American Fez

Chez Cannibal

Reading an article about genetically modified foodstuffs, my mind wanders to the meaty subject, literally, of cloning cuts of beef, chicken, lamb, and pork. 

Personally, I would much prefer to order my coq au vin knowing the protein portion was grown in a lab, rather than being dimly aware it was previously a living thing that spent its entire miserable existence in a cage.

Bring on the cloned meat, I say, and may the DNA tinkerers make it as juicy and as succulent and as guilt-free as possible. The only drawback, of course, is that the hubristic science won't stop there; and neither will the gastronome's desire for something special. 

Without a doubt, a some point in our dystopian future, the private dining rooms of the most exclusive restaurants will be serving cloned human meat to an ultra-rich clientele of ghoulish gourmands. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if hot plates of human meat were not already staples of cold-blooded kitchens in more debauched cities of the world.

That's bad enough. But just imagine the grim theme restaurants there will be:

"Hi. Welcome to The Morgueasboard. My name is Burke and I'll be your grave-robber today. Have you dined with us before? No, well, I'll just a take a few minutes to go over the torso with you .... "  

Hippocratic Nope

My old doctor was the sort of bushy-bearded, no-nonsense, antediluvian eccentric whose picture would not look out of place adorning the heavily curlicued label on a bottle of Victorian liver tonic.

"You drink alcohol?" he might say. "Well, for Heaven's sake at least drink strong ale, vintage port or single malt."

"You smoke? Well, there's nothing really wrong with the occasional Cuban every now and again."

"What's wrong with you now? A nasty cough? Don't bother me with such trivialities. Buy yourself a packet of lozenges. If you're still coughing in a fortnight go to the Emergency Room."

Alas, the dear fellow is retired now, replaced by Nurse Ratchet's nephew and his computerized diagnoses.

Honestly, these days, I'd prefer traipsing into the woods to see the wise woman who lives under an oak tree and drink her elixir of berries and twigs than visit a sterile clinic for a prescription of little pink pills.

Straight From The Tap

One of the great disappointments of the dictionary is discovering that our word "bath" is not derived from the story of David and Bathsheba.

Aside from fancy scented bubbles and a cute loofah, the notion that merely dipping her toe into a clawfoot tub might be the prelude to a sorry tale of adultery and murder would certainly add a certain frisson to any young woman's daily ablutions.

'Don't forget to wash behind your ears, and be careful that no Biblical Kings are observing you from a place of seclusion while you scrub your lower back."

Men meanwhile, especially those named David, would be required to remove themselves to a reasonable distance when a female enters the bathroom, just so they are not tempted by the sight of fancy scented bubbles sliding across a well-turned ankle.

If all the above precautions were taken, then men named Uriah could breathe easily. 

But as it is, our word bath actually just has some boring Germanic root, which is no fun at all.

Content Is KIng

To whom it may concern,

Although I shall persevere with this blog, fruitless and absurd though such efforts are, I have spent the last week creating yet another blog elsewhere. 

Hosted by New England's internationally ignored Catawampus Museum of Art, my new blog will be a repository of my willfully misjudged art criticism. Incorrect information about four paintings has already been uploaded for your eyebrow-raising perusal.

http://catawampusartmuseum.blogspot.com/

Catawampus has the advantage of being a word that not only means 'askew' but also sounds like one of those old western Massachusetts towns named after an Indian tribe. My hope is yo update the museum's collection of criticism at least once a week, which is roughly the same regularity with which I will continue to add to the nonsense appearing here.

Yours in blogdom, etc.

Slim Pickings

Nobody called Slim lives around here. This isn't a Slim town. Somebody called Slim just wouldn't fit in; same as an Atahualpa or a Nebuchadnezzar wouldn't. We did have a Jeremiah once but he didn't last long. 

There is a Montezuma's Cafe on Main Street, but it's not named after the owner. His name is Hank. Montezuma's is nominally a Mexican restaurant but folks only go there for the bacon-cheese burgers. I often look around the tables at Montezuma's and think there are guys in here who secretly wish they were called Slim, but they're too embarrassed to take the name on with all that it implies. 

Take Bubba, for instance, sitting over there by the cactus. Shirt barely covering his belly, ass always bulging out of his pants, legs the size of tree trunks and six chins, meat grease dribbling down all six of them. Your typical Bubba. But inside this Bubba is a Slim screaming to get out.

I've seen him slip those Raybans on when he thinks he's alone. I've seen him attempting to saunter instead of waddle when he thinks no-one is watching. It's excruciating theater. But at least he makes the effort, even if it is hopeless. 

I guess we're all a bunch of dreamers in this town, truth be told. We may not have any dreaming spires, exactly, but there is an impressive marble obelisk in the park -- although nobody knows what it commemorates because the inscription is on the base and we can't bend down that far anymore.

Jury Duty

Consider the juvenile delinquent. Let ye who hath never repeatedly kicked a vending machine in frustration be the first to declare him "guilty" of vandalism. Yea, though the delinquent be insolent and slovenly, I don't give a fig for the perimeter fencing at Querulous and Company that he supposedly destroyed. Nor am I convinced that the Querulous and Company premises did not deserve such destruction anyway.

My suggestion that everyone could easily "Skype" into the courtroom the following day when required to provide a verdict, instead of sitting on those uncomfortable benches all day listening to a load of petty legal twaddle, was not received well. The supercilious judicial phrase "found in contempt" was uttered, rather rudely if you ask me.

In desperation, I turned to my fellow jurors: why don't we each contribute a few bucks to get the fence mended? In exchange, Querulous and Company will agree to drop the charges. Then we can wash our hands of this ridiculously trivial case and won't be forced to come back tomorrow to waste more of our valuable time.

Alas, there were no takers. Honestly, what is the world coming to? Sometimes you feel like the only Joseph of Arimathea in a room packed with the Friends of Barabbas.

Marketing and Promotions

I am developing a rollable deodorant that reveals the name and logo of the manufacturer - "Sirocco by Maurice," for example - when applied to a person's armpits.  A sort of billboard under the arms, if you will.

What is the point of such a marketing ploy? Surely the name and logo will be concealed by clothing and the natural position of the deodorant wearer's arms?

Well, I imagine the sort of person who would roll branded deodorant on their underarms is the same sort of person who always wears sleeveless t-shirts and stretches their arms a lot when yawning, which they also do a lot. And there are, I hasten to add, a lot of those sorts of people in the world today. Just look around you. Clearly, the "Sirocco by Maurice" underarm billboard would be seen by millions on a daily basis.

My other idea is a speaking deodorant that announces the name of the brand name of deodorant whenever the wearer begins to perspire. This would be an ersatz sexy voice for women's deodorant: "This lady is wearing Fresh As A Daisy deodorant by Samantha of Bond Street." And a deep, husky voice for men: "This gentleman is wearing Woodsman's Fable deodorant by Hank of Fifth Avenue."

