A Concealed Business Suggestion ...

[THIS JUST IN]

Mr. Wang Qin
HanG Seng Bank LTD.
Des Voeux RD. Branch
Central Hong Kong, Honk Kong. [HONK?]

Good day,

Let me start by introducing myself. I am Mr. Wang Qin credit officer of the Hang Seng Bank Ltd. I have a concealed business suggestion for
you.

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Bloggard, Bald Grog, Grab Gold, Drag Glob

If you're wondering about these phrases, they're anagrams of my name, "Bloggard".

I also ran my full name ("Arthur Cronos"), and came up with 21,000 lines of anagrams, mostly awful, but lots of good ones, like "Our Car's Thorn", "Roast or Churn", "Short Rancour", "Torn Cars Hour", "Oars Torch Urn", "Raunch Rotors", and "Honor Car Rust."

In fact, I've made a little poem. Each line is an anagram of "Arthur Cronos," kind of a testament to narcissism, and having too much time on one's hands. Hope you like it ...

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Bubble Champ

San Diego Hilton, 1984: I had learned it a few years earlier, from Polaris the Magnificent, who was a performing magician.

Polaris, dressed in a longish purple robe and a tall, conical hat, stood upon the flat stage at the Ghiradelli Chocolate Factory mall, outside on a warm Spring day, and there he mystified young children, and the rest of us.

I set my helmet down on the bench, and watched the show. The motorcycle was safe enough, chained to a parking meter nearby. I figured that if somebody was strong enough to lift the moto above the parking meter, they deserved to steal it, so I relaxed and that Polaris was really great.

And afterward somehow we struck up a conversation, as he was packing up his magicabelia, and later we met some buddy of his at a Mission Street tacqueria, and while sitting around the table over beers, the buddy said "Show him the bubbles."

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Bloggard Wins Award!

WEBLOG wannabe 2004 weblog award awarded to Bloggard in the category of "Best Teeny-Weeny Stories"

Do you like this award? All of us here at me are very excited, and we'd like to thank the acadamy, and my mother, and our lord and- Oh, wait. Hold on a minute. Let's start over ...

Do you like this award? You do? That's swell. Because you too can have a nice award, courtesy of that CSS-maven Ms. Firda Beka, who lives far away. To claim your award, just visit one of her pretty sites, specifically this one:

Award-O-Matic

So Long -- Adieu Kangaroo

Montpelier, Vermont: Bob Keeshan, Captain Kangaroo on television, died at 76. The show, consisting of visits with puppets like Mr. Moose telling knock-knock jokes (shown here), won several awards and was wildly popular with children. As a young man, I kind of liked him, too. Just a throw-back, I suppose.

The Captain did the same thing every day. Sporting a Beatles haircut and large moustache, and wearing what appeared to be an English bus-driver's uniform whose huge pockets were filled with unexpected objects, he puttered around in the "Treasure House", chatting with the puppets and Mr. Green Jeans, an eternally unemployed neighbor.

It strikes me now that Captain Kangaroo was very lucky to have Mr. Green Jeans as a neighbor, because most folks wouldn't be able to visit every single day like that.

Once the Captain was selling something, some kind of "Fun Kit", consisting of scissors and glue and crayons, and my little brother George wanted one.

Christmas was fast approaching, and that gave me an idea.

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A Moment in Time

Wichita Falls, 1961: I was the head of the drum section, and in my senior year of high school I was voted "Band King", and had a large picture in our yearbook, The Bearcat. Last summer, I'd spent two weeks at a drumming camp in Arlington, Texas, led by two older guys and Emmory Whipple, who was three times state Rudimental Champion.

The military style of playing a snare drum, very crisply, is called "Rudimental" drumming, because there are 26 drum rudiments. They have fanciful names, such as five-stroke roll, double paradiddle, flamaque. Combined, you can play any rhythmic pattern that can be written.

Playing the rudiments cleanly and quickly came easily to me. I encountered a space where I was just looking at the music, hearing in my mind what it should sound like, and my hands creating that sound. All the while, I sat back, like an engineer in a control booth, adjusting this, regulating that.

I was pretty good. That's why it was so upsetting.

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Flash! Radio Hosts Flipping Out Over Illegals

On the radio: For the last week, the radio talkshow hosts have been frothing at the mouth. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, and a couple more that Adrienne listens to.

It seems that Presiden Bush made a speech in which he recommended that all the illegal immigrants now in the USA could be granted "guest worker" status, and therefore could legally work here.

I'm not sure what this is all about, but these talkshow hosts are furious. They say it portends terrible things ...

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Missing What We Didn't Used to Have

Mount Shasta: A couple of days ago, Adrienne (recovering from her deadly Komodo Kitty infection) and I were sitting at our dining room table. This table overlooks a shallow bay window above our front yard, which lies above the streetcorner.

The house diagonally across the corner -- what my mother called "Catty-Corner" -- has a couple with two children and a springy young black lab who was galloping wildly up the street, prancing like a playful pony. In their window, we could still just see their eight-foot Christmas tree, harvested up on the mountain, and still lit up.

"You know," Adrienne said. "I've been wondering what it would be like to be their kid."

