The Pig On The Loos

      This blog reports, you decide. Anyone planning on joining the Farm team?

Something About A Bird In The Hand

      "The arsehole has landed, repeat, the arsehole has landed." It looks like the President is finally going to thank Atlantic Canada-- er, okay, a coterie of business leaders in a speech in Halifax-- for Canada's help on September 11th. Three years late, of course. That's probably another reason he doesn't like libraries; beyond the horrible prospect of reading, one can only imagine what his late fines would be.

      And how, you might ask, does the Doctor plan to make it through the next day of the American invasion? Shouldn't it be obvious? (He might even end up singing "Pieces of You" in the process.)

Chic Ken Little?

      Most of us have heard different reports like this onr for weeks (months?) now, but suffice it to say the rumour will no doubt have everyone gathering about their TV sets at 7.30 tonight. Is it Chicken Little crying again about the sky falling? Who knows. Regardless, you've got to tip your hat to the man.

      UPDATE: And it's official: the sky has indeed fallen.

So Much For The Tommy-Knockers

      So, my countryfolk decided on Tommy Douglas as the Greatest Canadian, with Terry Fox and Pierre Trudeau behind him. Can't say it really surprises me given the Canadian propensity to opt for the safe and uncontroversial choice. But, of course, I'm waiting for the inevitable screen-captures that will soon be posted about the blogosphere of a certain lass, sitting directly behind Rex Murphy, grinning like a schoolgirl on allowance day. (Sorry, kiddo, had to chuckle.) But, oh, yes, there will be pictures, I'm sure, from her legion of followers. And the countdown begins.... now.

It's Lodged In Their Craws

      It seems the Templars still resent being seen as bad examplars....

Sophistication

      Reading-- gleefully, I might add-- this piece, I'm reminded of Northrop Frye's famous claim that all literary theory that couldn't be taught at the kindergarten level was useless. No wonder the academy's awash in so much theoretical circle-jerking. Key quote: "Given their vulnerability to the bad writing charge, the theorists would profit from a dose of humility or, even better, humor." Indeed, though the minions of Sophistopheles couldn't find either humility or humour with Tenzing Norgay, Rand McNally and a giant, red neon sign that pointed to those qualities and flashed "Humility and Humour, Right Here, Get Them While They're Hot!" Check out the award-winning quote at the end of the article. It's a doozy.

On Taking Dante Down Again

      Tossing through my increasingly messy library last night, I dragged down my copy of Dante's Commedia for the first time in some months. The Commedia's a strange book for me. I seldom reread through the Purgatorio or the Paradiso, my attention almost inevitably going directly to the Inferno, perhaps because it's more vibrant than the other books. It also reminds me, without fail, of a particular young woman I once knew, a young woman, I should probably add, that I think about more often than I care to admit. (There's a particular irony to this, as my copy of Dante's masterwork was a Christmas gift from another young woman's parents.) Every time I crawl into Dante, within the first few stanzas, my eyes glaze over and I'm distracted, my brain back in a long-defunct bar on the York Campus where I once tore through the Inferno in a sitting. Or, rather I planned to, though I made it through a huge portion of it (and had the out-of-body realization that I had to be the only person in that bar literally going through Hell), until said young woman wound up inviting me over to join her at her table. For the rest of that year, I wound up sitting with her and her friends every Friday, idling away hours over copious amounts of coffee and beer. Sadly, I haven't seen her in more than five years now, but somehow she remains fixed in my memory, peculiarly Beatified, as much as I try to slough it off as a sentimental stupidity on my part. I can't explain it, and I surely won't elaborate on it; but I have a strange feeling that I'll always think of her when I reach for Dante, and that fact alone keeps me from being able to reread the book with any sort of commitment or focus. Sometimes I wonder if such associations are worth the prices that we pay for them, the freedom of amnesia seeming so much healthier. But things are as they are, and poor Dante now has, for me at least, that woman tied around his neck, though that's not a bad thing, really, especially for those of us that haven't so much abandoned the true path as given up on going anywhere. The past, though, keeps rearing its head, unsettling us as it rattles its chains Jacob Marley-like. Mr. Eliot was half-right: history isn't freedom, but it surely is servitude.

In the Background This Morning....

		It's a better album than many people tend to appreciate, The Rhythm of the Saints (1990), Simon's Brazilian follow-up to the African-inflected Graceland. The standout track here is the first one, "The Obvious Child," which features some pretty terrific drum work by Grupo Cultural. The album by-and-large is a persistent shuffle with odd accentuations and diminishments, with songs like "Proof," "She Moves On" and "Born At The Right Time" proving more evocative than one might first think. The album, though, is a bit of a sad experience, because nothing Simon's done since has been of this calibre, let alone Graceland's.
Just try and find this double-CD bootleg. The album is an excellent recording of a Van concert in Dublin 1995, with The Man soaring through a lot of the songs he seldom performs in concert, including "Wonderful Remark," "St. Dominic's Preview," "Listen To The Lion," "Slim Slow Slider," "Madame George," "Ballerina" and "Brown-Eyed Girl," the last revamped with bristling new horn lines and sounding as fresh as ever. It also features the hilarious medley of "Tupelo Honey," probably the most capital-R Romantic song in Van's catalogue, with 'Why Must I Always Explain," perhaps his most cynical and frustrated. There are 29 tracks to these discs, and the last six are from concerts in 1986 and 1983, and features rare, rare, rare performances of "Thanks For The Information" and "Here Comes The Knight." Dynamite stuff, and of surprisingly decent quality for a bootleg.

Did The Earth Move For Ya?

      Ladies and gentlemen: one of the rare times four inches is a good thing.

Insert. Your. Own. Over. Punctuated. Sentence. Here.

      Paul Martin vis à vis William Shatner? I'll let Paul Wells explain.   On a side note: the Greatest Canadian debate last night was inredibly annoying, with only Paul Gross (Pearson), George Strombopolous (sp?; Douglas) and Rex Murphy (Trudeau) making any sort of worthwhile statements. Frankly, I wanted to stuff ostrich eggs into the gaping craws of Mary Walsh (Banting), Deborah Grey (Gretzky) and that unfathomably-annoying airhead whose name I do not know, and frankly prefer it that way, that platitudinously smirked through her case for David Suzuki. If there was any last minute momentum going into the voting, I suspect it's with Pearson, for whom Paul Gross' speech, flag and all, was certainly the high-point. The low point? The desperate whingeing of those still clinging to their hatred of Trudeau, to the point it seemed a rather mean-spirited pile-on, and which rightly earned the indignant smackdown from Trudeau's son Justin. (The son certainly possesses some of his father's rhetorical fire.) The "winner" will be announced tonight on the CBC at 8pm. It's down to three, I think: race leader Tommy Douglas, rising challenger Trudeau, and, thanks to Paul Gross, Pearson might still have a shot. But soon this whole ruckus will be over and we can set our eyes on a much less back-slapping spectacle-- the vote for the Worst Canadian. Paul Bernardo? Celine Dion? Stay tuned to find out.

