American Fez

More Cold News

Inform someone that you have a cold and without fail they will provide you with some bizarre remedy: "Forget about zinc. That's just some old wives crap. What you really want to do is take a shaft of willow root and rub it on a blind toad's belly on the second Sunday in October, then stick both ends of the root up your nose and set fire to it while drowning the toad in an artesian well. I swear to God, it's the only thing that really works."
Frankly, I'm willing to try it, since my nose feels like the Riechenbach Falls with Sherlock Holmes jammed up one nostril and Moriarty jammed up the other. Meanwhile, the Hound of the Baskervilles is playing fetch in my throat ...and he needs his nails cut.

Remember to check back tomorrow for more thrilling "Stephenesque Has A Cold" Updates!

(Yes. I really am the sort of whining baby who complains about his cold all the time until everybody else is bored senseless. That's me in a nutshell.)

Opportunity Knox

My good friend Stefan Beck is to be congratualted since he has got his hands dirty in the grimy world of political weeklies. The former Datmouth eminence-gris has written a thought-provoking "piece" that binds together 1920s homosexualist Evelyn Waugh's Knoxian view of the deadly sin of Sloth with the former Swift Boat Swabber John Kerry, and is available for reading at National Review Online.
Well worth your perusal as is everything that Mr. Beck writes over at Armavirumque

Trivia note: the Three-toed Sloth is the only other creature that makes love face to face with its partner as the human does. I bet you didn't know that!

National Public Radio in the Morning

Der-ner ner ner ner-ner. Hi! This is Sky Whizzbang and welcome to Marketplace on National Public Radio! Der-ner ner ner ner-ner. The yen topples over and stubs its toe against the dollar! Der-ner ner ner ner-ner. Hi! This is Zak Boomerang and you're listening to Marketplace on National Public Radio! Der-ner ner ner ner-ner. The hula hoop makes a comeback! Der-ner ner ner ner-ner. Hi! This is Zip Superduper with Marketplace from National Public Radio! Der-ner ner ner ner-ner! Top Wall Street analysts say money is green! Der-ner ner ner ner-ner! Hi! This is Topaz Willywonker and that about wraps it up! You've been listening to Marketplace on National Public Radio! Der-ner ner ner ner-ner. The time is six o'clock.

Bless You!

And the Sneezers did journey to Nostrilum whereat they did accost Peter in the Temple, and the Sneezers saith unto him: "Peter. We are afflicted with the phlegm plague in our noses. Take us to your Lord and Master so that we may be cured of our terrible cold!"
And Peter did reply unto them: "Oh dear. Yes that does sound like a bad one. But, alas, although my Lord and Master can raise up the dead and turn-eth water into wine, lo, there is not much even He can do about a runny nose and bad cough." And so the Sneezers did depart for Cataarh where they were enslaved by Hackahack who put them to work in his lowly zinc mines.
Here end-eth the lesson.

Jackson-ville

Where is the Jackson's blog? Surely such intelligent, erudite and witty people should have a blog of their own. Perhaps the intricate design layout is slowing the process down? Look, I have already suggested a name for the blog!

For The Children

I am in search of an illustrator for my children's history book idea: "Mao Tse Tung And His Little Red Butt" - must be able to wield crayon and gouache.

A Tissue

A bad cold has taken possession of me, imprisoning my mind since I can barely think about anything else except the coughing, hacking, sneezing gaoler.
As anyone - eveybody, I imagine - who has suffered from a cold can attest: there is no such thing as the "common" cold: they are all high-born, distinctive, and demand our immediate and full attention. My current cold is like having a UFO attached to my face: a cigar-shaped object with mysterious lights, full of little green men ... just hovering ...

Wednesday Morning: A Romance

The icy hand of Death, remorseless bone scrimshawed with the names of that day's grim harvest of souls, gripped my resolute scrotum as I strode, flintlock and sabre hilt glinting in the early dawn light, towards the appointed place; Baron Fieldze, my stout second, maintaining steady pace with me; and yet the unanswerable question still jostled and harried my otherwise implacable mind: Why on Earth had I insulted the honor of Count Liverre-Sault's pet guinea pig, Piggy Wiggy the Great?
Now, on the count of ten, either I or Liverre-Sault would die. I thought of Countess Bustia, no doubt still slumbering in her silken bower at this accursed hour, perhaps waking to discover with horror that I breathed no more, falling perhaps, driven by unextinguishable sorrow, into the arms of the triumphant Liverre-Sault. And should I be victorious, I resolved, then I would ensure that Piggy Wiggy The Great should never want for lettuce or whatever it is that guinea pigs eat, and all the jingly plastic toys and wheels that money can buy form the pet shop in Crappe Strasse.

The Compleat Mangler Project

Since my own literary ambitions are currently aflame on the bonfire of wasted talent, I have decided to turn my writerly attentions to Izaak Walton, the author of, amongst other tedious titles and examples of printed buffoonery, The Compleat Angler, available for reading online here. Since the volume in question is obviously a work of incomprehensible waffle, I have, as it were, translated the book from its original gibberish into a language more suited to the modern ear. Consequently, in my version, the character called "Piscator" has been re-named "Piss Taker". Furthermore, there is now obviously a new chapter listing for the book, which runs as follows:

Chapter I: A conversation between a Piss Taker, a William Faulkner, and a Billy Bunter, each denouncing the other's recreations as a complete waste of time.

