ChrisMcColl.com

my bad epic poem, part one

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 04:19:00 +0000

I had that same dream the other night.

The one where I had gotten involved in a mass marriage in a park the year before--
One of the ones with hundreds of people marrying each other under the auspices of some cultish leader on a dais,
Only my wedding hadn’t been that successful, and there were only dozens of us.
And I ended up wed to thirty-seven men and sixty-eight women,
Each of whom turned out to be nearly twice as desperate for affection as any of the men.
That’s almost one hundred and thirty-six units of desperation.
We kept most of it in bottles in the garage.

So anyway, my dream started a few months after they all divorced me.
A mass divorce--
One of the ones with hundreds of people divorcing each other under the auspices of some cultish lawyer on a dais,
Only my divorce hadn’t been that successful, and there were only dozens of them
And one of me.
They got the houses in the divorce,
But they all ended up paying me alimony.
I was getting over a million dollars a year.
I quit my job
(I was a dancer),
And spent my days pursuing my one true love:
Cartooning.
But just for the art,
Not for the money.
I’m no whore.

So my dream started one night when I was bored
Because I didn’t have a job
And I had entered a dark period in my art
And developed cartoonists’ block.
And I was sitting in my flat
Sniffing magic markers and feeling conflicted about the fact that I hadn’t yet given my ex-wives and ex-husbands back
The one hundred and five keys to their one hundred and five houses,
When I looked out the window
And saw a drunk Irish priest staggering up the street.
So, just for fun--
I was bored, remember--
I decided I’d steal his wallet.
But just for the art,
Not for the money.
I’m no thief.

I went outside and then realized
I hadn’t brought a mask.
So I hid behind a hedge and set it on fire instead
And when the priest walked by, I bellowed in my best Charlton Heston voice,
“I am the Lord your God! Avert your eyes!”
And he was so drunk he did it,
And when his eyes were averted,
I got his wallet,
Although he did see me.

I had a great time.
I spent the money on Simpsons DVDs and keychains.
But then I started to feel guilty and to question why I’d done it
(this turned out to be all a part of a dark period in my art).
I figured I should go to confession,
Because even though I had joined the cult,
I had held onto my love of Catholic confession--
The face-to-face kind.
I loved it.
I loved telling the priest the sins I’d committed
Right to his face
Just to watch when he winced
Because then I knew
He’d committed the same one.

But I couldn’t go to face-to-face confession,
I realized,
Because if it turned out the priest was the one I’d mugged,
He’d recognize me,
And he might beat me up
(he looked like one of those violent kinds of priests).
So I had to go into a confessional,
Which I also loved,
Because I’m a claustromaniac.

So I’m in the confessional
And I’m telling my sins through the screen,
So the priest can’t see me,
When all of a sudden I notice
That there’s a fake screen
Superimposed over the real screen,
Like at cash machines when smart criminals get your card details and password as you slide your card into the slot.
I raced through my sins
And bounced up and down nervously while the priest absolved me
(God he took forever),
And I got permission to do my penance in installments,
Although I had to make a downpayment of five Hail Marys,
And agree to a lousy interest rate which basically tacked a Nicene Creed and a decade of the rosary onto a principal penance of less than half that.
So I got outside
Just in time to see some guy racing out of the church with all my soul’s details.

Naturally I panicked.
You hear all these horror stories about people having their soul’s details stolen.
My worst fear was that he’d sell my soul to the devil
In order to finally launch his career as a cabaret poet or
Internationally-renowned Cajun chef or something.
But at the least I figured he’d be going out and committing terrible sins
Like embezzlement
Or heresy or coveting
Or desecration of holy relics
And charging them to my soul
So his soul would be clear of wrong-doing.

I had to find him and stop him.
It was time for some soul-searching.

But first I called the Vatican’s emergency 800 number
To report my soul stolen.

nine elements of the master plan

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 16:57:00 +0000

find 599 other guys to ride into Valley of Death
evil twins
tie sheets together, drop them out window and shimmy down after bed check
annex Poland
throw toaster in bathtub so it looks like heart failure
after henchman crushes Bond, irradiate US gold supply at Fort Knox
gather 10,000 Mongol warriors to storm city
burglarize Watergate Hotel
rent ancient god Mohotec costume to frighten Scoob and those meddling kids away from Aztec treasure

untitled julia roberts vehicle

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:55:00 +0000

Julia Roberts needs my help, clearly. Let's look at how things are going for the former mega-star:

her last major box-office hit was Ocean's Eleven, and she didn't even get to be one of the eleven--six years ago.
Charlie Wilson's War, napped its way through its opening weekend. Also, Julia played a 55-year-old woman.
in Ocean's Twelve, the poor dear's name came seventh in the opening credits. SEVENTH. Even Elliott Gould and Carl Reiner got a "with" and an "and."
yes, she did win Parade.com's 2008 online poll for the "Best Dressed Oscar winner," but she won it for her look from 2001. To paraphrase Hilary Duff, how very yesterday.
and okay, fine, she was named America's fourth favorite movie star in Harris' January poll. But John Wayne was sixth, and he's dead. And Sean Connery was seventh, and he's not dead, exacctly, but he's definitely collecting a pension. The point being, Harris isn't doing Julia any favors.
she's had to resort to doing voiceover work for animated characters in kiddie films: The Ant Bully and Charlotte's Web. God knows there aren't enough movies out there about bugs...
her slated 2008 releases are Fireflies in the Garden and The Friday Night Knitting Club. Why do I suspect these will not have the impact on our screens of, say, a Gladiator or a Day After Tomorrow? I mean For crying out loud - a KNITTING CLUB MOVIE? And as far as the other one goes, the title comes from a poem by Robert "Upbeat, Feel-Good Movie of the Summer" Frost. Nuff said.

Thus it is high time someone put together a vehicle that will enable Julia Roberts to breathe some life into a career that is, frankly, flagging. Hollywood, I am that someone. And I have just the vehicle. Remember this movie?

Mystic Pizza (1988) - Three teenage girls come of age while working in a pizza parlor in Connecticut.

Why doesn't Julia make films like this anymore? The major marketing demographic for movies these days is still males aged 16-35. There's nothing males aged 16-36 like to look at more than teenage girls. And what better fantasy fodder for males aged 16-36 than teenage girls in tight clothes serving up beer and pizza?

Case closed. Obviously, a sequel to Mystic Pizza is in order if we have any hope of saving Ms. Roberts from herself. I therefore entreaty any film company execs and/or green light guys reading this to consider the following pitches:

Alarmistic Pizza - Three teenage girls try to deal with the color-coded, post-9/11 world while working in a pizza parlor in Connecticut.

Animistic Pizza - Three teenage girls convert to Shinto and make pizza in Connecticut.

Bigamistic Pizza - Three teenage girls marry the same man and work in his pizza parlor in Connecticut.

Conformistic Pizza - Three teenage girls make a completely predictable Hollywood sequel about working in a pizza parlor in Connecticut.

Euphemistic Pizza - Three "teenage" girls "work" in a "pizza parlor" in "Connecticut," if you know what I mean...

Extremistic Pizza - Three teenage girls work in a pizza parlor in Connecticut and dream of becoming professional ice-climbers.

Optimistic Pizza - Three teenage girls only send out half-full pizza boxes from their pizza parlor in Connecticut.

Pessimistic Pizza - Three teenage girls bake their heads, Sylvia-Plath-style, in a pizza oven in Connecticut.

and my personal favorite...

Taxidermistic Pizza - Low-budget horror. Three largely unclothed teenage girls. An isolated pizza parlor in the backwoods of Connecticut. Watch them stuff themselves.

zen rude-ism: rude questions for meditation

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:40:00 +0000

rude questions for meditation

Meditation is a critical element of Zen Rude-ism. It is just as Pying-Pyong asked his pupils, "Why don't you go someplace perhaps no less than a million miles away and sit in a position that you find uncomfortable for you to be in so you'll stop with the bothering of people all the time and you'll maybe be staying put for a change and doing not a thing for let's say five to seven years or longer it should be too soon?"

Just as Chin, Shin, and the other pupils of the Rude-ist Masters had their wisdom upon which to meditate, so we provide you here with a variety of spiritual conundrums to occupy your thoughts and bring you closer to your own Rude Awakening.

We have found that obsessing about one question each day for a week has made us significantly Ruder. We hope you will find the same. About yourself, that is, not us. We mean, we hope you will find yourself Ruder. Not Ruder than we are, but Ruder than you were before. We don't mind if you're Ruder than we are--it's not like a competition or anything, but that's not what we hope for. Not because we're comparing, but...whatever.

week one
What is the deal with that guy?

week two
Do I look like I give a rat's ass?

week three
What's a guy gotta do to get a little service around here?

week four
Who asked you, anyway?

week five
I've lost my ticket - can I still collect my shoes?

week six
Geez, make it a little hotter in here, why don't you?
(additional thought for deeper meditation: I'd like to melt my ass off)

week seven
You wanna hear the sound of one man snapping?

week eight
So the soup today...any good?

week nine
How am I? Can I just tell you about this lower back pain? Have you seen how I'm sitting here? Do I look comfortable to you?

week ten
What, do you work for Rubbermaid or something?

the oxy-moron

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:47:00 +0000

I had a pimple once--
largely a tiny blemish--
but when it wouldn’t go away,
when it just sat there, quiet and well-behaved on my face,
comfortably situated like a gracious house guest who won’t leave,
who has outstayed an invitation he never had,
when it did absolutely nothing as hard and fast as it could,
there on the back of my forehead,
I found I had begun to obsess about my abscess--
I was the Restless Patient.