The Wrong Side of Mykonos

      Anthony Lane's review of Alexander in The New Yorker is a devastating series of pot-shots, and possibly the funniest review yet of a film that's been prone to elicit funny reviews. Check out this paragraph, ample evidence that Lane's not pulling any punches:

Alexander, born in 356 B.C., was the son of King Philip II of Macedonia and Olympias, one of his many wives; or, to put the matter in its most startling form, Colin Farrell is the son of Val Kilmer and Angelina Jolie. Wow. Given parentage of that calibre, the boy was never going to be your basic, middle-income Macedonian. Either he was going to conquer nation-states all the way from Athens to India, engraving his name in history, or he was going to wind up running a club called Oedipussy on the wrong end of Mykonos. There is certainly no love lost, in this movie, between Alexander and his father, but the amount of love earned, and wrestled over, between mother and son should have been enough to draw the attention of social services, better known as the god Apollo. Jolie is in her element here, bravely choosing to impersonate a Russian gangster in the delivery of her dialogue, and spending large portions of the film with a snake or two coiled around her person. “Her skin is wet. Her tongue is fire,” the Queen says of her favorite pet, although it could be the other way around. We are supposed to read these scenes as evidence of her exotic unknowability and pagan working practices, although, if half of what I hear is true, they resemble a perfectly normal day in the Jolie household.

Those sounds you're hearing are the repeated lashes and snaps of Lane's towel against the backsides of just about everyone and everything connected to the film. Ouch. I also like Lane's dig that Farrell plays Alexander "as if he had researched the life of Anne Heche by mistake." I speculated a long while ago that this movie was going to be a fiasco, but I surely didn't guess it would end up in the same kettle of film infamies as Cleopatra and Ishtar.

Floored And Troubled

      My apologies again-- no time today to really update this blog, or even to begin to answer my email, now as backed up as Wilford Brimley without his Quaker oatmeal. Before you start thinking me an excuse-maker of Republican proportions, let me just say that I'm positively knackered. Today was spent entirely redoing the kitchen floor-- ripping up the old, putting in the new, and all the extant stuff that had to be done to enable those blasted things. It was a noisy, dusty, exhausting day, soundtracked, alas by the shrieks and peals of a radial arm-saw, noises which make those painful fingernail-on-blackboard sounds seem absolutely melodic by comparison. All this, of course, had to happen on the first day in at least a week in which the sky was (almost) blue in dark little corner of southern Ontario, as if to emphasize the shame of a good day lost. But, thank goodness, it's all done now-- except for putting the kitchen back together again, a task for tomorrow and most-certainly one on par with putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.

       The only one, of course, who seemed to have an easy day of it today was Trouble, who managed to hide away from everything in a fashion that made me rather envious indeed. As you can see, he was a little purturbed by the commotion, but not enough to go retreating into a closet or some deep, dark cubbyhole. It must be nice to be a cat. Adorable little bastard.

      Now I must shower and go out and drink until I no longer feel pain. Or feel, period. With my luck, tonight will turn out to be one of those nights I won't be able to get a buzz no matter how much I drink. At the very least, I won't be having to endure those horrible shrieks for a bit. Unless, of course--- well, I won't finish that sentence. One has to be something resembling a gentleman. Even if, these days, that seems to mark one as an anachronism. It's time to go get really floored. Don Henley was right: I haven't been drinkin' enough. Cheers.

Just How Do You Mean That, Sir?

      I don't even want to think about this, not even for a second, because while a lot of you might picture Benjamin Braddock, I'd picture Ratso Rizzo and suddenly want to rip my eyeballs right out of their sockets.   In a word, ewwww.

Our Home And Native Lap

      Colour this blog reassured.   It's comforting that we have people to monitor such dire situations for us.   Imagine how lost we would be if we had no outlets for our increasingly-valuable money. And, no, this blog will not make any jokes about loony slots.   Ka-ching!

Doctor J Hurts Babies

      Best compliment the Doctor's had in a while:

Oy...Where are you? Gosh, you are so addictive.

Don't say that too loudly, or else Health Canada will want to stick labels on this blog saying that it causes impotence. Which it might, by the way. But I take absolutely no responsibility for that.    For some reason, I'm reminded of the old line about the chronic masturbator: "He went Onan-Onan-On...."

      And, again, the Doc's behind on his email again. Please bear with me....

It's An Illness, I Tell You, An Illness

      Either that, or there's something in the groundwater this year, as I've just learned that there will be a fifth wedding this year, as another one of my cousins is about to get hitched in three weeks. Crimony, I remember keeping an eye on this kid when he was a baby. This is profoundly disturbing, as if all of the couples that I know in the world have suddenly gone Stepford on me. Everyone is collectivizing. Everyone, that is, but yours truly of whom the deed of collectivizing is as doomed as a pair of spandex pants on Della Reese (and just as appealing a proposition). Things are changing. Hardened hearts are becoming as soft as pumice stones; cynics are becoming googly-eyed romantics; the people that used to say "never" are saying things like "I do" and "I will." I'm feeling like Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers realizing that everyone he knows has been replaced. There's also the opposite sentiment, not one I cling to, but which I can no more avoid than anyone, the awkward wondering why everyone else is suddenly vaulting into wedded briss, er, bliss, while I trundle on unable to fathom even being involved, let alone in love. The thought of getting M'ed is as incomprehensible to me as a Mongolian folk-song. (The best response to this is one of a friends': "you can't change a good thing.") One starts to wonder if one has become the kid left behind while the other kids are promoted to the next grade. Thankfully, that's not the way I look at it all most of the time; my metaphor is that I'm the lemming standing aside wondering why the hell everyone else is rushing over the cliff. Me, cynical? Me, the adherent to Spencer's Law ("Murphy was an optimist")? Not in your wildest, most intensely-lubricated fantasies. But now I'm convinced: there has to be something in the water. Thank Darwin I don't drink... water. Speaking of which, it's time for a nightcap. Cheers.

U Broke It, U Bought It

      Am I starting anything if I report this? Hmmm? How much do you think this architectural eyesore would gather?   Six pounds? Seven?

