During the White House reception for the Nobel winners, Gore was invited for a special, private 30-minute meeting with President Bush.  However, he was unwilling to talk about what they discussed:

“It was a private meeting,” he said, “and I’m not going to say anything about it other than that it was very nice, very cordial. He was very gracious in setting up the meeting, and it was a very good and very substantive conversation. That’s all.”

Fortunately, Geese Aplenty has obtained an exclusive transcript of this historic meeting, which is reprinted below:

BUSH: Thanks for coming in, Al.  Basically, this is about that whole global warming thing, which apparently you know something about.

GORE: I know a little, Mr. President, but hasn’t your administration typically denied the problem’s existence and even tried to discredit it?

BUSH: Bygones. I’m getting more interested in it.

GORE: Well, did you get a chance to see my movie on the topic?

BUSH: Was that the one where The Rock is a football player and discovers he has a cute 8-year old daughter?

GORE: No, that was a comedy called The Game Plan.  My movie was a documentary called An Inconvenient Truth.

BUSH: Then I didn’t see your movie. The only movie I’ve seen in the last three years was the one with The Rock and the cute kid.

GORE: Well, look, I can run through the problem pretty quickly for you. Let me set up my laptop--

(Bush BLANCHES)

GORE: Mr. President! Are you all right?

BUSH: You’re about to start showing me facts and figures, aren’t you?

GORE: Well, I just wanted to give you a summary of the--

BUSH: Al, you don’t work here, so you don’t know. But I’m telling you now.  Nobody shows me facts and figures. Allergies.

GORE: Well, what do you want me to do?

BUSH: Here’s the thing.  I’m getting a little worried about my legacy. I kinda don’t want to just have it be around the Iraq thing.

GORE: Well, you can also be remembered as the first President who was given the office by the Supreme Court.

BUSH: ...

GORE: ...

BUSH ...got a little fire in yer belly still, doncha Al?

GORE: My apologies, Mr. President, I honestly don’t know where that came from.

BUSH: Bygones. Point is, I want you to certify my administration as a Green Administration.

GORE: What?

BUSH: Yeah, everyone says you’re the green guy, so I want you to endorse my greenery.  Give me a big “thumbs up” from the standpoint of the green thing.  Once you do that, people will remember me as the Green President and not the Iraq guy. So what do you say?

GORE: Green President? What does that even mean?  Your policies are not environmentally friendly.

BUSH: Well, can’t you just say that the White House is green? Like, the staff recycles and stuff?

GORE: I’d have to run tests, evaluate the processes, crunch the--

BUSH: Facts and figures.  Al, what did I just tell you.

GORE: My apologies, Mr. President.

BUSH: Look, what can you do?

(pause)

GORE: Tell you what. I am willing to go out there to the mob of reporters outside right now and tell you that, with every fiber of my being, I believe that you are green. Your every action as shown you to be green. Your foreign policy, your domestic policy, your Supreme Court candidates--everything you’ve done for the last seven years has proven that you are truly green.  Many people prefer a president with experience and expertise, but you have shown that it’s possible to get through two terms by being nothing but green.

BUSH: ....there’s something in the way you’re phrasing that that’s actually making fun of me, isn’t there?

GORE: I’m afraid so, Mr. President.

BUSH: Okay, forget the whole thing. Just say nothing to the reporters. Good luck with your Nobel thingie, Al.

GORE: Good luck with your legacy, Mr. President.

“It’s always been you,” she breathed, her chest heaving like a freshman at college who had too many beers to drink at her first frat party.

As he reluctantly bathed in the shower of oncoming gunfire, he wondered how the bullets in his chest could be so hot even while his body was becoming increasingly colder.

“You and I will never be together.” Her eyes flashed like an exhibitionist in an oversized raincoat.

“I hate the rain,” she sighed. “Sometimes I see me dead in it. As well as tax audited.”

“Yes, that was your father,” the white whale responded, nonplussed. “He vanished under the waves with my Dad and they were never seen again.  I tracked you down using genealogical records.  You, Abu, are Ahab’s last living descendant--and frankly, I hope you’ve been keeping your harpoon sharpened, because I am plenty pissed.”

People tell me that I’m getting more curmudgeonly as I get older, which I take as a compliment. I mean, have you ever met one of those people in their eighties who are upbeat and pleasant all the time?  I look at those people and I can only assume that for eighty years they just haven’t been paying attention.

But sometimes a gesture of human kindness pierces my heart and cuts through all the negativity I’ve accumulated as a result of Darfur, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, global warming, and Adam Sandler.

Such was the case this weekend.  My friend Meredith knows some crazy people, and one of them threw a birthday party for her fiancée. What was the nature of said party? We were given movie cameras and told to write, film, and edit a movie in around six hours.  The Red Vic theater in San Francisco was rented out at midnight to screen all of the movies to a bunch of tired and (by that time) mostly drunk filmmakers.

Needless to say, this was a pretty stressful enterprise; we only had a few hours of light to capture all the footage. And most of our film consisted of exterior shots, as it was decided to do a parody of Run Lola Run (one of my favorite movies, as it happens) full of in-jokes and references to the birthday boy and his fiancée.

So anyway, I was trying to take some shots of Lola (Meredith) running.  We were running out of time, and we were all tired.  I needed a shot of her running down her apartment stairs, but we were in a cramped courtyard and I was having a hard time setting up the tripod.  I backed up against an apartment door and shouted “Okay, give me a second, I’m trying to get you into frame--”

--and suddenly, the door behind me opened.

