Ode to Boxing Day: Whoville Chainsaw Massacre (aka Grinch 2)

'Tis the day after Christmas ... and I wish I could tell you I wrote this following, but I didn't. The credit goes to Jade, from Dreamcraft. Enjoy!

Grinch 2:

Whoville Chainsaw Massacre

Twas the night after Christmas and Whoville was rocking
With the kind of wild party that brings people flocking.
The noise and the booze, all the singing and dancing ...
The racket and rumpus, the shmoozing and prancing ...
Would drive to the point of starting a riot
Any poor fellow who just fancied quiet.
And you already know who was sane by an inch:
Poised on the brink was the poor old green Grinch.

All the popping and bopping, the preening and prancing,
The swinging and zinging, and -- oh, the break-dancing!
Were more than the Grinch could guess how to endure ...
And then, all at once, he envisioned a cure,
For there by the Christmas tree, flat on the floor,
Was one lonely present. A forgotten chainsaw.

By nine in the morning even Max was vibrating
With the jackhammer jollity; it's not overstating
That not even Max could endure so much 'cheer,'
No matter how snockered one became on Who beer.
And by two in the P.M., oh, Maxie was worried,
For the Grinch looked so manic; the beast who'd been buried
Beneath fudge and tinsel, and the charm of a child
Had clawed back to the surface ... and my, he was wild!


And the Grinch had no sooner set eyes on that tool
Than he said to himself, "Grinchie, you’ll been such a fool,
To think you could bear all this ruckus and humbug,
This rumpus and dumpus, this scampus and scumbug,
This noise, noise, noise, noise, that these Whofolk call ‘fun,’
While the stores are all closed and you can’t buy a gun --
There isn’t a fowling piece (nor even a pheasant),
But one of these idiots forgot his best present!"
For under the Christmas tree, left on the floor,
Wrapped up in red ribbons lay a brand new chainsaw:

All shiny and sharpy, all toothy and jagged --
Just begging for gasoline! So, out the Grinch swaggered
With a light, empty gascan and a bag full of quarters,
To the gas station downtown, with a brain full of slaughters ...
There wouldn’t be any Who left to make noise!
They’d be peacefully absent, the Who girls and boys.
The Who-guys and ladies would be quiet as the snow --
And Cindy-Lou Who’d be the first one to go.

For the Grinch could envisage the headlines tomorrow,
When no Who in Whoville survived to feel sorrow --
Here was a task to which the Grinch felt quite equal
(And MGM’s already contracted the sequel):
GRINCH II: WHOVILLE CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

Thanks to Jade for the words; and to Jim Carey for for the visualization.

Cheers to all,
MK

In the landscape of spring

Looking back on yesterday's post, which was on the theme of human rights and the flak which one can draw for being different in any way, I was reminded of a Chinese poem.

Now, I don't know if Bruce Lee wrote this (he was an artist, calligrapher, writer and poet as well as a martial artist, actor and director ... little wonder he passed over at a very young age: he had packed three or four lifetimes into the thirty years he lived among us). But Lee certainly quoted it in his book, or in the notes for his book. If he didn't actually write it, he might have translated it (he was completely bilingual too), which means it might even be Lao Tzu or Confucius ... I wish I knew for sure: anyone??

I remember reading it about 35 years ago, being stunned by its implications, and I've never forgotten it. These few lines say it all ... for everyone on the planet, no matter what your difference is:

In the landscape of spring
The flowering branches grow naturally,
Some long, some short.

Even today, I find myself staring at those three lines ... 14 words ... and am struck as speechless as I was when I was a kid, growing up and knowing I was waaaay different from the rest of the little bast--dears. Reading those lines, you feel a tiny nub of stillness and peace inside, and if you look inward and pay attention to it, it grows until it threatens to fill you up, and you'd be ecstatic if it did.

The sensation you're feeling is acceptance. Not by your neighbors (Jill or Ron, and Bobby and Carol who live next door ... remember them from "Here comes Damocles with his chainsaw.") The acceptance you feel certainly doesn't come from anything to do with the government or legal system, either.

Now, some folks are almost certain to perceive "God(s)" in this sensation, but you'll have to exercise extreme caution if you're heading in that direction, because you'll get a big argument from the guys who sell salvation ("kindly leave a contribution on the tray").

If you were asking Keegan --? Nostrakeeganus, he say, what you're feeling is a waking up, an epiphany. Whatever, whoever, you are, you're (wait for this: hold your breath and soak it in through the pores) NATURAL. You're what eighteen billion years' worth of universal evolution (through the mechanism of eons of time, plenty of sex and inevitability of death) has made you; you're absolutely, 100%, what the Universe intended you to be at this point in time and space. Gay? Great. Black? Beautiful. Asian? Awesome. Fat? Far out! Short? Shooper! Tall? Terrific. Old? Orlright! You get the picture.

