"Ain't Been Served; Ain't Getting Served."

New York City. 1:30 PM.
Are You Being Served is on Channel 21.
Do you know where your children are?

Watching five minutes of Are You Being Served -- which is, after all, as much as any thinking person can sustain without imploding -- and squinting into the grey-and-brown-and-snot-green screen, I thought: "And who of this nut-brown, motley bestiary is yet counted among the living and the sensate?" These people were old, broke-down, crooked and crabbed in the late Seventies. It is too much to hope that Captain Peacock is still among the living. Ditto Mrs. Slocombe.

The great shock of course, when one views an old episode of Are You Being Served, is how young Wendy Richard ("Wendy Richards") was in it. And yet when she appeared on our screens next, in Eastenders, she was a hoar-headed half-upright revenant. I believe she is now indeed a tenant of the grave. What happened in that mysterious interim? How badly and rawly and close to the flame did she live, that the gods threw her down so low and abused her spirit-self and bade her grub in the filth for dirt and blood and garbage as her daily bread? She was a frisky pixie one minute; the next she was the she-hag of the moors.

Was WENDY stranded on an island like Odysseus, and forced to "couple" with mythological mermen? Was she obliged to do battle with Cyclopses, and Scylla and Charybdis, to scratch and claw her way back to Borehamwood and Albert Square? Did she feast meanly and jealously on human flesh? Did she slake her devalued and voided soul with sweetmeats from the grave for sustenance in her uncalendered years of dark days?

Contrast the fate of the late Ms. "Richards" with that of JOHN INMAN. He's still alive (if being John Inman can ever really be called "living"), [I just checked and actually he's dead - he died four years ago -- but my point remains I think] {perhaps it doesn't} and well and living in Florida [he isn't] {he's dead} .

[I am going to continue to pretend I don't know that John Inman is in fact dead so that I can make my regrettably somewhat compromised point.]

John Inman is Dorian Gray, while Wendy Richards was his portrait; for every crude, coarse, vulgar, Gott-verboten thing that VICIOUS JOHN did (and they have been called legion, for they are many), it was thrice-damned WENDY who saw another lock of hair turn'd hoar overnight, whose back hunched some more, who grew a horn in the centre of her forehead and felt in her craw a snaggletooth inch another inch.

(M.K. P____ I think it was who once declared an undying and vigilant and pathetic love and admiration for Wendy Richard in Are You Being Served. I think he used to extract weird joy from confessing such things to shock his crowd of young and callow friends. Now LA RICHARD is dead and M.K.P. is in love with an aged corpse. Michael, very well is it said: that death shall catch us all, even our one-time true-loves!)

[...]

Admittedly John Inman being dead, and Wendy Richard in fact outliving him by two whole years before she too submitted to vile death, reduces somewhat the puissance of my original point (to wit: that John Inman outlived all his cohorts on Are You Being Served and was alive and well in Florida), but the point can be made to a lesser degree with reference to Barbara Windsor.

Barbara Windsor is older than Methuselah, and she is certainly older than the late Wendy Richard, but BABS is still alive and well (perhaps she even lives in Florida--). Could it be that WENDY "took on" the many sins of BABS and it was those abundant manifold sick vile excesses that cruelly "done in" MS. RICHARDS?

This is of course a matter of purest speculation.

(Pause as the author checks to see if Barbara Windsor is still alive or if she died in 2002.)
__________________________________________

NOW...

As the English firmament spins further away from me and as of course our own childhoods become more strange to, and remote from, us, I find myself having to frown and try to clarify neglected memories. Jamie Oliver on TV said that his chicken and potatos and tomatos dish was "fandabidozi" and as a consequence I found myself in the peculiar position of explaining who the Krankies were to my American wife. Found myself doubting the data as I relayed it: "She was... a Scottish midget... who dressed up as a schoolboy and... pretended to be her husband's son? She was his wife, but... [hesitating; faltering...] ...but she pretended to be his son."
_____________________________________________


(Sheepish afterword. Following further rudimentary research, I have discovered that Captain Peacock is still among the living. "Which is," to quote Emerson, "what old people called - the gods visible again." That great, grand, old man! That cheat of base, grasping Charon!!!

And ---

What a mess I made of this point I had to make.)

