IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

Where I-85 meets I-285 in Atlanta is a well-known landmark called Spaghetti Junction, an insane wowzer of over and underpasses, on and off ramps, composed of 16 bridges, the tallest of which rises 100 feet in the air. It’s a scary place. A number of bad accidents there. The bridges are skinny things with mack trucks barrelling over them. There is no side of the road to them. Ask an Atlanta driver how’d they like to break down on one of those skinny Spaghetti Junction bridges.

So, it was evening rush hour and we were heading out to the suburbs where H.o.p. was to trick-or-treat with his cousins. He’s got his Halloween costume and bucket with him. We were groaning about the traffic but it was expected and was moving pretty briskly after a point. But we were all still kind of grumpy and things were feeling chaotic in the way that they feel chaotic when you’re in Atlanta traffic at rush hour and wondering if you’re going to get to where you’re going on time. We realized we probably would as we started up one of the Spaghetti Junction bridges. And we hear this pop somewhere in the vicinity of the engine. And the van starts to slow down.

We broke down on one of the Spaghetti Junction ramps. Broke down flat dead. We were in the left lane and there was no pulling to the right. Marty managed to guide the swiftly slowing car over to as far left on the bridge that there happens to be which isn’t much so half the van was sticking out into the lane. Cars and mack trucks are zipping up behind us and honking as they maneuver to pass. Like we would be sitting there if we had any alternative. Your auto is no safe place to be but to get out of it would be certain suicide. There’s no walking off this bridge. Marty called 911 and informed of the situation and they said the police would be there soon. I don’t know how long we sat there, maybe 15 to 20 minutes. Marty counted 4 times we were nearly rear-ended, while I was thinking about how if someone rear-ended us we’d go sailing right off the bridge and onto the interstate below. And it was twilight and quickly getting darker. I was thinking that if I thought it was dangerous and frightening sitting there in twilight, it was going to be loads of fun when it was dark. Marty says it’s one of the scariest situations he’s ever been in his life, which echoes my assessment of the situation.

I really really really didn’t want to be a headliner on the ten o’clock news.

Finally, a police car arrived. The towing service we’d called had said it would be 45 minutes before they could get someone to us. The policeman said that was no good and he’d get someone there in ten minutes. The blue flashing lights behind us on the bridge were a great relief. A mack truck would think twice before smacking those. I wondered what the policeman was thinking as we all sat there waiting for the tow truck. Was he hoping no one was going to rear end him and send him slamming into us? And if he wasn’t worried about that, then what was he thinking about.

He didn’t look real happy. He didn’t smile when he came up to talk to us. He frowned throughout.

It was longer than ten minutes but finally the tow truck came soaring up the bridge behind the police car and pulled over in front of the van. Oh, he looked like such a nice guy. A big smile. By now I’d convinced H.o.p. this was an Adventure! We climbed into the back of the tow truck into a cloud of petrochemical fumes where I promptly began to almost have an asthma attack, now that we were out of the van. I stifled it while the guy hooked up the van as quickly as I’ve seen done and as he climbed back in H.o.p. exclaimed, “This is an adventure!” and the tow truck driver grinned. As we drove off, H.o.p. crowed about how it was a very bumpy great adventure. The driver dropped us off at a Burger King on a nearby highway, which made H.o.p. even happier. He ate a burger and fries while we waited for my brother to come pick us up.

We just got the van out of the shop a couple weeks ago with a bill of over $800 for rebuilding the front end. We’d said, “Ah well, that’ll keep us running for a little while.”

Little while was right.

But we made it to the suburbs in time. H.o.p. went out trick-or-treating and came back with a full bucket.

Coolest costume was the kid dressed as a table. A big full blown 3 door widths size table with place settings.

And the most bizarre sighting of the night?

My brother, driving, asked, “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing or are my eyes playing tricks on me?”

In front of us was a big black truck. Embedded in its mud flaps were red tail lights in the shape of iron crosses.

Years ago when I had a real photo set up I concentrated on doing architectural shots. With the digital painting I’ve focused on faces but the other night when we were dropped off at Burger King by the tow truck, we walked in to a lush old version of “Strangers in Paradise” playiing. Despite it being dinner hour, the place was empty but for a couple of others and one of the employees was out in the restaurant polishing up the chrome and wiping fingerprints off surfaces. To this velvety “Strangers in Paradise”. I wanted to take a picture of the woman polishing the chrome but somehow it didn’t feel right to approach her. There was something about the moment where it felt it would have been invasive. A rupture in the atmosphere.

