American Fez

Nero's Games

If the relevant authorities stage an official inquiry into the drugs scandal at this year's Tour de France, then I hope someone tells them that it's much more exciting to observe maniacal, sinew-straining dope fiends crashing through the Languedoc than it is to fall asleep watching the evenly paced pedaling of goody-goody cyclists with their knobbly knees and luridly colored racing caps.
I know I speak for many sports enthusiasts when I say that I would certainly attend more cycling events if I knew for sure that the steroid junkie winner's heart was going to explode the second after he crossed the finish line. Those about to hide a handful of amphetamine capsules in the front of their lycra shorts, we salute you.
Oh, and I don't think they should be allowed to use brakes on the downhill bits.

Say Nothing

A lunchtime discussion concerning Angelina Jolie's bizarre role as Grendel's mother in the new Beowulf movie evolves into a general critique of animated breasts as a genre. In Grendel's mother's case, motion-captured and therefore undoubtedly enhanced super-breasts.
I volunteer very few thoughts on this subject, except to briefly outline a long-brooded-over and rather melancholy observation that even real breasts usually turn out to be mere trompe-l'oeil deceptions designed to fool the male eye. My theory is immediately denounced by an especially macho colleague who loudly and rather ungallantly proclaims his own wife as living proof that enormous bosoms do indeed exist.
When he has finished boasting I must bite my tongue, since I am itching to inform him that I have actually seen his wife's bared breasts in the flesh, Polaroid evidence of which was once a required item in a "scavenger hunt" I took part in long ago, in the carefree days before they met.  And I don't want to admit that, when all is said and done, he actually has a very good point.

Baron Samedi

Andrea Bocelli? I'd rather listen to a speak-your-weight machine. In fact, I'd rather listen to two speak-your-weight machines discussing their stamp collections.  But then I guess I don't have a romantic bone in my body. I do have lots of romantic marrow and romantic sinew and romantic ligaments and so on, but alas, no actual romantic bones as such.
In the long run, however, I think this lack of amatory fibias and tibias and whatnots will probably be a good thing. After all, when you  grow aged and wizened and lose control of your mind and musculatory system, you don't want your skeleton suddenly beginning to entertain quixotic notions of its own, do you? As Sir Thomas Browne says: "Who knows the fate of his bones., or how often he is to buried? Who hath the oracle of his ashes, or whither they are to be scattered?" How very true those words are. Imagine your impassioned skeleton running off to join the Mardi Gras in a top hat while the rest of you remains boxed-up and inaminate and freshly a-molderin' in the grave.
But you can never be truly confident about your own bones. They simply aren't very trustworthy. Bones always know that they'll have the last laugh after the rest of you has rotted away. This is why skulls grin all the time. It's their little in-joke.

Whim of the Kitchen (Prix Fixe)

Boiled Eggs Voila!
Kipper Anglais avec Bouillabaisse de Sarah Brightman
Pol Pot (serves two)

Saltimbocca con Feety (with side of unidentified solid)
General Franco's Chicken in Guernica Sauce
Soiled Leg of Neddy

Runny Runny Liquorice Pudding

-  or -

Zuper Zized Zuper Zuppe
Selection of Arse Meats et Fromage du Last of the Mohicans
Pol Pot (serves two)

Acropolis of  Draconianed Livers
Atahualpan Skin Cakes (with side of unidentified solid)
Beef Strippers on the Gibbet

Chocolate Bum Bums

... And Let's Hear a Big Round of Applause for Dixon of Dock Green on Glockenspiel!

Which kind of "Living History" musical experience would you prefer to attend:

a) Some bearded maniac playing atonal tunes on a whale bone flute at Jorvik Viking Center?

b) Some middle-aged woman pretending to be a teenager while playing scratchy Elvis 45s on a mono record player with a detachable speaker lid at Strawbery Banke?

c) The Police reunion tour at Boston's Fenway Park this Saturday, featuring Sting and the other two, whatever their names are?

