American Fez

Nemo: A Moral Approach

Marine biologist, haddock farmer, lobsterman, whaler, seal clubber, fisher of ocean dwelling creatures, roe harvester, oyster diver, clam digger, and crabbing bailiff, First Lieutenant Nemo had been all these things before he kissed the Admiral’s ring back in ‘87.
These days he would often spend lonely days at sea by squatting on the poop deck and tossing medium sized squids at my head. “You know what?” he’d say, indicating the slimy pink mess sliding down my face, “Millions of years ago, before we crawled out of the water and evolved into humankind, that’s what we used to look like. So I guess you should be nice to the cephalopod mollusk life-forms you meet on the way up because you’ll meet them again on the way down.”
Then he’d begin to weep before snatching another miserable squid from the hold and throwing that one back into the blue-green depths it called home. After this lachrymose performance, Nemo would proceed to be violently sick over the side of the boat until the rest of the crew had spoken kindly to every single squid aboard and assured these inky beings that we humanoid sailors maintained only the deepest respect and greatest regard for them as cephalopod mollusk life-forms.
Later Nemo was transferred to submarines and I lost track of his career. No doubt he was promoted to higher rank, possibly captain. He seemed a type capable of pulling a few salty strings by impressing the Admiralty with his prodigious beard and twitchy eyebrows before his irrepressibly maverick nature would lead to his eventual downfall. And I always felt that his bizarre attachment to squids would backfire on him before too long, especially if he should encounter one of the "giant" variety during one of these perilous undersea adventures his particular genre of submariner always insist upon undertaking at enormous risk, not only to themselves, but also to their crew, those guiltless persons whose very lives and futures any decent captain worth his golden epaulettes would consider with a much greater degree of concern than that shown by the Nemos of this world.

All About Me

He was a big bastard called Norman who ate with his hands. Could have been court jester at the court of Alphonse IX if he played his cards right. No such luck. But his blood was medieval, plowman's blood, and it flowed through his leper colony of a heart like bubbling bubonic brine.
I hated him. They said his brother was Norwegian, but I could smell the Balinese all over him. It stank in his hair like an imported tropical gel. Very greasy, very, very slippery. "No, not today, thank you," I told him. "We don't accept Balinesian coinage in this establishment. Not from the likes of you at any rate."
He tried to sell me a sledgehammer with a bit of the handle missing. No takers. It was solid oak, though, you could feel the quality, feel the width.
"I've got to get a bus to Omaha." he said.
So I slammed the fucking door in his face.
I heard later he took part in human pyramid scheme somewhere out in the desert. He was on the bottom as usual and didn't get a drink for fifteen days. That's his skeleton hanging up in the corner. We went round the medical college with it but couldn't give it away: too bleached, they told us, been out in the sun too long.

I have posted this example of autobiography here because it has been deleted from the "About" section of this weblog and replaced it with a personal description that more accurately conveys my current mode of being. Please refer to the "About" link that appears beneath my author photo and email link to access this latest word portrait of my personality and achievements. Thank you

Sky Scribe

Examining several lines of Arabic script, I was struck by how easy it would be to skywrite Arabic letters with my single engine Focker Wulf bi-plane - just a few flicks of the aircraft's tail amid the clouds would be all that is required to compose most average slogans and advertisements for local Arabic businesses who might require such aeronautical public relations services. Conversely, of course, considering the expert degree of artistry and measure of precision involved, airborne Chinese calligraphy would be extremely difficult to execute.

Ill Met By Moonlight

PBS Mystery? Me? Oh I'll watch anything that begins with ....

