American Fez

Stephenesque Designs

I have just created a new font which I have named Byzantine Headache Condensed. This supreme example of the typographer's art blends the ancient curves of Constantinople with the modern serifs of Istanbul and a blotchy silhouette nostalgia for broken dot matrix printers. Unfortunately I cannot employ my font on this web page since I am unable to upload it correctly.

Shaggy Fox Story

The Russian composer Rimsky Korsakov has an appealing name: a dashing, inspiring sort of name that might be given to a particularly wise and courageous fox in a fairytale read to a sickly child by a Grand Duchess in a novel by Tolstoy.
My curiosity was aroused, then, after receiving a personal invitation to tour the oddly titled Rimsky Korsakov Food Research Laboratory, especially since the tour, so the invitation informed me, would be conducted by none other that Dr. Janet Gleedlebaum, the eminent Orientalist and Dietician. And imagine my further fascination when arriving at the gates of the laboratory upon the appointed day, I found them not only designed and painted bright red to resemble Japanese torii, but also flanked by two giant statues of the fox spirit Inari of Shinto legend.
Inside this strange building, Dr. Gleedlebaum told me that her in-depth exploration and study of Far Eastern culture and cuisine had led her to develop a new strain of rice whose molecular structure was based upon a symphonic suite by Rimsky Korsakov. For instance, the doctor explained as she brandished an example beneath my nose, each grain of rice in this bowl contains a musical note taken from Sheherazade, and she popped the brown pellet into her mouth and swallowed hard, a procedure she repeated three hundred times in as many seconds.
So you eat the rice raw? I enquired of her.
Digesting the last of the grains from the bowl, Dr. Gleedlebaum laughed and extracted twelve acupuncturist needles from a blazing furnace nearby. These she swiftly inserted into her own abdomen while licking her lips.
Not raw, she explained: the principal is the same as Vietnamese Pho soup, which is cooked in the bowl as the diner eats, but in this case my rice steams in your own stomach thanks to the application of heat from the needles - one of which she immediately withdrew from her stomach and dipped in a duck sauce concoction: mmmm, she said, that’s good.
But where does Rimsky Korsakov come into all this, I asked.
In answer, the doctor silently unbuttoned her white lab coat and pulled her blouse over her head, motioning for me to press my ear against her smooth, white flesh: yes, there was no doubt about it, I could hear the rice sizzling away to the opening bars of Rimsky Korsakov’s Sheherazade in Dr. Gleedlebaum’s stomach.
That’s quite amazing, I told her: but what do you make for dessert?

In the Snow Country

And it came to pass that it was the year of the Great Snows.
And in this time of perilous weather the people of the Lord crieth out, "Oh Lord, why should it be that the great fiery ball in yon sky provideth no warmth for thy people who are sore cold? ... And why doth the white snow fall upon the Earth in great heaps and mounds so that it doth hindereth the progression of thy people from pointeth A to pointeth B?"
And the Lord spake unto his people and He sayeth to them as if unto a stupid child: "If ye were not so concerned with wearing thy stylish robes and trendy garments of silken comfort, and if ye did instead weareth the big wooly sweaters and thick socks with sensible boots such as even thy mothers commanded ye to wear on days like this, then ye would not be so cold would ye ... And perhaps ye should also consider cultivating a really massive beard similar to the one I boasteth on my holy face, and like that which sprouteth upon the divine chinny chin chin of the Sacred Billy Goat Of The Temple. That too might help a little bit. And behold it is February anyway, so what do ye bloody well expect!"
But it so came to pass that the people of the Lord did ignore His words. And buildeth they instead a giant raft, and upon this raft the people of the Lord did set sail for the hot springs and soothing rays of the places they had seen in the glossy brochures which the Evil One had cunningly left laying around on the coffee tables in the dwelling places of the people of the Lord and everyone felt better about everythingeth.
Amen. Nice tan.