How to turn your grown-up shoes into happy shoes dispelling the dark shadows at your heels.

Another guy down at the studio right now has some intellectual property lawyers in recording a CD for the Christian market, convinced they will make millions off of it. Have no idea if they are Christians.

All are songs that they’ve written based on the bible. My husband was there when they were recording one of the tunes. “Oh, Leviticus, oh, Leviticus, you are a book of many laws. You teach us how to eat, how to bathe and how to act. You are a book of many laws.” In every verse they add another law that Leviticus covers. Which could end up being a very long song but this is the abbreviated version. The melody? The’ve set it to “Polly wolly doodle all day.”

Even odder, my husband doesn’t get the impression that this is a children’s CD.

The original “Polly Wolly Doodle All Day” ends with some lyrics that, well, we just don’t understand around this household.

Behind the barn, down on my knees
sing Polly wolly doodle all the day
I thought I heard a chicken sneeze
sing Polly wolly doodle all the day

Oh he sneezed so hard with the whooping cough
sing Polly wolly doodle all the day
he sneezed his head and his tail right off
sing Polly wolly doodle all the day

Years ago there was this guy who would send my husband a cassette of his clients singing acapella, my husband did all the music and he’d take the tracks in to him and then this guy would lay in the vocals at his own studio. So my husband never met the clients, nor did he want to. One of my husband’s restrictions on doing the work was that he never have to meet or talk to the guy’s clients.

One of whom started off doing Country songs about picking up cowboys, then switched over to Christian songs like, “Happy, happy, the Israeli, dancing in his land so free.”

You’d have to hear it to fully appreciate. It was so uhm soooooo that we kept a recording of it, which is around here somewhere on a cassette titled, “The Worst Shit I’ve Ever Heard”.

This woman later got a Christian television show.

(Reposting. Accidentally wrote over another post with this so replaced it and now am reposting this trivial but humorous little item.)

So one of the men down at the studio who does corporate stuff got a work order for a person with the first name of Glace and a popular Chinese last name. He assumed the Glace was a typo and when he met her the next day he said, “It’s so nice to meet you, Grace.” And she replied that no her name was indeed Glace, and that it was her parents’ bad idea of a joke, that she could indeed pronounce r’s and jokingly wished him, “Melly Chlistmas.”

Now that would be something to have parents with that kind of sense of humor. I’m imagining the thoughts that tripped through their heads every time someone asked their daughter’s name, when she was a child, and they brightly smiled and replied, “Glace!” Some will say they they were unsympathetic to so name their daughter, but they sound like perhaps the kind of people I’d have wished to be sitting next to in the park, watching our respective kids playing in the sand.

I’ve been reading these Egyptian love poems which seem to me to not be just love poems, though I could be wrong. In the 9th poem given from a selection of fragments, the lover enters the river to cross to his “sister” on the far side, a crocodile waiting in the shallows.

The introduction reads, “Love songs or poems are probably found in every culture…Although they appear to be spontaneous outbursts of young people, they are thought to be the deliberate works of literary artists.” And these poems do seem very simple and straightforward, or at least the translation lends them that air. But reading the first I was caught up with thoughts on generations upon generations of individuals singing of nearly the same experience, of the peculiar nature of continuity and rebirth by virtue alone of resemblance of deep emotion and experience, was carried into those thoughts which went on for a while and it occurred to me that it wasn’t by accident, that it was the intention of the poems. “Yes, these are good,” I thought, but was also thinking that these are not just love poems. Each one carried the words abroad the personal, without losing a dramatic intimacy. And it was the 9th poem that made me feel I was right on that, considering the symbolism of the crocodile, revered and feared, Sobek the god of fertility and rebirth, as one who originated the life-bringing Nile. But these are fragments collected from three different sources in a translation by Miriam Lichtheim, so it’s her voice one is hearing also that perhaps lends an air of sameness to them, as if they could be by the same author. And I wonder if the selection presented, the 9 poems, are as given in the book from which they’re taken. If Lichtheim had so ordered them, and if she had a purpose in arranging these poems as she did so that the 9th concerns the crossing of the river and the crocodile.

