'Twas Two Nights After Christmas

Dedicated to "Typhoid Emma" as she henceforth will be called

Edit: Harvey thinks this entry may scare away those with a faint constitution. Thus, proceed at your own risk.

'Twas two nights after Christmas, when all through the abode,
We all soon were stirring, racing to the commode.
The cookies were tossed on the staircase with flair,
In hopes that somebody soon would clean there.
My parents were nestled all snug in their bed,
While visions of chef's salad danced in their heads.
And Cooper in his collar, and I in my clothes,
Had just settled our brains for a short winter's doze.
When down from my bowels there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the couch to try not to splatter.
Away to the bathroom I flew like a flash,
But stopped on the staircase, and threw up (with a splash).
And yet I charged on and raced to the head,
Waking my mother, asleep in her bed.
Then what from my large intestines should expel,
But a new round of chunks with their own unique smell.
With a little old back pain, so achy and new,
I knew in a moment it must be the flu.
More rapid than eagles, his courses they came,
And he whistled and shouted and called them by name:
Now peppers! Now cheddar!
Now, avocados!
On, lettuce! On, turkey!
On, something that glows?
To the top of the tub!
To the edge of the wall!
Now hurl away! Hurl away!
Hurl away all!
As dry heaves that before the eaten meal piles
When they meet with an obstacle, just regurgitate bile,
So into the toilet the courses they spewed,
With the tank full of acid and digested food.
And then, in an hour, I heard from my room
The ralphing and retching of mother's exhume.
As I covered my ears and was turning around,
I thought of the girl who was causing this sound.
She was dressed all in pink, from her head to her toes,
And her blanket was matching, except it had holes.
On Christmas Eve it was her turn it to hurl,
But yet she was still our dear baby girl.
Her eyes--how they twinkled! Her dimples, how merry!
Her cheeks were like roses, her nose like a cherry!
Her cute little smile as she gave you a hug,
You'd never know you were getting the bug.
The shreds of a blankie held tight in her grasp,
And the scourge it encircled our heads like an asp
She had a sweet face but she ached all our bellies.
We moaned and we groaned, as we vomitted jellies.
A pang in my gut and a twinge on my tongue
Soon gave me to know the flu wasn't done.
One phone call then two, a right jolly old plague,
My mother's whole family, they weren't being vague.
Mike Johnson cacked first, Mary barfed in the hall,
And Stanley seemed healthy, but soon joined us all.
Then laying my finger aside of the john,
And giving a flush, I sent the puke gone.
It sprang down the pipe, on its way to the sewer,
(Though it soon was replaced by yack that was newer.)
But I heard it exclaim, 'ere it flowed out of sight,

"Happy New Year's to all, and to all a good night!"

They want to drown me

A couple of people have brought this to my attention. What's missing from the website version, but appeared in the e-mail version that Kraft forwarded to me is the biblical passage that suggests that all those who bring this show to others should "have a great millstone hung around his neck and... drowned in the depths of the sea." It's a little too ridiculous for me to really respond seriously, but let me just say this:

Instead of giving your money to a group that will just use it to mount protests, you should use the money to buy a ticket to our show and find out why it is so blasphemous for yourself. Then your money will go directly to places like BARCC that are actively working to prevent and stop sin instead of just railing against it. And then you can go on calling us blasphemous, if that's what you really think.

My biggest problem with protests like these is that they are usually led by people who haven't actually seen the show or have any idea what it's about. But as Kraft's "I'm definitely going to go see the show now" demonstrated, all publicity is good publicity and in the end, this kind of stuff just brings us a larger audience.

Oh, and VAGINA! (with jazz hands)

Pay up!

From Amrys...

Pay up, Sox fans.

Farewell, Mr. Martinez...

Now that it's the off-season, all we baseball fans have to talk about are trades and signings. For the Red Sox, it seems like half the team is up for free agency. One of the big questions has been whether Pedro "The-Yankees-Are-My-Daddy" Martinez will play for the Evil Empire that is George Steinbrenner's baseball club. And now it has finally happened -- next season, Pedro's going to be playing in New York.

No, not that New York.

It's not official yet (I don't think), but it looks like Pedro is on his way to returning to his National League roots by way of the New York Mets. Perhaps the World Series reminded him how much he likes to be on the otherside of an at-bat. Or maybe the Mets just offered him more money. Either way, he earned his ring in Boston and now he's moving on.

The real question is, how will the Mets take to Nelson de la Rosa?

Press Release...

In a class I took with Patrick Winston, one of our assignments was to write a press release on a topic I have since forgotten. The first rule, he said, was to put the most important information in the first paragraph, the next most important in the second, and so on, because various publications will chop the release at various lengths to make it fit their desired column inches. It made perfect sense, but I hadn't seen a counter-example failing until today...

