HAPPY HOLIDAYS . . .

. . . FROM ALL OF US AT
HIRSH HORN'S WEAKLY BLOW!

A HOLIDAY GREETING FROM THE EDITOR

As Editor of Hirsh Horn's Weakly Blow, it is my obligation to wish each and every one of you a lucrative and terror-free Holiday Season! It has been two or, possibly, three months since we launched this blog and dozens of readers have hit us, on purpose or by accident, several times. We have achieved many achievements, including a donation from my aunt and a death threat from a gun nut, or "firearms enthusiast" as he prefers to call himself. Hirsh Horn's Weakly Blow is not afraid of controversy and we will not back down from a position of principle, merely because a firearms enthusiast has threatened to "separate [our] souls from [our] liberal [bottoms]."

On a personal note, my aunt and self have MOVED OUT of the basement of the DuStentch Ammonia and Households Solvents Packaging Facility in Brass Castle, NJ and now live somewhere far away from there. Also, I remain single and would like to meet a nice, plump lady. Please try to remember that information, because love is the true meaning of Christmas and many other holidays.

Once again, on behalf of myself, my aunt and our 16 cats,

HAVE A YULETIDE CHRISTMAS

AND A RESOLUTE NEW YEAR!

Conrad Coleridge, Editor

And now . . .

A HOLIDAY MESSAGE FROM

HIRSH HORN

PUBLISHER of HIRSH HORN'S WEAKLY BLOW

Thanks Kenrod! You folks don't know me yet, but you will. And you will like me . . . or you'll regret it.

HA! I'm kidding. The truth is, you will like me because everybody does. What the hell is not to like?

Like Kenrod said, Happy blahblahblah. My name is Hirsh Horn and I pay the bills around here, which is why the sign upstairs has got my name on it. Don't worry, I can afford it - I'm President and CEO of DuStentch Ammonia and Households Solvents, Inc. I've got seven plants all over South Jersey and about 300 employees. Most of 'em are Guatemalan or something and over the weekend I gave out Christmas turkeys to every last one of 'em. You may not believe it, but some of those people never saw a turkey in their lives. It feels good to give 'em one and watch 'em look surprised, 'cause that's what the holidays are all about and blahblahblah. People like to get free food and turkey only costs ten bucks a bird if you buy 300 of 'em.

Anyway, I hear this blog thing is working out okay and according to my wife, who's always got something to say about every damn thing, I should tell you the story behind how it got started and also make a Statement of Principles. So, here comes all of that:

The story behind this thing is that Uncle Sam's Internal Revenuers will reach into your pocket and take whatever they can get as long as there's a coin or two jingling around down there, next to your balls. So instead of lettin' them have it, you might as well spend it in the interest of the public interest, by buying girl scout cookies or paying for a soccer team or whatever the hell. So, if you're like me, you make the same damn mistake you always make and you ask your wife what to do and she says you should publish a bleg or a blog or something. And you say, What the hell is that? and she says, Well, you get a writer to make up articles once a week, like in the Burlington County Advertiser. So, okay.

Now, mind you, I didn't get to be CEO of DuStench by doing things half-way. If I'm gonna do something at all, I'm gonna do it right. So I set out to find the best damn writers in the world!

But I couldn't. I don't know any damn writers and I'm glad I don't. So I forgot about the whole thing for a while, but then my wife started yapping about it again. She met somebody whose son is a college boy, and she's a nag, my wife, so I listened to her again and met with this snot-nosed kid who's too lazy even to put on a tie. I ask this mutt, as politely as I can, if he wouldn't mind doing a little writing for Hirsh Horn's Weakly Blow, in the interest of the public interest. And what does he say? He says he wants ten bucks an hour and he wants health insurance and he wants, get this, an "editorial budget."

And I'm thinkin' to myself: What in hell . . . ?!

Because there is no effin' way I'm gonna pay some crumbum writer more than the minimum wage. I've got Guatemalans all over South Jersey and every last one of 'em gets the minimum wage and, believe you me, they are happy to get it. And here I am, trying to publish a blog, even though I'm still not sure what the hell it is, in the interest of the public interest, and along comes this university brat who's worse than Uncle Sam's Internal Revenuers. Put yourself in my shoes - what would you do?

I'll tell you what you would do. You'd say, Why, you little thumb-sucking three-card-monte hustlin' college boy son-of-a-bitch! How fackin' old do you think I am? And then you'd sock him in the throat.

I know, I know - I gotta watch my temper. You can get in a lotta trouble, sockin' a kid in the throat. But, listen, I've got the best effin' lawyer in Jersey on a $3 million retainer and that kinda money buys a lot of justice. Try reporting one of my plants to OSHA and you'll find out what I mean.

So, after I punched-in that fella's windpipe, I thought to myself: Well, Hirsh, satisfying as that was, you've still got to find some fruity intellectual namby-pamby to write this blog of yours. And then my secretary, Tamika - nice gal, she's from Newark - Tamika reminds me that there's a guy named Kenrod that lives in the basement of one of my plants. And this guy's a writer - a good one, too, for all I know. So I rang him up and, oh boy, was he game! No health insurance, no "budgets" and, you can be damn sure, no ten bucks an hour.

I just let him write whatever he wants, which is why he writes mostly about himself - or so I hear, anyway, I never read this crap.

Alright, what else? Oh, yeah, my pain-in-the-ass wife - I call her The War Department - says I have to state my principles. So, okay, wait a minute. I think I gave my principles to Tamika and she put 'em somewhere.

Okay, here come the principles:

As publisher of Hirsh Horn's Weakly Blow, it is my duty - and I'll let you in on a little secret, it is also my pleasure - to see to it that the decent, hard-working people of this community, if there are any, aren't robbed blind by a pack of money-mad pirates or any other kind of pack of something. And I'll let you in on another little secret: I think I'm the man to do it. You see, I have money and property up the wazoo - I mean it. Let's say I lose a million dollars this year, publishing this effin' thing; and then let's say I lose another million next year and the year after that. At the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll probably have to close this blog in . . . sixty years!

HA! Ha, ha, ha! Sixty years! Good one, right?

So, for the next sixty years, I guess, I'll be . . .

. . . feistily yours,

Hirsh Horn, Publisher

Charles "Chuck" Hirshberg wuz here & thanks everyone else who wuz, too!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

-cc-

MY KINDA TOWN: A WEAKLY BLOW MIDWESTERN MISADVENTURE

Destination . . .

