Quibblings

QUIBBLINGS: alternate for of the word siblings, which accounts for the sisterly tendency toward minor (hopefully not major) arguments.

My brother and I seem fortunate in that we get along pretty great. Disagreements are rare. More common is his tendency to interpret that I have insulted him in some minor way when in reality I intended nothing of the sort. He does seem more sensitive than most toward imagining slights however there is a definite body of evidence to suggest that I am, or else have been, of that same tendency, even though I do not feel that I am.

My nephew of four is a loud little guy, always gabbing exuberantly or singing or droning while stomping around in circles. The niece, Claire, at the final turn of year-one, seems to adore her brother, or at least finds him an engaging entertainment, and lacking the language to fully participate, has adopted a loud drone of her own which her loving parents kindly refer to as the most annoying sound on Earth, often referring to her as Clairodactyl.

I predict they will do very well as siblings. He showers her with regular affection. I'm still immensely impressed and proud at what a great dad my brother has turned out to be. His generosity as a family man is... inspiring.

The close-quarters Covid environment seems a threat though, as Dad tires of the constant pandemonium while working a sensitive career from home. I hope he can bear this assault without too much backlash at the kid, who will no doubt receive plenty of that from teachers as well. He is a very gregarious and loving boy and it would be a tragedy to crush that spirit. A real tragedy.

Question Q: If you could learn the absolute truth about one thing, what QUESTION would you ask?

Well that's a trillion dollar question. The origin of the universe?

Is it applicable to say I would like to meet the Buddha and/or Jesus of Nazareth and learn the truth of their stories behind the suspicious literary tales; their real origins and methods which led to their wisdom?

 

Pupparazzi

PUPPARAZZI: Independent furry four-legged celebrity-hounds who take every opportunity to hassle, hamper, trample, torment (and mostly lick) their target of the moment; namely myself. Specifically they are:

Pupparino: (top/right) A.K.A. River, Chicken Wing. 

Pupparoo: (bottom/left) A.K.A. Jetzia, Jet, Munchkin, Wee Monster, Monkey, Turkey, Whackadoodle, Barky McBarkenheimer, Poodella-Queen Of The Floor

Question P: Your favourite PET you've had.

Blue of course. Short for Bluejay. I'll never know a finer dog. Through Covid I have missed her more than ever, and dreamt of her occasionally.

Ovaltine

OVALTINE: a whey-and-egg malted milk drink brand anglicized from Ovomaltine (Latin for egg and malt) by process of human error. I drank it as a kid, adding the powder to milk and fighting to blend the stubborn stuff, because my mom had been a fan of it in her childhood. At the time my friends were unfamiliar with it but now as adults, maybe everyone's heard of it?

Like the more popular Nestle Quick chocolate milk mix it hails from Switzerland. Of course Ovaltine's real claim to fame arrived in this 1974 theatrical masterpiece Young Frankenstein with Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn and Marty Feldman:

Question O: What "OLD-person" thing do you do?

I forget shit all the time. Such as doing my daily A-to-Z. I'm a week behind. Time to get crackin'.

Neography

NEOGRAPHY: the new but familiar landscapes I inhabit, to varying degrees as I suffer my good and bad days. The world looks entirely different when you have unlearned in a wholesale way in a real courageous pursuit of truth and in the course, gained a ridiculously rare appreciation for causality, illusion and human duality which should be compulsory to the human experience, the absence of which being close to the root of near every problem imaginable, great or small, and the root of foolishness in all our great collections of naive solutions which distract and divide us and stroke our preposterous egos and will never work.

Question N: If you had to move to a different NATION, which would you choose?

India, Cambodia or Vietnam, all for one shared reason and each for a unique one. It is only love for friends and family that keeps me in this place where I basically approve of nothing that goes on here!

Mindcrack

MINDCRACK: another term for Minecraft; a game addictive to the brain; the hyper-real lego game where the blocks come with their own reliable chemistry and physical properties so that you can combine them into new blocks. For instance, you mine stone and build a furnace. Mine coal and iron ore and produce iron ingots in the furnace. With iron and other materials you can build armor, weapons and tools... You can build practically anything. Someone built a working computer in Minecraft although in game scale it was probably the size of Belgium.

What makes the game work so well is that this basic model of Earth, equipped with minerals, plants and life forms is so logistically generous you can build large complex things in no time. Most flora grows from seed to maturity in a (ten-minute) day. You can move any object instantly and effortlessly and carry enormous miniaturized inventories, and most transformations (recipes) are instant just by adding the right components to your workbench (called a crafting table) or loom, anvil or other such facility.

