Hunter Ceiling Fans: Spinning nowhere fast

First volley
Bought my Hunter ceiling fan at Costco months ago, and was appalled to find that the product came missing parts -- the "remote control receiver" and 3 6-32 machine screws. That's completely unacceptable, but what's been worse is the absolutely atrocious Hunter customer service. My wife and I have called more than once to have these items sent to us, and after literally months, we've only received the remote control receiver. The screws sent to us were the wrong ones. How does a company like Hunter pass itself off as a credible entity when it cannot get even the most basic aspects of packaging and problem resolution straight? Well, I'm a blogger and plan to share my experience with the Better Business Bureau and with http://consumerist.com/. I don't take kindly to being treated like a fool.

Reply from Hunter
Thank you for your email. We apologize that you have experienced a problem receiving replacement parts. Please provide the order number or phone number used when you contacted us so that we can locate your order in our system. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Please contact us again with the requested information for further assistance.

Second volley
"Please provide the order number or phone number used when you contacted us so that we can locate your order in our system."

Is that a joke? Are you joking with me? Could you put an already inconvenienced customer to more trouble? Should I also include the birthday and favorite color of the operator to whom I spoke?

After an arduous 17 minutes, most of which was only various forms of "hold", I spoke to a Hunter operator today and learned the screw I need is on back-order and won't be available until January 2010. Where do you get your screws? The planet Crypton? IT'S A SCREW. Do you have a single person machining your screws for your entire customer base? Ridiculous upon ridiculous. Hey, I'm only some moron who was stupid enough to buy your product. I mean, who am I that I should impose myself upon Hunter? In fact, accept my apologies for bothering you, for taking up your time.

You know what? You know that strange mental meme in Korea called "fan death?" Where Koreans are terrified of being in a room, or sleeping in a room where is a fan? I hope the fear of fan death sweeps North American. I hope it sweeps your entire customer base. Because given the level of incompetence Hunter has exhibited in my brief experience, I think it's equally irrational to purchase anything from a company that is so backward and upside-down that it takes upwards of nine months to provide a customer with THREE SCREWS. It takes nine months for a human being to form in the womb and be born -- and that's how long it takes Hunter to send me three screws that should have been in the fan I bought in the first place. Screw. Human being. In Hunter's world, both have the same gestation period. Insane.

Soundboarding Part I

Corman couldn't help himself. When he heard a sound from outside, or even from another room, that he could not place, he immediately ascribed it the oddest, most absurd origins. When he lived in an apartment, the rolling sound that came from his upstairs neighbor (probably an office chair on the hardwood floor), brought to mind an image of her rolling cannon balls across the floor, or playing snooker while lying on the floor: the object to send balls through the legs of chairs, banking them off the molding so they came out from under the center of the couch. Or, the times random bangs of objects falling startled him, he imagined her learning how to juggle with lead replicas of parakeets.

During college, Corman rented a room in a neighborhood that had a strangely dense population of dogs whose owners left them tied up in their respective back yards all day and all night. Few of them, though, even seemed like actual dogs. Most were mangy, sloppily cross-bred hulks, seeming to be part hyena, part jackal, part hobo. Taking the back alley as a short cut to school was like walking the gauntlet in a maximum security prison: the dogs all coming to malevolent life as Corman passed. All of the dogs rushing their back fences, growling, barking, snarling. The din was terrible, but what was worse was that it somehow seemed personal. The dogs seemed to single out Corman as someone they hated and cursed, reviled and spat upon. The dogs only lacked were bandannas and tattoos, to make the prison gang scene complete.

That was years ago, and Corman was now married and a homeowner, struggling each day to sustain the pretense of ordinary life in his ordinary neighborhood. But the ordinary neighborhood was its own hotbed of alien clamor. Once, while relcined on the couch, Corman heard a loud, insectile sound circling the block. He imagined a teenager on the street was flying a fully weaponized remote control kill-drone around the neighbor; a military-surplus eBay gift from his engineer father. When Corman finally troubled himself to look out the window after the sixth or seventh pass, he saw a full-grown man astride a motor bike the size of a lapdog. It was incredible he could fold his body onto the tiny contraption. By the look on his face, one might have thought the man was test-piloting some nano-technology death-machine. As Corman went back to his book, he imagined the man taking the mini mini-bike to a gas station for fuel, cradling it like a cat and gently feeding it the gas pump nozzle.

Other times, the neighbors further down the street blew off fireworks (there was no rhyme or reason that brought out the fire crackers; it need only be sundown and not snowing outside), Corman imagined a hillbilly, musket shoot-out amid the beer-swilling horde, whom he mentally monikered "The Philistines." They were harmless people, he guessed, but there were very much outdoor people, who gathered around picnic tables like a hunting party, like some primitive council; like the start of society. Especially when they gathered around a bonfire that they built in the middle of one of their driveways. They hooted and hollered into the night. As Corman grew restless one night against their snarling-jovial sounds, he wondered if he might walk by the driveway the next morning -- fold-out lawn chairs askew and overturned, beer bottles everywhere -- and see the charred remains of a human leg or torso in the raised metal pit where they fired up the ritual flames each night.

Proximity had everything to do with the amount of mental anguish the sounds caused Corman. Low-flying jets rankled him. The mini mini-bike irked him. The Philistines annoyed him. But, unfortunately, some of the most torturous sounds occurred right in his own home: Corman was married to a Soundist.

Soundists don't hear their own noise. No one has yet determined if "Soundism" is a neurological condition, psychological in nature, or simply a myth created by complaining Hearists (those who seem to hear everything).

On the grand whole of things, Corman was enormously lucky. His wife was lovely in all ways: temperament, looks, sense of humor, compatibility, etc.. All except one: she was a Soundist. Not only that, she was a virtuoso Soundist. When she loaded the dishwasher, the cacophony was so great, Corman imagined her standing in the kitchen wearing a football helmet and smashing plates, bowls and cutlery into the open dishwasher with a tennis racket. Everafter, he demanded that the dishes and their cleanliness and use-readiness be my responsibility; that the dishwasher be my domain. Eventually, he found us clang-resistant carbon-wrapped cutlery; indestructible, yet made no more sound than a rubber ball when dropped on the tile floor.

The slamming and banging that occurred when she cooked filled him with images that she worked with mallets and jackhammers and small explosives. Afterward, he ensured that dinner preparations were under my purview, silent salads and quiet frozen lasagnas and quesadillas became the order of the day.

When she cleaned, he imagined her punching holes into the walls with white phosphorus and C4. He took care of that as much as he could while she was at work. That, and the laundry as well. Whenever she went downstairs into the unfinished basement, sounds began to emanate upward like those that might be heard in a mine shaft: the screech of metal against stone, the rumbling rock of explosives splitting great mounds of earth, strange clanging as though someone dropped a metal lunch bucket down a narrow, stone-walled well.

She never meant any harm, that was obvious enough. There were times the noise was so egregious, Corman would huddle in his home office and simply listen to the great crashing and rending beyond his closed door. When he emerged, he always expected to find structural damage to the house; blackened holes in the walls, the smell of burnt hair and wiring pervading. But he never did. Everything was fine.


Part II

Bent over the barrel so long, it hurts to straighten up

My favorite café recently tried an innovative promotion: Name Your Own Price Night. Patrons were invited to pay whatever they wanted for their drinks. If they chose, they could have treated themselves to some special concoction that might have normally run four or five dollars, and paid only a dollar for it. Or, if they were of a charitable mind, they could have paid a little more for their usual, and helped the proprietor out.

Of all the possibilities such a night held, what actually occurred was rather surprising to all involved: patrons were irked, rankled, put-out, bothered, cheesed-off, displeased and otherwise unwilling to name their own price. They just wanted to pay what they'd always paid.

I didn't happen to be there that evening, so I didn't witness this firsthand. But hearing, later, from reliable sources, I was mystified. As described to me, patrons were utterly baffled and bewildered by the prospect of naming their own price for their drinks. It rattled them. The response to the evening's promotion was overwhelmingly negative.

Which made me wonder: Did the proprietor unwittingly tap into the rancid gene within our fellow citizens that makes us all such easy prey for our wanton, irresponsible, tax-addicted politicians? Have people been bent over the barrel for so long that it's too painful to straighten up? Must be.

In the 1980s, there was a popular television show called Real People, which featured strange and quirky -- usually funny -- people from around the United States. I recall one segment they did on a restaurant that allowed patrons to pay whatever they wanted for their meals. On its face, it sounded like a business plan drawn up by the Mel Brooks character, Max Bialystock, fully aimed at sinking the restaurant. But, strangely, patrons were not only honest -- no one ever ordered a full meal and then paid only a dollar for it -- they tended to overcharge themselves. It was a great story about common decency and honesty.

The concept can and has worked. So, what's wrong with the people where I live?

I believe this case is the first tangible evidence I've come across of not only the existence of the flaccid tyranny under which Canadians live, but also its effect. Canada has no PATRIOT Act, no Guantanamo Bay, no Blackwater, no extraordinary rendition.

What we have may be worse: A decades-long bureaucratic coup d'etat. Domination by pencil-pushing, paper-shuffling career civil servants. Beancounters as potentates. All of whom have bent The People, not with brutality, but with bland fish-eyed blankness, officiousness, and a lust for the fine print. They have broken The People with the death-of-a-thousand cuts insult to the brain, to the spirit, to the soul with fine upon fee upon surcharge upon tax. Taking and taking and taking, whittling away every corner and edge of a citizen's income and sustenance and pleasure. And always devising new attacks, such as the so-called Harmonized Tax.