. . . CHICAGO!

A few months ago, I received an email from one Robbie Fulks, esq, a talented singer, songwriter and guitarist whom I have long admired.

From time to time, Robbie invites various musicians to the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago where he puts on concerts that he later broadcasts on his XM Radio* show, "Robbie's Secret Country." His email informed me that on December 9, he intended to devote one of these concerts to the music of The Carter Family, a subject upon which I am an expert, or at least a blowhard. Would I be willing to come to Chicago to be interviewed on stage? If so, he was prepared to pay me the astounding sum of $300; and if I would condescend to appear at a second concert on the same day, the gratuity would be correspondingly doubled.

Now, talking is one of my favorite diversions and rarely do I receive this sort of encouragement, so I said 'yes' without hesitation. On December 8, I jetted to the City of the Big Shoulders, landing at O'Hare Airport at precisely noon. Despite the cash windfall Robbie was about to lavish upon me, I was in an economical mood and made one of the greatest errors of my error-filled life: I decided to take public transportation from the airport to my hotel.

Nearly a week has passed and I am still recuperating from this ordeal, but the healing process has been hastened considerably by an exchange of emails with Alison Perona, Inspector General of the Chicago Transit Authority, which I reproduce below in its genuine entirety:

Dear Inspector General:

How are you? I am fine. I live in Boston and recently visited Chicago for the first time in many years. I decided to try your service from the airport and it was, I think, an unnecessarily distressing experience, which I know you did not intend and would not wish to see repeated.

Here is what happened: After retrieving my suitcase from baggage claim, I followed the signs to the subway and stepped up to a pass-dispensing machine to purchase a pass. I had five twenty-dollar-bills and $1.75 in change. As you probably know, the subway costs $2, so I put one of the twenties in the machine and asked it for a $2 ticket. However, the machine did not give me a ticket. It simply looked back at me as though I was stupid and reminded me that I had just given it $20, which I already knew. Fortunately, a nice man came up behind me and said: "That thing don't give change." Not being from Chicago, I reached for my wallet and pulled out a credit card, only to hear the same nice man (and he was a nice man, as you shall soon see) say: "It don't take credit cards neither." Looking about me, I saw a gaggle of out-of-towners like myself, staggering around like zombies, holding out large bills and begging Chicagoans for change. Fortunately for me, the nice man was nice enough to give me a quarter.

So here's my first question: Is it really true that your subway machines don't give change or take credit cards? Because I have lived in Boston, New York and Washington, three cities that, in many ways, have nothing on you, I'm sure, but all of which allow commuters to both use their credit cards and receive change for large bills.

Now, here's another pickle I'd like you to think about: The train ride from the airport to my hotel in Rogers Park took an excruciating two-hours-and-twenty-minutes (this is not a typo.) I spent most of the trip recalling cliches about slowness - "slow as molasses in January," "I'm coming, and so is Christmas," etc - and there were several annoying incidents along the way that dragged out the journey even further.

For instance, just three stops into the trip, we were all hustled out of the train and loaded onto a tightly-packed slow-moving shuttle bus where I was forced to listen to a very nasty man fulminate against illegal immigrants. He said that unless Mexico stopped "sending us" illegal immigrants, we should invade it and remove its leaders. Evidently, he believes this strategy is working so well in Iraq that we should try it out on other countries that threaten our security by being poor. Please find this man and waterboard him.

Anyhoo, eventually the bus rolled up to the next stop and unloaded us and we waited another ten minutes for another train that moved along at an average speed of, I'd say, 6-1/2 miles-per-hour. That train, however, was like the Georgia Mail compared to the train I transferred to, I believe on the cheerlessly-named "Brown Line." What was truly impressive was that this Brown Line train achieved extraordinary depths of slowness while skipping as many stops as it stopped at, much to the fury of my fellow passengers, most of whom were Chicagoans and probably deserve better.

So here is my second question: Is there some way that you could let me know when these various annoyances are corrected, so that I can return to Chicago under more pleasant circumstances?

Many thanks for your kind attention to these questions. I am sure you will appreciate that they are offered in a spirit of friendly encouragement.

Very truly yours, etc.

I am delighted to report that, in less than 24 hours, I received the following reply:

Dear Mr. Hirshberg,

On behalf of the CTA, I apologize for the inconveniences you experienced on your trip to Chicago.

The CTA is currently engaging in massive reconstruction and improvement projects, most notably on the Blue and Brown Lines. If you check the CTA's website http://www.transitchicago.com/, you can follow the progress of these projects.

I have forwarded your e-mail to the relevant departments so that all of the issues presented can be reviewed.

N.B. The President's authorization to use "extreme tactics" on enemies of the United States does not permit the CTA to waterboard obnoxious customers, no matter how annoying they are.

Alison Perona
Inspector General

Needless to say, I was more than satisfied with every aspect of this reply - except one, which I called to Ms. Perona's attention in a subsequent email, to wit:

Dear Inspector General:

I could scarcely have hoped for a more prompt, professional and gratifying response to my email of 12/13. However, I do wish to call your attention to one unfortunate bobble on your part. You wrote: "The President's authorization to use 'extreme tactics' on enemies of the United States does not permit the CTA to waterboard obnoxious customers." I am sure that is true, for the time being. But please note that the President's policy authorizes ENHANCED tactics of interrogation, not EXTREME ones. Waterboarding is an enhancement, not an extremity.

Nonetheless, your email has greatly enhanced my impression of Chicago in general, and the CTA in particular.

Gratefully yours, etc.

It only remains for me to recount to you, the interested reader, the remaining highlights of my visit to Chicago. On Sunday morning, I dressed in conservative blue, found the Old Town School of Folk Music and asked to be taken to Mr. Robbie Fulks, which was accordingly done. Robbie was leading a small ensemble in a song called "I've Got a Home in that Rock" and enjoying himself hugely; but the moment he turned his head in my direction, his enjoyment evaporated. It was obvious that he did not recognize me and would have been happy to continue not recognizing me for the rest of his life.

