American Fez

A Play For Today

'Tis A Pity It's A War
A tragi-comedy of Iraq in an unknown number of acts

Scene One: The Pentagon Tavern in Illyria D.C.
Malvolio, Bosola, Falstaff, and Bottom are poring over a military map

Bosola: (aside)
Our play begins with a black construction
Of many troops for Baghdad bound
In search of weapons of mass destruction
Which are never found.

Enter Sir Dubya Bush, the Duchess of Rumsfelda, and Cheney disguised as Polonius, with attendants and the Senate Armed Services Committee

Sir Dubya
Cynics do say I commence battle for the oil
But I am here to plant the seed of democracy
In autocratic foreign soil.

Duchess of Rumsfelda:
We have come to Iraq to lend a hand
To nurture sweet liberty in desert sand
And so now the tyrant's toppled
I'm going on TV to get Ted Koppled.

Cheney:
Hey nonny nonny!

Scene Two. The Syrian border.
Enter Ali Baba and the Forty Insurgents

Ali Baba:
Open Sesame!

Ali and the Forty Insurgents cross the border into Iraq

Ali Baba:
I am a Mullah, grim and bearded
I've observed the Crusader's pitch
And now I'm gonna queer it.

The Forty Insurgents:
Driving bomb packed four-wheel Ford
We'll gladly die to meet our Lord.
And aid workers we'll kidnap and behead
Because Ali tells us Paradise is like Club Med.

Trumpets and alarums

Scene Three. Abu Ghraib Prison.
Enter Bottom wearing a donkey's head. He leads a group of naked prisoners also wearing donkey heads. And Private Lyndie Scapegoat

Bottom:
Ill met by flash bulb Private Lyndie Scapegoat!

Pte Lyndie Scapegoat:
Here's a good trick if whistleblowers don't spoil it.
We'll take these Korans and flush 'em down the toilet.

Bottom
Tho' this be method
There be madness in't.

Scene Four: The White House Tavern in Illyria DC.
Enter Sir Dubya, the Duchess of Rumsfelda, and Cheney disguised as Feste the Clown

Cheney:
The insurgency is on its last cross-gartered legs.
As, indeed, should I be.

Duchess of Rumsfelda:
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Creeps in this petty place from day to day
Speak the last syllable of recorded press conference
And all our strategies have lighted soldiers
The way to dusty death. Out, out occupying forces
In twelve years time.

Sir Dubya
Hey nonny nonny.

Curtain

My Desert Island Parodies

One of the big problems I have with people's lists of Desert Island Discs is that the disc-pickers selfishly never take Man Friday's musical tastes into account; I mean, the poor savage will be forced to lounge in the sands and listen to your choices too, and he may not care for track two of Throbbing Gristle's first album. And what if constantly repeated plays of a scratchy vinyl edition of "Love Theme from Vampyros Lesbos" finally drives that noble native to murder? He might prefer to exist in lonely isolation with blood on his hands rather than endure yet more of Dawn Upshaw singing "Knoxville: Summer of 1915", even if it is the best version.
Anyway, in view of the views expressed above, I have decided to list my five favorite literary parodies instead. Here they are (in no particular order):

1. Craig Brown's "Brian Sewell's Diary"
This appeared in Private Eye some years ago, and I think it is the best parody The Master has yet produced. I had no idea who Sewell was when I read it for the first time - he is art critic for London's "Evening Standard" newspaper - but found the parody enormously funny anyway.

2. Edward Pygge's "Ted Hughes: 'Crow Resting'"
Edward Pygge is obviously a pseudonym, and Ted Hughes is pretty is easy to parody, but I think Pygge's "Crow Resting" stands out as being better than most: "I will spread his shit with generosity" Great line.