Personally, I would plump for either the avante-garde Viking or the Peggy Sue impersonator, since those performances will not only be superior to The Police's, they will also be more authentic.

(Dixon of Dock Green was a British crime drama about an elderly police office stood behind a desk entering shoplifting figures into his notebook. As Square-Eyed Bob says, "I've seen worse.")

If H.P. Lovecraft Had Possessed A Sense of Humor

A cracked pane in Uncle Zip's  rather oriel window reveals the spectre of Edward Gorey in all his scratchy ink, faux Edwardian finery. Synchronistically, just yesterday I had posted a copy of Gorey's 'The Gashlycrumb Tinies' to a long lost friend in Wolverhampton. Best described, in my opinion, as Virginia Woolf and Mikhail Bulgakov versus the Addams Family in a rhyming couplet competition, Gorey's best book is probably 'The Disrespectful Summons' which can be viewed, probably illegally, online here. (But since the man himself is dead and I don't much care for the commercial business built up around him, I'll let my copywright qualms slide for now)
 

The Archeological Underbelly

This time last year I was excavating Minotaur turds from the deep, ancient Attic soil. The deep and extremely credulous pockets of the Smithsonian paid my expedition expenses, as usual. Those fatheads will fund anything. How well I recall that idiot Professor Shickelgruber in his pince-nez, pith helmet and one-piece safari suit asking me how I could tell the difference between Minotaur crap and Gorgon crap. Naturally, I responded with a withering stare then called him a douche bag under my breath. What was I supposed to say?
Later, after he had stopped crying, I gently explained how all Gorgon crap - usually diarrhea, according to the writings of Preposterous - had instantly turned to stone when Theseus slew Medusa, and that Greek children of the time had found these flat poop stones ideal for skimming across the Aegean shallows. So, I added, we know for certain that all surviving examples of Gorgon crap lie at the bottom of the ocean, like Atlantis.

Your Church Or Mine?

I am not ungodly. I just don't happen to have one at the moment.
There's probably some old Deist bits and pieces in that old suitcase over there, if you really want to know: a few Buddha heads, some misidentified Greek statuary, half a Jehovah, you know, that sort of thing.
But like I said, as far as having a God goes, I'm currently unattached.
That Kali seems kinda nice, although perhaps a touch high-maintenance. Possibly out-of-my-league. I don't konow if you remember the problems I had with Isis and hr damned mysteries? Well, suffice it to say, I don't want to go through that again.

Prophets of Doom

At the airport an inflectionless voice floats through the air-conditioning like an evil fairy, rapping the foreheads of luggage-laden travelers with her magic-headache wand: your departure has been delayed, the voice announces calmly, there is no further information at this time.
His sanity challenged by this news, an enraged fat man in frog-colored sweat pants leaps to his feet: "How is this possible?" he demands of anyone who will listen. "I must be in Kalamazoo by six!" Other sour-faced passengers surround the desk, frantically waving boarding passes in the air as if they were desperate brokers vainly trying to sell worthless shares on the floor of a failing stock market.
Then the conspiracy theory huddles begin to form. There is always an expert with a briefcase and Tom Clancy novel: "Well, I heard that they've had to divert planes from New York because of freak snow storms in Ohio." he explains to his agitated, captive audience. "And so all flights in the South West corridor have been grounded while they wait for the all clear from Toronto. We could be stuck here until Tuesday." The enraged fat man in frog-colored sweat pants nods in bewildered agreement. "The airline had better put us up somewhere nice." he mutters.
Ultimately, of course, the plane will take off only fifteen minutes or so behind schedule.

