TODAY'S BLOG for Tuesday, April 26th, 2011 —

No crying in baseball; no swearing in Zapopan.

 

“Swearing was invented as a compromise between running away and fighting.”

— Finley Peter Dunne

Hijole. Mexico is a mystery to me. I know it’s there, about three times the size of Texas with 100 million-ish souls wandering about their daily chores, blessing and cursing, as we all do. There’s a suburb outside of Guadalajara in south central Mexico. It’s called Zapopan and has over a million people.

The city council of Zapopan a while ago outlawed swearing. Well. Swearing in public. Sobrés — Oh, really.

According to The Associated Press, if the cops catch you cussing — out loud — it carries a fine up to $400 and/or 36 hours in the pokey. I wonder if they can arrest you on suspicion of thinking about swearing?

I’m guessing you’d have to string together an especially colorful and ribald string of suggestive nouns and verbs — in front of the Pope’s dowager sister — to draw the maximum sentence.

Nomas estoy payeseando — Just kidding.

A member of the Institutional Revolutionary created the legislation, which also bans miniskirts in public offices and outlaws homosexuals in public pools. Hm. I wonder how one checks on something like that. I mean, the miniskirts seem like a no-brainer (cerebros de nada, by the way). But the gay thing? Do the Federalis look for some guy in a lounge chair wagging his finger from side-to-side in tune with an internal humming of “State Fair?”

Chale — Oh sure. Considering ALL the guys in Mexico wear Speedos, how hard is that going to be to enforce?

As for the swearing part of this new city ordinance, it doesn’t come right out and define which are the naughty words and which aren’t. Take “¡Caray!” for instance. It’s what Cubs’ announcer Harry Carrey says all the time — “Holy cow!” I’m hoping they wouldn’t get that strict.

The aldermen of Zapopan left enforcement of the No Swearing misdemeanor up to the discretion of la policia, sometimes known as chocomilk because of the dark brown color of their uniforms.

That strikes me as being a tough job — or not — being a cop in Mexico. Mexicans swear so much more creatively than we, their neighbors to the north.

This is my own prejudice, but the Mexican word — “achichincle” — rolls wonderfully off the tongue and is so much nicer than its English translation of “brown noser.” Although, if you say, “Hey. Ese. Brown noser…” with a good Mexican accent, that sounds pretty cool. I’m thinking achichincle isn’t such a harsh curse and if uttered in public might draw maybe a $3 fine — or, about 348 million pesos.

Up where I live at Scared o’ Bears Ranch, we are hard-pressed to find call girls. You never see hookers on our lonely road nor by Interstate 5 and that could just be simple economics. Everyone drives so fast around here, by the time one would spot a leggy B-girl and hit the brakes, they’d be all the way to Disneyland before they finally stopped.

The most common Mexican term for a lady of the evening is puta. It’s short for prostituta. If you’re a guy, and a guy calls you the P-word, it’s not a good thing. Some favored synonyms are arana (meaning “spider” — one could teach a college class on the metaphorical and psychological traumas for men inherent in that word); gallina (hen); and, my favorite, gaviota. Gaviota means, “sea gull” literally, but in street language, it means, “a mighty dang ugly tart.” We named a state beach here in Alta California, “Gaviota.” I just thought I’d mention that so the next time you’re driving up Highway 101 past Santa Barbara, you can smirk when you pass the sign.

Now if you wanted to visit an actual whorehouse, that’s called a burdel, congal, bodio, zumbido, cortifjo, manflota, bule or putero.

Or so I’ve heard from my friend, City of Santa Clarita General Manager Ken Pulskamp.

Or, en español: Kennado Pulskampio.

Mexicans jokingly refer to the madame of said casa de mala nota sometimes as Madre Superiora. It means, “Mother Superior.” That’s not very nice. There’s also madrina or abadesa. I like the sound of the latter. It’s rather scholarly. It means, “abbess.” With contrite apologies to Marlee Lauffer, vice president in charge of public relations at my neighboring rancho, Newhall Land, a madame down Mexico way is also jocularly known as jefa de relaciones publicas — or, head of public relations.

One thing about Mexico, they have a sort of love-hate thing going with the term, “mother.” Mothers are revered to the point of sainthood. Yet, the literal translation, “madre,” is one the lowest things you can say about a person or event. You say, “una madre,” and it means, “worthless.” I think the Mexicans have the world’s only zen slur: “Su madre es su madre.”

The literal translation of “your mother” into Spanish is about the worst thing you can say to a person. It is the English equivalent of… How would we delicately decipher that? It would be like going up to someone and saying the two-word suggestion where you wish someone would be sexually violated. Yet — and here’s the confusing part — if you say “a todo madre,” that’s a good thing. It means, “A-plus,” or “first class” or “that was completely cool!”

I’ve seen a T-shirt that reads: “Me vale madre.” The literal meaning is, “It makes mommy to me.” In slang, it means: “Actually, I could give a rip” except instead of rip, insert a bad S-word.

Of course, I’m just touching a toe into the uncharted waters of Mexican swearing. I could safely add the Mexican word for a large goat here. I won’t. While it literally means, “goat,” in street parlance, it is like calling someone of the English tongue an… well. I can’t say that either in a Christian website. The police use the term over their radios: “Adam Henry.” If you’re clever, you can put the “A” and “H” together and figure what that means. I think some wonderful author once wrote a mighty fine novel with that title.

There’s another terribly inappropriate word to use around mixed company or at the dinner table. To us gringos, it would seem rather inoffensive. The Spanish dictionary definition is “an assistant cook.” Really, it’s a bad adjective, as if you were to say, “That was a blankety-blanking stupid thing to do.”

Of course, there are dark Hispanic phrases that, until now, have never been seen before in print.

I’m thinking of, “¿Tu madre esta en la borrachera en la escuela?”

TRANSLATION: “Is your mother drunk at the school beer bash?”

Or: “¡Dame chanza! Tu madre es desnuda en la biblioteca! Otra vez.”

TRANSLATION: “Cripes. Your mother is naked at the library. Again.”

Or: “¡Encarcelaron tu mammacita nalgona por feo!”

TRANSLATION: “They arrested your big-butted mother for being ugly.”

Or: “¡Que tipazo su madre!”

TRANSLATION: “Hey! What a great guy your mother is!”

Or: “Esta madre ojon con agarraderastiene un gusto raro.”

TRANSLATION: “Your wall-eyed mother tastes funny and has breasts shaped like hand straps on public transportation.”

While the above might cause me to sprint out of the dugout with murder in my eyes, I think after five steps I’d be repeating the translation and start giggling.

Or, my personal favorite: “Tu madre hizo malo en los examenes.”

TRANSLATION: “Your mother did poorly on her SAT’s.”

At 400 bucks a verbal transgression, I don’t think I’d do very well in the sunny climes of Zapopan. Up here in the states, I can jump up and down and scream “¡¡albondigas!!” with impunity.

Relax.

It just means “meatballs.”

• © 2011 John Boston/The Boston Report •

BLOG for Monday, April 11th, 2011 —

I had a birthday and a friend died.

Not that the incidents were related.

I just turned 61, which, on the surface, doesn’t seem like a landmark birthday. But it is. It’s the 40th anniversary of reaching 21. You know. Alleged adulthood? I’ve got my fingers crossed that it will magically take effect soon.

Last Thursday, I started my birthday with the usual ritual of using my face to push myself out of bed. I’ve earned every strained, damaged, tweaked and arthritic joint and muscle. Playing basketball into my mid 50s earned a titanium hip. Well. Half a one. A love of salt, sugar, fast foods, soda pop and dinners at midnight washed down with denial built a mind that creates the fiction. My brain stubbornly adheres to the theory that I can still leap over tall buildings with a single bound. My body answers, somehow in the voice of a black diva soul singer with a pudgy wagging finger: “Umm um um um ummmmm... Hell no you can’t…”

I had a great birthday. Breakfast with a childhood friend. Lunch with another. A couple hundred emails and birthday wishes. (I am embarrassingly wealthy with friends.) Midday, I headed out to the mountains to be by myself. I used to love to just get in the truck and drive, no destination in mind. Times have been so fiscally severe that spending 100 bucks on a tank of gasoline JUST TO DRIVE AROUND seemed shameful.

And then there was my Dad to care for. I do not recommend dementia and frankly, I plan to boycott it when I approach that state sometime in the mid 23rd century. They call where my father is a home and while staff does its best to make an impossible situation tolerable, it is not a home. It is a room. Zombies wander the hall. My father ends up wearing other people’s glasses and other people’s underwear. That’s fine in college but not when you’re just about 90. I’d rather have the funds to hire three shifts of Swedish swimsuit nurse/lingerie models (something just poetic to have on one’s resume) dote over Pops and spoon-feed him soup. And while I’m wishing, somehow, I’ve won the Mother of All Lotteries and have acquired Yosemite National Park. Dad and the Swedes have their own cozy cabin just beyond yelling distance of my own ranch house.

Ah, fantasy.

The last non-taxable wilderness.

I drove through a small blizzard in Frazier Park and while others may curse the snow, I was all smiles. Freedom. Big pick-up truck. The sanctuary of The Road. Remember that haunting Beatles’ lyric? “Oh, that magic feeling. No where to go. No where to go...”

On my birthday I got to enjoy the company of someone that I’m quite close to.

Me.

I came out the other side of the high ranchland of Lockwood Valley and meandered slowly toward the Sespe Wilderness Area. Disappeared into the woods. Hiked. Heard hardly a sound, save for birds, varmints or a creek or ten. No talk radio. No cars. No Muzak. No opinions. None of that constant barrage of modern sound that we used to call white noise. It’s not white anymore, by the way, more the color of dirty snow.

I smiled quite a bit. I sat on rocks and watched storm clouds race overhead, colliding then melting into clear skies. My cell phone doesn’t work at all here and I was quite happy about that. Sabbath.

By sunset, I was back in civilization. I checked into a hotel, something I haven’t done in eons. I walked on the beach, bought a couple of T-shirts on sale, dropped by a Western outfitters to have a hat stretched and found many excuses not to return — not home, but the place I’m currently staying.

More hiking. I took another nap. This time, at the edge of the Pacific.

My friend Andy Kress died Saturday.

My first reaction was to smile and play a drum solo aimed at Heaven. I think God understands what’s in your heart. Andy looked a little like Hoss on “Bonanza.” He was as big and certainly as sweet. Andy played the drums. In high school, when my name was Walter, he would laugh, shake his head and vibrate like a very large bowl of Jell-O. He’d say, “Walt. You just crack me up.”

When was the last time I saw him? Twenty years ago? More? A life — in the worst cases, your life — goes by. You meet someone you were close to. Sentences and brief statistics are exchanged. Number of pets, children, ex-wives. Addresses. Jobs. There’s usually that all-encompassing query that few of us ever have an answer: “What do you do?”

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Internal scream.

It’s almost as if they knew.

If only we had the answer to that.

“What do you do?”

About what?

Our cholesterol level? Our part in failed relationships? Our regrets? Our daily cowardices? Things we wished we wouldn’t have done, should have done, could have done? Fights we should have avoided? Fights we should have fought to the death? Dear waiting friend, Death Itself?

I was talking with a pal, a Non-Death Pal. At 61, I literally have hundreds and hundreds of these creatures. Most are around my age. I don’t know if I’m the only one who does this, but I start rearranging friends and alleged family members, as if we were in some Gym Class Of The Abyss, lining them up and wondering who is going to fly off next.

And to where?

Will I get to see them?

Is there Heaven? Hell? Worse — Canoga Park?

I certainly like the Vikings’ concept of Valhalla. Pal around all day. Rough house. Explore. By sunset, all wounds are healed. Dinner. Your girlfriend or wife? She actually LIKES you in this scenario. I see myself in a horned helmet, pigtails, sheepishly raising a hand and asking: “And a movie?”

I’ve been drumming all afternoon, using fingertips or two pens as sticks. Fortunately, I’ve been by myself. This is important to others because I’m just a terrible drummer.

It’s the strangest thing.

I sense Andy hears me. I sense the guy is really happy where he is.

These things sneak up on you. I was fine for the first few hours. I mean, after all. Our exchanges in the last half-century would fill up a few Post-It notes. But that darn guy was such a peach and good soul. Oregon. Heaven. Something long distance I’ve known from years.

I sobbed quite heavily over Andy Kress. It wasn’t over his death nor the fear of mine.

The thing that frightens me most in Life?

It’s is not being myself, of wasting not time, but opportunity. Of wasting my life, comatose in a fog, right in the middle of paradise.

I search and find that the thing I mourn, that I cry so heavily over, is the realization of not being grateful enough for how profoundly beautiful, and precious, life is.

I cried because finally, after all these years, I got an answer to “What do you do?”

Andy Kress banged on a drum. Each vibration was a joyous gift to the universe.

Thank you, dear Andy, perfect Andy, Andy in Musicians’ Valhalla.

You crack me up, too.

Happy birthday, by the way.

• © 2011 John Boston/The Boston Report •

TODAY'S BLOG for Wednesday, April 6th, 2011 —

My friend is infested with French rats. Well. Not him, personally. His tony 72,000 square foot house has been plagued by giant rodents. It’s not like they walk across the living room on their hind feet in little rat bathrobes in the middle of the afternoon.

No.

If they did, you could just shoot them.

These giant rats only come out in the wee small hours when everyone is asleep.

If my pal were a god-forsaken Yuppie, he’d call an exterminator or maybe motor into Beverly Hills and buy a designer Eddie Bauer floral pattern rat trap.

But my pal is not a Yuppie. He’s rural. He sets a trap line.

The problem at first was that the rats were ignoring the bait of choice — peanut butter. My friend used other attractive food stuffs, but the bait that caught the first dirty rat was snail.

Or, in French, that’s escargot.

I’m guessing he placed a dead snail in the trap. Even though snails locomote real, darn slow, you couldn’t expect a snail, even if you asked it nicely, to just stay put until a big stinky rat with 4-inch teeth pounced on you. Anyway. The snails seem to work and my friend has captured even more rats.

I don’t know if he has caught enough rats to knit, say, a doily, a horse blanket or small afghan. (That would certainly be a future garage sale item, rat fur knitted into a miniature likeness of the Mullah Omar.) Still. It got me to thinking.

Is my friend being serious when he announced his home has been infiltrated by French Rats, or just metaphorical?

I hope the latter. I don’t like rats. I don’t care much for the French. They still owe us something like a trillion-gazillion dollars from World Wars I and II and they’re rather snooty when it comes to lifting a pinkie as our alleged ally. What manner of strange creature would a French Rat be?

I’m betting they’d be scampering around the rafters wearing wine-stained sleeveless wife-beater T-shirts. They’d have little berets. And skimpy mustaches. Them what would wear shoes on their bony little feet would be wearing those cross-gender Espadrilles slip-on loafers.

They’d knock over wine bottles and pry off the corks. After sipping the spilled beverage, they’d twist their noses and make disparaging remarks about California wines and Americans in general.

The nerve, them being rats.

I wonder if my friend’s unwanted guests smoke? You know, cigarettes? Little brown European mouse cigarettes? The French smoke too much. They also don’t wear deodorant, not like our American rodents wear deodorant, although they might. I have never lifted up the tiny arm of a mouse for an up close and personal inspection.

I imagine that if I had the opportunity to speak with a French rat on the topic of their not wearing deodorant, and how uncivilized and offensive that is to a normal creature, I bet they’d be offended. And they’d get all defensive and from there waltz to denial that really, there is nothing odious about them.

That’s the trouble with the French. And rats. And Democrats. They don’t take Personal Responsibility.

Here’s another thing about French Rats. They don’t shampoo or use cream rinse. They have that greasy, tousled look, not to mention the little daubs of oil paint on them, which they just daub on for effect.

I would hate the thought of French Rats moving into my community, driving out the good, simple, hard-working indigenous Scared o’ Bears Ranch rodentici. If the French Rats move in, wouldn’t it logically follow that French People would soon follow?

Can you imagine?

Town Council meetings — in French. I mean, I don’t go to Town Council meetings anyway, so it wouldn’t affect me much whatever language they’re speaking (although I might be tempted to attend a City Council meeting if they spoke in, oh, say, Pig Latin or Baby Talk). But French is the only Romance Language where you talk through your nose. Shouldn’t whatever august body that directs who gets to be in a Romance Language kick the French out of the league?

If more French people moved near me, I’d have even more people riding around on bicycles with large, skinny loaves of bread sticking out of their baskets and there’s the whole issue of the women not shaving their legs.

Or armpits.

Or those healthy moustaches French women sport.

It could happen. It always starts with something small.

Eurotrash Rats?

I don’t need them in my valley.

On the bright side, Eurotrash Rats a positively grand name for a bad but angry garage band.

• © 2011 John Boston/The Boston Report •

 BLOG for Monday, April 4th, 2011 —

The Internet is both blessing and curse. I have used the World Wide Web for researching everything from how many times Clyde Barrow was shot (18) to learning about the world’s largest cockroaches (some South American models have 19-inch wingspans).

With every new invention, there seems to be this Adam and Eve balancing act of good and evil.

I get SPAM.

There's two kinds of SPAM. The first is the by-product pasty meat-like substance made famous in the Monty Python Viking sketch ("SPAM-SPAM-SPAM-SPAM... SPAM-SPAM-SPAM-SPAM... SPAM-SPAM-SPAM-SPAM... SPAM-SPAM-SPAM-SPAM..." etc.). The other is your basic e-mail version of junk mail, times a million.

Supposedly I have all these ethereal moats and towers built into my computer, protecting me from sales people. A lot of times, these protective walls don’t work and I get offers from pitchmen I don’t know, selling everything from partnerships in African diamond mines to how I can make big money working at home.

I already make big money working from home.

About once a month, an unasked-for advertisement sneaks in, rather boldly, suggesting: “Add 1-to-3 inches to your…”

I’m not going to print the word that describes where these strangers would like to add that “1-to-3 inches...”

Suffice to say, these X-rated solicitors are not interested in me enjoying epic gains to my community stature, vertical leap or raised eyebrows.

I always wince when friends of mine send out these mass mailings of jokes. I am part of a football-field length of computer addresses. I rarely scan my co-joke receivers but one wonders. Moammar Gadhafi or Hugh Hefner could be perusing my private e-mail number via a “You Know You’re A Redneck” humor offering from a friend in Colorado.

