American Fez

The Mysterious Case of the Reddening Herbert

Although I am a sober fellow, one who normally shrinks from all manifestations of sensationalism, hyperbole and morbid observations of the ghoulish and bizarre, I must confess that the extraordinary series of events that later came to be known as the Mysterious Case of the Reddening Herbert, and their consequent effects upon the sanity of Mr Edward Herbert, the celebrated balloonist and weasel breeder, have forced me to retire to this exclusive clinic in the wooded environs of East Wobbleton with only a battered copy of Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler and a restorative vial of magnesium tonic to soothe my troubled mind.
It had long been my custom, when holidaying at the Dwarf Inn at Handlebar Landing, and relaxing with a glowing pipe and medicinal tincture of port or brandy after devouring one of Madam O'Dwarf's deliciously famous eel-pie suppers, to entertain those agreeable companions seated nearby with the finer points of my days wat'ry adventures amongst the pike, tench, bream and whatever other be-finned denizen of stream or lake had mischanced upon my baited and submerged hook. During the late August of 1907, a particularly warm example of that sun-drenched month, such a companion and interlocutor was the aforementioned Mr Edward Herbert. As he perused his newspaper, I disclosed to him, by way of an amusing digression to the main tale of my heated battle with an especially stubborn chub, how a tiny particle of piscine scale and its attendant slime had besmirched my tweed coat, causing me no small amount of consternation as I was knee-deep in swirling eddies, far from the riverbank, and thus deprived of my box of monogrammed hanker-chiefs that I keep stowed in my wicker creel for just such occasions - I am fastidious regarding standards of personal hygiene and presentable appearance even when engaged in the field with rod and reel - when Mr Herbert suddenly became noticeably agitated and his face began to exhibit what can only be described as a ruddy hue: "Oh just get on with your ridiculous story you superannuated, boring little tit and leave us all in peace!" he suddenly exploded, spluttering minute fragments of horseradish and garden pea into the air.
Naturally, I fled from the room in abject terror, dislodging an antique elk's head trophy from its position on the wall as I sprang out of my armchair. Mayhap some brutish sprite or ill-mannered genie had taken possession of Mr Edwards' mind, forcing him to behave in such a brusque and uncivilized way? Alas I don't suppose we shall ever know what strange cataclysm of the brain caused Mr Edwards' impromptu rage, but readers will be glad to know the man himself appears to have recovered his senses. Just this very morning, for example, he bade me a crisp "good-day, sir" as I set out once more to pit my wits, like a wise old kingfisher or wily heron, against those silvery foes that lurk in the swirling currents 'neath the rustling branches of the willow tree, and so this alarming and unusual transformations at Dwarf Inn on that terrible summer night must remain forever the "Mysterious Case of the Reddening Herbert."

My Portfolio

"The re-extrapolation of sub-dividend percentages, when referenced as negative double-integers in terms of fully transparent and transferable liquidity, if cross-bartered, a priori, as estimated off-shore assets and ad-hoc scalable guarantees, should underwrite all extant promissory notes, modified transactions (yen only) and pending anti-dividends subject to hitherto undisclosed payments-in-kind as commissioned by active fund managers before lunch. All such pending balances and auto-reversible amounts can be viewed as the gray area in slice 2(b) of the pie chart on page forty-seven on your account statement."

Futility Investments was an equal-opportunities employer ...but we've had to let everybody go because of the sub-prime screw-up and the credit crunch and everything.

Ash Wednesday

Remember, O man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return, unless thy body and soul art stuffed with sanctity, in which case you'll just turn a weird, waxy gray color, and then be transported to some godforsaken, rural Sicilian church and thy grimly incorruptible mortal remains shalt be crammed into a presentation glass coffin past which zillions of senile, doddery nuns will file before buying a souvenir strand of thy beatific hair that hath supposedly been cut from thy holy head but in fact hath actually been snipped from the mangy coat of the nearest rabid dog by the local gold-toothed Bishop. I don't know about thee, but I'm definitely giving up religion for Lent. Amen