This Is The House That Tom Built

      For the literary-minded among you, it's worth noting that Faber and Faber is turning 75 this year. Blessed be Faber, the only major publishing house that still tries to support the idea of poetry-- unlike, say, McClelland and Stewart in Canada, or even Knopf in the U.S.

But Where Did She Get Them?

      This blog can't even begin to fathom-- oh, hell, just read it for yourself.      Incroyable.

Bawdy Englische

Silly, silly, silly. But it amused me.   Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find the best titles for Amish porn films. And, please, no Burnin' Down The Barn or Wagon It In Pennsylvania.

"I Guess God Hates Us"

      The great bit about this article: it's hard to tell where the satire begins.   Or, for that matter, where it will end, in these days of chronic fatigue syndrome and attention deficit disorder. Just wait until they come up with a jargonistic enough name for it, and it'll enter the pantheon of human ailments.

The Return Of The Queen

      In a perverse way, this wouldn't be such a bad idea, especially for those disaffected Blue Staters.   Until, of course, they realized they'd have to watch Coronation Street religiously, whereupon it'd be the Boston Tea Party all over again. (A truly instructive historical symbol that tea party: not only does it explain what Americans will go to war over, it demonstrates too their technique for making tea.   No wonder most of them drink coffee instead.)

Ray On

      Every now and again, the N-S-G can float about the internet and alight upon something that makes him smile.    Approximately, anyway.

Ray Charles 'Genius Loves Company' just recently because the first album of his long career to sell more than 1 million units. Now it has sold 3 million.

Since debuting on August 31, 'Genius Loves Company' has sold over 2 million copies in the United States and a further 1 million in other territories.

It is the best selling album of Charles' career.

Note the truly intimidating statistic: "It was his 250th album."   At the risk of sounding like Keanu Reeves, I think that deserves a "Whoa...."

What's Your Favourite Word?

      According to a new poll commissioned by the British Council of non-native English speakers, the most beautiful word in the English language is... wait for it... Mother.    (Now what muthas thought that was a good idea?)   With that in mind-- what's your favourite word in this bizarre, chemically-unstable language? (I'm going to let you folks discuss this before I jump in.)

      And, I have to ask, what fuck-nuts thought "hen night" constituted a word in the English language? D'Oh....

Yet Another Article About Boobies

      This time, from the increasingly-grasping Maureen Dowd, who, sadly, with each column she writes proves herself her own worst intellectual enemy. I have a sneaking suspicion that, were she alive today, Pauline Kael would have grabbed Ms. Dowd by the lapels, or the hems, or whatever seemed most appropriate at the time, and said, "Get over yourself!" And, "by the way, get a focus: you write like a lonely Democratic hack with an axe to grind, and you're proving Zell Miller right, God forfend."

High-Energy Plankton

      There are two things to be taken from this article: that Jon Stewart is now perceived as being almost as credible as any of the other news anchors out there (most of us knew this long ago), and that perhaps it wasn't the religious vote that brought W back to power, but the Old Vote. Ya see? Never trust anyone over the age of 30. Not even the Not-So-Good Doctor. Especially not the Not-So-Good Doctor. It may be wise to begin considering, seriously this time, an old idea-- that is, ironically enough, about thirty years old....

And Your Legs All White From The Winter

      Leonard's first new album since the somewhat disappointing Ten New Songs in 2001 is due out sometime in the next week or so. You can check out Amazon's information here. Rolling Stone's remarkably insipid review can be found here, and you can check out some other reviews from Pitchfork ("a gorgeous, quietly poignant rendering of autumnality"), Pop Matters ("at his age, the fire still obviously burns"), The Guardian ("his voice has almost vanished into a husking whisper"; see also this piece that should be subtitled "70 Things About Leonard Cohen"), All Music ("Cohen's most upbeat offering"), E! Online (which, in its typical cheese-ball fashion claims that, groan, "this is no way to say goodbye"), the Calgary Sun (in a 'verse' review, it posits that "the art of seduction becomes the art of anaesthesia"), and the Yale Daily News ("in its sound and content, "Dear Heather" marks the culmination of Cohen's music career"). Metacritic has an array of the reviews so far, though their numeric system leaves much to be desired, considering most of the critics aren't working in percentiles.

      It matters little to me, alas. I have to wait until after the holidays. That'll teach me to be such a hard person to buy gifts for. Natch.... ^~~Take this longing from my tongue, / Whatever useless things these ears have done....^~~

The Endeles Knot

      As it's more than likely of interest to absosmurfly no-one, I decided to follow through on a long-undelivered promise to RB about an antique paper of mine on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by posting it on the less-accessible, and less-generally-relevant, Other Site. Here's the link on the EXTREMELY unlikely chance any of you might be curious of viewing a portrait of the Doc as a young (bullshit) artist. I take very little responsibility for it now, as, history has proven, that incarnation of the Not-So-Good Doc was an idiot.   Okay, even more of one. To repeat a personal mantra, torn from the lyrics of Mr Dylan, I was so much older then, / I'm younger than that now....

What A Frosty-Spirited Rogue Is This?

      Go ahead, everyone: read this and say what you're going to say....   Harrumph.   Sometimes one simply HAS to serve one's country.   Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party....   (True patriot love, indeed.)

      And, by the way, those of us north of the border have a very different answer to the question posed by this article than the author provides.   How can I suggest the Canadian answer to the question without being reductive or overly direct? Hmmm..... [deliberative pause] [gentle scratching of the beard in contemplation] Ah, eureka! Let's put it in a word [he stops and tugs lightly at the edges of his moustache whiskers, as if to say "Come and lie down on the railroad tracks my dear..."] :  Meeeeeoooooow!!!

---

      THIS JUST IN: The United States of America has just declared war on Canada. Invasion forces are mobilizing, but external sources report that those forces are confusedly assembling at the Mexican border.

      UPDATE:   Drunken Fenians from Nova Scotia are already setting fire to the White House and singing songs of Acadie--- again.  They are insisting, between pints of Keith's, that American President George W. Bush change his name to Percival B. Vagina, and they are taunting Vice-President Dick Cheney to come out of what they howlingly call "[his] insincere, uncircumcised location."   The ghost of Dolly Madison is reported to be positively despondent. The ghost of Wilfrid Laurier, in a press release from purgatory, has declared that he was misquoted a century ago, proclaiming that he actually said it was the 21st that would be Canada's century. American prisoners, most of them captured on errant trips to the bathroom to evacuate themselves of excess water, are now being held in Iqaluit, where they are being forced to listen to Anne Murray's "Snowbird" on eternal repeat. Petitions for mercy from Kofi Annan and the United Nations have so far gone unheeded. More news as it happens.

