American Fez

Old MacDonald's Advice Bureau

Attention corn growers. According to the Old Farmer's Almanac, you should wait to plant your corn until "the oak leaf is as big as a squirrel's ear." Consequently, since this particular course of agricultural action obviously seems to require such an inconvenient and tiresome comparison, I would suggest that you don't bother planting corn at all, but simply obtain the quantity you need from a nearby grocery store instead because it is so relatively cheap to buy. Let some other damn fool farmer waste his valuable time measuring squirrel's ears!
For you and I, we are more concerned with moonlight and its invigorating turnips. And they take a lot of work.

All is H.G. Wells and All Manner of Things Shall be H.G. Wells

Careless, remedial little Billy. He got his sea monkeys mixed up with his ant farm and all these horrid, slithery mutant worm things with red antennae started crawling through the holes in his Chia pet and infesting the Lego people. It was like a miniature version of that scene in 'Seed of Azaroth' when the evil sperms are chasing Gloria Perkins across the twisting iron horizons of Cthlonia, the steampunk city.
In the end Debbie got down on her hands and knees and patiently scraped them all up with an old spatula before flushing the whole lot down the toilet.
I don't think that was such a good idea, I told her. Slimy, crime-against-nature type lifeforms like that always thrive in sewers. They will mate with the old rusting soda cans and grow to be thirty feet long with sharp, pointy aluminum teeth. And when the seven sacred squid teats give succor to the Creepy Crawly King then these foul abominations shall emerge from their Stygian breeding grounds to reclaim their ancient Playskool legacy.
Well, Billy's not getting a dog anytime soon, she replied, if he can't even be trusted to look after an ant farm and some sea monkeys.
And so the gates of the messy laboratory of childhood are locked and bolted once again until the pre-pubescent professor can learn to put his test tubes away and clean up after himself.

(This is my response to a quick re-read of Wells' novel 'The Island of Doctor Moreau.' I think I've covered most of major points quite adequately.)

The Bouillabaisse of Life

Since I was forced to play the part of Monsieur le Turbot in last year's Human Aquarium Showcase production of 'La recherche de Nemo,' I have recently embarked upon an extensive and punishing exercise regimen, as I don't want be cast in the same comic relief bottom-feeder role again this year.
Auditions are scheduled for early June, so it is imperative that I have an elusive "six pack" by then. Fortunately my body can already boast the outline of one of those convenient cardboard carrying cases that six-packs are packaged in, including the easy-grip handle, so I won't have much more work to do before my abs are just sheer, sleek, gleaming stand-alone cans of powerful muscle.
And once I possess the kind of lethally streamlined physique that a tiger shark can only dream of, well then I can confidently read for a leading role in 2008's play, 'The Three Swordfishkateers.'
I am hoping to land the part of king of that submerged, seaweed-covered castle thing that all the best aquariums are decorated with.

Monkey Business

On a faux Gallic whim - is there any other kind? - I swaggered into the Boston Public Library to liberate a copy of The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert from that moldering, Bastille of books where it languished amongst lesser works.
Alas, the Paperback Pimpernel was too late: Joubert's published thoughts had already acquired dog-eared pages, extraneous ballpointed marginalia and a yellowy patina of highlighter pen.
Morons, obviously, don't understand that library books should not be written in, but you would assume that any reader literate enough to read Joubert would possess better manners. Apparently not.
And besides, what is the point of making notes about somebody else's notebook in that same notebook?
Frankly, I think that these reprobates who deface library books should have their hands covered in peanut butter, and then be forced to watch as each of their fingers is devoured by a different ravenous monkey.
As Joubert himself remarks: "Lions, bulls; images of strength are everywhere, whereas images of wisdom are nowhere."

Auld Acquaintence Brought To Mind

Frankly, I'm a little bit worried about Good King Wenceslas. I haven't heard a peep out of him since Christmas. It's like he's completely fallen off the radar. He was everybody's new best friend during the Yuletide celebrations but now he's become a total recluse.
His blog hasn't been updated in a while either; and Wenceslasesque-dot-com was a daily "must read" during the winter months with its fascinating updates about how deep and crisp and even the snow round about was. The Good King had even put a Paypal button in the sidebar so that readers could donate fire wood to disadvantaged winter fuel gatherers. Alas, there have been no new posts since that long one about the Feast of Stephen in late December with the embedded You Tube video of the moon shining brightly.
I guess I must blame myself. I should never have left that drunken comment on the Feast post. You know, the one where I wrote: "Actually, Wenceslas, the snow just looks like a heap of sludgy brown shit, if you ask me."

