Did you see Paul McCartney on "Saturday Night Live" last night?

Oh, that wasn't last night. That was back in 1993. Here's a report of last night's show, and here's the clip of him doing — of all things — "A Day in the Life." I don't think The Beatles ever did that live. It was weird having Paul sing the John part (as well as the comb-across-my-hair Paul part), and the last verse was replaced by the chorus of "Give Peace a Chance" — in case you didn't pick up on the tribute to John (a few days after the 30th anniversary of his death.)

"I wasn't really dead," says Paul, in that 1993 clip, when Chris Farley asks if the "Paul is dead" thing was a hoax. And now, Paul lives on, and poor Chris is dead. Chris was born here in Madison and is buried here, in a cemetery at the end of a street named Farley.

Said the President to the 1,500 troops in camouflage uniform: "You guys make a pretty good photo op,"

I'm thinking he said it with knowing — perhaps even self-deprecating — humor, but still, extracted and quoted on Drudge, it looks awful.

Also at the first link: "President Obama will not announce his decision on sending more troops to Afghanistan before the Thanksgiving holiday, senior aides said Thursday." The news is no news. It would be funny — in a Generalissimo Franco is still dead kind of way — if it weren't so not funny.

I have "Saturday Night Live" sketch idea but it can't be used...

... because regular TV-watching type people don't care enough about David Brooks. But the idea is to combine 2 things:

1. David Brooks's story about how one time he sat through some dinner and all the while endured the hand of a Republican Senator on his inner thigh.

2. Bruno, the Sacha Baron Cohen character, who is always crossing lines to see what kind of a reaction he can get out of various uptight/homophobic/politically correct Americans.

Bruno escalates the outrage until the prank target finally rejects him, and what's so funny — when it's funny — is how long it takes for some people make him stop, making Brooks an ideal target.

***

Ah! Suddenly, I get it. I see what Brooks was doing. The theory that Brooks doesn't know how to disengage from a grope or that he's too polite is absurd. But this needs a second post, with its own headline. Hang on a sec.

"Elvis the ecstatic/ Elvis the plastic/ Elvis the elastic with a spastic dance that could explain the energy of America.”

Bono's poem about Elvis, aired on British radio:

A warning about the poem’s language preceded the airing, as a series of offensive words including “nigger” and “spastic” were employed.

Here in America — where we have Elvis energy, apparently — those 2 words are on completely different levels of offensiveness, but I guess that's the way they talk in Britain, where, presumably, "spastic" is not a word to be used casually.

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Bonus: "Saturday Night Live" transcript. ("Oh no, its Chaz 'The Spaz' Knerlman!... Why don't you shut up, Spazalopolis!")

Ah, now it's coming back to me. Remember back in 2006, when Tiger Woods got into trouble for casually saying "spaz" in Britain? Language Log had a great post titled "A Brief History of Spaz":

[T]he clumsy or inept meaning of spaz remained mostly on the playground until the late 1970s, when it began seeping into American popular culture. In 1978, Saturday Night Live started running occasional sketches starring "The Nerds," with Bill Murray as Todd DiLamuca and Gilda Radner as Lisa Loopner. On two shows that year (Apr. 22 and Nov. 4), host Steve Martin joined in, playing the character Charles Knerlman, or "Chaz the Spaz" as he was known to Todd and Lisa.... A year after the SNL sketches in 1979, Bill Murray starred in the summer-camp comedy Meatballs, which featured a stereotypically nerdy character played by Jack Blum called "Spaz."

For someone like Tiger Woods who came of age in the '80s (and who, incidentally, is on record as saying that another Bill Murray movie, Caddyshack, is his all-time favorite), the American usage of spaz had long lost any resonance it might have had with the epithet spastic. This is not the case in Great Britain, however, where both spastic and spaz evidently remain in active usage as derogatory terms for people with cerebral palsy or other disabilities affecting motor coordination. A BBC survey ranked spastic as the second-most offensive term for disabled people, just below retard....

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Don't you love the energy of America?

The Fordification of Barack Obama.

Given this, will "SNL" need an Obama impersonator who — like Chevy Chase — can do pratfalls?

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian said:

It would be funny if, after he bonked his big noggin, he said "Wait a minute... we're about to sign some bill spending a trillion dollars of unnecessary pork during a recession? What?! Not on my watch, we're not!" and promptly ran back to the White House and fired everyone.