limited thinker

Great Moments in Sportswriting, Part CLVXXIII

2007-01-04T08:01:00.000-08:00

From Ivan Meisel of ESPN, opining on Alabama's hiring of Nick Saban, a peripatetic genius of the gridiron:

It may fly in the face of recent history to believe that Alabama should have hired someone for whom the program would be a step up. They have tried that in the last four hires over 10 years, and Mike DuBose, Dennis Franchione, Mike Price and Mike Shula didn't work.

(Snip... two paragraphs)

If Saban wins and bolts, as he did at Michigan State and LSU, or if he fails to win $32 million worth of games, Saban will have done more to make Alabama football smaller than anything the three Mikes ever did. The way to success in the SEC, as Auburn, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida have illustrated, is to hire coaches on their way up who will build programs that last.

Who knows why...

2006-11-14T11:58:00.000-08:00

...I'm doing this, but I am.

Technorati Profile

Coast to riposte

2006-10-10T10:46:00.000-07:00

Coast to Coast, the early a.m. radio show on AM radio, is considered by obsessives and lunatics to be the CNN of supernatural, conspiratorial and extraterrestrial phenomena. Originally hosted by Ur-crackpot Art Bell, who was replaced by the more genially paranoid George Noory, the show features a companion web site where listeners can post additional "proof" of their otherwordly experiences, as if the word of someone blathering about aliens at 2 a.m. after being on hold for 90 minutes isn't enough.

Alas, a perusal of the site's "images" section may serve to disappoint those who "want to believe":

o THE HAUNTED MICROWAVE: Marijuana may stave off Alzheimer's disease, but its effects on the deductive faculties of youths remain unfortunate.

o "OLD SEA HAG": Here's guessing his girlfriend took "on the personality" every 28 days.

o THANKS, KID!: Apparently, the "monster" had huge tits and blonde hair.

The photo begs the question of whether it's a good or bad thing for a philanderer to have a wife that stupid. I do know a few guys with ostensibly intelligent spouses who get more trim than a hedge, so I'll venture it's a bad thing.

o "LABIALITY OF MOOD": If this doesn't convince you there's some seriously spooky shit out there, then maybe the fact that its post-hypnotic creators have "been the subject of a Canadian documentary and have done a guest spot on Darkness Radio" will. But that's what happens when you get high at the "famous Skinwalker ranch."

o "YOU TELL ME WHAT THIS IS!": I don't know. A fuckin' bush, maybe?

o THE GRASSY KNOLL: Nobody's fired a gun in Dallas for over 40 years.

o CROP CIRCLES: You know how I know crop circles are the product of alien spaceships? Because people in rural areas are so busy they'd never have time to crush some wheat.

o RETURN OF THE DEMON: It looks like pussy to me.

o DUUUUUUUUDE: Our Lord and Savior later turned male plants into some serious skunk weed.

o BLACK HELICOPTER: Proof positive that helicopters can be painted black.

No, man... read the guy's story. It's the context, man. THE CONTEXT!

o SHADOW ATTACK: It's refreshing to read a supernatural being will transcend time and space, life and death, being and nothingness just to punch a guy in the face. Nice straight right! Maybe he's a southpaw whom other "shadow people" won't fight, at least not this early in their careers. If so, he needs a new promoter.

On the bright side, this is evidence that if you're ever haunted by a hot lady ghost, the fact she's dead doesn't mean you can't fuck her, at least theoretically.

This Man on Women - Nos. 69-60

2006-09-22T15:37:00.000-07:00

Line 'em up, knock 'em down. Another ten desirables:

69 (!). Rachel Weisz: The "thinking man's beauty," blah, blah, blah. If so, one might ask when thinking, what does thought have to do with the price of tea in China? One is here to prioritize fantasies in the pyramidally-structured hierarchy of self-abuse, for Christ's sake.

68. Melania Knauss: I thought the deal with Slovenian models is there's an inverse correlation between between hotness and Slovenian-ness. Did I mention she looks German?

67. Catherine Zeta-Jones: Not with your dick. Ms. Zeta-Jones is one of those chicks who makes a decent impression at first, then uglifies like Dorian Gray's portrait upon further reflection, so much so that Michael Douglas's Karloffian turn as her husband seems a step up for her.

66. Jennifer Garner: Nothing to sneeze at, of course, but I've heard informed speculation she makes vanilla taste like pomegranate.

65. Jennifer Esposito: Spike Lee nailing her kinda' ruins it, but there's a certain functionality to her looks that wedges her into the prestigious number 65 position in the askmen.com Hall of Fame.

64. Alyssa Milano: Prettier with earplugs. Just a guess.

63. Jaime Pressly: Anti-zaftig, if that's your thing. I know the phrase "I wouldn't throw her out of bed" means nothing coming from me, but Ms. Pressly looks like an 85-year-old man's idea of what a desperate, thirtysomething male thinks is hot. And while I know men complain that hot woman are humor-impaired, her alleged comic chops don't move me one way or the other.

62. Holly Valence: (VAY-lence) 1. The combining capacity of an atom or radical determined by the number of electrons that it will lose, add, or share when it reacts with other atoms.; 2. The last name of a chick I'd do even though I have no idea who the hell she is.

61. Jennifer Connelly: I used to masturbate "to" her constantly until someone mentioned she looked like my mom. Talk about nipping that shit in the bud.

60. Leeann Tweeden: Chaos theory needs no further proof beyond the fact that the only reason Ms. Tweeden's not spinning around a pole in Jacksonville is the years-old flapping of a butterfly's wings over the Kamchatka Peninsula.

This Man on Women - Nos. 79-70

2006-09-22T14:13:00.000-07:00

Our next group of ten babes:

79. Zhang Ziyi: She's a cutie, but she's no Sung Hi Lee.

78. Uma Thurman: I sometimes get the feeling that gay guys, when they're sitting around drinking white wine coolers and chewing the fat, always settle on Ms. Thurman when the conversation turns to, "Okay - if somebody put a gun to your head, which stupid bitch would you agree to sleep with?"

77. Heather Graham: She's pure, unadulterated ho-bag, and that's a genuine compliment said with the unfiltered sincerity of an Americorp's volunteer helping folks gut their houses in the post-Katrina Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. A national treasure.

76. Christina Milian: She looks fresher than a grouper at the Fulton Street fish market.

75. Samaire Armstrong: Young? Check. Cute? Check. Monkey woman thing going? Check. But at certain angles, she reminds me of an adolescent Susan Powter, which makes my johnson sag like the third act of "Titus Andronicus."

74. Kate Beckinsale: Rumor has it she's gonna' let someone fuck her in the next few years.

73. Lisa Ray: Half-Indian, half-Polish. There's a joke in there somewhere - possible punch line: "so you know where to put your finger when you tell her she's a dumb motherfucker" - but she's all-hot in my book.

72. Rachel Bilson: Plastic surgery isn't just for the aged anymore, apparently.

71. Molly Sims: What's irritating about Sims is she thinks she has to have a personality, which in a woman as hot as her is so beside the point I get dizzy. It's like reading The New Testament for fishing tips.

I don't care if that doesn't make sense. Beautiful women make me crazy.

70. Natasha Bedingfield: New Zealand also gave us Peter Jackson. I consider it a wash, kiwis.

This Man on Women - Nos. 89-80

2006-09-22T13:05:00.000-07:00

And now to review askmen.com's next deca-group of babes.

89. Tyra Banks: My mom always told me that if I didn't have anything nice to say about someone, don't say anything at all, so instead of mentioning how Ms. Banks's daytime talk show plays like a parody of a daytime talk show, I'll simply point out she has the nicest tits this side of John Travolta and be done with it.

88. Krista Allen: She looks like she could beat the shit out of me. And I don't mean that in the good way.

87. Rosario Dawson: Hispanic enough to be cast as an Afghan princess in Oliver Stone's "Alexander," Ms. Dawson possesses a high-wattage smile sure to give epilectics their well-deserved seizures and ivory poachers their "one-last-haul-and-I'm-out-of-the-business" reveries.

86. Hillary Duff: "Hillary turned 18 on September 28, 2005..." is the first phrase in askmen.com's "Career Highlight" profile of Ms. Duff. So you're not a pedophile anymore.

85. Diane Lane: Is a gay guy the photo editor here? Of all the pictures of Ms. Lane traversing the Internet, surely there's one that doesn't make her look like Charles Bukowski's girlfriend. Frankly, it's a jarring image coming after Hillary Duff.

84. Alyson Hannigan: Lists like this always have a few mildly attractive women like Ms. Hannigan thrown in so you think there's a few famous, desirable women out there you could actually get. Stop thinking that. You can't.

83. Morgan Webb: Who?

82. Sung Hi Lee: The flower's a nice touch. So is everything else, but I'm sensing that "famous" has lost all meaning in the editorial offices of askmen.com.