You can roll your eyes now but, trust me, you'll be rolling my speaking deodorant in the very near future.  After all, you won't want friends and colleagues to think the deathly silence emanating from your armpits means you aren't wearing any ...

Neptune's Vacuum Cleaner

Much as admire the swimming pool paintings of David Hockney, I feel he never quite captured the rippled reality of underwater vacuum cleaners. Mind you, I suppose rendering the daily maintenance of aquatic luxuries on canvas was not really what the Yorkshire master was going for. One imagines such an exacting artistic pursuit would give even Leonardo the benz. Nevertheless, although no great draughtsman, I myslef have given it a shot.

Eat your heart out Canaletto. I don't expect to receive any commissions from wealthy aesthetes in Beverly Hills, obviously, but perhaps there is a potential patron somewhere in Florida or South Carolina? I don't work weekends, FYI.

Dried Fruit And Your Soul

Everything happens for a Raisin. Focus on this eternal truth and one day you might achieve Sultana.

Vikings consulted their prunestones; Gypsies have their mysterious currant cards; the ancient Chinese believed the prophecies of the I Fig and the ancient Greeks threw themselves on the mercy of the three white-robed Dates.

But following the Raisin is the only true path to Sultana, all others lead to a state of crystallised banana. And you don't want that.

For Want Of A Better Word

I usually enjoy the convoluted, labyrinthine sentences readers are forced to navigate when they, for want of a better word, 'peruse'  literary works from previous centuries. Sentences in such books often continue for nine or ten lines, even the length of a modern paragraph.

Harrison Ainsworth, writer of, for want of a better phrase, historical derring-do, published a novel of long sentences about the Tower of London in 1840. It's the sort of highfalutin nonsense I thought I might like, but I can't get beyond the first few gilt-edged pages.

I don't know what, for want of a better sentence, you'd call the book reading equivalent of having eyes bigger than your stomach, but I certainly have potboiler indigestion after my Harrison Ainsworth experience. 

Nevertheless, for want of a better paragraph, I hope the short, boring sentences of modern novels suffer a similar fate. Humanity is truly doomed if people are still reading the withered and eroded prose of contemporary fiction in one hundred years time. 

Articles of Faith

God is in the details, they preach to me. But I'm an atheist.

And being an atheist, I simply ignore any important information vouchsafed to me from Heaven: these details can't be right, I conclude, a holy light seems to be shining from within them.

Such willful disbelief rarely ever works out for me. I guess it's a variety of hubris and consequently punished by whichever God made the effort. I think it's usually Ganesha, the elephant in the room, so to speak.

For instance, I'm not really sure whether I should've added the an before atheist in the first line of this post, or whether I should've just written atheist without the addition of an.

Considering the subject, you would think that's the kind of grammatical detail wherein you'd find a God; or a least some sort of deity might appear to me in a sentence about Damascus. 

But I only ever find a cold, implacable void in the details. 

Weather Man

I recently purchased an extra-sturdy, reinforced umbrella to replace those flimsy umbrellas of mine demolished by last month's high winds and heavy rains. 

When fully open, the umbrella's mechanism reminds me of a robotic armature from some dystopian sci-fi film. I would not be surprised to learn that the canopy is not only rain resistant but also bulletproof. Perhaps the ferrule is even poison tipped?

Alas, this extra-sturdy, reinforced umbrella is so heavy that my arm aches whenever I hold it over my head. The umbrella's form might follow function but its weight most definitely does not. Frankly, I'd rather be windswept and soaked to the skin than incapacitated by muscle spasms. Mary Poppins would be permanently grounded. 

The answer is one of those full-body rain suits modeled after the latest in toxic waste clean-up fashion. I'm just afraid a sudden gust would inflate such an outfit, lifting me skywards and away over the houses like an untethered balloon.

That would be okay as long as I was buffeted in the general direction I was traveling. I might even get there sooner. Something to think about in these wet and windy times.

The Concrete Closet

I've lived in Boston for a long time now. Walking out into the city feels like getting dressed in the same old everyday clothes I always wear; its neighborhoods fit me just right in all the important places and the color of the sidewalk complements my complexion. The buildings aren't too boxy in the shoulders and most of the streets are a fun paisley pattern rather than that tedious windowpane check you find in Manhattan. Sure, parts of the city might be more ring-around-the-collar than Emerald Necklace, but that's what you'd expect after so much daily wear and tear.

As for Boston's shoes, the apotheosis of any outfit, this was a penny loafer town back in the day. Some pennies were even shinier than the shoes they adorned. I used to think most of the wealth of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was strolling around Beacon Hill stuck on people's feet. Of course, it's all bedraggled chukka boots and filthy flip-flops now, just like everywhere else. Disposable footwear for disposable times. 

These idle thoughts were inspired by my fruitless quest to find a Back Bay cobbler. There are tailors and seamstresses in every corner of the city but no cobblers I could find. You can get a pair of old-fashioned pleated, baggy pants cut and sewn into pencil thin, slim-fit trousers anywhere, but it's impossible to get a pair of Oxblood Oxfords resoled downtown. You might just as throw yourself upon the charity of fairy-tale cobbling elves.

I searched in all the places you would normally look: in the empty mezzanine lobby of the Park Plaza Hotel; down the sunless side street where the watch repair guy used to be; along all the subterranean walkways beneath Park Street; opposite the men's bathrooms behind the Panda Express at the food court; on the second floor above the dry cleaners in the alley adjacent to the parking garage; in the weird alcove beside the elevator and under the escalators at Copley Place. You name the nook or cranny and I looked there but found no cobbler. 

The crossing-sweeper, the lamplighter, and now the cobbler: all traders that have disappeared from the high street. I suppose I could run into Marshalls or DSW and buy a brand new pair of similar shoes, but how long before these stores also relinquish their brick and mortar identities for the more profitable guise of online retailing? And my profession also seems to be following them into extinction, arm in arm with the man in the sandwich shop whose business relies on my custom every lunchtime. 

We will be replaced by Capital One 360 "banking cafes," no doubt, and whatever other unholy hybrids the financial sector breeds. Then walking out into the city will no longer feel like getting dressed in the same old everyday clothes I always wear; it will be like being forced into spandex pants and a hairshirt with a dayglo dunce's cap completing the outfit. God knows what shoes will be on my feet. Some sort of inflatable plastic sneakers I should imagine. Whatever, I hope to be living full time in Hawaii long before that happens.

Winter, We Hardly Knew Ye

As Winter coughs up its last spiteful gobbets of unpleasant weather, daffodils are already extending their bulbous yellow heads above the flowerbed parapets.