Obama Vs. Osama: Trump Trumped

Shall I be that pioneer, with the first of the Obama/Osama conspiracy theories? B'lieve I shall.

Where were you when Osama's death was announced?, asks the boring man who seems to permanently dawdle around the water-cooler, always looking for a "water-cooler moment".

"I was watching Celebrity Apprentice," I answer icily. "Now let me get a cup of water."

Last night Celebrity Apprentice had droned on inconsequentially and without any clear narrative, as it usually does, for the better part of its two-hour duration. It was reaching its "climax" - the boardroom sequence in which the losing team has to fight and bellow among themselves for their "very survival". That game slapper NeNe Leakes had spent the whole episode bawling and growling incoherently at Star Jones. Donald Trump was sitting across the table from them, squinting contentedly like mad Pontius Pilate, as the black folks squabbled for his pleasure.

("Is Donald Trump a racist?" - David Letterman.)

It was all going Trump's way, then, until suddenly the broadcast was interrupted with the announcement that President Obama was about to make an "emergency statement".

"This cannot be an accident," I remarked to my wife. "Trump rides Obama about his birth certificate all week and Obama just happens to make an emergency announcement while The Celebrity Apprentice is on?"

Could it be, I merely ASK, that President Obama has had the opportunity to kill Osama Bin Laden at any time he wanted, and that he only struck yesterday - he only gave the kill-order yesterday - expressly so that he could make the announcement during Donald Trump's weekly two-hour slot on Sunday night?

Could it be, I say, that the death of Osama Bin Laden was merely a stroke of one-upmanship in that bigger battle betwixt Obama and Trump?

Mull on that a while, Mullah Omar. Here's an anecdote. When the news was broken, my wife had retreated to the shower, so when I shouted through the apartment, "Osama is dead!" she - in the shower - thought I was saying "Obama is dead!" For a moment, for her, it was a very different reality from the rest of us.
Actually, when I think about it, it is habitually a "very different reality" for my wife from "the rest of us".

[TYPE AND MOTIF INDEX OF HUMOR J1772: "One object thought to be another." Or K2150: "Innocent made to appear guilty." Subset: "School of jokes based around the amusing confusion between the similarity of the names, Obama and Osama."]

THREE QUICK JOKES.

-----Well, Osama is dead and that is that. He shan't be back any time soon. "Ding dong." We shall not see his like again, &c. I am only slightly anxious because I have been putting the blame on him for everything that has gone wrong in my personal life for the last ten years and suddenly I've lost that stand-by - that "wingman" if you like. Who to blame, now my scapegoat is gone?

-----Incidentally, in the name of fairness, I should note that Jenks Whittenberg was the first one with the news of Osama's death. He had claimed that Bin Laden was dead way back in October 2001. Certainly Jenks was slightly premature, but you have to admire his uncanny prescience withal.

-----I was a bit disappointed that Obama didn't pull Osama's decapitated head out from behind his lectern - or even (as my wife suggested) film the announcement while squatting athwart the corpse of Osama.

TO SUM UP:

"Osama Bin Laden is dead," Obama announced gravely on the television.
"That's all well and good," I responded, "but more importantly: who was fired on The Celebrity Apprentice?"

Death Valley Woolgathering

"Fall Poem"

Isn't the "style icon" every Fall
Diane Keaton in Annie Hall?

__________________________________

"Charles Manson Musings"

I was watching recent clips of Charlie Manson in the dock, up to his usual cabaret. This time I was thinking, "Looks like he's had some work done."

Then later I thought, "Manson looks bad. He's looking run-down. Not his usual perky self. He must have a lot of stress in his life."

I stopped midway through this train of thought and caught myself. I went, "What stress? One thing you can't accuse Charles Manson of is keeping things bottled up."

These are my thoughts for to-day. If you tuned in wondering what I am up to these days, THIS IS THE SUM OF IT.

"Compleat Cobblers."

I have stopped watching Dog the Bounty Hunter because I think that I have seen every episode several times. Nothing more depressing than sitting through episodes trying to recall whether you have seen them or not. Waiting for a dim light of doomed recognition to bleerily alight at the bottom of your weary medulla oblongata. Waiting for a stray quip from Beth that "rings a vague bell," or a memorable facial tic, a harelip or a squint, something unique and familiar about the perp.

