ask palinode #11: clash of the tired hooers
» Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Oooookay. Time for another installment of that, whatchacallit, thing, where people want to know stuff and I tell them. I forget what it's called. Hold on, I'm going to go stare at the cat until I remember.

Okay, got it now. Thanks, cat.

Palinode,

I have finger puppets of Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, William Shakespeare and Charles Darwin, but they're not talking to each other right now. And they look kind of pissed off. I think they may have had a fight while I was gone. What do you think happened?

Savia

Saviabella, without a doubt those are the most miserable world-weary finger puppets I've ever seen - and you haven't even taken the tags off yet. I should report you for this, Ms. Savia. The cops will come and then, as Adrian Mole likes to say, you'll get done for sure. How'd you like them apples, Savia? To get done by a bunch of cops showing up at your door?

Don't answer that.

It's well-known that finger puppets, just like the rest of us, enjoy prog rock. Your puppets have slipped into a state of gloom because their prog rock needs are not being addresssed, which has resulted in a state of underprogment. Initial symptoms manifest as listlessness, which progresses to neuralgia, fraying, and a matted look, as if a cat had got ahold of them and dragged them under the chaise longue.

Just as different basement-dwelling teens from the seventies and eighties preferred different prog rock bands, so do different finger puppets. The trick is matching the puppet to the correct gang of long-haired coke-snorting four-chord-loving rock snobs that have made life so miserable for most of us.

Puppet #1: Charles Darwin

Capsule bio: A gentleman scientist from nineteenth century England. Sailed on a boat called the Beagle. Looked at big birds and scary lizards on rocky wastelands in the Pacific. Discovered that the path to atheism ran through the ovipositor of a wasp.

Best match: Mike Oldfield, Tubular Bells. This is the classiest piece of progressive rock out there, and to judge by by Darwin's white beard, kindly expression and elegant but well-worn coat, he likes his prog as a background air to the motions of his mind.

2nd choice: Yes, The Yes Album. Charles Darwin enjoys the complex harmonies, even if he finds Jon Anderson's high-pitched vocals a little disturbing. He also draws quiet inspiration from the first part of "Starship Trooper".

Puppet #2: William Shakespeare

Capsule bio: Led a life of wretched disappointment. Married a woman many years his senior who may have been his father's mistress. Son Hamnet died young, probably from silly name. Ground out an existence in the theatre, died respectably well-off and left his secondbest bed to his wife. Wrote some plays concerning kings, magicians, and a guy with a donkey's head.

Best match: Jethro Tull, Minstrel in the Gallery. Shakespeare likes his prog rock fried in the fat of folk, and Tull's folk influences and flutework glisten on Minstrel. Jethro Tull kind of seem like they come out of the sixteenth century. From under a pile of horse shit.

2nd choice: Rush, A Farewell to Kings. One word: madrigal.

Puppet #3: Virginia Woolf.

Capsule bio: Miserable depressed writer from the twentieth century who wrote a number of books, each one less accessible than the last. Despised the world and everyone in it, herself included. Had a fatal passion for collecting river rocks.

Best match: Emerson Lake & Palmer, Brain Salad Surgery. OMG. Any way you cut it, "Karn Evil 9" is a thirty-minute masterpiece of rock so prog that you'll need a medic afterwards. When Keith Emerson sings "Soon the gypsy queen in a glaze of vaseline/ Will perform on guillotine/ What a scene! what a scene!" halfway through "Karn Evil 9 (First Impressions)," you know you're in the presence of sheer. Genius. This is what Septimus Smith was singing when he leaped to his death.

2nd choice: King Crimson, In The Court of the Crimson King. No particular reason, but if Virginia Woolf were going to get into 1970s art-rock, she should start here.

Puppet #4: Sigmund Freud.

Capsule bio: Born Sigismund Schlomo Freud. Enjoyed cigars, maids, talking about sex with Viennese housewives. Thought about infant sexuality and personality formation for years until he realized that the human race carried within itself a deathward impulse. Smoked his jaw off.

Best match: Pink Floyd, The Wall. Don't tell me you didn't see this one a mile away. I think Freud contributed backup vocals on "Young Lust". His campaign against dark sarcasm in the classroom does not need to be explored here. He did, however, feel that children needed some education, even it amounted to thought control.

2nd choice: Kraftwerk, The Man-Machine. Although Freud was not interested in the cyborgian themes of the album, dismissing it as yet another example of the death drive in action, he loved the vocoder. Because at the end of his life, Freud's musical career was cut short by cancer in his jaw. He could have cut a few singles with a vocoder and some session musicians. I'm not saying it would have been an epic body of work, but it would have found its niche.

Labels: ask palinode, lies, literature, music

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how to get rid of the navbar in your blogspot blog, yo
» 

First things first: All thanks and love to Schmutzie, who showed me how to do this fix. If you want to thank someone for this, thank her. I'm the messenger.

Hey friends (you are my friends, right? You're not going to do that thing where you walk up all friendly and then stick me in the back of the neck for the mob money, are you? Because mob justice - that's not okay. Not in my book. Not between friends.). Do you walk around hating the navbar at the top of a blogspot blog? Does it make you grind your teeth and strangle wildlife? Maybe something like that? All I know is, I get to thinking about the navbar and suddenly all the geese and deer in the park are dead.

I'm not sure if this constitutes a gross violation of Blogger's terms of use - I am way too lazy to go look - but here's a handy way to remove the navigation bar from your site. This particular method works for the beta blogs only, but there's an easy fix for old blogspot blogs.

1. In order to do this, you need to start poking around in the HTML. Get some gloves first. Okay, got the gloves, that's good. Click on the Template tab and choose 'Edit HTML'. If you're the nervous kind, with the sweats and shivers and the rolling rheumy eyes, you may want to download your template just in case.

