Published on
February 7, 2010 in
stories.
Let’s talk about this. I was born in New York City on December 7, 1924. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on my seventeenth birthday. I joined the Army when I turned eighteen. I lost the bottom half of my left leg when I was nineteen, in the Battle of Anzio. I was back in Rome two years later, after the liberation. I wore my pants leg pinned up. I would no more wear a false foot than I would a false mustache or a false nose. People can take me as I am.
Continue reading ‘Untold Tales: The Singular Affair of the Aluminum Crutch’
I have always viewed Gravity’s Rainbow as a big stack of comic books on a rainy afternoon: Buncha good stories in there.
You can view the Bible the same way: Buncha good stories about dozens of generations (43 according to luke 3:23:38, but there are lots of different canonical counts) of interrelated families, all the way back to jump.
That would be a decent way to compile a book of stories: Start 43 or so generations BCE, follow a matrilineal or patrilineal line, and tell one story per generation all the way up to the present: 150-ish stories, related by birth.
I haven’t ever cared much about writing stories set before 1200 CE, but maybe I should keep my eyes open for a way in.
Image CC-BY-NC-ND by Shemer.
Way off topic, but I want to get this logged someplace public:
Two weeks ago, some fraudster with a Pasadena address added himself to our U.S. Bank FlexPerks Visa account. The card’s fraud department noticed this and froze our account without notifying us. When our card started being rejected by everyone we phoned up, closed the old cards and got new cards.
This morning, we phoned up the card’s automated system and it rejected our ZIP code and phone numbers. Ugh, fraud on the new cards as well?
After fifteen or twenty minutes on hold, this is how the U.S. Bank fraud people explained our new problem:
When we reported the previous fraud, they fixed it in the card system but not in the main back-end system. When the two systems reconciled, the main system added the fraudster back to our card account—onto our new cards!
Thanks for your honesty, U.S. Bank, but we still closed our accounts. If you like, we can recommend some security ninjas who can close those holes for you.
Image CC-BY-NC-SA by Vicky TGAW
Published on
November 20, 2009 in
stories.
Every year, just after midnight on December 6th, Saint Nicholas visits every home on earth.1 Every child receives three small chocolate candies.2 Every adult receives punishment for the sins he or she has committed during the year. That is why we call Saint Nicholas Day “The Day of Atonement.”
In January, Mike Anderson bought a chicken-processing plant and continued to pay his mostly-Mexican workforce minimum wage. He thought this was more than fair. On December 6th Nicholas turned the factory into a worker-owned cooperative and hired Mike as janitor. He sold Mike’s home and used the proceeds to buy one-speed bicycles for the workers’ children.
In April, Jenny Evans’ neighbor bought an enormous new truck. In June Jenny bought one to match. On December 6th Nicholas sold both trucks and used the proceeds to buy 79,997 packets of kohlrabi seeds and two Matchbox cars. He gave the seeds to Jenny and her neighbor and the Matchbox cars to some kids on the next block.
In July, Chris Green ate beef every day all month. On December 6th Nicholas placed him and his family in a one-year indenture to a strict but kind farmer outside Belur in Karnataka. The children don’t seem to mind the work, or the lentils.
In October, Mandy Johnson got drunk and slept with her best friend’s husband. On December 6th Nicholas sat that one out. He figured it was basically self-punishing.
On December 6th, Nicholas impaled Dave Williams on a spit, and placed the spit over a charcoal fire. We will not speak of the reason why. Neither the spit nor the fire has proved fatal. We imagine Dave will hang onto life until next Saint Nicholas Day. Perhaps he will behave differently next year.
1Nicholas is one of the largest landowners in Zurich. It is speculated that he may store his vast currency reserves under a mountain there.
2These candies are manufactured using chocolate raised on Nicholas’ plantations in Côte D’ivoire by freed child-slaves and processed in factories fueled by the burning souls of the slavemasters.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Published on
October 23, 2009 in
music.