Current Issues In Lactation

      The Not-So-Good Doctor, oh-so-evidently, gall-darned went and studied The Wrong Thing.     (From the Continuing Education calendar for Mohawk College.)

      All together now: ^~~Regrets, I've had a few....^~~

Excuses, Excuses

      Oy vey. As many of my regular readers here know (some probably all too well), I've become extremely slow with email over the years, and I'm seeming only get to worse with it with Age. To top it off, the flurry of emails with which I am now backed up like an old woman who's eaten too much cheese has tended to consist of messages that, in answering them, require responses longer than a few lines, and my lazy-arsed-self has a tendency to suffer from Hamlet-like fits of procrastination. I assure you, this is never a personal thing: it's just plain old-fashioned indolence on my part. For those of you waiting for emails-- Laura, Chris, Zozo, Rori, among too many others-- be aware that I'm taking the better part of this morning to get caught up on all the correspondence, and you should receive something by around noon. I may (God, Darwin, and Aretha Franklin willing) even get to responding to the comments on the blogs, depending on how much coffee I can funnel into my system. You know it's going to be a long morning when you begin considering, as I have, the feasibility of drinking coffee out of a yard. Alas, It'd never work; I wouldn't be able to stir in the milk and sugar. Besides, I'd probably start to look like Joe Cocker mid-ballad, my meagre little body a series of tremors, tics and spasms-- Bugs Bunny after a magic potion, or Paul Martin trying to explain the sponsorship scandal. Just rest assured, he says aware there are many emails to go before he sleeps, I'm working on it. Now-- batten down the hatches, and bring on the coffee!

      Oy.... It's a cold, ugly Wednesday morning, as wet as Paris Hilton in a crack-house. Hump day, indeed.

      UPDATE: It's 10 am, and I've barely nicked the iceberg. Am reminded of Steven Wright's great line from some years ago: "I'm studying evolution. It's going realllllllll slooooooooow...." And why is it that even smarter comedians can't figure out how to use adverbs properly? Back to the mail....

      UPDATE: It's just after 12:30pm, and I'm finally (I think, he says, hoping he's not forgotten something or someone) DONE. For now. I'm now feeling absolutely protoplasmal. I'm too old for this sort of thing....

Anyways I Digest

      This one's for Christie: Ali G's commencement address at Harvard. I wish I could see why other people find this guy funny, but I just can't. Mind you, I loathe(d) a lot of the shows that everyone else raved about: Seinfeld, Sex and the City, Friends, Curb Your Enthusiasm, to name a few. I just find this stuff trite-- and that it's been done better by much cleverer people.

And I'll Huff, And I'll Puff And I'll.....

      Ladies and gentlemen, your Quote of The Day: "'We never have full-blown penetration,' he says. 'But, you know, on the intro, there is a vagina smoking a cigarette.'" That's what this blog calls "public access."

Show A Little Spine

      I like this idea, I really do. It's simple, and very, very forceful. (And the first one of you that suggests this is very Klingon in nature will be severely punished.)

The Persistence of Mammaries

      This blog probably shouldn't link to this page, but every now and again it has to serve an educational purpose, and duty, my friends, is everything. (And, in the words of Marshall McLuhan, "that which pleases teaches more effectively.")

      [with thanks to Dave for the link, though this blog certainly does NOT want to know if said link compelled an urge to make the bald man puke....   ]

Heavy PET-ting And A Lot Of Philately

      Yesterday turned into quite the hectic little day, with emails flying in faster than I could process them. Those of you still waiting for emails: please forgive me: I'm getting to you. But I wanted to make a few observations here about the TV fare last night:

      
•       Rex Murphy's case for Pierre Trudeau on The Greatest Canadian was even better than I thought it would be. If you missed it last night, check it out tonight on CBC Newsworld at 8pm, 11 pm, 2 am or 5am, or on Sunday at 5pm (all times EST). Unfortunately, the CBC hasn't put up video links to the programmes, nor have they put up transcripts of the arguments as they were made in the individual episodes. Murphy's was-- by far-- the strongest case made so far, his language thistle-sharp, his observations and synopses rigorously shrewd (and salient), his case as a whole the cleverest and the most touching of the lot, the last, in part, because Murphy's argument found a gravitas that all of the others lacked. No doubt about it, Murphy won the advocacy contest hands-down, Rex the Muhammad Ali in a ring of George Churvalos (with Mary Walsh and Bret "the Hitman" Hart Sonny Listons in Lewiston). He might as well have been dancing around at the end shouting I am the.... Well, never mind, this blog won't go there. Murphy's was a stirring presentation, the masterstroke of the series.   (And, for those interested, you can find Youssef Karsh's famous portrait of Trudeau that RK mentioned earlier right here.)
        
•       A commercial break led me to fumble through a few other channels. I was swiftly reminded why I should not do this on a Monday night, as I stumbled upon the increasingly-desperate (and putrid) Fear Factor, a show whose primary function seems to be to get busty young women to ingest the grossest things imaginable in order to satiate the perverse desires of disturbed losers to see such women throughly debase themselves for a bit of cash-- and so those losers can sit at home and indulge in adolescent sniggering that amounts to "If she'll put that in her mouth...." (Read that sentence ten times fast.) The show's little more than macabre porn, a gruesome, grotesque exercise in gagging, swallowing, and accidental facialing, with a bit of T&A to bracket the experience. And yet, this convulsion-causing crap is considered acceptable family television. It leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. Appropriately, one supposes.
        
•       Inter-commercial surfing (I'm a man: it's in my nature) also led me to a rerun episode of Celebrity Poker, in which Lauren Graham of Gilmore Girls, looking uncharacteristically hot and on the verge of bouncing out of her top, demonstrated that she's probably possessed of certain qualities that would dispose her well towards philately. Or something that sounds remarkably like philately. Or, perhaps, both. My chivalrous side tried--valiantly, I might add-- not to make the association with Fear Factor, but it was, alas, inevitable. I may have to force myself to watch a few episodes of Gilmore Girls, if only I could stomach the pretentious, nattering, faux-femme-Mametism of the show's dialogue.   No, it's not worth it. Nothing is.
  
         Ms. Graham won the game, by the way.   I wonder how that happened. It's not as if she had any tells.... But the other players, the men especially, seemed preternaturally distracted and given to serious lapses of judgment. But, good little philatelist that she was, she appropriately stuck it to them. Insert your own pun here about the predictability of the mail.

