Greetings from Fort Mudge

Mention the Seminole comical strip Pogo to l'homme moyen sensuel and if you get any reaction at all, it'll be "Oh, yeah, 'We have met the enemy and he is us' -- now get the goddamn microphone out of my face, I've got some sensuel to moy."

That catchphrase, which, admittedly, boy cartoonist Walt Kelly milked pretty hard in his sunset years, might be the only thing most people remember about ol' Pogo if they remember anything at all, and that's a damned shame. As a technician, Kelly's contribution to the cartoonist's craft is probably even greater than George Herriman's; Kelly's influence is just howlingly obvious in the way Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes characters moved, and how his strips were laid out -- hell, even in his use of vegetation as a framing device. Pioneering, too, was his characters' proscenium-breaking; when Albert Alligator, lighting his see-gar, reaches out and strikes his match on the panel border, you're seeing a form so confident in its maturity that it can afford to be playful.



Kelly's skill as an artist is unassailable. I mean, look at the detail in this next strip! Individual blades of grass! Wood grain! There's actual wood grain on the tree in the first panel! You know why Watterson hung up his spikes, right? It's because newspapers have shrunk the comic strip down to subatomic size; it's pointless to lavish the kind of attention Kelly gave his creations any more; your readers won't even know...



"You are a YOK!" I mean, what can you say?

It's in the realm of language that Kelly truly shone. His daily strip was a wonderful mangrove of puns and portmanteaux, all delivered in a disarming parody of Southern speech (Kelly was himself from Bridgeport, Connecticut -- not exactly a hotbed of Southern literary tradition), and his poetry and song lyrics were so rich with utterly effortless linguistic play that it's impossible not to nominate him as America's answer to Lewis Carroll.

Take Kelly's famous reworking of the "Deck the Halls" Christmas carol (the other thing l'homme might remember: "Deck us all with Boston Charlie/Walla Walla Wash., an' Kalamazoo...." In the liner notes to Songs of the Pogo, reissued in 2003 on Reaction Records, Mark Burstein places Kelly in the nonsense tradition of Carroll and James Joyce:

This is a poetic form that has come to be known as "Anguish Languish" (an "anguished" English language) and popularized by Howard L. Chace in his book of the same title in 1956. It is the substitution of words which, when read silently make no literal sense, but when read aloud take on the sounds and rhythms of another work. His "Ladle Red Rotten Hut" (Little Red Riding Hood) which starts out "Wants pawn term dare worsted ladle gull..." is a well-known classic of the genre.

I've found a Sunday strip in Ten Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo where Kelly grabs the ball and runs all the way out of the stadium with it:

Howland Owl (the pompous intellectual): I been up all night thinkin'.
Churchy La Femme (the bon vivant and slightly dense, if goodhearted, turtle): Bully for you!
Owl: I've come up with an idea that will ee-clipse every blinding flash of inspired genius what I is ever had.
Churchy: What a coincidence!
Owl: You mean you is had an idea too?
Churchy: Yes yes yes! Like you say... a idea what unclips every blind flask of unspired geraniums what ever I is had.
Owl: I is had a most wonderful idea what will make us millionaires.
Churchy: A miracle! So is I! At the very same time.
Owl: I had mine at a quarter pas' ten.
Churchy: I had mine at ten oh two.
Owl: Mine is got the ingrediments of scintillating scientific achievement inherent in it.
Churchy: Mine is too! It got the ungreedy minks of single-eightin' sinus siftin' an' cheese mints inherited too!
Owl: Mine is the upshot of a college course I took.
Churchy: Mine is shot up from a coarse college too.
Owl: Mine is a triumphant elegant aurora of the intellect.
Churchy: Mine is a trumpetin' elephant all roarin' off the innerlick, too.
Owl: I is jes' had another great idea, a boon to mankind.
Churchy: Me too! I is ready to boom to mankind too.
Owl: Namely: To chunk you overboard (pushes Churchy into the swamp).
Churchy: I thought of it first (grabs Owl by the nose as he falls).
Owl (floating in the water): We shouldn't compete... We should pool our talents...
Churchy: Looks like we already is.

I mean, good god, was there ever a more economical demonstration of the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy? Somewhere in San Francisco, Griffy and Zippy tip their caps and hoist a bottle of Taco Sauce to Kelly's memory...

There was another area in which Kelly was a pioneer: Pogo was the first cartoon character drafted for a presidential election, the 1952 Eisenhower-Stevenson affair. While Kelly managed to make some fairly hilarious hay from the phenomenon, it wasn't until the 1956 replay that he began to cash in on it. In that year, along with Brill Building maven Norman Monath, he released the record album Songs of the Pogo, a collection of settings of his Carroll-esque song lyrics.

Most of these novelty songs don't very well stand the test of time, probably weren't all that great to begin with. But the ones that do, oh man are they great. My own favorite is "Lines Upon a Tranquil Brow," the first six of which are meditative, moody, fretful, all pensive suspended chords and spoken narration -- by Kelly himself:

Have you ever while pond'ring the ways of the morn,
Thought to save just a bit, just a drop in the horn;
To pour in the ev'ning or late afternoon
Or during the night when we're shining the moon?
Have you ever cried out while counting the snow
Or watching the tomtit warble hello....

And then there's a complete break in mood, a drunken bump-and-grind Dixieland band awakes and blatters:

Break out the cigars, this life is for squirrels [fermata]
We're off to the drugstore to whistle at girls?

Mighty hard to argue with, I must say.

American place-names are undeniably poetic. You get yourself a bellyful of Walt Whitman, of Carl Sandburg, of John Steinbeck, of Woodie Guthrie, and you're likely to appreciate a country that can give cities such euphonious names as Kalamazoo, Kankakee, Walla Walla, Waukegan, Waco, Tishimingo, Oswego... Snatch yourself a listen to Tom Waits' "Gun Street Girl" from Rain Dogs and you'll see just how incredibly evocative those place-names can be. Or hell, Chuck Berry...

Well, you've never heard anybody take a swan-dive and wallow in American place-names like you're about to. Walt whipped up a fight song for Pogo's 1956 Presidential bid. Ordinarily you'd expect a fight song to be the sort of thing that large crowds of people can sing together in football stadiums. But since Walt didn't really have that restriction, and because he never did anything halfway, he cooked up this astonishing stew of sheer, tongue-twisting, beautiful, baldfaced nonsense. Lewis Carroll ain't even a patch on this thing. Edward Lear can't even whistle it.

Just listen to this thing. "Wheeling, West Virginia, with everything that's in ya..." It just doesn't get better than this. Lyrics below. Warbled with gusto by Walt Himself...