Teens tend to play the game for the community factor. They can be a sentient adult, easily form a profitable business (or two or more) and start buying, selling and pursuing the largest bank account.

I play because it's a wonderland of creativity and in terms of community its an opportunity to more easily live out your dreams than in the (ultra-fake) real world!

Question M: If MARS were inhabitable would you accept a one-way ticket?

Quite possibly. It would depend on more criteria then we want to get into today.

Dr. Pi: parrot therapy

Letterfettered

Welcome back to my pitiful April A-to-Z Blogging adventure, where I'm slowly trying to build a daily writing habit so I can get back to crafting fiction again...

Letterfettered: This is an inevitable A-to-Z blogging experience; where the alphabet blocks your every move. For example you want to do an article on cow's breath but you've already published Chi-Chi Rodriguez so you're looking at H for Halitosis but you'd have to switch the Hasslehoff article to D for David but where would you then move the Didgeridoo piece? So you decide on M is for Moo Breath instead and move the More Than a Feeling piece to B for Boston - no wait. B has already been published. Okay, G is for Guitars Galore and I'll move the Giddy-up article to H is for Horse. Done. No, wait. I needed H for Halitisos. Then you say fuck it, and play Minecraft instead. 

Question L: What LAW would you create if you knew everyone would be forced to obey?

I don't know. Laws don't seem to be the genesis of real change. But okay; just for fun: No guns. Ever. For Anyone. Ever.

Karakurbagasi

KARAKURBAGASI: a Turkish toad. And by that I mean it's just Turkish for toad. And by that I mean that this is a totally random word and I have no idea what I'm about to say. And by that I mean that this will be the worst blog post ever. 

Let's see if I can dig up something short and sweet and get you out of here so we can both get on with our lives:

Here we go. A turkey/toad chimera for your enjoyment.

Now, if that looks to you more like a bat/squirrel/ram chimera that's because you need glasses.

Hey! What's that behind you!

(runs away)

Question K: What do you miss most about being a KID?

Playing street hockey. I was damn good but its just playing I miss, rather than the recognition. And also the innocence. I assumed the world of adults would be sane and I would fine comfort in growing up. But not so.

Jobvious

JOBVIOUS: This is where you need income but can't figure out what to do and then it turns out that your favourite hobby has become a marketable talent and people are trying to hire folks with your experience and having trouble finding available providers but somehow you don't know what you should do.

Case in point: I love to Dungeon Master D&D games and consider myself pretty advanced at it. Almost unbelievingly, it turns out that while the participation rates of D&D players is growing the number of willing DM's is not keeping up, and yes, people are paying well for DM service! And yet I feel reluctant to look into this as an income opportunity. Why not, you ask? I don't even know.

Question J: What JUNK food item could you eat every day?

Easy: a large Dairy Queen blizzard: the cookie dough variety with add-on Reeces PB cups. I've never ordered any other kind for twenty-five years and I remember being tickled to see Jack Nicholson's character order the exact same concoction in the quirky entertaining film About Schmidt, where one of his other special treats was getting to see Kathy Bates stark naked!

Some-Idiot

Some-IDIOT: this is a sort of safe word used in place of the dreaded T _ _ _ p word; the unspeakable name of the great orange psychotic pea-brained narcissist who was recently granted the largely-ceremonial role of President of the United Semi-automatic-gun-peoples of America (a.k.a.: USA) by a minority voting contingent comprised of gullible morons; filthy stinking racists; redneck gun-humping fucknutters; the criminally rich and other miscellaneous confused scaredy cats, along with an exceptionally goofy antiquated system known as the Exceptionally Goofy Antiquated Electoral College, or Electoral College for short, who's job it is to inflate the voting power of slave states through a mind-boggling patchwork of qualifiers, legal ambiguity and an approval rating among American citizens which has lingered in a decided minority since your grandparents first danced the jitterbug.

Basically it artificially stops the more-popular Democrats from keeping power and creates a flip-flopping two-party experience which nurtures enough hostile tribal delirium among the peoples that they won't be inclined to stop and think about who the real enemy might be, because THAT would be holy-shit-bad-bad-news for the wee horde of miscreants who have been getting away with gleefully running (or owning as they put it) the country and stuffing their pockets under cover of a maelstrom of misdirection and fear-mongering for an
absurdly long time.

Uggghhhh!

Why

The fuck

Are we talking about this?

