American Fez

Franz Kafka on Facebook

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he discovered that his Facebook account had been hacked by some unknown virus and his profile picture was now a close-up photograph of a dung beetle. His privacy settings had been changed, repeated requests to join Farmville and Mafia Wars had been sent to all his contacts, and You Tube videos of advertisements for vitamin supplements and hair regrowth hormones had been posted on their Walls. Consequently everyone had de-friended him and Gregor's personal messages were now being reported as spam.
Gregor rang a call center in some undisclosed location, speaking briefly to an unemotional voice representing his ISP. "This is not our fault," the voice said. "You need to quit your browser, reboot your computer, re-install the software delete the preferences, change your password and allocate more memory to the program."
"To Hell with it," Gregor muttered to himself. "I think I'll just cancel my Facebook account and join another social network instead." And sure enough, it wasn't long before Gregor became Foursquare mayor of the shadowy area outside the walls of the Castle.com

Old Mother Hubbard: the Case Against

The sheer senility of Old Mother Hubbard absolutely beggars belief. How could anyone except the most severely retarded cretin forget that her dog supply cupboard was completely devoid of bones? This is surely a case of crass, criminal neglect by a mentally-defective hag rather than the forgivable absent-mindedness of a distressed gentlewoman, and yet we teach our children to sing nursery rhymes about such lack of respect for animal welfare. No wonder there are reports of local boys, the so-called Hubbard Gang, bullying Pigling Bland, stealing the Three Little Kitten's mittens, and urinating all over Baa Baa Black Sheep's bags of wool. This is the rocky road that leads to the murder of Cock Robin. Mark my words, very soon the world will not be safe for this little piggy to go to market without having his picnic basket vandalized by marauding mobs of mindless Jacks and Jills. Where is that damn Pied Piper when you need him?

Remote Control

So-called "entertainment" is seldom actually entertaining these days, and only the victim of an evaporated intellect could possibly be entertained by television, the ne plus ultra of anaesthesiological technology. Television is merely a method of sleeping without going to sleep, of switching on to switch off. Indeed, a skilled surgeon could probably perform complex amputations while his patients gaped at Mad Men or The Simpsons - "pass the chips and dip, please Nurse" - although such operations would undoubtedly involve excruciating pain during commercial breaks.
And so it disturbs me that some of these network television signals still travel through the ether, meaning that invisible and invasive squadrons of soap opera and game show particles are constantly locked in an aerial dogfight with my brain, even while I am trying to read or write. I am sure this relentless bombardment of moronic transmissions is why I mysteriously seem to know so much trivia about TV programs I have never seen, and why I used to think that Perry Mason was a character in Kafka's The Trial.

Lunch Break

It really is amazing how much the Stomach God controls our daily lives. We even reserve certain hours of the day for appeasing the Stomach God's tyrannical demands. Millions of people spend their entire working day harvesting and preparing special offerings for the Stomach God. Stroll along any rural or urban street you will find various temples erected to the Stomach God, some with golden arches, others with decorative canopies of more elaborate design. Even the shelves of every bookstore creak under the weight of devotional literature about the Stomach God's elaborate rituals and romances. There are even persons who worship the Stomach God so much that they permit the Stomach God to expand and overtake their entire bodies. Every day is a feast day in the religion of the Stomach God.

Nomen-Haute-Clature

Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer for whom a variety of mobile, two-wheeled cappuccino-maker was named, also circumnavigated the land mass we now call the United States. His eldest son, Chicago Vespucci, gave his name to a type of deep-dish pizza that became popular with the Algonquin Indians. "Thin crust pizza doth remind the savages too much of the dried, bloody scalps of their enemies," Chicago confided to his diary. Indeed, many scholars believe that the term Algonquin actually means 'The people of the pie.'

Dollars and Sense

Self-interested celebrities like Barack Obama and Sarah Palin are obviously not interested in boosting the national economy, otherwise they would surely have posed in the nude for a saucy calendar like everybody else does when they desperately need to raise lots of money for their favorite charity. I myself have appeared in over fifty thousand such nude calendars, and I'm only collecting funds to mend the roof at St Cuthbert's In The Raw, my local church, never mind restore the entire country's financial structure on a healthy footing.
Unfortunately, the enormous cost of producing my nude calendars far exceeds the revenue I receive from selling them, and the St Cuthbert's Roof Fund is now significantly in debt to the printing company. Truth be told, I haven't sold any nude calendars at all, and I'm now seriously considering forgetting all about my slated roof designs and just stuffing the rafters with all the leftover nude calendars, thereby creating a sort of nude, ecclesiastical collage visible from the air. The other option is an application of roof-shaped papier-mache gunk, which is apparently the preferred solution of the - excessively prudish, if you ask me - St Cuthbert's Council of Elders.
But we wouldn't be experiencing these problems if I were famous. In fact, we could probably commission a roof by Frank Gehry if only I possessed the same kind of star power that Barack and Sarah can claim. So you've got to wonder what's stopping them from stripping off, getting photographed, selling calendars, and wiping out America's debt.

Seven Sentences In Search of a Paragraph

The nose is the anti-anus, and the anus is often the ante-nose.

One man's tribal totem is another man's unwanted souvenir from his brother's Indonesian vacation.

A disturbed elbow ladles out more soup.

The Devil tries to find work for idle hands to do, but unfortunately so much of it is automated these days.

For prisoners on hunger-strike, Thanksgiving is the most frustrating time of the year.

Olaf Garlic Press, the first openly gay Viking.

I tried to borrow Franz Kafka's The Castle from my local library, but the librarian at the desk wouldn't give it to me.

The Business of America Is Bizniz

I apologize to those readers who have not received their Stephenesque luxury coffee mugs yet, but the unique, overland via camel, eight-week delivery timetable is how I manage to keep prices low. 
I realize this news will provide little comfort to those who claim my prices are too high, but would you prefer that I employ hunchbacked children in filthy, disease-ridden Indonesian sweatshops? 
As for those among you who criticize me for taking advantage of low wage leper labor in wretched African ceramic mills, all I can say is: do you really want to drink your coffee out of a mug with "Made in China" stamped on the base? 
Well, it just so happens that using cheap, Chinese pottery production lines is how I can afford to pass these great savings on to you, my valued customers.

Merlin and the Soft-Serve Ice Cream

I'm recumbent in a deckchair at the beach, consulting John Cowper Powys' The Complex Vision through tinted sunglasses, my feet digging themselves further into the sand the more I sink into the book. If only I could train an amiable seagull to perch on my shoulder and turn the pages with its beak for me; perhaps even teach a compliant crab to scuttle back and forth across each line with a magnifying glass, although that might set fire to the paper if the sun shone too strongly. But for the most part, I sometimes wish I had developed a tolerance for light fiction like everybody else. 

(Note: I do actually enjoy some light fiction, but mostly in the winter.)