Varieties of Musings

A Sudden Sense of Absence

Where have all the Dissidents gone? Perhaps, like the lamp-lighters and crossing-sweepers before them, their argumentative vocation has withered to nothing but a redundant and slightly whiny profession in this Sovietless eras of kinder, gentler politics; or maybe, like Afro hairstyles springing from Caucasian scalps, Dissidentism has simply fallen out of fashion. I don’t know: it’s all Chechen rebels and Islamic insurgents today, isn’t it.

Whimsical Notion:

Since theatrical types, board-creepers, sceneshifters, cardboard sky fixers, paper moon hangers, and backstage johnnies in general all refer to the supplemental and decorative set dressings of their craft as “properties”, then surely the posterior section of a pantomime cow that got lost would be “lost property” in more ways than one! But wait: perhaps it is the Costume Department rather than Props who control the administration of pantomime cow parts. Mmmmm.

Wheels of Prozac

Judging by the volume of passengers who loudly, determinedly, and unselfconsciously discuss their profoundest and most seriously intimate problems in great and gory detail while journeying from one place to another upon Boston’s echoing underground and very public transportation system - where even the most monotonous sounds travel at speeds far faster than the actual train - there must be a sort of Mobile Psychiatrist who, employing the subway seats as his couch, conducts his daily doses of mind-rinse therapy in these ill-lit and rat-infested tunnels and tracks bored through the city’s lower depths so long ago.

Pale Celebration

After yet another midnight flurry, as I trudge to work in the morning through streets frosted with lumps of crystalline white snow, iced muck, and frozen sand, thick winter hat pulled tightly over my ears against a bitter winter, the city seems almost like a crumbling, half-eaten wedding cake. A passing dog pauses: cheap champagne spilt on a linen tablecloth.
“Do you, Stephenesque, take this weather, in sickness and in health, ashes to ashes, for as long as ye shall live?”
I do, I guess.

Indian Ellipsis

I had made elaborate plans with myself that evening to do absolutely nothing at all except read, and was already deeply embedded into the couch and engrossed by the tales from Sir Richard Burton’s translation of the Thousand and One Nights when Comma called me on the telephone. Reluctantly I rolled off the couch and crawled over to answer the persistent ringing, my mind still stuffed with images of palm trees in the desert and crescent moons beneath which Scheherazade’s crescent eyes peered through arabesque windows.

"I’m bored," Comma’s petulant voice said down the line, "let’s go out and get a drink."

Comma is nicknamed Comma because I feel that that there is always more to be said about our peculiar relationship, but that neither of us is quite sure how to finish the sentence, although on the subject of dragging me from my sofa she usually has more success…. And so after much haggling and humming and hawing she eventually persuaded me to abandon the magical, exotic world of my book for what she dramatically referred to as “the adventure story of real life.”

"Let’s go to Shays," she added, "it’s always cozy in there."

"Alright."

Three glasses of beer at the bar reminded my body that I hadn’t eaten anything substantial all day, and I began to crave something warm and meaty to absorb all that fizzy ale sloshing about inside me. Comma doesn’t like to eat late at night since she claims that you get fat from filling yourself up and then going to bed without working it off.

Nevertheless, we dined at the Bombay Club across the way, probably the last table to be seated before the kitchen staff pulled the shutters down on their vats of boiling curry. Leaning against the window, high above the road, we watched the long lines of traffic slide down JFK Street towards Allston, Brighton, the suburbs and points bedtime.
I ordered the Lamb Saag as always, and Comma got the weird fish thing she loves but I hate, so we didn’t ferry dripping forkfuls of food back and forth from our respective plates like most other couples do when eating at ethnic restaurants.

When I awoke the next morning, Comma, awkwardly squeezed into the bottom bit of her lingerie and still only half awake herself was already retrieving the rest of her clothes from my bedroom floor, handling each item with great circumspection as if she were afraid the fabric would suddenly be transformed into sharp slivers of broken glass upon which she might cut her fingers.