My overwrought imagination sees the people who wouldn't name their own price for their drinks as abused children who go stand in the corner on their own the moment they sense they may have done something wrong.

Where is civilization at when civilians have been so woefully mistreated for so long, that they cannot partake in a fun night where the foot of the Crown is not firmly on the back of their neck? It's as though people don't recognize freedom or fairness when they're faced with it. Or, at the very least, don't know how to enjoy or avail of it.

Being allowed to stop banging their heads against the Wall-of-Taxed-to-Death-life, my friends and neighbors didn't enjoy the cessation of pain, they worried that they might have broken the wall. And might have to pay for it. And pay tax on that payment. Or be fined, or written up, or marked down in the "red" column of some desk jockey's ledger.

Canadian Indoorsmen name new Poet Laureate!

The Fraternal Order of Canadian Indoorsmen announced today that Robert Earl Stewart, author of Something Burned Along the Southern Border is its new poet laureate -- in recognition of this book's important contribution to literature.

Brother Stewart was among the founding members of The Fraternal Order of Canadian Indoorsmen, and pioneered "Frontporchmanship" in 2002. He has been a loyal and dedicated member and shall hold the position of Poet Laureate for one calendar year.

Congratulations Brother Stewart!

Taobh istigh go bhfuil ár amach na ndoirse (Indoors is our out of doors)

The Reading

It was autumn, once again, and time for The Festival of the Book in the wee city of Boilston. The largest meeting place in the locale -- the Arnold "Gabby" Goone Local 758 union hall -- was spiffed and stocked with bookmarks and programs, flyers and stacks of 70- and 80-page books authored by the events' readers.

The emcee for the poetry evening was Graydon Gobshyte, "professor of Humanities and Inanities at the university," he chuckled, introducing himself.

Graydon dressed in Lord Byron black, cinematically contrasting his white push-broom mustachio and hair, which he wore in a "come-as-you-may" Princeton cut. He sat upon "a stool-like structure," as he pithily referred to the tall stool at the narrow lectern at the head of the room. He surveyed the audience for the poetry reading.

"Birds are like raisins," he addressed the audience. "Verse are like caymans. Incandescent. Omnipresent. Apoplectic. Epileptic." He enjoyed the sound of his voice in the ringing silence; pinging on the mind of each eager listener like a felt mallet on a xylophone bar. His British-Albertan-Kentuckian accent was in fine tune.

"Poetry is sheer, shocking, volatile and eggshell. Tomahawk. Roadblock. But most of all -- as Summerhanz said of Quarendon's work -- 'It does nothing.'"

Graydon smiled without smiling, pleased with his parry. "It gives me great pleasure to introduce the first reader in our program. He is a poet who has won numerous national and international awards. Among them, he has worn the Fitzcummings Poetry Speedo three years running in Grand Bend, Ontario. Was awarded the Clint Astor Quill in Pegasus, Illinois. Held the Hamish Ludon Chair for an entire half summer session semester in Fogshire, U.K., and whose work has been anthologized throughout eastern Europe and the Caribbean."

Dramatic pause.

"I give you, Oscar Winner."

Polite applause.

Oscar came forward, a bent, balding man who might have been forty or sixty years of age. His countenance was a circuitboard of tics and twitches. He regarded the audience with a series of quick, bird-like glances. In his hands, he clutched a saddled-stitched copy of his most recent book of poems: Dreamcatching Canoes of the Solar Distance Fog Bank.

"Thanks," he muttered in a voice like a rusty hinge; his "S"s sounded like a blast of static coming from the back of his throat. "Thanks so much."

He read part of a sonnet cycle in which he envisioned quilts his grandmother quilted as canned preserves; marmalade mosaics of memory.

When Winner finished the third Petrarchan sonnet, Graydon led the polite applause, seeming more to chase the anemic poet away from the lectern, clapping his hands, than applauding his reading. There. Graydon had his audience back.

"I don't think it's too early in the day to quote Aristotle," he chuckled, "who was at his most priggish and provocative when he said, 'Από ό, τι έχουμε πει ότι θα πρέπει να θεωρηθεί ότι η λειτουργία του ποιητή είναι να περιγράψει, δεν είναι αυτό που συνέβη, αλλά ένα είδος πράγμα που μπορεί να συμβεί, δηλαδή ό, τι είναι δυνατόν ως πιθανή και αναγκαία. Η διάκριση μεταξύ ιστορικός και ποιητής δεν είναι στην πεζογραφία μία γραφή και το άλλο στίχος-μπορεί να θέσει το έργο του Ηροδότου σε στίχους, και θα εξακολουθεί να είναι ένα είδος ιστορίας? Αποτελείται πραγματικά σε αυτό, ότι εκείνο που περιγράφει το πράγμα που έχει, και το άλλο ένα είδος πράγμα που θα μπορούσε να είναι. Εξ ου και η ποίηση είναι κάτι πιο φιλοσοφικό και της εισαγωγής πιο σοβαρή από ό, τι ιστορία, δεδομένου ότι οι δηλώσεις του σχετικά με τη φύση της μάλλον καθολικές, ενώ εκείνα της ιστορίας είναι singulars. Με την καθολική δήλωση εννοώ ένα ως προς το τι έχει ή τέτοιου είδους άνθρωπος είναι πιθανό ή κατ 'ανάγκη να πω ή να κάνουν-που είναι ο σκοπός της ποίησης, αν και σφραγίζουν τα ίδια ονόματα με τους χαρακτήρες? Από μια μοναδική κατάσταση, το ένα ως προς ό, τι , λένε, ο Αλκιβιάδης είχε ή είχε κάνει γι 'αυτόν.'"

Humble pause. Graydon then introduced the next reader: a shockingly heavy woman named Maryanne Haywire, who read several poems about works of art, she explained, which didn't exist. She smiled over her clever premise as the audience pretended to understand it.

Halfway through her reading, Rena Carmichael -- a dedicated bingo player who had come to see her neighbor, Cyril Beacon, read -- burst into a hectic coughing fit. She was led from the room by Ron Crux, the undertaker, who was also there to support Cyril. Maryanne was sufficiently unnerved and knocked out-of-synch by the coughing fit, that she stopped reading and returned to her seat. The audience encouraged her to continue, but Maryanne waved them off, her eyes watering, cheeks burning, hoping Rena was showing the first signs of esophageal cancer.

Graydon returned to the lectern with bon mots in Latin and French, and reminders of wine and cheese following the reading.

More poets were introduced, their awards and accolades recounted like obscure battlefield victories: The Poetry Necktie of Nile, Newfoundland, The Platinum Slipper of Provance, Yukon, The Knotted Rope of Scarfansky, New Jersey.

Finally, the evening came to the point where the final reader was introduced.

"It's my great privilege," Graydon said, mustering all the "hurrah-for-the-little-guy" he had, "to introduce a first-time reader, Mr. Cyril Beacon. You may know him as the owner of Beacon Hardware, but his poetry is raw as newly turned earth, supple as the first buds of spring, and khaki. His work is tremendously khaki." Then, with a gracious bow: "I give you Cyril Beacon."

Polite applause was supplanted by surprised applause, interspersed with curious applause. Cyril made his way to the lectern. He'd never stood at one before, but he was glad for it. He set the pages of his poems atop it, and steadied himself. "Thank you," he said.

Cyril proceeded to read a prose poem about a man who never had time to write, so he feigned insanity in order to be committed to a psychiatric ward. There, he had all the time in the world to covertly work on his novel, in between sessions of fooling doctors and nursing with his charade. Interacting with fellow patients, however, was another story. They wore on him. The prose poem ended with the man finally being released from the psych ward, pronounced sane, but by then actually severely mentally ill.

The audience didn't seem sure that the poem had ended when it ended, so Graydon led the polite applause to break the awkward silence following the piece.

Cyril read another prose poem. This one was based on an image that when people were born, they materialized in a forest with one end of a rope tied around their waist, and the other end tied to a tree. The people picked up the excess rope and began their journey through the forest -- through life. They made turns, here and there, and every once in a while tugged on their rope to feel the resistance of the tree by which they first awoke. But as people got older, and made more and more twists and turns through the forest, they no longer felt the resistance of that original tree, but of subsequent trees. When people ran out of slack, that was the end of their lives. Some people materialized in the forest with short ropes, and some with very long ropes. Some peoples' ropes criss-crossed and became tangled.

Cyril received polite, if diffident, applause when he finished his reading. Graydon returned to the podium, moving as though he'd been kicked squarely in his pocket Proust. He applauded, but his mustachio twitched.

"And on that very khaki note," he said, "let us now enjoy some wine and cheese."

During the reception, there was muffled talk about Cyril's work and reading. The pervading opinion was that he was a good soul who should stick to selling shovels and pliers and lengths of chain.

"He sounded so ordinary," Myrna Swinebuff stage-whispered to her book club friends. "He didn't have any of the natural presence of Graydon, or any of the other readers, poor soul."

"You know, there wasn't a single grandmother or quilt or canned preserve in any of his work," Oliver Hazelwood said to his partner. "Graydon said it perfectly when he described the poor man's work as 'khaki.' It so was."

As it turned out, the whispers of the literati gossipers were prophetic: Cyril was never again invited to read his work at the Boilston Festival of the Book.

"That's OK," Cyril said to his collie, Seamus. "They weren't really my crowd, anyhow."

But he thought of the Festival of the Book, and the literati, every once in a while. In fact, he did so every time he sold a shovel or bucket.