I turned around, and an elderly lady smiled and gestured to me.

“Come in, come in, shoot here.” She had an accent--I couldn’t quite place it. Swedish?

It was a foggy, chilly day in the city, and I could feel the heat spilling out of her well-warmed apartment.

“Oh!” I said. “Okay, it will just be a second. Thanks!”

And I backed up a few feet.

“Come in more, shoot, shoot,” she said, urging me on.

So I backed up even more and planted my ass in her hallway and set up the camera and got the shot.

I turned around and said to my savior, “You’re very kind.”

“Ah, of course, of course,” she said, and then she shut the door.

Now, admittedly, this was Meredith’s neighbor and probably knew her by sight, so she didn’t think she was opening her door to a psycho killer or anything. But still, this lady was warm and peaceful in her apartment on a cold November day.  She disrupted her tranquility so a bunch of shouting morons could enter her house and finish a ridiculous movie.

So, of all the things I’m thankful for, topping the list is anyone who is willing to open the front door, place trust in humanity, and let people get the shot they need:

(And isn’t Meredith a dead ringer for the real Lola?)

Happy Thanksgiving.

ME (excitedly): How can they talk about remaking Poltergeist? It’s perfect the way it is. I don’t care if the special effects are dated.

COLLEAGUE: You’re probably right.

(Young, female co-worker walks by)

ME: YOU! What do you think of Poltergeist?

YOUNG FEMALE CO-WORKER: Older guys?

ME: ....

YOUNG FEMALE CO-WORKER: Why are you asking what I think of older guys?

ME: Not older guys. POLTER GEIST.

YOUNG FEMALE CO-WORKER: Whatever.

COLLEAGUE: Greg, tell me again how it is that you still have a job.

In complete defiance of all those over the years who have complained that I never write about anything important, here is a ripped-from-the-headlines discussion of the Oxford comma, also known as the “serial comma.” The summary of the discussion is as follows: anyone who uses the serial comma is one of the Chosen; anyone who doesn’t is a mutton head.

The serial comma is where you use a comma after the last item in a sentence to designate a list. For example:

“Greg blogs about wheat, toads, and potstickers.”

Here’s the same sentence without the serial comma:

“Greg blogs about wheat, toads and potstickers.”

Note how that sentence is completely confusing.  Why does “wheat” get its own little special space of the universe, while “toads” and “potstickers” are jammed together like frat boys in the back of a pickup? Are those two items somehow connected? Is there a cosmic meaning that one should derive from their breathless union?

Of course not, and that’s why each item needs a comma.  Those items are begging for a comma. If they don’t have a comma, they don’t look right. You stare at them and you sense something wrong.  Something out of place.  Something that strikes at the core of their identity. Like Lindsay Lohan with an alcohol monitoring bracelet.

The problem is, there’s no consensus. Most grammar books will say “Whatever, you can do it both ways.” However, before you shrug off responsibility for the issue and embrace the ambiguity, let’s take a look at two people who dislike the serial comma.  You will see why it is not wise to align yourself with their camp.

1) Lynn Truss, author of the best-selling grammar book Eats, Shoots & Leaves.  Despite the title of her book being an homage to the confusion caused by the lack of the serial comma, she writes: “My own feeling is that one shouldn’t be too rigid about the Oxford comma. Sometimes the sentence is improved by including it; sometimes it isn’t.” Whatever. Truss is from Britain, where the serial comma is typically not used, so her opinion is worthless.  The Brits weren’t that wishy washy about taking over the world, were they?  The sun no longer rises and sets on the British empire, and it’s all because of their highly problematic handling of the serial comma.

2) Some jerk at a job interview several years ago.  I was applying for a communications position at PeopleSoft, and one of the first questions my interviewer asked me was my opinion on the Oxford comma. I said I used it; he said that he didn’t. And what happened a few years later? Oracle bought PeopleSoft and fired most of its employees.  And why? Opinions vary, but I believe it’s because PeopleSoft didn’t use the serial comma.

Now, to be fair, a Wikipedia article on the subject does give some interesting examples of confusion that is created by the use of the serial comma.  But these examples are flawed.  Here’s one of the sentences used to show the potential problems of the serial comma:

“To my mother, Ayn Rand and God.”

The meaning of this sentence is clear. This is obviously a list of three. But if the serial comma is used:

“To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God. “

The commas appear to be setting off “Ayn Rand” from the rest of the items, suggesting that the writer’s mother is Ayn Rand.  This serves to confuse rather than clarify the sentence.

My response? Give me a break, Wikipedia; Ayn Rand was a windbag who wrote character speeches that literally went on for sixty pages.  If you were Ayn Rand’s child, you would not be dedicating things to her; you would be in therapy. Therefore, it’s impossible to read the sentence to mean that the writer’s mother is Ayn Rand, which serves to prove my point that the serial comma is always correct and its omission is always wrong.

As we head into another election season, it will be the responsibility of each and every citizen to choose allegiances and make decisions. To do that, you must first find out who you are. I mean--who you really are. Are you a proponent of the serial comma? Or are you one of the rump-fed ratbrain maggot pies who seek to destroy civilization as we know it? Be the former.  Join us.  We are waiting for you.

We are happy, hopeful, and enlightened.