Two Thirds Of A Joke
1. The fattest knight at King Arthur’s round table was Sir Cumference.
He acquired his size from eating too much pi.
2. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.
3. She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.
4. The teacher confiscated a rubber band pistol was confiscated from a student in an algebra class, because it was a weapon of math disruption.
5. No matter how much you push the envelope, it’ll still be stationery.
6. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.
7. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.
8. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.
9. A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.
10. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
11. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
12. A baseball cap and a beret were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. The beret said to the cap:
‘You stay here; I’ll go on a head.
13. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.
14. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: ‘Keep off the Grass.’
15. The midget fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.
16. The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.
17. A backward poet writes inverse.
18. In a democracy it’s your vote that counts. In feudalism it’s your count that votes.
19. When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion.
20. If you jumped off the bridge in Paris, you’d be in Seine.
21. A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says, ‘I’m sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger.’
22. Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns to the other and says ‘Dam!’
23. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft.
Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can’t have your kayak and heat it too.
24. Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, ‘I’ve lost my electron.’ The other says ‘Are you sure?’
The first replies, ‘Yes, I’m positive.’
25. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal?
He wanted to transcend dental medication.
26. There was the person who sent ten puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.
27. Pictures are from The Library of Congress. This repost was written like Chuck Palahniuk.
Winching The Dead
A recent post included the phrase “getting severely overweight dead people out of an apartment building.” Those are googling words. Most of the results are hand wringing about the number of overweight people. A couple of the results were worth clicking out.
The headline result is from Merry Olde England, which is becoming known as the fattest country in Europe. Fire service called in 50 times to winch fat people out.
“Paramedics in the West Midlands have had to call on their heavy-lifting emergency service colleagues, despite having extra equipment to help move extremely heavy patients themselves. Over a three-year period they called in West Midlands Fire and Rescue Service on 50 occasions, so the patients could be winched out with apparatus designed for lifting car wrecks. Sometimes morbidly obese patients, … can only be extracted from their homes after a window is taken out, say firefighters. …
Nick Harrison, chairman of the West Midlands Fire Brigades Union, said: “In most cases these people are quite elderly and are suffering from serious medical issues which have left them bedridden for a long time, and they have put on a lot of weight. “Many times we have to remove the whole window frame and get them out that way. It’s a lot simpler and safer both for them and for the rescuers.” …
Official statistics show the West Midlands to be the fattest region in Britain, which is itself the fattest major country in Europe. According to the Association of Public Health Observatories, about 25 per cent of adults in Britain are now clinically obese. In the West Midlands, the figure is 29 per cent. By comparison, across the European Union as a whole it is just 14 per cent. “
One of the commenters had a constructive suggestion: “The ‘feeders’ should be brought to court and punished. For every obese person there is one or more ‘feeders’, who shop, supply the food, help the person eat it etc. Being a ‘feeder’ should be a criminal offense.”
For some algorithmically correct reason, Minute mysteries was a result. “The object of minute mysteries (aka lateral thinking puzzles) is for you to unravel the mystery, based on very limited and somewhat ambiguous clues. You are given a scenario (usually involving a death of some sort), and you have to deduce what has happened. Someone must look at the solution so that you can ask them questions to try and figure it out. The questions have to be phrased so that the only possible answers are yes, no or not relevant. There is no limit to the number of questions, and it can be helpful to have multiple people working on the case.”
Evidently, number 71 was the connection. “71. Three heavy people try to crowd under one umbrella, and nobody gets wet.” The answer is “71. It is sunny and hot.”
PG heard someone telling these stories years ago. There are some on the list he remembers. “5. A man lives on the twelfth floor of an apartment building. Every morning he wakes up, gets dressed, eats, goes to the elevator, takes it down to the lobby, and leaves the building for work. In the evening, he goes through the lobby to the elevator, and, if there is someone else in the elevator (or if it was raining that day) he goes back to his floor directly. However, if there is nobody else in the elevator and it hasn’t rained, he goes to the 10th floor and walks up two flights of stairs to his room. ~ ~ The man is a midget. He can’t reach the upper elevator buttons, but he can ask people to push them for him. He can also push them with his umbrella. ~ ~ 7. A man walks into a bar and asks for a drink. The bartender pulls out a gun and points it at him. The man says, “Thank you,” and walks out. ~ ~ The man has hiccups; the bartender scares them away by pulling a gun.
Pictures are from The Library of Congress.
Self Portraits On Drugs
A person, Bryan Lewis Saunders, conducted an experiment. “After experiencing drastic changes in my environment, I looked for other experiences that might profoundly affect my perception of the self. So I devised another experiment where everyday I took a different drug and drew myself under the influence. Within weeks I became lethargic and suffered mild brain damage. I am still conducting this experiment but over greater lapses of time. I only take drugs that are given to me.”
Abilify / Xanax / Ativan ~ 90mg Abilify ~ 1 sm Glass of “real” Absinth ~ 10mg Adderall ~ 10mg Ambien ~ Bath Salts ~ 15mg Buspar (snorted) ~ 4 Butalbitals ~ Butane Honey Oil ~ 250mg Cephalexin ~ 1/2 gram Cocaine ~ Computer Duster (2 squirts) ~ 2 bottles of Cough Syrup ~ 1 “Bump” of Crystalmeth ~ 4mg Dilaudid ~ 1 shot of Dilaudid / 3 shots of Morphine ~ DMT ~ 60mg Geodon ~ Hash ~ Huffing Gas ~ Huffing Lighter Fluid ~ 7.5mg Hydrocodone / 7.5mg Oxycodone / 3mg Xanax ~ 3mg Klonopin~ 10mg Loritab ~ Marijuana (Kine Bud) ~ G13 Marijuana ~ Morphine IV ~ Psilocybin Mushrooms (2 caps onset) ~ 2mg Nicotine Gum ~ Nitrous Oxide ~ Nitrous Oxide / Valium I.V. ~ PCP ~ 7.5mg Percocet ~ 2 Pot Brownies ~ 1 Glass of Pruno ~ Marijuana Resin ~ 4mg Risperdol ~ Ritilin (doseage unknown-snorted) ~ Salvia Divinorum (right before but mostly right after) ~ 100mg Seroquel ~ 100mg Trazadone ~ 20mg Valium ~ Valium I.V. (doseage unknown in hospital) ~ Valium IV, (Albuterol, Saline & Oxygen) mixture ~ 2mg Xanax ~ 50mg Zoloft (after 2 weeks prescribed) ~ 10mg Zyprexa ~ Ativan / Haloperidol (doseage unknown in hospital)
Mr. Saunders is a piece of work. He has done a self portrait every day for years, and performs something called “stand up tragedy”. His website has a massive interview page. The rest of this post will be selections from that.
