Mystery Title

                                                                    אני לא יכול לסבול את זה יותר

 

Ok, Now I’m Mad!!!
I bit the hook and took a look at a cook-book. No recipies, not even for four(4) ‘-pies’. Only pictures of famous ‘Cooks-throughout-History‘. I’ve been rooked. The cover shows an English Muffin®, its nooks and crannies just begging to Eat or be Eaten. I blame the English. And their dough of a languish, which is the Subject of my present Spring of Dis-contempt.

Written by a Woman. (may I mention that?) Actually a tag-team of ‘Women’. Latex-based, Aquatic “Swimmin’ Women.” Yes; Say it aloud, otherwise you’ll miss my point exactly.

My recent “Story of ‘O’ failed regretably to create the ground-swell of populist fervor for english spelling reform I’d anticipated. Well O.K. ‘Desperate Times require desperate measures’.
‘O’ as in what? WTF? (‘le’az’a’freaking’zel!!) as we say in fractured Hebrew)
Two (2) ‘O’s make an ‘oo’ as in ‘Cook’ and ‘Book’. So far so good (?)
But one ‘O’ as in ‘Woman’ is pronounced exactly the same. Don’t just trust me; say it aloud.
But wait:, you get a couple Vaginae together in one place and all of a sudden it’s ‘O’ as in ‘Women’? A short ‘I’? As in ‘It’?
English used to be my first language, right after PA-Dutch (Deutsch) I am here-with demoting it to ‘third-language’ status, and even that on a ’till proven innocent’ basis.
Who needs it? To paraphrase W.C. Fields: “How can ya trust a language that can’t even trust its own Vowels?”
And so I hope my Dear Readers have the free-time to study Esperanto. My Future Posts here shall be in a Language which fulfills a minimal bucket-list requirement for consistent orthography. Sionara, Auf Wiedersehen, Au revoir, English Muffin. I’ve had it!

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Q: What? You’re really gonna quit posting in English?!
A: Yup. Until fir-ther notice.
Q: “Fur-ther Notice’
A: Fir-Fur, who cares anymore? They can use Google-Translate. Start with the title here, fr’instance
Q: ..with mixed results?
A: No, I’ll make sure what I write comes out purr-fect.
Q: You sly little kitten, you….

 

Lights in the Northern Sky

Help! I’m in love with my secretary. Shh… It’s a secret. We chat, high, above the fray, and the fraying grappling hooks ‘n ropes of our detractors down below at R.D Tractors, Inc.™ Aloft in our secret airy loft we feast on each other’s aura, aroma, aurora… aureolae?
‘Aurora’ (not her real name) is a far cry from her predecessor, tired, borey Alice. I must have been in One-der-land when I hired Alice; she hated me from Day One. And only now do I find out the awful truth, on her Xanga (www.xanga.com/I_h8_johnny) Seems her mad uncle raised her in a play-pen with no escape, while he looped endlessly through every Lee Marvin flick available at the time. So no wonder. I’d glad-lee forgive her, but I’m blocked, sad-lee.

   Meanwhile, speaking of women, TV, ropes, cables, eats, shoots, leaves, loves; I lost my place in the script, here is another learning-experience  from our long climb to the apex, the zenith, the pinacle, pineapple, whatevah. ‘Oohh.. Aurora, don’t tickle me there just yet. Wait’ll I hit submit here..’ Ok, now, where were we? Aurora?”

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‘Mabel gets a retroactive Black Label’®

Ever since they cut my cable, Mabel doesn’t visit.
I thought our love was strong and stable; wish-fullfillment, is it?

I still recall the day I climbed the whole way up that tree
(A pirate feed, from need, not greed), and the way she looked at me

“But now I’m just a eunoch, just a door you knocked on nightly?”
(As I turn the static up to ten, the Contrast to ‘unsightly’)

She screamed: “I bought a DVD. I download shit for free.
Enjoy pointing your furniture at where yer TV used to be.”

Q: Easy come, easy go. huh?

A: Yup, that’s Aurora, and Mabel, in a nutshell

Q: May I suggest a ‘half-shell’? You get more room for channels that way.

A: Oof. Don’t remind me. 

Mares eat oats and a Doe does too … up to a point

In the News: ‘World Spelling Bee to be replaced next year by a simple random-number memorization contest’

My HORSE is , like, HOARSE; She’s COARSE, of COURSE
But what’s WORSE: Now she’s starting to CURSE, ‘en FORCE’
And all because the Name of the Horse is the famous Miss Tourette’s

(Thought I’d) teach her to spell, this horse; in MORSE
She’d tap out the letters (for oats, of COURSE)
But this VERSE may end with a NURSE (or a HEARSE)
It’s just killing Miss Tourette’s

(Break)

The CHORUS,  (MORRIS, BORIS ‘n and HORACE)
say: “Vat a silly filly!”
Their POROUS minds will never grasp:
‘Spelling is, like,  willy-nilly.’

