tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57034058949739413412024-03-05T19:11:20.985-08:00The Haltiwanger ReportDr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.comBlogger71125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-62997930049417986122017-09-28T13:27:00.000-07:002017-09-28T13:27:14.364-07:00Failed Openings To Mystery Novels I Will Never Finish Writing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Death Of An Insurance Premium</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
I was never an
attractive man. Far from it in fact, and yet somehow I made that ugliness work
for me at the insurance agency. Perhaps clients looked at my face, saw the
failure and hopelessness etched into its crags and creases, not to mention the
moles and boils and rashes and such, and thought, yes, I do need some kind of
protection. After all, life’s a racket and you just need to stay ahead of the
game. That’s what they teach us in the insurance business and then I just pass the
fear on to you and eventually, over time, climb my way up to salesman of the
month. And then salesman of the year, despite daily eruptions of facial pus
from my many boils not to mention those few lawsuits I’m still facing. But it’s
lonely at the top. All the candy in the five candy dishes that were so artfully
arranged on laminate pressboard and sturdy metal-legged tables draped with festive
tablecloths in the Holiday Inn convention centre room for Roy’s retirement
party, that was all on my dime. Just a gift from the salesman of the year to
show how generous I am even though no one knew it was me who bought and stocked
the candy dishes, and though I do like to give anonymously I did have cause to
mention it a couple of times to a few folks around the punchbowl and in the buffet
line. Sometimes you have to toot your own horn and I don’t mean farting in a
cold car somewhere on the outskirts of Minnesota with an inexplicable erection
in 30-below weather.</div>
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“Say, did you get a
chance to try some of the candy?” I asked, nonchalant as all hell. I got some
nods…yes, yes, they did try some candy. Yes, they enjoyed it though, judging by
their reactions, either they were just drunk or they weren’t that sold on the
stuff. Of course the double martinis didn’t help, no doubt dulling their taste buds.
Time to show these souses what really went into being top of the heap. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Yeah, well, I put
that together. I’ve always felt candy is the unsung icebreaker at parties. I
mean, put out a nice dish of candy, or five dishes if you’ve got the money,
which I do, and soon everyone’s talking and rubbing elbows and shoulders and
fornicating in the cloak room and feeding each other canapés and exchanging
phone numbers and shoe sizes and vacuum cleaner repairmen advice and baby-sitter
recommendations, and tax bracket loopholes and, holy crap if you haven’t
created a thriving little community. How great is that? And that’s what I’m all
about. Community, fornication, tax loopholes and shitting in your enemy’s pants.
I mean shoes.” People were always impressed with this little speech of mine and
I would deliver it at the drop of a hat, even at a baptism, funeral or even
once at a bris.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
It was at one of
those office parties that I met Guinevere. She was the wife of the company’s
head chartered accountant, Del Plunkin, a mousey guy who had more cardigan
sweaters than Siberia has musk-oxen or the frozen bodies of dissidents who had
tried to escape the Gulag twenty years earlier, and I’ll be damned if this woman
wasn’t all over me, backing me into a corner behind the grand piano and a
potted palm tree and there behind the fronds she rubbed my penis through my
trousers with one of those extra long shoe horns that rich people or those with
arthritis seem to own. The next 86 hours were bewitching as we ditched
diplomacy and roamed from motel room to motel room, engaging in every carnal
activity known to civilization and I’m including all species in that
declaration so, that my head wasn’t bitten off during the proceedings or I
wasn’t left to guard some eggs for six or seven years, I can only thank my
lucky stars.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
It was at the Sea
Horse Motel after an especially rousing round of lovemaking that left friction
burns on my forehead, earlobes and ankles, no thanks to the vinyl headboard and
a carpet-sample book that found its way under the sheets at the height of our
frenzied coupling, that Guinevere turned to me as we lay on the Magic Fingers
Massaging Bed, enjoying the last vibrations out of our last quarter we’d dropped
into the slot only moments earlier and said, “You know, Leopold, if only my
husband were out of the picture we could be together forever.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“I’ve thought about
that, baby and I like the sound of it.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Well, you’re an
insurance guy so you know all about the triple indemnity clause whereby if you
kill my husband but make it look like an accident or that he was chewed by
feral dogs or a meteorite hit him, but only in Saskatchewan, then I get triple
the amount of money on his insurance policy that I’m going to take out on him,
with your help.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“And what do I get
out of the deal, honeybunch?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“You get my
everlasting love and the fact that I’m willing to overlook the pus eruptions
from your many boils, even at intimate moments because pus really has no place
in the bedroom I’ll remind you yet again, so that should count for a whole lot
right in of itself. Oh, and I’ll throw in fifty grand for your troubles.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Hmmm. A measly
fifty grand out of the, what…3.3 million you’ll be collecting on the triple
indemnity policy. Forget about it, sister. I got other plans. Anyway, truth is,
if we’re together after we off your husband why aren’t we sharing the money?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Oh, we would. Of
course we would, Leopold. The fifty grand is just a little something extra for
you, a little play-around money. Take a friend to Las Vegas or something. On me.
All you need to do is one little thing.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Oh, why didn’t you
say so? In that case, lay it out for me in terms I can understand. I’m a man
who likes clear instructions and a nice roast chicken on a paper plate.
Down-to-earth, greasy and disposable, that’s my motto.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Okay. I’ve figured
it from every angle and this is the one that works. My husband and I are due to
travel to Saskatchewan next month to visit his ailing mother. In fact she may
be dying but either way I intend to hasten the process along because both my
husband and I are named in her will and she’s sitting on a ton of money due to
her investments in both the electric cattle-prod and paperclip industries. She lives
in a small town called Moosamin, and as they’re an affluent family, the town
grain elevator is named after them. So, every time we visit the mother insists
on schlepping us out to this hideous thing where we stand and gaze up and marvel
at the family name painted on old, moldy, rotting wood. You starting to see
where this is going?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“You want me to
push them off the grain elevator?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“No, you idiot. What
did I just say about the triple indemnity clause? Remember, if Del gets hit by
a meteor <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anywhere</i> in Saskatchewan,
the insurance company will honor the policy. I figure with his mother standing
there we might as well kill two birds with one stone and quadruple our money.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Now you’re
talking, honey. But seems to me just standing around hoping for a meteor to
fall on them, well you could be there for days. Even months. Or years. I mean
isn’t this whole meteor thing a bit of a long-shot? Can’t we just go back to
the feral dogs?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Of course it’s a
long-shot, you twit. You think we’re going to stand around a grain elevator waiting
for a meteor to fall on them. We’ll die of old age before that happens. What
I’m suggesting is this. You remember Siegfried Putchkin? He’s the guy who made those
fake flaming meatball centerpieces for Clifton and Bernice’s wedding.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“How could I
forget? Right after that they promoted Clifton to head of the accounts payable
division. This for a guy who can barely write his own name on a cheque. Those
flaming meatballs really impressed someone.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Well, yeah, what
did you think? Bernice is the daughter of Colby Hamstring, the president of the
goddamn insurance company. Anyway, this guy, Putchkin, he’s really got a talent
for constructing faux-meatballs. Kind of like his own little niche market. I
had no idea of the size or scope of the fake meatball industry when I started
this little project. So I called him up and asked him if he thought he could
create a fake meteorite. Well, that had him thinking for a while until I
explained to him that meteorites are not unlike meatballs. Spherical but with
lumpy surfaces, happy and durable in extreme heat and deadly if traveling at a
high velocity with absolutely no regard for human life. Meatball or meteorite,
the description applies equally to both. After that he was all in. I’m awaiting
delivery of the meatball any day now. He’s constructed it from papier-m<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">â</span>ch<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é</span>
and liver p<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">â</span>t<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é</span>. Light enough for us to carry but heavy enough, when dropped
from the top of a grain elevator, to crush a person’s skull. Something to do
with how Putchkin freezes the liver p<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">â</span>t<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é first. I just need you to drop the
damn thing on them while they’re gazing up at their flaking-painted name.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">“Better
yet,” Leopold replied, “why not hedge our bets by throwing some feral dogs into
the mix. </span>I’m sure I could round up a bunch of half-starved psychotic
mutts and let’em loose on Del and his mom in case the meteorite doesn’t kill
them right off. Meteorite, feral dogs, c’mon, how can you miss? If the fake
meteorite doesn’t crush their heads then the dogs will eat them. And the frozen
liver p<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">â</span>t<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é to boot</span>.
Which is like eating the evidence if you think about it. Either way we’ll be
laughing all the way to the offshore bank in the Cayman Islands and the dogs’ll
be chewing intestines till the cows come home.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“I was thinking
more the Antarctic.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“What’s that?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“The Antarctic, for
an offshore bank to hide our money.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“They got banks in
the Antarctic?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Of course. No
safer place to keep your money these days than in the Antarctic National Bank.
Makes the Swiss look like wussies in the world of international finance. Your
money is hidden deep beneath the ice and guarded by an army of penguins who
will peck any intruder to death. Beats the shit out of those Alps and those
stuffy Swiss twits with their moldy cheese breath any day.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Is that true?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Which part?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“The part about the
penguins.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Of course. And
they’re trained by the Israeli army in the art of Krav Maga.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Uh, yeah, whatever
you say, doll-face. I dig the ice. And penguins. I dig penguins guarding our
money and I dig the Israeli army even though I’m no so big on the desert climate
, so really, the Antarctic sounds fine by me. I like things a little frosty. For
me, for you and for our money. And maybe we can find time for some below-zero
loving, if you catch my snowdrift.” Little was Leopold to know that these words
would come back to haunt him, not in the frozen wasteland of the Antarctic but
instead out back of an Olive Garden in Winnipeg in 13-below and a backlit figure
on a snowmobile pointing a .303 hunting rifle at him and the last thing he
could feel was the cool snow beneath him that he’d collapsed into and how it
turned a bright red like a snow cone, reminding him of those hot summer days
when the mosquitoes were plentiful and bounced off your forehead like bloodied
raindrops, but with needle-shaped proboscis and spindly legs and a high,
whining sound that he’d come to associate with youth and skin afflictions and
lactose intolerance at the fair-grounds and getting whapped with a partially-frozen
bible by his high school gym teacher after another sad display of rope-climbing,
finishing with the teacher announcing to the class that if Leopold should ever
be so fortunate as to procreate then all his children would look like potato
chips. Time would prove the gym teacher right, amazingly enough, but that’s
another story and depended on who you asked, since some claimed the kids looked
more like those jumbo shrimp in shrimp cocktails due to their reddish hue and
many tiny legs and the dark sand veins that ran up the back of their tiny heads
and the way they liked to cling to glass surfaces and then just look
googly-eyed at things, especially if they were tomato-sauce based.</div>
Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-81430469516334416512016-12-30T19:58:00.000-08:002016-12-31T01:40:49.296-08:00Dr. Haltiwanger's Top 7 Best Books of 2016This is that time of year when every Tom, Dick, Harry and Fred, Cindy, Boris, Petunia and Ed, Morton, Dorothy, Ludmilla and Oscar, Sydney, Mindy, Horsham and Mildred's cousin Mitzi Plotzman, like to publish their top-ten book lists for the past year and I felt, as an avid reader myself, there should be a Haltiwanger top-ten book list but I could only come up with seven, perhaps due to my unrestricted ingestion of Neo-Citran. Usually I fall asleep between putting on socks so that's a good indicator of how far I get with pages. Nevertheless, here are some of the best books of 2016 that I think I read. <br />
<br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Voice-Thrower of Thornhill,
Ontario by Milton Doiley and </b><br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Abigail Tundry</span></b>
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There are some contemporary Canadian novels that seem so
steeped in a traditional sense of place that it’s as if you can smell the pine
beetles and poutine drippings and loon droppings and wheat chafe and bowling
alley shoe deodorant spray from a mile away. Some would claim that continuing
to write such fiction is like trying to beat a carpet with a geoduck, and they
wouldn’t be far off but there’s still something to say for a book that wears its
maple leaf on its snot-covered sleeve, and this is such a book.
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The motifs tumble down like maple leaves on a blustery fall
day only to be used by wandering bands of out-of-work hobo rodeo clowns as toilet paper after a
ten-course dumpster buffet. Skip back to
1973.
Thornhill is just beginning to become a burgeoning suburban bedroom
community, a place where you can be friendly but still get lost, in the woods
or rifling through your neighbour’s garbage, the
perfect hideaway for Clyde Torkins and his wife, Tilly, on-the-run from police
in Michigan for a series of bank robberies. It’s not long before Clyde becomes
a top janitorial supply salesman and Tilly, following her life-long dream, is
soon a popular local ventriloquist with her dummy, Mr. Dentalis, who she takes
to visit schools to teach the children about good dental and other forms of hygiene.
But beneath this perfect suburban façade lies a seething and strange world of
unworldly desires with Tilly leading the charge as a paid-for-hire topless
ventriloquist, performing for groups of slobbering married men in rec-rooms
across the district. This novel is a beautiful and touching examination of the
bonds of marriage tested in an oncoming new world where the old values are cast
aside like burger wrappers out a car window and racy jokes around a rec-room
bar become a plot for revenge and perhaps even murder. Not to mention a run for
president of a balloon manufacturing company with links to some allegedly
corrupt Rotary Club funds. The plot thickens like a stew left on the stove too long.</div>
</div>
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<br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Crimson Pistachio
by Torrance Fippler </b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsQhXxUDcgoY4Db5VCBEHf-FumBGOlr3eDNNjF8MajtKfCHoqFuYrMY5qAy-Vh4bhrQvCdYEyIJPW-NfhBsPDG0Qi3yZGg5Z3yHeLpeCla6_U279_penaSFIYCK8xgFn1kzyzAIbXAyFih/s1600/booklist5.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsQhXxUDcgoY4Db5VCBEHf-FumBGOlr3eDNNjF8MajtKfCHoqFuYrMY5qAy-Vh4bhrQvCdYEyIJPW-NfhBsPDG0Qi3yZGg5Z3yHeLpeCla6_U279_penaSFIYCK8xgFn1kzyzAIbXAyFih/s400/booklist5.jpeg" width="277" /></a></div>
<br />
Remember when pistachios used to be dyed red? Then they
stopped doing that for some reason that I know nothing about. Well this book
delves into that mystery like a squirrel into a bag of nuts and holy smokes if
you aren’t shocked by the results. A captivating read, like being chained to a
radiator in a run-down motel. The book’s cover didn’t seem to have any
designation whether the book was fiction or non-fiction but I’m erring on the
side of non-fiction because it makes the plot, characters and pistachios all
that more intriguing. Especially once the KGB become involved with an Iranian
pistachio smuggling ring.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Pinsky Geltman’s Last
Stand by Hamish Recondo</b></div>
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj64jyTh2kWBQN70PqJ4DvbQ49Vz2465SrTIYzGUOYHspnYmHpGlP3HLi2Ys5okRaFQJnKduJyN05_vKNgtNsHDG59SJZsU-4TtUItXwLC_G408D8NxSuYyleGF7fIkLiRThVTtsUTNCO2m/s1600/booklist.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj64jyTh2kWBQN70PqJ4DvbQ49Vz2465SrTIYzGUOYHspnYmHpGlP3HLi2Ys5okRaFQJnKduJyN05_vKNgtNsHDG59SJZsU-4TtUItXwLC_G408D8NxSuYyleGF7fIkLiRThVTtsUTNCO2m/s400/booklist.jpeg" width="287" /></a></div>
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<br />
A great chess player is blown up while eating pickled
herring in kosher restaurant in a Toronto strip-mall. On the other side of the
world a young child wanders away from the family yurt and is flung into a world
full of menace, malice and hailstones as big as gallstones. Then they turn out
to be actual gallstones. In the neighbouring village the local butterfly
collector finds a note in one of his killing jars. It’s a note from a Russian
soldier semi-frozen in Siberia to his betrothed back in St. Petersburg. She’s
already dumped him for another guy but he doesn’t know that as he freezes to
death in a Siberian field blowing last kisses to her into the frigid air. Are
these seemingly unconnected events part of a brilliant short story collection?