Beautiful poems. Perhaps Osiris and Isis.

My heart bounds in its place
Like the red fish in its pond

Never mind the seeming semi-erotic nature of the red fish (the red fish makes an appearance in other love poems), I am wondering what is this fish? The breeding of goldfish for enjoyment (though first in temples) comes from China but this gives the idea of a red fish kept for pleasure. Egyptians kept fish but did they have a red fish like the goldfish? I read about the Oxyrhynchus and its importance but I’ve not found any pictures of it as a red fish.

And what is the saam-plant which appears in one of the poems.

Saam-plants here summon us

I do a search and find only that saam in Egyptian means toxic. Oh, wait, I read elsewhere that wormwood is perhaps mentioned in ancient Egyptian writings as saam.

So, I’m a little confused on the saam-plants. Any relationship with the word soma?

King Mill and canal, Augusta, Ga. 1970s

Marty worked briefly at the King cotton mill after we were married but I didn’t take pics of the mill until after he’d worked there. Across the canal from it was the bulk of the cotton mill neighborhood, the worst part of which, the tenements lining the street, I think were already being torn down. But I remember going past them when I was younger and the humanity sitting out on the stoops was sad. As for the tenements, I remember a distinguishing feature being a lack of paint, such as in the cotton mill area we briefly lived in later outside of Atlanta.

The color of and outside the King Mill was all Georgia red clay but inside, in the mill, it was blue, indigo fibers floating so thick in the sweltering air that it was difficult to breathe and Marty came home covered in blue. You couldn’t get rid of the blue, as if it was millions of worms working into the skin. And after a few short days he was coming home coughing blue. If that was happening after a few days, one could imagine what it meant to work there a lifetime, and how many people lived in the tenements who no longer had their health because of their work. Marty only worked there a brief while but it was long enough. I yelled at him each day that he had to get out of there now. Not later. Now. He was just coming out of a long illness during which he’d been unable to work and had been unable to find work afterward.

Marty’s job was carrying these 12 foot long, three foot diameter rolls of denim as they came off the machines that rolled them. Carried them from one end of the building to the other from where they’d be shipped out. The indigo dye vats were directly below where he was working, thus the blue. He has no idea why King Mill didn’t have carts for carrying these huge rolls of cloth.

It was a non-union mill.

As you can see in the above photo, the windows of the mill are all bricked up. It was perpetual night in the mill in that sweltering blue cloud of fibers. I don’t know why they bricked over the windows. This link goes to an old postcard of the John P. King and Sibley Cotton Mills of Augsta, Ga. The postcard is from about 1900 to 1910 and the windows seem to have yet been bricked over.

The description reads:

Early-twentieth century postcard image of the John P. King and Sibley cotton mills on the Savannah River in Augusta, Georgia. John P. King Cotton Mill appears in the foreground of the image and Sibley Cotton Mill appears in the background. The expansion of the Augusta Canal between 1872 and 1875 served to further spur the growth of the cotton manufacturing industry in Augusta. In 1880 the Sibley Cotton Mill was built on the former site of the Confederate Powder Mill. The mill was outfitted with automatic sprinklers in addition to electric lighting and provided tenement housing for its employees. At the turn of the twentieth century Sibley Cotton Mill employed approximately eight hundred Augustans. Construction began on the John P. King Cotton Mill in 1882 and the mill produced its first bobbin in October of 1883. The four story mill was headed by Charles Estes and employed approximately six hundred people at the turn of the twentieth century.

If you care to take a look at the Summerville house of King Mill’s Landon Thomas there are five impressive images here. “On the hill”, or Summerville, was an older area in Augusta with some fine, large houses. It was cooler on the hill and being on the hill meant, in the old days, you wouldn’t be flooded. We lived in several different apartments there before and after living in downtown Augusta (when no one lived downtown).

The website with the postcards and links to Thomas Landon’s residence is “The East Central Georgial Regional Library”. Their page “Introduction to Historic Picture Postcards of Augusta” talks about “King Cotton” and the mills and the wealth that flowed from them, and then gives a brief paragraph on the labor situtation.

On the other hand, Augusta’s history of labor strikes demonstrated the unrest that sometimes flowed from wealth disparities and other problematic aspects of industrial practices.