This was understandable and, indeed, typical. My appearance is such that it produces unsettling sensations in strangers, especially women. Indeed, it happens so frequently that I rarely become rattled in these situations. I was quite sympathetic to Robbie, as my face-and-figure pose particular problems to a professional entertainer who has committed himself to appearing with me on the stage. On the other hand, I had exchanged enough emails with Robbie to optimistically consider him my friend. But on another hand, I realized that I had only actually met him once, at my ex-brother-in-law's wedding seven-or-eight years ago.

"'It's me," I explained, extending my hand aggressively, "Charles 'Chuck' Hirshberg."

Had I announced myself as his blind date, Robbie Fulks could not have been more disappointed. He stared at the neck of his guitar in an agony of embarrassment as he shook my hand.

"It's been a long time," I pointed out, helpfully.

"Ya," he mumbled, "since our, um, . . . wedding."

I tried changing the subject. "Am I dressed okay?" I asked.

He looked at my clothes and snorted: "You're over-thinkin' this."

For the next few hours, Robbie energetically avoided me until it was time to invite me onstage for the interview, which went rather well, I thought. Robbie is unnecessarily tall and I am imprudently short and the audience seemed to enjoy the Mutt-and-Jeff aspect of our conversation. So at the end of the second show, when Robbie invited me on stage to sing a verse of "Worried Man Blues," I thought he had begun to accept me. I had a slight cold and sang my verse in a gruff, down-home growl that the audience applauded with great sympathy. A few days later, I wrote Robbie, asking for a recording of my performance. He replied thus:

"The channel on the mike you sang through was not turned on. You can hear your vocal a little bit as bleed through the other mikes. But mostly, you can hear me laughing sinisterly, like Eddie Murphy, through a mike that is on."

Ah, well. At least that explains the audience's enthusiastic applause: They couldn't hear me.

----------
*XM is a satellite radio service that works like this: First, you purchase a special XM radio receiver for about $600; then you pay a fee of approximately $600 a month, which may seem like a lot, but you get to listen to your choice of 46,000 channels, each of them broadcast by satellite to ensure perfect stereophonic clarity. A rival service, Sirius Radio, charges twice as much and offers only 23,000 channels, but one of them features Howard Stern. Decisions, decisions . . .

-cc-

ANNOUNCING THE WEAKLY BLOW'S . . .

2007

MASCOT of the YEAR!
OSCAR

"New Mexico Guns' gun-toting,

left-handed, NRA-Supporting mouse"

That is Oscar's actual Official Designation - verbatim!

His motto:

"The principals of New Mexico Guns are

Christ-centered and Scripturally-focused."

English is not just the only language I know; it is the most accommodating language I know. No thought is too preposterous to be expressed in it, in a hundred different preposterous ways. So whenever I am unable to extract a sensible meaning from a sentence of English, I try to stay cool. It may take several hours of reading and re-reading but there's usually a needle of coherence to be found 'neath the haystack of jumbled words. Of course, sometimes the meaning that emerges is even more preposterous than the dross that covered it - and Oscar's motto is one of the most delightful specimens of such a sentence that I have ever discovered.

To be sure, Oscar stumbled briefly at the outset - I'm fairly certain that the word principles was called for, rather than principals. But the heart of his motto, the fervent declaration of a Christ-centered, spiritually-focused love of firearms, is spot-on and beautifully expressed. Is it not?

I am quite serious about this, a little bit. Just now, I stopped typing and saw in my imagination a great, unfathomable chasm - The Grand Chasm, I call it - that represents the philosophical distance between Oscar's human creators and me. In fact, I truly believe that I have more in common with an Irish Wolfhound of my acquaintance . . . .

SAGE

Food-focused, self-centered mascot

of

Vicki Constantine Croke,

Author, Journalist, Hardly-Bitten Newswoman

New Mexico Guns, the organization that Oscar guards with such Christ-centered, left-handed vigilance, is devoted to protecting the Second Amendment to our Constitution (you know, the one that calls for "a well-regulated militia.") It does so by providing a variety of courses in the use of firearms, including "youth classes" for pre-kindergartners at a fee of $50.00 per child.

After all, did not Jesus say, whilst He walked among us: "Suffer the children to come unto Me"?

Mindful of Christ's many exhortations to charity, New Mexico Guns also offers "significant discounts to non-profit groups, such as the Boy/Girl Scouts, organized ministries, volunteer chaplain programs, or private and home schools that receive no tax support, etc."

I am certain that New Mexico Guns is a sincere enterprise. I mean, just look at Oscar - that mouse was summoned from yarn with meticulous care by someone who loved him. What amazes me is not that I disagree with its values, but that those values are completely incomprehensible to me. And evidently, that's just to be expected, for on the New Mexico Guns homepage, just a few inches beneath Oscar's portrait, reads the following:

"Oscar and our training pictures say much more (i.e., 'a thousand words') than most may initially comprehend."

Amen to that!

-cc-

A JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY . . . WITH SHAKE-SHAKE-SHAKIN' BOOTIES

In the summer of Nineteen-hundred-and-seventy-two, when I was a lad of eleven, we packed up the family Dodge and set out upon an exodus that would change my life, mostly for the worse. From Menlo Park, California, we drove 1,228.24 miles (thank you, Mapquest, for the precision) to Boulder, Colorado, there to settle ourselves in the lap of the Rockies for the next five-or-so years.

Boulder would prove to be a purgatory so horrid that, even today, the mere mention of it brings dyspepsia and, occasionally, anxiety attacks. Excuse me, here comes one now.

Okay, I'm back. Where was I?

Therapy and reprogramming have brought me to realize that Boulder actually had relatively little to do with the darkness of those years, even though the town was, at that time, basically South Park with a University plopped in the middle of it. The resemblance is so acute that once, while watching a South Park episode in which the town was destroyed by, I believe, Scientologist martians . . .



. . . I rose from my couch with ecstasy and, while dancing an evil dance and laughing an evil laugh, cried: "Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!! Burn, you rat-bastard southwestern Gomorrah! Burn and die!"

Like I said, though: The real problem was not Boulder. It was, first of all, my home life, which was like an episode of Supernanny, only Supernanny never showed-up; and, second, the 1970s.


I thought of the '70s recently while having a conversation with a teenage friend of mine - I'll call her Ceecee - who was having boyfriend issues and didn't know any better than to ask me for advice. After hearing her out, I told her that I had no opinion on what she should do and, if I had, I would have urged her to do the opposite, as my advice on matters of love is always bad. She seemed surprised and delighted to meet an adult who had so low an opinion of himself and began asking me questions about my youth. I told her a few of the sad stories; then I moved on to the frightening stories; and I was just getting started on the harrowing stories when she begged me to stop.