3. Julian Maclaren Ross' "Christopher Isherwood: 'I Am A Chimera'"
JMC skewers self-important tripe good and proper.

4. Anon's "Muriel's Song"
No idea who actually wrote this, but it's a version of the old medieval ballad "Sumer Is Icumen In" based on plumbing problems:
Plumber is icumen in
Bludie big tu-du.
Bloweth lampe and showeth dampe
Etc

5. Beyond The Fringe's "Shakespeare's 'So That's The Way You Like It'"
Shakespeare is pretty easy to parody also, and again, I think this rises above the standard.

6. My own "Theodore Dalrymple's 'A Second Opinion'"
Forgive me for picking myself.

7. Noel Coward's "Swiss Family Whittlebot"
Coward destroys the Sitwell family with superb skill.

8. Frederick Crews' "F.R Leavis"
Crews acrobatically kicks sand in the stupid critic Leavis' face: "Don't talk to me about Shaespeare until you've gone through Lwrence twice and made a list of everything he has to say against the Establishment"

9. Anthony Powell's "Mark Members: 'Iron Aspidistra'"
Absurd thirties' style poetry by Powell's own fictional character. It's not that great, really, and I only include it here because I bought a copy and it was expensive.

10. Craig Brown's "Anthony Powell's Diary'"
Another Brown masterpiece, again published in Private Eye, and again not re-published in the recent Brown collection. Brilliant spoof of Powell's actual "Diaries".

This New Age

It is winter in the human vineyard. The aged vines are now withered and shriveled, ransacked of their fruits and then coiled Grecian-style on the furrowed dusty earth like worthless rows of cow turds in a long forgotten field. Somewhere in the distance, sweating in a rotten timbered barn, a hunchbacked peasant is treading grapes with warty feet while a toothless crone scratches an aimless tune on a snivelling fiddle. The vintages have turned to vinegar. Empty barrels roll in the wind like tumbleweeds. What was once decanted into crystal goblets is now poured into filthy plastic buckets and then slopped around until an army of flies have drowned in its rancid depths. I was thirty-nine years old yesterday. A perennial frost has fallen and the tragic muse descends. "Shut up" a wise man says.
Still, I have to admit, the very many drinks I had last were pretty good.

It Is My Birthday

Which I Observe With A Paragraph in the Style of Anthony Powell

With predictable annual regularity of slide rule precision, the stooping, slightly confused figure of Crowley, my father's soldier servant, in a manner somewhat resembling Grayling's enormous picture Sir John Marsh Announcing the Death of Romney at Corunna, would appear in the nursery doorway at intervals of three-hundred-and-sixty-five days to inform me that a celebratory function in remembrance of my bodily dispatch from my mother's womb was about to occur. This event, for some reason always falling during the month of July, was always marked by the production of a "birthday cake", prepared by cook in her powdery lair, and constructed from two tiers of cylindrical sponge encased in an armory of white and pink icing, the surface of which was planted with inflammable waxen sticks. After I had been ordered to extinguish this assemblage of candles with a single breath, a feat of exhalation rarely completed to anyone's satisfaction, Crowley, brandishing a silver knife as if he were a blackened-faced commando about to creep up behind some unsuspecting German sentry of the first war, would advance upon the flaming confection and cleave the whole cake open along its sugary diameter. These ceremonial slicing duties completed, triangular-shaped specimens of cook's triumph were distributed amongst every member of the household. Between bulging-cheeked mouthfuls, brushing the yellow crumbs and other baked debris from their lips, such awkward beings as were gathered in the hall would at this juncture in the proceedings begin to mumble a traditional wassail, the lyrics of which had been composed in ages past for Jacobean confabulations of semi-maniacal choristers to impart their dubious best wishes to "dear so-and-so" in a relentlessly repetitive fashion.

A Business Plan

Being a man who enjoys a leisurely Friday, and also as a man of with a considerably wide-range of diverse interests, I have spent most of the morning in my local public library thumbing through the New Scientist. Within the pages of this periodically read periodical, I discover thrilling news of species of horned hamster, unfortunately currently extinct, unless, of course, a few experimental recipients of New Scientist profiles desire to do something drastic with recovered horned-hamster DNA samples. Considering that powdered rhino horn - no easy thing to obtain - is considered by the romantic cognoscenti to be a vital ingredient in any successful love potion, think of the cheap, bottled aphrodisiac opportunities offered by re-created cuddly horned-hamsters! So come on you adventurous genetic scientists, get off your white-coat clad backsides and get cloning!