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Don't Cook Christmas!

Fernwood Street, Hollywood, 1970: Bell-bottom pants were big, see-through shirts were the ticket. I went to buy some.

In the little shop, a saleswoman slightly older than myself correctly identified me as a rube, and coerced me into black and white. (I look lousy in black, and I look lousy in white, but I didn't know it then.) I tried on these odd garments, wasn't sure.

She spied a loose thread on the pants, dangling from the area of the zipper.

"Let me get that off," she said. In the middle of the store, kneeling on the carpet, she bit it off.

Both flattered, and embarassed to the core, I hurredly gave her my last dollars, and left quickly.

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Ruru the Guru -- What's Fun?

San Francisco Yellow Pages, 1986: In the Yellow Pages that year you'd find listed "Third Ear Telepathic Answering Service" at 221-3333. If you called it you might hear this --

"Hello and thank you for calling Third Ear Telepathic Answering Service, the modern telepathic answering service that can help you move your merchandise!

"I am your Host and Operator Ruru the Guru, speaking to you direct from the Himalaya Hideaway.

"Earlier today somebody asked me, 'Ruru, what do you like to do for fun?'

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Money and the Gubbamint

Will the United States ever have a balanced budget?

Never happen. That's now how we operate. Here's how it works ...

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Telemarketers -- Five responses for telemarketers

Knowing how interested many folks are in Telemarketer Calls, here is a short list of general-purpose responses, for those times when you're just too busy to make up a fresh line of BS for your telemarketer friends --

1. I'm sorry, but what does this have to do with human sacrifice?

2. Seriously, will you still be this interested in me after we've dated for a while?

3. Would you be able to tell if I were defecating right now?

4. I am French. Your money means nothing to me.

5. I can smell your panties through the phone.

This list of five is just one of many at Merlin's List of 5ves.

The Mountain Lion

Mount Tamalpais, Marin County, Yesterday Morning: Layla is a great athelete in my book. Adrienne's younger daughter, Layla spent some time years ago deathly ill, but has recovered amazingly, and she hikes and bikes, and leaves strong men puttering along in her dust. In her gym, she excels as well.

On her radio as she got up she heard that, further down the coast, a young mountain lion killed a couple of bicyclists and a jogger. Quite possibly from the young cat's view, it was just having fun. But we humans take it seriously when it an animal has power over us.

The cat is gone, put down by the law, but of course it worries Layla, because on Mount Tam, where she goes running up the mountain trail most mornings, there are lions and tigers and bears, oh my. At least, there are lions and bears.

Yesterday's run began as usual ...

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Terrorism Alert Status

Wierd and Wonderful World of Will Stone

South of Market, San Francisco, 1975: Back in my Simple Simon days, I got a call from a fellow one day who said his name was Will Stone. His voice was precise and somber; I pictured him tall and thin, something perhaps like the House of Usher.

Thin he was, as it turned out, though no taller than myself. He'd started an art gallery in a warehouse cum arty-mall, and he needed a bookkeeper. Somehow he felt that Simple Simon was the guy.

He hired me. I grew to enjoy him tremendously as a friend, perhaps partly because he was as strange as the artwork.

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Defending Her Honor

Henrietta, Texas, 1961: It was a problem. I was a high-school senior, and the Code of the West said I had to do something. Here is the problem in your nutcase:

Robert Bell, a year my junior, had insulted my girlfriend Carolyn, publicly in the hall, stating that she was just a bitch. People had heard him.

"What are you going to do?" asked Molly Gill.

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The Minstrel Show

Henrietta, Texas, 1955: The Kiwanis Minstrel Show was coming to town, or at least to the high-school gymnasium. The basketball floor was covered with row on row of folding chairs, and ticket-sellers encamped at the rear doors.

I had an important job, operating the spotlight, and sat alone in the high bleachers. During rehearsals, I watched as a young schoolmate, Robert Bell, stuck a nail into the electrical circuit, so as to feel the jolt. Nobody stopped him. Who cared if he fried?

Just as the television show "Amos & Andy" has disappeared, and never emerges among the late-night reruns, so has the Minstrel Show disappeared. Of course the original ones toured the South once apon a time, and Lenny Sloan resurrected the "Three Black and Three White Minstrel Show" in San Francisco during my early answering service days. In fact, Lenny was my client, and now that I think about it, if I recall right, he still owes me money!

But back then, in my home town, this was the Kiwanis Club, masters of disguise.

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Dennis's Kitten

Marina Green, San Francisco, 1976: My friend Dennis, who invented the Taxicab Theory of Life, had got himself a kitty. It was small and gray, with wide-open eyes, and it bounced and bounded around the tables and the chairs.

Dennis always lived better than I did. I thought it was because he got free money, but it may have just been that he had better taste. His father had created a metal-fabricating and manufacturing business back in Chicago, and after Dennis emerged from the Peace Corps he received checks, which I envied, though of course I'd already had my turn.

He drove an older BMW, and he had a small apartment, kept as neat as himself, right at the end of a short street that pointed straight at the Marina Green, giving him a view of the Bay, a block away.

We fell out, for several years. It was because of his cat.

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