“Go right to the SOURCE; If it’s NORSE, it’s “P U R S E”, (but
DORIS’s purse was, like, TERSE; She forgets
How awful this can be be to a Horse like the
Famous Miss Tourette’s

Yeah MARES (and BEARS?) eat OATS, write NOTES
They put ’em in QUOTES if that FLOATS their BOATS
Dey LOADS da CODES till dere heads EXPLODES
Like my (in-) famous Miss Tourette’s

A Ray of Hope? Let’s hope not.

IMPORTANT (?) ADD: This here is what we professionals in the blog bizness call a ‘Type ‘B’ entry. (That’s ‘B’ as in ‘Subtle’). Silent. Esoteric. Appeals to that 2% of the audience who are cursed to a life of word-obsession, for want of a more neutral term. Anyway, posts like this usually don’t include, for example, pictures of Flowers-which-greeted-me-un-announced-this-morning. All the better to focus the reader’s attention on the sly literary hokum. Actually, I await Chrome-poet’s rumored discussion of Poetry-as-an-Art. His grasp exceeds mine like a Maserati racing against an ’84 Ford Fiesta with its stock 40 Hp. ‘power-plant’. Oh well. Enjoy, meanwhile:

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I’m not a Registered RM Nurse®, but I play one on Xanga. (Oh wait, that’s ‘RN’. Damn. Re-do From Start).

Raymond‘s short on RAM
‘I think’ but there’s no ‘I am!’
I remind him of the Remedy:
Duh! “Buy Random Access Memory.”
{Note: Lacking a clear sense of personhood, Ray ignored the letter he received from ‘his’ Bank, which contained his ‘personal PIN ID-number’. He was, to his credit, alert to the disgusting redundancy in the form-letter’s wording. Maybe this explains its short trip to the trash can. Ah, progress in its awesome incontestable banality.}

“You rhyme but you’re no Rimbaud“
Ray, I didn’t say “Your life is flawed“
But when in Rome, choose Remus or Romulus
Both are wolves; e-qual-ly ominous

{Note: I’ve been known to  contend that free verse is the last recourse of scoundrels, and if you desire a ‘second opinion’… um.. I’ll glady say it again. Still, I’m moved to tears by loose lines I read here and there on Xanga. Ray, however, principally moveth mine bowels. Stuck as he is between lip-service to Form, but congenitally devoid of the most basic grasp of Function. Don’t tell him I said that.

There’s room for rum in the equation.
‘I may be drunk, but  I’ll awake Caucasian’
Where to start? I suggest ‘erasing’
Oh and your mother-board needs replacing.

{Note: A poet in his purest incarnation ‘disappears’, leaving the lines, which could just as well have arrived from Arcturus, to resonate… or not. Ray is pricing 1 Gigabyte for his dual-core AMD™   GIGO

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Q: What you got against Ray?

A: Nothing, dear. He isn’t even a real person

Q: That’s not his fault…

A: Good point. I’ll try to be nicer to him next time I don’t see him.

 

Lasting Fame

Ok, I’ll admit it.  I thought my last Q-trip would bring me decades of name-drop-ready, to-die-for, wannabe-beseiged Notoriety. Theo, the Front-Page fossil artifact, who gets 300 comments for asking, like, “So, what’s your favorite color?” or “I read that toenails are this year’s fashion statement. What’s everyone think?” would Message me to ask for tips on building readership.

    I’d just tell him “Hey, the Secret is.. um.. ‘depth’. I mean, anyone with a working sound-card can click here on ‘Audio’ and hear me profess that “I knew a newly-neutered gnu that was nuder than the newly-neutered gnu that your gnu knew!” Learn to play an instrument, Teddy, and maybe in ten or twenty years we can have a little cook-off. And cartoons? Where are your cartoons. Or poems, for that matter? Or photos of anywhere a tad more exotic than, where’re you from, Hoboken?”
    But overall, I do piss into the ocean. figuratively. (not to demean in the slightest the amazing comments I get from my beloved readers, who by and large give me goose-bumps every morning)  And luckily I’ve learned here to piss into the ocean not to warm it up; (‘…dunna wanna work’) but instead, ‘just because I gotta’.