Now, in the absence of a regular stream of Parking Wars episodes, I have elected to watch River Monsters to feed my appetite for cable reality guff. It naturally doesn't feature the same high-grade repartee as Dog the Bounty Hunter, but on the positive side it does have gigantic freshwater fish.

The gist of this show is the same as Dog anyway: hunt down a perp, wherefore 95% of the show is wholly devoid of direction, necessarily devoted to building up the putative "thrill of the chase". When the perpetrator (or here the "fish") is finally identified, located and caught, there is that same familiar sense of anti-climax, and the corollary pang of intense self-loathing, felt by the viewer. However on River Monsters, for better or for worse, the presenter does not take the giant fish onto the back seat of an SUV, offer it a cigarette, and try to turn it to Jesus and redemption.

In today's episode, the English extreme-stunt-fisherman presenter (or "EESFP" - his name escapes me and I can't even be bothered to look it up) was hunting down a monster killer fish described in Eskimo legends. He was in Alaska. In other programs this would of course be cue for a volley of jokes about Sarah Palin but River Monsters is not that show. It never will be. If you want Sarah Palin jokes switch to Letterman.

After much exposition and shrill shilly-shallying, and interviewing less-than-credible "witnesses" (half the time I felt like I was watching Teeth Mountain testifying on Judge Judy Christ sake) the EESFP found himself in the unenviable position of trying in vain to catch a common or garden sockeye salmon. When he finally hooked one, a baby bear came over and stole it from him. I'm not making this up - it really happened. The camera crew were so vexxed by this baby bear stealing their salmon that they reported him to the authorities. Really.

I couldn't work out the relevance of the capture of this salmon to the larger narrative (which is, lest we forget, the capture of the mysterious Esquimaux Death Fish) anyway. It was not properly explained. They were trying to ascertain whether there was a "viable food source" for the Mystery Monster Fish I think, but I would have thought the mere presence of the salmon alone was sufficient to conclude that there was a food source. Anyway, after the baby bear chased them off the river they blithely abandoned the hunt for sockeye salmon with utter equanimity. They said, "Well there are pike and salmon in the river so the monster fish could obviously eat them." So what was this whole folderol scene for?

It seems to me, as a lowly layperson, a landlubber and no "piscatorean," that the whole scene was cooked up purely to get a scene with a grizzly bear hovering in the background. The presenter kept pretending to be nonplussed, prattling on about absolutely nothing, while there was a bear idling on the opposite bank of the river. Like he was a tough guy, unfazed by bears. This was just the usual prick-teasing that goes on on American television. They keep you watching narrative emptiness waiting for the punchline. Obviously they decided that the baby bear did not have the cinematic cachet that an adult one would, but still he made the EESFP and his crew look like bunglers and cowards.

So they shopped the poor bear to the park ranger.

Wonder what happened to him.

I hope he wasn't shot.

Anyway, after that - and with no "useful data" extracted from the sockeye salmon - the EESFP went up in a small plane where he interviewed a female anthropologist who told him in detail about a giant monster fish she had seen from the air last year. Why didn't they use her testimony in the first place? Without the capering on the riverbank amongst our ursine cousins?

From this "expert testimony" our intrepid guide quickly asserted that the fish was - must be - a "Massive White Sturgeon". The rapidity and ease with which he arrived at this diagnosis just from the female anthropologist's scanty and bored testimony was suspicious to my critical and cynical eyes and ears. It smacked, I say, of a put-on. Then he says, with equal blitheness, "Well I could spend forty or fifty years trying to catch a sturgeon on this body of water but you and I in televisionland don't have forty or fifty years to spare so I am going to go down to Oregon waters, there to catch a sturgeon." To anticipate his viewers' obvious disappointment, he insisted "I am still catching the same fish, just in completely different waters several thousand miles away. This is not, I repeat not, a cop-out."

This was a reductio ad absurdum if I ever I heard one. There was no proof that the Monster Fish in question was a Massive White Sturgeon except on our eminent expert's dubious say-so; his speculation would only be confirmed by catching the monster fish in question in Alaskan waters. Which he now had decided against. This journey down to Oregon was a fool's errand.