No, they’re part of a brilliant novel that jumps around like head lice in an
elementary school. If you can’t follow it, that’s your fault. Better luck next
time, bub!</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Heavy Snow In
Vaagasraagard by Ilsa Oogaard</b></div>
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<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz-xeaHW-4XZPOJuYZTWdteNsd9Eb4AfYfwSid8iAY7ISx6xbg3o4Uw2KB1pMvFsl5pb7FZSRxCNchNqvqcLwWb3WFrLWXUVGyeLf6lXDWTHQUc7Hhyj2eiOw9I4qtF8MlzGlJ4bvO7GNH/s1600/booklist2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz-xeaHW-4XZPOJuYZTWdteNsd9Eb4AfYfwSid8iAY7ISx6xbg3o4Uw2KB1pMvFsl5pb7FZSRxCNchNqvqcLwWb3WFrLWXUVGyeLf6lXDWTHQUc7Hhyj2eiOw9I4qtF8MlzGlJ4bvO7GNH/s400/booklist2.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
I’m not one for the fantasy genre but Ilsa Oogaard really
hits it out of the fjord with this one. This novel has more characters than all
the changes of underwear in a George Martin trilogy but they’re much more fully
rounded because Ms. Oogaard has the good sense to incorporate their shoe sizes.
It’s little things like that that really make their personalities pop and add
an air of realism to the world of Gloogvarnishhooven. All I can say is that
when Rankgnor, lord of Svenoorgorlogen discovers the magic lichen near his
journey’s end and is then able to reverse time to bring his dead father back so
he can pay him the three gold coins he owes him (about fifty bucks in today’s
Canadian dollars), I wept like a baby seal lost on an ice floe. Then I went
outside and chopped some wood and let my tears fall upon lumber that shed its
own tears as I struck it over and over again with a potato peeler. It was going
to be a long, cold winter.</div>
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<br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Alcoholic Dogs by
Clayton Tononoclot</b></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLRAl3l_W8ITnQuzlnw-HqL5i09ZfxiMn2Xm13_wYO1oGEPXeQwv82ZYDjaA-in162zFMj1_HVL2zI5OhcFKawSvFSiPVeJoXSaoNEFzLZLWREvgwWdTzyqPp84BGrSUtjv0yulkq1iUjm/s1600/booklist3.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLRAl3l_W8ITnQuzlnw-HqL5i09ZfxiMn2Xm13_wYO1oGEPXeQwv82ZYDjaA-in162zFMj1_HVL2zI5OhcFKawSvFSiPVeJoXSaoNEFzLZLWREvgwWdTzyqPp84BGrSUtjv0yulkq1iUjm/s400/booklist3.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br />
Here’s another one I’m not sure is fiction or non-fiction
but hot damn if it isn’t a great read either way. This is a poignant book that
challenges you to, if not change your life, at least change your socks
occasionally. Many books have titles that are misleading but for this book not
to worry. Alcoholic dogs galore are pouring from the pages, stumbling about in
the alleyways, sprawled out on the sidewalk, on the couch, vomiting on favorite
chew toys…no sirree, it’s not a pretty sight. But then Psychiatrist Bob shows
up and Mitzi Tobogner from the women’s auxillary at Dapson Falls First
Penetcostal Church and even with a roving band of distempered alcoholic dogs
unwilling to sit down with Psychiatrist Bob to really get at the root of their
problems, the town never gives up hope. It’s a piquant narrative, like accidentally
sucking a red pepper flake up your nasal cavity, but is able to portray the
grey areas of moral dilemmas, such as taking a pair of hockey gloves out of a
community centre lost and found box even though they’re not yours, filling them
with luncheon meat and then putting them back, with great subtlety
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<span style="font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(and by that I mean both the sneaking of the hockey gloves and the
insertion of the luncheon meat)</span>. A story of
love, redemption, of alcoholic dogs puking on your carpeting and most of all,
families and their pets and the co-mingling of their hairy parts during normal day-to-day
and evening activities.</div>
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<br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Upholsterer by Lesley
Melby</b></div>
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<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo43occVhB1We5QU8cjuaCKzXkSE227rcKeXhTJB3kGaxBY_FTPAr5nG3ip05P3CJii95jf23xaoigm8uT13OSX5ivsFpLq7kYiFp_VMSXGxDfAg0Gm3lKaBhS8MEiq8-Afk74WNLrLNYC/s1600/booklist6.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo43occVhB1We5QU8cjuaCKzXkSE227rcKeXhTJB3kGaxBY_FTPAr5nG3ip05P3CJii95jf23xaoigm8uT13OSX5ivsFpLq7kYiFp_VMSXGxDfAg0Gm3lKaBhS8MEiq8-Afk74WNLrLNYC/s400/booklist6.gif" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
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Who is the Upholsterer? Hitman, world renowned artist, or
maybe both? Who knows, and by the end of this fabulous novel that breaks so
many novel-breaking rules some reviewers have described it as The James Joyce
Semen Express ejaculating through the glory hole of the death of language
itself, you’ll feel like you’ve been slapped upside the head with your own
scrotum (for those who don’t own a scrotum you can substitute frozen peas
thawed in a plastic sandwich bag, or for those with a scrotum but are unable to
slap themselves in the head with it, no problem, the book actually comes with a
realistic plastic scrotum shrink-wrapped to the cover so you can whap yourself
silly with it each time the text prompts you to do so), and be all the much
wiser for it. But it’s not all just slappy scrotums and cat-scratched sofas
dragged into the upholstery shop. Beneath the slapdash barrage of words lies deep
underlying ideas about arts and culture in a society that values money and jumbo
shrimp that have been successfully transplanted with human heads, above all
else that is decent and worthy of a mall kiosk or even grandmothers
spoon-feeding baby lizards while navigating a mine field in Eastern Europe. The
main character, an upholstery artist, literally nail-guns her way up through
the swanky ranks of the New York art world
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with her performance pieces where she refinishes a sofa
while teaching an incontinent parrot to talk or enlists the aide of genuine
hoboes to smash up Louis IV furniture to use as firewood to heat up their cans
of pork and beans on the rooftop of the Guggenheim. But that’s just a teaser to
the places this novel will take you and all I can say, after finishing this
book my teats were sore for weeks and I had hoof and mouth disease for six
months. The power of words is not to be underestimated. This novel is also an
homage to the world of upholstery and the toll it takes on those who practice
this demanding and dark art. </div>
</div>
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<br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Tungsten! By Dr. Jamon
Jambon</b></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjf8Yqa2Xcf_uZvQ6cA9sSSxsjMN2WosaIZ9Ux-90a6Qom-GQvN7tHJYBXh6Ej2IdIRT8-SWkE2nF_0OdcCqSSW3KZ3XA42bqsiovfKQ4QalVm8-fj4Fo_OEYzRIV4Lv4Weey5rjwzIJ1o/s1600/booklist4.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="373" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjf8Yqa2Xcf_uZvQ6cA9sSSxsjMN2WosaIZ9Ux-90a6Qom-GQvN7tHJYBXh6Ej2IdIRT8-SWkE2nF_0OdcCqSSW3KZ3XA42bqsiovfKQ4QalVm8-fj4Fo_OEYzRIV4Lv4Weey5rjwzIJ1o/s400/booklist4.gif" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br />
You thought you knew everything about this wonderful metal
but think again. By the time you finish the first page of this fascinating book
you’ll have to rethink everything you’ve ever thought about tungsten steel. From
its discovery to its rare properties to even its very name (in German it means
‘wolf cream’ or ‘wolf froth’ stemming from a time back in the 16<sup>th</sup>
century when rabid wolves wandered the countryside dragging off babies and ham
hocks for sustenance and strudel-bakers’ wives for mating with), tungsten will
never be the same old reliable metal you once knew it to be. In the end though
your eyes will be opened to new insights, only to be closed again by burning ingots
of smelted steel shooting out from an arc furnace that these words will
construct in your cranium. The next time you mention tungsten and someone nods
their head dismissively, you’ll know now to act quickly and deliver them a
swift kick to the shin and yell “Tungsten!” at the top of your lungs to snap
them back to reality so that they can fully understand and appreciate the precarious position of tungsten
in the world today, whether it be the global marketplace or down-and-out in a scrapyard in New Jersey. </div>
</div>
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<br /></div>
Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-18241029808085264502016-12-13T13:21:00.001-08:002016-12-13T19:56:08.109-08:00Failed Openings To Mystey Novels I Will Never Finish Writing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqOAIJae-rwdW9Hz4iUlYnKyYKsZ97xw7gvHoKsP6752ZXTys2yq7l8I1KkacVtFfIZaDtTejZulSadfm7tvhA04N5cyRUN51XUhJri78hb6fNKUYVBiQztDw6uxuZevOcGrqw6OCfKSsk/s1600/DSC_0002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqOAIJae-rwdW9Hz4iUlYnKyYKsZ97xw7gvHoKsP6752ZXTys2yq7l8I1KkacVtFfIZaDtTejZulSadfm7tvhA04N5cyRUN51XUhJri78hb6fNKUYVBiQztDw6uxuZevOcGrqw6OCfKSsk/s640/DSC_0002.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Case of the
Salivating Salami or The Worm Drives A Hearse – A Hal Vershtmeyer Mystery</b></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“What is this? Where are the coagulation results?” Dr. Wolf
threw the test tube to the floor, the glass smashing on the tiling. He was
brimming with dissatisfaction much like when the brim of a hat takes on too
much rain. “The saliva-to-potato mastication ratios are all off. Who took these
measurements? We’re talking millions of dollars here. Wake up folks!”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
A hush settled over the laboratory,
many of the scientists farting under their lab coats in fear that they were the
next to be fired from the project. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“Dr. Wolf,” a meek voice wavered
from behind a shelf of beakers. “I think if you speak with Ludwig he might be
able to explain to you what went wrong. Apparently something to do with
contaminated saliva and the potatoes sent by Farmer Dan had too many eyes,
which altered the test results significantly. I don’t think we should view this
as a setback. It might actually have pointed the way to a solution.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“Okay then,” Dr. Wolf barked. “Find
Ludwig and bring him to my office. Why isn’t he here?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“He’s in the tunnels, sir. Looking
for rats. And wall sponges.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“Well find him. I want answers fast
before the investors back out.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
Twenty minutes later found a
sweating and grimy Ludwig traipsing along the hallway to Dr. Wolf’s office. His
pockets were full of wall sponges that had extended their tentacles, burrowing
through the fabric of his shirt and trousers and then into his flesh with their
miniscule tentacle teeth so that now they were feeding upon Ludwig’s blood but
he didn’t mind. It made him feel as if he belonged…as if he were part of something
larger, a family maybe. Anyway, this was his job, what they paid him for. Whenever
he walked into the laboratory with a twinkle in his eye and wall sponges
feeding on his blood supply, there was always a group of friendly faces waiting
there to greet him and offer him a coffee and occasionally even a doughnut with
no more than one or two bites out of it and sometimes even an untouched
blueberry Danish. One day they gave him an apple fritter. He still has dreams
about it. Once he saw an apple that had the same markings as the liver-spotted
hand of the <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>scientist who gave him
the fritter and he felt it was meant to be. He bought the apple and kept it in
an old Philishave electric razor box where, over time, it liquefied into a
furry sludge that, in the right light, resembled Hanks Snow’s toupee if it
hadn’t been combed for a week.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
He knocked on Dr. Wolf’s door. No
answer. He knocked again. Still nothing. He pushed on the door and it swung
open.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“Dr. Wolf,” Ludwig called. “Dr.
Wolf, are you there? You wanted to see me? I got some beautiful wall sponges
from the tunnels. They’re feeding now. Should be nice and fattened up for the
experiment next week. As long as I can get that transfusion later on. These
little buggers sure are hungry. It’s only been an hour and already I’m feeling
dizzy. And I ate at least half my weight in rat meat today. In another hour
I’ll be bone dry. You won’t be able to squeeze a drop of blood out of me if you
were old Jesus H. Christ himself. ‘Course that was water into wine or something
but with me it would be psoriasis into potato salad or boils into
bouillabaisse. Anyway, you know what I mean.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
A desk lamp fashioned from an elk
horn flicked on illuminating, although in shadow, a figure sitting behind the
enormous desk built from timber rumored to be from the remains of a Viking
ship, even though it had IKEA stickers on it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“Dr. Wolf is dead,” the figure
said. “He met with an unfortunate end at a ball-peen hammer factory. What
caused him to be there in the first place is anybody’s guess? He was actually
supposed to be at a chicken-skin rendering plant in Fluxenburg but somehow he
got sidetracked and ended up in an industrial park on the outskirts of
Nornvonhooven, being ball-peen hammered to death on an automated assembly line
by usually trustworthy robotic machinery that punch a time clock just like any
other human, pay their union dues, support their families, contribute to their
community, coach the local little league or sit on the P.T.A. In other words all
upstanding members of society, albeit robotic. And yet they’re picked on, time
and time again. Shunned by the very people who invented them. Maybe that’s why
they sought some form of revenge on poor Dr. Wolf who sat on the board of
directors for the Abolishment of Robots from Places of Both Work and Leisure.