A shadowy figure stalks across the moonlit moor and begins digging a hole in the middle of a barren field. Silence except for the grinding of pickaxe blade against stone and clammy clay: is he burying something? Or digging something up? It is impossible to ascertain the exact nature of his labors for a cobalt mist suddenly rises from the nearby marsh and obscures our view. When the dense fog lifts the figure is gone, his solemn and mysterious task has been completed and we are none the wiser.
Meanwhile, back at the dark, grim Victorian Asylum perched high on the steep, forbidding cliffs above bottomless Loch Lobotomy, the new brain transplants have finally arrived. Crouching behind one of the throbbing EST machines, Jock McHatchet, the infamous Edinburgh ear thief is assuming the identity of horribly murdered Swiss neurosurgeon Dr Friedrich Scalpel. He hides his hairy knuckles in the pockets of his blood soaked lab coat and lurches off down the corridor towards the operating table and the waiting patient.
Meanwhile, across the loch at Naughtie Manor, local beauty Lasciviousia de Slatterne has been posing without her clothes again for yet another of Master Johnny’s amateur invocations of ancient Egypt in gouache and ink. Lasciviousa is both oiled and veiled, and draped nakedly across Master Johnny’s antique leopard skin divan, a golden urn clamped between her gleaming thighs. Grrrrr, Lasciviousia motions with her ruby lips and pearly teeth. Although this minimal tableaux does not capture much of Cleopatra’s sandy Alexandria, Master Johnny would shriek that authenticity is not the point, and that you, philistine, do not understand his work.
Meanwhile, “What’s that rattling noise?” says Master Johnny, his attention suddenly distracted from the easel by this errant sound. “It’s coming from the golden urn. There’s something inside.”
He snatches the urn away from Lasciviousia’s gyrating hips and turns it over, shaking the contents out onto the floor. Out falls a single human ear with a note securely tucked inside the lobe: “Which You Were Ear” scrawled in green felt tip.
“What’s it mean, Johnny?” Lasciviousia purrs. “What do they want?”
“I’ve no idea.” Master Johnny replies through gritted teeth. ‘It’s a dense web of bad puns and grubby metaphor. Only one man can solve this damnable riddle, and his name is Sherlock Holmes!”
“Oh no!” Lasciviousia cries incredulously, “You don’t mean that arrogant faggot drug addict with the fatboy sidekick who lives with his mom?”
“Ah, that’s a good point.” Master Johnny concurs, “I’d forgotten about his disgusting personal habits. Perhaps we can find someone else instead ... or do it ourselves, even.

Meanwhile ... Continued on page 2467.

Jet Stream

Considering how much money I have spent on air travel over the years I probably could have bought my own plane by now, and then, rather than being forced to endure the restrictive and inconvenient whims of major airlines flight schedules, I would be able to zoom off to whatever destination I chose whenever I wanted to travel there,
I would perform the flying duties myself, naturally, and my machine would be such a superbly stylish example of avante-garde aeronautical engineering that Charles Lindbergh would incinerate his own "Spirit of St. Louis" in a terrible orgy of jealous rage. My co-pilot would be Danger in the form of one of those gorgeously emerald-golden Maxfield Parrish nymphettes, nude except for a pair of flying goggles and a satin scarf fluttering about her lovely shoulders. We would hold cockpit conversations like:
"Hey Danger, what do you say we loop the loop all the way to Guadeloupe?"
"I’ll go anywhere with you, Baron."
"We may only be flying a single engine Focker Wulf bi-plane with a rusty propeller, Danger, but rest assured, I’ve got a zeppelin in my jodphurs."
"And I’ve got a runway in mine, skipper!"
"Tally ho-o-o-o-o-o-o!"
But, alas, this is merely idle fancy; and so here I sit, scrolling through Expedia and Travelocity, searching for bargain airfares to Bulgaria in business class. Where is the romance, I ask you, where is the glamor of yesteryear's Art Deco aviation?

Modern Philosophy

Old Scrotum Community College's Guide to Modern Philosophy

Section A: Gender, Interpretation and Usage in the Post-Industrial Global Village

Part IV: Rene Descartes (Pre-Afro American Emancipation European Thought Sub-section Fv7D)
"I think therefore I broadcast the contents of my moronic, sweaty brain to whomsoever happens to be in the immediate vicinity at maximum volume no matter how stupid, ignorant, or banal my thoughts may be." - This is an example of Cartesian Dualism: the thinker assumes his opinions to be important and interesting purely because they are his, when, in truth, his thoughts are extremely tedious. (Cross reference with 'Bloggers' and 'Pundits')

Part V: Emmanuel Kant (European Though Sub-section Alpha Maroon Wig 3c)
"Yeah? Fuck off! .... Duuuuuuude!" - An example of the dialectic of Kant be bothered to think it through properly.

