Turn around, Bright Eyes…
This link, supplied by Randolph for Congress stalwart Jim Flanagan (take a bow, Jim! Thank you!), just goes to show ya that once every several years Jay Leno is worth watching. And there I was claiming once every 20!
Bright Eyes is an enterprising young fellow and I appreciate his candor. I suggest he make sure his tax papers are in order this year, and I’d double check to make sure he doesn’t have nail clippers in his carry-on.
Sounds to me like in ending his song the dude quoted an appropriate chunk of Arabic. In reponse to the question [paraphrasing]: "Does the president smell his own bullshit?" he replies [bukra?] fil mishmish. The 12 of us who caught the reference thank you, B.E.:
"… bukra fil mishmish meaning: ‘tomorrow, when the apricots bloom.’ It may be taken to be a mythical tomorrow, though the author may have intended it to be a real and not a ‘mythical’ one. She may have indeed meant to convey the idea that the mishmish will bloom, fleetingly, and that the Arabs, perhaps in this case more specifically the Egyptians, ‘needed to seize the time’ to bring change. However, in Arabic, the title of this literary masterpiece (completed in 1958 but not published until 2002) could be Filmishmish, a more widespread usage of the term, the closest equivalent to it in English I can think of is ‘wishful thinking.’ This expression is one of the many ways in which Arabs show their cynicism in the colloquial. When someone promises or predicts something which is found by others unfeasible, their comment would be filmishmish, meaning that this may happen when the time of apricots comes, as if saying ‘it will never happen’ or ‘a figment of imagination’ or ‘wishful thinking.’ "
At the school I taught at in Qatar, some of us teachers reassigned ourselves silly names for the kids classes so they could remember us better. I was Mr. Sheesha; my Canadian housemate Mike was Mr. Mishmish.
