(I started writing this a while ago, but then I sold all of the jokes to gypsies, so now I must furnish the entry with new ones.)
An old friend of mine won an Oscar recently, which is excellent, and much like the crafty Ms. Passion, I had an influx of traffic on this here website due to a link on said friend's old blog. Given the, uh, adult nature of the traffic, I am feeling a certain amount of pressure to adopt an intriguing pseudonym like "Lorenzo from Accounting" or "Lunch", and posit scenarios which might better fit the expectations of these new visitors.
I never thought it would happen to me! Despite his incorrect and shameful choice of headgear, the professional affiliation of great service toward our corporation was overwhelming! Together, we searched very much to achieve bare financial milestones established with great knowing by the regional management for whom effortless brilliance of leadership and strategy is infinitely disappointed by our meager abilities and profound inadequacy. But yet we both felt great seriousness toward our professional responsibilities!
There is an article coming in a local newspaper about the travel book, so I am looking forward to that. In the March edition, upon much consideration, we decided to change "Birdgeport" to "Bridgeport" on the map for that part of the city. One bar on the south side closed, so that came out, and a Neapolitan pizza place on the north side went in. But we haven't done anything about the somewhat daffy computer-generated index, which has to be seen to be appreciated.
Reports have it that Cheeta was featured on Episode 350 of This American Life. I haven't listened yet, but I am always excited for the old fellow to get some of the recognition he so richly deserves. His masterwork "Green, Brown, Yellow" recently had its first formal exhibition in my living room during a party, and I think everyone was very impressed. (I should note that I had it framed at The Practical Angle in Chicago and they did a fine job.)
I never thought it would happen to me! I was just sitting there on the mountain, on the lookout for peanuts or old fruit, when...
July 14, 2007
Spotrick says:
And that's why monkeys should not be allowed to drive.
Kat(i)e says:
I am confused - should I be looking at this from right to left? Either way it seems the cartoon is out of order.. >Is he is the car or not? Why does he get out midway thru and look at the car as though it's not his "Oh well, I'll drive it anyway! >Insert maniacal monkey laugh here<"
chimpsonfilm says:
It's a tough one. If we go right to left, then we can assume that he was driving really fast but in a straight line (1), got frustrated with the fact that the car was fully under his control and easy to operate, which is not as he was led to expect machinery would be (2), and decided to drink in order to restore his confusion toward human technology (3) - possibly this all relates to a deep-seated fear of evolution and absorption into the mechanized human world on the monkey's part. I'm not sure. Sadly, my kanji reading ability is abysmal.
June 26, 2007
If anyone died from suspense at the end of the last entry, I sincerely apologize. Sometimes, the power of these situations is too much even for my unstoppable reporting technique to contain. There should be disclaimers, perhaps. But now, I must continue. If you are returning to this website late and you have not read the first entry in this series, do not go any further; it will make no sense to you, and you are likely to find your emotions overwhelmed.
So, at the end of the last entry, I was in Japan, and the original painting by the famous monkey was in Chicago. I was not sure that my mother could be entrusted with the care of fine art, but I had little choice. I've read a lot about how to be an art collector, and the literature is unambiguous on the point that you should not dent or bend the fine art, both of which stood a strong chance of happening if the monkey painting had to make two trips through customs. (This was around the time that Steve Wynn poked a hole through his Picasso; abuse of fine art was a hot-button topic.)
(I realize that some may consider my concern for the care of art hypocritical in light of a certain story that has been going around for years about my tenure as a security guard at the Krannert Art Museum and a painting which is shown on this page. In response, I kind of gaze off into the distance, and then suddenly change the subject.)
I could only trust that my mother would not botch the job. The seasons turned; beautiful autumn came to Hiroshima and the Chugoku area, winter followed and with it visits from friends, and spring slid out from behind all those cold winds. It was time to leave Japan again. I went on a long trip, returned to Japan a third time in order to pick up my stuff, and took my sweet time going from the west coast of the United States to my once and future home in Chicago. Through all of that, the painting by the famous monkey waited, hidden to me and to the world. My mother was under strict orders not to open it; whatever kind of wrapping those chimps had managed would have to serve as the last line of defense for the fine art inside.
Because I have, as I said, read extensively from the literature, I was aware that an unveiling is the sort of thing an art collector does with brand-new, never-before-seen artwork, so I announced that I would be holding one of those after I got back to Chicago. (Of course you're invited.) As you can imagine, though, I was more than a bit concerned when my mother admitted that she couldn't find the monkey painting, even though she knew it was around there somewhere. Tense days and nights followed. My mother doesn't actually do a whole lot except go to work and take yoga classes once a week, so she dedicated herself to the task of figuring out where she put the monkey painting, and by the next time I visited, she had found it. The painting was expertly packaged in exactly the sort of big cardboard envelope that humans might use.
"Well done, Dan," I said, softly. "Well done."
I had to open it. The literature is ambiguous on the point of whether the art collector himself is allowed to see the artwork before the unveiling, but I decided to excuse the impulse; I am, after all, new at this, and can be forgiven a few lapses in procedure. I slid my finger under the flap of the envelope, and removed a few knick-knacks: a certificate of authenticity, an autographed photo of Cheeta, and some other papers of that ilk. And then there was nothing else between me and the painting.
It is really fucking good. I was genuinely astonished from the moment I laid eyes upon it. I had an idea in mind when I chose the colors green, brown, and yellow, and Cheeta understood completely, transforming my pithy notion into the stuff of great artwork. The painting is abstract, and it is suggestive of bananas hidden in a forest. (The forest may be upside down.) I don't mind admitting that I almost cried; I had a masterpiece in my hands. At last, I had my own painting by a famous monkey.
Well, the unveiling is still yet to come. I need to get a job and possibly a new apartment first. Since I am still unemployed, I have plenty of time for scientific analysis, and I am pleased to announce, after extensive testing, that my famous monkey painting is a remarkable 54% better than anything Van Gogh ever did, which is saying something, because Van Gogh is really considered one of the major painters of his era. It is also 16% better than 82% of Picasso's work, 7% better than 70% of the remaining 18%, and the rest has yet to be calculated, but it's looking good for the monkey, and also for my happy life as an art collector.
I will be commissioning another painting shortly after getting a job.
June 22, 2007
I've had this news excerpt sitting around since last August.
(news) NEW DELHI - In an effort to keep monkeys out of the New Delhi subways, authorities have called in one of the few animals known to scare the creatures — a fierce-looking primate called the langur, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported Wednesday.
The decision to hire a langurwallah — a man who trains and controls the langurs — came after a monkey got into a metro car in June, the newspaper reported.
On June 9, a monkey reportedly crawled through some pipes and ended up aboard a train, scowling at passengers and jumping around a car.
Passengers had to be moved to another car while staff chased the dexterous creature, causing delays.
The langur handler was being employed to prevent more such problems.
"There are too many monkeys," Dayal was quoted as saying.
It's "cellar door" for some; for others, "too many monkeys" is the most beautiful combination of words in the English language. Admittedly, I was on the subway today, on my way back from buying some pants, and it was extremely crowded; I am not sure that monkeys would have improved the situation, so fair enough to the New Delhi subway riders and their langurs.
Do you see how understanding I have become in my old age?
I am ashamed to say that I wrote about the monkey painting on MySpace before I did so here. There is no good excuse; expectations are low on MySpace, so when you post something there, you're not really under any obligation to make it good. As long as it's OMG - or, ideally, OMFG LOL - you've held up your end of the agreement with the reader. Well, enough of that.
So there was the whole Howard Hong thing from the summer of 2005, when that visionary art collector paid like $25,000 to buy some paintings by a famous monkey from the swinging Sixties, which extensive scientific analysis (more about that later) has revealed to be the smartest thing anyone has ever done. I was unemployed at the time after my impulsive move to Austin, and I could feel the tangible lack of progress my life was making toward a state of ownership of art by famous monkeys; despair set in. Howard even emailed me, but I didn't really know what to say other than, "Can I have one? The article said you had a few of them. Seriously, could I have one?"
Well, everything got back on the right track, I'm happy to say. As you might know, I did finally get a job, and then I split for Japan again; I paid my debts and resumed my place as a responsible member of society, even if it was, perhaps, not the precise society that genetics had intended for me. And I got to thinking about making progress again. After a brief flirtation with investing my new-found savings in stocks and bonds, I decided to do the mature thing and find a famous monkey who sells his art.