William Wordsworth would call them "a host," but they're more like an unruly mob. If plants could carry flaming torches, then I'm sure they'd chase the monster Jack Frost out of the garden, rather than let him leave peacefully at his appointed time.

I'm not one to talk to flowers like experts say you should. I imagine they'd be brazenly conceited and pompous conversationalists, talking about themselves the whole time, never letting their interlocutor get a word in edgewise.

Evergreens in the garden must view the blooming of daffodils in Spring much as a black sheep views the visit of an especially obsequious gamboling lamb.

So come back frozen gray earth and brown sticks, all is forgiven? Not a chance. I'd much rather spend time with Spring's vainglorious popinjay than that unfriendly, miserable old curmudgeon called Winter.

Sound And Fury Signifying Nothing

Listening to a 78RPM recording of some pre-war thespian — I use the word advisedly — reading passages from The Aeneid, I was struck, and not for the first time, by the appalling quality of early twentieth-century acting. 

Those formidable yet tremulous tones, somewhat sing-songy, full of foreboding and dark portents even when reciting the most sentimental of love lyrics or pronouncing Old Mother Hubbard's cupboard to be bare. One can easily imagine that "bare" being rendered as three syllables, each with its own vocal curlicue.

More of an incantation than a speaking voice, this style of acting renders all dialogue as a series of rhetorical questions rather than conversation. It's as if they were perpetually auditioning for the role of the Ghost of Hamlet's Father, even the actresses.

After five minutes of such declamatory melodrama, the weary ear longs for the aggrieved mumble of Sylvester Stallone or the clipped monotony of contemporary British performance.

"I sing of arms and of a man ..." Fine, but don't sing about them like you're in Sarah Bernhardt's shower rhapsodising upon the perfection of your own navel to the last loofah sponge in the world. The muse doesn't tolerate that sort of theatrical hubris anymore.

The Homeric Metabolism

In the guise of 'Dr Homer,' antiquity's greatest authority on weight-loss, I am creating my own specialised diet.

It's a combination of the Mediterranean diet and the Paleo diet, so I'm calling it the 'Trojan Diet' as the menu consists of only those foodstuffs eaten by Achilles in his tent outside the gates of Troy.

I'm not entirely sure what these would have been, so I'm going with olive oil (obviously), fish (no-brainer), ritually slaughtered meats (naturally), and a variety of salad and cheeses. Dieters will also be allowed one slice of chocolate cake per week (Trojan horse).

I also recommend that thirty figs be consumed with each meal, which will be known as "The Fare That Launched A Thousand Shits." 

Step By Step; Line By Line

I cannot read a book while walking along the street. Admittedly, I've never tried, but this lack of application is not the sole reason why the perambulatory consumption of literature is not listed as a skill on my curriculum vitae. 

I tend to prefer to look where I'm going, for one thing. Finishing that last paragraph I was reading on the bus is not as important to me as avoiding striding headlong into a lamppost. No pulp thriller or sci-fi novel, no matter how plot driven it may be, is "unputdownable" when there is the possibility of tripping over a fire hydrant while devouring the cliffhanger ending to chapter twelve. 

Yet, working near a college campus, I constantly observe students lost in a book while walking along the street. I see them reading while crossing a busy road and I even see them reading while navigating their bicycles through heavy traffic -- look, professor, no hands!

The pedestrians are usually young women with Emily Dickinson hair, thrift store skirts, and Celtic Twilight jewelry. The fixed-gear cyclists are disheveled males re-reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods for the umpteenth time.

I admire Neil Gaiman's abundant talent, energy, and enthusiasm, but I've never read any of his novels. Perhaps that's why I don't read while walking along the street: I lack the disheveled, speculative fiction strand of DNA that's apparently so essential to reading in motion?

Never mind. This weekend, while stationary on my sofa, I shall be consulting a collection of George Orwell's essays called Facing Unpleasant Facts. It's about time.  

 

The Polling Season

Today is known as Super Tuesday on the political calendar.

Which means tomorrow will be Incredulous Wednesday, followed by Coming-To-Terms-With-It Thursday, Apathetic Friday, and so on.

Day by day, month by month, the invasive, man-eating species we call Presidential candidates are cultivated with incalculable amounts of financial manure. 

Instead of the sun, their greasy tendrils reach for the spotlight and the camera flash.

It is like a phallus-shaped hothouse where only self-perpetuating Triffids grow.

Or a boundless field commandeered for dubious agricultural experiments. Typical crop rotation: lies, fraud, military spending, kickbacks, etc.

If only there was weed-killer strong enough to destroy them all. 

You Are Here, Possibly

Warned of an approaching blizzard, I make the fundamental error of seeking updates from a live weather map on television.

But there's so much on-screen meteorological data, so many color-coded precipitation charts and animated storm-tracking diagrams, that it's impossible to tell exactly what part of the world the map is supposed to represent.

It could be New England, I guess, if you squint hard enough. Then again, it might also be Tahiti, the Black Forest, or even a live video feed from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover.

Is that really a cold front advancing towards southern Massachusetts, as the weatherman claims, or is he surreptitiously re-using old computer graphics from the typhoon that slammed into Bermuda last week?

The contours of the land mass in question are so obscured by computer generated imagery that it's impossible to tell.

I once accidentally set fire to a fold-up tourist map of San Francisco. Even while still aflame it was easier to read than this live weather map of who knows where.

Split Ends

3006 Freight Street, home of Euro Style Hair Salon, is not the most fashionable of addresses. Indeed, examining the building, a laconic eye would probably conclude the "euro style" referred to is Poland circa 1945. 

The establishment's awning, formerly bright red with white lettering, has faded and weathered into a sort of grimy puce. Its brickwork, a functional arrangement of grey blocks, is defaced by unreadable, monochromatic graffiti. I am always surprised to see an "open" sign on the front door when "condemned" would be more appropriate. The lighting inside is fluorescent green. There is a concrete ashtray beside the entrance that has not been emptied for quite some time.

Who gets their hair cut at Euro Style Hair Salon? I've never seen any customers sitting in the swivel chair while flicking through a dog-eared Vogue magazine. The ramshackle residents of Freight Street look as though they wash their hair once a month at most, lathering up with dish detergent followed by a quick rinse under a lukewarm faucet. There are no elaborate perms or trendy color highlights here.

Nevertheless, glossy advertisements for such haute couture coiffures stare out from the smudgy windows of Euro Style Hair Salon; headshots of glamorous models more suited to the nightclubs of New York and London than the dereliction of 3006 Freight Street. The owner might just as well promote pictures of Carmen Miranda and the Bride of Frankenstein for all the good it'll do his business. 