Here is a pretty green picture taken of King Mill in 2001 when it was abruptly closed, supposedly unable to match overseas competition.

The film “Norma Rae” is based on the unionization of the J. P. Stevens mill. In the film Ron Leibman as Reuben Warshowsky delivers the following speech to the mill workers.

On October 4, 1970, my grandfather, Isaac Abraham Warshowsky, aged eighty-seven, died in his sleep in New York City. On the following Friday morning, his funeral was held. My mother and father attended, my two uncles from Brooklyn attended, my Aunt Minnie came up from Florida. Also present were eight hundred and sixty-two members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and Cloth, Hat and Cap Makers’ Union. Also members of his family. In death as in life, they stood at his side. They had fought battles with him, bound the wounds of battle with him, had earned bread together and had broken it together. When they spoke, they spoke in one voice, and they were heard. They were black, they were white, they were Irish, they were Polish, they were Catholic, they were Jews, they were one. That’s what a union is: one… Ladies and gentlemen, the textile industry, in which you are spending your lives and your substance, and in which your children and their children will spend their lives and their substance, is the only industry in the whole length and breadth of the United States of America that is not unionized. Therefore, they are free to exploit you, to cheat you, to lie to you, and to take away what is rightfully yours - your health, a decent wage, a fit place to work. I would urge you to stop them by coming down to room 207 at the Golden Cherry Motel, to pick up a union card and to sign it…It comes from the Bible - according to the tribes of your fathers, ye shall inherit. It comes from Reuben Warshowsky - not unless you make it happen. .

The film was made in 1979, which is after my husband was working at King Mill in Augusta.

This is the Golden Cherry Motel in Opelika. Filming for “Norma Rae” was done there. We were on the road doing the Holiday Inn circuit in the SE not long after “Norma Rae” was released and found ourselves put up at the Golden Cherry any time we were at the Holiday Inn in Opelika. Yes, they’d do that, not put you up at the Holiday Inn where you were playing, but put you in a cheaper motel. We called the Golden Cherry the Cherry Pit as the room was as cramped as I’ve ever been in, and was dirty and depressing. In order to film at the Golden Cherry, they’d knocked a wall down between two of the rooms. I never saw that particular room.

Staying there, our only consolation was the Golden Cherry’s vague notoriety.

Sally Field and crew may have filmed at the “Golden Cherry” but they stayed at the Holiday Inn. Apparently the people who ran the Golden Cherry were a couple called Aunt Loudell and Uncle Cell. If this is so, I don’t recollect anything about them. I had thought that the Holiday Inn and the Golden Cherry were owned by the same guy. I ask my husband about it and he says that they were. So at least that was the situation by the time we stayed there, which was early 80s. I never met the owner. I only remember the manager.

It has became fashionable and artsy to live in the mill area here in Atlanta. Small mill houses go for sizeable rents. Like most of these things, it started out as a cheap place for artists and musicians to live, then the upscaling happens and prices jump out of sight. After living in several different mill houses when we were first married, I can’t stand them and we have always steered clear of the mill area here though some find it yesteryear romantic. I don’t. I don’t like the smell of mill houses. Don’t like the quality of the air in them. Don’t like the feel of everything held together by a few rusty nails. I don’t like remembering how bitterly cold they are during the winter months and, because of lack of insulation, expensive to heat.

I feel just incredibly sad looking at a cafeteria token for King Mill. Maybe because a cafeteria token seems so perfectly symbolic of taking your sustenance from the place that steals your health and life, but finances fine homes and gardens in Summerville. It seems perfectly symbolic of a system that created generations of dependency poverty, people who worked for just enough money to have the tenement roof but never enough money to hope of getting away while still healthy and then unable to get way when disabled and their family members all working for the mill. This token at the above link was worth 10 cents and is now an item for trade and I wonder who wants to collect items from the textile mills.

Now, after that depressing last post, on a brighter note, we have loads of plasticene (for claymation), not all the colors H.o.p. would like, but we’ve got gobs and he’s now finding it difficult to think of what to do for his fledgling attempt at a movie. I quickly realized, as he went through ideas, one after another, that though we also now have aluminum wire for armatures (expensive!!!) that doing armatures is something best reserved for the future and more dedicated projects. Like far in the future. What was I thinking when I started talking armatures to H.o.p. a couple weeks ago? Much over enthusiasm on my part. Lots of over enthusiasm on my part. I’ve now been having to talk him out of armatures, as I realized that he would, of course, want a new armature a day.