Florid(a)

Smothered by mercury-boiling, super-tropical temperatures, St. Augustine really is St.Disgustine at the moment. I am sweating like a Jesuit. The cypresses, moss-laden live oaks and faux palms provide no shelter from the heat's muggy, overpowering embrace. I think I even saw an alligator with a sunburn: "You probably want to put something on that" I told it, but he just yawned and snapped back at me. Ungrateful beast. He'll look pretty foolish when his scales begin to peel.
Such excessive heat proves, once again, how science fiction has failed us. I was hoping to be subsisting inside a climate-controlled, glass-dome covered world by now, with matter transportation facilities and a television embedded in my forehead. Fat chance. The only matter transportation around here is the steady stream of sweat that flows from my armpits to my wrists. They depart on the second every second. Very reliable.
Consequently I am slumped within the air vortex produced by a rotary ceiling fan, reading a slim HMSO guidebook to the ruins at Wall in Staffordshire, formerly known as the Roman town of Letocetum, which once contained a fine bathing system of frigidarium, tepidarium, laconicum and caldarium. Nice. Sometimes I think the human race has made absolutely no progress at all during the last two thousand years.

The Antiques Roadshow On Blocks

A random selection of exhibits on display at the Lightner Museum in Saint Augustine: a shrunken head; a malachite vase from Russia; a snowy owl (stuffed obviously); vintage shower attachments; an Egyptian mummy; a small collection of Venetian glassware; a bust of John Milton; an oil painting by the French artist Leon Comerre entitled The Maid at the Door; and a rocking chair in the neo-Classical style. Such a hodgepodge of curiosities, more closely resembling the contents of a superior junk shop than a mini-Met. But I liked it very much.
I had never seen a shrunken head before. It was about the size of a fist but the ears hadn't shrunk as much as the skull, making it easy to imagine some clumsy headhunter kneeling over his grisly task, thinking: "Damn. I've buggered up the ears again. Perhaps if I hang it around the back of my belt no-one will notice."
Or maybe the head just came from one of those tribes that practised ear elongating body modification, and so the ears were actually to scale.

The Parent Trap

Visiting one's parents is like making a pilgrimage to some ancient monument: the audio guides don't work, the exhibits aren't labelled properly, the entrance fee is extortionate and the toilets are always full. But it's the "living history" tour site that really bother me. The actors are terrible in their funny costumes, and why do they insist on speaking in that weird dialect using all those old, outdated words?
Meanwhile, my mother's well-stocked fridge is decorated with a ceramic magnet bearing the dubious and extremely cutesy legend: "Cats are little people in fur coats." So I wonder if this entitles me to throw red paint at her callously sophisticated pets when they try to devour my feet during the night?

Jet Spleen

At Kitty Hawk in December 1903, if only Orville Wright had turned to his brother Wilbur and said, "You know something Wilbur, let's not tell people about our wonderful aeronautical invention. After all, the assholes will only ruin it."
Alas,  unlike the Wright Brothers' rickety flying machine, such a sensible conversation never got off the ground. And so we are stuck with gateway travel, stale peanuts, insufficient leg-room and other soul-destroying airborne inconveniences. Other passengers, for example.
When my Delta Connection arrived at Jacksonville airport this morning, the woman sat behind me immediately made three unanswered phone calls. "I just wanted to let you know that we've just landed safely." she solemnly informed a trio of answering machines, as if disaster had been expected. "And I'm okay."
After her third unsuccessful attempt at relaying news of her physical and mental wellbeing to apparently disinterested contacts, I decided to make a call of my own: "Nobody else seems to care." I told the receptionist at my office as loudly as possible, "But I thought you should know that our journey through the clouds has terminated without incident and the woman in row 3b has neither had to drink her own urine nor eat my liver while clinging to her bottom seat cushion flotation device. Over and out."
Sometimes oh how I wish stagecoach and clipper ship were still humanity's only means of available transportation. Mind you, then fellow passengers would no doubt be on the receiving end of mobile communications like: "I just wanted to let you know that we've docked at Whitby and I haven't been bitten on the neck by a vampire, haven't been eaten by a giant squid or kraken, and I haven't been forced to leap overboard after being confronted by some unnameable terror either."