Recently there’s been a lot of chatter on the internet about a series of self-portraits that Bryan Lewis Saunders drew/painted/etched while he was on a whole potpourri of different drugs. My friend Kelly sent me the link because the day previous, I sent her a video of some chick on YouTube describing the experience of turkey-bastering DMT up her butthole . That her brain connected Bryan Saunders with that video should give you some idea as to what his work is like.
These portraits alone, though, are hardly interesting enough to merit Bryan any additional attention. It wasn’t until I realized that these 32 paintings comprise only 1/250th of a 16 year self-portrait project that I decided to spend a Sunday afternoon Skyping him at his home in Johnson City, Tennessee. As our conversation teetered between horrifying and hilarious, I realized that–although colossal–the self-portrait project is only a fragment of his dense portfolio of other equally involved multimedia projects. Bryan’s hermitic, Appalachian livelihood fostered an unarguable talent for embarking on extremely bizarre and elaborate artistic undertakings.
What started as a simple conversation about self-portraits spiraled into a cordial chat about crystal meth, Chinese standup comedy, blood, obese girls who suck dicks for attention, the process of getting severely overweight dead people out of an apartment building, and a few other equally engaging topics. By the end of our two-hour chat, I decided that Bryan Lewis Saunders is a living manifestation of Xenia, Ohio in Harmony Korine’s film, Gummo . And now he’s my friend. ~ ~
Well I wanted to be a famous comedian in China. I was living in my aunt’s trailer in Virginia, and the family was having a lot of problems. One of my cousins was on meth. My great aunt had Alzheimer’s. Another one had a stroke. It was a lot of confusion and constant arguing back and forth, so I just thought to myself, “well I’ll be better in China.” I spent like six hours a day, seven days a week for like nine months straight teaching myself Mandarin. I thought that I’d go to some cities in communist China where they don’t have any tourism, and I would do standup comedy there. I figured within one year I’d have my own sitcom, then I’d be doing blockbuster features in China, and then I’d be a big international superstar. I went and did a Chinese wedding in New York City, and it went pretty well, so I went to Fujo to become a superstar. After like the third day, I met a guy who could speak English pretty well, and he told me that they didn’t have stand up comedy in China. I was pretty devastated, so when I was forced to leave I thought, “Well hell, Tennessee is pretty cheap, so I moved back here and decided that I’d just do standup tragedy and try to make all of these strangers cry instead. ~ ~
What were your favorite substances consumed? What were the worst? Xanax (totem poles – 4mg) would probably be one of my favorites. It made me feel real at peace with life and with the trauma, and it also made me a real social dynamo! I’m sort of a recluse but with the Xanax I could just walk up and talk to total strangers! The Butane Honey Oil was a real blast too! The worst is a toss up between PCP and Seroquel (heavy tranquilizer/anti-psychotic agent) 100 mg. I went to a doctor to hopefully get more different drugs and told him about my project and showed him my pictures on various drugs and he only wrote one prescription for 90 Seroquels thinking I was psychotic.~ ~
What’s next? Where’s the acid? As far as acid goes, I’ve tried acid 3 times in NE Tennessee and all 3 times it was really crappy. Nothing like the U.V.A. acid in the mid eighties. People here say, “I did 8 of ’em. I took 4. I did 6 of ’em.”. And I’m like, “If one doesn’t do it for you, why take 7 more? That’s ignorant!” As for what’s next, it all depends on what people give me. I don’t seek them out and there are still plenty of big ones I need to draw under the influence of; Heroin, LSD, DMT, Computer Duster, Ayahuasca, Peyote and I don’t want to die until I do a self-portrait on Crack. You see today we live in a narcissistic and obsessive culture, totally overflowing with drugs. And as an artist I am the filter. Picasso and Matisse got it right when one of them said, “Cézanne is the father of us all.” It’s not a stretch by any means to say, “On some days, my brain chemistry is my vantage point and my face is his Mont Sainte-Victoire.” For people interested in this particular body of work, my Facebook has the best and most up to date collection of drawings under the influence. And I’m a weird person, and I’m way more well known for other stuff besides the drawings and drugs… ~ ~
On your MySpace page, you say you have mental problems. How do you deal with these on a day-to-day basis? I’ve been labeled with: Antisocial Personality Disorder (as a child), Borderline (in my teens), Schizotypal (as a young adult), Paranoid Schizophrenic (at present)… but I believe all that says much more about the system of classification than it does about me as an individual. Their response to that, of course, is that I’m in denial. So I self-medicate with art, obsessively and constantly, and when things in my environment get too overwhelming, I check into a hospital and get medicated, get out, wean myself off the drugs and start over. Not a cycle I recommend, but I know myself well and have the art…I’ve been living with it forever. Sometimes when I get “woggy” and can’t understand what people are saying, I’ll go to another country and fight the (imaginary) mental language problem with a (real genuine) language problem and make art… It depends on how severe the crisis is. I’m the most rational psychotic I know, if I even am psychotic? I’m fortunate in that respect; most aren’t so lucky.
Is there anything you’d like to add or anything you’d like to tell our readers? Thanks for giving me the opportunity to share what I do! It feels good to be included here. Oh, and if you’re online sometime and come across my series of self-portraits under the influence of different drugs, know that I don’t “party” I just experiment, and I’m willing to trade art for drugs that I haven’t drawn myself on yet. But keep the jenkem to yourselves! ~ ~
Any last words? “Be leery of signs. Once I drove to Alabama, and the first fruit stand I came to across the State Line had a sign that said, “COLOREDS WELCOME”. It struck a nerve. I didn’t know if they meant it or not. With language like that – surely they didn’t. It confused me. The same with the “Free Speech Zone” sign. I’ve performed at many places here in Johnson City using the exact same material and have never had a problem with censorship. After all it’s America ? The only place that advertises FREE SPEECH here, is the only place that DOESN’T allow it. So be wary of signs, chances are – THEY ARE INSTRUCTING THE EXACT OPPOSITE !!!”
Cemetery Blues
PG and Uzi had their usual Sunday phone call, and agreed to go to “Sunday in the Park”. It is a festival in Oakland Cemetery, with live music, people in costumes, open mausoleums, and lots of good clean fun. It wasn’t until that evening that PG learned that today is Dead Poets Remembrance Day. Edgar Allan Poe met his maker on this day in 1849.
There was a Chamblee54 post about DPRD two years ago. The idea is to go to a cemetery and read a poem. An effort will be made to do that tonight, although promises about dead poets are notoriously unreliable. The 2010 post is included as part two of this feature.
The first poem read that afternoon was “Looking for the Buckhead Boys” by James Dickey. In the intervening two years, PG listened to a podcast with Christopher Dickey, the son of the writer. Sometimes bard is short for bastard.
So PG, Uzi, and Hazmat went to a festival in Oakland Cemetery. Like everything else, it is more popular and expensive. You had to pay to park, which Uzi generously took care of. The brick walls around the boneyard have been repaired, and no longer look like they are going to fall down. Those walls are important, because people are dying to get inside. This is the second time that PG and Uzi have attended the October festival in Oakland Cemetery.
