Department Of Incongruity Department

I'd sell your heart to the junkman baby
For a buck, for a buck
If you're looking for someone to pull you out of that ditch
You're out of luck, you're out of luck

Ship is sinking
The ship is sinking
The ship is sinking

There's a leak, there's a leak in the boiler room
The poor, the lame, the blind
Who are the ones that we kept in charge?
Killers, thieves and lawyers

God's away, God's away
God's away on business, business
God's away, God's away
God's away on business, business

Digging up the dead with a shovel and a pick
It's a job, it's a job
Bloody moon rising with a plague and a flood
Join the mob, join the mob
It's all over, it's all over
It's all over

There's a leak, there's a leak in the boiler room
The poor, the lame, the blind
Who are the ones that we kept in charge?
Killers, thieves and lawyers

God's away, God's away
God's away on business, business
God's away, God's away on business, business

Godddamn there's always such a big temptation
To be good, to be good
There's always free cheddar in a mousetrap, baby
It's a deal, it's a deal

God's away, God's away
God's away on business, business
God's away, God's away
God's away on business, business

I narrow my eyes like a coin slot baby
Let her ring, let her ring

God's away, God's away
God's away on business, business
God's away, God's away
God's away on business, business

Tom Waits/ Kathleen Brennan

A Near-Fatal Overdose Of Early Seventies Hip-Shaking Awesomeness

Pan's People were a dance troupe that Top of the Pops used to trot out when a pop single absolutely had to be played and the band that recorded it was too stoned or had 10 percent too much dignity to show up and lip-sync it. And you had to play T. Rex in 1971.

T. Rex was Marc Bolan and a loose gaggle of other blokes. A lot of rock critics point to Bolan as the milepost that marks the birth of Glam Rock, even though there were plenty of art-school fops like Bryan Ferry straddling the Liberace/TeddyBoy divide visually and musically just then. Bolan was dead in a car crash before the decade ended, even though he was so afraid of dying in a car crash that he never got a driver's license. Life is like that sometimes.

Everyone would point to Bang a Gong as their big hit, but Jeepster is the really kewl thing you'd put in a seventies movie soundtrack if you knew what you were doing.

I'm getting old. The contemporary emcee's joke at the beginning about David Cameron falls flat for me. I know David Cameron was only five when that video was made -- but I was almost old enough to take a run at those sherbert-colored qiana-clad hip-hugger and halter-topped pre-boob-job-buxom bell-bottomed babes after the show. I would have invited them to play army man with me, but still.

I Think I've Been Spending TOO Much Time With My Family. Everything Is Starting To Sound The Same

Link goes to YouTube:

Sippican's Handy Guide To Writing On The Internet

Hello, Interfriends. I'm from the Intertunnel, and I'm here to help. Perhaps you're new to blogging, or you're so busy running your actual empires that writing a short essay each day is cutting into your FarmVille time. Try my handy guide to writing blogposts, now in NEW, handy, step-by-step format. It's so easy, any fool can do it, and probably will.

Sippican's Handy Guide To Writing On The Internet:

(Parse innocuous comments by prominent dullards for deep and sinister meanings. Read only extemporaneous verbal remarks, transcribed by detractors who can't spell and edited by invertebrates, and refer to them like they're a legal brief.)

Insert picture chosen from thousands to make person look bad here. Bonus points for unwittingly using photoshopped examples stolen from Google.

(Clumsily disguise editorial comments masquerading as a search for information here. Refer to previously published balderdash as gospel to support. Steal what you can from Wikipedia, but don't just cut and paste. Paste the text into your Apple thingie and type a new version right below it, then erase the original. Confuse "reign" and "rein" to prove you went to college.)

(Place apostrophes all over the place until your text looks vaguely arabic. Make up all sorts of imaginary rules for where they go, like before the pluralizing "s" on a word that ends in a vowel. These rules are similar to the law your friend told you about that driving with your shoes off is illegal. Your friend can neither confirm nor contradict this idea for you; he was shot dead by a policeman during a routine traffic stop because he was fumbling around under his seat and the policeman capped him. The policeman sure looked silly when the guy only had an unlaced shoe in his hand.)

(Under no circumstances learn actual grammatical rules by heart. Make sure to use the term "teaching to the test" unironically and pejoratively when referring to any educational enterprise, including the education you didn't get.)

(Never refer to any evidence. Write "the science" like a four-year-old would. If anyone ever corrects your grammar, including mentioning that it's not spelled "grammer," make sure to unhinge your jaw and scream at your monitor while you call them the sort of person that places other persons in an oven, and then tell them to perish in a conflagration. Remember, ALL CAPS is not just for acronyms anymore; it's for BEING UNASSAILABLY CORRECT ON THE INTERNETS. Your ambivalence about (your)grammar notwithstanding, if any person refuses to hew to the imaginary dictum that LEGO blocks in the plural never be referred to as legos, or stubbornly refuses to care how to spell "Wookiee," come at them like they owe you money.)