2. In the template, find the body, near the top of the page. Here's what mine looks like:

body {
background:$bgcolor;
margin:0;
color:$textcolor;
font:x-small Georgia Serif;
font-size/* */:/**/small;
font-size: /**/small;
text-align: center;
}
a:link {
color:$linkcolor;
text-decoration:none;
}
a:visited {
color:$visitedlinkcolor;
text-decoration:none;
}
a:hover {
color:$titlecolor;
text-decoration:underline;
}
a img {
border-width:0;
}

3. After the image attributes, insert the following code:

#navbar-iframe {
height:0px;
visibility:hidden;
display:none
}

That should do the trick. For old skool blogspot blogs, the navbar is not an iframe element (as far as I know), so you should be able to get away with inserting the same code but removing the "-iframe" bit.

Now you are free of all your navbar troubles. No more hitting the 'next' button and finding yourself at some crazed right-wing blog, or a fourteen year old Filipino girl writing about her kooky friends, or a spamlog offering stock tips or herbal Vuhz@gra. You're one step closer to never having to experience anything ever again unexpected or in any way discomfiting.

Speaking of which, go read PWOT's article on the subject.

Labels: metablog, tutorial

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beloved old template on notice
» 

I'm going to be trying out the upgraded Blogger templates for a bit. The objective here is to reproduce my old template as closely as possible while taking advantage of all the new nubbly bits that bloggah-bayduh has to offer. Bear with me. I'm not like Schmutzie, who thinks nothing of taking apart her entire site and reassembling it into something strange and new. I'm an internets fuddy-duddy.

You'd be amazed at how often the Firefox spellcheck flags my posts.

Update: Actually, I'm liking the white right now. Let's stay with simple for the moment.

Labels: metablog

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dictionary fixes
» Monday, October 30, 2006

Although it's well known that I know every word worth knowing in the English language, it occurred to me that I may not know the words not worth knowing. That is, the worthless words. The following words are unnecessary and should be removed from the dictionary as soon as possible.

dictionary. How often do you use this word? How versatile is it? The only time you ever have call to say 'dictionary' is when you have to go use the dictionary. It's absolutely true - I can guarantee that you will never say the following phrases:

Hey baby, I've got an attractive antique dictionary.*
Don't bother with Wikipedia, we'll look it up in the dictionary.
Are you bleeding? Don't worry, we'll apply the dictionary.
Reese Witherspoon recently separated from her dictionary that ridiculous ponce.

From now on, when you need to use that book (see? It's a book. That's a nice short word.), just say, "I need to look that word up in this book. This... wordbook".


gouache. Why don't you know the meaning of this word? In the Oxford Wordbook, the entry reads as follows:

gouache(goo-osh). [Fr., ad. It. guazzo] Hah. Oh man. You actually looked this up, hey? We're caught. Hands down. We just made this up in like, 1550 or something. This book's full of made-up words. Like 'hobbit'. Please don't say anything.

elf. Not so much a word as a category that should be abolished and expunged from memory. Elf, Dwarf, Hobbit, Halfling, Orc, Ent, Uruk-buttfuck-hai. These words are heavy stones, hewn from the living rock of Balrogistan or whatever, that weigh down the souls of pre-teen boys.


matrix. In 1999, moviegoers wondered - What Is The Matrix? In 2003, The Matrix turned out to be a cruel joke on moviegoers. Not only did the Wachowskis introduce cheap post-structuralist philosophy and wire-fu to mainstream movies, they also polluted a serviceable word. Remember the good old days when The Matrix was a virtual world being fed to us by a race of machines using our slumbering bodies as a power source (somehow)? Those were good times. Simple times. Then it was a place where sentient software hid from The Source? And then it was - something else? And the whole thing ends with that smart-talking Colonel Sanders on a park bench? Why did I pay for that shit?


foodie. If we all hold hands, close our eyes and pray really hard, we can kick the hell out of anyone who self-describes with this word. We really can.

grille. So some people want to look like cars. So they have their mouths fitted with a crusty rack of metal. So they look like low-rent villains from your average post-apocalyptic eighties flick. Let them do what makes them happy. Just don't ever mention it.




*Actually, I have a kick-ass Compact OED with the magnifying glass in its sliding cardboard compartment, and I think I've impressed a few women with it. A few.

Labels: film, language, scorn

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trying not to write too much about buffets and not succeeding
» Sunday, October 29, 2006

Today: a Sunday. Bad day. Sundays are never great, but today was worse. I don't generally write about my day - who wants to know what I've done with my average afternoon? - but I'm getting all revved up for NaBloPoMo, and besides, the only way to see clear of the pain, to walk through its dense thorny thickets, is to hack through it with the old blog machete and end up on the other side. Where the Highway of Achievement feeds into the Quiet Suburb of Thank-god-that's- done-with.

Today was not bad because I took my wife out to breakfast with my ex-fiancée, although that sort of thing is dicey at the best of times. It's not bad because I woke up to snow, or because a cold had floated in on the usual viral vectors and inhabited my sinuses. It was bad because I didn't pay attention to the furious restaurant snob that lives inside me and rages at brunch buffets.

Fucking brunch buffets. Ever-congealing, colours converging, a thousand choices knit together by one flavour. If a buffet were a person, it would be the kind of person I would kill and gladly go to jail for. The courts might convict me but I would be a folk hero. Thomas Pynchon would show up at my cell and shake my hand. He would reveal his face to me, and lo, it would be myself, a time traveller returned to the twentieth century to write really bulky, obscene, boring novels - okay, this fantasy is not only too complicated, it's not even making sense.