Granted. I’m a little wicked. Not much, but a little. But I don’t do pornographic searches on the Internet, home or office. I don’t order latex love dolls over eBay nor have any particular interest in viewing “Really Big Ukrainian Women!!” Friends in The Computer Universe tell me there are companies who just farm the ether, plucking millions of e-mail addresses right out of the air. Then, they sell those computer locations to not-so-august captains of industry touting everything from how to import Thailand sex slaves to improving my romantic life through a mystery herb.

I guarantee you. My sex life will never have anything to do with a guy named Herb.

Then there are those nether region Pinocchio kits.

It’s not like I’m going to kill an afternoon writing back to these people.

Dear Sir or Madam:

Thank you for your kind interest in contacting Scared O’ Bears Ranch and your recent inquiry regarding elongating that which Nature was content to dole out.

Naturally, if your sales pitch is based on marketing research or a national survey specifically on me, you could understand both my concern and apprehension at ever appearing in public again.

Alas, ignorance is bliss. Except for perhaps the actual strand count of my hair, circumference of my waist, blood pressure, cholesterol level, blood sugar count, the sad shape of my pipe cleaner-sized biceps, the lack of any angles in my feet and four-digit heart rate, I am quite happy with my measurements, except for possibly my IQ and for that, I am considering cutting back my viewing of the television show, “Keith Oberweenie” to approximately eight seconds every 23 years.

So. Thanks for asking. If I were to add an additional 1-to-3 inches anywhere in my life, it would probably be on the radio antenna of my truck. We’re rural and FM reception is scratchy and positively horrendous.

If you’d be a dear, please ask your friends in organized crime to delete me from their mailing lists.

Sincerely,

John Boston

Confident Heterosexual

Of course, I’ll never send a return e-mail like the above to any herbalist, electro-shock jockstrap maker or whatever Rube Goldberg inventor who is pestering me. I’d only get passed on to another junk mail list of people interested in asking, “Would you like to add 3-to-6 inches to your …?” followed by, “Now that you’ve added 3-to-6 inches, what’s stopping you from stapling on an additional 128 centimeters?” and so on and so on.

Soon, we’d be swimming in uncharted Ripley’s Believe it or Not waters here.

I think the makers of these mystery elongation products ought to get hold of Osama bin Laden’s e-mail address. They ought to bother him into perdition. Of course, I doubt if Osama would use any of these self-professed miracle products on himself.

He’s a big enough you-know-what already without having to add six to 18 picas…

• © 2011 John Boston/The Boston Report •

BLOG for Wednesday, March 30th, 2011 —

One on the sad rights of passage is that as we grow older, we men store more and more things into our shirt pockets.

One of the sad, telltale signs that you’re an actual, nerd-like adult is that you carry things in your shirt pocket.

Not pants pocket, mind you. But your shirt pocket.

When I was a kid, I never dreamed of keeping anything in my shirt pocket. Jeans pocket? Yes. My Levis cubbyholes were the depository for such important boyhood tools as sand, seashells, a bone from an actual squirrel, a small pocketknife and keys for house and gates. I must have taken some childhood vow of poverty because I was always, if not broke, an aggravating nickel short of anything I wanted to buy.

Like Twinkies.

Twinkies cost 13 cents back then and no matter how deep I dug, all I always had was 8 cents.

The problem is no matter how long you stare at 8 cents, it’s still 8 cents.

We do that as adults. A waiter comes up to us with our returned credit card and announces: “The bank says you only have lint in your account. The bank says we’re supposed to slap you around a little and spit latté in your face.” Instead of grabbing a shank of lamb and hightailing it to a stolen car in the parking lot, we just stare at the credit card, as if by sheer will we can raise our limit.

I kept all my homework in my jeans. A forged absentee note I never used save to show to my friends. Marbles. Prizes from Cracker Jack boxes. In the 6th grade, I had an actual, functioning skeleton key that fit most of the indoor locks at my school. That was pretty cool. Sometimes I carried gum — regular and garlic-flavored for practical jokes. I had a worn blue St. Christopher’s medal just in case I wanted to go steady that day.

Like that was going to happen at 12.

But my shirt pocket?

It remained empty.

Nothing ever went into my shirt pocket, a fact I blame on gravity and the rudeness of my peers. When you’re a young guy, you live the life more of a professional wrestler than a civilized person. You spend your days pushing people out of line, tripping them or getting into or out of headlocks. There is absolute zero tolerance for personal space and had I kept anything in my shirt pocket, it would only be temptation for some cement-headed playmate to try and yank it out. I wasn’t exactly a slow learner and this was long before Miranda, so it only took me maybe two ripped shirt pockets to realize how the real world recognized search and seizure.

But now, I get home at night from a long day and there is an entire archaeological dig in my two shirt pockets. Glasses. Pen. Cash. Change. Coupons. During cold and flu season, a Vicks inhaler.

I’ve noticed, being older — and probably the fact I’m 225, sunglassed and look like I’ll bite your head clean blankety-blank off — people don’t reach uninvited to pull things out of my shirt pocket, so it’s a fairly safe place to keep notes.

During the course of a day, I slowly grow breasts with the amount of notes I stuff into my shirt pockets. There are telephone numbers (no names connected to the telephone numbers — just mysterious telephone numbers). Grocery lists. Mail. Jokes. Lists. Receipts. Poems. Prayers. Reminders. Press pass. Ideas for essays. Dialogue for the novels.

There’s a joke.

I juggle no less than seven books in my head and always during the day, conversations come up amongst heroes and villains only I can see. These are Pulitizer-prize winning dialogues, I assure you. Only by the time I get home and uncrinkle these wadded balls of Post-its, napkins and scraps of paper, I can’t read my own handwriting.

“‘Fr dlgrer koonts if you want to krusperpuppie,’ said Detective Clinton, his (word smeared by cheese) drawn and quivering,” my novel note reads.

I suppose this would work just ducky if I were writing a nihilist novel in pretend German.

Hmmmm. You wonder. Is there a nihilist German author somewhere who has notes in his shirt pocket scribbled in accidental perfect English?

• © 2011 John Boston/The Boston Report •

BLOG for Monday, March 28th, 2011 —

I was sitting around a friend’s kitchen a while ago as she was dutifully preparing for a June wedding. It was one of those boffo Town & Country affairs. I have bought cars that have cost less money than the cost of invitations alone. She purchased a bunch of homeless orphans, dressed them up as angels and used them to hand-deliver the invites, which added to the wedding going over-budget.

My pal was addressing envelopes from a guest list the size of a small Asian country. She asked me my middle name.

“I have none.”

My pal looked up tiredly, giving her brother one of those tired girl looks. You know. Where the woman slightly purses her lips, lowers her head to automatically form three chins, giving them the illusion of being larger than what they actually are? She stared, like a patient cop.

“He has none,” said her brother, sticking up for me.

The soon-to-be-bride/amiga turned the look over to me, as if she held this glower long enough, I’d crack.

Middle name? I have none.

I was not born with my present handle. About 20 years ago, I legally changed from my slave name of Walter Stanislav Cieplik Jr. to John Boston. And so it has been since. There’s no big secret, but, every once in a while, some distant ghost from the past will call me Walt. It’s usually out of some issue of stubbornness or control on their part. Or, it’s an attempt to put me in my place. Which is okay. Being gaseous, I really don’t have a place. Besides. These are the people I bump into every two decades for 40 seconds. It’s a manageable issue.

My bride pal asked: “While I’m making out the invitation, would you LIKE a middle name?” It was one of those grocery store questions. Like, “If you buy two six-packs of Dr. Pepper, did you know you can get a third one free?”

“Vladweenus,” I said, after a character in one of my novels.

“Two words or hyphenated?” she asked.

“One,” I responded, straightening. “The ‘X’ is upper case.”

She didn’t rise to the bait.

Only afterward did I wonder. Should I have a middle name? I’m not into numerology or astrology, so I’m not too worried about misaligning some stars, leftover smaller gods or cosmic timetable about this current parenthesis in which I’m serving time. I didn’t want a middle name because I practiced, for over a year way back when, how “John Boston” sounded. And I like the simplicity just fine, thank you.

But then I got to thinking. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to have a middle name, one I could stick in a metaphorical junk drawer, pulling it out when it would be rarely needed, like for wedding invitations or just one Platinum credit card.

I briefly considered, “Scourge of God.” Briefly. John “Scourge of God” Boston. It’s not a bad byline for a political satirist, but I think one could seriously tempt Forces Much Larger Than Oneself by playing in that abandoned mine shaft. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if certain local fundamentalist Christian organizations and the Insufferable Left already feel the middle name of “Scourge of God” is implied by my body of work.

There’s “Irene.”

“What’s your middle name?” someone asks.

“Irene.”

And the person who asked starts laughing. I would, of course, stare coldly at the giggler until they swallowed their guffaws and apologized. “Do you remember the Johnny Cash song, ‘Boy Named Sue?’ Mr. Cash wrote it after me. I served 32 months in juvie when I was 14 for killing a person who made fun of my middle name,” I would say, deadpan. “So why don’t you wipe that insipid grin from your face and say my middle name — Irene.”

Who’s your daddy?

“Irene.”

If I wanted to go the serial killer route, the middle name of “Wayne” would have to be considered. “John Wayne Boston killed 347 male nurses in the tri-states area during the early 21st century,” the encyclopedia would read.

I think Wayne’s out.

I could go ethnic and just shake empty the name dictionary: “John Alejandro Ramirez-Gonzalez Consuelo Maria O’Brien Abdullah Rahim Tucci Zorro Boston.” How my hand would ache signing land grants and other official documents.

If I were younger and not spoken for, I might consider an Indian middle name. I think girls find that attractive. “Hi. I’m John Boston.”

“What’s your middle name?”

“John ‘Ten Wolves’ Boston, last living war chief of the Aliklik nation. My people have endured many deprivations over the years.” I’d stare off toward a distant horizon and I think that brief moment of silence would aid in the pick-up line.

Adding another city would be out of the question. John Austin Boston. Too Dr. Seussian although John Fairbanks Boston has a certain literary bon vivant and John Cleveland Boston might help in a run for the White House in 2012.

John Wesley Boston carries a Bob Dylan nasally folksong lilt:

“John... Wesley... Boston... was a friend to the poooooooor. He car-ried a-gun in every haaaaand. And all along the countryside he opened many a door. He was never known to shoot an honest man…”

(Insert annoying harmonica solo here.)

I suppose I could steal some long-unused name of a great thinker and hope it rubbed off: Homer, Euripedes, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Sophocles — but then, I’d end up sounding more like a running back than a writer.

There’s John Hamlet Boston, but I am already laced with indecision.

“Another day. Should I write a trenchant essay? Or, should I not?” wonders John Hamlet Boston.

Sigh.

Lower head.

Raise head.

Sigh.

I could go the rap recording artist route and stick my new middle name in front of the first two: “Snoop Slobbery Doggie Biscuit Johnny Boston…”

No. That doesn’t feel right.

I think if it’s OK with everyone, I’ll remain just plain John Boston and not really care that people whisper, as if I were Steppenwolf: “There goes the man with no middle name.”

Of course, Steppenwolf didn’t even have a first name, unless people were misunderstanding him and thought he was legally Step N. Wolf.

As I grow older, I find it matters less.

As my dopey sister-like substance Leslie Boston (no middle name) still says, as if she were a character in Li’l Abner:

“Call me what you like, as long as it’s not Late For Dinner.”

• © 2011 John Boston/The Boston Report •

BLOG for Friday, March 4th, 2011 —

I was pushing the shopping cart through Ralph’s — that would be the grocery store, not the black and white TV sitcom bus driver from yesteryear. As I rolled through Ralph’s pristine fish department, my eyes bulged and I did a cartoon double-take. There was a display of free pamphlets by the lobster tank. They were school bus yellow.

They read:

“How To Cook LIVE Lobster.”

Me, I’m a lobster man and I’m OK. In the past, I just loved the satisfying sound of ectoskeleton cracking. That first taste of white and pink flesh, dipped in lemon and butter, was enough to nearly make me swoon. I always knew that the lobsters swimming around in the big tank in the front of fish restaurants weren’t just for decoration. No. This was Lobster Death Row.

But, the other day, reading that pamphlet, well. It just gave me the willies. The first two steps were easy enough in preparing the tasty crustacean: 1) Measure amount of water need to cover lobster; and 2) Add one tablespoon of salt for each quart of water. It was the third step that made me queasy: 3) Bring water to boil and drop lobster into pot.

Dear Award-Winning John Boston:

If you’re not in the mood for lobster, I’ve got a great recipe for Monkey Bread. Add 4 cups of sifted flour to 2 cups of milk and 26 cubes of butter. Add 1 lb. of processed sugar, a dash of vanilla and 1 monkey.

Be sure to wash the monkey thoroughly first as they are dirty little creatures enamored with exploring areas that no Christian ought to explore. You may want to ahem — dispatch — the monkey before adding him or her to the mix as they tend to scream, bite and try to climb out of the baking dish. A heavy skillet applied as many times as necessary can usually do the trick although some prefer leaving the monkey in a room alone for a few thoughtful moments by itself with a last cigarette and small monkey-sized revolver with 1 bullet as you don’t want it to get any ideas.

Place the monkey face down in the mixture so the eyes don’t stare back at you in eternal accusation and bake for 8 minutes at 225. Serves six.

Hope this helps!

Charlize Theron

Complicated Actress Who Once Had A Bad Experience

With A Monkey But Still Voted as Sexy Person Nonetheless

Thank you, Charlize.

Anyway. I don’t want to seem like a pansy, but I can’t imagine dropping a live anything in a vat of boiling water, save for that rock band Right Said Fred. That was the group that sang, “I’m Too Sexy For My Legs” a few years back. I imagine it gets worse if you’ve had the lobster for a few weeks and have developed a relationship with it to the point you’ve added little submersible toys to the lobster tank to keep it company. Maybe you’ve given it a name. Like Larry or Lavonne.

“Aren’t you the prettiest lobster?” you say, bending over the tank and dropping in live mice or whatever lobsters eat. “Yes you are. Yes you are!”

How can you drop something very much alive with whom you are on a first-name basis into a vat of boiling water? Unless of course you named the creature “Nancy Pelosi” or “Hillary.” Still. It’s wicked.

Does the little lobster soul have time to get out of the body before you drop it in the soup? Or, is it trapped in there, you eat it and now, the ghost of the lobster now inhabits your body.

Gross.

It’s different with a cheeseburger. A cheeseburger used to be a cow, in more ways than one. But I like to think the soul of the cow had a chance to escape before the cow was maced or electrocuted or died of boredom after cowboys read “WordPerfect for Dummies” to it day after day after day until finally, it just rolled its eyes heavenward and mooed one final plea: “There has got to be a better life somewhere.”

But dropping a living lobster, with its little legs and claws wiggling in protest — no last minute call of reprieve from the Lobster Governor, no lobster priest to chant a briny deep prayer before it takes the Big Steam Bath, no looking over at the tank to make eye contact and bravely mouth the words in lobster-talk: “Don’t worry. Everything will be OK,” — it has this Hannibal Lector ghoulishness to it.

It’s Friday. I wonder how many of you people out there are going out to dinner tonight to have lobster…

Or my friend Charlize Theron’s monkey bread…

• © 2011 John Boston/The Boston Report •

BLOG for Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011 —

The Simplest of Christmas Presents

“It is a test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.”

— Lord Chesterton

The things I wished for during Christmas are not so different from what I wanted when I was a boy.

When’s the last time you’ve had peace? Don’t rush off to the safety of some rote greeting card wisdom or memorized prayer and pass it off as your own experience.

When is the last time you experienced this rare sanctuary?

There are many pretenders to peace. Fatigue. Distraction. A good laugh. Ice cream.

I remember when I was 8. I used to climb to nearly the top of a huge tree. It was a great place to get away from all the problems of the world. Today, as a dad, I’d probably be horrified to see my daughter Indiana of just about the same age scamper to such dizzying heights.

There was a perfect spot just a few feet from the pinnacle. The crook of a branch fit my small body perfectly. Above was just enough shade. I was protected from the gaze of heaven and far enough above the din to not be seen by the earthbound. I remember just lying back, putting my hands behind my head and letting the wind rock me.

Clouds slowly rolled by. I never thought of duties, bills or deadlines then.

I didn’t want anything, except for maybe to just stay in that moment of floating.

I had that feeling on horseback.

I used to like to ride on cold days, all bundled up, one hand holding reins, the other warming in a coat pocket. It’s even better, crunching through the snow. There’s something soothing about seeing your shadow from atop a tall horse. I looked at my negative reflection, moving on the ground, and felt linked to some distant fellow. Thousands of years earlier, there must have been another guy, riding alone, regarding his shadow. Maybe he smiled, knowing there was more permanence in his image than in any thought or concept.

Waves of freshness rub off my daughter and onto me. I am sometimes awash in her authenticity. Indy still has essence. Originality. Freshness.

And peace.

The other day, my girl spent some time making an elaborate and ornate list of what she wanted for Christmas. It had things like, “a hug from Dad” and “a smile from Daddy.” Almost all the requests were things from the heart, not actual presents. How lucky am I.

Peace is sometimes the unexpected gift. For me, it descends sometimes when I’m at my computer, next to the little fireplace in the office. Sometimes I have to fiercely summon it.

The French philosopher and mystic Michel Montaigne had a painful and wonderful revelation: “I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself.” There are enemies to Peace. There are days when I am more the monster. The darkness passes, blessedly. I realize I cannot afford the luxury of a grudge, especially on myself.

There is spiritual math to this.

That gentle soul and mythologist, Joseph Campbell, once confessed: “We get into trouble the instant we fail to see the ‘Thou’ in our brother’s eye.”

Mr. Campbell really punched the word, “instant.”

He noted that across cultures, religions and centuries, the magic of creation was based on that flow of oneness. We wander about, in our personal bodies, but, really, we’re connected. When we fail to see this divine connection, when we flail out or hold someone in judgment, we end up hurting ourselves.

But, that’s just my take. For many, this concept is nonsense.