The Five Biggest American Sit-Com Lies

If children's impressionable minds can be adversely affected by watching too much violence on television, is it also possible that they may be negatively influenced by watching too much happy-ever-after comedy? Below I have listed five deadly sit-com lies that could convince your kids to waste their lives lounging around in trendy coffee shops conducting inane conversations with equally vacuous stereotypes. So if your child seems to expect rapturous applause every time he walks into a room, you may want to address the following dangerous yet deceptively amusing untruths:

1. Anyone can afford a spacious and luxuriously furnished penthouse apartment in the city even though if they can never seem to hold down a proper job.

2. Morons are adorable

3. A short coda of laconic, horn-based jazz-blues fusion is the soundtrack of life, especially when you are looking at the exterior of your home or office.

4. Everyone has a loud and obnoxiously shrewish Jewish/Italian mother who, no matter how unsophisticated and gauche she may appear be, will later discreetly reveal herself to possess the practical wisdom of a domestic Socrates mixed with Dr Ruth.

5. There is an invisible studio audience that actually thinks such worthless dreck is funny.

The Gold, Silver and Bronze Peril

Considering recent media coverage, you might be forgiven for thinking that the evil doctor Fu Manchu was organizing the upcoming Olympic Games: "You have qualified for the two-thousand meter hurdles and it will be the most exquisite pain. Daughter, fetch the spiked running shoes. Chop, chop."
This devious Oriental has infamously polluted Peking's atmosphere as part of his fiendish plot to win the Decathalon gold medal. Meanwhile, millions of his Tibetan slaves toil ceaselessly in their mountain top prisons, making shoddy shot-put knock-offs.
China is hardly the most benign country in the world, but if we are going to point at its dirty laundry we really should check the backside of our own industrial-strength underwear first. Of course, if we really wanted to protest Chinese policy we could always stop borrowing their money and buying goods made in their factories. Somehow I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. After all, it is far more politically and economically expedient to resurrect the yellow peril and beat it over the head with a relay baton.

Forced To Endure "Entertainment"

Local rock bands are generally confined to the smelly cellars of neighborhood nightclubs during the winter months, much like medieval lepers were contained inside their quarantined colonies.
However, with the arrival of warm weather, much as a Chaucerian pilgrim might hear the dread approach of clanging hand-bells and a cry of "unclean!", so a twenty-first century stroller's spring afternoon reverie is often shattered by the deafening, electric roar of live music from a nearby park. It comes from an inescapably loud outdoor event promoting some overbearing radio station or youth action initiative by unleashing a torrent of rock and rap sludge into the atmosphere, not to mention an entire fleet of decapitating frisbees and fried dough fumes.
The event organizers couldn't afford a famous group so anyone within a five mile radius is forced to endure the Skid Marx or whomever instead: four or five local kids in skinny jeans and ironic t-shirts. The dull drone of the local band echoes around the park, bouncing off trees, disturbing a bum's slumbers and frightening the squirrels. A student trying to read under the shade of a tree is forced to give up and the street hawker selling sunglasses can't hear himself pitch his products.
It was once the first cuckoo of spring that heralded winter's end. Nowadays it is noise pollution from the first outdoor festival. Times change, literally and figuratively.

Adventure Cocktail Party

I got stuck talking to that lugubrious old grump Gulliver at the Swiss Family Robinson's barbecue last night. If you ask me, "travels" seems a rather deceptively grand and euphemistic term to describe all his shipwrecks and mishaps, but I wasn't going to say that to his face.
As usual, he denounced all the other guests as Yahoos and kept droning on and on about how horses are more intelligent than humans. It's really embarrassing and anti-social, and from the corner of my eye I could see all the available Amazons giving us an extremely wide berth. Eventually I made an excuse and went over to speak with the Last of the Mohicans.
The funny thing is, I always expect Gulliver to be either very tall or very tiny, and it's surprising to realize that he is actually just normal size when you meet him in person. Perhaps that's what makes him seem more boring than he really is. I mean, Quasimodo's hump is much smaller than you expect it to be, but then he can speak eloquently and movingly about his problems. And more importantly, he knows when to shut up.