Marketing to the Masses

As I Navigated the treacherous canyon that is the children's section of my local bookstore, a grizzled explorer in search of the legendary "good kids book", I happened to notice that most of the gleaming volumes on display included a colorful square suggesting what span of pre-teen ages might consider the book to be readable material:Jolly Roger the Roving Rabbit (suitable for ages 4-9)
What a good idea, I thought, surely all books should carry similar informative advice. For example:
The Stranger by Albert Camus (suitable for ages 14-16)
Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud (suitable for ages 16-18)
The Bible (suitable for ages 83-96)
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (suitable for bi-curious males)
And so on.

If Only I Lived In A Walk-In Refridgerator

As I lay sprawled sockless on the couch a malicious mosquito dive-bombed my unprotected ankle, took his surfeiting bite, and then darted in reverse back to the unswattable safety of microcosmic airborne speckledom. What on Earth, I wondered, do these vampires of the insect kingdom do with all the bellyfuls of blood they extract from unsuspecting humans such as I?
Could it be that learned mosquito scientists long ago discovered the secrets of DNA? Could it be that in some distant blood hive in the sky, busy mosquito biologists are cloning a race of mind-controllable mosquito men? Why does my mind's eye wish to be a camera filming endless reels of 1950s low-budget sci-fi movie scenarios? It is this relentless heat, no doubt, coupled with the insistant hypnotic commands of the Freon King who reigns in these air-conditioned realms. Will those damn drums never cease beating? What do they want from me? I can't take it any longer.

Mind, Body, and Spirit

Thought For The Day:

"Everyone hates me."

Something Sinister Through the Wall

Judging by the industrious degree of hammering, sawing, planing and screwing I can hear being undertaken in such a minute section of the apartment next door, I do believe the Norwood Builder himself has relocated here accompanied by his housekeeper. Construction seems to be entirely confined to an area, roughly four by six or so, directly behind my kitchen wall, which, in effect, has become a sort of giant sub-woofer for the duration.
My new neighbors also apparently share custody of a small and sullen sailor-suited boy who, on the occasion I encountered him in the stairwell, demanded to be given any unwanted newspapers and magazines I might possess for the purpose of pursuing his papier-mache projects. He claims to be making a Darth Vader mask for school. When I asked him what his father was building he ran away.
It's a Skinner Black Box is my best guess.

The Age of Steam

Steam billows forth from a city street drainage grate like some powerful genie released from a subterranean lamp. Sweat pours off the brow of a traffic cop, sizzles on the sun-baked black surface of the road and forms tiny rivulets that run through the cracking tar as if they were lava streaming across a volcanic landscape. On the horizon, automobiles ripple in a heat wave. Even Lawrence of Arabia and all his camels would swap at least three of his Pillars of Wisdom for just a few seconds of cooling breeze.

Pale Ale Update

This latest craze of "Boozehounding" that has hit the taverns and bars of Old Scrotum town leaves me extremely perplexed. Packs of adults dress up in dog costumes for the purpose of lapping imported Pale ales and Stouts from ceramic bowls placed on the floor of the chosen venue. Boozehound participants usually bark at the jukebox and growl if anyone attempts to enter the bathroom. Meanwhile, naughty Boozehounds will often sniff the buttocks of someone's girlfriend and then run away, cowering and whimpering under a nearby table when challenged. And the local newspaper, the Old Scrotum Sentinel, reports that several Old Scrotum Community College seniors have apparently raised $75 for charity by partaking in a sponsered Boozehounding dressed as cocker spaniels and poodles. This is supposed to make this foolish pastime acceptable, is it? Personally, I do not think $75 is very much money.

