The Grumpy Owl

Naming colours makes about as much sense as numbering orgasms.

Just a short bedtime story I wrote a few nights ago.

Click To Play

pic nicked from here

Once upon a time, below a blue sky in a yellow land, a monster named Albert lived on a green hill.   Everything in the land was yellow.  The trees were yellow, the ground was yellow and the buildings were yellow.  The teeth, the eyes and the hair: yellow, yellow and blonde.  Everything except for the hill Albert called home was yellow.  His hill was green.

The other monsters, the ones who did not live on the green hill, grew jealous of its strange colour.  “It’s not right,” they said, “that Albert should live on that green hill while we all live in yellow.”

They formed a committee and elected a representative to go speak to Albert.  Their representative was the famous vampire Count Dracula who ran on a platform of reasoned debate and won a landslide over the even more famous vampire Count Chocula.  But, in the spirit of bipartisanship, Count Dracula appointed Count Chocula as his assistant in charge of breakfast foods.

And the monsters sent these two to go speak to Albert about his green hill.

“It’s not right,” they said, after they had sat and enjoyed some blood tea with Albert -cheap blood tea, one must add– “That you have this green hill and all the other monsters here have to live in yellow.”

“I had not thought of it that way,” said Albert.  “I assumed that you all liked yellow.  Seeing how you live in so much of it.  You know, keeping a hill green is not an easy job.  Not in this climate.”

“We do like yellow,” replied Count Dracula.  “But we also like green.”

“In that case,” said Albert, “tell the other monsters that they may come up on my hill whenever they please.  And let no one say that Albert hoarded all the green for himself.”   Then he roared.  Albert couldn’t help it.  He was a monster after all.  But he was polite enough to excuse himself after.

The two counts returned and convened a meeting where they passed the news along to the members of the committee.  After some lively debate and a controversy involving a spiked punch bowl, the monsters decided to go to the hill the very next day.  And go they did.

There were many monsters and, with all of them upon it, Albert’s hill no longer seemed quite so big.  It was rather crowded indeed.  Monsters jostled and bothered each other.  They bumped and banged.  They clanged and they thumped.   Sharp tooth bit soft skin, hard horn tore tender flesh and razor claws cut shins and thighs and feet.

Pretty soon they had spilt enough blood to cover Albert’s hill in it.  Now it was no longer green but bright red instead.  Albert tried to wash the blood away with his hose but, with all the monsters there, rioting and clamouring, the water couldn’t even touch the ground.  He decided to speak to the count.

“Count Dracula,” he said, “All the blood from the bumps and scrapes of a crowded monster party has turned my hill red.  It’s not green any more.  Could you perhaps get everyone to leave for a day while I wash it?”

“You mean,” said the count, “That your hill is soaked in blood?”

“Yes,” said Albert, now shouting over the monsters who had stumbled between them.  “Completely covered in blood!”

“I see,” said the count.  He whispered to the other count and they quickly dropped out of sight.

Albert wondered what they were doing.  He tried not worry.  Surely the vampires would see that he was being fair and get everyone off the hill long enough for him to clean it.  That should only take a day or two and then everyone could enjoy it again.  But then he heard a strange noise and saw the monsters all acting crazy.  They were all getting down on their hands and knees, roaring with savage delight.

Albert grabbed a nearby werewolf and asked him:  “What’s going on?”

“Haven’t ya heard?” said the werewolf.  “This hill is covered in blood!  Monster blood!  The very best blood of all!”  And then the werewolf howled.  Unlike Albert, he was not polite enough to excuse himself.

Albert tried to stop them, first with reasoned debate and then with claws, but the monsters chased him right off his hill and put a restraining order against him.  From a distance of 150 metres he watched the fat  monsters laying around with full bellies and red mouths.  They had eaten all the grass.  And all that was left was yellow sand.

Now bored with the hill they began to shuffle off.  Some thanked Albert for his hospitality but most just ignored him.  Albert looked at his hill.  The green grass was all gone.  Now it looked more like a yellow lump.

After a few days of looking and feeling sad, he felt a tap on his shoulder.  It was Count Dracula.  “Hi there old chum,” said the Count, “Terribly sorry about what happened to your hill.”

“Well you should be.”

“And I am but I have some good news.”

“Did you find some grass seeds so I can replant my hill?”

“Even better than that.”

“Did you find a new green hill for me?  One with a moat and barbed wire?”

The Count laughed.  “No.  But here’s what we did find: Turns out that some greedy monster in the next county is hoarding a bright blue water hole.   We’re forming a committee to gain access to it.  And I’m running for chair.  As you  know, I get results.  Can I count on your vote?”