At one point, an odd line of thinking struck me:
what if, as a symptom, it filled out, ballooned, snowballed into a kind of volcano?
A real nightmare, clearly. Or not?
I’d be Volcano Man - no, Lavalier Mike, Suburban Superhero.
I said my name out loud, intoning it like a transforming spell
in some dramatic comic book.
When nothing happened, I realized
words do not make reality. A pronoun is not a person.
Saying “volcano” won’t cause a volcano,
even if the word erupts from your mouth
like lava.

A few hours later, I had a minute eruption
when I was stuck, trying to find a solution for a problem with a friend
as we filled out a sheet of transformations for geometry class:
you know, homework.
The pimple hung heavy on my mind, if lightly on my face.
It couldn’t go anywhere - my thoughts raced,
fixed on the swelling,
and transformed me into an idiot.
My friend suddenly exploded, “Ah, that’s it!”
but I heard the same words differently:
“Ugh, that zit!”
and I blew my top,
my thoughts melting into words carried along by my emotions.
I had become the Supermoron, Idio-tick, biting my friend’s head off:
“I used an Oxy-10 solution!” I fumed. “I can’t just erase it, you know!”

Profoundly confounded and openly wounded, my friend closed his book.
“Clearly we’ve shared a misunderstanding,” he said coldly,
then took the coat
and went away just like the pimple wouldn’t.
And a chill shook me
and I understood my mistake
and I thought,
if we both now understand it, was it still a misunderstanding?

Words aren’t lava.
If lava finds you, there is no mistake about it.
It will coat you and fix you
just exactly the same as you are
when you first fall under it, fall victim to the fumes
and the liquid rock whose heat will leave you unchanged and frozen in place -
a lump on the face of the rock -
until some future someone surveys the area
looking for the right imperfections that will carry him back in time
and breaks open the lump
and finds you in that same embarrassing position
and says to his equally unknown future friend, just a little ways off,
“Hey, come look at this idiot.”

Later that night, I looked up “lavalier,”
since I didn’t know the word.
Turns out it’s just a certain kind of suspended rock,
that can have special meaning for good friends.

I popped the pimple,
though in the past many have ordered me not to mess with such things
on account of it leaves marks that way--
in fact, I have a friend
different from the friend with whom I worked transformations
(not that it matters to you since you don’t know either of them)
but anyway I have a different friend
and his half-sister popped pimples her whole life
and now her face has been transformed by tiny dents--
the coordinate points of her poor behavior--
like she was hit with very small rocks
or very big words.

As I popped it
and I allowed my foremost thoughts to take me back
to what happened with my friend,
I imagined us as two cartoon heroes in a boxing ring:
General Specific and Private Public,
our words in balloons above our heads,
both hoping a left cross will be the right move.
I saw the lines drawn on paper locked in battle,
and I couldn’t erase them.
And I wondered,

Could a civil war start over something like this?

american update, part one (cliffs notes version)

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:02:00 +0000

I considered it my patriotic duty to kill some shorter trees in order to create the tree-death (printable) version of this post. Also, I said "duty"! Hee-hee!

Or you can click here to read the longer original version of the post. Or you can wait and read the longer version two days ago, when I posted it.

SUMMARY:

At the time the text begins, the narrator has been in the US for just over six months. He owns a cell phone. He bought three house phones at Circuit City[1]. We learn that the narrator’s story is set in an alternate-universe version of our world where cell phones are allowed to be as large as a Pez dispenser.

The narrator is a fat, country-western-music-loving American who has a lot of credit-card debt and votes Republican. His remarks about the War in Iraq reveal him to be an idiot.

The narrator analyzes an uninteresting headline from his local TV news, not realizing how this may confuse readers who believe that headlines are actually used in newspapers.

The narrator bought a house and through use of irony[2], he details the financial pitfalls he encountered, including:

moving to New York,
specifically Westchester County,
where the houses cost a great deal of money.
He also timed his purchase badly--
--here he digresses into a blatant rip-off of The Truman Show and a re-tread of earlier remarks about the alternate-universe America he inhabits; he attempts to avoid sounding unoriginal through use of postmodern self-conscious narration[3]--
arrived in the US without the paperwork he needed to establish his credit history while living overseas,
and moved into his house at a really inconvenient time for his family.

The narrator confirms the purchase of the house in the end and makes an unsuccessful joke about his own sarcasm.

He concludes by being rather unkind to the very nice lawyer who helped him with his home purchase. And all over a pen. What a jerk.

[1] The name of this chain of stores is derived from an early draft of the screenplay for the classic 1982 movie Tron.

[2] Irony (ī′ ruh nē, n.) - a literary device which allows posh speakers to be sarcastic without sounding common.

[3] Postmodern self-conscious narration (fan′ shaw, n.) - a literary device in which hack writers plagiarize the ideas of superior writers who have gone before them and attempt to come off as clever and knowing by pointing out that they’re thieving someone else’s work, but really just come across looking shabby and desperate.

american update, part one

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:09:00 +0000

I considered it my patriotic duty to kill some trees in order to create the tree-death (printable) version of this post. Also, I said "duty"! Hee-hee!

Or you can click here to read the shorter Cliffs Notes version of the post. Or you can wait and read the shorter Cliffs Notes version tomorrow, when I post it.

Right. I’ve been in the US for a little over six months now. One of the first things I did upon arriving in this country is purchase a cell phone (to those of you living in the UK, this is what you would call a mobile; to everyone else, this tone is what you would call condescending). I also went to Circuit City to buy three house phones. I bought three phones because the Patriot Act has outlawed the purchase of single items. Buying only two of something is a Class B misdemeanor. With a court order signed by two sitting judges, a US citizen can still buy single items, but only in gallon drums. Unless they are buying a single cell phone, which must be no larger than a Pez dispenser.

I have become truly American. I own two cars now. I have gained 140 lbs., largely by listening to everything that the ads on the Food Network tell me.

It’s okay, though, because I have registered for eight weight-loss programs and purchased twelve fitness products, each of which I learned about on a half-hour infomercial fronted by Jessica Simpson. I can’t afford any of these things, so I’ve put them on credit cards. Several lovely TV spokespeople have suggested cool ways to consolidate my debt.

I now vote Republican, because I realize it is sinful not to. I send an embossed Christmas card to the Bushes (Jr and Sr) every year. I realize that we had to invade Iraq because Osama bin Laden attacked us using the frequent flyer miles of Democrats living in Afghanistan. And because I’m in America, I now think Afghanistan is a city in Iraq.

I listen to country-western music. I think Hannah Montana is a funny show. I watch local news and I’m not bothered by headlines like “Robbed by Thieves.”

No, I have to stop there. This was an actual headline on my local news the other night, and it does bother me. I’m forced to wonder what it said before the editors got hold of it:

“’Robbed by Robbers’? What the hell kind of headline is that? Take it back and do it again. Preferably without inhaling varnish beforehand.”

So the copywriters spend an hour at Starbucks and come back with--

“’Robbed by Thieves.’ By thieves. Yes, dammit, yes. You see that? I like it--cuts right to the heart of the story. No fluff or crap. Run it.”

My main problem with the headline, frankly, is that it isn’t news. “Robbed by Thieves.” Well, yes, that is what thieves do. They rob. Thieves who never rob are just law-abiding citizens in ski hats. So how can it be news to say thieves robbed?

No--news would be something like, “Embalmed by Thieves,” or “Smelted by Thieves.” These are activities rarely associated with those who burgle. On the other hand, “Robbed by Buddhist Pilates Instructors” or “Robbed by Ferrets” would make excellent news stories as well.

But I digress.

So let’s see: I bought a house, which was a major undertaking, requiring me to provide our mortgage lenders with a scavenger hunt list full of things, except possibly a major and an undertaker.

I make no claims to be any kind of financial guru, but I now feel qualified to offer the following advice to anyone looking to relocate to the US from overseas. If you are interested in purchasing a home, you might consider...

not moving to New York, whose housing laws were clearly devised by a real estate attorney trapped inside Cheech and Chong’s VW minibus. I kid you not, in NY State, when you purchase a house, you will be charged $75 in order to pay a gratuity to the person who prepares the title for your home. That’s right - the state is enforcing tip money for its civil servants. They even label it that way on the closing paperwork: “Title preparer’s gratuity.” God bless. Call me pedantic, but if you are FORCED to pay it, then it isn’t TECHNICALLY a gratuity, is it? I’m going to introduce a motion to the New York legislature proposing that that line be reworded, “Title preparer’s mandatority.

If you must move to New York, under no circumstances should you move to Westchester County, which is the county with the highest property tax in the state. Seriously - the local taxes here cost more than the state taxes do. Which I think means that economists can now complete their geometric proof that New York is bigger on the inside than on the outside.

Then again, sure, the property taxes here are spine-chillingly high, but at least the actual houses are as expensive as all get out. Whee!

Naturally, if you’re going to invest thousands and thousands of dollars in a gaping vortex of debt, you’re going to want to time it carefully. I would recommend, for example, NOT attempting to secure a mortgage, say, around the time that the bottom falls out of the sub-prime lending market. As it happens, bottoms falling out of any kind of lending markets--sub-prime or prime or super-prime or even markets which are divisible by several different positive and negative integers beyond themselves and one--basically bottoms of any kind falling in any way out of any sort of lending markets will tend to make lenders, like banks and mortgage brokers and bent-nosed Sicilian gents with names like “Marty Shoes,” a mite anxious. So beware of falling bottoms. Because it’s bad enough that lawyers, banks and New York State will devour your savings like they’re a 3-pound lobster. It will be worse if you have to beg them to tie the bib on in the first place.