Oh, I really should stay away from the television set on Mondays. I shudder to think what this entry would be like if I hadn't dozed off and instead wound up sitting uncomfortably through an episode of Queer as Folk. Who am I kidding? I'd never make it through a full-episode. Monday night television, it's a profoundly disturbing thing, but at least I can remain blissfully ignorant about Rex Murphy's capacities as a philatelist. (As the old joke goes, at least here in Canada, "49 cents, same as in town.") With that, I'll shut up. Lickety-- (er...) -- spit.

Practically Thermonuclear

      Gene Weingarten's column this week is about coming together-- not in that way, you filthy poyvoyts-- after the seething contest of vitriol that we generally call "the American Presidential Election." His introduction sets matters out quite clearly:

We enter this holiday season a traumatized, polarized nation. As an alleged polarizer -- a member of the so-called "liberal" media elite -- I want to help in the important process of binding our wounds. Remember, people, we are all of us brothers and sisters, whether you happen to be one of those people who voted for Kerry, or one of those ignorant, bucktoothed, lunatic, Bible-thumping bumpkins who voted for Bush.

Sadly, he forgot slack-jawed, chicken-chom.... No, I'll be kind. Even if the next four years are going to be like wearing a Harris tweed suit in August without any underwear beneath.

First Thing We Do...

      ...let's fuck all the lawyers?!?    Key ironic quote: "'We went way farther than they did,' she said."

An Honest Bush

      Bush the Elder, in his speech at the Clinton Library ceremony, demonstrated something that's been sorely lacking for a while from American politics: good humour. Reading the transcript, it's hard not to think how much kinder (and gentler, one supposes) the man seems now that he's not in office (and his village-idiot son is in). I like these remarks on Clinton:

And seeing him out on the campaign trail, it was plain to see how he fed off the energy and the hopes and the aspirations of the American people. Simply put, he was a natural, and he made it look too easy.

And, oh, how I hated him for that.

Yes, Your Worship

      This blog absolutely hates it when this happens.

Tie Goes To The Hummer

      About this, probably the less said, the better.

      All together now: Tie a yellow ribbon / round the old oak tree....

A Few Prescriptions

      While just about everyone else in Canuckistan settles into watching the Grey Cup, or claiming they are anyway, this blog's settling in with some great material, musical and literary and savouring a bit of piece and quiet. What's up? I'm glad you didn't ask. Take a gander:

      Lewis' 1961 volume, a short but wonderfully compass-like text, it's a book many more "alert" readers within the academy should compel themselves to rediscover to keep the from setting to mind, let alone putting to paper, some of the more ridiculous notions that now hang within the academy like the smell of fresh baby poop. In fact, I'd encourage those readers to read these lines with an attention what all these ism-ists are really doing:

Escape, then, is common to many good and bad kinds of reading. By adding -ism to it, we suggest, I suppose, a confirmed habit of escaping too often, or for too long, or into the wrong things, or using escape as a substitute for action where action is appropriate, and thus neglecting real opportunities and evading real obligations. If so, we must judge each case on its merits. Escape is not necessarily joined to escapism.

Indeed. One might dare to point out to certain folks that "material" isn't necessarily "materialism," and that leaning too much on the latter may indeed be to evade one's real obligations.   And, I think it worth saying that Lewis is a writer too generally dismissed by the academy, for reasons, frankly, that tend to say more about the academy than they do about Lewis.

      Robbie Robertson's 1991 album is haunting series of New Orleans-textured songs, all of them evocative in their own ways, most of them astonishingly good. The album's opening track, "Night Parade," sets a fine-- but mercifully not overly ebullient-- bounce to things, before traversing through the eternizing strains of "Hold Back The Dawn," the muted, lightly shuffling duet with Neil Young on "Soap Box Preacher," the carpe diem plea of "What About Now?," and the harder-driving sounds of "Shake This Town" and "Resurrection." The album's final song, "Sign of the Rainbow," is a gorgeous evocation of hope that reminds one that Aaron Neville doesn't always have to use his voice for flaccid, whimpering covers of other people's songs. It really is too bad this album didn't get more attention than it did: it has a wonderful, lush sound, and with this album-- his second solo effort, after his 1987 self-titled album-- his voice manages to acquire that degree of coarse beauty that some of us at least hear in the voices of Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits. In a way, the album is more atmosphere than substance, but the air is thick and there's a lot of stuff going on, especially in the album's shadows.

      By no means Van the Man's best album, 1990's Enlightenment is a wonderfully satisfying album-- and, in fact, it was the first Van Morrison album I ever bought. (It may or may not be worth noting that it was Robertson who gave Morrison the nickname "Van the Man" in an improvised shout-out during The Last Waltz.) The album kicks off with the closest thing Van has had to a substantial hit since the 1970s, the rollicking "Real Real Gone," which manages to close off with a coda that name-checks Wilson Pickett, Gene Chandler, James Brown, and Solomon Burke. (And no one-- absolutely no one-- uses horn lines as effectively as Van. Okay: maybe Mr. Brown, but that's it.) There are some fine songs here-- the ironically disaffected title-track, "Avalon of the Heart," and the romantically-meditative "See Me Through"-- but the kicker is the eight-minute wonder that is "In The Days Before Rock 'n' Roll." The song is part poem and part song, the spoken word delivered in a mawkishly awkward rendition by Irish poet Paul Durcan, and the song done by Van, who, as the piece progresses, seems to go deeper and deeper into the music in a weird but absolutely wild tour through the music of Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and "the High Priest" himself, Ray Charles. I've heard a few attempts to create genuine poetry with popular music: none does it better than this song, a piece as "astral" as anything in the Belfast Cowboy's canon. It also reminds one how much the best music asks you to shut off your other senses so you can just surrender to the power of sound as history itself becomes a pattern in one's ears. Stunning.

      Great stuff, all three, all highly-recommended by the Not-So-Good Doctor for the stuff that ails you, especially as November moves toward the door and winter gets us firmly in its grasp. We'll all be needing to remember what tranquility is when the Christmas season reaches its manic acme and we end up running around like supposedly-cheery Travis Bickles. Call it the calm before the stores.