And that's what led me to Cheeta. Famous? Check. That chimp was in the Tarzan movies, also also something called Bela Lugosi Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla, according to his IMDB page, which, based on the title alone, may be better than Citizen Kane. At 75 years old, Cheeta has been recognized by Guinness as the world's oldest chimpanzee, and his love for life is matched only by his love for cake, which I'm sure we can all understand. He's received a lifetime achievement award from the mayor of Palm Springs, and he hobnobs with Elayne Boosler and Jane Goodall. This, then, is a very famous monkey.
I've wondered, in retrospect, if Cheeta wasn't a great painter, would I have bought one of his paintings anyway, as a symbolic gesture, as a prisoner of enthusiasm? Fortunately, that concern never came to pass; Cheeta is actually a sensational painter. This, I think, is quite good; there is an emotional richness in this one as well, but it's somewhat less mature in form. (This one, on the other hand, shows a mastery of technique - if anyone was so foolish as to think that monkeys slap paint on canvas without meaning, that's conclusive evidence that they're wrong - and it's frankly rather haunting, too. I have a theory that it may be a memory from the set of Bela Lugosi Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla, but only Cheeta knows for sure.)
The good news for aspiring collectors of fine art is that the residual checks from Tarzan aren't paying all of the bills any more - and Criterion is apparently dragging their feet on the Lugosi DVD - so Cheeta, resourceful chimp, has combined his passion (the other one, not cake) with his need to pay the rent. (That's a trick I haven't figured out. You could, if you like, say that Cheeta has made a monkey out of me.) After running around the apartment and yelling in deep reflection, I sat down at the computer and commissioned an original painting from Cheeta. After I sent in my payment, someone named Dan - either a person, or a monkey named Dan who has figured out how to use computers - emailed me to say that the payment had been received, and Cheeta would paint it soon. I told him Cheeta should take his time. I know that you can't rush monkey art. Dan had asked me to choose three colors for Cheeta to use, and I suggested green, brown and yellow, but said that Cheeta should do as he liked. I know how artists get when they feel like their art has been commercialized, and I didn't want to get into that kind of situation with my first original monkey commission. I think Dan is all about the bananas, though, because there was no delay; my mom emailed me only a few weeks later to say that a wrapped package had arrived, and it mentioned chimps on the address label. I told her that package was fine art and she had better be careful with it. She said she'd put it in the storage closet with my old comic books.
(I should clarify, by the way, that I was living in Japan at the time, but I had the painting shipped to my mother's place in Chicago, because I figured it was a real long-shot that a pair of chimpanzees could work out international shipping. It was impressive enough that they had a PayPal account.)
So the monkey painting was in a package at my mother's apartment, unseen by human eyes, and I was on the other side of the world. This story is getting exciting; I will continue in my next entry.
December 22, 2005
I have new software for managing this here website. On the right, you can see a list of Categories. Click on one, and it'll take you to a page with all of the entries I've written on that subject. The archives have grown too unwieldly, and since I only have four or five different things that I write about, I wanted people to be able to find, say, all of the panda porn entries with ease. If you have recommendations about categories that I should add (e.g. stuff I'm always yammering on about), please let me know. So far, I've assigned categories for everything from Japan onwards and the entire college era. I'll get the rabbi era done eventually, but I don't know if I'll ever do the Beelzetron entries, because there are so many of them, and I need to do new things to write about.
A lot of people are up in arms over the recent article claiming that Stalin had a secret plan to breed half-man, half-ape super warriors, but I don't really buy it. Look, everyone wants to make a connection between communism and monkeys. If we could place a chimpanzee at Trotsky's side during his "dustbin of history" speech flinging poo at the Mensheviks as they left the hall, we could pretty much draw the curtain on the human drama, take a bow and exit stage left. But we can't. The basic idea of this story is that, in 1926, Stalin found a scientist who had built his reputation on the artificial insemination of race-horses for the tsar and gave him a bunch of money to create obedient, powerful monkey-men who were "insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat." The scientist failed, as the story goes, and was duly punished.
Predictably enough, there are no corroborating sources on the web other than one brief reference to the scientist in question and bloggers linking to the article and going "woo woo monkeys". (Has anyone ever noticed how much the proliferation of blogs has diluted the usefulness of search results? It'd be fine if any of them had something to add to the topic. Instead, you just get a two hundred winners linking to the article and going "woo woo monkeys".) As I said, I don't believe the story. I could be wrong, but let me drop some history and see what you think.
By 1926, Stalin had the upper hand in the leadership struggle, but he was not the absolute ruler yet. He was still cutting deals under the table with other members of the Politburo and pitting various factions against each other. Trotsky was still on the scene; Zinoviev wasn't far removed from his power base in Leningrad, and Bukharin was at full strength. The Five Year Plan was still up for debate. Stalin and Bukharin hadn't even allied yet, let alone agreed about the shape of collectivization. There's no way Stalin could blow the 1926 equivalent of $200,000 on a whim. Also, armies of super-soldiers were not really his area of concern. Back then, Stalin's thing was Socialism in One Country. It was Trotsky who wanted to get other countries involved in the revolution early and often, and Stalin built a bunch of political capital by deriding him for it. (Yes, that's a deliberate turn of phrase.) People mistake the Iron Curtain Stalin of post-WW2 for the original version, who was far more interested in screwing with Russians than anything else. He was infinitely insecure; he probably would have been content to exert his dominance over the psyches of Russia for the rest of his life if Hitler hadn't forced him to deal with, you know, fighting a war.
But it's the quote about wanting soldiers who were "insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat" that gives the lie to the whole thing. Since when did Stalin give a fuck about whether anyone liked their dinner? Whenever he needed a new labor force for a construction project, he just arrested a bunch of people, sent them off to the work site and told their families to mail them food care of the labor camp if they wanted them to eat. He loved that sort of thing. Read his memos: arresting people was the light of his life. It would have stressed him out if the prisoners were "indifferent about the quality of food they eat". He'd have moped around for days and worn the same underwear until it had holes in it.
VOROSHILOV: "There's a petition going around the gulags to have Pizza Night moved to Mondays."
STALIN: "Why?"
VOROSHILOV: "Bit of a pick-me-up. You know, hard labor is hard enough without a case of the Mondays."
STALIN: "Oh, those gulags. I try to say no to them, but one look just melts my heart."
VOROSHILOV: "Ho, ho, ho."
STALIN: "Ho, ho, ho."
August 10, 2005
I'm on my way toward a better mood. I'm not there yet, but I'm heading in that direction. The weather has been kind of crazy for the last couple of weeks, and I'm really starting to enjoy it. The sky has that "aww, damn" apocalyptic tinge. If you don't have anything at stake, the onset of armaggeddon can be kind of relaxing.
I haven't made any noteworthy progress toward getting a job. A place I applied to in Connecticut last December called this morning and hung up as soon as I answered. I called them back and hung up on them, because my vengeance is swift, and precisely measured.
Brought to my attention by the good Mr. Sacki, here is the single greatest photograph ever taken:
"An orang-utan plays on water skis at an event marking 100 days to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Pusan, southeast of Seoul, August 10, 2005. The APEC meeting will be held in Pusan in November."
My guess is that picture will be able to restore eyesight to blind people, so if you know any, bring them up to your monitor, position their heads and just stand there, saying "...well? Eh? Eh?"
If that's how they commemorate 100 days left until the conference, the mind boggles to consider what they have planned for the conference itself. Monkeys in spacesuits floating around in zero-gravity is basically the starting point for what it's reasonable to expect. Meanwhile, here in the US, on the very same day, the Department of Defense announces that the fourth anniversary of 9/11 will be commemorated with a march and a country music concert in D.C. I want so badly to believe that there will be at least one orangutan wearing a cowboy hat onstage, but the fact is, our nation has lost its way.
But this webpage would not be what it is without a fair dose of self-criticism:
(news) NEW YORK - A fan who plunged from the upper deck at Yankee Stadium onto the screen behind home plate during Tuesday night's game between New York and the Chicago White Sox was released from the hospital into police custody Wednesday. The game was delayed for four minutes in the eighth inning after 18-year-old Scott Harper of Armonk, N.Y., plummeted about 40 feet onto the large net. Harper told three friends he was sitting with that he was going to test whether the net would hold his weight — and then he jumped, police said.
"The next thing you know, you don't see him anymore. You saw him on the net," said 18-year-old Mike Spadafino, one of Harper's friends.