Chapter II: Observations at the Rotter's Club

Chapter III: How to shout louder at the Local Pub

Chapter IV: Observations on the greed and ugliness of the Old Trout and then observing the Milkmaid's chest.

Chapter V: How to get rid of the Old Trout

That's as far as I've got so far. But you must admit, it's a pretty good Project as far as Projects go!

Bring Back Harold

Considering that over the past few months I have garnered a large group of supposedly literate readers, I am rather depressed that it has been left to myself to point out my own gross error of spelling Harold Nicolson's name
incorrectly yesterday. Surely the late, great diarist, biographer, belles-lettrist, humorist, politician, diplomat, and homosexualist deserves better than this?
If you have never read the works Harold Nicolson I suggest that you do so without delay. He was certainly a greater prose stylist than most of the "writers" of his own day, and surely the most polished diarist of the twentieth century.

Gallery Chronicles

Gathering my champagne hood and cheese bib, I proceed, with fleet foot clad in clacking clogs, to the detestable Armavirumque Gallery on high class, well-appointed Internet Street, where, with gross patriarchal ceremony, I hear that the fascist photograph "John Gross, Describing the Turner Prize to an Alarmed Associate Editor" will be unveiled to a salivating audience of neo-Nazis to raise money for the pro-Bush, Anti-Queer Eye Lobby. This new work, (de)based on the famous Caravaggian canvas "Boy Bitten By A Lizard", attempts to, in passe and out-moded figurative terms via its conservative formulae of digital pixelations, explain to the non-New Yorker what a cool bash for over-fed, wealthy artsy socialites is like. Needless to say, the picture holds no interest for the committed Lesbian, or the Union Pipe Fitter, nor the Anarchist.
Naturally, I left in hurry, so that my intellect might be purified by my thousandth viewing of the wondrous "Iraqi Being Sick On My Face" and "Robert Having His Penis Enlarged" by Junky Group painter Heroine van der Garbarge.

Continue Reading

I have noticed that it has become the hot new thing in weblogs right now to only post the first few lines of a specific entry on the blog home page, and then provide a link below that says "read more" or "continue reading" and that points the weblog visitor to the completed entry on another page. Since I am the sort of blogger who likes to wobble about precariously on the cutting edge of blogdom, I can't decide whether I should follow the example of these hip and happening stylishly cool sites, or remain loyal to the traditional "full post" type entry. It's like the difference between a snake and a serpent: one is just a silly old slithery thing, but the other is a hissing, spitting evil-doer, a venomously fanged tempter ever ready to beguile and deceive and betray and do lots of other nasty things besides. Continue Reading

Monday Morning Fever

Behold the withered foot of Time;
How yon graybeard lurches along his tocking path!
Arm in arm with the dreary sluggard Space,
E'en though his clogs do pinch his odored toes.
Clucking seconds from the darkling roost dispatched
And dance a crippled minuet o' moaning minutes gone
Heigh ho nonny nonny, it be twelve-past-nine!

(attrib. to Jonn Keats Esq. by His Enemies)

Down With Everybody!

Unless you are the Queen of England or some Great Khan or other, then the chances are - and this includes you Churchill, those watercolors are dreadful - chances are that you need to be taken down a peg or two from time to time - yes I'm looking at you, Patton.
But at this current juncture of the progress of the world through unimaginable time and space, I would have to say that Gay Men are most in need of participating in my self-esteem reduction program. I'm not being homophobic. It's for their own good after all. I am sure that all sensible gays such as Norman Douglas, Harold Nicholson and Evelyn Waugh, would agree with me wholeheartedly (as soon as they have been chastised for getting above themselves; perhaps it's my fault? I should never have called them "sensible", you think?)
Anyway, to begin with, they should cease calling themselves Gay, and that term should revert to its original meaning. Secondly, they should stop thinking that they know more than everybody else about clothes, art, and the application of garlic and other imported spices to food. Thirdly, they should give us our girlfriends back .... pronto.

Baedekers History

If there were Time Machines for hire, to which destination and at what period of history would you bid the hackney man drive: Minoan Cyclades? Edwardian Maidenhead? Elvisian Polynesia? Foggy, gas-lit Chinatown up Limehouse Docks way? Or just somewhere crap in Ice Age France?

Occupations Past and Pre-occupations Present

Last night's blank sheet of sleep once more shaded and colored in by dreams of the Centurion: "For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it." Married himself a busty brood mare. Little villa in the country with two chariot garage and an olive grove out back. Private bath, naturally. Sired sixty kids he did. Nubian slaves doing the vacuuming and making the coffee. You can't complain, can you? Hail Caesar!