Part VI: Freidrich Nietzche (Mad Gay Nazi European Ravings Sub-section Zzzz)
"Whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger, except me, it turns me into a huge talking orange three-toed sloth called Simon who wears jack boots with a Sid Vicious tee-shirt and a ballet tu-tu. Wibble, wibble, etc."- An example of Lebensraum on the third moon of the Planet Looney. (Cross reference Superman, Batman, Star Dreck, or the graphic novel of your choice.)

The Rest Is Silence

Alas, the superbly named Cardinal Sin of the Philippines has died.
The BBC website has thoughtfully provided online mourners with a suitable selection of interesting pictures from the Sinful life.
Rest in peace.

Hollywood Myths

Recently, prior to scrubbing the stone floor of the "soporific halls of Sleep" with my eyelashes, I have occasionally found sufficient wakeful minutes remaining to study several verses of Charles Martin’s new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which, as its name implies, is a very epic and ancient poem about things being transformed into other things, usually at the divine behest of some lovesick or grouchy deity.
So what catastrophic faux pas, one wonders, has Ben Stiller committed to so offend almighty Jove that the leader of the gods has taken time off from his skirt chasing to change the star of Something About Mary from a reasonably amusing actor into a third rate peddler of the world’s most insipid fart jokes and passé pratfall gags? Why have the Muses abandoned him, and why must whatever talent he possessed languish with Pluto in the underworld, never again to see the light of day? And why is Ben Stiller, like the remorseless eagle swooping down to hack Prometheus’ liver from his bloody chest each night with its vicious talons, now similarly forever fated to savage our local theater screens each evening with his wretched face in yet another shocking example of horrific cinematic carnage?
Alas, I have no answer to these questions. Do I look like an exiled Roman bard? No. No I don’t, do I.

Histoire de Melody Nell Gwynn

When I was a student of French history many years ago, the teacher, a gloomy and ineffectually etiolated somewhat resembling a Harlequin by Picasso, would always pronounce Edict of Nantes as 'Edith' of Nantes due to the addition of an extremely sibilant lisp to his - in my mind at least - extensive catalogue of personal and professional failings.
Still, Edith of Nantes, this was something for my young brain to conjure with while the lanky fool scrawled on his miserable chalkboard: who was this lady of iron doctrine who forced the Huguenots to flee France? I drew a picture, now, alas, lost.
Later, while his class trudged through unreadably tedious textbook descriptions of human experience towards the modern era, I amused myself by inventing yet more females who had played prominent and decisive roles in history's most recordable moments. There was the formidible Warsaw Pat, of course, and the incredibly bureaucratic North Atlantic Tracey Organisation, naturally. Working backwards, Magna Carla, I decided, would certainly repay further study. And there were many others I've undoubtedly forgotten.
Even later, as you may remember from an earlier post, the school finally expelled me because I refused to answer to the name "Etienne" when called upon to answer questions in my French language class.
Education? Do it at home.

Wings of the Morning

The city coffee shop: pink and brown plastic, stale cardboard, chipped synthetic glass streaked with condensation, the screech of styrofoam grinding against styrofoam, burning coffee beans, fried sugar and faint traces of industrial disinfectants. Everything here, especially the air, is artificial; frosted and coated with candy like the witch's house that Hansel and Gretel knew. A procession of somnabulant automatons in a shambling queue. We are drowsy prisoners in the dungeons of Dunkin Donuts: the Large Black is our jailer, the racks of inflated dough become our prison bars. I knew there was a reason why a plain cruller looks like the knot of a hangman’s rope.
"Do you have any last requests?"
"Yes, could I have an extra Sweet ‘n’ Low, please?"
"Denied. But I can offer you a Nutrasweet."
Coffee drinkers always exclaim that they "need" a cup, never that they actually "want" one. This is not surprising: who in their right mind would want a cup of this opaque sludge?
Imagine the boiling liquid coursing through the organic pipes and valves of your body's digestive system, rather like Dr Jekyll's monstrous potion bubbling mischievously along the copper tubes in his dank, dark Victorian laboratory.
You are paving your aorta with steaming tar.
You have filled your human tank with grade C low-octane petroleum, and you can now insert the caffeine keys into your sphincter and turn your brain's ignition on.
Personally I only delicately sip frothy cappuccino, which I pronounce out-of-sync, Fellini-style.

