Thursday, December 11, 2003

 
One-Upped by The Derb?
Or: The Bdelloid and The Illiad
Or: "Old Boy Blue Balls"

When K-Lo sent me(for final editorial approval) the dogs' breakfasts of potential posts from Jonah and John on Monday I elected to quote lines from "Little Boy Blue" about the soldier rather than the dog so that their publication on Wednesday would not be made to look too derivative by the REACTIONARY RAMBLING post of Tuesday. The schmalz classic by Louis Untermeyer(bartleby.com/104/5.html)begins with "The little toy dog is covered with dust, But sturdy and staunch he stands;" (Ha-Ha. I make- how you say? -leettle joke here)
At any rate, the reader is taken from the toy doggie covered with dust to the Derb-supplied Homer's Argos which bites it.(although that dusty Homeric cliche' wasn't used there)Should one want a longer version, with rhymes in english, there is Pope's translation. I'm not sure if anything could be done with his "..or was he prized For worthless beauty? therefore now despised; Such dogs and men there are, mere things of state; And always cherish'd by their friends, the great." Alec Baldwin and Sen. Kerry, at least, need not worry about having to depend upon employment as greeters, having made millions in movies and marriages respectively. Their lives will, no doubt, end less miserably than the unfortunate "Fatty" Arbuckle, recently noted on the Corner.
I had vaguely recalled something from perhaps the History Channel regarding his eventual acquital on criminal charges. Maybe the public is relatively to quick to turn on chubby guys like him and Newt and Rush, although it might be pushing it to suggest that we are sociobiologically programed to eat fatties when they screw up.
-Also recall catching a bit of "Ulysses" staring Kirk Douglas. At the end, he embraces Penelope, saying something about "all those lost years," getting a homecoming(after an absence of some 19 years-a long time for humans even if dwarfed by the 40 million years of the monastic parthenogenisis of bdelloid rotifers or the 425 million years of making whoopee in the sea by some of the Cylindroleberididae) not given to say, Hagar The Horrible.
Could Ulyssses, who washed ashore on Ogygia(cool name, and if the culture war means that we'll be treated to an epic where some guy washes up on the Island of Lesbos populated by say, Madonna and Spears, why, appoint me to The Board of Censors so that I can review the film - repeatedly)have been known to his intimates as "Colymbosathon ecplecticos"?
Dogpaddling out to creatures with and without a carapace, it should be noted that Squidward's employer, Mr. Crab, is no Scrooge McDuck.
Mixed reviews go out for images summoned up by the Corner's "KEEP MURDERING RADICALS IN JAIL": The building blocks are soap, prisons and Ann Coulter. Ixnay on the visions of soap and prison. Soap is, of course, something best not dropped in the shower, or at best, fashioned into John Lott's Pillar of Gun. And one trusts that Coulter will not have to take some "perp(or would it be "pert"?)walk en route to jail, assuming that she doesn't, say, publish something within 60 days of an election that displeases Big Brother. (It's apparently O.K. according to one Fed Court, to donate funds 365 days a year to a Hamas charity.) The blocks, Coulter, and soap, give rise to thoughts that are er, 99.4% impure. As to her "Adam's Apple," so dissed by the commie comic strip, "Boondocks,"-well, let's not go there. She's outta' my league and if Derby-sire takes a Wifey Numbah 2, one suspects that his Dragon Lady would force "Dear Yuhan/John" to write, "Farewell, My Concubine." Ahem, it so happens that the one passage(sensitive, compassionate conservative thatiyam)which I wish Esquire Coulter had stricken from "Treason" is a hint dropped that she favors murder of radicals in cells- which is found on pages59-60 to wit too witty: "Among the Soviet operatives who had been in government jobs and named by McCarthy were.......[many names follow]....and William Remington (later killed with a bar of soap by a patriotic inmate)." Over the top, as they say(or at least "over the hedge" as was said on the old National Lampoon Radio Hour describing a proposed country club prison breakout by convicted Watergate conspirators), but, not as offensive, I'll grant, as the countless yuks in movies and shitcoms about rape of men in prison. -Or by gorillas in, for example, "Trading Places" and Ace Ventura's "When Nature Calls." HardeeHarHarHoHo. But try to imagine Dear Reader, the reactions to jokes about similar fates if befallen to women. Hey, I gots daughters *and* sons to worry about.