Hail, Caesar, and Other Bad Weather

I recently moved from the hinterlands to the metrop. It has taken me some time to make the transition. Our bustling citadel, Ogguster, has enough people in it to fill the bleachers at Fenway, or maybe start a statewide insurrection if the constabulary is sleeping. But Johnny Law only sleeps in the daytime, because that’s when they’re on the clock, and sedition traditionally happens after the sun goes down, so there’s not much danger of that.

I’ve had to make new friends. My old friends were reliable, but somewhat uncultured. They were generous to a fault, though. They didn’t seem to mind it when I’d take an armload of firewood from their pile, as long as it was in the middle of the night while they were sleeping. I knew their habits well, and discerned that asking during the day would have been an additional imposition on their time, so I avoided that as well. I hate bothering people.

It took me a while to find a new tabernacle to worship at in Ogguster. I had to hunt around for my particular denomination, but I eventually found one by following the neon signs. This particular bethel has perhaps more beer taps than yours. I’ve been instructed by everyone from the pope to that Clinton woman to socialize, and worship the redeemer, in my own way, so I do. It takes a village to fill the stools at our local mission house, or at least an army base nearby, so maybe she had a point. I’m not sure I should trust her opinions other than that. She’s rich, but she splits her time between Arkansas and upstate New York. That smacks of bouncing your head off the Scylla and Charybdis over and over, without even trying to navigate the water in between. And as far as the pope goes, we do have something like communion wafers, although they’re much larger, and they have logos all over them, and you set your chalice on them. They taste about the same at the Catholic variety, so I assume they’re valid tickets to the Glory Land anyway.

So my new friend in the city, Norman Rockwall, asked me if I wanted to see a local feller play Two Gentlemen of Verona in Monmouth. I remarked that I didn’t really care for soccer, and two against one seemed a trifle unfair, even if the Verona squad was unranked. He explained that he was talking about going to see Shakespeare. I admitted I didn’t care who was holding the tickets, I still wasn’t interested. Eventually I got the drift, though, that it was a night at the theater he was touting. That sounded classy. I never miss a chance to put on my best bib and tucker, so I said sure.

We ended up outside a building big enough to be a reform school, but less charming. We got our ducats and went inside and climbed two or three hundred flights of stairs, or so it seemed to me, and sat with our backs to the wall up among the cobwebs. From our vantage  point, it was a flea circus, but my friend assured me that the actors were bound to have good elocution. I professed indifference on what kind of tradesmen they might be during the day, I just wanted to make sure they yelled loud enough so we’d know who was the villain, so I’d know who to root for.

Just then, way down front, I spotted some guys dressed for a funeral. They were generally molesting some form of fiddle. They had all kinds. They tucked some under their chins, with a hanky in between, so I knew they must have been rented, but not cleaned every time, like a rental car. Some had bigger ones that sat between their knees. Other fellas had some too big to ride like a gentleman, and they sorta stood next to it and tried to play is side saddle. They were making a terrible racket, each playing something else, and I wondered aloud why they they’d get dressed up and pay for primo seats like that and then cause such a commotion. Norman explained that they were just tuning up, and that they were the orchestra. This flummoxed me. I tune up my snowmobile in the garage, not on the trail. Don’t musicians have a garage?

The theatrical bill of fare had shifted, and Norman informed me that the Two Gentlemen of Verona had the night off, probably to go home and guard their woodpiles. Tonight’s menu was going to be something along the lines of Julius Caesar vs. All Comers, sorta like a wrestling match at a county fair. I wasn’t too “up” on Julius, but Norman filled me in some. Julio was some form of garlic eater back in the day, and he bivouacked in Gaul several times, at least until he got tired of being so far from his woodpile all the time. Then he went one last time and turned the Gaullians into regular Frenchmen, who couldn’t do no harm, and became sort of military speed bumps forevermore. I covered my ears and yelled, “Spoilers!”, but Norman assured me that the play was about a totally different kettle of fish. Caesar was a busy dude and had all sorts of adventures, I gathered. No idea when he had time left over to invent salads and Orange Julius.

Then the curtain went up and the show was purdy good. Julius came rolling into town like it was the circus. Some carpenters and cobblers and assorted other people who lost their jobs to the Chinese started in with dost thous and beseechings, and various other incomprehensible blather, and then started going on and on about the Ides of March, which if you ask me isn’t half as scary as April 15th, but no one in Hollywood ever listens to me.

So Caesar’s wife California wanted him to call in sick to work but she’s not as good looking as Cleopatra so he went anyway. His friends are throwing one of those Animal House parties where everyone’s wearing bedsheets and partying hearty and he doesn’t want to miss it. So he goes, and get this, his friends stab him at the foot of Pompeii, which wasn’t erupting just then, I guess. Brutus was involved somehow, but I didn’t see Popeye or Wimpy or anyone amusing. The proceedings were kind of depressing, truth be told.

Then Caesar’s friend Mark Anthony threw one of those Iranian funerals where the crowd kinda tosses the interested party around like a ragdoll and generally act like they’re at a rave instead of a requiem. This was all followed up by some battle scenes that wouldn’t fit on the stage. Then everyone except Ogguster Caesar commits suicide. I guess Ogguster was vice-Caesar or something, but I gather not many people voted for him, or even knew he was on the ballot, just like our elections.

