[Rrrring-rrring]. There goes my alarm call. I'd got up earlier to psyche myself by listening to *Blood on the Tracks*. Just past Idiot Wind: what an astonishing song ... almost all 'revenge' and 'vitriolic' songs, including earlier Dylan brilliancies like 'Positively 4th Street', are *callow*. Immature, even juvenile.

But 'Idiot Wind' is savagely mature: he's been there, she's been there, the song has been there ... and they've all done the vitriol thing together, soul to poison soul. Transcendent. Such beauty, in a world where 'one day soon' even 'you' will fall, leaving blood on your saddle.

Anyhooo ... that's just me trying to get my brain moving. I'll need it later. Another train-bound Saturday looms, destination the National Gallery in Dublin.

*EEE Man Chunon*? You need a good ear for that. Or you wind up saying 'I agree to have your babies in perpetuity and pay you $40,000 for each survivor' ... or whatever.

I do almost all my shopping in local shops. I don't drive, so I don't have easy access to the ring of hypermarts round the urban base perimeter. Plus, I've usually lived very near these local shops - upstairs from one, in one case. Works for me. Never saw the point in 'stocking up' with tins of nuke food.

The Bowers that Pee prob'ly poison it all anyway. I mean, even more than it's already poisinted.

It seems the pope has written a letter addressed to 'the faithful of Ireland'.

There's a rumour that it starts "Dear Mrs Murphy ... may I call you 'Eileen'?"

Basta. Gotta go. Later, all. We can excommunicate somebody when I get back, if you like. Or you could anathemize me in my absence, declare me to be 'fair game' (1960s Scientology, now *officially* disavowed): it declares its subject to be a stinking no-good traitor who uses the holy books as ass-wipes, and so the faithful are free to inflict any punishment they want.

L. Ron Hubbard called it down on a whole ship once, for nearly ramming his flagship. They hadda tie a dirty canvas round the smokestack and leave the deck unscrubbed, as penance.

Funny thing, apostasy. Believers really *hate* defectors, folk who used to believe the same stuff, but stopped.

I met them again recently. Very bright people both. And, weirdly, both remembered me at once, 25 yrs on ... a rarity in academe. So many faces, year after year. I rarely remembered anyone after three months *sans voir*.

<GMT>: Gross Moral Turpitude. In the 1980s it was believed that there were only two actions which would result in a tenured academic being fired.

GMT was one. I don't know what the other was, but I'm open to suggestions. As it were.

And my point is? There was a Notre Dame link, too tenuous to go into now. But I gather that it's *Egg Central* to Irish-American culture. Yet in Ireland itself it's rarely mentioned - many people never heard of it.

The same is true for other semiotic nodes which seem quinterssentially 'Irish' to an American, but have little purchase on Ireland itself.

Protean? Moi? That's, like, a kind of shampoo, isn't it?

But, like, so what. Everyone who is or used to be anyone has a system of exercises which are good for the brain ... and often involve temporal accretion.

Dust thou art. Stuck together with *Bondage*, the Paste that passeth Understanding.

One of my fave quotes in a King-James-Bible language mode, is actually an advert from the 1960s:

I'm clearly not looking for reasons as to why moles should be whacked. Thats a given: they're blind and nekkid and so remind me of *myself* at my most vulnerable (in the shower without my glasses or playing the Dutch against a GM) ... take yer pick.

So moles should be whacked. It's logical, Admiral. But what (on Urth) do molewhackers have to do with Patricius Sanctus, the heaven-bound patrician? What's the Irish link?

Then, sudden as that, I saw it. Connections are what I *do*, after all. Here is my theory:

Whack-a-mole is Guacamole, a prison camp where Americans torture former MWBs (Men With Beards) ... and ... uh ... OK, cut, restart.

Guacamole is *green* -- like mushy peas, boiled cabbage, shamrocks, part of the Irish tricolor flag ... and more.

A traditional Irish republican ballad has the much-quoted line "For they're hangin' men and women for the wearin' of the green".

And good luck to 'em, say I.

