Jots & Tittles From Barabas Munn-Dayne of Lake Flaccid, New York, Where It's Ground Hog Day 365-Days-a-Year: "Let There Be Sausage, and There Were Pigs."
That last part in that head right above this is from a strange book I found in the far-back area of the Lake Flaccid Pub_ic Library. They lost the big silver "L" off the facade of the library years ago and have never been able to replace it. Mayor Laplandier, and he's been Mayor of Lake Flaccid for 32 years, eight straight terms in office, says, "Get used to that 'L' missing. It's either that or get used to Snooker Balesterios, the City Cop, not having a legit patrol car. We fix the 'L' on the public library or we buy Snooker a real patrol car--which is it? Snooker says he feels 'queer' ridin' around in that golf cart we fixed up to look like a cop car, plus it ain't worth a tinker's damn in a high-speed chase--and if Snooker had a souped up cop car, Lake Flaccid could make some big bucks selling our high-speed chase vids to teevee cop shows--big bucks for the whole city. 'Sides, that sign don't a'fend no one in this burg. Double-'sides, no one I know goes near that library anyway since Mrs. Elmo Dullard got murdered in that far-back room over that damn book." And that book Mayor Laplandier mentions is the same strange book I found in that very same far-back corner where, yes, as the Mayor said, Mrs. Elmo Dullard, Synthetica was her familiar name, was murdered over that book...in fact, this very book I'm holding in my hand now, The Lake Flaccid Version of the Holy Christian Bible, as translated from the original King James Version, the original English, into American-Yankee English by Lake Flaccid's own, Joe Hanibal Wooster Guckucklian--the Guckucklians were an "odd" family who most oldtimers said were once a high-wire act that were fired on the spot by the Bostwick & Yearling Circus of Angry Passions right outside of Lake Flaccid--thrown off the special New York Central circus train on its way, some said, to Madison Square Garden in New York City. That happened back in the early 1940s--yep, and Joe Hanibal is the youngest son of Picks'iffian Faultenstall Guckucklian, a semi-musical genius who built highly prized pitchpipes that he made by stretching animal vocal chords (some said the vocal chords of cats mainly) over large oyster shells that Pick, as they called him, then sealed (cemented) together in a way whereby he was able to fashion a sound hole that when blown through over those cat (some said, like I said) vocal chords gave back a perfect "A"--the perfect pitch tone of natural A--cat vocal chords that Pick tuned by ear, he having perfect pitch, at least that's what people said.
So The Lake Flaccid Version of the Holy Christian Bible was the art of Joe Hanibal, who we called "Ballsy" in high school, a strange duck of a congenial enough but very akilter kid. And Ballsy Guckucklian rewrote the Christian Bible.
Here's the line I used in the head up there. It's from Ballsy's 23rd chapter of his "Book of Gin As Sustenance" (his version of the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament), verse 10: Twas in the year of the turpentine famine when the angel Petcock invented vowels in the language of the Capurnicans, that G. Hovah & Son desired through the veins in their bellies some Judaically illegal pig meat, at that time known as חזירע ברית [I never knew Ballsy knew Hebrew--and maybe he doesn't], the forbidden, therefore the most fascinating in terms of at that time's holy lust for forbidden things of all lustres. And the angel Petcock spoke at a banquet of Pig Loving Patricians and the demands for pig meat got so loud and aggravatingly obnoxious, the angel Petcock rose up and in a mighty wail that rang like thunder through the Great Hall of Heaven, "O.K., O.K., God-dammit, if it's חזירע ברית [pig meat] you want, it's חזירע ברית [pig meat] you got--'LET THERE BE SAUSAGE...and there were םיריזח [pigs]'"
So that's where I got that "Let There Be Sausage and There Were Pigs" thing. From the Lake Flaccid Version of the Christian Holy Bible.