Jump Down Turn Around Put It In Reverse

I have always been in the habit of composing spirituals especially adapted for whatever job I am engaged upon. Hence, back in the days when I was a parked expensive automobiles at a luxury hotel, the average evening might find me singing the following refrain to myself to a backbeat of jangling keys:

Pharoah needs his chariot parked
Down in the garage, oh my Lord
Said Pharoah needs his chariot parked(clap clap)
Down in Level Three, oh my Lord
Said Pharoah needs his chariot parked (clap clap)
And he dun gone given me the keys!

Said Pharoah needs his chariot parked (clap clap)
Yes my Lord!
Said Pharoah needs his chariot parked (clap clap)
Oh Lordy Lord!
It's a big ugly green Chevvy
Yes my Lord!
Said Pharoah needs his chariot parked
Oh Lordy Lord a new day's gonna come! (clap clap)

These days, of course, I am the Pharoah ... but I don't see why that should spoil my fun.

Widdershins

Thursday has been rather like erecting a purposeless wall in the middle of a barren field; rough red bricks laid after the Dutch pattern, and adorned with a fringe of conventional yet primitive castellations that have no true defensive function, except, perhaps, to inspire very small and very evil boys to scale one side of it and then tip boiling oil over pedestrians passing by on the other. And that is very much what Thursday has been like so far.

Apollo Disco

It is far too late for me to venture out carousing with the naughtier Vestal Virgins, of course, but the apparently the Latinitas Foundation of the Vatican has recently published a new Latin dictionary that includes translations of modern words. For example:

Hot Pants are "brevissimae bracae femineae"

Punk Rock is "punkianae catervae assecla"

Pizza is "placenta compressa"

I'm sure that somewhere in the ether Petronius is once more itching to take up his pen again....

For He Had Spoken Lightly Of A Woman's Name

So. It seems that the third-rate novelist, second-rate politician, first-rate journalist and media superstar Boris "I Woke Up One Morning And It Was Like This" Johnson now boasts a blog of his own; albeit a blog that seems to be written for him by somebody else.
Since BJ is the MP for some Thames-side resort or other, I'm sure that most of BJ's posts will confine themselves to discussion of "the new gibbet proposed for the corners of Hooray and Henry Streets", and the like. You know the sort of thing these people discuss: "Proposal to sell firearms and ammunition from Cholmondely's Bait and Tackle during the week of the Regatta" and so on. "Proposal to provide rocket launcher service and deflector shields for the #32 bus route" etc ...
But you never know.
However, one thing is sure and nothing's surer: somehow Theodore Dalrymple will worm his way into the "guest blogger" spot before too long, "giving it large" to BJ's constituents on the subject of the proposed combination prison and walk-in hospice to be built on the site of the former asylum on the road to Liddle Circulationeton.

Pasolini Contra Calvino

È buono che incolpa del Sultan, ho detto. Se desiderate andare circa willy-nilly l'innalzamento della tonalità agitata del tulip di Daphne con il vostro necromancy pagan, ho detto loro, quindi potreste desiderare pensare due volte a lavare i vostri piedi in creosoto. Non che ascoltano me, naturalmente. No dell'cOh. Trenta anni sono stato custode del faro a Herbert oblungo e prende uno per conoscere uno, ho detto, particolarmente se Dick Priapus e l'orchestra disgraceful sta giocando il waltz del cripple da Gertrude "grasso" dello Schleist mentre la nave va giù. In ogni modo, che cosa voi sanno, esattamente come ho predetto, sveglio la mattina prossima e la tonalità agitata del tulip di Daphne è di destra là nella cambusa, pianura come la verruca sull'estremità del naso del Cromwell, facente il pane tostato, ha bruciato il nero da entrambi i lati, poichè potreste prevedere, poiché la prima colazione Breadmen alla baia di Boffiny non ha inventato i tostapane elettrici fino a quattrocento anni dopo che Daphne sia stato già guasto, in modo da l'anima persa difficile ha condannato inseguire la terra per il resto di eternity mentre piangevano nel vuoto non ha saputo le regolazioni sulla macchina sono state supposte per essere regolate. Così naturalmente ci era a.lot di gridare ed urlando e denominando ogni "bastardo di Jesuit", posso dirvi, particolarmente dopo che Daphne abbia camminato pulito tramite la parete, prendendole tutte le marmellate d'arance importate con.

Translation By Google of "Exoneration of Tartuffe" by Stephenesque (Les Editions Crappo)

Exoneration of Tartuffe

It's no good blaming the Sultan, I said. If you want to go about willy-nilly raising the restless shade of Daphne Tulip with your pagan necromancy, I told them, then you might want to think twice about washing your feet in creosote. Not that they listen to me, of course. Oh no. Thirty years I've been lighthouse keeper at Herbert's Oblong, and it takes one to know one, I said, especially if Dick Priapus and the Disgraceful Orchestra are playing the Cripple Waltz from Schleist's "Fat Gertrude" as the ship goes down. Anyway, what do you know, exactly as I predicted, I wake up the next morning and the restless shade of Daphne Tulip is right there in the galley, plain as the wart on the end of Cromwell's nose, making the toast, burnt black on both sides, as you might expect, since the Breakfast Breadmen at Boffiny Bay didn't invent electric toasters until four hundred years after Daphne was already dead, so the poor lost soul doomed to stalk the Earth for the rest of eternity while weeping into the void didn't know how the settings on the machine were supposed to be set. So naturally there was a lot of shouting and yelling and calling every one "Jesuit bastard", I can tell you, especially after Daphne walked clean through the wall, taking all the imported marmalades with her.

