American Fez

Geneva UnConvention

I simply cannot understand why President Bush and his cronies at the Penthouse must resort to torturing innocent terrorists to find stuff out. Why don't they just Google it like everybody else does? If I wanted to to find Al Queda, I would simply look him up in the phone book. So why can't Donald Bumsfelt and his cronies in the Compartment of Homemade Security do that? Frankly speaking, it is absolutely unacceptable in this day and age to practice medieval acts of gross barbarity such as interviewing Republican Senator John McSane on CCN and Fox. If you ask me, Vice-President Lon Cheney and his cronies at the YMCIA will have lots of tough questions to answer when they are finally brought before the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Committee on Foreign Policy.

Inscrutable Medicine

Staggering around my local vitamin supplement store last night, rather tipsy after swallowing a complementary and extremely heady cocktail of boiling Conger Eel Oil and eviscerated Old Hag's Wort, I purchased a 500mg handy-pak of Zebra Cartilage in easy-to-swallow gel capsule form.
Zebra Cartilage is rich in bingo acids and oxymorons which help to break down the fatty gnomes which form around the outer brain pouffe during heavy bouts of paying visa bills. Naturally, Zebra Cartilage is not cheap. Oh no. In fact, it is very probable that users will run up astronomically high visa bills when buying even the smallest quantity of this powerful natural remedy for paying astronomically high visa bills. So what's the point, you ask. Well, that's just the mystery of Orient for you, isn't it.

Silly Books For Autumn

1. The Joy of X: An ancient text republished for the first time in over 2000 years in which an anonymous centurion argues why an X-shaped cross is more efficient than the more famous cruciform method of execution. (History)

2. The Joy of Ex: Explains why it's much better to be a woman's ex-boyfriend rather than the current stooge forced to waste his hard-earned cash buying shiny crap for the high-maintenance hag. (Self Help)

3. The Joy of Hex: Three wicked witches tell all! (Biography)

5. The Joy of Rex: YOU are the King. YOU rule by divine right. YOU make all the decisions. YOU can behead whomsoever you desire. YOU get the big bedroom full of concubines. (An Interactive Pop-Up Book Suitable For Ages 21-65)

6. The Joy of Sex: Translated from the original pseudo-feminist gibberish by a real man who knows what he wants ... and how to get it! (Fiction)

7. The Joy of Vex: Investigates the timeless of wonder of sitting around being concerned that your Silly Books for Autumn are not selling any copies. (New Age)

Travels With My Aunt

Without even the merest hint of a shadow of doubt, brooking no argument whatsover in the unshakable certitude of my own invioble logic, I can unequivocably proclaim that it is hereby decreed by me that the best website in the whole wide world is unquestionably the BBC online.
Not only does the BBC internet provide pages and pages of informative and scrollable text on an invaluable amount of fascinating subjects and newsworthy regional events both in Britain and abroad, readers can also gain access to live streaming and archived audio of the BBC's famous radio broadcasts.
Frankly, I do not have enough hours in my week to listen to all the shows I want to hear on Radio 4 and Radio 7. These two radio channels alone are absolutely worth the risibly small television license fee (roughly $19 per month, free if you are over 75 years of age) that the British government asks its citizens to pay for covering all the fabulous services the corporation provides. Anyone who complains about coughing up the few pennies required is obviously the meanest sort of miserly Scrooge  who ever collected cobwebs on his wallet. If you don't like the system then relinquish your TV set, or simply remove the receiver technology and only watch videos. I personally have funded the BBC over the years by my relentless purchase of shelf-loads of their extremely over-priced CDs and DVDs: ".... I've bought you yet another adaptation of "Poldark" for Christmas, auntie. Just what you always wanted."

News & Comment

It was with great shock, but also with a certain sense of depressing inevitability, that we learnt this week of the sacking of Professor Wackford Squeers from Dotheboys College, and his immediate removal from the Madeline Brey Chair of Advanced Anti-Socio-Pathology. How shameful is it that our institutes of higher learning can no longer find tenured positions in their leftist, pro-Muslim ivory towers for a really first class sadist? Of course, a cruel and vindictive bastard of genius such as Professor Squeers is completely anathema to the academic liberal elite cabal of Smikes, Little Nells, and David Copperfields assembled at Dotheboys by President Nickleby, and so he had to go.
Fortunately Professor Squeers has been offered a job at an esteemed Australian College of Transportation. The Antipodes gain is our loss.