There are Christmases past where I’ve wandered through the undeniable din of wrapping paper being shredded and the rush of dashing here and there. Today, it’s just me and the kid. That’s it. I’ll be surrounded by someone who loves me, good will and laughter.

I surely can’t speak for anyone else. None of us can. But, this is my prayer. I am going to steal a few minutes here and there over the course of the day. I’m going to search for those against whom I have a grudge.

Terrorists. Relatives. Politicians. That numbskull lawn troll in the parking lot who rudely cut me off. I’m going to forgive them. Some will be easy. Some will take fierceness. I’m also going to add myself to the top of that list. I will forgive as many times as necessary.

Why?

Well. It’s Christmas. And Peace is such a lovely present.

© 2010 John Boston/The Boston Report

YESTERDAY'S Blog for Thursday, December 16th, 2010

AnalProbe wants to be friends with you on Facebook.

Someone asked me the other day if I was working. I started to assume the slow-motion unemployed writhing dance. In mid-contortion, it hit me. I pretty much work seven days a week, probably in the 65-hour range. It’s just that I don’t have one of those regular job things where you get a regular paycheck.

I mention this because the following story probably has little to do with me. Still. I was horrified to learn that several financial institutions and credit agencies are now using Facebook and other social networks to spy on people applying for loans or lines of credits.

It gets worse.

Apparently, there is a new app called SocialMiner. It’s made by Cisco Systems. The software allows Those Interested to weasel into social networking sites to obtain background information.

Cisco released the following PR release: "With more and more Web-based conversations taking place over these social platforms, it's now more critical than ever that businesses are aware of what their customers are saying about them and are able to respond to general inquiries or rectify customer service issues so as to enhance and protect brand reputation."

And spy on you.

About three weeks ago, I rejoined Facebook. It’s a wonderful venue for me to create much mischief and monkey business. I catch up with old friends, make new ones and do one of the things that makes America great: we good-naturedly kid one another. There is also an immeasurable amount of good will and emotional support that goes on every day. The thing is, I get to choose what I say, and to whom I say it. I copy the old line that I’d rather not lie because it means I don’t have to have a good memory. Unless I give the go-ahead, I’d rather not have any information about myself given to another party, especially a government or business, like the donkey girl scouts at Cisco Systems and the mouth-breathing soul suckers they feed.

Currently, there is a class action lawsuit pending against a variety of national and international media, like CNN and, sob, my beloved Fox News. The latter are one of my alleged defenders of freedom and liberty. If proven true, these and other information outlets hired the services of the Delaware company Ringleader. It makes something called a Unique Device Identifier.

In English?

It’s a bug. It comes installed in cell phones or devices like the i’s — iPad, iTouch, iPhone. With this imbedded, it circumnavigates any defense, privacy or security settings in your device. You and who you are gets plunked onto a conveyer belt that can be used to collect information about you and you can’t do anything about it because some evil tech genius has created a defense called “re-spawning.” No matter if you find and delete this secret factory code, it will pop up again.

Damn their evil eyes.

And ears.

If this be true, that banks are hiding in the motel bushes of Facebook, playing the Vaseline-covered private detective seeking damning evidence on — well, everyone — I then have a question.

Where were the grown-ups?

I’d use, “adult,” but that word has been purloined by the porn industry.

Where was someone — somewhere along the command chain — who questioned if it’s ethically wrong to hide under a bouncing bed EVEN if it’s in the interest of the Chamber of Commerce.

I can understand wanting to protect an investment. However, that concept seems to be grossly weighed to the side of big business and not the individual consumer, customer or investor. But can you imagine? You want to share a photo of your vacation to Mt. Rushmore and there is some depraved prurient s.o.b. in a poor excuse for a job building a secret if not inaccurate record on you that will determine how much your next car or house payment will be or whether you qualify to rent an apartment because you said the CEO of GlobalSpyBank is actually a genital fungus.

And perhaps that’s what is needed here.

I wonder how that anonymous nerd swimming in the bowels of Amalgamated EvilProbeTech who thought of the idea would like it if Facebook and Youtube started following him around and posting particulars of his private life for all to see? Who is that faceless suit at Accuweather or ESPN who gave the go-ahead to collect data on me, a friend in Texas or whom-the-hell-ever? I’d like to see their names, faces, family photos, home addresses splashed over with us having the chance to rate them.

Put at the top of the list that face in the mirror. I’d be surprised if there is any righteous indignation over this. We have become numb to being violated.

This used to be a country of freedom. Not so any more. Yes. We get to make that decision to share our funny bones or souls on the web. And that’s our choice, good or bad to make and to suffer any consequences.

But it is my sincere prayer that there’s a re-birth of an endangered species, Americanus grown-upicus — the American grown-up. I hope they start to stand tall and repeat what should be obvious to an out-of-control behemoth in both the public and private sector:

Some things are none of your damn business.

A dear friend of mine who ran some banks once noted: “The logical conclusion for any problem is capitalism.”

© 2010 John Boston/The Boston Report

BLOG for Wednesday, December 15th, 2010

I wish me a Merry Christmas.

It hit me the other day that I know several thousand people. I caught myself alone and laughing — which sometime is not a good thing. This time, it was. Some day, when I get the time, I figured it would be fun to sit down and make a list of all the people I love and who, if not love, tolerate me with a shake of the head.

I laughed at the project because when I finally get the time to compose such a list, I’ll probably be too old to remember anyone who should go on it.

I think about those so many close to me around Christmas. Cards starting hitting the post office box around the first of December and I marvel at those with the time and discipline to send even a quickly scribbled signature under a family photograph and generic wishes.

I remember reading a story about a Christmas card that arrived in Oberlin, Kansas. I supposed “old-fashioned” is a good way to describe the curious artwork of a little girl and Santa Claus on the front.

The card was mailed from Alma, Nebraska, to Oberlin in 1914. It just arrived to descendents of Ethel Martin nearly a century later — in perfect condition.

Somehow, the card was rerouted to Illinois and stayed somewhere in a state of suspended animation for decades. The card still had the original 1-cent stamp. Someone popped it in an envelope with the correct modern postage.

Ethel Martin is long dead. Her sister-in-law, Bernice Martin, now owns the Christmas version of a message in a bottle.

I was haunted by this small gaffe by the United States Postal Service. I mean, they deliver billions of letters and packages every year and have a record close to perfection. But a Christmas card a century late carries a certain melancholy to it.

I had a terrible thought.

It’s not meant to be self-centered in the traditional definition. But why don’t we ever send Christmas cards to ourselves?

Think about that.

Makes you wiggle, doesn’t it?

Wishing yourself well carries uncomfortable tonnage, I think more so over the holidays.

I’m not talking narcissism.

Some people are impossibly vain, some stubborn, many self-righteous. They will probably never get to meet that one person closest to themselves in this lifetime.

It’s a crazy culture.

We’re taught to both indulge ourselves while never looking close. Some will bristle with a thick skin of sarcasm or smugness.

Somehow, the concept of wishing ourselves well is so repugnant. Yes. Giving to others and making this place a better world is a monumental part of what life is all about. But how many Christmases have gone by without us taking a long moment to look into the mirror and wish that reflection staring back joy, happiness, love and fulfillment?

What is it within us that feels we don’t deserve it?

What happened along the way that we are so hypnotized by culture and habit that we cannot ask a simple question, at Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hannukah or a dull Wednesday morning in July: “How are you?” followed by a sincere “Sure do wish you not just the best but extreme tonnage of happiness and fulfillment.”

The answer might hurt, but that wouldn’t be terrible. In fact, the scary part might be how freeing it would be.

If you could vault 100 years ahead and write yourself a Christmas card, what would it say?

I wish I had been harder on myself? I wish I ignored my dreams? I’m glad I didn’t take better care of myself?

I suspect not.

I’m going to do it. I’m going to write myself a Christmas letter. I’m going to decorate it with artwork. I’m going to ask how I’m doing. I’m going to print it out, put it in a stamped envelope and mail it to myself.

Fingers crossed, I’m hoping it makes it back to my mailbox before 2114.

© 2010 John Boston/The Boston Report

BLOG for Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

At the dawn of the 21st century, Jair Coelho made a fortune by acquiring the sole government contract to provide around 22,000 boxed meals a day for Rio de Janeiro’s prison population.

Señor Coelho was known as the "King of the Lunch Box." Coelho was convicted of fraud, racketeering and, mostly, the unforgivable sin of just plain bad cooking. Not only did 22,000 inmates turn up ill, Coelho was even condemned by the prison guards, who said watching the inmates swallow that lousy food even made them sick.

I think Jair is out by now, but the Lunch Box millionaire not only ended up doing hard time, but was forced to eat a steady diet of his own meat, tomato sauce, creamed corn, rice and beans and worms.

May...

Jerr…

Gross.

And hauntingly Old Testament.

Señor Lunch Box's just desserts got me to thinking about some of the eye-wateringly bad meals I’ve had to swallow in my time.

In a long ago summer of wild youth, I made a root beer float the size of a Rose Bowl Parade entry. I was in my early 20s and asked that eternal question facing young men: “What would happen if you sort of left off the 'root' part of the recipe and just mixed beer and vanilla ice cream?”

Well. After eight 44-ounce glasses, your tummy bloats and you suffer through hysterical religious visions. Setting the self-sanctimony in its proper perspective, while I never did drugs, I did do beer and ice cream.

I’ve never bought scallops or lobster from the trunk of a rusting old car parked along Highway 14 outside Mojave on a hot and humid day, sold by a shirtless man with discolored bare feet. But, when I was younger, I did attempt to pay my sibling-like substance Wilbur Peanuts from Venchura 20 bucks if he’d eat a lime green slimy shrimp an epoch or two past its shelf pull date.

“You’re such a sissy if you don’t,” I told Willie, trying to sweeten the pot.

About 30 years later, my chosen hermano lost his hair. I blame the shrimp. Of course, that was Will’s bad meal. Not mine.

When I was in 2nd grade, my father, Walt, sent me to school with a liver and jelly sandwich. On raisin toast.

I'm not making that up. That was lunch.

It must have been one of those landmark days for the boy. Like how you will always remember where you were and what you were doing when JFK was killed. Fifty years later, I could walk you to the exact playground bench where I unwrapped that beastly concoction from its wax paper coffin.

The raisin toast was drier than Barack Obama. The liver looked mummified and you probably wouldn’t want to think about touching the jelly because it had been sliming up next to the liver.

“Want to trade?” I asked playmates. Several dozen distorted elementary school faces stared from the sandwich to me back down to the sandwich.

Fried liver and jelly. On raisin bread toast.

I’m betting cannibals in the early Soviet Union would have turned their nose up at that menu item.

Not to be outdone, my mother, the notorious Crazy K, was Earth’s worst cook. She would boil hamburger. Not for any scientific experiment. For dinner. Fortunately, K never cooked that often and dinner usually comprised of a bologna sandwich (no condiments), Tang and caramels.

My worst home-cooking experience, however, was at the hands of my best friend’s wife. Which sounds like a country/western song: “At The Hands Of My Best Friend’s Wife.” To protect her identity, we'll just call her Mrs. Kate Phillip Allen Lanier.

My best pal since we were little — let’s just call him Phil — and Kate had been dating for over a decade and strange how I didn’t find it odd that they had never invited me over just for a home-cooked meal. We always ate out.

I finally found out why.

One day, Philsy calls me at the office with this hushed, urgent tone, saying that Katie wanted to cook dinner for us, that it was important because she wanted to show off her nonexistent domestic side and, mumbled sidebar, that she couldn’t cook canned soup without calling Hazmat and was very sensitive about her character flaw.

How can you say no when he puts it like that?

So I show up at their stylish L.A. home and you know when you walk into a room right after there’s been an argument? You can feel it on the walls? Times 12. Phil informs me that Katie had a toiling 22 hours in the kitchen and sort of ruined a blackened glazed lasagna that ended up being 1/256th-of-an-inch tall and was in the process of throwing Plan B together.

I sit.

Phillip sits.

After 10 minutes of small talk and literally twiddling our thumbs and whistling, Phil excuses himself to visit the kitchen to see what’s going on. I hear muffled cursing. A moment later, Phil returns, smiling. Kate follows and, in five trips they bring:

1)   Some sort of baked corn bread sludge sauce (something about too much milk in the corn bread so it never really had a chance from the get-go);

B)  An iceberg lettuce, cut conveniently into eight pieces;

ii)  A very small, 2-ounce barbecue rainforest Piggly Wiggly chicken still in the foil pan and tepid;

•)   Some nice napkins;

5)  And, a half-gallon of milk still in the waxed cardboard container with a picture of a missing child on the side.

Alas, I think the kid turned out to be Joe Biden. Bummer. They must have found him.

No one says a word. Three minutes later, dinner is over.

I nodded my head, pursed my lips, slapped my stomach con gusto and said, like a jovial Bill Clinton/Foghorn Leghorn: “Boy golleeee. Ahmm Ahhhhhh — stuhhffed!”

Phil blows milk from his nose and falls out of his chair. We're both laughing uncontrollably like we were back in 3rd grade.

His wife, Mrs. Katie Phillip Lanier, who was more mature, high-stepped it upstairs, sobbing.

Strange.

How come Phil's wife didn’t have to go to prison?

© 2010 John Boston/The Boston Report

YESTERDAY'S Blog for Thursday, December 8th, 2010

Girls & Cardboard Boxes are why

Cavemen Only Lived to be 30.

Moving does something to women. It morphs them into the Collective Bette Davis, wide-eyed, smeared make-up, trying to stab someone. Perhaps it’s revenge for 10 million years of male-dominated society. Whatever the reason, during a move, women are out to get us.

Have you ever noticed that when a woman packs, she will invariably find the largest cardboard box and shove inside things like anvils, bowling balls, the old Encyclopedia Britannica and large farm animals?

Why?

Because she doesn’t have to move it.

The man will rightly point out that there’s so much stuff in the box, like a waterbed with the water still in it, that if you try to move it, A) the thin bottom will rupture, (which, coincidentally, is a line from Keats) or, 2) as will your spleen rupture when you try to deadlift her Sentimental Boulders From Where I’ve Had Sex collection.

I have a friend whom I helped move years ago. She already had a unique art collection, which included train wreckage and a large part of the St. Francis Dam Disaster of 1928. Get this. A few days before the move, she (let’s just call her my ex-wife Rosalind to protect her identity) decided to take advantage of a Sparkletts water special offer. We had to move 20 5-gallon bottles of water, from her old place upstairs, down to the truck, then back over to her new place.

Which was upstairs.

On the 119th floor.

With no elevator.

And vampire bats.

Right before the move, she also bought a sofa.

Not an ordinary sofa.

No.

A white California king-size SLEEPER-sofa, which weighed the same as a small nuclear subarine.

Because we were but men, hence, born with filthy hands, Rozzie ordered that the white sofa be wrapped in slippery clear plastic bubble wrap. It was like moving a giant Baggie with a live seal inside that was constantly shooting at you.

“Why don’t you just smear the plastic cover with motor oil and Vaseline to really make it challenging?” I asked.

“Why don’t you just smear the plastic cover with motor oil and Vaseline to really make it challenging?” she repeated back, but with a rather snarky 2nd-grade neener-neener nasally downright sarcastic lilt to it.

And because we were ex-husband and wife, I had to repeat: “Why don’t YOU just smear the plastic cover with motor oil and Vaseline to really make it challenging?”

“You’re so…”

Before Rozzie could say: “immature,” I burst in and said: “immature,” right on top of her “immature.”

Mostly, except for places like Siberia and the Netherlands, women are smaller than men. That being true, they have what scientists call: “Girl Muscles.” They have no experience lifting the very boxes they pack. I had a gal pal who owned a suit of armor. It was to be moved.

“Why don’t you just get some stocky English guy fresh from right around the birth of the Age of Chivalry to climb into the armor and ride it over to your new place on horseback?” I suggested.

Women will laugh at the Comedy Store. Or maybe on a first date. They will not laugh during a move because, Moving Is Not Funny.

Do you ever watch those World’s Strongest Men competitions on ESPN14? You know. Where the big red-faced 600-pound Swedish monsters with the 60-inch necks military press tractors or bend tanks? Even they wouldn’t want to help my gal pals move.

“¡Mein Gott, acht tu floon de floon dur beenie shven fahwuoodie ahploom totally verboten under doctor’s der orders!!” they would exclaim, standing before a solid oak dresser the size of a New England whaling vessel.

“Careful! Don’t scratch it!” the gal will say, sing-songedly, standing on her tiptoes.

That sentence.

It carries a subtle, nasal quality to it, like an ill-tuned 1.5-cylinder North Korean motorcycle.

“Ruh-eeeeeehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhn…”

Cripes my mother, Crazy K, had a penchant for buying furniture by the ton. Dad worked three jobs. There was a while where we were moving every two weeks. In between, she would go out and buy some necessity, like that black mahogany entertainment center back in 1963. It was one piece of furniture but had a color TV and a record player in it, along with giant concert speakers. This thing had to be delivered at 3 a.m. when the streets were vacant on conjoined flatbed trucks. Back then, I weighed 125 pounds and my dad about 40 pounds less. We were living in an upstairs apartment with those 12-inch wide stairways. There was no way to fit a dolly under the beast with the cast-iron guts. You just had to Tarzan it up. Step by painful step. All the while, Crazy K barking orders and reminding:

“Careful! Don’t scratch it!!”

I still have one of those manly big leather weight-lifting belts. It’s about two-feet tall and six inches thick. It’s not to protect you from back injury. No. It’s for when you snap a few dozen vertebrae lifting a cast-iron stove, the little spine bones don’t go exploding all over the room where the dog can eat them. These belts are designed so that when your spinal column ruptures, all your v-braes just tinkle down into a neat little pile right by your shoes so someone can later sweep them up for you.

Every Monday, all across America, bent-over spineless men are wheeled into chiropractic offices, holding their little plastic bags of vertebrae.

“Please, Doc,” they say, wincing in pain. “Can you put these back in some reasonable order?”

Actually, if you have misplaced your spinal column, be forewarned. Some chiropractors will merely whack your bag full of vertebrae with a mallet and charge you $298.98 without even feeling your aurora borealis. If I want my aurora borealis felt, I'll take an airline flight.