Of course, if you do end up begging, it’s best to have all your paperwork in order. Thus, when making your overseas relocation to the US, it will be best if you haven’t actually spent any time overseas prior to your arrival in America. It turns out that for the last 50 years or so, the US has ceased to believe in the existence of “the rest of the world.” Instead, it believes that the horizon line created by the ocean and the sky is a fixed, tangible barrier into which ships will sail if allowed to go too far, like Jim Carrey did in The Truman Show. If somehow a ship should accidentally break through this barrier, it would find itself in a dark, nebulous world filled with sea serpents and bogeymen. This alleged “Europe” of which so many speak is purely an imaginary Never-Neverland with no more bearing on reality than the Loch Ness Monster or the separation of church and state. The Middle East is a sort of fictional “Albert Square” setting used as the background for the long-running nightly serial drama called “The News.” Some people have been watching this program for so long that they have actually begun to believe that the characters in it are as real as they are.

The point is that if you have been out of the US for any length of time, when you return, you will find that no record of you as a consumer or wage-earner exists here. You will have no credit record and will thus be incapable of qualifying for a loan of any sort unless you a) construct a credit history for yourself by pasting together every bill, bank balance sheet, credit card report, tax return and pay stub you have received or sent for the last two years (make sure you have all of these handy so you don’t have to make a lot of overseas calls!), or b) convince the financial institutions of the US and the rest of the world to communicate with one another in a spirit of respect and cooperation as peers and equals.

Oh, and if you DO manage to sort out all the necessary paperwork, neatly line up your internal organs in alphabetical order on a marble slab, pay all the necessary expenses and live through the closing date without stabbing one of the eight people there to sign papers in the neck with a pen, be sure you have more than four days to move in before school starts for your kids and your new job begins in earnest.

In spite of all this, we managed to buy a house. Which we love, by the way, irrespective of my mildly sarcastic tone (okay, maybe less of a tone and more of a sarcastic orchestration). My favorite part of the whole experience was when we finished signing all the paperwork. After the fiscal colonic we had undergone, we stood up with our papers and our lawyer said, “You can keep the pen, you know, as a memento. Because it’s such a big day.” She was, in reality, a very lovely woman who was incredibly helpful. But there was a part of me that wanted to say, “Um, actually, I think the house will probably remind us of buying the house a bit better. Plus, I’m less likely to lose the house by putting it in my shirt pocket and then having it fall out when I lean over to tie my shoes. Plus, it’s kind of a cheap pen.”

more to come...

my bad limerick

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 22:08:00 +0000

There is a fine Irish lad named Tom Quilligan,
and if you let him drink once, then he will again.
I bought him round after round
Last time I was in town,
And the S.O.B. stuck me with the bill again.

nine surprises encountered while on safari

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 02:00:00 +0000

rain barrel outside hut stocked with something that clearly wasn't Evian
during documentary filming, vegan hyenas refused to eat wounded gazelle
sides of rhinos used as ad space for GAP and Verizon
"Serengeti" is a really really funny word when you're drunk
nothing tastes better than barbecue of endangered species
native clicking language made up years ago to mock American tourists
that big ball of yarn those lions were playing with? actually a human head
difficult locals refused to tape new episode of Boston Legal for us
turns out it's not so much a dry heat

zen rude-ism: the rude-ist view of karma

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:12:00 +0000

the rude-ist view of karma

Conventional Zen teaches that any deed which stems from an intention of desire, hate, or delusion will create a response in the Universe. Put simply, the Universe acts on us as an effect of the way we ourselves behave.

The Zen Rude-ist understands this, but figures, 'If the Universe can dish it out, the Universe can take it.'

from the fifth kondo of the nameless master

Chin's desire for Awakening stood the test of Time. Many months had passed. He had learned much. Again, he asked his master, “Please show me how to achieve Inner Peace as you have achieved it, Master.”

The master responded in a riddle. “Let me clue you in to something, Melvin. Ever since you showed up, I haven't had twelve seconds of ‘Inner Peace.” If you'd go away and never talk to me again, maybe then I could teach you something about it!”

Chin paused in his bewilderment. His thoughts chased the paradox around and around, as a dog with its tail. While he was so occupied, the Master gave him a dead arm.

newsletter from the head office

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 05:59:00 +0000

HEADLINESS - the unofficial in-house newsletter of the head office

HEADLINESS is only available online, and then only if you behave yourself. Submissions should be sent to The Shadow Head marked "You Have Way Too Much Free Time". Unlike the other in-house e-newsletter, if you want to send in stuff, we don't care what font or color you use. Knock yourself out.

HEADLINESS

a newsletter for select staff of the Head Office

1 March 2008
__________________________________________________________________

"WOOOOHOOOOOO!!!!! YEAH, MAN!! BEER IS, LIKE, GOD!!!"
--Benjamin Franklin

quotation
Thanks to Plain Amanda in Accounting for the above inspiring quote. We may have punched it up a bit.

new notices

message from the shadow head
Thank you. At our last full staff meeting, or as I like to call it, The Beginning of the End, our Fearless Leader mentioned two things that I hope we all remember. First, the New Restructuring Plan is currently being road-tested in our division, and the effectiveness and value of the plan will be evaluated at the end of the fiscal year. Second, our Fearless Leader has NO DOUBT that at that time of evaluation we as an office will resoundingly and enthusiastically endorse our New Restructuring Plan as The Best and Only Restructuring Plan for Us.

With this in mind, I have been asked to remind you that March is already upon us. By now you should all be quivering with the ecstasy produced by life within the New Restructuring Plan. If you are not, you'd damn well better start quivering now, or you're in it deep, okay? You have all been assigned to cross-divisional committees which will meet once a week from now until the Time of Evaluation; the entirety of these meetings will be given over to what we are sure will be nothing short of hyperbolic laud for the New Restructuring Plan. Weird Gavin in Tech Support is designing a new database in which all staff will be required to enter daily compliments for the New Restructuring Plan. Some suggestions for entries:

"If you only use one restructuring plan this year, make it The New Restructuring Plan!"

"Because of the New Restructuring Plan, I can enjoy dairy again!"

"The New Restructuring Plan is the feel-good plan of the year!"

"I didn't think it was possible for someone my age to meet someone new. Boy was I wrong. Thanks, New Restructuring Plan!"

"The New Restructuring Plan has helped me to finally consolidate my debt!"

"Nothing ever conceived by Man can compare to the awesome glory and majesty that is the New Restructuring Plan - not democracy, not fire, not calculus. All Man's achievements from here to the dusk of time will be crushing disappointments. We have reached the apex of our existence."

Or words to that effect. Please bear in mind that your raises for next year will be offered in direct proportion to your sincerity. I look forward to reading and hearing your critiques of this important new development in the life of our business.

Yours,

The Shadow Head

cool person of the week
This week's Ultra-Cool Person is Hot Debbie in Human Resources. She is that from which all other cool derives. She could give seminars on cool. She has cornered the market on coolosity and coolaciousness, which we realize were not technically words when we started this sentence, but due to the Universe's awareness of the need for newer and better words to more effectively encapsulate the coolarianism of Hot Debbie, all of the formerly made-up words we've written have now popped into existence in the Oxford English Dictionary. So that's a big up to the Universe for finally getting around to recognizing what the rest of us have known forever.

More cool people later.

bored of directors?
So are we.

seriously--true story
So we're getting ready to leave the house the other day, and we start talking to our daughters about things. The girls could not be less interested, as they're engrossed in some complicated fantasy about a grand ball for princesses and fairy godmothers getting their dresses ready and the dances they'll have to do and what-not. So we're doling out instructions like, "Listen to your mother," and "Try to pick up all the toys you're leaving all over the place," and "Never agree to the first bid you're given--a punter's always willing to bargain at least a little," and so on, and the girls are working out dance moves or something. So we say to them, "You know, you could at least PRETEND to be listening to us."

And our older daughter gets all indignant and comes back with, "But we were pretending to listen."

this has nothing to do with anything
Tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking, and when she passes, each one she passes goes, "Ah." When she walks, she’s like a samba that swings so cool and sways so gentle that when she passes, each one she passes goes, "Ooh." Oh, but we watch her so sadly. How can we tell her we love her? Yes we would give our heart gladly, but each day, when she walks to the sea, she looks straight ahead, not at us.

Tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking, and when she passes, we smile - but she doesn’t see.

question for ya
How come you can get salmonella from eating bad chicken, but you can't get chickenella from eating bad salmon?

very imaginary person consulting visit
On Tuesday, 19 March, from 8.00 - 11.00 am, the Head Office will be visited by General Robert Tuttle (Ret’d.), now senior consultant at Load of Crap Consulting, in order for him to offer tips on the implementation of the New Restructuring Plan. Some of you may remember Tuttle as the imaginary soldier that Trapper and Hawkeye made up in order to play with Frank and Margaret's heads in that episode of M*A*S*H in the first or second season. Since then, Tuttle has had roles as Vera, Norm's imaginary wife on Cheers, and as Niles' imaginary wife Maris on Frasier.

It is highly recommended that you find an opportunity to actually meet General Tuttle, as for some mysterious reason doing so makes it easier to forget him later on.

upcoming staff appreciation party
Several staff members have expressed concern at the previous bulletin’s announcement of our Staff Appreciation Party next Friday at 2:00 and have suggested that the bold face sentence at the end, "Employees may leave at 4.00 pm," cast a slightly draconian shadow over the event. Some say that this has given the party an "obligatory" feel which could make the event feel less "light" somehow, less "fun." The boldface remark seems to have had a certain "or else" tone of which we were unaware.

We would like to assure everyone that though you absolutely and without exception must attend the party in its entirety from the first cheesing of the crackers at 2:00 to the final meaningless, empty wish for everyone to have an enjoyable weekend, the party is not--we repeat NOT--obligatory. There has been a grave misunderstanding. Having said this, while none of you are obliged to attend the party, all of you are obliged to want to attend the party. Various senior administrators will be circulating throughout the event. Any body language, sarcasm, off-hand remark or latent thought detected behind one's eyes will be grounds for immediate professional humiliation.