The Faubourg

Proust, the final frontier. These are the pages of In Search of Lost Time. Its seven-volume mission: to explore aristocratic French salon society, to seek out effete characters and new drawing rooms to lounge about in, to daintily go where no son of bourgeois parents has gone before. Whooooooosh! Ah-ah-aaaaaah-ah ah! Ah-ah-aaaaaah-ah ah! Ah-ha-aaaaaah-ah ah! Zzzzzzzzzzzz.
Marcel's log. Stardate, er, .... oh I can't be bothered to turn over in my bed, to disturb the satin sheets that enshroud my ivory legs and stare at the chiding clock upon my lengthy mantelpiece. And what is a star anyway? Merely a philistine pin-prick in the remorseless dark of an evening sky that mercilessly illuminates the pellucid tears that disturb the cheek of that marble faun in the Place de Toilette Tradeur.
How sad is the.... etc.

In Search of Wasted Time

Dreary, wishy-washy seconds float sluggishly downstream. Gradually they collect in the stagnant inlet of flotsam and jetsam we wearily describe as "a minute." Dragged down below the surface by the combined weight of polluted moments, they sink deeper and deeper into the dark and muddy bed full of rusting and tangled hours in this wretched post-industrial canal called "day".
Personally, I never have any Spare Time (SP) on my hands because I wear special time-resistant gloves whenever I am handling infectious clocks. My gloves have this protective coating that repels the tick-tockety residue so I don't cactch those nasty temporal diseases. This leaves me plenty of Quality Time (QT) to rewrite Marcel Proust's famous novel, Remembrance of Things Past.
I shall, of course, be employing a modern idiom, and I will also be updating both the period and the place in which the action takes place: I am thinking the year 2006 in contemporary Tokyo will suffice for my dramatic and thematic requirements, and the narrator's nostalgic reverie will begin after he relaxes in one of those Japanese capsule hotels with a can of Classic Coke.
To emphasise this new Eastern approach to the novel, my first volume will be re-titled "The Way of the Swann," and it will mainly concern the narrator's growing interest in Samurai swordplay and nubile women dressed up like schoolgirls. Here is the opening paragraph of the novel with my hip new additions. You will notice that it is far more exciting than the original:

The Way of the Swann
Part One: Vengence of the Madelaine (Hell Comes To Combray)

For a while back there, I would hit the sack immediately after The Sopranos had finished because there wasn't anything else on TV that I wanted to watch. So I chilled in my crib and fantansized about beheading my enemies with a massive ceremonial Japanese sword; and so excited did I become with this idea that I barely had time to think "I am bagging out on the day" before I fell asleep, so tired was I after a hard days samurai training. But then I would suddenly jolt awake again as the synthesised pop tune I heard that morning ran through my head and I remembered the buxom women in schoolgirl clothes dancing on the stage that I had read about in my mother's fashion magazines last week.
_ _ _ _

That's all I have done so far. Pretty exciting isn't it? Much more up- to-date than the boring original French nonsense. I doubt anyone in their right mind will bother to read that old Proustian crap anymore when they can read my gripping adventure instead.

