OUT ON A LIM
Paul May 24th, 2009
“Howl, howl, howl, howl!”
22 August 2010: Flushing with J.D. Salinger
August 22nd, 2010News that the standard white porcelain toilet from J.D. Salinger’s North Carolina home is selling for $1 million on eBay gives one pause (the kind that refreshes). It’s a commodity unlike no other, because it’s where the famously reclusive author might have written the earlier drafts, which he subsequently rejected, of such disemboweling works as Raise High the Toilet Seat, Carpenters; Pee More: An Introduction; Fanny and Pooey; Catcher in the Loo; and, of course, “A Perfect Day for Bananaflush.”
17 August 2010: Incoming Class of Tabula Rasa
August 17th, 2010Beloit College’s Mindset List for the incoming Class of 2014 is both comic and tragic. It makes me happy to learn that, born in 1992, “a quarter of the freshmen class has at least one immigrant parent, and the immigration debate is not a big priority unless it involves real aliens from another planet.” But it makes me sad that, for most of them, “Beethoven has always been a dog,” and that “they first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus.” Teachers, take note. The pitcher is empty. Say that to the kids in class, and they’ll probably tell you where to go for the cheapest beer in town.
16 August 2010: Obama and Antigone
August 16th, 2010Kreon’s downfall in the play Antigone by Sophocles is that he chose to pursue the Letter of the Law instead of the Spirit of the Law. Although “freedom of worship” is one of our most sacred constitutional rights as American citizens, Republicans are now vehemently against the building of a mosque within two blocks of Ground Zero in New York City; they claim it would celebrate the triumph of Muslim terrorists on 9/11. So President Obama now finds himself between Iraq and a hard place. The irony of all this, of course, is that in the play by Sophocles, Antigone was upholding a more ancient law. She violated the king’s new edict when she chose to bury her dead brother according to the religious custom of her time. With regard to the building of this mosque, I’m afraid that the Republicans are more like Kreon, in wanting to legislate new laws to suit their political and religious purposes; and Obama is the heroic but unfortunate Antigone, the one who upholds the Constitution of the United States. I hope that what happens to Antigone does not happen to Obama, when the same hypocritical right-wing religious fanatics who argue against our “freedom of worship” begin to rally yet again for our “right to bear arms.”
1 August 2010: Mel Gibson and John Milton
August 1st, 2010As an undergraduate English major, I dropped out of a class on John Milton (1608-1674) when I couldn’t deal with the poet’s arrogant presumption in Paradise Lost to “justify the ways of God to man.” And then, as a graduate student, I dropped out of a Milton seminar when I came across accounts of how the self-righteous polemicist went blind at the age of 46, and how he proceeded to maltreat the three daughters who were his amanuenses the last twenty years of his life. To this day, I remain ambivalent about having dropped out of those classes.
And now the media is full of news about Mel Gibson’s rancorous racist and sexist rants against his ex-girlfriend and mother of his youngest child. I hate to confess this, but among my favorite movies are some of Gibson’s earliest work as an actor—Gallipoli (1981), The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), and even the Mad Max series. He started to lose me with the Lethal Weapon movies in the late 1980s, and by the time The Man Without a Face (1993) came along, I noticed that he wasn’t aging well. Indeed, his face was undergoing a strange transformation.
And now the awful transformation is complete. The latest photographs of Mel Gibson in the media are hard to look at. It’s hard to believe, but this man, who was once so blessed with good looks, who might have been one of the good angels in Milton’s paradise, now looks like hell. But, perhaps all is not lost. For his next film project, Mel Gibson can now play the aging John Milton browbeating the women in his life. The part seems tailor-made for him. Let’s see him unleashing his lethal weapons yet again, as he seeks to “justify the ways of man to woman.”
Meanwhile, I don’t know whether to keep or throw away the Mel Gibson movies in my collection.
27 July 2010: To Russia, With Love
July 27th, 2010News leaking out of BP indicates that wayward CEO Tony Hayward is stepping down in October, and will be assigned to a key post at TNK-BP in Russia, where he will presumably oversee all offshore drilling for oil in that part of the world. No one is saying it, but I have a deep suspicion that Hayward might be CIA’s new undercover agent to undermine the Russian economy and ruin its ecology. While over there, he will, of course, hook up with defrocked Russian spy Anna Chapman, and they’ll ooze out their lives happily ever after.