So, don't worry, be happy. So long, that is, as you know your theory of evolution, on the cosmic time-scale, the four-billion-year geological history of this planet, and Darwin's Solution to the God Hypothesis.

(Needless to say, if you've been taught, and firmly believe, Creationism, you're up the proverbial creek with no paddles in sight, even with a good pair of field glasses and two hours of fair weather. But we're not going to go there today. We went there yesterday ... and I can still feel the frustration of getting to the end of the logic train and finding -- not an answer, but a bloody great oil tanker head-on crash with a loco hauling boxcars filled with super-phosphate. To quote Edgar Montrose; KABOOM!!! So, we're not going there again. My ears are still ringing.)

Instead, we're wandering this route: the landscape of spring. It's spring here downunder, and it's fresh and beautiful. Went for a hike in the midst of it a couple of days ago, and I'd like to share the pictures.

Keep the poem in mind. Print it out and stick it on the wall above your monitor. Carry it in your wallet. (You could yell it at people who give you flak, but they'd only think you were even weirder for quoting poetry now.) So, think of the poem as you scroll down, and feel a little peace:

If it's all Greek to you ... read on!

A bunch of symbols is about to appear in the right margin:




...and numerous people will be wondering what the hell it's all about. It looks a little like something borrowed from an obelisk ... and you're starting to see these squiggles appearing all over the web.

It's all about something called the "creative commons license," and rather than blather at length about it, I'll give you the link to go right there, if you have the slightest interest, and check it out for yourself:

Creative Commons

The symbols basically tell visitors what they can, and can't do with the materials posted to this blog, although that's a terse, argumentative way of putting it. I'd be more likely to say, "If you want to use stuff posted here, please give me a citation when you re-post it somewhere -- a link would be nice, to bring visitors to this page; and you're welcome to repost the stuff, so long as you don't make a buck out of us, and we get the credit ... and, most importantly, you don't muck about with the materials before reposting. Meaning, please don't change what I said here, or rewrite the poetry!

Alack and alas, it's actually become necessary on today's web to put these legal symbols on a page, because the content of one's page is quite likely to get (and I use the proper term here ... though it sounds like a nasty medical procedure) scraped.

Scraped. Isn't that a horrible term? It basically means, unscrupulous people tour the web, thieving whole pages here and there as they go; they then plunk the pages down on their own sites and, voila, park their Google ads on them, and they're in business without writing a single word, taking a photo, doing some artwork, of their own.

It's illegal, of course; it's also very hard to stop. There's a new service which has just come along, called Copyscape, and to one degree and another, it should help protect people's websites and blogs. The Copyscape service scans and compares pages so, theoretically, if the content were identical, it would pop up the comparison and kick the case back to the legal publisher (on the understanding that the thief ain't the one using Copyscape, obviously).

Okay. It's nice in theory. But there's something else out there called "remixing," which is where multiple websites are "scraped" and content pasted together to make something new. And I seriously doubt there's anying much Copyscape will be able to do about that.

Anyway, the symbols are appearing on this page for obvious reasons. I'm uploading a lot of original stuff, such as Jade's artwork, Keegan's poetry and photos. And it turns out, you have to make some kind of a statement, sooner or later, to protect yourself against scrapers.

I don't like the sound of being scraped. It sounds like they tie you down to a surgical table and do something horrific to the most vulnerable portions of the human anatomy.

So, here we go with the icons. Now, what the hell do they mean?

Content covered by the Creative Commons License. Duh.

Gimme a citation, or accreditation, if you use the work: a back-link would be nice!

Don't "remix" the work ... meaning, don't rewrite me, changing what I said.


Don't use the work for profit. I don't make a buck out of it, why should you?!

Uh ... this one speaks for itself, right?

(The rights being reserved are set out by the symbols ... always supposing you can interpret the symbols. Hence, this half-baked Rosetta Stone.)

It's interesting that the whole problem of "scraping" has become so prevelent, but one could hardly call it surprising. A couple of posts ago, I mentioned there are now more webpages than there are people in the world -- and at the same time, anything you can park Google ads on (except gay-friendly sites: we went through that already!) will apparently earn "nice money." Add in one more factor (the sheer inability, or unwilingness, of unscrupulous people to create their own site content), and you have the scenario in a nutshell. A lot of webpages exist to carry the damned ads, and if you can "scrape" the content for the pages, you don't have to do any work. Great.