Some people point out that buffets at really fancy restaurants carry a better class of food than, say, a Best Western breakfast smorg. It doesn't matter, people: any buffet, no matter how glorious, no matter how many fine fruits from overseas or how many fresh ahi tunas decorate the tables, perverts the ethos of restaurant going.

A restaurant is there to gratify your senses. It is designed to reverse the ancient order of food procurement, in which you woke up miserably hungry and went out hunting/foraging/ farming to ward off cruel starvation. Neolithic hunter-gatherers did not dress up in their finest hides to go eat a sabretooth steak at their local Stonehenge. Man, I bet I could get a movie made with a pitch like that.

When you go to a restaurant and sit down and tell other people to bring you food of your choice, in exchange for nothing more than money, you are telling the entirety of human history to go piss up a rope. Are you implicitly calling in a favour from the military-industrial complex of the western world when you order a slice of pie made with apples from New Zealand or peaches from California? Oh, undoubtedly. You are born into this privilege, and you may spend your life attempting to repair its routine violations of nature and human dignity, but the ease of restaurant-going remains one of the signal pleasures of progress. The buffet, with its agribiz-subsidized mountains of cheap wheat-and-beef and its wrongheaded system of making you get up and go to the food, combines all the worst aspects of modern consumer life, in which you are paying to serve yourself what is usually the cheapest of crap.

Although the buffet has a history going back to eighteenth century France, the meal in its modern form is owed to Las Vegas, where the "all you can eat" version was introduced in 1946. Casino buffets are traditionally cheap (although not as cheap as they used to be) because they pull in the crowds of cornfed tourists who, having been blessed with a minor excess of disposable income and a tremendous excess of appetite, will shove food in their mouths and coins in the slots until they end up, in another reversal of historical conditions, fat and broke at the same time.

The all-you-can-eat buffet system makes less sense when you remove it from a subsidized setting and isolate it in its own restaurant. When that happens, the buffet can no longer be a loss leader. The restaurant need to ensure the buffet's profitability, either by cutting every conceivable expense (eg. food quality, staff wages, faith in humanity) or by having a buffet only for Sundays of for 'special occasions,' when people decide to go out with their families and spend their hard-earned money on bulk-cooked cheap food sitting its own grease - which they need to go up and serve themselves. How have we been convinced that slopping food onto our plates is a privilege?

I shouldn't ask questions when I already know the answer. People like buffets because they can see the food. Because they can heap up five different desserts on a plate, eat a bite of each, and haul their butts back over for a few leaves of lettuce in a quart of oil. Because a buffet carries the promise of abundance, of limitless choice and affordable entitlement for people who quietly believe that the material privilege granted to them is not enough, that the house and car and pool table in the basement comprise only a portion of their birthright, that a restaurant which hands them a printed card and awaits their decision is only holding back what is rightfully theirs, which is everything. Chicken wings, roast beef, eggs benedict, black forest cake, cinnamon buns, perogies in butter, ribbons of bacon and pale shiny sausages, a giant loaf of eggs, potatoes sliced and hashed, cubes of cheddar and mozzarella in radial attitude with salami rounds, and all it of renewable, endlessly refreshed, from ten am to two. And then they're closing, so pay at the front and get out.

And if you go the place where I went today with my wife and my ex-fiancée, go with the eggs benedict but avoid the turkey. You seriously couldn't tell the difference between stuffing and bird.

Labels: food, scorn, useless

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beyond history
» Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Citizens of Vineland (plus one Slovenian): it turns out that Dubai is better than America. I know - you thought America was better than America. America proved that it was better than itself after Vegas began excreting replicas of the world's monuments as part of a project to weld the family theme park, the gambling den and the open-air brothel into one money-sucking fake-boobed beast. Now Dubai has trumped that with Falconcity of Wonders (L.L.C.).

Falconcity of Wonders. Just the name makes your brain enter a zone of irreality as you cope with that uncomfortably stretched grammar. FOW is a luxury destination that is, in every way possible, better than wherever you live now. Except it doesn't exist yet. Not completely. FOW is so fantastic that it's still a fantasy of money and maquettes and the collective will of a gang of really quite amazingly overwealthed bastards from the United Arab Emirates.

Falconcity aims to recreate the "eight wonders of the world," plus a couple of their own invention. My favourite postmodern wonders are Theme Park and Falconcity Mall. I cannot recommend Theme Park enough:
Come opening day, I'm going on the Giant Straw Cannon Ride.

How is FOW superior in all ways (except the ontological one) to whatever pigsty you currently rest your sorry dogs in? Picture this conversation:

You: Hello old friend. I haven't seen you since highschool. [You hate this smug asshole]
Him: Hey loser. Still a loser?
You: No.
Him: Yeah, you're a loser. Where are you living these days? Tin shack in Bakersfield?
You: I live in Falconcity of Wonders, Dubai, at the top of the Dubai Eiffel Tower.
Him: [big gory head explosion as smug asshole absorbs the awesomeness of what you just said]

You see? Yeah, you see just fine.

If you ever went to Vegas and thought "Gee, I wish I could actually live in the Luxor," then you're an appalling freak - but you're Falconcity's appalling freak. Every single one of FOWs wonders is designed bigger and better than its progenitor. An Eiffel tower decked out with luxury apartments, retail and office space for "elits," taller than the original; the Dubai Hanging Gardens of Babylon, helpfully distinguished from non-Dubai Gardens to avoid confusion - plus the original probably didn't house as many "eco-friendly luxury flats". FOW's slogan is "Beyond History," which is where the developers clearly imagine themselves to be - protected in a cocoon of capital, propelled out beyond the flux of fortune. They should hire J.G. Ballard to live there and walk the streets as a kind of living exhibit.