Albert thought about his days in the hard yellow sunlight looking at his little yellow lump of a hill.  He was hot and tired.  He wanted nothing more than to feel some bright blue water on his face.   “You know what,” said Albert.  “I could really go for a swim about now.”  He shook the count’s hand.  “When do we get in?”

pic nicked from here

In the first chapter of my imaginary book, How to Hack Like a High School Illiterate: Earning High Marks from Morons While Destroying Prose, I advise the reader to start every essay with a dictionary definition.  Not only does it add needless verbosity, it also shows that you either had no idea what the word meant when you started writing or you think the person reading the essay doesn’t know the meaning of the thing they are reading about.

But definitions are wonderful. According to the dictionary defining something is to  fix or state the exact meaning of a thing.  Words can defined, people can be defined and boundaries can be defined eg. “Don’t put your thumb in there and, if you do, keep it out of my mouth after.“  Even the word definition can be defined!

(Chapter Two: The Explanation Point Makes the Redundant Exciting!”)

As wonderful as definitions are, they remind me of apologies.  For while an apology might be an expression of regret it is also, according to the dictionary, a formal justification or defence.  It might be easy to imagine that one would be defending themselves because they’re wrong but that’s just because we’re suspicious bastards.  One could be defending themselves because their accuser is wrong.  Or perhaps they’re just paranoid and are feeling defensive.

A word’s definition is its apology!

Without these apologies, what are these words?  Just senseless yammerings or scrawled doodles.   They’re not really anything at all!  They’re just noise!!!

When words are attached to the wrong definitions they’re lies.  The dictionary tells us that lies are something meant to deceive or give a wrong impression.  So if you use the wrong word to describe a certain definition, you’re lying!  And you better be careful about that.  Because, if you get caught, you might have to apologize.

And no one wants to do that.  Doing what you want is enough work.  Explaining why you did it should be someone else’s job.

YouTube – Tickle Monsters Are Robots!!!!! via Way of the West

This epic sci-fi rock opera springs from the mind of Alexander Abel, age five.

When earth is invaded by people-drinking aliens armed with devastating tickle lasers, humanity’s very future hangs in the balance. Will the super heroes prevail? Who will be left standing when the tickle war is over? One thing is certain– THEM ARE COMING.

The Striking Viking Story Pirates (www.storypirates.org) adapt and perform stories written by kids as a way of celebrating the words and ideas of young people.

Director: Jeff Tomsic.
Music: Eli Bolin.

For more info: http://www.storypirates.org/

It’d true, you know.  Tickle Monsters are robots.

There is one thing that you will not see in Star Trek, Terminator or any of the summer blockbusters; One thing that is perfectly natural, usually harmless and a subject of great interest to most people on the planet.  That one thing is not shit (you will see a lot of that this summer) it’s something that stinks much less and is completely unrelated to any chimpanzee taboo.

It’s a hard-on.

A simple erect penis.

Hollywood, indeed our whole culture, is terrified of the erect cock.  They will show tig ol’ bake fitties, they might show you a bit of bush and it’s even possible that you’ll glimpse a flaccid penis.  But you will not see an erect cock.

That remains taboo.

(more…)

There is an oft repeated sentiment in Homer:  That the next generation is always weaker than the former.  That if you keep going back in time, you will find men who could move boulders with their bare hands; men who were heroes, possessing the strength and apprehension of Gods.  But Homer operates on the level of pure perception.  That is, he is uninterrupted by reality.

People just think that they were better when they were younger.  They ascribe attributes to themselves that they never actually had.  Our giant fathers appear as supermen.  Our creaking bodies mythologize the easy muscles of youth.  We remember triumphing over such a big world and forget how small we were.  And, the older we get, the more outrageous our claims become.

Yet, having said that, I think this next generation is soft.

(more…)

I’ve long had the feeling that most of our propaganda is done in reverse. If a video is telling you not to do something, it’s often saying do it. Do it now and do it often.

This anti-porn flick from 1965, “Perversion for Profit” by a group called “Citizens for Decent Literature” confirms my suspicion.

They keep showing nudes while telling people not to buy these mags. You couldn’t advertise porn any better than that. You probably couldn’t advertise porn at all. Unless you said – “Don’t buy porn, you commie!” Then you could show all the tits you want.

I just wonder how many people bought the whole package. You know, went out, purchased a girlie mag then joined the communist party. Just who are these “Citizens for Decent Literature”? Godless, smut-reading, sodomites and commies. That’s who.

