As its title suggests, The Complete History of Comedy [Abridged] is an incomplete chronicle of what makes people laugh and those jesters who deliberately induce said laughter, from ancient times until today. Starting with a riff on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show monologues telling theatergoers to shut their cells, where the exits are, etc., there is an endless stream of skits, standup, slapstick, one-liners, cream pies, double entendres, in-jokes, topical jibes at those Three-plus Stooges in the Trump regime and much more, as the jaunty Zehra Fazal, Marc Ginsburg and Mark Jacobson bring the annals of amusement to life.

 My first recollection of  attending a Major League baseball game was seeing the great Mickey Mantle and the legendary New York Yankees play the Indians at the cavernous Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

Decades later, the Cleveland Indians and their iconic logo, Chief Wahoo, are an inextricable part of who I am. I was there for the bat day crowds of 80,000, freakish, exhilarating anomalies in otherwise forgettable 100-loss seasons. I was there for the final game at the old “Mistake on the Lake,” and smuggled in a bottle of champagne so we could toast to the last time we would ever have to see our team play at the old dump, built atop, well, an old dump. I was there to see President Bill Clinton throw out the first pitch at virgin Jacobs Field in that thrilling inaugural game. After hearing rumblings for years about the team possibly relocating, walking into that pristine, gorgeous new ballpark that fine day gave me comforting assurance that one of the few things in life I really cared about was around to stay.

Last year, the FCC passed rules that restricted internet service providers, both home and mobile, to only  being able to disclose customers’ online habits on an opt-in basis – you would have to explicitly say they could, versus having to find some obscure sub-page on their web site to opt out. But like so many other protections for everyday people, those have gone out the window, giving your ISP the right to sell everything they can gather about you to the highest bidder.

Every web site you visit, from shopping sites to torrent hosts to medical resources, will now be up for sale, for no other reason than because these corporations don’t think they’re profiting enough from those $50-a-month service packages they’re selling you. They’ll know about your medical conditions. They’ll know what porn you watch. They’ll know if you’re questioning your gender or sexual orientation, and if you’re a teenager doing it on your parents’ computer, they’ll show your parents ads based on that, and no amount of browser history clearing will save you.

Donald Trump should love hemp. That’s right, you know, hemp is terrific. Just terrific. It’s going to make a tremendous amount of money for people in this great country. Win big. Really big.

… or at least that’s what we’d like to hear him say.

Trying to find the new administration’s position on hemp and hemp alone is like parsing hemp stacks for chemical pesticides and herbicides. Non-existent.

But Donald Trump should love hemp anyway and here’s why.

First the necessary primer. Hemp and its more popular cousin marijuana are related, but still quite different. Both emanate from the cannabis plant, but like, say, the familiar family dog, they are distinct. Canines can be bred to be giant Great Danes or tiny Chihuahuas, gentle and kind Labrador Retrievers or strong and aggressive Pit Bulls. By analogy, the hemp plant can be grown to be strong and fibrous for cordage that sails ships, or molecularly balanced for the oils that treat seizures in small children. Believe me, this plant is incredible.

It is almost impossible to find a picture of Chuck Berry where he isn’t holding a guitar, typically a Gibson ES-350T or ES-335. Although the 335 is probably more common in the photo vaults, most of records that Berry made during his heyday in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s – “Maybelline,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Roll Over Beethoven” etc. – were cut with the 350T.

The 350T is a semi-acoustic archtop, something of a cross between an amplified acoustic guitar such as the ES-150 and full solid bodies such as the Les Paul. A solid center block permitted electric amplification without too much feedback, while the hollow pockets on both sides of the guitar featured f-shaped sound holes which permitted the instrument to be played acoustically. Like most of the guitars of its era, it was intended for guitarists playing in the jazz orchestras popular at the time. Its arched body is a piece of craftsmanship, the work of a master luthier. They cost shit-tons of money.