Makes legit writers, artists, photographers, poets and webmasters cringe ... and DreamCraft has just decided to at the very least start plunking the icons on some pages, to (mildly) deter the scrapers. We do use Copyscape, too. But it's the "remix" people who are almost certainly going to slither through that net, because I'm 99.999% sure that Copyscape doesn't read PARTS of a page; it compares whole pages. Hmmmm.

If you're interested, or have online intellectual properties to protect, it's Copyscape.com, and it's worth a look.

The Joys of Gay Poetry (hey, it even rhymes!)

Monday finds us working on fresh artwork for the website, and wondering at the cynicism of the search engine world ... I'll tell you THAT story in a day or two!

There are things called 'Search Engine Wars.' In this corner, Google, wearing the Darth Vader helmet. In that corner, the Alien, having just assimilated a Kodiak grizzly and now standing nine feet tall. In the third corner, the Predator, priming his weapons and wanting both of the others stuffed and mounted on his office wall back home. In the fourth corner, King Kong, and in the middle, you and me, trying to figure out how to get the hell out of the ring -- and how we got there in the first place!

It's a long, complex and somewhat confounding story, and I don't have time to tell it right now, but return in the next day or two, and all shall be revealed. [sound of barfing] Seriously, you won't believe this, and if you're in any way interested in marketing your books on the Internet, there's a whole bunch of stuff you have to be aware of, lest you get shot down in flames and wonder why! (Indie publishing is rough enough at the best of times without getting caught in the cogs and gears of online monster machines.)

For the moment, I'm on the run, but call this the 'preview,' or the 'trailer' for the main feature which will certainly make you blink.

For today, being on the run, I'm not going to ramble, nor tackle a serious topic which warrants a lot more time than I can give it! Instead .. something so new, I'd say the ink was still wet, if I hadn't written it in pencil in the back of a notebook. A new poem -- gay poem, at that.

(For those who can't stand poetry, gay or not, skip the next part and scroll down to the artwork which was uloaded yesterday: I promise you a full-on intrigue tomorrow or the next day. For myself, I actually classify poetry as a kind of art. Painting pictures with words, as a friend of mine once remarked, a long, long time ago. So forgive me if I goet arty-tarty on you again. I don't do it very often.)

I don't often write poetry these days, but when I do, I like to share it. Enjoy...

He said,
"Who are you, stranger?
What brings you to this town?"
I said,
"I come from far away,
The wind has brought me down
From mountains where the trees
Cling on beneath the autumn sky;
I'm searching for a place
To call my home, before I die."

He said,
"I keep a cabin in the woods
Not far from here.
Don't get too many visitors,
Cuz folks have too much fear
Of people who're different ...
I'm different -- you've been told."
I said,
"You're not so different,
And as for me? I'm bold."

He looked into the autumn sun;
He looked into the wind,
He touched my face, he touched my hair --
And if I'd never sinned,
I'd have fallen, fast, from grace...
But I've been there before,
And when he set his lips on mine ...
Well, I was home. I swore --

Here was home, for all my days.
Here was kith and kin,
And all the things I've wanted,
And all the love within.
Here -- a place for weary bones
To take their rest awhile,
And learn to watch the world spin on...
And learn, again, to smile.

He said,
"You're not so different,
Not if we're both the same."
I said,
"We always have been,
And nobody's to blame
That we just never met before
I wandered here, this fall."
And I gave him, then, my hand to hold --
My life, my heart, and all.

Cheers,
MK

Was Achilles a Hoopy Frood?

Eureka! (I'm going to lay some Ancient Greek on you today ... and anyone who has already scrolled down far enough won't be complaining.)

No, that's not the sound of bathwater splashing you hear; nor is Keegan likely to go streaking into an unsuspecting street, nekkid or towel-clad. That kind of activity, we leave to Ancient Greeks ... which is not to say that 94 year old Greek guys look any more terrific than ANY guys at a similar age ... but if we're talking about Greek dudes circa 1200 BC in towels, all you have to do is turn on TROY. I have to say, I don't think anybody ever looked better in a towel. Or out of it, for that matter. [grin]

All of which has absolutely nothing to do with the bellow of "Eureka!" which heads off this post. I admit, I digress ... but then again, if one is going to digress, one should at least have the common decency to digress in the direction of Greek superheroes (in or out of towels), right?

The "Eureka" was all about (don't worry: we'll return to Ancient Greek superheroes in a little while) Keegan finding a copy of the 20 POEMS ebook, after a half hour of searching every drive and disk in this zipcode area.

