American Fez

The Amazon dot com of 18th Century Bone Merchants

Here be the business card of one Nathaniel Longbottom of Southwark, purveyor of articulated human and animal skeletons to ... well, to whomsoever wanted to buy them, I suppose; morbid maniacs from Edinburgh, mostly, you would have to assume.

The 'Athens of the North,' of course, was where all those doctors of this and that who were indifferent to getting their fingers dirty lived; and Burke and Hare, the infamous grave-robbing double act, also called Edinburgh their home.

In such circumstances, where supply so swiftly outstrips demand, Nathaniel Longbottom's Scottish competition must often often have found themselves short of stock, hence Longbottom's promise to send his grim goods "packed safe for either sea or land carriage."

Nowadays, skeletons can easily be dispatched by flying drone, rather like some dark, reverse version of a stork delivering a newborn baby. That's progress for you.

Horse and Rider

I am tired of technology; up to here with updates; done with downloads; made maudlin my modems; weary of the web; disenchanted with my desktop; listless over my laptop. Google, suffice it to say, makes me gloomy. 

I have Internet indigestion, have long since lost my appetite for applications, yet continue consuming digital information like a greedy child caught with his fingers in the Wikipedia jar.

Indeed, here I sit, having forgotten whether it's the horse or rider who is pale, Googling the phrase instead of using my own brain to remember.

"Behold a pale horse," the search engine says. I suppose my initial confusion stemmed from the fact that the pale horse's rider is Death; not a figure known for his healthy tan, either. 

If you ask me, future editors of the Book of Revelations should simplify matters by rewriting the sentence as "Behold a pale hearse," which reduces the figure of Death and his pasty mount to one, far more memorable character.

Come to think of it, Book of Revelations is a good name for a repository of information such as Google, and so that's exactly what I'm going to say from now on when searching topics on the Internet: "I'm going to consult the Great Beast."

Steinberg

Any old fool can be an old master; any distracted exhibitionist can be an abstract expressionist; and any con artist can be a conceptual artist. But it takes real genius to be a great cartoonist.

Today, bereft of my own ideas (witness the Gidget post below), I was flicking through an old book of Saul Steinberg drawings, wondering - as I always do - how he makes it look so easy.

Simple Gidgets

I was not aware, until fairly recently, that Aaron Copland's famous ballet suite, Appalachian Spring, might just as well be called Hawaiian Volcano for all the inspiration the composer derived from any mountain stream or equinoctial thaw. The present title was merely suggested to Copland by dancer Martha Graham as he could not think of one himself.

This was all rather depressing news to me because, until fairly recently, while listening to the music, I'd always pictured a snaggle-toothed Mother Ann Lee, Shaker supremo, striding around the hills in her bonnet exhorting the birds and bees to make chairs, not love; a mental image I found quite amusing.

But come to think of it, the 'Shaker Melody' section of Appalachian Spring, could easily be incorporated into Hawaiian Volcano, since Mother's clan would no doubt fashion excellent Shaker surfboards, suitable for riding waves of either saltwater or molten lava. This notion of surfing Shakers on Maui has much humorous appeal also.

Take it away, brother Maestro dude ...

Custer in a Cubicle

Wrathmann, that radish-faced scourge of rationality and compromise in the office, has never picked his battles. For him, every second of the working day is either Custer's Last Stand or the Suez Crisis. His wagons are always circled; the enemy is eternally at the gates. 

In fact, so implacable and overbearing is Wrathmann, had he been at Little Bighorn, I'm certain the Lakota Sioux would have simply slunk off home, weeping, frustrated and chastened. After all, such is the way most of his colleagues respond to confrontations with him, even if only requesting he re-send an email. Stalemate and a long war of attrition is the best you an hope for in a skirmish with Wrathmann. 

We have our Human Resources guide to professional protocol and business etiquette; Wrathmann has his dog-eared copies of Way of the Warrior and the Art of the War. Indeed, it would not surprise me to learn he had written those books in a previous life, since Wrathmann views his every interaction as an opportunity to build himself a cage to fight his way out of. If only the rest of us were not continually hit by the daily schrapnel, we might actually get some work done.

That Conversation

He raised an eyebrow, like a lifted buttock allowing a sidelong fart to escape.

"You want how much?" he said.

"Don't think of it as a sum." I explained. "It sounds bad when you put it in round number terms but it's really not that much. Think of it instead as a simple cost of living adjustment."

He rolled his eyes as though fixated on some poor soul being broken upon the wheel and deciding the torture wasn't painful enough.

"Cost of living adjustment?" he said.

"Yes."

"Well, we do have one of those every year." he continued, wrinkling his nose like an excitable bloodhound picking up a particularly fragrant scent. "Except around here we call it just not getting fired."