The Name Game 2008

You can't avoid politics during this season. I've tried. Here's a short list of nicknames I have found for some of over dozen politicians of both major American political parties running for President of these United States next year. You can be sure this list isn't complete. Enjoy. Alphabetically:

Bacark Yomama
Breck Girl
Hitlery
Her Thighness
Huckleberry
The Huckster
Julie Annie
Kookcinich
McPain
McShame
McVain
Osama
Rooty
Rudy McRombee
RuPaul
Silky Pony

And here is a list of nicknames for the supporters of just one of the candidates:

consprazoids
Paultards
Paulbots
Paulistinians

One of the people with the clown names will be , sooner than you can imagine, the Leader of the Free World! Ouch!

Comic Desolation

The cafe next door was open, as was the pub. I went for a walk around downtown before returning to the pub for a couple of pints of dark ale. Christmas Day afternoon. The Indian deli was open, Mickey D's was closed. There was a line in front of one of two cinema multiplexes, a beggar pestering film aficionados. A bookstore called The Comic Relief, located between a fantasy bookstore and the best bookstore in town or anywhere Half Price Books, was open, at least a half a dozen customers inside. The Subway sandwich shop was open too, as were the two drugstores in the neighbourhood. Beggars, the homeless, a group of teenage punks at the plaza in front of the subway station which was open.

I stepped inside the pub. A basketball game was playing on the flat screen TVs. Not one familiar face among the two dozen customers. A half dozen goth punks at the bar and at tables. The barmaid, Erica, is a goth punk herself, her T-shirt this afternoon said "DESOLATION". She was the only staff member in. What if there is trouble, I wondered. Well, her goth punk friends drinking free beer would come to her aid, I concluded. The kitchen was closed as usual on holidays, and Erica could only heat up and serve yesterday's chili, if anyone asked.

A bearded, four eyed man, looking like the stereotype of a computer geek, sitting at the bar, wore a green sweatshirt with the following, supposedly Irish poem on the back of it:

May the roof above us
never fall in
And we friends beneath
never fall out

Fair enough. A fat, aging, bleached blonde goth punk woman at the bar was giving me The Look. Oh, no. My drinking buddy Mike soon arrived and we had one of our deep conversations. What's the next rebellious look, we wondered. What can beat the lip, eyebrow and nose earrings for outrageousness? When he gave up hippiedom, Mike said, he only had to cut his hair. How will they go straight with tattooes on every finger of the knuckle? And what about music, I asked? In the past century, it's come from Scott Joplin and Louis Armstrong, both classically trained, to the reductionist anti-music of the illiterate rap "artists". What's next? Good questions. We wished each other a Merry Christmas, I stepped out and drove home.

Beet it!

The palms of my hands are red from beet juice which isn't so easy to wash off. I pray I won't be called to another interrogation any time soon, or more trouble would follow as a result. To the first one of those (mandatory interrogations), I arrived carrying a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Invitation to a Beheading, ostensibly as a packaging of sorts for the Bob Dylan CD titled Lovesick, published for some odd reason on a Victoria's Secret record label, which CD had been presented to me raw, without a jewel case, and was to serve there as a piece exculpating evidence. Given the weird cultural atmosphere of the times, that idea didn't quite work. But that's another story altogether. Back to the beets.

Slicing beets is a Holiday ritual for me, making borscht, using a recipe that is in part improvised, as I have been looking for, but have not found, the secret ingredient that gives it a special tangy taste, like mom and the woman who now owns a restaurant in Santa Monica made it. Is it the Maggi sauce? Or white vinegar? Or dried mushrooms? I use all three and still am not quite there. Maybe it's the wrong dry mushrooms, you must use those that grow in the forest where wild bisons roam, pee and poop? I don't know, but I keep trying, using the Japanese variety that's available here. (The cookbooks are not much help. The taste must be a deep secret like the Coca Cola formula!)

The other dish I know how to make from red beets is called Ćwikła (go ahead, pronounce it!) and it is beets pickled with fresh horseradish and white vinegar, a dish that none of my co-workers will touch if I were to bring it to department pot luck parties, not even the Indians among them, who normally enjoy eating spicy foods. That's all right, more for my friend and me! (A strong alcoholic libation is required, too.)

And that's the Christmas Holiday non-traditional beet story.

The Hate Man

There once was a man in my town who called himself the Hate Man. Like many other street people, he'd hang around the neighbourhood where university students lived, played, shopped and walked to classes. Standing on the corner in front of a bookstore, he shouted to no one in particular, and to all who could hear him "I HATE YOU!". He dressed in women's clothes from a Salvation Army store, long dresses, shawls, worn out sweaters, long gray beard, tennis shoes on his feet, mismatched striped socks, cheap jewelry jangling on his forearms. A character. People said he was a former university professor who had gone mad after taking one too many LSD trips. Another madman on city streets. I've no idea what happened to him, I haven't seen him in ages.

Just the other day I ran into a mention of him on some Internet forum. According to the poster, this was the philosophy of the Hate Man:

Never say anything good to anyone, never say I love you ever. When you hold something in, it builds more tension, and makes you more inclined to DO something good for someone--since actions speak louder than words.