Thanks to: The New Criterion

Paralyzed Paracelsus

Below is a photograph I took through wet iron railings of the Porta Magica in Rome's Piazza Vittorio, all that remains of a villa once inhabited by Massimo Palomara da Pietraforte, an alchemist and practising Arcadian poet of the seventeenth century. Apparently the formula for transmuting base metal into gold is engraved around the doorway, a complicated recipe that involves blending lead, tin, bronze, mercury, antinomy and vitriol. There is also a great deal of inscrutable advice: Quando In Tua Domo Nigri Corvi Parturient Albas Columbas Tunc Vocaberis Sapiens, which supposedly means "When black ravens give birth to white doves in your house, then you will be called wise." Meanwhile, the two vaguely Karl Malden-ish figures who stand sentry seem equally disinterested in whether you answered friend, foe or F-off to their diminutive challenge. Some use they would be, guarding the Philosopher's Stone.

Personally I have always considered alchemy to be an extremely tedious topic. One cannot help conjuring mental images of some wizened maniac setting his ludicrously long beard alight by desperately peering just a little too closely into his burning pestle. And the whole upside down hermaphrodite thing has never appealed to me either.

Big Blog Yawn Bollocks

It is absolutely outrageous and unbelievably incredible that our newspaper of record, The New York Times, aka "The Old Pink Lady", although reporting the malicious theft of a pig by left-wing agitator Tom Tom the Piper's Son in a tiny, smudged column at the bottom of page 604 in the classified ads section, neglected to mention that the porcine contraband was in fact destined for an Islamo-Fascist sponsored dinner table at a sumptuous feast celebrating the Times'  favorite pundit and liberal elite superstar Gnome Chumpsky, aka The Archbishop of Canterbury. Even the Zionist controlled media were slow to condemn Tom Tom for his non-kosher swine stealing activities. The erstwhile Piper's Son was even praised in the pages of Britain's leading Nazi rag, The Spectator, by none other than Taki aka Taki, author of A History of The Peloponnesian War. But only CrapPundit has the integrity to reveal the shocking truth that Tom Tom is not the son of Piper at all. I can exclusively announce that Tom Tom's father actually plays the Shakuhachi, which is a sort of Japanese flute. Very, very different from the Pipe than other news agencies and blogs have reported.

Click here to contribute to the Justice For Tom Tom the Shakuhachi Player's Son Campaign, and please write your personal checks and money orders out to "Campaign Against Shakuhachi Harassment," or you can just simply use our acronym C.A.S.H.

Hat tip to: Instapundit, Bit Fat Fool, BoringWeb, and Wanker.com

There Are No Starbucks In Rome

Why do American food and beverage franchises force their employees to face customers whilst clad in ludicrous theme apparel and branded baseball hats? Step into a Starbucks and you are immediately set upon by a team of highly strung short stops demanding to help you. Walk across the average Food Court, on the other hand, and enter psychedelic little league game gone badly wrong.

Of course, such demeaning dress codes are merely another aspect of the infantilism that has been introduced into almost every arena of American society. The fast food establishments that enforce them transport their clientele into fantasy worlds of convenience, fairy palaces of fat of sugar, where dreaming diners forget that the enormous mounds of edible plastic they are consuming is of extremely inferior quality. This is the land where Peter Pan is grounded by diarrhea and Tinkerbelle has terrible acne. The land where the word "value" means twenty percent more.

In Rome, the serious men who serve espresso wear crisp white shirts, black ties and black trousers, and sweeping linen aprons fastened around their waists. You feel like an adult when ordering from them. And even your poorly pronounced Italian will make more sense than the weird make-believe, mumbling language of Starbucks.

There Is Always A Tourist Who Walks Beside You

Beneath an excessively groomed pediment of stone white hair his face was tanned a particularly cancerous shade of brown, and his pruned neck terminated in a repulsively starched and canary yellow nylon golf shirt buttoned all the way up to the thorax. He drove the sort of enormous automobile that guzzles gas like a hungry infant guzzles milk from a bottle, his wife seated beside him, a purse-lipped package of wrinkles and taut sinew slathered in make-up. She might have dead, or impersonating a salami for all I knew.

"Where can I park around here?" He demanded of me as I strolled home with my bag of groceries, as if I were his personal parking attendant.

"This is Beacon Hill," I told him. "It's all resident parking only around here. You can try Cambridge Street or there's a lot under the Commons."