Finally! Airport security we can believe in!

From The Washington Post:

"To identify potentially dangerous individuals, the Transportation Security Administration has stationed specially trained behavior-detection officers at 161 U.S. airports. The officers may be positioned anywhere, from the parking garage to the gate, trying to spot passengers who show an unusual level of nervousness or stress."

What signs and attributes and behavior are they looking for, which would unmask a potential terrorist?

• Nervousness and/or stress


• Carrying "bag-like" items on or around their person


• Perturbed by delays and cancelations


• Traveling alone or in small or large groups


• Appearing preoccupied with "being somewhere else" -- perhaps a place where 72 virgins await them?


• Flustered or otherwise fidgeting with documents and/or tickets

There have long been sober plans of simply eradicating air travel altogether, but so far no better way to draw these "questionables" into the light of day has been formulated.

Until that day, the unprofitable insanity of airports, airlines and airport security continues.

Pray for the day when real-time X-ray footage of whole neighborhoods can be obtained and scrutinized by security professionals so that the madness of people leaving their homes can end.

Making C-3PO's Day

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Dying to Get In

A young pathologist bites into an apple while conducting an autopsy. His supervisor walks in a moment later, sees the apple, sees the young pathologist chewing, and shouts, "What are you doing?"

The young pathologist flinches and says, "This is the morgue. I'm eating. Everyone on TV and in movies eats in the morgue."

His supervisor says, "I know that, but you'll ruin your appetite," as he moves to a nearby gurney and pulls away a white sheet. Beneath it lies a fully appointed salad bar.

By the end of the week, the pizza buffet, chocolate fountain and Mongolian grill have been installed. There is hardly enough room to roll in bodies to the examination table.

The supervisor's supervisor laments, "What have you done to my morgue?" The supervisor flinches and says, "Everybody eats in the morgue." His boss shouts, "No! Only morgue technicians and pathologists used to eat in the morgue! Now everyone wants to eat down there!"

Weeks later, the morgue is filled with small dining tables covered with white linen, a candle on each for ambiance; a congenial murmur rises from the formally dressed diners. In a far corner of the morgue sits the young pathologist, a small desk lamp illuminating bills of lading before him. He speaks quietly, but forcefully into a telephone, trying to get a better deal on veal and fennel.

DubiousPedia.org: The Online Encyclopedia for Our Changing Times

What makes DubiousPedia unique among all of the millions of information sources on the Internet?

DubiousPedia is the only information source that can be edited any time, with any content, by any person on the Web.

We believe that if you have the intelligence to turn on a computer and open a Web browser, then you're more than qualified to alter and add to the wealth of information available for free on DubiousPedia.

Some sample entries:

• "Steven Tyler led the Cleveland Indians in battle against General Custer in 1869, where Custer and his men won in the 11th inning on a surprise bunt laid down by J. Edgar Hoover."


• "After writing the Bible, and a number of stage plays under the pen name 'William Shakespeare,' Jesus Christ retired to Little House on the Prairie, Arkansas, where he pursued moonshiners."


• "In 1974, Michael Moore of Flint, Michigan invented Communism."


• "After single-handedly winning World War I, Ronald Reagan invented electricity and ice cream and built an actress named Marilyn Monroe in his laboratory."


• "The Reverend Billy Graham rode a brontosaurus out of the Garden of Eden one day a thousand years ago, but was unable to find his way back. He lay -- in the biblical sense -- with the first woman he met, and the two of them went on to populate the earth aboard an ark."


• "God, Yahweh, Jehovah, I-Am-Who-Am, Bubba-From-the-Stars is a Caucasian male born in Lubbock, Texas in 1903 and went on to be a champion eater of baby-back ribs on the competitive-eating circuit."


• "Scientists believe the earth is 133 years old."

We live in a "customer service" culture where citizenship had been abdicated for consumership. It's not enough to want what we and want and to want it now, people have the right to believe what they like, and to have written proof supporting their beliefs on the Internet.

Hence, DubiousPedia.

Check it out today, and share your wisdom!

Job Application -- Prose Poem

(Originally appeared in The North American Review in 2005)

To: Minna Construction

From: Whetam Gnauckweirst

Please accept this prose poem as a request for employment with your company as court writer, stenographer, poet, and balladeer. I have impeccable personal hygiene, quick reflexes, I'm punctual, observant, have my own vehicle, take few sick days, and make friends easily. I know how to help by staying out of the way. My sense of humor has been described as "off color" and "obscure", however, my daily manner of speech is laden with profanity. I'm an avid watcher of the TV show C.O.P.S., which aids me in relating to the common man.

Why would a construction company need a poet? Because throwing a handful of coins behind nearly finished walls doesn't do justice to the feat of Building. I will write epic poems about your skill and tenacity (Petrarchan sonnets are my specialty), about the vagaries of weather, temperature, and terrain on which you work. I will sing odes during lunch breaks. I'll go out for coffee and sandwiches. I'll produce a monograph dedicated to the band of brothers, to their nail guns and dirty boots when the job is finished. To their camaraderie. And when we repair to the neighborhood tavern for ale and spirits, I will regale patrons with tales nails and wood, drywall and tear-dampened cement. I will produce what your sweaty brows, dirty hands, and two-by-fours will not: life everlasting.

The True Greatest American

According to the Discovery Channel a few years ago, Ronald Reagan was voted the "Greatest American." Helpful to Reagan's cause was that the vote took place shortly after his death. Had one of the Keebler elves died shortly before the vote, there's certainty that he would have won the vote.

Inside the Hotdog Factory has undertaken an exhaustive, scientific study -- so secret that its results are not available to anyone to evaluate -- looking into who truly was the Greatest American. After years of polling and study, a winner has been determined: Evel Knievel.

Although the exact criteria used to winnow down to the Greatest American cannot be shared with the Philistine public, it can be revealed that candidates were looked at for their creativity, free market fundamentals, commitment to capitalism, ability to capture the public imagination, and actual, tangible contributions to the world that bettered life for humanity in concrete ways. Under the weight of those variables, most politicians, writers, artists, musicians, actors, philosophers and "humanitarians" were quickly dispatched with. It should be noted that not only did Ronald Reagan not make it into the Top 10 of our Greatest Americans, but that Bozo the Clown and Al Goldstein rated higher than the ex-president.

But enough with the losers, let's talk about the winner.

Evel Knievel never dreamed up a dangerous idea and then sent someone else into harm's way to fulfill it (though various accidents following jumps did manage to blind two cameramen -- each losing an eye -- on separate occasions). He always put his own body on the line. The more daring the stunt, the more people would want to see it, the more tickets were sold, the more TV cameras were on hand, the more money was made. The man should have been named Kapitalism Knievel, he so embodied the free market spirit.

His first jump took him over the fountains in front of Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, on December 31, 1967. Knievel crashed, broke just about every major bone in his body, and remained in a coma for 29 days. He recuperated, devised another jump, and continued to earn his living by risking his life. He even paid for his own copious health care.



Hightlight Reel (from Wikipedia)

• On May 25, 1968, in Scottsdale, Arizona, Knievel crashed while attempting to jump fifteen Ford Mustangs.


• On January 7 and January 8, 1971, Knievel set the record by selling over 100,000 tickets to back-to-back performances at the Houston Astrodome.


• On February 28, he set a new world record by jumping 19 cars with his Harley-Davidson XR-750 in Ontario, California.


• On May 10, Knievel crashed while attempting to jump 13 Pepsi delivery trucks.


• [I]n November, 1973, he successfully jumped over 50 stacked cars at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.


• On September 8, 1974 Evel Knievel attempted to jump Snake River Canyon. The parachute on the "skycycle" deployed prematurely, ruining the jump and nearly causing Knievel to end up in the water below.


• On May 26, 1975, in front of 90,000 people at Wembley Stadium in London, Knievel crashed while trying to land a jump over thirteen redundant single-deck AEC Merlin buses.



• On October 25, 1975, Knievel successfully jumped fourteen Greyhound buses at the Kings Island theme park in Ohio.



• In the winter of 1976, Knievel was scheduled to jump a tank full of live sharks live national television. During a rehearsal, however, Knievel lost control of the motorcycle and crashed into a cameraman. The jump was canceled.


• On January 31, 1977, during a dress rehearsal for a CBS special on live daredevil stunts at the Chicago International Amphitheatre, Knievel crashed, breaking both arms and his collarbone.

When the jumps went bad, there was no golden parachute for Knievel to deploy, no executive privilege to invoke, no battery of attorneys behind which to hide. When he crashed, he was often smashed to bits. Because he had so many jump dates scheduled in advance, his broken bones were often set with metal plates beneath his skin so that he could continue performing unhindered by bulky casts.

One of his jumps in the early 1970s was attended by a large contingent of a motorcycle gang. As Knievel was going through his pre-jump show -- riding wheelies, standing on the motorcycle seat, riding his motorcycle backwards -- one of the bikers shouted an expletive that Knievel heard. It was a family show and Knievel was incensed that such un-family-friendly language was used amid his audience. So, he rode over to the offending lout and punched the biker in the face. This mobilized the entire motorcycle gang to attack Knievel. As the bikers rose to converge on the daredevil, an even larger contingent of union guys jumped up from their seats and converged on the bikers. An epic brawl ensued in which the union guys laid waste to the bikers, many of whom were hospitalized for months afterward.

Evel Knievel never asked anyone else to fight his battles, but he inspired such loyalty in his fans that they spontaneously came to his aid when it was needed.