One final point. It has been observed that this is meant to be a "thank you" event, and that if we powers-that-be really wanted to say thank you, we could have let all of you just go home at 2:00. Well, geniuses, if you all go home at 2:00, how exactly are we going to be able to say thank you to you all? So thank you, you ungrateful motherthankers.

professional development
Effective immediately, professional development will be referred to as "Professional Regression," in order to more directly enable us to nurture the tendencies we have caused to gurgle up from the Office's very esophagus. All professional development funds for staff will be transferred over to corresponding Professional Regression funds; staffers wishing to secure money in order to do something unprofessional will find the appropriate forms in the Conferences folder on the network.

repeat notices
numerology division
just how healthy are you?
Can you answer the following questions?

Does your blood pressure have three 6's in it?
Is your body fat percentage a multiple of 7?
Do you find yourself drawn to food in pentagonal containers?
Is it all you can do to muster up the energy to click your mouse in order to scroll down through this email?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, help is at hand. The Numerology Division offers FREE Death Checks to all staff members. We'll take all the numbers the medical staff gave you in your WellPerson Check and plug them into our astrological charts to tell you to within twenty years, exactly when and how you're going to die. You'd be surprised how well this will enable you to plan for the future. If you're in need of a second opinion, one of our phrenologists would be happy to read the bumps on your head.

renewal of staff contracts
Because many other international headhunters begin recruiting in the summer or early fall, there is a significant advantage for We Administrators to know how many of staffers will be killed by paid assassins this year. If there is a staff member on whom you would like to take out a contract, please let us know as soon as possible in order that we might dispatch one of our boys to whack him or her.

still bored of directors?
Right back atcha, baby.

fearless leader’s monthly staff meeting address
Tuesday, 30 March 2008
In a departure from tradition, our Fearless Leader this year will be performing his one-man version of two sell-out Broadway shows, "The Reduced Mamma Mia." Thrill to his dulcet renderings of "Money," "Gimme," and "Just Knowing Me, Not You."

Plans for next year's "The Reduced Cirque du Soleil" are already underway.

security reminder
We understand that many of you are disgruntled with the necessity of having to show your IDs every time you come or go from the building. Please understand that this is critical to company security. We have been informed by unreliable know-nothings at the Department of Homeland Security that we are at Tom Clancy Alert Status, which means there is a clear and present danger to us. We have it on good authority that Sean Bean is planning something against us, something spectacular involving CGI programming, even as we type. So guards will continue to search bags of those people who do not have proper ID. If your moaning continues, the friskings begin. If the crap from you people continues even still, we implement the body cavity searches. So watch it.

instructions from the shadow head
Effective immediately, all personnel will be aware that lies are the new truth. Additionally, we have recently outsourced to various consultancies all our boat-rocking, muck-raking, water-muddying, devil's advocating, rabble-rousing, nay-saying, down-putting and head-shaking. You shouldn't need to worry about this stuff. Everything's great.

Have a nice day.

We will have more Headliness another time--not necessarily next week, but when we can get around to it, all right? Sheesh! Enough with the pressure, you people. For crying out loud already--you are aware that we have to write all this ourself, we trust?

eight ways to get asked to leave staff meetings

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 02:12:00 +0000

bathe in fish juice
order invisible friends to put clothes back on
spell, out loud, everything everyone says
periodically ask if person next to you wants to see your rash
play ‘chew and show’ with cookies
get up and run fingers through the hair of whoever’s speaking
suggest group consider how Captain Kirk would handle situation
two words: interpretive dance

my other bad couplets

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 02:33:00 +0000

other bad trees were killed to make the tree-death (printable) version

1. my elephant couplet
Flyswatters hold no appeal to the elephant:
due to her size, gnats and flies seem irrelephant.

2. my manatee couplet
The lumbering, sweet-tempered manatee
despite her great size shows no vanatee.

3. my couplet describing a grade-school loser
He's the guy who jabs and pokes at you in lunchlines,
then tries to tell you jokes without the punchlines.

4. my condom couplet
Having sex every now and then is
the perfect time to wrap your pen-is.

a word from the head office

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 03:55:00 +0000

toward a new corporate restructuring plan

as it happens, this plan itself has been restructured in tree-death (printable) format

it has also been restructured into a tree-death (printable) format just for SCHOOLS, if you're interested, though you'll need to print the pages back-to-back and fold them into a cute little booklet; it's an arts-and-crafts feature to make it feel more "schooly"

The Head Office Restructuring Committee (HORC) was formed last year in response to the need for a new committee to be formed. Following the consumption of literally dozens of half-caff lattes and the general acknowledgement that a cohesive restructuring plan will never be created until managerial pig-headedness and office in-fighting is quashed (i.e. never), the Committee has prepared this booklet as a summary of progress. Presented largely in rhetorical-question-and-facetious-answer format, the Committee hopes you won’t notice the misplaced participle at the beginning of this sentence which implies that the Committee itself, rather than the booklet, has a format. If we’re an office anywhere near worth our salt, these grammatical mistakes will engender extensive and vitriolic staff feedback.
--The Committee to Openly Mock the Head Office Restructuring Committee (COMHORC), February 2008

The Committee will be guided by the following priorities when making decisions regarding restructuring, except in cases where we don’t feel like it:

Dedicate so much time to planning the restructuring that it is impossible to facilitate the creation of an office culture that values collaboration, reflection, and communication, because we’re all too freaking busy going to restructuring-plan meetings
Promote a greater sense of those things that make each office division pissed off at the others
Take advantage of corporate discretionary fund to go on frivolous fact-finding trips and “retreats” to nice local restaurants
Over-extend the use of all existing office facilities such that members of the office staff can butt heads as much as possible

1. Is the office going to move to a structure that streamlines and improves transparency?
Please. Streamlining and transparency are so 2005. If we’re going to steal a restructuring model from another company, you can be damn sure it will have a funky, hip descriptor (who has a “name” anymore, anyway?) with loads of corporate street-cred. Something like an Organic, Multi-Phase, Triangulating (OMPT) Restructuring Model, only softer to reflect the fact that we’re warm and fuzzy while at the same time getting across the idea that we are all about kicking the ass of other businesses. Maybe, “Fuzzy, Warm, Whole-Customer TimeFrame with Special Ass(everation)-Kicking Adjunct.”

In the meantime, you could call what we’ve been doing “investigating” types of restructuring plans, if by “investigating” you mean “having all our friends at other companies email, fax, and otherwise pelt us with whatever rubbish ideas their companies have been using to deal with their own structural inadequacies.” This has been very helpful in that it has proven to us that yes, in fact there are dozens of other companies around the world just as screwed up as we are.

As a side note, it turns out that the classic type of restructuring model, which involves focusing resources in areas of greatest market opportunity, is very unlikely to work for us. So expect to see this as the proposed model from the Head Office some time soon.

2. Is the Restructuring Committee looking at personnel, budget expenditures, and internal conflicts, or is it looking only at the office management structure itself?
As we’re sure you can imagine, it is very hard to look only at restructuring and also fulfil our mandate to get our sweaty little fingers into as many office pies as possible.

3. The process seems too fast—what can we do about this?
Lace up them running shoes, baby.

4. How will low-level office staffers be included in the process?
In much the same way that smoking is included in the life of a professional athlete.[1]

5. Will there be an approval process after the new restructuring plan is completed?
Our intention is to make you believe that your input is valued throughout the process. By the time the new plan is actually created, we hope to have had a number of occasions for you to say what you think while we sit and stare at you with empty smiles on our faces. After you have been thanked and your suggestions summarily ignored, we will leave to ridicule you behind closed doors. So no, genius, there won’t be a separate approval process.

6. If the new structure is profoundly different from what we currently have, how will staff be able to prepare for the change?
Even if the restructuring plan is finished in time for an adequate period of adjustment to take place, we plan to pack that time full of amusing time-wasters, which we like to call “professional development.” These will include visits from the top professionals in the field of corporate restructuring, people with “best-selling” books entitled things like All Work and No Play Means Johnny Needs a New Corporate Structural Model, and REST(rict)RUC(tions)TUR(n out)ING(enuity): Bringing Peace of Mind to Your Head Office. They will come with their pre-fab presentations, foisting their agendas and opinions on us by the roomful and trying desperately to jam our square realities into their round ideas.

People who agree with us will get to go on trips to offices in exotic locations to see how much easier it is to be happy with your office’s structural model when you work in an exotic location. In short, we will do exactly what we feel is necessary to alleviate our guilt about those people whom we’ve made unhappy with the changes. Then we will stop thinking about it.

7. What if the new plan appears to require a change in contracts or staffing levels?
This is a very sensitive issue, mostly because nobody likes it when we in the Administration say we are going to start “making changes in staffing levels,” a polite euphemism for what we in Admin more often call “cutting loose the debris.” You’d be really surprised the way people’s danders get up when the idea of losing their jobs rears its head. Go figure.

Because of this, we will never EVER talk about people losing their jobs, even when we have every intention of getting rid of them. Instead, we will continue our policy of passive-aggressive staff review and control. This is that thing we do where we don’t tell you, “You should have done this in that situation”; what we say is, “It’s interesting that you chose to do that in that situation. I might not have chosen to do that. But you did, which is interesting.” It’s also that thing we do where we don’t tell you what we think personally, but we tell you, “You should know that this is what people are saying about you.” Often we do this during formal job evaluations, which is great fun. You should see the looks on your faces when you suddenly think that you’re completely alone and everyone around you is talking about you and you don’t know who you can trust. It’s a hoot.