Euro Style Hair Salon does pedicures, too, apparently. Those must happen in the back room with a view of all the abandoned shopping carts and smashed bottles littering the ground beneath the Eastbound overpass. Imagine getting your toenails painted scarlet while staring at all that broken glass and rusting metal. But then I doubt anyone does. 

TMI February

February: the constipated month, stuck between December's festive diarrhea and the regular bowel movements of early Spring. A time to sit patiently on life's cold toilet seat while the new year finds its rhythm. 

If you think that's disgusting, remember the name February is derived from the Latin februum, meaning purification, so analogies to the expulsion of waste matter from the body are appropriate, even exact. 

We should be grateful for the invention of indoor plumbing; the installation of privies within the home and the demolition of their antecedents at the bottom of the garden. After all, it is my belief that the myth of the werewolf is derived from peasants witnessing their neighbors straining at stool in February's freezing moonlight. 

Fortunately, March approacheth, notoriously "windy" though it may be, and relief is at hand as we rip another sheet from the roll of calendar paper.

A Tale of Two AJs

I haven't read any AJ Liebling, although he's been among my top five "must get around to reading" authors since college.

Somehow his books never reach the top of the pile, pipped to a place on my bedside table by competing authors whose works capture my attention at the eleventh hour, and it's always the eleventh hour, apparently, when I'm considering reading AJ Liebling. 

Just about any other author can trump AJ Liebling. James Pope-Hennessy, Sainte-Beuve, Fernando Pessoa, Stella Gibbons, that guy who wrote the illustrated guide to starting your own hand-tool based woodshop. Even DH Lawrence. 

I have looked at a different AJ's books - AJ Ayer - but I found that experience soporific. I don't think my tyrannized brain slogged past the first few paragraphs without rebelling into dormancy and profound torpor.

AJ Ayer's friends called him 'Freddie,' which is like calling Beelzebub 'Bubby,' if you ask me. 

But I have a new AJ Liebling paperback in my hands now, a collection of essays with the winningly advantageous title Just Enough Liebling. Maybe, just maybe, just enough Liebling will be the right amount of AJ to finally shut out the other contenders.

Update: I'm reading Edward Hoagland instead

1984's Technology Is Still Watching You

In a forgotten room of an abandoned building, a long dead security guard is still at his post. 

His skeletal remains slowly collapse into the swivel chair where he sat each night drinking lukewarm coffee while observing the outside via an electronic eye.

But the monitor in front of him has been blank for many years. 

Ragged strips of blue uniform still cling to his crumbling bones. His peaked cap, always too big, has now toppled off skull, falling upturned onto the floor where it catches raindrops from the leaking roof.

Yet amongst all this disintegration and decay, somehow a long, bony finger still hovers over the record-button of a cobwebbed VCR

Videotape! Get with the program, suerveillance state. Big Brother should surely be recording his security camera footage as high-resolution digital files these days.

Rachmaninoff and Me

There was a time when I thought Rachmaninoff was an extra long, brown, and very thin European cigarette purchased by the carton from the Duty-Free shop at Schipol airport. 

Later, I discovered Rachmaninoff was actually tinny music emanating from an ancient portable radio-cassette machine in the local Russian Tea Room; a plinkety-plonk piano mocking me as I tried to figure out what to do with the dollop of jam I'd been served with my samovar. 

On Friday evenings, there were Tea Room Concerts: a square-shouldered, square-foreheaded bald man with a nose like an eagle's beak slaved away at a Bontempi keyboard. He never looked happy. Vocalise arranged for synthesised organ sound and samba drum rhythm was a particular favorite of the blue-rinsed hair crowd. It was their Brown Eyed Girl

"Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto number 3 in D-minor, opus thirty," said the man on the radio. "Daniel Batonwaver conducting the Chintz Youth Orchestra featuring soloist Anastasia Hamfisterova."

It was very quiet in the onion-domed church. You could hear my paperback copy of Pnin drop. "Sorry about that," I said to the man in the next pew. "They told me I'd be here all night so I brought along something to read. I must have dozed off." 

"That's highly unorthodox," he replied. 

The Face of Age (Monday)

The Face of Age has the pallor of Frankenstein's monster and the hairstyle of the Invisible Man.

It has Gothic graveyard teeth and Count Dracula's lips. Its hirsute ears are ersatz werewolf and its nose is the shape and texture of The Blob.

The Face of Age greets the new day like a vampire at sunrise. It staggers out into the world, arms outstretched like The Mummy in search of a secret lost in the sands of time. 

And its eyes are the terrified eyes of a horror film audience, peering at the flickering screen through trembling fingers.

The Face of Age is an X-rated B-movie and the picture quality is poor. I think my copy is on VHS.

At The Flea Market

Genuine vintage toilet for sale. Mid-century modern. Bauhaus lines. Seat is not original but it's a top quality reproduction. Flush still works. The U-bend shows some signs of wear but that's only to be expected. Would be a perfect addition to a Frank Lloyd Wright home or anything by Gropius. Comes with the matching bidet but if you don't mind a dirty bum I can possibly split them up.

Do I hear a thousand bucks? .... Nine hundred bucks?

There's not a scratch on the enamel. This toilet has only been cleaned with organic oils and the softest leather rags. No abrasive liquids or wire scrubbing brushes. Only one previous owner. A fragrant lady of distinction and regular bowel movements. Opportunities do purchase a vintage toilet like this are very, very rare.

Do I hear eight hundred dollars? That's a bargain. I'm giving it away for seven hundred dollars ....

You are looking at one of the finest toilets ever produced. The work of a craftsman. An absolutely exquisite commode. This isn't the sort of average, modern toilet you'd call 'the can.' I don't know what the polite term for the toilet was in Viennese high society during the Secession, but that's what the likes of Gustav Klimt would have called this beauty when he needed to take a crap.

Six hundred dollars, my final offer. Includes the matching bidet and I'll also throw in this CD of Richard Strauss' Thus Spake Zarathustra and Other Favorites. Genuine vintage toilet for sale. Don't make me put it on Craigslist so any old loser with diarrhea can sit his unworthy backside on it. Do I hear five hundred dollars? ....

Anyone? Anyone at all? Any takers? 

Nice Work If You Can Get It

A Danube river tour guide answering questions about Hungarian history in four different languages; a hotel bellhop in Rome reasonably conversant in at least three and various forms of international baggage slang; a Gypsy beggar child in Athens attempting to beguile tourists in English, Spanish, then French and finally German.

Surely they'd be better off applying for simultaneous translation jobs at the United Nations, rather than scrabbling around European cities for minimum wage, gratuities, and loose change.

A young Chinese couple own and operate my local dry cleaner. Times are tough judging by those empty wire hangers swinging on the racks when I open the door from the street. But they're both at the counter from six to six, every day of the week, poring over paving slab-sized medical textbooks, adjusting their spectacles while pointing out important passages to each other. They hold my shirts up to the light as if scrutinizing an X-ray for signs of ketchup stain cancer or spilled gravy disease. They strap my wool overcoat onto a gurney and wheel it away for emergency attention. They do a great job for little reward.