And as a coming attraction, another strange thing happened to me on returning back up here to Lake Flaccid after having spent some time downstate in New York City. Where I slept on the floor of The Daily Growler offices, don't you know. On the floor just the not-so-swank editorial offices. Actually, I slept on the floor in the space Mr. Ed the Editing Horse leases as an apartment. And,oh God in Heaven, first of all, my back's still killing me from the discomfort of sleeping on that floor--I found some hay in Ed's food bin and packed that in some sheets, clean, too, I found in Franny & Zoe's desk drawer. Second of all, I've never smelled such a strange odor as I smelled down there those nights. Leftover from Mr. Ed, I assume. I've been around dogs and their odors, but I'm not used to horse odors--but whewww! Though I was lucky. Mr Ed wasn't there. He'd gotten a job pulling a horse-drawn snowplow up near Stowe, Vermont, so he'd taken off to do that, for extra dough, I assumed. Do horses make big bucks as snowplow horses? Who knows? So I had Ed's stable-like office to myself. Please, don't ask me about his waste. Please.
So I got back up here like five days ago--what's this, er-ah, Friday! Fish Day up here. Though it's still Ground Hog Day up here, too, so you can eat pork today, too--fish cakes and spaghetti or how 'bout some pork-stuffed stuffed cabbage? Yummy. The temperature got back up up here into the high 30s so that was hot enough for me to head back up, kick thegrowlingwolf out of my digs, and settle back into my daily lakeside routine.
I got quite a surprise when I unstuffed my stuffed mailbox when I got back. First thing I spotted was an interesting cheery red envelope with a more interesting return address: "Cecil Beagle-Jones, 3_ C_____ Avenue East, Lake Flaccid, New York 1____" It was on top of several rather unattractive pieces of mail.
Once back in the semiwarmth of my cabin, I threw all the mail slithering across the cabin floor, except for the red envelope. I threw that other mail, that plain ole mail helter-skelter across my living room. Then I hastily ripped open that special red envelope. Another surprise awaited me. It was a letter and in the letter was a formal invitation inviting me to dinner on a certain-certain future eve. The letter explained the reason I was being invited to dine with Lake Flaccid's most famous citizen. It seems that while the Wolf Man was up here.... Remember, I gave thegrowlingwolf the use of my cabin while Lake Flaccid was snowed and iced in a week or so back--and I gave him the keys to the Snocat, blah, blah, blah?--and sure enough the Wolf Man did make it up here in spite of the snow and the ice and the dead town--and sure enough just like I told him, nobody was in town except the man I said would be in town, our most famous citizen, Cecil the Dog Faced Boy III. And, sure enough, who do you think the Wolf Man chanced to run into his very first day up here but Lake Flaccid's strange but famous resident, Cecil the Dog-Face Boy III. [I'd forgotten that Cecil uses the name Cecil Beagle-Jones as his legal name. You know, for signing documents and checks and things, though according to rumors, Cecil's birth certificate lists his name as "Cecil the Dog-faced Boy III"...his mother's name as "Priscilla Jan Beagle" (from Forest Tucker, Illinois) and his father's name as "Cecil the Dog-faced Boy Jones, Junior" (at the time of the Third's birth, Cecil, Jr., was living and working as a racker in a pool hall in Miami).]
The letter explains how Cecil and the Wolf Man met. Then Cecil says that as a result of that first meeting and several more that followed, that the Wolf Man and Cecil the Dog Faced Boy III were of parallel minds and that they had spent several long evenings of deep intellectual reasoning and during the more social aspects of those evenings, the Wolf Man had spoken highly of me and had even guided Cecil to The Daily Growler and some of my Jots & Tittles posts on his new Mac wireless laptop, of which Cecil had read several, been impressed and couldn't imagine how we'd lived in so small a berg as Lake Flaccid for so many years without
"acquaintancing" ourselves, and I use Cecil's that which I dub "Cecil's word." The invitation said that I, Barabas Munn-Dayne was invited to dine "in splendor," as the invitation said, with Cecil Beagle-Jones, the infamous or famous whichever way you care to look at him, Cecil the Dog-Faced Boy III, at his residence in the foothill community of Rich-Rich Highlands, named for the Rich Brothers who built it, Lake Flaccid's finest neighborhood.