Go Go Pogo

As Maine go oh so Pogo go Key Largo,
Otsego to Frisco go to Fargo,
Okeefenokee playin' possum on a Pogo
Stick around and see the show go over

Landalive a band o' jive will blow go Pogo
I go you go who go to go Polly voo go,
From Caravan Diego, Waco and Oswego,
Tweedle de he go she go we go me go Pogo.

Atascadero, Wheeler, Barrow,
Someplace in Mexico
Delaware, Ohio, and you don't need the text to go
Wheeling, West Virginia
With ev'rything that's in ya.
Down the line you'll see the shine
From Oregon to Caroline!

Oh, eenie meenie minie Kokomo go Pogo.
Tishimingo, sing those lingo, whistling go.
Shamokin to Hoboken, Chenango to Chicango
It's golly, I go goo goo goin' go go Pogo!

We're not privileged to know where ol' Walt is now, o' course, but let's hope it's somewhere like this:

For Your Weekend Reading Pleasure

A little something to cozy up with next to the fire tonight. For your aperitif, may I suggest a nice glass of Drano...?

Welcome to Doomsday by Bill Moyers

There are times when what we journalists see and intend to write about dispassionately sends a shiver down the spine, shaking us from our neutrality. This has been happening to me frequently of late as one story after another drives home the fact that the delusional is no longer marginal but has come in from the fringe to influence the seats of power. We are witnessing today a coupling of ideology and theology that threatens our ability to meet the growing ecological crisis. Theology asserts propositions that need not be proven true, while ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The combination can make it impossible for a democracy to fashion real-world solutions to otherwise intractable challenges.

Annotated By the Plain People of Ireland

Extracted from Myles na cGopaleen's blog, ca. 1941...

Yes, More of It

What happens to blows at a council meeting?
It looks as if they might be exchanged!
What does pandemonium do?
It breaks loose.
Describe its subsequent dominion.
It reigns.
How are allegations dealt with?
Hotly.
What is the mean temperature of an altercation, therefore?
Heated.
What is the behaviour of a heated altercation?
It follows.
What happens to order?
It is restored.
Alternatively, in what does the meeting break up?
Disorder.
What does the meeting do in disorder?
Breaks up.
In the what direction does the meeting break in disorder?
Up!
In what direction should I shut?
Up!

Faix & Begorrah

Begob, and it's afther bein' a fine day for the Reinforcin' o' the Stereotypes!

Gilliard doesn't quite nail it: St. Patrick's Day is fuckin' amateur hour, and that's what's so disgusting about it. A drinking gentleman can hold his damned liquor or he is quite properly shunned by friend and stranger alike.

However icky it gets out there, let's remember some sage advice for the 364 days every year that are not St. Patrick's Day, from Flann O'Brien, who by all accounts knew what he was talking about.

The Workman's Friend

When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night--
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

When Money's tight and is hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt--
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

When health is bad and your heart feels strange,
And your face is pale and wan,
When doctors say that you need a change,
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN

When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan,
When hunger grows as your meals are rare--
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

In time of trouble and lousy strife,
You have still got a darlint plan,
You still can turn to a brighter life--
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

The Plain People of Ireland want you to go read some more.

Walkabout

On a luscious early spring day recently, Dr. Watson packed along his trusty service revolver and, defying the pain from wounds suffered in the Afghan campaign, accompanied me on a substantial History Hike over Short Hill on Egg Path, down to the site of John Mobberly's house at the other end of that venerable thoroughfare, and back around the end of Short Hill by the old Around the Points Road that connected Lovettsville and Harpers Ferry.

It was about as nice a hike as I've ever had, is all.

Here's the magic-lantern show...

We discovered yet another house-relic, this one about 300 yards from the ruin I found a couple of weeks ago:



Now I understand why you can see Egg Path from so far away after it snows: A Power Line Runs Through It:



Here's where you should just shut up and let the picture speak for itself. Come up and over the top of Short Hill, this is what you see:



Up the valley. That's the Potomac cleaving those hills. Mobberly's house stood somewhere in the lower right quadrant.



Down now in Turneysville, the end of Egg Path. John Mobberly's homestead stood somewhere to the left. The house visible may or may not be the home of Jim Riley, one of Mobberly's henchman. Riley survived the war, escaped prosecution despite the $1000 reward placed on his head during the war, and became the operator of the ferry across the Shenandoah into Harpers Ferry. He lived until 1918.

Shortly before I took this picture, a magnificent red fox zoomed across this view, from right to left. We didn't think he was symbolic at all. Oh, no.



Be a deer and hold my skulls, won't you?



Harpers Ferry. The Tri-State Area. Virginia on the left, West By God Virginia center, Maryland right. John Brown dead center, a-molderin' in the mud.



Finally, a bald eagle's nest overhanging the Potomac bank. Madame Eagle's head is just barely visible. The man of the house had just scarpered magnificently. A national symbol has no need to be photographed, thanks very much.



Up Next on the Mobberly Trail: Who's Your Daddy?

Taking Ball, Going Home

Prolly quixotic as all get-out, prolly asinine for any number of reasons, prolly completely impossible legally... But it has a certain...symmetry...that's impossible to deny given the region's history. And Jesus Christ would it be emotionally satisfying.

Growth Foes Seek to Divide Loudoun in Two

By Michael Laris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Gathered around folding tables in a cramped community center room decorated with a watercolor of an idyllic red barn, three dozen secessionists plotted to cut Loudoun County in two.

There was a Web designer, a software programmer, a geographer, a government investigator, a pet sitter, several local officials and much talk of revolution. Their goal: to form a more perfect county, or at least a less developed one, by breaking away from more suburban Loudoun.

"Just as the Founding Fathers freed themselves from the yoke of the British, this is a similar effort," said Robert W. Lazaro Jr., an aide to county board Chairman Scott K. York (I) and member of the town council in the western Loudoun community of Purcellville. The group met there last week and will do so tonight....

Well, I think to that Web designer, software programmer, geographer, etc., you can add one cranky bulldozer-hatin' blogologist, if he can figure out where this thing is taking place tonight (the WashPost article wasn't very clear).

Aux barricades, mes enfants!

The Secret Life of Machines

Back in the mid-Nineties, I used to block time on the family calendar, ply the kids with Benadryl to knock 'em out, fire up the popcorn maker, unplug the phone, and hunker down in the Jingo Catacombs for the happiest hour of the week: A&E's presentation of The Secret Life of Machines.

I simply couldn't help it, the show hit me right where I'm most vulnerable: Tim Hunkin, this English arty-geek-boy eccentric, narrates amusingly illustrated explications of how common household machines work, how they came to be invented, and the principles of physics they employ.

Try his Secret Life of the Fax Machine; if you're not just 100% beguiled by it, then you and I have nothing further to say. Good day to you, sir. I said, good day.

There's an amusing interview with Hunkin at the B3TA web site.

