A Brand New Month!

Well, we're on the verge of June coming to an end and July starting up.

That means I get to stay up till midnight tonight! Yea!

July 4th, that's the week I fought for my country and brought home the bacon. My own brand, "Declaration of Independence Bacon."

The Fat Crown Seller

I have a vast inventory of crowns for sale. And I am extremely fat. How did this happen?

You see, I eat a lot of Imperial margarine. And whenever I take a bite, I hear the flourish of a trumpet and a crown instantly appears on my head.

Taking off the crowns over the years meant finding something to do with them, which led to a lucrative sideline of sales. Beautiful crowns too.

I learned that if I take smaller bites, I can get smaller crowns. Therefore I've expanded my clientele to include dentists, crowns for teeth.

Pigmeat Markham on Sotomayor: Order in the courtroom, here come de judge.

Do be a do-bee, don't be a don't-bee.

Oyster Stew

Yesterday I did something mad that I periodically do, which is to eat oyster stew.

It always make me feel weird internally down in the abdominal region. And there's some kind of after effects up here too, in the head. It's not that pleasant.

It's great going down, but you should never overdo it. I used an entire can of oysters, which is 8 ounces.

Good stuff.

A Bird Takes Flight

I have friends in high places, birds.

I was walking down a ramp today ... and there was a bird at the end ... trapped, no way of escape ... at the other end a building, walls on the side of the ramp ...

I'm lumbering down toward it, very menacingly. I've got you in my clutches.

When ... the bird takes flight and escapes! How surprising.

Another was nearby when I pulled my car toward the garage ... I've got you now ... when, there it goes up over the roof.

Willipus Wallipus

I have an old record that's one of my favorites from childhood. It's from 1953 and broken. It has lots of surface noise.

It is the story of Willipus Wallipus and how he got in lots of trouble. This story has him releasing the brakes of a car and running into a chicken coop. He learns his lesson, I hope, that Mom and Dad know best.

The record is on Cricket Records. The label says "Sung by Cousin Cricket." It is record number C-42B. Sold by Pickwick Sales Corp., New York.

The flip side's label is almost all gone. It's title has the phrase "Could Not Swim" in it, probably someone "Who" Could Not Swim. Performers' names are missing except for Toni Waiman and an orchestra.

Tighten Up

Hi everybody. I'm D.B. Kundalini and the Drells, from Houston, Texas. And we not only sing, but we dance just as good as we want. And down in Houston this is the music we tighten up to.

Can you guess what record I'm listening to right now?

When a dog pees on the grass it says, What am I, a tree?

The Deadliest Catch

Is it just my imagination or is the show "The Deadliest Catch" the only thing on TV? I walk through my living room when the TV's on and there it is, some guys up around Alaska trying to catch King Crab. Constantly!

The waves are splashing up over the boat. Bon Jovi's singing "Wanted Dead or Alive" like it's number one on the charts. There's several boats and they're apparently competing to see who can bring in the most crab. These boatloads of men are out to sea for eight months at a time, making me more curious about some of the intimate details of their lives than anything else they actually show.

But anyway, those are details we're not meant to know. I'm sure it would be embarrassing to them. Although the imagination can't help but run wild and also into some very familiar guesses. Maybe that would indeed be "The Deadliest Catch," were we to find out, and were some of the wives back on shore to discover what's really going on out there. Or maybe not...

I worry about this show. These guys are having a hard enough time catching all the King Crab needed for the current demand. They're on the verge of death half the time. If the whole world is following their exploits, won't it make us want to buy even more King Crab just to support them, hence creating even more demand, hence making their lives even more hectic, and making the deadliest catch even deadlier? I'm afraid we'll be killing them with kindness.

Then they might end up staying out 12 months of every year, only making it home on the extra day in leap year. At which time they show up, their wives have two or three kids they didn't know about. But by now they're madly in love with each other anyway. So they all go out, the lovers from the boat, the ex-wives and their on-shore lovers, and have a big dinner. Of course they go out for seafood, and you can guess what they order.

Coffin/Toy Mashup

You've got a funeral and there they are at the cemetery. The chief pallbearer says, "If anyone objects to the burying of this body, let him speak now or forever hold his peace."

