No way I would write a whole play for one pic.

No way I would write a whole play for one pic.

A One Act Icelandic Play called “Arnika”

[Arnika and Ligisnurd sitting on a dock of the bay, whittling whalebone.]

Arnika
Do you hear that foghorn?

Ligisnurd
No.

Arnika
What are you? Deaf?

Ligisnurd
Now I hear it.

Arnika
What happened between us? You don’t love me anymore.

Ligisnurd
I do. I was just distracted by the foghorn.

Arnika
Which you didn’t hear.

Ligisnurd
You always bring this up. I never loved her.

Arnika
Right.

[A bunch of people enter carrying foul smelling fish carcasses in a net.]

Ligisnurd
You probably think I was after your sister, but I wasn’t.

Arnika
Just because this whole place stinks of foul fish.

Ligisnurd
Stinks? I like the smell.

Arnika
I knew it.

Ligisnurd
Knew what?

Arnika
You always liked her best.

Ligisnurd
We have to talk. We have to talk about so many things.

[Men enter to chop the heads off the fish..]

Arnika
Talk about what? My uncle sexually abused me and you saw and went to scandinavian playwright school instead. My mother became a prostitute in Paris and sent home flowers. My father had three hundred mistresses and never smiled once in his life. How do these things happen? You’re my brother Ligisnurd. Explain it to me.

Ligisnurd
I guess we have to have sex to fix everything. This is Iceland, after all.

Arnika
You got that right, bro.

[Fishermen sweep the offal off into the sea.]

Arnika and Ligisnurd embrace and have lots of sex. Close curtain.

imageThe bay. Where they would have lived happily ever after except for being doomed Scandinavians.


Yeah. Sitting on the dock of the bay. we all do it.

Strawberry shortcake.

Strawberry shortcake.

Thing is, I couldn’t find a birthday candle in the kitchen. There were these green things that look like fuses but I didn’t want to blow up her cake. So I put a flag in it and rewrote Irving Berlin.

God bless Patricia
Wife that I love
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night
With the light from above.

From the Greyhounds
To the marshlands
To the seashore
Her Jersey home.

God bless Patricia
My home sweet home.

What could I do. She didn’t want me to get her a gift, not even my best offer:

1500 horsepower. 0-60 in 2.3 seconds. She said, "Don't do the usual man thing, get me what YOU want." Nothing will do.

1500 horsepower. 0-60 in 2.3 seconds. She said, “Don’t do the usual man thing and get me what YOU want.” Nothing will do. If you can’t find a loving card, the hell with it.

The Last Lap


Mopar, Bausch & Lomb, me, what could be more right? Not Polish though.

Been having some intense conversations with my wife and close friends. They agree it’s my fault I’m not better known. I should be a self-promoter. I should play better with others. (One guy left because he thought I was using him, like artists don’t do whatever they have to to get their art across.)

And they always somehow assumed that people would see, meaning they had no responsibility to say, “Hey! Look at this guy. He’s the best that ever was.” So they never did.

Even though I’ve changed countless lives with what I wrote. That was assumed, accepted, as if it was a private service I was offering.

It’s not. I write because I can’t not write. Doing it since I was a teenager. Don’t promote myself because I was never good at it. Doesn’t mean I don’t need money. Never passed the hat as a blogger. Did you notice? No. But I have just a few more years to put my writings in hard copy. So that they don’t die after I do. I’m very very lucky. My literary heroes died in their forties. I’m in my early sixties. But please try to start thinking about buying the books my wife and I will be producing.

You can start by buying The Boomer Bible and The Indictment: An Obama Diary, both available at Amazon.com. The Lounge Conversations will be available soon.

Thank you.

Who else makes their state flag into a helmet?

Who else makes their state flag into a helmet?

So we were watching Rutgers playing Maryland, two last ditch teams trying to salvage some dignity and momentum from disastrous football seasons, and given that, the conversation wandered. I asked my wife how it is I know what seems to be the state anthem when I couldn’t hum even the tune of any other state anthem. We played a chaste choral version of it on YouTube, and she gave me my answer. The melody is the same as Tanenbaum, the German Christmas song, which we mostly know as O Christmas Tree. Case closed.