“Was it something I said in my sleep?” I said.

“I forgot I promised to have breakfast with Nadine.”

With her head bowed intently over the discarded pieces of clothing tossed here and there the night before, her body almost bent double with her left hand clutching stockings and silky slip to her stomach while her right arm swept across the carpet to snatch up her skirt, it occurred to me, the memory of last night's meal still lingering in my subconscious, that Comma resembled one of those cute lumbering baby elephants you occasionally see in Bollywood movie posters, and observing her heavy breasts swaying to and fro as she moved about the room, I tried to recall whether it was Indian or African elephants who could boast the larger ears.

Eventually I decided the answer must be African elephants, but that Indian elephants had the nicer ones. Period.

Horror in a Can

She had a mouthful of grape flavored soda. I could hear it fizzing against the fillings in her teeth. But the smell was the worst part, the unmistakably sickening stench of sugared fruit cultivated in a greenhouse formed of human breath, hot and tropical, like a candy-coated belch or a fructose infused fart.
Imagine, if you will, a corp of heavy artillery blasting endless cannonballs of congealed and rotten melons, apples, oranges, and pineapples into the innocent, fresh face of a single advancing soldier, and you may perhaps gain some idea of what it is like to interact at close quarters with someone drinking grape soda.

City Journal

There are certain sectors of the city, makeshift urban funk holes, that seem to be constructed from stale air, shattered glass, filthy plastic rags, the grimy detritus of the day echoing with the mindless, inchoate shouting of human litter: the hoarse latitudes, as it were: zones of hopelessness that no matter how rebuilt, redeveloped, gentrified or whitewashed will always attract the destitute and itinerant, those vacant, migrant minds incarcerated inside self-crippled, unwashed bodies, tottering and lurching forward haphazardly in their own timeless space, led like the drunken sailors in Shakespeare’s Tempest by some mentholated spirit of the air, by some invisible hobo Ariel, to the same concrete arena of dejection, gloom and depression to which they and their kind have always been drawn. There is such a place in Boston’s Government Center district, always windswept, it is a paved pit of ordure whose rectangular boundaries are four weather-beaten, crumbling concrete benches and emaciated sprigs of dying greenery amongst which only the eternally incapacitated sit, all day and everyday, staring at the products of neglect. Meanwhile, not twenty feet away, heavily deodorized clerks in polyester pants are processing new social security numbers for the next generation.

(When I write about "social affairs", I write about social affairs - not about the theater like some other websites I could mention)

The New Stoicism

Why bother "putting things into perspective", since apparently the only things that are really worth seeing are those shapeless, optically illusive things that remain hidden in the invisible sand dunes beyond the vanishing point anyway. For it is only within this evaporated landscape of convergent linearity, along these latitudes of nothingness where picture planes are vaporized, it is only here that he who defines himself in terms of the Perpendicular Pronoun, while engaged upon his Pythagorean quest and consulting logarithmic charts, can locate such geometric wisdom as he requires to "put things into perspective."

Personally, I find it more profitable to take my frustrations out on an underling or an intern. But that's just me.

NYRB Tip

Once upon a time, the Great Wall of China was the only man-made object visible from space, but now, of course, eagle-eyed astronauts can also spot all those unsold piles of The Da Vinci Code reading companion cash-in books that form huge great tottering towers of babble in the receiving dock at your local bookstore mall. Fortunately, stacked neatly in the shadow of these colossal edifices, the adventurous reader can often discover interesting classic novels recently republished by the New York Review of Books. I am currently devouring the excellent Singapore Grip by J.G. Farrell, and I recommend it very highly indeed.