I'm honestly not sure how I feel about these kinds of developments. I always get stuck somewhere between disgust and awe, plus a kind of dumbfounded emptiness at the realization that human beings will do absolutely anything. Slaughter a nation, pitch a game show, build a shrine to capital so enormous and multipurposed that people can visit, shop, live and grow old there - you imagine it, we'll do it.

Best sentence from the website (among many): "We are not revealing a secret by stating that the vision of the UAE Vice President and Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum has put Dubai in the fast track towards a prosperous future." Well, you wouldn't want to go out on a limb and pretend that UAE Vice President and Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum was keeping his ambitions a big secret.

The other best sentence: "The legs are a collection of 4-6 story buildings with different themes ranging from Happy Yemen, Lebanon down town Solider, India Taj Mahal, Rome’s Leaning Tower of Pisa, Italian Gondola boats of Venice, and London’s Big Ben." Okay, let's leave out the fact that this sentence features a highly unusual description of legs. Happy Yemen theme? Lebanon... Solider (I googled it)? Rome's Leaning Tower of Pisa? I always thought it was Pisa's Tower of Pisa.

Labels: falconcity of wonders, the end of all things, useless

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follow up call
» Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Schmutzie: Hello, [workplace], Schmutzie speaking.

Palinode: Remember a while back when I asked you about a thermos?

Schmutzie: No.

Palinode: We were on the bus, and I accused you of hating a thermos? I'm calling to follow up on my original inquiry.

Schmutzie: I don't remember. And that doesn't work.

Palinode: How's that?

Schmutzie: You don't hate a thermos. It doesn't make sense.

Palinode: Sure it does. You hate a thermos. Or you did last time we talked.

Schmutzie: It's not possible.

Palinode: It's totally possible. When we get home tonight, I'll hate a thermos for you. Even though I'm pretty fond of a thermos.

Schmutzie: Yeah, that's not going to happen.

Palinode: I'll even hate a shoe. How's that sound?

Schmutzie: A shoe.

Palinode: Tell you what. We get home, I'll renounce a shoe.

Schmutzie: [overexcited] No! I mean, no. You can't renounce a shoe.

Palinode: Bring me a shoe and I'll renounce that shit for you.

Schmutzie: I'm in this conversation because why?

Palinode: Make sure the shoe is from a pair you're going to throw out.

Schmutzie: [silent, possibly away from phone]

Palinode: Because when I renounce a shoe, that thing's done. Unnnwearable.

Labels: conversations, shoes, thermoses

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some kind of bloggerful
» Friday, October 20, 2006

This post was written for the online journal Reconstruction as part of an issue on blogging.



Blogging in Theory and Practice

*written with Big Star blasting on the stereo and a poster of Heart on the wall. The poster is there for verisimilitude.*


I.
Around Christmas of 1993 my roommate brought home a state-of-the-art computer, an IBM-compatible 386 PC with a 66 Mhz processor and 256 megabytes of RAM. I don't recall any other stats, which is good, because surely it would destroy my mind to summon up all the details of that machine at once. Best of all, though, we had ourselves an internal modem and a dial-up internet connection. It may not have been much, but we could play Doom with our friends. We could talk with pale malformed weirdos on our local electronic bulletin board. And we could surf the web.

My favourite web site at the time was called Uroulette. It was an image of a roulette wheel that would, when clicked on, spit you out onto a random spot on the web. The sense of discovery was intoxicating at first, even if there wasn't a whole lot to see. An academic paper on rice-growing here, a scanned-in passport photo of some bearded guy there, and pages that were nothing but links to academic papers on rice-growing. We spent so much time roaming around the internet that we developed a game, which we would have called Circling the Web if we'd been the naming sort. The rules were simple: start at a random spot and head out, going link to link, constantly moving forward, until we found ourselves back at the site where we'd started. We were always surprised how short the journeys were. The web was tiny at the time, with all the familiar forms present but embryonic, curled up in watery cyberslumber.

That game would get boring incredibly quickly if played today. The web was smaller and sparser in 1994, but it was exciting to follow a hyperlink to another web page, even if it was just a resume for some computer science nerd, or a page of half-baked ideas in an ugly lemon-yellow Times New Roman centred on a background of blinking stars. It was still really cool. Even Netscape 2.0 was cool. A friend of ours had his very own webpage called "Chaos Vortex," which featured a few links to pages about computers and gaming. It was ugly and self-important and the bright red background was an abuse of HTML, but it still rocked our casbahs. It was also the first weblog I'd ever seen, a proto-blog, years before the term was coined, nearly a decade before I started one of my own.


II.
My first weblog, a mostly abandoned mine tunnel bored into cyberspace, was started in 2003 primarly as a way of relieving the pressure and boredom of my job. I worked at an independent production company as a researcher for a show on 20th century disasters, which meant that I had to phone rescuers, witnesses, survivors, and the families of the dead. If you enjoy calling people up cold and coaxing out the worst memories of their lives on a random Wednesday afternoon, then you're - well, you're just like me.

Against this daily flood of pain, loss, remorse and recrimination, I found myself needing more and more to build something to stanch or divert what I was experiencing, a counterstructure, a wall of good old goofiness. I started writing about the crappy twenty-four hour restaurant up the block from my office. My entries were usually written at work, in little bursts between phone calls. I wrote down conversations with my wife, wrote about the changing weather, gathered trivia from everywhere. I may have intended to build a wall, but it was shaping up more like a tower of trash. Like a great number of weblog authors, I had started a mental recycling project.