I often think their dry cleaning business must be their idea of a relaxing break between delivering TED talks on obscure bacterial infections. But they live in the poky rooms above the crumbling storefront, so I doubt they lead exciting double lives.

At my work, we're waiting for a client to connect to our conference call. I spend the time writing this; Tim is idly thumbing through his phone; Janice and Pete are discussing Downton Abbey. We could be learning a new language or reading an educational textbook. We could be improving ourselves, but we're not. We're just wasting valuable time before the client tells us they're going with a different vendor on this one.

Still, our standard of living is good. I can afford to get my clothes dry cleaned, Tim is wearing a Versace t-shirt, Janice is off to Mexico next week and Pete just came back from the Bahamas. Nice work if you can get it.

What Makes Tomorrow's Homes So Indifferent, So Unappealing?

The technological singularity, of course, will not be when artificial intelligence advances beyond human understanding and control, but when it slumps into laziness and apathy. Imagine, if you will, an army of robotic Bartleby the Scriveners bleeping their disinterestedness. 

Moody, lethargic machines are fairly common in comedic science-fiction, yet you never hear technocrats or futurists bemoaning the possibility of such an unproductive development. They are possessed with a sort of myopic, self-abusive optimism. Even the prospect of human enslavement by Nazi androids seems to fill them with a sense of masturbatory awe. Every cloud has a silver metallic, self-programmable lining in their virtual Erewhon. They cannot imagine the ironic wrench thrown into their hubristic works.

Personally, I have no doubt that cybernauts wearing virtual reality goggles will actually daydream about being somewhere else, or that our domestic automatons will spit oil in our soup. I'm already pretty certain that my smartphone is prank calling me. 

Feels Good When It Stops

Our company builds custom brick walls against which you may bang your head. And we're not just the builders, we are also the clients.

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Always Underachieving

A bruise blackened toenail emerges from tepid water sloshing around an old, rusted tin bathtub. I think it belongs to the mailman, lazily soaking his swollen feet instead of delivering letters that contain important and time sensitive information.

Two frightened eyes stare out of a mud-packed face. The cucumber slices covering her eyes fell off and slid down her cheeks like big green tears. It's the woman from the American Airlines check-in desk. No wonder your flight is delayed.

Buttocks quiver above a plastic chair, concerned there is no cushion to ease the impact of painful hemorrhoids meeting polyurethane. This is the backside of the person who answers the phone at Customer Care, except there's no answer because this person is on a perpetual bathroom break, re-applying ointments and balms.

It's impossible to get anything done today.

Motivational Indigestion

'When you devour the flesh of another animal,' said Roland the Shamanic Chef from the stage. 'You assume the power of that animal.' He glanced around the auditorium, allowing the implications of this extraordinary claim a chance to simmer in the minds of his audience. 

'I now have the power of a chicken,' they all thought. 

The sceptical among them, however, wondered if a small blob of chicken salad from the lunch buffet really counted as the flesh of another animal. After all, the copious amounts of mayonnaise involved must surely hinder the power transference process?

And what of those diners in Paris currently consuming the power of frogs' legs? Would such pirated dynamism gain them anything beyond the ability to hop a mere yard or two along the Champs Élysées, if that?

And what about the powers ingested by eating oxtail soup, eel pie, goat's head stew, Portuguese sardines in tomato ketchup? So many questions.

But Roland was on the move again: striding to center stage where the ersatz kitchen counter was. 'So for the afternoon session,' he announced. 'I'm going to show you how to cook a side of bison. Now this recipe will make a meal for four, so all the family gets some of that famous bovine power of belligerence because we all need to become a little more assertive in our everyday lives.'

'Shut up and give me my money back you two-bit excuse for a snake oil salesman!' shouted a heckler in row F, standing up and shaking his fist at Roland as those in his immediate vicinity turned around to stare at him.

'Sorry. I ate the last of the prairie oysters,' the heckler explained, rubbing his stomach before sitting down again.

The Commercial Fringe

The shopping mall massage chair business is a hard-earned dollar. All you can do is offer a brief in-situ experience, as nobody actually wants to install one permanently in their home. After all, the average massage chair is about the same size as a double bed. Then where you put your ninety-inch 4K television?

And, although there is no shortage of sweat-panted, food-court fattened shoppers who might enjoy nothing more than wallowing, hippo-like, in the leathery, undulating comfort of such mechanical furniture, the bargain hunting masses rarely trudge through the neglected mezzanines where massage chair floor models languish.

I only came across the examples pictured below when lost in the catacombs of Level 2A, wandering past the shoe repair station and the lost property kiosk, searching for the bathrooms at the end of a dimly-lit corridor.

These enormous receptacles for aching bones had been dumped in the walkway and left to peddle their own orthopedic benefits. No human salesman was present, but the insertion of a dollar bill in the armrest slot bought a minute of lower back pain relief if you were so inclined.

Does anybody ever have a go on these? I asked the equally idle shoe repair guy.

He wrinkled his nose and shook his head. Folk just come here to take a piss and then leave, he said. That's the only foot traffic we get. Sometimes you'll get a couple having an argument over in the corner, but mostly it's just piss and leave. 

I thought it would be polite to ask him how his business was doing, despite my better judgement and overwhelming urge to join the ranks of the piss and leave people. He shrugged. Been better, been worse.

I didn't ask him what could be worse than a day with zero sales spent watching people walk in and out of the bathrooms. Perhaps no longer being needed at all, like the guy who used to cajole people into trying the massage chairs but was replaced by an automated payment machine.

Farewell 2015, We Hardly Knew Ye.

The Old Year shuffles towards its place of execution: a two-sided scaffold where Olde Father Time waits for the chimes of midnight with his gleaming scythe.

A drunken crowd has gathered: Champagne Charlies and Charlottes wearing spangled party hats, draped in colorful streamers, chewing the plastic mouthpieces of silent, broken noisemakers, occasionally casting a bleary eye at the clock.

Meanwhile, in another time zone, it's still afternoon and Uncle Janus can't remember which of his two faces should be facing forward when he exhales January winds into his part of the world

And the New Year itself? A pink, puffy child screaming on the threshold of a door marked 2016. I hope you know how to change a diaper, dear reader, because there's going to be a lot of crap coming.

Getting Figgy With It

I was not serenaded with the final verses of "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" until I was in my college; my younger self being spared the tiresome demands for figgy pudding and a cup of cheer that conclude the song in question.