And it was odd that Cecil III had moved to Lake Flaccid several years ago and yet I'd never met him. I'd seen him shuffling along through town occasionally, but he was always wearing that fancy sack over his head. Also, like everybody here in Lake Flaccid has seen and knows by sight, I'd witnessed Cecil Third's big red Rolls-Royce cruising through town at outlandish but accepted speeds. A big fire-engine red Rolls with, I swear, with a hood ornament in the image of Cecil-the-Dog-faced-Boy--a solid silver replica of Cecil III's famous grandfather, "the Original Dog-Faced Boy" riding proudly against the rushing winds up on the tip of that big car's long hood.
Besides, too, everybody in town, including me, knows Cecil III's chauffeur, Hot Toy Chow. Yes, that's his name, though he's originally from London and not China. Hot Toy talks about himself nonstop in fast Chinese-chopped English with its thick Brit accent; however, Hot Toy never about his boss. He'll change the subject if you ask him anything about Cecil. Besides, Hot Toy only brings the Rolls up to Lake Flaccid in the late spring and summer. During the winters, Hot Toy lives with a woman he says is his wife down in Albany, New York, where he runs an Italian-Asian restaurant. Hot Toy, by the way, says he was the result of an Irish mother and a Chinese bootmaker father named Jimmy San Chow. Jimmy San had been a struggling peasant shoemaker in Mao's China and he'd eventually paid $3,000 US bucks to get himself smuggled out of China through Hong Kong to be finally dropped off and left on his own in Liverpool, England. After marrying a Miss Kelli O'Dell, he changed his name to Jimmy Ju-Sang Chow Stein, I swear that's what Hot Toy told us. As Ju-Sang Chow Stein, he made a fortune off his line of ladies shoes. True or not, that was Hot Toy's story.
But even knowing Hot Toy like I did, and it was very casually, let me tell you, usually when he was pretty well tanked up over at Ben Oversight's Changing Daily Bar where he hung out all the time. But, I knew Cecil by sightings only, never meeting him personally. "Snout-to-snout," as I liked to jokingly say about meeting Cecil face-to-face--or mug to mug or pug to pug and the jokes go on--though do dogs have snouts? I've got pigs on my mind, see.
So I responded with an acceptance to the invitation and when the night came, I gussied myself up a bit, put on my thirty-year-old Brooks Brothers suit, and after a cup of coffee at Donnie's Sugar-Coated Delights Coffee Shop and Donna's Chandler's Shop, I walked over to Cecil Third's comfortable-looking though not ostentatious home--walked over to Rich-Rich Highland via way of Celery Lane and Bravado Circle. Trust me, Cecil lives in Lake Flaccid's currently most exclusive neighborhood, though there is a rumor that some Saudi-Arabian prince with too much money wants to build a ski resort here in Lake Flaccid. We're all holding our breaths til that happens, though old man Moore over at the feed store swears he's seen a bunch of Arabs, wearing turbans and maybe riding horses, he's not sure about the horses, using transomes out on Thunder Slope, the highest hill around that could maybe possibly who knows? be high enough for a ski slope, though I can't see it.
I arrived at Cecil Third's house a bit tuckered out. It's a steep hill you've got to climb to get to his house. Catching my breath in huge frosty gulps, I rang Cecil's doorbell. There was a dog-barking sound coming from inside the door. During one fierce spasm of barking, the barking stopped abruptly and soon I was, like I joked, snout-to-snout with Cecil the Dog Faced Boy III. The infamous Cecil the Dog-faced Boy III. There I was and there he was, though he was wearing his custom-made sack over his head. That was kind of rude I thought. What the hell. He courteously ushered me into the entrance-way/vestibule, though this space was big enough to have a silver chandelier hanging down from an extremely high ceiling of what looked to me like redwood above it, hanging from an arced ceiling that led you out of the vestibule to extend on through an apocalyptic doorway of carved masked faces into what I'd describe as an almost banquet-room-large living room. An enormous room with that extended high ceiling, all rare-wood panelling and rare-wood log beams overhanging you across the open ceiling. It was a very long room with a huge oddly shaped stone fireplace at its far end. Was that a fireplug that fireplace was shaped like? That's what it looked like to me. A fireplug with a log burning in it.