Oh, and I might as well enter the latest Xanga Zuchini Contest that everyone’s talking about. Here’s my entry. Makes up in colorful yet youthful exuberance for what she lacked (at the time I photographed her) in size and maturity. Eat squash, xanga-drones!

And while we’re at it, here’s a two minute dog song, sorta un-finished, but worth neutering(?)

“Giving you the Doggie Back”

Price vary, here at Hairy Harry®

There’s a sucker born every minute

You buy the box: It’s Cash ‘N Carry

Ya start bitching when you see what’s in it….

 

 

Help! ‘Q’ is fighting for her Survival and she can’t do it without U

    One would have to be living deep inside four windowless fire-walls not to have noticed the Xanga Front-Page Brouhaha these past few weeks concerning the fate of the letter ‘Q’ Now I’m not suggesting you run there and read about it; the place is lately becoming a gas-station rest-room filled with once-deservedly-anonymous self-appointed and -annointed barely-verbal diarhea-sufferers, some of them also on an excess of diuretics. I bravely check out the place once a week or so, as a public service here, at the cost of then going a week without Valium™. Ugh!

    At any rate, what started as a mild-mannered post on Letter-ish, the new Xanga sister-site for folks obsessed (moi?) with consonants and vials of vowels, has escalated into a veritable World WarIII. 

Revelife, the Jeezuz-dittos hangout, has abandoned its usual “Did Jesus masturbate?” type of in-depth theology, declaring the Question-Of-The-Century “SOLVED: No extant photos of Him wearing glasses.” Their forces are now divided between “If ‘Q’ was good enough for our Lord and Saviour, it’s good enough for poor pitiable me.  After all, the letter appears 17 times (!) in the Holy Writ” pitted against the Existentialist trolls: “God, if she exists, would have wanted us to use the brain She gave us, and it’s a no-brainer that a letter so redundant has outlived its usefulness.” —297 Comments, profusely spewed-upon by Saints Augustine, Camus, and ‘Pastor Bob Speaks’

Momaroo in turn has neglected temporarily the hot issue of “What color are your baby’s feces?” while they get down-and-dirty on alphabetic pedagogy. Most of ’em seem to think that since “TWA just took off” and “L&M got kicked out for smoking.” the loss one yet one more letter in the alphabet will make it just that much easier to teach today’s modern preservatives and flavor-enhancers-addled young mind to read and rite. Not to mention a cheaper Speak’N-Spell™ at Discount City®.

Health-kicker, a breath of fresh air, is almost solidly in favor of keeping the letter, though for possibly trivial reasons: example: “What’ll we call Q-tips?”
The Afro-Americans, still partially euphoric over the election of one of their stellar own to the highest office in the land, none-the-less can’t seem to adopt a consistent party line. On the one hand Kwanzaa© somehow anticipated the proposed sloughing-off years ago, but there are still, (on the other hand, whose palm is ‘flesh-coloured’ How’d that happen?) there are Uncle Toms and Aunt B’s who prefer not to make waves. After all, the Honkies have such a long track record of ‘blame the schvartzes’, in case the experiment goes south.

    And so you probably want to know where I stand on the Issue?
‘Unexpectedly conservative’, I’d describe my stance. I mean, just when I belatedly, against the late Dick Feynman’s wise advice, came to grips with the absurdities of Quantum Physics, I’m supposed to learn to call it ‘Kwantum’? ‘Q’ is, I’ll admit, about the most useless letter in the alphabet. It can’t even stand up by itself, needing a ‘U’ to hold its pathetic little hand. Plus, sitting there at the extreme upper left of the QWERTY keyboard, it’d be child’s-play to simply re-engineer the keyscan.dll routine. ‘Q’ does, granted, have an important meaning in electronics, describing the sharpness of an LC tuned-circuit’s resonance curve. And Barbara Tuchman might sue whatever agency takes responsibility in the end for axeing the letter. “An ‘O’ with a ‘chup-chik!’“, detractors will call it disparagingly. And I predict a division along blue/red state lines. “What, Dan Quayle died in vain??!”, the Limbaugh-drones will rant into their cheap cordless phones from trailer courts in Texas.
    I therefore have no kwalms about remaining kwiet on this hot-button kwestion. Rage on, Front Page. Beats “Theo Sucks-Y/N?” any day..