81. Jennifer Lopez: Ms. Lopez must thank her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that good judgement has nothing to do with sex appeal, what with her frequent marriages and her use of the n-word as a song lyric. Not that I wouldn't bone her nine ways from Sunday, but there's a certain fatalism now involved when you tell your buddy how you'd bone her nine ways from Sunday. It's like two old men talking about the weather.

80. Blake Lively: And how! (That's her real name, too, not her stripper appellation.) I've always been a fan of her "hippie-chick-goes-to-the-prom" look, even though she thinks she invented it.

This Man on Women - Nos. 99 to 90

2006-09-22T12:03:00.000-07:00

A flashy website called askmen.com has compiled a list of "The Top 99 Most Desirable Women," and though the compilation's organizing principle is difficult to glean, I'm assuming it's something along the lines of being hot and famous at the same time.

These are all fine women, but - alas - not without their flaws, which I detail below along with their assets:

99. Anna Kournikova: Compared to the near-fetal features of tennis's latest femme banale, Kournikova comes across like Jane Mansfield, and that's a good thing. I used to complain that Kournikova's eyes were too closely set together, but now I realize that's just my inner homo talking.

98. Piper Perabo: My disenfranchisement from popular culture indicates Ms. Perabo could give me an under-the-table handjob at The Subway Inn on 59th Street and I'd still not know who she was. The central photo shows an attractive woman with a slightly stupeified mien, so what's not to love?

97. Vanessa Marcil: Apparently, she's famous enough to get an inside ticket to the DVD release party for "Kill Bill: Volume 1," which is great! (Isn't "volume" just precious?) A comely lass, but I bet I'd get tired of her "great-to-see-you-until-I-realize-I-don't-know-who-you-are" smile after stalking her for six months.

96. Nicole Kidman: Since when did "class" become a synonym for "I just smelled a fart"? Aging, and not gracefully.*

95. Gabrielle Union: Another one I've never heard of. Her Barbie doll looks do leave me with the (no doubt) mistaken impression that she's one of the few black women I could boss around.

94. Bryce Dallas Howard: Like bonus tracks tacked on to the end of the first generation of CDs, Opie's daughter seems to have been inserted on the list to make sure critics like me are really paying attention. I am, and if this list were of "The Top 4,736,356,921 Most Desirable Women," Ms. Howard still wouldn't belong on it.

Yes, the "Opie's daughter" thing is a cheap shot.

93. Lucy Liu: That fake smile. That iron gaze. That user reputation. That bitch priestess countenance. Marry me, baby.

92. Vanessa Hessler: File under "CATEGORY: FANTASY; Subcategory: Au pair, naive."

What's troubling is that in the next week I'm going to mention to someone that I've never heard of Vanessa Hessler and he's going to look at me like I just got out of a cave in the Hindu-Kush.

91. Cameron Diaz: I didn't know how annoying a dopey, bubbly blonde could be until I watched Diaz do that routine for the fifth or sixth time. It produced suicidal feelings, and a few others I can't outline here in case I run for public office.

90. Amanda Bynes: If I had a daughter, I'd really hope she doesn't look like Ms. Bynes.

------
* That sentiment and others like it should not be confused with a refusal on my part to bone any of these chicks.

Meet the Press

2006-06-02T12:06:00.000-07:00

There is little as striking as the difference between the English attitude towards the press versus that of bestial Americans. In Britain, one need not be of manor born to share the general notion that Fleet Street is a but a pen for a swinish horde, a boulevard of drunken louts whose familiarity with the truth resembles Quentin Crisp's conversancy with heterosexual sex. The lot of them, when carousing in pubs, seem nothing so much as the worst fantasies of Hieronymous Bosch - a collection of imps, daemons, and golems engaged in all manner of horrific perfidy. Tomfools, all.

In America, by contrast, journalists are given awards.

It would be easy to fob off the dissimilarity to the limitless depths of American imbecility - it truly is a well that will never run dry - but that would be engaging in the lazy, sophomoric "analysis" so typical of the Fourth Estate, as well as the Irish. I believe there is a more trenchant explanation.

First, however, it would be wise to characterize more clearly what the English and Americans have in mind when they picture their Platonic ideal of a reporter. Jeffrey Bernard, the late writer of The Spectator's "Low Life" column, leaps to mind for most Britains. A dispomaniac whose drunkeness would have been considered heroic if in fact it weren't so completely obscene, Bernard spent his days writing in a stupor, constantly medicating himself with scotch after scotch. His vomit-flecked typewriter regularly churned reams of calumny, libel and sedition, to the point where had he been writing a century earlier under the aegis of my ancestors, his life would have been cut short at the gallow's pole.

Alas, in the "anything goes" era England has endured for the last forty years, Bernard enjoyed a certain celebrity, though it was of the daft uncle variety. In spite of the fact I give no credit to those who parade their tolerance as a towering achievement, like a righteous manifestation of the Manhattan Project, it reflects rather well on the English that they have never given Bernard nor any other prevaricating scribbler the sort of power which would result in execution if misused. In the influence rankings of bourgeois careers, journalist rates somewhere between assistant manager of a bowling alley and oaffish mop handler at an adult book store. They're hardly worth the trouble of firing, never mind punishments more capital.

American democracy, on the other hand, has its price, and a large percentage of the bill stems from the press's sway over the unwashed. Any sentient being can see the idea of American journalists setting the intellectual agenda for the American body politic bears an uncanny resemblance to a blind Princess Diana leading an Afghani orphan through a Russian minefield. Could anyone be less suited to the task of true journalism than an American journalist?

Picture the prototypical hack, if you dare. Regardless of what university attended, this pale wretch undoubtedly festooned his dorm with a poster of Che Guevera, an upside down photograph of the planet Earth, and - as a tip of the hat to his god above all gods, irony - a black and white portrait of a bloated Elvis Presley, preferably the one where he receives a commendation from Richard Nixon. This boy's university days were not spent seeking knowledge and females, as were mine, but ginning up incidents of "racism" at his notorious hotbed of bigotry.

Seven years later, degree in hand, it's off to the races, so to speak. With the appearance and bearing of a fetal pig, this mooncalf compensates for his inability to move events by tendentiously describing them to fit his jaundiced view of the same. In England, of course, it hardly matters because peers like myself are able to crush dissent, restore order, and round up the usual suspects before anything gets out of hand. But in America, a commoner is just as likely as not to vote in accordance with the foolish "advise" - ahem, news - he's read recently in his newspaper. Such are the wages of your democracy and your first amendment, my American friend.

It would be one thing if American journalists would clownishly misinterpret and misrepresent events and simply leave it at that. Yet they insist on lowering the bar even further by doing so in the most witless, dull, and stupefying manner imaginable. Have you ever read a piece of American journalism pillar to post? Never has imbecility and soporiferousness commingled so effortlessly; it's a singular experience to be falling asleep while reading, then being asked to turn the page again. It's a wonder there's not a Pulitzer Prize for the induction of narcolepsy.

At least Bernard, however unwittingly, could turn a phrase or two, and English journalists, while downing "me fifteenth pint," occasionally will utter something witty. Not so their American brethren. Their glum prose reflects suitably their general glumness, a condition they variegate with ample infusions of obnoxious self-righteousness and appropriate self-loathing. Like feminists, journalists know there is no joke better than one left unsaid, and the presence of mirth near them is like garlic to vampires. Oh by all means, let's let them call the shots!

I've lived stateside for almost fifteen years, and while I view American culture as a vulgar parade of savagery, saying the same of American journalism seems almost a compliment, however unintended. Perhaps there's a word - uninvented, perhaps undiscovered - that can encompass the wholesale idiocy, joylessness, and unsophistication of reportage, American-style. If the Lord, for whatever perverse reasons, made me a newspaper editor, I'd assign my staff to seek out this gargantuan bon mot, confident in the knowledge it would forever remain a mystery.

- Twimbley Duddleston IV

"Lost" is Found

2006-05-10T19:29:00.000-07:00

I know no one's asking, but has anyone noticed how Lost is coming to resemble the Ur-videogame Myst?

I realize Lost has lots of people - hot chicks too - while Myst featured, well, just you, but the idea of cavorting on a mysterious island with a bunch of puzzles cooked up by an evil genius joins these two works like shared organs between Siamese twins.

Fine by me. I tried playing Myst years ago, and not only could I not figure out any of the puzzles, I couldn't glean the object of the game. Chess, Monopoly, boxing, elections - I know what people need to do to win those competitions. Plus, there's incentive to play well or at least cheat dextrously, since the winner of each gets to nail the loser's wife until sunset. Usually that's an incentive.

What do you get for winning Myst? Porn's already free. Myst left me mystified.

