Blunt Wit

Go and catch a falling rock star,

Immaculately conceive with some ganja
,
Tell me how many dead brain cells there are
,
Or who invited the Devil’s last hurrah,

Teach me to hear mermaids kvetching
,
Or to keep away envy’s retching,

And find what wind serves to cloud an honest mind
,
If thou be’est born to kinky sights,

Things risible to see
,
Be ridden a hundred times in seven days and nights,

Till exhaustion ages pubic hairs on thee;

Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me
all warped wonders that erupted in thee,

And swear nowhere lives a tranny true and fair.

If thou find’st one, dingle my dangle

Such a pilgrimage were rad.

Yet do not; I would probably not go,

Though we might bump uglies next door.

Though she were hot when you met her,

At last when the beer wears off
and you see she’s nary wetter

Yet she will screw your bud,
ere you realize she’s a he.

Anyone done Donne?

Do you think love is more constant or ephemeral?  Lasting or transient? 

Ever had a transgender experience?

The original for your reading pleasure …

Go and catch a falling star by Johnny Donne

Go and catch a falling star,    

Get with child a mandrake root, 

Tell me where all past years are,    

Or who cleft the Devil’s foot;  

Teach me to hear mermaids singing,         

Or to keep off envy’s stinging, 

And find  what wind  serves to advance an honest mind.  

If thou be’st born to strange sights,  

Things invisible to see,  

Ride ten thousand days and nights    

Till Age snow white hairs on thee; 

Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me 
all strange wonders that befell thee,  

And swear nowhere  lives a woman true and fair.    

If thou find’st one, let me know;    

Such a pilgrimage were sweet.  

Yet do not; I would not go,

Though at next door we might meet. 

Though she were true when you met her,  

And last till you write your letter,          

Yet she  will be  false, ere I come, to two or three.

This is such an awesome poem.  I didn’t fully comprehend the depth of emotion when I read it in my youth.  It’s a poem you read several times and each time it reveals a bit more … skin. 

I am forever looking for the deepest meanings in words.  The layer below.  The strong undertow of implied meaning. Or that gentle tug on emotion.   Those lyric little beauties.  But sometimes it is the sheer whimsy of words that catches my breath. That breezy brush over the surface of life that flutters the heart and releases a big ole belly laugh.

Take for example the time I took my daughter to buy hiking boots for an upcoming school trip to Yosemite. As we pulled into the parking lot of the sports store, she looked across at an opposing shoe store and blurted out, “I wonder if they have any at that Shoe Pavy-lon over there.”  I failed to suppress my chuckle.  Being very smart, very quick and very sensitive she corrected herself immediately, “Shoe Pa-vill-yun.”  

Then playing short course golf with my young son (our bonding exercise of choice) on the 7th hole we came across a majestic white bird and he said, “Look at that egg-rhett.”  I stifled a laugh (as he is even more sensitive than his sister) and said, “I believe it’s pronounced Eee-gret.”  ”Nope. Egg-rhett,” he replied emphatically.  I realized the early stages of trench digging, the locking into a position no matter what the cost. So I dropped the subject and the ensuing putt and everyone left happy.

Being too lazy (i’m certain it was more of a sudden swoon of laconicity rather than my general nature) to walk the 20 feet across the room to pick up the phone and since I had my headset on and was sitting in front of my computer I decided to place a call home to my folks on Skype and catch up.  After a short conversation I casually mentioned I was calling on my computer.  My Mom perked up.  Her good friend from Israel, Dahlia, had recently asked her to get Skype so they could talk and she insisted I explain this strange and magical technology to her.  After running down the skinny, she said she would straight away get on ’snipe’.  ”Now, once again, that’s snipe dot com, right,”  she confirmed. I think she could hear my laughter all the way in Tennessee without the assistance of Snipe, uh, I mean Skype.  

Anyway, have you ever been snipe hunting? If not please let me know so I can explain it to you in detail. It is truly a once in a lifetime experience!

Also, do you have any whimsical stories about words gone awry or astray of their intended meanings? Please do share.

So why do you read anything anyway? Great literature, newspapers, magazines, blogs; every word we digest builds up emotional muscle, laughable ligature, spiritual sinews.

Like calories, we intake words to live. They inform us, educate us, entertain us and on rare occasions even enlighten us. Unlike bricks and mortar, they do not crumble and crack with age. They hurdle us back in time. They transport us forward in time. They come to us always at just the right moment.

Words create parallel realities just askew from our own. These imaginary universes look, taste, smell, sound and feel much like the one we currently inhabit. Yet something’s just not quite right. No words can capture the blue in the sky, the clashing sweetness and sourness of Tom Yum soup, the aroma of freshly baked sex, the anguish in Morrissey’s voice or the rapture of the beautiful game. Words form only close approximations.