ArtGate

She lived at the top of one of those solid old Boston townhouses that resemble red cliffs rising steeply above a frozen sea of cobblestone and dog shit. Some mutton chopped lawyer’s family must have lived here once, but the building had been sliced and diced into individual apartments long ago. There had been a lot of creative plumbing at one time or another. Whenever you flushed the toilet it seemed as if you could hear an echo sloshing around in another bathroom four flights below.
Climbing the stairs was like scaling Everest, and often times just as miserably cold since the heat loved to bundle itself up into secret, inaccessible corners in that place, and so she always wore thick sweaters even when she had nothing else on, even in June. It didn’t bother me that much, really, but then women usually seem to feel the cold more than other people, don’t they.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. She was an “artist,” which is why she lived on the top floor, because she got more light that way. Although, to be frank, I could never figure out what she needed the light for. I mean, light didn’t really have anything to do with her work, since she was one of those abstract body artists who just roll around in the nude covered in paint to produce physical patterns and shapes on the canvas or whatever. Pure figure painting, you might say.
And that, to cut to the chase, is how we met. I was in the local grocery store buying all this eggplant to make a really massive ratatouille that I could freeze and she just walked straight up to me, right there in the vegetable aisle – I remember that a Hall and Oates song was playing on the store’s PA system - affixed her hands firmly on my buttocks (a real tight, strong-fingered grip it was too) and she whispered in my ear that she wanted to use me as a human brush to make beautiful pictures with.
That sounds absolutely fascinating, I told her, and exactly the type of thing I would be interested in doing, but, too be honest, I’m not very hairy and therefore wouldn’t make a very useful human brush.
She said that the hair didn’t matter, and that it was only fresh and exciting skin textures she was looking for, not proper bristles. So, since I had a lot of time on my hands back then, I agreed to go along with her to her studio on the top floor.
We made a few quality conceptual pieces together, and then about two weeks later she apparently discovered this guy with eczema called “The Lizard King” who was hanging around in PharmaSave one day and so she dumped me for him. I guess she must have thought it was bohemian or something. At any rate, that was pretty much the end of my brief flirtation with the Art World because I just sort of, well, I guess I just fell off the canvas after that.

My Inheritance

My embryo, reclining in my mother’s womb like Lord Peacock upon the ancestral chaise lounge, must have exerted a powerful magnetic force to attract all the quality genes my parents could offer it, since my twin brother received absolutely none of them. To this day he looks like a version of me from which all the goodness has evaporated: imagine, if you will, that I am the succulent, irresistible, mouthwatering plum ripened by especially golden Mediterranean sunlight, and that my brother is, well, he would just be the miserable, wrinkled-up stewed prune, wouldn’t he. Ah well, such is the of capricious nature of human biology. And why not, yes, let's hope I get all the money too! Hurrah!

Music, Man

A young musician recently asked me to compose the liner notes for his latest CD release. Writing about music of any kind must surely be the world's most pretentious occupation: this young man's music, for instance, can only be described as emanating from that rather anemic strain of wistfully melodic lo-fi pop that recalls the naive, awkward longings of playground romance. Once can almost imagine the lyrics scrawled on crumpled paper in pastel crayon passed through raindrop wet school gate railings with fumbling fingers and a low sigh.

Fortunately, the square cardboard covers of my old Scott Walker albums boast breezily grandiloquent descriptions of the musical contents recorded on the enclosed vinyl disc, profoundly effusive essays on the subject of the singer’s voice written in freewheelin’ 1960s sentence structures, and so consequently I will be using these examples of classic sleeve notation as a template for my own work in this uninhibited sphere of activity.

Elements of Speech

The pronunciation of certain words in everyday speech has always been a controversial subject. Take a word like "controversy" for instance: most people articulate it with four distinct syllables as "con-tro-vur-see", whereas people like myself who were taught to speak correctly say "con-trovosee". It is, of course, a Latin word - controversia - which means my pronunciation would appear to be the proper one. Raise your hands everyone who agrees with me ...yes, yes, yes ... so that's everybody, then. Good. I win.