I'm not sure that's such a bad thing, too, but there are plenty of people who will no doubt set me straight. Don't.

- Brian Moore

Swing Time

2006-05-09T17:30:00.000-07:00

It was inevitable I'd stumble upon another loathsome American practice before too long, and thanks to one afternoon of overwhelming ennui, two bottles of my cheapest claret, three packages of a cigarette brand known as "Kools," and my occasional talent for infinite patience, I was exposed to the practice some colonials call "swinging."

It seems Ralph P_____, one of my gardeners, is a zealous practitioneer of the hobby. I plied the savage with the wine and the "smokes," as he called them weezily, after overhearing a conversation Ralph was having with his wife, if that's what you want to call her. (He certainly doesn't, as the term "ol' lady" is his preferred appellation for Daisy P_____.) In any event, he and Daisy were busily planning the logistics for an evening of "swinging" this weekend.

It seems the P____s had met another couple "on line" - meaning they had rendezvoused on the Internet, that agora of debauchery so popular with Americans. After some negotiations, the two pairs had decided to trade spouses for an evening of sexual deviance. Frankly, the nausea which racked my body prevented me from discerning most of the details, but the idea of Ralph trading his wife with an anonymous male inspired sufficiently revolting images in my mind's eye that the actual particulars hardly mattered. Need we know the contents of Falstaff's dinner to realize his alcohol-related vomitus is a sight best left unseen?

Feigning interest in him generally, I sat Ralph down for an employee review cum annual master/servant bonding ceremony - how 'bout that sporting franchise? and isn't she a comely wench? and the rest of it all. The "comely wench" bait was taken with less hesitancy than a shark devours chum, and Ralph and I were off to the races.

I'll spare you the goriest details, but suffice it to say there are semi-discrete organizations which facilitate the exchange of spouses for sexual gratification. As Ralph proved unwittingly, through both his personal appearance and with pictures of his "conquests," the practice attracts people who could be described charitably as louts, corpulents, mooncalfs, barbarians, maniacs and tomfools. It is also tremendously emasculating, as I had to inform Ralph, with emphasis.

After caning him several times, I told the nurseryman there was a perfectly acceptable alternative to "swinging" which doesn't involve depositing another man's penis into his wife's vagina like a dispenser rod inside a roll of toilet paper. We call it infidelity, which in the vulgate means "fooling around;" I practice it with frequency. His mouth opened wide, whether from pain or understanding, I did not know and could not care.

"You see - it's Ralph, right? You see, Ralph, males are adorned with the golden shackles of a biological imperative which compels them to plant their seed inside every vagina surrounded by what they consider a fine specimen of the female persuasion," I said. "It's a way for them to maximize their offspring, consequently asserting a certain dominion over the planet and, in an admittedly detached, unconscious way - and I'm not assuming you go for this stuff, uh, Ralph - achieve a sort of immortality."

The stench of wine, Kools, and incomprehension dominated my gardener.

"Or to put it another way, you can have your cake and eat it too," I said.

Another blank.

"Ralph, you get to fuck anyone you can lay your hands on and your wife doesn't, and she won't have a clue if you play your cards right," I said. Then I reached for my cane.

"Ohhhhhhhh," said Ralph. "Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh. I get ya'. Some of 'dos guys, they got 'dos big cocks, okay?, and I don't like 'dos big cocks in my Daisy's pussy, you know? It gets her all stretched out, okay?" He bleated further utterances, which, though incomprehensible, I assumed were a continuation of this train of thought.

"Yes, Ralph. Okay."

- Twimbley Duddleston IV

Flyin' Fuckin' Robots

2006-05-09T11:22:00.000-07:00

First, I suppose I gotta' apologize for takin' a few months off. I had to go to this thing called "rehab" where not only do they make you not drink, they tell you that you were a cocksucker for drinkin' except that you weren't a cocksucker because you really didn't have any control over it. Hey, doctor's orders.

The very name of the place - First Step Meadows - tells you all you need to know. It's for homos. I made a lot of people cry there with my straight talk, but that's for another day, because I got serious things on my mind.

My heart almost seized me when I opened up today's "Star-Ledger" and read about how there ain't shit we can do against an attack of flying robots. You think? Jesus. If there was anything we could do about flying robots, we would've done it by now, since the fear of flying robots - especially at O'Shea's - is so great it cuts through ideology and partisanship.

Our very humanity is what's gonna' bone us in the war against flying robots. The thing is, your average robot's got no conscience, no mind to speak of, regardless of his origin. He's just a machine, doing machine things and thinking machine thoughts. Maybe it wants some nuts and bolts for food, maybe it wants to get fucked up on some spiked motor oil. And, of course, it wants to fuck all our women, but that's pretty much it. There's nothing to stop them from takin' over the world; no second thoughts, no remorse like I kinda' felt after I broke a beer bottle on my son's face for actin' queer. And when they learn how to fly, it's over. They win.

(This isn't confirmed, but Butch - who's been right about this stuff before - told me that the robots were workin' on fag robots to assfuck all the males after the flying robots conquer the world. He said he's seen the prototype on the Internet - a big dildo attached to robot machine, and no pair of steel-plated drawers will be able to stop it!)

I guess we're just countin' the days until all that shit happens. So I'm gonna' have me a drink or ten at O'Shea's, and no robot-ignorant, rehab pansy is gonna' tell me otherwise.

- Frank McManus

Paging Through "People"

2006-01-29T10:03:00.001-08:00

The wife brought home a copy of People magazine last night, so this morning I afforded myself the opportunity of waltzing through its contents. Some thoughts:

o Page 62. Just like I passed on the chance to watch Brokeback Mountain, I skipped the article on real life gay cowboys. Anyway, isn't putting Ang Lee, Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry and Jake Gyllenhaal in the same room like hitting for the cycle of boring?

o Page 96. Look at Angelina Jolie's left forearm. She must be snapping off Brad something fierce. Happy endings notwithstanding, I think we can agree that whatever the goals of "Yele Haiti", boots-on-the-ground results remain elusive.

o Page 91. "Mehmet Ali Agca, 48, who shot Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1981, was released from an Istanbul prison Jan. 12 after serving 25 years for that crime and the 1979 murder of a Turkish jounalist. The Pope, who died last April at 84, forgave Agca in 1983." Two things: 1. I thought Turkish justice was supposed to harsh. 2. I dig "in 1983." The Pope spent two years thinking about how'd he'd like to fuck up that Turkish motherfucker who took a shot at him. Good Pope!

o Page 78. Shelley Winters bit the dust. It don't mean nothing to me, but I did have a conversation with the ghostwriter of her autobiography who told me she used to fart up a storm while they were "writing," yet insisted on keeping the windows closed. He said her gas bombs were so nasty they brought tears to his eyes.

o Page 70. The 12 Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards are on TNT Jan. 29. "The award show where only actors vote for actors." I'm being serious as a heart attack here - and I know I'm not the first dude to express such sentiments - but I'd rather watch my dog take a shit. This thing is a joke, right?

- Brian Moore

Gazzara on Cassavettes

2006-01-27T12:18:00.000-08:00

Actor Ben Gazzara shared his reflections on his artistically fruitful collaboration with actor/director John Cassavettes:

o "John was a brilliant guy. A genius! Now I don't mean genius in the brainy sense, like a guy who keeps telling you that Peking Duck isn't really from Peking when all you want to do is eat some goddamn dim sum, or a guy who knows the square root of pi and all that college stuff. No, John was a genius in the you-can't-make-heads-or-tails-out-of-what-he's-saying sense. He'd come up with a concept like 'the Chinese bookie you're about to kill isn't really a Chinese bookie.' And I'd run with it."

o "If John was so self-indulgent, like all the little critics liked to write, how did he get a piece of ass like Gena Rowlands? Huh? Huh? You tell me, buster?"

o "John used to be famous for his acting. Now he gets praise for his pictures. He was Quentino Taranto before Quentin Taranto was born, kiddio. But he should be remembered for his acting, too. His performances in Marjorie's Baby and The Baker's Dozen still bring it. First class stuff."

o "John has a son named Rick who's in showbiz. Nice kid. A chip off the old block. He acts, directs, dances - just like his old man."

- Brian Moore

Michael Jackson...

2006-01-27T11:30:00.000-08:00

...in Times Square?

Nope. It's just another burqa-wearin' Swede galivanting around New York City like he owns the place.

- Frank McManus

Gazzara on "Road House"

2006-01-26T11:22:00.000-08:00

Actor Ben Gazzara calls Road House his "most watched" film, a judgement based on the number of times the Patrick Swayze vehicle has been shown on cable. "TNT. HBO. TBS. Lifetime. All of them. It's all over the television like a cheap whore," he said during an interview with limitedthinker.