He rolled his eyes and flashed me a bleachy smile, cynical and condescending. "Well how's anyone meant to see the place if you can't park here?"

There were many replies to that. Here was a typical tourist, one among many millions, who could not conceive that the world had not been designed for his own convenience. But then, why would he? Raised in a human battery farm of gated community, shopping mall, and office complex, why would he not believe that everywhere else was equally as uniform and structured. I am sure he felt surprised that he did not have to pay to get in, obviously considering Beacon Hill to be some sort of Plimoth Plantation living museum. I often observe such daytrippers, taking photographs of fire hydrants that they think date back to the time of Paul Revere.

"Hey, Frank, over here: this must be the Starbucks the Pilgrim Fathers went to."

Up In The Air

Flying over the Alps, gazing out of my tiny window at the jagged topography below, I always half expect to espy the ruins of some inaccessibly ancient mountain temple pitched amid the gleaming peaks. Its sacred fire long extinguished by two millennia of avalanching snows; the stone altar lost amid rubble from innumerable rock slides and the dry bones of sacrificial offerings; its rough carved, rune covered colonnades felled by lightning strikes and sonic boom. Then somebody offers me a plastic tray conveying a reality adjustment of chicken cacciatore and eccles cake manufactured by Sky Gourmet. "And our cabin crew will be coming through with a selection of bladder eviscerating fizzy drinks."

Airport departure lounges, of course, are shopping malls in excelsis. There is no escape. Potential spenders graze the merchandise like cattle on the way to the butcher's yard. At Fiumicino one has the choice of Ferrari, Nike, Tie Rack, and some rather expensive leather goods stores. Prada to go. As usual, I purchased Tazza D'Oro coffee beans: it's something to do during the pre-board boredom. At security they asked me what was in my carry-on bag. Two books and some coffee, I told them. "No liquids!" the woman shrieked - apparently under the delusion that I had intentionally poured hot coffee into my luggage.

The Happenin' Way

Tomorrow I take wing for Rome. I shall be resident in the Eternal City, not for eternity, but for approximately eight days, until September 22nd or thereabouts. Since I am not paying, I am staying in an  especially grand and elegant hotel. It is the sort of fantastically expensive establishment where liveried attendants are employed to whisper "Remember you are mortal" in guest's ears as we travel upwards in the gleaming elevator from marbled lobby to the sumptuous suite divine, much as ancient slaves did while accompanying victorious Caesar in his chariot during the celebration of Triumphs.
My favorite trattoria in Rome is the Burga Rex in Piazza Graffito where the chef, Dottore Crippini, makes double cheese whoppers out of oil infused she-wolf bladders. Dinner is followed by a brisk stroll around the square and its infamous yellow fountain. There is a popular tradition that if you are sick three times in the Heavi fountain, then you will definitely return to the Capuchin hospital you passed by on your way in. They believe in prescribing a course of leeches for every ailment.
Of course, no trip to Rome is complete without going to see the changeable Pope Climate, better known to his friends as "The German Shepherd."
If you are lucky, his Hooliganess might grant you an audience, but it will probably be just a bunch of old timers from the sticks who have already seen "Mamma Mia" over forty times. Where he finds these people is beyond me.
Anyway, the whole point of this post is that there won't be another one until next Thursday.

Old Mother Goose Versus Al Queda

It is interesting to think that four hundred years ago, street urchins would almost certainly have contrived grim nursery rhymes and sinister games about the September 11th hijackers. The stuffed effigies of Mohammed Atta et al would have become modern Guy Fawkeses in an American equivalent of British bonfire night; Islamo-scarecrows wheeled around in a barrow from Main Street to Jackson Corner by ragged-trousered entrepreneurs prepared to sell their creations for a penny. As it is, we rarely ever mention those murderously inhuman, thoroughly alien individuals responsible for all that destruction and death. It is a great shame that our children's natural bloodthirstyness has been rinsed out of them.

Ear, Nose and Throat

They say that the lines on every face tell its own story. I suppose, then, that each such visage begins as a nursery rhyme and concludes as something unreadable by Trollope ... mind you, at the moment, my own resembles a well-thumbed chick-lit, Oprah-approved bestseller; passed on from wide-eyed chick to wide-eyed chick in an orgy of book club ecstacy. No doubt I shall soon be adapted into a movie starring an A-list cast of buxom beauties ... er ... where was I? ... oh yes, unreadable by Trollope; dusty, leather-bound volumes with yellowing pages and broken spines. Although, you'd have to say, considering how relentlessly blank most people look today, they might as well just be books on tape; the cheap type that are recorded on analogue cassettes whose oxide crumbles after only three plays. And like most modern books, they don't feature much of a story either.