III.
It is my firm belief that blogs, like books of poetry or really good jokes, are useless. I mean that in the best sense of the word. Weblogs may hone your writing and debating skills. Some blogs advertise products and make money for their authors, some provide information for professionals, and it's said that the entirety of Web 2.0 is blog-based. I suppose that weblogs in the aggregate recapitulate the basic architecture of the web - small pieces loosely joined - and are therefore a useful object of thought and experiment, but I think of blogs chiefly as a literary form, a kind of refined speech that falls somewhere between the private and the published. Anyone who's posted a conversation or an anecdote on a blog knows how easy it is to reshape facts on the fly and produce a piece of instant lit.*

In fact, if weblogs have done anything, they've provided an astonishing volume of new literature, much of it an indistinguishable blend of memoir and fiction (It's no surprise that established journalists have been suspicious of weblogs - how can you compete with the speed and immediacy of a blog posting? How do you combat the inspired bullshit of bloggers?). Success in literary blogging is still measured by the book deal, but there are other markers of success, such as Heather Armstrong's ability to support her family via blogging.

At this point I'm sure someone is going to think, "Sure Mr. Node, but have you noticed how much of this 'new literature' is total crap? Goths of Livejournal, goths of Xanga, spinning out fantasies of self-absorption and adolescent triumph?" To which I say, Yup. Almost all of it is crap. The elements of blogging, as far as I'm concerned, are already junk. Our lives, our entire world, form a heap of trivia and disaster. To some degree we're stuck in the tragic position of Klee's "Angelus Novus", unable to reach back and mend the catastrophe of history. What we do have is memory and language, which, along with a high-speed connection, is all you need to reshape it, hold it up for your readers, plunge your hand in and rip out the joke. It fixes nothing, changes nothing: a completely useless task. But I can't stop doing it.


*By way of example, I really am listening to Big Star as I write this. But the poster of Heart exists only in my imagination.

Labels: metablog

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private service announcement
» Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Hey good people! People of the blog! In keeping with my very bad habit of starting and abandoning weblogs on other hosting services, I've started a weblog on Wordpress. I call it Palinode's Sunny Time Ledger, and I've trying to find a focus for it. The theory being that if I find a focus, I won't just dump it after a week or two, once the fizzy feeling fades. Topics so far include: polders, wine and office talk. Should I call it "Palinode's Polders, Wine and Office Talk Forum?" I sure think so.

If you had control of Palinode's Sunny Time Ledger, what would you do with it? Remember that you could say whatever you wanted and the words would be attributable to me.

Labels: new weblog

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ask palinode #10: keeping things up
» Sunday, October 15, 2006

When I launched my Ask Palinode service - free in 34 countries! - I expected a flood of filthy questions. A big raging flood, tenting the dams of ignorance until the pressure of curiosity built up and questions spewed forth. And nine months later, an answer was born! That's where we get knowledge from.

Finally I detect a crack in the dam. Today's crack comes from Janet, who asks:

Which is more cost-effective in the long run: a penile implant or a prescription for Viagra? Just curious as to your opinion.

As long as there have been men, Janet, there have been penises on them. And as long as there have been penises, there have been penis problems. Some of these problems stem from the erections that soldiers get after they've shot all the husbands and bayoneted all the children. Some problems arise when men discover that their erections are not the same size as the freakishly small percentage of men who appear in porn. And other problems dangle limply from men who discover that, despite their most intense powers of concentration and years of ninja training, they can't achieve or sustain a decent erection.


Some contend that erectile dysfunction is primarily a result of complications from vascular disease, medications or therapies, neurological and psychological problems. The truth is that there is only one cause, and all underlying conditions only symptoms: the sufferers have unwittingly given offense to Cthulhu and the Old Ones, who sleep the ages away in the ancient stone city of R'lyeh, having in the intervening aeons passed beyond death. One day they will awake and take further vengeance on humanity, but until then they've cursed certain men with impotence. There are no curses for women - the Old Ones like and respect women, feeling that the patriarchal system has already disadvantaged them enough. In secret they campaign for wage equality and subsidized daycare, sending their depraved servants forth into the world to write thoughtful op-eds on a variety of topics.

There's also Peyronie's Disease, which is not related to Cthulhu, and is in fact Yahweh's version of the same eldritch curse.

Thousands of years of effort have shown that you cannot petition Cthulhu with prayer, so for remedy we must turn to mundane means. There are a number of ways to make your penis go from point A to B:

1. The Vacuum Pump. Based on the principle that nature abhors a vacuum, these devices pull your penis into a suction tube and, uh, plump it up some. Like just about anything else in this dumbass free-for-all that we call the modern world, you can get cheap pumps that will probably herniate you good, or you can get super-duper top of the line implements with replaceable parts and packaging that doesn't feature a gay porn model on its cover.
   
   For those of you who feel thrifty or broke, I suggest the Rookie-of-the-Year Pump, weighing in at only $12.95 USD. Product highlights include a "clear tube tunnel" for viewing results. Because we all know how time-consuming it is to have to pull your penis out of your pleasure pump every time you need to check on it.
   
   On the other end of the scale sits the Osbon ErecAid System Esteem, which will set you back 448 genuine American dollars. Powered by batteries and boasting "ergonomic design," the ErecAid comes with a warranty and a convenient carryng case. It also claims a whopping 90% success rate (take that, Cthulhu!). These expensive models may only be used for intimate sexual congress with your wife; illicit or 'pervy' sex will make your penis blow up.