Learning to speak with diction both pure and true was actually a feat of amazing endurance on my part. The odds were stacked against me since I did not respond well to that particular manifestation of scholastic authority and the ludicrously deranged, wizened figure who enforced it - imagine taking piano lessons from Dr. Strangelove -yet I somehow managed to transform my tongue into a wrecking ball and I demolished those formidable academic odds. Not that I wish to present myself as some sort of elocutionary hero, but think of me as, perhaps, a sort of Shackleton of Sentences.

Pisces Patients

I am proud to practice a very noble and ancient profession; so venerable it might well be called the world’s fourth or fifth oldest, and considered by connoisseurs of marine biology as an art form rather than a plain vocation; its pedigree traceable to the timeless Dead Sea shore where prehistoric cryptozoologists trepanned the coelcanths they caught with their bare hands. Yes, that’s right, I’m a fish lobotomist. You might think that fish look pretty dim in normal circumstances, but you should see one with half its already miniscule brain removed by powerful surgical tools! Behold the scaly fellow flapping his bewildered way through the champagne bubble depths of the ocean with his rubbery lips opening and closing like the broken lid on an pedal bin: fwop duh fwop duh fwop duh fwop duh.
But why perform a lobotomy on a fish? Well, can you see that bloated off-white shape floating upside down in the recuperation tank? That’s one much less schizophrenic Chilean Sea Bass, and let’s face facts, whether it’s been baked, grilled, or fried, folks don’t want to be eating mad fish now do they.

Firmament Ferment

My Monday morning metaphor for globalization: Imagine a child’s pink, green and blue pastel colored plastic globe flattened into one of those swirly, psychedelic fairground lollipops that hit the ground with a gooey kaleidoscopic splat after plummeting from the highest elevation of a rollercoaster when that old spoilsport gravity rips them from the grasp of a small and very sticky hand … this is how the world ends, not with a bang but with the snotty wail of a greedy adolescent on a sugar high locked into a metal cage by some over-tattooed, tobacco-chewing, greaseball carnival huckster. There you are, globalization described in a nutshell by the "king of infinite space" as Hamlet would say. Throughout the ages, philosophers and priests from many different cultures and creeds have struggled to explain and illustrate exactly how the Earth finds itself suspended amid the clockwork motions of heavenly spheres. These robed and bearded sages have argued that our blue-green planet is shouldered by sweaty, shirtless Hercules, or that it is balanced on the back of an ornamental and rather moody elephant. Personally, my own pet theories - depending upon whether I am in good temper or bad - is that the world either bobbles about in the pale yellow throat sack of some especially warty and extremely flatulent toad whose comet of a tongue shoots into space to snuff out a circling star fly, or that it joyously spins like a gleaming beach ball on the shiny nose of a comic strip seal with fluttering eyelids and a winsome smile. But then I don't wear a beard so what do I know about it.

Promises Promises

For the benefit of you, dear reader, from this day forth, in sickness and in health, this blog will attempt to value quality of sentences over quantity of postings. In other words, I shall try to make your Stephenesque reading experience finer and more potent to that hitherto encountered in this humble sector of the Internet.
Obviously, to commit such hopes and plans to public scrutiny is to risk a frightful jinx. Perhaps the Muses will take umbrage at such a classical exhibition of hubris and presumption, and therefore my postings hereafter may very well be cast into celestially ordained and inexorable decline. Indeed, one might as well bring down the Curse of the Mummy on one’s head, desecrate the tomb of the Pharaoh, scratch one’s buttocks with, his ankh, and use the sacred scarab as a doorstop. Nevertheless, paying closer attention to the standard of my writing is what I intend to do, and like the foolhardy, stubborn archeologists of those old movies set amid the Hollywood cardboard pyramids of ancient Egypt, I shall press on regardless of the consequences.
Not an easy thing to do, for to write well in these dark days of Microsoft Word and instant self-publication one not only needs a room of one’s own, but also a mind of one’s own, and such a mind is an increasingly rare commodity. Ah yes, the E-Age of Communication: alas it’s just millions of bores babbling second hand and third-rate opinions all at the same time.
But have no fear, dear reader, here am I at my desk in the wee hours of the Sabbath, listening to Strauss Orchesterlieder while drinking spiced chai in a maroon shirt fastened at the sleeve by discreet emerald cufflinks. Yes, I am “pre-writing” Monday’s post so that it will be superior to a version composed in my usual rush, panic and hue and cry to fill this space for you to peruse at your leisure.