Well, it was a pretty good show, all around, but they should probably spring for more fake blood if they want to keep people interested in the cheap seats. And George Lucas coulda told them that it was a mistake to massacre Julius in the first play, right out of the gate. It makes sequels pretty difficult, and being back before Christ, the opportunities for time travel or clones were few and far between. But still, two thumbs up from this reviewer. No Christians were harmed in the making of the play, and the horses were killed off-stage.

Top Ten Adviceses for Aspirating Writerers

Before I begin with the advices, I’m required to pull rank somehow. Lay out my bona fidos. In order to tempt you to take writing advice from me, I have to lure you into thinking that I’ve managed to produce some form of folding money by writing. That’s the Holy Grail, and I have to convince you I’ve had a swig from it before you’ll listen to me. Here goes: I’m such a good writer that I have intermittently been able to cover the monthly fee for keeping a bank account open to accept the money I’ve earned by writing. I know, huh? How awesome is that?

I don’t mean to brag, but I have adjectives I haven’t even used yet. I can swear more convincingly than Edna St. Vincent Millay and write dialog better than any you’ll find in the Encyclopedia Britannica. I can make grown men weep and women violent. I have the touch, and I’m here to give you the benefit of my touching.

I started out fairly wretched, so it was easier for me to become an inkstained wretch than most people. I wrote a book that had pages with printing on both sides and two covers that were too far apart. I sold several copies of that book to drunk persons who found themselves on Amazon at 4 AM (it’s my target demographic). That doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily have that kind of luck. Those people might have sobered up by now. I advise you to start off slowly and confine yourself to writing for the Internets. But whatever you decide, make sure you confine yourself, or someone else will.

Here’s my Top Ten Adviceses for Aspirating Writerers:

1. Make sure all the guidance you seek out on any topic is from a deciled list. Never read anything with even a hint of paragraphs about it. Numbered pages are right out. Don’t waste your time with any wild-eyed iconoclasts while you’re poking around the Intertunnel looking for your lists. Remember that nothing important ever consists of nine or eleven items. Ten items is your guarantee of quality.
2. Use words like “deciled” in your writing. It wasn’t a word until I made it a word in the previous entry on this list. Sprinkle in words like that, and pretty soon your blog or website or honeypot or whatever will be search engine optimized to be Numero Uno, baby, whenever anyone uses Google to look for words that don’t exist. Just watch the money roll in from that.
3. Only express strong opinions about who shot first or the dress some talentless skank was wearing at the Oscars. All other opinions will be met with an endless cavalcade of death threats on Twitter and bad reviews on Yelp! — whether or not you own a business. Yelpers will found a company under your name, rent a strip mall storefront, and then fill it with employees just so they can give you bad reviews if you express certain opinions that are beyond the pale. Never mention that Windows 10 works just fine, for instance.
4. Make sure you tell everyone how passionate you are about writing. Let’s say you’re applying for a job offered by a Bangladeshi spammer on People per Hour to fill out an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the comments he’s leaving on abandoned blogs for generic Nair for back hair. It’s really important for you to assure him how passionate you are about that type of work. The job pays almost as well as delivering gluten-free pizza using Uber cab service, so you’re going to have to show some serious passion if you want to beat out Mikayla, Michaela, Makaila, Makhailla, and Premjit for the job.
5. You need a headshot photo. Make sure it’s taken of you, by you, at arm’s length. Employers have learned to trust only people who appear to be furtively looking up at the surveillance camera in a convenience store while pursing their lips into a kind of smirk. It gives off a vibe that screams: passion.
6. Sometimes passion alone isn’t enough to get that Kenyan to award you that erotic fiction e-book gig. That’s when you need to haul out the big guns, and assure them that you have a real “flare” for writing to amplify all that passion.
7. You’re going to have to know all about how sexy a werewolf is. You can’t limit your ability to textually sexify werewolves solely to the terrestrial kind, either. Bone up on sexy interstellar  werewolves along with the domestic breeds. It never hurts to have a minor in Sexy Vampirism to go with your B.A. in Libidinous Lycanthropy.
8. Don’t make the mistake of offering content that’s too challenging for the average college-educated person to understand. I mean, does that GIF really need to be animated? Can’t it just be a GIF?
9. Use mnemonic devices to organize your daily efforts. For instance, I keep a little framed sign on my desk that says: K.I.S.S.. It’s an acronym that reminds me that if I don’t write something and sell it soon, I might be Killed Indiscriminately by the ShutzStaffel. I think that’s what it stands for. I got it from the tail end of a deciled list and can only remember the first three items. Number 4 was an animated GIF, and I got confounded.
10. Under no circumstances get a real job and leave writing to people who are good at it. Get a real job and then use the office computer to write badly and show those starving writers they’re starving for a reason.