We believe he was set up.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“Who are you?” Ludwig asked.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
Bletchford Capillary, sole heir to
the throne of England, that is when England was part of the Antarctica back in
the 5<sup>th</sup> century. Currently I’m a chartered accountant working for a
yoga pants company. My wife, Mitzi, is a hired assassin who goes by the name
Buttercup. The reason I’m telling you this is because, of course, now Mitzi, or
Buttercup if you prefer, is going to kill you. We have to do this you
understand to protect our board of directors and their unrelenting demands. One
year it was three-toed sloths. That’s all they wanted. If it wasn’t a
three-toed sloth they didn’t want to know you. You could give them a brick of
solid gold and they wouldn’t have blinked. This year it’s something far more
insidious. I’m not at liberty to reveal the details but suffice to say it
involves rats wearing pants and replacing all the eyes on potatoes with mouths
and teeth. I tell you this because you’re going to be dead in a minute.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
That’s what you think, Ludwig
thought to himself and then he threw a wall sponge that he’d worked loose from
his left buttock at Bletchford Capillary who fell to the ground screaming as
the wall sponge fed upon the blood-flow to his face. Ludwig tore another wall
sponge loose from his flesh and readied it for the arrival of Mitzi, no doubt
bearing a Glock, a bullet-proof brassiere and sharpened assassin’s teeth.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
But that was not to be the case
because instead of Mitzi coming through the door it was his old boss from the
mop-head factory, Hal Vershtmeyer, who had been dead for the past twenty years
but now was apparently not. Ludwig had attended the funeral. He still
remembered the catering at the reception afterwards. Who would’ve thought that
mini-eggrolls would go so well with mole sauce? </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“Mr. Vershtmeyer, is that you?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“Ludwig, come with me. I have some
people I need you to meet. They live in the centre of the earth. Don’t be
scared. They’re hairless but kind. Do you have a pair of galoshes?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“I’m not sure.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“Not to worry. We’ll fix you up
with some once we get under the topsoil. Now let’s hurry. There’s not a moment
to waste. The fate of the world rests upon how quickly we act. The tubers are mutating
every time they reproduce. Are your intestines able to process dirt?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“How so?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“Like if you eat it.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“I dunno. Never ate dirt before.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“Not to worry. You’ll love it.
Tastes like chicken. Well, chicken covered in dirt. Think of it as an herb
crusting for poultry. Now let’s go save mankind. Oh, just one more thing. Ever
wrestled a worm?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“Worms? Hell, yeah. Hundreds of
times. Why didn’t you just say so in the first place? Could’ve saved us all
this yakking. I learned worm rasslin’ at my daddy’s knee before I even learned
to blink or regurgitate.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“Music to my ears, Ludwig, music to
my dirt-filled ears. Now let’s go give those worms a taste of their own
medicine. Remember, best to catch them unawares during their excretion or
lovemaking times.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“You don’t have to tell me. I’ve
got a room full of trophy worm heads that I procured while they were either sitting
on the potty or engaging in some conjugal activity. C’ourse worms don’t
actually sit on a toilet seat when they defecate and I can’t truly say the
worms I saw making the beast with two segmented backs were married or just
dating, but you know what I mean.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“They live to eat and excrete, eat
and excrete,” Hal Vershtmeyer said, an odd glaze coming over his eyes and his
face exhibiting small facial tics. “The worm is devoted to digestion,” he
continued in a monotone voice, “and thus is a perfect soil-enriching machine.
Eat and excrete, eat and excrete, passing its nitrogen-rich soil casings, fresh
from its intestinal tract back into the earth where they nurture life with
their digestive system enzymes. We are one with the worms, the worms are one
with us,” Hal Vershtmeyer began chanting and just as Ludwig was starting to get
worried Hal hit Ludwig over the head with a Chicago 58 salami that he’d pulled
from the pocket of his Kevlar bathrobe, knocking Ludwig out cold and then,
pulling up a clod of turf Hal Vershtmeyer uncovered an iron hatch set into the
dirt, which he opened by spinning the wheel lock. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
Flinging the hatch open Hal called
down, “I’ve got him. Everything in place?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“We are ready,” a gravelly voice
answered from beneath the earth. “That’s the second-to-last one we can cross
off our list. With Ludwig as our hostage our bargaining chip just increased. Those
wall sponges can suck blood in hell for all they’re worth.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“Who’s next on the list?” Hal
Vershtmeyer asked.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
“Your wife and children, of
course.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
Vershtmeyer didn’t even blink. He
just adjusted his cufflinks, no mean feat when you’ve jerry-rigged them to a bullet-proof
bathrobe and readied himself for the task at hand. From Helsinki to hell in two
easy steps, he thought, with maybe a stopover in Timmins, Ontario for doughnuts,
a shower and that hooker with the cheese string connection and her fantastic Flat-Tops
record collection. That’s the kind of stuff dreams are made of, even when it’s
20-below outside but you’ve got sixty Sterno cans burning in the double-wide,
melting cheese strings over Wonder Bread and illuminating the prefab molded
plastic shower and half-sized bathtub in a flickering romantic light, plug-in Brazilian
Carnival-scented air freshener working overtime and the Flat-Tops singing “Sneaking
Kisses Behind The Iguana Farm,” in those famous falsetto voices that once made the
Queen of Sweden soil herself in the royal dinghy while crossing the river Torne
at twilight, on her way to cull the royal geese with a Gatling gun given to her
by the King of Thailand as thanks for introducing herring into his diet. That’s
the kind of sock-it-to-you thinking that got you somewhere in this life and
soon the world would know who Hal Vershtmeyer was, one swing of a Chicago 58
salami at a time…one swing of a Chicago 58 salami at a time. It may not be a
herring but never underestimate the power of a salami’s velocity, especially on
cooler nights with few prevailing winds and the barometric pressure hovering at
around 30. Like a grand slam in the old brain pan with enough meat grease left
over to high-five an overworked butcher and leave plenty of fat slime on his
palm to give him reason to stop and ponder. As it would anyone, as Hal
Vershtmeyer was soon to discover. Either way, no worm conquerors were going to pull the
dirt over his eyes.</div>
Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-6155995339168768952016-10-25T12:51:00.002-07:002016-10-25T14:33:12.155-07:00Failed Openings To Mystery Novels I Will Never Finish Writing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">CSI: Janitorial Division –The Chopped Liver
Killer Dossier</b> <style><!--
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The rain was
hitting the pavement with the kind of force you usually reserve for hammering
nails or mashing potatoes but not driving nails into mashed potatoes because,
hell, even a drugged iguana could do that. Anyway, it was just that kind of
evening. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
Al the janitor sat
at the bar tapping a grime-encrusted fingernail against his shot glass and
pondering the role of dog feces in the history of world sanitation and its
various customs and hygienic problems. For some, Al had been led to understand
by his now long-dead and doughnut and cheese Danish-loving community college
instructor in Building Cleaning Maintenance 101, dog feces at certain points in
history were not looked down upon but rather revered as instruments of
fortune-telling, shelter-building material and occasionally as a form of
currency between countries and nations. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
Al was conflicted
by these thoughts because in his involvement with dog feces, both past and
present, it was just another disgusting task he had to endure, usually in the
underground parkade of the condominium complex he cleaned and he found it
difficult to find anything to revere about these canine droppings. The only
positive thing he could say is that his vast experience picking up these turds had
given him an uncanny insight into the types of dogs and their dietary habits just
by what they left behind. Not just visually but his olfactory senses too were
called into play and then the analytical part of his brain kicked in as he
ascertained date, time, enzyme production and breakdown, proliferance of flies
or likewise discoloration from dried to almost mummified in appearance and
proximity to the underground ventilation fans that could hasten such variations
in either preservation or decomposition depending on breed of dog (usually
determined by fece size and meat or vegetable content), weather conditions and
a host of other factors. It even gave him an insight into the psychological
make-up of the dog. All of which made him much in demand as a CSI Janitorial
Division consulting expert when the police had an especially messy case on
their hands. And that was only half of his talents. His thoughts on the
chemical breakdown of finger and hand smudges on the stainless steel panels
that line many of today’s contemporary and stylish condominium complex
elevators was renowned among fellow janitors in a fifty-block radius and one custodian
in Istanbul.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
It was precisely this
kind of expertise that impelled Lt. Tungsten of Homicide Division, 28<sup>th</sup>
Precinct to creep up behind Al the janitor as he sat on his bar stool and
whisper in his ear using his hand puppet, Goobly Tungsten Jr. III, the same
puppet he used to intimidate and interrogate the vilest of criminals that the
city seemed to produce with the same ease as growing lichen upon lichen upon
lichen upon moss, “Would both fresh dog feces and smudged fingerprints on the
glass lobby doors instantly be construed as the perfect evidence to secure a
murderer’s arrest and conviction, if, of course, a dead body had at first been
found in the east stairwell of the condo building, the body lying near the rear
exit door, a Canadian Tire plastic bag over its head to catch the oozy run-off
trickling from the hole in the back of its skull and clutched in its rigor
mortised hand two tickets to tonight’s large mouth bass fishing convention at
the Holiday Inn at the junction of Truncton and Hwy 3, the overpass offering a
wonderful scenic view, especially in the winter if you’re lucky enough to snag a
front room. Bass fishing be damned when you’re sitting back with your tootsies
on the radiator, sipping a rye and ginger ale, munching Moo Shoo pork-flavoured
beef jerky and watching semis navigate the tricky turnoff during a winter white
out, just waiting for a jackknife, and a little porno on the TV for a background
soundtrack and to add to the enchantment of the evening.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“That’s a hell’uva
build-up but you know that wouldn’t be enough,” Al the janitor replied,
completely nonplussed by the hand puppet in his personal space or the voice and
body behind it. Even with all the warty afflictions or phlegm-filled smoker’s
cough.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Up for re-election
are we, Al?” Tungsten enquired after he’d cleared his throat into a handkerchief
and tucked it away in the top of his cowboy boot.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“I have served the
Canadian League of Custodial Workers well in my tenure as their monthly scribe
and many have commented favorably on both my penmanship and my unique
perspective on most cleaning matters. I am appointed, not elected so back by
popular demand, you’ve got me for the next four years, yet again. Now what can
I do for you, Lt.?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Like I said, dog
feces, smudged fingerprints, Canadian Tire money and I mean a whole suitcase
full of it, dead herring in the air ducts, red herrings in the lobby, fish oil
on the carpeting and a whole lot of nothing on the witness end of things. Seems
everyone was running their dishwasher or air conditioner or vacuum cleaner at
that exact moment when some poor helpless soul was screaming for mercy in the
hallway while a ruthless killer hovered over them, wielding, what appears to be
from the evidence left behind at the crime scene, a piece of raw liver. But
that’s just the coroner’s guess, right now. Me, I’d say it’s the Chopped Liver
Killer except something isn’t sitting right but I’m not sure what. Call it a
hunch.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Could be, Lt.,
that the liver remnants found were raw and the Chopped Liver Killer follows a
whole different M.O. beginning with the fact his liver is cooked. I think we’re
looking at a copycat but one, who no doubt, wants to separate himself from the
original, to leave his own mark so to speak but still pay homage to the liver
fetish.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“But why leave the
bag of Canadian Tire money? I counted it. There was enough there to buy a pack
of picture hooks. Maybe even an air freshener, like you hang from the rearview.
That’s no small potatoes.” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“It is if you live
in P.E.I. They got potatoes there as big as your head or the tumor they took
out of my Aunt Edna’s rear end. Anyway, to the point. He’s not in it for the
money. He’s driven by other, more ungodly, more degenerate desires that you and
I could only begin to understand, perhaps after we drink six packs of
Neo-Citran and eat all the chemical debris at the bottom of a bag of
ketchup-flavoured potato chips. Then, and only then may we even attempt to
probe the depraved depths of this fiendish mind.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Okay, if you say
so. Think you can help? I’ll even spring for the Neo-Citran. And the potato
chips.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Yes, but I’m going
to need to see those dog feces and any remnants of the liver used as the murder
weapon. Also, perhaps I can have some of that Canadian Tire money. I need a new
mop head.”</div>
Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-35623098982633337332016-10-06T10:03:00.002-07:002016-10-06T10:03:50.305-07:00Failed Openings To Mystery Novels I Will Never Finish Writing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Requiem For A Pogo Stick</b></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
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<b> </b>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
Imagine that one of
the greatest crime bosses in the city sat up at 3 in the morning, crying as he
watched freshly hatched baby sea turtles scurrying for the water getting
snatched up by marauding seagulls on TV. Even though he had ordered the hit on
his wife’s brother only minutes earlier (because he woke up with indigestion
and felt he had to kill somebody he didn’t like), it was the sea turtles and
not the fact that he had just okayed the murder of his brother-in-law (because
he couldn’t find the Pepto-Bismal), that caused his tear ducts to well up. In
Sicily when your well was dry legend said that you were to bring ten virgins to
cry into it and soon the well and the cisterns would again flood with water but
as the big crime boss’s mother used to tell him, “Fluppo, it makes no
difference how many virgins you march to that well. Stuff dries up ‘cause the
gods are angry and eventually they’ll defecate in your gutters and you won’t be
able to enjoy your roast suckling pig and potatoes and soon you’ll have to wear
boots in your very own home because of the amount of god shit covering the
floor. So keep your nose clean. And anyway, who th’hell can find ten virgins
anymore. Not with your father loose in the village.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
Now, at 3:30 in the
morning watching baby sea turtles scampering for freedom from the pesky beaks
of predators on the Nature channel, Fluppo Kapolski, who had never been to
Sicily, nor had his parents since they were Polish dissidents who had settled
in Hungary years earlier but began passing their son off as Italian early on as
a joke but then the joke stuck like when you make a face too much and someone
tells you if you do it too long it’ll stay that way, confronted his mortality
for the very first time when the patio door slid open and a man on a pogo stick
bounced into the room. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Holy shit,” Fluppo
yelled, “it’s like some kind’a half-man half-kangaroo fuckin’ mutant.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Relax,” the guy on
the pogo stick huffed. “I ain’t no mutant. My name’s Pup Toranado and I’m here
to avenge the murder of my cousin who you sawed in half two years ago in a
lumber mill and then mailed one half to each side of the family, which really
upset everybody. We’re still in therapy y’know.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“What, I never
sawed no guy in half. I’m in dry cleaning.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Cut the crap,
Fluppo. We both know the truth.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“How th’hell did
you get past my security.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Good old pogo
stick, Fluppo. Hopped over the laser beams, the attack dogs, the piranha-filled
moat, right across the lawn, over the swimming pool and right into your room.
And all in under two minutes flat. Never underestimate spring-loaded
technology.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Hey, I know what
you mean. I launder a bunch of money through a spring and ball-bearing
manufacturing company and they gave me some of their heavy-duty springs as a
gift. Well, I’ll tell you, I can catapault a dead body off’a a coupl’a those things
a good twenty feet into the air and into the middle of the river. I’m not
kidding. And that’s where I’m gonna catapault you in a minute if you don’t get
off that fuckin’ pogo stick and show me a bit of respect. My neck’s starting to
hurt watching you bounce up and down.” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Respect, that’s a
laugh. You didn’t show my cousin any respect when you ran him through that band
saw. Eh, Fluppo.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“He was a two-bit
numbers runner who was skimming from my take. Believe you me, guy like that
steals from me, I run him through the band saw crotch-first so he lives a
little longer and can watch his dick get torn apart in the blade. I got movies
if you want’a see’em?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
A sudden rage
thrummed through Pogo-Stick man’s body, a rage so pure, so crystalline it was
as if both he and his pogo-stick were one entity, not unlike Bruce Lee and his
nunchucks in Fists of Fury, and Pogo-Stick man felt himself fused in some
unholy alliance with his main mode of transportation, flesh and metal combining
so as to mete out justice for those who couldn’t mete it out themselves or most
likely didn’t have at their disposal spring-loaded weaponry and in a frenzy of
pogo-stick activity Pogo-Stick man attacked the biggest crime boss in the city,
springing up and down and then going almost horizontal to pogo-stick drop-kick
Fluppo Kapolski to the ground. That’s when things really got ugly. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
Lt. Bilcher of
homicide stood scratching his head and wondering what and who could do this to
a body. A human body he might add. He’d seen worse done to a sawhorse used as a
decoy during a heist, the sawhorse paying the price as a group of hobos carried
it off to their hobo camp to battle it out for the sawhorse’s hand in marriage
and the lucky winner getting to consummate the wedding under a bridge in the honeymoon
suite refrigerator box. It’s said the lucky hobo had the splinters to prove it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Whaddya think, Lt?”
one of his detectives asked.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“The markings are
unusual and yet somehow seem familiar. It’s almost like something out of my
childhood and yet I just can’t seem to recall it.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
The coroner piped
in, “The whole body is covered by these strange circular indents but there’s truly
nothing in my years of experience that help me to recognize what the origin of
these markings are. Obviously, whatever they were, they were no doubt the
murder weapon. I’ll have to assemble every round object known in the world and
then test them all out on my own flesh if I run out of lab subjects. By the way,
let your friends and family know I pay fifty bucks for test subjects. Little
extra money never hurt for the frozen beef fund or bus fare to the Buttonhole Museum.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“You know,” Lt.
