Ah, good ol' Larry "Wide Stance" Craig, former Senator from Idaho! Don't you know it's got to be hell for him in an Idaho bar...well, if he went to bars...or lived in Idaho anymore. IIRC he's now with a firm (heh, "firm", get it?) in D.C., lobbying for roomier bathroom stalls so that men who really like to sprawl out and maybe even indulge in their constitutional right to tap their feet in a public restroom can do so and not be falsely arrested in a gay-sex sting, accused of doing something so clearly ridiculous for an Idaho cowboy as give the Universal Sign for "I Wanna Play, Do You?".
Yes, my good friend schadenfreude has given me countless hours of huge belly laughs for decades. Those tv shows about starving orphans rescued from some war-torn African hell-hole and given a wonderful future with loving families in a comfortable, prosperous and safe European country where an incoming President doesn't eat the outgoing one? A Reader's Digest tale of a 10-year-old wheelchair-bound Paralympic competitor who wakes to find her plane crashed after colliding with an iceberg, and who is forced to battle hungry polar bears armed with nothing but a spoon, and then rides for days on a narwhal to an Inuit settlement where she uses gum-wrapper foil to fashion a solar charger to power a phone so she can call her estranged Dad to come save her Mom and pet pony back at the crash site? Finally giving in to the emotional blackmail of the tough-ass guy who guilt-deluges viewers with 3-minute extreme close-ups of poverty-stricken South American kids with cleft-head and eyeball leprosy who are forced to eat garbage the monkeys throw out? They're nothing to schadenfreude.
None of these, not a single one, can match the ecstasy that floods my soul when I see a smart-ass punk sk8ter traumatically sterilize himself after he misses a 40-foot jump and straddles a metal stair rail. Nothing comes close to giving me the simple pleasure and sense of justice as does watching a swaggering adolescent Welsh bully who just beat several smaller kids, including kicking a girl in the head, himself get one-punched into brain-damaging coma by a passing man who happened to hate bullies. And does it get any better than seeing robbers who enter a Mom-and-Pop pawn shop and start pistol-whipping the elderly owners, who are then shot to Swiss-cheese shit by the son they didn't count on being in the back of the store? Oh, good times, good times.