As I entered the sparsely lit room and after my eyes opened wider and focused better, a great surprise lay in wait for me. I saw it at first as though a monster. What else could it be? But then my eyes focused and I saw it and I was banged head on by what was zooming out at me from over that fireplace, hanging above it precariously. It was a most unusual sight. Something I for sure had never seen before anywhere, not even in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Over that big fireplace hung a mounted elephant's head. That's right, a complete elephant's head, with its long trunk stuffed upwards in a curled-up position. Out from the sides of that coiled up trunk outthrusted in high-polished splendor the old beast's stellae-like ivory tusks. What a strange and alarming sight that was as it bloomed out of the upper darkness of the room to explode finally in an intruding way--forcing its presence on you--out into the room's flashing firelight and straight into your awestruck keeping-adjusting eyes.
It struck me as a rather macabre mounting--elephants have enormously large heads, don't you know. Before I could say anything, Cecil III, still wearing his head sack so I couldn't see his head or face, and noticing me staring at the elephant's head, said, "My Grandad shot that on a trip to the Kingdom of Brunei back in his heyday. It was a special-invitational trophy elephant hunt set up by His Royal Highness the King of Brunei. My Grandad won the trophy by shooting that head. "Old Bull" they said his name was. Cost my Grandad $100,000 to have that head mounted and then shipped back to Sarasota, Florida, his headquarters in those days. He was really proud of that thing. I think it's a bit gaudy, but still I sometimes find myself dreaming that it was I who shot it and not my Grandad."
He then led me to a large brown leather comfy chair just in front of the fireplace back from the hearth a tad. It proved to be a butter-leather arm chair that I sunk into in luxurious ease--in fact, it was then I began to notice how luxurious the whole place was. Who'd a known such a magnificent room was in Lake Flaccid? How'd did he get this stuff into town without the gossipers knowing all about it? I don't remember any moving vans are eighteen wheelers coming into town to deliver all the geegaws in this room--to deliver the timbers and wood to even build such a room should have been noticed by the locals. I never noticed anything like that. Yeah, I remember them building this house, but it's a log cabin-type, A-frame-type typical house around here, nothing special, except, yes, it's big, bigger than most of the big houses around town.
The chair I sat in faced at an angle a matching twin chair sitting across from it.
"Would you care for some tawny port I just got in from Portugal?" Cecil asked me once I was settled in that magnificent chair. "It's 40 years old. Want a snifter?" "Damn right, thank you, Mr. Boy...." "You can call me Cecil. I go by Beagle-Jones after my mother, but you can call me Cecil, or Ceese, or Sylvia, like the boys used to joshingly call me in the West End boarding school I attended when I lived in London."
He walked over to a large cedar cabinet and came back with a cut crystal decanter choking on a deep-blood-reddy tawny liquid rippling through its facets to dance around the dark walls of that firelit room and two crystal brandy snifters. He poured out two large slugs of the wine and handed me a snifter. I rolled the glass around in my palms for a while before offering my snifter up as a toast to which Cecil Third raised high his snifter so they could meet in mid-air. As we clinked crystal rims, he shouted, "Huzzahs and mucho suerte" and took a long sip of his wine. I took a long sip of my wine then, and after I swallowed it and let out a exhilarating "Swooooosh," I declared, "Ah, that's as smooth as the smoothest little baby's ass there ever was in the world." "Forty years old, my man, hardly a baby," Ceese Third reminded me, "but, Whoooooo, though forty-years-old, it is still smooth as a newborn baby's ass, on that I'll agree...or even more romantic, let me say it's as smooth as the inside of a virginal girl's sweet thighs!" I swear I sensed a tear in Cecil's eye after that last statement, though, like I said, I couldn't see his eyes as long as he wore that sack over his head.