That Corporate Buzz

Despite the profound foolishness of their thoughts and deeds, I have always maintained a soft spot for the Situationists International because I like their name. "Beneath the pavement - the beach!" was one of their more wildly romantic slogans; but as we city dwellers are all too well aware, the truth is actually "Beneath the pavement - the sewer!" But that's idealism for you.

Anyway, since I have decided to create a logo for this site so that I am no longer forcing Fairfield Porter's painting of the typist into blog prostitution, I began researching SI symbols, hoping to ween a little inspiration from their supposedly high octane blend of design and polemic. Sadly, I found myself extremely disappointed and bored by the lacklustre, unimaginative quality of their artworks. No wonder the movement petered out into a series of unreadable pamphlets. Consequently, I am hiring (at no fee) an illustrator friend of mine to sketch a logo for me from scratch. After much deliberation we concluded that the Stephenesque brand should be represented by  a woodcut-style drawing of a kingfisher wearing an eyepatch and a fez who beak imprisons a wriggling fish wearing an eyepatch and a fez whose jaws ensnare a despairing water beetle wearing an eyepatch and a fez, and so on. What does this image mean? I have absolutely no idea, but I am crossing my fingers for an image that blends the figurative oddity of Hieronymus Bosch with the quaint whimsy of Osbert Lancaster.

For Your Consideration

If you would like to read some real content, might I suggest you visit Kevin's site at Cogito Corp. Especially make time to check out his articles archive.

Open Letter To A Brueghelian Peasant.

Dear Serf,

The skeletal fish swimming in its sea of stone does not foresee the fossil forming sediment, nor can the bulbous amber eye of the fatted calf espy the suckling spit that it will roll upon. With a bodyful of bubonic and the Wife of Bath bouncing on your bony knee you could have hit the plague pit smiling. But you prefer to drape yourself in dung and clip the toenails of Erasmus. Yes. The plague pit and the pendulum await your pitchforked corpse so take your pick, peasant: El Diablo or Le Jongleur?

Your sincerely,
Stephenesque

Agents and Patients

I find it highly amusing that all these neo-Conservative culture vulture bloggers are continually invoking the name of the North-West Somersetshire novelist Evelyn Waugh to support their pro-Bush theories. One would have thought these right wing readers would rather chide this anti-social author of Best Gay Novel of 1945 for his virulent and relentless anti-Americanism, so plainly evident throughout his published letters and diaries. In fact, you could almost claim that Waugh invented literary anti-Americanism. The old puffy-faced, ear trumpet weilding snob would have considered every single American citizen to be several degrees sub-Hooper, and he would surely be laughing up his tweedy sleeve at Uncle Sam's current troubles with Koranic-based toilet paper.
Why do East Coast American Conservatives always choose such comically antique and cantankerous old fogeys for their mascots? Surely they would be much better served by championing the stylishly urbane and pro-American Anthony Powell instead. And besides, Powell's novels wipe the floor with all that homoerotic proto-Catholic nonsense about ineffectual, socially awkward lords and ladies losing the keys to their castles.

Do The Locomotion

In this detail from the right panel of his truly awesome masterpiece, "The Garden of Earthly Delights," the Flemish master Hieronymus Bosch depicts the doomed and despairing bodies of damned souls passing through the demonic digestive system of an appalling bird-headed creature, then being excreted as the contents of strange bubble turds into a bottomless pit of stinking ordure, a journey not wholly unlike that faced by travelers on Boston's public transportation system. Take the wretched, prideful slattern who lounges at the feet of the bird monster with a toad squatting on her chest, for example, as she gazes into a mirror planted in the buttocks of a grinning demon - surely this scarifying image represents the fate of a tired and dejected commuter staring glumly out of the filthy train window at the drearily relentless conurbation of rat-infested apartment buildings, discount chain stores, empty office blocks, and third-rate colleges he passes during his daily grind back and forth between his so-called "home" and place of work.
Only a genius such as Bosch, rallying all the extensive power of his sublime imagination, could possibly conceive the true medieval nightmare that is the depressing mortal coil we mockingly call "the nine to five."