But alas, today I’m not here to contemplate the what or the how or the why of words. No, today, it is all about the where. Where do you like best to take in your words? Do you like to slurp them with your morning meal? Do you prefer to caress them in a well lighted place? Or do you blatantly voyeur them through the window of your computer?

Me, my favorite place to cavort with words is on the toilet. Yes, that’s right, sitting upon my very own thrown, I find it soothing to sink deeper into the muck of a story. There exists a certain regularity that breeds peace of mind, a solitude conducive to the sweet release of the day’s troubles in the reverie of a tale well told.

How about you, where do you most like to read your words?
What words do you inhale the most?
Is there any book/blog/article that has enlightened you in the last little while? Please share!

For those of you who don’t know the man …

The visagely intense Neel Kashkari is the wunderkind that Treasury Secretary Paulson appointed Interim Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability. In this role, he heads the Office of Financial Stability, the office set up to buy troubled financial assets from U.S. financial firms under the $700 billion U.S. Government Troubled Assets Relief Program. He’s the man with the plan. The grand pooh-bah for dubya. The dude who’s going to single handedly rescue Capitalism from the clutches of evil and save the world as we know it.

Anyway, I thought given the overwhelming magnitude of his task I would write him an open letter and offer some sage yet practical advice …

Dear Interim Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability Kashkari,

Felicitations on being named head of the Office of Financial Stability. Couldn’t have happened to a more stand up guy. If anyone can save the capitalist system from collapse, it is a hot-shot 35 year old rocket scientist turned Goldman Sachs money wizard from Akron, Ohio. I am reminded of the saying, “It takes a thief to catch a thief.”

After feeding Bear Sterns to the bears at JPMorgan, proffering up an $85 billion liquidity facility for AIG, taking over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and letting the Brothers Lehman go bankrupt, your boss finally got his chicken little on and cried the sky was falling. The subsequent passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 put a cool $700B of taxpayer funmuny into your lap.

Your boss told congress that you would come up with a comprehensive strategy that is both immediate and specific and would have broad impact to stabilize the economy and improve liquidity. His buddy, Bernanke, further said your plan would pump up investor confidence and have positive impact on the broader economy and GDP.

So I know you’re trying to figure the best way to spend that money and save the world (economy). At first you proposed using your monopoly money to buy up illiquid mortgage backed securities (MBS) with the intent to reduce potential losses encountered by those same financial institutions you used to work with. You do realize in any other universe, the whole financial instrument ponzi scheme these institutions ginned up would be illegal. Hell, it goes without saying it was unethical. Now you’ve abandoned even that idea and are looking at cash infusions into the top banks (who also happen to be the top offenders).

So before you go a givin all that money to the idiots who got us into this fine mess in the first place, I’ve got an even spiffier idea, one that better aligns with aforementioned stated criteria for the bailout plan.

Given your high-falutin Wharton education you know that $700B works out to be a little over $2000 per taxpayer. So just think, for $2000 you could outfit each and every man, woman and child in America their very own virtual reality iglasses.

These award-winning Head Mounted Display Image Monitors are used by the United States Navy, NASA and porn aficionados alike. They give their users a delicious 70 inch HDTV experience.

Just think of the possibilities. Joe six pack, Joe the plumber, hell, even Joe the investment banker no longer need angst about our deteriorating economic conditions. They can just veg out to the latest movies or escapist TV. Hell, who needs reality when they can have virtual reality!

This, of course, will also create incredible economic activity in Hollywood as they drum up newer, stupider, happier pap for their virtually real audience. Everyone can star in his or her own reality TV series. Everyone can be the center of his or her own virtual universe. Everyone can do his or her part to help bailout the financial system by simply wishing the mortgage crisis never happened.

My proposal is both immediate and specific and would have broad impact to stabilize the economy and improve liquidity. It would clearly pump up virtual investor confidence and have seemingly positive impact on the broader economy and GDP. It would restore the hegemony of capitalism while simultaneously exploiting America’s greatest national treasure: Hollywood!

So do you have any bright ideas to solve the financial crisis and rescue capitalism?

Disclosure: author holds 45% ownership stake in Ultimate3DHeaven, makers of iglasses, but this fact in no shape or fashion colors his analysis.

I recently read a statistic that more people had moved out of the great state of California than moved in over the past year.  This has gotten everyone from governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to my local paper boy nervous.  “What if you all move away, what happens to my route,” a young distraught Jeremy said to me the other day.  I reassured him that we, at least, would wait until after the next big earthquake before we ever bolted out of the state. 
 