Yesterday, Amal sent out the following e-mail to putz both linking to a story and conveniently summarizing it:

From: Amal Dorai
To: putz
Subject: ironyx10

Summary: Marine has doctors cut off his finger to save his wedding ring. They do so, but end up losing his ring the commotion.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/12/12/marine.finger.ap/index.html

Today this same story appeared in the Metro, the free daily paper I read on the T every morning. Except there was something missing - the Metro, in its ongoing pursuit of journalistic excellence,
trimmed the story after the fourth paragraph. But the punchline doesn't show up until the fifth paragraph. And suddenly I find myself grateful to Amal for sending out one of his stupid links because I knew why that story was tragically funny and the guy sitting next to me probably didn't.

Imagine...

24 years ago today, my favorite member (sorry, Paul) of my favorite band was shot and killed by a lunatic. But thanks to the advent of artificial intelligence and natural language processing, you can still talk to John Lennon. It's not the most intelligent bot I've ever seen, but it is attempting to be John Lennon, so I took the time to play with it for awhile.

To enter the conversation, the site recreates Yoko Ono's YES Painting, which John Lennon saw the day he met Yoko, so the story goes. I saw that piece when it was at The List Visual Arts Center at MIT. They no longer let you climb up the ladder, but I stepped on the first two rungs anyhow, just to be able to say that I climbed the same ladder John Lennon climbed. And then the curator told me to stop. I did a similar thing at the John Lennon exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland a few years ago. One of Lennon's pianos was there behind a rope and I reached over and touched the low A. I briefly thought about playing it (the note, not the piano as a whole), but decided that I didn't want to draw attention to myself.

"People say I'm crazy, doing what I'm doing..."

Musical variety

Riding the T every morning, I've gotten used to the usual musicians that rotate through the Davis Square stop. Occassionally there will be someone new -- like Morgan and his friend with the stand-up bass and fiddle playing Irish folk songs. But I usually never see those folks more than once. Half the time it's the same handful of people -- the guy with the hand painted box for collecting change, the guy who sounds like James Taylor and sings the song about the downtown train, the kid with his Beatles chord book, and the guy who was playing this morning, who I will refer to as Acoustic Guitar Man.

Acoustic Guitar Man sounds pleasant enough the first time you hear him -- just his guitar, no singing, plucking melodic melodies in a way reminiscent of elevator music. But if you see him often enough, or if you happen to get stuck waiting an extra long time for the train, you discover Acoustic Guitar Man's secret -- he only knows three songs. This usually suffices to fool people, because by the time his set recycles, you've already gotten on the train and left. Normally, it wouldn't be quite so bad -- "Downtown Train" guy usually sings the "Downtown Train" song and I don't mind because I like the song and his other songs sound sufficiently different. But Acoustic Guitar Man plays "My Heart Will Go On" from "The Titanic," which happens to make me cringe. And his renditions of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and "The Rainbow Connection" wind up sounding like music from "The Titanic" as well. And so instead of being compelled to throw change in his guitar case, I have to resist the urge to grab his guitar and throw it on the train tracks.

But this morning, as "The Rainbow Connection" wound down, a holiday miracle occurred. He started playing something different -- "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas." What's more, it didn't sound like it came out of "The Titanic" soundtrack. I was so shocked and delighted that I threw a dollar into his guitar case. I can only hope that he uses that money to buy himself a new songbook.

This day in history...

(Most of these taken from the History Channel's This Day In History website.)

1823 -- The Monroe Doctrine was declared. Surprisingly, this had nothing to do with jcbarret, jrandall, and johnston or even qmahoney. It was an isolationist foreign policy drawn up by US President James Monroe.

1859 -- John Brown's body was a-moulderin' in his grave... actually, it was hanging in Charles Town, VA, by order of the US Marines.

1932 -- Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, stars of the seven Road movies, appeared together on stage for the first time at the Paramount Theater. "We're off on the road to Morocco..."

1942 -- Enrico Fermi controlled the first nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago. His laboratory was originally a squash court underneath Stagg Field.

1954 -- Senator Joseph McCarthy was condemned by the US Senate for "conduct unbecoming a United States Senator." You know, like calling everybody and his mother a communist and a spy.

1964 -- Ringo Starr had his tonsils taken out and the Beatles temporarily replaced him with a guy named Jimmy Nichols.

1981 -- My mother spent 18+ hours in labor while my father wondered why he didn't bring a book. At 6:43 pm after much insistence that I stay where it was warm, I finally fell out of my mother's uterus, attempting to hang myself on the umbilical cord.

... and don't anyone say anything about Britney Spears.