Toilette

It may be February but it’s always August under your armpits. A good anti-perspirant is hard to find: the only sweat staunchers available from my local apothecary are vile odored roll-ons such as Sporty Chai, Ocean Mint, or Eggplant Musk. I certainly don’t want to smell like essence of organic fruit, but then, do I really want to swagger around the boardwalks and boulevards of Old Boston Town stinking like a Parisian whore’s coachman? Well, yes. Yes I damn well do. Which is why I’m special ordering twelve cases of Aqua di Bar at the Folie Bergere Deoderante.from the Raunchy Toulouse Parfum Collection. So if you find yourself forced to step over the prostrate bodies of chorus lines of swooning, topless Can Can dancers, you can be sure I’m in the immediate vicinity.

Gentlemen's Outfitters

Two new fashionable boutiques have opened in my neighborhood, Phat Kow and FCUK-WIT.
Phat Kow caters to the hefty baboons who knuckle drag their putrid green fingernails down Newbury Street before lumbering off to the ImPrudential Center’s Food Court to feast on super-sized platters of flavored lard. FCUK-WIT supplies ultra figure-hugging, ass in a vice, black spandex tee shirts to a clientele who possess what can only be described as “nipple-ringed, anorexic Asian gayboy body types.” Is it any wonder I shop at Brooks Brothers? Nobody else sells anything that fits an old fashioned “medium”.

(I have a thirty inch waist: eat your hearts out, girls!)

Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World of Gas Bills

Amongst all the baffling scientific conundrums currently puzzling the brains of the world's most intellectual riddle solvers, a problem even more eminently esoteric than "Can pyramid power sharpen my new three-blade razor?" and "Am I Crown Prince Alexei, the heir to the Czarist fortune?" - is the ancient and arcane question: "Why is my gas bill so high?" - the answer to which is known only to a secret sect of heavily bearded sages who work at a company called Keyspan Energy.
Fortunately, weird hieroglyphics I found printed on an obscure document discovered in the deepest, darkest recesses of my mailbox may provide a solution. After I translated these odd hieroglyphics with the aid of a stolen utility company Rosetta stone, I learned that it has something to do with the cost of gas delivery to my home: apparently, gas must be delivered to my house by chauffeur driven Rolls Royce, or in one of those new-fangled Hummer Stretch limousines, for only this luxurious method of transport can justify the enormous gas delivery charge Keyspan Energy adds to my monthly usage bill.

Cold War Cuisine

As one of the more entertaining aspects of my imminent business excursion to Algerhissberg, I have booked a table at Chez Atomique, the cold war themed five star restaurant located in the heart of the city's notorious "Warhead District". Here, in an exquisitely spartan room designed in corrugated iron to resemble a typical 1950's fall out shelter, mutant waitrons shuffle back and forth beneath strip lighting delivering a poor selection of unmarked tinned meats, powdered and condensed milks, and freeze-dried vegetables to an undernourished hipster clientele.

Duck Sauce Duality

As a frequent tourist in the sauce-flooded rice fields of Cantonese Cuisine, as a wandering wayfarer among the irregular contours of Peking Duck, and in my tasty role as adjutant to General Gau, it has come to my attention that there are only really two civilized methods of eating Chinese food in Western latitudes.

1. In the appropriate environment: a ruby wall-papered restaurant whose satin nooks and bamboo scented corners are saturated with the flavors of the Orient, where satiated golden Buddhas and lurking Fu Manchus observe hunched diners hovering over steaming plates of kung pao chicken and wielding chopsticks with the artful finesse of dragon tattooed transvestites applying tweezers to their eyelids: "We'll start with a C67, two B29s, and a B74 with broccoli, and could we have some more tea please."