By the end of his jumping career, Knievel said that he earned approximately $60 million and spent every cent of it, never knowing which jump would be his last. He never raided a Savings & Loan, never engineered a Ponzi scheme, never bilked anyone out of anything. He did, however, once beat the shit out of a person he believed had severely wronged him:

On October 14, 1977, Knievel pleaded guilty to battery and was sentenced to six months in county jail and three years probation. The charges stemmed from his assault with a baseball bat upon Shelly Saltman, promoter of the Snake River Canyon jump and author of the book Evel Knievel on Tour. Saltman's book alleged that Knievel abused his wife and kids, and that he used drugs. The accusations so angered Knievel that he attacked Saltman -- with the aid of two henchmen -- with two broken arms.

For his courage, character and commitment to capitalism, Evel Knievel was the logical choice for the Inside the Hotdog Factory "Greatest American" title. If only the old motorcycle maven were around to enjoy this accolade.

Coffee Rogue: Three Prose Poems

I
(originally appeared in The North American Review)

I see you: a tall, golem-faced ectomorph skulking around the office casting the sidelong glances of an accomplished flasher. Your soul is poisoned, I have no doubt of that, the way you fill your coffee mug from the communal pot and leave only that last, spiteful splash behind, never, ever, never bothering yourself to brew a fresh pot.

Do you come from an unbroken line of rotters? I see your first ancestors urinating into campfires that took all night to light, feigning injury while the rest of the tribe went out hunting; your forebears hanging around the cave eying the interns.

What unnerves me most, is that your footsteps make no sound. I recall, once, voiding at a urinal in the restroom and hearing the door open, and then suddenly you were squaring up at the urinal next to me; your presence making my bashful bladder shrivel.

Coffee rogue, I think about filling two carafes with toilet water and walking up behind you at your desk and smashing the carafes together like cymbals above your head. But something tells me you’d probably enjoy that.


II

You hover around the coffee maker like a crow seeking carrion. You are the Iago-gossip slithering about, calm and content in your meager shell that belies no self-indulgence. Still, you are a rogue wave amid womanhood, your cabbage patch half-smile and see-nothing eyes do not deflect me from knowing you mean none of us well. Unlike your male counterpart, you hang back so that you’re not actively disliked, though I don’t doubt that if you were a sorority sister on the Isle of Lesbos millennia ago -- as the naked volleyball team practiced on the beach beneath the new sky -- that you would have groused in shadows and hogged all of the barrettes for yourself.


III

There you are, humiliating yourself, making feeble amends, filling a coffee pot from the water cooler with a look on your face like you're aiding animal husbandry or pouring molten steel into a thimble. Your ferret eyes turn to me as I enter the kitchenette, your gray expression exuding the contempt of kings emptying their own chamber pots.

Watching your awkward, motionless operation, I envision you at the age of nine, sleeping over a friend's house the night a storm swells outside. In the middle of the night, lightning pitchforks from the sky, thunder rumbles its malevolent bass note, and your friend's mother opens a groggy eye in that momentary flash to see you standing at the foot of the bed like a Brady Bunch Jack the Ripper.

Parents throughout your old neighborhood whispered to one another, "Something off about that boy."

My morbid mind wonders if you wear this expression while making love to your wife or hugging your children; your rogue DNA painted through their morose cells like graffiti on a train trestle.

At least, as we stand waiting while the coffee brews, I don't have to worry about making small-talk.

Paranormal Activity: a review

My original response to the film Paranormal Activity.

Paranormal Activity is a movie of many dichotomies. It's amazingly suspenseful at times, yet crushingly dull at others. There are some genuinely frightening scenes, and yet also some frightfully inane moments. One of the two main characters is the target of a malevolent, monstrous force and seeks an answer to and release from the problem. The other central character acts -- during the same harrowing moments -- like it's playtime.

What the film gets right
There is no fang-brandishing, hunched, hairy CGI monster prowling this horror movie. Suspsense is masterfully created and heightened by the use of eerie soundscapes. The malevolent force makes its presence known by a low rumbling that sounds like the start of an earthquake. Then, behind that, there are various creaks and footsteps and other subtle manifestations. When there is visual manifestation of the presence, it comes in the form of the bedroom door moving on its own, the living room chandelier moving, as well as other objects. When one of the main characters powders the upstairs hallway with baby powder, hoping the entity will leave footprints, proof of the entity's movements in the house are scant, but present. They're compelling due to their scarcity.

What the film gets wrong
One word: Micah.

The main characters of Paranormal Activity are Katie and Micah. Katie, a college student, believes she's been haunted by a demonic presence since the age of eight. Micah is her live-in, day-trading boyfriend, to whom all of life, all the world, especially his girlfriend's supernatural stalker, is merely a joke; some spoof to be captured on camera. The movie is comprised of footage he shoots with a new video camera purchased for the purpose of documenting the "paranormal activity" that appears to follow Katie around.

Micah is obnoxious in the extreme from the get-go. He's an arrogant, shallow, frivolous frat-boy who alternates between inane jokes at Katie's expense, and empty bluster and boyish bravado when the shit starts to hit the fan. The inference of the movie is that Katie's haunting is exascerbated by Micah filming the happenings -- running the camera from a tripod while they sleep, capturing the majority of the activity when neither is conscious. Then there are the moments when Micah goes around the house with the camera "calling out" the demon like a drunken lout looking for a barfight.

Early in the movie, when Katie invites a psychic to the house to check things out, Micah comes up with one of his brilliant ideas: Why not get a Ouija board, ask the entity what it wants, and then give the entity what it asks for? To which the psychic says, "The problem is, I believe it wants Katie."

Micah's silent reaction? Most likely: Oh, didn't think of that.

After promising "not to buy a Ouija board," Micah cleverly borrows one -- and actually argues the fine distinction of his promise. Katie is rightfully outraged, having begged Micah not to undertake such actions that might aggravate the demonic presence. But since Micah cares for no one but himself, he is slow to acquiesce, and does so only after the damage is done.

What the film further gets wrong is how long Katie and Micah remain in the house where the escalating hauntings occur. Yes, it's established early on that Katie is the one being haunted, so moving locations, technically, wouldn't help. But given the foothold the presence has in that house, what could it hurt? By the time they decide on the obvious, it's too late.

In the end
The movie scores points with lay-ups -- meaning, all the scary stuff happens at about three o'clock on the morning. You can't miss with that. And you can't miss when you have scary shit happening to characters who are fast asleep -- especially under circumstances where no one with any ordinary functioning nervous system would be able to sleep. The reliance on the sound effects saves the day. But for every gain the sound departments achieves, the character Micah piddles away. The film is by turns jarring, affecting, annoying and boring.

It seems that Paranormal Activity maker, Oren Peli, is having trouble finding funding for his next film, Area 51. That may be due to the fact that not every film can be saved by sound effects. If Paranormal Activity says one thing about Peli, it's that he has no skill at as a storyteller. He creates situations, he can establish and heighten suspense, but the house of cards is continually falling due to the very weak story holding things together. He has a very difficult time making the audience care.

The film is worth seeing, but it all really boils down to watching two people being scared to death while they're asleep. That's the crux of the movie, which is not much for one to hang his hat on.

Battle of the self-publishing titans: A review of Wordclay's services

Here is the feedback I recently provided to Wordclay.com's customer service:

I've been using Lulu.com since 2005, and thought I'd give Wordclay a try because Lulu's shipping rates have become outrageous. I uploaded -- and then deleted -- a manuscript to Wordclay this morning, and if anyone's interested, I have the following feedback:

Manuscript formatting
Although I was using an approved font -- Calisto MT -- my manuscript came out all wonky in the galley. I changed my font to Georgia, and that solved the problem, except for the fact that I prefer Calisto MT.

Wordclay's copyright page
Although I already have a proper copyright page in my book, Wordclay added it's own. So, my book had two copyright pages, which also threw off my headers at the beginning of the book (I don't want headers or footers to show until the start of the actual text of the book on page 14 or so. I had this all set and formatted in MS Word, but Wordclay's "bot" undid that).

Table of Contents
Not all of my books have a Table of Contents, but this one did. On entries where the text wrapped to a second line, I had formatted the page numbers to appear, along with all of the others, at the far right side of that page. Wordclay's "bot" undid this formatting so that pages numbers for entries that wrapped appeared right after the title, on the left.

WORST
The DIY cover fee/process. I was all set to go through with the publication process, just to see the quality of a Wordclay book, but was stopped in my tracks by the limited cover art options. I will not pay -- nor should I have to pay -- $25 to use my own cover art. You don't need a panel of experts to take my cover's rectal temperature, Wordclay only needs to provide dimensions and recommended resolution specs to users in order for proper covers to be uploaded.

Conclusion
So, there ended my experience with Wordclay. In light of the cover art limitations and fee, I won't and cannot abide the needless and awkward alterations to my manuscript by the Wordclay "bot", and thus will publish none of my work with Wordclay. I found you on Stumbleupon about a year ago, and only my inchoate dissatisfaction with Lulu.com led me to try you out. I don't agree with Lulu's outrageously overpriced shipping fees, but their service is easy-to-use and intuitive, and respectful to my work. They also allow mere vulgarians to upload their own cover art without the Panel of Elders' scrutiny beforehand.

Good luck and goodbye.

