High Kookookajoo

It's 1977, and the bloodied tail end of the boomer generation crank up their amps to 11 and turn their manners and morals down to less than zero. Energy abounds... The Sex Pistols, Clash, Ramones, Iggy Pop and Patti Smith pull rock music onto a dark, wild ride of speedball-fueled mania dressed in heroin chic.

Dead Meat in Concert watch us die on stage if bad smack fails to kill us, the din no doubt will

The Sex Pistols and Sid Vicious' twisted snarl paved the way for Billy Idol's "White Wedding" to become the most-frequently requested song at U.S. wedding receptions and Bar-Mitzvahs (source:WIKIPEDIA).

I list Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and The Sirens of Titan among my top ten favorite novels. He was the same age as my dad.

I feel like I'm in a time warp, governed by the spiritual descendents of the criminal Richard Nixon and his morally currupt stooges. I mean, John Mitchell, Spiro Agnew and the rest had nothing on Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales and Carl Rove.

George Bush, unfortunately, is more personable. Somehow it helps him get away with this crap.

This time Gonzales takes the fall for Rove. Someone taking the fall for Rove is becoming a weekly occurance.

I like the name, 'Love Day', rather than naming the day after a minor-leaguer saint with dubious credentials. Love Day just seems more universal, accessible, and we all need a little love once in a while.

"Happy Valentine's Day," I said this morning, when my sweetie came downstairs, ready for work. We exchanged a small kiss. Every day our love is the same, no single day better or worse than any other.

Whatever you choose to call it, this is the day we honor carnal love, masquerading it as romance. On Love Day, who doesn't want it to end dancing the horizontal fandango with the consenting adult of our choice?

Sometimes a small kiss can mean more than a big fat wet one.

Goodbye, Anna Nicole

we all want your baby

now that you've truly become

femme fatale ity

Who else could we honor on this Love Day except the recently deceased Anna Nicole Smith? The world will be a less interesting place without her brass beauty and the tornado of public notoriety that followed her around. She parlayed the bodacious best of what nature gave her into quite a nice living for herself: fame and fortune, American style.

Anna Nicole may have taken on too much of the Marilyn Monroe model and suffered a similar tragic death, somehow karma. We're all potential accidents waiting to happen, but there's a few that travel at more dangerous speeds.

I mentioned to my son Matt that he should get in an early claim as the father of Anna Nicole's baby. Call a press-conference or something. Not only would it help cement his image as a super-stud, but it would also look great on his resume:

2007 -- Present: Paternity claimant for the love child of Anna Nicole Smith

No matter if he can't prove he was ever in the same country with her, never mind the same bed (or wherever she does it). It's the fashion of the Age to confess for fame.

It would be a sweet irony if the baby's DNA failed to match any of the guys claiming they jammed the bun into Anna Nicole's oven. Too bad that would leave a four-hundred-million-dollar baby with a probate judge for a father.

I love Halloween... well, for the kids sake, anyway. On the face of it, the entire ritual is weird, and must seem quite strange to those raised outside of the European Christian tradition.

Mrs. L., a Japanese national, happens to be one of them, as a matter of fact. Japanese don't really have costume holidays, but they have their share of devil's and demons, and these appear in many of the folk festivals. [As far as I can tell, the guys who dress up as the Japanese devil are always pretty drunk.] Mrs. L. does like the idea of kids going around getting free stuff from the neighbors, though. They do something similar in Japan on New Year's Day, though I understand it's strict a cash-only business.

I wrote a Halloween story a couple of years ago, riffing on an incident in my youth where we may have given an old women a heart attack by scaring the beejesus out of her with a cherry bomb.

I made my story different, though. This time the boys used a more direct method of getting rid of the old bag, though they swore it was only an accident. The story is called, Last Soldier to Die in the Pumpkin Wars -- click here to check it out.

Inspired by a friend who does radio plays, I made a half-baked effort to produce the piece as an 'audio-tale', with sound effects and actors. Well, I got started late, and may not make my self-imposed Saturday deadline.

I didn't manage to get any actors, either. I need 3 sixth or seventh-grade boys, an old woman, and someone to play a policeman. At first I thought, "I'll just ask the teachers at the Carlisle Middle-school."

Somehow I just didn't want to contact the school and ask for 3 boys to act in a radio play. They would probably assume I was some kind of wierdo.

I plan to solve that by next year and do a more professional release of the product. My audio editing software and rendering platform are okay, but not quite up to the task, either.

All Hallow's Eve

dress down like a witch,

my pretty... spin by the fire,

dance up a moonsong

We're invited to a Halloween party on Saturday. I'm going as Jimmy Hendrix's afro... it's hard to explain.... you have to try and envision it.