Except on the YouTube sidebar I saw this, which purported to be Maryland, My Maryland. It really isn’t, but also might really be. A video poem of gray times our kids are trying to recast in pure black and white, where black is white and white is black, with the new black wholly evil. T’was never so. T’will never be. Maryland, my Maryland.

image

I never experience it in person. Only on Drudge. Kind of like a New York taxi ride. Lots of crazy scary stuff whirling around, but nothing to worry your little head about. I’m a WASP. Used to paying full ticket retail for everything.

Sing along you clownish fools…

Lyrics

Smarty Dawkins met the Yahweh
Yeah he tried to set him straight
Looked him in the eye, and claimed a better way.

Smarty Dawkins on a mountain
High above the ignorant lot
Wrote about the loft of logic
Why he was smarter by a lot

All you foolish stupid dumb ones
All you people who misspell tweets
I am Dawkins, best of smart ones
Gonna bring you to your knees

No one ever spoke to Newton
They just admired his brain instead
Working on his love of God through science

Only Jesus saw it coming
forty days of wilderness
Took his sons and daughters with him
Yeah, they were those he chose to bless

All you foolish stupid dumb ones
All you people who misspell tweets
I am Dawkins, best of smart ones
Gonna bring you to your knees

Holy Father, what’s the matter
Where have all your children gone
Sitting in the dark, living all by themselves
You don’t have to hide anymore

All you zombies show your faces
All you people in the street
All you sittin’ in high places
The pieces gonna fall on you

image

All you Dawkins show your faces
All you people in the street
All you sittin’ in high places
It’s all gonna fall on you.

There are 3300 drawings in Shuteye Town 1999. Here are five of them.

There are 3300 drawings in Shuteye Town 1999. Here are five of them.


I’ve got better versions of all of these available. But these are the ones that hang in the upstairs hall, which constitutes my lame little art gallery.

Why am I showing you? Money, Gus. I’ve got 3300 of’em. Mounted in floating glass frames, they’re guaranteed to stop visitors in their tracks, including nubile young things (if I even still knew the meaning of the words nubile and young.) But here’s the proposition. You can go to my old blog site Deerhound Diary, page and page and page (and page and page) until you find something sufficiently outlandish, obscene, or ridiculous to suit your no doubt maimed esthetic taste, and then place an order at my FB page for an 8″ X 10″ high quality photo printout. The floating frame is your problem. It’s gonna cost you fifty bucks. Why? Because I don’t care whether you buy or not (don’t tell my wife), and I promise to sign each one on the back and include a red bandanna, courtesy of the Shuteye Train.

Now, the big close. Bad iPhone photos of just four of the images shown up top. The fifth failed to reveal its inner non-blurred beauty to both me and my much better half. She’s blaming the phone. I’m blaming the 130-some years we’ve lived between us.

Once upon a time there was Beavis and Butthead. You probably forgot them. I didn't.

Once upon a time there was Beavis and Butthead. You probably forgot them. I didn’t.

She died, she did. Of an ailment called Shuteye Town. My wife loves  all the dark stuff. I just love naked women. Unless they're dead. Which doesn't explain this picture , unless I I think I actually drew something that provokes an emotion beyond snark.

She died, she did. Of an ailment called Shuteye Town. My wife loves all the dark stuff. I just love naked women. Unless they’re dead. Which doesn’t explain this picture , unless I I think I actually drew something that provokes an emotion beyond snark.

Shuteye Town was full of hip-hop. I could show you more but then I'd have to moe you down, sucka.

Shuteye Town was full of hip-hop. I could show you more but then I’d have to moe you down, sucka.

Where we all be headed, bro. The great "To Be Done" on everybody's bucket list is Mr. D.

Where we all be headed, bro. The great “To Be Done” on everybody’s bucket list is Mr. D.

If you enjoy Dancing with Mr. D, please remember to buy the forthcoming book The Lounge Conversations.