As far as I was concerned, carol singers congregated around our family doorstep solely to convey glad tidings to me and my kin. All they wanted in return were a few measly coins to rattle in their collecting tin (no doubt the money would fund the purchase of a more energy efficient lantern for next year). A brisk exchange of seasonal greetings for my father's cash would bring the performance to an abrupt conclusion, its premature termination apparently a satisfactory outcome for all concerned

So when I did eventually hear those final verses, while trapped in the audience at a college glee club recital one bleak December night before Christmas break, my older, slightly louche self misheard the lyrics...

"Bring us some frickin' pudding! Oh bring us some frickin' pudding!"

I thought the mild profanity was all part of the act. In fact, this gluttonously aggressive chant was the only part of the evening I found remotely entertaining (or musical, for that matter). I even considered joining the glee club if singers were permitted to curse with such joyful abandon. It was not to be, of course.

Figgy pudding? How absolutely disgusting. I can't imagine anything less appetizing. Some traditions should really remain buried in the past.

Meanwhile, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Glad tidings I bring to you and your kin (and you don't have to give me any money or clumps of appalling dessert in a disposal bowl, either). 

Christmas Conscientious Objector

There is a War on Christmas in my place of work each December, and the open plan design of our offices is ideal for fighting this war on many fronts at once. 

We are a mixed bag of believers, non-believers, don't knows, don't cares, two Jews, a Muslim, and a Wiccan Priestess who is on a part time contract, so the battles rage unabated all through Advent.

When to put the decorations up, what decoration are permitted, where the decorations are allowed to be, and when the decorations should be taken down: all fodder for the blazing cannons.

The last week before New Year's, however, is a sort of Treaty of Versailles: an unsatisfactory and merely temporary peace, ultimately resulting in nothing but rapid inflation of pique and a powder keg of resentment.

Hostilities resume when the combatants return to work in the first week of January and Frank the militant atheist from Sales occupies the water cooler with his booming blitzkrieg voice. "We shall fight in the cubicles," says Joan, the born-again Christian from HR. "We shall fight n the loading zones. We shall fight in the hallway and the lobby. We shall never surrender."

Which probably means she's going to hang that horrendous "musical" Holy Family mobile in the canteen again next year, despite the fact that Frank continually tries to destroy it with his squadron of flicked elastic bands.

Personally, I am tired of being deafened by the conflict and wish to declare my ears a No Fly Zone next year.

Apostatizing In A Winter Wonderland

You can be sure there is a War on Christmas when young lovers frolicking in the snow refrain from naming their snowmen 'Parson Brown.'

Alas, almost all snowmen built these days are exclusively secular. Any couple wishing to be married by an anthropomorphic snow creation today would invent a 'Justice of the Peace Brown,' no doubt wearing a Harry Potter baseball cap and a gender neutral scarf.

Parson Brown has become a figure from an ancient, musty and best-forgotten past; as foreign as an Eleusinian Hierophant; as alien as Almondine, the triple-breasted Nougat priestess from the Planet Marzipan (from where it takes at least eight million light years to get a marriage license approved anyway).

The only vaguely Christian snowman I'm aware of this year is Father Melti, outside St Igbert's Chapel of the Defrosted Martyr, and his head has already collapsed and unpleasant yellow spots have appeared around his cratered torso.

Yes, the Winter Wonderland of our modern age is a well-populated pagan landscape of carrot-nosed, atheist snow-persons.

So never send to know for whom the sleigh bell rings; it rings for thee, Baby Jesus.

Fetus Creepus

It is hard to hold out much hope for the generously named species of so-called homo-"sapiens." The moment our squidgy ancestors crawled out the sea they slipped on the banana peel of evolution.

Then the first caveman realized his hunting tools could also be employed to kill his fellow and the rot truly began. We were already pretty much post-human pre-Ice Age, if you ask me.

But now come tidings of genetically-modified "designer" babies: the embryo as rich person's plaything. We will truly become a society of sculpted Eloi and a hodge podge of Morlocks.

Of course, some irresponsible, self-aggrandizing pop music superstar will take it all too far. A glittery blue-skinned baby with purple eyes and emerald hair, like an expensive Hermes handbag that can puke and scream.

One can only imagine the hospital sample sales: "Slightly Imperfect Children. Shop Now. Everything Must Go."

Sardine Workshop

Canned sardines: packed tightly together like humans on a subway train (although the little fishes smell much nicer.) 

Salted, slathered with olive oil, sometimes skinless and deboned, like the unfortunate captives of a particularly sadistic Mongol emperor 

Sometimes they are called pilchards, like a drunken literary critic mispronouncing Rosamunde Pilcher's surname in a Bloomsbury pub.

Sardines contain lots of Omegas, just like the attic at Roger Fry's house.

But they don't stretch much, unlike the present blogger trying to make that last comparison. 

So endeth the Sardine Workshop unsuccessfully. Eat your heart out King Oscar.

Nasal Media

Social media is surely the Internet equivalent of picking your nose, and actually interacting with social media is surely the Intenet equivalent of eating it too. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that social media has replaced picking your nose as the world's number one brainless activity. Even being asleep requires more intelligence and discrimination than "liking" a Facebook post.

Once upon a time, dragged daily through the underground vaults of the city by a rattling tram, I often witnessed google-eyed commuters burrowing into their nostrils with wormlike fingers while staring into space. These days, however, those same overworked digits idly massage the screens of Smartphones instead, their owners sniffing and snorting as they briefly acknowledge each Facebook update with a dismissive swipe.

Alas, operating a smartphone at the moment obviously requires both hands: one to securely grip the expensive device and the other to knead, slap and poke its surface. Consequently so much nasal waste remains uncollected now, like bags of slimy garbage abandoned by the train tracks, since former nostril-rummaging fingers are currently otherwise engaged. 

The development of hands-free tech will no doubt provide a solution, enabling Facebookers of the future to merely blink to like their friends' latest Instagrams, leaving all their fingers free to excavate each nostril as they blink again to scroll through even more insipid images.

Such will the walls of the World of Tomorrow be smeared with squillions of both real and 'e' boogers, fresh picked from squillions of real and virtual noses.

Thanksgiving Tips

Before dinner last Thanksgiving, hands clasped and eyes closed, I acknowledged life's great bounty with a solemn prayer of appreciation.

But when I raised my humble head to survey the table, however, I observed all the food had already been devoured by my greedier, less reverent family. The only remains were a small, watery blob of cranberry sauce and the ruins of a turkey, slivers of slimy dark-grey meat clinging to its ravaged bones. There might have been the brown blister of an over-roasted Brussels sprout, also, but most of the spread had been reduced to a depressing landscape of drained tureens and serving platters scraped clean.

Yeah, thanks a lot. 

My uncle Silas slapped his stomach then belched in my face. That's some good eatin', he said to nobody in particular while loosening the adjustable waistband on his comfort-fit chinos. The others, equally bloated and barely conscious, slumped goggle-eyed in their chairs, threatening to topple face forward into pools of congealing gravy.

