American Fez

That's Entertainment

I watched the Oscars last night, mostly because the film Inception is heavily based on my unsuccessful career in telepathic bowel evacuation techniques, but also because I am distantly related to King George VI via a scion of the Vortigern branch of ancient Romano-British nobility. Unfortunately, It is unknown whether this common ancestor of ours suffered from a stammer, since his tongue was ripped out at birth by a rival Saxon claimant to fertile lands due west of the Incestium stronghold (current day Stagnantpool).

And if I may boast of yet another connection with Hollywood's most glamorous night of the year, I also once visited Oscar-night presenter Anne Hathaway's lovely cottage in Stratford Upon Avon. Alas, the popular actress was not at home at the time, and for some reason I had to pay to get in, but I was pleased to see that Anne was very fond of antique furniture, even if most of it was pushed against the walls and roped off. She might want to do something about that dreadful musty odor as well, if you ask me.

Finally, I have been a member of the Academy for over twenty-five years: my short film Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was nominated for "Best Adapted Screenplay from a Preposterous Book to Adapt a Screenplay From." We also earned a "Best Supporting Actress in a Dubious Role" nomination that year for Gloria Perkins' performance as Diocletian's Slave Girl.

So, as you can plainly see, the Oscar telecast holds a great deal of interest for me both personally and professionally. Consequently, I always make time to watch the awards ceremony, unless of course there happens to be a house burning down across the street that I can stand and stare at, or a terrible motoring accident in the immediate vicinity that I can hover around.

The Siege of Tripoli

I had lunch with Colonel Gaddafi in the spring of 1972. I introduced myself as Dracula and he shook me warmly by the hand. The colonel was dressed in a sparkly brocade khaftan with purple epaulets, shitkicker sandals and a splendid Cor Blimey hat; the entire outfit a gift from Carnaby Street's popular PLO boutique, as he was not on speaking terms with the great Milanese fashion houses at that time. He smelled of burning petroleum, which he told me was a Pan-Arabic scent which he had recently bottled and was now available for export. Our conversation touched on many subjects: Julius Caesar's response to premature balding; whether the Atiq Mosque in Jalu looked more like a series of anthills or molehills; Olga Korbut's chances of winning Olympic gold; and later, as the hot Libyan day cooled into night, Gaddafi began to share his views on more personal topics, such as the physical endowments of Ukrainian nurses, and his abiding interest in traditional desert circus acts like the snake charmer, the rope trick, and especially the human cannonball.

Colonel Mynamar Gaddafi Duck

An old American Fez proverb: "Never trust any global statesman whose name can be transliterated into several different variations." Obviously, the last nine words in my little dictum are completely superfluous, but I am implying a certain hemispherical bias, illusory though its origin may be. Let us briefly ponder, for example, the career of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi; or Colonel Ghaddafi if you prefer; or perhaps you know him best as Colonel Kaddafi; or Colonel Qadafi, even. Whatever, in the interests of simplicity I shall just use the Gaddafi spelling from now on, otherwise we'll be here longer than his dismal reign has lasted.

Like most Arab countries, Libya did not exist before the invention of the pith helmet and the desert boot. It was more or less the result of squodging together the Emirates of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania - easier to transliterate than to spell - with the former Ottoman colony of Fezzan, and then enthroning a genial despot who didn't like Italians: his name was King Idris; and he ruled relatively feebly until 1969, when he had to go to hospital and his army told him not to bother coming back. Enter Colonel Gaddafi.

Gaddafi has been in power for a long period of time, but fortunately his rule can be defined very simply: he caused untold misery for his people and the people of countries. There is really nothing else you need to know about him except that he is obviously one of those deranged megalomaniacs, like Hitler, who apparently believe that politics is a form theater. There can be no other explanation for his frequent and alarming outlandish costume changes, or his Ziegfeldian cavalcade of all female bodyguards. Alas, Gaddafi would be truly entertaining if real people had not died on and off stage during his lengthy pantomime. That the US government has felt obliged to join this clown in an awkward performance of Who's On First reveals our foreign policy in all its desperate mugging for the camera. So let us hope that Gaddafi has fallen through the trap door of his own shifting scenery, never to be seen in the spotlight again, no matter how you wish to spell his name on the billboard of history.