Women sometimes think shaming us is a good motivation to get us to deadlift a cardboard box the size of a small bedroom and filled 150-gallon indoor trees, the freshwater eel aquarium and their full-size Abraham Lincoln Just Sitting There Thinking marble statue.

Inside all of us males is wisdom and, for a fleeting moment, it hits us: “This is STUPID. I’m going to seriously damage myself if I try to lift that.”

We may even point out: “Hon. Why in the holy Bekins hell did you cram railroad ties and our Kris Kraft into this wet cardboard box?”

Women, being women, will respond with a narrow-eyed mincy pursed lips look and say: “Well, Hon…”

(When we say, “Hon,” we mean, “Honey. I’m so grateful every moment since the day I met you and boy howdy are you breathtakingly beautiful.”

When women say, “Hon,” after you say "Hon," they mean, “asshole.”)

“…I’ll just get it later myself or get another man — a real man — to take it.”

That’s when guys go over-the-cliff chimp stupid.

We should just simple shrug and agree:

“Okay, babe. Great idea. Let’s get some more help.”

At least we men should take a step in reverse, squint back at them and respond: “Talk’s cheap and so’s your hairy-backed Quest for Fire cavemother. Go ahead, Sheena. Lift that bad ol’ 8-ton box held together with a Post-it note on the bottom and just heft it all the way up to the snow level where you and the yeti will be living.”

(BLOG ADVISORY: Men have permission to use the above come-back line, but practice it several times a day in front of the bathroom mirror. There’s a lot of tricky syntax, punctuation in unlikely places and you’ve got to know how to lift your eyebrows at just the right time for a woman to not only completely understand you but feel your sarcasm on a cellular level.)

One wonders.

Back in the Pleistocene Epoch, when men had a life expectancy of about 30 — was it because women made them move so much?

Remember. Things were heavier back then, too.

I wonder, if during a move, a cavewomen ever said, in that nasally key of R-ruptured flat: “Careful! Don’t scratch it!!”

I’m going to start a line of T-shirts with that phrase, in 207 languages. I’m going to make a billion.

© 2010 John Boston/The Boston Report

WEDNESDAY'S Blog for December 8th, 2010

Doo-wack-a-doo wacka-doo.

Lennon’s Dead. How about you?

“Everybody loves you when you’re six feet under the ground.”

                                                                                             — John Lennon

Like most of my generation, the Beatles hold a special spot in my heart. People much more intelligent about the group can provide pie charts and sighs about their importance. I suppose the thing I remember most about them is a quote from a dear and strikingly beautiful friend of mine.

Years ago, I was putting together some Question of the Day feature and asked a statuesque Teutonic model pal the following question:

“Who would win in a fight: Superman or the Beatles?”

Without pause, she eyeballed me and said: “The Beatles.”

You have to ask.

“Why?”

“Because there are four of them,” she said.

I don’t know. Maybe they could beat the Man of Steel in a fight, and, if not, certainly charm him back to civilization.

Today, Dec. 8th, marks the 30th anniversary of the death of John Lennon, fatally shot by a deranged person. I shall not mention the assassin’s name. History and newspapers need to record such facts. Spiritually, it elevates the insane to cult status and elevates them in an oddball equality with the person they murdered.

I’m not a big fan of the ’60s. It was what it was, of thises and thats, great music and armpit hair on women, roadtrips, the immortality of youth and millions passing as profound. For all the good intent of Peace and Love, our own seeds of destruction were planted. In attempting to knock down repressive walls, the ’60s had no plan for adequate shelter.

Still. Simply. What music.

I suspect John Lennon saw at times that absolute magic to life, the possibilities. There certainly was no problem with the Beatles. It was we. Peace and Love became its own religion, filled with judgment, the ends justify the means and one of the Devil’s favorite tools: self-righteousness. Nearly a half-century later, we’re left with facing a world without boundaries, sex without love, moral relativism, an upside-down culture that bows to youth and a political correctness that has become socio/political insanity.

John Lennon was not a big fan of insanity.

Insanity.

I’m struck by how often the “Smart Beatle” spoke about this constant companion of humanity.

In a BBC interview, he noted: “Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends.”

True.

What odd gene swims inside that makes us blindly follow a Genghis Khan, an Obama, a Palin, as if somehow, with the reins of our lives firmly in their hands, we will be okay. Podium, guitar. We listen to the wrong song. We don’t listen to ours.

It’s easy to write a fetching tune about blind and bloated politicians. But how would you dance to: “How Stupid am I for Voting for that Guy?”

Perhaps, self-consciously?

It’s not about Left, Right or Center. Look around the world and you can find people of questionable mental capacity running billion-dollar economies and controlling armies.

Finger pointing. Whether it’s love gone wrong or which besieged poor soul is sitting on the throne, blame is always a good source of lyrics.

A Beatle. A Hitler. A flea-bitten mufti.

We get to temporarily wiggle away from the devils or just feel good, for a moment, distracted that both our divinity and our insanity are within.

© 2010 John Boston/The Boston Report • More Stories? Visit westranchbeacon.com

TUESDAY'S Blog for December 7th, 2010

Yet Another Illegal Alien Problem…

We suffer from a most serious problem with illegal aliens. No. I don’t mean dry wall contractors from Honduras or tenors from Ireland. Killer Bees buzz amongst us.

Despite a faux tough immigration policy, zillions and gazillions of emotionally hardened bees — some with gang markings, baggy pants and tattoos — have crossed the Mexican border and are speeding toward my home atop teeny-tiny iddy-biddy little bee-sized Harley Davidsons.

Also called Africanized bees because they wear colorful full-length tribal robes and like to hunt lions while singing: “A-wheem-away a-wheem-away, a-wheem-away,” Killer Bees (always capitalized because if they found out we were referring to them in lower case, the consequences would be dreadful), were invented in 1956. That’s when a janitor in Brazil left a laboratory door open and a soft-spoken and polite regular bee had sex with the Warner Brothers’ Tasmanian Devil. The resulting devil spawn was the dreaded Killer Bee.

I don’t know from whence the second Killer Bee came. I think it’s like the Old Testament and you just have to take it on faith that, yes, there was a Second Killer Bee and a third called Cain and another called Abel and a whole lot of other Killer Bees named Ezekial and Loco.

“And Ezekial beget Chewy, and Chewy dated Congolium, but Congolium didn’t like it that Chewy didn’t have a job and kept finding excuses to bump into her with his stinger so she married Caleb, who begat Hiram, who got drunk and begat Lagerfield and Lagerfield told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on.” (Book o’ Bees; 12:22)

Like Joe Biden, Killer Bees are unrelenting and live in barns, holes in the ground, under logs and in your car iPod. Their favorite songs are “Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies, “Sugar Walls” by the recording artist formerly known as Prince, “Honey, Don’t,” believe it or not, by the Beatles and “Sweet Emotion” by Aerosmith.

Killer Bees LEAST favorite songs are “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple; “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” by The Platters; “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room” by Brownsville Station and any song by Poison.

Killer Bees especially hate the old “Barney” song. You remember? The annoying purple dinosaur? If you play his tune backwards, it goes a little something like this: “WE HATE BEES. BEES EAT TREES. BEES REAL DEAD IS A COOL DISEASE WITH A NICK-NACK PADDY-WHACK GIVE A BEE A BONE,’ THIS KILLER BEE IS A BIG STUPID DRONE.”

The government isn’t much help. A couple of years ago, they came out with a study done by some junior senator named Barack Obama the Reader’s Digest version of which is: “If you come in contact with Killer Bees, run, run, run away and don’t make eye contact.”

While the president confessed he had no knowledge of the existence of Killer Bees, despite authoring a 48,000-page piece of legislation outlining his ambiguity on the subject, his former spiritual advisor, the Rev. Wright, accused Killer Bees as being a plot by a racist government and asked why is it the bees were “Africanized.” A government spokesman — a white government spokesman — noted they were called “Africanized” because they didn’t come from Sweden, among other places, and Rev. Wright rolled his eyes and said “Yeah. Right. That’s what The Man WANTS you to believe.”

There are several ways to get Killer Bees mad. Like not surrendering your car keys and Versateller Card when they demand them. You might not want to be in a bar in a large fly suit loudly bragging that one common house gnat could kick the stripes off of any 3,000 KB’s with one stinger tied behind his butt. You especially don’t want to do this around closing time, which is when Killer Bees get really hammered.

You might not want to sneak up behind a Killer Bee while he’s sniffing a rose and yell: “RAAAA-YYYYDDD!!!” then slap him on the shoulder and start laughing like an idiot.

On the bright side, many local law enforcement agencies have an informative video instructing folks what to do when faced during a Killer Bee Event.

It pains me to say, but, yes. It’s a “B” movie.

© 2010 John Boston/The Boston Report

MONDAY'S Blog for December 6th, 2010

'Ron Burgandy' is not a comedy. It's a documentary.

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The ABC’s of Being a Gonzo Reporter

 

       “A visitor to an Alabama hamlet came upon a big dog attacking a small boy. Quickly, the out-of-towner leapt onto the beast, pulled it off the child and strangled it with his bare hands. A reporter for the village weekly witnessed the attack. Sir, tomorrow’s headline will tell of your epic deed,” said the journalist. He framed the words in the air: “Local Hero Saves Toddler by Killing Giant Vicious Rogue Predator!”  The sheepish man explains he’s not local.  “Well then,” says the reporter, “Tomorrow’s headline shall read: “Alabama Neighbor Saves Child — Strangles Killer Mutt!”  The visitor explains that he’s actually from New York City.  The reporter’s eyes narrow and he harrumphs:  “Then let the immortal public record reflect: ‘Yankee Kills Family Pet.”

— Old journalist joke. Or is it?

 

   What makes a reporter? It’s a discombobulating straight-line and one volleyed by the Capitol Correspondents Association.

   They’re the Sacramento body which issues press passes to the state legislature. Due to a recent virus of increasing bloggers, the CCA needed to know just who is a reporter and who ain’t.

   If I may be of service —

   What makes a reporter?

   Certainly a modicum of insanity.

   I’ve been a professional journalist since I was 14. The newer crop of reporters? I’m rather disappointed. You’ll find few Hunter S. Thompsons. What generation are we onto now? Z? Double-small-a? They are, alas, uncompromisingly sane.

   The 21st century newsroom is yawningly sterile. My best pal in the whole world, Phil Lanier, well into his late 20s, did the best chimpanzee imitation. He could fool a chimp.

   And that’s not a bad tool to learn in life.

   Phil would vault onto his desk, crouch menacingly, toss papers and make bluff charges at the county reporter, who had the panache to make only the faintest sign of annoyance.

   A good chimp imitation is a lost art.

   Of course, not all things monkey make a good reporter and granted, the following is based on reporters in a movie.

   But did you ever see the original “King Kong?”

   When they bring back this 3-story ape from an uncharted island, it’s chained to a platform awaiting to go on stage before a packed New York City theater crowd. The ape is surrounded by reporters. They ask the producer and owner of King Kong: “Say — what’s the angle here?”

   Foof.

   Foof-a-mundo.

   I don’t know. Is it a sidebar on a banana salesman?

This line — the one line nearly a century ago — completely captures the spirit, intelligence and creativity of the 5th estate. Here sits an ape with teeth the size of a refrigerator and a reporter has to wonder: “Gee. What is the angle here?”

   Wild guess.

   Do you think it’s the foul-smelling 8-ton giant ape standing about a yard next to your left shoulder there, Bob Woodward?

   You know what’s worse? There’s like 15 dozen other reporters standing behind this guy, pens poised ove steno pads, waiting for an answer.

   Good reporters are such a rarity. Especially the ones with those old-fashion vaudeville voices. The business editor at a certain former swashbuckling newspaper I used to work at eons ago, Art Beeghely, would sit hunched over at his typewriter for weeks. Finally, the pressure would rise to bursting point and Art would crack. He, too, would climb atop his desk, although not chimp-like, and belt out show tunes in a mellifluous, bass voice. I loved Art’s “Old Man River.” It just keeps rolling, rolling along.

   A good reporter should be able to bare his soul and sing a good Broadway melody.

   Susan Starbird was a reporter-ette who had been a dance major at CalArts. She wore this trashy ensemble to work one day, a fire engine red Danskins cocktail modern dress number. When the new managing editor, all of 20 minutes on the job, ordered her to cover a story, she protested.

She, too, climbed on a desk (his, not hers) and twirled, swishing her skirt in his face while chanting, “No. No-no. Oh-no-no-no-no.” The future so crystal clear, the new M.E. walked out, never to return.

Dancing, and, obviously, desk-climbing, are a must for a reporter, as is the ability to intimidate useless middle management.

Reporters love free food. Like starving puppies, they will be your friend for a season if you feed them. Sugar-based products with rich, creamy bases are preferred.

    You know.

   Cakes?

   Yummy, yummy cakes?

   You could be Charles Manson’s press secretary, hand out Twinkies and be assured of a good spin on your cult leader in tomorrow’s front page.

Reporters should be able to take a complicated issue and explain it with clarity. Let’s look at a lead paragraph from a recent page 1 story. We’ll just call the newspaper The New York Times to protect its innocence:

    “The southwest regional division of a joint federal/state mining oversight committee which oversees oversights in regions where federal and state interests overlap, issued a three-prong recommendation in a 2,388-page report yesterday at their annual committee meeting yesterday and agreed, upon reviewing their own report, to schedule a meeting to reflect on the jurisprudence and juxtapositioning of their sphere of influence in matters to be discussed at another meeting. In a separate matter, no lesbians were hurt in the collision, but, had they been, you could just jolly well blame that George W. Bush fella, who not only is a lesbian hater, but a hater, period. C’mon, men! Let’s lynch him!”

     Pant, pant, pant, drink whiskey, pant, take drugs, pant, write more.

     A reporter should be adept at inserting buzzwords, clichés and arcane phrases into their prose. Like:

    Morass.

    Morass a wonderfully sophomoric word journalists like to use because if you pause, it sounds like “more” and “ass.”

    When confronted by a grumpy copy editor, the reporter can justify, “I meant like the Vietnam War.”

    Reporters are terribly underpaid and it’s these small victories during a day that keep them from suicide.

    “Roving bands of rock-throwing, drunken soccer fans” is one of journalism’s more favored clichés and should be inserted into stories, usually on the jump pages, whenever possible. It can spice up an otherwise terminally dull story:

    “Roving bands of rock-throwing, drunken soccer fans were noticeably absent last night when the village aldermen met to discuss a new sewer line in the Tri-County area.

   “‘We weren’t informed of the meeting until the last minute and were unable to attend,’ said Sean McWeenie, spokesman for a local roving band of rock-throwing drunken soccer fans. ‘Obviously, our group is interested because there could be leftover pipes and joints from such a sewer project and, if our organization were to branch out into other endeavors, like throwing pipes and joints, such a project would be of interest to our constituents.’”

   What makes a reporter? Well. Shabby clothes, especially an aging brown corduroy sports coat which makes you look like a drugged juggling bear in a backwater Russian circus.

    Or, if you’re a girl reporter, a Sicilian widow cocktail outfit for the rubber chicken circuit. If you’re really a good girl reporter, you’ll find a way to interrupt your society event by climbing atop a chair or table and screaming, “He died so young!” then falling backwards into someone’s (preferably a fireman’s) arms.

    Bonus points if you can yell it in Sicilian: “He died-uh so-uh yung-guh!”

    Misquoting is also a must, or, if you will, a muss.

    I remember being stupid enough to invite a reporter to cover my impending garage sale and downsizing of Scared o’ Bears Ranch. After two, count them, two cautions not to turn the story into something it was not, I shared that I really liked Santa Rosa and wouldn’t mind living there and that I was going to be visiting my daughter at a granola farm camp last summer. Somehow, that turned into a war-declared sized headline: “Mr. SCV Moves out of SCV!”

    Followed by: “Thousand Injured!”

    “Global Warming Blamed!

    “And George W. Bush is a Hater! Slap him! Slap him!”

     I’ve misplaced four months of my life explaining the subtle difference between “out of” and across” to people who read the story. To a person, which is sad, they growled the name of the certain hometown paper and spit: “Oh. Them. Typical.”

    So many important things contribute to reporters ranking lower than Congress and used car salesmen in approval ratings. Most can be lumped into two categories: 1) Their Fundamental Nature; and B) Their Behavior. Other than that, reporters are just fine, except that Journalism requires the least number of units (3/4) to get a degree.

    My favorite reportorial faux pax?

    “An Italian of firefighters.”

    It’s much more poetic and attention-stopping than “battalion.”

    Italians. Battalions. Does it really matter any more if someone writing a story has a certified press pass?

© 2010 John Boston/The Boston Report

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THE BLOG for Friday, December 3rd, 2010 but still fresh and funny as it was three days ago...

Remember when a Boob Job involved Laurel & Hardy looking for work?

 

On the Doing of Boobies

& The Bisecting of Flesh

 

 

“I did my boobs,” a friend once told me. Yes. She was a lady friend. No. We weren’t involved. Her statement struck me as strange, inalterable, as if one day, I was on the front lawn, raking leaves, and someone close in my life roared up the dirt road in a TransAm to breathlessly announce: “I robbed a bank, killed the guard, the cops are on my tail, there’s no going back now.”

 

“I did my boobs.”

 

Me. I don’t even like wearing jewelry. I’ve never owned a ring, necklace or tiara, have a hard time keeping a watch on my wrist. I can’t imagine carting years beyond term two Baggies filled with silicone Jell-O or stretching my face so I looked like Joan Crawford in Kabuiki theater. Sure. If I were the Elephant Man, I could see plastic surgery. “Yes. Let’s take about six pounds off the skull, replace the trunk with a cute little Annette Funicello nose and trade in the 32 ounces of dark blue liver lips for something a bit more magenta and understated.”

 

Sorry. Sticking an air hose in one’s mammary glands and inflating them to Pasadena Rose Parade Float level seems a bit garish to me.

 

I can’t say, in Seinfeld rerun fashion: “Hey. What’s the deal with women today?” because men are getting into the act, too. Not that they’re having boob jobs. But some get tummy tucks. Some get face lifts so they can look like a Hollywood Wax Museum version of themselves. Some even purchase a procedure called, sorry, involuntary tightening of the sphincter here — penile implants.