Someone speaks up, because we've all heard of criminal types burying rocks in a casket and then instigating successful crime sprees long after their supposed death.

"All right," one of the underling pallbearers says, pulling out a crank that's inset in the edge of the coffin. He starts turning it, and we all can hear the familiar strains of "Pop Goes The Weasel."

The music gets right to that well known moment of truth, then the coffin lid flips open and the person springs up. Instead of a normal body, there's a normal head and a paper body with a spring inside it, and the base of the body is connected intrinsically with the lining of the casket.

My Inner Piranha

I'm writing three (3) "inner piranha" posts today. But I'm not copying and pasting, nor am I memorizing what I wrote at the other blog. Since this is the second one, there's only one that's already written. After this one I still have one to go. There may be some duplication, because my doctrine of the inner piranha is not extremely detailed.

The last one I remember I started off saying "My inner piranha is a very tired fish tonight." So I'll vary that, change it up a bit ... and hope you enjoy what is about to follow. When I get all three I will come back and post the link to the other two, so that you, the person seeking to learn about the inner piranha can do so with greater ease.

My inner piranha, at times so full of life, tonight is one tired fish. It has been swimming all day, engaged in lots of hunting for decent meat to munch on.

I have depended on my inner piranha today to get several tasks done. I needed to have some true intensity in these tasks, yet I needed to come across as someone casual enough to go with the flow. The piranha knows the needs of my life and what we need to do to maintain a more or less healthy symbiotic relationship. I scratch his fins, he scratches mine.

But like I said, the fish is tired tonight. Because at some point, the varied and challenging tasks of the day took a lot of my energy. Meaning I depended on my inner piranha to do a lot of work -- guiding me and enlivening me -- and now I'm worn down. And unfortunately the fish didn't get a lot out of it. He needs his munching time too. He needs his sustenance.

Your inner piranha is like a force for good or a force for dissolution. Good for you, the organism needing his energy. But he needs energy too, and lacking a proper source, he gets the energy where he can, which might mean feeding on you. The inner piranha exists within the void of each of our cells. And if he turns on those cells, you can see there's not much future for you or it.

I should have taken better care of my inner piranha, but lately I've been saying Manana, piranha, and we can't keep going on like that. These challenges are going to become more challenging if I have to engage them without his energy. But I need to help replenish his energy, his essential drive.

Without that, I may die ... and he will die as well.

[UPDATE: The first of the three "inner piranha" posts is at Boy Leg. It is a shorter post than the second one above. The third is also longer, at dbkundalini.]

O papa, the Albuterol makes me so jittery!

I was at a nursing home and 'Love Shack' was playing loudly on the cable TV info channel. Seemed incongruous.

Swan

A swan just swam by me. I wasted some time trying to video it, which fails on my phone almost always.

It was doing more drinking and picking at stuff under the water than swimming. But some of each.

The Exalted Stuck Pig

KFC still refuses to put grilled chicken on the buffet. They guard it like gold.

The Trial

I'm rereading "The Trial" by Franz Kafka. It's been a couple years or more. This time I'm not trying to "figure it out" but just accept it as the conditions stated.

Also I'm reading it very much as a piece of humor, and there are some wonderfully funny things ... as I recall ... and as I have already well noted in reading the first few chapters today. (I don't want to accrue any guilt in saying that, so technically I read the first few chapters a little bit last night and the rest today.)

The part where K. is supposedly looking for a carpenter named Lanz, while actually looking for the place where his appointment with the inquiry is supposed to be, is hilarious. The people of the apartment building are so helpful, thinking they remember a carpenter named Lanz, etc.

I was watching the movie by Orson Welles. I think I've only made it through the entire thing once. The rest of the times I start watching it, get a certain distance, then something else comes up and I quit. The same thing is going to happen in a few minutes, because I got the new Three Stooges DVD set and want to watch some of it.

Plus, as good as the Welles' scenery and staging is, I hate having the imagery from it too fresh in my mind when reading the book. It's unavoidable at this point ... but I don't want to do anything more to encourage it happening.