Hey look at this. I was cleaning out my nest and I found some old Ice Cube.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU8H9_YBM3A&rel=1]

The above song is one of my favourite songs from one of my favourite albums of all time: “Death Certificate.” Until the other day, I hadn’t listened to it in about ten years. Brings back some memories. Not good ones, really, but memories all the same. Mainly of dumb shit.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oJM22XG5hc&rel=1]

I really miss Ice Cube. I know he’s still around but he’s just not the same Ice Cube. There’s a whole generation out there that has never known a world where he wasn’t in movies; a generation that thinks Fiddy and his songs about lollipops and candy-shops are gangsta. No wonder hip-hop is dead. These days it wins Oscars.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLNPYwthRKQ&rel=1]

I remember a simpler time, when this shit was unapologetically vulgar, evil and (dare I say it?) funky. It was also smart without stopping every two seconds to tell you that it’s smart, which is what the bulk of so-called conscious hip-hip does. It was also bawdy; funny and serious at the same time. But, if you didn’t take it seriously, you never got the joke. Black or white, it was about us. Now it’s all about them.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=astFJUjy8G4&rel=1]

In a good mood? I have the cure. The story of the Beslan siege as told by the children who survived it. It’s a great documentary.

1 of 6

2 of 6

3 of 6

4 of 6

5 of 6

6 of 6

Pedants hate the term “very unique” and spend quite a bit of time protesting it. I can’t blame them. They are right. Words mean what they mean. Unique means one of a kind. Although my sympathies lie with the pedants, I’m now willing to bend on this term. It is perfectly acceptable to ascribe degrees to uniqueness. The reason is simple: Everything is unique and/or nothing is.

Unique is dead.

I grew up in a primitive time. Sure, we had a vast communication network that spanned the globe but it was the telephone. And long distance calls were expensive. You only called people you already knew. You never just sat around dialing numbers at random or performing google searches.

At a time like that, before the internet, it was very easy to believe in the superstition of uniqueness. Cut off from the insane ramblings of the vast bulk of mankind, anyone could believe that they were a special little snowflake. Many of us did. We were taught to believe that.

But it was a lie. Now that we have the interwebs, we know that whatever weird shit we’re into, someone else is into the exact same thing, in the exact same way, and they’ve already formed a club. None of us are as unique as we were led to believe. We may be different from something but we are the same as something else. It all depends on how you look at it and what you’re being compared to.

And this is just about human personalities. I’m not even going to get into bits of information endlessly replicated, not going to discuss the copies and frauds made of any object you care to mention, the peak of mass production and the stuttering return of the handcrafted. I’m just saying that unique is a lot rarer than it used to be.

But don’t worry. It was never that important.

Well, cute cat, I’m not really being mean at all. I think that being unique, at some point, became more important than being good. And that was a troubling weight on all of our backs. We all wanted to be different. We’d even like garbage that no one else, in their right mind, could possibly like, just to be different. How else can you explain indie-rock?

We’re now free of that because we have six billion people on this planet and a lot of them have webpages. We know we’re not unique. We’re not different at all. Those people across the planet are into the same things we are. Maybe even more so.

Umm, yes rape cat. That was another problem. If we suffered, by let’s say by being a cat who was raped, we thought we were alone in this too. Uniqueness, you see is a double edged sword. Quite often our suffering is added to by the feeling of facing it alone.

But now we can be sure that, no matter how miserable we may be, there are others out there who share our misery. Maybe they’re even more miserable than us! Isn’t that a great thought, Rape Cat? A whole world full of incomprehensible suffering.

That’s right helmet cat! Now you’ve got it.

You can still wear your handsome helmet and not worry about being different. You can wear it just because you like it. There’s cats in helmets all over the internet. So if you want to do that, you just go right ahead. You’re now part of a tribe that knows no geography, probably has a proud history of some kind or another, and is looking forward to a bright, shining future. You might not be unique but you’re still pretty unique.

You have a degree of uniqueness. Just not the whole thing. That’s not so bad is it?

Eve is a virtual teacher who can read the emotions of her student’s faces and respond to them. She’s linked to the child by computer and can also monitor heart rate, movements and skin resistance through a mouse.

And I can’t possibly be the only person who thinks Eve is hot . . . Can I?

We’ve all heard stories about teachers molesting students but, looking at Eve, I wonder how long it’ll be before some tech- savvy students molest their teacher.

To make matters worse, the system’s actual name is “Easy With Eve.” That just sort of lends itself to porn: “Easy Eve”, “Sleazy With Eve”, etc.

The kid who hacks this and makes it pornographic, applying Eve’s interactivity in all the wrong places, is going to be very rich.  So get to work!  Extra credit!

The election in Ontario is over. Norman Bates lookalike Dalton McGuinty and his Liberals won. I thought this may be a chance to explain Canadian politics to my American readers. I know that they’re interested – particularly now that our dollar is worth so much more than their peso.

The first thing you need to understand is that Canadians, as a rule, hate all politicians. So when you hear us berate Bush, you shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that we’re democrats. We’re not. Canadians always vote for the person they hate least. We now have four or five parties to choose from.

