American Fez

Tales from the Attic

The history of my family, from Domesday Book to Housing Bubble, is recorded on several crinkly sheets of ancient vellum foolscap bound with human skin, which is sadly disfigured by an inelegant tattoo proclaiming: "Archibald Loves Doris Forever."
Apparently there was once a collection of ferrotype photographs, too, but these were long ago consigned to the smelting flames of self-censorship by some anonymous and hopefully distant relative.
Luckily, we also have a tradition of oral history. Family archives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, have been passed down from generation to generation as lines of heroic verse, in similar fashion to how the events of Homer's Iliad were remembered before writing, except there are more battles and Trojan horses in our chronology.
My favorite story details the murder of old Aunt Egberta in twelve stanzas of blood-soaked rhyming couplets. According to the poet, probably my Great-Great-Great Grandfather Rufus, old Aunt Egberta mistook an ignoble savage for a noble one, and was bludgeoned to death by a tribal totem. No-one was ever prosecuted for this ghastly crime, but it is whispered in the final stanza that Cousin Elba did serve a short custodial sentence for laughing during the post-mortem.
I would reproduce these entertaining verses here, but alas they were copyrighted by my sister's brother-in-law about three years ago.

Dancing With The Stars (and Stripes)

Anncr: Dancing the Presidential Tango, here's Barack Obama and his partner Nanci Pelosikovski!!

Quick, quick, quick, slow, trip, stumble, mis-step, fall over, quick, quick, quick, slow, stumble, block, disconnect, fall over, stalemate, twist ankle, collapse.

Tom: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Ha ha ha. Some of those moves seemed to get a little confusing out there. So just what did our judges make of that?

Bruno: Barack, Barack, Barack. I wonder if you have the legs for this? They are terribly weak at the knees. And your feet? Your feet are all flappy, flappy, flappy like the feet of a little girl wearing her mother's high heels as she clomps around the room not knowing where she is going. But you have a nice smile.

Len: Frankly I was appalled. I'm sorry but I had absolutely no idea what was going on, and neither, I'm pretty sure, do you.

Carrie Ann: Barack, I wanted to like this so much, and I think you've got what it takes to be great but I just didn't see it here. I don't know what went wrong. You really need to work on your posture and everything else as well.

Tom: Well, it looks like Barack might be bottom off tonight's poll again. So unless you people at home make the call he's in great danger of being voted off the show.

People at Home: Is anybody actually watching this crap? Anybody mind if I change the channel?

Click

We'll Always Have Whitby

It seems that the Bermuda Triangle, an isoscelesian expanse of geometric geography if ever there was one, has itself recently mysteriously disappeared. It was once impossible to purchase a used, mass-market, paperback book of weird tales and strange occurrences that did not devote at least two chapters to the subject. These days such publications are stuffed with nonsense about spectral housewives who are doomed to haunt shopping malls until they can spend all the discount sale coupons they failed to redeem in life, or tedious paragraphs about talking moths attempting to deliver long-winded and incomprehensible messages to bemused, pot-smoking teenagers. Where, the discerning Yeti aficionado demands to know, are the good, old-fashioned stories about Spring Heeled Jacks frightening pregnant women, diabolical goat-men prowling the Parisian sewers, and twin-engine amphibious aircraft that suddenly vanish without trace during routine flights around Cape Bizarro? No doubt boxes of files containing information on these important topics will soon be washed ashore upon the North Yorkshire coast - but will they be discovered amongst all those severed feet scattered about all over beach?

Telegram for Mr .... Er, How Did I Manage To Lose That Thing

Subscribing to a monthly magazine is a wonderful strategy for testing the capabilities and competence of your local mail system. For instance, let's pretend that you live in Boston and have subscribed to the Fortean Times for the past nine years, and in that time seventy-five issues out of a possible one-hundred-and-eight have been successfully delivered to your doorstep. Your conclusion: a fairly incompetant mail service operates in Boston. This is probably why publishers offer such huge discounts on their products: they know that you'll actually only receive about three-quarters of the magazines you have ordered. Such are the economies of profit and loss.

On Maneuvers

A great deal of sauerkraut-scented hot air has been blustering around the blogosphere once again on the subject of gays in the military, so let me lay my own weapons of discussion upon the table. Personally, I am strongly in favor of gays in the military, primarily because I am strongly in favor of anyone in the military as long as it isn't me. In fact, some of the most successful - and most vicious - generals of history have been gay: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Richard the Lionheart, much of the Nazi high command during the Second World War, and so on. Frankly, if heterosexual soldiers are so concerned about rubbing shoulders in the ranks, I cannot understand why the Pentagon does not simply give the gays their own battalion. They could go commando, both literally and figuratively. "The Pink Watch" could be their nickname. Enemy units would be so unnerved by the prospect of getting their asses kicked by gay platoons that strategic errors would surely be made. Islamic armies, for certain, would lose the respect of their jihadist brethren if they were vanquished by Battlegroup Village People.

Phlegm Fatale

"Chase me, I'm a cold" the bonde germ purred playfully. Then it skipped around my nasel passages all night in a flowing green ballgown of snot and heavy clogs. This morning, my head feels a mothball wedged in the pocket of a decrepit pair of old tweed trousers. That'll teach me to catch a cold.