Good night all. May you not wake up to officers in your room there to arrest you!

I saw a guy who looked like a high school friend, like he looked years ago.

I took a few charming photos. My camera failed at a couple very bad times.

At a very peaceful rural cemetery. The birds are very full of life. And the breeze.

Abhorring A Vacuum (Miscellaney)

The music business abhors a vacuum. The years I could've been a teenage idol (and wasn't), others came rushing into the vacuum to fill it. That was when we had a lesser bunch, Donny Osmond, Tony DeFranco, etc. It's just stunning that somehow the course of music history righted itself and found its natural course again.

By the time an idea makes it here, it has to qualify, endure several time trials. Maybe my standard is low, but it's still there.

In a hurry I accidentally put my underwear on backwards, but it's just for a few minutes while typing this. They are definitely sewn to go on only one way.

To bugs dew is a bucket of drinking water left at their door.

To bugs the lawnmower is a hurricane.

My Urban Imagination

The bus station I was in wasn't really an urban setting. It was a small city, but nothing like the bigger places, which I'm not at very often but have been there enough to know the difference.

Still it had some of the same characteristics, people passing quietly, looking around, sitting without looking at you, or sitting without speaking to you. I sat on the end of a bench on which there was another guy and he didn't note my existence and I didn't note his.

It gave me a taste of the whole urban thing, which is not that comfortable to me. But I'm walking along, going from the car across the street, then into the bus station. I can see my reflection and think I'm just melting in with the others. Check my wallet and checkbook to make sure pickpockets aren't at work.

I did my mobile texting to this blog -- which didn't work properly -- and turned at the end of the bench so that guy couldn't see what I was doing exactly.

Quiet In Crowds

I'm at a bus station. I'm very quiet in a crowd.

Garbage

I thought a bag of garbage might've been mine. I didn't see it in the street when I passed. But then there it was. I watched it get hit a few times and didn't recognize any of the guts that spilled out.

Old Building

I'm looking at an old building that's 10 stories tall, apparently vacant above the first floor. One window is just a board. I'd love to see what's in there. But that's not going to happen.

A Long Way From Home

Sometimes I feel like a fish out of water...a long, very long way from home. Catch the song allusion? You're standing there knowing you're on a completely different track.

The above paragraph was written on my phone. Via an email posting, testing it out. A couple things I don't like about it. One, there's no way to put a title on that I know of. Two, there's no quotation marks on my phone. Three, it put a couple extraneous @ signs in there and I had to manually edit them out. Four, it doesn't automatically flesh out my thought, which requires some extra writing.

Every once in a while, though, it's like that. Standing there with a group of people and knowing ... there's a vast difference here.

Every little whipstitch, phoning it in. Going to bed. Ate a big dinner and feel fat. Terrible way to go to bed! But at this point it can't be helped.

They Love Meat

I took my dog to a fancy restaurant.

She says to the waiter, "Could I see your meat menu, please?"

Chastity Bono

Chastity. Born a girl and now she's going to be a man.

It's weird that mistakes like this are made before we're born. But bureaucracy is the same the universe over. They lose your file or the proper orders are misplaced. We hope these things eventually are straightened out.

I Can Name That Mower

I can name that mower in three seconds.

I'm going for the direction of the sound first. East, south, west? Then the appearance of closeness, of pitch shifts.

Is it simply passing? Does it persist? Does it sound like it has a bagger or is exposed?

Billy Jack Meets Tarzan

I just had a good spree of thought/fantasy about the coming together of two great action heroes, Billy Jack and Tarzan.

At the time I really loved Billy Jack (the first movie) and of course Tarzan, swinging through the jungle doing a great Carol Burnett impression. We used to watch movies of Tarzan with these prolonged underwater fights, and it about destroyed my lungs watching him stay underwater for eight to 10 minutes at a time. But somehow he always survived.

Billy Jack was a survivor too. I'm sure if I saw that movie again it'd all come rushing back to me. Why exactly it appealed to me at the time I can't say. It was countercultural with a sense of still enforcing justice. The poor put upon kids had a hero who seemed to have mystical (Native American) powers and a mother figure to counsel them, the way I remember it.