I, Dubious

From the fabled, golden shimmering placenta-soaked hour of my nativity until this very Rolex-encrusted second, I have always been what unimaginative dullards and literal minded bores wearyingly describe as a “pretentious” person; and although I may not have entered this world with the proverbial silver spoon in my mouth, I have extremely good reason to believe that my newborn dewy lips did in fact clasp a rare ivory Balinese feasting ladle, decorated with sacred carvings and ancient tribal poems. Indeed, I probably had two.
Personally, I can announce without reservation that I am unequivocally proud of my pretentious streak. It is the silver bow extravagantly tied around the gift box of my daily thoughts before they are presented to you on this otherwise humble page.
Such creative energy and drive is what differentiates me from animals of the human kind, those conventional, consensus-seeking baboons whose two-cent souls might just as well evaporate in the fetid, stagnant humidity of a decrepit city zoo’s barren and unloved Ape House.
Pretension, I might add, topples Cleanliness from its angelic perch next to Godliness; for how can a dim witted, banal and insipid mentality - no matter how spotlessly clean it might be - even hope to understand the ineffable mind of God? It obviously can’t. And this miserable lack of comprehension is why tiresome, dreary pedants possessed of zero fantasy life are going to burn in the lowest furnace in the hottest fires of the darkest pit of Hell until the end of eternity. You can observe their emaciated, sunken cerebellums sweating through that tawdry, acne-riddled onionskin stretched across their exceedingly low and furrowed brows. I am thinking especially of those undignified wretches called political pundits. Lord preserve us from this terrible, mouth-breathing breed of intellectual gnome.
So there!
Now where was I? Oh yes, I remember: As far as armpits go, mine can be favorably compared with those belonging to Genghis Khan, and many beautiful women have told me that the sensuously exquisite bone structure that forms my armpit region, and the fine hair that finds easy purchase within it, recall for them the lush yellow foliage and rugged landscape of central Asia. Application of exotically scented deodorants to this area often leads to ...(this post has been abandoned due to detection of dangerous levels of pretension)

MenInBlack Are the Old Black

Aliens from outer space have absolutely no sense of style whatsoever. Just think how dismally uninspired and talentless the Venusian UFO manufacturers must be considering that they have completely failed to progress beyond constructing those exceedingly humdrum and outmoded "flying saucer" and "cigar-shaped object" boring UFOs that persistantly disfigure our skies with their unfashionable and third-rate designs.
Close encounters of the third kind? More like close encounters of the passe kind.
What are those mysterious lights hovering above the tree tops? Who cares: I've seen forty watt bulbs that are more exciting than that.
Let's face it, Aliens are so yesterday.
The mesmerising trajectory of a human cannonball, on the other hand, is one aerial sight that really gets the pulse racing. Therefore I am extremely pleased to announce that my good friend The Amazing Loonie has recently been inducted into the Human Cannonball Hall of Fame, located just off Route 747a at Baaang, Eastern Nebraska.
Unfortunately, The Amazing Loonie is the only inductee so far, and many people might claim that the cloakroom of an abandoned Elks Lodge doesn't really count as a "hall", so I guess it's not much of an attraction at the moment. Still, half a day spent wandering around this circus exhibit certainly beats the hours you'll waste yawning into the face of some dull visitor from the stars who has ruined your crop field with his nerdy space craft and tediously repeats his demand to be taken to your leader.

Where Are They Now?

I was in this rock group once. We were called Fluorescent Yeti and recorded a long -playing album on green vinyl entitled “The Stomping’ Sounds of Fluorescent Yeti.”
The cover design featured a tinted photograph of members of the band crouching in tall grass and staring at the camera like, well, I suppose we looked like a bunch of sullen yetis staring at a camera.
I played lead mellotron. There were twelve other mellotrons in the band, plus three sets of vibes, an electric dulcimer, Theremin, two zithers, Yma Sumac impersonator, moog, ARP, stringed wobbler. Kate Bushalizer, four sousaphones, Slovenian trumpet, two gypsy girls with tambourines, another chick who waffled on about the zodiac, a piano, several violins and a lonely viola, an accordion, and then of course we had all the usual guitar, bass, and drums nonsense mixed in as well.
Our most popular song was the barn dance favorite “Bigfoot Blues.” Perhaps you remember the chorus?