Obviously scared and shaken after he landed, Harper sat with his head in his hands for a few moments before climbing on the net back up to the middle level of seats as players watched and the crowd roared. Harper then was hoisted over the railing and led away by security.
"They claimed we were saying, `Sit or jump, sit or jump,'" Spadafino said. "It was everyone in there, in the basic area."
"People think we threw him off, but we're all best friends, so I don't think that would ever happen," said 20-year-old Giusseppe Tripi, another one of Harper's friends.
Best friends don't throw each other off buildings? Jesus, I have some apologies to make. Let me start with Saul. What I was trying to say when I grabbed you by the arm, spun you around and hurled you from the upper deck of the United Center was "I'm glad for the good times we've had together, and I really respect the way your shoulder has healed."
Sometimes, I despair of ever really managing to communicate with anyone.
August 8, 2005
I've given it a lot of consideration, and based on the state of my job search and the economy as a whole, I've decided to take a new approach and post a picture of a monkey wearing a tie:
Sometimes, it helps to re-assess the situation. He's sitting in the mailing cart! Is that other monkey mailing him somewhere? What is going on? Suddenly, uncertainty is delightful.
(Tecmo Bowl) The Race-Changing Injury
This one happens only during seasons (obviously). When a black player gets injured, he appears white on the screen where he's lying on the field and the paramedics are rushing in to help him. But then when he's being carried off he's back to normal. I don't know why this would be, since it doesn't seem like it would take any programming effort simply to leave them in the same state they were when they went down. For some reason the programmers decided to make it so that everyone who gets injured looks white from afar.
Madden '06 is coming out, and a severe test of my self-restraint will begin tonight at midnight. I could be putting all of this idle time to good use building a franchise, I will tell myself. The little digital men will thrive with the attention I will be able to give them as an unemployed guy. Beaming, their skill ratings will increase, and I will use the joystick to increase the amount of imaginary money they receive. It all seems so reasonable. Everything works together; nobody is on their own, unless their skill rating drops under 60 or so.
In the meantime, I've been trying to make a contribution to the store of knowledge on Wikipedia. It's slow going, because I'm not feeling very communicative right now, but I've left a mark. For example, I wrote exactly one line of this entry. Can you guess which one?
July 30, 2005
It's hot again, and the three-legged cat was waiting outside my door with a bunch of things to say about it. I let the cat in and gave it some cold water. My mother says it probably has fleas, since it spends all of its time outside. I told her I think she probably has fleas and hung up. Actually, I just asked to borrow some money.
So, here's the news out of Jacksonville:
A gorilla and a chimpanzee are both recovering after a fight at the Jacksonville Zoo. They live just across the moat from each other, which is usually a good barrier, since both fear the water and neither knows how to swim. One of the largest gorillas at the zoo, a 24-year-old male named Quito, either fell into the moat or tried to cross it, and ended up on the chimps side.
Dr. Nick Kapustin is the Zoo's Veterinarian. He says, "There was an altercation and we have a chimp with Quito going into his territory and the two got aggressive with each other."
Chimps are more aggressive, but much smaller. A 150-pound chimp named Jackson went up against a more than 500-pound gorilla, named Quito, and the chimp lost.
Kapustin says, "Jackson the chimp sustained some bite wounds and lacerations and he was treated immediately."
Quito didn't have any physical wounds but apparently went underwater when he was in the mote, which left him very sick.
Kapustin says, "He likely inhaled water into his lungs. That can create some respiratory problems and that's what we're dealing with now."
Both Quiot and Jackson are recovering in their indoor habitats and both are expected to be okay.
What in the hell was the chimp thinking? That gorilla had 350 pounds on it! I guess everybody has to defend their territory, but let's face it, if some 550 pound guy showed up at the door of my apartment, I would make certain strategic concessions and perhaps devise a plan involving running away with the remote control. That's not what the chimp did, though, and fortunately his unrealistic assessment of his own fighting ability did not prove fatal. An exhaustive two-minute search of the Jacksonville Zoo website did not reveal any updates about the condition of the combatants, although apparently a bonobo had a baby last year, so that's nice.
Anthropological studies tend to focus on social interactions and hierarchies within the individual species, but I've never been able to accrue as much data as I'd like regarding what different kinds of monkeys and apes think about each other. Now, we know that when a chimp sees a gorilla, he thinks, "I can take that guy." So that's good to know. It's a start.
Obviously, I ain't got no job, and I've been playing this game called Facade over the last couple of days. It's unique in the sense that the goal is not to defeat someone or win a contest or wrangle shapes; you play a character who visits his married friends one night and observes their marriage falling apart, and then you either speed the decline or try to save the marriage. It's done in the style of a one-act play, complete with curtains. (In a nice touch, it generates a 'stageplay' based on what happened during the game.) The characters speak out loud, and you talk back to them by typing. They're meant to be able to parse complete sentences - you don't select from a set of responses, like most RPGs, and they remember what you've said before. There are a few things that come up each time (a bad trip to Italy, the decor of the living room), but otherwise, each game is intended to come out differently depending on what you do.
Well, apparently, I am the last person you want to save your marriage, because I fucking suck at it. On the few occasions that I haven't been kicked out of the apartment, one of them has declared the marriage a sham and stormed out. I'm getting nowhere with this. The best I've managed to do is get them united in being pissed off at me, which hopefully leads to, I don't know, angry denunciation sex later on. One problem is that I don't type fast enough to break into the conversation, but more than that, I'm frustrated because I can't tell what portion of the blame falls on the programming (it's a college A.I. project, not a professional venture) and what is the fault of my various emotional inadequacies. I guess I'm bringing this up in the hope that someone a little better-adjusted than I am will give it a go and let me know. 'Mark' is one of the names they offer - the characters address you by name rather a lot - so I use that one when I'm doing my best (and things inevitably fall apart at the end), and 'Gonzalo' is the name I use when I'm getting frustrated.
(A bit of web research has at least revealed that Grace will not run off with you, no matter how much you make out with her, so at least I'm not the only person who has tried that.)
June 6, 2005
I hope everyone has read the monkey economics story in The New York Times by now. There's really no way to do it justice by quoting any particular excerpt from it. In fact, I'm not sure that any sequence of words and numbers in the English language has achieved such powerful effect since, say, the Gettysburg Address. That's pretty much what that article is. Adam Smith gets irrefutably smacked in the introduction, which is always a good fun, and now that they have discovered prostitution, the Capuchin Whore of Babylon should be along shortly and there will be no stopping the tortured artists among them. (Bonobos, on the other hand, are still waiting for one of them to emerge as something other than a Whore of Babylon and discover apostasy in order to complete the other half of the famed whore-nun divide.) The only problem with the article is the very last sentence, which implies that the monkeys engage in economics much like humans do. In fact, the monkeys are much better at it, because they walk out of there with grapes and Jell-O, whereas guys at the stock exchange yell a lot and have to wear ties all day.
(news) The Pope, who was elected in April, also condemned divorce, artificial birth control, trial marriages and free-style unions, saying all of these practices were dangerous for the family.
Does anyone else get the impression that someone in the Vatican is just making up secular practices and seeing how many he can report to Ratzinger with a straight face? What, exactly, is a free-style union? Is that where my arm is married to your leg but my shoulder is playing the field, or is the Pope trying to pick a fight with the Jungle Brothers? Can you renew a trial marriage after thirty days at the special low introductory rate, or does that only apply to the trial period, after which the marriage is full price? What about marriage a la carte? Marriage on demand? Ratzinger, you boob, you're just giving us ideas out here in the secular world.
May 24, 2005
I should talk about the scary dream that I had last night, because my foot still hurts. I was standing outside with a friend and her three year old daughter. They had a new house on a hill with big lawn and no other houses in sight, out in the country. It came time for the three year old to go to bed (even though the sun had only just begun to set), so we hugged, and then they went in, leaving the door open behind them. Suddenly I heard a cry from inside. The three year old had spotted a giant angry gorilla through the window. I ran to the door, but the giant angry gorilla was fast, and I couldn't close the door in time. The giant angry gorilla roared and clawed at the door. Desperate, I tried to kick the door shut. Unfortunately, in real life, I had fallen asleep on the couch, and my powerful kick actually hit the edge of the coffee table. That fucking hurt.