(The author of this post is available at most airport book stalls, and is an extremely easy read. Why not bring him to the beach and share him with your friends?)

Boo La La

In order to inject a little exotic spice into our love-making, Verena and  I were advised to dress-up and adopt the personalities of famous lovers. "Fantasy role-playing" our sexologist called it. Instinctively, and because we harbor a deep and abiding love of all things ala Francais, we instantly agreed to transform ourselves into Napoleon and Josephine that very evening.

Now, students of popular quotations can probably spot the flaw in our decision almost immediately. However, as we over-excitedly rushed across town to the costume shop, Verena and I plain forgot that "Not tonight, Josephine" is perhaps the world's most notoriously nay-saying rejection.

"But that was just that one night before an especially important battle." I assured Verena. "An unusual exception to Napoleon's normally passionate rule." Anyway, eventually, after much faux French-accented whispering of sweet nothings, I was finally able to coax her into the boudoir, and there she lay, seductively arrayed in her rented First Empire finery, coyly awaiting the great French general's thrusting manouvers as I adjusted my tricolor hat in the bathroom mirror.

I must have been halfway down the street when my phone rang. "What are you doing?" Verena's puzzled voice demanded ... "I'm retreating from Moscow." I told her.

Oh well, back to square one. Romance is such a game of chess, isn't it?

Eastern Promise

I have of late, I know not why, been drinking rather a lot of raw, fermented kombucha root. The experience is rather like gulping down tangy mouthfuls of cold sea monkey tea. Apparently this healthy Chinese brew contains a significant number of "live cultures" - which always makes me think of groups of effete bacteria swimming around quoting Oscar Wilde: "Some of us may hide in the cracks behind the toilet but we are looking at the stars!"

I had hoped that imbibing this restorative liquid might improve my typing, and at four dollars per sixteen fluid ounces I don't think I was expecting much. Alas, I am still all hunt and peck with Constantine's finger at the keyboard.

(You will note that I am trying to include explanatory links in my posts since some readers still claim that they often have no idea what I'm talking about.)

Period Piece

Shall I compare thee to a Shakespeare play?
Thou art more dramatic and contrived;
Apparently it’s your “time of the month” today
But so far my codpiece has survived.

See also:
All Men Are Prospero At The Dessert Island

Crypto-Archeology

Of all the pagan religions, I have always considered the pre-Christian cult of Mithras to be particularly interesting, mostly, I admit, because Mithras is how a Roman suffering from a speech impediment would pronounce the word mistress, as in: "I have a secret altar nest in the city where I go to visit my Mithras."

My "lisp theory" of antiquity obviously explains why women were denied initiation into the cult's mysteries. After all, what self-respecting neophyte would want his wife finding out that he went to see his Mithras every night? Especially when he's spent his entire paycheck on a slaughtered bull for his Mithras, and consequently can't give his wife any housekeeping money.

Is it any wonder that such a henpecked husband would seek solace in the arms of his Mithras? Yes indeed, if only scholars would listen to Crypto-Archeologists like me, I think we would have a much better understanding of what motivated ancient man.

Okay. Perhaps a Roman would not actually say the word mistress in the first place. But that is beside the point. After all, we are talking archeology here, not linguistics.

Bound and Gagged

If each morning may be described as a collection of blank pages upon which we record our daily deeds so that, at the chimes of midnight, Life can finally publish a Book of the Day, then this particular fourth of September I have produced a bumper illustrated history of Monday in seven volumes. True, only the second paragraph of page 134 and the eighth line of page 793 are actually worth reading, bit I am certain that fig.9b will raise a smile on some lips. Mind you, the binding is cheaply manufactured so you'll want to be very careful when handling the whole book, especially volume six, as it is rather delicate. And why Life decided to use that picture of me on the cover I'll never know. But it's the title Life has used that really bothers me: "September 4th: Why Bother Getting Up?" The book is sure to hit the remainders bin very swiftly with an unpromising title like that. You would think Life would know these things after all these years, wouldn't you? But that's just Life, I guess.