Yeah I’m the downtown fluorescent yeti
And I gotta a hairy girl named Yeti Betty
Yeti Betty Yeti Betty, Yeti Betty
Is givin’ this fluorescent yeti the bigfoot blues

Our other hit was the tear-jerking power ballad “Footprints in the Woods.”The words to this torch song were particularly poignant and memorable:

Footprints in the wood
Ape-like impressions in the mud
Just footprints in the wood
Look out, there's Elmer Fudd
Searching for those footprints in the wood

Later we tried to produce a concept album, as these sorts of "gatefold sleeve" encased extravanganzas were very popular during the Vietnam era. This magnum opus, for that's what it was, we tentatively called "Jack and the Giant Pot Plant." It was about a deaf, dumb, and blind pot-dealing Yeti who ... well, we never did figure that part out. In fact, we didn't progress much beyond noodling about with a seventeen-minute opening instrumental track before some members of the band became more interested in UFO sightings than yeti lore. Predictably they started a rival band called UFO, but got sued because somebody was already called that. Anyway, undaunted by these setbacks the rest of us formed Sasquatch, a five-piece acoustic ensemble. We played a few folk clubs around town before our initial enthusiasm completely petered, pauled, and maryied out.

The Devil Finds Work ...

Pivotal Moments in French History #2

The Evacuation of Boughelles in 1287 was the direct result of a concerted push by Turdist calvary flushed with success after the Stomache Rebellion earlier that year at the Battle of Constipation. Indeed, Chevalier de Sphinqtour had only signed the Syrup of Figges that previous July under enormous strain, since great pressure had been exerted upon him to occupy the Toilette Bowl region of Eastern Buttoque before it fell into insurgent hands. It was this crucial moment that Rolaid, the ubiquitous hero of medieval French poetry, was finally able to rally his crack troops in support of de Sphinqtour's victorious encircling movement of Boughelles and the city's resistance was broken at last.

Taken from Josef Campball's seminal book "The Hero With A Thousand Arses"

Siegfried at the Confluence of Sewers

Fouls reeks will rise. With what shivering horror and how well, even after all this time gone by, the wafted guerilla smell of human sweat smothered by baby powder and a liberal application of acrid perfume still recalls the spine-chilling enormous billowy shadow of Mrs. Kooper, my old crotchety music teacher, with her Richard the Third haircut, gravestone teeth, and flabby treble-clef figure cloaked in seventies' polyester potato sack. This clammy current of memory-stirring air, an archived ambiance of some terrible childhood trauma, measuring Force Negative Nine on the Beaufort Scale, uncoils itself invisibly in space as if it were spiraling spectral smoke from a phantom candle, silently forming transparent clouds in the troposphere like the powerful flatulence of Ariel, otherwise undetected on the magic isle; or the steaming sulfurous body odor of Vulcan that Venus finds unmentionably revolting; or the vile, bloody breath of Chronos hiccupped into the world as he devours the last of his children.
At any rate, a woman stinking of sweat, baby powder and eye-watering perfumes clambered into the seat beside mine on the train this morning, transporting me unwillingly backwards in time to a grim moment when I was forced to cringe over a glockenspiel while the big bass drum of Mrs Kooper's breasts beat a different type of time into my pre-teen skull.

Busy Bee Workshop

Script Re-write For My Latest PBS Children's TV Show

Hello children. I'm Boris the Beekeeper. Do you want to come and see my Magic Bee Hive? It's just down the garden path here, next to the foul smelling, worm-riddled compost heap. Come along then!
I want to see if I can collect some lovely honey from my Magic Bee Hive for sweetening that disgusting herbal tea which is the only kind my stupid wife buys. But first we have to put on our protective clothing so that we don't get stung by the nasty possessive bees while we are stealing their honey.
That fool of a wife of mine got stung yesterday, which is why her head has swelled up like a beach ball and is full of revolting yellow pus. She might die because she's allergic. She can't eat peanuts either. Isn't she stupid, children!
Do you know how we collect the honey from the Magic Bee Hive? No? Well that's because you are stupid too, children, and you cannot even wipe your noses properly! Oh well, I guess I shall have to demonstrate. What we do is this: we spray powerful poison over the bees so that they all die. When they have fallen on the ground and are writhing around in agony, we stamp really hard on them with are special lead-soled boots and shout "Die! Die!" at them in a funny German accent.
Then we sweep them up into the big black plastic garbage bag and burn them on a big bonfire that annoys the neighbors. Then we have a cigarette and a large scotch. Afterwards we smash the Magic Bee Hive with a heavy sledgehammer and pay the kid next door five cents per hour to scoop the honey up with his bare hands. And that is how Honeynut Cheerio breakfast cereal is made!
Goodby children .... no, wait! Which of you thieving little swine has hidden my sedative?