For the record, Fanta has become the beverage of choice among the Abu Ghraib prison abuse crew. According to Coca-Cola's website, consumers around the world, particularly teens, associate Fanta with happiness and special times spent with friends and family. Given that a new legal team was brought in for the defense today, could this presage a change in the defense strategy? If Pepsi meant "Look, the choice of a new generation was to flush the Koran down the toilet," and Dr. Pepper meant "Yes, I would like to be a Pepper, as opposed to someone who is going to jail for a long time," then Fanta may mean, "I associate this trial with happiness and special times spent with prisoners whose genitals I burned using hot lamps." I haven't been to law school so I can't really predict how that plea might turn out.
May 13, 2005
Another job for which I am better qualified than the man who currently holds it is the job of CTA President. Residents of the city of Chicago know that our public transportation system is teetering on the verge of collapse, and the minions of Kruesi claim that jacking fares to $3 while cutting service is the only way to save it. I, on the other hand, am possessed of wide, staring eyes and a strong urge to fly, and I have insights that the minions do not. For example, one way for the CTA to save a lot of money would be to cut down on the number of guys in green vests wandering aimlessly back and forth at the Division subway stop. Prior to this week, there was already a surplus of those guys, and now their number has doubled. The only thing they do that can be construed as work-related is getting out of the train's way when it finally creeps into the station.
Now, lest someone sneer and call me a consultant, let me clarify that I am not proposing layoffs. Workers are valuable assets, but they must be deployed correctly. These men should not be fired; clearly, they are well-versed in the art of bamboozlement, because they get paid to wander around in green vests, and their bosses think it's a good thing. They are experts in techniques that the CTA can use to get out of paying its debts. Put them in a room with, say, this month's electricity bill and a telephone. They know the weaknesses of middle management; they they know how to deal with that shit.
Kruesi is a weak little man who instead chooses to whinge about the state legislature.
(news) COVINGTON, La. -- Officials captured 47 monkeys that had escaped from the Tulane Primate Center, but six remained on the loose Tuesday and seemed to be hiding out in a heavily wooded area near the site. The monkeys escaped Monday evening. Officials said the monkeys got loose because a cage was not locked properly. The monkeys had observed how the cage was opened and closed and apparently used that knowledge to their advantage.
Mike Aertker, spokesman for the Primate Center, said the monkeys were being used solely for breeding purposes, and had not been subjected to experiments of any kind. Aertker said the monkeys are not aggressive and pose no threat to people.
The interesting thing is, when given a choice, 38 of the monkeys who were recaptured by the breeding facility chose to listen to Pinkerton.
Following up on my last entry, Arden, our remote correspondent, reported that Letterman had a bit on Tuesday night where he and Paul Schaffer tried to guess whether paintings were by an ape or an artist. According to Arden, the one by the ape was "quite a good painting". Frankly, when an ape paints well, I think he or she deserves some credit. The critics who derided Congo's exhibition in 1957 probably did so from a position of defending art; to admit that an ape could paint well would, they feared, open some kind of fissure beneath the integrity of modern abstract art, revealing it as a con along the lines of all those lame jokes and commercials where aesthetes mistake a common object for a masterpiece and shower it with pseudo art-speak. But it wouldn't. Some people paint better than others, and some monkeys paint better than others, too. Congo happened to be a fucking good painter. As the article said:
He painted within the boundaries of the sheet of paper and never allowed the paint to spill over the edge. He also appeared to know when he had finished a painting: He refused to pick up his brush or pencil over the work.
Could any monkey with a paint-brush produce great art? Of course not. I strongly doubt that this monkey's work would be anything other than an empty exercise in form, and this monkey probably lacks the discipline to go beyond surface assumptions about his relationship with his art. But, for fuck's sake, if you gave this monkey a canvas, he would come back to you with some fucking intense reflections about where he's been and what he's seen. And you can't tell me this monkey doesn't know some shit about life.
It seems to be raining very hard right now. But, seriously, if anyone thought that would prevent me from hitting all the locations on my carefully-drawn map for the first day of Free Frosty Weekend, they are fools. I guess I should take this opportunity to thank the crazy chili finger woman for her diligent efforts towards embarassing a corporate monolith into giving me a free lunch. If someone could get Pizza Hut to do the same, that would be great, because I don't feel like cooking tonight.
May 11, 2005
One of my colleagues reported that he'd done a Google search for the terms 'Heiden' and 'monkey' and come up with 137 hits from this web-page. In my defense, I can only suggest that a more accurate count might have included the names of individual kinds of monkeys (and apes), such as gibbons or chimps or gorillas. Really, though, the clear implication is that I've been shockingly derelict in my duties as a practicioner of serious fucking journalism and I need to focus.
(news) Congo the chimpanzee led a brief artistic career and enjoyed little critical success, despite the patronage of his contemporary and fellow abstract painter, Pablo Picasso. But nearly half a century after Congo's artistic career, some of his paintings are going on sale at a prestigious London auction house alongside works by Andy Warhol and Renoir.
Three tempera on paper works — brightly colored compositions of bold brushstrokes — will be featured as a single lot in the sale of Modern and Contemporary Art at Bonhams on June 20, the auctioneer said Wednesday. The lot estimate is between $1,130-$1,500. Bonhams said it believed the auction is a first.
"I would sincerely doubt that chimpanzee art has ever been auctioned before," said Howard Rutkowski, the auction house's director of modern and contemporary art. "I don't think anybody else has been crazy enough to do this. I'm sure other auction houses think this is completely mad."
Congo, who was born in 1954, produced some 400 drawings and paintings between the ages of 2 and 4. It was not immediately known if he was still alive, a Bonhams spokeswoman said. In 1957, animal behaviorist Desmond Morris organized an exhibition of chimpanzee art at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, including works by Congo. Critics reacted with a mixture of scorn and skepticism, but Picasso is recorded as having owned a painting by Congo, Bonhams said.
In all likelihood, given the average lifespan of a chimpanzee, Congo has joined Van Gogh, Modigliani and various other dead guys in the ranks of great artists who were unappreciated in their own lifetime. (And lest you think these are just more of my knee-jerk partisan pro-monkey politics, I suggest you check out some of Congo's work. It's really good!) Do you even realize how these artists are sitting around in the afterlife trashing us? The walls of heaven's coffee shops ring with Van Gogh's "She never loved me" and Modigliani's "It's not like tuberculosis medicine would have been that expensive" and Congo's "Pick my back" and Van Gogh's "Oh, yeah, they all love Starry Night *now*" and Modigliani's "I was doing that Africa stuff decades before Picasso" and Congo's "Are you going to finish that banana?"
I have long advocated giving every monkey in the world a bucket of paint. Worst case scenario, we end up with a bunch of blue and red monkeys looking sheepish. I say this to the leaders of the world: you're botching the job, let me take over for a while.
I really want those paintings, but I am well aware that heartless manipulators with large checkbooks will drive up the bidding. I actually would pay a thousand dollars for three good paintings by a famous monkey. Probably you knew that, though. I would frame them, and next to them I would frame my credit card statement, which would read 'PAINTINGS BY FAMOUS MONKEY'.
Okay.
I was turned down for the lycopene study because Dr. Wu measured me at 6 feet tall, which is a full three inches shorter than I actually am, according to the physical I had before I left for Japan in 2003. My weight is normal for my actual height, but Dr. Wu did manage to weigh me correctly, so my actual weight at my non-actual height would make me kind of overweight and thereby disqualified for the study group. Now, I'm not saying that Dr. Wu is a jabbering incompetent lunatic but I do find it odd that I would lose three inches of height during a period of time when all I did was go to Japan and talk to Japanese people. If Japan has actually found a way to make visitors shorter, then I believe a number of health alerts are called for, as well as a motherfucking APB on that traitorous bastard Rick Moranis. The more plausible explanation, of course, is that Dr. Wu blew it, so the woman in charge of the study said I could come back in July and participate in that dosing group.
May 28, 2004
Let us now speak of animals. First, I would like to discuss how they can be employed in the education of those who seek to speak English:
ANIMAL KNOCKOUT
This is a simple game that is played with the animal flashcards that are intended to be used in the kids classes. The deck is shuffled, the cards are dealt and the terms 'high-stakes', 'fold' and 'hold 'em' are taught, more for the instructor's amusement than anything else. (Anyone who has lived in Japan for any period of time will know that there is no need to teach Japanese people the word 'gambler'.) Each student lays down an animal, and then a battle ensues in which students attempt to 'knockout' the other students' animals by playing cards from their hand and making comparisons in which their animal is superior to that of their opponent. ("My monkey is smarter than your mouse," etc.) In the game's debut, Chisato (a housewife) and Chieko (a thirteen year old girl) savaged each others' forces, leaving the witless Morihisa (god knows what he does for a living) largely unscathed. It was looking like a serious tactical error when Chieko was left with only a rabbit to face Morihisa, who was showing a horse and had, let's face it, already done seven lessons on how to make comparisons whereas she was on her first, but Morihisa, frozen, was unable to generate a comparison in which the horse trumped the rabbit and could only watch as his entire kingdom was laid to waste by the rabbit.
