STOUT FELLOWS

The karaoke place was a big slice of steaming putrified hell, so we didn't go in. I don't even know what that song was, but it sounded willowy, blonde, and washed out. Which is precisely like MAGA imagines Helen of Troy, because it says so in the Bible. Life is too short to hear MAGAite screeching. Now, if it had been a whole bunch of hair-ribboned ladies cosplaying Japanese Anime French maids singing, I might have been tempted. My friend the bookseller would, despite his in this case likely far superior judgement, have been dragged in.
Imagine the Belles of Saint Trinians, but in Franco-Japanese. Oooh, zesty!

Sadly, karaoke does not fulfill even my most twisted old-geezer fantasies.
That's probably a good thing too.

I seriously doubt that the world is ready for shapely big-eyed misses in modest black dresses, white frilly aprons, and Catholic headmistress footwear, preparing lovely cups of royal milk tea while discussing the ins and outs of aged Virginia flake tobacco such as Sir Bertrand Russell smoked, Comoy briar pipes from the thirties through the sixties, and why it seems like every great Dutch poet from the sixteen hundreds through the early nineteen hundreds seemed to invent his or her own grammar, orthography, and even vocabulary.

Years ago an editor postulated that there ain't no such thing as a Limburgian language. Then sat back and waited. The resultant comment string, very sincere, proved him right. Several hundred screeds in Limburgic that collective showed such dialect diversity and fracturing that no one could possibly argue the case for Limburgian linguistic coherence. Or coherence, period.

There are several languages in the New Guinea highlands that have extremely limited vocabularies. And utterly lack any means of expressing 'weltanschauung' or 'existentialismus'. Antidisestablishmentarianism. Gestalt.

Almost all of them have a distinct word for 'penis-gourd'. Sometimes several. Whereas ALL versions of Limburgic use exactly the same word for that. Quod erat demonstrandum. And by the way, no one is interested in your penis-gourd. There is more to life than penis-gourds.

What is curious about the hilltribe languages is that there are either two or three words for all vegetables, which translate as "good to eat" versus "not so good to eat", or "nice veg", "not particularly good veg", and "crappy veg that those schmucks one valley over eat".
Which is remarkably like English cooking.


The burger joint was shortstaffed this evening. Despite that, service was prompt, efficient, and capable. Hardest working man in North Beach. Worth his weight in gold.
The former bail-out bar was closed. The current one nearly empty.
Tat Yee was the only customer when we got there.
American wrestling on teevee.
A very stupid sport.
Empty gourds.


I did manage to introduce the bookseller to the depravity of 'Little Bunny Foo Foo', which is a formative American cultural manifestation, illustrative of much in the contemporary welt anschauung, so at least there was that. A victory of sorts.



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