CAMPOut: Running hot and cold...

In case you missed it, the daughter of baseball great Ted Williams is suing to keep her half-brother from putting the .400 hitter in deep freeze-a process called Cryogenics. The kid figures science will eventually cure old age, they can wake dad, clone his DNA and produce pennant winners. Or something like that.

In the meantime, with the Ted Williams on Ice controversy all over Entertainment Tonight, you’d think they were touting Disney on Ice, which, is kinda funny now that I’ve mentioned it, because rumor has had it for years that Walt himself was flash frozen for posterity. I happen to have inside information from a VIP at Forest Lawn Cemetery in L.A. that Walt is indeed in the earth and not in an ice cube tray somewhere.

Be that as it may, to freeze or not to freeze Ted is still page one. Which is amusing, given the rest of the news. Love the stock market. You need Dramamine just to watch CNBC. After an internal audit of my personal finances, I’ve pretty well resigned myself to funding my 80s with a News Journal paper route.

And I’m trying to figure out why the words “special prosecutor” haven’t been revived for our Prez and Veep’s insider trading and failure to report stock deals. Somebody reported that W’s failure to let the SEC know about transactions was “not a federal offense.” Does this mean that a lowly blow job was a federal offense?

While I found things that Bill and the bimbos did federally offensive, let’s get real. Politicos with runaway zippers are vastly more interesting than, say CEO’s raping and pillaging our 401ks, but where are the calls for hearings and public hangings?

If journalists revealed as much detail about insider trading and inflated stock prices as we got about Monica Lewinsky’s damn dry cleaning, we might actually protect investors. There’s a concept.

You think I’m getting hot under the collar? I can’t help it. Hot Flash! Hormone Replacement Therapy gives women every single disease it was supposed to prevent! If we didn’t have strokes just hearing that news, we can now look forward to them. Do we throw away our estrogen, fry eggs on our foreheads and sprout macrame on our chins?

An entire nation of my peers, 13.5 million women to be exact, will have to decide whether to chuck their age-defying fountain of youth pills and get used to a humiliating array of symptoms. We’ll be wracked with insomnia, night sweats, hot flashes and, my personal favorite, violent mood swings. Even if nature didn’t provide the mood swings, this medical science double cross would have.

And what about homeopathic remedies like soy and black cohash? It sounds like a Humphrey Bogart film noir-The case of the Black Cohash. I’m convinced we should just go out to the last remaining parcel of woods along Route One (is there one?) and start randomly eating twigs and leaves. Even doctors I know are shaking their heads.

Okay, let’s review. We’ve got millions of irritable females, up all night worrying about morphing into Mammy Yockum, with perspiration on body parts that should be dry and dehydration of parts that should be moist. We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more.

I say we harness the energy and sic this army of pissed off, moody women on big business. Faced with clammy, crazed, middle aged women with goatees who’ve been up all night sweating over annual reports, CEOs will spill the goods and beg for mercy. We’ll find out who cooked which books faster than you can grill a Steak-Um with a hot flash.

Following the triumphant corporate crackdown, we head out West, dousing the forest fires with our night sweats and bestowing cantankerousness on the estrogen fueled cheeriness of Britney Spears and the Olsen Twins (“Just you wait!!! You’ll shrivel up some day, too!”).

Then we deploy Troop Menopause to the Middle East to occupy all disputed territories until everybody plays nice. Two weeks into this Feminist Jihad, as both Arabs and Jews are being driven crazy adjusting their thermostats and staying one step ahead of the violent mood swings you’ll have them begging to come to the peace table.

Find Bin Laden? No problem. Although I still don’t understand why the covert operations of the entire free world cannot find a six-foot tall terrorist in a bathrobe tethered to a dialysis machine. Even so, we’ll just go in and smoke him out with the steam coming out of our ears.

After all, thirteen million women just learned their hormones were being revoked, their health was at risk and, oops, medical science used them for guinea pigs.

I can hear Martha Stewart’s lawyer now. The Twinkie Defense has been replaced by the Prem-Pro Defense. “Your honor, they took away my estrogen and I can’t remember a thing!”

And we should infiltrate religious congregations where elders have been shuttling pedophile priests around faster than you can say Where’s Waldo. Okay, millions of bad-tempered women are telling you to stop it right now, pay the victims enough to get counseling and instead of running a villain protection program, put them in jail where they belong. Fix this, or else. Be afraid, be very afraid!!!!!

That’s it. We start a brand new acronym. Like MADD and GLADD, we have WIMMAN -Women in Menopause Marching Against Noxiousness. Our motto: Don’t sweat the small stuff. Our mascot: the Purple Flash. Imagine the stuff we can fix. The possibilities are endless.

Of course, we’ll have to do our work fast. One minute we’ll be fiery crones on a mission, the next we’ll be shivering and weeping in the corner, apologizing for living. Frankly, it’s enough to make me very irritable. Although, as I tell my mate, “don’t like this mood? Wait a minute.”

Ugh. I’m having another hot flash. Cryogenics sounds pretty good right about now. I’m going to stick my head in the freezer with the Ben & Jerry’s.