Bilcher said, “being he’s a big-shot crime boss with a lot of pull in local
politics we’re going to want to tread easy on this one boys so I’m issuing
special homicide slippers that I designed to be both durable and incognito, whether
you’re sloshing through blood, Bloody Mary’s or the blowholes of exploded <span class="st">Cetaceans</span>.” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Hear, hear,”
Detective Vinblot called out but he was faced down by a crowd of angry police
eyes, some of which were glass but nevertheless, full of police-like emotion and
menace and forlorn thoughts like empty bullet casings lying beneath some ferns,
a lush counterpoint to the decaying body that lay just ten feet away speckled
with pine needles, fungus beetles and cigarette butts. Exploded cetaceans was
still a sore point around the precinct, even though it had been over a year
since the Great Exploding Cetacean Catastrophe that had claimed ten lives but
claimed so much more in increasing the growing rift of distrust between humans
and their marine mammal friends. No one could forget the day that the Trojan
Whale was delivered to the doorstep of the precinct house, it’s blowhole secretly
loaded with dynamite and the ensuing bloody aftermath, some people actually
crushed beneath thousands of pounds of exploded whale meat and others hit by
whale bone shrapnel that tore through their bodies and pinned them to the
linoleum.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
All this was of no
concern to Pogo-Stick man as he calmly bounced from the crime scene, unnoticed
by the police. That’s the thing about a pogo stick. Everyone just takes you for
another exercise nut and not the scheming murderous maniac that you really are,
seeking revenge not just for yourself but even for say the woman you just met
at the grocery store who told you about how a shoe salesman sold her the wrong
insoles and now she has corns. Pup Toronado had heard it all and then some and
he was out to remedy the situation even if he had to pogo-stick half the city
to death to finally get justice for the misled, the dispossessed, the downtrodden,
the pork rind addicted and any stigmata aficionados working the blood donor
clinics in their burlap sweat pants. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
Late at night you
might hear a strange squeaking, an “er-er, er-er, er-er” and think it’s the
sound of your neighbour making love to a ceramic pagoda he stole out of a
goldfish bowl in a bailiff’s office, something he’s expressed an interest in
previously over glasses of pruno in the boiler room with the words, “Man, I’m
so horny I could fuck a ceramic pagoda like you see in those goldfish bowls,” but
were you to get up from your soiled sheets to gaze out the window you might see
a figure silhouetted against the moonlight, bouncing up and down on a pogo
stick and think, I bet that guy’s here to save the world. And you just might be
right.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
But you can only
save the world one filthy, despicable scab-encrusted criminal at a time so when
Pogo-Stick man got back to his rooming house and listened to his police scanner
while wolfing down some Chef Boyardee Beefaroni to maintain both his stamina
and his crime-fighting physique, he nearly shot a Beefaroni noodle out his nose
when he heard this:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Calling all units.
We’ve got a 345 in progress, 2786 Plubber Blvd., suspect appears to be holding
a prize-winning pumpkin hostage and threatening to blow its pumpkin innards from
here to kingdom come. Requesting backup.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
Without further
notice, Pup Toranado bounced his way out the door, down the stairs, through the
lobby and then pogoed for twenty-seven blocks to get to the hostage taking. He
loved pumpkin judging contests and goddamn anyone who got in the path of this
glorious autumn event where only the largest of gourds had a shot at winning
the whole shebang. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
Somehow though, in
the back of his mind, as he bounced down the sidewalk, his brain whapping
against the sides of his cranial cavity like gelatin in a preschooler’s lunch
bag, it all seemed too picture perfect, as if someone were playing on his
nostalgic pumpkin memories and his penchant for exotic gourds artfully arranged
on staircases. He wondered if perhaps there might be a more devious mind at
work behind this, setting him up for something so diabolical, so evil even his
pogo stick wouldn’t be enough to protect him and destroy the enemy. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
That’s when his
pogo stick slipped on a worm and then everything went dark. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
You know how they
say you’re not in Kansas anymore. Well, when he awoke not only was he not in
Kansas, it didn’t appear he was even on the planet as far as he could tell.
Instead, gazing out the windows in a chair that felt both surgical and sofa-like
simultaneously, he saw what he could only describe as outer space. The windows
wrapped around a semi-circular enclosure that featured all manner of confusing
technological matter and through the huge windows all he could see was
blackness and stars. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
He shifted about in
the chair and that’s when he discovered his hands and legs were strapped down.
Then, as he waggled around some more he realized that he wasn’t actually
feeling anything in his legs. They were numb and when he managed to move them a
bit they had a metallic creaky sound. My god, he thought, what’s going on? He
bent forward and peered down to the most unspeakable horror. Or was it?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
From the hipbone
down, his legs were gone. Instead, in their place, were two pogo sticks,
seemingly grafted to his flesh judging by what he saw for his pants were gone.
Perhaps his legs were still wearing them, wherever they might be. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
A figure hove into
view in front of him. He must be groggier than he thought because he’d never
seen anything hove into view before, much less a human. Maybe a cruise ship but
that was still pushing it. The man spoke.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Mr.Toranado, I
trust you had a good sleep. Nice to see you awake and hopefully fully recovered
and refreshed. Oh, by the way, while you were napping we performed a bit of
surgery. All for your benefit of course. That worm you hit with your pogo stick
did a great deal of damage. Who would think from something so small such disastrous
injuries would result but isn’t that really just the way of the world.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Where am I? What
have you done with my legs?” Pup Toranado croaked.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“One question at a
time. First you are on the Hybris 6, a top-secret government Black Ops space
station orbiting earth at 17,000 miles an hour and 320 miles above the planet..
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yes, we have replaced your
legs with pogo sticks. An apparatus you are no stranger to, as we have observed
during your crime-fighting escapades. I think you’ll find these new,
top-of-the-line gas-hydraulic fed spring mechanisms to your liking. With these
you could wipe out a hundred despots, if they were lined up end to end in less
than five minutes without breaking a sweat. So, Mr. Toranado, or may I call you
Pup, what do you think about joining our little Black Ops team.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Hot damn,” Pup
said, “where do I sign up?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“You already have,
Pup, you already have. Now, are you ready to put those pogo stick legs to good
use, wiping out evil around the world, one country, one city, one village, one
anthill at a time?” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“You bet, uh…?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Glubon. Agent
Glubon.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“You bet, Agent
Glubon. Now unstrap me and let’s put the ‘go’ back in pogo stick.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“That’s what I like
to hear. Agent Kugle, ready the departure-capsule. Mr. Toranado is going home.
Your first mission, Pup, is in London, England. We’ve had a report of a fish
and chip shop that’s been over-breading their fish. Think you can handle it?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Just watch me,”
Pup said. “Now where’s my pants?”</div>
Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-81766323750274463982016-09-27T13:36:00.002-07:002016-09-27T13:38:15.705-07:00Failed Openings To Mystery Novels I'll Never Finish Writing<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfrttqh55RCyngFIYn5tmtY3jvNbFfrxsO9yhbHBo0SDp1tZyEhXLAIjl6kIWx_fmHF9qhNa5vmCL0qRNGjiC8QuL0zhF9NCDiw-nFScDQ49ZNBKhA1gV5ezl_FHotduzLpkwl6H-n6U-6/s1600/DSC_0062.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfrttqh55RCyngFIYn5tmtY3jvNbFfrxsO9yhbHBo0SDp1tZyEhXLAIjl6kIWx_fmHF9qhNa5vmCL0qRNGjiC8QuL0zhF9NCDiw-nFScDQ49ZNBKhA1gV5ezl_FHotduzLpkwl6H-n6U-6/s640/DSC_0062.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>The Eyeball Eating Corgi Caper</b></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“Go on, you and
your crummy ventriloquist dummy get th’hell outta here. Neither I or the
children love you anymore.” Those were Gertie Plutachrisides’s last words to
her husband.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
And those so
happened to be the last words spoken to Felix Plutachrisides by any immediate
member of his family before he moved on to a skid-row hotel where he
successfully assembled an army of cockroaches to take over, what he believed to
be the epicenter of the city – the revolving restaurant with its faded waiters
and carpeting and maybe even faded pee stains around the lobby, in a
needle-like tower with a saucer-like protrusion near the top that was the
actual restaurant and where people revolved and ate Waldorf salads and leech
pudding and ostrich-foot consommé and nibbled the earlobes of sloths as well as
their own betrothed. And if that wasn’t enough his dummy wasn’t sleeping
properly, keeping the both of them up all night with its incessant talking and
nattering and hacking and coughing and gum-chewing and in the wee hours, though
Felix was loathe to admit it, the sound of masturbating, especially when one of
its new dummy magazines had arrived in the mail. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
So when Gertie
turned up dead the next morning, her pet Corgi having eaten her eyeballs
inexplicably before nuzzling up to her body which is how the police found the
two of them, the children fortunately still at school, Felix was amazed when
the cops showed up at his flea-bag hotel room and asked him to come downtown.
Especially because the downtown had burned down months ago during a riot over free
twist ties at the Chez Maurice Chevalier Institute of Science and Technology.
Oddly, when told of their mother’s death a day later, Piltron, the son asked
his sister, Verbia, “Do you think the Corgi finally ate her eyeballs?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
Verbia could only
nod her head in agreement. Everyone knew the family Corgi had a hankering for
eyeballs day or night and they all walked around with protective eyewear on
like what you’d wear at a construction site, for fear of losing their sight when
Balthazar, the Corgi, tried to eat their eyeballs, be it in the kitchen, the
bedroom, the garage or the den nodding out in front of the TV, one of the best
spots for eyeball eating Balthazar discovered though he truly, in his heart, wasn’t
that discerning as long as eyeballs were on the menu.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“The queen’s corgis
never ate no one’s eyeballs,” Felix would say but Gertie would ignore him or
reply, “She’s got all the money in the world to hush up all her corgi eyeball-eating
lawsuits, that’s why you never hear about it, you dumbbell.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
It was these exact
words that the homicide detectives threw back in Felix’s face like an old
washcloth used to swab a prize-winning pig after a particularly strenuous
showing at the 4-H Club, but Felix just looked at them blankly while deep
inside his mind he began jerking his nerve-endings into telepathy-carrying
waves in order to call his cockroach army into action and break him out of this
two-bit excuse for an investigation. Plus he didn’t kill his wife but he thought
he might know who did.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
But to prove it
he’d need every cockroach in the city on his side along with the mayor, two
dentists, an entertainment director at a senior’s home, a butcher, a wombat
impersonator and carte blanche at a Buddhist funeral supply store. Then, once
they’d settled into their revolving restaurant headquarters he could proceed
with his big plan. The steps leading up to it just chicken feed as far as he
was concerned. The real work would begin once they were up there in the clouds,
looking down and spinning around on some rusty hydraulic system, sucking on vintage
bread crusts for sustenance as he and his dummy and his cockroach army tried to
figure out how to save the entire human race. And it all began with the murder
of his wife that pointed towards an international conspiracy of incredible
proportions and would eventually stretch from the tony neighbourhoods of
Beverly Hills to the slums of the Antarctic. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
But I’m getting
ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning when Thurman Pipler, the father
of the modern revolving restaurant was himself being hatched in a petri dish
back in a dustbowl dead horse town in 1936 by a most unusual doctor and the
world had no idea that at that moment the entire course of history would change
and would coincidentally parallel the arrival of the complimentary bread basket
to the restaurant dining table. But that’s a whole other story.</div>
Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-33856613244419625932016-09-01T11:57:00.003-07:002016-09-01T14:14:39.684-07:00Failed Openings to Mystery Novels I'll Never Finish Writing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><br /></b>
<b><span id="goog_59761404">The Roman Toilet Ultimatum</span></b><br />
<span id="goog_59761404">by</span><span id="goog_59761404"> </span>
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{page:</style><span style="font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Torrance P. DerSitis (my thriller novel pen-name)</span><br />
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“City coroner,” the voice on the other
side of the door stated with all the authority you would expect from a person
who was allowed to exhume the dead on just a whim, rip open their bodies and
poke around to their heart’s content and Chisley Torgair thought, “But wait, I’m
not deceased. What could the coroner possibly want with me?”</div>
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That was to be his final thought
because just then a pigeon began cooing madly at the window of his dingy
one-room walk-up and when he turned to look he was met with a .22 slug right
through the head. He never heard the breaking glass. Oddly, his last question
was answered with the pull of a trigger.</div>
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A shadowy figure on the fire escape,
still holding a smoldering gun then uttered some seemingly nonsensical words that
would soon reverberate not only through the local precinct house but
internationally from a yurt in Irkutsk to a back deck barbeque party in Tobermory
at the tip of Georgian Bay with everyone in casual slacks, plus a couple of
stops on some ice floes along the way, beneath which lay secret laboratories
where recreational mutants were being bred, part insect, part mammal to
undermine the willpower of the human race, the project headed up by a group of
disgruntled ex-KGB and CIA agents and scientists who were not happy with their
severance pay, or so some said. “Makes the Cold War seem like Miami, eh, Yuri?”