<"I say, where's my black cap? Jolly good, dashed decent thing for a condemned man -- well, technically, a just-about-to-be condemned man ... bet you can't translate that into classical Greek. Latin? Well, never mind. You'll have time to continue your classical education at the Lake of Fire ... So, I say, here goes. Aloysius O'Shaughnessy, you have been found guilty of *crimes against fashion*, to wit, a somewhat frayed necktie in Kelly Green, plus a bad case of MacGillycuddy's Reeks. I hereby sentence you to be hanged by the neck until at least one of the aforementioned appendages falls off. So mote it be. All rise.
And all will rise again when the hangin' starts, dontcha know. They don't call 'em Easter Risings for nothing. Signed herewith, His Excellency Judge Willy the Pimp.">

Here, however, is the clincher. A line by William Burroughs (who also had a hanging fixation). Needs to be spoken in that sepulchral junkie priest's voice:

<"It's *green*, see. A green fix should last a long time.">

Who was the English poet who wrote about his 'vegetable love'? Thinking of longterm floral perspectives rather than, say, a fondness for gardening? Wasn't Donne, was it? Herbert, perhaps ...

I suspect that, at the time, Bill Burroughs had a theory that chlorophyll was a powerful - and hitherto undetected - opiate with vast pain-killing properties.

What more could anyone want? Given what *They* are doing to the planet, the notion that we use our remaining time to kill the pain - and play one decent chess game - is worth considering.

<Combinations and chemistry are your only men>.

Well, no, not really my chest. Or even my chess. I have yet to burn my first bra, ackshully. But it sounded better than getting stuff outta my Broca node and cerebral lemon curd factory.

I've just decided to call off today and nominate tomorrow in its place. The implications are incalculable.

So here goes. If 'Z' is the temporary y-axis of a 4-dimensional coordinate system using quaternions as well as tensor geometry ... and 'Fundamentals of Geometry' means "measuring earth with your bottom", then ...

What does an LT *look like*? A male person, spectacles, white coat, redundant apparata such as biros and sliderules protrude from inky pockets?

The source indicates that they may *look* like Labtex but are 'really' chess GMs. Of course, they could be actual LTs toiling in Deep Fritz's silicon intestines ... but why draw attention to this? Shock Horror: Lab techs "look like lab techs" ... by our secret investigations unit.

Naaah. Equally, Occam's razor tells us they're unlikely to be, say, female or Martian. In such a case *that* would be the story.

Which leaves two geeky GMs. Not ubergeeks (no story) but players who usually seem human ('nose and toes the same way goes ... check.')

I'll go for: Anand & Gelfand, aka 'Vishy' and 'Bob'. Or <An& & Gelf&> - a wizardry convention in deepest Quebec?

BTW, I was going to change the name <Frogspawn> to <Wizard Wheezes> but concluded it was just too Atlantically ambiguous. It has nothing to do with Gandalfians with magic sticks and spells and conic sections on their heads ... 'wizard wheeze' is old-fashioned English schoolboy slang for a prank or a jolly jape.

*Them*, we have.

And another thing: Europa, the Jovian moon, one of the four Galileans. Is it Eurocentric? Eccentric? Water Icy?

And another thing ... some large chunks of Jackie ... en anglais ...

Brel/Walker/Shuman: 'Jackie' ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dfq...

*This* is why Walker became a 'recluse' (definition: somebody who won't talk to journalists) ... dig those hand movements, the limp-wristed 'queer' and the fist-pumping exponent of virility ... watch as Scott gives the world the finger on national TV ... feel his humiliation ... listen to his later work, especially 'Tilt' and 'Drift'.

<I'd have to get drunk every night To talk about virility
With some old grandmother who might
Be decked out like a Christmas tree

And if I joined the social whirl
Became procurer of young girls
Then I would have my own bordellos
My record would be number one
And I'd sell records by the ton
All sung by many other fellows
My name would then be handsome Jack
And I'd sell boats of opium
Whiskey that came from Twickenham
Authentic queers and phony virgins

My name would then be Jupiter
And I would know where I was going
And then I would become all knowing
With my beard so long and flowing
If I became deaf dumb and blind
Because I pitied all mankind
And broke my heart to make things right ...>

This subrule is illiterate ('look of' -??) and can therefore be ignored.

Lab techs are black, furry, eager and trained to fetch whacked moles.

The Irish connection is moles turn green after being whacked.

Now to recover from the musical overdose, although ABBA is mostly harmless... ;)

<Jessica: <It's always puzzled me that <excommunicated> people can still talk.>>

Ah yes, the Clan felt much the same way too. :)

And why not? His hobbies are not our business, though he made other people's hobbies - 'Marxism and stamp collecting', to quote Anatoly Karpov - *his* business. Certainly the most influential trannie since the English general who preferred corsetry to cordite, and is thought to have originated the phrase "Have him washed and stripped and taken to my tent".