It's difficult to classify Hunkin as either an artist or a scientist -- his web site announces him as both "engineer" and "cartoonist" -- and this is a great part of his charm. He makes art installations -- full-sized tableaux vivants, working machines, arcade games, interactive exhibits -- that comment very drolly on both science and art, bridging the gap between the two with disarming -- and frequently explosively funny -- humor.

Finally, check out this poster he drew. Way too cool.

Day Off

Taking a day off today to investigate this thing, in the most excellent company of Dr. Watson:



I will report on any findings that arise.

In the meantime, here's what's got my bile duct working overtime this otherwise lovely Monday morning. The country continues to wrestle with an advanced case of The Stupids:

Battle on Teaching Evolution Sharpens (headline links to full story)

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 14, 2005; Page A01

WICHITA – Propelled by a polished strategy crafted by activists on America's political right, a battle is intensifying across the nation over how students are taught about the origins of life. Policymakers in 19 states are weighing proposals that question the science of evolution.

The proposals typically stop short of overturning evolution or introducing biblical accounts. Instead, they are calculated pleas to teach what advocates consider gaps in long-accepted Darwinian theory, with many relying on the idea of intelligent design, which posits the central role of a creator.

If these cretins manage to bludgeon this idiocy into our classrooms, I think it's the duty of the few of us remaining who have two brain cells to rub together, to embark on a work of collaborative Dada art the likes of which the world has never seen: The destruction of the entire Scientific Method, which is, after all, "reality-based" and therefore passé. Warning stickers in textbooks should be piled so thick that the covers no longer close. Gravitation is "only a theory." General Relativity: "only a theory." Disease spread by germs: "only a theory." (Actually, there's a very good case made by St. Augustine that it is in fact demonic possession; let's investigate this further.)

Science class is NOT A DEMOCRACY. (Yes. I'm yelling. Tough shit -- oh, and I'm cursing too, apparently.) Reality is not subject to a fucking vote. If 19 out of 20 people believe in their heart of hearts that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east and someone with a compass and a notebook and a set of empirical data 2000 years old concludes that the sun has NEVER ONCE risen in the west, THAT GUY WINS. Reset your fucking watches and DEAL WITH IT.

Seriously, I want to punch somebody.

Pious cheeseheads.

You want the best evidence that we're descended from booger-eating, shit-throwing, compulsive-masturbating apes? Go look in the mirror, prole. You're it.

And I was in such a good mood, too!

Just What I Needed

Something else to stay up late at night worrying about...

Mass extinction comes every 62 million years, UC physicists discover

It's been 65 million since the dinosaurs bought it.

Perhaps the Vogons need to resurface the hyperspace bypass...

Dang

Well, there goes another cherished fantasy...

From the print edition of this AM's WashPost:

Correction

A March 9 Food article misidentified the founder of the Food Blog Awards. She is Kate Hopkins, not Kate Hudson.



Next they'll be telling me that's not Kate Winslet running Checkout Counter 5 at the Leesburg Safeway, and my life will be in tatters.

There's Nothing Like a Dame

After the Secession Vote of 1861, the inhabitants of Loudoun County were left with two competing realities to which they could subscribe: Union or Secesh. There was no third way, no Ralph Nader or Ross Perot cop-out, no "none of the above" to check haughtily on some ballot.

You chose. There was no other option.

And in this borderland, nowhere did these two realities compete more vigorously than among La Différence.

When John Mobberly died, in 1865, his body had to be transported down-valley from his native Waters (now Neersville and Loudoun Heights, on the Virginia side of the Potomac from Harpers Ferry) eight miles to Hillsboro for burial. It wouldn't have been safe to bury him up in Waters, so detested was he by his loyalist neighbors. But because his exploits had gained him so much admiration among the Secessionist people of Hillsboro, his burial was apparently attended by the entirety of Hillsboro's Fairer Sex. His funeral cortege paraded from Salem Church, a mile north of Hillsboro, into Hillsboro proper, and then back out again to his final resting place in the Salem Church yard.



Some time soon after his death, a stone was erected over his grave. It is believed that the tombstone was paid for by subscriptions from Hillsboro's womenfolk. The obverse of his gravestone gives the particulars of his life, but the reverse is inscribed with a poem that is worth reproducing here, in the clippety-clop Hallmark rhythms of the time:

God bless thee brave soldier
Thy life's dream is o'er
For country and and freedom*
Thou wilt battle no more
To the land of the blessed
Thou hast gone to depart
With a smile on thy face
And a joy in thy heart
Thrice hallowed the green spot
Where our hero is laid
His deeds from our memory
Shall nevermore fade
The stranger will say,
As he lingers around
'Tis the grave of a hero
'Tis liberty's mound

*I would like it known that three -- count 'em, three -- local famous-guy hotshot historians have omitted this line from their accounts of Mobberly's burial; having unearthed this missing line by the expedient of having actually looked at the tombstone instead of taking somebody's word for it, I hereby demand that henceforth this shall be known as the "Jingo Line" from Mobberly's epitaph. Thank you very much.

Now, let's get another perspective, shall we, from Waterford, about 6 miles away to the east from Mobberly's grave...



In May of 1864, an underground newsletter, The Waterford News, began publication.

A trio of Quaker women from Waterford, Sarah Steer (26), Lizzie Dutton (24) and Lida Dutton (19), took advantage of a friendly relationship between Lizzie and Lida's father, John Dutton, and the editor of the Baltimore American. Their father had been virtually exiled from Waterford to Point of Rocks, Maryland, for his strongly pro-Union views, leaving his daughters behind. In their off-hours, the pro-Union presses of the Baltimore American produced, in probably the same way that most church newsletters are done today, a run of a thousand copies of Sarah, Lizzie and Lida's four-page publication. In time, it came to be praised by Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, and recognized by Abraham Lincoln himself.

The girls' motive in risking the dangers inherent in publishing an underground pro-Union paper inside Dixie (and let's not pussyfoot; this was a very brave thing to do) was complex. First, as they said in their maiden editorial, was to "Cheer the weary soldier and render material aid to the sick and wounded." To this end, the proceeds from sales went to the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a charity that took care of Union soldiers. They also hoped that a defiant voice from the South would help to convince the Union to lift the Federal blockade that kept them hungry and cold.

But a third factor motivated them. They were witnesses to, and victims of, constant harrassment at the hands of the Border guerrillas who raided and stole from them and their neighbors. In the first issue of their newsletter, they describe, surprisingly coolly, given its enormity, an event they witnessed. There can be no doubt that this event, and others like it, burned into these girls' hearts a deep hatred of their tormentors.