Put Billy Jack and Tarzan in the jungle together, with Delores and Jane, and you've got all the action and justice you can handle. If Boy is kind of a hippie doing performance art downtown with a lot of his wayward teen friends, and there's a big Ape, like the Sheriff in Billy Jack, causing troubles, Billy could be out in a heat hutch somewhere meditating and Tarzan could be knitting stronger vines. Then they descend on the Ape and the ape people of the town and bring justice to the entire jungle. We wouldn't end it like Billy Jack, though, with him being led away. Instead it'd have a happy ending, like with him shipping out to some other locale, like to take on Fu Manchu and the yellow menace.

Hello to Tom Laughlin out there. During the '08 campaign I saw some things by him online, like he's a Renaissance man intellectual, which I would want to tamp down a bit instead of being so overt about it.

The first movie was a great one at the time!

Your Undercover Blogger

Be on the lookout for me around town, looking to report on the little incidences of life I see you engaged in.

You won't recognize me, really. My disguise is no disguise. Maybe I'm right in front of you in line, or behind you. You don't know.

I will tell what I hear, what I observe. And if you come across it online, perhaps at random, or perhaps directly by super cosmic guidance, you will wonder, Could this be about me? Then what will you wonder? Who was it? Could I ask to see the surveillance tape?

I don't have a notebook. I am not flashing a press pass. I'm just there, hidden in the best way, right in plain sight. But you won't grab me by the collar because you'll never know it's me.

Fat Cats And Cigars

Interesting ad theme and coincidence of placement on Daily Kos this morning!

The evil smiling fat cat corporate Man with his cigar and fancy suit. The guy on the right holding all the cash even had a bunch of money where his hankie should be. The guy on the left looks almost too young to be a seasoned enough fat cat to show up in ads. But they have to start somewhere.

Speaking of hankies in your suit, I haven't thought about that for years. When I was a kid we got our suits back from the cleaners and they had a piece of cardboard in the pocket with a tiny bit of hankie top stitched on it. So that's what we used for a hankie back then. For display purposes only!

Pregnant Man Gives Birth Again

This story has popped up again. I can't remember the details and don't feel like hitting the link. Whatever's going on he seems to be very fertile. See you in nine months!

An Old Defective Album

I ran across this album at a thrift store, still sealed. I was hoping it would have some "Party Song" lyrics like some of the other records I've had. Semi-racy stuff with lots of double entendres.

It didn't look overly promising in that regard, just going by the titles, such as "I Love You Waltz," "Old Grey Mare Polka," "Astronaut Polka," and "Turkey In The Straw," among others.

The only thing that suggested possibly some oo-la-la was the picture of the lady and the caption, "If I had my way, I would ? all day." With a question mark in there like that. But the caption relates to the first song, the "I Love You Waltz," in which they say "I love you" in various languages, English, Russian, and Polish.

You can see it's by Norm Dombrowski and the Happy Notes. Norm, the leader of the group, was also the drummer. They also had Ronald Gruna, trumpet and bass guitar; Irvin Kovalski, trumpet and guitar; John Hobson, bass guitar; Dave Wanta, concertina and guitar; and Bob Organiscak, sax and clarinet.

It's polka style music. I've only listened to the first couple of songs.

OK, I said this album was sealed, which is true. But when I opened it, it was defective. A little crumb of something stuck on the record and intrinsically part of the vinyl, either as it originally was or it's eaten in there after all these years. It might, might play through that section. I don't know.

It's something, though -- this album's been in someone's collection all these years, unopened, then ends up in a thrift store, and all these years it's had a secret flaw. Its imperfection -- its original sin -- has been exposed!

The record was put out by Gold Records, Stevens Point, Wisconsin.

Chasing Off Those Who Poop

I heard they wanted to allow dogs to run free at a lake somewhere, to chase off all the geese that otherwise wander the banks endlessly pooping and messing up the grass.

The big problem of course was that the dogs ended up pooping also. When meant a progression of ever bigger and badder animals, bobcats to chase away the dogs, wolves to chase away the bobcats, wild boars to chase away the wolves, tigers to chase away the wild boars, lions to chase away the tigers, etc. Because they're all pooping on the grass.