The Poet's Garden

Here lies one whose name is writ in hedgehog urine

One fine morning in early Autumn, upon a whim, I purchased a Grecian urn from a hirsute man in a dark pinstripe suit who, before he was arrested by the police, sold such items of archaeological interest from a shady pitch outside the British Museum.
"Tell you what, Guv'nor." he said. "This urn'll look smashing in your back garden surrounded by lichens, moss, weeds and whatnot.
"I couldn't agree more." I told him. "I'll take it."
"Lovely. And could I interest sir in this charming hieroglyphic obelisk  from the third kingdom at all?"
"Not today, thank you, no. The urn is all I need for now." I replied, mesmerized by the Attic shape and fair attitude of my new possession.
I suppose I must have been feeling a touch poetical that day, perhaps even slightly consumptivey or something, for  Grecian urns are by no means traditional souvenirs of one's visit to the city of Dickens and Tommy Steele. Yet I had been truck by the poetical power of the object and, as the salesman had observed, once I had burned all the lilies and marigolds and other flowery nonsense that my idiot wife had planted, the urn would make a superb centerpiece for the jardin du poèt I was planning.
As soon as I arrived at home I began demolishing the ludicrous orange grove my buffoonish other half had built the previous year, and erected a wild Arcadian diorama for my urn in the ruins. This involved piling up a bunch of stones into a reasonable semblance of a castle wall onto which the splendor could fall, as long as I remembered to order some sacks of splendor from Tennyson Splendor Supply Co.
Then I hacked into the town water supply,dismantling the pipes and diverting the flow so that it became a small, weed-infested stream suitable for virginal maidens like Ophelia to drown themselves in. After lunch I trimmed an enormous privet hedge into the shape of a huge albatross and added a few Corinthian columns to my ivy clad "Tomb of Endymion."
Two weeks later, when all the poetical garden ornaments were properly arranged, I changed into a frilly shirt, took up a scroll of parchment, some green inks and an especially feathery quill , and sat beneath the mottled shade of a weeping willow tree I had planted, awaiting inspiration.
Unfortunately it began to rain almost immediately, so I had to go inside. When it stopped I returned to my garden only to discover that it had turned into a sea of mud. Oh well, I thought, there's only one thing for it: "What passing bells for these who die as cattle ..." I started inscribing on my piece of damp parchment. After all, we poets are nothing if not adaptable to the tyranny of circumstance.

The Mosque of Comedy, the Mosque of Tragedy

Islamabad? Yes and it keeps getting worse, doesn't it.  An angry school of Muhammadheaded sharks swimming in the very choppy waters off Cape Koran. Just like in that movie Ja'aws (peace be upon him): "We've got to get a bigger burkha!"
Meanwhile, have you read Omar Imam Poe's The Mosque of the Red Death? It's a work in progress.

Christian Comedy Club Routines

Good evening ladies and gentlemen and cherubim. How's everyone doing tonight? In excelsis are we? I'm glad to hear it
I tell you, though, a funny thing happened to me on my way here tonight. I was walking down the Appian Way and I suddenly saw Jesus standing in front of me, as plain as Opus Dei. I said: "Domine quo vadis?" and he said "It's that church over there with the white facade."
So anyway. I say, I say, I say, have you heard the news about the Angel Gabriel? He's just bought a house at 668 Revelation Street, so now he's the neighbor of the beast.
And Saint John is very cross: he's just had to spend a long, dark night in Seoul.
Oh Lordy Lord a-new jokes a-coming. Yes sir.
What do you call a book about a man who cleans out the Hippo cage at the zoo? The Confessions of Saint Disgustine.
Anyway. That's all from me. Short but sweet, just like Mother Theresa. You've been a wonderful congregation. Amen. Thank you and good night!

Why Old Music Should Be Banned

Moon river, eh? Isn't it just great: "Two drifters off to see the world" - and traveling on one those gas-guzzling, cheapo airlines with the massive carbon footprint, I'll be bound ! You can call that crossing in style if you like. Frankly I call it ecologically irresponsible.
But "there's such a lot of world to see," apparently. Well, not if they carry on like this there won't be. The world will shrivel up even smaller than our huckleberry friends' tiny pea brains. And that so-called Moon River will simply evaporate into a muddy stream of smelly brown piss. Rainbow's end? Yes, and they'll find a pot of starving African kids at the end of it, with poor old Bono's head in the bottom.
Moon River, my bum. Why do these finger-clicking selfish morons never seem to listen to what Madonna and Phil Collins and all the other important modern celebrities tell them?

