American Fez

The Auld Nick Sentinel

As a self-proclaimed Witch-Craze Denier, someone who believes that the witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries weren't as bad as modern feminists have made them out to be, controversial historian David Disgustine is refused entry to Salem and many parts of northern Europe. "I'm not saying that no witches were burned," he says. "Just that they weren't burned all that badly. Perhaps a slight crisping around the edges and a bit of an irritating ruddiness in the face."
Miss Elsie Nobrah of the The Old Crone Memory Project disagrees. "Millions of lonely old women were condemned in kangaroo courts and then executed by crazy old men," she argues. "You'd have to be a crazy old man yourself to believe that these crazy events never took place."
"Whatever," replies Disgustine. "The United Nations established a permanent home for witches in Cambridge, Massachusetts after the Revolutionary War. What more do these wretched women want?"

From the Xanadu Daily Free Press

Despite much local opposition, plans are going ahead for the construction of a new Pleasure Dome near the sacred Alph river.
The site developer, Kubla Khan Inc, have promised area residents that the Pleasure Dome will provide much needed gardens bright with sinuous rills, where blossom many an incense-bearing tree. But opponents claim that the dome takes up twice five miles of fertile ground, and will create deep, romantic chasm in a once beloved parklands, become a savage place where wild-eyed women will wail for their demon lovers at all hours of the night.
"It's always the same," said one. "Someone builds a Pleasure Dome and next thing you know there's a string of honey-dew fast food restaurants and boozy milk-of-paradise bars blighting the neighborhood and the streets are full of loud ancestral voices prophesying war."

At Chez Zombie's

"Hello. My name's Nadine and I'll be your server tonight. Have either of you been to a Pete's BBQ Shack before?"
"Yes, I have. In the olden times, before the flood."
"Great. Well we have a few new items on the menu I need to tell you about."
"So you don't have the pteradactyl wings in hot sauce anymore?"
"Er ..."

Summer On Mars

Like many moody, pale children, my favorite beach days were spent stumbling around rock pools, stubbing my sunburned toes on pink limpet shells and shaking clinging seaweed from my legs while trying to balance a plastic bucket on a bed of blue-black mussel clusters. I would drag these salty, shallow puddles with a nylon net attached to a bamboo pole, seeking tiny crabs, little fishes and other unidentifiable aquatic lifeforms had been deposited there by a receding tide.
Consequently, recent news that Mars might boast "briny pools" beneath its dusty surface made me think that exile to that red planet may not be so bad, should our own atmosphere fail to maintain conditions necessary for minimum human subsistence. Indeed, what ice-cream dribbling child would not enjoy hunting those little green Martian crabs scuttling around sideways amongst the purple rocks and orange seaweed?

The Vitamin Alphabet

Like furious chord progressions in some insanely disjointed heavy-metal anthem, the many varieties of vitamin supplement bottles blur into a single, byzantine letter as my eyes survey them on the pharmacy shelf: A-B-C-D-E to Zinc via Fish Oil and Flax Seed.
Frankly, I think my system needs more Vitamin A, for that is how I've self-diagnosed myself on the internet. We seem best suited to each other. It is the first in line, the alpha dog of the health aisle, and so am I. 
Of course, I could attempt to acquire my Vitamin A from real food rather than once-per-day tablets taken with water, but then a diet of liver and carrots doesn't seem all that appealing. There is always the option of drinking a farmer's wife's weight in milk, obviously, although I really don't want to be walking around smelling like an overactive cow udder.
But, alas, for some reason, the supplement manufacturers don't make a stand-alone vial of Vitamin A, so I suppose I'll have to make do with the multi-format motherlode

Tomb It May Concern

A single engine plane nosedives into a Montana cemetery and a single brain-cell suicide bomber detonates his or her deadly ego at an Iraqi funeral. These twin graveyard calamities recalled to mind Thomas Hardy's great poem, Channel Firing, in which God is forced to inform his awakening dead that the noises disturbing their eternal sleep are not the trumpets of Judgment Day, as they had assumed, but merely cannon fire from warships out at sea. They can lay rest assured, he tells these trembling and confused corpses, that the Hour of Final Reckoning will be a much more pleasant experience altogether than what they have just heard.

Asleep in Woolf's Clothing

A dilettante needs a chateau of his own if he is to write blog posts, preferably in the Loire Valley. And he will require a cellar stocked with many vintage wines too. Plus an excellent cook, valet and French maid. And a secretary to whom he can dictate his reams and reams of self-interested purple prose.

Breakfast and its Discontents

This morning at work, when I bemoaned the absence of poppy-seed bagels in our staff breakfast basket, I was told "tough titty." An ugly and somewhat scheudenfraude-ish expression, "tough titty" never fails to conjure, in my mind at least, a mental image of Salvador Dali's memorable painting Premonition of Civil War.

Indeed, one wonders how many heads would have rolled if Franco or La Pasionaria had been denied their usual early morning repast during the Spanish conflict. Only the brave Buenaventura Durruti would have said "Here, my friend. Take half of my breakfast sandwich. It is only a stale blueberry muffin but I want you to have it." And that, of course, is the toughest tit of all.