THE WORLD FAMOUS ANIMAL TOURNAMENT
One thing I like very much about Japanese people is that they can always be counted on to have an opinion about animals. Now, I'm fairly confident that any of my friends could produce a top-five-animals list in fairly short order, but the average man-on-the-street back in the USA has, I suspect, not given very much thought to the subject, which is very stupid not to have done. At the beginning of the class, students are asked to list their top five animals. (Nobody has trouble doing this.) Then they are taught how to make similes ('_ is as [adj.] as _' or '_ is not as [adj.] as _'), and while they are doing a silent reading exercise, I use the top five lists to seed the tournament. Snakes, wolves and pirahnas get automatic bids because they are featured in the text lesson I use to give the exercise an air of scholastic legitimacy, and also because every great competition needs villains as well as heroes, teams you root for as well as teams you root against. All of the #1 animals from the students' lists make the tournament, and so do animals featured on more than one list. Then, after some educational mumbo-jumbo, we are ready to play. Comparisons must be made, each series is best-of-three; the rest is up to chance.
For two consecutive tournaments, Dogs came in as the consensus top-ranked species, and for two consecutive tournaments, Dogs made first-round exits. Their collapse in the first tournament remains the most shocking. Though hardly a small-species team, Birds had shown very little support prior to the match, earning a bid only because I had spent a while explaining the differences between parrots and parakeets and I needed a low-ranked team to fill out the lower end of the bracket. (The seeding procedures weren't completely finalized at that point.) In the end, Dogs' inability to fly cost them greatly. Birds' triumph was short-lived, as they got swept by Goldfish in the next round. But for a while, they were the toast of the Animal Tournament.
Dogs would suffer another upset loss to Pirahnas in the Animal Tournament II before finally righting the ship and reaching the finals against Cats in Animal Tournament III, going on to topple Cinderella-story Koalas in Animal Tournament IV. "I fucking hate Dogs," said Andrew, a fellow teacher. "They're the Manchester United of Animal Tournament."
Pirahnas are the Gonzaga of Animal Tournament. They never, ever appear on anyone's top five lists, yet tournament after tournament, thanks largely to the sharpness of their teeth and their swimming ability, they upset a larger-species competitor and go on an improbable run that stops just short of the trophy. In Animal Tournament II, the class wiseacre decided that he was backing Pirahnas all the way, and his aggressive approach stunned the rest of the class; before they had really begun to get comfortable with the target structure, he'd led Pirahnas to an upset of heavily-favored Dogs. (Dogs vs. Pirahnas is one of the great rivalries of Animal Tournament. They played twice more after that first matchup, with Dogs winning the next two.) By the time the next round began, the rest of the class was a little more prepared to back their own animals. Pirahnas took the first comparison, but Cats roared back to seize the second. The wiseacre was ready and spoke quickly, making a comparison on the grounds of 'cool'...but he made a key mistake in sentence structure and put the pirahnas first in the sentence, so it came out 'Pirahnas are not as cool as Cats.' He realized what he'd done and howled. The class cheered. Cats went on to lose in the finals to Goldfish.
I double-checked the seeding because it looked too good to be true: a possible semi-finals matchup between Monkeys and Elephants. It had the potential to be the greatest non-championship series in Animal Tournament history. I began to think about inviting other classes in to watch. But anything is possible on paper; five minutes later, Wolves had upset Monkeys and Pirahnas had, for the second tournament in a row, swept the Elephants. The students seemed to realize they had fucked up when the semi-finals rolled around and we were looking at Wolves against Pirahnas. Nice one. Television ratings went through the floor. Elephants, the Kevin Garnett of Animal Tournament, have yet to get out of the first round.
"I think there's something dodgy in the seeding there," said one of my fellow teachers, studying a bracket. "Monkeys got a pretty cushy first-round matchup, considering Dogs were the #1 seed and they had to play Pirahnas." The league office denied all knowledge of wrong-doing.
I: Cats (d Goldfish)
II: Goldfish (d Cats)
III: Cats (d Dogs)
IV: Dogs (d Koalas)
V: Wolves (d Horses)
VI: Dogs (d Dolphins)
VII: Tigers (d Fish)
Of course, you read all of that and you narrow your eyes. "He is dodging the question," you mutter. "Still I do not know where he has been for the last month. He must account for a number of things, and he has not done so. Curse his evasiveness; I will demand answers."
"Holy shit!" you cry, seizing your computer monitor. "Is that a statue of two monkeys dressed as samurais?! And one of them has a bandage on his leg, presumably from a battle of some kind?! I cannot believe I have seen this! Having done so, how am I supposed to write this report for work? Thanks for blowing my mind, you damn webpage guy!!
Last Friday was the one-year anniversary of my landing in Japan, so I decided to celebrate by going to the zoo. (Someone told me it's all happening at the zoo.) The Kyoto Zoo is notoriously depressing, so I decided to take the train up to to the atmospheric urban decay of Osaka and its Tenno-ji Zoo. It was, as the following image proves, a fine decision:
The zoo itself is in an oddly exhilirating state of disrepair. The animals have been finding food somehow, but the staff appear to have fucked off at some point in the late 1960s. (It's not hard to guess where they might have gone: the zoo is next to the Shin-Sekai district, which is full of low-rent porn theaters, pachinko halls and gloriously seedy shogi parlors.) The Western concepts of 'urban planning' don't exist as we know them in Japan, leading to bizarre sights like this:
The rhinos have very easy access to the highway, which is exactly what you'd want them to have, I suppose. There were a fine bunch of monkeys and penguins at Tenno-ji, and those are the cornerstones of any zoo, as far as I am concerned. (I'm not going to walk away disappointed as long as there are some monkeys and some penguins; it is a good rule to live by, really.) The hippo was underwater the whole time I was there, but they did have this helpful display that explained the ecosystem that forms around hippos:
So, that's how that works. It was a very nice day. Later, I went to Kairyukan, the Osaka Aquarium, which was all right. Unlike Tenno-ji, the owners had spent more on building it than the spare change they had in their pockets at the moment when one of them said, "Hey, wouldn't it be fun to own an aquarium," so there was a fairly different ambiance. The highlight, predictably enough, was in Ecuadorian rain forest exhibit. It was intended to display some turtles and other fish, but the overly-thorough designers had evidently gotten a bulk discount on organisms typically found in the area:
The three resident squirrel monkeys were avoiding the water, pausing in their leaps to give occasional utterly-confounded looks downward. ("Look, I'm sure they know there's been a mistake. Probably some fish wound up at the zoo and they'll be sending a car for us any minute now.) In any event, for those of us who were not squirrel monkeys, that was also a pleasant day. I sat and stared for a while:
I almost had something. Oof! For a minute there, I nearly lost myself.
April 10, 2004
It's been a good weekend. On Thursday, I went to visit the local monkeys with some friends. The babies were out and around, and although they were young, they appeared to be committed to the fundamentals, namely the tremendous importance of climbing on things and the equally tremendous importance of abandoning the basic principles of physics as applicable to self-preservation whilst launching surprise attacks intended to knock each other off said things. We met a Japanese researcher who was tracking what he referred as 'monkey male female intimacy'. He'd identified the alpha male of the mountain and kept following him around with a notebook, running if necessary. Did the alpha male have many girlfriends? No, he said, checking through his logs to be sure. Zero girlfriends. We weren't really surprised, given that some git was following the poor monkey around with a notebook, making even a master seduction process rather difficult. We gave sympathetic nods to the obviously frustrated monkey and I wondered how long it would be until he abdicated the alpha-ship in exchange for some time alone with the ladies. For everyone else, it was a beautiful day, with spring weather and the last of the cherry blossoms crying out life and peace and naps whenever anyone liked.
On Friday, I found an international foods store and gave the Japanese a fright by wandering around with a dazed grin. I nearly wept at the sight of some Newman's Own products. I blew the last of the petty cash on chips, dip and a jar of pickles.