Smash, Crash, Wallop, Etc

A new film has just been released starring mechanical figures that can alter their form and function at whim. As you probably know, these presumably self-lubricating and rather nasty machines are called Transformers, and the movie is based upon the kind of plastic toy replica that I accidentally trod on with my bare foot when it was left lying around on the carpet some years ago. As I recall, a piece broke off the wretched thing with a sickening crunch and then a small child started to cry.  Weeping became outright howling when, clutching my unfortunate foot, I hopped out into street and threw the offending article as far into the distance as I possibly could.
During this entire drama the toy Transformer singularly failed, as I gloatingly pointed out to the distraught child at the time, to transform itself into anything that could beat me up.
Frankly I think the Transformers scenario I've just outlined is vastly more entertaining than the tedious, film-by-numbers Hollywood version.  Their movie may have more expensive special effects action sequences, but mine has real, honest-to-God sniffling runny noses and trembling accusatory forefingers. Their villains descend, predictably, from outer-space, like zillions of yawn-inducing tin-pot celluloid baddies before them, whereas mine emerge unexpectedly from the plush weft of a finely textured Oriental rug. And, ultimately, mine is just more violent.

Opening soon at a floor near you. Parental guidance is advised. Contains strong language and some sort of screwdriver type thing.

Global Boring Concert

The specious, sanctimonious Live Earth concerts have proved once more that the greatest danger facing the world today is self-important popstars. If only we could cut down on popstar emissions we might be able to preserve a relatively sane and cultured future for our children. As it is, we find ourselves smugly and arrogantly lectured to by under-talented and over-sequinned egomaniacs whose heads have apparently been replaced by airbrushed balloons of indestructible self-esteem. And besides, any Earth worth saving would surely have opened up and swallowed the lot of them.
Information about global warming is as ubiquitous as the spam email it so often resembles. Anyone who owns a computer, iPod or a television will already be reasonably familiar with the fundamentals. An orthopraxist Green event like Live Earth, then, is not really about raising "awareness," but more about raising profiles, notably that of recently re-formed dinosaur rock back Genesis, who were probably performing those same songs during the first Ice Age.
I ride a bike or walk whenever and wherever it is feasible to do so; I use natural and organic products if they are available; I recycle what can be recycled; I don't need Madonna's carbon tits telling me which light bulbs to buy.
So shut up and shove off, popstars, and take that repulsive toad Bono with you.

Return To Sender

Acedia, the backwater badlands of Arcadia. A clammy brain packed in styrofoam and cellophane is delivered to a derelict address; a vague arrangement of concrete constructed for no reason in an otherwise empty and dusty tarmac desert.  The sky is overcast, but  the air is dank and muggy, as if God, embarrassed by his creation, had hidden this world in his armpit for eternity.
Alone in its cardboard box, the brain thinks: "Boredom is rather like a having a migraine that doesn't hurt. Even a zillion naked can-can girls dancing to an Orphean lyre while reciting the racier works of Ovid could not cure it. It is quite probable that God only rested on the seventh day because he was already bored of his creation? After humping the continents into place, and then painstakingly serrating the Norwegian coast, not God's limbs but his mind grew weary, and so, to get the thankless job over and done with, he simply filled the rest of the globe in with dirty water."

Caveat Credo: These are merely the irreligious notions of a bored brain in a box thinking out loud. (And it's not even attached to electrodes.)

Next week: The medieval fortress of Ennui.