There are always things that you need to see at Oakland. Margaret Mitchell, the Lion Statue, and the mausoleums are important stops. PG followed the signs to the grave of Bobby Jones. It had golf balls and a putter, which was not necessary.
Don LeVert was a member of the Atlanta Sky Hi Club for many, many years before his departure in 1997. PG and Uzi always seek him out, and it is usually a bit of an adventure finding him.
After visiting Don, PG found the marker for “Brother John Wade”. His time on earth was September 23, 1865 to January 15, 1916. This was from the autumn just after the War Between the States until 37 days before PG’s father was born in Rowland, North Carolina. There was a renewed sense of connection to the stone monuments.
The facebook friend said “Today is Dead Poets Remembrance Day, Oct. 7th, the day Edgar Allan Poe died. Be sure to visit a graveyard and read some poetry today”. PG didn’t have anything better to do.
The first obstacle was finding a book of poetry. PG is not a poetry person. A look at the shelf turned up a paperback, “125 years of Atlantic “. Poetry was to be found between those covers.
The book had two stickers, both saying 69 cents. At the old Book Nook, this meant that the book was half the price on the sticker. With tax, that would be 38 cents.
125YOA had stayed in PG’s car for a few years. Whenever he was stuck somewhere with time to kill, this book was waiting. One afternoon in 1998, there was a slow day at work. PG read a remembrance by Gertrude Stein, about life in France at the start of World War II.
The cemetery of choice was connected to the Nancy Creek Primitive Baptist Church. PG has driven by this facility thousands of times. He walked past the graves until he found a fallen tree to sit down on.
The first poem was “Looking for the Buckhead Boys” by James Dickey. PG began to read out loud, and soon could smell the drug store air of Wender and Roberts. The author bought fifty cents worth of gas at a Gulf station. Today, fifty cents might buy a tablespoon of gas, and Gulf was long ago bought out by BP. Wender and Roberts became a bar, which was torn down, to make way for a shopping destination.
Buckhead is not what it used to be. When Mr. Dickey was the bravest man in Buckhead ( he took a shit in the toilet at Tyree’s pool hall), PG was not even thought of. The traffic jams on Peachtree Street are still there, as the blue haired ladies follow poets into the ground.
When PG finished reading Mr. Dickey, he put a teal postit in the book, where the poem stood. PG looked up, and the graveyard seemed different. Maybe the sun had sank a bit in the sky, and maybe the poem had changed PG in a way he could not put into words. Maybe another poem was the answer. Take the glasses off, open the book at random, and turn the pages until a poem shows up.
On page 404…the historic Atlanta area code…was “The Wartime Journey” by Jan Struther. The 1944 work was unknown territory. A group of people are traveling on a train. The wounded vet, the untried recruit, the salesmen shared the space with a lady, taking a baby for her soldier husband to meet. The theme of the rhymes was that America was totally at war, and that war is different from peacetime. Today’s war in Babylon is not like that.
Halfway through the reading, a freight train pulled by. Today, passenger trains are a novelty, and freight rules the rails. The shipment today was double decked containers, ready to pull off and slap on an eighteen wheeler.
Deaths are said to come in threes, and reading poetry in a graveyard should be the same. PG went on a random search for a Moe, to go with the Curley and Larry already digested. A page of poems by Emily Dickinson was the result. These pages left PG unmoved. It was as if he was back in the sixth grade, with a horrible English teacher forcing him to memorize Hiawatha. It was time to go home.
Kiss Me
PG recently got two emails from a friend. One of them is serious. It is up to the reader to tell which is which. This was written like Rudyard Kipling.
Why keep Aspirin by your bedside? It’s about Heart Attacks – There are other symptoms of a heart attack, besides the pain on the left arm. One must also be aware of an intense pain on the chin, as well as nausea and lots of sweating; however, these symptoms may also occur less frequently. Note: There may be NO pain in the chest during a heart attack.
Most heart attacks occur in the day, generally between 6 A.M. and noon. Having one during the night, when the heart should be most at rest, means that something unusual happened. The majority of people (about 60%) who had a heart attack during their sleep did not wake up. However, if it occurs, the chest pain may wake you up from your deep sleep.
If that happens, immediately dissolve two aspirins in your mouth and swallow them with a bit of water. Afterwards: Call 911. Phone a neighbor or a family member who lives very close by. – Say “heart attack!” Say that you have taken 2 Aspirins. Take a seat on a chair or sofa near the front door, and wait for their arrival and …DO NOT LIE DOWN!
If you take an aspirin or a baby aspirin once a day, take it at night. The reason: Aspirin has a 24-hour “half-life”; therefore, if most heart attacks happen in the wee hours of the morning, the Aspirin would be strongest in your system. Aspirin lasts a really long time in your medicine chest for years, (when it gets old, it smells like vinegar). Bayer is making crystal aspirin to dissolve instantly on the tongue. They work much faster than the tablets.
A Cardiologist has stated that if each person after receiving this e-mail, sends it to 10 people, probably one life could be saved! I have already shared this information. What about you? Do forward this message. It may save lives!
A guy is 72 years old and loves to fish. He was sitting in his boat the other day when he heard a voice say, ‘Pick me up.’ He looked around and couldn’t see anyone. He thought he was dreaming when he heard the voice say again, ‘Pick me up.’
He looked in the water and there, floating on the top, was a frog.The man said, ‘Are you talking to me?
The frog said, ‘Yes, I’m talking to you. Pick me up, then kiss me and I’ll turn into the most beautiful woman you have ever seen. I’ll make sure that all your friends are envious and jealous, because I will be your bride!’
The man looked at the frog for a short time, reached over, picked it up, and placed it in his shirt pocket.
The frog said, “Didn’t you hear what I said? I said, “Kiss me, and I will be your beautiful bride.”‘
He opened his pocket, looked at the frog and said, ‘Nah. At my age, I’d rather have a talking frog.’
Defender
A fbf posted a link: “I am a Community Activist. What kind of Social Advocate are you?” PG is a subtractvocate. The link refers to an online test from McKinsey & Company. It is adapted from a 2009 report, Activists, Pundits, and Quiet Followers: Engaging the public in social issues.
The first question is a statement. You have six choices, ranging from disagree strongly to agree strongly. “I would be willing to lead a public debate on a social issue I’m interested in.” That is as appealing as root canal without Novocaine. Strongly disagree. PG does not want to have to kill anyone.
The second statement is “We are in this world to help others no matter how far away we are.” This is an idea that sounds good, until you do the due dilgence. Many people who try to help you help others are either incompetent or crooked. There is also the “are in this world” riff. Human beings are animals, with the goal of surviving long enough to continue the species. Disagree.
The same six options are available for all ten statements. This probably makes for easy number crunching when the survey is complete. It does not allow for nuanced answers. Here are the other eight statements, and the PG score.