The masthead of their first issue gives the date as "5th Month, 28th, 1864," which already clues us in as to its Quaker provenance: The Quakers eschewed the names of the months and days as pagan (and damned rightly, too, by Frigg!), and invented their own nomenclature. Here is the incident described:

We had repeated visits from the Rebels last week. On the morning of the 17th they attacked a small party of our men, having first succeeded in drawing seven of them into a trap, wounded four, took two prisoners, and one escaped. The wounded were taken to the house of Rachel Steer, a kind Union Lady, where they received every attention from our skillful surgeon, Dr. T. M. Bond and many devoted friends. Two of them died and one is rapidly improving, tho' four balls passed through different parts of his body..."

Any of that sound familiar?

They can't have known it at the time, because his activities in Loudoun Valley had only just begun, but this is an eyewitness account of the incident I described not long ago, in which Mobberly rode his horse over the prostrate Sergeant Stewart and stole his boots.

What's more, one of the three editresses of The Waterford News, Sarah Steer, was the niece of "the kind Union lady" Rachel Steer in the quote above.

Once again, it can't be stressed enough: These people all lived within a few miles of each other. It's an idea I think we have lost, in an urbane, bourgeois world with immediate worldwide communication and jet travel, where if you don't like what's happening to you you can just pick up and leave. You had to choose.

-----

Having read all eight issues of their sweet-hearted little rag, I begin to appreciate the depth of the desperation of those times. I will return later to their newsletter, which is absolutely chockablock with delicious details of life in wartime Waterford. For now, let's just be happy that they existed.



And I just need to make one small but terribly ungallant sally, a long, low Johnny-Reb wolf-whistle directed at Lida Dutton... She's long since shuffled off this mortal coil, so she won't mind... Hubba, and at the risk of repeating myself, HUBBA!

Following the Mobberly Trail? Step right this way. Next up: We Survey the Territory

-----

Sources:

The Waterford News: An underground Union newspaper published by three Quaker maidens in Confederate Virginia 1964-65, introduced and annotated by Taylor M. Chamberin, Bronwen C. Souders, John M. Souders, (c)1999 Waterford Foundation, Inc., Waterford, VA.

Rough-Riding Scout: The Story of John Mobberly, Loudoun's Own Civil War Guerrilla Hero by Richard E. Crouch, (c)1994 Elden Editions, Arlington, VA

On the Futility of Labor and Vice Versa

The sonsabitches actually made me work today. Of all the nerve.

Halfway through a post on Yankee vs. Secesh girls and the trouble they get up to.

Worth coming back for. Wait'll you get a load of this Quaker skirt! Grrrr!

Burn, Baby, Burn

Adjacent Wal-Marts May Dodge Size Curbs
Calvert Had Stopped Supercenter Plans

By Amit R. Paley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 7, 2005

Robin Gottlieb cringed when she learned of Wal-Mart's plans to build a store the size of three football fields near her home in Dunkirk, a cozy hamlet in Southern Maryland ringed by rolling tobacco fields. The 44-year-old librarian feared it would overwhelm her tightknit community and usher in even more development.

After intense lobbying from Gottlieb and her neighbors, Calvert County officials passed tough regulations last summer that limited the size of big-box stores in quaint town centers such as Dunkirk's. Gottlieb and her friends arranged to cheer the victory with celebratory drinks.

But Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, appears to have hit upon a novel way around the rules: divide the store in two.

In what company officials are calling one of the first arrangements of its kind in the country, Wal-Mart plans to build a 74,998-square-foot store cheek by jowl with a 22,689-square-foot garden center. The two Wal-Marts -- each with its own entrance, utilities, bathrooms and cash registers -- would have a combined area 30 percent larger than the 75,000-square-foot limit for a single store in Dunkirk.

The tactic is the latest example of Wal-Mart's increasingly creative responses to the scores of jurisdictions, including Prince William and Montgomery counties, that have passed regulations limiting the size and location of big-box stores.

Mia Masten, community affairs manager for Wal-Mart's eastern region, said she believed the Dunkirk site would be the first time the Bentonville, Ark., company will build two side-by-side stores in response to size restrictions. It is a strategy that Wal-Mart is likely to consider in other areas, she said.

"As these big-box bills come up, all retailers will just have to be flexible," she said. "In this case, we developed a model that allowed us to reach our customers."

She then emitted a banshee shriek, unhinged her jaw and used her hideous clawed talons to throw in a snack of three human infants, who died screaming in her fire-belching gullet...

Can you dig the pure, unalloyed evil in that last graf? "We developed a model that allowed us to reach our customers..."

As if, in attempting to protect their rural homes from being bulldozed over by salivating, union-busting greedheads, this Communist librarian (Jesus, a librarian!) was taking food from the mouths of Mia Fucking Masten's children.

When the Revolution comes, the first person I will chain to the back of my car and drag around a burning Wal-Mart parking lot will be Mia Masten, community affairs manager for Wal-Mart's eastern region.

Mia's a busy little Minion of the Dark Lord of the Underworld. She has her talons in lots of pies.

Grover Cleveland Didn't Do Jack

Yeah, so Bobby Lightfoot does batshit insane re-captioning of New Yorker cartoons for giggles, and gives us Dadaist reworkings of the old Spy Magazine "Separated At Birth?" feature and generally kuts a kookie figure. That'd be enough, because that aspect of it is hernia-inducingly funny. I mean, I couldn't breathe in for about 30 seconds after seeing that cartoon up there.

But he also writes insightful shit about his life in music, shit that's both keenly perceptive:

Rufus Wainwright reminds me of Tom Waits, in that he pursues a very specific esthetic that is eclectic and eschews that which is "tasty", "punchy" and "sleek". His works are unapologetically ambitious and his approach makes me think that perhaps he knows his days of commercial viability are numbered. There is a desperation, a cramming-in of ambitious and difficult music that connotes a desire to get it out while the getting is good.

And snot-blasting funny:

If [Avril Lavigne's Under My Skin] were my dog I would drown it and bury it with its head above ground that the insects and beasts of the forest could slowly devour the skin and eyes, leaving only the skull with its weeping eye sockets.

The fact that he's my disgustingly overtalented kid brother's got nothing to do with it.

Oh, and In Answer to Your Question...

Yes, a bear does in fact shit in the woods.

Johnny Archaeology

So this house that we Jingos moved out to back last summer....

I don't believe you've been properly introduced.



Ever since I can remember, I've always wanted to live somewhere old. It's a bit unfortunate that I'm a United Statesian, because not much this side of the Pond can truly be considered old; the difference between Europeans and Americans, it's said, is that the Euros think that a hundred miles is a long way, while we Yanks think that a hundred years is a long time. And oh dear God do we destroy old things. It's amazing how enthusiastically we destroy old things.

So when Wonder Woman and I found a house in remotest Loudoun that had grown up around an 1780s log cabin -- a place that, astonishingly, we could actually afford -- it was as if a lifetime of yearning had finally fulfilled itself. Now I type this in a fireplace-heated room with adze marks on the log walls that date to the winter when Washington was at Valley Forge. I can't help bragging on it a little; it's just really fuckin' cool.