Appalled on the Fourth of July

After the last firework had been extinguished, and all the stars despangled, and as dark, deserted streets silently eclipsed the crowds that only minutes before had jostled there, encumbered by their deckchairs and picnic coolers, amid hot-dog vendors and purveyors of fried dough, I took a stroll along the Esplanade to survey the ruins, as if I were a medieval scribe recording the carnage of some ancient battle.
Broken deckchairs, overturned picnic hampers, abandoned bottles and discarded cans of all kinds, ripped-up pizza boxes, and enough tumbleweed plastic bags to hold the groceries of a million shoppers. What sort of humans leave such waste behind them? What kind of patriotism is it that turns the world into a cesspit where you may feed your face until you are full and then fling what's left onto the floor? There was nearly as much greasy garbage scattered around as there is after the Earth Day concert.
I have a solution: rather than firing rockets up into the sky, let's light them underneath people's backsides instead.  I call this my scorched anus policy.

A Brief Account of Books I Never Finished Reading

Number IX: Roger Scruton's "Modern Culture"

Rider-to-hounds and tin whistle virtuoso Roger Scruton, author of Francesca, occasionally tries his hand at composing reader friendly tomes of expository philosophy and aesthetics. If you need to know the essential facts about Emmanuel Kant, for example, then Scruton is usually an exceptionally scrutable guide. His Modern Culture, however, I never finished reading. Truth be told, I never really started.
The book begins with a quote from Philip Larkin's poem Churchgoing: 'What remains,' Larkin asks in this epigraph, 'When disbelief is gone?' Well, I already know the answer to that question, and the answer is Philip Larkin's enormous collection of pornographic books. So, should I read on?
I flicked through a few pages at random, making weary note of the ponderous, contusion-forming titans I chanced upon: Karl Marx (too boring); Richard Wagner (too morbid); D. H. Lawrence (too phallic); Oswald Spengler (not today, thank you).
Then I came across a chapter entitled "Yoofanasia," which sounded too much like the name of a Pet Shop Boys album* for my liking, and since M John Harrison's superb Viriconium was lying nearby, I threw Modern Culture down and picked that up instead. Consequently, after getting as far as page iv, I never finished the Scruton book.

*As I recall, inanely inoffensive pop music duo The Pet Shop Boys successfully sued Scruton for libel several years ago. I can't remember why. I guess I didn't finish reading that news story either.

Tuesdays With Moray

Moray is an especially inarticulate moray eel who looks rather like the victim of a botched circumcision operation. Every Tuesday I snorkel over to visit Moray in his charming coral reef, where he delights in ripping huge chunks of flesh from my arms and legs with his vicious teeth.
I have learned many valuable life lessons from Moray, but the most important is this: the best way to kill the slippery bastard is either by shooting him with a special underwater spear gun, or by repeatedly smashing his head against a submerged rock until he stops wriggling about for good.

If you have enjoyed reading this post you might also like: The Five Dead Fish You Will Smell In Heaven by Mitch Absolute-Shite

(A note on the text: Yeah, I made the terrible mistake of actually going to a bookstore again)

Quintessence of Dust

Since I spent most of yesterday doing all the things I normally put off until tomorrow, I have nothing to do today. And consequently I may even have unwittingly tackled some of the problems that normally crop up unexpectedly the day after tomorrow. But I'm not sure about that yet, obviously. But if I'm unusually relaxed on Tuesday it will be because yesterday I killed two birds with a single stone without even knowing I was doing it. Perhaps this serendipitous chain of completed chore events is somehow related to the old proverb, "a stitch in time saves nine," and if so, what are the remaining eight threads that will be rescued from the haphazardly sewn fabric rota of thankless effort that we call our "to do list"?
Speaking of which, I believe it was Emmanuel Kant, in his Critique of the State of the Living Room, who wrote that, "Man's house cannot well subsist in cleanliness and good order if he lacks thereof the assistance of a maid who arrives upon his doorstep once-a-week with her mop and bucket; for man alone cannot sweep crumbs from down the back of the sofa, nor expunge grime from behind his toilet bowl, when his valuable time be more profitably engaged in the observance of sporting activity beaming forth from his enormous televisual device, especially upon the weekends."
Food for thought.