THIS WEEK IN THE ARTS

Comedy Central capitulated to Muslim nutbags.  Next night,  Jon Stewart told the Muzzie neanderthals to go fuck themselves.  Final score: Comedy Central nil, Jon Stewart 1.


Today is Shakespeare's birthday.  To commemorate the occasion, I bought a can of mead and wore my niftiest codpiece to work.

If I hear that Wavin' Flag song one more time....

Last night, after much deliberation, I stabbed one of my narrators to death and shredded everything he had forced me to type.  After two months' work, I am again a free man.

I watched something called Bright Star, a movie about John Keats and his love affair with what's-her-name.  (Before I write the last sentence inside these brackets, I should tell you that I hate love stories.  I couldn't wait for Keats to die.)

Joni Mitchell called Bob Dylan a phony and a plagiarist.  I own albums by each of them.  I blame it all on drugs.  Actually, I blame most things on drugs.  I'm on a few drugs.  Llewellen, hit me again big guy.

BECAUSE WEDNESDAY NIGHT IS POETRY NIGHT....

Chess Players

They sit in well-lit rows,
cufflinks sparkling over each battlefield
like stars.  Is this what God was doing
at Flanders, Stalingrad?

The wooden men click.  They're not fooled
by generals bargaining at tables.
They face each other.  They die.
Spaces split slowly open like craters, wounds.

The women are somewhere else,
harmless, beyond hope.
In here is a perfect celibacy
- knights without favours, castles bare of maidens.

Sometimes it ends in madness
- Steinitz challenging that
star-sleeved General to match His mere omniscience
against the mind of a chessplayer.

Time shrivels like an aging pianist's fingers
on keys where there are more harmonics
than atoms in the universe.
Yet nothing really happens

among these clocks and lights.
The end is scarcity,
winds howling over the chequered plains.
Imagine moving words

like platoons into their slaughter
- you'd never get literature!
Yet the chessplayers talk of beauty.
Sometimes they sigh like lovers.

-- Carol Rumens

Man, I love that poem. 

Carted a batch stuff to Value Village today.  Got another box  for the Sally Ann.  Gonna get a dumpster delivered so I can liposuck the basement.  Gotta get this place in fighting trim. Want to be able to whisper and hear an echo.


Hmmm... Just read this over.  Sounds like a song.
Better copyright the bugger.
This post copyright 2010 by Blind Lemon Boogaloo.  All rights reserved.

Llewellen:  Beer.

FACING RETIREMENT (PART ONE OF...?)

I don't know what the hell I'm going to do when I have to retire.  Shoot myself in the face, I suppose.  Beats getting up and shaving... and doing what? Poking around and pretending to give a damn?  Puttering about, playing at some boring, useless, sweet fuck all for the rest of the day?
I can't imagine it.  I don't want to imagine it. The mere thought is curdling the beer I'm drinking.
Life without the daily grind. Sweet deal, right? 
Horseshit.
I  love the daily grind. I don't want to be just another old fucker walking aimlessly about town, pants hitched up to my throat, looking kindly at strangers, pretending things matter.
I look at where I am and where I'm headed
and I want that gunshot to the face
when the time comes.
And please, I implore you: not a word to my wife. She has plans.  She thinks I'm on board. She can't wait.
Nope. Uh uh.
For me, it's the full-tilt boogie
or the big sleep.


Please note: any comments will be considered, but likely disregarded.
Llewellen... fetch 'em.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

You might well ask: what was this company thinking?

But the bigger question is this: why the fuck do parents buy this kind of crap for their very young daughters? And why do these same assholes (and their next-door neighbours) continue to purchase  t-shirts with suggestive -- and by that I mean sexual -- slogans for their little girls?  What the hell is wrong with people?  Bras, tank tops, makeup, spaghetti strap skimpery on little kids.  Kee-rist. Why not go the whole way and get wee Molly a nifty dildo and a cheeky, ass-cheek tattoo for her seventh birthday?

Childhood used to stretch until adolescence.  These days, it's eleven and twelve-year-olds with stretch marks.

Llewellen: I need a beer. And I need it now, son.

Next week: How we've fucked up boys.

SCHOOL SMELLS

Ahhh....

The smells.  Like: fresh wax on the hallways.  Coffee brewing in the staffroom. Freshly ground pencil shavings. And yeah... the kids.

Mostly, kids smell like dust.  Like the open road.  Like freedom.   But then, of course, there's Daniel, who -- like his biblical namesake -- must surely bunk with lions.  How in the hell does a child manage to smell that sour?  (Picture: Barf Bag,  that never-seen-but-often-mentioned character in 'Holes'.)  And don't even think of  getting me started on Lucy.  (This child's bouquet would bring you to tears.  Literally.)

Children should be seen. But  never, ever, smelled.

Thank you for listening.  You're a wonderful audience.  Drive safely and happy motoring.

Your humble public servant,

Phineas Boogaloo

(whose knees might be shot, but whose nose is working just fine.  And overtime.)

My school board has decided, in its wisdom, to chop funding for primary literacy.  Twenty-two half-time positions (eleven people, three of whom are my friends) will be gone by the end of the school year.

And the muckety-mucks that okayed this horseshit  will scratch their brainless heads a couple of years from now and wonder why little Billy and Sally (in Grade Six) can't fucking read above a Grade Two level.  Yeah.  Good luck with all that.  (Are they completely unaware that their vaunted primary Provincial test scores are less than stellar now?)

To mix a couple of metaphors -- and then a nice stiff drink -- I'm thinking it's maybe time to hang up my spurs and sail off into the sunset.

WEEK IN AND YEAR OUT

I get home from work (educating children) and read the news.  Children slaughtered.  Mutilated.  Raped.  Starved.  Stories from every country: rich and poor, western and not, democracies, theocracies, tribal shit and whatever the hell else there is.

We are a fucking lousy species. 

Pardon Me, But

How (and fer fucks sake WHY) does a convicted felon receive a pardon for the crime (merely by asking) three years after he's released from prison?  What?  Like all is forgiven and forgotten? Or at least sealed and unavailable?  Unbefuckinglievable.

"A pardon is not meant to erase or excuse a criminal act. A pardon means that the record of the conviction is kept separate and apart from other criminal records."  Uh huh.  Why?
"That means the conviction doesn't show up on checks at the Canadian Police Information Centre, a database used by the RCMP and other police."  Really?  Well pardon me, but why the fuck not?

"James was one of 14,748 Canadians given a pardon in 2006-07, while 103 people were refused, according to government records."  That's 99 fucking percent!

Insert speechless bit here.

On this most holy of weekends for the deluded practitioners of the ancient hoax, I am delighted to see

a) The Pope swimming upstream against a rather violent current;

b) The Archbishop of Canterbury sticking his oar in (to what ultimate effect, I cannot fathom);

c) a bunch of Dutch brewskis cooling themselves in my refrigerator.

Brethren, let us not drown in the septic bilge of religious wee-wee.  Rather, let us be revelers, anointed neath the amber waves and white-capped froth of a few chilled Heinekens. For that is the way of true deliverance. **

Hallelujah. 


Llewellen: fetch us the sacred vessels... and the bottle opener.

** (The Lunch Counter Prayer.  Reproduced with the permission of  Rev. Phineas Boogaloo.)