18 July 2010: In and Out of Bed with Zsa Zsa Gabor
July 18th, 2010Before Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, celebrities who are celebrated for doing nothing well or worthwhile except to promote themselves as celebrities, there was Hungarian-born Zsa Zsa Gabor, former beauty queen, socialite and occasional actress who starred in such howlers as Queen of Outer Space and Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood. There’s news this morning that the 93-year-old lady was watching Jeopardy in bed last night with her 9th husband, Frederic Prinz von Anhalt, when the phone rang. She reached for the phone, fell out of bed, and broke her hips and several other bones. At her age, this is no joking matter. But, unlike Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, Zsa Zsa Gabor is capable of laughing at herself. According to the tabloids, she once claimed that she was a good housekeeper because every time she divorced, she kept the house. I hope the lady recovers and mends quickly.
10 July 2010: Shapeshifting With Sarah Palin!
July 10th, 2010Sarah Palin has done it again! Although she was born in The Year of the Dragon (1964), she is not content being a mere Dragon Lady. Through the years, she has, by her own account, been a barracuda on the basketball court, an attack dog on the campaign trail for the GOP, a pitbull with lipstick. And now, in her latest television commercial, she wants to be identified as a feminist Ursus arctos horribilis, the grizzliest of the Mama Grizzlies.
Keith Olbermann has already pointed out on MSNBC that grizzlies eat their own young. To that, I’d like to add the following information which I found on the internet: ”Grizzlies are subject to fragmentation, a form of population segregation. Fragmentation causes inbreeding depression, which leads to a decrease in genetic variability in the grizzly bear species. This decreases the fitness of the population for several reasons. First, inbreeding forces competition with relatives, which decreases the evolutionary fitness of the species. Secondly, the decrease in genetic variability causes an increased possibility that a lethal homozygous recessive trait may be expressed; this decreases the average litter size reproduced, indirectly decreasing the population.”
How Sarah Palin identifies with all this, I’m not sure. But, wait. At the end of her new television commercial, Sarah shapeshifts yet again. ”Look out Washington,” she warns, “cause there’s a whole stampede of pink elephants crossing the line, and the E.T.A. for them stampeding through is November 2, 2010.”
So what happens after November 2, 2010? What specious subspecies is Sarah turning into next?
8 July 2019: Rachel Maddow Plays With Trucks And Guns!
July 8th, 2010I watch The Rachel Maddow Show assiduously, not only because it’s the best-researched cable news program on the air, not only because Rachel is erudite and isn’t afraid to use big words or to indulge in her love of puns, but also because Rachel herself is one of the most joyous and gleeful political commentators on television today. She was at her most joyous and gleeful this past Tuesday and Wednesday when her show was aired live from Afghanistan. There she was in Kabul, striding shoulder-to-shoulder with our brave young soldiers, riding in armored trucks and playing with deadly weapons. It’s a little boy’s dream come true! And when she was shopping for a gift to bring back to her mother, Rachel showed no interest in the emeralds or other precious stones from the region which NBC chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel was trying to show her. Instead, Rachel chose to buy her mother an ugly little carpet decorated with guns! Engel looked astonished. He said he has never seen anyone actually buying one of those carpets. Rachel is now on her way home back to the States. I’d love to see the look on her mother’s face when she sees that carpet.
2 July 2010: Loose Lips Sink Ships!
July 2nd, 2010According to The Washington Post, U.S. Marines are being warned to be wary of foreign beauties they might meet and mate while they are on shore leave in the Seychelles islands. Pictures of Anna Chapman, the ravishing redhead who has been arrested recently as a Russian spy, are being circulated among the 3,000 sex-starved marines who have now been at sea almost seven months, as someone who might show undue interest in them, waiting for them to reveal vital information “when the moment is right.” That’ll really get us screwed. Okay, enough said about Pussy Galore. What about the U.S. Marines who happen to be women? Or gay? Pictures of which foreign male beauties should they be shown? Soccer players from Brazil and the Netherlands? Or maybe Ghana and Uruguay? Wait, how about Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner? They’re not human, are they? Who knows what they’re hiding behind those smoldering eyes? Or when they’ll sink their fangs into all our sweet and innocent shipmates? Hmmmm. For my money, “Give me Bela Lugosi or give me death!” And my lips will be forever sealed.