"Was it really that bad?" she asked, looking anxious and dyspeptic.

Actually, I think it was probably worse. And I decided that, whether she wanted to hear it not, I was determined to convey to my young friend just how soul-crushing American culture could be in the mid-1970s. But how to do it?

And then, a penny fell from heaven. Sarah Tisch, a very dear old friend (I mean, of course, that our friendship is old, not Sarah herself) sent me this:



Sarah got it from her husband, Carl Bobrow, who got it from a string of forwarded messages so long that the original sender had faded into the ether. Whoever he was, here's what happened to him: One day, while installing a ceiling fan for his grandfather-in-law, he discovered the above, stashed in the eaves - J. C. Penney's catalogue of the Seven Storey Mountain between heaven and hell, where the souls of the wicked are cleansed by suffering.

My own personal cleansing began in earnest when I was a juvenile delinquent who occasionally attended Boulder High School. I looked like this . . .




. . . at a time when it would have been more expedient to look like this:



Now, please don't misunderstand me: I'm not suggesting that the '70s was a wicked era because everybody dressed-up like nimrods. (Look at my thrift-store shirt, for Crissake.) It was a wicked era because of its relentless obsession with conformity.



It was especially hard on young people who defied the expectations of their parents and communities. Nowadays, the Internet functions like a periscope with which a kid can catch glimpses of the entire planet and fact-check the threatening remonstrations of a parent or teacher. We had none of that, so it was much easier for authority figures to terrorize us, if they chose. All an adult had to do was discover an adolescent’s deepest wish and then assure the poor kid that he’d never get it unless he behaved in whatever way the adult wanted him to behave. Even the most spirited kid could be beaten down with threats about what awaited him in the outside world – I saw it many times.



Thank God, it is now virtually impossible to alienate a young person the way we could be alienated. As long as a kid can find her way to a computer, she can roust-up an online community that shares all of her own peculiarities – however peculiar those peculiarities may be. But in the ‘70s, each individual misfit or weirdo was assured that he or she was the only person on earth who didn’t want to be “normal.” And the spectacular advantages of being normal were hammered into us all day long – by our cereal boxes, by our teachers, by our parents and, of course, by all five channels on our television sets.

In the ‘70s, you displayed your oddities at your own risk – sometimes, at risk of life-and-limb. I will never forget when one of my best friends got drunk, confided to me that he was gay and sobbed with relief when I told him I didn’t give a shit. A month-or-so later, he took me to a gay bar in Denver. We drove through the sleaziest part of town – West Colfax, I believe – and parked in an unlit lot behind a completely dark abandoned factory building. Then we walked down a short flight of stairs to a landing where half-a-dozen musclebound biker types guarded the door. They waved us inside and suddenly, I found myself on the set of Saturday Night Fever, except everyone was male. It was exactly like visiting a speakeasy.


I showed these pictures to Ceecee and we had a long, bonding conversation (though I almost punched her in the neck for calling my high school girlfriend a "ho.") But one historical detail puzzled her: Hadn't the '70s been preceded by the '60s, a time of youthful rebellion, politicking, drug-taking and non-stop rutting?

Well, yes. And for many of us, its pathetic remnants were a particularly dispiriting sign of futility. I remember two kinds of ex-hippies, principally: Those who had completely thrown-in the towel and gotten their real estate licenses; and those who sat around their cheerless apartments treating their hangovers with bong-hits. Both species would reminisce insufferably about their anti-establishment pranks, their immense moral courage and all that they’d done to “change the world.” It could be very embarrassing to listen to them. They were like those guys you so often meet in sports bars, bragging boisterously about all the women they’ve bedded – too thick and too drunk to realize that everybody in earshot knows they are, you might say, exaggerating.

Of course, this whole post is an exaggeration. Nothing in the past is entirely as we remember it and I have deliberately forgotten far, far more about my adolescence than I remember. But I can tell you this: I thank God, if She's out there to be thanked, that bright, spirited, beautiful Ceecee waited until 1990 to enter the world.

-cc-

BELTWAY BEAUTIFICATION (Or: Is it true what they say about our nation's capital?)

Recently, I was forced to leave the haven of home for a fortnight's journey to the City that Loves to Serve - Washington, DC. I used to live and work in the District, way back in the Reagan era, which, despite my memories of it, was apparently a Golden Age of prosperity and freedom. So much so that Washington has re-named its only endurable airport after the star of Girls On Probation.

While in Washington, I had several hair-raising adventures that reminded me of younger and happier days, when I was a bright-eyed bushy-headed gofer at the Washington Post Magazine. For instance, during a visit to the National Archives, a security officer gave me the business for endangering the security of the reading room by trying to enter it while wearing a baseball cap. I never found out if my hat was feared as a potential terrorist, or whether the Chief of Archives suspected that it might attempt to steal documents by concealing them under its brim. If the former, perhaps, in future, security officers could simply search hats for guns, knives and explosives - a procedure that would take no more than a quarter-of-an-hour, even in Washington. If the latter, I would think that my hat would be no more likely to conceal documents than my shirt or my underpants, both of which were allowed to enter the reading room without intereference.

That afternoon, as I walked back from the Archives to my cousin's house in Georgetown, I came across the following sign on M Street:




Ha, ha, ha, I thought to myself. There's Washington in a nutshell: The Municipal Beautification Department oblivious to the Department of Public Thoroughfares; an admonition for caution, incautiously obstructed. Ha, ha, ha.

Unfortunately, the ha-ha-ha's quickly gave away to consternation. All up-and-down M Street, and a quarter mile up Wisconsin Avenue, nearly all cautionary signs were obstructed in the same way.

Like the Bush Administration in Iraq, the municipal government of the District of Columbia has thrown caution to the wind.

-cc-

MASCOTS of the MONTH

Remember when you were a kid and you fell off your bike, face-first, smacking your mouth on the pavement? Remember what that tasted like? Well, that's the flavor of GRIDIRON GLORY!