An Immodest Proposal

I recall reading that during the 1970s the Swedish royal family regularly journeyed back and forth between their various regal appointments via public transportation. At the time, the era of ermine flares and disco crowns, such a method of traveling from Palace A to Palace B was considered the height of Scandinavian eccentricity. However, in the light of modern terrorist attacks, a King hopping on the local bus route seems quite a courageous display of "we are all in it together" fellowship with his people in the face of great potential danger. It is unlikely that Tony Blair returned to London today from the G8 summit in Scotland by squeezing himself in with all the commuters on the 9:36 Glasgow to Euston train, calling at Penrith, Oxenholme and Preston. But perhaps he should have done. Perhaps our world leaders can set an example for the rest of us - and demonstrate some of this “resolve” they keep alluding to - by riding public transport instead of bullet-proof limousines for the next six months. I, for one, would feel greatly comforted by such a bravura show of solidarity as I step into the subway each morning.

The Poet Consoles A Child

Do not weep, small being, for when we consider the Rolo as a unit of candy we must conclude that is most unsatisfactory, that it is merely an insipid splodge of unadventurous, run-of-the-mill conical caramel which has been indifferently and predictably encased in a miserly thin layer of so-called "milk" chocolate. So I beg you to consider, tiny tot, that the wretched and forgettable Rolo is certainly no match for that celestial duo, the Milky Way and the Mars Bar. But, alas, you are not yet old enough to grapple with these stout candies. Moreover, as you have discovered for yourself, the tubular packaging of the assembled Rolo collection is both banal, plain, and tedious in the extreme, easily collapsing so that individual Rolo units tumble down the back of the car seat and become lost forever. But no great weeping epic should be performed on account of this sudden displacement, for many candy experts regard such remote automotive voids like the back of the car seat as the best place for the unfortunate sweetmeat named Rolo: a dark and silent grave where it may gather dust and mold and meditate upon its own lack of quality. Therefore, snot-nosed brat, wail ye not and be merry, else ye shalt be confined to thy room without benefit of Bob The Builder.

On The Road To Mandalay

Arrow shower-like monsoon rains follow withering Burmese heat. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a bamboo-chewing panda padding down the street with the gooey remains of a melted barometer stuck to its fur; or a lazy python coiling itself around a lamp post before slithering into the shade beneath a SUV to escape the sizzling downpour. Meanwhile, having crossed the steaming river of tar called Commonwealth Avenue, two pith-helmeted explorers encounter exotic plant life in the deep craters of an extinct but still smoking Starbucks:
"By gad, Livingstone, what strange and unknown species of man-eating vegetation is this?"
"Amazing, Stanley, it's actually a Boston University drama student on her lunch break."
"They'll never believe this at the Royal Society."
"Well, they're the damned bloody fools who told us Boston was a temperate rather than a tropical climate."
"Yes, that's damned true, damn them."
"Yes indeed. Damn their damn eyes, damn them."
"Damn that damn Royal Society .... etc."

...dialogue continues until everyone dies of malaria.

G8-Gate

Of course, one of the most controversial issues that our so-called world leaders will studiously avoid addressing at the current G8 summit is whether or not Tarzan still has a role to play in modern Africa. In the past, most of this troubled continent's problems were easily solved by summoning Tarzan and his army of wild beasts via jungle telegraph. The yodelling ape man would swiftly arrive on a swinging vine, beat up the baddies, balance the books, sort out everyone's debts, pose for snapshots with Cheetah and some prominent bankers, and then ride off into the sunset on the back of a smiling elephant.
These days we have Bob Geldof who also yodels and dresses in leather rags.

1776 And All That

A Spoilsport writes ....