He Haunts Us Still

      Well, it seems we're now pulling into the finishing stretch of the Greatest Canadian debate, as the last of the unaired specials-- the case for Pierre Eliott Trudeau-- is aired either tonight or tomorrow, depending on whether or not one lives in Ralph Klein land (that's Alberta for my American friends). Despite some viable arguments to be made for specific candidates (particularly Mike Pearson, Tommy Douglas and Terry Fox), it's my inclination that the question at stake is pretty much a no-brainer, an inclination, I think, that is shared by the folks at the CBC who saved the largest figure of all for last. It's also suggestive that Trudeau's advocate isn't an awkwardly situated star, like Paul Gross, or a preening intellectual wannabe, like the endlessly annoying Mary Walsh. No, Trudeau's advocate is the giant among the advocates, the best writer and speaker, and surely the one least likely to rely on stretching the truth to make a point: Rex Murphy, perhaps the closest Canada has yet come to a Jonathan Swift. I expect Murphy's case will be decisive, even though, in large part, he has the easiest case to make. One of Trudeau's biographers (I can't remember which, unfortunately) famously began a study of him by rewriting Bosola's words from John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. "He haunts us still," the revamped line ran, and there was and is a lot of truth to the assertion. More even than Pearson or Douglas, on whose shoulders Trudeau stood, he defined what we now know as modern Canada, a fact some, like Brian Mulroney, tried to remake, only to find the ghost of Trudeau thwarting them at almost every step. Remember the Meech Lake Accord, a document that might have led us into no end of constitutional buggery? It threatened to slide right under the national radar until Trudeau spoke out against it, and opponents suddenly started cropping up like dandelions on an over-watered lawn. Trudeau's opposition, from retirement one should add, was both the first launch against the accord and the death knell for it, too. He haunted us still then. He haunts us still now.

      I said that Trudeau stood on the shoulders of Pearson and Douglas, and that's something worth considering further. Both men surely did a lot for Canada, and both are directly responsible for things that we now deem central to our national identity (Pearson's flag, the creation of UN peacekeepers; Douglas' expanded vision of a social safety net, implemented in large part by Pearson), but it was Trudeau that dared to deal with the larger questions of what Canada should be as a nation and as a society. In effect, Trudeau took the contributions of people like Pearson and Douglas to the next logical steps-- to a Charter of Rights, to a redefined judiciary, to establishing Canada as a distinct nation unto itself and no longer clinging to the British apron-strings. Moreover, he had to face the issue of seperatism head on, in part, I suspect, because the new Canada that was slowly coming into creation was an increasingly autonomous state, even if Canada had supposedly been on its own since 1867. He took us, one might say, through the looking-glass, with a sharply-identified notion of what Trudeau called a "just society" as the guiding beacon. That issues like gay marriage, abortion rights and the like aren't nearly as incendiary in Canada as they are below the border is probably in part attributable to him: the idea of "rights," as controversial as it has sometimes proven, has, especially in recent years proven more central to Canadian thinking than they are now in the United States. Simple, pithy phrases of Trudeau's, like "the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation," have become central tenets of the way we think, whether we realize it or not. Canada, and so many of its laws, still seem very much framed by Trudeau's thinking, and the more we get away from him historically, the more we seem ensconced within his headspace. In a way, Trudeau was Canada's Lincoln, the leader whose vision of his country not only determined its historical course but refigured the very notion of national unity. "Just watch me," he famously said, antagonizing seperatists and those that doubted him. We did. I'm not sure we had much choice. Even those that loathed Trudeau couldn't escape his presence or his influence, almost in the same way that most writers can't excape entirely the legacy of Shakespeare: the shadows, simply put, were too large. As former Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa said, furious that Trudeau had jumped into the Meech Lake fray, "it's that bastard Trudeau." Bastard, perhaps; but he was the only political titan that Canada ever produced, a fact underlined by the rather awkward respect accorded him by even his fiercest political detractors; whatever one thought of him, one never underestimated the impact he might have. There's no other Canadian politician of the past century of whom the same might be said. Mulroney? Chretien? Even Pearson or Diefenbaker? No. Surely not Joe Clark, the only man ever to defeat Trudeau at the ballot box and whose political career has proven something of a comedy of errors. And I don't think there's anyone who seriously believes that the passing of any of those men will prove as evocative, or as personally significant, as Trudeau's passing in 2000. The national reaction was one of shock, an awareness of some event of great import having happened, but that reaction was never hagiographical or deifying as, say, the American reaction was to Reagan's death. Canadians loved him as they hated him, and the general response wasn't that different than the Chorus' reaction to the revelation of Tiresias in Sophocles' Oedipus the King: we couldn't accept him any more than we could deny him, and frankly, we didn't know what to say. We were lucky we weren't cleft on the wings of dark foreboding beating.

      It's a bit ironic how history has unfolded. Many thought Trudeau had run the country on a series of fool's missions, and many thought the enactment of the Free Trade Agreement would make Canada even more dependent upon, and culturally akin to, the United States. That hasn't happened. In fact, now, more than ever, the distinctions between Canada and the United States are sharper now than they've been in decades, and the idea of Canada as an independent cultural entity is stronger now than it was even during Trudeau's years. That's Trudeau's largest legacy, I think. Even those most frustrated by Trudeau and by his policies (official bilingualism not being the least of them) often find themselves now resting on so many of his once-controversial determinations as if they were truisms. In many ways, he seemed to take Canada on a roller-coaster ride that alternately enfuriated, scared and even occasionally titillated us, but we've all not only survived the ride but we've come through it with stronger stomachs and a little less trepidation about matters that once might have intimidated us as a country. The legacy's larger even than that: Mulroney often found himself trapped by the ways in which Trudeau had remade the political climate, and Martin now finds himself trapped by the conditions that certain things once controversial now seem almost sacrosanct. Particularly as the United States seems to be taking a jagged turn to the political right, Canada's politics has tended to remain ideologically temperate, much to the chagrin of Stockwell Day and Preston Manning and Stephen Harper-- to say nothing of Jack Layton. No one can say that Canada follows Trudeau's motto "reason over passion" completely, but as so much of the rest of the world seems to be letting passion get the better of it, Canada has tended more toward reason, toward the cautious and the logical, with our nation more than most accepted by the rest of the world as a surely flawed but nonetheless admirable state.

      There's one last point to make on all this, and it's one that I think tends not to be appreciated as fully as it should be. Trudeau was the first major Canadian leader to demonstrate a joie de vivre, a sometimes blithe but never glib attitude that now seems inculcated into the larger part of Canadian character. From his pirouetting behind Queen Elizabeth II to the notorious "fuddle-duddle" fiasco, in a way he typified some of those characteristics that now seem as if they were always a part of our international identity: earnestness, smugness, humour, even silliness; he was Canada's first truly cavalier politician, and it's only been in the past few decades that the nation as a whole has really been cultivating that aspect of its personality. It's an attitude that's helped keep Canada grounded: in effect, it's helped to remind us about not sweating the small stuff, a hard thing for a country previously given to belly-aching and navel-gazing and still occasionally capable of relapses into same. The fact is, as a society we're still coming to terms with Trudeau, even though we seldom think of him directly as we do so. We don't have to. Whether we observe it or not, he haunts us still.