Question I: What IDIOSYNCRASY or INSIGHT has been useful to you, either overall, or on a particular occasion?

The habit and talent for detecting ILLUSION. Which is everywhere, by the way.

Hoarderline Personalities

Hoarderline Personality Disorder: This is where your lives are in disorder because there is too much shit in your house. Not like the super-hoarders I've heard about on the glass tit machine but borderline hoarders, with more shit than the average citizen (with average hoarding tendencies) but less than the professional hoarders who's walls you never see.

Even living in a hoarderline situation is a bit dangerous. There's more than a few slippery slopes lurking about the dense landscape. The good news is that I was able to gently confront the roommate about it and it seems we're both on the same page after all, in wanting to do something about it.

Question H: How would people celebrate a HOLIDAY named in your HONOUR?

Well it would have to start on New Day Rising Eve when friends and family gather in large groups to smoke cigars and drink scotch. The children would get coke, candy and Kraft Dinner (sorry, cola I mean) and be sequestered in another space, let's say a finished basement, for a slumber party of their own design and management while the adults challenge themselves to identify the hidden realities of their lives and the major problems inhibiting their happiness.

Off to bed. No alarm clocks. The first one up checks on the children to make sure no one needs rescuing from whatever Lord of the Flies scenario they've devolved into and then starts making gallons of coffee.

French toast, OJ and champagne for breakfast and Irish coffee through the morning. Everyone dresses up as Gandalf except for that one weird cousin who dresses as Gollum.

Board games, cocktails, imported cheeses, pate...

Steak and red wine for dinner. Someone tops up the mac and cheese downstairs and confiscates any sticks sharpened at both ends.

Cigars and cognac in the evening and thoughtful discussion on how to resolve problems and live better lives over the next year.

Too bad I'll be dead before all this comes to fruition.

Gillooly

GILLOOLY (verb): to gillooly someone is to sabotage or attack a victim in some way which benefits a third party. The term's genesis comes from the name Jeff Gillooly, the former moniker of psychopath, accused rapist, deranged idiot, famed bludgeoneer and shambling mound of inhuman excrement Jeff Stone who changed his name after being released from prison for being the primary psychopath, accused rapist, deranged idiot, famed bludgeoneer and shambling mound of inhuman excrement who conspired to have figure skater Nancy Kerrigan attacked with a police baton in order to cripple her so that she could not interfere with Super-Moron Tonya Harding's figure skating career by being better than her, this after Kerrigan was accused of muttering "I could beat that Harding skank standing on one leg."

It turns out she was correct, winning silver in the following Olympics while Harding finished eighth.

This particular shambling poo mound only served 6 months of his adorable two-year sentence due to the universal opinion of American judges that "...prisons are not a place for monsters. They are a place for poor people who may or may not have committed a crime; who knows; who cares? Not me. They're just black people. Pass the caviar."

Since his release the Great Gillooly-come-Stone has remarried and taken ownership of his idiot bride's children after she committed suicide according to popular opinion (by beating herself repeatedly with a police baton, you ask? -- I don't know. Probably.) Reports indicate that the children are in good hands and will learn the best techniques available for beating and raping women.

Question G: What GIFT have you re-gifted? If none, name a gift you would re-gift, if received.

I surely must have re-gifted something at some point in my life but I honestly can't think of anything. If I received the gift of a police baton I would give it to Jeff Stone I guess. Preferably I'd give it to him right through his piece of shit cranium.

Editor's Note: The rather indulgent preceding diatribe was not well researched. At all. Like he didn't even bother to watch any of the collection of Tonya Harding movies.

F'LOG

F'LOG: a contraction of "food log" where you record every detail of every meal you eat for your team of dietitians and then try to resist flogging yourself for the litany of errors and failures of discipline it memorializes.

Question F: Which FILM could you watch over and over?

I'm compelled to be indulgent. As one who's watched close to three thousand films in my life, including mini-series and shorts, I'll permit myself three categories; 1--theatrical; 2--based on a true story, and 3--documentary.

1: Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship. Seen it at least a dozen times, often with commentary enabled because it's the best story ever. Possibly you disagree that it's the best story ever. That's okay, but if I find out I will see to it that you disappear without a trace.*

2: Moneyball: It amazes myself how often I spontaneously watch this. Seven or eight times. As a storyteller I find it addictive just to observe how well-crafted this piece is, specifically as a "true story." And I know that there are factual cheats at play which make it a more compelling story to absorb specifically in movie form but that is part of the craft which I speak of, Also I adore Brad Pitt and Philip Seymore Hoffman as actors.