Leprechaun Brain

That most dubious of very public holidays, Saint Patrick's Day: a festival of binge drinking and verdant cheesiness featuring celebrants who conclude their stout-sodden evenings looking rather green in addition to wearing it. Top o' the regurgitation to you.
The dour, proto-puritan Saint Patrick, of course, is famous for hounding pagans out of Ireland with his dreadful Christian proselytizing, and then later demonizing these peaceful folk as "snakes." He is the death-cult propagandist who laid waste to a formerly bountiful land with his dreadful desert religion, so how amusing it is that his feast day has become such a drunken, rollicking perversion of his miserable beliefs, lately typified by that weasel-faced Pope Benedict demanding that Africans be denied the use of rubber contraceptives.
Mine's a shamrock martini, by the way, if you're buying.

Obesity: Appeasement and Denial

A transcript of a speech broadcast to the House of Pancakes by Neville Tenderloin, former Prime Eater of Great Britain and Defender of "Big" Ben.

I am speaking to you from the cafeteria at number 10, Downing Street.
This morning the Fast Food Ambassador handed me a large cheeseburger with bacon and extra cheese and double fries, stating that if I ate it all by 11.00 a.m. and also sucked down the Super Size Fizzo Cola he gave me, a state of fulfillment would exist in my stomach. I have to tell you now that such an undertaking has indeed taken place, and I also ordered a chocolate cream pie for dessert. Consequently a state of gross and bloated satisfaction exists between me and my tummy-tum-tum.
Nevertheless, the claim has been made by certain skinny-minnies on the opposition benches that obesity is a massive problem of global proportions because many people in the free world are actually beginning to look like big fat orbs with little tiny arms and legs sticking out of them and equally round, double-chinned heads on top. But I fart in the face of these dietmongers and scrawny, no-assed, granola-faced whingers.
Indeed, I have in my hand a piece of paper from Chez Hitler. On it is written the menu for the superb range of smorgasboard treats available from this convenient eatery. And remember, receive a free giant soda with every bucket of fried chicken wings you order.
It is truly a "Feast in our Time". Enjoy!

More Shirt Stories

I spent perhaps twenty minutes observing a corpulent fellow straining the seams of his satiny white shirt. It was wrinkle-free but he was not. And I suppose it was drip-dry, too, but he was sweating more than a boil-in-the-bag meal. It reminded me of a pale dust sheet slung over an overstuffed armchair in an empty room, billowing and bunching every time the man moved, as if animated by some unsteady specter that hadn't learned how to haunt properly. Randomly, I thought of Satie's Gnossiennes played on a tuba.

100% Cotton and its Discontents

My clothes were once bespoke. They said: "It's not our fault we are a funny shape but at least we fit right." Now, alas, in this current economic crisis, when my old cufflinks are worth more than my retirement account, I am forced to shop at high street retailers for pre-packaged shirts with so many pins in them that they could be mistaken for voodoo doll attire.
All the usual suspects are represented in these racks: Klein, Claiborne, Karan, and the clownish Ted Baker and BCBG whose stripy, multi-colored creations look like the wallpaper in Oscar Wilde's downstairs lavatory. And what in the name of Savile Row does the designation modern fit mean? I suppose a literal translation would be something along the lines of "not for fat guys."
Fortunately I am a fellow of slender build, for whom banally fashionable tailoring, however vaguely constructed it may be, is no too-tight obstacle, and so, somehow, I leave the store clutching a button-up thing in a color described as "rhubarb," wondering what the Hell I'll wear it with.

Said I ...

After much careful consideration of anachronistic modes of dialogue, not to mention unregulated circumlocution, always an Achilles' heel of mine, my inner-rhetorician and I have decided to become a sparkling 'said I' sort of witty raconteur, rather than the more modern and infinitely more tedious, plain-old 'I said' type of droning recollector of dreary conversations.
As in: "You have the armpits of a nineteenth-century Irish navvy," said I to the sweaty, polyester-shirted tax consultant who had the bald effrontery to deny my standard deduction for the cost of one pair of purple pantaloons (velvet) and razor-sharp rapier (cold steel) for professional purposes. "You, sir, are an absolute bounder of the blackest kind," said I in continuation. "And from this moment on I shall entrust preparation of my IRS returns to Messrs Turbo Tax & Co."

Stimulus Via Hot Airship

Credit-crunch relief, delivered by our dollar dirigible for those financially-strapped citizens who desperately need to buy new HD televisions. It both a blimp for bankrupts and a zillionaire's zeppelin, containing enough air-money to inflate all of Erewhon's white elephants and fly them to their famous graveyard. Hurrah, here it comes.

Like a total eclipse of Capitol Hill, this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see this astonishing phenomenon, except for when it happened last year as well.

Igbert's Depression

Spare a thought for poor Igbert Twaddle if perchance you spy that slack-jawed wretch kneeling on the pavement begging for some thoughts. Igbert's head is a ghost head. There is nothing between his neglected ears except a dry desert of dullardisms and the occasional conventional wisdom cactus. In fact, you can hear Igbert's derelict cranium creaking on its rusty skull hinge and see his neurons crumbling into dust. Somewhere a weatherbeaten, tattered synapse is flapping in the breeze. Buddy, can you spare a thought for poor Igbert Twaddle?