Now, the version of it I found (and at this point it is the ONLY copy) is the version I gave at Christmas 2004 as a Yuletide gift to members and visitors at Mel Keegan OnLine. The whole content is identical ... I tell a lie; I just changed the contact information in the back. Okay, it's almost identical. The only part you'll have to ignore is where I say, "Merry Christmas 2004" ... and I don't honestly want to alter that, because this is the version of the ebook which dates from that time.

Click here to download the MEL KEEGAN: 20 POEMS ebook. The size is about 500kb (we compressed the hell out of it; believe it or not, it's also beautifully illustrated, at this size). You're downloading a zip file, from which you'll extract a PDF, and you're in business. You don't need passwords to open the file, but we secured it to prevent copying and printing and so on, with the rationalization that an eBook is an eBook ... which made sense at the time. If you absolutely need a printable copy, drop me a line via the website or the blog here.

Enjoy!

Now, back to far more important issues.

I came across some production photos which even exceed one's twenty-first century fascination with bathroom accoutrements. Cellphones. Cameras. Beachtents ... on the frontlines at the battle of Troy. There is something delicious about ooparts, and before anyone says I just invented a word -- it's a 1980s archaeological term meaning "out of place artifacts."

The pictures, below, are irresistable. One can only hope that the archaeologists workling at sites like TROY will start turning up the cellphones and cameras soon. Maybe, in the ancient world, burying cellphones and cameras along with the dead was a taboo, which is, of course, why tomb raiders never find them.

Click for a larger view of the images; I have no idea where they originate. I suspect they're culled from some magazines, but couldn't tell you which. Again ... enjoy. These HAVE to be worth a chuckle.

Curious electric

No, not the Jon and Vangelis album ... though I could say good things about it. I've had it on plastic, that weird black vinyl stuff, for a looooong time. (Believe it or not, we still have a [gasp!] record player.) But no, not that. This somewhat paradoxical bit of feedback that's come out of the sales figures for July:

The vast majority of SF readers prefer paperbacks. Historical fiction readers love their screenreaders and eBooks.

As Bilbo said, "Isn't that odd?" You'd have put money on it being the other way around. Being something of an SF fancier myself, I love my gadgets, but when I'm reading historical fiction, I not only like a book, I like a bloody great big hardcover.

Speaking of ebooks: apologies to one and all. The screenreader version of WHITE ROSE OF NIGHT is much later than I had anticipated ... and it's all my fault. It's sitting there, waiting for me to go through and approve the layout, and I've been so buried in work, I haven't had the chance. So --

If you're waiting for WHITE ROSE formatted especially for your Palm or Pocket PC, give me a few more days, and I'll have it done.

And now for a reader's question that caught me by surprise. What happened (she asked) to the slim volume of Keegan's poems, 'MK: 20 Poems.' And the answer to this excellent question is ... I'm clueless. Sometime, somewhere in the changeover to the new website, it slipped through the cracks and went missing. Vamoosed into some other dimension. It's not linked into anything at this point in time, and although I'd had the idea of making it a free part of the Members' Zone ... I forgot. Utterly.

Next problem: I can't even find a copy of it. I know it's on one of the backup archives somewhere, however, and I hope to be able to find it later today, or perhaps tomorrow. At which point I'll link it into the blog here -- free download and so forth, with my apologies.

The same reader asked, do I write a lot of poetry? I used to, a long time ago. These days I write poetry only to enrich a book. There's a sonnet in THE SWORDSMAN, for instance, and buried right in the middle of NOCTURNE is a poem which always gets overlooked (even by me), because it *is* buried in the middle of the book.(Not much call for poetry in NARC and HELLGATE, but you can usually find an excuse to write verse in fantasy fiction.)

The reader who asked about this is not a "vampyre person," but is a great devotee of romantic poetry, so rather than say something crass like, "Buy the goddamned book," I'm going to be decent, and include the poem right here.

(For those of you who can't bear poetry, skip the next part.)

I have walked alone
Through the silent places of the world
And tasted of night’s shadows,
Which coil like troubled smoke upon the mind.
I have heard the sigh
Of calm, deep waters; they call to me
To rest in stillness, everlasting and resigned.
The hollowness within
Is filled with echoings of cherished dreams
That, one by one, have died;
And, hearing those still waters
In the labyrinths of endless nights, I’ve cried.

And this alone, of all things, have I learned and kept:
Love is worth each tear of blood I ever wept.

***

Harking back for a moment to the 'Mars of Bust' post of last week or so ... headlining the science news today is the little story that they've struck real, genuine water ice about 2" under the surface on Mars. You gotta like that.