Immediately upon moving in, I realized I had set myself up for a lifetime of happy obsession. Indisputably excellent architectural restorers, the previous owners don't seem to have been particularly interested or emotionally involved with the history of the property. They certainly didn't leave me with much in the way of a provenance. Me, I want to try to get inside the very skin of the people who lived here. I'm after what Tony Horwitz, in his Confederates in the Attic, termed the "history high." This exalted state, aspired to by hardcore historical reenactors, comes when you've managed to altogether slough off all mental trappings of modernity, and have achieved the illusion that you have actually time-tripped to your chosen period.

I don't think I'm quite that hardcore, but I do believe that I am on a mission to find and accost the people who lived on this land before me, wrest their secrets from them. It's the least I owe them. "Who Built Neddie's House?" is the question at hand, and I simply can't in good conscience continue to live in their house without searching for an answer.

All of which comes to explain how I came to be in the Antique Records Room at the Loudoun County Courthouse in Leesburg a few days ago, poring over two-century-old property deeds and tax and marriage records written in magnificent copperplate hand. Boy, those kids knew from neat handwriting.

The way you trace these things is that each property deed will refer back to the deed by which the seller acquired the land. So if Mr. Foo sold a parcel to Mrs. Bar, the deed of that transaction will refer to the deed by which Mr. Foo acquired the parcel from Mr. Squatch some years before. You should thus theoretically be able to hopscotch back in time to the first deed.

But of course, there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip, as the man said, and I've gotten hung up in 1874. A local farmer named Long probably deeded a legacy parcel to his daughters, who sold the property in that year. But I can't find the deed by which the daughters acquired the land.

So trying to clear this up I've been closely reading these surveyors' descriptions of my parcel (in the course of this stuff I've become something of a maven on the history of land surveying, but that's another post). Reading these things is a bit of an art, and it helps if you have a paper and pencil to sketch what's being described.

So on this deed dated 1874, I found this description of my land:

"Beginning at 1) a set stone corner to Stevens and in C.W. Kidwell's line near his house; thence with Kidwell, Everhart and others N 63 E 98 40/100 poles to (2) a stone with an X cut in it, corner to Miss R. Boothe, thence down the hill with her line S 25 1/2 E 27 poles..."

Waitaminnit. Say what!?!?

"A set stone corner to Stevens and in C.W. Kidwell's line near his house..."

Now, hang on. Let's work out that thicket of pronoun antecedents. "A set stone corner to Stevens and in C.W. Kidwell's line near his house..."

His house? Kidwell's?

"...In Kidwell's line near his house..."

There's no house there. I've been back there. I've looked.

Blink.

Blink.

Blink.

A set stone corner to Stevens...



"...In Kidwell's line near his house..."



Do you see it? Do you see it?

Scrabbling uphill to get a better look, I nearly stumbled into this. Always wondered where that tiny constant trickle down the end of the yard came from. Now I know. Kidwell's springhouse. Still producing.



The once-proud main entrance to the yard, the garden gate. Welcome home!



An outbuilding foundation:



This one's a little hard to parse, so I'll give it to you twice: Once as-is...



And once with an overlay. See the outline of the building foundation? Three sides stone, one side timber, I'm guessing.



At this point, I guess the question is, What do I do with this? The house isn't on my land, and while I do have the name of the owner, what do I do? Hey, buddy -- do you know what you've got on your propitty? You just gonna let that decay into nothing? Can I buy it off you?

Oh, one more thing: I followed his property wall up the mountain as far as it would go, and found this:



Now I know where all that banging was coming from last deer season. Sure would be a shame if that deer-blind met with some kind of accident, now wouldn't it?

Server Logs Are Funny Things...

I've kind of forbidden myself from poring over the Jingo server logs, watching who clicks what -- which is a good thing because it was getting to be a bit of a nasty obsession. The Pickle Fublic -- sorry, that should be Fickle Public, the Cointreau and Robitussin must be kicking in -- can be a puzzling bunch of fuzzbunnies.

But that doesn't mean I've given it up entirely.

One of the things I can get with Statcounter is a list of search queries that people have conducted in order to wind up here. Usually they're pretty straightforward. But how the hell the person who searched on "Gay Manassas" at Google wound up at By Neddie Jingo! will forever be a mystery -- not to mention the occasion of just a teensy little frisson of homosexual panic. When the C&R wears off, I mean. Meanwhile, I hope you bookmarked me.

Come to think of it, John Mobberly did look kinda dishy.

Slap-Nuts Funny

Jesus' General. You heard it here...uh...probably 67,098th.

Never in a Million Years

It might have been during the Alleghenian Orogeny, in the Permian Period of the Paleozoic Era of the Phanerozoic Eon, which is to say about 286,000,000 years ago, that a series of floods and evaporations, lasting a few million years each, deposited layers of mud and silt on a flood-plain on the part of the Earth that would eventually become what its hominid inhabitants were pleased to refer to as the East Coast of the United States of America. This floor finally dried up completely, was heaved heavenward by the tectonic plate movement that produced the Blue Ridge Mountains, and produced this egg-sized object:



This little rock survived floods and fires and dinosaur-killing meteor-impacts, sometimes buried underground, sometimes exposed to the open air, slowly eroding here and there, until, 286,000,001 years later, a hapless hominid goober whose entire species had inhabited the planet for considerably less than 5/286th of the life of this rock, and 1/4,500th of the life of the planet, and whose own existence had lasted for about 1/102,272,727th of that span, walking his canine goobers along the Maryland bank of the Potomac River one day, used his spanking-new, highly fashionable opposable thumb to pick it up.

And promptly, with the savoir-faire characteristic of his species, shattered it into bits.

The reason, I'm sure, that we still to this day have to endlessly refight the Scopes Monkey Trial is simply that we silly little human beings are just not capable of comprehending what A Million Years means. I was trying just now at dinner to explain the idea to Betty and Freddy. To children who are quite convinced that the entire universe came into being the instant the OB/GYN smacked their little meconium-encrusted buttocks, the idea of Weird Old Dad trying to get them to understand the howling, yawning gulfs of geological time over Swedish meatballs and egg noodles was pretty risible. I can't imagine I'd have much more luck with your average Southern Baptist.

After 44 years on this planet. I think have a pretty good grasp of what a hundred years means. Plenty of cultural upheaval, plenty of cosmetic change to the earthly landscape, lots of human activity. Three generations born and died. 1905 to 2005? Yeah, I get it. Takes a bit of reading, a bit of empathy, but I get it.

Geologically, of course, it doesn't even register as a nanosecond.