For Immediate Release

Architectural News: Wind Breaking, er, I mean Ground Breaking Ceremony at Venerable New England Seat of Learning

Distinguished scientist Dr. John Thomas last night laid the foundation stone of Old Scrotum Community College’s new Sports and Leisure Complex. This state of the art health and fitness facility will be the first of its kind in New England, offering Old Scrotum’s undergraduates unparalleled access to wi-fi internet, unisex shower and sauna amenities, super-solarium, psychic readings, tattoo imaging, walk-in body piercing service, free sperm bank, Viagra management, and 3-D Bosomarium. In addition, there will be a few odds and ends of gym equipment too, probably those long poles with the weights on the ends that people lift up and down, you know, stuff like that.
Celebrated experimental architect Edwin Meece van der Rohe designed the complex, winning the prestigious commission despite stiff competition from the likes of Frank Lloyds Bank and I. M Payoff.
Viewing van der Rohe’s blueprints in the college hospitality suite, Old Scrotum’s Chaplain, Father Lou Brecated of Saint Condom’s, announced "I am against abortion, and this certainly is one."

Earlier Old Scrotum news can be found in the archives section of this blog. I don't know what it is about this place. It's rather like The Village in "The Prisoner". I can never seem to escape from it.

For Those Who Walk Abroad In Socks & Sandals

Nave of Hearts: A Churchgoing Love Story Revisited

Although out of breath from chasing my daughter's pet rabbit around the cabbage patch, I still managed to make it to the Chapel just in time for Evensong or whatever mediaeval ceremony the faithful few were celebrating. My wife Margery was kneeling - as she always does - in a pew nearest the memorial stained-glass window featuring ‘Saint Cuthbert the Acne-Scarred Scattering Turnips Amongst the Forty Children of Ethel the Brood Mare.’
"Get up you stupid slag." I hissed. "Your hairline is visible from the pulpit and the vicar can see the join." I had spotted Reverend Bilge’s beady eye and arched brow staring down at the top of Margery’s head from his lofty perch the minute I flung the door open.
"We shall now sing Hymn 362."He announced, as if someone had just farted in the font.
Then old, wizened Mrs Peachum began kneading the organ as, on cue, Margery, creaking and groaning, finally rose to her feet. "Sweet Jesu Maileth In My Rebate Oh Great Redeemer" the congregation sang, always a difficult hymn for bass-baritones like Margery. Poor cow.
Poor me, for that matter; it was no fun being married to the bum note in the choir, if you get my drift.
And so, while Margery was still enthralled in song, I was able to fold my secret epistle into a paper airplane and send it flying across the apse to be caught Miss Prym’s warm, caressing hands. It said: "I’ve laid on tea for two in the Parsonage garden. Meet me after the service and I’ll butter your scones."
My spectacles began to steam up as I watched Miss Prym adjust her girdle as she read my letter. I was already sweating with anticipation beneath my wooly cardigan, the green and beige one that Miss Prym had remarked very favorably upon that June afternoon twelve years earlier. Racked with nerves, I glanced over at Miss Pym’s divine form once more. Had it been wise to strike while the iron was still so hot?

…. To be continued in seventeen years time.

Iceman Cometh

I spent the entire weekend at Dr. Hans Frie’s pioneering skin clinic, having microscopic heat activated bio-cooling molecules inserted beneath my skin. Now my whole body will remain comfortably cool on even the most humid of swelteringly hot summer days. I am now a sort of walking human refrigeration system. The only drawback is that a little light comes on every time I open my mouth.
But what the Hell! I am fresh as a daisy all the time with my inbuilt air conditioning. While the rest of this sunburned and unprepossessing world goes puffing and perspiring past in its shabby seersucker shorts and shoddy sandals, I can dress like an Eskimo if I want and still not draw a bead of sweat. Ha ha!

Officer Material

Superheroes rarely hold any commissioned rank below or above that of Captain. There are plenty of Captain Marvels and Captain Fantastics, for example, but very few special-power enhanced Colonels or Brigadiers, and absolutely no cape-crusading Corporals whatsoever. It is also difficult to imagine an avenging Aide-de-Camp zooming across the city skyline to foil a villainous mastermind’s fiendish schemes. Do superheroes achieve Captain status via swift promotion through the military machine? Was Captain America once just plain old Private America, advancing from General Issue to Superhuman Issue? And is there a superhero’s veterans association with a secret lodge where grizzled crime-fighters drink dollar drafts at formica tables while listening to the music of Kenny Loggins? I wonder.