On the left, you will notice a new photo gallery. Instead of a standard travelogue, wherein I would merely tell of the long journey and the train breaking down in the middle of nowhere and the crazy French nature photographer who hired me as his translator and the long hike through the forest and along the narrow, frozen mountain, let me quote to you from a pamphlet, some of which is available on the website.
An outline of Jigokudani Yaenkoen
Since 1964, Jigokudani yaenkoen loved by many people in all over the world. Jigokudani Yaenkoen as a place where the interesting the mode of life of the Japanese Macaque can be observed nearby, and as a place of Monkey’s Onsen. And many researchers and photographers coming too, and they leave their achievements lots. Jigokudani is located in a mountainous area in approximately the center of Japan. Jigokudani Monkey Park is located in the valley of Yokoyu-River that flowing from Shigakogen area of the northern part of Nagano-Prefecture. At 850 meters in elevation, it is a harsh environment where snow covers the ground for one-third of the year. People called Jigokudani (Hell's Valley) because they could see the spectacle that looks like the hell that steep cliff, spring out boiling water from the surface of the earth. But this place is a paradise for monkeys. Two groups of monkeys are living in naturally at present.
Remarkable points
The monkeys, they are animals near by the human being. In other wards the human is a kind of the monkeys. They have some resemblances between human being. For example, face shape, and their appearance of hand and when they use it, and so on. In other way, they have original peculiarity appearance of their hind legs and how to use, and so on. Please try to observe their body difference between human or other animals and monkey. The Japanese Macaque makes groups it have highly social structures for their lives. In their lives, they are able to keep good relationship each other because they observe and consider about their each active in their group. Please try to observe each monkey what they do in their group.
Most readers of this web-page will be able to make an educated guess about of the spiritual significance of what I found there. Needless to say, it was a powerful day, and I will bring those truths to you, in time. For now I have only the pictures, and may they be a spell for winter wherever it lingers.
(news) A warning that terrorists might strike trains and buses in major U.S. cities using bombs concealed in bags or luggage has the nation's transit systems ratcheting up security measures.
Is this really what it's come to at home? If they're serious about tackling concealed sources of terror on the trains, they need to start with buckets of barbecue chicken on the CTA. A whole lot of terror has been enacted upon my innocent stomach by those fucking things.
January 17, 2004
I have been away from this for so long that I had to review some old entries to remind myself what I sound like. According to my notes, M. Heiden was a mild-mannered museum security guard when an accidental encounter with a radioactive microphone infused him with the force of five emcees. I am going to roll with that and we will see how it goes.
(usenet) Here's that granola recipe that Ted Washington has been talking about. He's been using it to help power him - and the Patriots defense. Man it's awesome and only take a few minutes.
1 cup (4 ounces) hazelnuts
1 cup (4 ounces) unblanched almonds
1 cup (4 ounces) raw cashews
1/2 cup canola oil
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
Grated zest of 1 orange
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise
2 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
7-8 ounces dried raisins, dates, etc.
Whole milk yogurt
Tupelo honey
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Spread the nuts in a single layer on a baking sheet and toast for about 8 minutes, or until lightly browned and fragrant. Remove from the oven, leaving the oven on. Transfer to a large plate and let cool. With a rollingpin, crush the nuts until coarse. In a medium bowl, stir the oil, maple syrup, brown sugar, orange zest, and vanilla bean together. Add the oats and stir gently to coat. spread the mixture on a baking sheet and toast for 15 to 20 minutes, stirring every few minutes to encourage even browning. Remove from the oven an let cool on the pan. Transfer the granola to a bowl and toss with the dried fruit and crushed nuts. Serve either with cold milk, or top with a the whole milk yogurt and honey.
2003 was a very good year, and December was its greatest month. The Israelis had the idea that we should take advantage of unseasonably warm weather at the beginning of the month to play soccer, and the Canadian, the Englishman and I were all up for it. We showed up at the Kyoto University sports complex one night and claimed an empty strip of field to play. We had no real business being there, but the Israelis are a confident lot who appear to know people everywhere they go, and no one bothered us. It was very crowded, with the field hockey team and the soccer teams hard at work. I was pleased to note that Kyoto University fields an American football team. The long-snapper and the place-holder spent most of the night rehearsing their roles with monomaniacal resolve. We split into teams and played soccer (football, isn't it, kids in the park, jumpers for goalposts) for a while. It was my first game in 15 years, and I was terrible, retaining no footwork or ball control skills whatsoever. The others were better, but the Canadian was pissed off at the Israelis for not passing to him, and the Englishman was the only real ace on both halves of the pitch. As such, when some guys from the Kyoto University soccer team came over and invited us to play them, I didn't give our squad much of a chance. As it turns out, though, our size advantage played a decisive role - they kept bouncing off us, falling down and apologizing - and we were ahead 30-2 when the stadium lights were finally turned off. They were very nice guys and we all promised to play again soon.
We had our school Christmas party late one Sunday night at a nabe restaurant called The Lockup. It was on a dark, unmarked side street in the massive shopping arcade in downtown Kyoto. (To be fair, all side streets are unmarked in this country, and the shopping arcade pales in comparison to its equivalents in Osaka, but I am trying to set the scene here.) I'm not that into being on time or having any idea where I'm going, so I showed up 45 minutes late and therefore arrived alone. Although there was an unlit sign over a wall-length window indicating the location of the restaurant, there was no door, and the other side of the window was an empty, featureless black space without any people. After busting some nihongo ("Lock-up wa doku des ka?") for a gang of drunk salarymen, I was led into a bar next door and guided to the entrance for The Lockup, which was several feet away behind some barrels. A hallway went to the featureless black space I'd seen through the window, and stairs led down to a tunnel with locked doors, distant screams and flickering candles. To my surprise, part of the floor had been replaced by deep sponges. I wandered around for a while until suddenly a waitress appeared, took me by the arm and guided me through a door and past several jail cells to a large cell at the end of the hall, where sat everybody from my school as well as some random Japanese people. I greeted everyone, took off my shoes and sat down to eat. The kim-chee nabe at our table was warming my stomach when suddenly the lights went out, black-lights came on, and monsters raced into the cell, tackling and hitting people. There were too many of them, and they could not be stopped. Then waitresses in tight mini-skirts appeared and shot the monsters with laser guns. The dying monsters crawled away as the lights came on and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" rose up on the sound system. Me and a random Japanese guy hugged each other. A waitress came in to take everyone's picture. During the Secret Santa, I gave two bomb-ass wooden monkey stamps and I received a nice houseplant.
I spent a few days traveling along the west coast of Japan after that, visiting the cities of Hiroshima, Onomichi and Kurashiki as well as the island of Miyajima; and when I disappear from the earth, those memories will be among the last parts of me to go.
It was profoundly disorienting to come home from a long trip and still be in Japan. Everyone was happy to see me back at the public baths, though. The owner, sentimental old coot that he is, grunted and pointed at a sign to make sure that I understood they would be taking holidays on January 1 and 3-5. Earning 'regular' status there is one of my greatest achievements and I am very proud of it. The yakuza guys asked me for the lowdown when a new foreigner walked in. (I didn't know him. They thought he was nuts for spending so much time in the green electrically-charged pool.) In the steam room, where gloriously tinny 1950s jazz is piped in through the ceiling, one yakuza asked me how the Chicago mob was doing. I meant to tell him that they were all pretty old, but I accidentally told him that they were my grandfather. (The conversations are all in Japanese, and mine remains shitty.) He nodded and seemed content with my answer. On another occasion, I chatted with a yakuza about The Last Samurai. He liked it a lot. He asked me what kind of work my family did, and I told him that my mother was an office worker. He said that he came from a long line of samurais and then he traced his entire family tree, identifying where and when each samurai lived, following that with a disseration on his wife's family tree, which was also chock-full of samurais. I said that was great, because I know the word for 'great'.
And now it is January, and I am back at work for undetermined months to come. My Japanese income tax return came back, and it was unexpectedly generous. My credit card debt has been vastly reduced and Citibank has learned that I am capable of being a fully ascetic motherfucker. Fred, a yakuza guy I have taken to calling Fred, just got the light-blue added to his full-back-butt-and-legs tattoo of a warrior slaying a demon. He's taking it one color at a time, which I think is wise. The weather has become bitterly cold, and there is no heat in my old house. Others have kerosene heaters, but I have read too many accounts of disastrous polar expeditions to go in for that shit.