Below are Gazzara's remembrances of this landmark film:

o "Swayze was a talented kid, but too pretty for his own good. His hair - it looked like it could fly. I took him aside and told him 'Pat, you're a good kid, but you can't make it in this business if you're prettier than the leading lady.' He told me he thought I was right, but his advisors told him differently. I told him 'be a man, then!' But he wouldn't be a man. Look where he is now and look where I am now."

o "I always thought Road House was an unrealistic picture. I played Brad Wesley, the capo of a Missouri cowtown called... I can't remember what it was called. Anyway, Swayze plays this bouncer who comes to town and defeats me on my own turf. Now anyone who knows me knows there isn't a snowball's chance in hell a bouncer could take me. Not on my own turf. Not on anyone's turf. So there's no realism there. A picture has to have realism."

o "I didn't want to do the picture at first. It's for kids. Then I got to thinking - the new generation needs to see it done, Gazzera-style. So I agreed."

o "How did I prepare for the role? What kind of a fuckin' question is that? I pretended I was the capo of a Missouri cowtown, you idiot. It's like being the capo of a big town, only here, there's less people. You break legs. You just don't get as much money. The cost of living is lower, though. So it's a wash."

o "The fellow who played the blind leader of the rock band in the picture was a blind leader of a rock band in real life. I think that's why we were able to pull that off in Road House. Again, realism. If the guy wasn't really blind, people would walk out of the theater saying 'I liked the picture except for Swayze beating Gazzera and the blind leader of the rock band.' But people didn't say that, except for the first part."

o "The scene where I'm having brunch. The bloody mary was my idea. I had the writer put it in, and Swayze had to react on the spot. I guess he did okay."

- Brian Moore

An Interview with Ben Gazzara

2006-01-26T10:16:00.000-08:00

Gazzara.

A bold name. A man's name. And the surname of actor Ben, perhaps the finest Italian-American actor of his generation - or any other.

Born Biagio Anthony Gazzara, the Manhattan native has enjoyed a six-decade career in the motion picture and television business, but in spite of the "glitz and glizz," as he puts it, of the show business industry, his heart has never strayed far from his Lower East Side, Sicilian roots.

"I'm as Italian as confetti," Gazzera, his trademark baritone as resonant as ever, told limitedthinker's Brian Moore. "And you can quota me on that."

Over dinner recently, Gazzara reflected on his life and work, thoughts he's generously agreed to share with the reader of this blog. The interview will be presented in installments over the coming weeks.

But a sampling:

On blogging:

Gazzara: What is this for again?

Moore: It's for my blog.

Gazzara: Blogs... Blogs... What are those? Wait - they're those computer deals where people write whatever they want and no one reads 'em, right?

Moore: That's about it.

Gazzara: Aw, fuck it. It's Monday.

On Judiasm:

I like Judiasm. What's not to like? Look, getting pissed off about Jews in Hollywood is like getting pissed off about midgets in Oz. Good people. Tough negotiators. I like Jews, but what's more important is... Jews like me. I'm vigorous. We Italians have a word for it - macho.

On Elaine Stritch:

I balled that broad for - what? - two years. Jesus. What was I thinking?

Coming next... Gazzara shares his memories of his "most watched" film, Road House with Patrick Swayze.

- Brian Moore

Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon

2006-01-19T13:49:00.000-08:00

I was reading the paper at O'Shea's the other day when I came upon a story about how college kids don't cut it in the "skills" department. According to the pin dicks at the American Institutes for Research, half the punks at four-year schools like St. John's "could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school."

Or as this Irishman puts it, half of college kids aren't women.

I don't know shit about any of that stuff and it hasn't stopped me. Exercise? That's for chicks so they look good when I'm fuckin' 'em. Newspaper editorials? If they're talking about the stories in the back of the paper that demand committees be formed to look into something further, I got no use for 'em. Credit cards? Jesus, Mary and Joseph. They're my wife's plastic vibrators. And parental involvement in school? I remember my old man telling me "school's for fags, son" when I was three-years-old.

Even if half the chicks in college don't know this stuff, what difference does it make? They've got to know one thing - the location of Frank McManus's johnson.

- Frank McManus

OUTRAGE!

2006-01-17T15:26:00.000-08:00

Nothing is clearer than this - the only problem with capital punishment in America is the infrequency of its use. Americans, who as a matter of course parade their vulgarity as if it were a second skin, suddenly become country vicars when the subject of executing a low rogue comes about. Those who urinate with drumbeat predictability upon a neighbor's lawn are suddenly willing to count angels and split hairs.

"Well," they'll reason, "he did kill two people who were happily married. But there's nothing, oh, special about the way he slayed them. The woman wasn't raped and it appears their property was more or less left intact, no doubt as a courtesy to the couple's inheritors. It's as if there was an underlying courtesy to the slaughter, which must be acknowledged in a court of law." With this in mind, Americans on a jury will mutter at each other for five days, then bleat: "Life it is!"

Of course, had the rogue done something truly horrible like take the couple's car, then Americans - of course! - will consider throwing execution into the bisque of options stewing before them.

Rubbish, I say. Hang these killers and let daemons sort them out. But there are crimes so low, so fiendish, that hanging - or being tied in a sack with a gorilla and a cobra and thrown into the Tiber - seems more a tip of the hat to the criminal's perfidy than the punishment it's intended to be. Indeed, hell is no place for these scalliwags, since its master Lucifer is an angel fallen from God and thus linked to the divine. No, for these impish, contemptible dogs a special hell must be made - crawling with beasts of darkness, riddled with tortures unknown even to the vilest Arab, and supervised by unbathed Romanians.

Such a crime has been uncovered recently, and forgive me if its depravity spawns a certain irrationality in my prose: a 22-year-old American savage has been caught impersonating a British royal. The surreptitious beast claimed to be "Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, the Fifth Duke of Cleveland" and demanded the students of an American public school in Minnesota refer to him as "your grace." After fooling some of the lowborns for a time, the students managed to intuit, as all plebians do instinctively in the presence of their betters, though in this case their primitive understanding came to fruition due to their betters's absence, that this pasty, moderately obese, bespectacled layabout was no "duke."

Since Americans will be reading this, I find it problematic to use the phrase "needless to say," but such concerns notwithstanding, needless to say this treasonous pig would be dangling from a rope if he tried this subterfuge in England. Rich and poor, low and high, young and old, man and woman - all would unite to put the scum to death. In the place of my birth during my 22nd year, ironically, we uncoverd a Scotsman who claimed to be a "laird" in his native Edinborough. At first we laughed it off, since proclaiming oneself "laird" is a bit like seizing title to assistant manager of the women's footware section in a smallish department store, and this goes doubly when making the claim in England, in front of actual royalty.

But there's the principle, even when dealing with Scotch royalty. We assembled the citizens, who:

1. Cut out his tongue and fed it to swine;

2. Gouged his eyes forth and used them for a short-lived game of marbles;

3. Dispatched with his nose, causing the children to laugh uncontrollably as he now resembled the very swine to which his tongue had been fed - I believed the lads called him "Swiney Todd," though their rantings were difficult to comprehend because of the "lairdly" screaming;

4. Sliced off his fingers and toes and stuffed them in every orifice, natural and man-made;

5. Opened his gut and rolled out his intestines, cutting out whatever victuals he may have obtained by his fraud;

6. Had him hanged.

Yes, yes - in the words of my father: "You call that punishment?" If I had the resources, I would have doubled the length of the four-hour ordeal in the interests of justice, but I had only a few constables, who were unable to control the mob's zeal for seeing the scales balanced before their eyes. As they say in the States, he got off light.

As will this pagan, sub-human malefactor I wrote of earlier, no doubt. There's little wonder why those who impersonate royals do so routinely in the United States, where the "punishment" is as likely to be a six-figure book deal as it is a night in the stockade, as opposed to England, where the word punishment yields no confusion among the populace.

- Twimbley Duddleston IV

The Golden Globes

2006-01-16T20:25:00.000-08:00

A bunch of gals came into O'Shea's tonight wanting to watch something called The Golden Globe Awards. My reaction, like yours if you're not a chick or a homo, was what the fuck are the The Golden Globe Awards?

I thought letting the chicks have their way might end in a handjob to yours truly delivered under the back booth, but no handjob was worth this. What I saw was a bunch of prancin', mincin' Bonny Prince Charlie Hollywood bon vivants actin' like they owned the place, which they probably did considering all the money for nothing they get thrown at them.

I handled it quiet, though, like a gentleman. I told Pat the bartender to change the channel during one of the ads for disposable douche, then put my .22 on the bar in case anyone cracked foxy. Pat changed the tube to midget wrestling, something he gets on satellite in exchange for paying some raghead a fifty for the "Wide Globe O' Sports" package. The chicks were so drunk they thought the one in the unitard was Dustin Hoffman and the one in the Batman mask was a short guy who played Batman, so they were none the wiser. Apparently, it's "anything goes" at the Globes. Jesus.