My own "Paranormal Activity" with a unionized poltergeist

Ever since I was a child, I've been freaked-out by the dark. When I was about seven or eight, I saw an episode of The Courtship of Eddie's Father (starring Bill Bixby), in which the magazine the main character published was running a story about ghosts. A blurry, black-and-white photograph of a "ghost" was shown, which to my young eyes looked like the Genuine Article. It scared the hell out of me. More than that, it left me with the subterranean dread: Oh no! Now the ghosts know that I know about them! They'll never let me live with this information! Which led to a string of sleepless nights.

The ghosts, however, did let me live. I guess I wasn't the threat to them that I figured I was.

To this day, though, I can't slide aside a closed shower curtain without involuntarily holding my breath, certain that either the Angel Gabriel or a moldering zombie -- something like that decomposing naked lady in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining -- might be standing in there. I'm a light sleeper. My mind assigns the most sinister origins to every creak and wheeze of my house in the middle of the night. I'm a rational atheist who knows there are no monsters prowling the dark, or waiting beneath my bed to grab my ankles, or standing behind doors waiting to throw an otherworldly half-nelson on me. Still, I keep a shillelagh under the bed.

In my weaker, more ridiculous moments, I'm sure I'm being stalked by an entity. Except, my pursuer is of a lazy, non-proactive variety. For instance, I only feel his presence after watching horror movies -- only particularly unnerving horror movies, like Ju On or The Ring, or most recently Paranormal Activity. It's as though my entity is a unionized dullard who loafs on the job until his supervisor gets wind that I've seen another horror movie.

"What are you waiting for?" the underworld supervisor shouts at my stalker. "Do you want him to keep watching horror movies until he's completely unmasked us?"

"No," my entity replies, hating to be yelled at.

"Well then, get him!"

So, my entity wakens in my attic and kicks a beam or two. Then, maybe, he passes between the walls down to the unfinished basement and messes up the messy pile of laundry lying on the floor by the washer and dryer. All the while, my insomniac antennae sends an alert to my brainstem, which disseminates a bulletin to all my nerve-endings: Something from the underworld is afoot.

But it never gets any more dramatic than that. My entity creeps around in the hallway outside my bedroom, looks over my collection of DVDs in my office -- probably stifles a sneeze because I never dust in there; and then curses himself for stifling the sneeze, realizing he's on scene to frighten and intimidate me; make me fear for my soul, for my sanity.

After all, I recently saw Paranormal Activity where I witnessed a very credible demonstration of a person being swallowed up by demonic possession. The film achieved the strangest wire-walk between stark terror, excruciating suspense, and utter dullness in between scares. But the scares stuck. I believe. I know an entity is also hunting me. He's just not very organized or consistent with his efforts. Maybe he's got an attitude problem, or trouble dealing with authority.

Demons (I throw all otherworldly beings into the same grab bag; maybe they'll come after for doing that) are supposed to be of a sinister nature, are they not? So, what's to keep a demon from disobeying his supervisor's orders? I can see the malevolent entities in their dark, dank lockerroom as they suit-up for another night's haunting. They greet each other with the old saw, "Haunting hard?"

"Hardly haunting."

Guffaws echo through the morgue-tiled changing area. A poster on the wall reads: "You don't have to be evil to work in this place, but it helps!"

Somehow, though, I think my entity got into the wrong line of work. "I'm a sloth-demon at heart," I can hear him confiding to a friend over drinks after the haunt. "I just want to plant myself somewhere, slow everybody down, muddle a few of the weaker minds, spoil a harvest or two, get someone chased out of the village. You know."

"Sure, sure," my entity's compadre says. "But you have to wait for a retirement to get one of those plum positions. Nobody's quitting those."

"I know," my entity grouses into his drink. "It's all who you know, not what you know."

"Count yourself lucky you're haunting in North America," the compadre says. "You ever get assigned to the Caribbean?"

"No."

"Shit, those shaman and witchdoctors'll eat you for lunch. We could learn from them."

"No kidding?"

"I don't kid about these things."

And so my entity gets lazy, rationalizing, Well look at this guy I'm haunting. He's an atheist, swears like a dockworker, laughs at only the sickest jokes, and reads the damnedest, most depressing books about the JFK assassination and C.I.A. drug-running. And that blog of his! Don't get me started on that blog! What's left for me to do?

So, word of my having seen Paranormal Activity has reached the underworld and my entity is back. I was up late last night working on the computer, and kept looking into the darkened hallway beyond the door, somehow thinking a bone-white, ancient, mummified form might suddenly sprint into my office, screeching unintelligibly, tackling me to the floor. Or, the Web browser on my computer screen fading out and being replaced with a horrifying face. Or, going into the bedroom where my wife slept without bother, and the ceiling fan might turn into four arms that'll lunge down, silently pin me to the floor so that I could be carted off to the underworld to be --

To be what?

I never get that far. What in the world would an otherworldly entity want with me? I have no information that would be useful to a presence that can presumably walk through walls and invisibly spy on people. And though I believe in the existence of a human soul, what would an entity -- or the outfit employing an entity -- want with my soul? It's not like it's capable of manual labor. To my knowledge, it's not combustible, or otherwise useful as fuel. There's a possibility souls could be held for ransom, or used as bargaining chips in disputes with benevolent deities. But that seems thin. I can't see my entity playing a mystical game of chess with Ra or Zeus or Xenu, for my or anyone else's soul. Poker is too crude and trendy a game to interest the underworld. Just because a presence may exude stinky ectoplasm on a suede couch, doesn't mean it would submit to the pedestrian rules of card play.

So, where does this leave me? The heebie jeebies inspired by Paranormal Activity are beginning to ebb. My entity seems already to be losing interest in me. I still jump when dishes in the sink shift, as gravity slowly attempts to reshuffle everything in the world that's stacked. Never in my life have I witnessed something I would even remotely consider "supernatural." Sure, the movie has me thinking about it. Maybe it's like everything else in the movies: the cinematic entities are looming and terrifying, powerful and cunning, when, in fact, ghostly presences in real life -- if they exist at all -- are nothing more than invisible roustabouts throwing rocks at someone's house in the night, running away, giggling, thinking, We so got them!

The Ordealist - Part II

Read Part I

The only friend Bevin had in the company -- and in life -- was Roche, a technician at WorkplaceUSA, who set up mics and video equipment for executive meetings and presentations. Roche was an aspiring filmmaker in his spare time. A local film festival had sprung up in recent years, and the previous year had held a "48-Hour Film Contest," in which filmmaking teams signed up to write and produce a four-minute short in the space of a single weekend. Last year, Roche teamed up with his brother, Claude, along with Bevin and managed to wrangle third place out of two dozen entries. This year, Claude was out. He and his wife just had a baby, but Claude had also mentioned something in passing to Roche about wanting to strangle Bevin with piano wire. Roche had shrugged. Bevin's storyboarding skills were impeccable.

This year, Roche brought on board a guy named Raif, a writer who also worked the counter at a neighborhood sex shop. And Raif brought along his friend, Kurt, who was an all-around film buff willing to hold mics and help with set-ups.

Roche was the one with the camera, so after picking up the 48-Hour Film Contest package, everyone met at his house.

The four guys sat around in Roche's furnished basement. Roche had a clipboard on his knee. "All right, the prop we were given is a can opener, and the line of dialogue we have to incorporate is 'I think I've made a terrible mistake.'" He looked at the group. "All right, who wants to start the brainstorming?"

"Maybe we have a guy opening a really large can of tuna," Kurt said, "I mean a huge, coffin-sized can and he finds a dead person inside --"

"Can't do it," Bevin said, cutting in. "Where are we going to get such a large can with no budget and on such short notice?"

"Right, well," Kurt said, irritated, "isn't that where the filmmaking comes in? We do a series of shots to make it look like --"

"It's already been done," Bevin said. "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

"OK," Roche said, moving conversation along. "What else?"

"We could go the absurdist route," Raif said. "And have a guy talking to his psychiatrist or someone, and the guy has the can opener affixed to his head."

"It's been done," Bevin said. "Saturday Night Live has been doing that sort of thing for years."

Looking at the clouding expressions on the faces of Kurt and Raif, Roche turned to Bevin: "How about you, Bev?"

"I was thinking," Bevin said, "about a guy who finds a magic box somewhere -- like a cafe -- that gives him three wishes."

Kurt and Raif looked at each other, and then at Roche. Roche nodded and scribbled something on his clipboard.

"How about locations?" Roche said after a couple of hours of brainstorming a premise -- nothing firm had been decided on that front.

"No problem filming at the store," Raif said. "Actually, we've got a surplus of three dozen inflatable sex dolls that only have one arm. They could be useful"

Roche and Kurt laughed. "That would be cool!" Roche said, writing on his clipboard.

"The movie has to be PG," Bevin said. "So, I don't think we can use the sex dolls."

The brainstorming session went on a few more hours, and the tension in the basement grew more and more rank and dense. Raif and Kurt were just not meshing with Bevin's meticulous nature, but Roche was confident that they'd all get over it as they narrowed in on a premise and began writing the script.

Raif went outside for a smoke at one point, and was joined by Kurt who simply needed some air -- some unBevinated air. "Can we say 'cock-blocker at every turn'?" Raif said. "Holy shit, if I hear one more time that an idea's 'already been done' or is 'cliche,' I'm going to . . ." he trailed off, unable to think of a good threat.



The process, the mood, the atmosphere, the working dynamics among the four aspiring filmmakers didn't improve as time wore on. It seemed they would never settle on a premise.

"How about some amputees sitting around a poker table playing for limbs?" Kurt said.