Now ZB

There was this place called Shuteye Town. Thirty eight subway stations, a mall with a bookstore and electronic gadgets and CDs and videos. It was 1999 and Bill Clinton was still in office. Shuteye Town had its own twin towers. Before 9/11.

You see, I started to write a bible for the X, Y, Millennial generation kids I’d been encountering. Having done The Boomer Bible for my own generation — some 300,000 words worth — I felt a kind of obligation to do something commensurate for the kids.

So, the Zeezer Bible weighed in at 11,000 words. Hmmm. It was complete. It did the task I’d set for it. But it seemed kind of, you know, puny. So I started doodling with the drawing function in the app formerly known as Word 97. I built the whole modern world around The Zeezer Bible and made the search for its various “books” a treasure hunt. I got completely carried away.

Now, my lovely wife has extracted the first of probably many books from this terrible, awful, revolting, hilarious place. It’s coming soon. Called The Lounge Conversations. She’s finalized content, designed the front and back covers, and I finally participated by reading the text. It’s all as pertinent to Now as if I’d written it yesterday, but I was smarter then than now, so I can attest to the fact that it’s fifteen years old. And gleaming like a newborn colt.

We can publish the Zeezer Bible separately, right now, which I’d do in a heartbeat, but my wife says no. She wants you to pay for the privilege of buying a baker’s dozen of them and putting them personally in the hands of kids you know — especially if they go to Yale, Princeton, Amherst and — and what’s that other place, honey? — yeah. Missouri. Is that a college or a state, sweetheart? No. I don’t know either. Let the customers decide.

Now 2

Thunderbolt

Thunderbolt

According to the New York Times, U.S. Warplanes upset some ISIS folks the other day.

ISTANBUL — Intensifying pressure on the Islamic State, United States warplanes for the first time attacked hundreds of trucks on Monday that the extremist group has been using to smuggle the crude oil it has been producing in Syria, American officials said.

According to an initial assessment, 116 trucks were destroyed in the attack, which took place near Deir al-Zour, an area in eastern Syria that is controlled by the Islamic State.

The airstrikes were carried out by four A-10 attack planes and two AC-130 gunships based in Turkey.

Plans for the strike were developed well before the terrorist attacks in and around Paris on Friday, officials familiar with the operation said, part of a broader operation to disrupt the ability of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, to generate revenue to support its military operations and govern its territory.

Thunderbolts. Hellfire up close and personal. My dad was haunted by the fact that his own WWII Thunderbolt strafed trucks so close to the ground that he could see the faces of the men he killed. The A-10 is the same kind of plane. Not a high wire act but a ground hugging murderous machine. Even its shadow is a menace.

P-47 Thunderbolt

P-47 Thunderbolt

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r9qcWljsT7s

Didn’t even occur to me until I saw this Geico commercial. Why can’t Peter Pan ever be played by a boy? Old as I am, I grew up with Mary Martin in the title role. Had a deck of .45s with her singing. And make no mistake, she could sing her ass off.

Then came Sandy Duncan. Why was she Peter Pan, other than being the most flat-chested woman in history.

But here’s the deal. Boys can be Peter Pan. Most of them are. Never ever ever grow up. And they can sing like nobody. There’s a word for what boys can do with their voices. Descant. Women cannot even approach it. No matter how flat chested they are.

So we need a private space to heal in. It’s called Everyland. And Alwaysland. Because we have, will, and forever rule. Boys that we be.

She was cute. Just not a boy.

She was cute. Just not a boy.

P.S. And my wife insisted I include this one too.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?sns=em&v=gcrw5sRgxzE

Michael LeJeune

Michael LeJeune

Steven Crowder posted An Open Letter to Liberals on the subject of Islam. Funny and serious too. But for the first time in a long time I’m moved to republish a comment from that thread. By the man in the picture.

Islam: A Synopsis

A brief explanation of Islam for the uninitiated:

Islam is not a religion nor is it a cult. It is a complete system. Islam has religious, legal, political, economic and military components. The religious component is a beard for all the other components.

Islamization occurs when there are sufficient Muslims in a country to agitate for their so-called ‘religious rights.’