There’s the Conservatives. This party is basically an American Fifth Column. So why do people vote for them? Usually it’s to punish the Liberals for something. Their hardcore supporters are basically hippies in suits. The hippies try to say “I’m a rebel” by wearing their little hippie outfits — funny hair and grubby clothes — while banging a drum and having peculiar dietary habits like veganism. Conservatives try to say “I’m a success” by wearing their little conservative outfits — suits and short hair — while talking on a bluetooth/blackberry and having peculiar dietary habits like eating lots of steak. Just like the hippies are anarchists because it makes a statement about who they are, some yuppies are conservatives because it’s part of the whole “I’m a success” package. They love America because they have an inferiority complex about being Canadian. They think that being born in Canada means you’re not as cool or successful as someone born in the states. They’re usually pretty annoying. Their women range from frumpy to hot and frightening. (To me, hot and frightening are the same thing.)

Then there’s the New Democratic Party. They’re socialists and the favored party of people who think that all their problems are caused by society and can be solved by society. No one really takes them seriously. (Not even the unions anymore.) It’s good when they have a voice –like in a minority government — because they do have some good ideas (healthcare) but I’m not sure that anyone actually wants to see these people run the country. They seem to believe what they say and they say some crazy shit. New Democrats are usually pretty annoying. Their women are either humorless university students or disgruntled and out of shape welfare cases who aspire to being factory workers.

The Liberals are who usually run Canada. It doesn’t mean the same thing up here as it does in the states. The Liberals are a conservative party. They don’t do anything except preserve the status quo. They’re also hopelessly corrupt — lying and stealing like most people breathe. But Canadians want two things from their government. The first is stability. We love stability. The Liberals provide it. We also want to bitch about high taxes and corrupt, lying government. The Liberals provide us with this pastime and we reward them by constantly voting them back in. Unless they’ve been caught stealing too much and then we vote in the Conservatives to punish them. The rest of the time we vote Liberal because we’re like an abused wife and they bought us flowers. They also seem less dangerous than everyone else. The Liberals are a cynical bunch of bureaucrats and we vote for them out of cynicism. They’re pretty annoying but, if you volunteer for them, they’ll probably hook you up with a job. I’ve met plenty of women who voted Liberal but I don’t think that I’ve ever actually met a Liberal.

Finally, there’s the Green Party. This is the party for people who have become so cynical that they can’t even bring themselves to vote for the Liberals anymore. Basically, if you’re the sort of person who feels guilty about not voting, you vote Green. They have a platform but I don’t know that anyone has heard it. Something to do about the environment? I guess so. I mean they’re called Greens and plants are green so it stands to reason. These people actually don’t annoy me because they don’t even know what they stand for. And their women are pretty, stoned, smart and friendly.

There’s also The Bloc Quebecois. They’re nationalist socialists who want Quebec to separate from Canada. Until then, they’ll take us for all we’re worth. The conservatives kiss their ass because if Canada breaks up we’ll all be Americans. The NDP kiss their ass because they think Quebecers are oppressed. The Liberals actually have a beef with them. I think The Bloc must be horning in on some of their rackets or maybe it’s because there’s nothing less stable than a country breaking apart. And who knows what the Greens think? The Bloc is annoying but very smart and actually has some good points. Their women are French and that’s good enough for me.

That’s politics in Canada and that’s why I voted for a cat.

I think he was trying to appeal to the kids with this PSA, but he makes some really interesting points.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNwJZe8HtOE]

Grumpy was suddenly in a big clear light. This scared the bejeepers out of Grumpy. He hooted like he had never hooted before. When no one answered, Grumpy got even more scared and he passed right out like someone had knocked him on the head with a brick. Not hard enough to kill him — he was already dead — but hard enough to knock him out.

When he finally woke up he was surprised to learn that he could travel wherever he wanted and he could pass right through objects. Even objects as dense as Robocop 3. But the really weird thing was that when he passed through a DVD, it was like he was watching the movie. So he kept passing his head through the first Robocop because, let’s face it, that movie never gets old because Paul Verhoven is a genius. Grumpy did this for three and a half days. By the end of these days he had memorized the whole movie and not just the part that goes: “I’d buy that for a dollar!” This realized a long held dream of Grumpy’s.

Then a big owl appeared and it said to Grumpy: “I project rays of light and you should pray to me or something. Recognize this light as loving kindness and you’ll be released!”

“I’ll buy that for a dollar!” Grumpy hollered.

“I don’t think you understand,” said the owl.

“Now wait a minute . . . You’re taking this kinda personally, aren’t you?” Grumpy said, just like the evil Clarence Boddicker said when Robocop was approaching.

“I think you should really start praying now Mr. Grumpy.”

“See,” Grumpy said. “I’ve got this problem. Cops don’t like me so I don’t like cops.”

The big owl shook his head and then he became really scary. “Dead or alive,” he said, “you’re coming with me.”

Will Grumpy escape the clutches of Big Scary Owl Thing Who Wants to be Prayed To? Will he stop speaking the beautiful and poetic language of Robocop? Tune in again to find out. same owl place; some owl time.