One can't help feeling that the founding fathers and mothers had a more sophisticated understanding of military intelligence.

At the same time in Russia, France, England and Prussia, the Chevalier d'Eon lived a remarkable double or quadruple life, playing master chess in a dress while pretending to be his own sister, brother, or wife.

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, partly inspired RL Stevenson's story of Dr Jekyll; then there was Irish military surgeon James Barry, found after his/her death to have been a woman. Not to mention Lennie Cohen's favorite icon of femaleness, Joan of Arc.

Eonism is still found in certain Parisian circles. And it beats <le mccarthysme>. And Pablo Picasso never got called an @#$%*@! (Ah so. As *sole heir* to Dr Bowdler, I object), according to J. Richman. He's probably wrong, but it's a fine rhyme.

These were sophisticated people, bubba ... as Hunter Thomson warned Bill Clinton before he embarked on his career in *internal affairs*.

It was said that Hoover could piss into a tent from five miles away, and rot a guy-rope every time.

GMT was one. I don't know what the other was, but I'm open to suggestions. As it were. >

I realized I was getting old when I stopped living with professors' daughters (or sons) and started going out with their wives instead.

Not the same professors, I hasten to add. I'd moved cities in the interim.

But these posts haven't turned up *here*, apart from an allusion in the Mork game. Itself a cute and sophisticated polycosmic jest. Somebody out there has a sensa yuma.

It's probably just me.

I committed a sort of accidental semi-plagiarism once, mostly thru ignorance. I know it's not the real deal, but it illustrates some of the difficulties.

This was the late 1970s and I was in the final year of an arts degree. I was required to produce two long essays or mini-theses on subjects of my choosing. One about literature, one about the grab-bag of 'language' stuff which made up the rest of my degree - some linguistics, some structuralism, Anglo-Saxon poetry, Germanic philology, stylistics, semiotics, and more stuff I don't remember.

The literature one was easy: Pynchon. Despite the fact that he was alive and about a decade younger than I am now, he was acceptable. The first academic text about him had just come out (by the time I wrote my Master's thesis on him three years later, there were about 20 ... now, G-d knows).

Choosing Pynchon also allowed me to sneak in bits of the stuff he wrote about: science fiction, dope, mathematics, paranoia, global politics, central Asian love songs, information theory, albatross nosology ... not all of which was familiar to the denizens of an English Dept. So I baffled 'em with bull, I guess.

The second essay was more problematic. In theory, I could've repeated the trick: I'd discovered people like McLuhan, Umberto Eco, Bucky Fuller and other 'independent thinkers' - not quite cranks, but getting there - and could've lashed together a piece on, say, semiotics and Gutenberg, with lashings of whoever I could squeeze in.

But I had discovered an idea called Linguistic Relativism, propounded in the 1940s by Sapir and Whorf. It had apparently gone out of fashion in linguistic circles - there was only one book about it in the college library, rarely borrowed. And I thought I saw a way to map their ideas onto the orthodox linguistics of Chomsky (then in the ascendant) and the media theories of McLuhan (then out of vogue).

So I wrote 'Whorf, McLuhan & Chomsky'. What I had no way of knowing was that Whorfism had returned in force, to the point of being the 'standard model' of the social sciences in American universities. Steve Pinker still writes very good books demolishing it. I had no inkling that anyone even remembered it in the 70s.

My college wasn't *bad* - actually world-class in some subjects - but its philosophy dept was ruled by medieval theology, and the linguistics dept was almost non-existent, a piece of window dressing that concentrated on Gaelic. Hence the absence of books.

My essay wasn't bad either, but it must've looked odd to them. I was bolting two very different linguists together, and acting as if one was obscure, when he wasn't. And I mysteriously threw in this sixties McLuhanite guff. Perverse.

Not plagiarized either, but dependent on biased - and therefore inaccurate - sources.

Of course, then and now, normal folk obviate these problems by discussing their plans with supervisors or tutors. That was something I just wouldn't do. I still get tongue-tied every time an editor asks me what something is 'about' before I've written it.

I know they have to ask. I must be frustrating to deal with. But how can I know what I think until I see what I've said?