Well, there you have it. You’re now ready to enter the lucrative world of Intertunnel writing. If you’re wondering if my advice is any better than the other 40,995,651 websites offering writing advice, I urge you to search on Google for “Top Ten Adviceses for Aspirating Writerers.” I assure you I’ll be the very first entry on the search results. That’s how the quality of everything on the Intertunnel is determined.

Parsing The Candidates

Of course it’s election season. The die has been cast, and broken, and used again anyway. I know they’ll keep counting ballots until their Kyoceras run out of toner, but it appears the results won’t shift much, so I feel safe to weigh in on the election, so my readers can understand how I arrive at an electoral strategy.

I tried something new this year. Normally, I simply take my ill-considered opinions into the voting booth and vote against all sorts of people. I never vote for anyone. I feel that only encourages them. Politicians should always feel that every ballot is filled out with the off hand pinching the nostrils. If they feel you’re enthusiastic about them, instead of just settling for them, they do things like invade Poland. But this year I wanted to vote, just once, for someone. I wanted to feel that surge of self-satisfaction that others enjoy when they’re filling out ballots for a favored son, even if they’re just filling out absentee ballots for comatose nursing home denizens.

This proved difficult. I don’t know a lot of politicians. I can’t remember if they shake babies and kiss hands, or the other way around. I can’t seem to recall which ones are for being against, and which are against being for. I knew I’d need to bone up to make an informed decision. And I’m not much of a boner.

So I decided to simply drive around, and count the number of signs by the side of the road. More signs must mean the candidate would be better at excoriating the Federal Reserve bank for their insistence on using paper instead of doubloons, or taunting midgets in sweatclothes into fighting the Russian army. On the local level, more signs would indicate more brothers-in-law who could help you run the the motor vehicle department more efficiently by not showing up for work very often. Numbers aren’t everything in this scheme, however. I also ranked them on their choice of fonts. How else are you supposed to decide who’s fly and who’s wack?

It was a tough go. There were a lot of signs. Lots. The circus used to be more circumspect about touting themselves. And they were all jumbled together on lawns and intersection islands. It was hard to tell who hated who by the signs alone. Once upon a time, you could tell the political parties by simply observing the color of the text. Red team was always for things like annexing the Sudetenland, and blue team was for five year plans for the collective farms you’d be living in. There were also political garanimal clues. If there was an elephant label in their underwear, they wanted Mexicans to mow their lawns, but not vote. A donkey in their underoos wanted the Mexicans to vote, but not pester them in the Home Depot parking lot.

I noticed people running for the senate using only their first name on their signs. This seemed a trifle familiar to my ear, er, eye. I always picture senators wearing, if not togas, at least a clip on tie, and being somewhat serious. When I vote for a senator, I prefer a triple-barreled name to make my choice seem more important. Serial killers and senators should always have a middle name, not just a Christian name and a surname. Bonus points would be awarded if the middle name is Wayne. All serial killers seem to have Wayne as their middle name. It lends an air of seriousness to their affairs. Senators kill at least as many people, so they should try to keep up. They should put their confirmation name on their posters, instead of touting themselves on posters like they’re Cher or Madonna or Mussolini or something.

There were a lot of signs for a Harris/Walz ticket. No other information or clues was added to their posters, just their names, so I had to guess what kind of politicians they were. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think that both Richard Harris and Christopher Waltz are fine actors, but  I was unsure they’d make efficient administrators at the federal level. I was doubly suspicious in this regard because Waltz allowed so many signs to be printed with his name misspelled. Forgetting little things like that are the sort of thing that gets you embroiled in wars in Korea. Just ask Dean Acheson. Others might object to Richard Harris because he’s a foreigner, and dead, but neither of those things is an impediment to voting, so I don’t see why it should disqualify you from serving a term or two in office.

There was some other fellow named Trump Vance running, and he had a lot of signs. I think his only claim to fame was being a descendant of the actress who played Ricky and Lucy’s downstairs neighbor back in the fifties on cathode-ray television. I had nothing else to go on but his pedigree.  The press has been entirely mum about him.

There were many hyphenated women running for various offices. Their signs reminded me of spelling class in the first grade, where you’d start writing your name and run out of room for the last three letters in your last name. My wife doesn’t like to squint at male stripper shows, and I don’t like squinting at political Burma-Shave signs, so I wasn’t going to cast a vote for any of them.

But there was one guy I felt was the man for the job. I wasn’t sure what job, because his yard sign only contained his first and last name. But I figured a man with that amount of moxie, who could simply put his name out there on his yard signs, no other clues, had the self-assurance I appreciate in an executive at any level. He didn’t have anywhere near the number of signs as any of the other candidates, but their rarity just made them more memorable, like a wart on the end of a stripper’s nose. He was my guy.

His name wasn’t pre-printed anywhere on the ballot, another sign of his supreme confidence, I thought. I wasn’t even sure what position he was running for, so I wrote it in next to every race on the ballot. I was proud and happy to vote for Douglas Roofing for everything. I’m not sure if he won, but if he did, he should thank the guy that printed his signs. And me, of course.

Sippican Cottage Exclusive: Insider Whistleblower Reveals How Crowdstrike Broke the Internet

Exclusive video! Must credit Sippican Cottage!

Or, you know, The IT Crowd.