Hirsh Horn's Weakly Blow is sending out a big, appreciative tom-turkey SQUAWK!!! to a pair of football mascots who never tire of smashing their mouths for their schools. That's the kind of pathological obsession it takes to spell V-I-C-T-O-R-Y. These cross-dressing exhibitionists put the "it" in "spirit" and the "oot" in "root." And you'd better believe they know . . . there's no "I" in "MASCOT."

First, let's bow our heads and say pre-victory grace over . . .

'SENATOR SNAFU'
THE EDIBLE BABY

Smuckhill Junior College Screamin' Eagles

Now let's have a fearsome Weakly Blow hellfire holler for . . .

'WILD OSCAR'
THE OPENLY-GAY

NEAPOLITAN MASTIF

GRIZZLY BIBLE INSTITUTE DANCIN' DOGS

Congratulations to November's sacrificial mammals! No turkey can touch you!

-cc-

'GOOD QUESTION, AMBER!' A Weakly Blow White House Adventure

[NOTE: The members of the West Boston Irish Drunkards Society - a fraternal organization which, despite its name, exists only to torment me - made clear their opinion of the Weakly Blow on the second day of its life: "Your blog is an abomination," they wrote to the editor, "and you are ugly and short." These anonymous cowards (they maintain their anonymity by never removing their faces from behind their humongous beer mugs, even when visiting the men's room) have once again risen from their alcoholic stupors to render the following judgement: "Dear Editor: 'Good Question Amber!' is the most a bominable [sic] post ever posted on yr a bominable [sic again] blog. But that is only because it is the longest. Very truly yours, etc." Unfortunately, the Drunkards are not altogether wrong in this instance. It is a touch long but I am not talented enough to trim it, nor humble enough to kill it. Proceed at your own risk and cease reading if your skin busts out in hives. Hirsh Horn's Weakly Blow cannot be resbonsible for rashes induced by poor writing, or by anything else. - cc]

David Almacy

Former White House Internet Director

Photo: Courtesy of the White House

A few weeks ago, I read in the always-informative-and-amusing Boston Globe that the President had initiated a Bold New Initiative aimed at solving the problem of "climate change," which is what Republicans call "global warming." To me, climate change is an important topic, because I got a kick out of March of the Penguins and I'm a sucker for baby harp seals and I enjoy having non-cancerous skin. But as noted in a previous post, the Boston Globe isn't always spot-on when it comes to seeing something, writing down what was seen, and then publishing a comprehensible account of the whole affair. So instead of relying on the Globe, I went to a website I knew I could trust - www.whitehouse.gov - to find out exactly what The Decider had decided to do. The answer was, I confess, disappointing, for the Bold New Initiative turned out to be . . .

. . . a speech.

Now, as everyone knows, a speech is better than nothing, except, I guess, this time, when it wasn't. It was fairly long - more than twenty minutes - and seemed even longer because of some unnecessary padding. Here are a few actual excerpts, guaranteed utterly genuine:

"Every day energy brings countless benefits to our people. Energy powers new hospitals and schools so we can live longer and more productive lives. Energy transforms the way we produce food . . . Right now much of the world's energy comes from oil. . . . Almost all our vehicles run on gasoline or diesel fuel."

Evidently, times have grown so tough at the White House that either President Bush's speeches are being written by a fifth grader, or he is writing them himself. I half-expected him to say: "My daddy has a big red car that can go real fast - brrrr-OOOM! And daddy's red car drinks gas that gots no lead in it."

But he did not. Instead, he said this:

"There is a way forward that will enable us to grow our economies and protect the environment and that's called technology."

I read that sentence over a few times; then I read the whole speech over again. All of that reading took about three-and-a-half minutes, because I read very slowly. Then I took another three-and-a-half minutes to think a little bit, but I had to stop because thinking makes me queasy - almost as queasy as that sentence: "There is a way forward . . . and that's called technology."

In the first place, "technology" is a noun that pines for some sort of a verb. I've got nothing against nouns - "penguin," "seal" and "skin," for instance, are all nouns. But when someone, especially the President, initiates an initiative, a noun can't do the job alone.

Consider this: if President McKinley had relied on nouns alone, we might never have been able to have the Spanish-American War. The initiative behind that war was: REMEMBER THE MAINE! People started yelling that initiative at other people, so loudly, and so frequently, a lot of guys probably went off to war thinking that Spain had blown up Maine itself. That's how you know a Bold New Initiative is working: People start acting even stupider than they really are. But supposing McKinley had stood before Congress and said: "There is a way forward that will enable us to take Cuba and the Philippines and, incidentally, Guam, away from Spain - and that is called Maine."

Doesn't work, does it?

There could be a deeper problem here, too. I like technology as much as the next guy. Without technology, you couldn't very well take cameras up to the North Pole and follow penguins around, could you? But there was a particular way in which we humans kick-started this whole "climate change" thing . . . and that was called technology.

So I decided that it was my editorial duty to put these concerns to the proper authorities, which, in this case, meant President Bush and his wife, Laura. I realized that it might be necessary to climb a few rungs up the bureaucratic ladder before a face-to-face meeting could be arranged, but where better to start than www.whitehouse.gov? Sure enough, a few clicks of the "search" function and I was directed to . . .

WHITE HOUSE INTERACTIVE

Here was a page where citizen journalists like me could engage in constructive dialogue with America's most powerful, non-partisan public servants. Before engaging, however, I decided to "lurk," as we bloggers say, reading a few of the questions that other citizen journalists had previously put before the White House. Question # 1:

Question, Amber from Eaton: George W. Bush is what number as President of the U.S.?

Answer, David Almacy, Former White House Internet Director: Good question, Amber. President George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States. His father, George H.W. Bush, is the 41st. In fact, the order of U.S. Presidents is the source of one of my favorite trivia questions. As previously stated, President Bush is 43rd, but there have only been 42 men to serve as President. Why the difference? The answer is because Grover Cleveland is the only man to serve two terms, non-consecutively. . . .

It goes on from there, for a long time, which is understandable, I guess, since it's the source of one of David's favorite trivia questions. But, to my mind, it raised a couple of additional trivia questions. First, what does Amber have against the encyclopedia? Second, if her question was a good one, what constitutes a bad one?