was the joke they liked to beat like a dead horse around the facilities. A dead
horse they would have gladly eaten instead of having to chow down on freeze-dried
and microwavable entrees with names like “Glucose mit Hoof und Meatbowls and
Chocolate Cesspool Pit.” </div>
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“Tungsten spit-croft filberts divisional
seepage trust wingo-wingo gestational crust,” were the enigmatically
strung-together words the shadowy figure murmured reverently as he watched
Chisley Torgair momentarily twitch on the ground before his lights went out. Doesn’t
take long with a .22 drilling you a third eye while a pigeon shits in that sad
excuse for a flowerbox outside your rooming-house window that you fill with
your stubbed-out cigarette butts and lung oysters hawked up morning, noon and
night and all that despite your first name being Chisley. How did Chisley
Torgair, a broken-down and alcoholic Venetian blind assembler, though once the
scion of a wealthy family until he got into black market guinea pig breeding
and tried to pass off a couple of rats with glued on hair he cut from
passed-out drunks sleeping in his alleyway as “show pigs”, now currently jobless
and his only family that hadn’t disowned him the yellowed and mottled pictures
that came with his wallet, fit into the big picture? Moments later the city
coroner and his assistant broke down the rooming-house door but they were too
late. The assassin had disappeared. </div>
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“Goddamnit, Plitzsky, we’re too
late!”</div>
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“I know, didn’t you just say that a
moment ago?”</div>
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“No, that must’ve been someone else
or else you’re hearing things. When’s the last time you got some sleep,
Plitzsky?</div>
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“Don’t worry about me, Chief. I can
run on empty until I’m mummified.”</div>
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“If you say so. Anyway, this guy’s
playing us like a marlin on 120 Ib. test line. Teasing us for hours until we
just wanna give up, fling ourselves in the boat and die.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 4.0cm;">
“I hear you, boss. My gills are
hurting just thinking about it.”</div>
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This gave the coroner pause for as
far as he knew his assistant had never before displayed any type of affinity or
affiliation with fish species.</div>
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A hundred miles away in the
countryside in a heavily secured barn surrounded by an electrified fence, rows
of cows stood, their skullcaps cut away and plexi-glass domes placed over their
brain cavities. Their udders were hooked up to lie detector machines and the
cows were being asked questions by a group of men in lab coats. </div>
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“Your mother’s maiden name?” one man
barked.</div>
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“You have eight apples. Sally takes
away two. Then a laser disintegrates another. But the laser is so swift it’s
actually beaming into the future. So, did those apples actually exist in the
past or did you create them with extrapolations based partly on memory, partly
on misguided future desires mixed with an overwhelming sense of regret and despair?”
yelled another. The cows looked neither confused nor intrigued. They appeared
neutral as did their test results.</div>
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In an office overlooking the barn
floor below, Dr. Mibley Forblooth took it all in and lit a stick of incense
before placing it gently in the makeshift shrine he had erected to Phil Horvance,
philosopher, god, chartered accountant and his recently deceased brother-in-law
and who had vouched for his initiation into the secret sect of which he was now
president. A sect that was now poised to take over the world if they played
their cards right and the detonation buoys they’d contracted out to a bunch of
undergrad engineering students to build were both working and had been placed
in the right freighter shipping lanes. Of course all the students would have to
be killed afterwards.</div>
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As he placed the incense into the
shrine built from the limbs of superhero toys, condiment packs pilfered from
fast food restaurants and rat droppings, and ignoring a text message on his
phone asking “How’s it going with the bovine?” he intoned the holy words, the
words actually not nonsensical at all but a code for a very simple set of
instructions with nevertheless complex and catastrophic repercussions beginning
with the downfall of the three great superpowers of the world. And with all the
technology of today to think that this entire, crazy scheme had actually been
hatched way back when in the lavatories of Rome when some bad mutton had sent a
bunch of scheming senators into the communal facilities where they then,
between grunts and gas-passing swore and plotted revenge on all emperors, past,
present and future. But as they say, “when in Rome…” I guess the same could be
said for Sudbury after the sun’s gone down.</div>
Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-82496948650547511862016-05-04T15:27:00.000-07:002016-05-05T12:21:31.186-07:00Ventriloquism - Barrel of Laughs or Bucket of Blood...You Be The Judge<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dyr_QrqJWk0FsO9LJZDXu5BeetmXNj1bG3JuNiaAVxwmVpaLdF3T-kQwrd_8Nxsl-X5LuHZYt26iZdhF9Y2fA' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<br />
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm proud to announce the new prototype for my soon-to-be-patented Dr. Haltiwanger Voice-Throwing device. What appears to be a simple cardboard tube is really a state-of-the-art ventriloquist's aid as my good friend, Ed Smeeley Jr. demonstrates in the video. Many thanks to Mr. Smeeley who took time out of his busy day as an unemployed roofer and loving divorcee to help with this instructional video.Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-43343537363569344302015-08-29T12:10:00.001-07:002015-08-29T21:13:20.458-07:00Reviews of Books I've Never Read<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>The Manticore by Robertson Davies</b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh561SHosJ6Ww_HLGLyCRdU3cQBah29ECb2xJgUTRsL4FiLSJhwiTR2LCBbH-zIgYzu2IxA1EOKAmhhrXpPn5P1GXewTuYXZ18fParPvwRP90GwkFFXA4zJReW2gnLzP4wFYGgxc1_Llhg4/s1600/manticore1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="345" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh561SHosJ6Ww_HLGLyCRdU3cQBah29ECb2xJgUTRsL4FiLSJhwiTR2LCBbH-zIgYzu2IxA1EOKAmhhrXpPn5P1GXewTuYXZ18fParPvwRP90GwkFFXA4zJReW2gnLzP4wFYGgxc1_Llhg4/s1600/manticore1.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This early depiction of the Manticore by famed renaissance artist, Molvado Retento, bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Davies himself. Note the full beard, mischievous look and a strong set of clackers in its mouth and by gosh if it isn't Mr. Davies' doppleganger, albeit with claws and tusks. As for the penis, well we're not privy to that knowledge but if you drop by the Happy Times Massage Parlour where Mr. Davies was a frequent visitor and show them this picture, I'm sure one or two of the nice ladies who work there would be able to verify whether Mr. Davies' woo-woo or ding-dong or cylinder of celestial dormant beings looked anything like the one pictured above. Suffice to say, if it was good enough for them it was certainly good enough for a Medici.</td></tr>
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After my last review of Farley Mowat's People of the Deer, I felt myself on a kind of Canadian mission realizing I haven't been doing my own country justice when it comes to reviewing books I've never read. So now, not only have I latched on to this personally neglected Canadian literary contingent but I've also recognized an oft overlooked correlation between great Canadian literary works and the fact their authors also sport some very impressive, one might even say, monumental beards (Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields and Alice Munro excluded). We're talking facial hair that would catch the breath of any National Gallery portraitist or envious biker gang members just before they pummel the writer to death in the parking lot of a Tim Horton's. These are beards that appear able to withstand even the iciest winds at the corner of Portage and Main or any bingo hall parking lot in December in Sudbury, and though the beard hairs may be rimed with frost and even forming icicles on, say, partially frozen bodies that have tumbled off of snowmobiles into a snowbank during a liquor store run and forgotten by their drunken friends huffing glue and Cheezies debris between Molson Canadians and Grand Theft Auto segues, beneath, the skin oddly remains as hot and inviting as the sands on any beach in Georgian Bay when the mosquitoes are feasting on human blood and the sun is at its summer zenith. You might sink the Edmund Fitzgerald in the frigid waters of Lake Superior but you'll never sink a beard like Farley Mowat's, Robertson Davies' or Noogie Humphries', the little-known and in my opinion, under-appreciated author of Barn Owls and Babushkas, A Memoir of Growing Up as a Bearded Circus Lady on the Prairies. Mowat's beard, to this day, is more recognizable than all the books he wrote combined or the sealskin pajamas that he liked to greet visiting royalty in (he preferred the sealskin because the strength and thickness of the fabric always hid his spontaneous erections as opposed to his usual kilt that pitched a tent, as they say, with any passing dog, squirrel, wayward narwhals, royalty, or vehicle with four-wheel drive not to mention ice cream trucks driven by toothless men who are stingy with the napkins during the summer months, spit while they speak and think squid rings in waffle cones are a treat) and as for Mr. Davies, well, he took that beard all the way to the academic bank and from there to the bestseller list and from there to a massage parlour just on the outskirts of Etobicoke, next to a fish and chip shop that offered up a great deal on two pieces of cod, fries and a large soda fountain drink with free refills, all for just $11.99. Which is just what Mr. Robertson as a man required, especially one of such a cerebral nature, to replenish his energies after a Bangkok-style massage with a happy ending and complimentary breath mint and Handi-Wipe.<br />
<br />
But, back to the matter at hand (not the hand that facilitated Mr. Davies' happy ending but rather his own literary hand that lay pen to paper or quill to parchment or whatever the hell Mr. Davies wrote his exhausting novels on and with), as I aim to illuminate you, the slumbering reader, with some insights into one of Mr. Davies' finest books, The Manticore. What exactly is a manticore you might ask and I've asked myself the same question again and again except on Thursdays when I'm clipping my landlady's cat's toenails (for which I receive a reduced monthly rent), and have no time for manticores, unicorns, flugelhorns, pinafores or the social mores of carnivores drunkenly mating with wild boar in the hopes of producing offspring they can eat well into their retirement years while their local butcher weeps into his tenderloin. But I do have some theories, none of which I can remember right now. Anyway, it's obvious the manticore is a creature half man, half beast with a luxurious beard, circumcised penis and nasty teeth. The beast finds its origins in ancient Persian mythology but then the Egyptians stole the concept and turned the creature into the Sphinx and made him good at crossword puzzles and sniffing out anyone with an Oedipus Complex instead of holing up in a cave and gnashing down on human organ meats. The Greeks also got hold of this human/animal hybrid and turned him into the Minotaur, the only difference being they shaved off his beard, turned it into a goatee, reattached his foreskin and threw in some bull's horns and the hairy buttocks of a short-order cook. Last but not least, the ancient Mycenaeans also adopted him into their mythology but they shrunk him down to size and turned him into a paramecium, thus paving the way for future microscopic discoveries. Science thanks you, o people of Mycenae. <br />
<br />
So, why did Mr. Davies decide to title his novel after such a monstrous brute? Well, for that answer we would have to ask Mr. Davies himself but he's dead so, no luck on that end. Nevertheless, scholars seem to agree that the manticore stands in as a metaphor for the subconscious mind of the main character of the novel, Dougie Stimple, born into a rich family that owns pretty much everything in the town of Deptford, an imaginary place Davies invented and was so in love with that he decided to write a trilogy about it. Davies did the very same thing with Cornish game hens, becoming so enraptured with the delectable little birds he devoted another series of books, known as the Cornish trilogy, to these flightless morsels of meat. It seems that once Mr. Davies set his mind to something there was no stopping him until he wrote three or more books and exhausted the subject thoroughly. I believe that if you were to exhume Mr. Davies' corpse you would easily find bits of Cornish game hen lodged in his teeth.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN9vYmWWityV62i4PPJl2U8xI7vOiaqaOF6phZjqpVmHqEzDDFdXX_QppvXPCDU7EER3W7RPsQ2pWFeICjk0qrL2lOUMP0oBgElUDhyphenhyphenQ4xeQy5Vv2NXqVnkanv2Zh-ZAIVEu0J4XeJEXpR/s1600/cornish-hen-raw.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN9vYmWWityV62i4PPJl2U8xI7vOiaqaOF6phZjqpVmHqEzDDFdXX_QppvXPCDU7EER3W7RPsQ2pWFeICjk0qrL2lOUMP0oBgElUDhyphenhyphenQ4xeQy5Vv2NXqVnkanv2Zh-ZAIVEu0J4XeJEXpR/s1600/cornish-hen-raw.jpg" width="383" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Cornish game hen in all its glory. It's no wonder Mr. Davies was so infatuated with these winsome and weenie delectable chickens. See how adorably they sit in the palm of one's hand, as if sitting alertly in an educational institution, attentive and eager to pay attention to the teacher, even if headless and thus with no brain capacity for learning. It only shows their tenacity to get ahead in this world where other forms of poultry tower over them.</td></tr>
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But back to The Manticore. The book is the second in the trilogy and traces the psychologically uneasy path Dougie Stimple takes after learning that his billionaire father, the father that he revered, as a child himself killed the wife of the town's minister with an overcooked meatball. It seems that Dougie's father, Percy, was having a friendly snowball fight with some of the poorer neighbourhood children but after being pummeled relentlessly, he decided to hide a day-old overcooked meatball inside a snowball to get revenge on those uncouth and ragamuffin boot-lickers who would sell their own grandmother for a can of pork and beans, pogo stick or deck of nudie cards down at Frank's Variety Store. Well, lo and behold, the meatball snowball misses its mark and instead of striking some impoverished kid like Boots Gulinksy or Fenwick Chavez, the deadly ball of ice and meat meets up with the minister's pregnant wife and she meets her maker after it strikes her in the temple but her baby is born right there on the snowy pavement, premature but alive and from there destiny is set like bowling pins adherent to the manipulations of a scientifically precise and and yet otherworldly machinery. <br />
<br />
Like father like son but in this case the father, Percy, lets this early childhood murder wash off of him like water off a duck's back or a mermaid's tuchas, such is the way his conscience works but his son is not so lucky and perhaps, genetically, the guilt finds its way downstream, along the seminal highway and buries itself deep within Dougie's bloodstream. This is not the only guilt he lives with as his billions of inherited dollars lays out for him an endless stream of hookers, rare Pope Benedict Ratzinger XVI commemorative mousetraps and deli meat platters with imported head cheese whose lusciously jellied interiors are hand-crafted by ex-Nazis eking out a living in Quonset huts on the banks of the Mississippi. His fervor for Nazi-crafted head cheese and Pope memorabilia and the ease with which he can attain these things causes him to question his special place in society, surrounding himself with such exotic culinary and artistic treasures while all around him the villagers of Deptford suffer horribly and are forced to eat bologna, have sex with empty tennis ball containers filled with packing peanuts and moldy foam rubber and ruminate over the unraveling doily collection they picked up for a song at the senior citizen's drop-in centre. <br />
<br />
This is where the novel really takes off, although with the bumpy and tentative steps of a reluctant <br />
and perhaps constipated astronaut taking their first steps on the moon. Dougie, after graduating from university, feels a black hole in his soul, a head cheese-less void if you will and though slated to take over his father's business (something to do with wombats, double-sided tape and a revolutionary new mop head that never needs squeezing), he instead jets off to Switzerland to have his head examined by none other than famed psychoanalyst, Dr. Dieter von Bronhaufschlossen, the two of them going to work on Dougie's cranium like a couple of hyenas on some tourists locked out of their car at an animal safari park. <br />
<br />
If Freud would have had a field day with Dougie's deep-seated noggin problems then Dr. Dieter von Bronhaufschlossen is pitching a no-hitter with his probing questions and revealing insights into Dougie's well-ingrained fears and anxieties. These problems are just a couple of worm heads away from the surface and Dougie feels the pain all too severely, even with the Swedish massages and naked fondue parties that he revels in to forget his past.<br />
<br />
But as we know, you can't escape your past or maybe your past clings to you like lichen on fungus filaments, which could be a metaphor for the human soul or simply mean you should shower more often. It's really this idea that is the hinge point for the rest of the narrative and Dougie's innermost thoughts are sent swinging like a squeaky screen porch door that's almost as irritating as the mosquitoes that find their way through the mesh or your stepmother's incessant aimless humming as she catalogues her twist tie collection. Witness this bit of psychoanalytic dialogue from the novel if you need further proof.<br />
<br />
Dr. Bronhaufschlossen: Tell me about your first sexual encounter, Herr Dougie?<br />
Dougie: Well, it involved tuberculosis, a well-bred singing Jewish girl, the murder of my father and a Boy Scout's uniform.<br />
Dr. B: I had no idea your father was murdered.<br />
D: Yes, he was killed by a dogmatic and cow-like swordsman after arguing over a blind concubine whose genealogy included an enchanted glass of water.<br />
Dr. B: An automatic sword-slinging cow? Wow, your father was a brave man and I'm to infer, ugly as sin too as he had to hire a blind concubine. Tell me more about this enchanted glass water?<br />
D: Well, I knew long ago my father was a romantic even though he was Canadian and only mated once a year during maple tree syrup tapping season but he advertised his pedigree like an Oxford graduate repressing his wispy, maidenly ways even though he had the lips of a volcano and jaws of destruction that could wreck any joke like a Scandinavian lubber fiend troll.<br />
Dr. B: Interesting. I would suggest that due to this upbringing your anima now has a sour gloss that masquerades as a projection of your father's regret over the snowball-meatball incident and his erotic dreams that involved buggering poor-spirited snowmen in the Alps but you're still avoiding my enchanted glass question. Obviously this problem is more deep-seated than a geologist hunkered down on the Canadian Shield and like him we must take a rock hammer and chip away at this igneous rock of memory.<br />
D: Are you suggesting, Doctor, that we take a rock hammer to my head?<br />