Osbert Contra Wislon

There can be few darlings out there in footlight land unaware that the lovely "comedy of manners" was dealt an ill-mannered, anti-kissy-wissy blow by Edmund Wislon's very mean 1926 work, By Greyhound Coach to Elsinore, and that the "comedy of manners" as we all know, love, and revere it was subsequently unable to re-attain the level of elegant poise and uncanny composure it boasted prior to Wislon's infamous printed thrust to the bared and defenceless bosom of this most wonderful of light dramatic forms.
How well I remember those heady, grease-paint scented evenings that previous summer; draping my loud-checked self across the chaise lounge in the Royal Box at the Beaumont Fletcherdome every night during the second act of Terence Shortrunne's The Crushed Pansy. It was the scene where Raymond with a tennis racquet hidden in his trousers creeps through Lady Dracula Verrie-Severe's window, hoping to discover Clarence and Miss Elephantine in the nude.
I was still in love with Camilla then, determined to immortalize her irresistable pout in a seminal work of fiction I would publish. It would be written with a powerful passion and avante-garde verve in my study, meanwhile Camilla curled up beside me in an overstuffed armchair, polishing my cane and brushing my top hat, as it were. But that was before I discovered that Camilla was an insatiable lesbian, obsessed with a bearded lady twice her age called Dame Haroldie Pinter who had escaped from a freak show many years before dressed as a pantomime yak.
And now, in the autumn of my years, as the hunchbacked shadows lengthen and Apollo complains of sore feet and a bad case of piles, I learn - with still broken heart once more kicked in the ventricle - that Wislon's wretched book has been re-issued in paperback with a new introduction by Dave Beggarsbelief.

(This Post has been sponsered by the Campaign for More Silly Names and Titles)

Skull And Cross Stamps

Those wayfarers who approachmy house from the sea will have noticed the rotting corpses and bleached skeletons hanging from simple gallows erected on the rocks beside my mailbox. Suffice it to say, these are the unloved remains of scurvied couriers who attempted to board my house armed with unsolicited letters and other types of pirate junk communications. Rabid cormorants pecked out their eyes long before these villains exhaled their last grogged breath upon the watery gibbet. Barnacles and limpets find easy purchase on blackening toe and finger nails, while slimy green seaweeds are entangled amid what's left of the accursed courier's matted hair. Relentless, unforgiving waves break against the mailbox and the rocks: "pirate mailman, pirate mailman, beware of the salty sea dog" the ocean seems to whisper as its ...We are sorry. There has been a communication failure. Your visit is important to us. Please stay online and the next available blogger will be able to assist you.

Intimations of Amber

One can detect the advent of the Fall percolating through an open window as its characteristic aromas blend with and eventually surmount those other natural scents that are borne upon the air, although I should be hesitant to identify these specific fragrances that attend this most poeticized of seasons, and although the sun may still shine, the Autumnal light it flashes has acquired a crisper edge than that felt just days before, and so the body, hidden deep within the sofa beneath a blanket of newspapers and unread books, can with easier conscience shrug aside the persistant summons to venture out of doors. And the drains get clogged as well with all those brown dead things.

Sign of the Fish

Regarding the goldfish and all his works, I am a brutal disciplinarian. Equipped with a roving and spiteful eye either side of his rebellious head, the goldfish believes himself to be master of all he surveys, and his Machiavellian survey includes not only the bowl in which he swims, but also the room wherein this bowl is placed, and if encouraged, will eventually manoeuver to control the will of his owner with his powerful aquatic thought beams. The goldfish keeper foolish enough to place a plastic castle in his goldfish's bowl is only filling his pet's mind with dangerous ideas. As Izaak Walton remarked in Piscine Reveries In Scotland and Wales : "The Golde Fishe that hath dominion o'er the house betokens an unhappy state of affairs that 'tis indeed a worlde turned upside down. Nor shalt ye permit the Golde Fishe to arise o'er his lowly station, lest all that ye love be swept from the hearth along with the ashes of the day, aye, 'twould be better to call the wolf to thine own door and invite him across the threshold!" Hitler was suspicious of goldfish, as was Charlemagne. With good reason.
My own goldfish is called "Mr. Kipper": he knows who is boss. Oh yes indeed.

Fig. 12b

I am shocked and amazed - and not a little disturbed - by the reviews of Michael Barber's new book about Anthony Powell. Considering that it is a biography of perhaps the most pictorially sensitive of novelists, you would think these so-called "experts" might mention the plates. But of course not: it is the work of a moment to review the text - with Powell your review writes itself, depending on your point of view - but much harder for the poor lamb, deadline-harried reviewers to think of something original to say about the illustrations. And so they don't bother.
Consequently, as usual, it is left to the true connoisseurs like myself to supply the information.
(This is why you should leave your newspapers and magazine in their rack, and only read blogs if you want to know the really important stuff.)
Anyway, my review of the pictures in the book: dreadful. Ninety-percent of them are just duplicates of the ones Powell used in his memoirs. Exactly the same, with the exception of the photograph of ex-squeeze Nina Hammet (which I must admit is rather interesting).