My method worked for Pynchon text #2, the M.A., which got the 1st first-class MA award they'd given in ten years, a real rarity then.

I know they have to ask. I must be frustrating to deal with. But how can I know what I think until I see what I've said?>>

Check. :) I have an absolutely horrible time trying to come up with email titles. A title is supposed to be kinda a summary, innit?

And my problem goes something like this: I usually try to be concise. So...

... all that stuff ... which has become a standard model of its own, a popular and widely-held point of view ...

But ... if this is the case, how come autism ("an abnormality of childhood development affecting language and social communication; absorption in imaginative activity directed by the thinker's wishes, with loss of contact with reality") -- or, let's say, Asperger's Syndrome (defined as "a mild psychiatric disorder characterized by poor social interaction and obsessive behavior"), to keep our targets modest ... how come these things are characterized as disorders? Abnormalities? Illnesses, even?

Why aren't they *sacraments*? Or things you could win a Nobel for, like chemistry ("a mild psychiatric disorder characterized by the obsessive combination and synthesis of fundamental materials")? Or an Oscar, like acting ("a disorder of childhood development where the sufferer becomes adept at pretending to be somebody else")?

Okay, guilty as charged. Plug me into a wall socket, 220 volts is fine but I can live with 110. I *can* talk to electrons, I can, and I believe in the anode, the cathode, and the holy grid.

I'd like a sacrament, a Nobel, *and* an Oscar ... but I accept that this could be wish-directed magical thinking. So any one of the three will do fine.

At that time in that place, Abba were deeply uncool. Bouncy pop music *about nothing* (well, about relationships, but with no Joni-style souls bared or Dylanesque masks - ergo, about nothing). And pre-punk Swedish haircuts when 'everyone' had supposedly passed through hippie, metal, punk, goth, new romanticism, etc, and reached ... probably miserable Manchester, either in its Joy Division or Smiths era. But not Stockholm syndrome.

Carrying a chunk of Abba vinyl was social death, worse even than Gilbert O'Sullivan.

Funny, though, a coupla years later Bjorn Again showed up and the students went daft about 'em.

Meanwhile, the other node in my nexus - The Residents - were so obscure that almost nobody had heard of them. If they'd had a fan base, I might have damaged it by comparing them to Abba. But they didn't: I was the sole fan in the vicinity. I certainly didn't know any others - but I wanted to share them with the world, and a 'ridiculous' link to Abba was a way to do it.

As you can see, I have other ways now. And even some meta-ways.

And my actual argument wasn't obscure or intellectual at all. It just said, hey, we're postmodern now, it's all out there, everything is up for grabs, experience as much as you can and sample the rest for later.

Did I mention vinyl? This was before CDs, before computers, maybe even before video. Certainly before wikipedia, and I'm pretty sure that (then) neither Abba nor The Residents had an entry in the Encyclopedia Brittannica.

The Residents sometimes made noisy arty stuff -- unlistenable and hip -- but, like another fave band of mine, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, they also did pure pop, when they wanted to.

So you had Abba doing perfect bouncy pop and telling us that at Waterloo, Napoleon *did surrender*. The Residents had a more idiomatic grasp of American English, but they were in the same zone. With a dash of film noir.

Since lyrics are a big part of what you and I like, here is an example. One song by the Residents - in its entirety - went:

<No-one knew exactly who
She was or how she died.
But when they opened up her purse
They found a snail inside.>

To me, this is more than a song. It's a movie -- perhaps with Marilyn (or Shelley Winters?) as the woman, Robert Mitchum hovering as maybe a bent cop who knows too much, a guest spot by Salvador Dali -- they visit a show together in flashback and see a piece called Rainy Taxi, with snails. And there's a part for Jimmy Stewart: her husband, his boss, or both.

It should've been made in 1946, but the Coen brothers could still do it, combining the retro-noir of Miller's Crossing with the unfakable moral authority and *goodness* of Fargo.

And inside 5 years CGI will be good enough to make new movies with dead stars. A lot of purists will go ape, a lot of legal tangles will need sorting -- it's probably *already* technically feasible but the legals scare everyone off.

But I've been waiting a long time for this. The first film article I ever wrote, circa 1978, was a call to replace actors with their animated avatars. We're on the brink.

And the place where Abba meet The Residents is as good a place to start *as any*.