So I'm currently working this meeting, you know, working it into an interview-type piece that I'll publish soon here in these Jots and Tittles--"An Interview With Cecil the Dog-faced Boy of Lake Flaccid, N.Y. Coming Soon!" I'll have to hawk it like you would a freak show starring a dog-faced boy--or an alligator boy or a lobster-faced boy.
In the meantime, let's fall into some:
Jots & Tittles
--another side of the Obama puzzle: Why choose a Repugnican from New Hampshire to be your Secretary of Commerce in the first place? And further, does his picking this fool mean that Obama didn't know this guy voted to do away with the whole Commerce Department back when his party had overwhelming power?--yeah, this Yankee wanted to do away with the whole Department of Commerce--this Reagan-thinking Conservative prick who also despises any kind of immigrant, unless he's a white immigrant with direct British ties. These kind of appointments leave everyone shaking their heads and wondering what the hell is going on in Obama's mind? He's got to know what we all keep thinking. He's too smart to not have figured out all this stuff himself. Or is his head up his ass now that he's got the power to really change things?
--the Carlyle Group: here's a site that shows you what a bunch of war criminals this gang is:
www.hereinreality.com/carlyle.html
--perhaps the first bluesman to get a college degree: "Harrison D. Nelson, Jr., later to be known as Peppermint Harris ('Pep" to his friends), was born in Texarkana, Texas on July 17, 1925. He attended Grandview Junior High and later Dunbar High School in Texarkana, graduating in 1943. After completing high school, Pep enrolled at Texas Southern University with a major in Speech and a minor in History. He received his BA degree in English" [from Unlimited Blues, #144 Spring 1983, "From University to the Blues," p. 25].
--the Tom Daschle tax evasion goes deeper than old Tom's forgetting to pay $130,000 in overlooked taxes. Tom has done nothing his whole life but be a politician. After he failed to gain back his Senate seat, old Tom went on a lecture circuit. Why, hell, folks, old Tom lectured his ass off. Who was he lecturing? Aha. There's the trouble with not just old Tom but all old kicked out or retired politicians. Tom was lecturing to big corporations. What was he lecturing about? Why old Tom was lecturing big corporations on how to use ex-legislators like him to get their big moneyed feet in the doors so they can back their Brink's trucks up to the Federal Reserve loading dock and cart off millions upon billions of bucks for their future gangbangs.... Why old Tom Daschle whose only-ever job was as a politician was a good lecturer, too. And old Tom lived well on his Senate salary, which ain't bad, folks, say compared to your lousy salary, but oh how much better Tom lived off his lecturing salary. But after Tom left the Senate, well, hot damn, folks, as a lecturer to big corporations, teaching them how to use politicians for their own gains, Tom made millions of corporate bucks--millions! Tom made millions off who? Why old Tom made millions off the very companies he would regulate as Sec'y of Health and Wealth.
--politicians are along with corporate CEOs the biggest and boldest crooks in the world--Obama may be waking up and smelling the coffee in his the most deceitful political office in the world.
--notice how there are now new sets of pundits telling us what the matter is all over the chaotic place?--pundits who know no more about what the matter is than the hapless pundits they replaced. Like Glenn Greenwald. Bill Moyers said tonight on his teevee show--it was boring, by the way--that Glenn Greenwald, who is a writer for Salon.com, is one of the most influential bloggers on the Internet political scene. I've never read Salon.com much; nor do I read the Huffington Post that much--seems like the same-old same-old quasi-liberal going-nowhere bullshit to me--like, you know, just a flip of the coin away from not being liberal at all--not having anymore hindsight or innovative ideas than any fool journalist who decides he's a Beltway broadcaster of provocative phrases....ah shit, their shit stinks! Greenwald has no idea what's going on anymore than Obama now does. Obama's nonpartisanship is the worst mistake our so-qualified yet scared president has made so far. The rightwing Whites are now after his black ass.