2. Viagra. In its never-ending battle against the sleeping beasts of R'lyeh, Pfizer introduced this drug in 1998. As a star describes a course about the night sky, so did Pfizer's profits soar high above the atmosphere as men by the millions lined up to pay $10 per pill. Millions of couples mistook a hard cock for self-esteem and made of an erection a fulcrum on which to pivot an ageing marriage into a satisfactory position. Yahoo! Viagra, or Sildenafil, should be taken 30 minutes to 4 hours before intercourse. Side effects range from persistent headaches to sudden death. Other side effects include outrageous volumes of spam, which is more of a side effect from having an email account anywhere on Earth.



3. Implants. It's not as easy as you may think for the casual inquirer to get a price quote for penile implants. You wouldn't believe how many confused silences you get when you say, "No, I don't have erectile dysfunction... I um, I have an online advice column". After a bit of digging, though, I found out that a simple inflatable implant (squeeze scrotum twice for full erection) can be purchased and installed (by a qualified urologist) for around $25,000 USD. The device consists of two malleable rods implanted on either side of the urethra, with a connecting line to the squeezy bulb (for squeezing) and a resevoir. It is actually a small scale model of Cthulhu itself, whose monstrous shape and aspect will send your brain screaming into insanity. Therefore the operation can only be performed by a fully qualified and certifiably blind urologist. Urologists were once blindfolded before they performed the procedure, but the malice of the AMS Ambicor Implant System was such that it seemed to leech into the fabric of the fold and imprint itself on the eyes of the hapless urologists, who would run from the operating room screaming, "R'lyeh! Yog-Sothoth! YOG-SOTHOTH!" and such like.

Update: It was brought to my attention by my brain that, in all my fervor, I neglected to answer the part of the question that dealt with cost-effectiveness, which is to say that I neglected to answer the question altogether. So sorry. Let's assume that the average age for impotence is fifty. It may be younger, but I'm thirty-five already, and I'd like to believe that I'm fifeen years from the age of flaccidity. If your average young-at-heart but limp-of-dick fifty-year old goes and gets his pump/Viagra/implant at fifty, let's say that he has twenty good humping years ahead of him. Furthermore, let's assume that our humping machine goes at it three times a week. Way to go, grandpa!

The Pump. The Timmedical Osbon ErecAid System Esteem is under a lifetime warranty, although I'd read the fine print, since normal use of the device usually constitutes abuse with any other product. If the warranty holds up, you could conceivably enjoy twenty years of humping for only $400-$450, with $500.00 more for batteries, Windex, and other sundries. This, my friends, is a good deal.

Viagra. With twenty years of sex, three times per week, ten bucks per fuck, you're looking at a whole lot of cash for your dash. Believe it or not, you may spend up to $31,200, not taking inflation into account. Once you factor in dinner and a bottle of wine, sex begins to look prohibitively expensive. Do you want to look at your spouse and think, There's ten bucks for ten minutes? I didn't think so.

Implants. It's true: the cost of an implant and surgery may run up to $25,000. With a ten year warranty on parts (but not labour), you may find yourself spending no more than $30,000 on your god-given right to shtup every inviting hole you come across with no more compunction than you'd squeeze your scrotum - which is all you need to do to get it up. Medically insured surgery with a few months recovery time will guarantee you instant erections on demand! No inconvenient waiting period! Get up and get off in record time! Don't let age and illness stop your big-cock rights as guaranteed in the Constitution! Rights void if used for the queer stuff.

What are ye, some kind of not-curious person? Ask the Palinode any question. Any question at all. He will answer you. The power of Christ compels him. Askpalinode @ gmail . com.

Labels: ask palinode, cthulhu, impotence, sex

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infinite crisis
» Friday, October 13, 2006

Until I show you this image, nothing else can possibly happen in the palace. No one will oil the oubliette, polish the balustrades or refresh the moat. So in the spirit of moving on, here you go.

Ha ha. Stupid flower woman. She shall die for sure.

I'm glad this is just a panel from DC Comics Crisis on Infinite Earths, and not, say, a page ripped from a Nazi instruction manual for urban warfare. "How to Fight in Charming Little Market Areas of Western Europe - Know Your Hostages". Imagine how the war might have turned out if those lousy Ratzis went around targeting stupid flower women. Those soft-hearted Amerikaners would have thrown down their rifles and skedaddled, all pronto.

Labels: comics, history, useless

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ask palinode #9: drugs and violence edition
» Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Cenobyte, she is my most prolific questioner-askioner so far. Today she ask:

I have some other questions. Is there a daily quota on the number of questions any one emailer may send?

Does toad-licking really make you hallucinate?

If Queen Bee is on a train leaving Pasadena is travelling 90 miles per hour going west and Worker Bee is on a small, privately chartered airplane from Little Compton travelling east at 300 miles per hour, when and where will Queen Bee's path intersect with Worker Bee's path, if one drew a straight line representing each journey in a two-dimensional representation?

#1. That's one for the FAQs. There is, in point of fact, no limit on questions, quantitative or qualitative. You can ask me anything you want, as much as you want, by the barrel, carried in sacks, moved in lead-lined containers by dead of night. It doesn't matter. Prepositions or adverbs, interrogative or nominative, participle or gerund, I'll take them all on and leave them bruised and quivering on the mat. Eight rounds running and I'm the welterweight champion of response. Biznatches!

Bear in mind, o biznatches, that I try, however feebly, to be timely with my answers. That means that if you ask me twenty questions at once, they will necessarily be short, curt, brusque, rude, nasty, and combative like a mo'fo. Or just brief. Better that you ask one well-chosen question and be rewarded with buckets of bullshit, instead of asking twenty questions and getting a few turds in return.

As always, the Ask Palinode project is, like the rest of this weblog, a small affair intended for the amusement of me and my close friends, whose definition I freely and gladly extend to all visitors. Even the ones who come from Google looking for 'anal sex man'.