Anyway, Hoffman won, so I lost five bucks to a gal from Weehawken* who kept screaming she blew Hoffman 15 years ago in the Port Authority men's room.

Who would lie about such a thing?

- Frank McManus

* I'm pretty sure I wound up fuckin' her.

A Cinematic Adventure

2006-01-16T12:19:00.000-08:00

T'is a rare day when I venture to the "multiplex," a Frankenstein monster of a word culled from missappropriated classical language used to denote a collection of movie theaters. As with everything else, Americans's chimpanzee-like attention span demands a plethora of options, cinematic and otherwise, lest their minds boggle at the idea of staying with one thought or narrative for longer than it takes to savage a female in the throes of estrus. Thus they construct multiplexes with a minimum of a dozen theaters, and thus on those occasions I'd like to see a movie, it's the multiplex where I am forced to go.

I saw King Kong yesterday, and I must say it was capital! Of course, the titular character evoked a wonder I'd never experienced at the cinema. The gorilla here was spectacularly well-trained - I've fired servants who were less agile than this lithesome beast - indeed, so much so the emotions he mimicked, a vast, rangy span running from displeasure to rage, seemed to mirror those I admire so much in myself. Furthermore, while I'm not an expert in the optical arts, I imagine the work done with mirrors to make what in the wild would be eight feet tall seem 25 on screen must have been of the pioneering variety. On a similar note, only the Lord knows what dark mechanical prestidigitations enabled the filmmakers to create long-dead beasts of the Cretaceous Period with such dextrous fidelity. Bravo! One would think there'd be lucrative military and police "spin-offs" for this kind of technology - just imagine the look on a rioter's face when confronted not with a reluctant bobbie but a savage, if robotic, Tyranosaur - but such things are beyond my purview.

It almost goes without saying that movie's female lead, Naomi Watts, was fetching in the extreme. My nephew, about whom I'll have more to say later, tells me she's Australian, news which came as a distinct surprise. For me, it's always been a race to the bottom between Americans and Australians as to which was the most vulgar of England's cast-offs; every time one hits the depths of savagery, the other proceeds to roll up its sleeves for the hard work of digging even deeper. Which will emerge first in China is anyone's guess.

But Miss Watts possesses a velvet hold upon my being. I emerged from the theater with her in my thoughts and since then, particularly when in the shower or alone in front of my computer, my thoughts continue to turn towards her, aggressively. Cinephiles should keep on eye out for this young lady. No doubt she has a future as a popular movie star!

As for my nephew, he has aspirations to be a part of the movie industry; as such, they provoke a sigh in me, followed by a swift rap on his head from my walking stick. I tell Winston that many of my teachers at the prestigious Hempston Bridge school no doubt wanted to sodomize the young boys under their authority, but these pederasts had the good sense not to parade it as a lifelong ambition. One must adopt a similar attitude with the flicks. If he thinks he can make money as a silent partner in a film, more power to him. But first he must inherit the money.

- Twimbley Duddleston IV

An Open Letter to Random House

2006-01-11T13:55:00.000-08:00

Dear Random House,

The post below about my New Year's Eve was total bullshit, so could I get a book deal? Please?

Love,

Brian Moore

- Brian Moore

Robert Adams Is A Dumb White Guy

2006-01-06T08:11:00.000-08:00

Everything I write is a lie, except the stuff that's true. So it's pretty much true that I wrote the following "review" of Bishop T.D. Jakes: Woman, Thou Art Loosed Worship 2002 on Netflix:

After watching Jakes's inspiring sermon, I agreed to "loose" my wife on
alternating Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:45 p.m. -5:15 p.m., providing she
wears a GPS tracking device around her ankle.

To which this response, from someone name Robert Adams, was rendered:

Unfortunately for me, the first review led me to believe there was actually
a sermon buried in this DVD which led me to waste 60 minutes watching "too
ethnic for me" singing and dancing in a packed arena. Unless you like that sort
of thing, stay away from this one.

Happy trails, Mrs. Adams!

- Brian Moore

Pick Up Lines for Youths

2006-01-04T22:29:00.000-08:00

At O'Shea's, I've seen it all, including the garbage how-do-you-dos the young stallions use on phillies. Christ, I'd be lucky to work the Port Authority men's room if that was the best material at my disposal. In the interest in keeping pregnancy up, here are some of ol' Frank's best openers:

1. My mother didn't like gals like you, so be grateful I'm buying you a Carling's Black Label, bitch.

2. How 'bout that penis? ("Cock" works just fine after midnight, but it's classier if you don't whip it out right away. Let the broad's imagination work its magic.)

3. My bottom of the barrel goes yard over your top of the heap.

4. Stop talking to the oak, minx!

5. You make me want to go to the can, kick out the junkie, and plow the monkey. (The rhyme is what gets 'em.)

Now go to work, homo!

- Frank McManus

New Year's Eve

2006-01-03T13:47:00.000-08:00

It's funny what forces memory to the fore - Proust's madeline, the queen of hearts, some twine tied around the index finger. For me, it was paging through piles of ancient Leg Show and Black Tail magazines at my dermatologist's office that, like tsunami through village, slammed heretofore blacked-out memories of my New Year's Eve to the front and center of my consciousness this afternoon.

I had a fuckin' great time, it seems. The evening started around eight o'clock.

To grease the skids prior to dinner, the wife and I had a bottle of outrageously-priced champagne while seated on the porch wicker. It was lovely chatting with her, sharing the anticipation that precedes a fine evening, but soon it was clear that French bubbly was not getting me remotely fucked up enough to have a good time, considering where I live. You might know it as Hades.

"There's a dinosaur!" I bellowed, pointing towards the sky at about a 60 degree angle, the height I thought credible for a phony dinosaur sighting.

The wife didn't move.

"NO! REALLY! LOOK!" I repeated that six times - each more frantic - until my frenzy and the addition of "don't be a cooze!" forced her to take the bait, which gave me the three seconds I needed to whip out my coke grinder, thankfully already spun, and cram it into my nose. By the time my wife told me I was "full of shit," I'd already hidden the near-depleted apparatus near my penis - cops! - massaged the coke into the recesses of my nostrils, and given my gums a quick "freeze." You know the drill.

"That shit's fucked up, honey," I said. I finished the champagne. I told her if we didn't get to the restaurant right away, we'd be in a lot of trouble food-wise. It's the oldest trick in the book - if you ever want to get your girl off the subject of a bullshit dinosaur sighting, pretend you're going to be late for your reservation. She got into the Benz faster than... a tsunami through a village, the only image my mind was capable of conjuring then. I did 84 mph in a school zone, but only kids not worth worrying about would be studying then, I figured, and they're too light to do any real damage to my grill.

We arrived at Le Star, our favorite restaurant. I told her the smart move would be for her to handle the maitre d' while I "powdered my nose" - get it? - "because I know you hate it when I keep going to the can during dinner." (I am manipulative, cleverly so; she bought it hook, line, and that other thing.) I basically snorted an eight-ball while I was inside; I guess it took a long time, too, because some asshole continued to pound the door no matter how loudly I screamed for him to "fuck off!"

I came out, unleashing my best wide-eyed, bad intentions look. The guy was a cop. He didn't have a uniform on, but I know from cops. He kept staring at me as I bolted past, as cops will do. Since I didn't want to cause a scene, I only said my mission in life was to nail his daughter in the ass. (I could've fucked him up just for looking at me, but even I show a little restraint now and then.) Anyway, since cops are pussies, he didn't say a fuckin' thing back. He may have said something to the manager, though. I didn't give a fuck.

My wife, still at the bar, was pretty pissed off; apparently, I'd been in the unisex bathroom for twenty minutes. "Then have a few drinks. Jesus!" I said, then ordered three martinis, as if we were having lunch. I knocked back two like they were shots before savoring the third for a couple of minutes. A good martini, properly made, is meant to be sipped, and even a Type A guy like me will stop and smell the roses, so to speak, before ordering another two. The bartender was a sweet-looking college co-ed who I suddenly realized I wanted to fuck, but even with that heady wind in her sails she couldn't make 'em fast enough. No matter how many times I pounded the polished oak, she took forever. Sighing really loud and saying "fuck!" a lot didn't help, either.

The maitre d' finally showed, except he's Mr. Attitude now. "The fuck?" I said. "It's fuckin New Year's Eve. Am I the first guy to ever want to get his drink on?" The guy didn't say anything. He shepherded us to our table, located somewhere between Siberia and the dark side of the moon. The wife wouldn't have it, nor would I.

"How many times have we been here?" I asked, grabbing his arm.

"Mr. Moore, you seem quite intox..."

I shoved three C-notes into his mouth. "Get us the fuckin' table we asked for, you fuck!"