 

Sounds like a stool pigeon running amok in the prison system.

 

“Jiggers, men,” whispers a jailhouse tough cookie. “The place is crawling with penile implants. They’re eavesdropping on all our conversations and snitching to the warden. Be careful. The walls have ears. Which is better than you-know-what-ziz-ziz-ziz.”

 

Ziz.

 

I shudder to think how those things work. Maybe with every penile implant, then hand out one of those miniaturized versions of an air mattress inflater to carry around with you. I wonder if — ahem — it — makes some sort of Whoopie Cushion sound when you let the air out.

 

“Brttttt. Wheeeeeeeeez. He-be-be-be-be-beeeee.”

 

You always like to blame someone in cases like this. Society. Cosmopolitan Magazine. The James Bond movies. I know some people feel they just don’t measure up and if they just had this certain jawline or national park-esque mammary glands, life would be swell and they’d be King or Queen of The Prom, several decades too late. Remember when a boob job was just part-time employment for Laurel and Hardy?

 

Women are blowing up their lips, too. I can appreciate a full, pouty mouth. But there’s a distinct difference between when Nature is the Sculptor or Josef Mengele’s grandson is practicing in Beverly Hills under an alias and toothy grin.

 

“I did my boobs.”

 

How do you answer that? Shrug. Agree. “Boobs are nice to do.”

 

I never wondered until now why is it the mammary gland has earned more nicknames than any other body part. Playful whales. Irene and Betty. Fun mounds. We don’t have affectionate-sounding nicknames for our kidneys, do we? We don’t call our elbows joy angles or the bottoms of our chins padded mouse ceilings.

 

I see younger people with pierced tongues and noses. I know it’s a fashion statement. Like: “Hi. I’m Bored. There’s A Hole In The Ozone And To Protest My Anger I’m Going To Drive A Sear’s Crafstman Socket Wrench Through A Particularly Sensitive Area Of My Body Then Won’t Mom And Dad Be Really, Really Peeved.”

 

And,

 

“I voted for Obama.”

 

I don’t know where it’s all going to end. People walking into clinics, asking: “A perkier knee cap, please, or a sexier toe, and while you’re at it, a branding iron bisecting my calf and a chrome bolt through the side of the brain that reasons.”

 

“I did my boobs.”

 

What can I say?

 

Me? I just eat my vegetables.

© 2010 John Boston/The Boston Report

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THE BLOG for Thursday, December 2nd, 2010

My Dad at 87, my daughter at 7.

 

Happy Birthday, to that Guy

Who Stormed Anzio

 

     What an odd thing. There once was a boy at the age of 5 who lost his father. Stan stepped off a sidewalk in Massachusetts in 1927 and was hit by a truck. He died in the hospital. Before he did, he asked that his son, Walter, to make sure he would one day take First Communion.

I’ve never asked my Dad if he did. Today is his birthday. He is 88. Perhaps now wouldn’t be a bad time to ask.

     I who am paid albeit poorly to do history, know little of my family, my father. He is one of the sweetest people I have ever met, almost childlike in his simplicity. He smiles recalling life on a farm during the Depression. One winter they cooked crow. “Bitter,” he noted, laughing and shaking his head as if tasting it all over again.

     Walt was always his own man, unaware that you’re supposed to fold up the tent after you retire and that if you didn’t have any interest, you’d probably die. I’m still working at 60 and Dad retired in his mid-50’s. I can’t recall, except for horse racing in the 1960s, what really tickled his fancy, what made him get out of bed in the morning. But he did. At sunrise. He’d walk for several miles, eat a healthy breakfast, read the paper, exercise, make lunch. Sometimes there would be some small errand in there. Up until his mid-80’s, Walt went to the gym at least four times a week. Make dinner. Watch a show, or not. Walk again. Go to bed. I never remember this quiet soul ever having a friend. No ‘Wonder What I’ll Shoot On The Back Nine Today.’ No hobbies. No vices. No passions. No goals except to take care of himself. No dreams that I’m aware of. And what a sweet, simple dear not man, but angel. If anything, here was a man who spent his life caring for others.

     As a boy, Walt would walk two miles to school, then run home for lunch, run back to school, then walk back afterwards. That’s eight miles.

      I commissioned someone to paint a picture for him. It was of chocolate milk and graham crackers, set on a wood table. Every Friday at school, for two cents, the kids could buy chocolate milk and crackers. Dad never had the money. He smiled recalling how he longingly stared at the other kids swallowing their treats.

     About 40 years ago, Dad got real sick and almost died. He lost all sorts of weight and the doctors couldn’t figure it out. I could. He had to live with my mother and she not so much an erosionary force but a death star sucking entire galaxies into her will. I think Dad took one of those middle age moments to consider checking out.

     You know what brought him back from the brink?

     My half-sister.

     She visited him in the hospital not so much to pep the guy up, but to ask if she could have his golf clubs. “You won’t be needing them any more, Walt.”

     Dad didn’t play golf. But I could see the fire erupt in his eyes when she said that. Dear God, the divine spirit pounds strongly in us. He recovered. And he didn’t give her the clubs.

     I look at my own life, the people so near and dear to me and relationships that go back eons. Some I know like the back of my hand. Some I’ve lived in the same house for beyond eternity it seems and I still couldn’t tell you what makes them tick.

     My Dad once painted my Alfa Romeo racing car orange.

     Some may jump ahead and coo, “How sweet.” I came back from college one evening. I had spent weeks sanding this high-powered convertible. Without asking, Dad took some orange house paint and a 5-inch-wise paintbrush and painted my car for me. Once he shaved my dog’s head. Once he used a space-age polymer to glue the handle back on my stick shift.

     After one of my patented heavy sighs over the parents I drew in this oddball parenthesis and a long stare of disbelief, I said: “Dad. I can’t go in reverse.”

     “Well, Son,” Dad said, as he walked away. “You’ll just have to be careful.”

     Dad helped design the B-1 Bomber and yet, seemed like he lived in the 19th century. Never owned a credit card and I think he was in his 50s before he had his first checking account.

There really should be a class somewhere around the 6th grade that teaches us that we can’t, nor shouldn’t try, to change someone. I wasted so many years somehow feeling that I should spend my attention units not focusing on myself, but rather, try to construct that perfect sentence where I could convince my father to take his rightful identity as James Bond or Tarzan or at least Robert Young on “Father Knows Best.”

      How the hell could you survive at five the death of your father, the Depression, World War II, my mother and me without being careful?

      I remember a Christmas Eve a few years back. There were 20 or so of us at a friend’s table. Some armchair bookreader started waxing poetic about World War II. Rare for Dad, he quietly spoke. He turned down being a Ranger in 1942 Europe because he noticed most of the guys in the Rangers were getting killed. He recalled storming the beach at Anzio in total wet darkness, holding onto the back of the guy in front and flailing through the surf as bullets pinged by.

     “I remember the lucky guys were the ones who fell in the netting and broke their legs,” he said, smiling. He talked about walking through the snows of Germany in 1944 and seeing how beautiful and angelic were the faces of all the dead young boys, frozen in the snow. Some seemed to be 10, maybe 11.

      I’ve been looking at pictures of Yosemite lately. At first, the darn guy just never wanted to go and you needed a crowbar to pry him from his routine. I felt so righteously smug the first time I dragged him, muttering and sullen, to the national park. He stood in the woods, blanketed with a small fresh snow and air so fresh.

     “It’s all so beautiful, you just want to stretch out your arms and hug it,” he said.

      In those few words, he taught me that’s what you do with Life.

     We haven’t been back in three years.

     Dementia caught up with Pops a little over a year ago. Again willful me, I made him move in with me back in 1995 I think it was. I figured as he got older, it would be simpler to keep an eye on him. He was still driving then and still had that not so much habit but signature of “being careful.” He drove with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brakes. He always drove like that, even when he was a teenager, he told me. His little green Honda looked like he parked it on a driving range. There were small dents circumnavigating the car. I remember sitting in my office when he came in and started to tell me something.

     “I can’t think of the word,” he said, shaking his head and snapping his fingers. “I got…” He’d walk away then return 10 minutes later, almost having it. I’m not kidding. About five trips and an hour later, he came back with a big smile. “I remember. I got into an accident.”

     It wasn’t anything big. If you’re the woman at the gym in the Bentley with the light green paint on your bumper — Hey. Sorry. It was one of those left-handed blessings. I was going to have one of those backwards conversations that children end up having with their parents, telling them that their driving days are over.

     Darn it.

     Cars are so profoundly beautiful. They can take us to the grocery store. They can take us to Yosemite — whenever we want. They allow us to just drive around, get away, sort things out. It just sucks canal water big time that the mind, the eyes, the presence of mind, just — goes.

     We lived in a paradise of a home, our own little Sherwood Forest of great oaks. It was sanctuary for me, my young daughter and Dad. I moved out there for first selfish reasons. It was my dream home. But, I also felt that with Dad’s wanderlust and advancing age, he’d be able to take long walks in one of the prettiest areas in the whole valley.

     I remember Dad getting more and more angry. Funny. One day, I get up. I’m in my underwear. I go out to make tea. Dad’s on the phone, embroiled in some small argument. I really rather not even know what’s going on. But, when you have control issues…

     I hugged Pops and asked what’s wrong. He kept turning his back on me and arguing into the receiver. I sleepily offered help and reached for the phone. He turned away more and yelled: “My son’s really mad at me!!!” then threw the phone on the chair and stormed off. I pick up the phone. Dial tone.

     I’m still in my underwear. Tea in hand, I saunter back to my office to see how can I distract myself with the nonsense of email and pretending I’m a novelist. A few minutes later, someone’s pounding on the door, demanding that I come out. It’s not Dad’s voice.

     I open the door. An L.A. Sheriff’s deputy is standing there, hand on revolver. Behind him is The World’s Cutest Sheriff’s Deputy. She’s smiling sheepishly. I’m not kidding the first thing that goes through my mind as I’m sucking in my manly tummy is “I’ve got to lose 40 pounds at the gym today.”

Dad could not find his insurance card and had called 911. After 20 minutes, six cops confirm what I already know: he’s— ahem — colorful and a handful. Ha-ha. I’m now in the L.A. County data base and have concerned social workers randomly strolling through my home to see what became of his “missing $400,000.” You cannot — can NOT — even jest with a social worker that “if I knew Dad had $400,000 in our joint checking account I would have shot him long ago” because social workers just look blankly at you and scribble something damning on their clipboard.

    Dear, dear Dad. Not even 20 minutes after the police had left, Dad comes up to me, hugs me as if nothing happened and says, “Hey, Son! Let’s run some errands in town today!”

    He ran away one night into the woods, miles away, carrying just a pumpkin pie. Bless their hearts, the Sheriff’s deputies helped in the search. I was the one who found him. He was confused, exhausted, angry. And it was so cool what he did, that last big adventure of his. I admire him for it.

     He’s been in an assisted-living home now about a year. I visit him two, three, four times a week and there isn’t a day goes by that I’m not relieved and that down to my marrow I don’t like it.

Science is at times wonderful. He’s on medication and literally runs to hug me every time I see him. That laughing, kind soul is back. And yet, not. He wonders why he is here, what he did to be with all those elderly zombies.

      Yesterday, as is often our habit, we go to a park by a lake. Sometimes we hike. Sometimes we sit and play two-handed Pinochle. I’ve been playing that stupid game since I’ve been seven. It’s quiet. The sun is warm. The clouds move slowly across the sky. We have picnics, often just McDonald’s. Here is a guy who spent 40 years carefully weighing and measuring all manner of evil, ill-tasting health food concoctions and now, he just loves Fish Fillets, fries and a large chocolate shake. He’s put on 25 pounds and looks good. At times I marvel how well he plays cards. At times, I let him win about half the time because it’s fun to see him smile when he wins an allegedly tight hand.

     I don’t think God minds when you cheat backwards like that.

     It’s my Dad’s birthday today. He’s 88. He’s ice-skated on a frozen lake in Switzerland. He ran next to me for miles, giving me that final push when I was 7 so I could learn how to ride a bike. He cannot comprehend a $3 cup of coffee and carries no keys, no wallet and all his possessions fit into a few drawers and a small closet. I wish we could live in Yosemite, where he could walk in profound beauty several times a day and that I had the money to hire the kindest people to help care for him. Still. We laugh every time we see one another.

     I love the guy so much.

© 2010 John Boston/The Boston Report

---

BLOG for Wednesday, December 1st, 2010

     (WASHINGTON D.C. — BOSTON REPORT WIRE SERVICES) President Barack Obama today signed the controversial Third World Foil Hat Treaty, compelling the United States to strict environmental guidelines. The Treaty calls for the U.S. to “semi-pre-Cambrian meteorological standards.”

     “After days of tough negotiations, the president lobbied for and got the word, ‘semi’ to be included into the treaty,” said White House Press Secretary Robert “Smirky” Gibbs at a hastily called media conference.

     Starting tomorrow, all private enterprises, local governments, schools, institutions and individuals must comply with Spartan pollution guidelines.

     “It is a glorious day for Earth and the environment,” said outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “Essentially, we are bringing back America to a kinder, more gentile time where we even take the hunter out of ‘hunter/gatherer.’”

     There are provisions in the bill to fine individuals who make dust while plucking out plants to eat. Unions, certain black people and the federal government are exempt from the 45,000-plus pages of guidelines.

President Obama, pleased at getting the prefix, “semi” included in the title of the treaty.

     “The simplistic beauty of the Cambrian Period some 150 years ago… (the president was interrupted by whispers from interim Chief of Staff and former South Carolina Senate candidate/porn felon Alvin Green) I mean, 500 million years ago was a noted lack of humans,” said the president. “But one problem with these Cambrian critters is that they expelled enormous amounts of methane. I know. I have a dog. And some golf clubs. But I digress. By adding the term, ‘semi,’ we thereby not only disallow Americans from polluting via their despicable and insensitive vehicles, jobs, industries and way of life, we also disallow them from, ahem, creating methane.”

     Critics of the president, who noted that Mr. Obama makes more public speaking gaffes in an hour than all eight years of George Dubyuhbush, were beaten by members of the media for “wrong thinking.”

     The President noted that “approximately 300 billion new jobs, give or take” would be created by the formation of a new level of federal government called TMP, or, The Methane Police.

     Longtime Mass. House representative Barney Franks, who lobbied hard for the position, will be the head of The Methane Police, which comes with a set of rubber gloves, a box of matches, a bicycle horn and a large box of corks. When asked what his duties as the new J. Edgar Hoover of Federal Emission Controls, Franks angrily responded: “If you are too stupid to know, then don’t ask.”

Moments later, a spokesman for Franks said the Democrat “is standing by his statement in that after a few hours, the general public will become distracted from his remarks by the President, the Karsdashians or a really funny YouTube video.”

     The state of Vermont, which is gay, took to Mr. Franks response. The state legislature immediately passed a unanimous measure, abandoning their state motto of “Freedom and Unity” and changing it to: “If You’re Too Stupid To Know, Don’t Ask.”

      Neighboring New Hampshire, also gay, went one step further, changing their state motto to: “If You’re Too Stupid To Know, Don’t Ask. Don’t Tell.”

     Franks adopted New Hampshire’s motto for the agency, along with the last two words: “Don’t Smell.”

     California, which isn’t gay, but wants to be, also considered changing their state motto, which is currently “Plausible Stupidity” by was distracted.

     Republicans were quick to point out that by signing the Foil Hat treaty, the United States would be reduced to a sub-Third World status.

     Incoming House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) noted that “this certainly puts the job issue on a back burner” and questioned just exactly will happen to the 300 million Americans now that they have to live outdoors, nude. That answer appeared on page 32,013 of the treaty, which read: “So with this treaty, the United States will become one, giant national park with all government employees serving as various levels of park rangers and the Park being off limits to most people.”

     Senate lame duck Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is not gay, despite the overly theatrical name, commented:

      “We are the vanguard of an exciting, new generation that adores humanity but despises humans. It is now time to turn this self-loathing outward to the majority who do not share our views.”

© 2010 John Boston/The Boston Report. May you pull a back muscle

yanking wild onions tomorrow when this treaty takes effect if you violate this copyright.

BLOG for Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

Listening to the Distant Call

of an Unshaved Armpit

“Can’t you smell that smell?”

                                                             — Lynryd Skynryd

     One of my first conscious encounters with armpits occurred when I was in the second grade. Bobby Thompson lifted his wing and exhaled a furious blast of air at a mutual playmate of ours. The kid dutifully rolled his eyes, spun in a circle, went limp as only 7-year-old boys can do and pretended to collapse right there on the playground asphalt. It took minutes to play-revive him.

      Now, some 40 years later, I read that humans actually can communicate from chemical signals released from armpits.

      Here. Let me read to you a paragraph from the offending Associated Press article: “In a study using armpit secretions, scientists have found what they call the first proof that people can influence each other through airborne chemical signals they don’t even notice.”

      At first, I thought, “Duh.”

      Who hasn’t been unduly influenced by B.O.?

      You’re standing in a train next to a fellow in a turban who’s wearing a polyester cowboy shirt that hasn’t been washed since Eisenhower was president. That guy has so much body odor, your contact lenses keep sliding off and the people in the “Vacation In Lovely Bermuda” posters grab their noses and dive under the coral.

Dear Mr. Boston:

We’re not exactly sure if your last sentence starting with, “That guy,” is simply yet another syntax gaffe or a serious aspersion cast against the 34th president of the United States. While we appreciate rural humor as much as the next chap, we’d like to point out that Dwight David Eisenhower was a person of extreme and conscientious cleanliness who not only bathed more than Howard Hughes, but also kept two deodorant lozenges lodged under his armpits 24 hours a day. That’s why he always short-armed his salute.

Very truly yours,

Mrs. Poo Tinky

Curator

The Eisenhower Presidential Library

     Be that as it may, I’ve known many people who can communicate through their armpits. A friend of mine in high school (let’s just call him noted musician John Hobbs of Nashville, TN, to protect his innocence) could frap out “The Star Spangled Banner” by cupping his hand under his left arm and pumping air into and out of Nature’s Neglected Cavity.