Dr. B: Precisely, Herr Dougie. Now please take off your pants and hang them on that suit rack. We wouldn't want to get them all dusty.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJBwNudb6k2zX9nfYP07boQmzL8PjDmRmBBENB8z7SaO31YcZawoT7jfuQOVnuR2VY5ieqKYxh-w3q75dD0ZYFopX-PGKli0dxRaYb4b-1YUJJ-LpAu3O_A6ToBSpf3vM1pwopw92szhDX/s1600/suit+rack.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="340" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJBwNudb6k2zX9nfYP07boQmzL8PjDmRmBBENB8z7SaO31YcZawoT7jfuQOVnuR2VY5ieqKYxh-w3q75dD0ZYFopX-PGKli0dxRaYb4b-1YUJJ-LpAu3O_A6ToBSpf3vM1pwopw92szhDX/s400/suit+rack.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Swiss in those years were known for their complicated and highly-evolved suit racks such as the one pictured above, the Mit Anzug <span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;">Güselchübel</span> XL-300</span>0 and it's more than likely this is the one Dr. Bronhaufschlossen had in his office. In fact many a Swiss psychoanalyst favoured this particular model because besides functioning as a suit rack, it also doubled as a physical test for determining the degree of neurosis in a particular patient when they were asked to hang their pants in the proper part of the device and their subsequent displays of frustration and neurotic behavior could be duly noted by the attending physician.</td></tr>
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<br />
Charlatan or not, Dougie Stimple commits himself to Dr. Dieter von Bronhaufschlossen's intense psychoanalysis and years pass in Switzerland (the Swiss run on dog years because of their love for St. Bernards so everything ages more quickly, thus the whole Swiss time mechanisms inside watches which is why we're always running late, even for our own funerals), and as Dougie and the doctor peel away more layers revealing the depths of Dougie's subconscious it becomes obvious to everyone except maybe the author, that the manticore is not just a metaphor for Dougie Stimple's mind but that his body might actually contain manticore DNA and Dr. Bronhaufschlossen is quick to jump on this amazing opportunity, desperately in need of money after losing his shirt due to some heavy bets he had recently made in a Swiss milk maid milking competition. Greta Gruenheister came in third even after Dr. Bronhaufschlossen had been tipped off she and her cow, Heidi, were a sure thing in the fifth milk pail filling race and he was into his bookie for a cool 20 G's plus the vig. <br />
<br />
The good doctor, never to look a gift horse or manticore in the mouth, plays cupid with Dougie and another one of his patients, Vilma Schlugen who he's treating for her compulsion to cover her face in anchovy paste whenever a cuckoo clock strikes seven, and soon Dougie and Vilma are making even the Matterhorn tremble with their vigorous and vicarious lovemaking on Dr. Bronhaufschlossen's Mit Anzug <span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: small; line-height: 18px;">Güselchübel</span><span style="font-size: small;"> XL-3000 suit rack. "Hang your pants on that," Dougie says to him in Chapter 6, Vilma naked, sated and sprawled over the device and Dougie, standing on a desk and dripping semen all over Dr. B's antique meerschaum pipe collection.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">But Dr. </span>Bronhaufschlossen couldn't have cared less if Dougie had spewed his tainted tadpole juice all over Dr. B's diploma or his cherished Himmel Strasbourg macrame art pieces because all Dr. B. could see was dollar signs flashing before his eyes along with little manticore babies running around in the first ever manticore theme park and people from all over the world lined up to see them. At a price. The fact was manticore babies meant serious coin.<br />
<br />
Fate is a strange thing in that it strikes both those who are enjoying their infinity pools built into the sides of cliff faces that also feature Roman ruins and roller derby rinks as well as those in Sally Ann clothes finding an almost full Big Mac in the trash along with a half full Coke and some slivers of Black Forest cake still stuck to its paper plate near a park bench beneath a spreading majestic oak tree to enjoy the meal on while fighting off three-headed chipmunks. As such, fate plays a certain role in this novel as the child of the minister's wife who gives birth after being hit by a meatball-filled snowball by Dougie's father, Percy, grows up to be a hired killer for a top secret government agency and on the side, between killing despotic heads of states of various countries, corporations and dollar store franchises, seeks revenge on his mother's unfortunate and accidental murder. His name is Chip Glunk but his code name is Agent XL-7 or Bob for short.<br />
<br />
This is where the novel really takes a turn and is a testament to Mr. Davies' abilities as both a philosophical novelist and popular wordsmith simultaneously. With Agent XL-7 now hunting down Dougie in the Swiss alps and Dr. Bronhaufschlossen finalizing his plans for his manticore petting zoo and theme park, the book becomes a kind of Eiger Sanction for the literary set complete with manticore mutants and power-hungry psychoanalysts. Vilma Schlugen becomes pregnant with Dougie's mutated DNA offspring and soon is giving birth to a litter of manticore babies (manticores are apparently born in litters of anywhere from six to ten and a group of manticores are known as a George Foreman Grill for reasons that I'm unable to track down).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Manticore babies at play while mom keeps a careful eye out for any sudden intruders that would hunt them out for their colourful and svelte pelts.</td></tr>
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I won't reveal to you how this strange plot twist plays out but suffice to say this novel goes from soup to nuts with little left to the imagination except perhaps what is really cooking in that crock pot that Dougie calls a brain. In the end I leave you with this description that the author writes as an afterword to his book.<br />
<br />
"Manticore is derived from the Latin and ancient Greek, 'man' in Latin meaning 'pertaining to
the male of the human species' and 'core' having its roots in the language of something I can't remember and alluding to the maze where the minotaur became lost and
eventually lay down and died due to the lack of human internal organs to
eat. Put them together and you have a man who seeks to eat himself or
others, a form of cannibalism that Freud equates with our most primal
impulses and the releasing of the id or as they say up in Cache Creek,
BC, popping the lid on a container of fat, juicy dew worms when the
trout are really hankering for horseflies." <br />
<br />
What does this mean? Well, it's open to interpretation but if Mr. Davies were alive today to explain himself I still think we'd be none the wiser, whether to the mysteries of the manticore in myth and metaphor, the workings of the subconscious mind or how to use a Swiss suit rack without severing your fingers.<br />
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<br />Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-61988816351504915802015-06-04T12:02:00.002-07:002015-06-04T12:02:41.242-07:00Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-Rama-The Liverwurst ConspiracyLet me open this post by simply stating I love meat that comes in a tubular shape (I'm not talking about penises, by the way). What I like even more are organ meats stuffed into a cylindrical casing (again, not talking about penises here). That's why it galls me utterly and completely to have to post this newest piece of perversity by that cringe-producing scribbler who can turn ordinary paper spattered with pen and ink into vomit inducing imagery but I can tell you this, I'm thinking of upping the ante and charging not only pork and beans but also a tube or two of liverwurst sausage for posting this new drawing. Or any other future drawings for that matter. Just as an artist needs variety in their subject matter, I too need variety in my daily dietary intake and frankly, these pork and beans are killing me. I need a little meat protein to offset the bean protein (because you'd need an electron microscope to find the pork in those cans of pork and beans), and some liverwurst would definitely make my day not to mention oil the old bowels and turn bathroom time into a backyard slip'n slide rather than the World War II mortar attack it usually resembles, my bathroom looking much like Berlin circa 1945.<br />
<br />
Variety, of course, is not a word Mr. Laba is well-acquainted with in his art. Not only does he beat a dead horse over and over again, but he then sells it for horse meat and then begins to beat the horse meat, whether in hamburger form or filet. He will follow people home from the butcher shop and then sneak into their homes and beat their horse meat while they're upstairs sorting the laundry or arranging their collection of Hummel figurines.<br />
The reason for this whole rant upon a liverwurst theme is because Mr. Laba calls this newest drawing The Birth of Liverwurst. Now I'm all for the birth of baby Jesus or the birth of a new star in the universe or the birth practices of opossums on the outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico, perhaps in a ditch out back of a bingo hall where the various discarded fast food debris provides sustenance to the new-born, nearly blind and hungry baby opossums with their groping little hands and mucous-slathered bodies, but I have my doubts that liverwurst is birthed, but rather is extruded through some kind of meat emulsifying machine.<br />
<br />
That Mr. Laba then sticks in the good Lord's son, savior and all round bon-vivant, Jesus Christ, bearing an immense liverwurst through a prehistoric landscape, makes me think Mr. Laba has lost all his marbles and secondly, that he will meet his end in a church pew (even though he is a Jew), while in the process of inserting lewd images from his pornographic photo collection of ventriloquist dummies having their way with Lithuanian pantyhose models, into the Bibles and that by the time he is found on Sunday morning the church mice will have eaten out his eyes and covered the rest of his putrescent and psoriasis-spackled body with mouse droppings. Hopefully it won't be the Ladies Auxillary first on the scene for such a sight would no doubt cause them to drop their various trays of delectable baked goods from their already-over-taxed arthritic hands and the sheer horror of it all may set back the production of fudge brownies, blueberry scones and oatmeal cookies for years to come, much to the detriment of the other parishioners.<br />
<br />
Enough said about that and if Mr. Laba doesn't meet his maker covered in mouse feces (the meek shall inherit the earth and Mr. Laba's body, too if my predictions come true), then perhaps he might do us all a favour and fall into a meat emulsifier and turn his innards into something useful like, say, rat bait for school cafeterias.<br />
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Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-79477814313709577332015-03-06T20:39:00.001-08:002015-03-06T20:39:08.997-08:00Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-Rama-The Chicken Neck-Sucking ExtravaganzaMark Laba sucks chicken necks. I don't mean that figuratively. I mean he actually buys chicken necks from the butcher (he gets a two-pound bag of them for less than three bucks, the same price the butcher charges people who come in to buy them for their cats and dogs), takes them home, boils them and then sits down to a big plate of wet, limp chicken necks, sucking back the fat and cartilage and pimpled pale skin like they were the last chicken necks on earth. I have no doubt he would have sex with a chicken neck if he could figure out the logistics. His mouth makes lovemaking sounds as it slops about on the bony flesh and saliva smears his lips like chicken fat lipstick on a beak. I've witnessed this although Mr. Laba doesn't know as I was peeking through his window, bits of shrubbery pasted to my skull to camouflage my presence to both him and any neighbourhood watch patrols. Not to mention the police. The reason I preface this new atrocity I'm posting by Mr. Laba with this chicken neck theme is because he calls this one, "Mmmmm, chicken," and may I be the first to point out that the fetal old man in the image bears a strong resemblance to the artist himself, minus the umbilical cord and the visible head vein. Beneath his matted comb-over of course, it's probably head veins galore. All else seems to be a spitting image of the artist as an ancient fetus.<br />
I charged four cans of pork and beans to post this abomination, namely because I found it so distasteful it actually gave me hemorrhoids in my mouth and I've had to add dollops of Preparation H to my bowl of beans to combat this unfortunate result. I don't mind bad art but when that art actually produces inflammations of anal vascular structures in an oral environment, well, that's just too much for me. Freud would have a field day with this oral/anal fixation phenomena resulting in a physical manifestation created by a visual disturbance, but for me the only field day I'm having is that one where I have to bury a dead guinea pig that was hit by a runaway hot dog cart in a vacant lot strewn with the type of debris people are too lazy to haul to the city dump. That's no field of dreams, more like a field of screams, especially from all the hobos sleeping on discarded mattresses, crying out from either alcohol poisoning, the DT's or rats trying to eat their faces. A few of them have old Milton Bradley game pieces lodged in their nostrils but for what reason I'm not able to discern. Perhaps it's some kind of secret hobo code. By the way, that guinea pig's name was Frederick and he's dearly missed by everyone in the rooming-house who knew him. Except for Mr. Tungsten who is convinced his dead wife's soul had entered Frederick's body in order to berate him from beyond the grave. When we asked for proof he claimed they both made the same squeaking noises, wore their hair the same way and both had a fondness for whole grains, semi-brown apple slices and wood shavings.<br />
Anyway, here's Mr. Laba's pen and ink piece of crapola, fit neither for gallery or lining the birdcage of an incontinent parakeet. If walls had hemorrhoids instead of ears, they'd look like this. <br />
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<br />Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-73868623776241615812015-02-22T09:49:00.004-08:002015-02-22T20:32:10.883-08:00Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-Rama-The Anthony Quinn Edition<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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With my underpants spattered and stained with so much pork
and bean gas debris it can only mean one thing–it’s time again for another of
that rat-feces eating freak, Mark Laba’s drawings. This week he appeared in a
bit of a frantic state, sweat beading the ear-wax coloured flesh of his face as
he plunked down four rolls of pork and bean change and pleaded with me to post
this drawing posthaste. “What’s the rush, fungus-breath?” I asked, the effort
to contain my sneer causing me to drool on my shirtfront and as it was more
than miniscule pork and bean shrapnel drool on my I Love Wolves sweat top, the
rendering of a pack of wolves not only glow-in-the-dark but with eyes as
riveting and haunting as the gooey burning embers of melted marshmallows in a
campfire on the lake where Tom Thompson drowned, I’ll be charging Mr. Laba
extra money for dry-cleaning. “Don’t ask any questions,” he replied, “and just
listen to this.” Nevertheless, I interrupted and asked him the title of his
latest calamity. “It’s called Requiem For A Gillnetter,” and I guess, the story
he related after this has something to do with its inspiration, albeit in such
a roundabout way it’s akin to picking your nose with your toes while you’re
restrained in a straitjacket and crazed sea otters are tearing open and munching
on your testicles, mistaking them for mollusk meat as someone dressed as a
banana tries to sell you a life insurance policy. Unfortunately, our previous pork
and bean procurement agreement commits me to relaying this drawing and the
accompanying story so hold on to your hats and air-sickness bags and prepare
yourself for a turbulent ride. </div>
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“Back in my art school days,” Mr. Laba said, “I was working
late one night in the studio, all alone. I was crouched down, rooting through a
supply cabinet for paint when I heard a voice behind me. It was a deep, heavily
accented voice and when I turned around I was staring into the remarkable and
unmistakable visage of Anthony Quinn. I froze on the spot. ‘These things,’ he
said, pointing to some wrought iron sculptures a friend of mine had made, ‘these
are very interesting. What do you call them?’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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‘I…I…well, they don’t really have a name,’ I stammered. ‘A
friend of mine makes them, that’s all I know.’</div>
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‘They are very interesting,’ Anthony Quinn repeated. Behind
him stood another man who bore a passing resemblance to an aged Rod Steiger,
but I couldn’t be sure. It was at that moment I thought I should tell Anthony
Quinn what I thought of him as an acting legend and the fact he’s been in some
of the greatest films I’ve ever seen (not to mention maybe a quick nod to Rod
Steiger, if that’s who he was and his work in On The Waterfront or In The Heat
Of The Night). I wasn’t even going to mention Zorba the Greek, which everyone
associates Anthony Quinn with. No, I was going to go out on a limb and tell him
how amazing he was in Requiem For A Heavyweight, a film that still haunts me to
this day. Not to mention Lawrence of Arabia, which I can watch endlessly. But,
as Anthony Quinn turned around and started to leave followed by Rod Steiger’s
doppleganger, I said nothing, not even acknowledging the fact that this man was
an incredible actor from a bygone era when magnificent movies were made by megalomaniac
studio heads and producers who didn’t always see a profit margin in everything
they put on the screen. </div>
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I let this momentous chance slip away and the next day when
I mentioned to schoolmates that I met Anthony Quinn in the studio the previous
evening, I being an older student amongst a generation ten or more years
younger than me, most didn’t even know who he was. I was astonished, to say the
least. Some did nod their heads briefly with distant memories of Zorba the
Greek or maybe the title just twigged some collective mass pop culture
unconscious reflex, like some kitschy album cover or movie poster in their
parents’ rec-room.”</div>
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As far as I can guess the only connection between this great
film and Mr. Laba’s putrid scribbling is the fact both begin with the word
“requiem.” After that, one work of art attains greatness and the other finds
its calling in the sewer amongst the used condoms, human waste and the many
unsecured false teeth that have fallen between the gratings while trying to
bite into hot dogs on the street.</div>
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Requiem for a heavyweight, indeed! All I can say, Mr. Laba, is that it’s obvious to me
that, if you didn’t hasten Mr. Quinn to an early grave you certainly broke his
heart with your ignorance and lack of acknowledgment of his greatness as an
actor and legendary status in the movie industry. Though I can’t really believe
that your deer-in-the-headlights vacuous countenance and personality could
actually affect someone of such stature, I also can’t help but think that on
his deathbed Mr. Quinn might have taken a moment from his hesitant and final faltering
steps into the afterlife to reflect, if only momentarily, on those he had met
in his life (horse’s asses such as yourself), who saddened him to such a degree
that hovering vultures waiting to pick his bones would be an honest respite
from the rat-feces eating ignoramuses such as yourself. The fact that Mr. Quinn
was also an accomplished painter and that in his early days had studied architecture
with Frank Lloyd Wright, should be a sign that any art supplies you have left, Mr.