Current Affairs

Despite what the no-nothing editors and glib pundits say about the combat records of the Presidential candidates, accurate information on this subject is actually extremely important for the potential voter to digest. I mean, look at the example of Eisenhower
Here is a man who became President simply because his Machaivellian aides fooled the electorate in to believing that he had once been "Supreme Allied Commander in Europe" - a phony sounding title if there ever was one, and only backed up by the weight of history and other such flimsy documents.
I have personally read through the whole of Howard Dimwitts "Illustrated History of the Second World War for Boys and Girls" and I have found absolutely zero mention of Eisenhower at either Stalingrad or in the Battle of Britain! He simply wasn't there.
No. It seems that friend Eisenhower - thanks to the timely intervention of his Great Aunt Ikette - had his feet up the whole time on desks in the chic capitals of some of Europe's most glamorous destinations. The mind boggles at what Chancellor Rommel and Heir Napoleon must of thought of fatty Eisenhower swaggering around the Rue and the Strasse as if he owned the place, while all the time, millions of miles away on the surface of the moon, those gallant Vegetarians Against Racism fought hand to hand against the Zarphooian Beef Insurgents from the black planet Ignubbe in one of the bloodiest tank battles of Korean Crusades.
The duped electorate of 1873 might have liked "Ike", but how could a man with such a shadowy past have possibly have liked himself?

You ... You ... You Ninny!

When calling a moron a moron, when drawing his "attention" to his own mental vacuity, coloring your abuse with vituperate curses and rude epithets will often have the opposite effect to that intended. For if you are reviling a moron in these sad and stupid times, supplementing your insults with profanities - no matter how revolting they may be - actually lessens the impact of the verbal vilification. Even denouncing your target as a chronic performer of the vilest, most disgusting and sinful deeds upon the most shameful parts of the human body is water off a duck's back to the average moron; the usual humdrum contents of lacklustre, quasi-formed sentences in an average days dismal conversation with his equally moronic peers.
Consequently, so that the moron might possibly think twice about his half-wit actions, we must resort to pure, time-honored, and unexpectedly refined forms of traditional defamation: "cretinous dwarf", "degenerate imbecile", "bovine oaf", these are all useful words and phrases you may wish to employ when venturing out of doors.

Mephistopheles And Co.

After eighteen years of fruitlessly attempting to summon the awesome power of our master Satan into our magic circle by chanting the Lord's Prayer backwards while cavorting around ogiastically in the woods with no clothes on, my Black Mass Acolytes and I - the Chappaquidssett County Devil Worshippers and Nudists Club - have finally decided to change things around a bit.
As of next Sunday, instead of chanting the prayer in reverse, we are going to chant from the inside out in a sort of kaleidoscopic fashion. Starting on the second "forgive", we are going to chant backwards until we reach the first "hallowed", then, every third acolyte on the left chanting each alternate syllable of every word, we will proceed chanting forwards from the last "thy name" until we come full circle back to the first "our Father".
Summoning the forces of darkness in this manner, we believe, will really separate the true diabolists like ourselves from the fringe weirdoes like the Mangawansett District Horned One Appreciation Society And Lodge.
failing that we will have to up the tempo of the orgy, I suppose.

Comments

I would like to pause for a moment of sincerity (haven't done that for a while!) to thank those people who liven up my soggy site with their witty comments. How proud I am to provoke such amusing and entertaining remarks - and they almost always are; so superior to the "yeah I think that too" comments left on most people's blogs. This is probably the only thing I have ever written on Stephenesque that is actually true. Thank you again, people.

Situation Vacant

My good friend Outer Life seems to labor under the misguided impression that "First Sea Lord" is a really cool job title. Pah!
Apparently he has never heard of the Rouge Dragon Pursuivant, Herald in Ordinary to the Royal College of Arms.
Then, of course, there are the Heralds Extraordinary, such as Fitzalan Pursuivant Extraordinary, and Maltravers Herald Extraordinary. Cool job titles all.
By the way, anybody who needs a job, and desires one with a cool title, might like to know that the posts of Somerset Herald, Blue Mantle Pursuivant, and Portcullis Pursuivant are currently vacant.
Apply online here
Be warned, however, that the positions only pay thirteen pounds and ninety-five pence per year. So you might need to find a day job too.

Shakespeare's Sense of Humour

In this module, students are asked to compare and contrast the examples of humour quoted below. What dramatic effect did the Bard hope to achieve with his "sense of humour"?

Example A. From "I Don't Like It At All"

(Scene: The Boar's Conversation Inn. Enter Falstaff and Attendents)

Mistress Pillock: Shalt I tempt thee with an odored foot cake for thy pox, good Falstaff?

Falstaff: Aye. If it be fresh tartered from a Spanish parson's rump at Michaelmas!

All: Ha Ha Ha!