I also flatter myself that I can comprehend a thousand years. One day long ago I stood in the reliquary of the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, contemplating the marble steps that led down to the display of a fingerbone of the Apostle James, noting soberly that a thousand years' worth of pilgrims had worn deep foot-shaped twin grooves into the stone. It was quite eerie to think that those stones had begun to be ground down by the worn shoes of hopeful people at some point in the Norman Conquest of Britain. The wearing away of the stone had continued through the Magna Carta, the discovery of America, the Protestant Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the First and Second World Wars, and on up to today. A thousand years.

Still, of course, nothing but a geological eye-blink. My little striated rock snaps its fingers and barks a contemptuous laugh.

Now, try to wrap your brain around A THOUSAND THOUSAND YEARS. Not one time through all that stuff up there, not ten times through, not even simply many times. I mean TEN HUNDRED TIMES TEN HUNDRED YEARS. All of that stuff, from William the Conqueror down (aaaaaall the way down!) to George W. Bush, a thousand times. We can say "a million years" to ourselves over and over, and never understand what we mean. It's simply too immense a thing to comprehend.

In the history of this planet, it's the Second Hand going around the clock ONCE. That's ONE MINUTE, in Geology Time.

So I don't hold much (not much) contempt for people who insist against overwhelming evidence that Grandpa Weren't No Monkey. That little striated rock that just crumbled in your hand, that little clod of schmutz that you just hamfisted into dust, that rock is, quite literally, older than you can possibly understand....

The impulse against Darwinian evolution arises from an understandable desire for certainty, against random chance. Of course it also arises from just good ol' human hubris, from a refusal (or inability) to acknowledge the relatively recent discovery that we've inhabited a 4.5 billion-year-old rock in space for the tiniest, most infinitessimally insignificant doink of its existence. We can't possibly be an accident! We must be here for a reason!

Here's Richard Dawkins, in his concluding paragraphs to The Blind Watchmaker:

We have sought a way of taming chance, of drawing its fangs. "Untamed chance," pure, naked chance, means ordered design springing into existence from nothing, in a single leap. It would be untamed chance if once there was no eye, and then, suddenly, in the twinkling of a generation, an eye appeared, fully fashioned, perfect and whole. This is possible, but the odds against it will keep us writing noughts till the end of time. The same applies against the spontaneous existence of any fully fashioned, perfect and whole being, including -- I see no way to avoid the conclusion -- deities.

To "tame" chance means to break down the very improbable into less probable small components arranged in a series. No matter how improbable it is that an X could have arisen from a Y in a single step, it is always possible to conceive of a series of infinitessimally graded intermediates between them. However improbable a large-scale change may be, smaller changes are less improbable. And provided we postulate a sufficiently large series of sufficiently graded intermediates, we shall be able to derive anything from anything else, without invoking astronomical improbabilities. We are allowed to do this only if there has been sufficient time to fit all the intermediates in.... (My emphasis.)

If all the foregoing is a bit dense, let's call up another source for our conclusion, another of Life's Great Philosophers:

So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth.

-----
Postscript: If you're a geologist or an evolutionary biologist, I freely admit to pulling nearly all of that science gobbledegook right outta my fundamental aperture: I know precisely squadoosh about geology and what I know about evolution I got from Dawkins' book, which is an utterly compelling read and reinforces everything I've ever suspected about the nature of reality. The geology I got from a .edu site at The College of William and Mary. I probably misread all of it.

But I guarantee, you still can't imagine a million years.

We Kid Because We Love

If Ailes had his way, he would muffle
Any copy employing "kerfluffle"
Let us send to his eyrie
A nice dictionary
That up his rear end he can stuffle

Like an Iodine Contrast X-Ray

Remember this pic?



I took the photo a few weeks ago to vaguely wave at the general area where Civil War Psycho John Mobberly took advantage of his intimate knowledge of the local mountain paths to guide remnants of Elijah White's Comanches over Short Hill to attack an encampment of Yankees outside Lovettsville.

Wellsir, since I took the picture we've had us a little snowfall.



Ain't it just transcendently weird what Mother Nature will do sometimes, her wonders to perform...?

You couldn't get a better look at Egg Path if you'd shot high-contrast iodine into Short Hill's veins and took an x-ray... That path is completely invisible unless it's snowed...

Up next on the Mobberly Trail: There's nothing like a dame. Or three dames, in this case.

I Wish Somebody Would Tell Me What Diddy-Wah-Diddy Means

On a weekend day just before the Recent End of the World in Ice, we Jingos packed into the family jalopy to run some mundane errands. For once in my life, I was able to gainsay young Betty in the matter of the radio station -- avoiding an enervating immersion in our local Clear-Channel Suckfest, which inevitably induces in me mild nausea, accompanied by the urge to lecture crankily.

Instead I was treated to a pleasant moment with National Treasure Dick Spottswood's Obsolete Music Show on our public station.

I love American roots music just as much as the next gink, and I've got a pretty good storehouse of knowledge about it -- quite a lot of it gleaned from listening to Spottswood -- but I don't think I've ever had my neck wrenched quite so violently by anything I've heard on the radio as when he played a set of Blind Blake's ragtimes. Ho-lee jumpin' catphish, where have they been hiding this guy since 1927?



I've only been able to find one recording of his this morning, and you can listen to "Diddy Wah Diddy" here, or you can poke around in Spottswood's archive of the show (Dick starts talking about Blake at 1:37:45 - at least check out the first cut, "West Coast Blues," which will just knock you out)-- seriously, it's worth the effort, because I haven't been so ass-smacked by a guitar player since I first heard Django Reinhardt 25 years ago. (OK, acoustic guitarist -- Danny Gatton is still the Telecaster Christ...)

Listen to the guitar breaks in "Diddy Wah" -- it's like he's got extra fingers on each hand -- there's no other explanation for his ability to play multiple alternating bass notes while carrying a complex melody. Plainly, he set himself the task of replicating ragtime piano on guitar, and succeeded better than absolutely anyone. Just stunning stuff -- and I've been through all your Reverend Gary Davises, your Tampa Reds, your Blind Lemons, your Blind Willie McTells -- Blind Blake leaves the whole vision-impaired bunch a little sick.

(I leaned over to Wonder Woman at one point in the experience, whispered that I thought I needed The Operation... What operation? she asked suspiciously. You know... the eyes. They've gotta go.... Gotta have 'em plunked out if I'm ever to progress as guitar player....)

Here's an excellent biographical article on Blind Blake.

One other gem in Spottswood's show last week: Check out Onie Wheeler's "Bonaparte's Retreat" (at 1:00:09) -- If you were wondering where Tom Waits gets his inspirations for his acid-addled flea-circus arrangements, I don't think you need to look any farther. What a strange, strange piece of music....

Hell-Hounds on My Trail

[N.B.: The Mavens of Blogging strongly caution against blog-posts without accompanying graphics -- apparently you clowns just can't handle a couple of paragraphs of text unadorned by shiny and colorful objects to gaze at -- but Your Ned is at home during a snowstorm down four miles of copper wire that produce modem speeds that would have been laughed at in 1995. Seriously, I'm getting 28.8 speeds here, it's flippin' EXCRUCIATING... So no uploads today: The glorious prose will simply have to stand on its own.]