I don't suppose there's any wine left? I asked an empty bottle of Sauvignon Blanc rolling across the table cloth. Nope. Thought not.

This year, therefore, I'm not giving thanks until after dinner. And I shall be mostly expressing gratitude for my aggressive elbows and that I'm slightly stronger and spritelier than most of my relations. If I'm still awake by then, of course.

A Drinker's Week

The woman at my local liquor store is a cocktail shaker shaped siren on an island of amber colored bottles, but these days I wisely ignore her glug-glug song. 

I used to imbibe a variety of booze most nights of the week: a mellowing glass of Montenegro on Sunday evenings as I contemplated the week ahead; a glass of wine or two on Tuesday to keep my wheels oiled and my mind on track; a few commiserative ales after work on hump day with my colleagues while we criticized and disparaged our clients; followed by black spiced rum at end of day on Friday as I hoisted the Jolly Roger in preparation for the weekend. Saturday night, of course, belonged to mixed drinks in mixed company; then a mellowing glass of Montenegro on Sunday evenings as I contemplated the week ahead, and so on ...

Older now, more susceptible to hangovers and other post-drink impairments, I confine myself to mere edge-removing quantities of red wine or beer.

The problem is: as I age, the daily grind accumulates more and sharper edges: as one edge is obliterated with drink another immediately appears. Consequently, taking the edge off with a glass of cabernet franc becomes a kind of whack-a-mole played with countless refills and top offs. 

Perhaps I should upgrade my per diem intake to a tankard of mead? 

Pshaw In The City

He was called Shaw, although he spelled it Pshaw, like the exclamation of disbelief, but without the exclamation mark, obviously. 

Pshaw claimed the s was silent, naturally, so pronounced his name as "Paw," which could be awkward when he introduced himself to others. "I am poor," he would say, and charitable people would often give him a quarter. 

"I ask no quarter," he would respond to such largesse, which could also be awkward. Fortunately, we do not live in medieval times, or else he might be run through by his interlocutor's sword. 

I do not pretend to be the equal of P. G Wodehouse (pronounced Woodhouse). Indeed, dear old Pelham Grenville forgot more funny names than I will ever know. But I do think Pshaw possesses more comic possibility than Psmith.

To which purists no doubt respond "Pshaw!"

The Devil and All His Cliches

The Devil finds work for idle hands?

I very much doubt it.

I'm no student of the Bible, I'm not even a casual consumer of medieval demonology nor a member of the Satanic book-of-the-month club, but it does seem fairly obvious to me that any Devil worth his pitchfork and cloven hooves would never entrust his important diabolical work to just any old lazybones.  

Those hands are idle, after all. A leopard does not change his spots, especially a lethargic leopard. Even if the Devil does find work for the idle hands, it's highly unlikely the work is actually going to get done.

Why do the Devil's work today when you can put it off until tomorrow, I can hear an owner of idle hands saying. And I should know: it takes one to know one, as they say.

So if the Devil is handing out tasks willy-nilly, I'd bet my immortal soul he's giving them to impatient hands instead.  

Impatient handed people aren't going to merely lounge around daydreaming about accomplishments, or sit cross-legged on the floor meditating on the pros and cons of taking action. No, they simply rush headlong into whatever work there is without thinking of the consequences. Such bundles of misdirected energy are exactly the sort of mindless Type-A personalities the Devil is looking for when he wants his evildoing done.

The Devil will find work for idle hands?

No chance. He doesn't even call them back for a second interview. 

Horizontal Disintegration

Once upon a time, before the digital flood, I was pretty good at doing my job. At least that's what I gathered from the positive performance reviews I received each year. From time to time I'd even get, you know, a pay raise or even a Christmas bonus.

These days, however, grappling with the old-fashioned nitty-gritty of my job is the last thing required of me at the office. Providing solutions is the name of the game now. I need to be part of a problem solving team first and foremost. Although the only real problem we encounter is that our company doesn't make enough money anymore. And we haven't been able to solve that one yet.

So I don't have performance reviews anymore. There's nothing to review. I am just one of three computer monkeys picking data fleas off each other, and nobody can tell whether we're doing it efficiently or not, including ourselves. Hear no productivity, see no productivity, speak no productivity.... Well, that's not exactly true. We actually talk about productivity quite a lot; then we return to our cubicles and completely forget what was discussed.

No review, of course, means no pay raise. Not that there's money to give raises anyway, and not giving reviews is a good way to avoid the awkward subject altogether. Sometimes naive employees do ask about raises, but we tell them to wait until their annual reviews that we know will never happen. Besides, I fully expect us to go bankrupt before the cost of living goes up again.

Schneer Rock News

A guidebook claims Winslow Homer painted every inch of the Cape Ethel landscape except Schneer Rock. Supposedly he set his easel opposite the dramatic blue-black rock only to see the philistine sea breeze fling his paints and brushes into the waves. Whereupon the artist gathered up what was left of his equipment and left Schneer Rock in a huff, never to return.

The guidebook's author advises his readers to do the same. The rock, he writes, resembles a fat swimmer who has waddled into the sea at waist height to take a clandestine pee. It has no geological or aesthetic interest, he adds, unless you happen to be an ornithologist studying seagull crap density. Suffice it to say, I wrote this guidebook and I am still seeking a publisher.

Schneer rock was named after Igbert Schneer, an eighteenth-century blackguard of fearsome reputation. His portrait can be found on page thirteen of a rare book called Infamous Rogues of Bygone Days (Boston, 1912). Reproduced in lurid color, it depicts an aggressively bald colonial-era man with greenish skin and strands of lank, brown hair dripping from the sides of his scalp. The shoulders beneath his cloak appear to be uneven, suggesting a crooked spine, maybe even a withered arm clutching a dagger, or just complete indifference to what the world thought of him. If you ask me, Igbert looks not unlike a hunchbacked toad emerging from the slimy depths of a stagnant pond. But then I am a direct descendent of his and so inclined to charitable opinion. Most people consider him much uglier than that.

Fortunately, my vanity can claim absolutely zero family resemblance. Infamy, roguishness and - praise be! - greenish pallor apparently disappeared from the Schneer gene pool upon Igbert's death. His son, Josiah, was by all accounts a gentleman farmer of conventional aspect and unremarkable habits. Nevertheless, I often study the portrait of Igbert Schneer pondering his repulsive physiognomy and vile personality. Were these biological anomalies confined to Igbert's life alone? Or do such deviant characteristics merely lie dormant in the Schneer bloodline, waiting for a suitable concoction of polluted DNA to congeal?