(Exeunt Attendents with cakes)

Example B. From "Yes. We Have No Codpieces"

(Scene: The Night Watch)

Phlegmo: 'Tis time.

Bugger: 'Tis e'en time eno' by a Coxcomb's tattoo-ed buttock and nipple piercings says I.

(Enter the Duke of Bananapeelo dressed as a Sumo Wrestler. Phlemgo and Bugger conceal themselves behind a convenient arras)

Example C. From "A Hangover's Tale"

(Scene: Lady Fellatia's Robing Room. Dribble wears a pair of her bloomers on his head)

Dribble: Hark! Fellatia weeps amongst her weeds, for Dribble hath once more over-boozed his bonce and malnourished his manhood and hence no plenty provideth I to sweet maidens aged one and twenty.

(Exeunt Dribble)

Story Time

Tales From The Arabian Minute And A Half During The Afternoons

Translated by Stephenesque, with a little bit of help from his well-thumbed "Persian-English Dictionary For Tourists" (Cassell's 1924 edition)

And after Scherenadze had finished shaking her belly-button and sliding her head from side to side in a jerky yet oddly seductive motion, she sat down upon Achmed's magic carpet and told him the tale of Abu, to whom the Sultan presented the gift of ten sacks of rare and exotic spices in return for Abu's slaying of the Great Satan's favorite aunt, Betty Satan. And although Abu thanked the Sultan and praised Allah for his bountiful munificence, Abu was rahter disappointed because he secretly liked his food "mild", and so wasn't too bothered about the rare and exotic spices really. He would have probably preferred some gold stuff, to tell the truth, or a nice new camel instead. Something like that, you know.

RePrint

I had completely forgotten that I wrote this little squib:

Who Guards the Guards?

Mary Mary, chief warden of an infamous maximum-security prison nicknamed The Garden, has been accused of brutally torturing the prisoners under her supervision, the so-called "Pretty Maids."
Said one distressed neighbor who had been peeking over the electrified garden fence, "the Pretty Maids were forced to stand all in a row for hours and hours on end. It really was quite contrary behavior on Mary Mary's part."
A former Garden guard who asked not to be named said: "We used to ring these silver bells really loudly at night so the Pretty Maids couldn't get any sleep. Then, at prescribed intervals, we would pull the Pretty Maids out of their beds and pelt them with sharpened cockle shells."
"I wasn't being quite contrary" the former guard added. "I was just following orders."
Meanwhile, radical horticultural societies across the country have demanded an explanation for Mary Mary's quite contrary actions. "Mary Mary is solely responsible for this inhuman treatment of the Pretty Maids." said one. "She should hand over control of The Garden immediately to someone who can grow it properly."

Forget About England. It's Just As Bad Here You Know

My latest submission to City Journal, reprinted by kind permission of Thumbelina Social Affairs Blog:

Oh To Be In Fairyland

Deep in the darkest cells of the smelly dungeon in the Evil Queen's castle where I work, my patients often say to me: "Good Wizard Dalrymple in your coat so white with golden stethoscope hung about your neck on that daisy chain, listen to the tale I tell, for I am only a poor old unmarried woman who lives in a shoe with all her malnourished children and doesn't know what to do. I'm addicted to jub-jub juice, and the father of my children, Tom Tom the Piper's Son, beats me up every night with a magic wand when he comes home from stealing pigs."
Naturally, this disgusting slag is grossly obese, the horrific result of filling her fat face with jam tarts all day long. "Have you never read Der Untergang des Abendlandes by Oswald Spengler, I demand of the pathetic, quivering flesh mountain.... etc.

It is amazing how many articles you read in the American press about how malignant the English social experiment has grown, yet there are so very few about how equally disgusting American social detritus can be. There are vicious, moronic hooligans in Boston too, you know.

New Spheres of Activity

Those readers who were aghast to learn yesterday that I have thrown my novel upon the consuming fires - thanks for your support Mike in Idaho - will be overjoyed to hear that I have not spurned all creative endeavor. Indeed, I have discarded the novelist's pen so that both my hands are free to fiddle with the composer's metronone (although I haven't actually found the time to purchase such an instrument yet, so I am currently using an egg timer instead - the result is a lot of extremely long dirge-like notes that I am very pleased with so far).
My first composition - an atonal one - in D-minor for double bass bassoon, Lithuanian horn, big tuba, electronic oompah machine, kettle drum, tea pot timpani, and vox-sphincter, is provisionally entitled Bite of the Grumble Bee: a gavotte for five dancers and elephant. This new ballet - with choreography also by me - tells the heartbreaking story of a young man who cannot organise all the pages in his novel properly. As he sits on the floor shuffling his papers, four people dance around him making funny faces. Then an elephant comes in and sits on his typewriter. Curtain. The end. This business of music and dance is so much easier than writing novels. Take it from me. I know.

Eh?

Old gibbering Gibbon the Gubernatorial Gabbler is drugged and dragged by Lady Gubbin's Dragoons to the gibbet between the goblet stall and the gander's pen in the Goblin Market. Here the gobsmacked gather to gobble giblets of gamey goose ...

(to be continued when I can be bothered to go on with it)

Waste of Time.