Laba, you should quickly ram down your throat and put the art world out if its
misery. If you don’t choke to death slowly and painfully (hopefully), at least
it might direct you toward another useful calling such as boll weevil breeding,
zipper repair or boiling animal parts in your backyard for head-cheese. </div>
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Finally, this is not the first time Mr. Laba has pulled a
stunt like this. A few years ago he failed to acknowledge Steven Seagal in a
hotel lobby for Mr. Seagal’s groundbreaking work in On Deadly Ground or Under
Siege 2: Dark Territory and in the same hotel, Mr. Laba, on another occasion
(what’s wrong with Mr. Laba, does he haunt hotel lobbies just waiting for an
opportunity to willfully ignore such great culture-defining cinematic artistes),
had a chance to tell Lou Diamond Phillips how much he admired his work as they
were sharing the same elevator and yet, once again, Mr. Laba chose to say
nothing and stare into space idiotically. I mean, even just a quick nod to La
Bamba wouldn’t have killed him. But instead he decided to stare at his
distorted reflection in the various reflective surfaces of the elevator and
tried not to fart. I pray that when these two fine actors must one day sadly meet
their maker, Mr. Laba’s name might be on their parched ancient lips as they
curse his very existence with their last dying breath. You are an asshole, Mr.
Laba and if Anthony Quinn, God rest his soul, were still alive today he’d be
the first to tell you so. </div>
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Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-26887528672708586322015-02-21T17:08:00.002-08:002015-02-21T23:47:05.896-08:00Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-Rama Pork & Bean Challenge-Day 5Well, it's finally day 5 and the finale of the great art for pork and beans extravaganza and I can tell that that toe-fungus licking bohemian bozo, Mark Laba, has finally hit the wall. I found him supine in the alleyway out back of my rooming house, urine-soaked sweat pants halfway to his knees and a KFC bucket jauntily lodged on his misshapen head. It appears that raccoons may have been licking at the chicken grease from the bucket as spoor leavings traced his body like the chalk outline at a murder scene. I'm not sure if he had just collapsed or perhaps this was some form of performance art that he's decided to explore. I can only hope the former because its bad enough just looking at his puffy and psoriasis-speckled physique but if he intends to put that abomination into motion then heaven help us all, whether weak or strong of stomach. The results will always be the same. Loss of appetite for three days to five weeks, a sudden emptying of your bank account, dreams that involve hand puppets trying to eat egg salad sandwiches and a compulsion to clip your toenails at bus stops. On that note, viewer beware. Hopefully the raccoons will return to eat his body before he wakes up.<br />
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<br />Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-44739187495313210372015-02-21T16:37:00.001-08:002015-02-21T23:46:48.095-08:00Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-Rama Pork & Bean Challenge-Day 4Day 4 of the art for pork and bean money festivities and that pariah of pen and ink, Mark Laba, is looking as tired as some three-legged creature dragging itself across a desert highway after it's already been run over numerous times but won't give up, just looking for some arid, prickly patch of cactus and wind-whipped candy wrappers and chicken nugget debris to lay down and die under. But then again, Mr. Laba looks like that even on his best and least-stressed days. If only he could find a rewarding profession like myself, say in the janitorial and erotic arts, perhaps he might find the more sublime meanings to life. Alas, he won't and so we're left with this fetid pool of scribbling that not even the best sewage treatment plant could possibly dream of filtering for healthy drinking or boiling spaghetti water.<br />
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<br />Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-53056841133970008612015-02-21T16:36:00.000-08:002015-02-21T23:46:26.644-08:00Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-Rama Pork & Bean Challenge-Day 3Well, Day 3 of the pork and bean art challenge and I can tell that the artiste formerly known as The Nose-Picking Fiend, Mark Laba, is getting tired due to the fact he has all the vim and vigour of earwax just beginning to crust over. It's all about inertia and Mr. Laba is obviously following his prescribed path to bitter dissolution whereby his body slowly leaks all of its fluids in a bus shelter while fighting pigeons for discarded French fries and bread crusts. All this to say he's a sad, sad excuse for both a human being and the pencil-wielding bladder of a squashed porcupine that he so uncannily resembles and if incontinence were an art term rather than a condition, Mr. Laba would lead this artistic movement. Enough said. Here's the newest scribblings. Better luck next time, Laba. I only retched twice but I'm enjoying the pork and beans, just as long as I don't look at your drawings before I eat.<br />
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<br />Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-39295858368068938282015-02-21T16:34:00.001-08:002015-02-21T16:34:14.151-08:00Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-Rama Pork & Bean Challenge-Day 2Well, it's the second day of the pork'n'bean art marathon and that lily-livered, knuckle-dragging charlatan of the arts, Mark Laba, has managed to cram yet another pen into his self-abuse cramped fist and produce some more crap suitable for lining the cages of diarrhea-suffering parrots. "Down and dirty, fast and loose," is how Mr. Laba explained these latest renderings to me and I believe those were the famous last words of Fast Eddie before Minnesota Fats whipped his ass on the nine-ball table and later had his thumbs broken by a two-headed man in a back alley outside of Medicine Hat. On that note these drawings are visually not unlike rendered fat except at least one you can cook with while the other wouldn't even make good toilet paper, coffee filters or a shim to stick under the leg of a wobbly table at the Legion Hall.<br />
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<br />Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-53056878439157814462015-02-21T16:33:00.000-08:002015-02-21T16:33:01.287-08:00Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-Rama Pork & Bean Challenge-Day 1<style>
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I was poking around in my larder the other day when I noticed that my pork and bean supplies were alarmingly depleted and in order to remedy the situation I hatched this little plan. Now I'm not an artist (who needs the anxiety, headaches and sweatpants
stained with paint and foie gras grease not to mention an ego the size of a neck goiter like my neighbour, Boris, the unemployed Zamboni driver has) but I know of one man, that
paramecium of a human, Mark Laba, who fancies himself a bit of an artiste (his sweatpants
stink like a bullfrog during mating season) and gave him this challenge. Three drawings a day for five days and I would faithfully post the results to the hordes of the Haltiwanger admirers out there, but it would come at a price. Each drawing posted would cost Mr. Laba a can of pork and beans (or the monetary equivalent), and so by my calculations, five days would garner me a whopping fifteen cans of mechanically de-boned meat and bean succulence, whether it be in a molasses or tomato-based sauce. I would have charged Mr. Laba more but I didn't want to overstate my case and cause him to wet his pants in the process or scare him off or both, knowing Mr. Laba's weak tendencies and cowardly temperament. But at that price I knew that his fat head filled with delusions of artistic success would compel him to sweat blood and ink for five days and supply me with the following monstrosities, along with a healthy supply of pork and beans to add to the old larder.<br />
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So off to work went that pariah of the palette, that wannabe artiste who should frankly have his beret flambéed in front of him while someone beats him soundly with a baguette upon his balding pate until he has some sense knocked into him and goes back to his calling, which is point man on the dog turd cleaning brigade with the rest of the parolees. <br />
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Anyway, here's the first batch of block-headed, ham-fisted scribblings and just for your knowledge, all of them gave me acid reflux and one of them actually made me incontinent.<br />
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Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-22886073767296876542015-01-09T14:15:00.001-08:002015-01-09T20:08:09.116-08:00Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-Rama<style>
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Another couple of rolls of nickels and dimes have arrived
along with the acquisition of more cans of pork and beans on my part, which means it’s time to dust off those berets and
prepare yourself for the newest artistic debacle from that
degenerate of the palette, Mark Laba. Mr. Laba calls
this one Pongo’s Revenge. I’m not sure which of the actual characters depicted
is Pongo but honestly, they all seem to be, in varying degrees, self-portraits
of Mr. Laba himself in his various states of self-delusion and the duress he suffers from his constant meat sweats. I, unfortunately, don't have the luxury of sweating out the residue of beef, pork or poultry as one would be hard-pressed to actually find a piece of meat in any of the umpteen cans of pork and beans that line the shelves of my clothes closet, but then I'm just a simple janitor whereas Mr. Laba leads the life of the idle, meat-eating, pen-wielding, masturbating rich, creating his artistically useless pieces of dreck that no doubt have brought him untold riches that he's acquired fobbing off his scrawls and scratches to unsuspecting clients at the senior citizen's home where, behind every bedpan hides a blank cheque book. All I can say is that with this newest entry Mr. Laba proves that once again he is the Picasso of pimple juice, the Rembrandt of rectal ooze, the Caravaggio of semen crust and all I can hope is that he chokes on a piece of steak before he can finish his next piece. As for me, I don't have to worry about suffering such a fate because those beans go down easy...easy like a Sunday morning.</div>
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<br />Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-87288760265023020262014-12-16T15:38:00.002-08:002014-12-16T15:38:55.069-08:00Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-RamaMy hunger for pork'n'beans, like the universe, is a boundless thing, which is why I am again posting more of Mr. Laba's degenerate art work to keep the money for those cans flowing. What can I say about Mr. Laba's endeavors except that he certainly knows how to massacre paper with pen and ink but at least it keeps his hands busy because he would no doubt be abusing himself relentlessly were it not for this little hobby of his. Monkey-fisted, ham-headed, worm-brained, the endless analogies to his physiological and psychological make-up escape me although descriptive words like priapic, paunchy and perverted certainly top the list. Beneath you will find his newest creation, a piece I found so distasteful I charged him five cans of pork and beans to post it. He calls it "The Sleep of Reason Produces Few Reasons For Sleep," but I call it "You Better Sleep With One Eye Open Like The Guy In Your Picture, Laba, Because When The Pork & Bean Money Runs Out I'm Gonna Kill You!" <br />
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<br />Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-16007314298910597522014-11-27T12:44:00.001-08:002014-11-27T12:47:13.552-08:00Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-RamaWell, dear readers, it's that time again where that bozo from British Columbia, Mark Laba, has paid me in pork and bean money to splat his artwork up on my widely read and much talked about blog. He's now paying me in rolls of nickels and dimes, the brown paper rolls stained with the remnants of his Cheezie-dusted fingerprints but even if he's nickel and diming me to death, I have to take his money as per our previous agreement. Obviously things are taking a turn for the worse for Mr. Laba if he's resorting to paying me with rolls of coins, coins he no doubt fished out of the fountain at the local mall when security wasn't looking. Nevertheless, a man's got to eat and every roll of coins is another notch in my pork'n'bean belt while Mr. Laba, one can safely assume, can't even give his art away due to its infantile rendering and contemptible subject matter. That he even grips a pen in that monkey-fist he calls a hand (a hand that would be much more well-suited to self-pleasuring than attempting any drawing) is an abomination upon the art world and I've seen better results from diarrhea splatters in the toilet bowls of public restrooms than the crude markings Mr. Laba scrawls on cheap paper he finds in wastebaskets. He calls this new drawing "The Loneliness of the Long Distance-Calling Ventriloquist with Walrus" but I think "Laba Licks Urinal Pucks" is more fitting. Those urinal pucks might also explain how he hallucinates and then renders such distasteful themes. Lay off the urinal pucks, Laba, whether you're sniffing or licking them because they'll rot whatever is left of your pine-scented brain. As for the walrus, wishful thinking on his part because no walrus would have sex with him even if he were the last mammal on the ice floe and he had seal meat strapped to his scrawny, pallid body and fake tusks fashioned from toilet paper rolls stuck with his own snot to his face. Anyway, try to enjoy the drawing and I'll certainly be enjoying my pork and beans.<br />
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<br />Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-48082453011261768672014-11-18T12:20:00.001-08:002014-11-18T14:18:53.336-08:00Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-RamaDear readers, it's time again for me to post another of that miscreant who calls himself a man, Mark Laba's artistic endeavors even though I'm starting to think he's paying me with counterfeit twenties. Nevertheless, the lady at the Shop'n'Go casts nary a glance at the bills I produce and thus my pork and beans and Chef Boyardee Beefaroni larder is bursting at the seams with chemically enhanced and mechanically de-boned goodness and nutrition. So, up goes another messy piece of pen and ink from a man who must make mucilage his muse judging by his disgusting and talentless work not to mention the crusty stains that always seem to speckle his shirt and pants. In this drawing I believe he his attempting some sort of metaphorical rendering of that keftede-headed Casanova of Crete, the famed Telly Savalas, depicted in all his post-Kojak glory. Or maybe it's pre-Kojak, who can tell from these puerile pen-on-paper markings that would make even goat droppings on broken concrete seem like a Matisse. I believe Mr. Laba calls this one "Who Loves You, Baby," but "Who Loathes You, Laba" would be more fitting.<br />
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<br />Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-87569182050809576982014-10-23T21:17:00.004-07:002014-10-23T21:32:26.568-07:00Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-RamaHere's another piece of trash Mr. Laba has created. Just keep those pork and beans coming, Laba or I'm taking you off the site. In this instance he apparently was too lazy to even draw something and so he just took an existing Jughead Jones Gag Bag (I'm gagging right now), switched around a bunch of heads and then added his own obscure and idiotic speech balloons that he claims are poetic. I guess they are if you think poetry is something wet you step in in the rooming-house bathroom late a night. Good work, Laba. Leonardo da Vinci you ain't. And frankly, your obsession with Archie comics, goats and Milton Berle's penis is very off putting.<br />
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<br />Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-43413122984244118352014-10-23T12:53:00.003-07:002014-10-23T12:53:44.726-07:00Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-RamaHere's another piece by that degenerate artist, Mark Laba. That he's paying me in pork and bean money to show his work on my site is the only motivating factor here for me but after viewing this piece of trash, I'm reconsidering this arrangement. Unfortunately I'm heating up a can of pork and beans right now and mmmmm! do they ever smell delicious so I guess the artwork stays for now until I get a bad can and have diarrhea in my pants. Mr. Laba calls this one Nauseous Fingerprints or something like that and all I can say is, I'm getting nauseous looking at it.<br />