ATTENTION: No male human will pay attention to you on the Intertunnel if you don't have pictures of broads on your page. Even the gay men demand this. So make with the hubba hubba or get used to tumbleweeds in your sitemeter:

If you want women to read, too, you're going to have to play a deeper game than just hoary old pictures of Italian actresses. You need to find pictures of women eating ice cream while reading recipes and dieting advice during a shoe-shopping expedition. I'm not sure where to get those without reading The Frisky, so we're going to have to improvise:

(Here's a good spot to start making a dog's breakfast of compound words. Split them apart when you're using them as adjectives, even though that makes half of the resulting two words back into an extra verb in the sentence. Then smash two others together for no reason because some crummy website's URL does, and it looks funny if you don't. Most everything grammatically correct  looks funny at this point; you can't go by that.)

(Here's where we just throw in the towel and write a blogpost that announces that the semicolon is useless, because you have no idea how to use it, and from now on it's banned on the Intertunnel because you said so. Get some jellyfish at a style guide desk to agree with you, after they've finished decreeing that we all go into the sewer through a personhole. Almost forgot: If you write for the Uppastump Vermont Yankee and Coupon Clipper Gazette and you're too dull-witted to even cover the town meetings and they send you  to cover high school sports instead, make sure you go out of your way to farg up the acronym "RBI" and use it for a plural, too. In conversation, double down on the awesome and utter: Rs BI. )

(Too two to tu. I'm a little Intertunnel train. To Two! Too To! I go 'round and 'round in circles going: To Too! Where to I go around in circles? Over they're. Your stupid if you don't know that.)

(Now we're going to beg the question. Everything begs the question. You are going to use this term more than a dullard with barbecue sauce all down his muu-muu shirt covering the Pats uses the term "step up." You are going to ladle "begging the question" all over everything like some sort of idiomatic gravy. You will, however, never once use it to mean what it actually means, which is petitio principii. When challenged, you will refer to any number of your shortbus colleagues infesting the Intertunnel who have written blogposts announcing that since so many people are dullards and use terms they don't understand, it now magically works as anything you want it to, like a Webster's Swiss Army knife.)

(Moving on, be sure to point out that certain newsgathering outlets are sinister cabals run by shadowy malefactors and staffed by malignant hatchetmen. Then endlessly link to their output, and talk unremittingly about their puerile opinions, and ignore anyone talking sense.)

(Here's where you place an update thanking another website owner with at least 10 percent more traffic than you for linking to your blogpost. You sent it to them four times, but try to act surprised and gratified. And don't forget to tell everyone to hit your tip jar even though you make mid six-figures and have tenure)

Needs More... Some Cowbell

I've got an ARP Axxe up in my attic. Call me.

Mission Accomplished

I work all the time, but make little money. That's a bad combination for my family to put up with. I've tried lately not to work on Sunday so much, and my younger son has started getting wild idée fixe notions about what we're going to do on the seventh day. And what's possible.

By the time Sunday rolls around, we're going to camp on the dark side of the moon using a rocket we made in the basement with cardboard and tape and eat bearburgers and ride mooses in races with movie stars and split atoms with kitchen cutlery and catch fish that would strain a politician's mettle to claim they'd caught bigger. We're going to find an extra moon on Pluto with binoculars and dig up dimetrodons and shoot an apple off every head we see. You can lick thirty tigers, today, surely, Dad.

Above all he wants to make a video. He wants to make one that would give Disney a truss to lug around the Oscars; grind Pixar to pixels; make Freddy Wong foreswear muzzle flash forevermore. He wants YouTube to send him a Nobel Prize.

We have a snapshot camera.

He was upset a little. His grand plans of building castle sets from legos, only bigger than a real one, and making his head turn all around in a circle met the immovable rock of our time and circumstances. I told him the secret that the penguin nun with the sweet face told me all those years ago: You need to tell a story? You need the five Ws.

And so he supplied himself as the Who and his things as the What and summertime as the When and his house as the Where. He drew out his little storyboard with an unsteady pencil while I sipped my coffee with one eye open.
     "You need a Why, son."
     "To make people smile."
Mission Accomplished, son. 

Ken The Whirligig Craftsman Illustrates Perfectly How Stimulus Spending Works

Around the back, it explains green energy and quantitative easing. If he set it on fire and kept cranking, he could change the name of the machine to "British Riots" and no one would notice the difference.The machine is simply that versatile, intricate, and useful.