That singular insult to the human nostril, the sickly-sweet stench of fried dough sizzling on a sidewalk corner, is always an odoriferous harbinger of some wretched Municipal Festival of Public Degradation greasing itself up with fairground fat as it prepares to assault the peace and quiet of one's neighborhood with its third-rate music and dim-witted entertainments. The July 4th firework display at the Hatch Shell in Boston is just such an event.
You can call me a Benedict Arnold or the Bunker Hill Killjoy, if you like, but honestly, the first face-painted human garbage machine clad in stars-and-stripes underwear who comes staggering drunkenly around the corner is often enough for me to wish that the revolution never occurred, that our Founding Fathers lost the plot, and that we all still lived in Americashire, an insignificant wheat-producing dependency of the United Kingdom.
Did George Washington really cross the Delaware so that extra-cheese chomping overweight families sprawled on grubby towels could feel free to fart and belch in time to the music of rictus-grinned musicians demeaning themselves by performing a medley of Things Go Better With Coke, America the Beautiful and Theme from Sponge Bob Squarepants? I think not.
Had that be-wigged hero foreseen the future, Washington would surely have turned his boat around and paddled straight back home whistling "God Save the King" through his famous wooden teeth.
So, how should we celebrate this emotional festival of National pride? Well, good taste and simple commonsense obviously suggest that our great country’s independence from the tyrant George would be commemorated in a far more dignified manner by a thrilling all-day ceremonial fly-past of the Old Scrotum Flying Club, led by a certain blogsmith and his gorgeous aviatrix companion in their single-engine Focker Wulf bi-plane.
If the call comes, I am ready.

(This is all, of course, tongue firmly in cheek. I actually love the Hatch Shell fireworks display; but then I am fortunate enough to be able to watch the festivities from the comfort of a Beacon Hill roof deck without rubbing grubby shoulders with the horrible hoi polloi crouching on the Esplanade.

This Suburban Life

Perhaps the club foot and blood-soaked flat-top skull should have tipped me and the wife off that he wasn't the type of person I really wanted to be babysitting our little girl Marie Lou. The bolts through the neck and Jolly Green Giant being sick flesh tone should also have given us pause for thought. "Guys!" these features should have been screaming, "This is freakin' Frankenstein's monster here, not Mother Goose and Bambi. Are you sure you want this fiend of Satan to be rocking the cradle and pinching the cheeks of the apple of your eye while you're out at the movies? Are you guys out of your minds?"

But, you know, I'm a bit a softy and the horrible creature really looked like he could use a few bucks, so I showed him where the fridge was and how to work the satellite TV and then me and Thelma took off to see the new Batman film. When we returned five hours later Marie Lou was thankfully sleeping peacefully in her crib, although the plastic Noah's Ark we bought her for Christmas had been smashed to smithereens and Talkin' Teddy's head had been violently ripped off and flung into bathroom sink. Never mind. You expect these sorts of things with a first time baby sitter. But what I was't prepared for was the sight of an old blind fiddle player sitting in the living room slurping the last dregs of my best bottle of brandy while Frankenstein's monster stroked his forehead. "What's all this?" I said.

" ... Friend." replied the monster.

"That's as may be." I said. "But what's he doing here without my permission or that of my wife?"

The monster rose unsteadily to his feet, completely blotto by the look of it: "I am not an animal." he grunted. "I am a human being."

"Don't play the Elephant Man with me, young man." I told him. "You were placed in a position of responsibility in this household and we expect, nay demand, that you repay that trust by letting us know if you're going to invite strangers over. Is that understood?"

"Ughnn"

"Is that understood?"

"Yyyhn."

"Okay. Now here's your twenty dollars as we agreed on."

"Thhnyu."

Meanwhile, as you could predict, the old blind fiddle player just kept mumbling to himself in the corner and wouldn't budge and inch or let go of the brandy bottle. Typical. In the end I had to call the Police and have him forcibly removed. So, of course, the good babysitter search is back on again. If you know anyone please let me know.