I am most interested in issues that have affected me at a personal level.
It is my responsibility to find ways to help others who haven’t had the opportunities I’ve had.
When it comes to issues I care about, I won’t hesitate to take the lead.
I only engage in conversations about social issues with people I already know.
I concentrate my energy in helping my local community first.
I am very careful when choosing who I talk to about social issues.
I prefer to support social issues from home (e.g., blogging, emailing) instead of at public events.
There is not much that someone like me can do to help solve issues like world hunger or poverty.
The quiz statements are very fond of first person. Eight of the ten statements contain the word “I”, or verb contractions starting with “I”. One of the non I sentences uses the word “me”. The other non I sentence uses “we” twice.
Congratulations, you are a: Defender. This was written like David Foster Wallace
PG And OD Go To Tennessee
Tuesday September 25
At one pm Monday, September 24, PG thought he was going to be home all week. It was not a bad prospect. Life if neo Brookhaven is good. Suddenly, a message appeared from OD, who had a vehicle and was willing to drive to Short Mountain. An agreement was made to go at nineish Tuesday morning.
At 10:15 Tuesday, a Ford pickup truck drove past the house, with PG waving at the driver. The truck turned around, and came back to get PG. The Tennessee adventure was on. The ride was full of conversation, but little highway drama. The truck pulled in front of the barn a little bit before the second lunch bell.
At Short Mountain Sanctuary, there are two camping options. The yurt yard is next to the knoll, and is much less walking than the ridges behind the garden. The down side is the noise from the knoll, and frequent visits from goats. PG has a bum knee, which should not be confused with a knee bum. The idea was to walk as little as possible, which is still going to be a good bit. An empty spot was found in the yurt yard. The Tennessee mountain home was soon going up.
The idea is to set the tent up, and throw a tarpaulin over it. A rope is run to the nearest tree, and an you have instant shelter. The tent PG has is 26 years old. There is a door zipper which does not like to work. PG had taken it out of storage a few days earlier, had zipped and unzipped this door, and it seemed to be working.
The best place for the tent seemed to be a spot at the edge of level ground, with a steep drop inches away. That night, PG discovered that this was not a good location for the tent. An unsteady knee does not like to take the first step outside on 45 degree land. This problem would have to wait until Wednesday to be fixed.
At some point Tuesday, PG was on the back porch. This is a dangerous place to be during dinner prep. Gabby had a bowl of something called almost waldorf salad, and was looking for someone to mix in mayonnaise. This is done with your hands, your fingers diving into a sea of cut up fruit. Hand washing is encouraged.
Tuesday was not a good night. After eating too much casserole and fistfucker salad, PG decided to go to sleep. The talent show was going on, and the audience appreciation would not allow sleep in the yurt yard. PG decided to get up, tried to open the tent door, and the zipper was not working. It would connect for a few inches, miss a few inches, and the connect again. PG was very concerned. The goats like to check out tents when humans are away. Even though PG does not keep food in his tent, he did not want to have a four legged investigation, with or without a search warrant.
So PG wandered around, talked to some people around the fire, and saw the end of the talent show. Eventually he went back to his tent, after almost tumbling down the hill trying to get in. After laying on the ground, thinking unpleasant thoughts, PG got up to pee. When he got back inside the tent, he tried to close the door zipper using the outside pull. The door zipper came together without a problem. Maybe this journey was going to work out after all.
Wednesday September 26
After breakfast, playback theater convened on the knoll. A dozen or so people did dramatic exercises, and then performed stories. The narratives come from the lives of the players. PG told the tent door story of the night before. The person playing PG taking a piss was a six foot four inch tall transperson. In another story, PG played the alcoholic mother of a no good roommate.
Adjustments were made to the Tennessee mountain home. The tent was moved back a few feet, and the tarp positioned accordingly. There was some background sounds while this was going on. A tent on the other side of the yard emanated the sounds of two people having a very, very good afternoon. Meanwhile, three tents up on PG’s side, a Kiwi-Filipino pair played ukeleles, and sang Abba songs.
Wednesday had the most fabulous dinner of the gathering. The theme was “Night of a thousand Agneses”. (Agni? Agniece?) The namesake queen has been a faerie fixture for years and years.
PG saw an Agnes show in New Orleans once. Her and then partner Gabriel danced and tried on outfits, while the crowd shouted put it on, put it on. The reason why people call them drag queens is because they are always dragging bags of costumes around.
And indeed, there were dozens of fabulous outfits on display. Everyone was Agnes. When you got to the kitchen, the dinner was arranged on the plate as a caricature of the eponymous diva. After dinner was some enthusiastic drumming by the fire, and a night of much improved sleep.
Thursday September 27
Thursday started out smoothly enough. PG brought a paper cup to the kitchen, got some coffee, and went back to his tent. He left this cup in the drink holder of his chair, and went back to the house. When he returned, his neighbors told him a goat had been licking the inside of the cup.
After a while, PG thought it would be fun to take pictures. He took shirt, pants, and shoes off, grabbed the camera, and walked towards the back of the yurt yard, There were a few pictures made of goat activity, especially of one short, dark furred animal. She came over to PG, and started to rub her horns against the back of his leg. We will call this animal Zette, which may or may not be her real name.
PG did not appreciate this, and tried to push Zette away. Every time PG pushed away, Zette pushed back a bit harder. Fighting a goat one handed is a losing proposition, and PG was starting to worry. By this time, Zette was taking a step back, and charging into PG, who kept stepping away, trying to declare a truce. There was no place to hide.
A longtime resident, who we will call Joe Floor, saw the action. Joe grabbed Zette by the horns, and dragged her to the ridge behind the yurt yard. Joe knows how to talk to goats. When Joe released Zette, she started to scratch her rear paws, as if getting ready for some serious charging. Joe grabbed her by the horns, and shoved her face into the ground. Zette learned that this was not going to be tolerated.
Later in the day, PG sat down in his chair. The camping furniture had been rescued from a garbage pile a few weeks earlier. It’s ease of transportation got it included on this trip, and until Thursday afternoon it was a good choice. When you sit in a fabric seat, and hear threads breaking under your weight, you think maybe you should have taken another chair.
The rest of the day was a symphony of sloth. There was an ice cream social two ridges over. The vehicle driving there was going up the driveway as PG finished lunch. The art opening was not what PG wanted to be doing, even if the cake was spectacular. The next move was into the kitchen, which is not a good thing to do when you are bored. There was a pile of garlic waiting to be shelled and pressed. PG got through most of it, until he could not squeeze the press any more.
After a nap, the dinner turned out to be pretty good. At the fire, PG found a drum that make good sounds without ruining your hands. There was a movie showing in the pavilion. It was about a young man who studied violin at Who Lee Yard. “Was that as difficult to play as it was to listen to?”
