We're Gonna Whip Your Ass! (the great Canadian reality show)

Alternate title or subtitle of the show: Who Wants to be a Solomonaire?
    Like many of my better ideas (should I put irony-quotes around the "better"?) this one comes to me as I emerge from deep sleep and the grotesque empire of dreams. I forget most of the details of this dream--my dreams tend to disappear on waking, no matter how hard I try to remember them) on this occasion one item remains in my consciousness: my undergoing a particularly curious and horrific type of torture (at whose hands I have no idea) and the simultaneous panicky thought that I should NEVER tell anyone what this torture method is, lest some clever sadist out there might see it and use it.
   The rest of the dream evaporates as my waking thoughts assemble, but the analytic thought then occurs that this weird dream is some sort of wacky offshoot of a large buffet supper and the last bit of reading I did before bedtime, a quick, superficial glance at a profile of Jason Kenney in the latest issue of Walrus magazine (cover-headline: "And you think Harper is right wing: The ascent of Jason Kenney")
   Amid all this, the daily domestic agenda comes pelting in (jeez, how long since I've watered the plants...) intermixed with an almost automatic elaboration (not sure what else to call it) of a Walrus call-out (large-type thing) that the magazine's layout crew used to relieve the long grey story--a call-out restating, "Still Kenney's balancing act has come at a cost: increasingly, this country has seen its international image tarred with a mean streak."--into some extrapolations of the whole tough-on-crime tenet (over which the article vigorously wrings its semantic hands) into some thoughts about how the dramatic structure of civil and criminal trials might be improved by turning a few of them into reality shows. Details of how this would work, e.g.lawyers showboating extravagently, and the vast audience voting on the verdict and sentence, cascade into my brain remarkably fast.
    But also another panicky thought intrudes, that I won't get the details threshed out in the hour or so before the dog must be walked, or I'll get sidelined on social-media as I too often do ...

Judge Judy...

...todays G&Mail India election p.1 too...
 

What can't be found on the internet

As a fossil old enough to remember flip-flip-flipping through a card-index to do research, let me gladly confess to immense gratitude for the quantum leap in ease-of-hunting and plethora-of-results delivered by the digital revolution and the internet.
    When in 1993 I wrote an undergrad paper on Firesign Theatre, the transition from old-school to cybertech was just beginning and I was actually able to do both, finding (via the subject-files of the card-index) that the University of Alberta's Rutherford Library had, yes, a copy of their Big Book of Plays, and (via a scholarly CD--an intermediate method which I suspect is equally extinct now) the news that a single serious article existed on them. In a theatre journal not carried by the U of A Library system. Damn.
    Now I punch in "Firesign Theatre" to the Google search-engine and presto: "About 1,530,000 results" starting with the usual Wikipedia entry (requiring the usual additional citations), then the group's own website, extending down to the usual fan-emissions and passing mentions.
   And now today (actually July 21, as Google Blogger only lists start-date) we get the current uproar over Rolling Stone magazine's latest cover (close up of Boston-bomber Tsarnaev's face) has me thinking "great opportunity for a spot of satire.. But first the search of the topic. WHOA!!--as of Aug. 2, 82,800,000 results!! Apres Google le deluge!
   Where to start? With the caterwauling of my fellow basement-cranks? Or the measured chin-stroking of legitimate journalists? Well, how about a Canadian compromise?...
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/07/19/rolling_stones_tsarnaev_cover_is_great_journalism_mallick.html
    Mallick is something of a controversy herself (yet she garners fewer than 250,000 Google hits, and only 1,294 Twitter followers--as of Aug 2 again--versus the 3,000 to 8,000 of most media personages, and let's not even mention my pitiful 342). Yes, Mallick is somewhat... surreal:
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/07/25/heather-mallick-royal-baby-column_n_3654138.html#slide=2742558
    And leftie, if that matters to you. A person could spend half a lifetime researching Mallick online if the urge struck. Alas, she wearies me quickly. I'm more interested in why Huffington Post is so blandly boring, clogging my inbox with tripe about Frankie Valli on Elvis, retiring abroad, "25 Most Ripped Men over 50" and "Aging Too Fast." Are you asleep yet? But such flummery sells to my boomer-demographic, I guess.
    Or I drift to tangential Mallick items, e.g. an online journalism busybody that sort of defends her, saying, "Mallick seems to be consistent"--at what is unspecified, although ideology seems the most likely candidate. The site's platitude-monger also yawps about "balance" in the classic style of low-end journalism critics, i.e. not specifying between what and what. Really, balance is one of the most dubious journalism virtues, usually just a screen for a writer's bias. Maybe it's just a mental illness of mine (check the Manual) but I prefer the bias of any journalist to be open and ripsnorting.

*in progress, I hope...*

Dave Edmunds, "It Aint Easy"

Part 2.1 Dylan-Shakespeare: Adding Fool to the Firesign

Yes, I do love Firesign Theatre; I'm not a Dylan monomaniac! But when I stumbled upon this cute item, a found-poem by one of the Firesign guys...

http://www.radiofreeoz.com/spam-poem-8212012/comment-page-1/#comment-36834

...the natural-born opportunist in me just HAD to turn it to advantage in my flaky-obsessive drive to prove DYLAN PLAGIARIZED SHAKESPEARE!!! Excuse the media sensationalism there, but really, what does a guy have to DO to be taken seriously?

Anyway, here is my self-serving reply to the found-poem:


Found poems can be great fun. Bet you were absolutely splitting your gut at how tender and sensitive this one turned out! Hee hee! I recall another such creature from the 90s from our University of Alberta student literary inconsequence called "Subliminal Racism in Websters"  which was simply four or five two-word lines consisting of the two-word index-headings from the Dictionary, Hilarious as heck when the right adjective coincided with the right identifiable group (and of course it had built-in alliteration). Okay, maybe not quite as funny as your "What Makes America Great?" schtick ("Ask the cop in the woodpile!")
   In fact I was so inspired by this sophomore exercise (not yours), that I composed a found poem myself, consisting of various commercial signs I drove by in my taxi, all tailored to resemble Zen profundity or something (title: "Wisdom Along the Way'). Great fun, but a bit laborious in the filtration and arrangement end.
   But hey, my intent here isn't to tell you how much I've loved you guys over the years (y'know, in a non-carnal sense). It's to plug my own crackpot theory that Bob Dylan derived much or most of those screwball _Basement Tapes_ songs from Shakespeare, of all sources. Seriously!--check the blog! Okay, maybe some water-pipe filtration was involved in Dylan's writing too. Not that my theory is so important, I'm just trying to achieve recognition as the biggest flake in western civilization since Alan J. Weberman!
   Keep up the shoes for industry, guys! Love ya! Non-carnally!

PS: I'm gonna play your _Shakespeare's Lost Comedie_ LP backwards too, and see if it adds any evidence! Yes I can!

      *    *    *


Whoa!--an actually COMPLETED blog-post! How often does THAT happen? No, wait, I can make this baby incomplete too, by promising to dredge up those two found-poems mentioned. Heck, it's been a while since I posted/re-published a golden oldie...

And in this pigsty of an office I could be digging for years...