I tried scrolling down to examine the rest of the questions, but I hadn't scrolled long before I found there was nowhere left to scroll. Evidently, Amber's question was so good, all other questions have been removed from White House Interactive and David Almacy has been relieved of his cumbersome responsibilities. Not a single question has been asked since Amber asked hers on March 26, 2007 10:57 a.m.(EDT)

Sheesh, I thought to myself, nearly everyone in America must have read Amber's question by now, and David's answer, too. Had White House Interactive really ceased interacting? This seemed unfair - a thought which surprised me because I didn't realize the White House was capable of being unfair. But then - aha! - I noticed that at the top of the page, there was a hot link, urging me to SUBMIT A QUESTION. So I did, to wit:

Dear David Almacy, Former White House Internet Director,

How are you? I am fine. Here is my question: It seems that no questions have been asked or answered on "White House Interactive" since Amber's good question got the star treatment back in March. Wassup with that? Has this service been discontinued? If so, why? And to whom should I complain about it? I am a very skilled complainer and maybe I can get you your job back. Yours, patriotically, Conrad Coleridge, Brass Castle, NJ

To my immense surprise, I received an answer from David almost immediately:

Thank you for your input.

I wasn't aware that I'd put anything in and wondered where I'd put it. But at least the White House, through David Almacy, expressed its position with uncharacteristic swiftness and precision, even if that position seemed a little more guarded than I felt was necessary.

So, to David Almacy, wherever you are, I am happy to say . . .

You're welcome!

HELLO TO THE FLOWERS

My uncle, Richard Feynman, used to say this a lot:

"I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view that I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say, 'Look how beautiful it is!' and I'll agree. Then he'll say, 'I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull.'

"I think he's kind of nutty.

"First of all, the beauty he sees is available to other people, and to me. Although I may not be as aesthetically refined as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions in there, which also have a beauty. There's not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter. There's beauty at smaller dimensions - the inner structure. Also, the processes: The fact that the color of the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting: It means the insects can see the color! It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in lower forms? All kinds of interesting questions that only add to the excitement and the mystery and the awe of a flower! "

I saw something today that made me think of all of this, but before I show you what it was, I must ask you to consider the beauty of the Browneyed Susan (Rudbeckia triloba) . . .

. . . a flower that always reminds me of my sister, another beautiful Browneyed Susan. But forget her for a moment (sorry, Sis.) Keep thinking of that flower, if you can, while thinking about this: Uncle Richard also introduced the world to nanotechnology in a speech he gave in December of 1959. See the connection?

No, probably not.

Well, take a look at this:

See what I mean? The orange photograph - more accurately a "photomicrograph" - was taken by Ghim Wei Ho, a Ph.D. student of nanotechnology at Cambridge. It shows "a 3-D nanostructure grown by controlled nucleation of silicon carbide nanowires on Gallium catalyst particles." If, for some reason, you want to know what that actually means, there's an explanation here. But why bother? I mean, why take it all apart and make it all dull? ;-)

I doubt that even Uncle Richard could have imagined that flowers not only contain beauty in many dimensions (so to speak) but exist in many dimensions! On the other hand, I doubt that he would have been surprised.

Jesus, I miss my Uncle Richard! And in this, I gather, I'm not entirely alone.

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Fine print: The photomicrograph is ©Ghim Wei Ho and Prof. Mark Welland, Nanostructure Center, University of Cambridge. The Browneyed Susans are © Me - all rights protected by my platoon of sleazy lawyers.

GOODBYE TO THE FLOWERS

I've lived in nearly every part of this country at one time or another but, to me, it's only in New England that the "poetry of seasonal change" feels like more than a cliche. Most times, in most places, a changing season is treated as just one more dreary pretext for one more dreary sale down at some dreary suburban mall. Don't you hate that?

But here in Massachusetts, spring and summer really do sing the body electric. Winter really does look and feel like a whited sepulcher. And in between floats autumn, the richest season by far, when Life and Death wrestle over the tiny souls of a billion fiery leaves.

The fall announces itself with a chill that whips into your eyes, your mouth, your throat and makes you feel everything a little more deeply: The scent of burnt leaves; the flavor of apple cider and cinnamon donuts; and the dull pain in your (my) still-healing heart.

Of course, there's a lot that's unsettling about a New England autumn. It makes me conscious of how little time I have here on earth, and how much I've got to lose. It reminds me that my wonderful freedom to feel and to write as I please is a terribly fragile privilege - as fragile as the blooms that I often stop to photograph with my little Nikon Coolpix. Those blooms are beginning to shrivel-up and flutter away now and I wonder what and who I will be when they return - and whether I'll be here to see them. Today, as I was snapping my camera at a lilly, I found myself humming an old song by the late John Hartford called . . .

I'M GOING TO WORK IN TALL BUILDINGS

someday, my baby, when i am a man
and others have taught me the best that they can
they'll cut off my hair and sell me a suit
and send me to work in tall buildings

so it's
goodbye to the sunshine
goodbye to the dew
goodbye to the flowers
and goodbye to you

i'm off to the subway
i must not be late,

i'm going to work in tall buildings

now, when i'm retired, my life is my own

i've made all the payments, it's time to go home

and wonder what happened, betwixt and between . . .

when i went to work in tall buildings

So my autumn wish for you, my loved ones (and for everybody else on earth, too) is, may you never have to work in tall buildings. Unless, of course, you like that sort of thing.

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NEWSFLASH! GLOBE'S FLASHY HEADLINES FLASHIEST ON THE GLOBE!

I think it was Arthur Schopenhauer who said, Wenn das Leben nicht entworfen war, um Ihr Herz zu brechen, als es war schlecht in der Tat entworfen ording - which, according to the Babelfish translator, means, roughly: "If life was NOT designed in order to break your heart, it was badly designed indeed."

I couldn't have said it better myself, especially in German. My heart has been broken so many times, in so many places, by so many people, things and institutions, that I sometimes wonder: Which do I get to have more often, heartbreak or toaster waffles?

And yet, as accustomed as I am to the agony of despair that follows the explosion (or implosion) of something I once loved, it's hard to believe that even a heart as brittle as mine could be broken by . . . a newspaper.

But the Boston Globe is no ordinary newspaper.

I started reading the Globe in 1979, shortly after matriculating at my dear old alma mater, The Massachusetts College of Insufferable Brats. (Our dear old college motto: "It may be your money, daddy, but it's my goddamn life!") During the week, we brats did not often read newspapers, because we rarely got out of bed 'til late afternoon and by that time, all of the news was obsolete. But on Sunday, when you needed to find something to do with the girl you'd slept with on Saturday night - something that didn't involve talking to her very much - a thick, sharable newspaper was a valuable acquisition.