Last week, pursuant to his Mobberly duties, your Ned investigated the Blue Ridge Center for Environmental Stewardship, a nature-trails-and-local-history operation over on the other side of Short Hill. Rumor had it that a house where Mobberly had been wickedly ambushed by Perfious Yankeedom only to escape by the skin of his teeth was being excavated by the minions of Professor Quackenbush. (Whether this is actually that residence or merely a historical chimera is awaiting confirmation; I have written to the Professor under the assumed guise of Nosirrah Doowrehs, a Levantine dealer in Civil War antiquities and other curiosities, and am awaiting his promised reply. Please don't tell him it's actually me!)

At the Blue Ridge Center, an affable young man who identified himself as Ron greeted me and gave me the run of the place. A 900-acre nature preserve dedicated to ecological experimentation and historical preservation just south of Loudoun Heights, it is dotted with both butterfly habitats and the ruins of early-nineteenth-century farmhouses, which are being studied by Quackenbush and his henchmen for clues to the whereabouts of Prince Roderick's Purloined Orb. It is one of these farmhouses that purports to be my Mobberly locale.

The gloaming encroached as I glimmed the ruin, mentally reconstructing the events described in dusty tomes I have unearthed. (Should Professor Quackenbush confirm my -- sorry, Doowrehs' -- theory, I'll blog it in the near future, but for now it must remain a tantalizing dream.) Time passed, and the gloaming stopped the glimming, and, glum, I made my way back to my truck. Ron was shuttering the office cabin as I passed him. I asked him if I could return some day soon with my kids and dogs; they'd enjoy the place in fine weather.

Ron suddenly looked stricken and pale, the face of a man who's been badly frightened. "Keep away from there with your dogs, mister," he stammered. "You don't know what's out there. I'm telling you, man, keep away!" This last was hissed gutturally, his features tightened and anxious. "Just keep away!

He disappeared in the dusk.

It was not until the next morning, as I browsed the local Loudoun Times-Mirror over my coffee, when the full purport of Ron's warning became clear. Here I reproduce the complete article, with not one word omitted:

KILLER DOGS RUNNING LOOSE IN NEERSVILLE

Three killer dogs are running free in the Neersville area of western Loudoun -- and Animal Control wants them.

On Feb. 4, the dogs broke into a pasture at the Blue Ridge Center for Environmental Stewardship on Harpers Ferry Road between Purcellville and the West Virginia border, killing 90 chickens and injuring several sheep, according to Rob Carey, the center's spokesman.

The dogs -- a Rottweiler with a chain collar, a black Lab/Rottweiler mix and a long-haired tan dog -- were spotted again the following weekend, Carey said, when they acted aggressively toward a man who was hiking with his dogs on the Blue Ridge Center's trails.

Animal Control set traps around the property for the dogs but has not yet found them. They apparently cross back and forth between Virginia and West Virginia, said Animal Control spokeswoman Laura Danis.

If you see these dogs, call Animal Control at 703-777-0406.

-----

I've got some better advice: If you see these dogs, bend over and kiss your ass an affectionate goodbye, because your doom is sealed. The Hounds of Hell have been unleashed, and it is time to rue the day you ever crossed swords with Quackenbush...

Up Next on the Mobberly Trail: Short Hill Reveals Her Secrets

My Bologna Has a First Name

Far-distant-future scientists working with hypersensitive technologies beyond our puny modern ken* may come up with a nano-unit to express the degree to which I give a shit about the Oscars, but they sure aren't there yet. There are (I am told) entire subcults within the porn audience driven into paroxysms at the spectacle of a spinally pliable man gobbling his own perpendicular bisector -- but the frisson stirred by such a sideshow event is as dust in the wind compared to the movie industry performing the same feat. Suck away, say I.

-----
*My sources advise me that the Puny Modern Ken won a a nod for Best Self-Fellating in a Short Feature, but this is as yet unconfirmed.

How to Write an Earworm

Do you know what an earworm is? It's a song so damned catchy that all you have to do is hear it once and it will stick in your head until you either a) drink yourself blind, b) get smacked in the head with an eight-iron, or c) die. I'm given to understand there are other cures, but at exactly this moment I'm really not in a hurry to try them out.

I've been having a nice long wallow in Andy Partridge's Fuzzy Warbles demos-and-lost-tracks series, and I've gotten the happiest earworm infection I've had since 1989, when I first heard XTC's "Mayor of Simpleton."

The tune in question is called "I Can't Tell What Truth Is Anymore," on Volume 6. Lyrically, you might be tempted to read it as an anthem for our defeated and disgusted times, but really it's just a boy-loses-girl song. It couldn't be a simpler bit of bubblegummy fluff -- I can easily imagine it tootling along during the Obligatory Slapstick Chase Scene in an early Scooby-Doo cartoon. It's the sort of dangerously sticky-sweet cinnamon bun that Partridge can easily toss out endlessly in his sleep (think "Cherry in Your Tree," or the above "Mayor of Simpleton"), a talent he sometimes disparages as beneath his dignity, not knowing what it's like to spend your life wishing you could write just one song that catchy.

Even though it's only a demo, a candidate for an album (Nonsuch) that never made it past the winnowing process, the thing is as expertly crafted, as architecturally perfect a bit of candyfloss as you're like to come across this year. Ergo, earworm.

I've extracted the song (Andy won't mind. Go and buy the CD.), and you can hear it here. (It will pop a new browser window. When the tune starts to play, move that window aside and come back to this window. Mom.)

So why's this particular song so damned skillfully done? What's the formula, Mister Wizard?

1. Start with an introductory phrase that twists the melody very slightly. In this case, the hook phrase is rendered in a minor mode, so one note is different from the way you'll hear it in the rest of the song. A deft application of a cliché. (Clichés are sometimes exactly what's called for in this particular artform.)


2. Repeat that slightly twisted melody only twice more: Once to introduce the instrumental passage, and once to end the song. Symmetry.


3. It certainly doesn't hurt to stick to primary-color I-IV-V chords in your verse and chorus. Meat and potatoes. Predictable. Solid.


4. But in your middle eight, go ahead and throw in an F#dim7 chord (under "And if you've gone for good"...) to suggest incompletion and anxiety. And of course write your lyrics so that the most significant word in the whole song, the revelation of the cause for our narrator's anxiety -- "gone" -- falls exactly on that diminished chord. You do this because you're a fucking pop-songcraft god.


5. End your middle eight on that protracted V chord. Oh, absolutely, yes. Again, a cliché, but this is a bubblegum song, not the Coffee Cantata. When you play the song live, you can stretch that suspension out over, hell, 32 bars, before crashing back down to the tonic to start the next verse -- just like the rising ahhh's in "Twist and Shout." They'll have to disinfect the theater seats.