When politically correct and culturally diverse societies agree to ‘the reasonable’ Muslim demands for their ‘religious rights,’ they also get the other components under the table. Here’s how it works (percentages source, CIA: The World Fact Book (2007)).

As long as the Muslim population remains around 1% of any given country they will be regarded as a peace-loving minority and not as a threat to anyone. In fact, they may be featured in articles and films, stereotyped for their colorful uniqueness:

United States — Muslim 1.0%
Australia — Muslim 1.5%
Canada — Muslim 1.9%
China — Muslim 1%-2%
Italy — Muslim 1.5%
Norway — Muslim 1.8%

At 2% and 3% they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups with major recruiting from the jails and among street gangs:

Denmark — Muslim 2%
Germany — Muslim 3.7%
United Kingdom — Muslim 2.7%
Spain — Muslim 4%
Thailand — Muslim 4.6%

From 5% on they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population.

They will push for the introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature it on their shelves — along with threats for failure to comply. (United States).

France — Muslim 8%
Philippines — Muslim 5%
Sweden — Muslim 5%
Switzerland — Muslim 4.3%
The Netherlands — Muslim 5.5%
Trinidad &Tobago — Muslim 5.8%

At this point, they will work to get the ruling government to allow them to rule themselves under Sharia, the Islamic Law. The ultimate goal of Islam is not to convert the world but to establish Sharia law over the entire world.

When Muslims reach 10% of the population, they will increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions (Paris — car-burnings). Any non-Muslim action that offends Islam will result in uprisings and threats (Amsterdam — Mohammed cartoons).

Guyana — Muslim 10%
India — Muslim 13.4%
Israel — Muslim 16%
Kenya — Muslim 10%
Russia — Muslim 10-15%

After reaching 20% expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad militia formations, sporadic killings and church and synagogue burning:

Ethiopia — Muslim 32.8%

At 40% you will find widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks and ongoing militia warfare:

Bosnia — Muslim 40%
Chad — Muslim 53.1%
Lebanon — Muslim 59.7%

From 60% you may expect unfettered persecution of non-believers and other religions, sporadic ethnic cleansing (genocide), use of Sharia Law as a weapon and Jizya, the tax placed on infidels:
Albania — Muslim 70%
Malaysia — Muslim 60.4%
Qatar — Muslim 77.5%
Sudan — Muslim 70%

After 80% expect State run ethnic cleansing and genocide:

Bangladesh — Muslim 83%
Egypt — Muslim 90%
Gaza — Muslim 98.7%
Indonesia — Muslim 86.1%
Iran — Muslim 98%
Iraq — Muslim 97%
Jordan — Muslim 92%
Morocco — Muslim 98.7%
Pakistan — Muslim 97%
Palestine — Muslim 99%
Syria — Muslim 90%
Tajikistan — Muslim 90%
Turkey — Muslim 99.8%
United Arab Emirates — Muslim 96%
100% will usher in the peace of ‘Dar-es-Salaam’ — the Islamic House of Peace — there’s supposed to be peace because everybody is a Muslim:

Afghanistan — Muslim 100%
Saudi Arabia — Muslim 100%
Somalia — Muslim 100%
Yemen — Muslim 99.9%

Of course, that’s not the case. To satisfy their blood lust, Muslims then start killing each other for a variety of reasons.

‘Before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world and all of us against the infidel. — Leon Uris, ‘The Haj’

It is good to remember that in many, many countries, such as France, the Muslim populations are centered around ghettos based on their ethnicity. Muslims do not integrate into the community at large. Therefore, they exercise more power than their national average would indicate.

Adapted from Dr. Peter Hammond’s book: Slavery, Terrorism & Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat .

She did a photo shoot. Already you know it’s going to be not safe for work.

Isn't she right about that?

Isn’t she right about that?

What’s the word they use for it these days? Muffin, Tuffin, Somefin’? You’ve been warned, mind. NOT SAFE FOR WORK.

Women think they have everything going for them. Not quite true.

Women think they have everything going for them. Not quite true.

Thing they overlook. Camel toe.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HGWzD86eKos

Well, actually, they all do. They just don’t all have to show them all the time.