Against his quivering, shriveling will, Raif glanced at Bevin whose blank expression managed to evoke emotion: all different shades of dour disapproval. Why don't we dump this putz? Raif wondered, feeling the time nearing when he could no longer keep such thoughts locked politely in his head.

"What's funny about making fun of amputees?" Bevin droned.

"Well, maybe they're dead guys," Kurt said.

"It's already been done," Bevin said.

"But I haven't even gotten to my idea," Kurt said.

"Ghost, Sixth Sense," Bevin said. "Ghost Town."

"I give up!" Raif said, rising from his chair. To Roche: "Thanks but no thanks, I didn't sign on for this!" He walked out of the basement. Roche followed.

"Hey man," Roche said, catching Raif at the front door. "Don't be so sensitive. We're just kicking ideas around."

"No, you're buddy is kicking ideas to death," Raif said.

"Look, go home, have a beer, sleep on it, and come back tomorrow. We'll have a premise by then and we'll be all ready to go. What do you say?"

Raif thought about it. "All right," he said, hating himself for caving.



The following day was no better. Raif arrived at Roche's house -- Bevin was already there, and Kurt came twenty minutes later -- actually feeling a bit of optimism. The moment that he stepped into the hotzone of Bevin's contaminated radius, that optimism curdled like the cream in his coffee . . . and the ordeal continued.

No premise had been arrived at the evening before, so the brainstorming continued. By the stroke of noon, when Roche brought out the first beers of the day, Raif had resolved himself to sticking with the contest merely to see for how long and in how many different ways Bevin could cock-block the creative process.

Raif wasn't sure if it was the beer -- which was oddly flat and skunky -- or simple weariness that made him lose focus on the premise-seeking process, but around dinner time, the guys had decided their movie would be about a murderer who hid in the trunks of people's cars and sprang out at his unsuspecting victims.

The premise as Raif understood it didn't make any sense, but he was so punch-drunk from Bevin's unending onslaught of inane questions and his guillotining ideas before they were more than a few words out of someone's mouth, that he went along with the group. Bevin's meticulous storyboards -- which he produced in a short matter of time -- didn't illuminate the convoluted storyline. By then, Raif was beyond caring.

If the premise-seeking process hadn't proven tedious enough, setting up the first shot was surely madness-inducing. Bevin made so many crippling interjections in the conversation about how to begin that Roche -- himself wearying -- turned over directorship to his incessant friend. Then the guys were treated to the most bizarre sight yet: Bevin second-guessing, interrupting and cock-blocking himself as he tried to decide how to set up the first shot.

By then, Raif's brain felt like it was in a vacuum-sealed plastic pouch, groaning and throbbing for oxygen that could not be had. He saw that Kurt had developed a facial tic he hadn't noticed before. Then he paused and realized a series of short-circuiting twitches ran riot around his own face. And still, Bevin continued, speaking in a low, flat, nasal-deadened voice; seeming to talk more to himself than anyone else.

Feeling more and more disconnected from the activity around him, Raif slipped into kamikaze auto-pilot. For instance, when Roche -- who was playing the killer in the film -- finally got into the trunk of his car, and the door shut upon him, Raif turned to Bevin and plucked the camera from his grip.

"What are you doing?" Bevin said. "I'm the director now."

Raif was aware of Bevin talking, but finally a mental callous had developed over his mind which dampened the sound of his voice. He handed the camera to Kurt, who, by the look in his own glassy eyes, seemed to be in the same dissociative mental space.

Raif punched Bevin in the face.

Part of him wished he was not buried so deep behind his defensive, mental callous because he would have really enjoyed the moment of contact. For once, Bevin did as he was supposed to do -- he fell down unconscious. By the time Roche figured there was something wrong, and began knocking on the trunk door to be let out, Raif and Kurt had carried Bevin into the backyard.

In storyboard snatches of consciousness, Raif and Kurt acted as one, as their own, sub-story telneted mentally between them.

They bound Bevin in plastic wrap. He was left to lay like a nightclub mummy on the lawn as Raif went to his car and brought box after box of one-armed inflatable sex dolls into the back yard. Kurt brought tanks of helium from Raif's backseat -- Raif kept such things on hand; one never knew when one might need helium.

They positioned Bevin in one of Roche's lawn chairs and fastened the floating, inflatable sex dolls to the chair with a series of bungee cords, sections of clothesline, various length extension cords found in Roche's house, and the rest of the plastic wrap. By then, Bevin had wakened -- his left eye swelling nicely -- and struggled meekly against his restraints. He moaned behind the gag they'd affixed.

When the sixteenth sex doll had been inflated with helium, Bevin began to hover inches above the ground. When the twenty first doll was fastened to him, he rose into the air. As he slowly cleared Raif and Kurt's height, Bevin's eyes widened with genuine fear. It was the first actual human emotion anyone would have seen in that obsidian gaze.

Kurt stood back with Roche's camera, filming Bevin's lazy ascent. When the counter indicated that he'd come to the three-minute and forty-second mark, he turned the camera on Raif who said, "I think I've made a terrible mistake," and waved a can opener in front of the lens. There was a two second pause, and then he said: "Naahhhhhh."

Bevin's ascent leveled-off when he passed the height of the telephone wires running behind Roche's house. Then he drifted beyond the neighbors' trees and out of sight.



The film, titled C-Blocker, was entered into the 48 Hour Film Contest the following day as a mockumentary. It took First Prize, which greatly eased Roche's anger over the project being high-jacked while he was locked in the trunk of his car (for some reason, the fact that he hadn't seen the safety lever inside the trunk that would have allowed him to open the door himself made him ever more angry at Raif and Kurt). But winning a film contest assuaged that nicely.

The film was also Exhibit A in Bevin's lawsuit against Raif, Kurt and Roche. As Bevin came to no bodily harm as a result of his sex doll flight, and Raif's punch had left no lasting damage -- and after reviewing Roche's notes of the premise brainstorming session preceding the sex doll flight, augmented by Raif and Kurt's descriptions, and further supplemented by Bevin's own interjections -- the judge in the case had no choice but to find Raif, Kurt and Roche guilty and give them a suspended sentence.

He didn't say so in court, but the judge commented that evening to his wife: "I had a defendant today who was completely in the right" referring to Bevin, "but the kid was the damnedest pain the ass I've ever encountered."

After which, the judge's wife noticed with concern a facial tic twitching around her husband's eyes and the corner of his mouth.

The Ordealist - Part I

Wherever Bevin Bleakman went, he made an impression. He was like a human EMB (electro-magnetic bomb), silencing laughter by questioning jokes until they lay in pieces like disassembled clocks, mangling conversations with inane, irrelevant comments, and dowsing all cheer and merriment with his bland, clay-colored countenance, and dung-pillar bearing.

"I highly doubt there were a million kids at the Chuck E. Cheese," Bevin wheezed, unsmiling, interrupting a colleague talking about his child's birthday party over the weekend.

"I just meant the place was packed," the colleague said, annoyed.

"Then just say it was packed," Bevin replied, and walked away to get a Fresca from the soda machine.

Bevin kept no plants in his cubicle or at his apartment, but his colleagues did. Strangely, there was an invisible field radiating out from Bevin's cubicle, approximately thirty feet or so, in which his colleagues' plants wilted and died no matter how much love and attention they received. When Bevin stopped by a colleague's desk with a question or comment, that person's coffee went rancid, their pop went flat, their computer crashed, long dormant stuttering resurfaced, and facial tics suddenly flourished.

At the counter of the lobby cafe, Bevin eyed the food in the glass display case: "Uh, the egg-and-cheese-and-sausage-on-an-English-muffin," Bevin said to the cashier, "what's in that?"

"Egg and cheddar cheese, and sausage, on an English muffin," the cashier sighed. She went through this with him every time he came round.

"And the cinnamon roll," Bevin said, "what's in that?"

"Cinnamon and pastry," the cashier said -- then caught herself: "And pieces of walnut."

"No peanuts? I'm allergic to peanuts," Bevin said.

"Just walnuts."

"Mushrooms?" Bevin said. The cashier looked at him, wondering if he was joking, but realized, he never joked. He just went on and on and on, no matter how many increasingly-impatient people stood in line behind him. Bevin was impervious to the overt, angry coughs, the huffs of impatience, the odd "Come on, guy, we don't have all day!" from the others waiting.

"We don't put mushrooms in our pastries," the cashier said.

"Were they near mushrooms during transport?"

"No. I don't think so."

"Were they near mushrooms where they were made?"

"I have no idea."

After a further excruciating moment of deliberation, Bevin ordered a small, cup of hot water.

"What kind of tea do you want?" the cashier asked.

"None," Bevin said, placing a quarter on the counter for the cup. "I have my own upstairs."

The others in line watched like an outraged war crimes tribunal, as Bevin walked away, oblivious.

The depleted uranium of Bevin's personality first came to light at WorkplaceUSA soon after he was hired as a programmer for the Web site. Although it wasn't his job, he reviewed the HTML code of various pages on the site, and approached Sledge McFarland, the senior, lone, overworked Web designer, with a few pages of print-outs.

"Sledge," Bevin said, coming up behind the frenetic, overweight Web designer, startling him. "Can I talk to you about your coding?"

Sledge's startlement curdled -- as did the half-full pint of chocolate milk by his mouse pad -- into astonished rage. He slowly turned from his twenty-one inch monitor in which he had sixteen applications open and running in as many various-sized windows. "You want to talk about what?"

Oblivious, Bevin showed Sledge the pages he printed out. "You're not closing your 'p' tags. Best practices dictates that all tags must have closing tags."