Although most Insufferables preferred the New York Times, chiefly because it absorbed more of daddy's money, I liked the Globe. It weighed a lot less than the Times, the pictures were larger, the comics more plentiful and, best of all, it came with coupons that saved you money on salty snacks. The only thing I didn't like about it was that the ink would rub-off on your hands and, if you weren't careful, your shirt. I used to wonder if they printed it with natural lump charcoal.

Seriously, it was a great paper. The editorial page was feisty and liberal; feistier still were the SWAT teams of dogged, fearless investigative journalists; and, without a doubt, the Globe boasted the best news photographers in the country.

Oh, and one more thing: It was scrupulously edited.

Today, however, the Boston Globe is a piece of shit, and Editor Martin Baron and CEO/Publisher Richard Gilman never cease in their efforts to flush the thing farther down the crapper. Over the last decade-or-so, I watched the slow crucifixion and decomposition of this cultural treasure until my heart broke; but, happily, the heartbreak is over. Since there's no longer the slightest vestige of cultural treasure in what now passes for the Globe, I'm able to enjoy it on its own buffoonish terms. If Chevy Chase had been born a newspaper, he would have grown up to be the Boston Globe.

Except for the Red Sox boxscores, there is very little actual information in the Globe, but you can always extract plenty of entertainment from it's impetuous fouling of the English language. Think of a small boy reverently picking up a beautiful, expensive violin . . . and then using it to wallop his little sister on top of her head. Here's a selection of actual headlines - guaranteed genuine - all of which appeared on the paper's website in just one week!

BIOTERROR DRILL BY MAIL SET FOR BOSTON

FINALLY, LEFTHANDER GETS OPPOSITE RESULT

TURBINE STAKES ITS ONLINE GAME TURF

LOVE INFUSES FIREFIGHTERS RITES

NY WELCOMES WAVE ADAPTIVE MODULAR VESSEL

PAVOROTTI ALWAYS VOICED HIS LOVE OF TENNIS

IMMERSION DIRECTOR EXERCISES OPTIONS

LOSS TO VENUS NOT UPSETTING

Even more entertaining - at least to me - are the endless reporting and editing pratfalls that make the Globe's "Corrections" section its most valuable asset. Herewith, last week's choicest offering:

September 7, 2007 Correction: Because of a reporting error, a Page One story in some editions yesterday about the TV series "Curious George" misidentified Arthur, the main character of another PBS show. Arthur is an aardvark, not a mouse.

One thing's for damn sure: You'll never have to read a correction like that in Hirsh Horn's Weakly Blow.

6AARDVARK6

6MOUSE6

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The Weakly Blow Celebrity Vault, Vol. I: COOKIN' WITH THE KING

Most of my adulthood has been spent, or mis-spent, as a bumbling journalist. I don’t regret the journalism, but the bumbling was unfortunate and sometimes, when I recall the worst of my bumbles, I cringe with such force that I risk serious injury. So I’ve tried to forget as much of the past 20 years as possible.

But a couple of weeks ago, my toilet-seat cover exploded. Stay with me, please, you'll see where I'm going with this in a minute. I say it exploded, but that's just my hypothesis; all I know for sure is that I went into the bathroom and the toilet was wearing its cover in a slovenly fashion, caved in over one eye, as though it had been out on a bender the night before. I'm probably exaggerating a little bit, for effect, but this part is more-or-less true: I had to go down to the basement to get a toilet wrench.

Now, I have two good reasons to avoid going to the basement. For one thing, it's inhabited by a community of bats who despise me. About a year ago, one of them flapped his way up a heating vent and emerged in my bedroom, where I was lying around in my underpants and did not wish to be disturbed. I urged him to leave, as politely and firmly as I could, standing by the window and waving my arms battishly, demonstrating what I needed him to do. He declined to take my advice, so I retrieved a feather duster from the broom closet and chased him around the room with it, trying to drive him out an open window. But he just kept circling the walls, smacking his fangs and waving his little ears until, finally, the feather duster and I got sick of it. So I went and got a broom, slapped him silly with it, pinned him against the radiator and bashed his brains out with a ball-peen hammer. Of course, as everyone knows, bats are very loyal to their own and hold onto their grudges for many generations.

But there's an even more compelling reason for me to shun the basement: Many of my most cringe-inducing memories live down there. And on this occasion (the toilet occasion, I mean), just as I was about to head back upstairs with the wrench, my eye feel upon two whole boxes of such memories - dozens of cassette tape-recordings of bumbling interviews that I have conducted over the last couple of decades, mostly with celebrities.

I don't know what made me carry those boxes upstairs; perhaps I was procrastinating about the toilet. But whatever the reason, I started listening to the tapes and realized that, despite the hours and hours of humiliating faux pas and reporterly boorishnesses they contain, there's a lot of really interesting and peculiar stuff in there, too. Most of it is stuff that I would not wish to have published in profit-making periodicals, because I hate 'em (how I came to feel that way is a story for another time), so my next move was obvious: Publish them in the world-famous Weakly Blow, which, whatever its unfathomable destiny, will never be described as "profit making."

And just like that, an occasional feature was born: The Weakly Blow Celebrity Vault.

Today, we open the vault for a demi-celebrity, the late Mary Jenkins, Elvis Presley's cook.

I interviewed Mary (it is impossible to call her "Ms. Jenkins" - trust me) by telephone on December 10, 1994, while preparing an Elvis-related coffee-table book for Life magazine. A few weeks earlier, in a preliminary interview, I'd asked Mary if she believed the rumors that Elvis was still alive. Pish-posh, she replied (or words to that effect), she knew that he was dead . . . because his ghost was staying in the back of her house.