Oops. She has openly confessed to having a vagina.

Oops. She has openly confessed to having a vagina.

Why censor the nipples and not the tuffin? She has a particularly cute one. But I’m too old to care.

And just because I can't help myself, my favorite video...

And just because I can’t help myself, my favorite video…

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lpkiIaFv5As

Okay. So Dylan Moran is head and shoulders above Jerry Seinfeld. What else is new? My wife is chortling right now.

Big thing is, she concedes some stand ups are funny.

Win/win for me. Right?

Of course he's Irish. But he's also a genius. Seinfeld is merely talented.

Of course he’s Irish. But he’s also a genius. Seinfeld is merely talented.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NS2waCMeokE

My wife insists Jerry Seinfeld is not funny. She’s one stubborn Irish broad.

An act with nothing blue. But not funny. According to my Irish wife.

An act with nothing blue. But not funny. According to my Irish wife.

She likes George Carlin. Guess who’s in the intro to the video above. But let’s be fair. She hasn’t even had her second cup of coffee.

image

Watching CSI New York late at night. Huge mystery in Central Park. Sorry. The biggest and best big city park is Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. Way, way beyond New York in beauty and mystery. Take a look. (On all of these, click for spectacular.)

Fairmount Park.

Oh well. New York is always hoist by its own petard. Always boasting, always a bust. Take a look at what New York can’t do.

image

image

image

image

image

image

He said he loved me.

He said he loved me.

Saw him in the backyard and then, without transition as these things go, in the back hall. He came to me and I was terrified. Stood up right next to me, close, close. Purring. I put my arm around his neck. His teeth were huge. His muscles rippled under my arm. I held my breath.

And then I seemed to feel familiarity. He was mine. We knew each other. I’d always known him. “Love you,” I said. And he answered in a cat voice. “Love you too. All the others killed me.”

Knew he wouldn’t hurt me. But he could and would hurt anybody else. What to do? Close to panic. And then I woke up.

It seems less than the dream experience to play this, but it’s the best I can do.

Made me think. Maybe house cats are the next step up from stone killers on the Savannah. Maybe Elliott and I have met before.

Or not.

Numb3rs

A charming, highly intelligent, and intensely annoying TV series available on Netflix if you get it. A discrepant but not dysfunctional family consisting of a ferocious FBI agent, his genuine math prodigy brother, and a widowered dad who was once a sixties radical with a checkered past. It’s cops and robbers, but the prodigy, Charlie, is the secret weapon who uses the most exotic math possible to find the bad guys. He’s a much honored professor at a fictionalized stand-in for CalTech. But he likes the move from abstraction to saving people’s lives with the FBI. They explain and beautifully CGI the math involved.

And they all have issues. Also, a complementary math prodigy is Charlie’s long long love interest. They try to date, go out to dinner, and discover what they have in common is only math. Lo and behold, eventually, it’s enough. The annoyance factor is dad, Judd Hirsch, who is still, deep down, a sixties radical, even though Number One son is hardcore FBI and Number Two Son, for whom he’s sacrificed everything, is also increasingly FBI.

And there’s a beautifully witty performance by Peter McNichol as a way out there physicist who is struggling with quantum reality and the meaning of life. At times he lives in a Buddhist monastery, the steam tunnels under the university, and the garage of the brothers. And he has a delightfully unlikely love affair with an FBI analyst played by Diane Farr.

Pretty sure you’d all love it. And the Chinese food and pizza. In boxes.

And for more about math…

Book of Ka

Ask Helkenberg. He knows what I’m talking about.

The Great Ka's. "Through the blue where bloom the stars and the mother moon looks down..."

The Great Ka’s. “Through the blue where bloom the stars and the mother moon looks down, We’ll away to land of…”

You see, in my fictional world, music is also numbers…

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uSR5A–rSOs

…and cosmology…

…and the journey to to the origins of the universe.

Which is right here.

Images, numbers, words, and divinity.

Behold the Raptor.

Behold the Raptor.

The real mathematics of the universe. Shammadamma.