#2. Tooooaaaaad. Many are the lives ruined by the licking of the smooth cold length of amphibian back - the secretions propelling the innocent into a nightmare demesne of fabricated terrors - intricate geometries of hell - the warty architecture of Satan's palace. Did you know that Satan had a palace? It's open to the public from May to September, with tours twice daily. Great Labour Day Weekend package specials, but don't phone for bookings. You can not get past the voice message system.

The short answer to your question is: Hell, yeah! Toad licking is a sure-fire legitimate way to hallucinate. As far as the nerdy men in the white coats know, toad venom is the only animal-produced hallucinogen occurring in nature (other animal toxins may cause you to hallucinate, but those hallucinations are usually of the long-tunnel-and-bright-lights variety). Before you go around licking toads, there are a few guidelines that you should follow:

Know your toads. Most people think that the cane toad, or bufo marinus, is the one to lick. Do not lick this toad. Their venom will burn your lips and tongue and make you sick as a dog (and it kills dogs). In other words, not a groovy high. Also, cane toads are insanely ugly little beasts that spread like a bad rash. They pretty much embody everything that's wrong with nature.

What you want to go a' licking is the bufo alvarius, or Sonoran Desert toad, the legendary vision toad of somewhere or other. This one contains both bufotenin and DMT, which makes it a pretty good buy for the money. DMT is also found in ayahuasca, that crazy shaman vine from the South Americas.

The toad venom can be licked straight from the toad's back, or harvested and then dried and smoked. I suppose you could snort it as well, but the idea of sniffing hallucinogenic toad dandruff up your nose doesn't sound like fun to me. The effects are short-lived but intense. Remember, DMT doesn't just kick your neurotransmitters around a bit; the stuff actually latches on to your receptors and offers a toady version of reality, which one user described as "being shot from a rifle barrel lined with baroque paintings and landing in a sea of electricity". I heard that on CBC radio once.

The real question is, are those toads high all the time? Because if I had a couple of glands on the back of my neck that dribbled out heavy drugs, I wouldn't be spending money on a night out, if you catch my drift. Maybe the toads ingest so much that they don't even know they're high. Maybe they just hop around and think "time to get shot out of the baroque rifle barrel again" like it's no big deal.

Hey, waittasec -- what if we're the ones who are constantly high but don't know it? What if we only see reality when we're stoned? What if toad venom is our gateway into reality? Whoah. Whoooaaah.

Whoooaaaaah.


#3. You didn't mention which states were involved in your math problem, so I'm going to assume that you're referring to Pasadena, California and Little Compton, Rhode Island. First, do these bees belong to the same hive? I only ask because the difference in latitude suggests that these two bees may not even be of the same species. My biggest worry is that Queen Bee may in fact be the Africanized 'killer bee,' and she may be traveling west to populate the whole land with vicious killer bees in a stingy orgy of reverse Manifest Destiny.

Meanwhile, the worker bee in her charter jet is racing east to stop the onrush of Africanized bee violence. That's no mean feat for one bee, exiled from her hive for Bee Crimes, seeking redemption in a mission to keep America bee-pure. But she has lots of cash, which softens the blow a bit. At least I'm pretty sure she's got cash, or at least some kind of benefactor on the side of the European-descended bees. Otherwise, where'd the charter flight come from? Bake sales? Clearly the Africanized bee is poor, consigned to riding the rails in order to propagate her hive.

It's not just a question of where they will meet, it's when: Can the heroic European worker bee get to the Africanized queen bee in time to stop Africanized bees from selling the drugs supplied to them by the Jew bees to all the hard-working but tragically naive Euro-descended bees? And once they meet, will the corrupted socialist bureaucracy of liberal do-gooders stop the worker bee before she can carry out her mission? Will those liberals enlist their liberal media shock troops to perform a 'hit' job on the admirable worker bee?

Frankly, Cenobyte, I'm a bit put off by the subtle-but-discernible racist undertones in your question. But I'll give it a shot.

Here is the best possible route between Little Compton, colonial fishing village non pareil, and Pasadena, the city where Griffin Mill murdered David Kahane over a screenplay:

If Queen Bee departs from Pasadena heading east by train and the Worker bee heads west by plane, the two will never meet. The Worker Bee will be traveling at least 37000 feet above the Queen Bee. Worker Bee will fly in a straight line until its fuel runs out over the Pacific, whereupon it will fall into the ocean. Meanwhile, the Queen Bee will take the train to Atlantic City, where she will play some craps and a few rounds of blackjack. Later she stings someone and dies.

Update: On second glance it seems that I misread the question. The train leaving Pasadena is heading west, not east. Likewise for Worker Bee in her chartered plane. This changes things a bit. Queen Bee travels first from Pasadena to the nearest train station in Glendale. She boards the train and then travels west, straight into the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, Worker Bee takes a bus to the Newport State Airport (ironically just outside of Middleton), hops a Dash-8 to Newark and books a continental flight to Madrid by way of London. At the last TSA security decide that her stinger is a weapon. Also, she doesn't have a proper container for her honey. She moons around the airport for a while, threatens a TSA official. They arrest her, cart her away to an offshore prison, where she spends the rest of her life futilely filing appeals and asking for a lawyer.

Are you of the question-asking mind? I will answer absolutely any question you put to me. Just send me an email at askpalinode @ gmail . com.