The Price of Democracy

Not content with disrupting important research at Giza and forcing the Cairo museum system to close early, it now seems like so-called Arabian pro-democracy protesters might even ruin everyone's enjoyment of the Bahrain Grand Prix. Surely this a demonstration too far. The Middle Eastern situation has certainly reached crisis point when the unwashed rabble are preventing bronzed and manicured young bucks from driving their expensive cars around the world's cities at ridiculous speeds. No doubt these turbaned killjoys will probably also ban the popping of champagne corks in the presence of bikini-clad girls. As Formula One supremo Bernie Eccleston says: "I hope we don't have to do anything. Let's hope this all blows away."

The Vicious Variety of Cherub

St Valentine's Day, of course, is a time when irresponsible Cupid armed with his curlicue bow and arrow flits around the atmosphere in search of unwary swains. I am eternally surprised, therefore, that our streets are not crowded with greedy merchants selling special Cupid Swatters for ten bucks each, possibly even portable packets of Cupid Flak that his targets can quickly toss into the air whenever they sense the winged nuisance overhead.  Instead they invade the sidewalks with grimy buckets of frazzled roses, anemic and indifferent red, for which they demand a king's ransom; and a chamberlain's ransom on top of that if you require a bit of ribbon also. Cupid, meanwhile, hovers nearby, free from danger, waiting for his portion of the take.

Riddle of the Sands

I fail to see what the Egyptian people are so frothy-mouthed about, we have been burdened with the same President for more than fifty years, much longer than Hosni Mubarak has clung to power in his touristy desert fiefdom. Sure, our President may alter his appearance and policies from time to time: he may "add colors to the chameleon" and promise, for example, to end wars where his previous incarnations started them, but he is essentially the same person despite his political affiliations, whether he uses the name Kennedy, Nixon, Bush or Obama. For all practical purposes, our elections are like voting for a choice between tan and beige, and occasionally ecru: whatever color we've decided to paint the basement this year. Our President is the zero with a thousand faces, if I may paraphrase an expression from a different type of mythology: either the Oak King or the Holly King, depending on whether Republicans or Democrats receive that fabled fifty-one percent of votes they call the mandate of the people. Mubarak, by comparison, is merely a Lord of Misrule whose paper crown is slowly slipping off his head.

Update: it appears that the Egyptian army have assumed control. Obviously a blow for freedom has been struck.

In My Cups

Quite often the glass is neither half full nor half empty, but merely inadequate. For instance, this morning I am predicting a kind of champagne day, yet find myself equipped with nought but a chipped, plastic tumbler with Denny's Ribs N Burgers printed on the exterior in beige lettering. Suffice it to say, walking around with a decent serving of top-shelf mental bubbly in such a wretched example of metaphorical barware does little to enhance one's mood of amiable optimism. And my experience of yesterday could also be described as "half full," but I was only given an medium-sized styrofoam coffee cup to contain its contents, which were, indeed, hot. Unfortunately, I think somebody had previously used this unwieldy drinking vessel, since there was a large fracture in the base and much of the half fullness of my disposition was slowly dripping out, making me feel somewhat half empty by the evening commute. Tomorrow is Friday, so I'd better be handed something colorful and ornate, like a goblet of glass blown by artisans in Murano, with a gilded stem.

There's No Getting Around Getting Around

Your morning commute: an unpleasant ordeal undertaken to arrive at a destination you'd rather not reach. There are the subway trains, like traveling in a tin can being kicked down a cobbled street by a one-legged man who falls over a lot; the roads, invariably gridlocked, or overrun by homicidal baboons driving mechanised rhinos down residential streets at ninety miles-per-hour; self-righteous cyclists with a overblown sense of environmental entitlement, priggishly claiming their inalienable right to pull wheelies on busy highways while weaving in and out of traffic at whim; and pushy, tunnel-vision pedestrians, oblivious to everything except whatever wretched donut shop beckons from across the way. It is little wonder that "Sorry I'm late" has replaced "Good morning" as the normal workplace greeting.