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<br />Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-44585476548936668142014-10-23T08:01:00.001-07:002014-10-23T08:01:24.871-07:00Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-RamaWelcome to a new section of the Haltiwanger Report where I give over content of the page to an acquaintance of mine by the name of Mark Laba. He believes himself to be something of an artist but between you and me, he's just a sniveling excuse for a human being with all the artistic merit of a chimpanzee in a painter's smock and beret. Truly, I detest him and his work more than I hate raisins in butter tarts but he has agreed to pay me twenty dollars a month to feature his art on my widely popular blog and frankly I need the money to keep me in pork and beans. So, without further ado here's Mr. Laba's first piece of work in my Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-Rama section. I'm not sure what this piece is as he didn't title it but apparently Mr. Laba tried to draw Archie's head, unsuccessfully I might add. He truly is a dimwit (Mr. Laba, not Archie of course).<br />
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<br />Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5703405894973941341.post-6826058425694563272014-10-07T11:06:00.001-07:002014-10-07T19:13:21.056-07:00Ideas For Novels I Will Never Write<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Terror at Ten Pin Lanes</b></span></div>
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As a man of science, gastronomy, art and literature, not to mention my erotic janitorial accomplishments, you can understand how I am brimming with ideas but have far too many projects to actually complete anything. But then again, I think there is much to be said for the uncompleted task as it leaves an air of mystery and keeps boredom from setting in, for both the artist and the reader or viewer of the work. Take for instance the many novels I have reviewed that I've never read. The fact is, after one or two pages, you've really absorbed the best parts of the book and to slog on ad nauseam is to do a great injustice to both the novelist and your brain. Best to quit while both you and the author are ahead and not get bogged down in those long middle sections and endings that always disappoint. Sometimes having the attention span of a gnat helps you keep one step ahead of the snap of the hungry frog's tongue and ending up as the after-scent of an amphibian's odorous burp. If you catch my drift.<br />
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On that note I've created this new section in my report wherein I discuss, briefly, an idea for a novel I'll never write accompanied by a cover drawing for the never-to-be-published book and in some cases, even an excerpt. So, for this first installment I humbly submit my blockbuster novel, bound to be enjoyed by young adult and mature readers alike and that I tentatively title, Terror At Ten Pin Lanes. Of course the book will never be finished let alone bound, so this whole point is moot.<br />
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The premise is simple but the plot winds like a hungry anaconda sniffing a lost goat in the Peruvian jungle. Octogenarian Al Kugleman is boiling eggs one day in his kitchen when a blinding light hits him and he's transformed into an ancient Aztec deity and called upon to sacrifice virgins for the good of his community. In exchange he promises a variety of civic-minded upgrades like a new little league ball park, renovations to a senior citizen's home, better cafeteria food at City Hall not to mention helping local businesses with their financial problems. All's well until Dusty Gimple, daughter of Henry and Mel Gimple, throws a monkey wrench into the Aztec god works when her father promises her as a sacrificial victim in exchange for Al Kugelman injecting some life and money into his fading bowling alley. Dusty is a feisty young thing and it turns out Al Kugelman and his posse of washed-up Aztec deities have bitten off more than they can chew when they butt heads with this spunky kid. <br />
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The climax of the novel has a showdown at the bowling alley with a whack load of aging and decrepit Aztec gods facing off against Dusty Gimple and her crack team of Ritalin-dosed high school buddies she calls into action and the lane gutters run with blood although whose I'm not saying. Suffice to say if I were to actually write this book no doubt the reviews would read "Eat hot loin cloth J.K. Rowling and Stephen King because there's a new guy in town and his bowling shoes don't stink." Please enjoy the cover drawing and the excerpt because that's all you'll ever see, perhaps thankfully or perhaps the anticipation of not knowing what comes next will gnaw away at your brain until, on your deathbed you might think, I wonder what ever happened to that Dusty Gimple and if she ever did give those Aztec deities a good whooping like they deserved, trying to muscle in on one town's supply of virgins with the promise of easy money and first dibs at the all-you-can eat buffet.<br />
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<br />
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Excerpt</span></i><br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chapter One - Aztec Party Hats</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It’s
odd when you look back from where you are and can’t remember the path you took
to get there in the first place. Maybe that’s why people just fall into things
and when you ask them how they came to be what they are or where they ended up
they just shrug their shoulders and say they were just lucky or unlucky but
things just kind of fell into place or happened a certain way. Take me for
example. All of thirteen years old and already I’m on the sacrificial virgins
list, just because my dad’s bowling alley is going tits up, as the boys at my
school like to say. Or better yet, take Al Kugelman a.k.a. the Aztec deity, and
the cause of all my problems. I mean who would’ve thought that this elderly man
living at the end of our street would suddenly be transformed into an Aztec god
while he was standing at the kitchen sink peeling some hard-boiled eggs one
day. Or at least that’s the way he tells it but really, when my dad presses him
on the details on this remarkable transformation, though it did nothing for his
bald spot or comb-over or disgusting varicose veins that stand out like
throbbing blue worms when he wears shorts on hot summer days, Al has trouble
remembering anything. He remembers the eggs and he remembers some sort of
blinding light bathing him in an intense heat and then bingo, he woke up in his
La-Z-Boy recliner chair wearing nothing but this magnificent feathered
headdress and a loincloth.He walked out of his house dressed like this and Mrs. Kulpinski, next door, almost had a heart attack while she was watering her rose bushes. Al Kugelman is not the kind of man you want to see in a bathing suit let alone a loin cloth but she did admit the feathered headdress made him look dignified.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">At
first everyone just thought he’d had a stroke seeing as he was speaking some
kind of language that wasn’t recognizable as anything but gibberish so we all
figured he’d just forgotten how to talk. Which is what happens with a stroke,
apparently. My grandmother, Nana Euclid had one and mom had to sit with her for
six months looking at alphabet books for babies, sounding out the letters and
trying to put them together into simple words. Like cat and rat and dog and
nut. She finally did get most of her speech back except sometimes she sounded
like she was trying to talk underwater or with too much food in her mouth and
her left eye got lazy and would look out at something else even when she was
staring straight into your face. Which is actually something I admired because
then you’ve got your vision in two different places, like those chameleons that
can rotate each of their eyes separately and then no predator can sneak up on
you. And believe me, they’re plenty of predators out there waiting for you,
even in tenth grade. I mean besides all the evil guys and kidnappers that
your parents are always warning you about or you see on TV, it’s the ones
closer to home like Lester Springmeyer, that kid two blocks away whose always
showing me his weenie or Mandy Glower, popular at school even though she’s
dosed to the gills on Ritalin and has the attention span of a Smart Phone and
uses that phone to spread terrible made-up rumors about people she hates and of
course Al Kugelman, octogenarian and Aztec god to boot, sticking me there on
his sacrificial list because my dad said it was okay if it would help save his
bowling alley, that you have to worry about. I’m not too happy with my dad right
now and my mom put up quite a stink but Al promised that the sacrifice was
years away, not really until I was an adult because he’s backlogged with
sacrificial virgins currently (they’re trucking them in from all parts of the
country, the demand for Al’s services are that great plus Al has a rule that no
one can be sacrificed until they’re of voting age so the victims awaiting
sacrifice are piling up), and by that time dad figures, once his business is
back in business again he can find a way to buy Al off. But I don’t think Aztec
gods can be bought off so easily, especially when you’ve signed some parchment
in blood and I know dad did this because after he got back from Al’s late one
night from a supposed poker game he was swearing and yelling at mom about where
she kept the Band-aids. Blood may be thicker than water but it certainly isn’t
as thick as the air at our house after mom got wind of the deal dad cut with Al
the Aztec god. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I
was in my bedroom that night when dad got home, but I was still awake even
though it was well past 11 and a school night. So I heard everything.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“What’s going on, Henry? Why are you
bleeding? I thought it was just a friendly poker game.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“It was, Mel. I just cut myself, I was
trying to cut a piece of salami, the knife slipped and I cut myself. Now where
are the goddamn Band-aids?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“On your forearm? You’re cutting salami
and that’s where the knife hits? I mean I understand a finger, a knuckle, but
who cuts a piece of salami and the knife slips all they way up their forearm.
You didn’t make some kind of deal with that old goat, did you?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“He’s not an old goat, Mel. He’s an Aztec
god and he can make things happen. Like getting the bowling alley back on
track, bringing in some business.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I knew it. You signed a pact in blood
with that old pervert. You promised him our daughter, didn’t you?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Mel, look at it this way. He’s
backlogged on sacrificial virgins right now. I mean you could fill a warehouse
with them. He told me he probably wouldn’t get around to sacrificing Dusty
until seven or eight years from now. And by that time really, what’re the
chances she’ll still be a virgin. Off to college, all that jazz, really we’d be
closing our eyes and pretending we’re blind if we didn’t recognize what’s
really going on. Which then instantly stops her from being sacrificial
material. So, bingo, the bowling alley is saved and Dusty continues on her way,
graduates, meets a nice guy, gets married and then one day she and hubby and
the grandkids inherit the business. Or if Al is still dead set on sacrificing
her, by that time with the bowling alley doing well I’m sure I could pay him
off with a nice chunk of money. I mean he’s an Aztec god and everything but
even an Aztec god needs some rec-room renovations or a new water heater or
something.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I
couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Not the fact that my dad offered me up for
sacrifice but that he actually expected me to take over the bowling alley one
day. Since I was a toddler it seemed my dad was forever putting me to work
there. When I was crawling he would attach dusting pads to my knees and have me
go up and down the lanes removing dirt and polishing the wood. I thought it was
a game. As I got older he put me in charge of spraying the bowling shoes with
disinfectant and that’s about when my disgust for bowling and the various vile
odors of human feet really swayed me towards becoming anything but the owner of
a bowling alley. As far as I was concerned virgin sacrifice would be a piece of
cake compared to deordorizing shoes and helping old people with gargoyle toes
try to find the right size shoes for their gnarled feet. Or worse yet, having
to attend to the bowling shoe needs of my classmates’ stinky feet. Humiliating
was not even close to the shame I felt but it all went right over my dad’s
toupee as he thought he was teaching me solid life lessons and business values
that would see me through to my old age. Either way I had no intention of being
sacrificed, by my family or an Aztec deity but if gods were anything like
humans, especially of the adult variety, I’d have them both eating out of the
palm of my hand in no time. With a little mall money to spend too.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It
was that night really, overhearing my parents arguing, that I made up my mind
to do something about this whole mess. First things first, I was going to have
a talk with Kugelman and get the lowdown on this whole Aztec god business. I
knew him of course as the old guy down the street and one of dad’s poker playing
cronies but since his transformation, he didn’t really say hello to me or mom
anymore when we passed him on the sidewalk, maybe because he secretly knew my
sacrifice was looming and he felt guilty about it. Or maybe Aztec gods didn’t
talk to mere mortals like us except to give us sacrificial instructions on our
day of reckoning. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Speaking
of days of reckoning, Kugelman was very private about his whole sacrificial
process. The way I read about it, the Aztecs liked to make a big show out of
their days of sacrifice, attended by thousands, bodies being carted up and down
the steps of the huge temple pyramids, lots of feasting, like a trip to
Disneyland but with lots of blood and no mouse. But Kugelman was really
secretive about the whole thing and never invited anyone to watch. It all took
place out back of Yeager’s Muffler and Brake Shop where there was an overgrown
and unused field behind a beaten-up chain link fence. In the middle of the
field was a Quonset hut and that’s where Al Kugelman set up his sacrificial
altar. The door was padlocked and occasionally customers at Yeager’s waiting
for their mufflers or brakes to be fixed would catch a glimpse of old Kugelman,
done up in his colorful feathered headdress, loincloth and fuzzy slippers,
ducking inside and closing the door quickly behind him. Nobody ever saw a
sacrificial victim being taken inside and even when Mr. Blanchard, a retired
army colonel and the leader of the town’s boy scout troop, set up a twenty-four
hour surveillance on the Quonset hut, nothing out of the ordinary was seen
except of course Kugelman in his crazy get-up going in and out of the hut a
couple of times. And not a drop of blood to be seen, which is pretty strange
when you’re sacrificing people for a living. The town council managed to
persuade Mr. Blanchard to call off his surveillance because they were afraid of
angering the Aztec god, especially after he’d just promised them a new baseball
diamond and bleachers for the Little League team.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">So,
one Saturday morning I begged off bowling alley duty with the excuse that I was
going to go downtown and have a look at my dad’s competition. See if I could
come back with some ideas to make dad’s business more successful. Dad’s bowling
alley was in a rundown building with musty carpeting and lanes that were
warping over time. The gumball and candy machines had the same stuff in them
from the 1950’s when the place was first built. At the time it was high tech.
Now Galaxy Lanes had opened downtown with glow-in-the-dark bowling,
state-of-the-art score keeping computers, a snack bar that served gourmet pizza
and fancy coffee and even a singles mingle bowling night where you could meet
that special someone while knocking down pins. The fact was it didn’t take a
rocket scientist to see where dad’s alley had gone wrong and Galaxy Lanes was
succeeding. But it would take money to update or a miracle to bring people in,
both of which would take an Aztec god to make it happen as far as my dad was
concerned. And an Aztec god demanded a sacrifice and so off I went to meet the
man or god who held the key to my fate.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It
was a beautiful spring day, warmer than usual as I pedaled my bike down the
street. Between the chirping birds, fluffy white clouds, buzzing bees and
blooming shrubbery the promise of summer was only a stones-throw away. </span></div>
Dr. Eustace Orville T. Haltiwanger IIIhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13852617483673783751noreply@blogger.com0