My friend Nathan and I went to see Keller Williams at the Varsity last night. I like Keller’s music, but the main draw is that he always looks like the world’s happiest eleven-year-old. It’s worth the price of admission to see him take such joy in his craft. Thanks, man!
Image ganked from someplace
Published on
October 21, 2009 in
research.
My next Untold Tale is “The Red Leech.” Cursory leech-research turned up this astonishing post: Leeches in Creation Mythology
One of the post’s citations is this:
“then did he become a leech-like clot; then did (Allah) make and fashion (him) in due proportion. And of him He made two sexes, male and female.” (Quran 75: 37-39)
We commit his body to the ground; earth to earth; leeches to leeches, clots to clots.
Image CC-BY-NC-SA by Dave ®
Published on
October 1, 2009 in
lies.
My wife and I have been taking Eudemox off-label as a mood synchronizer. Fortunately her moods seem to be dominant, otherwise I’d be dragging her down down down.
It’s a pretty electrifying exercise. Do you have somebody you’d trust with each other’s emotions?
Image CC-BY-NC-ND by peppysis
When I was out walking the dogs this morning they started tracking some barrow deer (which are burrowing deer we have around here). They got their name from the First People (who call themselves The People and not The First People, in the same way that we call it The United States and not The First United States because they did not (as we do not) wander around in a state of precognition that some bastards were going to blunder in from another dimension and kill most of us with alien diseases and guns and torture and shit, and when there’s just a heart-rending rump of us left give us a hearty kick in the nuts every time they even notice we still exist. Pretty much the correct response when you see one of the survivors of this morally-haywire ongoing genocide is to throw yourself prostrate, lay your wakizashi on the ground before you and just see what happens.)
Anyway barrow deer since the beginning of time will occasionally get into a burial ground and make a complete hash of it. The traditional solution to this was to keep a continuous fire of poison sumac going in the center of the burial ground. This took a great deal of courage and skill since inhaling the smoke from poison sumac inflames the lining of the lungs.
We live right next door to a cemetery. Story is that back in 1964 a whole herd of barrow deer got in there after hours one evening and by morning there was an unholy pile of Aaberg, Erickson, Askelund and Sonderby bones, after which the cemetery board approved an eight-foot above-ground, eight-foot below electrified fence with its own backup generator, which we can hear from our house whenever it fires up and it makes the dogs howl.
Barrow deer are gentle and no big deal (dead grandmas aside). What really bothers me is the big mothers they have in the swamps of northeastern Minnesota. The common name is the same but they’re actually a different species, Alces Tumulus. They have humongous antlers with their own moss (I’m tempted to say their own microclimate) and weigh up to 1800 pounds. When you feel the peat heaving under your boots, you run. They won’t hurt you on purpose but a one-ton barrow deer can do you a whole world of accidentally.
Anyway the dogs backed off on about my fifth whistle and we watched the dirt fly up out of the hole and the rain pounded it straight into mud.
Image CC-BY-SA by uberphot
The Pearly Kings and Queens are royalty I can get behind. Let no man call himself a king who does not make his own suit.
via Warren Ellis
Image CC-BY-NC-ND by squaregraph
The International Cartoonist Conspiracy, Big Time Attic, and Altered Esthetics Gallery in Minneapolis are staging Big Funny, a month-long wake celebrating the endangered medium known as “newspaper comics.” They have produced a full-size, full-color Sunday Funnies and loads of collateral art.
There will also be a vintage cigarette machine stocked with mini-comics. I will be contributing the three *highly-collectible* Uncles minis whose covers appear above. (Your spare change will help to buy meagre portions of Artist Chow for unnamed starving cartoonists and gallery owners who aren’t me. I get paid in mini-comics, which pretty much rules!)
The opening reception is Friday, August 7 from 7:00-11:00 at Altered Esthetics, 1224 Quincy Street NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413, 612.378.8888. Please bring your checkbook and a pocket full of quarters!