Friday September 28
Friday got off to a roaring start… not to be confused with Arora Thunder ,,, with a breakfast of rice, granola, hot sauce, and coffee. The dog’s breakfast is alive and well. Speaking of which, the sanctuary has two dogs now. Sharday has been joined by Biscuit. The canines show great patience towards the overdressed visitors. Rumors of a Biscuit and gravy dinner turned out to be reckless hearsay.
PG thought that maybe he could sit on the edge of his chair, but the fabric continued to rip further asunder. There was a pile of wood by the fire (duh,) and some of the logs had a flat cut on one side. PG found one that was just a cat’s hair wider than the chair frame, and secured it with bicycle innertube bungee. The contraption was surprisingly comfortable.
By this time, the faerie gathering lifestyle had sunk in. A trip to the house could take two hours, with all the stops for conversation along the way. Whole sun drenched afternoons float away. PG spent some time with his book, Skin Tight by Carl Hiaasen. It is a crime story with lots of bloodshed, crookiness, and weirdos. PG enjoyed the sensation of drifting between the alternative realities of the yurt yard, and Miami plastic surgery. “I stopped counting the bodies at seven. The higher the pile of corpses, the less clothing and/or morals.” Those amazon commenters just have a way with words.
PG picked up the book Thursday, after missing the ride to the ice cream social. There was a typo on page 27 of the First Ballantine Books Edition: October 1990. A young lady named Tina turns up not missing on page 25. The name Tina appears five times on page 26. In the 7th line of page 27, Tina became known as Tiny. She went back to being Tina the rest of the story.
Saturday September 29
Saturday was more of the slack gathering lifestyle. The most energetic PG got was attending the heart circle. Someone drew the Moon card from the Tarot deck, which was considered an omen of harvest moon synchronicity. Some powerful stories were shared in this circle.
After dinner, PG got into the drumming with a bit more vigor than was wise. He began to feel sleepy, and went to sleep soon after the full moon ritual. It turned into a replay of Tuesday night, with the noise from the knoll harmonizing with the noise in PG’s head. One day the mind/body chemistry will allow PG to be happy more of the time, or at least to avoid nights like Harvest Moon Saturday.
Sunday September 30
Sunday was another slack day. The sunshine was hidden behind ominous clouds, and rumors of nasty weather were rampant. After dinner, a joke telling circle got started on the back deck.
Why can’t Unitarians sing? Because they are looking at the next line to see if they agree with it.
This girl asked her daddy if she could use the pickup truck. Yes, you can use it, but you have to give me a blow job first. The girl pulled his pants down, and was about the taste the sausage when she threw her head back in dismay. Dayaddy, your diiyick tastes like sheeyit. Oh yeah, your brother had to use the truck this morning.
Monday October 1
This was to be the leaving day for PG and OD. The rain came in Sunday night, and by accounts was going to get worse on Monday. There was a deceptive break in the precipitation, which convinced OD that it was a good time to pack up.
PG got his gear in order, and dropped it off by the barn. OD left to get his truck. The parking for gatherings is on a neighboring ridge. The trail is two miles of steep hills and rough terrain. If you can get a ride, then you take it.
Waiting for your ride to get back from Pan meadow is a mellow end of the gathering. PG usually finds something to read. Today it was So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, by fellow blogger Mattilda. PG settled into the porch swing, and got through five paragraphs. Then people started to gather, then more people. Somebody started reciting lines from “Paris is Burning.” PG had stumbled into a viewing of PIB this summer, and knew what the person was talking about.
And the wait continued. PG was not sure when OD left, and didn’t think to look at a clock until quarter until three. At about four, OD finally appeared. It seems he had gotten on the wrong van, and taken an unexpected trip to the Nashville airport.
PG put his gear in the truck, and got in. OD drove about three miles down the Seals Hollow Road, when he saw a rock that he liked. When PG got out to pick up the rock, he noticed that OD’s trunk was not in the truck. The pickup turned around, and went back to the Sanctuary to get the trunk.
The emergency McDonalds in Woodbury was ignored. On the road to I24, a serious rainstorm hit. Major storm warnings were on the radio for the Nashville area. The storm was weathered, and a dinner stop was made at the Shoney’s in Manchester. The slowest server in Tennessee was working on that table. There was another storm waiting for the trip through Monteagle pass. These things shall pass.
Pictures are by Chamblee 54. The humans gave consent. This was written like J. K. Rowling.
Cursive
There was a feature in the NY Daily News about the death of cursive writing. HT to JoemyG-d. It seems like it is no longer being taught. PG says good riddance.
Cursive refers to the flowing style of handwriting, where the letters are joined. It is from the French word cursif. This is derived from Medieval Latin cursivus, literally, running, from Latin cursus, past participle of currere to run
Cursive sounds like curse, or using bad language. Many people trying to read cursive will curse. The synonym for cuss, however, is from the middle english word curs.
At Ashford Park , print writing was taught in the first grade, and cursive in the third grade. PG learned cursive, and then promptly forgot. He prints when he needs to write, except for a signature. Printing is much, much easier to read.
Some say that with the decline of cursive, that old handwritten letters will be impossible to read. With many cursive writers, they already are. Some people have the patience to write beautifully, but many others scrawl. There is a cliche about doctor’s handwriting on prescriptions. One wonders how many lives have been lost because a pharmacist is not a mind reader.
There is a quote, attributed to an ancient Greek, that “When we start to write, we will lose our ability to remember”. There was grumbling when the printing press replaced hand copied scrolls, and when the typewriter came onto the scene. Whenever machinery advances into manual territory, someone is not going to like it. This is a repost.