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Q: This is a parody, right?
A: Ahh.. ‘Q’, right on cue. Sure thing, cutie pie, not to worry.
Q: Whew! But still, I get your little joke; I am expendable, non? *sniffs*
A: Bite your tongue! I love you to pieces; better than waffles. I just hope my irony steals your heart.
Q: It has, kid. You’re the ferrous in the land. Yo te quiero mucho.
A: Ah, et tu, too. ‘Besemer mucho’… But you can kill the get-up, ‘Q’
Q: What, the dress?
A: Yeah I’d call that impromptu tu-tu too Teutonic for the occasion…
Q: This is an occasion?
A: Yeah. It only happens occasionally, when I have an ally present.
Q: You’re so sweet; you brought me a present?
A: Yeah, a stay of execution. And one with staying power.
Q: You mean, I’ll be a part of the Alphabet forever?
A: Well, in Hebrew, at least. We need you ‘like a robin needs a worm’.
Q: Eeww! great metaphor, Johnny.
A: Sorry. But what I mean is, in Hebrew we got like, seven ‘K’ sounds: various levels of throat-clearing noises. We use ‘Q’ to transliterate the letter ‘koof’®, one of the more civil ones.
Q: Like in ‘Qadima’, the name of your sleepy little hamlet?
A: Righto. Oof, now you make me hungry.
Q: Quiche is kosher…
A: This may be the start of a beautiful…
Q: ‘..a beautiful sentence. Glad I stopped by…

q: (‘Q’s 17 year old daughter): Who the hell is Besemer?

A: He’s the guy who figured out how to efficiently convert iron to steel in , I don’t know, 1832?. Plus, there’s a popular Latin song called ‘Bese me mucho’  Did I ever tell you you look like your mom, but 25 years younger? Now get on Wiki and be in on all the jokes. I’m-a lovin’ your jeans, btw.

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Ike’s Ex, her Axe, an Ox, The Oaks, and in the end, only Aches

Don’t try this at home!   Like Dylan said, (although he wasn’t talking about searching for the perfect rhyme and meter),
“You will wind up looking through a keyhole,   on    your   knees.”

I didn’t sleep at all last night
Just walked the streets; “Which house is Ike’s?”
I wandered left then blundered right
He was on one of his nightly hikes

The problem here is poor Ike’s ex-
They split after an awful fight
She’s probably queer; she don’t like sex
She barked, but now I fear she’ll bite

Ike’s ex’s axe is deadly sharp
She bought it at The Garden Shop®
Went home and practiced on a carp
There was nothing left but guts and slop

“Ike, we’ve got to watch our backs
Now I heard she killed the neighbor’s ox.”
Who’s next in line-for Ike’s ex’s axe?
He could wake up dead in a card-board box

“They released her?” Ike was stunned to hear
(She’d been locked up at The Peaceful Oaks®)
“Her place is a half a mile from here”
We jumped in-his car; no need to coax..

“Her mind is shot and her body aches”
Ike mentioned as he aimed his gun
“This is self-defense; hey, them’s the breaks.”
Sound of breaking glass, and the deed was done

So that’s the tale of Ike’s ex’s axe
and an ox at The Oaks, though it aches to see
How they locked him up. Hey ‘facts are facts’
Guess some vowels were never meant to be.

Sacred cow! The thing actually works! (except for ‘girls like me’)

I’m talking about the new Google robot-translator of course.
Played with a bit last night, expecting gibberish after watching it make chopped liver out of a hebrew news-page.
But just now I tried a few english phrases on the Google homepage version.

The results were simply perfect. Ok, it changed my title from ‘Holy Cow!’ to a simply sacred bovine, but why quibble.  In fact, I got the impression that there simply had to be a little native speaker somewhere typing out the results, sitting in a soundproof booth with headphones, like Eichman, only innocent and less banal.
He does have one mortal flaw though, apparently. When I entered “girls like me” he insisted on “Girls similar to me” . Um..excuse me… Wouldn’t anyone smart enough to correctly render ‘Time flies like an arrow” have heard of my vaunted charms? Even after the flight of a modest amount of Time?

Only when I changed it to “Girls adore me” did the guy finally’get it’, admit the bitter truth, and translate accurately, except for using the male ending for the verb adore’. Sucker.
SO LET’S HAVE FUN!
On this post especially, feel free to leave your comments here in Google-hebrew. I’ll reply and tell you what you  ‘might have said’, including mis-translations 

(Paste your comment into the window which opens when you click ‘Translate’ at the top of the Google home page. Remember to set the drop-downs to English ‘in’ and Hebrew ‘out’. Then just copy the little guy’s hebrew text and paste it into the comment box.
Just don’t mention that girls like me. It makes the little guy jealous.

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A few samples:

                                                                                                            1) “Holy Cow! The thing actually works”

פרה קדושה! הדבר אכן עובד

“Yonatan, this is a great post. and you are a freaking genius, by the way”.