2. Cold. Straight out of the fridge two days later. Directly devoured from the take-out carton while gawking at old Lauren Bacall movies wearing nothing but paisley patterned boxer shorts and an ancient Armani tee shirt.

If you consume Chinese food in any other way, then you're doing it wrong and should probably just stick to burgers and fries.

Dark Night of the Bowl

The empty bowl, slightly chipped, hung from a tiny hook in the darkest and most remote outpost of the china cabinet, shivers with that exquisitely paranoid, anxious shudder common to all desperately confused crockery. Apprehension, like the careless hand of the imbecilic dishwasher, permeates the bowl's stained and fading glaze, and the very air that fills the empty bowl tastes of bitter angst. Its decorative pattern, once floral, seems to have somehow withered on the vine and died: a succulent plum become a dried and disgusting plum. What, what, what, the worried bowl asks the depths of infinate cupboard, will be poured into me tomorrow: a crisping shower of frosted flakes? a swamp of split pea soup? a bog of steaming, lumpy oatmeal and brown sugar? the dog's dinner? What, what, what will be be poured into me tomorrow? ... And, and, and ... will I be safely washed up in luxurious, lemon scented detergents, and then, after my long and arduous journey, will I be restored in one pieice to this, my own private corner of the china cabinet, here to hang, the last of my line? Such are the questions this faithless bowl howls into the unanswering void. Ah yes, the days of Henry James' Golden Bowl are long departed, and soon the dustpan and the garbage pail shall claim this nervous relic for their netherworld.

Taupe Elk Speaks

This is Taupe Elk, and I bring you ancient tribal wisdom from the dark lands beyond the sun. But first a word about our combined yoga and chakra healing sessions held every Tuesday at our Wellness and Centering Center conveniently located in the back room of the Koyaanisqatsi New Age Yogurt Stop in the food court at your local shopping mall. Bring a friend and receive your choice of this collector's pack of unique Runic Tarot cards designed by Voltaire Von Zatan, or this shimmering ying-yang crystal pendant carved with mystic symbols sacred to Isis and Shiva.

Perhaps you are wondering, puny mortal, why these free with no obligation gifts from Taupe Elk's combined yoga and chakra healing sessions are blessed by spiritual connections with such a diverse range of deities and belief systems who favor our mouthwatering selection of merchandise with the awesome splendor of their unearthly sponsorship?

Well, seeker of hidden truths, that is exactly the divine revelation that I, Taupe Elk, swift-heeled Mercury to many Gods, courier through the magical ether to bestow upon you, the enlightened souls of my liberated clientele who attend my good value combined yoga and chakra healing sessions. And it can be YOURS for the amazing price of just three easy installments of $19.95 each. Now that's what I, Taupe Elk who dwells in the shaded mists of the valley of arcane knowledge, call a super satori bargain deal!

When Dinah Shores Ruled the Earth

They were robust, balding, catastrophic plaid wearing, enormous cigar chomping, golf course wandering, cold war fighting pillars of society. Their necks were red, their enemy was red, their bread was white, and the color of their money was fresh, crinkly green. They believed in progress and the scientific breakthrough concepts of tinned meats, powdered milk, and polyestherknitech drip-dry fabrics. These good old boys bore names such as Hiram P. Herbert Coffin Snr, Phineas O' Boomerang III, and Colonel Woodrow Hector Oilbarron Van Supersonikker Sir Yes Sir. 

Why is nobody called this now? Why are the student rooms of Yale and Harvard deserted of Coffin Jnrs and O'Boomerang VIIs? Did the descendents of these noble men change their family names during a mass American re-clanization during the 1960s?

I don't know. It seems that everybody I meet nowadays is called Zach or Shaneeta or Stoner or Kegman or "The Lewdster" or something like that.