Sledge glared at Bevin. Anyone else would have instantly read the look on the man's face: Are you kidding me? Anyone but Bevin.

Sledge rallied. This was the new guy; new guys made mistakes. About a hundred years ago, Sledge was the new guy and the odd person cut him a break, here and there. He unclenched his jaw, unclenched his fists, unclenched the cheeks of his expansive buttocks. "Guy," he said, trying to sound as friendly as he could manage.

"My name's Bevin," Bevin said, interrupting. "We were introduced last week. I'm Bevin Bleakman, programmer."

A facial tic began slapping around the corner of Sledge's right eyebrow. "Yeah," he said. "OK. Well, Bevin, I'm doing the work of four people here, and wherever I can make up a little time, I do it."

"Best practices dictates that all tags must have closing tags," Bevin said. He spoke as though he could repeat the line all day long, into the night, to the empty darkened office; into infinity.

"Then how about this?" Sledge said, sharpening his tone. "You do your job, and I'll do my --"

"Best practices dictates that all tags must have closing tags."

"It's perfectly acceptable to leave 'p' tags open!" Sledge exploded. "Each new 'p' tag is as good as a closing tag for the previous one!"

"Best practices dictates that all tags must have closing tags."

Sledge lurched his massive frame from his lopsided chair. "The pages look the way we want them to look! That's all that matters!"

"Best practices dictates that all tags must have closing tags."

The tic abusing Sledge's right eyebrow spread through his face like an electrical storm. He opened his mouth to tell Bevin to mind his own business, that he was not team lead, nor the manager, nor the director of the Web team, but all that came out was a scream: "Ahhhhhhhhhh!"

For the first time in a decade, Sledge ran. He had no idea why. The facial tic must have infested his brain, turning everything in there into static. Sledge lumbered to the end of the aisle, and without breaking stride, drove his large body into a file cabinet. He left a dent like a Volkswagen would have. He crumpled to the floor, eyes wide, blind, and verbalized what was in his mind: "Ugh! Ahhhhh! Yoooo-zebbbbb-yooooodel-dooooodel-mmmmmmmm . . ."

Colleagues jumped to their feet to see if Sledge was OK. One of them turned to Bevin to ask what had happened, but Bevin interrupted: "Best practices dictates that all tags must have closing tags."

The monitor on Sledge's desk flickered as his computer crashed.

Part II

Tonight… We Are All Rush Limbaugh

From ESPN: Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh was dropped from a group bidding to buy the St. Louis Rams.

Rush, you are not alone!

It wasn't so long ago that I made a bid to buy the greatest jai alai team on the planet. They were the Tangeryland Titty Twisters, and they were a ferocious delight behold. As my people were finalizing arrangements, a scurrilous story appeared in the media, purportedly written by me.

How's that for the Thugs of Slander to grab my own hand and batter my face with it, saying, "Why're you hitting yourself? Why're you hitting yourself?" That they would not only put forth a grossly hurtful story, but one allegedly given in the first person by me, slandering and libeling and humiliating myself.

The story? I'll share it now because the harm is already done: My First Firsthand Experience with Crucifixion.

Is the story true? Did I, as a child, once build a small cross and crucify a rubber Spiderman upon it? Yeah, so what? But I would never share such a story! I was eight years old at the time, hardly in the sandlot of reason.

But it doesn't matter now. When the Titty Twister management saw the story, they threw the brakes on my purchase of the team. As it turns out, they couldn't care less about any offense to the Christian church the story might have aroused, they were outraged to the point of violence by my disrespect toward Spiderman. Who knew he held such a lofty place in their culture? I certainly didn't.

So what if Rush Limbaugh has figuratively nailed a few Spidermen to homemade crosses? He's a self-made man and should be able to exercise the right of the wealthy to buy any gawddamned thing he wants. But no, the proprietors and adherents of this world's Spidermen prefer to discriminate, criminalize and marginalize poor, humble, eager-to-please multi-millionaires like us. Such is the injustice in this imperfect world.

I feel your pain, Rush. Maybe you can take solace as I did -- I purchased the homeland of my oppressors and put them all in prison.

Persuasiverse: The why, the "who cares?"

"Whaddya all want for nuthin'? A rrrrubber biscuit?" Dan Ackroyd once sang as Elwood Blues on a rendition of The Chips' 1956 song, "Rubber Biscuit," rolling the "r" like an Italian auctioneer.

The blog posts that comprise the new book, At One With the Perversiverse, were offered up free on the Web here on Inside the Hotdog Factory, written by the reclusive, enigmatic figure, Whetam Gnauckweirst. Such a "front" entity was needed because in today's free North American society, a person can be fired from their day job based upon what they write on their blog -- even if it has nothing to do with their employer, their industry, their job duties, etc.. Satirize your boss's favorite laxative, and you're on the street.

So, Whetam Gnauckweirst -- the caped, angry jester; the Barbadian garbage man -- wielded (and continues to wield) his satirical scythe here, centering his odd-colored eyes on the shape-shifting target of base human stupidity, cruelty, greed, avarice, corporatism, ambition and petty gain at the expense of others' pain (hello Oprah). There are also music and movie reviews.

Here are 98 blog posts, each a stone launched at the cranial vault of a multitude of Goliaths. Whether they are wife-beaters who think the single day's reprieve of Valentine's Day makes up for the pain and misery they lather on to their loved ones, or Rick Wagoner, former CEO of GM, drinking Putz Beer while smelting down his golden parachute, or Oprah Winfrey providing a pornographic venue for baffling, pathetic souls like Mackenzie Phillips to get up and humiliate themselves, the stones are thrown, accusations made, and satirical barbs swung at soft, unprotected regions of the guilty.

Some people think blogs are self-indulgent. Others believe blogs lack the journalistic integrity of established news sources. Show me a blog that's owned by GE or Disney. The only thing false on the Inside the Hotdog Factory is the moniker under which the posts are written. The rest is as truthful as one soul can be.

The backside of the Perversiverse

At One With the Perversiverse available now!

Synopsis

The “Perversiverse” is the tumultuous, paradoxical, multifarious, sweet-and-sour world-system that envelopes and influences our society. It’s where George W. Bush can be president of the United States, where Oprah Winfrey parades society’s lame and leprous before adoring audiences, where McDonald’s invades the Louvre, CEOs smelt down golden parachutes, political hacks control the discourse, and yuppie parents raise their children to possess a Mount Rushmore of self-worth, but not a mole hill of personal responsibility.

At One With the Perversiverse

Posts from this blog from the last three years have been corralled, straightjacketed and committed to the pages between two book covers. You can read the whole thing here for free; I've been casting these posts to the wind for going on five years. The indifference of the actual universe has been a useful crucible to me in forging the pieces that comprise At One With the Perversiverse.

A synopsis of the book is as follows:

The Perversiverse is the tumultuous, paradoxical, multifarious, sweet-and-sour world-system that envelopes and influences our society. It's where George W. Bush can be president of the United States, where Oprah Winfrey parades society's lame and leprous before adoring audiences, where McDonald's invades the Louvre, CEOs smelt down golden parachutes, political hacks control the discourse, and yuppie parents raise their children to possess a Mount Rushmore of self-worth, but not a mole hill of personal responsibility.

Check out At One With the Perversiverse. It's not The Secret and it's not The Lost Symbol. It's light on philosophy at times, but heavy with the heavy-handedness.

The wonderful Books I Love on Twitter was extraordinarily kind and gave this book a mention this evening. Much appreciated!

Reactions from around the neighborhood to Herta Mueller winning the Nobel Prize in Literature

"I don't know if I ever mentioned that I've always been a huge Mueller fan. I'm president of the Muller fan club in Polk County." -- Jeff the mailman

"My local book seller thinks I'm a real pain in the neck because I camp out on his doorstep on the eve of publication of every Herta Mueller book. Been doing it for years. Sometimes he calls the cops." -- Willem the butcher

"Every time I go into my local bookstore, I trip over a big pile of Herta Mueller books, it's getting to be a problem. And anytime you want to talk to the farmers at the local coffee shop about soybean crops and crop rotation, all they want to talk about is Herta Mueller. I'm sick of her." -- Kenny the alderman

"I went into the bookstore this morning and tripped over a stack of Herta Mueller books, as usual. Next, I went to Burger King, with the new Philip Roth novel under my arm. Everyone looked up from their Herta Mueller novels and glared at me. Crack-heads, truants, junkies, nitwits and pinheads, the kind of person who hangs around Burger King on a Friday morning at 10 a.m. (Myself excepted.) I perceived store-wide hostility as I slowly turned to the first page of the Roth book. I heard titters and jeers. Finally, a swarthy Negro wearing eleven parkas and 48 layers of clothing in 60-degree weather came over to my table and asked what kind of chump-ass shit was I reading when his Main Writer be winning the Nobel Prize. I fled the restaurant ahead of cries of Jew-loving punk and jive-ass pseudo-intellectual-capitalist-traditionalist-honkie-motherfucker. . . . Tough room in the age of Herta." -- Dalton, former mayor

While in the video store, Kathy the notary public was advised to watch the comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous, to which she replied, "Is this the Drop Dead Gorgeous directed by Akira Kurosawa, with a screenplay by Samuel Beckett, based on a novel by Herta Mueller?"