     It went a little something like this: “Brr-buh-brr BRRR-BRRR-BRRRRRR, Brr-buh-brr-brr-brr. BUH-BUH Brrrrrr, buh-puh-brrr, buh-puh-brrr-brrrr-brrrrr-brrrr...”
Evidently, there are other ways to communicate via your armpits.

     Government researchers — and you have to ask yourself: who do you have to kill to get a $278,000-a-year job like this? — “... wiped underarm secretions from one group of women under the noses of other women.”

     The findings:

     “It affected their cycles,” the scientists coughed, looking away with embarrassment as they were NOT talking about Harley Davidson’s new Sportster. It also proved that humans are influenced by pheromones — an invisible chemical signal that can influence creatures in all manner of behaviors, from signaling dominance to mating preference.

     I can attest to that.

     A good friend of mine dated this girl briefly in the ’60s. Actually, everybody dated everybody “briefly” in the ’60s. He met her in Santa Fe and she must have been doing something right with her sub-shoulder glands as my friend, Dick Cheney, found her narcotizingly attractive. Later — Horror of Guy Horrors — he discovered at that Pre-Moment Of Romantic Truth, said waitress/flower child didn’t shave her armpits. It looked like she had two Don Kings in a headlock.
 I can't speak for the former vice-president and this certainly is my own insecurity talking, but I don’t care how strong, primeval and sexually endearing an armpit hormone can be grunted into the ether. I see thick tufts of armpit hair on a woman and I come down with Hysterical Blinking followed by an embarrassing case of the stutters.

    What can I say?

    The armpit giveth.

    And the armpit taketh away.

© 2010 John Boston and The Boston Report.

BLOG for Monday, November 29th, 2010

A suspicious lack of lions in the gyno/Botox musical, “Burlesque.” Cher (4th from left) who hasn’t been in a film since “Birth of a Nation” was, alas, Cher.

Where are the diva-eating lions in “Burlesque?”

“There's no thief like a bad movie.”

                                                                                           — Sam Ewing

   There are Moments in Life and there are Guy Moments in Life. The other day, a pal who was a gal innocently asked: “Would you like to see ‘Burlesque?’ tonight?”

   In ManSpeak, this is equivalent to asking: “Some of the girls are going to get pap smears after our steno pool class. Wanna come along? It’ll be fun!”

   Or:

   “Want to spend four hours with me in the fabric store?”

   Or:

   “Pedicure with me and my mom?”

   And if you are a guy — a true guy — there is only one answer and one answer only to these questions. It is:

   “No.”

   What does a guy say?

   “Sure. I’d simply just LOVE to see a faux striptease movie involving a 90-year-old bass baritone in black silk stockings.”

“Burlesque” is the holiday movie offering those Judeo/Christian values of watching an old person strip. It stars Cher, who has no first or last name, just Cher and Christina Aguilera.

   I wish Christina Aguilera had just one name. I like the sound of “Aguilera.” It carries with it a certain elevation and sounds like the latest giant lizard to threaten Tokyo. I would sprint to see “Aguilera vs. Mothra.” I will not see “Burlesque,” not even if I’m captured by the Taliban and have my eyelids held open with clothespins.

   Cher has a last name. She is actually Cherilyn Sarkisian. I like “Sarkisian” as much as I like “Aguilera” and likewise feel it would make a great name for a giant Japanese monster.

   “Sarkisian vs. Godzilla.”

   Although how the mighty have fallen because why isn’t Godzilla, who is older than Cher by about 20 minutes, getting top billing? “Sarkisian vs. Godzilla” also sounds like one of those caged martial arts match-ups where full-contact fighters take three hours to bite one another’s eyeballs out and spit them out at the screaming, blood-spattered crowd.

   I strongly suspect there is little such manly entertainment in “Burlesque.”

   Again. I haven’t seen it. But I’m told it’s about how pop queen Christina Aguilera (insert giant honking fire-breathing lizard sound effect here) plays Ali, a waitress who robs a greasy spoon in Iowa and hops a bus to L.A. so she can become a stripper. Ali gets a job as a bartender, working for “Tess” played by the Botox-hindered Mrs. Sarkisian, who owns a glitzy boobie-o-torium on Sunset Blvd.

The ugly conservative head of mine always rises in protest at how Hollywood creates these fanciful worlds where the kindly bar owner is struggling to make ends (no pun intended) meet, yet has more overhead than the construction of the Pyramids.  NOT that I actually foresook my guyhood and saw the movie. But it sure seems like Mrs. Sarkisian’s nightclub spent more money in light bulb bills than all of Las Vegas.

I hate to give away the ending, but Aguilera (insert giant honking fire-breathing lizard sound effect here) gets her chance on stage, sings, dances and keeps all her clothes on, which accounts for the low wino/pervert clientele headcount during her performances.

   I don’t know.

   In these PC climes, it’s perhaps wrong to suggest that “Burlesque” is aimed at the 18-64 transvestite demographic. Probably more wrong still to suggest that if you’re a guy, and you’re going to see this film, you probably should be wearing Espadrilles or for the shorter cross-gendered, Espadrille wedges. If I had serious money, and I was again, forced by the Taliban to see this movie, I’d hire several dozen Ethel Merman impersonators and plant them in the theater. I’d push a button every once in a whle to relieve the tedium. At the same time, all the Mermans would leap up and start belting out, “My state fair is a great state fair, it’s the best state fair in our state!!!”

   That song? It’s from the musical, “State Fair.”

   Many don’t know this, but it was a heavily made up Ethel Merman who played evangelist/teen idol Pat Boone in the movie.

   Sadly, neither in “State Fair” nor “Burlesque” was there an explosion of a supertanker Botox Truck, which, I point out, is a great name for a heavy metal band.

   This may be even more off the point, but back in the 1950s, there was this really cool film involving a nightclub called “Mighty Joe Young.” It was take-off on “King Kong” only with a happy ending. A promoter brings Joe, the giant ape, to be the star of his New York City bar and grille. Besides Joe entertaining diners with a tug of war between he and the 12 strongest men in the world (no cost there; they all happened to live in the same flat next door to the club), there were lions. Yes. Lions. Dozens of full-grown male African lions in glass cages right next to the diners’ tables. I mean, did the nightclub owner NEVER own a pet? Lions, like all Nature’s creatures, at times do what Nature’s creatures oft do. I’m sorry. I just would not want to be trying to enjoy my dinner while a 600-pound big cat is enjoying his 7 o’clock trip to the litter box.

   Why aren’t there any giant apes or lions in “Burlesque?” They could have at least eaten the cast in the first 3.67 minutes of the movie.

   Not that I ever saw it.

© 2010 John Boston/The Boston Report

 BLOG from Thanksgiving Thursday, November 25th, 2010

It’s Thanksgiving. A time for all to show gratitude for the gifts we have received. Me? I’m grateful I never lived next door to Ramon Cabrera. Ramon holds the distinction of being the only human being to murder someone over a turkey. Well. Not so much a turkey, but a turkey song.

Senor Cabrera missed the electric chair by the chin hairs of an armadillo about 10 years ago. He currently is serving his ninth year of a 99-year sentence for murdering a musician in the Georgedubyuhbushjunior state of Texas. Why? His neighbor, David Saenz, didn’t know the words or lyrics to to “El Guajolote.”

Or, in English, “The Turkey.”

I think John Denver sang the English version. Here. It goes a little something like this: “Turkeys ... on my shoulder, look so lovely. Turkeys almost always ... make me cry.”

Enraged, Cabrera shot the musician in the head with the business end of a .38. Bonus, Saenz was Cabrera’s neighbor and Cabrera said he considered Saenz a good friend.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

Or, en español: “¡¿Con tales amigos, quien necessita anemigos?!”

I could see shooting someone because they wouldn’t stop singing. But geez. My friend and Emmy-winner, Curtis Foonman Stone, self-proclaimed “heart, soul and spinal column” to the country/western band, Highway 101, used to sing “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” just to annoy me.

“The men are all gone but the legend lives on of the great lake they call Gitchygoomie...” Curtis would croon. Then he’d stare at me to see if there was the smallest eye twitch or flinch. If I showed any sign of weakness, Curtis would jump into another lyric: “Hey fellas. It’s been sure good — to know YAA!”

There’s an important lesson here. I never shot Curtis for his annoying rendition of the Gordon Lightfoot folk epic of a Canadian oil tanker sinking in one of the great lakes. I certainly never shot him for NOT knowing “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” I should have shot him for breaking into my house years ago and stealing my wardrobe — pants, shirt, underwear, irreplaceable Scared o’ Bears Ranch bolo tie, Miami Vice pastel sports coat, cowboy boots, socks and Wife #1’s diamond earrings to play on some redneck televised musical.

Curtis, and Texas are a mysteries to me. Mr. Cabrera walks across the street to his friend’s house. He asks him to sing, “The Turkey.” Mr. Saenz can’t fake eight bars to “The Turkey,” let alone one. Mr. Cabrera goes, “Hm.” He gets into a fight with his neighbor. Leaves. Goes home. Comes back with a gun and, asks everyone on the block to give him some elbowroom. Then, pop-pop-pop, there is one less lounge singer on Planet Earth.

This is just so amazingly backward to me.

Shoot someone for playing a 1-amp organ while belting out, “If You’re Going To San Francisco, Be Sure To Wear, A Flower In Your Hair” in the key of R-ruptured flat.

Throw a grenade at someone for crooning, “Sugar Shack” while standing in place and doing the monkey. In front of you at the airport TSA strip search line.

Drop an anvil atop anyone who would dare attempt even one stanza from the worst song ever written — “My Boy Lollipop.”

“My boy Lollipop. He makes my heart go, giddyup. He’s my sugar daddy. He’s my favorite candy. My boy Lol-lee-po-uh-uh-up.”

Hit. Strike. Hit hit hit strike kick hit. Flying elbow drop.

Shoot someone for singing “MacArthur Park.” You know. The one about the cake melting? Or “Why Must I Be A Teen-Ager in Love” or “The Theme to the Blair Witch Project,” or “Mamacita? Donde de Santa Claus?” or anything by Jerry Lewis, Madonna, Pat Sajak or anything that falls under the category of “rap” or “polka.”

Or “Little Lappin’ Lupe Lou” by the Righteous Brothers.

I know. I know. “Little Lappin’ Lupe Lou” by the Righteous Brothers is a truly righteous song. I just wanted to make sure you were one of us and weren’t just nodding your head in mock moral outrage.

Damn, that Texas is a weird state.

When police and paramedics arrived at the murder scene, they found Saenz dead on the spot, crumpled over with his guitar and accordion at his feet.

I could see shooting someone for playing an accordion, the most annoying monkey instrument in the entire orchestra. But shooting someone for NOT playing an accordion? Strange and twisted, isn’t it?

What also struck me was the part of the country in which this homicide was perpetrated. Texas. You know. Where you can get executed for jaywalking? How — in a state where they can fry you at 315,000 volts for not saying “Sir” or “Ma’am,” before asking for a Pearl beer — can they give you a prison sentence where you’ll be eligible for parole in 30 years for shooting someone in cold blood for NOT knowing the words to “El Guajolote?”

It must be a really good song.

I think it goes a little something like this:

“El Guajolote. You drank my root beer float-tay. I’m going to throw you in the moat-tay. Cuz you’ve been smokin’ peyote. With Wile E. Kie-yo-tay...”

Oh well. You know what they say. Songs don’t kill people. People kill people.

Happy Thanksgiving. Don’t kill anybody.

© 2010 John Boston/The Boston Report

BLOG for Monday, November 22nd, 2010

One Chair, Two Colds & Sharing the Office

“A daughter is a little girl who grows up to be a friend.”

                                                                                                    — Unknown

My daughter and I spent the weekend dodging raindrops and nursing colds. One daughter. Two days. Three boxes of Kleenex. I’m so lucky to have an office on an old homestead, surrounded by trees and countless flowers, freeway close to everywhere, yet, somewhat isolated where you have to really work to see a neighbor’s house.

In about six weeks, Indiana Boston will turn 8. I am both delighted and melancholic.

She had just put on fresh, clean socks. I had been working on something at the computer and went in the house to brew some tea. A few minutes later, she was standing at the back door on one leg. No emergency or anything. Just a child’s problem solving. Indy couldn’t find her other shoe so she hopped on one foot through the puddles. Except for a few times, she stayed on the one shoed foot. The other, the one with the clean pink sock, was a pinch on the muddy side.

“Looks like you got your sock a little wet,” I pointed out.

As only a child can do, she twisted in angles that would make a yoga guru wince with envy and examined the bottom of her foot.

“It’s not wet,” she pronounced.

I remember a couple of years ago, we both almost fell over laughing when I pointed out her propensity for debate. We were on the verge of playing a game of tag before she added yet another rule. Finally, in pretend exasperation, I threw my hands in the air and asked: “Do you want to play tag or do you want to play attorney?”

I’m sure she really knew what an attorney was, nor heavens, may she ever, but Indiana surely did laugh at that one.

“The mud. The tell-tale moisture,” I noted, like a wily Clarence Darrow, waiting her to fall into a definitional trap. “Would you not call that wet?”

She studied the sock.

“It’s only wet — a little — on the bottom and only in spots,” she pronounced, through a clogged nose.

“Ah,” I said. “An optimist.”

“What’s an ‘optimist?’”

“Optimist. O-P-T-I-M-I-S-T. Someone who sees the positive things in a situation,” I said, then gave her the old glass-half-empty/glass-half-full parable. She thought about it and nodded.

“I need you to come back out to the office,” Indy said. “Daddy. I have to show you something.”

Until I hear: “John Boston. You’ve just won the lottery,” those are my favorite seven words in the English language.

Or, as Indy would clarify: “Those seven words in that particular order.”

Small drops of rain plopped into my steaming tea. I followed her back to our sanctuary. She had pulled the socks off and tried to run barefoot where it wasn’t wet. As I have done for so many thousands of times, I performed the simple ritual. I placed dear blessed life-giving tea next to the keyboard and sat in my oversized black leather chair. Indy climbed into my lap. I wrapped her cold wet feet in a towel and her a tissue for her runny nose.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

“Close YOUR eyes,” I said. “You’re not my boss.”

She gave me the obligatory Rounded-Shoulders/You’re Not Funny, Daddy, Although You Really Are And We’re Just Playing look.

“I’ll close them just this once,” I said, “but this is the last time.”

“Yeahrightsure,” she said, condensing it into a single word.

I’m lucky. I have a 7-year-old who knits me scarves and my walls are littered with cards and letters from her. Indy is prolific.

When I opened my eyes, there was the picture. It’s a perfect rendition of Indy and I standing in front of the big glass door to the office. She had captured, in perfect detail, me, her, Chico the dog, the panes of glass in the door, the flowers, the Navajo dream catcher we walk under. It hit me, as she snuggled on my lap with not one single tight muscle. We have been replaying this moment in the big black chair since she was but 48 hours old. She was about the size of a loaf of bread when we brought her back from the hospital. Wrapped so tightly in a soft little blanket, we sat in this very same chair. I stared at her with such amazement and marveled that life would be so perfect if all of us could stare in such amazement at everything in life — friends, enemies, the guy who cut us off in traffic.

“It’s not very good,” she said. There’s a pinch of the melancholic in that girl.

All grins, I examined it. “I know what you mean. And I’m glad you brought it up because I wanted to talk to you about giving up art. You know, you’re not very good at it. All in all, as an artist, I’d say you’re pretty stinky. I’ll bring this up to your mother, whom I assure you agrees with me.”

She blushed and smiled so big.

“I know. I’m not going to draw anymore. I’m bad.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all these years,” I said.

We gave each other a big hug.

I wish we hadn’t. But adventures came up and we’ve had to move four times since she was born. The nice constant is the office. In our first home, when she was just starting to crawl, I had to make an impromptu barricade from the living room to my work space. It was made of sofa pillows. That solution lasted a few hours. Indy plowed right through the blue denim barricade and I’ll never forget that look of pride in her face. When she was 1, I’d get up early and light the huge potbelly stove next to my desk. There were times I’d get actual work accomplished before she’d come stumbling down the long hallway. We’d sit, mesmerized by the flames and crackling wood. When Indy was older, that chair would be subject to eminent domain. I’d walk into my office and that big black leather piece of furniture would be cordoned off with bungie chords, Scotch tape, ribbon, Teddy bears, two-by-fours, you name it.

“You can’t sit here. It’s part of my fort,” Indy would announce, sometimes pointing a foam saber at me. I’d bring Indy in to help form a solution. She needs a fort. I need a place to write. How do we fix this? That kid was bad for my work ethic. It’s happened more than once when she’ll plead: “But Daddy. You have to play with me.” Summoning my darkest scowl, I would sometimes pick her up and bring her nose-to-nose for a meeting of the minds:

“I don’t HAVE to play with you,” I’d say so fiercely. “I WANT to play with you.”

I remember paying a king’s ransom for this chair — about three grand. At the time, I had hip and back issues and anyway, I spent a good part of my life sitting at a computer screen, writing columns, novels and the addendum monkey business of being me. When friends come over, they always try to clownishly outdo one another at how ill-fitting the thing is. It’s custom-made for my frame and was the same chair Judge Lance Ito sat in for it seems like a decade at the O.J. trial. I think I’m getting better use from mine.

I have read so many stories to my girl in this office chair. Warmed up cold hands and feet. Blown the same nose. She’s asks questions, from the lyrics to a song to where the color red come from (bugs, in part, I was surprised to find out — isn’t that something?) Often, I don’t have an answer. I take a moment and say: “Let us go to a source higher than ourselves” and look it up on the Internet.

We’re in a new home, a new office. There’s some memorabilia I had to sell the last move. I surely miss that old desk of my mentor, Ruth Newhall. But, the business of being John Boston somehow landed on its feet in another Garden of Eden and for that, I am most grateful.

I catch myself inspecting Indy. That twinkle of mischief in her eyes. The button nose, a few freckles. So smart. So beautiful. So always changing. I am beyond grateful that I have a chance to write a silly something while my daughter sits at the big table next to me, with so much concentration working on her art. The other day, she started designing a book. She informed me she’d do the art and I’d write the words. How cool is that?

I wonder what many parents wonder.