Anyway, we the Administration hope that breeding this fear and mistrust and self-doubt will cause those people we don’t like to quit of their own accord, thus saving us the emotionally draining experience of firing them. Oh, sorry—this was another planning question, wasn’t it?

8. What precisely, then, is the goal of the Committee?
The goal of the committee is to develop another bizarre-as-hell restructuring plan that reflects the narrow views of those random people involved in the committee and to provide ample time which will be largely wasted on excursions to theoretical restructuring conferences and to other companies who serve as exemplars of bizarre-as-hell restructuring. Bearing this in mind, the committee is striving for a January 2009 implementation date, with a proposed restructuring plan in place by September 2008. We know this is not enough time, but we don’t care. We will labor and delay for months, the restructuring plan will not be done until August—probably just before most office staff goes on vacation so that it will be presented to public outrage which will be frustrated and/or forgotten during the next two weeks, after which everyone will become overwhelmed by the end-of-the-calendar-year routine and won’t have the time or inclination to look at, critique, discuss and modify a restructuring plan. Then the Christmas holidays will roll around and a cabal more clandestine than freemasons will put the plan in place as a fait accompli for January.

Your Role
The committee is genuine in its quest to appear to want feedback from all members of the office community, particularly mid-level management. If we have time, we will make an effort to appear to want feedback from low-level staff as well. And lastly, from tech support. We ask EACH OF YOU to do three things:

1. Review the questions and answers contained in this document. Be distracted by the colored font. Ask yourself, “Why lilac?”

2. You will have time now during which you could prepare your own reports or read emails and other communications relevant to your actual job. Instead, spend this time examining the attached documents and any other stuff we throw at you. Consider how it would overturn your professional life if we decided to make our restructuring plan conform to one of those provided. Additionally, and most importantly, forget the practical issues associated with this plan. Rather, think “big picture”; practice talking about these restructuring models in broad, general terms. Use phrases like “workplace efficiency” in ways that never actually address either the workplace or efficiency.

3. Spend time going to long, drawn-out meetings where people are asked to talk about sensitive issues that get everyone riled up. Get riled up. Be assured that what you say will go nowhere. Become part of the negative undercurrent here at the office. Start sending hostile emails to like-minded thinkers swimming alongside you in the undercurrent. While you send these, notice that, on the office email system, new folders with attractive icons have been set up and dedicated to the controversial topics discussed in the aforementioned meetings. PAY NO ATTENTION to these folders—they are absolutely pointless, and frankly pretty stupid. The only people who contribute to these folders are sad losers who obviously don’t understand how this process works. These people are also compulsive committee-joiners and energetic do-gooders who will have the enthusiasm and joy beaten out of them in due course.

Your efforts in these matters will help make it easier for our confused ideological oligarchy to run the office unimpeded. We appreciate your understanding.

[1] A dangerous thing that we’ll try to avoid, though we know we can’t entirely.

zen rude-ism: the principle of wanting to stay asleep

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:26:00 +0000

from Chin's Ninth Moan

The Awakened One has achieved his status by embracing the One Reality that there is no Awakening, just a world full of bastards, jerks, and wise-asses.
--Chin the Kibbitzer, in response to the Second Sutra of Pying-Pyong's Dog

the second sutra of Pying-Pyong's dog

At breakfast, Pyong said, "It's like this: trying to achieve Awakening you might as well try to make the perfect piece of toast. You know how you never get it just the way you want it? A lot of it is mood--sometimes you want it crispy, sometimes you want maybe a kind of warm bread, and sometimes other things you are thinking. But you make the toast and it crunches and you get the stiff crusty parts lodged in your gums, which is a pain you never want I can tell you, or maybe it's too soft so when you dunk it in your tea--which is another thing you can never get right so don't get me started--it flops over like damp socks. And then there's the piece that maybe if you're lucky has what you want in the middle except the whole piece didn't toast evenly which is something that drives me so crazy I could go on all day.

"So the Awakened One is some guy who makes perfect toast one day. And he wakes up and he sits there and says, 'Okay so my whole life I'm spending making toast and now it's perfect. What the hell is wrong with me? Like I have to invent headaches for myself with the life I got? And somehow perfect toast is the achievement that my life will now get my head screwed on straight. Boy do I need a vacation.'

"But I could put it another way: Awakening is crap, and you do yourself a favor to figure that out early. Even my dog knows that."

And Pyong fed his toast to his dog.

the third moan of Pying-Pyong's dog

Fu-Lin asked Pying-Pyong, "Master, is your dog Awakened?"

Pying-Pyong replied, "What are you bothering me with this now I got a million things to do? Ask the dog, you need to know so bad. Only give him some jerky first which he enjoys when you do that."

Fu-Lin fed Pying-Pyong's dog. The dog snapped at him and bit through his finger, drawing blood. "He bit me!" Fu-Lin cried.

"So you got your answer," Pying-Pyong said. "Now get out of here. You give me a headache like I don't have words for. And get some more jerky."

teller is dead

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:58:00 +0000

not only is Teller dead, but so are a lot of trees, which contributed to this (printable) version of the following post

I thought it might be useful to explain a little bit about my relationship with my wife. You know, just in case you were wondering. And I thought I would begin by explaining the death of Teller.

As you will no doubt have already gleaned, I refer to Teller, the mute half of the Penn & Teller magic act. I realize that limiting the man to “the mute half of Penn & Teller” does him a disservice; he has a broad and deep list of extremely impressive credits to his name. One would think that such a disservice would matter more to me, now that he’s allegedly dead. But one would be mistaken.

About a year ago or so, my head decided that Teller had died. Don’t ask me why it decided this; my head just does things like this from time to time. It had come up with an elaborate story in order to fool me: one with lots of colorful detail to make it feel that much truer. My head told me that Teller’s death had been a shocking tragedy. Sitting down to lunch by himself in a restaurant in Los Angeles one day, he had selected a particular fish (the special of the day) as his entrée. At one time, I even knew the kind of fish it was, but it escapes me now. Some kind of unusual white fish, I think, like shad or mooneye. But not shad or mooneye.

In any case, this fish--notorious for its boniness--was nevertheless served whole from the grill. Teller tucked in while reading an esoteric book on magic. At one point, so immersed was he in his reading that he stopped giving his meal the attention it required: he swallowed two particularly pernicious fish bones. They went down badly and lodged in his throat, closing his windpipe. His arms flailed; his eyes bulged. More than usual. Someone nearby attempted the Heimlich maneuver, but the upward thrust only served to embed the bones more firmly. Within minutes, Teller had suffocated.

See what I mean? Pretty vivid for a load of complete rubbish, isn’t it?

The special beauty of the way my head works is that once it comes up with a gem like this, it doesn’t send me out immediately to preach my drivel to random acquaintances. Oh no. It plants little fallacious land mines, then sits back and waits for them to detonate. Which can happen any time.

So I’m hanging around one afternoon in January and my wife says to me, “Oh, I meant to tell you - Yvonne de Carlo died.” One of the reasons I know my wife still loves me is that she still tells me things like this. I know maybe five people in the world who both A) know that Yvonne de Carlo played Lily Munster (and also a couple parts on truly fine episodes of Fantasy Island) and B) care. My wife is one of them. I figure if she didn’t love me, she’d talk to one of the other four people about Yvonne de Carlo and leave me out of the loop. At least, this is what I tell myself. In my darker moments, I consider that she may tell all five of us, and I’m at the end of the list.

Let’s not go there now.

So it’s a grey rainy afternoon in London and my wife says to me, “Yvonne de Carlo died.”

And I reply. “Oh no--really? Jeez. First Teller, now Lily Munster.”

My wife got that look on her face that a person gets when they ask someone for directions to the bank and the someone says, “Flipknot hammock furry jinkle buttress.” It was as though she hadn’t experienced enough confusion in her life to be able to fill her question with the right amount:

“What?”

On some level, I sensed her perplexity, but it didn’t register with me, because I considered what I had said matter-of-fact, normal, and entirely a part of the fabric of reality. “What what?” I replied, unhelpfully.

“What did you say just then?”

“Just when?”

“Just then--before the thing about Lily Munster.”

“Jeez?”

My wife did not slap me for this, which demonstrates the full extent of her capacity for restraint. “No, you said someone else died. Who else died?”

“Oh, yeah. Teller. You know. Teller’s dead.”

My wife searched her deepest recesses frantically for more confusion to offer to me. After all, she had turned to me in her hour of need, presented all her confusion and hoped that I would dismiss it with a soothing clarification. Instead, I had taken the big mess of her confusion and before her very eyes sculpted it into an enormous flummox-shaped bafflement.

Her face scrunched up more and she leaned into me and said (with just a vague hint of desperation to her voice), “What the hell are you talking about?”

For a moment my resolve flickered. For a moment, I questioned what my head had told me. But no--it happened. Of course it did. Mentally, I shrugged off the flicker.

“You know, Teller. He died a little bit ago. The fish bone in the restaurant?”

My wife giggled a nervous giggle. “Teller? From Penn and Teller?”

“Yeah. He choked and died a few weeks ago.” I narrated the event for her - the lunch in LA, the whitefish (hake?), the book on magic, the well-meaning bystander, and Teller’s untimely and tragic end. With each detail, the amusement on my wife’s face expanded, and my resolve withered. I found I couldn’t place my source material for the account - had I read it in the newspaper? Unlikely, as I rarely read the newspaper. Television, then. But would TV news have had that book detail in it? Maybe a friend told me about it? Thing was, I hadn’t spoken with those other four people in a long time...