At these times, like Dr Jekyll clasping an empty test-tube, I stare into the bathroom mirror, scrutinizing my face for telltale signs of an unhealthy greenish glow, wrinkling lips, and the creeping horror of male pattern baldness. But bland, inoffensive features stare back at me. An unkind observer might note the beginnings of a widow's peak and some slight thinning on the crown - average attrition for my age - but no spine chilling hint of jade ears or an emerald nose. Yet paranoia still whispers that perhaps Igbert also looked normal in his early thirties, before deformity and psychosis took possession of his soul. Ample time for my own self to deteriorate beyond the pale. Alas, this printed illustration of an old man in an antiquarian book is the only surviving image of Igbert Schneer, so there is no way of knowing.

Mystery, intrigue, and even innuendo surround the whereabouts of the original oil painting from which the book plate was made. According to family legend, it once hung over the fireplace in the old Schneer homestead. The wretched thing was removed, however, when my great-grandmother complained that its creepy eyes not only followed her around the room but also up the staircase, across the landing, and into her boudoir. They say her husband threw the picture into the sea at Schneer Rock. It sank beneath the waves only to resurface every November 25th, Igbert's birthday, floating along the shoreline at low tide, casting a balefully leering eye upon any local ladies desperate enough to try sunbathing on Schneer Rock's windy, desolate beach. The last recorded sighting was made in 1957 by a Miss Gloria Bolk, although her friend claimed it was merely a dead jellyfish that Gloria saw, and not a haunted canvas emerging from the inky depths.

I interviewed Gloria at the homeless shelter where she now lives - built on the former site of the old Schnrer family homestead - finding the woman to be a very credible witness. Between gulps of peach schnapps, she confirmed the picture of the man she observed in the sea was identical to the one I showed her on page thirteen of Infamous Rogues of Bygone Days, albeit with seaweed and barnacles completely obscuring the subject's face, a condition only to be expected after so long in the water. He had your ears, she told me, except his were shaped more lumps of dead jellyfish.

I mention none of this in my Cape Ethel guidebook, except for a brief paragraph touching on the fact that Schneer Rock's large homeless population are the nation's number one consumers of peach schnapps. I'm saving the story for another book, an extremely slim coffee table-sized volume of old photographs to be titled Igbert Schneer: A Life & After Life In A Picture.

Medical Coverage

The flying doctor in his creaky biplane, goggles on his forehead, untied surgical mask fluttering in the wind.

His flying nurse, strapped to the fuselage with surgical tape, trying to find a vein while balancing between the wings.

The flying second opinion, looping the loop in a second-hand crop duster.

A team of flying consultants, flying in formation, vanish in the Bermuda Triangle, leaving behind them only a collection of mysterious bills.

A flying midwife emerges from the clouds in her skywriting plane: "It's a boy!"

The flying surgeon zooms beneath a bridge in his vintage Wernher von Braun rocket plane, flies sideways through Ribcage Canyon, then executes a roll over the heartland and is gone.

Meanwhile, the flying patient slumps in economy, middle seat.

Spirit of the Place

Just in time for Hallowe'en, I tumble through a hidden trapdoor into gruesome website called DiedInHouse.com

Morbid and paranoid tenants are invited to submit their home addresses to discover whether or not a previous tenant expired on the premises.

Beside satisfying eldritch curiosity, another benefit of the website I thought of was purely economical.

If your house comes up as "corpse positive," just print out the result and display it in your window. Then you won't need to decorate with expensive pumpkins, plastic gravestones, polyester spooks on sticks and other commercially produced Hallowe'en tat.

Visiting children on their Trick or Treat errands will surely be more impressed by proof of actual death rather than tacky, store-bought representations of such.

After all, real, scraped-off-the-mattress American gothic beats mass-produced zombies and a neon skeleton made in China every time.

Gnostic Acrostic

Among the reams of ancient gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi, a fragment of cryptic crossword still baffles scholars. 

7 Down: "Cranky Alexandrian scuppers early boat for deep thinker (6)"

If you ask me, the obvious solution is Origen. How did I arrive at this conclusion? Well, Origen has the right number of letters and a good selection of vowels. Furthermore, there are no other surviving clues to prove me wrong if those answers don't fit. 

This is the approach to scholarship I learnt from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ralph and I call it self reliance. We rule. 

Of course, most academics will dismiss my claims out of hand. I lack the correct credentials, apparently, for solving gnostic acrostics. Nor have I been initiated into the pneumatic mysteries of the Sacred Order of Seventh Book of Puzzles, based on the Gospel of Brainiac the Compiler. 

Professor Ali Baba of the Forty Sheaves Institute of Old Paper even told me to stick to Pythagorean Sudoko. The arrogance of these so-called Biblical scholars is breathtaking. 

Internet Droll

Unlike those infamous Online stalkers who plague the social media sites of fair e-maidens with rude and unsavory comments, I am a kinder, gentler creature dwelling beneath the bridges of the information superhighway. I like to think of myself as an Internet Droll rather than an Internet Troll. 

My contributions to 'the discussion' are generally fanciful, pithy and inoffensive; at worst they are merely facetious. I venture to be witty when I can, although I'm well aware that one person's idea of wit is another person's fatuous remark. To paraphrase Baden-Powell, I hope to leave the Internet a little better than I found it.

Of course, such coolness at the keyboard, such equanimity in the face of complete and utter nonsense, can take St Anthony-ish powers of discipline and self control. The almost Stalinist copy-and-paste screeds of lay science fanatics, for example, are usually especially nonsensical. Hiding behind the clubbable, cosmopolitan figure of Neil deGrasse Tyson - someone they had never heard of until he appeared on television - they repeat reams and reams of facts and figures concerning all manner of subjects they don't actually understand. 

Fortunately, what the Internet giveth the Internet can also demolisheth. I am not a fan of abbreviations, but I really do admire the shorthand notation "TL;DR" (too long, didn't read). Applied as a pithy response to some hulking, smug, waffle-filled paragraph about planetary radiation or quantum mechanics it can be very droll indeed.

Naturally, I invite my fellow Internet Drolls to type it into the comments section below, if you so desire.

Idle Hands

Although eventually deciding against the idea  - the 'nays' always triumph in my world - I had briefly considered rebranding this blog. No longer confronted by the idle thoughts of American Fez, readers would be exposed to the murky wisdom of The Tench instead.

Tench, of course, are freshwater bottom-feeders; poor men's carp. Like all fish, they look as though they'd have a lot to say for themselves if they could speak. Alas, whatever wise words such piscine interlocutors might divulge can be nothing but a muddy secret at the bottom of a stagnant pond. 

Suffice it to say, I could envision this blog as an appropriate interface for the tench's dark watered, sub-lily pad, snail-encrusted musings. But it was not to be. After all, at the end of the day, who gives a damn what this thing is called?