 

יונתן, זה נהדר לכתוב, ואתה א freaking גאון, דרך אגב

 

 

 

which comes out as ‘Yonatan, it’s marvelous to write, and you are aleph freaking (untranslatable utterance as in Weird Al’s parody of ‘Smells Like school Spirit’) Genius, by the way.

‘The Story of OU’

Me ‘n ‘OU’ are THROUGH! It’s final, just between me and THOU.
It was TOUGH, THOUGH, and I guess I OUGHT to be PROUD of myself.

Still, it took so long to see the light. That DUO of ‘O’ and ‘U’ together make the
sluttiest little dipthong what ever posed in a bikini. You can’t trust ’em.

Especially ‘O’. (Ok, she lets the ‘E’ dominate in PEOPLE now. Took me months to train her though.) In some countries, she’s not even allowed to show her face in ‘FACETIOUS’, for example. (Depending on your regional settings, you may have seen that as ‘FACETIS’, which looks, like, funny but you get used to it.)
Did I mention she likes to play with herself? I CHOSE not to bring it up, but I may CHOOSE to, later. What, she thinks two of her make a ‘U’?Like ‘Loosely’, you know, as in ‘in the sky’, um, ‘with Diamonds’.

And don’t kid yourselves that a week or so in Sartois with the Francophones WOULD reform her.

“OUI, the people, in order to create a more perfect OUIJA board’? I tied her to the bed when she came out with that.

“..a more perfect onion”?, she suggested, pleading, but I turned her on her tummy.
    Which is where she is, currently. I’m giving her some time to decide how she likes it. Which SOUND she truly believes in and vows to represent, like a normal letter; Like ‘K’ for example. He woke up; and she can TOO. ‘O’s a hole, ‘U’s a receptacle, that’s my opinion. Keep ’em apart. And yeah, even after I read their self-published kiss-n-tell “I, OU”, (or “OUI, OU” in the original French).   I’m not convinced I owe ‘O’ anything. Or ‘U’ for that matter.
Except perhaps two minutes of letter bliss. Ah, the little death.

Q: How do you say “Sorry, wrong number” in Russian?

Quick answer: (and much too quick, as I will explain) ‘You don’t!’
Just got a phone call, 8 PM-ish, on my land-line. A lady said, cheerfully enough:
“Brzyvodnynatzu goverapropdiagranzxiya.” Something like that…
Not having my dictionary nearby, I cheerfully asked “Me me’da’ber’et?” (‘Who (f.) is speaking?’ in hebrew. That was apparently enough to alert the dialing party that she’d made a mistake. Yeah, Russian uses numbers for letters in their 44-strong alphabet, so these things are bound to happen.
She said one word before hanging up: “Ta’ut” (‘mistake’)
Ok, I guess that’s enough pennance. Not like it’s her fault I was out watering my 3,278 plants, and had to run breathless to the phone. And I’m not asking for a personalized medallion just because I responded like a respectful human being, something almost unknown in these parts.
My dream, though, is to actually hear something like what I say, once a year or so, when I dial a wrong number:

“I’m so sooo sorry. I don’t know how I’ll even start to deal with the shame I’ve brought down on myself and by extension, my family, back to the 16 generation; I’m sure they’re spinning in their graves as we speak and it’s all my fault. If you can somehow manage to forgive me, I shall be forever in your debt. I have a property in Pennsylvania which I can arrange to have titled in your name, plus a 1947 Conn 10-M tenor saxophone and a 1938 Hammond B-3 organ in cherry condition. Please accept these pathetically inadequate tokens of my apologetic intentions.”
Often they’ve hung up before I can finish the whole flourish, and then I have sleepless nights for months on end.

    Anyway, I promised a Point to this post: It’s called researcher’s error. The dilligent technician needs to be mindful of the fact that every day, millions of Russians actually dial numbers correctly, and have heartfelt but incomprehensible chats with their fellow Cyrillic Slavs.
So no, it’s completely wrong-headed to stereotypically lump all unibrow Russian Babushkas into a sub-class labeled  “They don’t know how to say I’m sorry.”
In fact, most of the wrong numbers here are from brain-dead sloppy generic Israelis, who almost to-a-man(an undeserved descriptor) simply hang up without even admitting guilt.
I call ’em back. Every stinking one of them. Ask them when, precisely, they’d decided that saying they’re sorry became a give-away sign of short-penis-ness?

With mixed results. My spread-sheet shows their average penis-length in the 3 to 4 centimeter range. Godot help ’em. I’m just genetically luckily-endowed, I guess. Still, I turn to Xanga, my lover-de-jour, to at least provide the technical details:
How do you say “Sorry, wrong number.” in Russian?