American Fez

The Powers That Search

Google glass: a heinous attempt to reduce us all to the simpering, hitched-pants and ill-fitting shirt state of four-eyed nerds. Note that they lack the courage to call these ugly Internet-ready appendages Google glasses, which, of course, they actually are. Spectacles! They want everyone to be puny and wear spectacles all the time. Oh for a dune of virtual sand to kick in the face of those buffoonish boffins who manufacture such idiotic "wearable tech." 

But we no doubt will submit to universal, bespectacled doltishness, much as we are all now encumbered with our mobile phones. Personally I will be sporting the Yahoo Monocle, since I hope to receive a cash royalty if they ever manufacture such a thing, stylishly superior as it obviously will be to the oafish Google Glass.

No, I Have Many Bananas

In the kaleidoscopic order of value I call a household budget, bananas are kings of fruit. The prudent shopper can purchase a single, satisfying banana for twenty-five cents; much less than the cost of an overrated apple or a desultory "peach" - a misnomer if I ever heard one. But supreme edibility is not the bananas only claim to greatness.

Its skin, for instance, can be tossed to the floor and employed as the prime mover - literally - in a pratfall gag played against someone you dislike.

Unpeeled, it is possible the propitious shape of your banana might provide entertainment as a makeshift boomerang.

A bunch of unripened bananas worn as a costume offers excellent camouflage for participants in jungle warfare or, perhaps more likely in our case, participants caught in street-to-street fighting inside an urban supermarket.

And finally, if I met you on the street I could present you with a banana as an apology for wasting your time with such piffle as this blog post. 

Five Ring Circus

Western media bores are salivatingly eager to resuscitate the most trivial and banal aspects of Cold War conflict during the Sochi Winter Olympics: hotel rooms are bugged with neo-KGB surveillence; bread lines are longer than the bob-sled run; the athletes quarters look like the Lubyanka; Putin is smaller and weedier than he appears in his publicity shots; etc. It is rare to watch any event without such snide, anti-Russian remark being passed by our TV commentary teams.

No doubt things are not great in Russia. Where on Earth are they ever?

Not that I actually watch the Olympic coverage, of course. But I can hear the obnoxious, braying sound of competetive snowboard experts seeping through the pages of whatever book I'm reading as my wife vainly waits for figure skating to begin. It never seems to, however, since there's always more snowboarding whackiness for hours on end. 

The Auld Countrie

Winter snows again. Perishing cold again. Imagine being a poor page boy at a minor medieval court, slumped against the stone wall of some drafty castle, burying your motley-clad body in heaps of straw to keep warm since the steward and his porters are huddled around the only brazier so there's no room for you; no light, either. The thin pitched piping from a wooden flute floats across the great hall, slips through a balistraria and out into the frigid, starless night to swirl around the parapets. It's the same night after night. Stew for dinner washed down with a thimble of grog if you're lucky.That must've been a suck way to spend February.