Strip Strop

Las Vegas is obviously the future of America: from the cut-price service economy to the neon celebrity dinosaur decor. Endless miles of all-you-can-eat buffets and all-you-can-charge shopping surrounded by a bleak sprawl of identically soulless housing developments; no different, really, than those factory encircling slums back in the days of American manufacturing and production. There are a million ways to get nickel-and-dimed here. A million non-stop ways to super-size your personal debt consuming junk food and junk culture.
An Italian restaurant is decorated with classical Greek plaster-casts. The castellations of Excalibur are noticeably Ruritanian. The Sahara looks like a giant pack of Camel cigarettes. Even Bellagio, a sleek vector of "taste" on the Strip, merely reminds me of a luxury car commercial.
Meanwhile, a short drive away, is the natural wonder of Red Rock Canyon. Authentically ancient Indian glyphs can be seen carved into some of the rock faces. I imagine they probably say: "What on Earth have you done to that part of the desert?"

Sporadicism

The two cities I visit most are Rome, the eternal city, and Last Vegas, the ephemeral city: the capital of the ancient world for pleasure, and the electricity bill capital of the world for work. Two more diverse destinations could hardly be imagined.
Tomorrow, unfortunately, I am being dragged to Vegas and laboring in a dreary, soulless convention center until the conventioneers have gathered as many freebies as they can stuff into their suitcases and fled. I've written about Vegas before: here, here and here
Anyway, the upshot of all this is that posts here may be sporadic over the next few days while I recover from the flight and adjust to the plastic sidewalks.

In Defence of Doing Nothing

Models of industry and motivation often speak of their desire to embark upon annual, sun-drenched beach vacations in order to "recharge their batteries." Not me. I find beach conditions activities are so exasperating that sprawling about in sandy coves only serves to further deplete whatever energy reserves I may possess. And besides, my own personal batteries exhibit such low operating standards of durability that they require recharging at least once a week, never mind once per year. High achievers may dismiss this poor performance as an innate infestation of pure laziness, if they so please, but I prefer to regard my weekly downtime as "Philosphicus Horizontalum."
Socrates was right when he claimed that an unexamined life was not worth living, and I sometimes wish that movers and shakers who only ever examine business productivity levels would simply walk into the waves and drown themselves, rather than rejuvenating their robotically overworked limbs under the wretched Cancun sun. The world would be a much better place if all these desperate do-er personalities met a permanent deadline with death, because then the rest of us wouldn't have to bother with their inconvenient schedules and ridiculous timetables. We could spend our precious hours of life acquiring wisdom and writing ten volume critiques of our own navels instead. It might take us a while to get anything actually down on paper but, hey, what's the rush?

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse at Breakfast

War flosses his teeth with human sinew while Death burns his bone toast. Pestilence pours sour milk over a bowl of pancreatic cancer. Famine has forgotten to feed the horses again. Then all four of them watch Good Morning America on ABC, of which they are enormous fans.

The Consumer

On a tropical whim, I purchased a shimmering bottle of 'Hawaiian Wave' scented body wash, imagining that my morning shower would be transformed into a sparkling luau of leaping dolphins, fresh island fragrances, and giggling hula girls sponging me down with coconut loofahs.
Alas, upon releasing this Tiki genie from its plastic bottle, my tropical dream became a tremendous typhoon of sickly synthetic odors, as if some greedy ogre had spent the entire night belching grape soda fumes and fruity bubblegum and into my bathroom. The leaping dolphins turned into sullen, inky squids, and the hula girls withered into scratchy, cackling crones. Consequently my shower was a terrible torture to endure rather than an invigorating vacation to enjoy. 
"Who farted in the whore's boudoir," someone remarked when I arrived at work. You know, sometimes Old Spice just doesn't seem so bad.

Bathroom Sink Drama

Trimming one's toenails should be a solemn, solitary, almost surgical affair. But there are ritual and religious aspects, too: the naked supplicant holds his gleaming clippers aloft like a sacred chalice as the dying nail is sacrificed so that the new crowned keratin shalt flourish.
Recently I experienced a rather aboriginal moment while cutting my own toenails. A particularly tenacious, half-moon shaped nail suddenly sprang forward off my big toe as I sliced through it and went spinning across the bathroom at great speed. It somehow looped the loop in mid-air before slamming into the tiles, boomeranging itself back around behind me and scoring a direct hit on my posterior. Personally I found the whole episode rather disconcerting, so I decided to incinerate all the clipping on the spot just in case the Voodoo Priestess next door was getting up to her old tricks again.