So the past few days have been me convincing him it’s just fine to make characters out of the plasticene with no armature, that these will do just fine for his first endeavors. Little squat figures. Having convinced him, he is now trying to figure out what his first figures should be. He keeps making and squishing and making and squishing. I asked him this morning if he’d come up with any firm ideas and he said no because his movie must have a villain too and he hadn’t decided on a villain. I remind him he should make this first one as simple as possible, maybe even just one character, but he says no, there must be a villain. In the meanwhile, he keeps making new storyboards, looking for the right story, the right characters.

He is now talking having a robot that first looks like a cup and then transforms into an evil robot that takes over the earth, but he’s not certain about any of this.

Denied last December and back for another round with fresh confirmations, the U.S.’s use of white phosphorous, aka Willy Pete, in Fallujah. A blog With a View is one of those that’s posted on it and I followed the link to the photographs of charred flesh and bone dressed up in unburned clothes, charred flesh and bone resting on their beds, still snuggled in relatively undamaged linens.

I’m up when I should be in bed and had just finished reading for a second time today the comments to Nick’s My Rape Story at “Alas, A Blog”. I had just finished writing a couple paragraph comment that I deleted. Thinking I really should try to get some sleep I went over to “A Blog With a View” and there was the rain of white phosphorous.

Some of the comments on Nick’s “My Rape Story” (an almost rape story) were leaning towards “if you put yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time”, and there had been several who said, No, that puts blame on the victim and doesn’t cut it, and I was going to comment as well that it doesn’t cut it. But I didn’t as I felt my thoughts were superfluous and not very well stated.

Below is the comment I didn’t post.

I’ve been around this earth for 48 years and have heard a lot of different excuses for what constitutes a “yes”, quite frequently remarked upon by women in the “she was asking for it” vein. What is taken for constituting a “yes” changes, as it were, with the movement of shadows. Different generations, different backgrounds, different outlooks upon life. And so if one thinks about it one realizes that there are thus no firm parameters in that regard. They shift, they slide. Is the showing of the ankle a “yes” in a society where the ankle is considered risky by some, by not all? Does walking through a room nude constitute a “yes”? The “she asked for it” argument doesn’t work. What some believe qualifies as a yes, shifts and slides from person to person, generation to generation, culture to culture.

“No!” does work. “No!” is definite.

The comparison with the open window made by one commentor is a good one. A long while ago, we used to live in a neighborhood–and not your old time country neighborhood–where air conditioning was rare and everyone left their door open at night. At first I was amazed, then it made me realize that really it should be all right for people to leave their doors open at night. Now, as before, we live in a place with burglar bars and the windows screwed shut and little burglar alarms hooked up to the doors. It wouldn’t be us “asking for it” if we didn’t have these things. It is a matter of fear and knowledge of lack of respect for boundaries that causes us to live this way.

The problem is lack of respect for individual rights. Making judgments based on supposed cultural indicators/assumptions not only ignores and neglects the rights of the individual, it supposes that the rights of the individual are ultimately without value. If by reason of a particular setting one feels that a person raped is a person who asked for it, it’s no less than society inflicting punishment on the victim and virtually raping them again.

Our society really has very little respect for the individual and this plays out in every aspect of life, not only the sexual.

I stated that what some believe qualifies as a yes, shifts and slides from person to person, generation to generation, culture to culture, but that is only a half-truth as I tried later to communicate in the above not-posted comment. For we all know about boundaries. We all sense to some degree the sacredness of the individual. It’s just that our society, for all its supposed love for and fascination with the go-get-em individual (who is said to have built the West) tends to despise the rights of the individual and to hate the individual.

I see the loathing of the individual all around us. For instance, the loathing of the individual is the blame heaped on Katrina survivors for being in the position they were in. It’s the hatred for American Indians reminding us of hundreds of years of genocidal policies. It’s contempt for anyone who is in dire straits and somehow didn’t live up to their societally understood obligation to fend for their individual selves and never need any help–which is a rather bizarre societally understood obligation when anthropolgy tends to have as a defining point for civilization, the care taken for the vulnerable and the frail. But too often (and as ordained by our government) what the vulnerable get is punishment for vulnerability, and such as in the case of women raped who are said to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, what society feels for them is no less than outright hostility. How dare they put themselves in that position. How dare they.