Remember, O man, that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return

Some Day My Train Will Come

There was a busker at Park Street subway station this morning, enjoying the perfect acoustic possibilities provided by a distinct lack of locomotive activity. The tunnels were empty of trains but full of echoing music. As I stood gloomily on the platform, staring into the blackness beyond, I felt like asking the busker if he knew the tune to the popular sing-a-long Why Are We Waiting? Why-y-y Are We Waiting? But there were too many amplifier stacks and audio mixing consoles in the way, so I didn't. 
It seems that Boston's buskers haul more equipment around than Pink Floyd's entire road crew. Where once there was simply one man and his guitar, there is now a whole multimedia experience. Even the crumpled, old accordion player in the park has a light show and smoke machine. But perhaps that's just raw human aura emanating from his underclothes? Either way, his music is both evocative and compelling, and how I wish he would descend to Park Street's subterranean depths with his instrument, and there serenade we unhappy commuters with his creaky reels of pseudo-Parisian sounds. Instead we get these plaintive, yodeling strummers and their over-earnest versions of downbeat folksy classics. They are better than nothing, I suppose. Certainly better than the station's white-noise producing PA announcements. But still, I'd prefer the accordion any day of the week.

Page 2, Section 5, Line 3c

Imagine, for a moment, that your brain is a cheap, plastic kite attached to a kinked piece of grimy string tangled up in your skull. And it is a very blustery, overcast day with changeable winds. And you are not very good at flying kites, and so yours gets caught in the high branches of a diseased Dutch elm tree. And despite throwing heavy sticks at it, you can't dislodge your brain from its arboreal prison, and so it is claimed by a demented squirrel called Alphonso who nibbles away at the battered gray cells as if they were the last acorn nuts on the face of the Earth. This is me staring uncomprehendingly at a rogues gallery of tax forms.

Gazetteer of Places in Old Boston Towne

Number 4(a) - Mother Goose's Grave

Mother Goose: for some, a beloved author of timeless children's tales; but for others, a senile old bat who should have been locked up in a home for the terminally unhinged. Either way, her remains are reportedly interred in the Granary Burying Ground on Tremont Street. Her final resting-place is among those gray tombstones that look like they've shrunk; the ones with goofy, buck-toothed skulls carved onto the surface that have wings sprouting out of their ears. I guess such ridiculous decoration was de-rigueur back then. Frankly, the mind boggles.
A low-brow, bowdlerized version of the Brothers Grimm, this doddering Goose woman apparently believed that nursery rhymes should be twee little jingles that even a dull three-year-old could understand, remember and recite, rather than dark litanies of pseudo-sexual, proto-Nazi double-meanings and Nordic folklore. But I suppose that's dreary old Puritan New England for you.
Personally, I was reading Shakespeare, Dante and Balzac at birth, so I never bothered with kid's stuff like that.

Hamlet on Facebook

Fifteen Random Things About Me:

1. I believe in ghosts and have actually seen and spoken with one!

2. I ignored my uncle Claudius' friend request.

3. I often ask myself whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.

4. I used to know a guy called Yorick.

5. I once appeared in Ophelia's room with my doublet all unbraced, no hat upon my head, my stockings fouled, ungartered and down-gyvèd to my ankle.

6. I don't like it when pompous theatrical types refer to me as "The Dane."

7. I think funeral baked meats do coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.

8. I have knowingly sent two of my old schoolfellows to their deaths by employing the old "switcheroo" technique.

9.  I like to alter classical plays by inserting my own speeches into them in order to make other people feel guilty.

10. Sultry and hot weather is bad for my complexion

11. I sometimes enjoy concealing myself behind an arras and eavesdropping on other people's conversations, and then jumping out and killing whoever is talking.

12. I know not "seems."

13. I once mistook Polonius the Chamberlain for a fishmonger - on purpose!

14. There is method in my madness.

15. Or is there?

In this note: Fortinbras, Laertes

Spinstapundit

Why oh why is the government bailing out the Islamosexual marriages with Bernie Madoff's jewelry? I haven't seen any of Barack Obama's movies but if we are going to send free credit crunch 'n' munch to the victims of the Oscars then I say the money should come from A-Rod's retirement fund. Surely that's what it is there for? Do the Islamosexulists really think  that the treasury department can just grow tainted peanuts whenever it wants? How do they think we will be able to continue to pay for our half-time Super-Bowls in Iraq and Afghanistan if the auto industry's advertising budget must be spent on re-animating Bruce Springsteen every year? The mind boggles. Personally I blame Shepard Fairey and the other Jason Wu-wearing Wall Street graffiti traders. If they hadn't tagged all those foreclosed houses with a first coat of sub-primer we wouldn't be in this mess now.

