Clancy, 1/10/2008-2/28/2025

[vovat]

Clancy died last Friday. He was originally Beth's dog, but we left him with her mom and uncle when we moved up north. He and his sister Mabel, who died last year, were mostly Chihuahua and about a quarter Jack Russell Terrier, but while she had the Chihuahua body type, he was pretty stocky, and about twice her size. He still had the Chihuahua nervousness, though, and was afraid of a lot of things. He had a lip curl, and when he was a puppy, one of his ears pointed up and one down. He ended up living a year longer than Dewey, whom Clancy used to follow around and imitate when he was young. Clancy had been sick, and when we'd bring the cats down there, Felix would scare him away from the food. He did love cat food, but Felix didn't seem to want him around the dog food either.

To move to a totally different thing that happened on the same day, Jamal had requested tickets to the show Have I Got News for You, so we went with him to see that. It's a comedy news quiz show based on a British original, which airs on CNN and is in its second season, but Beth and I hadn't watched the first one. The host is Roy Wood Jr. (no relation to the guy from ELO, as far as I know), and the regular participants are Michael Ian Black and Amber Ruffin, with two guests every episode. I don't think I'd heard of Amber before, but she worked on the script rewrite for the recent Broadway revival of The Wiz. The guests at the taping we saw were Dave Foley and Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, who received some fame recently for telling Elon Musk to fuck off. A lot of the questions this time were about Donald Trump and J.D. Vance berating Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not sufficiently kowtowing to them, also addressing the "big, beautiful bill." I've always found it strange that a guy who's always putting on a tough-guy front is so fond of the word "beautiful," although it always seems to be in reference to something intended to be an inconvenience, like the border wall. Michael mentioned how Mike Lawler, who was his team partner in the previous episode, lied to him on the show about whether he'd vote to cut Medicaid. I was kind of relieved that there weren't any token conservatives on the filming we attended. I know it's a tradition on comedy shows like this to include people with different political perspectives, but when the Republican Party has pretty much gone full fascist, why even bother? That's part of why I gave up on Bill Maher as well. I haven't seen the finished episode yet, but Beth played a little of it yesterday, and they cut out a fair number of jokes, presumably for time. I assume that's standard, but I wouldn't mind seeing some of the outtakes from other episodes.