Dangling In The Air

      Catch this if you can.   (Points to all those of you that can resist the temptation to make cockpit jokes.)

Oh, Yeah, That's Why They Do It

      From today's NYT, an article that were it to appear linked on Fark would have an "unlikely" tag attached to it, comes this quote which should make all of us despair of what currently passes for contemporary American cultural thought:

Some are already taking aim at Mr. Stone's movie. "There will be people who see Alexander the Great's bisexuality as applauding that lifestyle, and unfortunately it will lead some young boys, young men down a path that I think they'll regret someday," said Bob Waliszewski, a film critic with Focus on the Family, a Christian group.

Lock up your boys! They might become so enamoured of Colin Farrell they'll suddenly decide they want, er, the bum's rush. Those of you that may have thought I over-reacted by describing the re-election of President Bush as a vote for tolerance and ignorance, I'd suggest you take a good, long hard look at this story, as dunderheads like Mr. Waliszewski that once would have seemed like lurching voices from the fringe now know themselves incredibly empowered. It makes this blog cringe.

American Woman

      Yet another reason (among so, so many in the past four years) I'm glad to be Canadian.

The Shr(i)ek of Memory

      Sorry, folks, there's not going to be too much of an update today as the N-S-G Doctor has decided rather selfishly to take Friday as an actual (gasp!) Friday and so dicker it away as mindlessly as possible.   One thing: watched Shrek 2 this morning at long last, the Doc being one who never gets out to movie theatres anymore. (It's a fact that astonishes some people that the last film I saw in the cinema was Gosford Park, and before that The Phantom Menace.)   I have to say I wasn't especially looking forward to seeing the movie, because, shall we say, I have a very specific personal association with the first film, and I half-expected my response to the sequel to be a little bittersweet. Alas, I'm cursed with an ironist's memory, to the point that certain films/books/songs/etc. can become, rather inexplicably, tied to certain people and events: to this day, an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air always reminds me of one young woman, Moondance reminds me of another, and even the smell of apples reminds me of yet another. It's a bit of a curse, I think. So, permanently etched in what remains of my brain is the memory of watching the first film with a certain young woman, not one of the ones alluded to above, her head gently resting on my lap as we watched it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Doc can be a bit of sentimental fool-- a fact he generally despises. I hate it when the past creeps out of its tomb and has to be put back in its place. Better not to go near the mausoleum in the first place.

      But, surprisingly, Shrek 2 really was a hoot to watch, the film being as good as its predecessor and just as inspired-- with the DVD featuring the bonus chuckle of hearing Larry King sing "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." I'm sure most of you have seen the film by now, and probably several times, so I'm really just having a delayed reaction as I am wont to do. Sure, the movie lacks the romantic poignancy of the first film, but it makes up for it with its madcappery. I haven't laughed quite as much as I did this morning in rather a long while. Such pleasant surprises don't happen often enough.

      As for, well, that memory-thang: it's not so bad, this time, even if a (very small) part of me can't help but wonder what that young woman-- so fiery, a whirlwind of energy and spirit, and very attractive, to say the least-- is doing now. It's been a while. *shrug* Oh shit, I'm starting to sound like a Paul Simon song. Memory: it's an unkind thing, best dispensed with like yesteray's garbage. But, what can I say? She was a gorgeous girl, by all accounts, with a lot of spunk and sass and charm. I've always been a sucker for women like that. That in itself is another curse of mine. Damn and blast, damn and blast.  

      Anyway, onward ho. A lazy, hazy, utterly unproductive Friday awaits.

Phenomenal?

      Frankly, I don't know what to make of this story which sounds pretty fishy to me. RK, any thoughts?   (Asks the guy who is suddenly thanking his lucky stars he's not grading university papers that manage to spell the word "like" incorrectly.)

      URGENT LIFE-CHANGING UPDATE: Just as I found a site online with the word in question, I received this (far more thorough) explanation from RK, which I'll let stand on its own:

Here's the word -- but the site I got it from has misspelt a couple of letters, I think. It's a portmanteau word the medieval scribe almost certainly intended as funny (rather like Rabelais' famous library catalogue): it simply describes a prophetic polymath by listing all his various ways of scrining as adverbial copulatives (I think the term is, though it sounds rude). If one knows some Greek, it becomes limpidly clear. I just know enough to spot about 3/4 of them.

      [Doc J inserts: keep in mind, there would be no hyphens in here. I have to add them otherwise the page would go on and on and on....]

Ornicopytheobibliopsychocrystarroscioaerogenethliometeoroaustrohiero-
anothropoichthyopyrosiderohpnomyoalectryoophiobotanopegohydrorhabdo-
crithoaleuroalphitoalomolybdoclerobeloaxinocoscinodactyliogeolithonpessopsephro-
catoptrotephraoneirochoonychodactyloarithstichooxogeloscogastrogyrocero-
bletonooenoscapulinaniac

With that, I'll simply say to any of you reading this that were students of mine in a previous incarnation: And you thought *I* was a brutal sonuvabitch??? If this woman is dealing with nine-year-olds, imagine what she'd have done with you....  

      Here, by the way, is RK's translation:

So (speculatively): "a worthless so-called prophet claiming to interpret the flight of birds, oracles, magic books, spirits, crystals, ghosts, movements of the air, astrology, astronomy, the winds, the omens from sacrifices, morphology, the movements of fish, forms of fire, the stars, the calendar, the movements or entrails of mice, chickens and serpents, herbs, the patterns of running water, water; using magic wands, sacrificial barley grains, wheat meal and barley groats to sprinkle over sacrificial animals, salt, lead; interpreting rumour, lightning-flashes, the patterns made by axe-heads, divining with a sieve; reading precious stones, movements of the earth, stones, game-patterns, darkness, mirrors, ashes, dreams, random heaps of things, the forms of fingers, groups of numbers, patterns of milk-curds, entrails, rings, the horns of animals, honeycombs, libations of wine, and hunchbacks."

Let us never forget the hunchbacks. Or the patterns made by axe-heads.

Georgie Porgy

      

      Gee, it seems the President kisses like he leads-- very much to one direction and to the great discomfort of others.   This blog is absolutely DYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYING to see the Prez plant a sweet, mushy, wet one on Donald Rumsfeld.      Hmmmm.... Query, he says scratching his beard: would it be considered gay if Bush kissed Dick?   Discuss among yourselves.

      The "blonde," by the way, is Bush's nominee for Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, who looks rather as if she's being given an Eskimo kiss by a randy seal.   What kind of seal? An elephant seal, of course.