There's no point in getting angry about this. I know: don't sweat the small stuff. You keep telling me that but it's hard sometimes. So he went over to Oregon where there are literally scads of sturgeon idly booping along the sea-floor just waiting to be hooked up. He caught one in about five seconds and it was about three foot long. We all mistook it for a sprat. It swam away as soon as he tried to grab it by the jaw so he fished for another one and made a mighty production of it when he caught this one, which was I think eight foot long. Still, the one in Alaska was meant to be twenty foot long so I felt cheated some more. By ooh let's see twelve feet of fish flesh.

Then he reaches into this micro-sturgeon's mouth and says, "Look the sturgeon has no teeth, just these telescopic gums." He demonstrated this by pulling the sturgeon's gums this way and that for a while, just to demonstrate the toothlessness of the fish. The poor sturgeon just took it with Christianly good grace. He "never said a mumblin' word." This did not seem to strengthen our presenter's position from where I was sitting. This diminutive, pacific, toothless wonder was our threatening Monster Esquimaux Killer?

The conclusion was, nevertheless, that this fish - "or one like it" - was the same monster up in Alaska and that it had capsized all those Esquimaux kayaks not by ruthless biting (since teeth had it none) but by its mysterious habit of leaping out of the water and knocking Esquimaux out of their canoes. This eccentric trick, incidentally, "has never been explained. Maybe it is motivated by panic."

Maybe.

This is some "fish story" indeed! This wasn't even the tale of "the one that got away" - this was the tale of "the much smaller version of the one several thousand miles away which even that one's identification was only deduced by the idlest speculation. And which got away."


"VENATOR"

Poem. Inspired by The Sleepy Eyes of Death Series

Observation:

It is now considered de rigeur
Among the au fait ronin
To disparage the bushido
While wholly upholding it.

[Interior query:

Can you knock a man unconscious
By punching him in the stomach?]

Funny Eyes of Death

"The sky... the sea... and the Musou-Masamune blade." RAIZA ICHIKAWA

I was watching The Sleepy Eyes of Death 1: The Chinese Jade, and in the fiftieth minute the master of karate Chen Sun (the excellent Tomisaburo Wakayama - the Japanese Lino Ventura) says to his arch-opponent, the ronin Nemuri Kyoshiro (Raizo Ichikawa), who he has a "hard-on" to battle, "Shall we fight?"

To which Raizo replies, "Not now. Let's end this rude interruption." They then fight off a cadre of inconsequential samurai.

I meanwhile misread the subtitles for a moment, and thought that Raizo had made a genuinely subversive and liberating comment: "Not now. Let's wait til the end of the film."

Boring Comics: Narratological Point.

It is a commonplace in Marvel comic books, particularly ones of a certain era, to waste several pages of the narrative with empty scenes showing the super heroes' battle abilities and finesse in generic battle scenes. The locus classicus is the Danger Room scene in The X-Men.
The splash page customarily begins with the X-Men seemingly spiritedly fighting one of their most notorious foes. After numerous pages (which we, the comic's humble buyers, have plainly invested and wasted whole cents in) the scene is revealed to be an exercise and an illusion. These were mere phantsasms - robotic simulacra created by the Shiiar technology of the Danger Room. Cut to a panel of Kitty Pryde at the Danger Room controls. Eating a slice of pizza, stuck in the mid-Eighties, talking her usual Mary-Sue jive.

This generic scene purportedly establishes the powers and pecadilloes of the characters for new, first-time readers. A similar scene is the opener of literally millions of comics: Spider-Man webspinning through New York and breezily espying a mugging in a back alley.

Must we ever be made to behold this sight ever again? Spider-Man captureing the muggers, grinding them down with vapid one-liners that everybody (really, everybody) is weary of. He webs them up and further lightly humiliates them, then turns to their victims who recoil from him and call him a "nasty hooligan" or some similar synonym.

Cut to a scene of J. Jonah Jameson droning on about the "web-spinning menace"; or a Daily Bugle front page editorializing against the infamous Spinner of Webs.

Marvel Comics are boring aren't they!!! I certainly wish they had never invented the Danger Room.

Add Danger Room scenes to my list of boring comics.

Also boring: "Pantheon" storylines that deal with characters from classical mythology.