Palindromes For Fun And Profit
Palindromes are phrases that are spelled the same backwards as they are forwards. Barry Duncan is a/the master palindromist. This is a self applied title … “The other, slightly longer, slightly more combative answer is that it means you shouldn’t confuse me with any of those garden-variety, ‘Madam I’m Adam’ hacks who couldn’t paint my shadow.” Mr. Duncan takes reversible phrases very seriously. The article makes a few points much better than this correspondent. When reading these quotes, be aware that the terms “words” and “characters” are used interchangeably. There is a difference between 44,444 words, and a similar number of characters. As it is, it would take 315 tweets to transmit 44,444 characters, and almost no one would realize that the last one is the first one in reverse order. (Quote) “One way that he categorizes them is by length. Those of one hundred or more characters are labeled simply “long.” Palindromes of one hundred or more words he calls “epic.” And palindromes of one thousand or more characters are called “mega.” … “Palindrome-writing in itself is nothing new. Bill Bryson, in his history of the English language, The Mother Tongue, puts the form at at least two thousand years old, citing our knowledge of Greek and Roman palindromes. The word itself derives from the Greek palindromos—“running back again”—and Bryson dates its English debut to 1629. He even claims to have found the first recorded palindrome in English, by the poet John Taylor (“Lewd I did live, & Evil did I dwel”), though, as Bryson points out, the ampersand is a bit of a disqualifier. Palindromes are just one form of wordplay among many. There are anagrams (transpositions of the letters of a word or phrase into a new word or phrase using exactly the same letters), tautonyms (words or phrases of two or more identical parts), isograms (words containing no more than one of any letter), pangrams (groups of words using each and every letter of the alphabet exactly once), bigrams, trigrams, tetragrams, and on we go. Many of these forms of wordplay have been around for quite a long time, but A. Ross Eckler, former editor of Word Ways magazine, dates a “renaissance of interest in recreational linguistics” to the mid-1960s. The growing interest in palindromes themselves can be tracked, indirectly, by the exponential increase in length of the Guinness-recognized world’s longest palindrome: from 242 words in 1971; to 11,125 in 1980; to 44,444 in 1984, sometime after which they seem to have stopped keeping the record.” (/Quote) El Google has a few results for palindrome. Fun with words advertises Georgia Natural Gas and Glenn Beck, before getting down to business. There is a list of popular palindromes…Do geese see God? … Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw? … Murder for a jar of red rum … Some men interpret nine memos. … Never odd or even. … Don’t nod … Dogma: I am God … Never odd or even … Too bad – I hid a boot … Rats live on no evil star … No trace; not one carton … Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw? … Murder for a jar of red rum … May a moody baby doom a yam? … Go hang a salami; I’m a lasagna hog! … Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas! … A Toyota! Race fast… safe car: a Toyota … Straw? No, too stupid a fad; I put soot on warts … Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era? … Doc Note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod … Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo … No, it never propagates if I set a gap or prevention … Anne, I vote more cars race Rome to Vienna … Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus … Kay, a red nude, peeped under a yak … Some men interpret nine memos … Campus Motto: Bottoms up, Mac … Go deliver a dare, vile dog! … Madam, in Eden I’m Adam … Ah, Satan sees Natasha … Lisa Bonet ate no basil … Do geese see God? … God saw I was dog … Dennis sinned. Special attention is given to the immortal “A man, a plan, a canal – Panama!”. Leigh Mercer published the phrase in the November 13 1948 issue of Notes & Queries. The webmaster of this facility points out that Panama is easy pickings for palindromists, with it’s alternating vowel, and consonants. The origin of this phrase is a matter of speculation. This page advertises a book, More George W. Bushisms: More of Slate’s Accidental Wit and Wisdom of Our 43rd President [Paperback]. Fun with words advertises Verizon stuff, and has lists. Since the list of phrases will probably have repeats from the above list, we will focus on the list of words and place names: aibohphobia, alula, cammac, civic, deified, deleveled, detartrated, devoved, dewed, evitative, Hannah, kayak, kinnikinnik, lemel, level, madam, Malayalam, minim, murdrum, peeweep, racecar, radar, redder, refer, reifier, repaper, reviver, rotator, rotavator, rotor, sagas, solos, sexes, stats, tenet, terret, tests, Glenelg (Australia), Kanakanak (Alaska), Kinikinik (Colorado), Navan (Meath, Ireland), Neuquen (Argentina), Ward Draw (South Dakota), Wassamassaw (South Carolina), Yreka Bakery (Yreka, California). Some of these phrases are worth repeating. We will try to weed out the dupes, but reversable fatigue may set in first: A dog, a plan, a canal: pagoda … A new order began, a more Roman age bred Rowena … A tin mug for a jar of gum, Nita … Able was I ere I saw Elba … Animal loots foliated detail of stool lamina … Anne, I vote more cars race Rome to Vienna … Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era? … Are we not pure? “No sir!” Panama’s moody Noriega brags. “It is garbage!” Irony dooms a man; a prisoner up to new era … As I pee, sir, I see Pisa! … Barge in! Relate mere war of 1991 for a were-metal Ernie grab! … Bombard a drab mob… Bush saw Sununu swash sub … Cain: a maniac … Cigar? Toss it in a can. It is so tragic … Daedalus: nine. Peninsula: dead … Dammit, I’m mad! … Delia saw I was ailed … Denim axes examined … Dennis and Edna sinned … Depardieu, go razz a rogue I draped … Desserts, I stressed! .. Did I draw Della too tall, Edward? I did? .. Do good? I? No! Evil anon I deliver. I maim nine more hero-men in Saginaw, sanitary sword a-tuck, Carol, I — lo! — rack, cut a drowsy rat in Aswan. I gas nine more hero-men in Miami. Reviled, I (Nona) live on. I do, O God! … Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard … Drat Saddam, a mad dastard! … Draw, O coward! … Draw pupil’s lip upward … Ed, I saw Harpo Marx ram Oprah W. aside … Eva, can I stab bats in a cave? .. Evil did I dwell; lewd I did live … Gateman sees name, garageman sees name tag … Go hang a salami; I’m a lasagna hog … Goldenrod-adorned log … Golf? No sir, prefer prison-flog … Harass sensuousness, Sarah … I roamed under it as a tired, nude Maori … Laminated E.T. animal … Lepers repel … Let O’Hara gain an inn in a Niagara hotel … Live not on evil … Lived on Decaf; faced no Devil … Lonely Tylenol … Ma is a nun, as I am … Ma is as selfless as I am … Madam in Eden, I’m Adam … Marge lets Norah see Sharon’s telegram … May a moody baby doom a yam … Meet animals; laminate ’em … Mr. Owl ate my metal worm … Murder for a jar of red rum … Never odd or even … No, Mel Gibson is a casino’s big lemon … No cab, no tuna nut on bacon … No lemon, no melon … No sir — away! A papaya war is on … On a clover, if alive, erupts a vast, pure evil; a fire volcano … Party boobytrap … Poor Dan is in a droop … Reviled did I live, said I, as evil I did deliver … Rise to vote, sir … Saw tide rose? So red it was … Senile felines … So many dynamos! .. Some men interpret nine memos … Stab nail at ill Italian bats … Stack cats … Stella won no wallets … Step on no pets … Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots! … Straw? No, too stupid a fad; I put soot on warts … T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I’d assign it a name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot-toilet … Tarzan raised Desi Arnaz’ rat … Ten animals I slam in a net … Too bad I hid a boot … Was it a car or a cat I saw? … Wonder if Sununu’s fired now … Won’t I panic in a pit now? … Won’t lovers revolt now? … Yo, banana boy! … Yo, Bob! Mug o’ gumbo, boy! … Yo, bottoms up! (U.S. motto, boy.) As some have noted, a popular entertainer has the last name Palin. She has a blog, Welcome To The PalinDrome: Sarah Palin’s Blog. The last post was October 2, 2008. We don’t want to Harass Sarah. We got tired of her a while back, just like this story about palindromes is getting tiresome. HT for the Barry Duncan story goes to the non reversible Andrew Sullivan. Pictures for this story are from The Library of Congress. This is a repost
Page Fifty Two
As citizens of facebook nation know, it is International Book Week. There is a ritual for observation of this event. “It’s international book week. The rules: grab the closest book to you, turn to page 52, post the 5th sentence as your status. Don’t mention the title. Copy the rules as part of your status.”