One To Sgro On

      Have I mentioned recently how glad I am to be a Canadian? If not, read this and share my joy that this stuff still passes for scandalous in this country.   Unlike, you know, going to war on false pretenses, outing CIA agents, or bitching about half-naked women Desperately and shamelessly parading their (gasp!) exposed backs (see "Desperate Housewives" link within) during Monday Night Football.   Let's hear it for true patriot love.

            

      Also note this absolutely gawd-awful sentence that some editor should have caught: "Conservative Leader Stephen Harper called on Shapiro to be transparent."   Isn't it nice when our journalists are so oblique?

A Charred Day's Night

      Here's a woman that, shall we say, has certainly urned her stay in prison.   This blog would like to note, for your edification, that jaw-dropping irony of this quote from the soon-to-be-plaintiff, once he vacuums: "That was when we were going up and down."   Indeed....   Somebody should have told this chap to get the fark out of Dodge.

Canadians, Rude?

      Parrish the thought!   Let us stew a moment on this quote from Liberal MP Sarmite Bulte (who, evidently, doesn't mind that the President used the word "liberal" as a smear-device in his recent ignominious campaign): "Other leaders have come here and I think my colleagues will show Bush the respect ... [he] ... deserves."   Ohhh-kay: get out the tomatoes and the Cool Whip, everybody!   It's time to go to Ottawa!   (Can we shout to the President that he can run but he can't hide?)

      UPDATE: Carolyn has promised she won't heckle the President. You can now set your watches, people. It's only a matter of time....

The Shopping News

      When it comes to Christmas shopping, the N-S-G Doctor would like to aver that he'd rather repeatedly insert staples into his esophogaus than trudge through the malls and deal with the various jackasses (jackae? doesn't that sound like a Euripides play?) that infest the places like hungry pedophiles on day passes.   This blog has to note this fact, and remember that this survey was done in British Columbia, after all:

Not only that, we lead the country in nude shopping.   Some 14 per cent of B.C. online shoppers said they "wear nothing often or always when shopping online."  This compares to the national average of four per cent.

Does anyone remember the days when no one would have even imagined asking such a question in a survey?   Alas, I am probably officially now an Old Man, moored as I am in thoughts of better days.

You've Got To Have Faith

      Naive as it sounds, this just might work.   I'm sure Ms. Hewitt's breasts will give a stunning pair of performances.

Bringing Up Baby

      Key quote from this article: "'I didn't want to waste it so I gave it to Honey Boy,' she said." Well, of course, one wouldn't want to waste it.   This blog's sure the little squirt will turn out with very strong bones and teeth. And, curiously enough, this piece suddenly casts new light (rather than a milky film) on the raising of Elijah Wood....

      [with thanks to RK for the link]

You Choose Tattered Drink

Check this out: the BBC has a small flash programme that allows you to build "a poem" to see the origins of certain words in Norman English. Okay, so there's no big shakes to the programme, but putting together the words can be fun, especially if you try to make the poem as dirty as possible. As you can see from the N-S-G Doctor's screen-cap, he was able to finagle something just lurid enough to win a Norton competition for Best Postmodern Erotic Poem. Er, well, maybe not-- but as bad as it is, it's still better than, well, let's just say enough of the stuff out there....       Can anyone tell I'm seriously procrastinating today?

      ADDENDUM: Anyone want to try to submit their poems? Go for it-- I daaaaaaaares ya.....

The Idea Of Order

At left: Didacus Valades' 1579 rendering of the Great Chain of Being from his Rhetorica Christiana. Valades was the first Mexican to have a book published in Europe. Notice the direct access to Hell for the fallen angels, as if they were suddenly jettisoned down a laundry chute.       It's a fascinating image, and a hard one to find on the Net in any degree of legible detail. (There's a larger version of the image you can peruse by clicking on the pic.) But dare any of us ponder a hierarchy so elaborately laid out, so ordered, that doesn't seem like an artificial-- to say nothing of arbitrary-- series of assignations?       And, yes, in case you are wondering: I am playing with images a lot to today. I am allowed. Don't make me throw any of you down any laundry chutes....

Absolutely Aiken For It, Baby....

      This blog's first response to reading the headline of this article was right out of King Lear: "Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!"   Then, it got to this paragraph which rather made this blog retreat into utter despair, certain that the cultural damage will be irrevocable and, indeed, damning:

The hour-long studio special will feature Aiken and Special Guest star Barry Manilow as well as gospel singer Yolanda Adams and NBC's "Will & Grace" star Megan Mullally.

Kinda makes you want to slit your own wrists, doesn't it?   No, not slit: more like hack into them madly and viciously with a dull and rusty butcher's cleaver.   It then gets, God help us, worse: apparently there's a book on the way.   Somewhere, that thought is making baby Jesus cry-- and the ghost of Emily Dickinson rend her larynx into shreds slightly smaller than the pieces of Ashlee Simpson's talent.   Where, oh where, is Max von Sydow when we need him?

      Alright, altogether now: Have yourselves a merry little Anti-Christmas.....

D'Oh! (A Deer, A Female Deer)

      From the "I Can't Believe That's Something Someone Would Have To Ask" file....

      And not from the same file per se, but the consanguineous file otherwise known as "I Can't Believe That's Something Someone Would Have To Point Out" comes this rather disturbing piece that simply serves to remind the Not-So-Good Doctor why he doesn't trust any doctors that take the title seriously.

      In both cases, one supposes, the buck ought to stop here.

Kooser and Kooser Still

      Is everyone ready to meet the new Poet Laureate of the United States?   His name is Ted Kooser, and he's a retired insurance company employee.   Gee, I thought Wallace Stevens had the patent on that racket. There's a more official biography here, and you can glance at a few of his poems here.   I have to admit, I'd never heard of him before today, but I guess now I'm going to have to give him a more studying glance. Have to say, the stuff I have seen so far hasn't especially impressed me, but that may simply be the limitations of what's available online.   Whatever else, the man seems to have the rustic-Americana look dead-to-rights.   Seems like his publishing company-- U of Nebraska P-- has decided to market him as a cross between Robert Frost and Bob Vila.  

The End of The End

It's a tragic sight, one to bring a small tear to the Not-So-Good Doctor's eye if it remained possible for him to produce one. Rumour has it that this old haunt (alcohol-serving, of course) of the Doc's is going to be "a Vegan-based lounge." As Peter Ustinov used to say so regularly, "oh, dear me." It staggers the horse-drawn mind.       And, no, none of you want to know (if you don't already) how much time I spent in that place....    One almost thinks the place deserves an elegy of sorts. *sniff*       (Vegans.... VEGANS!!! The world truly has changed-- and not for the better.... *pout*)   Maybe they just need some good old-fashioned milk.