27 June 2010: “Not tonight, Josephine!”
June 27th, 2010If men with erectile dysfunction can reach for Viagra and/or Cialis to make sure they’re “ready when the moment is right,” it’s only fair that women with libido difficulties should have a remedy of their own. According to an article in The New York Times, relief is just around the corner. Right now, the F.D.A. is vetting a drug called flibanserin. It’s supposed to increase female sexual desire, but it could also cause dizziness and nausea. Thus, coitus could be messy. Girl Sees Boy, Girl Gets Boy, Girl Vomits on Boy. Boy Runs To Loo To Take A Shower. Girl Loses Boy. Maybe that’s what happened to Napoleon long before he met his Waterloo. ”Not tonight, Josephine!”
25 June 2010: Wake Up, Little Sushi!
June 25th, 2010Scientists at Ocean Alliance, a research and conservation group, recently released a report which shows that “sperm whales feeding even in the most remote reaches of Earth’s oceans have built up stunningly high levels of toxic and heavy metals like cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium.” Industry dumps these things into the oceans, the fish are contaminated, the whales eat the fish, and we’re eating the same things the whales are eating, perhaps eating the whales as well while we’re at it. Ahhh, what waiters in fancy restaurants don’t tell us when we’re ordering “the catch of the day,” or when we’re being poisoned slowly at our favorite sushi bar. Tell your kids there’s no point trying to find Nemo or the little mermaid. They’re dead. And we will be, too, if we don’t wake up to what goes on in “the water planet.” BP isn’t the only culprit here.
23 June 2010: The Place For Criminals
June 23rd, 2010
I’m hooked on MSNBC, which bills itself as “The Place For Politics.” But why is it that, whenever HARDBALL with Chris Matthews, COUNTDOWN with Keith Olbermann or THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW aren’t on the air after 10 PM at night, or on weekends, the programming inadvertently turns to something called LOCKUP, a prison documentary about hardened criminals? Is this a portent of things to come in politics? Is it just a matter of time before LOCKUP starts featuring senators and congressmen who ought to be in jail for defending oil companies because they get Big Payments from them? Or for sexually practising in private what they condemn sanctimoniously in public? Or maybe just for sheer insufferable incivility towards the rightfully elected President and Commander-in-Chief of these United States?
19 June 2010: Women Beware Women!
June 19th, 2010It boggles my mind how, in recent years at the University of Kansas, so many of the young women in my classes do not want to be identified as feminists. They seem to want all the benefits, and actually take all the benefits for granted, but would rather not be identified with the cause, or the history of the struggle. Back in the 60s and 70s, life seemed so much simpler when opposing forces like Germaine Greer and Phyllis Schlafly were at least civil with one another. These days, temperate and well-mannered people in politics like Hillary Clinton, Claire McCaskill and Maxine Waters seem to be horribly outnumbered by the likes of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Sharron Angle, Sue Lowden, Liz Cheney, ad nauseam. So can we blame young women today if they would rather not be identified with these shrieking shrews? What hath feminism wrought? Perhaps Jacobean playwright John Middleton said it best, back in 1657, in the title of his play, Women Beware Women.
17 June 2010: Big Porno?
June 17th, 2010Now that BP has made Big Promises to make Big Payments (industry experts say the $20 billion in escrow will grow to $65 billion by the time this is all over), and now that BP has also provided some unintended comic relief by allowing Big People to laugh at the expense of “small people,” we all need to start filling up our gas-guzzling SUVs and RVs this summer at BP stations all over America, to make sure that BP stays solvent as a company, that it does not go into bankruptcy, that British Pensioners can continue to enjoy their cuppa as their American cousins cry all the way to the bank. Drill, baby, drill. Keep the oil coming. Plug that hole. Why does it all sound like Big Porno?
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- Comments(1)
haha. Glad to see the blogging intermission has ended… the argument among my friends about BP recently has been that the execs need to be charged with murder (for the people who lost their lives on the rig or should face some other extensive criminal charges). Maybe we should think of some porno punishment for them? having sex while sarah palin, in a black corset, orders them to drill, baby, drill… and about halfway through they get hosed down with gallons and gallons of crude…