PG had been resisting. For one thing, text from dead tree books cannot be copypasted. Posting the fifth sentence would involve typing the words by hand, which is too much work.
And so it is thursday morning of IBW, and 144 fbf have posted the meme. PG looks to his right, and sees no books in the first glance. A turn to the left shows a map book. The meme doesn’t say what kind of book, or how you can determine the fifth sentence of a diagram of residential roads, interstate highways, railroads, and industrial areas. Still, the post for today is on. Most people skip ahead to the pictures anyway. These pictures were not altered. L5P is on page 59.
One thing about map books is a refusal to use conventional page numbering. This is not a romance novel, nor is it going to change your life. The goal of a map book is to help you find your destination, and make money for the map book printer. (There are stories of map publishers inventing roads as a way of protecting their copyright.) This book is the 6th edition of Metro Atlanta, Georgia. It is printed by ADC maps. Their slogan is “The map people”. That inspires appalling visuals involving halloween parties, and the dragon con parade.
Some say that map books are obsolete. To hear these digital fascists, GPS and google have rendered dead tree street guides useless. Such words are heresy to those who have found their way with maps for years. There is a page to page flow with a book that is not available on the tiny backlit screen. You don’t have to plug in a book. If you are stuck in a car with nothing else to read, you can peruse a map, and always make a discovery.
To determine page 52, PG counted the pages by hand. The odds are on top, the evens on the bottom, just like in real life. The magic sheet is page 788. By amazing coincidence, PG lives on sheet 787. He is abundantly familiar with the contents of page 787. What is even more fun is the top of pp. 787-788 being roughly 144 yards north of where PG is typing this feature. While it is not sitting on top of the world, the top of the page can be a lively place.
The NW corner of page 788 is 33°52′30″N 84°18′45″W. This is a wooded area, owned by DeKalb County. The map shows it to be part of Peachtree DeKalb Airport. The woods used to be a part of the airport. There are abandoned light poles, and a section of red clay bulldozed into flatland submission.
This area is fun to look at on maps, because there usually a mistake. Edition 6 is no different. There is a small park, with a former little league ballpark, on Georgian Drive. The map shows this park going all the way to Tobey Road. In reality there is a strip of condos on Tobey, at the Clairmont conjunction. Before the condos were there, a used car lot was on the corner. Next to the used car lot was a house, with a goat in the back yard. The goat would chew kudzu leaves, and leave green stained vines behind.
The SE corner of page 788 is 33°48′45″N 84°15′00″W This is just a whit outside I285, a bit south of the Stone Mountain Freeway. There is a fine view of the highrises downtown on that part of the perimeter. Yes, this is OTP. The NE corner is somebody’s back yard on Henderson Mill Road, just next to I285.
The SW corner is Toco Hill shopping center. This was built in the black and white television era. It is the home of the Department of Labor. Many people have done time in that space. Here is the story of the name. “. It seems like a man was in Brazil, doing construction projects during World War Two. He had a housekeeper, who was a Brazilian Indian. Whenever he would put in a bid on a job, the housekeeper would say “toco”. It seems that toco is a Brazilian Indian word for “more luck than you can imagine.”
The 52 page bit was a bit of work, but easy to figure out. How do you determine the fifth sentence of a page from a map book? The page has letters on the top, and numbers running down the side. The idea is that you look up something in the index, and it gives you a pair of coordinates. An example is “Hardee Ave. W 788 A1 DC. That translates into page 788, coordinates A1, in Dekalb County. This is a lovely little road, with no side streets, that goes up a hill behind the airport. On the north side is the County Health Department. On the south side lie the remains of a neighborhood. It was bought out, and eliminated, due to airport noise.
The best way to determine the fifth sentence is to look for the E5 section of page 788. Technically that is fifth squared. In a biography of W.C. Fields, the fifth sentence of any page is likely to involve a fifth of whiskey. It will probably be empty.
The E5 section of page 788 is the setting of Lakeside HS. PG had a curious relationship with this facility, having gone to neighboring Cross Keys. At the time, Lakeside had the best football team in the state, and Cross Keys one of the worst. It didn’t help that the PG family went to Briarcliff Baptist Church, which was a hotbed of Lakeside attendees. In another bit of mapbook synchronicity, it seems that Briarcliff Baptist is on the right edge of page 787, which makes it due south of the house of PG.
Page 788 is a splendid little chunk of America. Between A1, and K10, dwell two interstate highways, Peachtree DeKalb Airport, Northlake Mall, and the Cecil B. Day campus of Mercer University. The latter facility is located on Mercer University Drive, which yields a terrific set of initials. Across from the mall is the transmitter tower for a 50,000 watt clear channel radio station, whose signal used to seep into neighborhood pay phones. When Simon and Garfunkel went looking for America, they could have gone to the fifty second page, the fifth sentence, of the sixth edition, of ADC (The map people) and their guide to Metro Atlanta Georgia.
Pictures today are by Chamblee54. This was written like David Foster Wallace
Rattled
PG was riding his bike one day, and found a trash pile. Being a certified member of the DeKalb Dumpster Divers, this was an opportunity. There was a collection of paperback books. The one on top had a comment on the cover… “Debra Galant does for the Mcmansions of New Jersey what Carl Hiassen did for the swamps of Florida.” You can even pronounce her last name.
Rattled is not a true story. You don’t go into court, without a lawyer, and get serious charges dismissed just by telling the truth. Especially not when the lies were told on national TV. But this is truthiness culture, where it doesn’t matter what really happened, as long as we are entertained. The spell check suggestions for truthiness are earthiness, mouthiness, and trashiness.
The acknowledgements page is usually skipped over. There are rumors of the CIA sending coded messages on this page. In Rattled, we find this on page vii: “Special thanks go to herpetologist Robert Zappalorti, who actually showed me a live timber rattlesnake and provoked it to rattle…”
Heather Peters is a tacky housewife. Her husband, Kevin, is a lawyer. He probably won’t make partner in his firm, at which point he can’t afford Heather. They are looking for a paradise in the woods, and think they found it. It is a monument to bad taste, in somewhere called Hebron Township, New Jersey. The book says this is Burlington County, and google says it is Essex County.
Two key characters are introduced early. Heather goes into the general store, where sushi has replaced fishing worms. Some old coot is sitting on a bench in front. Heather asks him for directions, and he spits tobacco juice at her. The designer footwear is not the only thing Harlan White misses.
As they are leaving the site of the new palace, some old hippie lady is leading a parade of animals across the route 381. Kevin is dreaming of a sexual reward for buying a big house, and almost runs over a duck. Clytemnestra is the favorite domestic animal of Agnes, who curses the SUV.