At some point, a daughter doesn’t climb from table to bookcase to desk to chair, to snuggle into a father’s lap or sit upon his shoulders as he works. I will miss that. Being an older dad, there are simple Laws of Engineering that can’t be violated and no matter how much I go to the gym, 40 years from now, I don’t know if I could balance a 48-year-old anything on a 100-year-old pair of shoulders.

On the bright side, if it ever happens, I imagine there’s a story in it, from either Indy or me.

© 2010 John Boston/The Boston Report

BLOG for November 19th, 2010

You never hear the Weather Channel describe hail as being the size of the tip of a medium-sized banana. Or the circumference of a ping pong ball. Or approximating the tonnage of an artichoke heart. Or in severe cases, a Hostess Snowball, that delightful and inexpensive dessert so healthy because it’s made with milk, eggs and chock full of vitamins. You certainly never hear about hail the size of a pup seal or Dr. Evil’s companion, Mini Me.

Hail the Size of a Latvian Child’s Nose

— Why is it Golf Balls have become the definitive standard of measurement for Hail?

Media is awash with clichés.

In sword and sandal movies, there’s the line: “Guards! Seize him!”

In science fiction, we have the happy desperate missive: “Why, it’s just crazy enough that it just might work!”

But in reporting the weather, the undisputed champion of all clichés is: “Hail the size of golf balls...”

I wonder. Perhaps there is a school somewhere, buried miles beneath the ground. Eager rookie meteorologists learn the basics, like how to affably accept having their hair jostled by bemused newsanchors. I know in Southern California, some knucklehead long ago initiated an oddball assumption that everyone in Southern California surfs and is headed to the beach.

“It’s going to be a pleasant 118 tomorrow, but the waves will be 5-7-feet and breaking from the South,” says the person-of-weather, grinning inanely.

But come rainy season, all over America, there is but one cliché that is blindly belted out without question:

“Hail the size of golf balls...”

Not: “Hail the size of ping pong balls...”

Not: “Hail the size of cow eyes...”

Nor: “Hail the size of the beads on the Pope’s rosary...”

What did forecasters do before the invention of golf in the mid-15th century?

Two 14th century Scotsmen are standing in a field, looking up at the heavens. A storm of Old Testament proportions rains down an unforgiving barrage of round, large, frozen pellets.

Wincing from every blow, one of the kilt-wearers takes a big one in the eye.

“Ow, McDuff. We appear to be at the mercy of hail the size of — ow — hail the size of — ow — the size of — ow — hail the size of, ow, don’t just stand there. Help me think of something to describe...”

“Oblate Spheroids?” answers McDuff before falling prone and spread-eagle after taking an anvil-sized ice cube to the temple.

“Nah. I think not. Poetic, yes, I’ll give you. But oblate spheroid is the shape of the Earth and I think that’d be too confusin’,” says MacTavish in a thick brogue. “The painted Queen’s holy trousers that smarts,” he says, before taking a machine gun burst of hail to the noggin and collapsing.

What is this fascination — this unimaginative bad habit — of linking the size of hail to golf balls? Golf balls are a handy comparison. Unlike marshmallows, golf balls raining from the heavens can be deadly. Marshmallows merely annoying.

And icky sticky.

Still.

Once I’d like to watch the Weather Channel and hear a meteorologist ruefully begin his report with:

“Hail the size of Satan’s great gigantic albino’s testicles...”

Before he could finish with “pelted the Midwest as if a billion Bjorn Borgs were vengefully poised on storm clouds, firing overhand smashes using one-third-sized tennis balls from the heavens,” weather security people are lifting him by his armpits and dragging him from the dais.

“Three Anabaptists were killed in an unrelated weather event!!” he shouts off-camera.

His stunned colleagues watch as he’s dragged from the set, then turn to the camera.

“We’re sorry for the outburst and want to assure you, the nation’s weather-viewing audience, that hail comes in one standard measurement and one standard measurement only: Golf Balls. Learn it. Live it. Memorize it. Furthermore...”

The ousted weatherman has broken free. Bursting into the studio, he races towards his empty chair.

“MATZOH BALLS!” he yells. “Hail can be the size of Matzoh balls, too! And small potatoes!”

Off camera, two shots ring out, followed by the sick dull thud of a body falling.

With his final breath, the Weather Channel’s version of Howard Beale whispers: “Cocktail onions. Hail the size of...”

His death is not in vain. Weathermen in all the English-speaking stations and cable outlets are now rethinking their blind devotion to the golf ball description. The size of hail is now being likened to “really small scoops of vanilla ice cream, the hard Hagaan-Daz kind which can bend cheaper spoons” and “cold big ovaries.”

Cold big ovaries are not to be confused with the infamous San Francisco bad-but-angry lesbian rock band of the same name in the early 1980s.

Who knows. Maybe something as crazy as creativity could worm its way through the liberally biased media. I can envision, a few weeks later after the Weather Channel murder, a CNN talking head winging it:

“Well. What do you know. Maybe Al Gore was right and the world is ending, all because of we stupid, stupid humans. Wait. Here’s a news alert. (He honks a bicycle horn.) This just in: Hail the size of the dimpled butt cheeks from a midget fell on Minneapolis. Miraculously, the city was spared, but, every trailer within 5,000 square miles was squished like one of those snakes in a Warner Brothers cartoon who gets flattened by a steamroller driven by a bulldog.

“A survivor of the trailer park carnage offered the obligatory promise that he would rebuild, which, when you come to think of it, isn’t that darn hard when you live in a trailer.”

The newsman turned to his co-host for a little mindless chuckle/anchor talk.

“Wouldn’t catch me living in one of those trailer parks, Kyra.”

“Well. No  sirree, Anderson. Not with what they pay you.”

Their shoulders bounce up and down as they giggle.

On a serious note, I Googled.

I looked up the phrase, “Hail the size of golf balls.” First I used the quote marks to obtain a fairly accurate measurement of how often the phrase is mentioned, at least on the Internet. I was shocked at the number: 117,000. If you widen the search and take off the quote marks, the number grows to 326,000.

Sweet hail the size of white powdery stale donut holes, that’s a lot of clichés…

© 2010 John Boston/The Boston Report • Thanks to MrPP.com for the ping pong art.

BLOG for November 18th, 2010

One way to get rid of a pesky squirrel is to send him to Washington to meet with the president: “Knock-knock,” says the squirrel. “Who’s there?” asks the president. “Indecisive squirrel,” says the rodent. “Indecisive squirrel who?” asks the president. “Well. That’s sort of the entire embodiment of the issue, isn’t it?” says the squirrel.

The problems of squirrels in the Santa Enchirito River Valley

“Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father — an act which made a deep impression on me at the time.”

                                                                                                                                                           — Ambrose Bierce

Santa Enchirito has been my home town for nearly half a century. Geologists visited here in the 1970s and made a startling discovery. It seems billions of years ago, or six months if you’re a Fundamental Christian, the moon broke apart from Earth right smack dab here. It accounts for our eclectic nature, watered down in recent years by an influx of latte-swilling condo monkeys some call yuppies.

A while back, while breakfasting at this unique little cowboy coffee shop called the Way Station, I was sharing a booth with some designer humans. She was electrically beautiful with soft red hair. He was your generic bored but useless 30-something pretending to be Eurotrash.

The words flowed from her mouth in a slight Florida drawl, as if in slow motion. At that moment, I knew what Hank Aaron meant when he said there were days where he could see the stitches rotating in slow motion on a 102 mph fastball.

Red asked me, in deadly seriousness, how we killed squirrels in Santa Enchirito.

From her standpoint, it was a legitimate question. She and Bruno had just survived weekend of miniature horror after finding a half-dead squirrel in the condo parking lot of their endless yuppie concentration camp.

My wildlife prognosis was that a hawk had kidnapped the squirrel, flown to the upper reaches of the stratosphere, then, ping, opened his claws and dropped the little rodent. Not being a flying squirrel, it found the earth’s pull undeniable. They say it isn’t the fall that kills you. It’s the sudden stop. Not so with this telephone wire nibbling mammal. He lived.

For a while.

Red’s boyfriend, big surprise, had some friends in a motorcycle gang. He called them. From her description and accusing glances at her indifferent partner, it seems the trio of bikers lived in a drug-induced state pretty much 24/7. Like they do this four times a week, the bikers took the still alive squirrel to a lawn and shot it.

Six times.

So Red swore.

Funny. Home owner associations have more rules than Judaism, but somehow, they never included: “Thou shalt not shoot injured squirrels on the commons…”

She told me that after the haze of gunfire, this Rasputin of squirrels still lived until a magic seventh bullet proved to be most Kevorkian. I’m trying to not look at her like she voted for Obama.

It was a most surreal breakfast. A squirrel, dropped from another galaxy, survives re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere and then is shot seven times by a motorcycle gang in a pristine sissy all beige townhouse project.

As if to be polite and include me in her conversation, Red asked me: “So. How do you people kill squirrels where you live?”

I didn’t like the “you people.” It was somehow, demeaning. Like we didn’t have running water or barber shops.

“I don’t kill squirrels any more,” I said.

“Why?” she asked.

“I’ve been converted,” I said. “I’m a squirrel Mormon.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t follow…”

“It’s an offshoot of Mitt Romney’s religion,” I explained. “We believe, well, not me, but a few of my parishioners at the enclave, that when you die, you return to a planet ruled by squirrels. Obviously, if you’ve built bad squirrel karma, it’s not going to be any picnic living an eternity on a planet ruled by giant squirrels.”

I pegged her for a Democrat, someone who would have no problem savaging ordinary Christians, but who would have an ethical issue with taking on someone with kooky beliefs. She nodded, then squeezed my hand.

I’ve had ex-wives tell me the one thing they found particularly chilling about our brief parentheses together was that I could lie so convincingly with a straight face.

“Like Ted Bundy,” the analogy was once made.

I looked into the trusting eyes of my red-haired friend. I said the word, “Well…” with a Reganesque nonchalance.

What to do?

Actually, I’m not much of a killer of anything, including squirrels, Anabaptists, life insurance salesmen. But I’m not above taking an hour from someone’s life, especially someone from out of town, to — how do we say in the between the coasts? Embellish?

“How do ‘we people’ (like the ones who say howdy and wear cowboy hats?) kill squirrels?”

I considered a response:

“We’ve always had a problem with squirrels in Santa Enchirito from as far back as I can remember. I underwent years of therapy because of my Uncle Horace. The psychoanalysis, the antidepressants, the treatment centers — they never could undo what Uncle Horace had wrought on my impressionable mind. A failed and humiliated vet, my uncle forced me to help him set traps for ground squirrels. He made the tiniest little picnic table and bench, then hooked it up to his car battery. He’d place a small steel plate of tiny pancakes on the little table, complete with a thimble to hold a small arrangement of flowers. The jolt never killed the squirrels. Just made them disoriented. Tongues out, they’d goose-step in circles around the ranch, spin a 360 and collapse. It always gave me the creeps. Horace had a dresser drawer filled with hundreds of tiny, squirrel-sized gingham handkerchiefs, neatly ironed. He take one and douse it in chloroform. He’d cup the squirrel’s fuzzy little head firm in the back, then hold the handkerchief firmly over his mouth until it passed out and keep it there and keep it there and keep it there. Unconscious, Horace would then take a big, industrial-size set of cymbals and crash them together over the squirrel. They die of shock in their sleep. The whole family was strange like that, but no one could hold a candle to Horace. I remember, one Christmas, we had tickets to see ‘Alvin & the Chipmunks’ down at the Pantages. Some poor college kid was dressed in costume like Alvin. Horace wrestled him to the ground and out comes the chloroform. I’m sure the poor kid had a promising life ahead. Horace was given 612 years, one for every tiny handkerchief he used on that poor, defenseless mascot. Had the youth been a mime, and what with our over-crowded prisons today, I’m sure Horace would be free by now.”

Had I sound effects, this would have been a good place to play Iron Butterfly’s “Inna gada da vida…”

Red stared at me. Thin eyebrows up. Waiting.

How do we kill squirrels in Santa Enchirito?

By locking the chattering, damaged with the big bushy tail critter in a room with a bunch of regional planning executives who use the word “mitigate” out of context until such time, the squirrel presses its face to a windowpane and screams in silence to an indifferent world, “Kill me.”?

By tying them to a little chair with squirrel duct tape and forcing them to watch “The Last Airbender” until their eyes cross?

By using gallons of hairspray, recombing their fur and smearing garish amounts of lipstick like Bette Davis in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” so they look like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and are ridiculed over conservative talk squirrel radio?

In an out-of-the-way cowboy coffee shop, a beautiful red-haired woman once asked me: “How do you people kill squirrels in the Santa Enchirito Valley?”

“Thoroughly,” I finally said, smiling sardonically. “And certainly, not with kindness.”

© 2010 John Boston/The Boston Report

Special thanks to Tom McClaughlin for his squirrel/Mr. President pix.

BLOG for November 17th, 2010

WASHINGTON (TBR WIRE SERVICES) — Facing growing criticism that they have found yet more new ways to irritate and degrade people, the Transportation Safety Administration today came out with a “kinder, gentler” set of guidelines for strip-searching and annoying the nation’s air travelers.

Like an emboldened teen on his second date, but with less acne, the TSA and the M.B.M.W.W.W.F.I.F.U. (Mouth-Breathing Minimum Wage Workers With 14-Inch Foreheads Union) have faced an often hostile reaction from the public over their “loosey-goosey” examination techniques at a variety of U.S. air terminals. These come in the form of intensive hands-on searches and new scanning devices that can exactly see what you look like naked.

The entire Denver International Airport had to be cleared for three hours after a riot of screaming passengers accidentally viewed raw footage of actress/comedienne Janeane Garofalo’s naked body.

“It was so — white,” said a passenger from business class, “like a great, albino prune.”

“This is nothing to be alarmed at,” said Captain Seymour Butts, head of Denver’s airport security. “The administration feels that our naked bodies are nothing that we should be ashamed about and that it’s okay, even safe and fun, when the Federal Government feels like looking at them. Besides. This kind of technology has been available for decades. When I was a boy, growing into manhood, why, you could buy these X-ray glasses from the back of comic books. Except for hysterical blindness caused by low doses of radiation, it won’t hurt you. Much. It’s also how I met my first wife.”

Mr. Butts was dressed in his traditional work uniform: a soiled terry cloth bathrobe, a pair of well-used bongo drums and lathered up with a half-gallon of Vaseline.

Many fliers believe these stepped up procedures constitute unreasonable search and seizure.

“Constitution, smonstitution,” said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. “That stuff is old news. Besides. It says, “unreasonable search AND seizure. Not OR. We’re just searching.”

When asked by a Boston Report correspondent about allegations that Mrs. Napolitano spent hours sitting in a recliner, watching hours of naked strip search video while eating popcorn in a darkened office, a spokesperson for Homeland Security responded: “Yeah. So?”

Some passengers, like, the ugly ones, may opt out of thorough probing hand searches. They must submit to full video scans that actually display a disarming portrait of what you look like naked.

“They say the radiation levels are safe, but I travel a lot and I’ve been noticing I haven’t been feeling very well lately. And, there’s these growths on my neck that look like gills,” said flyer and actor Michael Dorn, who played the alien Worf on the TV show, “Star Trek, the Next Generation.”

“On the bright side,” said Mr. Dorn, “at least now I don’t have to wear make-up and bonus, I get six FM radio stations in my molars.”

As a public relations outreach, the TSA is trying to put a positive spin on the intrusive strip searches and unasked-for Playboy sittings. The federal government is hoping to help next month’s unemployment stats by hiring several hundred thousand actors to wander the nation’s airports, nude, as the biblical characters, Adam and Eve. The TSA spokesmimes will approach people in air terminals, grab some formerly off-limits body part and smile warmly to indicate that it’s okay.

“It’s part of the national government’s Be Aware Of Your Body program,” said TSA chief, John Pistole, who mumbled under his breath: “And it’s not your body. It’s the government’s body.”

When asked what with the body cavity searches and the roving Adam and Eve program, had Pistole ever considered changing  his name, the TSA director said, “I did. My slave name was Buckminster Beaverton.

Mr. Beaverton, er — Pistole — issued the 11-point Strip searched Airline Passenger Bill of Rights that airport security personnel must adhere to or suffer sire consequences. Which is a narrowing of the eyes at them by a supervisor followed by a disapproving shaking of the head. In a world exclusive, The Boston Report is first to publish those human rights guarantees:

• The Strip searched Airline Passenger Bill of Rights •

1)            When an attractive female passenger comes up to your checkpoint wearing some sort of fur or faux fur article of clothing, the inspector may not ask: “Is that felt?” and when the woman says, “No,” the inspector may not follow up with a robust grabbing of said naughty part and responding: “Well it is now!” This is referred to as The Drunken Guards In A Bad Sword & Sandal Movie Rule.

2)            While inspecting passengers, an inspector may not hold onto certain passenger body parts, place their head on the passenger’s chest, writhe slowly and say: “My wife/husband does not understand me.”

3)            Ditto with: “Hold me. I’m in a very vulnerable place right now.”

4)            Ditto with: “How’d you like me to show you how you can get upgraded to Coach?”

5)            While body searching, inspector may not step on a Whoopee cushion while groping passenger nor make infantile bicycle horn ah-ooga noises. Nor may Airport Strip Search Personnel make slurping noises during said intrusive explorations.

6)            No matter how tempting, a security inspector may not request: “Turn your head to the left and cough, please.” To insure good international relations with our many friends worldwide, personnel may not say the above to certain female passengers in funny costumes and thick silent movie moustaches.

7)            Nor may personnel handle, for more than 2 minutes, any certain upper part of a woman passenger’s anatomy while pretending to turn radio knobs and calling: “Come in, Hanoi. Urgent! Hanoi! Come in, please…”

8)            No tired ventriloquist gags, either, please.

9)            Double-ditto with the “aren’t these supposed to be in carry-on?” jokes.

10)            There seems to be a misconception that voicing: “You’ve been a very naughty passenger and I’m afraid I’m going to have to punish you” is part of TSA standard professional invasive body search regimen. It is not.

11)            In search of extracurricular shift compensation, TSA employees must not approach husbands of attractive women after they have been photo scanned and ask: “Do you have any dirty pictures of your wife?” followed by a pause, 1-2-3- kick and a deadpan: “Would you like to buy some?”

