(Just do it. No, not that.)
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“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
— Hunter S. Thompson

If you haven’t noticed, this year simply will not behave. It just keeps getting more and more bizarrier. And have you heard this? Now, there’s a career politician in New Jersey who thinks he’s a Roman slave. True story. (Not the “Roman” part, the “thinks” part.)

Now, I know — it’s not exactly rare to find a career politician who’s insane. Here in South Carolina, we used to have a Governor who thought Brazil was in the Blue Ridge Mountains. (Of course, as any non-texting student knows, Brazil is in the Rockies.) But when an active United States Senator starts comparing himself to Kirk Douglas, I think somebody better starting organizing an intervention.

Meanwhile, a company that sells tennis shoes has decided to go bankrupt by releasing a TV ad that champions an NFL nobody as a hero, apparently for no particularly heroic reason other than the guy likes to take a knee. I hear there’s a Clinton-era intern suing Nike for equal time.

Since the “sacrifice” ad was first aired, social media comments about the long-suffering kneeler have jumped 360,000 percent, which is the strongest argument yet for requiring registered voters to take a simple IQ test. Also, in the first four days after the ad debuted, Nike sales spiked 27 percent, as though every juvenile fan of mediocre quarterbacks had suddenly grown a third foot.

Biology sidebar: one Google search for this football player lists the names of his parents. Google lists three people. This is one of the reasons Google is free.

Legal Disclaimer sidebar: if you have three parents, please don’t be offended by the Biology sidebar. You have enough to worry about trying to remember birthdays, shopping for anniversary gifts, and dodging 33% more parental guilt bombs.

And just in case you were thinking America had managed to corner the market on weirdness, there’s this from the Pacific Rim: various political types with severe Trump Derangement Syndrome are concerned about North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Basinger (the son and heir of former leader, Kim Il-Suited).

Apparently, the Professionally Deranged Lobby are afraid that Kim has conned our President, Donald “Tweety” Trump, and that the self-appointed Korean immortal has no intention whatsoever of du-nuking his nation. The Lobby claims that Kim has reneged, though there’s no hard evidence that he ever neged in the first place.

The nail-biters have gotten so concerned that members of ex-President Obama’s State Department (we don’t know why, but they refuse to leave) are dispatching their top diplomats, John Kerry, James Taylor, and Dennis Rodman. If Kim remains incalcitrant, Rodman and Taylor will unleash a duet of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” despite the Geneva Convention. None will survive.

Meanwhile,  back here in New Jersey, Senator Spartacus was busy making a pest of himself by declassifying documents that were already declassified (see intervention). Somehow, this is all part of his scheme to run for President in 2020, despite being a two-thousand-year-old Thracian gladiator.

Political sidebar: You can always tell when an American politician has her/his eye on the Oval Office. One day they’ll suddenly start referring to themselves in the first person plural. .Suddenly, “I” becomes “we” — we have a dream … we think our tax plan is better for everyday Americans … excuse us, we have to go use our bathroom — and that’s a sure sign that somebody’s about to form an “exploratory committee.”

Geography sidebar: New Jersey is known as “The Garden State,” and there has to be a reason for that to have happened. Surely. Somewhere.

And don’t even think about pointing out that the candidate can’t be America’s President simply because the rules say you have to have been born in America. Senator Spartacus was born in Thrace, which is nowhere near New Jersey, and has way less freeway exits.

So, technically, Spartacus can’t run for President. That would be like Arnold Schwarzenegger running for pub…okay, bad example.

But be careful. If you bring up the Thracial issue, you might soon be branded a bigot; a hater; a … Thracist.

So maybe it’s best to just let Spartacus and his co-conspirators (Crixus, Cannicus, Castus, Platypus) babble on. It’s not like we’re going to hear anything new from a two-thousand-year-old.

After all, as one of America’s last great statesmen, Senator Mo Udall, famously observed, “Everything’s been said, but not everybody has said it.”