Well. A thousand pages later I have come to the conclusion that "the novel" is not my medium.
An extremely long-winded saga of meaningless waffle about a man who never leaves his car and who falls in love with past life therapy junky, however, now that's definitely in my line. It was supposed to be a satire on modern life. Why bother?
It was going to be called "Can I Have My Soul Back, Please", or possibly "Hey Hey We're The Junkies". alas, now it is called, like so much else, "A Waste of Time".
Indian restaurant ownership, here I come .... (see below)

Indiah

If I were to open a fine dining establishment featuring the very best in modern Indian cuisine, I would do away with the tapestries of bejeweled elephants and cross-legged dusky maidens hanging above the tables, and go for a British Raj theme instead (aquatints of Mr. Kipling's army decked out in full regimental splendour groping the dusky maidens while rding the elephants).
And I would eject all the sitar tapes from the CD player, replacing them with scratchy recordings of "The Kashmiri Love Song" and "The Road To Mandalay" and other songs highly redolent of the era I am trying to evoke.
On the first page of the menu would be written the phrase "Sikh and Ye Shall Finde", and the mouthwatering dishes on offer might include such feasts as: Beef Biryani ala Cumberland Heavy Artillery; Old Major Arbuthnot's Dicky Tikka; Ye Olde Calcutta Mixed Grille in Black Hole Puree with Pakora Uprisings; 'Gad It's Hot' Sauce; A Princess Mufti of Shrimp; The Raj Quartet Entree Sampler Plate; etc...
I think it would be quite popular.

Shades. No Smile.

On my way to visit a friend of mine who dwells amid the rabbit warren of former servants quarters on Beacon Hill, my chosen route took me past John Kerry's home: a tidy, red brick Greek revival house on the corner of Louisberg Square. The sun flashed at the window panes, a seductive breeze tousled the tree greenery, birds tried to remember the words to their favorite songs, and I thought to myself: surely there is no more peaceful place in the city than here.
The senator must have been at home, since the flag hanging above his door was at full mast, and there was a gaggle of rather obvious secret service agents loitering around the front stoop, glaring malevolently at anyone strolling along the cobbled streets. Staring back at them, I imagined a troupe of angry swift boat veterans might suddenly emerge from the bushes brandishing their bestselling book in a threatening way, or a cadre of anti-abortion protestors dropping from the skies via parachute, armed with a cache of dangerous leaflets.
But nothing happened, of course. The only note of dissent was the dissatisfied, nagging voice of a little girl in the distance: "Mom, I want have another ice cream, mom."
"Good afternoon", I called to the secret service agents. But they didn't respond.

Something For The Weekend

I seem to have struck quite a nerve with my recent post about Gilbert Herring's matchstick-based artworks, and this site has been receiving over four thousand pings in a single day on the subject. Indeed, it is as though I have not just touched the nerve, but actually squared up to the nerve, insulted it, and then slapped the nerve in the face very hard and stolen its shoes.
Stephenesque and the post in question have even been name-checked by such web luminaries as Instapundit, Best of the Web, Google News, and Zach Braff's Garden State Blog. And, rather desperately, the 2 Blowhards also wrote a lengthy piece on Gilbert's matchstick model of Notre Dame Cathedral (1993), pretending like they already knew about him and had been fans for ages.
Previously, of course, as the world now knows, public awareness of Herring's pioneering and seminal work with matchsticks had been confined solely to a parenthetical comment in the annotated footnotes in the first draft of Roger Pinball-Wizard's Things the Masters Would Set Fire To If They Were Alive Today, available in scrunched-up ball format from the bottom of his wastepaper basket.
But now I have revealed that it was I who bought Gilbert his first box of matches. And that it was I who suggested that he should dip the individual matchsticks in creosote in case it rained while he was building his artworks outside in the garden because his mom wouldn't let him do it in the house because she was sick to the death of the sight of his lugubrious face hanging about all day. And that it was I who said that all that messy, dried glue stain smeared along the sides of his Westminster Abbey (1992) wasn't so bad and that you didn't really notice it in certain lights.
Anyway. These days Herring's matchstick models of famous buildings sell for millions, he is feted all across Europe, they are making a film of his life and working methods with top name actors, and yet all I've got to show for my support and encouragement in the early days is a half-collapsed, sixty matchstick tiny version of the Taj Mahal

Crown of Laurel

I was thrilled to learn during breakfast - nearly knocking my cornflakes to the floor as I leapt upwards in triumph - that I have won the Hatemongers Quarterly "First Annual Stupidest Lyric in Rock Music History Contest". The competition was fierce, and so I take great pride in my eventual victory.
The winning entry was the following couplet, sung by The Stranglers on their album track called "Ugly"

I guess I shouldn’t have strangled her to death
But I had to go to work and she had laced my coffee with acid

Pretty bad, obviously.
Stil, at least the song's protagonist actually goes to work, unlike the characters in most songs of similar ilk. Theodore Dalrymple would no doubt find hope for him, were they ever to cross paths in the prison in which Dalrymple works.