So I thought to help out and write a public service blog trumpeting all the good things about California in the hope that some of you gentle readers will become enamored and move out here.  I even caught wind of a letter circulating in the Governor’s office with a proposal that he shake the hand of every newcomer upon arrival.  So besides all of the other wonderful advantages, you might even get to meet the Terminator himself!

So why leave the cold, wet, snowy, hot, humid environment where you currently live elsewhere and come to California you ask?  Well, in sunny CA you get the best weather in the country.  It does take some getting used to however.  Perfection, that is.  Sometimes it can grate on you.  Like some divine practical joke, for instance, the surrounding hills turn green in the winter.  Lush, verdant, in the Damn winter!  And when summer comes they toast brown and wither away (like plants do in the winter in the other 99% of the world).  Hence the constant threat of forest fires like the rager that is currently threatening hot bed of liberal values, Los Angeles! 

Another big advantage is the absurdly high cost of living. 
“How, JD, can that be an advantage,” I can hear you scratching you head and muttering? 
Simple, it keeps you hungry, motivated and lean.  Ever notice how many fit, sexy people there are in CA on the TV.   One reason is because food costs twice as much there as the rest of world.  And don’t get me started on housing.  That’s three times as much. 

However, that’s a good thing according to the ‘Koi theory’, a recent line of scientific thinking that holds that some people, like the eponymous fish, grow to fit their surroundings.  Thus buy a big house and you yourself will get subtly bigger.  Stuff yourself into a small box of a house and you stay small, fit and trim.  These key advantages to your physical health and sex life can’t be overlooked.

Another advantage is the multi-cultural smorgasbord that lives in CA.  It is soooooo convenient.  Let’s just say it’s the middle of the night and you absolutely, positively need to have that odd paragraph translated into Pashtun, Urdu, Chinese, Japanese, Romanian, Russian or Spanglish.  There is always someone hanging around the local Home Depot or Quickie mart that can help you.  Most likely for free.  It’s a veritable United Nations in sunny Californigh-yay.  In fact, in parts of LA your probability of catching a stray bullet are the same as, say, in Iraq.

And finally another point I hinted at in my opening.  Your proximity to the stars!  Since roughly 40% of the State works for Hollywood, the chance that you run into your favorite star while out and about runs very high.  Hell, just the other day I ran into Christian Bale’s gardener’s niece.  She fixed me a double mocha frappuccino AND gave me her autograph.  Cool! 

So how about it, are you sold?  Ready to move to the land of milk and honeys? 

Some ardent junkies never ever leave their widescreens because so many exciting shows get broadcast week in and week out on US TV. Little beknownst to them, however, these choice shows are but the lucky survivors of a brutal Darwinian whittling process. You see, prior to each season, studio execs screen a multitude of pilot shows. They cull the pap and spoon off the cream of the viewing gems. Thus, alas, many a great show never sees the light of daytime, much less primetime, TV.

I thought to bring this viewing tyranny to an end and give you, the discerning public, the opportunity to possibly rescue a few of these top flight TV shows by creating a word of mouth campaign or an email blizzard to bring them back into the popular consciousness.

The first show that got unfairly and summarily axed was “CSI Billings,” a fast-paced drama about a team of forensic investigators trained to solve crimes by examining the evidence … in Billings, Montana.     They are on the case 24/7, scouring the scene, collecting the irrefutable evidence and hootin it up at the local dive bar, usually too drunk to put together the missing the pieces that will solve the mystery.  Interestingly enough, CBS originally pitched this as a “Reality CSI” series to augment their CSI franchise.

The next show to find the cutting floor rather than a coveted spot on the Food Network’s schedule is Rachael Ray’s  “Cooking your Pets.”  This idea was originally proposed to extend her bubbly franchise hits like “Cooking on $40 a Day,” “30-Minute Meals,” “Inside Dish,” and her syndicated daytime show.  While the show pilot got subpar ratings in the US, it played very well in certain East Asian countries.

Next to get bobbited was primetime soap with a truly contemporary take on the “happily ever after,” “Desperate 2nd Cousins” takes a darkly comedic look at suburbia, where the secret lives of kissing cousins aren’t always what they seem.
The series began with Mary Jo leaving her perfect house, in the loveliest of suburbs, and ending it all. Now she takes us into the lives of her family, friends and neighbors on Histeria Lane, commenting from her elevated P.O.V.  You know the axiom about Hollywood – “nothing new under the sun” this little experimental show was viewed by many audiences as too sophisticated for the average “Desperate Housewives” fan.

Well, if any of these shows catch your passing fancy then I suggest you get your stalk on and call, email and otherwise harass the offending network (execs) until they agree to reinstate the shows to their upcoming Spring slate.

Do you watch much TV?
What are your favorite shows?