However, if you hate someone, or have ill feelings toward them, then say it. When you express something, verbally it dilutes the feelings you had: catharsis.

I pass it along without a comment (not sure what it means.) Whenever I saw the Hate Man, observing his antics for a minute or two, I had the impression that he was really a comedian, a joker, a mocker of the Peace, Love and Understanding naive philosophies of the Aquarius Age, and that somewhere out of our sight he lived a perfectly boring middle class life. A part time Hate Man in a world gone full time mad.


P.S. The above was written before I found this reference.

Future Revenge

Here are some items from the Internet news discussion forum that I participate in anonymously (like everyone else there).

A recent Associated Press news item (abbreviated):

A long-missing Michelangelo sketch for the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, possibly his last design before his death, has been discovered in the basilica's offices, the Vatican newspaper said Thursday.

One forum participant's response:

One of my buddies bought a circa 1830 house, ripped the walls apart but didn't find anything of value. Before he closed up the walls, he placed TWO cans with coins and trinkets into the walls...labeling them 1 of 3 and 3 of 3.

Another news item (paraphrased):

Starbucks has issued a recall for 140,000 coffee mugs because the handles may just come right off. Made in China.

One forum participant's comment:

My heart bleeds for all the upscale white trash that stained the seats of their Beemers with cafe latte.

And finally, a tragic news story from the state of Georgia:

City police are investigating the circumstances surrounding the shooting death of a 22-year-old Brunswick man Tuesday. Police said Wednesday that a 35-month-old toddler may be responsible for pulling the trigger of the gun that killed Curtis Gabriel Collins, also know as "C-Real," at a music studio at 2405 Stonewall St., Brunswick. Police said the toddler allegedly took a gun from a table in a room at Gutter Entertainment.

(NOTE: C-Real was a rap "artist".) Two comments from forum participants:

[1] Perhaps it was meant as a subtle criticism of his talent.

[2] “Whadda ya mean, I can’t have a cookie?”

And so on. Fun, fun, fun. This is actually a serious forum with a mission, clearly stated principles and a particular view of the universe. (Above are not my responses, by the way. Mine aren't newsworthy!)

Party Time Times

Maybe I've been living on another planet, or not paying attention, but it has dawned on me that we are living during party time times. Or, perhaps it's just my timing, Tim? All right, all right, enough bad puns, time out!

I'm not a party dude, nor am I a party pooper, I've been invited to only one party recently, and due to a misunderstanding on my part, I missed it. There were to be 85 participants, and you were to wear a costume (yeah, wearing a costume, like they did in France before the Revolution!)

But the country has been partying lately, it seems to me, and it has been partying non-stop. A blogger I know has been closing all her posts urging the reader(s?) to "party on", thus diminishing and trivializing whatever intelligent message she tried to convey in the paragraphs preceding it. Would Elias Canetti end his famous journal entries with such a phrase? Sure, nobody's Elias Canetti, not even Elias Canetti, who's dead, but let's get serious occasionally. Anyway, it's her choice, it's innocent, who's to argue.

I have been hearing about partying more lately than in years past. Do you think it's the prosperity and peace (such as it is) , that brings the mindless party animals out of us? Like the Gay 20s? Or the early 1960s teenage dance crazes? (Hmm, every 40 years? Are we onto discovering a new historical loop?)

Whatever, it seems to me that the example comes from above, and this is what provoked this post. The "above" is of course the media and Hollywood. The trio of so-called celebutantes from Hollywood has been in the news constantly for the past couple of years, getting themselves arrested for drunk driving, going into rehab, emerging only to get arrested again, going to jail even, emerging loving Jesus, and then getting arrested again, and so on. But one constant in this operetta has been partying. These young women, all three of them in their mid twenties, who for some reason don't have to work, in between the rehabs and arrests they party, and they party until they drop, several times a week. Perhaps seven times a week. These are our children's role models, oh, not yours, not mine, but many others', to be sure. Party on.

I read that the prominent party hosts in the celebrity party cities (but certainly in many others too) London, New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., compete for celebrity guests. If a prominent Senator or the lead singer of the Aerosmith (but not the drummer, no thanks) can grace your party, some of his heavenly light will fall on you the hostess, raising the price of your stock in High Society.

The Society page of one local newspaper, titled Red Carpet, prints a weekly page of photographs of party goers in the city, all of them from the best families, beautiful women all blond with, curiously enough roots of their hair dyed dark, with names such as Alexandra, Alexis, Claudia, Jenevieve, Kimberly, Whitney, and not one Sue or Jane among them! So that we don't feel guilty about partying so much while the globe is warming and wars rage, all these Society parties, needless to say, have been arranged to be "benefits for the needy".

There is a book you can find in the largest section of most large American bookstores, the Self Help Section, titled Life is Short, Wear Your Party Pants, full of jolly if banal advice, and sophomoric platitudes to go along with it, on how to travel through life as if it were a party. No, sorry, dance through life WHICH IS a party! (You can purchase a copy through Amazon for the price of one red American cent!)

What more can I say, party on!