Personally, I long for the implementation of matter transporter commuting, not for reasons of speed or convenience, but because there will be much less human confrontation when we are all reduced to whizzing atoms. Of course, there is always the distinct and unfortunate possibility, however, that the matter transportation operators of the future will still be apathetic, resentful incompetents who hate their jobs, instead of highly-trained bio-engineering specialists wearing silver lab cloaks. It is easy to imagine, in such circumstances, that a commuter's head might materialise at his desk and torso in the lobby, while his arms and legs end up neatly stacked in a janitorial cupboard. The result will be even less productivity than today's world of physical delay and obstruction, that is, if we all still have jobs to go to then.

Productivity and the Paranormal

Roger at work gapples with the Wall Street Journal each morning in the break room. As he slowly begins to read, I notice that his brow has more furrows than the paper has creases, but he always finishes by tentatively agreeing with the Op-Ed columnists: we should cut spending and taxes, he announces somewhat hesitantly, rather like a novice bomb disposal technician choosing to cut the red wire first. You see, Roger describes himself as a Fiscal Conservative. Apparently, Roger still lives in that mythical, bygone era of financial responsibility, "my word is my bond," and buying souvenir coins from the US Mint. I mean, come on, surely Fiscal Conservatives died out with Nero's devaluation of the denarius. Really, Roger might just as well call himself an elected Quaestor. But then Roger actually believes that a healthy stock market means a healthy American economy because a profitable American company is going to create American jobs. I ask him if he also believes that Mitch McConnell looks like a chupacabra, or if he thinks that Ben Bernanke keeps the Loch Ness Monster in a large tank deep in the bowels of the Federal Reserve. But Roger just rolls his eyes at me and wanders off to his cubicle, the one we will be dismantling very shortly.

Achtung Human

The remorseless jackboot of Technology is rapidly trampling my career underfoot. The Maginot Line of my usefulness, as it were, is being breached by those twin stormtroopers: the memory chip and the microprocessor. I am one of the last remaining unconquered peoples, one of the few. The algorithmic gestapo will come for me sooner or later, however. The lights will go out all over my office and that quisling project manager will bid me turn in my spreadsheets for the last time. But I still feel superior, professionally speaking, to those whose jobs are merely being outsourced and exiled to some third-world Smogopolis. At least my position is being usurped by some form of ingenious automaton, and not by just another, cheaper type of human being. Indeed, it has taken a great deal of scientific innovation to invent a machine capable of doing my work. We're talking an almost "Super Brain" level of artificial intelligence. The company can't simply download any old software program, and then configure the code to complete my operational tasks, oh no. They need a series of complex, custom-built workstations linked to many network servers to simulate my level of skill and experience. In short, the new me will be called Sisyphus Protocol SS-70, and not Gupta from Mumbai.

Alien Sponge

As I was about to step into the shower this morning, I noticed that a fractal style design had mysteriously appeared on my bath mat overnight, flattening the weft in an intricate circular pattern. It was still damp to the touch and emitting a weird, mildewy energy. Such a strange, mystical imprint could not have been created by any human foot, unless the foot in question happened to be afflicted with a remarkable set of bunions or a particularly impressive verruca.

I suddenly recalled those odd, loofah-shaped lights I had observed hovering over the hot water tank the previous evening. At the time I had dismissed them as merely a figment of the blinking thermostat, but was it possible that they were actually the landing gear of an otherworldly craft from some distant gas company beyond the stars? And if so, was the fractal pattern on my bath mat a message from this alien corporation that I could lower my hot water bills by switching to their brand new, environmentally-friendly, solar powered heating system? Or, more prosaically, is it just really about damn time that I flung the wretched mat into the laundry?