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The Secretary of State is a crappy singer ...................Paul Ryan
Minnesota's Secretary of State, Mary Kiffmeyer, visited a nursing home in our coverage district recently, and I took pictures at the event. Kiffmeyer is a very nice woman, and it was very sweet of her to visit these older folks. It was a big treat for a lot of them. She discussed state history with them, and did other things old people enjoy, but then she did something that was truly horrible. She sat at a piano, played it, and sang Christmas songs to them. Let me put it to you bluntly: this woman's singing voice sounds like a large cat being run over by a very slow steamroller. It's a good thing she was bashful and sang softly, because if she had really belted out the songs, I probably would have thrown my camera at her head. The old folks didn't seem to mind her singing (most of them are hard of hearing), but for me it was one of the longest 20 minute periods of my life. Some things I would rather do than listen to Kiffmeyer sing include drinking a gallon of pesticide, jumping out my apartment window and landing on a pointy fence groin-first, dating right-wing columnist Ann Coulter, and burning in hell for the rest of eternity. If she wants to stand out from other politicians by treating her public appearances like the talent portion of a pageant, she should probably pick a talent in which she excels. For instance, if I wanted to impress someone with my talents, I probably wouldn't break out a bench press and start doing reps. Instead, I'd read them something I wrote, or show them a picture of my fabulous ass. Anyway, as I said, Kiffmeyer is a very nice lady, and as far as I know, she's a fine politician. But bad singing is inexcusable in my book, at least when the person knows they're a bad singer. And let me tell you, there's no way this woman doesn't know she's a bad singer. Of course, being a nice lady doesn't mean she abstains from sneaky politician deception tactics. Perhaps the best example of this is the picture of her on the state's website, seen below at left. In the picture, she looks fairly young. It also looks like the photographer used too strong of a flash, making her face very bright. This isn't a mistake. It's a little photography trick called overexposing the subject. You make the person's face really bright, and it makes it hard to see their wrinkles. If you look below at right, you'll see a real picture I took of Kiffmeyer, who is actually 57 years old.
For shame, Mary Kiffmeyer. For shame. With her $90,227 yearly salary, you'd think she could afford to buy Adobe Photoshop and get rid of those wrinkles in a realistic manner. Afterwards, she'd still have plenty of money left, which she could use to pay for singing lessons.
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In this column, it's not often that I talk about my job at The Newspaper
- which employs me - because I don't like to mix business with pleasure. If I were to make fun of an event I covered, and someone involved in the event found the column, I could get in trouble. But some events just can't be passed up.