I would also like to send my condolences to Scott Pinkerton, Brian Marrin, and Lorenzo Anderraga, my worthy opponents: better luck year. I beat the pants of you all! Hahahahahaha!

Finally, when The Crack Young Staff become the editors of Time and Newsweek - as they no doubt will - does this means that I will have a better chance of winning the Jeep giveaway, or whatever competition those magazines will be running in the year 2015.

Taking Sides

For reasons that need not be explained to you, I am currently reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins, and really rather enjoyable I find the whole book to be. Indeed, the political left might find it all quite pertinent to their current relationship with America, especially those sections involving the character named Scriassine, and Henri's ethical struggle with those who wish to control his newspaper with a strict political ideology at the expense of honesty.

Ancient Graffito from the Circus Maximus

So Kerrya only spent a few months with the Legions in Gaul
But Bushus never marched through the Doors of the Temple of Janus at all
One they call Little Caeser
And the other a cowering, quivering appeaser
By Jove it's enough to make you bang your head against Hadrian's Wall
Since neither worships Minerva for real 'cause they just tease her.

Thatcher Coup

I should have noted this earlier, but Private Eye currently boasts a glorious cover picture and accompanying bubble caption.

Oh You Peeping Tom!

Much as today we describe a certain type of grim scenario from Victorian times as "Dickensian", I wonder if commentators in the future will refer to the equally distressing scenes from our own period - tattooed drug dealer wearing a basketball outfit smashing the unmarried mother of his six obese children repeatedly over the head with the end of his i-pod whilst poking her in the eye with his cell phone - as "Dalrympian", since the byline Theodore Dalrymple is certainly ubiquitous enough in the magazines and newspapers of conservative persuasion to earn the adjectivication of his esteemed nom-de-plume.
For example, recently in the Social Affairs Unit Blog, the great man, writing under his real nom, Anthony Daniels, observes of the Great Tattooing Epidemic of the Age: "Even young doctors do it now, especially the women: a butterfly under the bra-strap".
How very true, it seems that absolutely nothing escapes the probing Dalrympian eye, not even those secret places beneath the bra strap!

Car Talk

Last week I happened to stroll past a Jeep owner berating a truck driver for taking up too much space on the city street. The Jeep owner was undoubtedly moving his penis-enhancement vehicle the 1.5 miles it takes to get to his office from home, whereas the truck driver was delivering fruit and vegetables to a local grocery store from far away.
I was reminded of the scene this morning, when listening to a report on the radio about urban traffic problems only getting worse: there are too many cars and not enough road, the interviewees said, and no solution in sight.
But have no fear, fellow citizens, Stephenesque can solve the gridlock issue in one fell swoop: simply revoke the driving licences of fifty percent of the population, since considering the way they drive most people have absolutely no right to hold such a document in the first place.
And people who drive by themselves to work should pay heavier road tolls, more car tax, double their accident insurance, twice as much for gas ... and the New Super Congestion and Gridlock Tariff, much like the one they have in London, only more expensive and wallet crippling.
You don't like it? Then get on the bus with everybody else.
There are only a three reasonably acceptable excuses for driving a vehicle around a city, and they are as follows:

1. You are an emergency medical or law enforcement officer.

2. You are delivering goods and produce to city stores.

3. You are in Monte Carlo and it is the Grand Prix.

Scanners

Perhaps I am behind the times in noting the proliferation of all these self-service product and credit card scanning machines at the grocery store, at the airport, and at the gymnasium.
Pretty soon you will be able to perform your own MRI: " ... To begin your MRI proceedure, please place your head in the brain scanning machine ... bzzz ... bzzzz .... You have a brain tumor ... bzzz ... bzzz ... Please remove your head from the scanning machine and we thank you for choosing a Greycell Scan-It-Yourself Skull Scanner ... To begin your MRI proceedure, please place your head ... etc"

Belch and Belchability

It was with great trepidation and anxious summoning of mental fortitude that I, Virginia Primme, a delicate and pale rose petal, easily and completely crushed by the weight of social expectation, set forth across Alehouse Heath upon my journey to Gassington House one fine Friday morning in September, and in that austere place, guided by the expert and firm hand of Miss Fanny Adams, I was to learn the gentlewomanly arts of Wallflowery and Purse-lippedness; but even the prospect of Miss Adams’ Gassington tutorials filled me with a certain dread, for I had often heard my sister Anne speak of the Scissor Running Room, endless games of Needle-In-Your-Eye, and how Gassington, unlike other great houses around the village of Rumble-Under-Buttocks, lacked the quiet sanctuary of a Whispering Gallery, since the third Earl had rather preferred construction of a Belching Gallery instead; what public horrors and embarrassments, I wondered, would befall such a introverted, simple daisy as I in such a place? Fortunately, I had remembered to pack several cans of Olde Sphincter’s Blasting Red Cheeker Extra Strong Lager Beer amongst the dresses in my trunk, and consumption of the contents in lively fashion, I felt certain, would compensate for any bashful feelings I might encounter in the social whirl of the many Autumnal evenings I was to spend within the drafty confines of the Belching Gallery over the coming weeks ....

(story will continue after the authoress has attended to her morning's duties in the Life Drawing Room)