Batman In England

Robin: "Goodness gracious me, Batman! We're in Stratford-Upon-Avon!"
Recently I've been thinking that Batman could improve his caped-crusading performance by studying crime-fighting techniques in other countries. After all, to paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, what should they know of Gotham city who only Gotham city know?
Perhaps, then, Batman could relocate the Batcave to an elfin grotto beneath Anne Hathaway's cottage? Or possibly just rent the Millennium Dome for a few months. He already has a butler, of course.
English super-villains have names like The Humourist, The Punster, The Badger, Cat Duchess, and The CCTV-Avoider. But Batman himself would have to be very careful while he is resident there, since he could very easily incur a criminal record of his own, simply by consistently driving his Batmobile on the wrong side of the road at velocities well over the speed limit. Or for operating a utility belt without the proper license.
The notorious English weather would be another drawback, too, particularly those dense fogs and mists, making the police's Bat-signal difficult to see at the best of times, no matter how brightly it was beamed into the sky. And I can't really see Bruce Wayne getting on very well with Boris Johnson either.
So I guess I don't know. Perhaps Spain might be a better option?

The Shape of Things To Comb

The author and political visionary H. G Wells was a true polymath and Renaissance man. When not writing his ingenious novels of science-fiction and social satire, Wells devoted much of his genius to the study of hairstyling and other salon arts.
Known as the Barbershop Notebooks, his private papers contain many elaborate and revolutionary designs for hairstyles such as "The War of the Curls," "The Toupée Machine," "The Country of the Blonde" and "The Invisible Perm." But most exciting of all was an experimental anti-baldness regimen called "The History of Mr Follicle." According to his notes, Wells' ground-breaking cure involved setting fire to the scalp and then waiting to see how fate intervened.
Although no modern dressers-of-hair acknowledge his influence, in many respects Wells can be described as a sort of Victorian Vidal Sassoon with Edwardian highlights complimenting a futuristic fringe. There was no room for conventional, Tory establishment side-partings in Wells' dystopian beauty school, yet the dull, unimaginative, so-called "crew cut" of Fabian coiffure was also anathema to him. He admired Kipling's bearing, but abhorred his mustache.
Ultimately, of course, H. G. Wells will be remembered as the subject of this blog post, but, if you do have an appointment at your local hair salon in the next few weeks, and are feeling the need for a new and trend-setting look, then you could do much worse than reacquaint yourself with the works of this sublime fantasist.

Romans on Twitter

julius caesar: I'm crossing the rubicon right now january 49BC

pompey: OMG! nearly two thousand years ago from web in reply to caesar

cicero: OMG! nearly two thousand years ago from web in reply to caesar

marc anthony: SPQR! :-) nearly two thousand years ago in reply to cicero

octavian: yo dude! look me up when you get into town nearly two thousand years ago in reply to caesar

julius caesar: veni vidi twitteri january 49BC

suetonius: surely you mean "iacta alea est" - no? about ninteen hundred years ago in reply to caesar

See also:

monsters on twitter

Methuselah on Facebook

Despite being an incredibly old man whose teenage years passed before the Flood, Methuselah has decided to sign-up for a Facebook account.
He's thinking of using a goofy headshot on his profile page so that he won't seem so old: probably a picture of himself wearing an Hawaiian shirt and crazy sunglasses that slide down his nose, revealing a comically raised eyebrow beneath an "aw shucks" frown. Perhaps he'll even make the photo black-and-white, to signify his unconventionality.
Alternatively, he might employ an avatar; a cartoon version of his own recognizable features rendered as if he were a character from The Simpsons or South Park. Such semiotic tomfoolery is sure to boost Methuselah's online popularity; after all, everybody who is anybody loves those shows and responds favorably to that variety of visual stimulant.
And besides, let's face it, Methuselah is going to need all the help he can get to find Facebook friends: all his real friends have been dead for centuries.

See also:

The Invisible Man Goes Social Networking

King Kong's Facebook Page

The Phantom of the Opera's Facebook Page

Thanksgiving On Facebook

Zyklonic Irritation

Andrea Murky, the new German Chancellor, is calling on old German Pope Benedictator to firmly denounce Catholic aficionados of Holocaust denial. Personally, I find it completely absurd that these robed idiots unquestionably accept ancient texts scrawled in dead languages concerning the existence of a "God" who lives in the sky, but reject all modern verbal testimony and physical evidence that Nazis who lived on Earth in living memory gassed Jews and other "undesirables" to death. Apparently, they believe passionately in Stille Nacht Heilige Nacht but not Kristallnacht.
Oh well. I suppose it's just another example of the discreditable credulity of those who lack credibility; alas, all too common in this day and age.