IKUKO is in Kurashiki. I will leave it to the French speakers of the world to decide whether the Japanese work the same magic with their language as they do with English. I suspect that IKUKO knows about as much French as I do, which is to say that IKUKO has access to a French dictionary if IKUKO can be arsed to get up and find it, and if that is the case, I'm guessing that the Japanese are, in fact, capable of making some measure of magic with other languages. It's a risky move on their part, though. Say what you will about their various military capitulations throughout the ages, but the one thing the French will fucking fight you over is their language. I can only hope they accept IKUKO with, well, satisfaction, as opposed to rage or, worse, ennui.
Unless it was decided while I was out of the room that merciless dominion over the earth is a good thing, I am absolutely astounded by the Sony Corporation's decision to name their latest robot QRIO. In years to come, the scattered bands of survivors may well point to the moment when we let the machines break the 'u'-follows-'q' rule as the moment when robots realized they could get away with anything, so they might as well give the wholesale slaughter of human beings a try.
I will have comments in days to come on Cookie Monster (some excellent comments on that entry have gone unused thus far), space travel, very tall basketball players and other important topics, so you ought to return to this space soon.
But! Perhaps you are still annoyed because it has been so long since I have written. I am unreliable, you think, and I have abandoned you to the savagery of your cubicle too many times to be forgiven. Let me say, then, that those other webpages can promise you multimedia and regular updates and all kinds of other crap, but we both know that I am the only one in the world who can bring you a photograph of two monkeys staging the death scene from 'Camille'.
I think I've made my point.
December 24, 2003
Although a full recounting of recent events will have to wait for a few days more, I would like to provide you with a story and a nice picture to send you into the holiday season on a positive note. You may remember the Hero vs Villain trials I was running a couple months ago. To recap, students are asked to select a hero and a villain, and then they must tell the story of their encounter using no more than five lines. The following story comes from Akiko, Kae and Rie. (To be honest, it was an Akiko-dominated affair. The strong areas of her vocabulary really show up in the final product, especially that first sentence. Rie had some input, particularly where exclamation points are concerned, but Kae took the Ringo role and mostly just gaped at the other two. Still, I will credit all three of them.) I believe it is a powerful piece of work and I would like to share it with you and with the armed forces everywhere.
HERO: SUPERMAN
VILLAIN: SADDAM HUSSEIN
1. Saddam Hussein is so selfish and mean to people and one day he hit his friend.
2. His friend told Superman what he did.
3. Superman wanted to help him.
4. So Superman fight with Saddam Hussein.
5. Finally Superman win, and Saddam Hussein run away!
RESULT: Superman d. Saddam Hussein, TKO.
Let those who hit their friends be warned that that shit will not be tolerated in the new year or any year to come. And now, continuing the theme of friendship, it will come as no surprise that the picture is of monkeys.
I am off to Hiroshima on an overnight bus. Happy holidays!
December 20, 2003
It's 3AM! It's snowing in Kyoto! And I saw a monkey on a motorbike!
I love everyone!!!
November 3, 2003
quintessence (n) 1 : the fifth and highest element in ancient and medieval philosophy that permeates all nature and is the substance composing the celestial bodies 2 : the essence of a thing in its purest and most concentrated form 3 : the most typical example or representative
April 15, 2003
Jesus! Does no one realize that this is the part where a deep rumble is heard from beneath Baghdad, and then a two-hundred foot tall Saddam Hussein rises from the ground with beams of concentrated chemical weapons shooting from his eyes, screaming "How, how, how will you stop me now?!?" Get out of there!
In paranoid states, I fall into a sort of pop culture kabbalism, wherein apparently coincidental news in the world of arts and entertainment can be interpreted and cross-referenced in such a way to reveal a code that underlies the direction of future events. So, you can imagine how I reacted to the death of Edwin Starr, writer of the song "War". ("War! Huh! Good God, y'all. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! Say it again, now.") Fucking two hundred feet tall with chemical-beam eyes, and suddenly Syria is in the Axis of Evil, and I still have to pay my credit card bill no matter what happens, but they won't accept yen, and yesterday, a random homeless person called me an alchemist in an accustatory tone, which is the third time that has happened. Fuck it! I'm done.
(Fametracker) Charlie Sheen has gone on record to say that his prayers are only with some of the U.S. troops, and he refuses to say which ones.
And now, for the touching story of a monkey living the good life.
(news) PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — Cheeta lives in this desert resort town like a lot of old movie stars, painting, playing the piano and watching his old movies. But as one of Palm Springs' only retired chimpanzees, he stands out. The last actor to have played the lead chimpanzee role in the Tarzan movies of the 1930s and '40s, Cheeta is 71 now the oldest chimp in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records. "He's just part of the family," said Dan Westfall, who saved Cheeta's life when he adopted him from Tony Gentry, an animal trainer who worked in Hollywood. Westfall and Abe Karajerjian care for Cheeta and other animals, including orangutans and monkeys, at a house they have nicknamed Casa de Cheeta. Cheeta spends his time playing with preschool toys, thumbing through magazines including National Geographic and playing the piano. In addition to his old movies, he likes watching Animal Planet and cartoons on television. Cheeta's handlers hope to sell some of his paintings which they describe as "Ape-Stract" to raise money for a sanctuary for homeless primates.
Two new office buildings are being constructed on previously vacant lots in the diagonal between the rabbi's office and my old digs at Beelzetron. Presumably, they will house homeless office workers, and that will be nice.
I now have a firm date of departure for Japan: May 21. I'll be in the Kansai region, which has the old cities (Kyoto, Nara) and Osaka, which, as anyone who has played Destroy All Monsters with me will tell you, has the long red boats that I like to pick up and throw. The Summersonic Festival presents itself as a good time for cowboys.
Thanks to the angel of death and his decision to pass over the Israelites, I have the next three days off, and two more days next week. Thanks, angel of death! I bet I'd get arrested if I tried to send him a thank-you card through the U.S. Postal Service, though. Not like Santa.
(news) A $1,400 monkey suit is on the loose somewhere in Champaign-Urbana. On Friday, April 4 the Xtension Chords, a student-run a cappella singing group, was selling tickets to their biggest show of the year, Acappellalooza X, when the suit was stolen. Because of the rainy weather, they had put the monkey suit near the stairwell in the southeast corner of the Illini Union. "They got sick of moving it in and out. When someone went to grab it, they saw it was lost," Eric Horng, treasurer of Xtension Chords and junior in LAS. The group rented the monkey suit from Dallas & Co. Costumes and Magic, 101 E. University Ave., Champaign. "I don't know why anyone would want to steal a monkey suit, Halloween is half a year away and it's hot in that suit," said Horng.
This is the part where I recline in my chair and shake my head as the sole candle flickers and rain batters the walls of the remote mountain hideaway. I'm retired. I don't do that any more. Plenty of other people can catch this guy. You don't need me. What's that? Johnson is lost in the field? Damn it. You don't understand what it takes out of me, to get into the mind of a criminal. To become him! I can't do it again. I...can't. But I must.
Because I like talking and writing, I am extremely disturbed by the current political and intellectual climate in America. The blacklists that have been launched against every celebrity who has spoken against the war are bad enough, but the nearly complete lack of outraged response is even worse. It's reported so casually, offhand, among items of society gossip. (Why can't we retroactively blacklist Donald Rumsfeld for shaking Saddam's hand and giving him weapons, or Dick Cheney for doing business with him less than five years ago?) Honestly, though, the incredible surge of internet fandom for former Iraqi information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf gives me sincere hope that the America I love is still there, waiting out the storm, and will return stronger, smarter and funnier than before - hopefully, no later than November 2004.
March 28, 2003
I have been assured by my journalist friend Tom that the monkeys referred to in the report about the Moroccan land-mine squad report actually just manage the effort from central command in Qatar. So, that's a relief.
In honor of an exceptional Point-Counterpoint in this week's Onion, I wanted to take a moment to note my favorite entries from the history of that fine genre. Unfortunately, The Onion's online archives are not comprehensive, so I could only find links to a few. I found an outside article that made reference to the powerful debate between the humidifier and the de-humidifier, but not the debate itself, and I couldn't find any reference at all to the one where a Packer fan and a Native American argued over what it was to see one's people obliterated. (Did I imagine that one?) The list looked skimpy without the missing entries, so I did not finish it. (2. Point-Counterpoint: Abortion and 1. Point-Counterpoint: Technology, for the record.) I sent The Onion an email expressing my feelings. Why didn't they archive "'Outdoor Advertising Is A Blight On Our Landscape' vs. 'I Just Wanted To Tell The Nice People About The Delicious Yogurt'"? I am losing touch with the world.