By the time I finished, my wife could barely contain her hysterics. Not that she especially tried. If I’m honest, I should admit that my rising, burning embarrassment did nothing to quell her laughter, nor did my sheepish mutterings of “Shut up.” Suffice it to say that we deduced, together, that the fatalistic Teller anecdote was merely a fantastic lie that I had concocted for a reason that would remain an indefinite mystery.

In any other marriage, that would have been the end of it. As faithful readers of my work will no doubt have discerned by now, however, my marriage differs somewhat from other marriages.

For the next several weeks, the pseudo-spectre of Teller haunted our conversations. Upon learning of Sidney Sheldon’s passing, I said to my wife, “That reminds me...did you hear that Teller from Penn & Teller died?” Initially, my wife could not be sure if I had forgotten our previous conversation on the matter (she held numerous irrefutable precedents upon which she based this uncertainty). To be fair, at this point I wasn’t sure if she had actually had the conversation about Teller, or if it was just a marvelously complicated memory by head had invented for my aggravation and its own amusement (again, my head does this sort of thing from time to time). The idea being, I can hardly fault my wife for her suspicions.

“Teller isn’t dead. You made that up,” she reminded me.

Anna Nicole Smith’s accidental drug overdose: “Wow. She was even younger than Teller when he died.”

“He’s still alive. Why do you keep saying that?”

Ian Richardson’s surprising demise: “His doctor said he was in good health. I think they said Teller had just had a physical.”

“Teller is not dead!”

Kurt Vonnegut’s death following his head injury while at home: “That is a real shame. One of the great black humorists of our day. Speaking of black humorists--”

“NOT DEAD! STILL COMPLETELY ALIVE! LET. IT. GO!”

As you may have surmised, by now I had taken to offering periodic faux-bituaries just to rankle my betrothed. I’ll own up: seeing her flip out because I said Teller was dead when he wasn’t sent ribbons of childish glee up and down my person. I realize this may mean I’m even more disturbed than my behavior to this point suggests, but I don’t care. I’m not proud of this needling torment, mind you. But, given the chance, it’s probably more than fair to say I’d do it again.

One night, we prepared for bed, and I switched the news on. A report came through stating that Charles Nelson Reilly had died of pneumonia. I made my obligatory connection to Teller. My wife, completing her evening’s ablutions, stepped out of the bathroom in order to issue a roary groan (or a groany roar) and howl, “Why do you keep saying that? He is not dead! What is it with you?”

At this moment, my head suggested I ask a question: “Why does it bother you so much?” I can’t imagine why such an obvious line of inquiry hadn’t occurred to me before.

Clearly my wife hadn’t asked this question before either, and she deflated almost visibly before me, as though she had suddenly and involuntarily re-routed all her irate energy into the part of her brain designed to work out problems. Trying to save face, she converted her fluster into annoyance: “I just don’t think it’s a nice thing to do! The poor guy is out there, still alive somewhere, and you keep telling people he’s dead.”

Not people. Just you.

“Well, so what? You still talk about him like he’s dead. And I just don’t think you should because it’s mean.” By now my wife had worked out that she didn’t have enough fluster to generate an annoyance and would have to settle for a sort of medium-strength petulance.

I pointed out that Teller was a much wealthier man than I am, and that he had a great many distractions in his life which might prevent him from hearing that some nobody living in London had fabricated (albeit somewhat comprehensively) a myth concerning the man’s death and refused to let go of it. Actually, given the sorts of shenanigans Penn and he get up to, part of me thought the myth might actually amuse Teller. Even if he wasn’t, he could always seek revenge by telling people that in fact I had died. And he had access to better information-dispersal systems than I did, so his lie would likely reach further than his widow...wife, that is. In short, while my beloved’s defense of the man was admirable and a little cute, I felt fairly confident Teller himself didn’t suffer a whole lot at my hands.

My wife’s final volley fell far short: “I still think you’re mean.”

In the months that followed, I explored my wife’s sensibilities on this subject: why didn’t I let it go? Was the thrill of getting under my wife’s skin really worth playing with the fate-tempting hand-grenade of another man’s suggested death? Did Teller really mean so little to me that I would use him in this way?

Of course, by the time such musings made their way around my head, I knew the answer: yes, I would tempt fate. Yes, my concern for the man approached non-existent. Yes, I would continue to make jokes at the expense of his failing vital signs.

After all, he was dead to me.

(Snook, maybe?)

10 things Og, my caveman neighbor, always complains about

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 01:01:00 +0000

shrieks from women he clubs over head to mate with
local basic cable package pretty lousy
GAP no longer stocks animal-skin loin cloths
sloping forehead draws attention to receding hairline
fireplace mocks him
cost for knuckle-waxing at beautician is highway robbery
dyslexic people who call him "Go"
zoo refuses to give Rogaine to sad, grey, bald woolly mammoth
Curb Your Enthusiasm somehow never seemed quite as funny as Seinfeld
poor selection of dinosaur meat at local deli

lobster bisque belgique

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 01:37:00 +0000

Many of you are undoubtedly familiar with Maurice Sendak's unforgettable 1962 masterpiece of postmodern verse, "Chicken Soup with Rice." The piece spoke to an American people living with the threat of imminent nuclear disaster, confronting the paranoia of the Cold War, reeling from the understanding that the "jungle music" known as "rock 'n roll" was not a fad, but an institution. This America needed reassurance; this America needed to know that the simple life would not be destroyed by bombs, absorbed into some communist conformist sensibility or subverted by Elvis' hips or the Beatles' moptops.

Sendak provided just that reassurance. His folksy, down-home recipe for the simple goodness of life spoke to the hearts and minds of our insecure countrymen. The problems of Sendak's world are modest: drooping roses, August heat, hosting a Halloween party, and so on. And all problems can be solved modestly: with soup.

We live in a different time. We know different things. We lack the insecurity of our parents and grandparents. Should a nuclear disaster grow imminent, Hollywood has taught us that Bruce Willis or Steven Seagal or Nicolas Cage will find the bomb, defuse it and kick the ass of the would-be bombers. In the unlikely event that they fail and plunge us into war and nuclear winter, Hollywood has taught us that time-travelling robots will return to a point prior to detonation and rewrite our future. Communism has proven to be as big a threat to American life as Esperanto. As for rock 'n roll, we have learned that our fear of this music stemmed from our inability to confront our shame. And as we all know, 21st-century America has no shame, so we're happy to let the music of our culture put our rampant gun violence, irresponsible sexual habits and tacit acceptance of illegal drug use to a funky, danceable rhythm.

A different time calls for a different poetic voice. Our children are the children of privilege and ambition. No longer content to tend flowers or host Halloween parties, they become clandestine pot-growers inspired by television and hope one day to crash the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party. Sendak's sentiments have no meaning for them and they drift aimlessly in a world without verse.

Children, drift no longer. I have arrived with the verse for your world. At least for the next six months.

Lobster Bisque Belgique

by Chris McColl (mostly)

a chicken soup for the privileged soul
with much gratitude and a smug sense of entitlement (from whence derives this almost piratical appropriation) to Maurice Sendak

On our January
ski holiday in Gstaad,
Fritz booked us in at Gildo's—well, MY GOD.
Wintering in Suisse? Give it the nod.
Eat one meal.
Eat all week.
Eat their lobster bisque belgique.

In February, I'll be there
for Jean-Paul G's anniversaire
with Puck catering the whole affair--
tres tres fou
tres tres chic
tres tres lobster bisque belgique

In March, Spring Break means that we're dismissed
To Brunei and all its hedonists.
Only ten-figure incomes make the list.
Swim at the Sultan's club.
Swim with the Sultan's clique.
Swim in lobster bisque belgique.

"April is the cruelest month."
T. S. Eliot's said to've said this onth.
Leth cruel? The Fat Duck for Easter lunth.
Heston's bubble
and Heston's squeak
Heston's lobster bisque belgique.

In May, of course we'll go to Cannes,
Enjoy Coco Chanel and coq au vin.
Join George C. at Casino Lucien.
With his winning smile
and my winning streak
We'll be winning lobster bisque belgique.

Divorcees in June say “I re-do”
(in a dress by Wang and shoes by Choo).
Paparazzi fight to get a view.
The couple’s presents? Gorgeous.
The couple’s future? Bleak.
The couple’s passed on lobster bisque belgique.

refond

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 02:31:00 +0000

So I’ve recently become very involved in and passionate about this new sport. It’s called Refond (emphasis on the first syllable). It was invented by my six-year-old daughter Beatrice. The object of the game is that Beatrice wins, no matter what.

To say that Beatrice has a competitive side is accurate only if she is also described as being shaped like a monogon. A monogon the size of the Great Wall of China. To play any game with her is an exercise in subordination, as she automatically assumes that she will go first. A suggestion to the contrary will require an explanation: this will need to be lengthy, convincing and more than likely slightly threatening. And even when and if she finally succumbs to someone else starting a game, the unspoken understanding is that, should this person win, the win will not carry any real weight in the Beatricentric folds of our household.

Crisis points are reached whenever the tide of a particular game turns against my little one--you know, she’s just rounded the final bend in Candyland and draws the card that sends her back to the Peppermint Forest. In these times of crisis, it’s like having a three-foot Allan Dershowitz next to you. Last night, she argued with me fervently that because I rolled the die when it was her turn, she should be allowed to have the number that came up on the die. Nevermind that the roll brought her right back into contention in a game she was losing. That wasn’t the point. Indeed, the rolling of dice is always subject to legal scrutiny in Beatrice’s world: if the roll comes up unfavorably, you’d better hope it didn’t graze your elbow, because of course that means you got in the way and the roll didn’t count. It’s interference.