I ordered a pitcher of martinis for me and a bottle of champagne for the wife. The martinis, however, were having the perverse effect of counteracting the coke. I couldn't have that. I just couldn't fuckin' have that. I called my guy on the cell, and once I told him he was a paranoid homo for complaining about my use of cellular technology, he agreed to come to the restaurant
with some blow and ecstasy. Remember that, reader - I requested cocaine and ecstasy.

You'll be unsuprised to find that Marvin took twice as long as promised to get there. He was dressed in fatigues, a Hawaiian shirt, and smelled like he'd just cornholed both Cheech and Chong in their pot humidor. I called him a motherfucker when he stumbled to our table. I grabbed him by his white-guy Afro and forced him into the bathroom.

I pulled out my roll, waiting while he went through dozens of pockets; I finished my martini and was well into jonesing for another when he finally recovered his "stash." And what did he have on him? Two ecstasy pills, a baggie of heroin, and a half-ounce of Mississippi dirtweed.

"You're fuckin' kidding, right?" I asked, not really asking.

"Man, it was such short notice, man, and it's New Year's Eve and..."

I grabbed his white-guy Afro once again - risking a massive lice infestation - and smashed his face into the mirror. He started crying, but it was more from the shock of me being "uncool" than from physical pain, something he was incapable of experiencing on that and most other evenings.

"I've taken shit from my wife," I said, "shit from a cop who happens to be in this restaurant as we speak" - that sobered Marvin's ass up a bit - "and shit from the maitre d' who normally begs to blow me when I eat here, so I'm not going to take any shit from you, Marvin. Now give me what I asked for, goddamnit!" I admit I use kid gloves on Marvin, but guys like him aren't easy to find.

Marvin wiped his nose. "That reefer's good shit, man. You should try it..."

I bounced his face off the mirror again; blood muffled the crunch of skull on glass. "I'm not in the habit of taking copper when promised gold, motherfucker."

Marvin came to his senses and handed me the coke and the ecstasy, and I took the baggie of heroin as a bonus to help cool the pain-in-the-ass edge I knew I'd have at 8 a.m. I peeled a bunch of Cs and shoved them in his mouth. (By the way, I consider myself the inventor of that move, so I wish to be properly credited by any thieves thinking about stealing my contribution to intellectual property and thuggish popular culture.)

After popping a tab and doing three lines off the largest piece of broken mirror I could find, I left Marvin to clean up. I saw three old ladies when I opened the door; they seemed pissed.

"You've been in there for twenty minutes," one of them said, pointing a gnarled finger at me. "Didn't you hear us knocking?"

"No, I didn't fuckin' hear you knocking and it wouldn't have mattered if I did. And don't go in there until Marvin's done wiping my cum off his face." I shoved ol' pointey-finger against the wall. She was near-weightless, giving the push a comic element.

The wife was pissed, of course, so I ordered her a fifth bottle of Dom along with a few bottles of whatever the fuck fancy Bordeaux the place was pimping. The hooch calmed her down - a bit. She hadn't liked this "amuse-bouche" thing they first served. She hadn't liked the fuckin' salad, either, and from the look on her face when the (hot little) waitress served the fish course, it didn't look like she'd be enjoying the mahi-mahi. Abandoning her for forty minutes contributed to her pissiness, which seemed unreasonable because I'd finally explained the important matters at hand. Anyway, when I asked for the waitress's phone number "because you and me really ought to fuck sometime," it seemed I'd found my ol' lady's proverbial last straw.

Blah-blah-blah a woman scorned, but it's not like I'd actually fucked this chick. For all the wife knew, I could've been joking around, engaging in a little end of the year frivolity. The hot little waitress didn't give me her number - she kept doing stage glances directed at the Mrs. - so the wife's hurling of the fish course was a complete overreaction. What's more, she didn't hit me, she hit the bony-fingered bovine who'd whined about me doing business in the ladies room; I ducked, quick-like, letting the plate fly over me and on to the dowager's boa.

Her reaction was seriously funny, and I laughed a good five minutes, maybe longer. I was getting massively fucked up by this point, so I can only speak generally, but images of a burning rooster and a spinning top are what keep coming to mind. That bitch could holler, too! She was working us over like a mad preacher, braying and spitting. My wife wasn't in the mood. She shoved the old biddy away. I used the break to shove a few more bills into the maitre d's mouth to pay for this bitch's meal and a cab home for her and the rest of the garden club. I mean, fuck!

The wife left while I paid our way back into the graces of this shitheel place, so I was free to spread holiday cheer at the bar unencumbered by a peanut gallery. (I let the busboy have the uneaten portion of our venison entree.) Nothing breaks the ice with a silver-haired old man better than calling him "fuckface," just like the way to a lady's heart is staring at her titties like you're about to make them explode, then putting your hand over her mouth when she begins to speak. And in spite of what you've heard, young folks love when an affectionate slap winds up hurting like hell as much as baby boomers dig the word "cunt." Of course, when the Dom gets ordered, everybody quits whining and gets in line.

I tried to force the waitress into the bathroom for a quickie, but she wasn't into it no matter how many Benjamins I tried to shove down her blouse. Bitch. I staggered out and drove home - I think I hit a dog - and that's when I mistook my wife for a major appliance.

God, did I have fun.

- Brian Moore

Aftermath

2006-01-01T21:09:00.000-08:00

Apparently, my bitch-assed 'fridge wants to sue me. Fuck you, 'fridge! Keep shit cold and shut the fuck up!

- Brian Moore

New Year's

2006-01-01T20:56:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd let you know I got so fucked up New Year's Eve that I tried to rape my - "our" - refrigerator. I kept slammin' my cock into the Fridgedair - stainless steel, hardcorin' it like the cold one was my cooze - until my baby yelled "bitch ain't cold; you're fucked up."

I said, "Bitch, you cold!" The 'fridge didn't say shit, so I kept on fuckin' it. Came all over the fuckin' icemaker.

- Brian Moore

Down on the Javanese

2005-12-28T20:54:00.000-08:00

As a matter of principle, I've no truck with the people of Java, just as I seldom rue the differences between those of the great Kingdom of England and the savages of Chad. But I must confess my sole experience with a Javanese native was desultory, at best.

The encounter, or series thereof, occurred at Hempston Bridge, a public school - which means "private school" to Americans - the envy of the realm. The boys and I thought a semester of instruction in the "art" of Javanese gamelon would be top shelf and thus enrolled in Prof. Kwai Barleyan's tutorial. From the start it was an exercise in rare personal restraint.

Though for the sake of convenience I'll stipulate he somehow earned his title, Professor Barleyan was a primitive sort. Upon meeting him, I could barely get past the notion that this petite, painfully thin man - his trousers touched his legs as often as Twiggy did - could teach me anything beyond the science of hauling a ricksaw, never mind the intracies of exotic music. And his diction left much to be desired; I longed for the return of Morse code as a popular means of communication, such was the off-putting nature of his omnipresent "aws," "ings," and "bongs." Conversations with housecats yielded clearer ends.

Granted, A.J.P. Taylor couldn't make head or tails of the gamelon any better than Barleyan, given the instruments's barbarity. Not horsehair on string, nor breath through reed, could in any way approximate the clanging, braying desperation of it all. Webscombe Summerthroat, an altogether decent chap and indulger of south of the Equator tribes, and who was later felled by AIDS, couldn't muster a single phrase of praise for this ridiculous set of contraptions. He was game for the challenge, too!

In any event, Prof. Barleyan proved to be a mean-spirited fellow, apparently unsatisfied with the witty analogies we lads used to describe the horrors of his chosen endeavor. "Tortured cat" - an insult to his people. "Suicide throng" - an imperfect slap to the face, wrong in fact and implied deed. "Give me rum, sodomy, and a greater portion of the lash instead of braving the throes of this 'instrument'" - you can imagine Barleyan's response to that.

His lowest moment came at the faculty's Boxing Day fete, an affair where the peers were known to "let it all hang out" - their phrase, by the way, which should give you an indication of how louche it could become. Prof. Barleyan had eight too many porters that morning, then complained bitterly of events in East Timor, a locale unaffixed to Java as far as I know and therefore bewildering as to why he would care for it in the first place.

I couldn't quote him, unless my memories of "ging-gong-aw-bong-ting-Timor" mean anything to you beyond the sheer gibberish it means to me, but there was anger in his tone. Webscombe delivered a rough translation to the lads, who then had to restrain me from caning Barleyan for his impudence and triviality in the presence of so many distinguished Englishman. The Javanese gypsy would have had better luck complaining of oppressive blueness in the summer sky against an intellect, and Catherine Wheel, as trenchant and unforgiving as mine.

