's always been kind of a candidate that the political and financial base of the party rallied around," McCain said, referring to Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole and George W. Bush. "This time that's not the case."

In praising Gov. Huckabee for his great presentation during the recent GOP Debate, John McCain reveals more about his own strength as a leader. John McCain understands what it takes to lead and recognizing the strength and intrinsic worth of an opponent is the attribute of a strong leader.

Gov. Huckabee is a great American - John McCain is the man to lead America in time of War on Islamist Terror and restore the confidence of all Americans in themselves!


Here in Illinois Rep. Jim Durkin leads a team that brought John McCain on to the tough Illinois ballot with a FULL slate of delegates. Straight Talk is effective and engaging

Chicago's Club of the UnClubbable

Above - Mycroft Holmes - Below Mike Houlihan in manly Pre-Labor Day Panama tan suit gives a stern temperance lecture to an obviously clubbable and reed thin chap at a charitable event. Absent from this charitable event were members of Chicago's Union League Club.


Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes, the talented and cerebral sons of Bob and Tess Holmes, coal carters from Yorkshire, remind me of Mike Houlihan: Like Mycroft, Mike Houlihan is cerebral, philosophical and poetic:Mike Houlihan - Author, Actor, Playwright, Film Director, Columnist, Patriot, Wit, Gadabout, Free-Spender, Arch-Goodguy, Pugilist, Censor.

Like Mycroft given to deep thought to the point of ennui:

...he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right. Again and again I have taken a problem to him, and have received an explanation which has afterwards proved to be the correct one. And yet he was absolutely incapable of working out the practical points...

– Sherlock Holmes, speaking of his brother in "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter"

From our friends at Wikpedia

And yet like Sherlock (- Ratiocinator extraordinaire, dope fiend, tobacconist, actor par excellence, musician, grifter, and wower of hot chicks) a man of the world, .

Houli is a complex man of universal tastes and inclinations - at once private and thoughtful and concurrently a Rabelaisian Rounder of the First Order.

Mike Houlihan,an 18th Century man of Johnsonian ( Samuel Johnson ) exertions and talents trapped in a faux-Edwardian world of stuffed shirts and phonies.

Houli got clubbed by the membership committee of the Union League Club - a dusty and pretentious convention center for low-brows with American Express Gold Cards. He was deemed 'unclubbale' - to use Dr. Johnson's 18th Century coinage. His heartache cried up to dry our eyes from the pulpy pages of Cliff Carlson's Irish American Magazine and made them moist with brotherly understanding - Page 28 - click my post title for the link:

Here is a poignant passage:

Of course I’m happy now that I
couldn’t join their club. Who wants
to go where they’re not wanted? But
these schmucks wouldn’t even put it in
writing, no letter, just the word passed
on to me, “Sorry you’re not our kind
darling.”
It’s all for the best. I couldn’t afford
it now anyway. However I would suggest
they remove the word “Chicago”
from their moniker at the Union League
Club. As Eddie Vrdolyak once said, “In
Chicago, we don’t stab you in the back,
we stab you in the front!” Well not
these guys.
So I will take pride in their snub and
remember my mother’s words “the bitter
lesson is best taught”. It’s what I got for
sticking my nose into a wasps nest.
Of course I forgive them and even
though I may announce to the world that
the Union League Club can kiss my fat
Irish ass, I’m actually, in my own way,
just turning the other cheek

Christian Gentleman to the backbone!

Houli, My Dear Fellow, a man of your expanded worth should not be confined, much less defined by a membership. You do more in a day than most of the Union League Club's overpaid ambulance chasers in two-tone broadcloth $400 shirts do a lifetime.

Who was it that said 'Study everything; join nothing?'

Mike Houlihan's Giant's eyes take in the cant and hypocrisy of our world right here in Chicago. This man is not Clubbable? Pish Posh!

Houli, enact a Club without Walls; found an Association without a Membership Committee. Make it an open membership to whomever you have the grace with whom you deign to congress.

To the phonies, snobs, louts, boors, tightwads - you might be unclubbable.