When she wins, she is insufferable. When she loses, she is inconsolable. In much the same way that she seems to believe that dessert is the only reason to eat a meal, she likewise believes that winning is the only reason to play a game. Losing is not just unacceptable, it is offensive. Losing causes her entire little world to fall in a shattered heap at her feet. And she is old enough to realize that she’s going to lose a lot, since she’s the youngest in the family and she has the least experience with the various games we play (having said this, she possesses one of the most devastating short-term memories I’ve ever come across and one plays Concentration with her at one’s own risk; my defeats at her hands have rarely been anything but humiliating).

The discovery of Refond has finally provided her with certain security in the world of familial competition. She invented it one Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago when she and I were home alone together.

There is nothing I would like more than to explain the rules to you, but it would be like trying to explain the shape of fog. Here’s what I can tell you: it involves a ball. The playing surface is the floor of our family room. I lean against one wall, in the midst of some oversized pillows and a bunch of stuffed bears who live in the pillows. Beatrice sits opposite me, about ten feet away, squeezed between the legs of one of our dining room chairs. We take turns rolling the ball back and forth across the floor. I think I’m meant to try to get the ball between the legs of the chair, which is of course impossible because the entire space between the legs is filled with child. What Beatrice is meant to do is a delightfully protean mystery. Oh, right--occasionally, at random moments, we shout, “Refond!” Well, I say random. Beatrice insists that there are clear reasons for saying it, and that whenever I say it, it’s always at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. Which is fair enough.

In spite of my tone, I must state for the record here that I have had more fun playing Refond than I have ever had playing any other game or sport in my life. Honestly. The beauty of it is, you know that you can’t win, so you don’t really have anything at stake. And with such a plastic set of rules, it’s impossible to play well, so there’s no pressure there either. All that’s left is the opportunity to sit and watch the marvelously convoluted imagination of a six-year-old attempt to turn an ordinary setting and a largely unpredictable series of events into a comprehensible victory. Of some sort.

The flights of rationalization and defensive logic involved in this process are beyond absurd - they are outright hysterical. I have never laughed harder at anything in my life. I have laughed until I gasped, until my abdomen burned with the ache, until I cried. And my daughter, herself infected my hysterics, desperately tried to get control of my laughter in hopes that it would allow her to regain control of her game.

Tonight, for instance, when I said I wanted to play, I began by asking Beatrice to confirm for me the fact that no one but her was allowed to win. This she would not do. I can understand this - without the bitter possibility of losing, winning tastes far less sweet. But I pressed this point, because I have always understood it as central to the game, and I wanted to have my understanding confirmed by the game’s creator and mistress. What I failed to appreciate, however, was that attempting to fix this rule in stone broke the second rule of the game: no Refond rule will ever be fixed in stone.

“You can win if you put the ball in the goal [between the legs of the chair].”

“So I just have to do that once, and then I win?”

“No, if you do that, you get a point.”

“How many points do I need to win?”

“225.”

I laughed here, at both her precision and her excess. I couldn’t help myself. She laughed too. I said, “We can’t play until I score 225 goals.”

“Okay, then, we’ll play to 20.”

“That’s still too much.”

“Okay, then, you can get 10 points for a goal.”

“So I only have to score two goals, and then I can win?”

“Yes,” she replied and promptly filled every square inch of the “goal” with her tiny body.

“Right, so like I said, I can’t win, because there is no way I can get this ball into your goal if you’re going to park yourself in front of it like that.”

“But you have two goals you can use.” This sentence delivered with the authoritative air of the experienced professional reading to the young neophyte from the international rulebook.

“Ah. What’s the other one?”

“The other chair.” She points to another, slightly larger chair, about two feet away from the one she’s gripping.

“Okay, so if I score twice in either of these goals, I win?”

“Yes.”

“Fine.” With this clarification of play, I prepare to roll the ball into the unprotected goal. Sensing this, my daughter shrieks and throws her body flat and outstretched on the floor, such that her arms and head block one chair while her legs block the other.

After a few more minutes’ negotiation, we resume play and I manage to score a goal. “Yes! Ten points!” I yell, the smell of victory finally wafting in my direction. I make a bit of a show here, whooping it up and bragging of my accomplishment to my other daughter, seated nearby. Beatrice, meanwhile, insists that I’ve only earned two points. I shout back that she said the goal was worth ten. Our debate escalates, and she senses that my superior volume could win the day. So, when I am momentarily distracted by her sister, Beatrice kicks the ball wildly. It bounces off the coffee table and hits me on the foot.

This move was apparently precisely what she was going for, as evidenced by her reaction: “HAH! YES!! GOAL! 5000 points! BOO-YAH!!!”

Game play is paused here as the phrase “boo-yah” coming out of the face of my child has reduced me, once again, to a giggling mess. The girls follow suit. When, minutes later, Beatrice is finally able to draw enough oxygen into her lungs to speak, she explains (rather haughtily, in my opinion) that if the ball ever hits a player after it bounces off of something, the player who throws it gets 5,000 points.

Again, fair enough. I have no one to blame for my ignorance but myself, after all.

One of my favorite aspects of Refond is that, unlike conventional sport, it does not have a clear endpoint. There are no banal markers like “innings” or “quarters” or “periods” or the like. Instead, each Refond event contents itself with a slow disintegration under the weight of its own complexity. At some point, my attempt to reconcile the various rules that Beatrice has constructed, along with her attempt to keep track of her own contradictions and reversals, will leave us both prone on the floor, psychicly shattered. Sometimes gameplay will be halted by a bathroom break, which walk might itself occasion a glimpse of some distraction more enticing than Refond: mom making lunch or sister fiddling around at some website. Every so often, as different props are introduced as Refond equipment, the props themselves lead the players into other recreation.

In all these instances, the promise of continuing the game remains in the air as heavy as the reality of the game’s conclusion. Some element of Refond, then, permeates all our daily activities; the game goes on for Beatrice even when it isn’t Refond season.

So, now we also play Refond Race to the Top of the School Steps (“You weren’t holding the rail the whole way up! I win!”) and Refond Clear the Breakfast Dishes Best (“Yours didn’t count because you pushed in my chair and I was supposed to do that. I win!”)

Someday, I hope to compile a rulebook for Refond - one that real sports geeks will pore over and memorize in order to engage in legalistic debates with one another, like they do about the designated hitter rule in baseball and the offside rule in European football. I’d love for there to be a National Refond League: a whole bunch of people who get together and compete in the sport and know that, no matter what happens in the end, Beatrice wins.

Even if she isn’t there.

zen rude-ism: the principle of not-doing-by-having-someone-else-do

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 02:07:00 +0000

from Lai-tze's fourth sutra

He who seeks Zen must learn to do by not doing. HOWEVER...if he can learn to do by having someone else do for him, he can seek Zen while enjoying a nice salad and having his dry cleaning picked up.

--Rude-ist Master Lai-Tze

the third kondo of Lai-Tze

After laboring for weeks, Seiko wandered one morning into the hut of his master, Lai-Tze. He found his master playing a ball-and-cup game while reclining in a bamboo chair.

“Master,” Seiko said, breathless and weak, “I require your wisdom.”

“You got it, kid,” said Lai-Tze. “Shoot.”

“You have told me I would find Zen in the mending of your roof. I did not. You said I would find Zen in the tending of your garden. I have not. You taught that I would find Zen in the cleaning of your dishes. I have not. Nor have I found Zen in the washing of your clothes, the sweeping of your floor, or in the drawing of your bath each evening. Each day I end my meditations in exhaustion, feeling no closer to Awakening.” Seiko sat on the floor heavily.

“Hey, look, you can't rush these things,” the master advised. “I mean, Zen could be anywhere! In your ear, under a bath mat, the bottom of a lake. Who knows? You can't force it. You've got to be more like me. For instance, when I want clean laundry, you don't see me racing out to get it myself, do you? I just wait, and it comes to me.”

“But that is because I bring it to you,” Seiko said.

“Very clever. And you say you're no closer to Awakening.” The master winked. “Now, I'm pretty sure I saw some Zen in the kitchen. So, if you go make my lunch, you might stumble across it.”

Seiko felt wisdom creep over him. “But, Master, would not the wise course be to wait and let Awakening come to me here?”

“No. That totally won't work. You need to go make lunch. Seriously.”

“But—“

“Trust me on this. I'll have a sandwich.” The master returned to his ball-and-cup game.

Seiko prepared tuna melts.

10 reasons I'm going straight to Hell when I die

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 01:54:00 +0000

you'll no doubt be pleased to learn that the trees who died making the tree-death (printable) version of this list all went to straight to Hell as well

mocking the "Taller Women Dating Shorter Men Support Group" website
contract I signed with Satan
saying Johnny Cash's performance in last music video must have been posthumous
always rearranging tchochkies in apartment of OCD friend
spending time at wife's aunt's funeral making up "The Sphincter Song" in my head
telling daughters last weekend that if they didn't lay off one another I'd pick up the smaller one by the ankles and whack the bigger one with her
actually writing down rules for party game called Mean-Spirited Judgment of Others
I'm just a bad person
could't resist great deal spiritual travel agent got me on direct SulfurousAir flight**
must do what it says on the Community Chest card I picked last time I played Monopoly

**Offer good only upon demise. Ticket non-refundable, non-transferrable. Not valid with any other offer. Void where prohibited.

tejal's hypothetical wedding

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 01:29:00 +0000

in the interest of the brevity of life, you might wish to skip over all this and plow right onto the tree-death (printable) version of the poem

I need to preface this particular piece of mental effluvium with two key bits of information about the primary players in this poem. Tejal, our protagonist, is in actual fact a sweet, funny, warm, kind person for whom I have more than a great deal of affection. By contrast, I am a jerk and a meanie (seriously - I even have the medallion to prove it).

Having said this, I should provide that essential bit of background that led me to compose the forthcoming bit of verse.