When down damn deep in our hearts we know about the sacred integrity of the individual. We know it with such surety that when graves are violated, though there’s no voice to say yes or no anymore, we understand it as treachery, a rejection of individual boundaries. That is, as long as we’re not businesses like Wal-Mart digging up or or building over American Indian burial grounds, which they have a pecuiliar history of doing.

I’m not qualifying vulnerability here even in terms of an absolute inability to help one’s self. Vulnerability is instead, in power over societies, the person standing half an inch shorter. It’s the person who says “No” but hasn’t the power to assert that “No”.

So I had been thinking about all this when I dropped by “A Blog with a View” and read the white phosphorous post and followed the link to the pictures and thought there are some who ordered this done who will not look at such pictures and be horrified, instead they’ll be enraged at the witness of the charred flesh, or maybe they will feel nothing at all. And I thought really this is no different from rape, it’s no different from the man who becomes enraged at the individual who says no and rapes them, it’s no different from society saying to the victim they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s all the same rage, comes from the same desire to violate, to humiliate, to annhilate. It happens in small ways all the time on the one-to-one. It is societally regulated and approved by different institutions, churches and governments that seem to have at their heart, as what most fundamentally binds their parts, an agreement on the distribution of that rage and what dimension of individual shall incur that wrath, whose measurements aren’t in accord with the corporate jacket. And then we wonder “ah, how” when it blossoms into atrocity. Or some of us don’t wonder at all, in the way that some believe no atrocity has taken place, that humankind has merely acted as a conduit for divine vengeance.

Wrong is wrong. Violation of the individual is simply wrong, that’s all there is to it. Whether in war, in jail, in school, in the home, in the hospital, in the nursing home, on the street, by government or by business, violation of the individual is wrong. The inability to see where exception is in fact the rule, and that all are exceptional. We know that we’re all exceptional too or we wouldn’t, when faced, for instance, with the textile mills, the grind of the mass production line, feel such horror at least for ourselves, though some of us may be convinced that others are indeed different and little better than cattle to be managed from birth to grave. Lose that knowledge of the exceptional, and respect for the individual in one part then two then three and you’re well on your way to a sick society.

Ah, but forget that. I’m a damn unrealistic stupidhead idiot idealist and am miserable 9/10’s of the time because of it.

Why do they call white phosphorous Willy Pete? I dunno, but hey, forget the bad talk on white phosphorous. I read it can be loads of fun! A september 2005 review of Tom Clancy’s “Rainbow Six Lockdown” gives it as one of the most popular gaming returns on the Xbox. “Terrorists have seized a deadly new weapon to unleash on the populous and Ding and the boys (and girls) of Rainbow Six neet to shut them down. Ubisoft has made some significant changes to their successful franchise, and Boheim has the full review.”

Boheim writes,

The enemies have about the same variety as every other FPS on the market, which is to say not a huge amount. But there is enough here, and the Havoc engine with its rag doll physics is fantastic. It’s satisfying to lift a terrorist high up into the air with a well placed grenade, or seeing one plummet off a tower bouncing as he hits the ground. My only knock is the change to the death effect when hitting a terrorist with the Willy Pete grenades. They used to run around screaming as they burned, which was always funny no matter how many times you did it, and now they are not only silent, but simply drop to their knees and slowly thrash about like they are swatting at invisible bees. I keep hoping that one of these times the old screamer will come back (and if anyone else has seen him, please call me), but he appears to be gone.

Ubisoft…the same people who have brought you “America’s Army”, the game that offers a built-in partnership with the U.S. Army.

Forget the “individual” crap. Life is one big game of losers and winners. If you’re not one, you’re the other, right? That’s how it works. There’s the heap and there are the winners who climb to the top and the losers upon whom they stand.

And, horrors, Ubisoft please bring back the death effect of the guy screaming bloody murder when hit with a Willy Pete grenade. Sounds fucking hysterical. Falling to the ground in silent tortured misery as you die is no fun at all to watch. I’ll be sure to remember that from now on with every winner-delivered blow I get in my little ring of life. “Must be entertaining and funny. Run around and scream. Hope I can remember to do both!”

Everyone’s a clown. Hey? Ultimately.