Like I said -- Mars or bust! However, I will add this: if we get there at all, it won't be the work of some of the scientists at the University of Arizona, in Tucson ... someone at the university either neglected to call in a cold-weather specialist, or actually refused to call one in (and I prefer to believe the former), leaving the Arizona-dwelling scienctists at the U ... hot weather people, all of them ... puzzling about how a chunk of warm(er) metal (ie., a spade), when shoved into a deposit of ice-gravel ... comes out of said ice gravel with stuff stuck to it. Geeze Louise, guys, any 9-year-old who ever shoveled out a driveway in upstate NY can figure this one out without even rubbing two brain cells together.

Every had your tongue stuck to a frozen window? (And no, I haven't ... I'm not quite that dense; but I know kids who did.)

I would recommend sending Arctic Canadian, Alaskan, Scottish, Scandinavian, Siberian and Russian science crews to open up the Martian colonies. At least they won't get their spades gummed up.

Or get their tongues frozen to the windows.

The Bard strikes back

No sooner had I uploaded my last post than I got a challenge. Nothing to do with the topic of movie violence, or whether I'm right or wrong to have reservations about it. I halfway imagined somebody would be upset about my not worshipping the ground Steven Spielberg walks on ... or something. But, no. Or, not yet anyway. The challenge was along the lines of, "All right, Smarty-pants, if you're so clever, how DO you write a sonnet?"

Okay, kids, since I've never been one to run away from a challenge, here goes:

Sonnets 101.

A sonnet is a rhyming poem where the lines and rhythm (metre) are set in exact patterns. Just (duh) take a look at an existing sonnet, and reverse-engineer it. I'm going to paste in the sonnet I wrote for THE SWORDSMAN, and we'll pick it to pieces right here...

How shall I say that I have never known
A thing more fair than life, than love, more rare?
Yet must I say, more precious, still, than these
Is friendship's very soul, and mateship's care.

A lie would pass these lips, were I to claim
That I have never wooed — nor loved, nor lost;
Yet all my lost affections leave me thus:
Cherishing friendship's pleasure ... and the cost.

For, seldom do the years design this joy:
Two hearts, two souls, around one cause entwined,
Where friendship, courage, joy and all the rest
Yield such sweet sorceries as soothe the mind ...

All this is surely true. Yet, still I say:
When friendship turned to love, I bless'd the day.


THE SWORDSMAN is a kind of 'court of the Medici' gay fantasy novel, so the 'sound and feel' of the sonnet reflect this ... and it's why I chose to use a sonnet instead of another poetic form. This pattern was 'The In Thing' for a long time, in exactly this era, from before Leonardo till well after Queen Elizabth I.

Notice it has 14 lines: 3 sets of 4, and two danglers.

Notice that the rhyming lines are 2 and 4 in each of the three 'verses' and then the dangling couplet rhymes.

Notice that EVERY line has 10 syllables. Not one less, nor more.

Lastly, notice that the 'punchline' to the whole piece is in the couplet at the end.

The sonnet form is uncomfortably like the limmerick. A limmerick is five lines, where the 'punchline' is saved for the last line, and lines 1, 2 an 5 rhyme, and lines 3 and 4 rhyme, albeit differently with each other:

If one caught a Chinchilla in Chile
And shaved off his beard, willy-nilly
It could rightly be said
That one have just made
A Chilean Chinchilla's chin chilly

Welllll ... the sonnet is distressingly similar in form, but I've never yet read a funny one. Now, there's a thought! (Can you imagine Shakespearean limmericks??)

How do you write a limmerick? First think of three rhyming words where the third one has the potential to be used as a punchline. Then, use the other two to frame the setup in Lines 1 and 2, and you're only short of the bridge:

On the chest of a barmaid at Yale
were tattooed the prices of ale,
and upon her behind,
for the sake of the blind,
was the same information in Braille.

(and yeah, okay, that's the 'printable version,' I know. Young children might be reading this. Although I can't imagine why.)

How do you write a sonnet? First, grasp the GIST of it. What's it about? This gist is the punchline, though the poem isn't funny. (I would LOVE to see a hilarious sonnet ... and a heartbreaking limmerick...) Once you know what the sonnet is about, you explore the concept and then have the inestimable joy of beating it into the format of 4x 4-line 'stanzas' plus one rhyming couplet...

Take it away, Bill, let's have Number 57! What a belter that one was:

Being your sad slave, what could I do but tend
Upon the times and hours of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend
Nor services to do, till you require:

Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu:

Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But like a sad slave, stay and think of nought
Save where you are, how happy you make those;-

So true a fool is love, that in your will,
Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.


...and yep, that was one of the two sonnets from Shapespeare's pen, rather than my own, that I used in FORTUNES OF WAR!