6. Hint forward. In literature, it's called "foreshadowing." Listen to the lovely little chiming arpeggiated twin-guitar figures under the main melody. It will assume more importance later.


7. Harmony vocal below the melody. Think late Beatles, think "Come Together," think "The One After 909." Partridge does this as a matter of habit, believing that the highest voice is the one that stands out. It's pretty rare, especially in late XTC records, for vocal harmonies to ride over the lead vocal like a bluegrass duet. And man, it's used to cool effect here.


8. The guitar solo isn't really a solo at all; it's a carefully composed instrumental passage, as formal as a minuet. Needless to say, it's an absolute knockout. The Clapton-voiced guitar states a new melody as the little chiming figure revolves. Then a small male choir picks up the figure that had been played by the twin guitars under the verse (see why that foreshadowing was so important?) as the Clapton guitar now begins to play the verse melody. The two figures twine beautifully together, to end with both entities playing the title line, the male voices taking the low harmony and the guitar the melody. Subtle, understated, classically symmetrical -- did you ever think you'd hear those words describing a passage in a bubblegum song?


9. In the outro, have the male voices pop back up with the same figure they sang in the instrumental passage. More symmetry.

It looks so simple from the outside, but once you tease it open, its insides are as finely wrought and carefully balanced as an expensive watch. A thing of incandescent beauty.

On One's Male Role Models

Once upon a long-ago time, Your Ned played second base on a company softball team. We were just awful -- in the two years I graced that team, I think we won maybe one game.

During one early autumn evening game, I was at bat. Standing at the plate waiting for the next pitch, I noticed that a V of Canada geese had appeared flying very low in the sky, straight in from deadaway center field toward home plate, just barely high enough to clear the backstop. It was beautiful, a real autumn treat.

I raised my hand to the ump, asking for time. Then I stepped out of the box and stood watching the geese fly by. I murmured something like, "Would you look at that..."

Behind me, the other team's catcher simply exploded. "What the fuck are you doing? Play ball, asshole!

Huh. Priorities.

Let us propose that there are two extremes in the male psyche, always at war with each other. Let us further propose that it's that war in our heads that is responsible for most of the bad craziness in the world today.

Religious and philosophical and literary smart guys have long recognized the problem, and sought to define it in various ways: Yin and Yang, Dionysus and Apollo, Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan, intuition and rationality. They all agree that when the two halves are in balance, sanity reigns.

Ah, what a crock of shit.

Bill Lee has written a new book, describing his life after his 1984 banishment from baseball for possession of Yin with intent to distribute, and criminal dearth of Yang. He's knocked around various pro-am, semi-pro, and other, downright weird back alleys of non-major-league ball. What's beautifully evident is that he's lost none of the wonderful cranky eccentricity that made me admire him so the first time around.

Among his exploits was a run for the American Presidency in 1988 on the Canadian Rhinoceros Party ticket -- a Dadaist political party with stated aims to "... abolish the environment rather than protect it on the grounds that it took up too much space to keep clean.... Bulldoze the Rocky Mountains so that Alberta could receive a few extra minutes of daylight.... Paint the White House pink and turn it into a Mexican restaurant.... A ban on guns and butter, since they both killed."

Hell, I'd have voted for him if I'd only known.

Of course this guy couldn't make it in pro sports: Completely unable to knuckle under to the pumped-up Yang of pro baseball, he flaunted his Yin in its face until it wouldn't take it any more and bit back. Poor bastard just refused to go along to get along.

Why is it that all my heroes seem to conform to this model to some extent or another?



So let's posit a spectrum that has Bill Lee over on one extreme and, oh, I dunno, say, Bernie Kerik waaaay over on the other. On Bill's side, there is laughter and surprise and reveling in serendipity. There's understanding Dada art, there's receptiveness to novelty, there's the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your head simultaneously without exploding.

Over on Bernie's side, you've got... well... Bernie Kerik. Play ball, asshole!

I will never be a CEO. I will never lead armies of men. I will never win political office -- even on the Rhinoceros Party platform -- an Oscar, People's Sexiest Man Alive.

I will, I'm afraid, always and forever, admire the geese.

Truth is Never Told During the Nine-to-Five Hours

I'm too gutted, been fighting tears all day, at this morning's horrifying news to do much by way of tribute to Hunter Thompson. He'd probably rag me mercilessly for my weakness, but there you have it. I'm not him.

Let's say this: I haven't taken acid in 25 years, but when I did, it was his voice that narrated the trip. Not Timothy Leary, not Ram Dass, none of those running dogs of icky hippie sentimentality. No, on a Thompsonian acid trip you weren't out to complete your soul or come to the realization of the Fundamental Oneness of All Living Beings or any of that Girl Scout shit: You wallowed in your alienation, you wore your rage like a cheap clown suit, you welcomed the terminally weird as a long-lost brother, you ripped the needle off "Birth of the Cool" and cranked "Trout Mask Replica" out the window: "You hear that, you boozhie motherfuckers? That's MY HEAD! That's going on up in there RIGHT NOW, and if you want it to stop, you're going to have to come up here and KILL ME!" Followed with a cackle of maniacal laughter and a hurled bottle smashing in the street.

Well, I guess we know where that leads, eh?

But I just can't get over the timing of Hunter's surrender, in these Days of Darkness in the Year of the Pig. I know who I blame, and I'm gunning for your asses....

America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

I was able to find this anecdote at an Esquire site, it's from Gene McGarr, a buddy of Thompson's when they were young:

Hunter came over one night. I was out working. I never bothered locking my door, because anybody who wanted to climb five flights of stairs and rob from me, they were welcome to. This was a hot summer night. All the windows in the block were open.

Hunter, apparently feeling a little frisky and being bored waiting around for me and not knowing when I was coming home, went into the front room, the windows opening out on the street, took off his belt, and started whipping the wall. You know, this loud thwack! Every time he'd thwack the wall, he'd yell, "Ahgggh!! Ahghhh! Aghhhh!"

Then he'd stop the thwacking and in another voice would say, "Do it again. Do it again. Keep doing it." And then this thwaaaack! So apparently there were people hanging out of windows yelling, "You son of a bitch! You can't get away with that...!" Then Hunter put his belt back on and sat down.

Well, about five minutes later there were the thundering hoofbeats of two New York City policemen, who by the time they had climbed five flights of stairs were truly apoplectic. They banged on the fucking door.

Now Hunter sat with, you know, his cigarette in hand, beer in the other and said "Who's there?" Two cops came in. They wanted to know what the fuck was going on. They had heard the complaints. They wanted to know, where were the bodies. They made Hunter take his shirt off. To show that he had no whip marks on him.