At the time, I worked in an office with Tejal and another equally wonderful woman named Wendy. Both Tejal and Wendy enjoy the odd evening out; for that matter, they don’t especially mind the even evening out either. Tejal spends a good bit of time clubbing and such, while Wendy likes nothing better than a fag and a pint with some mates at any pub with a reasonably friendly face behind the bar. I, on the other hand, much prefer the comfort of my own home, wherein I can slob around in pajama bottoms, slippers and an old sweater, bask in the loving glances of my wife and children and act like as big a goon as I wish.

Over time, as nature dictates, my propensity for dinner and television at home evolved into a reputation. I was “the guy who never went anywhere.” People stopped inviting me out because they guessed I’d say no. Which worked out fine, because they pretty much always guessed right.

Tejal in particular found this behavior incomprehensible. At work, I appeared to her to be an affable, outgoing sort of fellow. It was anathema, then, that I would sequester myself every evening and thus deny the world my congeniality. So wrong did she find this that she often questioned my motives on the matter.

One such interrogation went like this:

Tejal: So Chris, if I got married, would you come to my wedding?

Chris: It depends.

This was clearly the wrong answer. Tejal launched into a long harangue about how she couldn’t believe I wouldn’t go to her wedding after we’d been friends for so long and this was such an important day to her and so on. I stressed what I thought were a couple salient points. First, at that time, Tejal wasn’t even dating anybody, let alone engaged. Second, I didn’t say I wouldn’t go. I said, “It depends.”

For some reason, these facts did not make her feel any better. After a few more minutes spent berating me and attempting to draw Wendy over to her side of what she clearly saw as an argument, she asked a follow-up question: “What if Wendy got married? Would you go to her wedding?”

Now, I recognize that my response to this question was arguably even more ill-advised than my answer to Tejal’s first question. But those of you who have read my “Wagon Training” essay (also on this blog!) will be familiar with my honesty dysfunction. Actually, it’s more of a dishonesty dysfunction, in that I find, in moments of extreme pressure, I am incapable of lying. It is thus for this reason that I answered Tejal’s question, rather too rapidly, by saying,

“Sure.”

In my defense, there is a VERY good reason why my answers to the questions of my friends’ hypothetical weddings were discrepant. But I don’t want to go into all that now. You’ll just have to trust me. Or else buy me a case of Leffe beer (brun, please, not blond) and I’ll email it to you.

I did explain this reason to Tejal, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. For some peculiar reason, she became fixated on the idea that I would go to Wendy’s wedding without a moment’s hesitation, but I wouldn’t go to hers (again, I pointed out I didn’t say no, only “It depends,” but you can guess how far that got me).

The rest of that work day was basically one long bout of grief-taking on my part. I felt really bad about the whole situation. Not bad enough to take back anything I’d said, you understand, because after all, I am a jerk and a meanie. But bad enough to write a bad poem in Tejal’s honor.

So here it is.

Tejal's Hypothetical Wedding

It Depends

Tejal had planned a hypothetical wedding.

Her fake registry listed things for which she'd long yearned.

She daydreamed of make-believe crystal and bedding—

All those expensive gifts she could one day return.

Tejal dreamt up invitations to her wedding:

Invisible gold leaf on silk bond for her friends.

She thought mine to me with those words I'd been dreading:

"Chris, are you coming?" I replied, "It depends."

"I can't believe you wouldn't come to my wedding."

I stressed "It depends" is not the same thing as "No."

Still, I knew where the conversation was heading.

Before long, beaten down, I told her that I'd go.

After all, it was a non-existent wedding.

Gordon Ramsay would cook for celebs and royals

Baked organic free-range chicken with multi-grain breading

And a fish course of mackerel for Omega-3 oils.

Vera Wang herself the seamstress for the wedding,

The flowers all lilies and orchids in blossom,

The groom, that Love Island bloke the media gave such a shredding—

Not bright, but very rich, and the sex would be awesome.

It wouldn't exactly be an Indian wedding,

But Tejal's fantasy mum would be happy with that.

Her dad would coach in from some dive out in Reading,

And in every picture, dad's new wife would look fat.

And as it was an hallucinatory wedding,

I showed up wet with snow in my nicest pajamas.

I didn't drive in—I arrived there by sledding

Along with Tejal's gift: life-size robot llamas.

Tejal processed down the aisle for her imagin'ry wedding.

Eight baby seals honked as Elton sang his rewritten "Candle."

The bridesmaids gave lapdances—chaos was spreading!

Eating my chocolate pew, I watched the ensuing scandal.

A bouncy-castle reception followed the wedding.

Tejal thought Pete Tong's bagpiping discs would never end.

Then a French matador screamed, "Mon Dieu! A beheading!"

One of my llamas had bitten the head off the reverend

(He'd grow a lollipop head before his next wedding).

And the reception concluded as the sky turned maroon.

The tables walked over to see Tejal mopedding

From the reception to Lagos for their honeymoon.

Tejal imagined my thank-you note after her wedding,

Her illusion of Love's battle and her wedded bliss won.

"Will you come to the real thing?" she asked, tears almost shedding.

"It depends," I replied. "Only if it's like this one."

the last word in film - answers

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 02:16:00 +0000

1. The Man Who Would Be the Lion King

2. The Neverending Philadelphia Story

3. Barefoot in the Jurassic Park

4. Around the World in 80 Radio Days

5. In the Line of Chariots of Fire

6. Forget an American in Paris

7. Prelude to a French Kiss

8. Attack of the Killer Fried Green Tomatoes

9. Groundhog Independence Day

10.Father of the Princess Bride

11.No Way In and Out

12.A Few Good Grumpy Old Men

13.The Truman Quiz Show

14.A View to a License to Kill

15.The Truth About Cats and Reservoir Dogs

the last word in film

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 02:18:00 +0000

Each year, Hollywood’s editors hold the Splice World Film Festival. Of course, editors don’t finance their own films; instead, they take pieces left on editing-room floors and mix them to make new movies from previous releases. To simplify things, they only fuse movies that share the last words of their titles. You might see two men trade murders on a locomotive that is hijacked by Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes in Strangers on a Money Train, or Clark Gable falling in love with Claudette Colbert over a sumptuous Italian meal in It Happened One Big Night. Can you identify the Splice World films described below? (Note: the first film referred to in the description comes first in the spliced title)

(by the way, the Splice World Film Festival program can also be read in tree-death [printable] version)

1. Michael Caine and Sean Connery travel to an animated Indian jungle to help Simba, a young cub, fight his murderous uncle for control of the throne.

2. A boy buys a mysterious fantasy book about a young upper-class woman (Katherine Hepburn) romanced by her ex-husband and a writer for a society magazine.

3. Newlyweds Jane Fonda and Robert Redford take a New York City apartment and find their wacky domestic life complicated by genetically-engineered dinosaurs.

4. Phileas Fogg sets off to circumnavigate the globe, all of which looks strangely like Rockaway and Manhattan, in a film narrated by Woody Allen.

5. Clint Eastwood, an aging Secret Service man brought in to guard the President, trains for his assignment with the 1924 British Olympic running team.

6. Billy Crystal plays an NBA referee who romances Debra Winger by moving to France and taking up painting, all the while singing and dancing to Gershwin music.

7. On her wedding day, Meg Ryan’s soul enters an old man’s body; the groom, Alec Baldwin, flees, leaving the bride-to-be to get him back, with the help of an infuriating European con man, played by Kevin Kline.

8. In this cult horror film, marauding vegetables try to conquer the world, starting with the women visiting the Whistle Stop Café in Alabama.

9. Bill Murray finds himself reliving the same period of time over and over again, trapped until he helps save humanity from invading aliens.

10. Steve Martin must deal with his daughter’s imminent marriage to a two-faced, fairy-tale tyrant and enlists the aid of a pirate, a giant, and a Spanish swordsman.

11. After an affair with Sean Young, mistress of the Secretary of Defense, Kevin Costner worries about his future at the Pentagon when an actor at the Academy Awards reveals that one of his high-school teachers is gay.

12. Military lawyer Tom Cruise is sent to investigate the mysterious murder of a Marine and implicates loveable curmudgeons Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon.

13. Jim Carrey thinks he’s had a normal life until he discovers he’s been on camera since birth, as a contestant on a rigged 1950s trivia program.

14. James Bond must stop a maniac who wants to flood the Silicon Valley, while at the same time preventing a druglord from making billions of dollars on cocaine sales.

15. Janeane Garofalo and Uma Thurman star in an unusual remake of Cyrano de Bergerac, which involves not only gender reversal, but also a botched diamond heist carried out by men named after colors.

Answers will premiere tomorrow. Get your tuxes and gowns out of storage.

zen rude-ism: the list of jerks

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McColl) — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 03:20:00 +0000

Pying Pyong's Sutra of the Jerks (Sutra 18)

Pying-Pyong told his dog,

“I tell you, kid, there are basically ten kinds of jerk in the world that I should never want you to meet as meeting them is something that shouldn't happen to a dog.

“First there are those jerks like you've never even met a jerk like this before in your life.

“Then there are those jerks who are so busy thinking about how swell they are they don't see what jerks they're being.

“There are anal-retentive jerks what correct your grammar and make you use coasters and like that.

“There are jerks who only want to see you so they can beg something off you like a jerk.

“And the jerks you just hate just by looking at them.

“And the good-looking jerks. Them I don't like so much either.

“Let's not leave out the holier-than-thou jerks.

“Or conceited jerks with heads the size of I don't even know what and what do they have such a swelled head about anyway?

“And jerks who have energy to burn and they always burn it on being jerks.

“And stupid jerks.

“But I'll tell you kid, the worst of all are the good-looking stupid jerks who tell you ‘It's “between you and me ,' not “between you and I”' and then mooch five bucks from you.”