He’s always been a dullard wannabe Kennedy trying to parlay St. Paul’s School and a lucky admission to Yale with indifferent SATs to a career in the new McGovernized Democratic Party. Hence his sterling testimony to the Congress after his highly debatable Vietnam military experience.

http://youtu.be/ucY7JOfg6G4

You don’t have to listen to the whole video. Just enough to hear his ridiculous Kennedyesque accent. Odd that he can’t achieve the same verisimilitude with French, which he claims to know. He sounds like a high school student who got a D in French. Saw the same level of performance at a high school Honor Society ceremony giving ribbons to kids who had to read haltingly from phonetic scripts.

Seel Voo Play.

Dunce. Phony. Botulin face. Here’s what I wrote him back in 2004

Did he become more at home in America after he achieved celebrity by smearing his fellow troops in testimony before the U.S. Congress? Or was the big change accomplished by his marriage to a $300 million fortune? Or by his remarriage to the multi-lingual foreign born heiress of a $1 billion American manufacturing fortune? At exactly what point did he descend out of the Alps to mind-meld with us “working families”? What are we supposed to make of it all?

One possible interpretation of such a background is that John Kerry grew quite naturally into a sense of citizenship in the high civilization of the Old World, which consisted of the advanced European nations plus the northeastern intelligentsia of the United States, and came to believe that there was both a privilege and a responsibility of leadership by such elites over the benighted lesser folk outside his ken. During the period of the Cold War, this kind of self definition would pose little or no conflict of interest. While Europe’s interests coincided with America’s, he would encounter no crippling need to choose between them.

But the world changed after the Cold War and again after September 9/11. The unavoidable truth is that if Kerry’s real affinity is for the post-modern European sensibility rather than America’s heartland sensibility, he is in profoundly important ways no longer a completely trustworthy patriot, but a man of divided loyalties. That is in itself no crime, but it is an unacceptable state of mind in an American president leading his people in a war for survival.

Je suis ne Jude pas. Mais un duc. Vive la Danse Aristocratique.

Je ne suis pas Jude. Mais un duc. Vive la Danse Aristocratique. Cum harpsichord

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QheJWiUAgSo

At a loss for words. Oy vay.

Nordstrom Withdraws Hannukah Sweater

While Target is holding fast with its decision to market a controversial Christmas sweater, Nordstrom has buckled under the weight of social media criticism, pulling a potentially offensive Hanukkah version from its ugly holiday sweater lineup.

The festive blue women’s sweater by Faux Real features a large menorah and the words “Chai Maintenance” across the chest. The Hebrew word for life, chai is pronounced “high.” The characterization unleashed a flood of negative comments on Nordstrom’s Facebook page.

“I’m very disturbed by this sweater and the negative stereotype of Jewish women,” said one poster, calling it anti-Semitic.

Another expressed disappointment that Nordstrom would sell such a “degrading” item that makes fun of Jewish women.

Excuse me? In my lifetime of experience, Jewish women are proud of being “high maintenance.”

When did absolutely everybody lose their sense of humor? I think the sweater is cute. Thinking of getting one for my Catholic wife. She still knows how to laugh.

image

Don’t be any more of a putz than you can help. Get one for the JAP in your life.

Got it all here, don’t we? White girl with no panties singing the N-word as if she were making a point of freedom. American Flag, Hendrix chords from the national anthem, white boys on guitar as if Caucasians ever knew anything about music.

Cool, cool, cool. Need a safe place yet? Wait till you hear the original studio version.

Things evolve. So Patti became old hat and Courtney Love’s band Hole had to make the world safe for slutitude.

Paving the way for Amy Weinstein who had to die for the iconicism of the New Woman.

As opposed to when she wasn’t so moribund.

Amy died. And lo and behold, Gaga. Who isn’t exactly alive but a fair facsimile of Madonna, who is also not alive but very very rich.

Funny is funny. Women are funny. Whatever they say they want, what they really want, regardless of age or time or era or livelihood, is Mick Jagger.

Shidooby.

Believe me. Wish I could giver her a Binkie.

Believe me. Wish I could give her a Binkie.

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