Imagine it – you’re walking down the trail to the local watering hole, minding your own business, thinking about that cute girl with the wicked dreadlocks and the small bone plate in her lower lip when WHAM! You suddenly find yourself on the ground, your shit scattered about, and you have a snorting mountain of grey bulging flesh and sharp pointy teeth laying down a bad case of whoop ass all over you. Huh? What’s up with that? If that great cosmic wheel …Read the Rest
Ding Dong! The Witch is dead. Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch! Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead. Yeah, maybe it’s a bit lame. Lighten up, you can’t expect Hemingway every day (besides, I didn’t write it. See the disclaimer). But think about this: when the Flying Monkeys come, what will you do?
A few miles from my house, just down the highway from here and parked along the side of the road, is a bicycle. It’s a refurbished antique, painted spectral white all over (even the wheels) with a little basket on front and I think a little bell on the handlebars. It’s a mid-fifties or sixties job, really nicely restored, (not one of those retarded looking, turn-of-the-century contraptions with the five-foot-tall front wheel) and if I can get up the nerve, I’ll take a …Read the Rest
Another recent anniversary we should commemorate is that of Thomas Crapper, who died on the 27th of January, 100 years ago (sorry for the belated obituary, Tom). Contrary to popular opinion, it appears that Thomas Crapper did not invent the toilet, but he did do much to improve its function, including the ballcock and “Crapper’s Valveless Water Waste Preventer (Patent #4,990) One movable part only.” Excellent job, Thomas. Apparently, toilet improvement is a continuing effort, as there is even a …Read the Rest
Robert Frost, Pulitzer Prize winner, farmer, teacher, light-bulb-filament changer, newspaper delivery man, and American poet known for such works as “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” died 47 years ago today. He had a lot to write about. When Frost was eleven, his father died of tuberculosis, leaving the family with $8. His mother died of cancer, his sister died in the mental hospital which Frost himself had committed her to, his sons were …Read the Rest
I don’t get it. In the late 80s, a man named Ali Hassan al-Majid, who started his career in the Iraqi army as a motorcycle messenger, worked diligently with cousin Saddam Hussein to gas 5,000 Kurdish villagers in northern Iraq, thus earning him the nickname “Chemical Ali.” In all fairness to Ali, some say that Iran was responsible for the attacks, while still others claim the Kurds were “rebels” and the attacks therefore justifiable. But whatever the reasons, Ali’s work …Read the Rest