BLOG for November 16th, 2010

Stop Writing or We’ll Kill You.

TO:                   All Editorial Staff

FROM:            New Yorker Magazine Management

RE:                   New 2011 form rejection notice compliance

Because of unusually heavy editorial submissions during these hard economic times — brought upon us by the policies of George W. Bush — we have been forced to enact new, get-tough editorial policies to discourage submissions. As of Jan. 01, 2011, staff will use these — and only these — new rejection form letters in dealing with freelance material not meeting NYM requirements. Please read, initial and re-forward to insure we know you’re on board...

Dear Writer:

Thank you for your recent submission to The New Yorker. As the nation’s elite intellectual periodical, we are empowered to bestow upon you your new Indian name: Writing Poorly. We wish you good luck in wandering the streets while hollering: “Manuscript for Sale! Manuscript for Sale!” Damn you for wasting our precious time when we could be sitting with our feet up on the desk, texting.

Sincerely,

The New Yorker

Dear Writer:

Hi! I’m Timmy, the 11-year-old Special Education Needs intern in editorial. I’m from Uganda. I lost my spleen in a mime explosion. The U.N. doctors say this is very unusual as we have very few mimes in Africa and the few who are there rarely blow up. One of the writers who regular walks across something desolate and writes 400,000,000,000 tedious words on his experience brought me back and I’ve been sort of adopted by The New Yorker editorial department. They are nice people, except they wear powdered wigs and pinch snuff. I’ve also noticed they don’t laugh, instead, they sort of just push their glasses back onto the bridge of their nose and snigger. Anywho. Your unread manuscript, although I’m confident it has merit, has been forwarded to me and I am feeding it to my pet monkey, Zimbweebwee. Zimbweebwee likes your work very much. Could you send more for him to eat?

Your pal,

Timmy

The Ugandan Intern Without A Spleen.

Dear Writer:

We appreciate you sending us your recent story idea. Usually we don’t respond personally to each query. We used to get thousands. Every few seconds. We were unjustly busy, our own writing suffered and we took to telling everyone we met so. Eventually, word got out to the writing community that we had elevated the V-SAP (Viciously Smug And Pompous) bar so high that now, we only maybe get two or three submissions a year. That gives us more time to respond to each query and possibly offer some editorial critique to help you with your prose. Ready? Here goes. You suck canal water. Yeah, you. Don’t just stand there, eyeballing us. Go feed your laptop to the farm animals of Middle America where you evidently live and stop writing us.

Don’t Go Away Mad. Just Go Away.

The New Yorker

Dear Writer:

We are forwarding your manuscript to Charles Manson, along with your home address and a letter to his parole board suggesting they let him out early so he can hunt you down and kill you.

We remain, oh so cozy on the Inside,

THE New Yorker

Dear Writer:

Sorry. Combed through this and couldn’t find a single negative reference to those Teabagging bastards. As we in the media like to say: “WHAT referendum?”

Neutrally yours,

THE New Yorker

Dear Writer:

We’ve asked Broadway star Jude Law to dress up real over-the-top like a big fat opera lady singer in flip-flops and personally croon your rejection letter. Mr. Law? You’re up:

“Who... is getting published... Not You... Not You.

Your prose... is really bad... It’s poopie poo... Poopie poo.

It’s only... a New Yorker intern’s... point of view... point of view...

On the inside... of your flabby thighs... you can chew... you can chew...”

A-hole.

Best wishes for a green tomorrow,

Van “Yes. I Am a Commie” Jones,

Guest Rejection Czar

Dear Writer:

It is a rare treat to read such wonderful material. You are blessed with a unique voice, one that takes the reader to marvelous worlds. The mark of editing good prose is you reach the end of the story and not only realize you haven’t been editing, you’ve been wonderfully lost, involved and transported to an enticing, delightful new reality of craft and magic. Understand we read thousands of manuscripts and you made us laugh out loud AND cry — within the same paragraph! This work is unparalleled. You are not an artist. You are a master. Frankly, were we to publish this benchmark in literature, it would only serve to encourage other good writers outside the New Yorker family tree and our insufferable literati cocktail party circuit to approach us. Do you have anything else, say, about 1.5 million words (first graf) describing a metal cup, sunrise in Siberia and asking directions from a grizzled peasant in a meat hat?

The New Yorker

(Reminding you it’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.)

Dear Writer:

Sorry but your work doesn’t move us. That’s okay. It’s not you. It’s us. We’re products of public and private university system gone terribly awry. Nothing moves us. Each of us in The New Yorker Editorial Department weighs exactly 123 pounds. Man. Woman. No more. No less. We wear all black, consume nothing but over-priced coffee and alleged prose from H.L. Mencken wannabes. We have terrible posture and are suicidal. God. Please hear us. Someone bring back Jonathan Livingston Seagull to cheer us up.

For The New Yorker,

Bucky Dent

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Actually, Bucky Dent has neither penned any prose for this publication, nor has he acted as an editor. We just like to write, “Bucky Dent.” It’s liberating. And what’s that little Punch ‘n’ Judy hitter Bucky Dent going to do? Sue? Lift his little hemmed Bucky Dent skirt, dash out of steno pool and charge the mound?)

Dear Writer:

We are pleased to announce that The New Yorker Magazine has accepted your 500-word paragraph, completely as is. A check for $27,519 will be delivered tomorrow by 10 a.m. via messenger to your home. We don’t mean to impose, but would it be possible for you to deliver some random think piece on a regular basis — say, weekly? Obviously, being the main anchor of New Yorker’s new editorial page 3 will require a higher stipend. Is $50,000 per essay, along with expenses, okay by you? Oh, painted whores of Babylon. We’re sorry. We thought we were writing to Steve Martin, who really needs the money. Kiss off. And stay kissed off, you poser. We know Steve Martin. We are friends with Steve Martin. And you, sir or madam, are no Steve Martin.

The New Yorker

Dear Writer:

As devout Christians, we feel compelled to share that we reject Satan and we reject your stupid manuscript.

The NYer

Dear Writer:

While your manuscript on life during the Early Pleistocene epoch was beyond compelling, it is difficult to believe that you, the author, are actually “Mr. Homo Erectus.” What is it with writers and this fatal flaw thing? If we have erred in implying you are an immature little donkey girl scout, please accept our apology, Mr. Erectus.

Sincerely,

Mr. I. Karamba and Mrs. Kaye Sirrah-Sirrah

Editors-in-Chief, The New Yorker

Dear Writer:

Thank you for your insightful article and recipes in “Excuse Me! Are You Done Eating That?” Unfortunately, Al Gore published a similar article, “Hey Buster! Are You Done Eating That?” way back yonder in November of 2007. Mr. Gore, as you know, is up for another Nobel Peace Prize for attempting to eat absolutely everything so it doesn’t go into landfills. And how uncanny. His story was word-for-word to your piece. If you’d like, we’ve got his private cell phone number in our Rolodex and would be more than happy to contact him to negotiate splitting the article fee we’ve already paid him.

The New Yorker

Dear Writer:

How dare you.

For The New Yorker Magazine,

Maya Angelou

P.S. You know anyone with some really bad Polish poetry, in the original Polish? We’re fresh out and are paying $100,000 per line. And it doesn’t even have to rhyme or meter out. Ha ha.

Dear Writer:

We RAN that story, dummy. We KNOW Barack Obama is not an American citizen. We KNOW he was born in Tiera del Fuego and raised by Druid Eskimos, curiously so far from the North Pole. You know HOW we KNOW the president was NOT born in the United States? We KNOW because we ran a special 360-page edition of The New Yorker that featured 200 pages on Mr. Obama being the anti-Christ. Granted. That fact was brought up well within the story and you know how we use that really teeny-tiny type that goes on uninterrupted page after page. Still. If you would have simply read past the mandatory first graf (see www.thenewyorkerNYer Style Sheetfirstgrafunneccesarypretendcomputerstuff on our webpage) you would have NOTICED something. You would have noticed that right after the obligatory 1.5 million word ‘Fearless Correspondent’ tripe first-graf describing a metal cup, sunrise in Tierra del Fuego and asking directions from a grizzled peasant in a meat hat that we went into great detail about the curious gee-whiz cable TV comparison to the president’s life and the movie, “Omen II.”

Leave us alone or we’ll get a restraining order,

The New Yorker

Dear Writer:

We’d like to say, “Wow! We were moved!” or even “Not bad!” but alas, not even the addition of three lesbian vampires and a bucket of fizzy water could fix your manuscript. And stop starting all your sentences with, “All of a sudden.” Cripes. You are so predictable. And immature.

For the New Yorker Magazine,

Cardinal Edward Egan

Archdiocese of New York

Dear Writer:

Your work has been rejected on the grounds that it didn’t possess enough adjectives. Well. Big adjectives.

The Yorkmeister (our gang name)

Dear Writer:

Would it be possible for you to take all the letters in your story and sort of bend them into an illustration of two nude people in bed with a talking can of tuna? We think this would work better as a cartoon.

The New Yorker

Dear Mrs. Bush:

Treat seeing you at the museum fundraiser the other night. Be a dear, Laura, and say hi to George for us and hope you’re both resting well. Hear Dub’s book has skyrocketed. What WILL you do with the money?

Boy howdy, we’d sure loved your article, “Why My Husband Is NOT Adolph Hitler.” Alas, if we ran the trenchant think piece, it would severely mess with the minds of our loyal subscriber base and be akin to telling children there is no Santa.

Forgetting politics for the moment, we want to assure you we are on the same side of this class warfare thing. We are poised to offer you an 8-figure kill fee to never let this story see the light of day in any publication, web page or any communicative venue. Also, if there are any other stories you have that we can pay you an additional $20 million each not to run, please let us know.

Tennis Sunday?

The New Yorker

Dear Writer:

So just what would you do with the money if we published you? Buy food? We think not.

The new, Angry NYMag

Dear Writer:

How do you spell, “spleen?” Look at me. You want to write for The New Yorker? Learn how the hell to spell “spleen.” You’re not a writer. You’re a typist.

Little Timmy,

New Yorker Magazine’s plucky little 11-year-old Intern from Uganda

The author was once (honestly, swear to the Big G in H) the recipient of the world’s second shortest rejection letter from Simon and Schuster. It suggested: “Drop dead.”

(c) 2010 by John Boston

The Very First Blog on the New & Improved Boston Report for Monday, November 15th, 2010

If it passes the House, the Dasypygal Disabilities Act could affect people like actor Alec Baldwin, former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanual, Bigfoot, film critic Gene Shalit and all those hairy people in Sicily.

Too Hairy to Fail? Secret HB-14,319 Creates New Healthcare Nightmare

For the past few days, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been working quietly to retain power in Washington and has announced she will run as House Minority Leader. In the meantime, the controversial San Francisco liberal hopes to rush through several hundred pieces of legislation in the House, still controlled for the next few weeks by Democrats.

Perhaps the most controversial in this wheelbarrow of bills is HR-14,319 — The Dasypygal Disabilities Act.

If passed, the 3,214-page document will be the largest piece of legislation to ever come out of Congress and will greatly affect every tax-paying citizen in America.

“For far too long,” Mrs. Pelosi told a small gathering in an early morning porch-side press conference at her home in San Francisco, “people who suffer from this condition have lived a life of wiggling discomfort, without hope and understanding. This shining and enlightened legislation is but Part II of our Health Care Reform Act and I can confidently state, I am most proud of the Democrats for their near-unanimous support of this measure.”

“Dasypygal” is not a word familiar to most Americans. It means, “having hairy buttocks.”

“Not to be confused with being sexually intimate with the adult entertainer from the early 1970s, Harry Buttocks,” clarified Mrs. Pelosi, “nor Capt. Harry Buttocks who died defending Baltimore in the ill-fated 1646 Alliklik Indian Massacre.”

While staff at The Boston Report have delved into just several hundred pages this elephantine document, many disturbing details come to light. First is that it would make it illegal for a citizen to be caught with hairy buttocks.

Deep within the bowels of the bill are provisions that would call for the creation of several new federal agencies along with 1.7 million new jobs, including 855,000 F.H.B.I.’s, or, Federal Hairy Buttocks Inspectors.

Despite a haunting resemblance, Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, who was quick to point out he was not related to the 1970s porn star, Harry Buttocks, praised the legislation.

“This is but a grander version of the 2010 Census,” noted Reid, “which, as you know, not only completely eliminated unemployment in America, but placed us at an historic point where we actually had 104 percent employment. For the first time in our nation’s history, we had more people working than there were actual people.”

When asked for the source of his this staggering claim, Mr. Reid with a sneer and dismissive wave. Reid also had no comment about seeming self-interest language in the bill. On page 844, it reads that citizens of Nevada, “the ones in unions, are exempt from inspections.”

Mr. Reid exploded in an angry outburst when probed by a Boston Report reporter as to why this curious hall pass for part of the senator’s home state.

“One of us is lying,” said Mr. Reid. “How dare you suggest it is either a United States senator or an actual law of the United States.”

President Barack Obama praised the legislation, noting that while he had promised hundreds of thousands of “shovel-ready” jobs a few months ago, then apologized two weeks ago noting, “there are no such things as shovel-ready jobs,” promised that The Dasypygal Disabilities Act will provide tens of thousand “shovel-ready jobs.”

The president bowed, said, “kaneesheewah” and apologized to reporters, noting that, in the past, his was a failure of communication. “We are currently working with staff to come up with plausible deniability in case this important legislation on Dasypygal regulation is not correctly presented to the American people.”

“You see, there are such things as shovels,” the President said, holding an invisible shovel in his left hand. “And, a universal constant is the concept of ‘Ready.’” He then smiled and looked at his empty right hand, to indicate that his right hand stood for “Ready.”

“When you bring these two realities together, the shovel, and the ‘Ready,” the President said, conjoining his two hands, “then what you have is ‘shovel-ready.’ I frankly can’t see what’s wrong with you people out there if you’re not working.”

Immediate construction of the NPHBFRC (the Nancy Pelosi Hairy Buttocks Federal Research Center) will begin sometime in 2046 in Wisconsin.

“It will be a wonderful community builder for the people of that great state,” said vice-president Joe Biden, who was chosen to make patently ridiculous statements so as to deflect scant media criticism from the administration’s policies. “Besides the jobs, it surely will help the people of Wisconsin, who next to the Turks are the some of the hairiest on the planet. The Wisconsinites’ butts are so hairy, they don’t have to wear pants and that’s in the dead of winter.”

After conferring in whispers with an aide for a few moments, the vice-president clarified: “Perhaps I misspoke. While the people of Wisconsin, by state law, don’t have to wear pants, many do.”

Six high-speed rails will connect various parts of the country to the NPHBFRC.

“And, a cafeteria, I’m told,” said the vice-president before chortling out of context and being led offstage with ropes.

Having hairy buttocks accounts for ill-fitting pants, chronic itching, fleas, lice and, in some extreme cases, missing possums. It affects tourism because dasypygal people avoid lakes and beaches. A hefty fine of $25,000 and six months in jail will be assessed if citizens do not comply with Federal Hairy Buttocks Inspectors. Added to the price tag of this bill are the salaries and benefits of Federal Hairy Buttocks Mitigaters, Federal Hairy Buttocks Hotline, which citizens can use to report suspected violators, and the new Department of Federal Guest Workers Who Would Like To Have Hairy Buttocks But Cannot Afford It Due To Oppressive Imperialistic American Policies.

A curious alliance is forming, however, that is voicing dissent against HP-14,319.

The ACLU, that infamous and acrimonious legal aid gadfly known for endless arguing not only about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin, but also, what’s a pin, what’s an angel and how does anyone, really, in this day and age of relative morality, define “fit,” is against the measure.

“Due to complicated psychological issues stemming from our childhood, while we certainly condone egregious and random search and seizures on older white males, we fear not the slippery slope but a Velcro one,” said ACLU president Susan Herman. “Where does the buttocks end and where doth the buttocks begin? Could the government extend its definition of buttocks to the small of the back, the top of the thighs or all around to the other side of a person’s naughty parts? And what if someone were born facing in completely the wrong direction?”

In the wake of the October tsunami in which Tea Party activists led a cry for less government, HB-14,319 will markedly increase the federal presence and come at a cost of $3.2 trillion dollars.

The president chuckled his insufferable “puny small-headed Earthlings” laugh and explained, like a villain in a James Bond movie: “We’re actually going to MAKE $3.2 trillion, mostly from regaining lost sick days of dasypygal sufferers and also from clamping down on fraud in which we will collect fines from people who resist having their backsides checked for unwanted hair. I mean, people, it is as simple as that. Two words.”

Jaw defiantly out, President Obama struck a Mussolini-like pose and waited for applause. There was none

“Unwanted. Hair. You don’t want hair there. I don’t want hair there. What’s the problem?” asked the president.

Favored as incoming new House Majority Leader, John Boehner (R-Ohio) is not going along with the lame duck legislation.

“I don’t want my buttocks inspected. I don’t want my wife’s buttocks inspected. I really don’t need a government employee to check my rear end twice a month,” said Mr. Boehner. “This is something for the private sector.”

Interestingly, GOP rock star Sarah Palin strayed from party lines. Staring at a distant horizon and with a curious smile while curling her hair with a solitary finger, she noted: “I’m entering a new phase in my life where I don’t think I’d mind.”

“Yes. There are many things to be ironed out,” said Mrs. Pelosi. “We probably should read it at some point. You never know when a House page or something ends up having us bomb Denmark or something. But, in the House, it’s not our job to read things. That’s why we have a Senate.”

Environmental groups, normally left-leaning, have misgivings, fearing a planet-tipping influx of shaving cream, trillions of tons of hair and Nair being injected into a fragile ecosystem.

Curiously, members of Congress are exempt from “unasked-for federal, state or local butt inspections, hairy or otherwise.”

An investigative journalist from The Boston Report asked Mrs. Pelosi about the fairness and seeming inequality of HB-14,319.

Why shouldn’t members of Congress and their staff be subjected to the same high standards of America’s common man?

Mrs. Pelosi’s response was terse.

“How dare you insinuate…”

© 2010 John Boston/The Boston Report.