__________________________________________________

Further "English Bands That Americans Like"

The full title should be "English bands that Americans like inordinately," but I think that goes without saying. "English bands that the English ceased to listen to in 1986 but which keep coming round on American turntables."

New additions:

Elvis Costello
Echo and the Bunnymen
Nick Lowe

I thought about adding Sting and Paul McCartney to the list. Does anybody in England listen to these two redundant rascals?

Etymology, Blasphemy and Bowdler

Speaking of the Americans-as-Anglophiles, there is a quite new bar under the Williamsburg Bridge called Gordon Bennett. I was in there with Toby Spinks, sat at the bar, and I was explaining to Toby what "Gordon Bennett" signified in England. "It's an exclamation of awe or surprise." I went further than was necessary, delving as I did into the gnomic realms of etymological conjecture. I said, "It occurs to me now that the phrase may have survived and prevailed chiefly as a bowdlerization of 'God damn it'."

Profane people today are unaware that blasphemy was taken very seriously less than a century ago, at least in certain milieux. There was a New York street gang in the 1850s called The Dead Rabbits. According to the nameless author of the entry on Wikipedia,

The name has a second meaning rooted in Irish American vernacular of NYC in 1857. The word 'Rabbit' is the phonetic corruption of the Irish word ráibéad, meaning 'man to be feared'. 'Dead' was a slang intensifier meaning 'very'. Thus, a 'Dead Ráibéad' means a man to be greatly feared.

This sounds like so much blarney to me, begad and beggorah.
(Blarney? On Wikipedia? It can't be!)

Uncoincidentally, the phrase "dod rabbit" was also abroad at this time-- as a canny, insider, subversive, neutralized way of saying "God damn it". When you said it, anybody astute knew what you really meant, and yet you hadn't strictly offended genteel values by saying the real phrase. The same trick persists today after a fashion in the middle-class use of the oaths "Gosh" and "Golly" ("Cripes" and "Crumbs") ("Begad" and "Begorrah"), which avoid breaking the Third Commandment while pointing ingeniously to the blasphemies. Ambrose Bierce published under the name "Dod Grile" (for "God Riled") in his earliest writings.

I submit that the phonetic similarity between "Dod Rabbit" and "Dead Rabbit" is more convincing than some airy speculation about words from Gaelic. This Gaelic interpretation sounds to me like the wilful excesses of academe at its most academic. And yet it endures. I really should write a paper on this subject for Notes and Queries.

Evenings in the university periodical section blandly leafing through back-numbers of Notes and Queries. This, which sounds pathetic I know, also sounds beautiful to me now. Idly flicking through issues of Artforum on a Norwich night.

Anyway, I merely speculated at the bar that the same may be true of the oath "Gordon Bennett!" While I was explaining all this to Toby, mine host the bartender - a generic Williamsburg collegiate laid-back slacker stubbled t-shirted bardude - had the gall to chime in to "correct" me.

He brazenly leaned across the taps and "explained it away" by means of a fatuous scenario: "If we saw a great sports car right now, while an American would say 'Awesome!,' an English person would say 'Gordon Bennett!'"

How was this different from what I had said? He simply situated it in a rather banal context. He then added, authoritatively, that "Gordon Bennett was also a real guy."

So, of course, was Joe Shmoe a real guy; and what's your point?

I looked at him with wan, noli me tangere disdain. Mine host was a total type, known on college campuses the world over (and Williamsburg is, lest we forget, a college campus sans college). The collegiate American Anglophile dude. He has a close equivalent in Australia in Ryan Webb [see past issues of Curiosa Rubberlineana, ca. 2003-6]. He is expert in smalltalk about exotic sports and is a total bore about "guest beers". He has a preferred English football team and follows them closely. He can talk companionably to anybody, as long as they have a dedicated fondness for utter boredom.

I do not. I am not that man. Nor do I take well to being corrected on points of my own national folklore by outsiders. I said, "Pardon my mistake, Herr Doktor Bardude, I had you for a lowly cocktail shaker! I didn't realize you were the doyen of the philology department. I merely grew up in England."

What I should have said: "Gordon bleeding Bennett!"

What I should have said: "And what is the etymology of the word pillock exactly I wonder, hein?"