--Noam Chomsky can talk for two hours on just the concept of one word! Boring but brilliant.
--P.W. Singer is an interesting character. He's trying to frighten us with a new book on robotics and the military--how the military is testing a robot soldier that can fire an M-16 rifle and also fire a shoulder-held rocket launcher. Or how about these predator drone planes that are now wreaking havoc in Afghanistan and Pakistan--these drones are remote-controlled planes that can stay up in flight for 24 hours, have unbelieveable vision capabilities--their cameras film away while their performing a mission--like zooming in close on an Afghanistan school and watching with close-ups the murder and damage inflicted by the drone's missiles--these drone cameras can zoom in on US forces getting their cans blown off. You can watch predator drone videos on YouTube--the US soldiers call those videos, "war porn." Read Isaac Asimov's I-Robot--that's the book P.W. Singer says contains the robot Bill of Rights and Wrongs.
Run like a motherfucker when you hear one of these flying low over your neighborhood. This is Nazi rocket science on the hoof. The US got this knowledge when it instead of trying him as a Nazi war criminal, which he was, brought Werner Von Braun over here and made him head of our space and rocket program, that which we later called NASA. Von Braun (in Huntsville, Alabama, to this day there's a Von Braun Center) was the inventor of the V12 rocket, a predator drone prototype, the unmanned weapon of destruction Hitler used so viciously successfully and with deadly effect during World War II in what historically is called the Blitz of London, where for months Hitler bombed London nightly with these flying bombs, these V12 rockets. Today's predator drones are simply super-slick, hi-tech-advanced V12 rockets. Head for the nearest safe place when you catch a glint-flickering glimpse of it against a hot desert sunlit sky coming your way.
--Did you know these planes are piloted not from where the wars of occupation are happening, but from bases in the US, like the main one in Nevada? Yep, the predator drone pilots who fly the predator drones we use by the thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan--and also along our border with Mexico--live in actuality rather ordinary and privileged cool military lives. Like the ones who "fly" out of an air base in Nevada. They wake up in the morning, have breakfast with the wife and kids, then get in their SUVs and drive to the air base, where they check in through the gate, put their SUVs in their parking spaces, go into their offices, and their day consists of piloting predator drones on attacks on our terrorist enemies all around the world. Five o'clock comes and these flyboys climb out of their predator drone assimilators, climb back into their SUVs, and head back home to the wife and kiddies--maybe stopping off to get a little sloshed at a local "airmen's" bar on the way--so they can drown out the horrors they've committed from a safe distance all day long--watching close ups as US soldiers are blown to bits; watching close ups of the destruction to innocent human life caused by one of their predator drone missiles going astray and hitting a schoolyard full of school kids. All in a day's work and a night's nightmares.
--OK, OK, I'm'a scared of predator drones. The same predator drones Saddam Hussein was supposed to use to deliver his tons of Weapons of Mass Destruction against the United States back before our fearless little chickenshit faux president hanged ol' Saddam by the neck. Oh, was that a lie! It's OK, it was a lie told by our president. He's always forgiven his sins same as politicians also expect us to overlook or forgive them their costly sins, too.
--this P.W. Singer dude said what I thought was a clever statement. He said the military had rather follow the Star Trek Prime Directive than the Geneva Convention when it came to the use of robot weapons, like the robot soldier SWORD that can, like we said, fire a rifle or a rocket launcher.
--did you know the Swiss bank, USB, operating in this country, receiving bailout money from We the People of the USA, have said it demands the right to keep secret accounts of which it now has 19,000 active whose estimated worth is in the billions of dollars--dollars the USA is not allowed to tax or even investigate.
--how cool in the Super Bowl one of the players was named Santonio Holmes? I assume he's named after San Antonio, Texas!
--I'm tired and I want to go to bed.
Goodnight Irene,
barabasmunn-dayne, thejots&tittlesmanfromlakeflaccid,ny
for The "Lazy & Procrastinating" Daily Growler
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