The Way To The Stars

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology I will be able to post entries to this blog via my camera phone. No longer will the profound thoughts that occur to me as I walk down the street be lost to the world because I do not have a computer handy. I can now upload my important ideas and memes directly to this weblog the moment they enter my mind! In fact, that is exactly how I am writing this! How wonderful modern wireless technology truly isggfgszzxxxx ... excuse me, I'm walking under a bridge.... gfrdfree weekendzzz brrmmminutes... zapwhooooosh... Iraq insurgencyyyyyy ...advantages of cell phonnnnnzzad gfgfddddz ... I'm sorry, I'm breaking up ......sderrrrewhap... wha?Instapundit and whrrrrzzxxsed... article via Telegraph Online Daily ... brzzzzzznagh ... linked New York Times.... anytime minuteszzzzz ... bloggeddddr.... and, of course, Noam Chomsky free phone when you sign up for one of our plans now!
Wireless blogging: it's the way forwardddddzzzzzzzzz ...blip.

Of Spiggots and Things

The venerable Bearded has politely asked with me to pick the scabs of that disfiguring book "meme" which has recently been infecting the internet like a particularly virulent strain of bubonic plague. I only complete this horrible task as a favor to him.

>1. Total Number of Books You Have Owned:
Personally, I only buy books if I deem the contents to be worthwhile; consequently my bookshelves are meagrely furnished with dusty tomes. It is amazing that critics often praise specific volumes for being "well written" - you'd think that would be a given if the bloody thing is published. Anyway, on the whole, I'd quess I own about two hundred or so. I generally borrow from the Boston Atheneum and Public Library.

>2. Last Book I Bought:
"The Wind In The Willows" for my nephew's birthday.

>3. Last Book I Read:
I recently re-read "The Collected Poems" of Marianne Moore because they always inspire me, and I've been short of inspiration lately.

>4. Five Books That Mean a Lot To Me:
"A Dance To The Music of Time" by Anthony Powell.
"Diaries" of Harold Nicholson.
"The Castle" by Franz Kafka.
"Le Grand Meaulnes" by Alain Fournier.
"Diary Of A Country Doctor" by Mikhail Bulgakov.

>5. Four Folks I'm Laying This On:
Who do think I am? Typhoid Mary or something?

Latest Hip Technology

" ... Quoth the raven in random access digital stereo"

The P.O.W Clock

With an arched English eyebrow and a Gallic shrug, fellow Europeans often claim that only a jackbooted nation such as the Germans would invent a word, "Schadenfreude,” for describing the experience of finding great pleasure in someone else’s dire misfortune, yet I don’t believe this slanderous assertion for one second. Take our own word “snigger” for example; surely we only ever snigger at another person’s embarrassment or discomfiture and at no other time. Purists might suggest that we also snigger at rude or obscene jokes, yet I would argue that at such improper moments we are actually “smirking.”
Anyway, everybody can be sniggering away at my existing predicament, since I am currently unhappily busier that Josef Goebbel’s personal astrologer on Walpurgis Night - life is certainly no Berliner cabaret for me this week. All my free time seems to be locked up in Colditz Castle, desperately digging hidden tunnels by concealing dug earth in its trouser leg, building tiny glider planes out of old Red Cross crates, or trying to slip past the guards dressed up in Bavarian peasant costume: "Wakey wakey hours, minutes and seconds, we're going over the wire - tonight!"

Update: many thanks to Quicquid for correcting my earlier crassly mistaken spelling of Schedanwhatever-it-is. I hope he is sniggering at my misfortune.