The interview lasted about 40 minutes and, as you might expect, the majority of my questions were about her house-guest. She had sent me a copy of her book, Elvis: Memories Beyond Graceland Gates, which told some of the typically depressing stories about Elvis' porcine years, of which the following is but one depressing example:

"In later years, Elvis' appetite called for lots of very rich foods. Dr Nick (Elvis' pill-spewing personal physician -ed.) had him on a diet almost constantly then. [But] Elvis would call me in the kitchen. 'Mary, fix me some sausage and biscuits the way I like them.' The way he liked them was to melt two sticks of butter in a skillet, take about six or seven homemade biscuits, cut them in half, dip the halves in melted butter, put sausage in the middle and put the halves back together. . . . Elvis' colon got to bothering him real bad, so Dr Nick put him in the hospital. He had been up there several days when, one afternoon, I got a call from him. "Mary," he said, "I want you to fix me some kraut and wiener sandwiches. . . .'"

And so on. Of course, I had to ask her about that stuff (she would have been thrown off-guard if I'd started right in, asking about Elvis' ghost) but my heart wasn't really in it, so the results were unremarkable and I've deleted them. The ghostly part of the interview, though, went rather well and is transcribed below. I've subjected it to some subtle editing (and occasional re-wording), but only for clarity, not style. Mary was a dropper of malapropisms and I have removed most of those, because even though she died in 2000, I have no wish to make fun of her. But there are two malaprops that I think reveal a little about how she saw the world, so I've left them alone. First, the doorbells at rich people's houses are often connected to a series of musical pipes that most people call "chimes." Mary, however, called them "charms" and, as you'll see, she had her reasons. I expect she also had reasons for calling a collection of bedroom furniture a "suit," not the least of which may be that calling it a "suite" is a silly little commercial pomposity - don't you think?

One last thing: An understandably incredulous friend has asked whether this whole thing is for real, or a joke. So, listen, no balderdash, no applesauce - it's for real.

QUESTION: So, um, Elvis’ spirit moved into your house. Is that correct?

MARY JENKINS: Uh-huh, that’s correct. After he passed away, I wanted to see him. I prayed to see him. But he didn’t come. And everyone told me, “You have to stop worrying and pray that you will see him.” So I tried to stop worrying as much as I could.

Now, the first time he came, I was at Graceland. There wasn’t no one there but myself and his Aunt Delta. She was in her room and I was in the kitchen, sittin’ in a big chair. I wasn’t asleep; it was around 1:30, 2:00, somethin’ like that. We had, you know, them charms that make the doorbell ring. Those things started hittin’ up against each other - ringin’ and hittin’ and ringin’ and hittin’, and his aunt woke up. She hollered and said: “Mary, Mary! What is that?! What is that?”

And I said: “I’m not afraid. I know what it is.” It was him - singin’.

Then, the next time that happened, it was around the same time. I heard him walkin’ down the steps, just like we would hear him when he was alive, walkin’ up and down the stairs.

Q: You knew what his footsteps sounded like, from -

MJ: Yes! Yes! I heard him comin’ down the stairs just as plai-ai-ai-n . . . He walked down to the bottom step and them charms started ringin’ again – just started ringin’! But he didn’t call me that night; he didn’t wake up.

Q: When did he call you?

MJ: One night, he come to me in a dream. He said, “Mary, I want to come to your house to rest. I wanna rest.” He looked just like himself, you know? Like he wasn’t dead.

I said: “Well you know you're always welcome! I’ll fix a place for you. But, ain’t but one thing about it: I don’t have a bathroom in that room." He said, “Don’t worry about that; The Boys will be with me and they will prepare for that.”

[Editor's note: “The Boys” refers to Elvis’ Memphis Mafia, an entourage of a dozen-or-so hangers-on who served Elvis with shit-eating obsequiousness. Sorry for describing them that way, but perhaps it explains how, in Mary’s mind, The Boys might have been able to compensate for the lack of a bathroom.]

MJ: So I fixed the room up for him. It’s my guest bedroom in the back of the house. I had a bedroom suit in there - well, at that time I didn’t have the same bedroom suit that I do have. But I had a king size bed and I had it fixed up real nice - and he moved on in! Then, he came to me in another dream and he was talking about how nice it was and how he liked it and how he could rest in that room.

Q: Why do you think he keeps coming back like this?

MJ: I don’t know. I believe he just come back to see about to me. And he could have wanted to tell me something.

Q: But he hasn’t told you anything yet?

MJ: No. But we was reeee-eal close. Real close. He would tell me to come up and sit and watch the church programs with him on Sunday. He would enjoy it and I would, too.

Now, the last time it happened, he come down the steps and the charms started ringin’ and he stood there, right at the bottom of them steps. I looked up at him, and I didn’t say nothing and he didn’t say nothing. And then he just vanished away.

Q: That’s . . . incredible.

MJ: It sure is.

It sure was. Sad to say, my relationship with Mary, which had started out rather warm, soon went into a deep-freeze. Shortly after my little book was published, she phoned me up and preached me an indignant sermon that was often difficult to understand. Apparently, the photographer who took her portrait was even more of a bumbler than I am, and had busted one of her chairs. For this, he had paid her $75 in cash, but she now felt that sum was insufficient on the grounds that "seventy-five dollars don't buy no chair." I replied that, in my experience, it usually did, especially if the chair was a breakable one. Unabashed, she adjusted her aim and told me that the portrait itself was damnable, and that my caption to it contained an outrageous error. I had written that she occasionally served Elvis a scrumptious dessert called 7-Up Cake, which, she averred, she did not do.

My heart sank when she told me so - truly. I hate making mistakes in print, even when they involve mere desserts. But while Mary continued screeching at me, I thumbed through her book and there it was, as plain as the nose on Elvis' face: The King, she'd written, loved Seven-Up Cake . . . so much so that she'd included it in her compendium of "30 of Elvis' Favorite Recipes." When I brought this to her attention, she paused long enough to take two large gulps of air. And then, she did what all celebrities (and demi-celebrities) do at such a time:

She threatened to sue me.

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7-Up Cake

1 lb. margarine or butter (not one stick, mind you - one pound)
3 cups sugar
3 cups flour
¾ cup 7-Up
2 Tbs lemon flavoring or vanilla extract
6 eggs
Butter and eggs should be room temperature.

Combine butter and sugar, beat 10 – 15 minutes until creamy. Add eggs, beating in one at a time. Add flour and mix. Add 7-Up and flavoring, pour into a greased and floured bundt pan. Bake at 325 degrees for one hour and 15 – 20 minutes.

Glaze
Lemon Juice
1 cup powdered sugar
Mix well and pour over hot cake in pan

Begin eating, thinking of Elvis and Mary and the special sort of love they shared.

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