According to Google, NJ route 381 is between Princeton and New York City. This is the other end of the state from Burlington County. There is also Avenue New Jersey, 381, Complexo Industrial, Arujá – São Paulo, 07400-000, Brazil.
The fun starts when Harlan White is hired by Heather as a handyman. They are on the back patio when a timber rattler appears. Harlan knows snakes, and tries to get Heather to be calm. Of course, she screams bloody murder. The snake starts to rattle. Harlan throws a Ming Vase at the snake, and finishes it off with a croquet mallet.
The housing project, officially known as Galapagos Estates, was built in a wooded area that timber rattlers enjoy. The developer, Jack Barstad, got a crooked herpetologist to contribute to an enviornmental impact statement. The statement said there were no endangered species on the land. This is just one of the things Jack Barstad will have to answer for on judgement day, which might be shortly after his wife finds out about the multiple infidelities. The spell check suggestion for Barstad is Bastard. This anagram might be the origin of the name.
Agnes is a big shot at the Rolling Hills Nature Center. They have implanted tracking devices in the rattlesnakes. Agnes follows the beeping to the Peters house, and the party starts to swing. Before the night is over, both Kevin and Heather are in jail.
The fun continues for 243 pages. There are a few flaws. The girlfriend of Jack Barstad who goes to a wildlife society meeting, gets Harlan White in trouble, and disappears. Mr. Barstad hires a new companion, who plays a key role in the *climax* of the story.
PG is not an english teacher, just a slack blogger who enjoys a good story. Rattled was easy to read, and a lot of fun. The players may be cartoon characters, but they are familiar to observers of modern life. In the end, love, justice, and rehabilitation conquer all.
The book before this was Catch 22. It is praised as a classic, and does have it’s value. The problem is, sometimes the literary wonderfulness can be intimidating. PG just wants something to look at while he is eating at the pizza buffet.
Rattled,was good, dirty fun. It has a plot, and an assortment of characters. A few of the sex scenes are explicit enough to make D.H. Lawrence look like a wooden horse. It is mostly white, and any gay actors are invisibly in the closet.
Like the broadband bard said: Me? I’m a different kind of smart: I’m like an idiot savant… minus the savant part. . . Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. This was written like Chuck Palahniuk.
Fifty Shades Of Mauve
PG has a FBF that we will call Deutsch. He recently moved to Ohio to do graduate school. This is the opposite of the normal pattern, whereby people from Ohio move to Georgia. Something about trying to get to Florida, and running out of gas halfway through.
Deutsch has been keeping up on facebook. He wrote “I think I have a mullet now. I don’t know how to feel.” Somebody added “It makes me look just like a cow. Or a pig that needs to squeal.”
Apparently, Deutsch knows someone who reads Cosmopolitan. There was a post, 17 Shades of Stupid: Cosmo’s Worst BDSM Tips. There is no hint of a memorial to Helen Gurley Brown here. PG skimmed over this list.
9 – “Out at dinner, massage him over his pants — stop when he becomes hard. You want him to squirm throughout the meal like a two-year-old who needs to pee.”
13 – “Lie across an ottoman, and tell him, ‘Professor Wankerton, I’ve been bad and need a spanking.'”
15 – “Instruct him to wrap your chest and torso in plastic wrap and touch you through it — the muted sensation feels amazeballs.”
When you googlize the phrase “cosmopolitan bdsm,” the results are painful. Cosmopolitan.uk reports “Cupid.com have surveyed 2,000 dating Brits and found couples are not quite as prudish and ‘vanilla’ in the bedroom as we first thought thanks to the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon.”
A blog chimes in, Cosmo Has Some Terrible 50 Shades Of Grey Inspired BDSM Tips For You To Try. “What happens when the towering work of literature that is 50 Shades Of Grey collides with the erotic genius of Cosmo? A list of sex tips that would make Christian Grey jizz all over himself! I mean, assuming he likes ice cubes on his dick or eating food off his lady. Because all editions of Cosmo must contain at least one reference to each of those things. It’s in the bylaws.”
The Cosmonut Strikes Back (Emma Goldman’s materialistic lovechild) is a blog with a cool template, which PG might want to use at Chamblee54. (The template would reduce the picture width by 80 pixels. It is not going to happen.) The article about Cosmo was not very good.
The last thing published there is My beer is taunting me. “I bought myself a sixer of Magic Hat No. 9 yesterday, and I discovered that the bottlecaps include little phrases on them. My first one said “You need to write more” The second said “Heed the Spirit. If You can Hear It” The third said “Don’t hex what’s best” My personal favorite read “You were expecting something funny?” No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t even expecting my beer to tell me to write more. Which I’m doing, obviously.”
Another blog chiming in is Evil Slutopia: Home of the evil slut clique. “After years and years of boring repetetive sex tips and describing the “tie your man’s wrists with a silk scarf” trick as the most outrageous, naughtiest sex act ever, Cosmopolitan magazine has decided to endorse bondage… sort of. Yes, the April 2011 issue of Cosmo actually has the words “KINKY SEX” on its cover!”
This trendy sadism is usually blamed on Fifty Shades of Grey. It turns out that FSOG is sort of a publishing phenomenon. It was an internet “fanfic” that went intensely commercial. Obsidian Wings has a three part series about FSOG. Publishing may never be the same. (Spell check suggestions for FSOG: FOG, FROG, FLOG, SOGGY)
So, we need to consider the book before this post goes on too much more. PG has not read it, and there is little chance that he will. The next quote is part of a one star review at amazon. It seems like the author likes repetition.
*UPDATE*: Thanks to the many other perturbed readers who have shared their own choices of the most annoyingly overused phrases in this masterpiece. Following up on their suggestions with my ever-useful Kindle search function, I have discovered that Ana says “Jeez” 81 times and “oh my” 72 times. She “blushes” or “flushes” 125 times, including 13 that are “scarlet,” 6 that are “crimson,” and one that is “stars and stripes red.” (I can’t even imagine.) Ana “peeks up” at Christian 13 times, and there are 9 references to Christian’s “hooded eyes,” 7 to his “long index finger,” and 25 to how “hot” he is (including four recurrences of the epic declarative sentence “He’s so freaking hot.”). Christian’s “mouth presses into a hard line” 10 times. Characters “murmur” 199 times, “mutter” 49 times, and “whisper” 195 times (doesn’t anyone just talk?), “clamber” on/in/out of things 21 times, and “smirk” 34 times. Christian and Ana also “gasp” 46 times and experience 18 “breath hitches,” suggesting a need for prompt intervention by paramedics. Finally, in a remarkable bit of symmetry, our hero and heroine exchange 124 “grins” and 124 “frowns”… which, by the way, seems an awful lot of frowning for a woman who experiences “intense,” “body-shattering,” “delicious,” “violent,” “all-consuming,” “turbulent,” “agonizing” and “exhausting” orgasms on just about every page.
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.
Chamblee54 
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