The Ghost of Apartment 2a

Perched on the top step of my old front stoop like a weary king slouching on a well worn throne, abandoned by all his courtiers, awaiting, perhaps, the clamoring victorious arrival of his usurpers, I notice that this building has no cable nor satellite feed. Reception is poor here, and flickering blue distorted cathode ray images only remind me of my own reflection: indistinct, ephemeral. Who will TiVo this ectoplasm and watch it later?
A tiny rampaging bobblehead ant slaloms around invisible obstacles, then pauses, maybe to radio his position back to others in his unit, or maybe because he has suddenly realized all his companions have disappeared and he is on his own like me.
Ah, life today is free for those that can afford it but very expensive for those that can’t: a shame, since life was actually pretty cheap when I was alive. You could buy a whole good innings for under thirty grand – or less, if you were willing to put up with some malfunctioning parts. I knew one woman who purchased a seventy-five year life span and it only cost her a total of five thousand dollars after she had taken advantage of the Former Yugoslavian citizenship mail-in rebate offer. Yes sir, there were some sweet deals to be had back then.
Of course, some people who bought big eventually got fed up and went looking for a refund, but what were they going to do with that late cash influx – order an Armani shroud? Commission Richard Serra to decorate their tomb? No way. Life was too cheap for their refund to provide for that kind of egotistical largesse. And so these people’s refunds just sat in the bank gathering more mold than their rotting corpses.
How I wish I could haunt one of those nice new condos across the street with the central air and all those HDTV channels options.

Porky and Mess

To paraphrase George Gershwin, it's summertime and the livin' is queasy: all these big breasted buds in their spangly Bebe tops and bulging backpacks and billowy short ballet skirts clomping down the streets with all the elegance of sloppily shod shire horses slogging through the clinging mud of some particulary marshy rural gymkhana field? It must surely have something to do with all these ill-fitting and unhappily heeled shoes that are so fashionable with females these days. Bring back that sexy leggy swinging sixties half-inch stilletto stride, I say.
But no, we're just slapped in the face everyday with filthy flip flops from now until November - bummertime and the shuffling is greasy.

Heliotaxis

Finally a heavyweight Sun steps into the weekend ring and his muscular sunray fingers form a fireball fist to sucker punch Boston squarely in the city center with. His golden arm has been winding up to deliver this sizzling blow since early April, and so now the weather is suddenly swelteringly hot with a vengeance. These are the sorts of boiling temperatures in which fly-swatting Sicilian peasants curse snoring donkeys while beating the yellow dust from straw carpets. Meanwhile, I, in the stooping manner of Atlas shouldering the world, emerge from the basement with an air-conditioning system as a burden for my back. The retrieval and installation of this extremely cumbersome mechanical device is a solemn annual ritual, the lumbering procession of human and appliance advancing from storage bin to window rather like an icon of Saint Coolant being paraded to the altar on his special Feast Day.
For some reason, the first hot days of the year always reminds me of my curious inability to finish any of the Lawrence Durrell novels I begin to read. This failure is due, I have no doubt, to my avid enjoyment of his younger brother Gerald’s autobiographical books when I was small. The elder Durrell was lampooned so relentlessly in these that I have been unable to take him seriously ever since.

Correspondence Course

Stephenesque's Brief History of Ecclesiastical Curiosities

Number Forty-Seven: Pope Priapus II.

Pope Priapus II, formerly Grand Inquisitor of the Sanctumi Scrotumus and Bishop of Bashurs, came to be elected to fill the fisherman's underpants during the scandalous Cardinale Claudia of 1673. A great favorite with the laity, Priapus II was implicated in the Lateran Legge Schism of 1682, a thrusting liberal church movement whose rampant motto, "Get thee to a nunnery", proposed a closer embrace of female clergy.

The Archives of Spoof

At the request of Bleak Mouse, and since I am rather proud of it anyway, I am reposting below my parody of the literary prison doctor Theodore Dalrymple's seminal "Second Opinion" column which used to run bi-weekly in The Spectator.
Alas, Dalrymple rarely essays this column anymore, devoting most of his written output to demonising venerable authors and books whom he suspects of promoting over-liberalized moral values, you know the sort of thing: "Cinderella is a work shy slattern enslaved to moronic youth trends who demands that everything be handed to her on a magical plate."
But that's another parody waiting to be written. Here is the one I made earlier:

A Second Opinion
Any sane person who works in a prison, as I do, will have been startled by confabulations of young men wearing vicious, ill-fitting gray garments decorated with vertical arrows of eldritch black. This is the poor state of sartorial elegance exhibited by today’s convicted felons, who stalk the same cells once paced by the likes of Oscar Wilde.
Last week, in the prison where I bang my head against the wall, such a specimen of jailed manhood clothed in his cotton quiver came to see me.
“Doctor, I have been stabbed in the chest.” He said in those familiar self-pitying and aggrieved tones common to his kind.
I asked him if he had read A la Recherche Du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust. My own copy was presented and inscribed to me by the grateful President of Mobowayoland whom I had cured of chronic masturbation many years before.
“No-o-o.” He mumbled, as he spilled more of his own garish and untasteful blood upon my pristine floor. Reader, he did not request a mop and bucket from me with which he could have cleaned up his own sticky mess! How can such a creature, I wondered, provide for the prodigious brood of welfare brutes that he has no doubt sired in partnership with a slumful of anonymous whores, if he cannot even administer to his own flesh wounds? I myself, for example, regularly tend an entire herd of giraffe in my spare time!
So I looked up from my lunch of fresh Lobster and Burgundy to ask him this simple question. But alas, dear reader, he had died.

Everyone Through the Looking Glass

After I provided their marketing division with some pro bono services, the company that manufactures those cool new digital mirrors recently presented me with a free sample. I've installed it in my bathroom, and now waking up in the morning is a cutting-edge experience.
Basically, the digital mirror captures a reflected image as pixels and then flips them along the horizontal axis, thereby reproducing a far more accurate representation of how the subject standing before it actually appears to others - even if he hasn't washed his face and brushed his teeth yet!
And since the mirror also includes a number of photoshop-inspired computerized drawing and morph interfaces, users can digitally experiment with their own physical features with the built-in laser pen and palette, auditioning and evaluating daringly different hairstyles, skin tone shades, or even contact lens colors before making a final decision and an expensive trip to a professional. Personally, by increasing the degree of red in my face, I just tested out what I will look like with a severe sunburn later this summer, and now I'm fully prepared for the lobster shock. As long as it doesn't fall into the sink while I'm shaving, I think this digital mirror will prove to be one of the most useful electronic devices that I own.

Sky Mall

Heralded by the excited buzz of fluorescent lights, Mister Steryle saunters down the aeroplane aisle. There are no oil baron bacteria drilling deep wells in to this guy’s facial pores. No Tarzan germs swinging on his pubic hairs from testicle to testicle. It seems Mister Steryle’s skin sweats disinfectant and his blue lips spit bleach. You can hear him coming down the hall because his bones squeak. He probably shits toothpaste from a self-sanitizing ass. He belches breath mints, I have no doubt. Mister Steryle slips steam pressed magazines into his seat pocket: Fitness and Hygiene: GQ and Esquire: Metropolitan Bath.
They can still smell his lingering Old Spice aftershave in the previous terminal he departed from. Yes sir, Mister Steryle sure is pretty damn clean, but in a vulture and maggot ravaged white cattle skull in the desert sand sorta way. Like he’s been licked clean by loofa tongue. I guess you’d say there’s something downright nasty about how clean Mister Steryle is. Something sorta, well, unclean. Had Charles Dickens written "A Bathroom Carol", then Mister Steryle would be The Ghost of Shaving Cream Yet To Come.
Feeling slightly queasy, I bury myself in a packet of complimentary pretzels and an old paperback book.

Sailing To Byzantium

The frightfully credulous peoples of the ancient world were convinced that sighting the pair of rocks they called The Pillars of Hercules indicated that seafarers had reached the utmost limits of the habitable Earth, much as many people today believe that last call at Club Med signifies that very same global perimeter.
Of course, classical civilization would not have been an especially convenient tourist pool for the vacation trade to draw from. The Romans, for instance, an extremely superstitious and neurotic bunch at the best of times, would never set sandaled foot outside their own front porticoes unless the innumerable auguries and omens they cast prior to departure were favorable. One can only imagine the Olympian headaches at the travel agent’s office caused by the frequent re-arrangement of reservations because the oracular pig entrails foretold a troubled trip.
Personally, I am mulling over the possibilities of an autumnal excursion to Istanbul, recently glamorized by the thrilling Champions League soccer final contested there between Liverpool and AC Milan. I shall be in England for part of September anyway, so an additional journey to the former Constantinople should tax my resources too severely. We shall see what the American Express Fairy has to say on the subject.