I can't find a graceful way to pimp by Wish List for tearful goodbye presents. Believe me, I have tried.
March 27, 2003
That woozy feeling is back. I must be on the right track.
Obviously, my upcoming departure from indentured servitude has upset the balance of power between the rabbi and I. The shoe is on the other foot, if you will, or the yarmulke is on the other head, if you prefer something with situational relevance, or the crazy beard and curls are blowing in the wind on the other side of the street, you could say, if you were slightly mad. (The rabbi does not actually have either of those, just a slight funk that is reminiscent of old books and lox.) He has come to terms with my decision to leave, and now his only aim is to stall my departure as long as he can. Therefore, when given a task I do not wish to complete, I can threaten to give two weeks notice effective immediately, and he is forced to back off. For example, last week, he wanted me to call a bunch of rabbis who are new to the area and talk them into coming to a luncheon, because I can be charming when I feel like it. I said no, because I did not feel like meeting anyone new that day. And that was that. He is a cagey bastard, though, and has attempted to regain some of his former leverage by bringing cookies into the office and making reference to them whenever I show signs of becoming difficult. Of course, no cookies come from that guy without a story about the extended lineage of the bakers, families of Jews from Spain or Poland who have been baking for centuries. The cookies are generally quite good. I will give him that much.
The United States suddenly became very forthcoming about Iraqi casualty numbers after the Al Jazeera POW report this weekend. I think someone from Gen. Tommy Franks' office is calling everyone who has a telephone to make sure they know that we're up 300-16 or so. You know, pundits are always quick to holler at athletes who draw parallels between sports and war, but no one complains when the government uses the semiotics of organized athletics to make war go down smoothly.
I bought a digital camera in order to chronicle my time in Japan. All I have done with it thus far is to take pictures of myself hanging upside-down and making faces, like so:
In very short order, I start looking like my grandfather does all the time.
(news) A Moroccan publication accused the government Monday of providing unusual assistance to U.S. troops fighting in Iraq by offering them 2,000 monkeys trained in detonating land mines. The weekly al-Usbu' al-Siyassi reported that Morocco offered the U.S. forces a large number of monkeys, some from Morocco's Atlas Mountains and others imported, to use them for detonating land mines planted by the Iraqis. The publication quoted a highly-informed source as saying, "that is not a scientific illusion but a well-known military tactic."
Well-known by shitheads, maybe. Super Monkey Ball takes on a tragic resonance in the light of such wicked, degenerate notions. Monkey Target, wherein monkeys para-glide over the ocean and attempt to land on colorful islands for points, is now re-cast as a dance of aggression and murder. Morocco used to be the place where Grace Kelly was queen. Now, they're trying to put blowing up monkeys next to the phalanx and the flank manuever in the annals of combat techniques. Of course, I will provide space on this web-page for the Moroccan government to deny these accusations, because they are only accusations, and we must be fair, and try to think the best of the world around us...
February 4, 2003
I have a letter from the monkey house! The Oregon Zoo was quick with their response. They are all class at that zoo.
>>> "Marc Heiden"
First, please accept my condolences on the passing of Hugo, the elephant.
I read with great interest of Inji the Orangutan's Super Bowl prediction a couple weeks ago. I, too, thought that the Raiders would win. Although Inji did not succeed, I have great respect for her courage in going out on a limb (no pun intended) with the prediction. My question is this: Has Inji been informed that the Raiders did not win? If so, what was her reaction? Do you think that the news was / would have been especially disappointing to her, given her excellent 4-0 track record in the past?
Thank you very much for your time.
Best wishes,
Marc Heiden.
**
Thank you for expressing your sympathy regarding the loss of Hugo. He will certainly be missed not only for his genetic importance, but his mischievous antics.
Inji has not been informed of her prediction error,nor was she informed of her success in the past. She is a wise matriarch who is not into the prediction process as much as she enjoys "working" the media that come to watch. She fully understand that she is the center of attention and loves watching the photographers follow her every move.
Linda D'Ae-Smith
Public Relations
Oregon Zoo
(office phone)
(pager)
What a fine zoo! I am glad that someone prioritizes mischievous antics over genetic importance. You'd think that would come naturally, but then you look around, and the rabbi's hollering about how American Airlines is trying to screw him again, and somehow it's your responsibility to be the intermediary.
Should monkeys be taught success from failure? I don't see any reason to get up in their faces about it. The world will not be a better place if orangutans learn to second-guess themselves.
I noticed this weekend that my new computer has an Internet Checkers program. To begin a match, one need merely be connected to the internet and launch the checkers program; an opponent of the same skill level is then found, and the game begins. Players can only communicate with each other through two dozen catch phrases such as 'Yes', 'Nice move' and 'I'm thinking'. I am attempting to carve out a reputation for myself in the Internet Checkers world as the 'It was luck' guy. In any event, I would like to use this forum to decry the cowardice of the Dutch player from last night who, after being lured into a triple-jump, immediately resigned, even though he had at least five pieces left. That is not the response of an Intermediate-skilled competitor, sir, and that is what you explicitly claimed to be. It is not bad to have received such a beating from my crafty checkers tactics, because they are indeed crafty, but to forfeit the match with so much still at stake speaks poorly for you. I call upon all Dutch checkers players of conscience to disassociate themselves from this cowardly act and restore dignity to the Dutch checkers world, and I further demand that the Dutch player from last night re-assign a more accurate rating, such as 'Beginner', to his or her checker-playing abilities. He or she can do so through the menu on the top left, under 'Skill level'.
Also, to the player from Taiwan, I would like to say, 'It was luck', 'Yes', and 'It was luck'.
February 3, 2003
For a moment I thought it may have been shuttle debris, but no, the rabbi is back at work. Before he left, he and I jostled over the wallpaper on my computer desktop. Seeking simple joy between plunges into Microsoft Word, I had the classic Lee Harvey Oswald Rock Trio running. Seeing it by chance one day, the rabbi chuckled, and then announced that he was deeply offended, that he had watched the event live on TV, and that Jack Ruby was Jewish. (He dwelled on the last point the longest before hastily reiterating his horror.) I kept the image and turned off my screensaver in order to ensure that the image was on-screen more often. Figuring that one of the first things he would do after returning to the office would be to check whether it was still there, I used this fine entry from The Boondocks to further my entries in passive-aggressive arts.
Here is the reference for the football gambling monkey, courtesy of Mike Saul:
(news) Inji the orangutan is the Oregon Zoo's resident gambler, and she has a 4 and 0 track record for past football predictions. Inji's keepers lay out a Tampa Bay t-shirt and a Raider t-shirt. The primate then decides who will win and puts on the appropriate shirt. "We've got a pretty clear pick here: Raiders. Her grandson there picked the Bucks, but he doesn't have her proven record," zoo director Tony Vecchio told KOIN 6 News. Keepers say orangutans are naturally attracted to reds and yellows, and Inji purposely picked the black shirt.
I have sent an inquiry to the zoo and hope to have more news about the orangutan's reaction to the Raiders' defeat (and her own fallibility). Someone said, "Your website is funny, but it could be more poignant." Well, shit is about to get mighty poignant around here.
January 31, 2003
I am sorry that this webpage has not been receiving the focus it should over the last few weeks. Free time at work was sparse for a while, and now that the rabbi is out of town, I am devoting nearly all of my spare time to strategizing methods of escape. I know that I cannot just up-and-quit without a new job to walk into, because doing that at Beelzetron landed me in crushing debt from which I may never recover. But I must go. This shit is like Hungary in 1956, either bail out now or the Communists get you and all of your stuff for the next thirty years.
My friend Kurt, who is kind in the face of absurdity and also when facing away from absurdity, wrote a flattering essay about watching B-movies with me and some friends. Every smart-ass in a movie theater wishes he had a Boswell for his Dr. Johnson.
For a brief, horrifying moment, I thought I had inadvertently made the worst mistake of my life when I discovered that the Lincoln Park Zoo had held a Zooperbowl party without my knowing it. I calmed down, though, when I realized that the party was not actually held at the zoo. What's the point, then? Bunch of jackanapes planned that thing, I'll tell you. Mike Saul kept talking about a monkey who has been making Super Bowl predictions and was 4-0 until this year, when he screwed up by picking the Raiders. I have been searching for information on the monkey's reaction, but have been unsuccessful thus far.
I have a new email address. Spammers, you can make all the overtures you like towards the penis of heiden@enteract.com, because ain't nobody there.