Just put up a fence or kill the geese.

I'm Gonna Be A Wheel Someday

I'm singing the Fats Domino song today, "I'm Gonna Be A Wheel Someday" -- I've got it stuck in my mind, which is weird because I haven't heard it for over two weeks.

I don't know all the words but it's theme, I think, is the fact that someday I'm gonna be a wheel and then I won't want you. That's the song. Boy meets girl. Girl loves boy. Boy becomes wheel. Boy dumps girl.

You can cry, cry, cry, cry, cry ... (and here's where I don't know the words, but I'm filling them in anyway, and maybe they're right) ... and sigh, sigh, sigh, sigh, sigh, but that's no way on earth to win my heart.

I was a garage sale two weeks ago yesterday and got a CD that has this song on it, "The Best of Fats Domino, Vol. 1 - My Blue Heaven" from the Legendary Masters series. And beyond that I was at a record store early to mid-May and got a 45 rpm record of the same song, Imperial 5606. On the record "someday" is two words. The flip side is "I Want To Walk You Home." (I want to walk you home, but if you wait till I'm a wheel, I'll give you a ride.)

Local Book Clubs

We need local book clubs like this, so many of them that there's one for any book you might be reading, or the well-preserved records of the last time there was an exhaustive group discussion on a particular book.

I'm thinking of lists and databases or big file cabinets and digital printouts speeding by with every conceivable date and day of the week. "We discussed 'Tarzan of the Apes' in 1915 and I remember it as a very good group."

Conan

I don't watch much late night TV since I go to bed at 9:30. I get up at 5:30, so if I get to sleep right away, which happens much of the time, that's close to eight hours a night. I found that I need about that much sleep to be semi well-adjusted during the day.

Now that I'm an early to bed guy, that means I don't get to see all the stuff I used to like to watch, like the Daily Show and Colbert. Fortunately I can see bits of those shows online. I barely ever watched Jay Leno or David Letterman, at least in the last 10 years, and certainly couldn't stay awake for Conan after that. I used to ages ago. (How come no one ever mentions The Gaseous Wiener, one of my favorite characters from Conan's show?)

Now that Conan is on the Tonight Show, this week being the first, I've watched the first three episodes on Hulu. They're pretty funny. I liked the "Tweets of the Week" stuff, with a very over the top gruff guy reading mundane Tweets from celebrities. I didn't like the "In the Year 3000" bit even though I used to like the "2000" routine from years ago. So I skipped through that.

As for Andy Richter, it'd be better if he was over on the couch. And Max Weinberg looks great. I remember in 1993 when Conan came on being amused that his bandleader was a drummer.

Picnic Weather

Out for a quickie picky tonight, a quick picnic, pickynicking with the best of them. My immediate family. And Colonel Sanders.

A little cool, no panic, no packnicking, picking our place and picking at some Colonel chicknick on my picnic.

We Grant Wishes

We grant wishes for terminally ill children.

Yeah, I don't care anything about that. Can you believe the junk calls we get? That moment of dead silence, then the operator calling you by name like she really wanted to talk to you.

Good grief, I'm not giving you money. But thanks for calling. Click.

My Plant

I've got a new plant that I'm caring for. Trying not to give it too much water or too little. And the same for sunshine and shade and being indoors. (Except yesterday I was too busy and forgot it, so it was inside all day.)

It's called Diamond Frost, which I'd never heard of. I read the tag in a little more detail after I had it home. And, I don't know much about plants, but it says something like it was developed by a particular company and that it's prohibited to propagate it. Does that mean what it sounds like to me? Is this thing natural or Frankenstein?

Prohibited to propagate it? I hope it doesn't take over and shoot spores everywhere that I can't control. I don't think I would've bought it if I knew it came with special rules. But I don't know anything about plants.

Now I have two things to care for, the dog and the plant. Well, the cats might constitute a third thing, speaking technically. Dog, meet your brother, Diamond Frost. Diamond Frost, meet your sister, Dog. Neither of you disturb the cats, please, so they won't need anything.