3. Blackfish: Four times minimum. Probably five or six. Again I'm just super appreciative of the craft here. I can't imagine how this tale could have been told more effectively. As with Moneyball it's easy to give the film a click just to take another peak at their effective openings but then never get to a dull spot and think of turning it off.

*just kidding.

Exosculation

Exosculate: This is a dictionary-sanctioned word. But rather than explain it I shall point you toward the following obnoxious video. There are no rewards for watching the whole thing to the end (other than, it improves as it goes along), but if you're watching this during the Time Of The Great Plague... you possibly have nothing better to do. 

Question E: What is your most EXCELLENT memory? 

This is really tough. All my best memories are too intimate for - well, not for the internet, but for such spaces as this which serve ordinary decent people who respect ordinary decent superstitions around love and physical affection.

As for printable great memories: there are a few heroic sports moments; some vacation adventures; many family celebrations on the farm; a hundred good times with my best friend; cuddling on a park bench with I. S. watching the moon, snuggling with my dobie, Blue on my bed on weekend mornings, my first Rush concert, finishing my first novel... I can't pick one.

The vid was a hatchet job. It'll be messy:

Drummerboying

Drummerboying: This is where you give a gift that is probably useless but its the only thing you have to offer. For a while now I've been working on a gift for a special friend who is really under the gun currently and could use a doctor, a maid, an errand boy, a PSW, some cash and some new body parts. Instead she's getting a video.

Pa rum pum pum-pum.

Question D: Your favourite breed of DOG?

Doberman. Because Blue was a doberman. But I have been very enamored with greyhounds lately, So much so that I would say they're a very close second. I think Dobermans are primarily an off-shoot of greyhounds anyway.

Here's a sneak peak of the video's opening sequence:

Camp NaNo

Camp NaNo: November's National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) light versions, held every April and June. Writing goals can be personalized, as low as 10,000 words. I am an April Camp NaNo rebel this time around. My goal is simply to write every day. So far this has not extended beyond Blogging A-to-Z in which the vague theme is simply unfamiliar words, some of which I'm making up myself on the spot!

Question C: What did you think was COOL when you were Young, and now: not so much.

James Bond (the movie versions; i.e.: Sean Connery and Roger Moore) And I still kind of love them but I know these characters are ridiculous and can't possibly defend them against criticism. 

Benko

Benko: The Benko Cup is the trophy awarded annually to the playoffs champion of the Strat-o-matic Hockey League of which I was a member for about twelve years. I made it to the finals four times, was statistically the favorite to win every time and didn't finally win until the fourth time.

I miss my Strat-o buddies. I have kept in touch with them, showed up to hang out every now and then on league nights and participated muchly in their off-season board-gaming nights, which have been Covid-curtailed of course.

Benko is the surname of the man who originally introduce the league's founders to the strat-o-matic game back in their university days. I never met him.

Dungeons and Dragons is the "Strat-o-matic" of fantasy role-playing and I have added Benko to my DnD names database. This means that a non-player character might be assigned that name at some point in my campaign-building endeavors. At this time I am not building a campaign per se but I am building and collecting tools for such. I'm looking forward to playing again; possibly online.

Question B: Favourite BOOK ever read

I really want to say Siddhartha because I think it was the deepest most meaningful connection ever made but really, instinctively, it was the genesis of Dungeons and Dragons in my interpretation, both personally, and societally: The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) which thrills me the most. 

Agendocide

Agendocide: This is when an entire population of healthy goals and planning and diarizing gets gunned down by a lazy slob - or by someone who is hampered by serious medical and mobility issues but who is never entirely sure if they might actually secretly just be a lazy slob.

This one is celebrating Agendocide Day with a pretty serious bout of productivity:

I brushed my teeth today, spent some time outside, had a coffee, engaged in numerous phone calls in response to urgent affairs in Grampa Munster's corner (more on that later), spoke to a Health Network to clear up some medical needs and schedule an occupational therapist assessment, worked on an important video (more on that later) and did a little planning with a great pal with regards to April Camp Nano and April A-to-Z blogging.

And yeah: welcome to A-to-Z blogging! I'm gonna be busy plopping posts on this page six days a week. Sorry about your luck.

Question A: What non-traditional ANIMAL might you like as a pet?

Hmmm... honestly, a Bengal tiger because I could make him a mascot of the lacrosse team. I think he'd help draw a pretty good crowd. And hopefully not eat them.