Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Elbow, is for posts that make us laugh.
Egyptologists give one another special names. It’s one of those things we’ve always done. So John calls me Ikky (which is short for Ikhnaten) and I call him Akky (which is short for Akhenaten) and when people see the two of us together they say: “Hey! There goes Ikky and Akky.”
Being the environmentally conscientious sort that I am, I went out to WalFart and bought myself a new push mower. Besides helping to reduce gas emissions, it’s good exercise running up and down the lawn with a push mower. Plus it doesn’t do a half bad job of cutting the grass.
It’s not like Otis Garvey is snooty. I don’t think he’s snooty at all. But he wears a plastic optimism that reminds me of an evangelist who smiles and grins and says it’s a lovely day even when the hailstones are chipping the paint off his car. So it gave me a secret satisfaction to watch Garvey open the letter from Nigeria and read it with a serious look on his face.
It’s amazing how different a bus ride can be depending on the time of day and the day of week. Ride the bus in the morning on a week day and it’s full of tired students on their way to high school and sober-looking grownups on their way to work.
I kin heah Jeb comin’ from a million miles away—or at least I kin heah his ATV. I’m standin’ jus’ in from the road when he come out from the cornstalks agrinnin’ ‘n’ awavin’ like a fool, him with his dawg, Gopher, runnin’ behind.
Frank liked his new computer. His son Jimmy bought it for his 65th birthday. It came fully loaded—and with all the peripherals to boot. It had a fast CPU and a big flatscreen monitor. You could listen to music or watch a movie on it, scan pictures, run them off on a nice colour printer, record your voice, chat on the webcam. It was a real beauty.
When I answered the phone, a nondescript male voice asked for mister Winter. I said he was out and asked if the caller cared to leave a message. The nondescript male voice gave a name and said he was calling from Factory Casket Wholesalers. He understood a need had arisen in mister Winter’s household.
The cop motions me over to the curb in front of number twenty-two. He’s a funny-looking creature in a Kevlar shell whose precise movements give the impression he’s still doing drills at the police academy. He skitters to the car as I roll down the window.
It’s a beautiful summer’s day, so I go to the park with a book tucked under my arm. There’s a mature shade tree—a willow—standing near a bend in the creek. Its branches arch high overhead in a broad canopy and their ends swing low, almost sweeping the ground.
They give me a green capsule and tell me it contains a radioactive isotope. I swallow it and wait in the reception area until they call my name and lead me to a special room. They leave me alone to put on a gown.
My standard poodle ate Walt Whitman(Leaves of Grass in ropey coils on the lawn)I stoop and wrap my fingers aroundwarm Song-Of-My-Self turds.She winces at the stanzathat she squeezes from her anus.Do I constipate myself?Very well thenI constipate myself.I am large.I contain multitudes.And I wonder if Whitmanhad to work so hardto get his words outin the…
Metatags are declassé. The big search engines haven”t used them for 6 yrs. now. Anybody can put “god, love, jesus” in their metatags while the img src tag points to a jpg of a dwarf in flagrante delicto with a dog.
My daughter, now in grade 9, is learning to do linear equations in her math class, then mapping points as Cartesian co–ordinates on graph paper. She’s a reasonably bright 14-year-old, but no math whiz, mostly because she feels no motivation to learn the problems. How do they relate to real-world issues?
Suppose, instead of resolving theological differences through disputations and councils and seminars and symposia, we opted for something a little more robust. What if we asked our theologians to submit to a completely different process—a cage match.
“Plutoed” is the 2006 Word of the Year, as determined on the afternoon of January 5th, 2007.