"I tried to get my car winterized today and the guy at Jiffy Lube was too busy reading Herta Mueller to help me. So I went across the street to McDonald's and instead of asking me if I wanted fries with my order, she said 'Do you want Herta Mueller with that?' 'Hell yes, super-Herta me!'" -- Zeb the dogcatcher

Cries of "Bad taste" as McDonald's moves into 'Mona Lisa' museum

From CNN.com:

"Shortly after McDonald's' celebrated its 30-year presence in France, the fast-food chain is conquering one of the country's most valued cultural institutions --the Louvre.
. . .

"McDonald's plans seem to have caused more media attention abroad than in France, but for some French outlets, the idea of combining fast food and ancient art is stomach churning.

"The Parisian Web site 'Louvre pour tous' (Louvre for everyone) describes McDonald's' decision to open a restaurant in the prestigious museum as 'bad taste' and blamed the Louvre's directors for failing to prevent what could result in 'fragrances of fries drifting under Mona Lisa's nose'."

Elitists. Snobs. Kill joys.

McDonald's has been making people happy for almost 70 years. I guess the French don't want people to feel happy after looking at all their depressing art in the Louvre. I suppose the arbiters of taste would prefer mimes outside of the Louvre handing out week-old baguettes to hungry tourists at inflated prices.

I have long supported a citizen's group that's advocated for more McDoanld's, and strategically positioned McDonald's restaurants. We'd like to see more McDonald's franchises in funeral homes, for instance. And in rape counseling centers. Also, walk-in psychiatric facilities would be the perfect locations for a McDonald's -- Lord knows those down-in-the-mouth sad-sacks could use a good pick-me-up. And what about Ground Zero in New York? If there is one place in America that could use a good, old-fashioned clown smile boost in spirits, it's that unhappy place. We should get back to basics and put a McDonald's right in the middle of Ground Zero.

Instead of lining the border between North and South Korea with tens of thousands (if not millions) of landmines, why not line the border with one McDonald's after another? We should remind those Gloomy Guses in the North what they're missing out on.

Fact is, McDonald's is what people have wanted since the 1940s. The numbers don't lie. So, I say the elitist schmucks who want to put their no-fun, show-offy effete tastes ahead of popular opinion should take a backseat and get out of the way of everyone else's fun. Better yet, they should order some Happy Meals. Who doesn't feel better after eating a few Happy Meals?

Barbarians at the Gate

Liz Hastlethwarte smiled genially when she appeared on the nationally televised morning program. She was an editor with a major publishing house, and was appearing on TV to promote the latest opus by the publisher's most popular name-brand author. The book was a vampire-themed romantic techno-thriller about symbols in famous works of art and international architecture. The novel was considered a "roller coaster ride," as well as "rollicking good fun." It had a first printing of 1.5 million copies.

"So, do you have any new up-and-coming writers we should watch for?" the bubbly morning show host inquired.

Liz looked at her, blank. "No."

As the car service delivered Liz back to the publishing house headquarters -- she enjoyed thinking of it as a "house" even though it was actually a ten-floor office suite in a ninety story fortress-like skyscraper -- she pondered the TV host's odd question near the end of the otherwise successful interview.

New . . . writers? The concept struck Liz as strange. The only writers she'd ever worked with had been publishing for as long as she'd been alive. The only authors the publisher handled were those whose names filled half a dozen slots on the bestseller lists of any given newspaper on any given week of the year. When Liz thought of those authors, the only words that came to mind were brilliant, eminent, erudite, and a couple who were feisty with a hint of devil-may-care about them. But new was not a word she associated with writers.

When she returned to the marble walled office, Liz took a few minutes to sit at her desk and re-acclimate herself to the rarefied air. When the slight buzz induced by "outside" air had passed, she decided to seek an answer to this strange question about "new writers."

She didn't dare ask any of her peers for fear that any sign of weakness would give them a competitive edge as they all clawed their way toward becoming senior editors, and thence on to VPs and other assorted executives in the company.

Liz started with the company's Web site. It took some searching, and ultimately she had to refer to the Site Map to find the link to "Submission Guidelines." When the page came up, she chuckled seeing that the guidelines essentially told vulgarian scribes not to bother submitting at all. Of course, the language was dressed-up to read "We do not consider or accept unsolicited manuscripts," but the message was clear.

"Of course we don't," Liz mumbled to herself. My gosh, can you imagine what would come in the mail if we did? she thought. The collected works of rest room wall graffiti perverts, lists of dirty jokes, filthy limericks, the ravings of lunatics. She bristled.

After exhausting the scant information on the company Web site, Liz went out of her office.

I'll bet people still submit manuscripts to us even though the Web site is crystal clear on the matter, she thought. Like people who don't come to a complete stop at a STOP sign, but just roll through.

She went down to the mail room.

The first thing she noticed about the area was the noise and the heat. There was the squeak of gears and pulleys and the bang of metal collapsing against metal. It was like a workhouse setting in a Dickens novel.

The immediate area Liz entered looked ordinary enough where gray-faced hourly-waged workers sorted letters. She approached one of the smaller, wan female sorters. "Have you ever handled a package that contained a manuscript?" she asked. The moment the words were out of her mouth, Liz regretted the question. This poor dimwit probably has no idea what a "manuscript" is.

But the girl pointed to a double-doorway that led toward the area from which the heat and noise emanated. Liz cautiously made her way over there.

The heat in the dimly lit area was sweltering. The heavy clanging noise came from a set of steel doors that slowly opened and banged closed like a giant mouth. Hordes of shirtless, sweaty men worked before the door with shovels, loading large manila envelopes in the giant mouth. Each time the doors slowly opened, massive flames came forth like ravenous, monstrous tongues.

A man wearing a shirt and holding a clipboard approached Liz. She was grateful. She couldn't take another moment in that hellish scene.

"Are you lost?" the man shouted over the noise.

"No," Liz shouted back. She was ready to retreat, but figured she may as well ask her question while she was here. "I'm looking for the area where manuscripts from new writers come in."

The man shook his head. "This is where we deal with unsolicited manuscripts. You should check with HR."

Liz was surprised she hadn't thought of that herself. She thanked the man and hurried back to the elevator, haunted by what she had witnessed.

The Human Resources department directed Liz to the fourth floor, to an area called Acquisitions.

She was met at the door by a person whose gender she could not determine. The person was bald, had no eyebrows or eyelashes, and wore a formless metallic smock. The person had large, intense eyes and spoke with a voice like Muzak.

"Welcome," the person said. "I am Radian. How may I help you?"

Liz stared at the person, vaguely wondering if he or she was even human. She quickly regained her wits. "I'm looking for the area that accepts manuscripts by new authors." Liz spoke like a child asking for confirmation that newborn babies were, actually, the result of sexual intercourse.

Radian smiled warmly. "Yes, this is the place."

"Really?" Liz said. "May I look around? Is there someone who can tell me how it works?"

"Certainly," Radian said. "I will answer your questions."

As they walked through this portion of the publishing house, Liz was struck by how dissimilar it was to the other offices. There were no corners, no right angles anywhere. The walls, floor and ceiling were white, and merged into one another with soft, rounded gradients. It was like moving through tunnels, rather than corridors.

"I know that we don't accept unsolicited manuscripts," Liz said. "Which only makes sense. But how do we find the authors we do publish?"

Radian led Liz through an archway that gave onto a large, pod-like room. There was a clear pool in the center of the room in which five beings who looked like just Radian lay. They appeared to be naked, but had no nipples or genitals. They lay motionless with their eyes closed. The only movement was their chests slowly rising and falling with breath. From their bald heads rose bouquets of wires that disappeared into holes in the flooring above them.

"Here we have the solici-psychics immersed in amniotic fluid," Radian said softly. "They transfer psychic impressions to the main data collecting server, which filters out impurities and compiles lists of authors we should approach about writing books for us."

"Where do they get their impressions?" Liz said. "They don't look like they've ever been outside."

Radian smiled its beneficent smile. "You don't have to go into the world to find books that will sell." Radian walked back into the hallway/tunnel.

Liz was taken to another large room where the floor was covered by an enormous map of the country. Once again, people who physically resembled Radian populated the room. They walked, slowly, back and forth across the map holding what looked like dowsers, or divining rods.

"You are correct," Radian said, though Liz had said nothing. "Those are divining rods."

Liz looked at Radian, flustered. "How did you know that's what I was thinking?"

Radian smiled.

"What are these people doing?" Liz asked.

"They divine areas of the country the soli-psychics should focus on for their impressions."

Radian led Liz to yet another room. As they walked, Liz thought that she could no longer be shocked by what went on in Radian's area. She was wrong. This time, she had no difficulty identifying the beings populating that room -- they were chimpanzees. Liz and Radian observed them through a window. Inside, the chimps stood to one side of the room and hurled darts at pages affixed to the opposite wall.

"What are they throwing darts at?" Liz said.

"Those are lists of recent graduates of MFA creative writing programs. The names and locations are cross-referenced with data cultivated by the dowers and solic-psychics. Once all of the data has been filtered and collated, we run lists of authors from whom we solicit manuscripts."

Liz looked at the busy chimps. Psychics . . . dowsers . . . and chimps . . . of course, she thought.

"Would it be possible for you to give me the name, or possibly the manuscript of a new author?" Liz asked.

"Of course," Radian said.

Liz returned to her office with the manuscript by a heretofore unpublished author. The novel was scheduled for publication with great fanfare next quarter. It was a vampire-themed romantic techno-thriller about symbols in famous works of art and international architecture . . . with a twist.

She couldn't wait to read it.

Before she did, however, Liz made arrangements to return to the nationally televised morning show to promote the book the day of its release.