This antagonism remains with me, so it will only be an aspect of manifest destiny if and when I lash Barleyan's descendants into delivering me to The Carlyle in hasty fashion. When that happens, Barleyan should consider his mission fulfilled.

- Twimbley Duddleston IV

The Stinks

2005-12-28T19:28:00.000-08:00

It's easy to laugh at music critics who, after listening to a great work's premiere, dismiss said great work as garbage. The bomb throwers who panned Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring fall nicely into that rubric, though few in the audience at Spring's Paris premiere begged to differ.

Alas, The Kinks's Preservation: Act 1 does not fit so nicely. Listening to it is a bit like slowly committing suicide, as it kills its listener incrementally the way each and every shot of heroin saps a junkie's vital essence. Upon hearing Preservation the first time, my wife said she had visions of the cast of Jesus Christ Superstar battling with the boys and girls from Cats; then she threatened to divorce me if I ever played it again. It's a horrible thing when your wife smells musical bullshit faster than you do.

Disaster runs through the whole as fluidly as it does the parts. The lyrics wouldn't pass muster as a union local's anthem in Smyrna, Ga., the playing makes Half Japanese sound like late-60's era James Brown, and the sonics - writing and production - have the dulcet quality of two drunks arguing over the Yankees versus the Red Sox.

Pure torture. I hope it's on heavy rotation at Guantanomo Bay.

- Brian Moore

France

2005-12-28T08:17:00.000-08:00

There's a reason the Romans called it Gaul*.

- Brian Moore

* This post is in no way an endorsement of that crappy book, or its soon-to-be-considered crappy movie.

Quote Whore

2005-12-26T12:06:00.000-08:00

I pretend to see movies so you don't have to:

o Brokeback Mountain: I may be a bigot for not seeing it, but it's a small price to pay to miss two hours of excruciating boredom.

o Syriana: If Stephen Gaghan and Michael Moore ever took a bath together, the result should look like the egg drop soup I just stopped eating.

o King Kong: When I saw the original King Kong, my first thought wasn't, "God, I wish it was an hour and a half longer."

o The Family Stone: I wouldn't watch it with your eyes.

o Match Point: Woody Allen is back! To making another shitty movie.

o Rumor Has It ...this blows.

o The Ringer: Retarded!

o Cheaper By The Dozen II: It'll be even cheaper to miss it on Showtime next year.

o Memiors of A Geisha: You don't need two-plus hours to answer the question "do geishas put out?"

- Brian Moore

Kids Are Fags

2005-12-21T13:39:00.000-08:00

Christmas week was slow at O'Shea's until Everett McK___ - you'll understand later - strolled in like he'd won the Irish sweepstakes. The only thing missing was the marching band and that huge rod the drum major throws around. A regular cock of the walk, Ev was.

My curiousity piqued, I asked him what the fuck it was that was making him so fuckin' happy.

He says, "Me and my granddaughter, we're going to see the new Harry (sic) Potter movie this evening." Then Ev showed me this book, something called Larry Potter and the Goblin of Fire, along with a "World's Greatest Grandpa" mug. The book, I don't mind saying, looked like something the boys at Hackensack PD use as an interrogation tool.

So I asks him what all this Larry Potter shit was about. The answer I got back - I don't remember it word-for-word, since it pissed me off so - was something about elves and faries and warlocks and bullshit, only worse because it was kid elves and kid faries and kid warlocks and kid bullshit. I sat there, holding it in, letting McK____ bury himself with his own words. In public.

Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. I broke my bottle of Carling's Black Label against the bar, cried my war scream, grabbed Ev, twisted him around like Astaire on Rogers, and held the jagged glass against the folds of his chins. "Ev, if I ever hear one more thing about this Larry Potter shit, I'm gonna' slice your turkey neck!" I says.

I think Ev crapped himself. Sometimes it's hard to tell in O'Shea's.

McK____ ain't a bad guy, but he needs guidance. I says, "Ev, kids are fags."

"What do you mean?" he says.

"I mean what I says I mean! Look at kids. Boys want to play only with boys and girls want to play only with girls. And when they're playing, boys are all playing with army men - that's fag, Ev - and girls are all playing with princesses and dolls and other sundry dyke shit! It's why we gotta' waste half our adult life straightening them out, for Christ's sakes!"

"I'm not sure that's the way it..."

I moved the bottle into the neck flab, shutting him up real good.

I says, "You want more proof? What's the one thing adults don't like when they're trying to have a good time? That thing is kids and fags. And you know why? They both suck the air out of the room, so to speak. You can't do nothing when they're around, what with all the prancing and hollering." That brought Ev around to my way of thinking. He didn't say a fuckin' thing for the rest of the night, then slithered out to see his grandkid.

Not all kids are fags. I wanted to fingerblast Cinderella, bone Snow White, and dead fish Sleeping Beauty back when the other kids were experimenting with their sexuality. Hell, I told my dad that as soon as I got the chance I'd fuck the dyke right out of Marlene Dietrich, and I was only five at the time.

- Frank McManus

Monkeyshines

2005-12-20T11:55:00.000-08:00

The more Soviet archives are mined, the more it strikes me as impossible to have been too tough on Communism.

On the domestic front, it seems the "herd" of centrist Democrats with presidential ambitions is about to get thinner, if this and this can be taken seriously.

UPDATE: She's not Bella Abzug, but she 's no Jennifer Granholm, either.

- Brian Moore

A Defense of My Irish "Friend"

2005-12-20T10:17:00.000-08:00

An American plutocrat - an oxymoron if there ever was one - said "no good deed goes unpunished," and the reaction to my colleague Brian Moore's confessional about his heritage in the entry below attests to the wisdom of her statement, if not the quality of its source.

It seems Mr. Moore has riled the passions of Italians the world over. (If you must know, I've no taste for derogatory epithets such as "dago" and "wop," or those used for other breeds of men; brandishing such incendiery language has no place in a gentlemen's rhetorical arsenal.) Almost the minute the entry was posted, electronic mails from Italians in high dudgeon flooded Mr. Moore's inbox. The missives were filled with threats of violence, which stream forth from children of "the boot" as naturally as massages from the hands of Asiatic females.

"Yo Brian - I'm gonna' brake your fucken face, you fucken faggot" and "i knew were you live so wach the fuck out" typified the level of discourse. And what did Mr. Moore do to deserve this? He was candid about his ethnic heritage. This is the least we can expect from a man, even Mr. Moore. Rest assured that if evidence of mixed heritage in the Duddleston blood ever surfaced - say, it was discovered a barbarous Mongol wandering from the Golden Horde managed to savage a Duddleston woman on tour in medieval Bulgaria - you would be the first to know about it. (Please realize I'd need both the positive determination of a court, as well as rock-solid DNA evidence, before I'd confess such ignominious lineage. When one contemplates suicide, it's best to rely on fact, not conjecture.)

Don't misunderstand me - Mr. Moore is and will always be a low-breed Irishman, a man whose near-constant sloth is only broken by bouts of animalistic, irrational violence, and he is a drunkard, to boot. Should he ever desire employ at the House of Duddleston, the "No Irish Need Apply" sign would be dusted off in no time. That said, it must have been a shock to discover the hot Italian blood coursing through his veins - this may explain why he walloped a bartender who tried to serve him a wine cooler, since what did his liver care which magic intoxicant was poured down his throat? - and as a human being, I am sympathetic to the disappointments of sub-humans, though this is admittedly a vague sympathy.

History has been crueler to Italians than it has to the Irish. The Irish, of course, started low and stayed there, but Italians have been on a downward slide ever since the boy emperor of Rome, Romulus Augustus, was deposed by the Germanic upstart Odoacer in 476 A.D. Fifteen hundred years of misery ensued. And, no, Leonardo DaVinci should not be considered a respite from this deterioration; his drawings are nice, no doubt, but could any of those cleverly conceived contraptions actually fly?

I hope Mr. Moore can weather this controversy without spending too much of it passed out in a gutter. He was only being honest about his ethnic heritage, and as any dew-eyed American liberal will tell you, your ethnicity is the most important aspect of your being.

- Twimbley Duddleston IV

Cafone

2005-12-20T06:37:00.000-08:00

The clan Moore was thrown into chaos recently when it was discovered our heritage wasn't 100 percent mick Irish but included some indeterminate percentage of dago Italian. Soul searching ensued, as you might imagine, to the point where we questioned whether our fabled talent for munitions was less the stuff of IRA freedom fighters and more the crazy wop foolishness of Sacco and Vanzetti. (The excessive drinking still came from the loins of Erin, we figured.)

We did take a dram of solace in the fact our Italian ancestry is of the northern variety - Milan, to be specific - and not Sicilian trash.