Labels: ask palinode, bees, drugs, lies, toads

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ask palinode #8: life decisions - home business edition
» Monday, October 09, 2006

There are times when ketchup chips and episodes of Degrassi don't give you the answers in life you need. That's why I created the Ask Palinode column. Degrassi's good for certain things - don't have unprotected sex with a girl and get her pregnant and drop acid and jump off a bridge, all while still in junior high, for example - but the big questions go unaddressed. To wit:

My Dearest Palinode,

I have received a layoff notice and, come Christmas, I will be leaving my current employment. As my current career is somewhat lacking in meaning or money (the two m's that make the world turn) I'm feeling more relieved than anything else at this development. That said, I'm now faced with a somewhat existential question, to whit: "What should I do with my life?"

I had thought to seek the answer to this question through more conventional means, such as career counselling or meditation or severe alcohol abuse. Now that I have found your services, however, I realize that a far easier path lies before me. Thank you in advance for charting my life path.

Anxiously Yours,

Derek Pickell, aka Dreadmouse
http://dreadmouse.livejournal.com

Shucks, Derek: 'tain't nothing. Here is a step-by-step illustrated guide to turning your life around. But first I have to tell you about a woman who died of cancer, and the wonderful gift she gave a young Schmutzie.

In the year of not-too-long-ago, Schmutzie was a child who had never met me, never shot a gun, never kissed a boy. Maybe kissed a girl by this point, I don't know. Hold on a sec.

Palinode: When did you get that crazy stuffed rabbit from the woman with cancer?
Schmutzie: I was in my twenties or maybe my teens.
Palinode: Really?
Schmutzie: I was not a child. It was a weird gift.

Hngh. Looks like I got that part of the story wrong. But the woman who gave her the gift definitely had cancer, and she's definitely dead now. I think.

Palinode: Is that woman with cancer dead now?
Schmutzie: Yes, she's dead.
Palinode: Just checking.

Anyway, this woman with cancer, facing the end of her life, turned her talents to making rabbits out of felt. Here is Schmutzie's rabbit, with a handy air freshener for purposes of scale. It lives at her parents' house.

As far as I can tell, it's a blank-eyed pink bunny with an aardvark's nose. The woman who made this gave it to Schmutzie's mother as a gift intended for her daughter, who turned out not to be five but more like twenty-five. Whatever. Here's a more aardvarky view.

Clearly, Dreadmouse, you can see the appeal of a felt aardvark-rabbit. Hold on a moment, though, because the next image is a bit disturbing, in that make-your-children-leave-the-room way.

When I went to Las Vegas in 2004, poor people on the Strip kept on handing me little cards with images of women that looked surprisingly like this. Those women never had a copy of Stephen Wright's awesome but disappointingly brief new novel The Amalgamation Polka. But they were still clearly wanting to have sex for money.

A closer look reveals that this obscene ventral puckering is in fact a zipper:

Again for the purposes of scale, here's the belly of our rabbitvark with the air freshener and the Stephen Wright book.

The question remains: why would this stuffed creature go around with its belly zippered up and... oh God.

Damn, make it stop.

Merciful God in heaven.

Surely God has abandoned us.

This image is probably the worst thing I have ever done to the internet. Unless I took a photo of myself wearing this thing as a hat.

Maybe next time we visit Schmutzie's parents.

I'm sure you're wondering, Dreadmouse, why I showed you these pictures. Isn't it obvious? I was going to suggest that you find work with Heritage Canada as an architectural technologist, but after Schmutzie and I visited her family last weekend, I realized that you could make felt rabbitvarks with offspring curled up in their disturbingly pink insides. Materials are cheap, you wouldn't have to leave home, and you would give countless children horrible dreams as they cowered under the button-blank gaze of All-Mother Rabbitvark.

Act now and you'll receive this Air Wick air freshener completely free!

Labels: ask palinode, rabbits

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upside-down potatoes
» 

What passes for Canadian Thanksgiving around the PaliSchmutz household is passing. Long afternoon, cold air leaking in under the windowsill in the spare room, Schmutzie in the shower, potatoes in the oven. Palinode walking down the hallway.

Schmutzie: What time is it?

Palinode: Ten to two.

Schmutzie: Can you take the potatoes out of the oven?

Reassuring Potato-removal noises coming from the kitchen.

Palinode: Hey...

Schmutzie: Yeah?

Palinode: There's a problem with the potatoes.

Schmutzie: What's wrong with them?

Palinode: They're upside-down.

Pause from the bathroom.

Palinode: The potatoes are -

Schmutzie: What does that mean?

Palinode: It means that all the potatoes are upside-down.

Schmutzie: I don't understand what you're saying to me.

Palinode: All unwonted, the potatoes are upside-down now.

Schmutzie: That doesn't make any sense. Potatoes can't be upside-down.

Palinode: Sure they can. You just turn them over.

Schmutzie: Did you turn them over?

No noise from the kitchen.

Schmutzie: I said, did you turn them over?

Palinode: No.

Schmutzie: Then how -

Palinode: That's just it. I don't know.

Labels: conversations, food, mystery, potato terror

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chips and choice
» Friday, October 06, 2006

Before we do anything else, let's first dispose of the fact that this post mentions the city of Moose Jaw. Take a moment out to sit back, call the wife and kids over, guffaw some, shout "MOOSE JAW? WTF? etc.", snort a sip of Starbuck's out your nose, and generally do what you have to. The fact is that Moose Jaw is a pretty place with an awesome spa and the best Thai restaurant in the Western hemisphere. There's a glass noodle dish that kind of looks like a bird's nest and leaves you incapacitated with heat, but it tastes so good it's like nibbling on God's beard. Plus there's a waitress there who, even if you show up once every six months, will remember you, the people you came with the last time you showed up, what you ate and what you thought of what you ate.

Once I ordered the noodle dish and it was so hot I was dripping sweat from my forehead, panting like a dog and emptying sugar packets on