Real Life Bob the Builders

Once upon a time, and I employ the phrase advisedly, Sunday was the "day of rest," and pre-noon Sunday in particular was a silent, incubatory period of soothing non-activity. But, alas, our modern Sunday has become the day of incessant power sawing and rampant hammerdom. It is the Lord's Day no longer, but the day of over zealous maniacs who rise with the sabbath dawn, wriggle themselves into crusty dungarees, and then immediately run outside to commence the construction of immense geodesic domes in their backyards. The earlier the days begins, apparently, the better,: I reckon even Louisiana State Penitentiary chain-gangs, breaking rocks at gunpoint, were forced to struggle through their hard labors at more convenient hours than these weekend handymen eagerly choose to start work at.
Sunday mornings should surely be spent trying to remember where your slippers are, rather than consulting complicated blueprints, pounding nails into creaking timber frames, and loudly declaiming your views on the consistency of concrete.
Unfortunately, I believe I'm in the minority here.

Weekend Contrarianism

In egg terms, I have absolutely no doubt that Robert Mugabe is a thoroughly rotten example. And yet, in African terms, his Zimbabwe has been a relatively stable country. For although the Zimbabwean people are surely oppressed by Mugabe's self-serving style of government, at least they haven't fallen victim to those systematized machete-wielding, genocidal bloodbaths that the Darfurian and Rwandan populations have recently experienced.
It seems to me, unfortunately, that there are parts of the world where only megalomaniac dictators can maintain public order. After all, which would you prefer: oppressive measures or mass murder and chaos?

A note on the text: I know next to nothing about Africa politics. But this seems like a pretty rational assessment of the situation if you ask me. Obviously nobody did ask me, but then this is a blog so you should expect some pretty irresponsible posts from time to time.

Lights, Camera, Cue Coffin

The bereaved of Jackson, Mississippi are extremely concerned that the urned ashes they received from an incompetent crematorium may not actually be the remains of their dear departed.
To ensure that no such unfortunate mix-ups occur in the future, next time there is a death in the family they would be well advised to ship the deceased's corpse to Southampton, England where an enterprising funeral home offers live, pay-per-view video funerals featuring suitable musical accompaniment and DVD recording of the tear-stained farewell. This way grieving relatives will be able to maintain a closer and more critical watch on the fiery proceedings.

The Gripe of Spring

Rather than the "green, green grass of home," for most of this past winter my garden has resembled the far less celebrated brown, brown badlands of home.
But now the busy season of Spring is suddenly here again, and so backyard chores are sprouting up everywhere once more. This means the laborious, laborious lawnmower of home must be oiled and prepared for battle, not to mention the wearisome, wearisome weed-whacker of home, which requires an enormous amount of effort, too. And then there is the horrible, horrible hedge-trimmer of home as well. All of these tiresome, tiresome tools of home must be dragged up from the black, black basement of home to ruin my wistful, wistful weekends at home.
Worse still are the finicky, finicky flowerbeds of home. They are covered with the crappy, crappy compost of home, which is full of the wriggly, wriggly worms of home and the slimy, slimy slugs of home, and ... oh I could go on.

Bubblegum Mythology

Pantheon for Good Girls

Princess Bubblegum: Princess of the Gods who created the world by untying the frilly pink bow on a pretty box she got for her birthday. Inside was a shiny new Earth that she could play with. Most images of Princess Bubblegum depict her as a lovely ballerina with a very sparkly tiara.

Tiffany: Goddess of sugar and spice and all things nice. Usually shown helping mom bake cakes in the kitchen. The ancient texts are rather vague about the place of "mom" in the pantheon, but most scholars believe mom to represent a primordial force or totem that wears an apron.

Ken: God of not being mean. Always depicted without a penis, sometimes with chocolate smeared on his face.

Little Debbie: Patron saint of sad and happy clowns and kids with freckles. She is often depicted riding a pony or on roller-skates. Bubblegum priests regularly twist colored balloons into amusing shapes to honor Little Debbie.

Anus: Oh no! It's the Dark Lord come to spoil the fun.

More Mysteriously Boring Britain

The Sludgebury Dunce is a conical stone structure dating from the late neolithic period, conveniently located a mere ninety minutes brisk walk from Sludgebury train station.
According to local legend, if a chaste maiden straddles the Dunce on Midsummer Eve she will dream of someone who is extremely stupid. Some antiquarians, however, claim that it is actually the other way round, and if an extremely stupid person straddles the Dunce then he will dream of a chaste maiden. Alas, since there obviously aren't any chaste maidens in Sludgebury anymore most scholars wisely ignore this ancient custom and the tediously carved stone that inspired it.

See also:

The Monglesham Oblong

St Verukka's Welly

East Chilblain Shithouse