- Brian Moore

Rape Like A Man

2005-12-18T16:21:00.000-08:00

The folks at O'Shea's are all atwitter over the capture of perv fugitive Peter Bernstein, the homo who dressed like an NYPD firefighter to assault a New York lady in her Chelsea apartment over the summer. When the little hippy realized he was about to be arrested, he tried to kill himself by slashing his throat instead of going out like a man in a gunfight, preferably with hostages.

This shit is all part of a trend. Not a day goes by without me reading about some college queer who slips GBH or some such into a gal's drink, then lugs her back to her dorm for some dead fish action. Disguises? Narcotics? What the fuck is wrong with kids today?

Haven't any of 'em heard of good, old-fashioned rape? You want it? You take it! The way it's always been done.

Yeah, yeah. I know. "Rape." Both you and the gal know you're just cutting out the boring scenes, like a film editor. So the young men of today are losing the respect of women when they take the long way around the issue by slipping mickeys and dressing up like it's a fuckin' Halloween parade on Christopher Street. Life's all about respect, and you ain't gonna' get it unless you take it! Do you think Margaret Rottincrotch is going to look up to you in the morning after you went in back door while she was passed out, drool on the pillow? With that approach, all you can bank on is yelling in the morning and cops in the afternoon.

But if you "take charge," so to speak, she'll treat you like her pops on St. Paddy's. If you can't look a woman in the eye and say, "I'm only getting what's coming to me," then you don't deserve her respect.

Like I always say to the kids: "Think about it, if you're able."

- Frank McManus

Bri-ku

2005-12-13T21:43:00.000-08:00

Miranda

If cops beat punks with
War and Peace, not the phone book
Would no one complain?

Nature

Trees are majesty
Birds set many aflutter
Bores my dad shitless

Chaz

I have a friend who
Makes Wilt Chamberlain look gay
Where does that leave me?

Constitutional Flaw

I took a huge dump
This morning, the day's highlight
It's fine, it's Tuesday

Aristophanes

If frogs had wings, then
Every scientist would
Freak out and get drunk

- Brian Moore

Bone + Bovine = Freedom

2005-12-13T13:55:00.000-08:00

If I were an attorney specializing in the representation of geezers who want to dump their wives, I'd be hard-pedaling a Boniva grounds for divorce as a more compelling alternative to old saws like irreconcilable differences.

No judge on Earth would allow a man to waste what's left of his life wedded to one of those chattering hens.

- Brian Moore

From the Birds

2005-12-12T18:27:00.000-08:00

Living stateside can be monumentally tedious, often to the point where I'm tempted to petition Buckingham Palace for the immediate and irrevocable enslavement of Americans en masse for crimes of vulgarity and, frankly, penury. But the colonials do have a talent for innovation, the latest example of which is a phenomenon known here as "fantasy sports."

If you are unfamiliar, fantasy sports involve individuals of common origin cherry-picking athletes from actual blood-and-sinew sporting leagues to create Frankenstein monster-like teams imaginarily under control of this plebian owner. Using statistics generated from the athletes's actual performances in sanctioned sporting events, the nominal owner is able to generate a numeric "score" for his "team," which is pitted against other "teams" run by fellow members of the common herd. Thus these Average Joe participants are able to experience - fleetingly and cosmetically, of course - the sense of power enjoyed by a manager of a professional sports team. Some "owners" speak enthusiastically, if foolishly, of the intoxicating qualities of this majesterial sentiment.

Though I prefer to eat steak au poivre, with a demi-glace reduction infused with Port, I do consume the sundry hamburger, so far be it from me to dismiss every American creation as the work of sex-crazed imbeciles. For me and my peers, the delights of fantasy falconry have proved a heady meal.

Our rules are simple: We each "draft" - an American term for reducing an athlete to indentured servitude - five noted falconers based on our own assessments of each professional's birding prowess. Scoring is based on awarding points for each "macreskor," or kill, with the weight of the beast slain operating in integer form - we round up from .5 pounds - as a multiplier if it is over the average weight of a Dunsfordshire rabbit in estrus. Further, we penalize any "braegrogiasfain," or songbird rendered lifeless, if the fowl's plumes number less than eight. To put it simply, if the plumes are under this breakpoint figure, the number is used as a denominator under the numerator of such birds defeated, multiplied by the age of the falcon plus the number of competitions the falcon has participated in, divided by the sum of crannacks in the folsome. The International Society of Falconry frowns upon such cheap scoring tactics, and so do we.

Here is my team, the envy of fantasy falconers throughout the realm: Ralph "Scourge of Wales" Gwynnelscuddah, Rob the East Anglian, Hempstead Tudor, Nazahriheem Ali-Hindustan, and Son of Rob the East Anglian.

Many an afternoon has been lost in reverie over this most involving of conflicts.

- Twimbley Duddleston IV

Mookie Denied

2005-12-12T13:56:00.000-08:00

One of my all-time favorite colored ballplayers was Mookie Williams, who used to play outfield for the Mets. The "Mookster," as we liked to call him at O'Shea's, had the complete package - he could hit, field, and was always polite and well-spoken when interviewed after the game. All the fellahs at O'Shea's thought him a credit to his race.

That's why I almost shit myself when I read in the paper that Mookie was on death row in California, convicted of killing a bunch of Chinese guys in a robbery.

I says to Whitey, who was sitting next to me at O'Shea's, piss-your-pants drunk, "You hear about Mookie Williams?" I says.

"No." says Whitey. "Who's Mookie Williams?"

"He's the colored ballplayer from the Mets who hit the ball that went throught that homo Bill Buckner's legs like so much dick through his ass! Who the fuck else do you think I was talking about? Your wife?"

"Oh yeah. What about him?"

"He's on death row in California, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenberger ain't gonna' grant him clemency." I then explained to Whitey what clemency was, along with the gory details of Mookie shooting those slants. Awful stuff, I tell ya'; the details aren't right for a family blog.

I don't know what happened to Mookie, but whatever it was, it was a damn shame. You'd think a guy who'd made a few million dollars playing pro ball would have something better to do with his spare time than rob slants and start gangs, for Christ's sake.

He got awful fat, too.

- Frank McManus

IMHO

2005-12-12T13:41:00.000-08:00

It's been brought to my attention that blogs are excellent forums for expressing one's opinion, so consequently this blog should be riddled with them. My co-posters, Twimbley Duddleston IV and Frank McManus, have already logged in with two reasoned essays, and I'm feeling the pressure to contribute as well.

After spending the entire morning racking my brain for an opinion, I have finally succeeded: Saw kicked the shit out of Saw II, man. Anyone who tells you differently is retarded.

- Brian Moore

Fag Lion

2005-12-09T13:18:00.000-08:00

I was O'Shea's last night watching the game with Pete McCluskey when a commercial came on for The Chronicles of Narnia. In the middle of it, Pete says he saw the flick and what's more, the dumbfuck actually liked it.

Then he says something that really got my goat. He says, "You see that lion?"

"Yeah. So what?" I says.

"That lion's supposed to be Jesus."

Now God and me may not see eye-to-eye on everything - all that "forgiveness" bullshit is swishy to me - but I know the man upstairs wouldn't allow some Hollywood punk to make a movie where his son is played by a lion.

"That's bullshit!" I says.

"No. It talks in the movie and it comes back to life," Pete says.

"Comes back to life? So it's a fuckin' zombie lion!"

"No, it's Jesus."

"Look at that lion. Look at the way it prances around, pretty as you please. That's a fag lion if I ever saw one!"

That shut Pete up pretty fast, because he knows there's no way a fag lion can be Jesus. But it got me thinking - what if I came across that fag lion in real life? It'd be looking at me with its fag eyes and talking to me with its fag mouth, and I couldn't do shit about it because it could eat me, probably starting with my Irish cock.

- Frank McManus

Hands of Discipline

2005-12-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

There's been an awful lot of sanctimonious guff lately about the perfidious effects of - and I'm using the "politically correct" term here - domestic violence. The notion that any nation which fails to maintain order and discipline soon slides into chaos and savagery goes doubly for the domicile. As inconvenient as it may be, the hand that caresses must occasionally transform itself into the fist that pacifies.

To the effeminates who disagree out of a misguided sense of chivalry, I say pish-posh. They may think they can reason with the fairer sex, but even they know, on those dark nights when the wench insists on trifling over the amount of Port consumed, such thoughts are folly. To indulge the personal for a moment, my wife, who's seen as much of the inside of a mathematics textbook as an Indonesian aboriginal has of the Louvre, magically transforms into a distaff version of Archimedes once the third bottle is uncorked. Would reason prevail over her shrieking, a noise known only to me and fabled Phineus? Clearly not.

Of course, corporal punishment delivered without restraint is to be avoided; after all, you must look at her face for much of the evening, and divorce is no longer the cup of tea it was for Henry VIII. But with measured delivery, the hands of discipline yield a bountiful harvest of tranquility on the homefront.

- Twimbley Duddleston IV